The Shock of The New
Come what may, we as a nation are in a place we've never been




The other night I was at a social gathering of friends sitting around a backyard fire pit, and amid the ebb and flow of conversation and the sparks carried away into the night, a silence formed. And one of the group sitting there, gazing into the flames, intoned, "Now that George Bush is gone, we don't have much to talk about anymore."

Which made us chuckle, but, in fact, just as the administration of George W. Bush had become wearisome, so has talking about its incompetence, callousness and corruption. What more else could you say after eight years of the variation on a theme?

Witness the jubilation recorded and loaded up to YouTube above. The two young women are pouring into the street to experience an event they'll remember the rest of their lives. (I've experienced difficulty getting it to stick here; so you may or may not see it, if not, you can go here.) 

This is Broad Street, in Richmond, Virginia, between Harrison and Ryland streets, amid the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University. About this time, at the other end of town, a group of students and Obama supporters -- perhaps drifting up from the gala at Toad's Place in Shockoe -- formed in Capitol Square and stood before the Virginia State Capitol, designed by Thomas Jefferson, and once the seat of the Confederate legislature, and sang the "Star-Spangled Banner."

Then they, thousands of them, moved up through town, along Broad Street, hooting, cheering, chanting and waving banners and signs. Our city police watched uncomprehending and cautious. Here was not a riot, nothing violent, not even inebriated. Just happy.

"From The Hallelujah To The Hoot Is But A Step."

Amie and I were driving home after watching the results come in and the speeches, among friends, and where people cheered and wept. We had on WRIR and we heard a remote reporter speaking about some kind of spontaneous gathering at Adams and Broad, downtown and she said to me, "Let's go."

So we drove down to Franklin Street, parked there near Henry Street or so, and began walking over to Broad. We didn't see much of anybody at first, but heard the roaring of a crowd, and cheers, and car horns, and even train whistles as they locomotives passed along the northside track.

When we came out onto Broad, around Adams, we saw throngs, and two men walking up the middle of Broad Street holding a U.S. flag, like some 21st century version of Liberty Leading The People.

We followed along, the big majority of the crowd was bubbling toward Laurel and Franklin, at the center of the VCU campus, by dorms and Monroe Park. And we stood upon a wall there and watched the celebration. Drummers drummed, chanters chanted, some more daring clambered upon the new architectural affectation there in front of the dorms, a kind off stick pergola, and others climbed upon street poles and traffic signals. One girl, caught up in the moment, chose to trust fall into the arms of the waiting crowd. Something could have spun out and gone very badly, but, near as I could see and heard later, nothing untoward occurred (save for some isolated reported instances of pepper spraying by the police).

Though approaching a week later, I'm still somewhat in a state of disbelief. Virginia went Democratic, which it hasn't since Lyndon Johnson, almost in my life-time. A candidate for whom, though I was proud of, and though with a great ambivalence about the political system in general, I wanted to see win. And he triumphed. Before midnight. No days-long uncertainty, or tribulation, or Supreme Court intervention. He won it. He won amid the Republicans accusing him of getting money from overseas, and of ACORN stealing votes, and everything else they could latch hold of and throw in his direction.

On the opposite spectrum, the conspicuous lack of support Obama gave to the gay marriage propositions, especially in California, has already annoyed some of his committed supporters from the rainbow side. The financial bailout, the FISA rule that he voted to renew, all these aspects to his record will come into question during the months ahead. We'll see how much like Obama operates like a Chicago-machine apparatchik that the gets accused of.

And I found myself, despite my own tears of thanksgiving, thinking of several things. First, a sentiment expressed by Vladimir Nabokov, "that from the hallelujah to the hoot is but a step."

We learned this week that the vaunted "youth vote," though the highest in decades, was still not overwhelming, and what made the difference was that those who cast their vote didn't split between Democrats and Republicans, most of them sided with Obama. Which is how you win elections.

The next day, I would see reaction from around the world, the tears and cheers, in the streets of Paris, Singapore, and the Obama ancestral village in Kenya. This was a huge sigh of relief; like a war had ended.

But this election ended not a single war. Not yet. 

Later in the week, taking lunch at home, I watched on CSPAN a conference of Conservative women and they did not seem to understand why they had lost; they blamed the media -- despite Fox News and three hours of Rush Limbaugh and all of his ilk saturating the nation every day.

On First Friday, where some of the festive sense of earlier in the week could still be felt, the No BS Brass Band played in front of the former Obama-Biden canvassing offices. Now, the space resembled a hastily-organized musuem, filled with all manner of campaign ephemera, signs, flyers, photographs, even a few for Nader and McCain. I was reminded of all those images that have appeared on walls of the missing and dead following 9-11 and Katrina, and how different this was. The sudden urge to commemorate the just passed moment of triumph reinforces how, yes, the spectacular victory of Nov. 4 is past us. The real nasty business of governing is ahead. 

"The catastrophe that is the administration of George W. Bush is not unprecedented. It was merely inevitable."

And second, a feature in Esquire I noted some months ago, Charles B. Pierce's "The Cynic and Senator Obama."

Pierce, the titular Cynic, is listening to Obama speak over a car radio and through poor reception. Poetry.

"The sound quality is erratic, as though the engineer were putting down the volume at the end of every line. The applause sounds like water rushing through rusty pipes. The rudimentary transmission makes the stump speech sound both fresh and timeless. All of the same laugh lines and punch lines and applause lines are there, but they sound to the cynic like something different, as though he were listening for the first time to something out of the Library of Congress, a recording recently exhumed from an obscure archive. The cynic decides that politics is better on the radio, the same way baseball is, where you have to construct the scene in your own head. Radio is for dreamers. Television is for hucksters, and it has leached from American politics all of its creative imagination."

.................................................................................................

“I look forward as president to going before the world community and saying, ‘America is back. We’re ready to lead,’ “ Obama says on the radio, the static crackling and popping and the transmission fading, and it takes a moment for the cynic to wonder whether or not the world wants America to lead. Maybe the world wants America to sit down and shut up for a while.

. ...........................................................................................................................................

How we didn't get into this predicament just during the past eight years; oh no, there's plenty of blame to go around, including who you see in the mirror:

"There is no point anymore in blaming George Bush or the men he hired or the party he represented or the conservative movement that energized that party for what has happened to this country in the past seven years. They were all merely the vehicles through whom the fear and the lassitude and the neglect and the dry rot that had been afflicting the democratic structures for decades came to a dramatic and disastrous crescendo. The Bill of Rights had been rendered a nullity by degrees long before a passel of apparatchik hired lawyers found in its text enough gray space to allow a fecklessly incompetent president to command that torture be carried out in the country’s name."

"The ownership of the people over their politics -- and, therefore, over their government -- had been placed in quitclaim long before the towers fell, and the president told the people to be just afraid enough to let him take them to war and just afraid enough to reelect him, but not to be so afraid that they stayed out of the malls.

It had been happening, bit by bit, over nearly forty years. Ronald Reagan sold the idea that “government” was something alien. The notion of a political commonwealth fell into a desuetude so profound that even Bill Clinton said, “The era of Big Government is over” and was cheered across the political spectrum, so that when an American city drowned and the president didn’t care enough to leave a birthday party, and the disgraced former luxury-horse executive who’d been placed in charge of disaster relief behaved pretty much the way a disgraced former luxury-horse executive could be expected to behave in that situation, it could not have come as any kind of surprise to anyone honest enough to have watched the country steadily abandon self-government over the previous four decades. The catastrophe that is the administration of George W. Bush is not unprecedented. It was merely inevitable. The people of the United States have been accessorial in the murder of their country."

"The catastrophe that is the administration of George W. Bush is not unprecedented. It was merely inevitable," a-men, brother a-men.

.........................................................................................................................................

"In 2007, when asked about the possibility -- just the possibility -- of impeaching George W. Bush and/or Dick Cheney, Obama scoffed at the idea, not entirely because it was constitutionally unsound but also because it was impolite and a nuisance and might make many people angry at one another, and he was, after all, running to help save us from ourselves.

“We would, once again, rather than attending to the people’s business, be engaged in a tit-for-tat, back-and-forth, nonstop circus.”

He was offering a guilty country a nolo plea. Himself. Absolution without confession.

The cynic declined the deal. There were not enough people in handcuffs yet."

...................................................................................................................................................


"The cynic wondered if Obama’s campaign had not found itself in a blind alley of its own devising. By offering his complicit, fearful nation and its complicit, brutish people absolution without confession, without penance, Obama guaranteed that the sins would stay, and they would be committed over and over again, and against him this time. Poor bastard, thought the cynic. When the cynic heard Obama talk about Dr. King’s “fierce urgency of now,” he wondered first and always why Obama spent so much time talking about great men -- Abraham, Martin, John, and Bobby -- who’d all been shot in the head."

And Pierce wrote this before Hillary's Bobby Kennedy-primary ending in June kerfluffle. In the New York Deli a few days ago, I overheard an older gentleman striking up conversation with a college-age kid. The older man was more of a Ron Paul guy, so was the kid, and the Paulite said, he actually said this, "I feel so sorry for Barack. Even if he gets elected, somebody's going to shoot him."

Why do we think these things? Because in our hearts we don't really want any change. Anybody who tries is either marginalized, vilified -- or killed.

Now who sounds cynical?

Change Everywhere -- Except Here

We have elected Barack Hussein Obama President of the United States. He is ours now. And he's got a task ahead of worthy of cleaning the Augean stables. Already, the recriminations and attacks of the embittered have started, preparing to mince every gaffet -- like that remark about Nancy Reagan and séances -- made me chuckle, but wince, because I knew what was coming.

The thousands marched and expressed their exuberant enthusiasm for a paradigm shift in the way the nation is governed. Except for the Richmond city elections -- where everything basically remained the same.

We'll have a new mayor; instead of a Governor-Mayor, a Delegate-Reverend-Mayor and all but one of the sitting City Council returned to their chairs. So we get a big change at the national level, which is good, but more of the same right here on the street where political choices impart an immediate and direct affect. That outcome is a profound disappointment for me.

I listened to the Delegate-Minister-Mayor in a Meet The Candidates forum at the beginning of the season -- this was a strange Richmond day, rain while the sun shined, followed by a rainbow. During this session, the future Mayor grumped that he was tired of having to drive 95 miles to participate in cultural and sports activities. This stunned me. I know the man gets out of his house and visits restaurant row on Main Street from time-to-time, so what was he talking about?

Has he never attended a First Friday? Has he bothered to read the new Master Plan? Does he realize that this city supports a symphony and a ballet? He doesn't seem to know much, in fact, about the city he's now supposed to lead.

I Just Thought I Was Finished
The Writing Jag Part II

[Image: This is my office during the project. No, but, in truth it is photographer Walead Beshty composition, Dismal Science Reading Room, from June 7, 2006, Wit of the Staircase]


So at some point--it was after 4 am.--and the Late Night Mixtape is playing on WRIR, when I realize I'm hearing "Riot On The Radio" and "International War Criminal" each for the second time that I realize, well, I've done it again. And this minor filling task of the Rag-time in Richmond manuscript has turned into a forced march, a slog, and this is still before the whittling down to fit the proscribed size limits and all else that must be done to ready this thing for publication.

Amie got me up, though I complained, to get back at it and now with oatmeal eaten and coffee working here I am. It's October 23, 1909 and things are getting a little hazy. Wish me luck. This puppy has got to get done today, bibliography and all. I sense another very late night.

I'm goin' in.

************************************************************

Yup, still at it. Break for the pool, much needed, but my right eye is hurting and all the joints of my fingers, and I'm daubing with a cotton swab my upper right canine tooth with an alcohol pain deadener.

It's like midnight and I have two day's worth of work still and one night to do it in. And it's Monday, it's not like I can ask off from work. I'm kind of going nuts, slowly, back here in my time capsule.

Riot On The Radio, indeed.

Amie opened an envelope of my checks this afternoon without thinking and wondering if it was my copy of "New Adventures In Pornography." Which I think is a great blog name, and that's appropriate, since she came up--through my not hearing her correctly--the name for this one.

I have to go splash water on my face and weep a little.

Stupor Tuesday All's I care about is art (and whether this beard makes me look too old)

Me at the opening of Jillian McDonald's Fanatic
exhibition at 1708 Gallery, via Brad Birchett. Brad
addresses Jillian's obsession by describing me as
sporting a Billy Bob Thornton beard. Y'know, he's
right. I dunno yet if I want to keep the fuzz; five
years ago I looked like Trotsky. I don't know if this is
image inflation or deflation, but I know which Jillian
prefers.


Billion-eyed audience, fatigued as you are between Super Bowl elation and Super Tuesday depression, or vice versa, I'm not tonight discussing either. This is, after all, Mardis Gras. I've had two Hurricanes.

So fortified, I'm taking up a rather laggard brief summary of the past weekend and the cultural exploration of Richmond in which I'm able to partake.

The rains during February's First Friday subsided by afternoon making the later evening comfortable and suitable for the high art hike. We strolled into a.d.a to partake of the whimsical and perverse fantasyland of Yuliya Lanina with her wicked little creatures and landscapes that seduce the eye and titillate the senses. And made me feel weird. That the editor of Vanity Fair bought one of her pieces made me feel strange; just like when I buy one of the magazines almost every other month. It's People for people who think they are above people. I guess Richmond DNA dampens my sense of ironic fun. But Lanina is having fun turning the Teletubbies, and the Smurfs, and what ever else, inside out.

Between a.d.a and 1708 I got quite a dose of Chelsea. Not Clinton. The New York arts district. But without the art aquarium sensation. The other Chelsea, well, I saw her by Hillary during one stump speech or another and she was wearing black slacks, and observed, well, the audience behind her, all the way up. I thought at first I was seeing wrong; the camera switched to Hillary waving, then back, and yup. If you know what I'm saying. She's a tall, redheaded young woman.

Jillian's installation is dynamic and busy and fun. Plus, she was giving people fake Gothic type-face Billy Bob tattoos. This provided much enjoyment that I abstained from, but that's my issue. The Partner In Art For Life got one, as Brad Birchett via the 1708 blog shows.

Jillian had a steady stream of customers for the entire evening.

Besides here fascination for Billy Bob, Jillian also works in the idiom of...zombies. In one instance, she taped herself while riding on a New York subway transforming into a zombie. This is quite famous. I read about her in the New York Times some time ago, thinking she was one of those types circulating in the arts firmament, who wouldn't be caught dead, much less zombified, in Richmond. [Subway image via NYT, and Jillian]

Well.

I was quite wrong.

Here I could offer a dull discursis on how Jillian's art is an extension of vanitas, and embracing the fleeting and fickle nature of fame--what it does to those who experience the expansion of recognition and the audience that appreciates or becomes downright fanatic about that individual's greater presence.

I might go on about how Jillian's examination of the zombie is an understanding of our culture's death-in-life characteristic, and how we are both preoccupied by fatality, yet unable to come to terms with finality.

No matter how true (or not), such a recitation would drain the fun out of the experience, just as fluids seep out of a dead body.

We later had the delightful opportunity to hang out out with Jillian at Tarrant's, and found her to be unassuming, funny, smart, and from Winnipeg, Manitoba, and that's as in Canaday, bay-bee.

Her video pieces about she and Billy Bob, and zombies shorts, have provoked questions about how many were in her film crew. For the most part, it was just her and a camera, or a computer. She doesn't have much ambition to do videos and such things. Not her art, though part of the form she pursues. Wow. That was refreshing.

But prior to sitting down with Jillian, I took the shuttle bus provided by the Valentine Richmond History Center to see Shanna Merola's Tell Me Where You're Marching, Tell me Where You're Bound.

This is an eerie collection of images that seek to capture both the distance and immediacy of Richmond's slave-trading history. Little physical remains of the slave internment cells and wharves and auction houses, so Merola presents moods and poems about these places. She's from Connecticut, and studying here, which again demonstrates to me that those who come to Richmond from outside just see the place as we cannot. I hope she can figure out a way to stay and that I'll see more of her work.

Now amid all this, we also went to the third anniversary of WRIR 97.3 held at the Renaissance Conference Center, built in the 1880s as a Masonic meeting place. This was a big, good time, though the beer line proved lengthy and the service there a bit dilatory, but hey.

As is presented in these images from WRIR, and photographer Monica Marusek, the independent spirit was in full flower.

We arrived in time to see Tulsa Drone, a real treat. They describe themselves as ambient punk, which seems just destined to go into a the film score for an Edgar Allan Poe bio-pic, should one ever get made.

Amie and I enjoyed seeing the whole group under lights. We've been audience members most often in dark, crowded venues, and this night's line up was worth seeing. They had I think seven for so musicians performing, including horns -- a punk ambient big band.

They played, and were loud, and the space suited them, and I noted how several of the players turned away from the audience, so though I had plenty of light to view them, I couldn't see their faces.

Those rock and rollers.

The Richmond Moving Image Cooperative's Fifth Annual Italian Film Festival returned with its roster of classic Italian cinema to the Firehouse Theatre on Satuday. As usual, with every year, I become wintry and wistful in my mind, recalling the nights when I was young and walking to the late and lamented Biograph Theatre nearby on West Grace Street. A whole series of curling waves bearing sensations like lost objects in the water bob up. Of leaving a film and ambling with a friend, or alone, to the old Village Café while amid the raucous and debauched roisterousness of Grace in those days (and brought back to life with vivid impressions by Greg Hershey here.)

Having made it to a little round table, or a squeaking booth with wood darkened by a patina caused by the smoke of several thousand cigarettes, you'd sit there and talk about the film while the Village and Grace Street roared and clamored around you. There was nothing like this experience anywhere near Richmond at the time. This was the mid-1980s when Reagan was the perpetual president--he smiled, got elected; he smiled again, got elected; by then, I was tired of Reagan's smile. But we sort of knew where we stood. There was still a Soviet Union. I protested contra aide. Rent on my Grove Avenue upstairs room was a $135 a month, and I was hard-pressed to come up with the sum.

And the Biograph was an oasis--though an overused metaphor--but this was the truth of the matter. Seeing the latest Woody Allen, or a classic like Abel Gance's Napoléon (five hours cramped in a Biograph seat that sat at a slight backward and awkward incline, like an ancient astronaut's couch), or Rembetika about "the birth of the Greek blues." And you could go out into the evening with a girl and feel good about life. Man Facing Southeast's screening kind of changed my life. An incident that occurred to a friend of mine as we were making our way to The Village embarked me on writing a novel. Not published, but written -- you get my meaning.

Anyway, that the Richmond region is bereft of a true art house, like Charlottesville's Vinegar Hill, is preposterous. The Bow Tie Boulevard theater complex may fill this lapse, but we'll see. At least we'll be able to walk there. And that, too, was half the pleasure, of going to the Biogarph with anticipation, and leaving satisfied and perhaps hand-in-hand, meandering through a warm Fan night checkerboarded by the lit windows of apartment buildings, and townhouses lining Park Avenue, like Edwardian sideboards. Though still absurd, the world appeared to make more sense then, than now.

That the RMIC doesn't have a permenant space frustrates me, knowing that the exact place they needed, the 1926 Capitol Theatre (thank you Cinematour!) a few blocks from the Firehouse at Robinson and Broad, was ripped down with callous glee in September 1995 a mere four years prior to the group's organization under Mike Jones, and three before the arrival of James and Katie Adams Parrish, and Flicker. (I have a brief account of the Capitol's foreshortened life in True Richmond Stories.)

Enough of that: don't look back, as the song says.

At the Italian event was per usual the delicious offerings from Mama 'Zu and 8 1/2 restaurants, red wine, and even an Italian coffee cart parked out front. But there was no Sophia Loren. Due to the scarcity of film prints and even tighter presentation requirements, the anticipated 2 p.m. showing of Mario Monicelli's 1972 La Mortadella (Lady Liberty) starring La Loren wasn't available. So, instead, we were treated to Ettore Scola's 1974 C'eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much).

This year, the festival utilized rear screen projetion via DVD that prevented silhouettes of wine-drinkers and bathroom-goers from blocking the screen, but also can't give the richness of color that film provides. There was an amusing technical problem at the beginning that caused Mike Jones to soldier through a vamping introduction. The film is told from several perspectives and has three different beginnings. Well, as one of the protagonists is halted midway into a swimming pool dive, a narrator says that we'll return to his splashdown in 30 years. At this point the movie stopped and Mike and James futzed with the set up. I jibed that this is a meta cinematic concept,all we'll see is the three separate introductions, over and over. A woman in the audience laughed, "It's Groundhog Day after all!"

Loved that reference.

Still. The film prefigures a much worse 1983 Hollywood version--The Big Chill, or perhaps, John Sayles' 1980, The Return of the Secaucus 7. Less is at stake in those two than in the Monicelli film.

We All Loved is an epic, really, that embraces friendships several men and women from their days as partisans fighting the Germans in the snows during World War II. Woodstock it wasn't. And the vast themes of politics, of communism, the choice of moving into the middle class and respectability at the cost of shutting oneself off from a more radical past, and how compromise becomes necessary for living, the splendid evocations of love and loss and friendship and betrayals great and small-- they're all in there. And there's plenty of slapping. Men flathanding women, women backhanding men, and screaming and crying and attempted suicide. And the importance of the post-World War II film, and a leif motif of The Bicycle Thief (which I experienced for the first time at the festival, last year).

The audience for the second film, Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits, packed the place and there was much joyous eating, with the food line backed out the door. Also grand was seeing so many friends, and a few whom I'd not seen in a while.

Watching an original after the greater culture has so absorbed its themes and moods is jarring. The camera angles, the hyperreal colors, the antic dream like nature of the film, have been taken and put into films by lesser directors ever since 1965. Was it really that long ago? The hairstyles--in particular the character of Adele played by Luisa Della Noce--and even some of the fashions--and situations, seemed far more contemporary. This causes disorientation of a cinematic nature; the film is old, but it's been so plundered, you can think you're seeing either an hommage or a parody.

This was Fellini's first color project. And wow, was I astonished to see Valeska Gert as a nutty Far Eastern hermaphrodite seer! Members of the billion-eyed audience may recall her as the repressed lesbian overseer of the girl's reformatory to which Louise Brooks gets sent in Pabst's Diary of A Lost Girl.

Amie and me couldn't stay for the final film of the evening, Divorce American Style. But I have to say, the festival was a tremendous success for us, and I hope for the RMIC.

Zombies, A Birthday, the Slave Trail, and Big Naked Men



The gals are back for the First Friday's On and Off Broad Art Walk sponsored by Curated Culture that each month injects the kind of liveliness pictured here to midtown Richmond. If you are new to the billion-eyed audience, you may not know that the image is of a long ago opening at the former Three Miles Gallery which is now the new and improved Tarrant's Café, that takes the name and part of their space from the pharmacy that conducted business there for years, and a splendid stained glass transom bears the name.

We hope the rains of the day's forepart may slack and that the street will be busy anyway, as it often is, and that the girls will wear an appropriate wrap around their shoulders.

UPDATE: Yes indeedy, the precip is past, and Watteau clouds and blue sky are treating the eye.

The star turn tonight is the Jillian MacDonald exhibtion at the 1708 Gallery. MacDonald brings her new media/performance work, that has included transforming herself from a normal subway communter into a zombie, and an ongoing artful obsession with Billy Bob Thorton, and the general insanity of the age. And the Partner In Art For Life is bartending.

At art6, gallery go-founder John Bailey is displaying 13 floor-to-ceiling crayon drawings of nekkid men. Hey, if it's what you're into. The curious audience should be worth observing.

Also tonight, the Valentine Museum Richmond History Center opens Tell Me Where You're Marching, Tell Me Where You're Bound, a photographic exhibit of pinhole images by Shanna Merola of the all-but erased images of Richmond's antebellum slave trade. I want to make an effort to get to Court End for this, but as usual there's much going on. There's a gallery talk on February 10. This haunting image represents the holding pens of Lumpkin's Jail (If you follow the link, scroll down)

I'll be checking out the Third Birthday Party of WRIR Radio with its array of musical and performance artists. This is held in what was built as the Masonic Temple and is now commercial and residential, with the Renaissance Center conference center within. This is always a big fun party and I'm eager to hear the No BS Brass and Tulsa Drone. I've liked the snippets I've heard of Erin Tobey, but don't know much else about her.

Now, tomorrow, of course, if you have a cultural bone in your body is the Richmond Moving Image Co-Cop Italian Festival -- the fifth! -- and it's in the intimacy of the Firehouse Theatre, food, wine and cappacino all day long. All that, and Sophia Loren, too! [via onanslemming.nl]

Shameless Self-Promotion: A continuing series
Hell, nobody else will do it for you, as the saying goes...

Here, billion-eyed audience, is filmmaker David Williams' verison of the event presented by me and the partner-in-art-for life Amie Oliver, with help from the Art Cheerleaders (Kendra, blonde; and Rebecca, both artists in their own right). This piece, called "Dictation," was part of Amie's Walk The Walk exhibit at Plant Zero Art Center, available for viewing through December 23. I read pieces about the arts from my book True Richmond Stories.

This is me, Amie, Kendra (left) and Rebecca posed in front of the wall on which Amie wrote her impressions of my subject matter. Yes, she writes backward with her left hand with greater ease than she can scribe the other way. Yes, she installed a mirror so that passersby who cared to or even noticed could read the text.



Then here's an image of me and Amie with her long-time friend, artist and professor Ken Mitchell, visiting Richmond from the Glasgow School of Art a few weeks back. We love Ken--I first met him when Amie took our wedding holiday around the Scottish Highlands--and were happy to see him even for a brief time. As you can see, too, Ken took some True Richmond Stories with him.


And to round out the multi-media aspect of this post, here is the 26-minute interview conducted by Tim Bowring with me and Amie on his WRIR 97.3 show, Zero Hour.

http://www.twango.com/flash/audioplayer.aspx?media=Aok.10001&channelname=Aok.public&autoplay=true

Below is a snippet from the New York Deli event in Carytown that Amie shot. Here I'm presenting a piece about Martin Hawkins, the Revolutionary War-era sturgeon rider in the James River. Behind me are members of the Happy Lucky Combo; Pippin Barnett on percussion, Barry Bless with the accordian, and Dave Yoh on upright electric bass.

This was a great time. Ward Tefft of Chop Suey Books brough books across the street from Chop Suey Tuey -- about 20 or so-- and sold out of them. People came off the street having seen the slender volume setting on the front window shelf table, even after the music was over. The attraction: the Hollywood Cemetery pyramid on the cover. This is primal stuff; the pyramid is a greater symbol of Richmond than even the Lee Monument, since it is old, mysterious and the shape and meaning are more ancient than Richmond, race, politics, or even the Civil War (which is its putative purpose, commemorating 18,000 Southern dead buried there).

One young woman bought five books. I signed expressions of my appreciation for her choice; and that of her varied future in-laws and family.

The New York Deli gang passed to Amie a splended signature book in which they all expressed their appreciation that made me feel as though I'd accomplished something far more important than I think I have....humbling, is what it was.

Cognitive Collisions Part II

Seems to me, billion-eyed audience, that there should be theatrical extravaganzas or galas in Richmond that look like this. We have the narrow Edwardian streets and a few
old and some genuine decrepit buildings. There is a sense of gloom,
finished and vanished things, and cultivated absurdity, and opposites
in extremes. Sigh. This is from the Dresden Dolls Diary, Amanda Palmer
with "Camille and Meow."
"this is the fringe," she writes. "it's the best place in the world." I suppose so; if you're in a post punk Brechtian cabaret duo with a fervid and distinctive following.


Saturday, Nov. 3, I was in a personal-type appearance at the Holiday Shopper's Fair at the Cultural Arts Center of Glen Allen scheduled from 11:00 a.m to 1:00 p.m though I stayed about a half hour longer due to the numbers of people come through. This western Henrico County multiple use facility is in part housed in the rescued Glen Allen School, and it is next door to the restored 18th century Walkerton Tavern .

This event is a combination holiday sale for the region's museums. I'd never heard of it before, but plenty of other people know about it because there was a ceaseless flow of people ambling about, going from room to room, where various institutions had set up satellite gift shops.

I was there under the flag of the Valentine Richmond History Center . They'd brought 50 books when the show opened the day before when they'd sold 10. I pushed the goods with the assistance of the Two Nancys. Thank you, ladies.

Among the visitors was actor and acquaintance Raynor Scheine , who bought not one of the slender volumes, but two!

Mark Greenough, my colleague of many summers ago at Fort Harrison National Battlefield Park in Varina outside Richmond--where we both wore Union blue, and how now runs the tours of the Virginia Capitol, came by with his wife and I inscribed his copy of the slender volume, too.

One of the relief clerks--I cannot recall her name--told me that when she was walking into the place, she saw a man reading his recent acquisition while he was going to the parking lot--and he was chuckling. Stuff like this quite rewarding.

I provided sales patter: "Step right up, step right up, get your True Richmond Stories right here! Psychic horses! Ditch digger finds a diamond! Mr. Rubin predicts the weather! Dancing under the stars at Tantilla Garden ballroom! And to New Wave at the Cha Cha Palace, which some of you won't own up to now!"

And:

"Get your True Richmond Stories! No batteries or assembly required! No booting up or downloading! One size fits all! Matches all accessories! Makes you look smarter by carrying it around! Provides ideal holiday party tidbits to impress friends in conversation!

We sold out.

"Standing O"



Amie's behind more deadlines and didn't feel up to more social gyrations so she took me down to Plant Zero, me in my black tie and tails, for attending the OPUS "Standing O" gala for the benefit of the School of the Performing Arts for Children, founded by Larry and Jenny Brown, who were in attendance. Love those guys.

Amie needed to reinstall her video display with additional credits and music. She'd babysit the "Walk The Walk" exhibit in case some of the celebrants were curious about the pieces.

There was a red carpet and a faux news crew interviewing the arrivals as though they were celebrities. I was stopped for Harrison Ford -- I suppose because of my black fedora. (In honesty, my celebrity double is Cary Elwes -- but who knows his name well enough?)


My celebrity double, Cary Elwes. Same age, much better hair and smoother skin.


The newscaster asked me how the filming of "Indiana Jones IV" was going and I retorted, "Oh! I'm too old for all that! Jumping from trains! It's awful!" I'm not sure if the fellow was stunned or amused.

I made my way down the hall to Amie, who was intent at work and I told her I'd be out in a bit to check on her. I got signed in and motivated toward one of the bars for the first vodka tonic. There was plentiful food and a fountain a raised, large-to-small arrangement of shrimp that I munched at most of the night. I ran into various folks I knew, some better than others, and I am embarrassed that I'm not better at names. Faces, I recognize.

I admired the loverlies and fairest-of-them-all arriving, exhibiting their right to bare arms and shoulders and oh, I do love the look. All those high heels clicking on the bare concrete of Plant Zero's event space. So I propelled myself out to check on Amie, and she'd already gone. So I was on my own recognizance.

The Michael Clark Band, with the powerful voice of Miss Tracy Clark in the lead, provided the Motown-funk-blues theme for the evening, and for a while, me and Melanie--she quite striking in her white with black geometric pattern dress--danced up a sweating storm. At one point she even took off her heels. The rest of the crowd did a typical Richmond and stood there holding their drinks and rocking their heads. That is, until after the break and the second set and the audience was, ah, conditioned and primed to move.

I admired the upright video monitors that for most of the evening displayed images of the region's performance arts groups. I asked Jake Crocker about who supplied them because I'd like to use one for the Firehouse's Fireball gala in March. In the evening's second half, images of the night's party were getting shown. That was instant gratification. I'd like to have gotten some of those pictures.

So I danced, drank, and hobnobbed. About 11:30 I was tired, and so I set my glass down and proceeded to walk home, across the Mayo's Bridge -- the Richmond skyline has grown in the past few years, and it makes more of an impression on foot than by car. Still, I wish either we had no high rises at all--like central Paris--or several distinctive buildings. Instead, Richmond's nighttime cityscape isn't inspiring, no symphonic declaration of urbanity. You can thank "Dallas" prompted 1980s architecture, followed by even less interesting 1990s plans, for preventing dynamism in Richmond's skyline. Most of our older, better highrises are hidden behind the glass and plastic ones, and Jefferson's Temple of Democracy, atop its hill, is also invisible. Sad.

So, in my tux, I hied up 14th to Main, thence to Sixth, up to Broad, where the street lights were out (This happens on occasion and I wonder--does the city forget to pay the bill? Is it an auserity measure? Cops messing with the heads of potential miscreants?). I felt a little anxious and obvious but got a Robinson to Belmont bus without much of a wait at all.

I checked at Can Can where chairs were already getting stacked up, then chose to go to the New York Deli. This was, in retrospect, silly. D wasn't there, none of the Club NYD-ettes, just fine pretty things and clouds of cigarette smoke. I got home, reeking of the stuff. Amie wasn't pleased, and I was too happy with me, either.

Wordy Birds

By the way, here's me getting interviewed by Liz Humes on her "Wordy Birds" program that airs on WRIR 93.7 FM on Fridays, 12-12:30. I enjoy getting interviewed by Liz. She reads the books and asks good questions. You don't always get that lucky. Trust me. Plus, she's got that throaty Debra Winger voice.

Press to play.