The iconic 1960 album, “Satan is Real,” was recorded by Country Music Hall of Famers, Ira and Charlie Loudermilk, known popularly as the Louvin Brothers; innovators in gospel and close harmony, the Louvin Brothers’ collaboration was stunted by their 1963 breakup, and permanently ended in 1965 when Ira was killed in a car accident; “Satan is Real” is most recognized in certain quarters for its eccentric album cover, which depicts the singing Louvin Brothers wearing identical white linen suits in a rock quarry, surrounded by flaming tires, and, looming behind them, a fire-red, twelve foot tall plywood Satan; the album is transcendent; on the title track of “Satan is Real,” Ira tells a story with the foreboding message: “We know that Heaven is a real place where joy shall never end. But sinner friend, if you’re here today, Satan is real too. And Hell is a real place. A place of everlasting punishment”; after the story, the Louvin Brothers repeat the song’s angelic chorus; not too long ago, I went with my friend Katelina to see a concert by the still-spry Charlie Louvin; Katelina stopped by the music venue several hours before the show to purchase a ticket; when Katelina left, she noticed an elderly gentleman sitting on the bumper of a pickup truck, smoking a cigarette; without hesitation, she said, “Mr. Louvin?”; the fella looked up and replied, “Yes, ma’m”; Katelina told Charlie Louvin that she had, in her possession, a ticket to see him perform that evening; Charlie Louvin asked her, “Are you bringing your boyfriend?”; she smiled and answered, “No. He lives in Atlanta, and besides, he’s only a part-time lover”; Charlie Louvin then removed his hat, leaned towards Katelina, and said, “Well, ma’m, I’d like to be your lover the other part of the time”; the concert that night was excellent; I enjoyed a locally brewed beer and a bowl of pimento cheese before the show; afterwards, Charlie autographed a photograph of himself with Elvis Presley (who, in 1955, was the opening act for the Louvin Brothers); on July 7th, 2008, Charlie Louvin celebrated his 81st birthday.
GLEN ECHO PARK
•August 5, 2008 • 3 CommentsLocated in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Glen Echo, Maryland, Glen Echo Park thrived through 1968, when it promptly closed; with a history dating back to the late 19th century, the amusement park’s highlights included a carousel, bumper cars, and the Crystal Pool; Glen Echo Park’s extinction was due to pressure from local white citizens, who preferred that the park close rather than racially integrate; for the majority of its existence, Glen Echo Park was a whites-only establishment; the greater Washington D.C. area has a rich tradition of both politics and racism, and if you would like a firsthand view, plan an afternoon walk from the White House to Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue in the historic neighborhood of Anacostia; after departing the President’s home, take note of the staggering segregation when you arrive in the almost exclusively African-American Anacostia; while there is an upsetting level of poverty and violence in Anacostia, the neighborhood also has a vibrant cultural history, which is spotlighted at the Anacostia Community Museum; former residents of Anacostia include Frederick Douglass, Marvin Gaye, and Ezra Pound; in 1971, the abandoned and decaying Glen Echo Park became property of the National Park Service; the park is now used for cultural events, such as painting, glass blowing, and Contra and Square Dancing; Glen Echo Park has maintained a ramshackle, forgotten appearance, and evokes the feeling of a magical Ray Bradbury or Steven Millhauser story; if there was a remake of the terrifying, bizarre 1962 film, “Carnival of Souls,” Glen Echo Park would be a fine setting; I have no idea who would play the haunted, mysterious lead that was definitively embodied by Candace Hilligoss; Candace Hilligoss was the greatest horror film actress ever, and it is a shame that her career was so brief; say the name “Candace Hilligoss” out loud ten times, and you will believe you have conjured a demon—a Waspy demon; during my junior year in college, I had my heart broken, and while I deserved to have my heart broken, it still incapacitated me for several months; in an effort to get over the breakup, I spent Spring break driving down the east coast of the United States with two of my best friends; we planned to tour the South and smoke a lot of pot; we wanted “adventures”; we found an unplanned and traumatic adventure in Memphis, but several days before that disaster, we spent a night in Bethesda, Maryland; residents of Bethesda are proud to have the National Institutes of Health and the highest percentage of restaurants-per-capita in the United States; Bethesda is also the home of a pixyish brunette who hosted us while in Bethesda; we got tipsy with her, watched “Buena Vista Social Club,” then she took us to Glen Echo Park; it was late, the moon was full, and we were trespassing; we smoked and boozed and ran around the ancient wooden and metal amusement park rides, which seemed like frozen dinosaurs from the future; the Pixie dragged me by the wrist to the Bumper Car Pavilion, where she wordlessly held me close; she seemed to know without any explanation that I was confused and self-pitying and lonely; when we left the Pixie the next day, she kissed me and asked me to call her from the road; I did, and soon we began to date, spending time together in New England and England; it was a full eight months before our relationship fell apart; now she lives across the planet and writes for a Cambodian newspaper; I hear that she learned to ride across rivers on Thai elephants; her family still lives in Bethesda, and I imagine she visits them during certain Jewish holidays.
MY GIANT
•July 29, 2008 • 1 CommentA utopian community originally located near Asheville, North Carolina, MY GIANT took its name from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”; the exact quote from “Self-Reliance” is: “Travelling is a fool’s paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go”; blending Emersonian transcendentalism with various Eastern philosophies (including the “Bhagavad Gita” and “I Ching”), MY GIANT was started by a group of recent graduates from the visionary Black Mountain College in the late 1930’s; founded in 1933 and lasting only 25 years, Black Mountain College was a remarkable institution, responsible for much of the American avant-garde; the faculty of Black Mountain College included John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Josef Albers, and Buckminster Fuller; famous alumni of Black Mountain College include Robert Rauschenberg, Arthur Penn, Robert DeNiro, Sr., Cy Twombly, and the eleven members of MY GIANT; soon after graduation, the co-ed members of MY GIANT—six men and five women—took over an abandoned cotton mill in the mountains outside Asheville; I have visited Asheville—the “Paris of the South”—many times, and toured the lovely 1920’s art deco office buildings, Biltmore Estate, Masonic Temple, Thomas Wolfe House, O. Henry’s grave in Riverside Cemetery, and searched for the remains of the MY GIANT cotton mill, but could not find its location; the MY GIANT commune thrived in its North Carolina location for five years; in 1944, ten of the eleven member of MY GIANT decided to relocate to Manhattan’s Greenwich Village; the members of MY GIANT, who spent most of their time in North Carolina painting, debating, making field recordings of insects and birds, and gardening, moved into a cramped New York apartment on Bedford Street (near Chumley’s); Chumley’s, a beloved former speakeasy, is located at 86 Bedford Street, and legend maintains that the phrase “eighty-six”—as in, “Eighty-six that punk,” or, “We’re eighty-six on prosciutto-wrapped shrimp”—came from Prohibition, when patrons of Chumley’s would run out the door during a police raid; in a strained effort to earn enough money for New York City rent, several members of MY GIANT took jobs in Chumley’s; formerly teetotalers, the MY GIANT members began drinking with gusto, enjoying the glitz and gab of the West Village literary-establishment regulars (including Papa Hemingway); most damaging to the stability of MY GIANT was the rejection of Eastern philosophy and Emerson’s writings, which were replaced with the famed economist John Maynard Keynes’ epic “The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money”; capitalism became the new philosophy of MY GIANT, but as its members were trained as visual artists, they quickly fell victim to greed, petty in-fighting, and overspending on shoes and hats; they were incompetent wage-earners; MY GIANT went bankrupt—financially and philosophically—and its members scattered, a few returning to North Carolina, but most remaining in the northeast; MY GIANT vanished into obscurity, but for a fleeting moment, this tiny egalitarian society managed to live and create art together without bickering about the “Keynesian multiplier”; “My Giant” is also the name of a 1998 film romp starring Billy Crystal.
BADWATER
•July 22, 2008 • 1 CommentLocated in Death Valley, California, Badwater is the lowest point in North America; Badwater is 282 feet below sea level; while much of Death Valley is scalding hot, dry, and covered in salt, Badwater has a small, ancient spring; in the pool at Badwater lives the Death Valley pupfish, also known as Cyprinodon salinus; the Death Valley pupfish is a remnant of the last Ice Age, and the only species of its kind left on Earth; the hottest temperature ever recorded in North America is 134 degrees Fahrenheit—on July 10th, 1913, in Death Valley; I was in Death Valley for two days this past February; my parents flew to Las Vegas, then planned to visit Death Valley; a surprising amount of Fall and Winter rain in California resulted in the greatest floral growth in Death Valley in almost a century; my parents are the sort to fly across America to look at flowers growing in the desert; I am their youngest child; even though I was not initially invited, I decided to join my parents; I drove alone five hours northeast from Los Angeles; I left too late in the day, and by the time I turned right from US-395 North to CA-190 East, it was around nine o’clock at night; CA-190 takes you over 70 miles into Death Valley, and at night, it is dark, barren, and if you are alone, spooky; there is nothing; I was listening to a podcast of Thom Yorke on NPR, but my iPod finally died while on CA-190; with no human voices to keep me company, I felt incredibly lonely; somehow, my cell phone still got reception; I called my friend Elliot in Brooklyn, and when I asked what he was doing, he said he was watching the lunar eclipse from his rooftop; I told him I did not see a lunar eclipse, but when I looked up and to my right, there it was: a full moon, the color of blood; I got off the phone, and spent the rest of the trip following the maroon moon; the last time I saw a lunar eclipse was in October of 2004, and I was on the Upper West Side of Manhattan; I was meeting a friend at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas to see a late screening of the Alexander Payne film, “Sideways”; when I emerged from the Columbus Circle subway at 59th street, there were hundreds of people standing still on the sidewalk, staring at the night sky; I thought Manhattan was under attack again, but then I realized these people were collectively craning their necks to see the lunar eclipse; it seemed like mass hypnosis, a gaggle of Manhattan Moonies; when I made my way deep into the heart of Death Valley, I thought I had come upon a desert sea; the light from the moon reflected off the desert floor, glimmering, like a body of water full of bioluminescent plankton; I stopped my car in the middle of the highway, turned to the side, and flashed on my high-beams; there were no cars, no lights, nothing—so I got out of my car and walked off the highway; the ground beneath my feet crunched like snow; there was no water: this was an ocean of salt; I checked into our hotel—the Furnace Creek Inn—and met my parents; the next day, we picked armfuls of Desert Gold (a vibrant yellow flower) and explored Zabriskie Point—which was overrun with fannypack-wearing German tourists—as well as Badwater; I saw a school of tiny pupfish, and fantasized about reaching into the spring, grabbing one, and swallowing the salty desert sardine whole; I restrained myself; my parents and I walked a couple hundred yards past the spring, into the center of a salt field, and my father had me pose for photographs; we argued about the photos, because he wanted mountains behind me, but this position required me to stare directly into the sun; I gave in; this was not an uncommon fight for us; a month later, the half-dozen photos that my father took of me arrived in the mail; in the photographs, I am wearing a yellow shirt, blue hat—and glaring; I look like I want to fistfight; it is a desert mugshot; this is not how I want to think of myself, or how I want my parents to think of me; is this really how I look?; this is also not how I want to remember Death Valley; examining these photos of myself, I can not help but think of a poem a friend recently sent me (“Archaic Torso of Apollo,” by Rainer Maria Rilke); in the final stanza of Rilke’s poem about a headless statue, he writes: “…would not, from all borders of itself, / burst like a star: for here there is no place/ that does not see you. You must change your life.”
MERZBOW
•July 17, 2008 • 2 CommentsJapanese noise musician Masami Akita, who performs under the name “Merzbow,” specializes in music that sounds like massive titanium robots copulating; a bondage/fetishism enthusiast as well as a vegan animal rights activist (who dedicated the albums “Minazo Vol. 1 & 2” to an elephant seal), Merbow takes his moniker from Kurt Schwitters’ “Merzbau”; I discovered Merzbow while in a state of depression, and listened to his music for days at a time; Merzbow was, for me, the sound of all my frustration and rage (towards myself, the world) buzzing into the ether like an auditory Tesla coil; you see, while the music played it felt like the depression was out of my body and drifting towards the ceiling; I am not depressed anymore, but I still appreciate Merzbow—in smaller doses—and think that his life’s work has been a noble attempt at sonically representing the electric drone of contemporary culture; I genuinely believe that if you listen to any three discs from Merbow’s 50-disc boxed set “Merzbox”—or read Don DeLillo’s “White Noise”—you will begin to regard your household appliances with a newfound respect and/or fear; consider that while Japan has given birth to ambitious death cults (Aum Shinrikyo), rape and “futanari”/shemale comics (“manga”), an epidemic of male shut-ins (“hikikomori”) and teen suicide, as well as the misunderstood noise-artist known as Merzbow, 63 years ago the United States used two explosive devices to instantaneously, arbitrarily slaughter over 200,000 Japanese civilians; there is no elegant way for a culture to move forward from such an event; you could try to forget, but that would be futile, and besides, unexorcisable ghosts would keep appearing in your forests, photo albums, and artwork; Dr. Raymond Kurzweil, a leading futurist and Transhumanist, believes that at some point in the next 50 years, we will attain “Singularity,” a state where: “There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine or between physical and virtual reality”; if this terrifies you, do not be afraid: these adaptations towards a posthuman existence will occur not in a giant leap, but in a series of swift, continual baby steps, such that you will not be taken aback when your grandchild needs to be recharged like a cell phone; sometimes, the future has already occurred, but it takes years for a hesitant public to shed its past; if you would like to be inspired by noise that feels like a handful of glitter and thumbtacks, I suggest listening to Jimi Hendrix’s live performance of “The Star Spangled Banner” at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair in 1969, followed by “3 Types of Industrial Pollution” from Merzbow’s 1986 album, “Antimonument.”
WEEKI WACHEE
•July 14, 2008 • 1 CommentLocated on the Gulf Coast of Florida, Weeki Wachee Springs is the only city of live mermaids; Weeki Wachee was founded in 1947 by former Navy frogman, Newt Perry; the original mermaids were called “Aquabelles”; Weeki Wachee is one of the finest tourist attractions in the United States, and the entire operation—an underwater mermaid aquarium and a water park called Buccaneer Bay—is built on a natural spring; the spring is deep; if you go to Weeki Wachee—and you should go to Weeki Wachee—you will see mermaids, and you will gape like a prepubescent child; Weeki Wachee is a necessary destination in what Greil Marcus called “the old, weird America”; early last year, I met a girl—a young woman; I saw the girl perform in a Donna Reed dress, and she made me smile; let me clarify: I was on a semi-date, but when this girl walked on stage, everybody else in the room ceased to exist (including the semi-date, whose name I can not recall); soon after, this girl and I met for lunch in a park; I arrived before her, and as I waited, I wondered how I would appear to a beautiful girl in a car as she drove up; she arrived, then immediately went to the public restroom; I wondered if she was nervous too; probably not, I concluded; we sat down on a bench and talked for hours; I could have listened to her for days; when she spoke, I noticed a gentle lilt that reminded me perhaps of southern gentility—or Julie Andrews; I inquired about her accent, and she confessed that she stuttered as a child; years of practicing proper speech had created a curious enunciation of words; the resulting effect is that she seems like a kindergarten teacher, and you are her student; it is comforting; this girl’s stories meandered and circled and gave birth to other stories, like the tributary system of the Amazon River; I thought to myself: “What a lovely, odd girl”; at one moment in our conversation, her gaze drifted past me; she then said, “That squirrel looks like he’s reading a newspaper”; I turned to see a squirrel standing on hind legs, holding a scrap of paper in his front paws; the squirrel did look like he was reading a newspaper; the girl said that when she sees something so unbearably cute, it makes her want to grind her teeth; I understood what she meant (later, the same teeth-grinding issue arose with hummingbirds, except when they flew close she had a strange desire to pluck them from mid-air, like flying fruit); stop it! too cute!; our conversation in the park then drifted to Weeki Wachee, which was near her childhood home; I had heard that Weeki Wachee was celebrating its 60th anniversary, and the original mermaids would be performing a reunion show; we both talked about how fun it would be to go to the show; when we left the park, I wondered when I would see this girl again; soon, I hoped; I left for North Carolina the next day to visit friends in the military who were preparing to deploy for the Middle East; a week later, while in Wilmington, I received a phone call from the girl; she said that she was serious about going to Weeki Wachee, and wanted to know if I was just as serious; I was; I spent the summer getting to know this girl; we became friends; she liked to garden, and I once took a photo of her standing proudly with a handful of weeds, the sun setting behind her; she has the unique capacity to discover—in manual labor—the opportunity for magic; it is infectious; if this girl told you that hidden in the dirt and weeds was a wooden box full of gold, you would immediately grab a shovel and dig; I imagine her gorgeous mind as a Rube Goldberg machine, as Pee-Wee’s bedroom—an elaborate workshop of springs and sprockets and wee beasties tugging on levers, revealing rainbows and ghosts; late that summer, we flew to Florida and visited Weeki Wachee; we befriended some of the mermaids, and were even able to swim in the springs; she mastered using the oxygen tubes used by the mermaids and swam to the bottom (she was a natural, an Esther Williams—and the mermaids tried to recruit her to join their ranks); she outclassed me in the water; I watched from the surface as she fed bananas to floating turtles thirty feet below; I could not figure out how to breathe from those tubes—except in short spurts—but I loved being in the water, and while the girl swam below, her oxygen bubbles bursting around me, I thought: “I could not possibly feel more alive”; it was a couple months before the girl and I kissed; a year has passed, and I have since traveled to other cities to be with the girl, but still, when I am with her I feel so alive—and like I am floating; during “The Little Mermaid” show, the mermaids of Weeki Wachee sing: “We’re not like other women/We don’t have to clean an oven/And we never will grow old/We’ve got the world by the tail!”; when you go to Weeki Wachee—and you will go to Weeki Wachee—be sure to have your photo taken with a mermaid; mermaids are camera-friendly; you will never see a mermaid without her tail, and it is a given that she will be smiling; you will want photographic evidence of your visit; people will not believe that you met such a woman; you will need proof; have you ever been to a place so otherworldly you are sure you are dreaming?; I have.
SICK OF GOODBY’S
•July 11, 2008 • Leave a CommentA 1978 black-and-white photograph by Swiss-born photographer, Robert Frank; a vertical diptych (created with conjoined photographic frames), “Sick of Goodby’s” contains—in its top half—the dirty, warped beach image of an arm reaching into frame, holding a toy skeleton; the ocean’s horizon-line is in the distance, and the words “sick of” are scrawled across the photo; the lower half of “Sick of Goodby’s” depicts a small mirror resting against a larger mirror, the word “goodby’s” dripping down the image; it is unclear if the words were written in paint, lipstick, or blood; known for his iconic 1958 collection, “The Americans,” Robert Frank made the Kerouac-narrated Beat film “Pull My Daisy” in 1959 and spent much of the next decade creating films; I was aware of Robert Frank’s photos as a teenager, because he—along with Walker Evans—seemed to be the great visual chronicler of mid-20th century, roadside America; the photographs in “The Americans” are formal, elegant, and coolly ironic—just detached enough to create the feeling of immigrant insight into the post World War II/pre-Vietnam era in U.S. history; in college, I had a “hip” art teacher who showed us the rarely screened “Cocksucker Blues,” Frank’s druggy, sexy 1972 Rolling Stones tour film; my knowledge of Robert Frank’s work did not go beyond the Stones documentary; years later, while killing time in Washington Square Park, I began perusing the wares of one of the NYU-area sidewalk booksellers; I bought a French collection of Robert Frank’s photographs—published by the Centre National de la Photographie—for four dollars; the earliest photographs in the book are from 1949, and near the end of the collection is “Sick of Goodby’s”; this was the first time I saw “Sick of Goodby’s,” and I became obsessed with the image; “Sick of Goodby’s” did not resemble any of the Frank photos I knew from “The Americans”; I did not know what happened to the artist in the interim; in the back of this French book is a timeline of Robert Frank’s life, and it says that in 1974: “Andrea muerte dans un accident d’avion a Tikel au Guatemala”; I do not speak or read French, but had a vague sense of the sentence, and “muerte” seemed ominous; after a bit of research, I discovered that in the span of a few years in the 1970’s, Robert Frank’s daughter was killed in a plane crash and his son was diagnosed with schizophrenia; I can not imagine what Frank went through; his life was coming undone, and his photographs—which were influenced by his motion picture work as well as his enormous personal tragedy—would never be the same; Robert Frank’s photographs of this era are messy, scratched, covered in text, and deeply haunted; these photos seem to be movie stills married with script supervisor notes from the nightmare-film of a heartbroken, wrecked man; still, Frank managed to keep producing work; “Sick of Goodby’s” is a sort of mystic, sacrificial art: acknowledging the fragility of flesh, of film, the image is naked, sad, shattered, and ultimately—terrifying; but also, exhilarating; I am afraid of this photograph; if I stare at “Sick of Goodby’s” too long, I feel compelled to call my father and mother.
