Foster Dickson's Blog, page 32

Southern Movie 44: “Two Thousand Maniacs!” (1964)

It might be a good thing that Herschell Gordon Lewis’s 1964 Two Thousand Maniacs! is a hard movie to find. Lewis, a former English professor who is called the “Godfather of Gore,” became famous in the 1960s and 1970s for making bloody, disturbing horror movies. (He didn’t limit himself to those. Other productions from the 1960s included the “nudie” movies Goldilocks and the Three Bares and Boin-n-g!) Two Thousand Maniacs! present a wild and exaggeratedly horrific portrait of a small Deep Southern town whose commemoration of  the Civil War includes killing Yankees who are passing through. In this one, characters quickly become caricatures . . . and the absurdity quickly becomes obvious.

Two Thousand Maniacs! opens with a raucous, upbeat banjo-and-guitar song about how “The South’s gonna rise a-gain” as we watch a hillbilly in overalls  using binoculars to scope out passing cars from a tree. As he looks at the license plates, he signals to a man down the road whether he should leave a road sign that reads “Augusta 110” or remove that and put up a detour sign that will redirect them. They do this several times, grinning and waving like imbeciles as they do. In the middle of this, the scene shifts to a small, Southern downtown that is empty of cars and other normalcy, but has a throng of people waving Confederate flags and cheering (at nothing in particular). There is a banner across the town’s main street that reads “Pleasant Valley April 1865 – April 1965.” For anyone who doesn’t know their Southern history, the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse occurred on that former date, so this is the centennial of its end.

Soon, the two cars they’ve diverted arrive in the little downtown, and the flag-waving people run out to greet them. They surround the first car, which is a white convertible with two couples in it, and cheer them into the main intersection. The newcomers are confused and wary, but a loud and charismatic man in a suit and string tie presents himself as the mayor and assures them they’re being welcomed as guests of honor! Guests of honor to what? they want to know. Their concerns are waved off, and the two couples are coaxed out of the car and leave the scene. Right behind them is another convertible with a woman driving and a male passenger. We learned a moment before that she has picked him up as a hitchhiker and that he is a teacher heading to a convention. They too are surrounded and greeted with cheers, then convinced that they’re guests of honor too and coaxed out of the car despite mild objections. Near the end of these sequences, the two men from the road show up and are introduced as the “centennial chairman” and the “program chairman.” After the six guests of honor are ushered away, the two chairmen discuss a half-baked plan to go back to the road and lure a few more unsuspecting motorists for their own personal pleasure, but are scolded by the mayor for it. However, that doesn’t stop them from devising a plan to separate the couples and do as they will.

Up in the hotel room, one of the couples, the Millers fuss a little bit about the situation. The blonde bombshell wife Bea rolls around on the bed in her black lacy dress, while she shares that she doesn’t trust her husband John not to cheat. He responds in a swarthy way, then the phone rings. It is one of the local women Betsy who giggles and flirts, asking the husband to come down and meet her. Of course, John agrees, and against his wife’s lazy objections, he goes down to the lobby to meet her, and they leave arm in arm. Now that the wife is isolated, the two chairmen tell another man named Harper, who is sitting in the lobby, that it’s time for him. He calls upstairs and offers Bea to leave with him, and she coyly agrees and comes downstairs in a yellow outfit.

Now outdoors, Bea and Harper are sitting alone. They talk for a brief moment, then embrace and begin to kiss. When they stop, she asks what he does in the town, when they’re not hosting a centennial, and he brushes off her question, then pulls out a pocket knife, saying, “Feel how sharp that is.” She is reluctant but does it, and he slices her thumb open. She screams, outraged at the blood coming from her thumb and insists that he do something about it. Okay, he replies, and uses the small knife to cut off her whole thumb! As she screams louder, the scene faces out.

Next we see, Bea Miller is in the mayor’s office. Mayor Buckman has his arm around her shoulders as she weeps loudly, while Harper laughs and yucks it up over to the side. The mayor asks to see the wound, unwraps the rag on it, and agrees that it looks bad. Then the two men, with big smiles, call in the two chairmen for assistance. Bea begins to scream and thrash wildly, but they put her on the mayor’s desk and hold her down. One man gets an ax by the mantle. She struggles against the three holding her down, but to no avail— he lifts the ax and with great joy chops off her arm at the shoulder. As she lies dead, they pick up the arm and marvel at it gleefully.

One pervasive problem with Two Thousand Maniacs! is the sound quality. The recording equipment was clearly low-quality, and because the actors are shouting so many of the lines, it is hard to hear what they’re saying, especially indoors. This problem was particularly bad in the arm-chopping scene, when the men’s dialogue is going on alongside the woman’s screaming.

Back at the hotel, that hitchhiking teacher Tom White has figured out that something is up. He goes to the room of Terry Adams, the woman who picked him up, to share his concerns, but she thinks the treatment they’re receiving is wonderful. He disagrees, saying that his friend who is a history scholar didn’t say a word about any big Civil War event happening. (I’m not sure how it would be possible that no major Civil War events would be happening in April 1965, but okay.) Terry begins to see his point, but only stands there and rubs her face absent-mindedly. Tom then tries to make a long-distance phone call from the room, but is told by the front desk that he can’t. So the two hatch plan to use their spare change for a pay-phone call.

Tom then goes out and uses a pay phone to call the convention hotel in Atlanta. It takes a bit to get connected, but he does, then he is confused by being told that neither his friend nor any of the convention people are there until tomorrow. He tries to relays the urgency of talking to someone there, but gets nowhere. (It is at this point, when he is leaving the phone booth, that my suspicions were confirmed. As Tom leaves the phone booth, it is in a park full of palm trees— they’re filming in California.) When the scene shifts away from Tom, we see a laughing Mayor Buckman at his desk, proclaiming ironically, Sure, Mr. White, I’ll give him the message . . . The call was not routed to Atlanta, it was routed to the mayor! He folds up the message into a paper airplane, lights it on fire, sails it into the fireplace, and stomps on it.

That evening, the town is gathered around a campfire, where Bea’s arm is roasting on a spit, as a bluegrass trio plays “Rollin’ in my Sweet Baby’s Arms.” Again, the sound quality is terrible as people woohoo around the song. The other couple, who were in the first convertible, don’t seem to notice a human arm roasting nearby, but do notice that Bea is gone and John is with another woman. After we see John drinking moonshine and hanging on his new lady, Terry stops Mayor Buckman and asks what that is that’s roasting. He tells her that it’s . . . symbolic and that he’ll explain everything tomorrow. Terry looks concerned, and the mayor asks where Tom is. Terry reminds him that they aren’t a couple, that Tom’s car had broken down so she gave him a lift. The mayor guffaws again and says that he just wants them all at the party.

After the mayor leaves with the two chairmen, Tom sneaks out of the darkness, taps Terry to leave, and leads her to a marker in the woods. It says that the town was the site of a Union massacre in 1865 and that the town has pledged vengeance.

“What does it mean,” Terry asks in a whisper.

“It means that we’re here to be killed,” Tom replies.

And they run off into the dark woods.

Meanwhile, the mayor and the two chairmen are looking for them, but give up and say that they should return to the “horse race.” At the campfire, the second couple is led out (forcibly) by Harper, who tells them they’ll need their rest, and a very drunk John Miller is picked up to take part in the “horse race.” He protests that he doesn’t even know how to ride, but they tell him loudly and with wild shouts that he doesn’t need to. They drag the drunk man across a field— then tie him up to be drawn and quartered! Last we see of John Miller, one of his legs is being dragged across the grass.Yet, after the spectacle, the crowd isn’t as hyped as they have been. They look somber, almost remorseful . . . until one of the chairman shouts for some music and reminds them all, “You know what happens to anybody who backs out.” We don’t know, but they seem to. The bluegrass trio breaks into “Look away, Dixieland,” and the quiet crowd soon regains its momentum and goes off clapping and singing.

The next morning, the second couple David and Beverly Wells wake up to the bluegrass trio playing in the street outside their window. Beverly comments that this is starting to seem odd, and David agrees. He tries to call the others’ rooms, but is told that all of them are out for a walk. It’s eight AM, and given John’s drunken state the night before, it is unlikely that’s true. So the Wells opt for getting dressed and finding out what’s going on.

Meanwhile, the mayor tells his two accomplices that he doesn’t like that teacher fellow. He’s onto them and shouldn’t be allowed to start trouble.

Down in the street, the Wells are accosted by Harper and Betsy, and separated. David Wells is taken out to a field, despite his protestations, to a barrel roll. The stiff Yankee has lost all humor about the situation – can’t find his friends, separated from his wife, doesn’t know why he’s there – and tries to refuse. On top of a nearby hill, Betsy leads him to a small crowd where a yellow barrel with a Confederate flag on it is poised to be pushed down a hill. David isn’t interested, but is told that he must crawl through it, or they can’t have a barrel roll! Still unwilling, he is forced through, then is stopped midway while Mayor Buckman pounds nails into the barrel. We begin to realize what will happen: David will roll on the nails all the way down. By the time he reaches the bottom, he is bloody and dead. Over his red painted-splattered corpse, one of the excited chairmen proclaims, “This is the best centennial anybody’s ever had!”

Back at the hotel, Tom White finds a man guarding the hallway outside his door. He acknowledges him nonchalantly then goes back into his room and out the window to Terry’s room. Tom comes in her window, telling her to remain quiet. Then she goes out and lures the man into her room so Tom can hit him over the head. The pair escape the hotel on foot, but Harper comes chasing them. As they run through a field, Terry falls into a mud puddle, which Tom declares to be quicksand, but he extracts her. Right behind them, Harper falls into the same mire and drowns. For a moment, Tom considers going back to help him but doesn’t, and they continue to run, as creepy organ music accompanies their escape. However, for a moment, the music shifts to something sentimental as Terry washes her legs in a pond. Tom looks on. I guess we’re supposed to surmise that they’re falling in love, but this out-of-place scene is awkward.

Since we’ve figured out by now that the townspeople are picking off the Yankees one by one, our attention now shifted to the demise of Beverly Wells. She is led across a pretty green space in town to a yellow scaffold with a huge rock poised on top. Beverly is informed that she’ll be judging something for them. Judging what, she asks. Judging whether that rock has fallen or not! After struggling and protesting, Beverly is tied to a platform below the scaffold, and the locals begin to throw softballs at a target that will make the rock fall (kind of like a dunking booth). Of course, this task takes way too long, and the scene contains a lot of bad jokes and cheers from the crowd. Eventually, Beverly is crushed by the boulder, and the townspeople grin maliciously and nod silently.

With everyone dead except Terry and Tom, we know that Two Thousand Maniacs! is coming to an end. When we see Tom and Terry again, they run into a dirty, little boy named Billy who asks, “Whaddayoo want, Yankees?” Tom coerces him into showing them where their car is by promising that there’s candy that he can have. The boy falls for the trick, but the keys aren’t in the car. They send Billy for the keys, but the crazy mob is coming, and the rude boy arrives back just as the mob is upon them. He doesn’t want to give up the keys but does, and Tom grabs him and puts him in the car with them as they speed away.

Of course, it won’t be that easy. As they leave down a one-lane dirt road, a rickety truck follows, with banjo music playing. They drop Billy off at the paved road, and he kicks the dirt and complains that he didn’t get to drive and didn’t get any candy.

Tom and Terry return to civilization and report what has happened to the police. The officer who takes their complaint doesn’t believe a word they say, and even tells them that he’s never heard of Pleasant Valley. Tom retorts, asking how the man doesn’t even know the towns in his own county! But the country lawmen has his own retort: he’s going to given them both a breathalyzer test to be sure they aren’t drunk. Next we see the trio, Tom and Terry have led the officer to the turnoff, and the dirt road is gone. The lawman says that he’s lived around there is his whole life and that there never has been a Pleasant Valley. But Terry points out their car’s tracks, and the three go on foot to find it. They don’t go far when the lawman tells them that there are local legends about a town called Pleasant Valley, which the Union soldiers burned to the ground a hundred years ago. Tom and Terry are shocked: have they seen a whole town full of ghosts? As that conversation plays out, the stone marker about the massacre and the vengeance, which is nearby, disappears.

Tom and Terry drive away and stop at the state line. (The sign only says, “State Line.”) They debate for a moment over what happened to them, but they have Billy’s little play noose to prove that it was real. Tom tries to get out, saying that he’ll hitchhike his way to Atlanta, but Terry tells him to stay and drive. She wants to them to stay together, since she owes her life to him. She never wants them to be apart— it’s a love story after all!

Back in the boonies, the two so-called chairmen of the centennial whimsically wonder what the next centennial will be like. Maybe the Yankees will come in rocket ships next time. They get up to go back to town, so they don’t miss the “deadline,” and on their way, call Harper to come out of the quicksand. He comes out of the muck and, with equal nonchalance, wanders into the woods with them. And that’s where it ends.

Although films like Two Thousand Maniacs! are not meant to be taken seriously as cultural documents, they do perpetuate and reinforce stereotypes and misconceptions. Keep in mind that, by 1964, Americans had seen years’ worth of news coverage of Civil Rights protests where the white opposition was waving Confederate flags just like the ones in this film do. However, the cultural effects must’ve been minimal, since I seriously doubt that many American moviegoers went to see Two Thousand Maniacs! Put simply, the film plays on the worst stereotypes – violent Southerners who enjoy hurting people and who harbor resentment over the Civil War – and exaggerates them to the point of ridiculousness: torture and even cannibalism. The problem is in the lack of a nuanced understanding. The Lost Cause from the late 19th century and the return of Confederate flag in the 1960s are connected in complex ways, but films like these try to conflate them as being the same thing. Most of the flag-waving whites seen in those mobs in the ’60s were not Civil War scholars and, given their ages, were three to four generations removed from the war itself. Unlike the ghost-town Southerners in this movie, the real ones were only partially seeking vengeance for the loss in 1865— there was a much more tangible threat to the “Southern way of life” right there and then.

Unfortunately, the (minor) damage done to American culture by Two Thousand Maniacs! didn’t end there. In 2005, a sequel titled 2001 Maniacs was released, this time starring Robert Englund (of Nightmare on Elm Street fame) as Mayor Buckman. That travesty was then followed by 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams in 2010. Let’s hope there aren’t more.

Dirty Boots: “What you put in your gut . . .”

[image error]It would be hard to imagine a nicer folks than the ones who were at the Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network‘s Food and Farm Forum at Camp Beckwith last weekend. Though I’ve been a member of ASAN for several years, I’d never been able to go to their annual conference, which, for me as a teacher, comes right after Thanksgiving break and just before exams. But this year, I put it on the calendar, worked my syllabus around going, and am glad I did.

The forum brings members together from an array of backgrounds and roles – established farmers, new and aspiring farmers, sustainability specialists, good food enthusiasts, teachers and students – to talk about issues and prospects related to growing food and eating well in Alabama. Session topics ranged from specific practices, like solar energy or fermented foods, to organizing community gardens and farmers markets, and a plenary session this year centered on the varied environmental and agricultural experiences from Alabama’s Gulf Coast region, which included a man from Africatown. In the ones I attended, I learned about new (to me) foods like kefir, how to decipher PLU codes on produce, the organizing principles for farmers markets, building a food forest, choosing fruit trees to cultivate, and finally about one rural high school’s efforts at school-based growing and getting a salad bar in the lunchroom. And meals, which were served on-site in the camp’s dining hall, featured Alabama-grown produce in “swamp stew” and sweet potato bisque.

[image error]In Alabama, we may not all be farmers, but we all eat — some of us more than others! — and what I heard over and over was: how we eat affects our health and our environment. One of the panels was led by an Anniston-based doctor, who I also sat with at one of the meals, and he emphasized in our conversation and in that session that most of the problems he sees in sick patients could be helped by changes in diet. Another presenter who has a heritage-foods company near Atlanta said repeatedly, “What you put in your gut . . . affects your head,” to drive home her point that problems ranging from memory loss to Alzheimer’s can be helped with diet. I went down to Fairhope last weekend expecting to hear a lot about composting and avoiding pesticides and such, but one message, which applies to all of us, was more holistic than that: diminishing a reliance on processed foods will improve our lives and the lives of those around us.

I write often enough about the problems that Alabama faces, in our politics and in our culture, but this is one case of relatively small organization doing good work to alter the fabric of our culture for the better. The Alabama Sustainable Agriculture Network brings together people who have solutions to some of our fundamental problem and shares information about how to move in another direction. Given the near-total lack of leadership in most areas of concern and detriment in this state, I’ve come to believe that it is up to us individual citizens to right the ship, even if it is only a handful of people making a handful of changes in our daily lives, then passing that knowledge and wisdom on to a few others.

“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige,” a weekly column published every Tuesday afternoon, offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on life in the 21st century. To find and read previous posts, click here for a full list.

Disrupters & Interlopers: Modjeska Simkins

Though her name is not well known and rarely appears in larger Civil Rights history programs, the National Parks Service described Modjeska Monteith Simkins this way:

Modjeska Simkins was the matriarch of the Civil Rights Movement in South Carolina. She was also a leader in African-American public health and social reform. For her contributions to the struggle for civil rights, Simkins is an American Hero.

Born in 1899, Modjeska Monteith Simkins lived through nearly the entire twentieth century, and during that time, witnessed and worked for massive changes in African-American life.

Simkins earned a bachelors degree from the historically black Benedict College in 1921 then worked as a teacher. In 1929, she married and left the teaching profession.

Throughout the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s, Simkins worked in the field of public health and was very active in the state’s chapter of the NAACP. Though her successes with preventable diseases like tuberculosis were remarkable, opponents of civil rights and racial equality sometimes focused more attention on her politics than her work. She also played a significant role in the effort for racial equality in South Carolina’s public education system. However, some of her affiliations led to the accusation that she was a communist, and Simkins was investigated by the FBI and by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Of course, she was also active in the Civil Rights movement. According to the news website Black America Web:

Simkins’ outspoken nature and swift criticism of both her detractors and allies gained her quite the reputation across South Carolina. [ . . . ] Simkins worked well into her 80s on behalf of South Carolinians and was honored in 1990 with the Order of the Palmetto, the state’s highest civilian honor.

Today, Simkins’ legacy is well-preserved. The home in Columbia, South Carolina where she lived for sixty years – from 1932 until her death in 1992 – is on the National Register of Historic Places.  Simkins’ papers are held at the University of South Carolina and are available online. Also, the Modjeska Simkins School “was launched in 2015 to teach South Carolinians the history of their state that is often glossed over or left out of our school textbooks [and ] offers a forum for citizens of all ages to learn about the history of their state in the context of race, gender, economic inequality, and sexual orientation.”

For more information about Modjeska Monteith Simkins, you can read the entry about her in the South Carolina Encyclopedia.

Dirty Boots: “Kress on Dexter”

When it opened in the 1890s, Montgomery, Alabama’s SH Kress & Co. store was built with two entrances: one on Dexter Avenue for white customers, and one on Monroe Street for black customers. Kress was something like a department store with a lunch counter, and the one in Montgomery was the company’s third location. Being on downtown’s main thoroughfare, a half-block from the Court Square fountain, its location meant that it was a busy place. The store burned in 1927 but was remodeled beautifully in 1929, yet its bustling grandeur couldn’t save Kress from extinction. The whole Kress chain folded in the early 1980s, though Montgomery’s store stayed open for a while longer. By the end of the 20th century, the building was empty.

[image error]So it was with great pleasure that Montgomerians received the news that a developer had purchased the Kress building for renovation. The work of bringing the downtown landmark back to life began in 2015, and the building opened in 2018. The revitalization project that yielded Kress on Dexter made national news, in part for its preservation and presentation of the old marble walls that declared which water fountain was for which race. Kress on Dexter is a mix of historic and modern and still has two entrances, but now its contribution to Montgomery is more about openness and diversity, housing the Civil Rights-focused More Than Tours and 1977 Books, which calls itself an “Abolitionist Libería,” as well as a public-access storytelling booth and the Prevail Union coffee shop.

Tonight, our Creative Writing magnet’s poetry reading will be held in Kress on Dexter’s gallery space on the first floor. This is our second year having the reading there. When our school burned last August, we lost the on-campus black box theatre that we once used, so it has been wonderful to be welcomed into such a beautiful space. For those who might be interested in coming to the reading tonight, we seat at 6:30 and begin at 7:00. Admission is free. We’d be glad to have you.

“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige,” a weekly column published every Tuesday afternoon, offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on life in the 21st century. To find and read previous posts, click here for a full list.

Alabamiana: The first Iron Bowl in Auburn, 1989

On this day thirty years ago, the legendary Alabama-Auburn football game – the Iron Bowl – was played in Auburn’s Jordan-Hare Stadium for the first time. In 1989, Auburn not only had the home field advantage, they had beaten Bama three years prior, in 1986, ’87, and ’88. The Tigers’ victory in ’89 would make it four in a row.

In the history of the series, which began in 1893, Auburn took off to an early lead, beating Alabama seven times in the first twelve games. In those days, the game’s location varied among Montgomery, Tuscaloosa, and Birmingham. Then, after the game ended in a tie in 1907, Alabama refused to play Auburn anymore . . . that is until, as historian Wayne Flynt put it, “Governor Chauncey Sparks and the legislature forced Alabama to renew its rivalry with Auburn in 1944.”

By the time the series resumed, The University of Alabama had become a football powerhouse. ‘Bama beat Auburn twenty-six times over the next forty-one years. Though Auburn did have a five-game winning streak in the mid-1950s, Bama’s domination led them to win the Iron Bowl two thirds of the time, including a nine-game streak from 1973 until 1981. That may have had something to do with the fact that, for Alabama, the annual game against their in-state arch-rival was always a home game. Since the changes that led to a more standard agreement of alternating venues, starting in 1989, the series is nearly tied. Of the last thirty meetings, Alabama has won sixteen and Auburn fourteen. The home team has won twenty of the thirty meetings.

Currently, Alabama leads the overall series by a ten-game margin, but Auburn has won more games in both Tuscaloosa and Auburn, including the one last Saturday. Personally, I don’t know which is sweeter: beating Bama in the heart of their campus or beating them in the heart of ours. War Eagle!

Saturday Morning Reruns: “When Reading Meant Everything”

* This post originally appeared as the Dirty Boots column for August 20, 2019.

[image error]All of the books pictured here came into my life between ages 14 to 20, during the years 1989 through 1994, while I was in high school or the first two years of college, and each of them changed my life in its own way. It was a bleak time for me; my parents got divorced, my older brother got married and moved out, and my father remarried quickly, all in 1990, and once high school was done in ’92, our inability to afford much in the way of college meant that I would continue to live at home and attend a local school while working full-time. I was tethered to a life I didn’t want to lead in a place I didn’t want to be, and books (and music and movies, too) were my gateway to something greater than what I saw around me.

Though, as a young kid, I was something like the bullied Bastian in The Neverending Story who escaped from the world through books, what I have found in books and magazines (and music and movies) since then is expansion. By high school, I was no longer reading to get away from the world— I was reading to know it better, to see and to know more of it, to glimpse ways of life I hadn’t imagined, even when I couldn’t physically leave where I was.

Read the whole post

 

Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Revelations from Reading through the Code of Alabama, 1975”

[image error]I have this know-it-all tendency that causes me, usually out of boredom but sometimes out of curiosity, to browse government documents, law books, court decisions, local histories, old newspapers, census data, and other generally obscure texts just to see what’s in them. Sometimes I don’t understand them at all, I usually have to look up a handful of unfamiliar terms, and I almost always marvel at the confusing and cumbersome diction, especially in legal writing.

This time, I was compelled for some unbeknownst reason to start reading the online version of Alabama’s code of law, about which I offer these notes on the revelations found within.

Read the whole post

 

Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “The Boxes in the Attic: A Love Story”

They’re these low, wide boxes that the Paperback Book Club used to send shipments of four or five books at a time. They’re sturdy and durable, and they hold tabloid newspapers and 13″ x 18″ posters laying flat. They’re perfect.

[image error]Today, these boxes languish and collect dust for most of the year in the back of the storage space in our attic— until some glint of a memory nags me badly enough that I have to go upstairs and dig out the item on my mind. At a time before internet bookmarking and favorites, I used to tear out pages from magazines and newspapers and keep them. Even though I near-refused to read what my teachers assigned me in school, my habit of devouring periodicals never dulled, nor waned. Whether from Rolling Stone or Ray Gun, Mother Earth News or Acoustic Guitar, the Village Voice or the Montgomery Advertiser, if I found something I wanted to access again, I put it in one of those boxes. Sometimes whole issues, other times just pages. No underlying raison d’etre, no long-range intentions, no meticulous organization, no finely tuned system— just pages and pages in those boxes.

Over the last twenty years, since moving away from home into bachelor-pad apartments then getting married and having children and moving a few more times, the boxes have come with me. I’ve done some purging from them, reducing the number from a half-dozen or more in my single days down to only two or three now. Our attic’s scant few pieces of plywood flooring haven’t been able to accommodate my pop-culture hoarding like it used to, what with Christmas decorations and the other accroutrement of family life. Perhaps, rather than purging the evidence of my past peccadilloes, I could have bought and put down more plywood, but . . . I didn’t. So, these otherwise-worthless keepsakes from my formative years have remained tucked away from our now-life, but are always available to sift through and recall what is now faded and withered.

Something like a hope chest, these battered cardboard boxes hold reminders for me of what I once wanted for myself, what I hoped my life would become. There are mementos from actual lived experiences (events I attended, shows I saw, music I liked), and there are dreamy tidbits that appealed mostly to a deep, deep wishing well that I once harbored and nurtured. Those latter ones were what I intended to fill the hole in my heart with: they were proof that the eclectic and the interesting were out there and that the proprietors of these strange excitements offered general admission tickets. Within the pile may be a review of an Ani DiFranco album, an ad for a Paul Morrissey double-feature, some Keith Haring art, a photo spread of Drew Barrymore, a campaign for Gap khakis.

The boy who collected those pages, who was at once scarily naive and wildly hopeful, would have hung his head and wept if he knew about the man that he would become: a high school teacher with thinning hair and a little belly that expands with every microbrewed craft beer. That shaggy-haired boy with his 29-waist blue jeans and his pawn-shop guitars couldn’t have imagined that the songs he wrote in his lonely bedroom would never be heard, that the internet would destroy the pop-culture rags that fueled his imagination, that his life would proceed uninterrupted in his hometown, and that his torn-out pages would, twenty five years later, illicit a strange mixture of pleasure and sadness.

Read the whole post

 

Dirty Boots: “What I’m Thankful For”

[image error]Every year at this time, we’re encouraged to consider and even share what we’re thankful for. Of course, I’m thankful for my family, for the life that God has given me, for health and relative prosperity, and for the opportunity to teach and write as my way of making a living. But I’m also thankful for some other larger things, too.

Close to home, one thing I’m definitely thankful for is the new leadership of the Alabama Democratic Party. Back in October 2016, I wrote a post about voting in the general election and, in it, noted the significant number of Republican candidates who were running unopposed. Our political system can only be enhanced by having two (or more) vibrant political parties, and I appreciate the work that was done to reboot our state’s Democratic Party. Given the realities and consequences of our one-party politics since 2010, it’s clear that having options, diversity, and new ideas will serve to benefit our state.

Farther out, I’m also thankful that our nation’s democratic institutions are responding so vigorously to a time of obvious difficulty. We tend to think of the federal government only as elected and appointed officials who tax us and make new rules for us to live by, but the civics lesson that we’re living through right now has forced us to think about our democracy, how it works, who is operating the machinery of it, and what is and is not appropriate. We had been warned for months that we were moving toward a “constitutional crisis,” and it has clearly come. Complacency is no longer an option in America, and I’m thankful that our country is answering with a vital kind of energy.

Finally, if you read these columns with any regularity, you already know that there are four things that I value very much: education, voting, community, and food. I’m thankful that all four are part of my life, since, along with family and faith, they are keys to a good life. The ability to gain knowledge and wisdom, the right to elect our leaders, the capacity to work for the common good alongside our neighbors, and the blessing of healthy and delicious things to eat are blessings that not everyone enjoys. And while they are not ends in themselves, they are the means by which the best things can be obtained. I’m not only thankful that I have them; I’m also thankful that I understand how important they are.

My hope for this (and every) Thanksgiving is that we’ll pause from our daily doldrums to express gratitude for what we have, to express it also to those who aided us in having it, and to spend some time with people unlike ourselves in doing that. Doing the first of those is easy, saying thank-you out loud among family and friends, to no one in particular, then heading to the table to fix a plate. It’s the second and third that are more difficult: acknowledging the sources and underpinnings of the best parts of our lives, and listening to diverse ideas about what is worthy of being appreciated.

“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige,” a weekly column published every Tuesday afternoon, offers a Deep Southern, Generation X perspective on life in the 21st century. To find and read previous posts, click here for a full list.

Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Eudaemonia”

[image error]Though I certainly don’t eschew enjoyment or joy or fun or leisure, I seldom consider whether I’m happy. At least not in the way that Pharrell Williams sings about in his pop hit “Happy,” whose message I don’t love: do what feels good to you. My kids dial up that two minutes of clap-along subjectivism on the iPod in my truck sometimes, and I am reminded of these interminable suit-yourself messages. (I’d be a lot happier listening to The Band or The Allman Brothers Band or Widespread Panic, personally.)

Feel-good happiness is usually something I wave out of my face like an overzealous mosquito. These days, happiness is portrayed as a big smile on a sunny day with Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine” playing. That’s what the advertising agencies say it looks like . . . but that plastic, disposable version doesn’t look good to me.

Read the whole post