She Just Believes So Strongly In Who We Are As A Nation
Even the tears are calculated.
Cheers To Makers of Art Everywhere
It was great to see my friend Terry Gardner in Boulder today.
Bowl-Der-Ah-Doh
“People seeing the beauty of this valley will want to stay, and their staying will be the undoing of its beauty.” –Chief Niwot
Bowl-der is the perfect place for testing the hypothesis that geography determines culture. Bowl-der is, geographically speaking, a bowl of a city nestled between a high Great Plains ridge to the east and the front range of the Rocky Mountains to the west. The bowl effect makes for an interesting stew of human interactivity.
Taking cues from the uniqueness of the land, the thoughts and actions of Bowl-der’s inhabitants are distinctly different from those who live in the surrounding geo-cultural reality. Denver is sprawl. Thus, its sense of place is scattered, which is the polar opposite of the unified feel found in Bowl-der. Despite the diversity of parts that go into its making, Bowl-der is capable of acting as one.
A nestling valley like this makes people feel at home, and one finds positivity and immense possibility in this safe zone. It’s possible to be for things–alternative energy, for instance–without feeling foolish. No scarlet letters are issued to idealists here.
The flipside to the goodness of the bowl is the fact that it is contained. Bowl-der is a microcosm, a world unto itself. While we need these hot spots of consciousness and kindness, we also need to spread the goodness found in a place like Bowl-der into everyday America.
There’s Pasta Growin’ on the Mountain
Leftover Salmon returned to Boulder last night and the hometown crowd was there to greet the reunited slamgrass kings in style. Mayor McCheese was in the house. New Orleans’ live painter, Frenchy, threw bright paints on the night’s canvas. Friends greeted friends in the boogie zone and the place had such a nice aroma about it.
Jeff Sipe is back in the band on drums, which was nice to see. Salmon past and Salmon present were on display. Banjo player, Noam Pikelny, who joined the band after Mark Vann’s passing, had a stunning lead in the first set, after which Vince bowed down to him, as if to say, “We thank you young man, for holding down your position like a true champion and keeping the music alive.” Bill McKay brought some soul and blues to the party and Drew generally had command of his instruments and the crowd throughout.
Corn!
Vince deserves a paragraph of his own. He’s the master clown, and so humble.
Kraft. Macaroni and Cheese.
2007—The Year in Place
Last year I made note of the cities where I spent at least one night. It’s a neat exercise in reflection.
Here’s the list for 2007.
- Austin
- Asheville
- Palm Coast
- Houston
- Atlanta
- Nashville
- Rochester, MN
- New York City
- Vancouver, BC
- Princess-owned floating city at sea
- Denali
- Wilderness lodge outside Talkeetna
- Anchorage
- Chapel Hill
- Myrtle Beach
- Cambridge
- Orlando
- Marco Island
- Memphis
- Winston-Salem
- Boulder
Let’s Talk Trident
The Trident on West Pearl in Boulder is the great American coffee shop. The coffee is excellent and the conversation is even better. Intellectuals come down off the Hill and mingle with entrepreneurs, artists, vagabonds and canyon folk. It’s very much at the center of something, a confluence with different streams joining to make for a stronger river moving forward.
Lakota Still Fighting
According to the Sioux Falls Argus Leader, leaders of the American Indian Movement, including activist and actor Russell Means, dropped in on the State Department and the embassies of Bolivia, Venezuela, Chile and South Africa last week seeking recognition for their effort to form a free and independent Lakota nation.
The new nation is needed because Indians have been “dismissed” by the United States and are tired of living under a colonial apartheid system, Means said during a news conference held at Plymouth Congregational Church in northeast Washington.
“I want to emphasize, we do not represent the collaborators, the Vichy Indians and those tribal governments set up by the United States of America to ensure our poverty, to ensure the theft of our land and resources,” Means said, comparing elected tribal governments to Nazi collaborators in France during World War II.
Rodney Bordeaux, chairman of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, said his community has no desire to join the breakaway nation. Means and his group, which call themselves the Lakota Freedom Delegation, have never officially pitched their views to the Rosebud community, Bordeaux said.
Members of the new nation would not pay any taxes, and leaders would be informally chosen by community elders, Means said. Non-Indians could continue to live in the new nation’s territory, which would consist of the western parts of North and South Dakota and Nebraska and eastern parts of Wyoming and Montana. The new government would issue its own passports and drivers licenses, Means said.
Bolivian Ambassador Gustavo Guzman, who attended the press conference out of solidarity, said he takes the Lakotas’ declaration of independence seriously.
“We are here because the demands of indigenous people of America are our demands,” Guzman said.
I wonder if the Lakota Freedom Delegation would consider taking on dissidents who believe in their cause.
I’ll Vote for the Guy Who Did Inhale
“I used to sleep at the foot of Old Glory and awake in the dawn’s early light,
But much to my surprise when I opened my eyes I was a victim of the great compromise.” -John Prine
In today’s New York Times Magazine, Matt Bai has a cogent analysis of “Clintonism” and how its centrist approach will likely influence Democratic voters in 2008.
It’s worth the time it takes to read through the piece, but here’s the part I’d like to share here:
Listening to him talk, I found it hard not to wonder why so many of the challenges facing the next president were almost identical to those he vowed to address in 1992. Why, after Clinton’s two terms in office, were we still thinking about tomorrow? In some areas, most notably health care, Clinton tried gamely to leave behind lasting change, and he failed. In many more areas, though, the progress that was made under Clinton — almost 23 million new jobs, reductions in poverty, lower crime and higher wages — had been reversed or wiped away entirely in a remarkably short time. Clinton’s presidency seems now to have been oddly ephemeral, his record etched in chalk and left out in the rain.
Supporters of the Clintons see an obvious reason for this, of course — that George W. Bush and his Republican Party have, for the past seven years, undertaken a ferocious and unbending assault on Clinton’s progressive legacy.
Some Democrats, though, and especially those who are apt to call themselves “progressives,†offer a more complicated and less charitable explanation. In their view, Clinton failed to seize his moment and create a more enduring, more progressive legacy — not just because of the personal travails and Republican attacks that hobbled his presidency, but because his centrist, “third way†political strategy, his strategy of “triangulating†to find some middle point in every argument, sapped the party of its core principles. By this thinking, Clinton and his friends at the Democratic Leadership Council, the centrist think tank that served as a platform for his bid for national office, were so desperate to woo back moderate Southern voters that they accepted conservative assertions about government (that it was too big and unwieldy, that what was good for business was good for workers) and thus opened the door wide for Bush to come along and enact his extremist agenda with only token opposition. In other words, they say, he was less a victim of Bush’s radicalism than he was its enabler.
Bai has answers for the progressives that the Clinton’s would favor, but he also points out how Obama and Edwards are working to remind voters that a return of the Clintons’ to the White House would mean more of the same.
For me personally, there’s no debate. While Obama is far from the perfect candidate, he’s the only mainstream Dem offering even a shred of hope for substantive change. Given that I’m a resident of South Carolina, I look forward to casting my vote (for that possibiity of change) late next month.
From the Novel by Cormac McCarthy
Yesterday the rains fell, so we made our way to Sea Turtle Cinemas for a Saturday matinee. The draw was a new Coen brothers film, No Country for Old Men. I didn’t realize until the credits rolled that it was an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel of the same name. My bad.
Here’s how Miramax describes the story:
The story begins when Llewelyn Moss (played by Josh Brolin) finds a pickup truck surrounded by a sentry of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law—in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell (played by Tommy Lee Jones)—can contain. As Moss tries to evade his pursuers—in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives (played by Javier Bardem)—the film simultaneously strips down the American crime drama and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines.
While there’s plenty to say about the film, I’ve been meaning to read All the Pretty Horses for years, so when we got home from the theater, I did some interweb sleuthing on the mysterious man of letters. According to Wikipedia, literary critic Harold Bloom named McCarthy one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Philip Roth. He is frequently compared by modern reviewers to William Faulkner and sometimes to Herman Melville. That’s some stout company.
One of the links I followed from Wikipedia describes the dark depths that McCarthy mines. “Like the novelist Honoré de Balzac, who minutely chronicled every aspect of 19th century French society, McCarthy examines exhaustively the reptile brain of Appalachian hillbillies, and assorted Sonoran flotsam.” This latter category is where No Country for Old Men falls.
The imagery from the film (or book, I would imagine) will linger. But not all of it’s vile. Southwest Texas is rendered beautifully, for instance. In the Coen brother’s expert hands, it’s a romantic and timeless place. Sure, it can also be seen as an inhospitable desert, but human dramas play so well against these stark settings.
Seduced By Inanities
Doris Lessing, who published her first book in 1950, won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. Her acceptance speech addressed the value of books, or rather their diminshed value in our internet-obsessed modern culture. While certain members of the technorati have poked fun at her for being old-fashioned, I think we ought to listen to her warnings, or find ourselves dumbed down.
The Guardian has her speech in its entirety, but here are a few key portions:
We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women, who have had years of education, to know nothing of the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers.
What has happened to us is an amazing invention – computers and the internet and TV. It is a revolution. This is not the first revolution the human race has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, transformed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked: “What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?” In the same way, we never thought to ask, “How will our lives, our way of thinking, be changed by the internet, which has seduced a whole generation with its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that, once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging etc?”
Ouch. As a writer who has moved from producing poems, stories and essays to producing blog posts, this hits home. Of course, there is another side to the argument. The side where the internet is a place to share ideas. Many would argue the internet makes us smarter for that instanteous, worldwide sharing. I suppose it depends on how one utilizes the internet. If one’s time is absorbed in cultivating “friends” on MySpace and Facebook, one’s mind is likely not being enriched. On the other hand, if one uses the internet to seek out stories in The New Yorker or other more obscure but equally heady sites, then writers and intellectuals have every right to celebrate this new communications medium.
But what about the computer as composition tool? It’s a great word processor, but to think large and lovely thoughts, email, IM, iTunes and all other “distractions” must be disabled. I write blog posts with these apps running in the background, but the production of literature requires a deeper space.
Lessing has some thoughts on this too.
Writers are often asked: “How do you write? With a word processor? an electric typewriter? a quill? longhand?” But the essential question is: “Have you found a space, that empty space, which should surround you when you write? Into that space, which is like a form of listening, of attention, will come the words, the words your characters will speak, ideas – inspiration.” If a writer cannot find this space, then poems and stories may be stillborn. When writers talk to each other, what they discuss is always to do with this imaginative space, this other time. “Have you found it? Are you holding it fast?”
I dream of that space. And wonder where it might be hiding. Is it inside my own house at five in the morning, before mundane but economically necessary work calls? Perhaps. But it doesn’t look like that in my dreams. In my dreams it looks like a cabin in the woods, or a repurposed guesthouse in the mountains. Wherever it is, I know where it’s not. It’s not inside the web of interlinked items, fascinating and otherwise.