"Shoppray," David Oates

"Shoppray"
(David Oates)

Dear Lord, as I enter this mall, guide my footsteps, my eye and my hand, to the best things for me. Let me find that which will save labor, Lord, and that which will make me more attractive and stylish. Though the heathen say, "Hip today, gone tomorrow," I shall not listen to their scoffing, but, with your guidance, will find the latest thing in its most flattering incarnation. 

Lead me not into the dining area, for they have hidden the water fountains so that we sheep flock for moisture, then slay our wallets and diets with their greasy, awkward food. Let me find those things, Lord, which are most meet for our family, neither more things nor less than we ought. Please guide me past those things which will cost a lot and serve only, in the final judgment, to reduce the room in our closets. 

Bless my coupons, Lord; make them powerful -- let them match my needs, fit the specials. Lead me to the double- and triple-coupon days. For sweatshirts and Sears, candy bars and kitchen machines, Amen.

David Oates works, writes, and shops in Athens, Georgia. He will be this month's featured reader this coming Wednesday at The Globe for February's Word of Mouth gathering of poets, beer-drinkers, and intellectual reprobates.

"Hillbillyland": where D.W. Griffith meets Andy Griffith (and the Coen brothers)

"A dimwitted hillbilly gets involved in an armored-car robbery."
--TV Guide description of an episode of "Sheriff Lobo", Dec. 19 1983, page A54



What is it about "the South" -- quotation marks included -- that continues to appeal to script writers, directors and audiences this late in movie history? 

No other area of the country seems to conjure up such a strange mix of honor and family, humor, money -- or the lack of it -- and the pure romanticism of some long-gone past, with an ever-present threat of mayhem or violence. A southern setting (even in a work of fiction or film as broad in its setting as a John Grisham adaptation) is more likely to turn on a long-buried family secret as it is to feature an afternoon of iron-willed ladies drinking sweet tea served on a sheltering porch; make no mistake about a southern drama, there's always a gun somewhere in the house. Hollywood has always believed that alcohol, tobacco and firearms make a perfect Saturday night south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Hillbillyland explores Hollywood's never-ending fascination with moonshine, country bumpkins, and what goes on up there in the hills beyond Beverly. In the early 1920s as more people moved to the cities, Hollywood found it could make money telling audiences about the places they'd left behind. The South has long been a source of conflicting impulses in Hollywood; the region was mined for its "colorful" characters, mostly humorous, as well as its darker impulses. The sex and violence in 1950's Tobacco Road undercut the good-hearted goofiness of the Ma and Pa Kettle series of the 1940s, and this seesaw play of opposites and cultural attitudes has been a movie convention long unmatched by any other region in the country.

Percy Kilbride and Marjorie Main as Ma & Pa Kettle

Williamson shows how Hollywood has gotten a lot of mileage out of these stereotypes. The Coen brothers' Raising Arizona was a hit on the strength of Nicolas Cage's ironic portrayal of a hillbilly fool trying to achieve "the basic family unit" by stealing a baby, and then continuously compounding his mistakes. (An updated edition of this book would have to include the TV show Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, proving this funny-yokel archetype isn't dead by a long shot.) 

There was also Martin Scorsese's 1991 violent remake of Cape Fear, in which Robert DeNiro is a convicted rapist who terrorizes the family of the attorney who put him in jail, which takes place in a desolate Florida backwater town. In Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter challenges FBI agent Jodie Foster's cool by noting her "cheap shoes": "You're not more than one generation removed from poor white trash, are you? And that accent you've so desperately tried to hide -- pure West Virginia. What does your father do? Is he a coal miner? Does he stink of the land?" It's an unnerving moment. 
                                                                                                                               The early motion picture industry enticed audiences into movie palaces with spectacle, sex, and increasingly lurid tales of sin and seduction. Many of these movies used Southern settings, featuring taboo subjects. This combination proved so successful that, by the early 1930s, a conservative religious movement emerged with an aim to "clean up" Hollywood's excesses, led by the Catholic Church but supported by preachers, ministers, and spiritual spokesmen nationwide. The Catholic Church's League of Decency became the first cultural crusade against what was perceived as a threat to the national character. Wielding an authority of equal parts religion and politics, the League saw to it that movies were banned outright, content was snipped and clipped, and production scripts were combed over for hints of immorality. Classic novels were re-written for the screen to pass the scrutiny of the hastily-created, reactionary Hays Office.

There was a backlash among Hollywood writers as stories set in the South became a target. William Faulkner himself created the story of Sanctuary in three weeks ("the most horrific tale" Faukner could imagine, "a morbid tale of rape, murder, sexual impotence and perversion" -- he was broke, and decided to go for broke in his paid-for Hollywood bungalow) which certainly seems like an outright challenge to the Paramount studio censors. The studio made the film anyway. The rewritten, completed film (The Story of Temple Drake, 1933) abandons Faulkner's story for a much less-scandalous ending -- and a moral that the author never intended. Pre-code films (made before 1934) are being released on DVD, but Temple Drake is still unavailable. As World War II brought more sophisticated audiences to the movies censorship taboos began to fall, but Southern locales were still used to dramatize "taboo" subjects like miscegenation and incest. 

Williamson covers a lot of ground here, from D.W. Griffith'sTol'able David to John Boorman's Deliverance, The Dukes of Hazzard to The Andy Griffith Show, and his conclusions are necessarily broad ones. His best writing narrows focus on a specific film or theme: the on-location making of the log-cabin potboiler Stark Love (1926), by the director Karl Brown, is wildly detailed, with newspaper reporting and interviews with local extras who made appearances in the film as members of an "authentic" mountain family.

Film still from Stark Love (1926), with Forrest James and Helen Mundy 

To find hillbillies, he incongruously went first to New Orleans, the most interior southern city he could think of, and there he asked a journalist friend if he knew where there were any benighted mountain people. His friend had vaguely heard of a Berea College in Kentucky that was supposedly civilizing such types ... So Brown took the hint and got himself by train to Berea, where he got the none-too-surprising official cold shoulder from college people eager not to be associated by such "truth." Next Brown bounced to Nashville where he asked hotel desk clerks if they knew where any real isolated mountaineers lived. They didn't, but they pointed him in the direction of Knoxville, Tennessee, where someone else told him that those kinds of hillbillies were all over the line -- in North Carolina ...It was December 1925 when Brown staked his location. He went back to Robbinsville in the summer of 1926 with $50,000 and went to work on his movie, the first task being to acquire a "native" cast. But Brown had a major problem. He wanted to hire local people for parts in a movie that was guaranteed to insult them. He got around much of the problem by keeping the storyline to himself and by shooting out of sequence ... He hired many people to pantomime disconnected actions that told no narrative they could rightly follow. ... For the two fathers, Brown eventually cast two perfect country men, Reb Grogan and Silas Miracle, who were placated into acting as mountain monsters by being told they were impersonating North Carolina monsters, not Kentuckians. 

Williamson writes with an eye for history and, as someone who is upfront about his own "hillbilly bona-fides," a good deal of humor. He has also seen a lot of truly awful films and two-reelers, some archived in the Library of Congress -- more than 800 movies. Lots of movie stills, contemporary cartoons, and detailed captions accompany the text. At times the book reads like a college course -- Williamson is a professor at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, and acknowledges the input of several students -- but Hillbillyland is an entertaining look at how the film industry exploits this facet of American culture.

J.W. Williamson's website is Wataugawatch, a daily blog about North Carolina politics and culture. 

Dada meet mama: Marie Osmond reads "Karawane" by Hugo Ball

Sometimes it's best to let words and images speak for themselves. Explaining too much about the theory and writings of Hugo Ball and the Dada movement he helped create in the early decades of the twentieth century would risk ruining the joyous rhythms (and the sheer beauty of nonsense language) that resonate in his poetry.

If you're up to it, though, Malcolm Green's anthology of many early Dada texts offers all the intentionally maddening mysteries of the Dada movement. Blago Bung Blago Bung Bosso Fataka!, with a title taken from a poem by Hugo Ball, offers a look at Dada's brief but complex history, and the resulting outrage from Dada's confounded critics and even more confused audiences.

Ball did try to upset the cultural expectations of his time. His poems sought to "dissolve language" and create "a new sentence that was neither determined by, nor tied to, any conventional meaning," according to his diaries. The Cabaret Voltaire -- his Zurich nightclub -- became the center of a riotous, intentionally provoking, group of artists who called their movement Dada, itself a nonsense word chosen at random from a dictionary, and meant to denote no particular meaning.

Academic discussion aside, public outrage was swift at the total confusion of word and image that followed Dada performances, even surpassing Ball's own previous experiments with Expressionism and theater. Sophisticated audiences who were learning to appreciate (some would say grapple with) new artistic ideas such as cubism in art, dissonances explored by twentieth-century composers, and other experimental artistic forms were confused and angered by the Dada artists' complete disregard for meaning -- a clear reaction to the meaninglessness of World War I. In March 1916 one critic complained about the movement's "unforgivable blasphemy against the intellect":
They no longer believe in the intellect and its words ... and all they produce are monkey tricks. And if they were asked why they do it, probably they would answer it would be impious to expect them even to know. And they would underline this answer with a smile and this smile with a gesture of superiority. 

On the evening of June 23 1916 Ball came to the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire dressed in a cardboard suit and wearing an outrageous headdress, looking, as Green observes, like a "shaman." Nervously he recited a few of his sound poems, and inspired by his Catholic upbringing he began to recite his nonsense words in the "ancient cadences of priestly lamentation," Ball later wrote. One sound experiment, "Karawane," read:


When the performance was over, Ball wrote in his diary, "covered in sweat, I was carried from the stage like a magic bishop." This event turned out to be a defining moment in Dada; and although Dada art took many forms, the photo of Ball in his "magic bishop" suit has become a visual representation of the entire movement.

And who better to express the ineffable in the spoken words of Hugo Ball than the delightful Marie Osmond? For a presentation on sound poetry in an episode of Ripley's Believe It or Not television series from the 1980s, Marie introduces the audience to the complex world of Dada as she puts on makeup -- explaining that "when you know you're going to be on stage, you want to be sure you look your best -- and that you're properly dressed for the part."
It's an amusing way to describe the unconventional concepts of Ball's Dada poetry and its performance as art -- especially so when she produces the famous printed text of "Karawane" (reproduced above), pauses for a long moment, and creates one of the most unexpected and truly most dada-like moments in the history of television. Marie's introduction and striking performance of "Karawane" would undoubtedly bring a small smile from Hugo Ball. It would probably be impious for him to suggest he knows why.

"A dreamy new era for fish": catching fish with LSD, 1964

BoingBoing online -- always a fun site -- reports that in its March 30,1964 issue, Sports Illustrated profiled the efforts of marine biologist Howard Loeb to dose fish with LSD, in hopes that they would be easier to catch and thereby helping remove so-called "trash fish" from the larger market supply. Apparently the side-effects of eating tripping fish weren't at issue; Loeb is quoted in the article saying that he liked to work on "the fun stuff," including pond-shockers and poison baits, for commercial use.

The current media coverage of genetically-altered salmon ready for the dinner table seems to pale into insignificance when a reader considers that it was perfectly legal (if somewhat wacky) "to use LSD-25, a hallucinogenic drug derived from d-lysergic acid" as a commercial application, or that the phrase appears in a Sports Illustrated article in 1964. But then again, LSD wasn't put on the Federal schedule of illegal drugs until 1967. Here's an excerpt from the BoingBoing article, with a link to the full 1964SI article there.

An imaginative ex-paratrooper who has been in fish biology for 16 of his 42 years, Loeb often comes up with the unusual, working on what he calls "the fun stuff—the thing that nobody knows anything about." He devised the electric pond-shocker that conservation workers use to obtain fish samples. He has worked on selective poison baits for carp, a trash fish that has ruined many game-fish waters in New York and other states, and is assisting an associate, Bill Kelly, in working on long-lasting dyes for marking trout.

Several years ago Dr. Harold A. Abramson, Director of Psychiatric Research at South Oaks Psychiatric Hospital in Amityville, N.Y., chanced to read of Loeb's work on carp

poisons, and he offered a suggestion: use LSD-25, a hallucinogenic drug derived from d-lysergic acid, originally found in the ergot fungus that grows on rye...

If LSD could work on carp and other fish, the opportunities were unlimited for conservation authorities and sportsmen. For example, a pond loaded with carp poses problems. If any of the standard chemicals, such as rotenone, are used, all the fish, both carp and game fish, usually die, aquatic insects suffer and the poison sometimes lingers for months, preventing the restocking of game fish. But if a chemical could cause all the fish to surface for several hours without killing them, then the undesirable fish could be picked out and the game fish left to prosper.

Again, a surfacing chemical would enable biologists to take a highly accurate fish census of a body of water without harming a fin. A low-flying plane could photograph a treated body of water, and biologists, interpreting the pictures, could get a count of species and populations. ...

"Two Times Intro": Michael Stipe photographs Patti Smith

It's hard to believe now just how bohemian, uncommercial and downright scary the art scene of the East Village seemed to a nation grabbing up copies of albums by Peter Frampton and Fleetwood Mac in 1976. But time, memory, and the marketplace eventually have a way of softening all the rough edges -- these days, it's just as difficult to find a bohemian scene that doesn't eagerly get commercially packaged with the right image and promotion. And in 2010 Patti Smith received a National Book Award for Just Kids, her memoir of life in the 1970s with Robert Mapplethorpe. Imagine that.

Two Times Intro, Michael Stipe's surprisingly incomplete photo essay of Patti on tour in 1998, is a minor disappointment. There's no center to it, or rather the center is obviously missing -- there are no shots of Patti in mid-concert, flailing like a scarecrow in Jim Morrison ecstasy. It's a sensation akin to discovering an old photo album where someone's already removed the photos you'd really like to see. What's there is intriguing but doesn't reveal a lot, and the out-of-focus style Stipe uses isn't artful, just simply affected. The result is a collection of snaps with no heat, a little too much cool distance to be effective. 

However honest the effort, the sum of it is a missed opportunity for a meeting of generations.  Somewhere in Michael's garage, and Oliver Ray's basement, there are some great photos of Patti-the-shaman, as William Burroughs describes her in his brief opening. I hope they don't get water-damaged in that cardboard box along with the discarded Polaroid camera.

In years gone by, there were days when giants roamed the earth (and long before the days of bands like Mastodon's Leviathan, whose literary claims extend to concept albums eviscerating Moby Dick). Maybe my memory is being provoked by memories of long-gone concerts: I was at Madison Square for the Stones' Tour of the Americas show, part of of a fantastic week of rock performances described by Village Voice writer James Wolcott below. Here, from 1975, is the retelling of a backstage meeting of Patti Smith and Bob Dylan: New Jersey meets Rolling Thunder. Literary worlds were colliding, and in those days words provided a scene more visual than photographs.

A copy of Witt was slid across the table to Patti Smith. “Would you sign this for me, please?” “Sure,” said Patti, “what’s your first name?” He told her. “Like in New Jersey?” Patti asked, and he said no--with a z. “Well, I’ll draw you a map of Jersey,” and so on the inside page Patti scratched its intestinal boundaries, in the middle labeled it Neo Jersey, signed her name, and passed the copy of Witt back to Jerzy Kosinski.

The night before, after the second set at the Other End, the greenroom door opened and the remark hanging in the air was Bob Dylan asking a member of Patti’s band, “You’ve never been to New Jersey?” So, all hail Jersey. And in honor of Dylan’s own flair for geographical salutation (“So long New York, hello East Orange”), all hail the Rock and Roll Republic of New York. With the Rolling Stones holding out at Madison Square Garden, Patti Smith and her band at the Other End, and Bob Dylan making visitations to both events, New York was once again the world’s Rock and Roll Republic.

Patti Smith had a special Rimbaud-emblematized statement printed up in honor of Stones week, and when her band went into its version of “Time Is On My Side” (yes it is), she unbuttoned her blouse to reveal a Keith Richards T-shirt beneath. On the opening night she was tearing into each song and even those somewhat used to her galloping id were puzzled by lines like, “You gotta a lotta nerve sayin’ you won’t be my parking meter.”

Unknown to many in the audience, parked in the back of the room, his meter running a little quick, was the legendary Bobby D. himself. Dylan, despite his wary, quintessential cool, was giving the already highly charged room an extra layer of electricity and Patti, intoxicated by the atmosphere, rocked with stallion abandon. She was positively playing to Dylan, like Keith Carradine played to Lily Tomlin in the club scene from Nashville. But Dylan is an expert at gamesmanship, and he sat there, crossing and uncrossing his legs, playing back.

Afterwards, Dylan went backstage to introduce himself to Patti. He looked healthy, modestly relaxed (though his eyes never stopped burning with cool-blue fire), of unimposing physicality, yet the corporeal Dylan can never be separated from the mythic Dylan, and it’s that other Dylan--the brooding, volatile, poet-star of Don’t Look Back--who heightens or destroys the mood of a room with the tiniest of gestures. So despite Dylan’s casual graciousness, everyone was excitedly unsettled.

And there was a sexual excitation in the room as well. Bob Dylan, the verdict was unanimous, is an intensely sexual provocateur--“he really got me below the belt,” one of the women in the room said later. Understand, Dylan wasn’t egregiously coming on--he didn’t have to. For the sharp-pencil, slightly petulant vocals on Blood on the Tracks hardly prepared one for the warm, soft-bed tone of his speaking voice: the message driven home with that--Dylan offhand is still Dylan compelling. So with just small talk he had us all subdued, even Patti, though when the photographers’ popping flashbulbs began, she laughingly pushed him aside, saying, “Fuck you, then take my picture, boys.” Dylan smiled and swayed away.

Patti backstage, 1998, from Two Times Intro

The party soon broke up--Dylan had given his encouragement to Patti, the rest of us had a glimpse from some future version of Don’t Look Back (but with a different star)--and the speculation about Dylan’s visit commenced. What did his casual benediction signify?

Probably nothing, was the reasonable answer. But such sensible explanations are unsatisfying, not only because it’s a waste of Dylan’s mystique to interpret his moves on the most prosaic level, but because the four-day engagement at the Other End convincingly demonstrated that Patti and the band are no small-time cult phenomenon. Not only was Patti in good voice, but the band is extending itself confidently. Jay Doherty, the newly acquired drummer (he provides rhythmic heat, and Lenny Kaye has improved markedly on guitar--his solo on “Time Is On My Side” for example moves Keith Richards riffing to Verlaine slashing. The band’s technical improvement has helped revivify the repertoire: “Break It Up” is now more sharply focused, “Piss Factory” is dramatically jazzy, and their anthem, “Gloria,” ends the evening crashingly. Missing were “Free Money,” and “Land”--the Peckinpah-esque cinematic version of “Land of 1000 Dances”--which is being saved for the forthcoming album.

Years on: Marquee (from Two Times Intro, 1998)

Something is definitely going on here and I think I know what it is. During one of her sets Patti made the seemingly disconnected remark, “Don’t give up on Arnie Palmer.” But when the laughter subsided, she added, “The greats are still the greatest.” Yes, of course! All her life Patti Smith has had rock and roll in her blood--she has been, like the rest of us, a fan; this is part of her connection with her audience--and now she’s returning what rock has given her with the full force of her love.

Perhaps Dylan perceives that this passion is a planet wave of no small sweep. Yet what I cherished most about Patti’s engagement was not the pounding rock-and-roll intensity but a throwaway gesture of camaraderie. When Lenny Kaye was having difficulty setting up his guitar between numbers, Patti paced around, joked around, scratched her stomach, scratched her hair--still Kaye was not quite ready. “I don’t really mind,” she told the audience. “I mean, Mick would wait all night for Keith.”Copyright © James Wolcott 1975

[from "Tarantula Meets Mustang: Dylan Calls On Patti Smith," by James Wolcott, Village Voice, July 7, 1975]

Unsticking the art between the pages: "Label 228: A Street Art Project"

It was only a matter of time before Andre the Giant really did have a posse.

The black-and-white image of wrestler Andre the Giant on stickers affixed to stop-signs and telephone poles was an "experiment in phenomenology" begun in 1988 by design student Shepard Fairey, who in 2008 designed the now-famous Obama "Hope" image. Twenty years later, Fairey's original experiment has become an art form that appears virtually everywhere an artist can stick a label.

Artists that once sought gallery wall space find new media for expression, and new places to display their work; today, pop culture is the medium itself, and artists find tools in the everyday material of the marketplace. Spray can, markers, pen and ink -- these seem new and logical tools as art swings wildly from gallery to print to digital, pixel to page, and back again.

Others bypass this process all together and simply go from pole to post, creating stickable art that affixes to any surface. Label 228 (Soft Skull Press) began as camden noir's call for artists to submit their art on USPS Priority Mail stickers -- those ubiquitous rectangles with their inviting white space. Six months later, 500 items had arrived from around the world.

From the Soft Skull website: "These labels are free, portable, and quick and easy to exhibit, offering artists the chance to spend more time creating their work than if they were to paint and write directly on walls, vehicles, and public objects.”

One man's stickable art, of course, is another's graffiti; it's a toss-up if these labels by Mecro, Zoso, Kegr, Robots Will Kill! and others are permanent treasures. The disposable nature of a label suggests they're not meant to be -- the viewer's appreciation here depends on the images' inclusion in book format, away from the ephemeral encounter at street level. If the irony of this is lost on the artist, to the viewer looking through Label 228 its an irony that assumes its own art form.

"Wild Geese" (Mary Oliver)

"Wild Geese"(Mary Oliver)

You do not have to be good.You do not have to walk on your kneesfor a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.Meanwhile the world goes on.Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rainare moving across the landscapes,over the prairies and the deep trees,the mountains and the rivers.Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,are heading home again.Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,the world offers itself to your imagination,call to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –over and over announcing your placein the family of things.

"Wild Swans" is perhaps Mary Oliver's best-known poem. Oliver was deeply influenced by Edna St. Vincent Millay and briefly lived in Millay’s home, helping Norma Millay organize her sister’s papers. Oliver is notoriously reticent about her private life, but it was during this period that she met her long-time partner, Molly Malone Cook. She has her critics: Oliver's poetry has been called "lazy" and "unnecessary" by one pundit, who then comments rather helplessly in the face of the poet's popularity that "Reading Oliver is an exercise in futility, and so is this article, really, because if you're already not a fan of Oliver, I'm not going to set you against her, and if you are a fan, I'm not likely to change your mind." Take that! American Primitive (1983), Oliver's fifth book, won the Pulitzer Prize. Getting Americans to read poetry! -- who knows, it may lead them to the work of Lorine Niedecker. Oliver's most recent collection (2012) is Swan: Poems and Prose Poems.