Foster Dickson's Blog, page 44
May 7, 2019
Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige
I can’t imagine what it must be like to be incarcerated right now within one of Alabama’s prisons, especially after reading William Thornton’s article last week on al.com, which proclaimed our state’s prison culture to be “dog-eat-dog” and shared this as evidence:
The two-and-a-half-year investigation by the U.S. Justice Department of Alabama’s men’s prisons documented a bleak picture –convicted perpetrators of violent and non-violent crimes crammed together in understaffed, outdated facilities, where sex, drug abuse and violence create a world of animalistic nihilism. That atmosphere of beatings, coerced and extorted sexual contact, along with constant, mind-numbing vigilance has also been catalogued in an ongoing court case involving how Alabama treats its inmates.
The article also shared that 95% of inmates will return to society and may suffer recurring trauma from the conditions they experience while serving their sentences.
The Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution, which was ratified in 1791, forbids “cruel and unusual punishment.” As a people, we have known better than to treat human beings like this for hundreds of years. Of course, prison sentences are meant to be unpleasant, removing a person from friends and family and from mainstream life as a punishment that should fit the crime. However, in 21st century Alabama, we have multiple inhumane situations where unguarded or barely guarded inmates are locked in a world dominated by violence, killing, rape, coercion, and fear so constant that inmates have trouble even sleeping or bathing.
[image error]My chagrin over this is doubled by the fact that I have no idea what I, as an ordinary Alabamian, can do to help. Advocacy groups push constantly for reform legislation and improved funding, but neither of those long-range efforts will help the inmates who will get raped tonight or beat up tomorrow. The Justice Department also investigated and exposed the severity of the conditions, but I can’t imagine how many people were abused or tortured during the two-and-a-half years that their staff studied the situation.
What I’m left to ask is: if trained professionals, lawyers, judges, policy wonks, advocates, and legislators can’t stop this . . . what can an ordinary person do? Since I don’t know the answer to that question, all I can do here is remark that I hope our pangs of conscience and our sense of morality will lead us Alabamians and our state leaders to do what is necessary to relieve this suffering that results from the unabated cruelty and degradation, which current conditions allow.
“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige” posts will be published regularly on Tuesday afternoons.
To read recent posts, click the date below:
Or to find and read earlier posts, click here for a full list.
May 6, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Communities Supporting Agriculture Supporting Communities”
[image error]I’m going to explain an idea I’ve had for a long time, and maybe it’s a crackpot notion, but I don’t think so. It involves how Southerners eat nowadays and the results of those habits. The people of the Deep South are some of unhealthiest people in the nation, and that has a lot to do with higher rates of poverty and lower rates of education, which often lead to inadequate medical care and the regular consumption of cheap processed foods, like fast food and fried food. Suppose we change all that and start eating what we grow down here . . .
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May 3, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Revelations from Reading through the Code of Alabama, 1975”
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.
May 2, 2019
May 1, 2019
Southern Movie 35: “Paris Trout”
It might seem odd on the surface that 1991’s Paris Trout is one of the more obscure and hard-to-find Southern movies. It is the film version of a novel that won the National Book Award, and has a stellar cast, with Dennis Hopper, Barbara Hershey, and Ed Harris in the lead roles. However, today, not only will you not see it on lists of great films, you’ll hardly be able to find it. A search for its title on Amazon Prime only yields French cooking programs; on Netflix, that search brings up nothing remotely related; and Roku’s search function blanks out— nothing. The answer to this obscurity must lie, at least partially, in its subject matter: Paris Trout is the story of a cruel, violent, and self-righteous Southern bigot who murders a child, sexually assaults his own wife, bribes his way out of prison, kills his invalid mother, kills his own lawyer, and ultimately commits suicide out of self-pity. To say that his story is disturbing is an understatement.
It is easy to tell that Paris Trout will be an odd film from its opening scene. An elderly woman’s naked, limp body is being washed in a dim room. (It’s hard to tell at first whether she is alive or dead.) Soon, our view of the scene widens, and we see an African-American nurse doing the washing. A man then steps into the side of the scene, and the nurse says that she’ll “be through with Miss Trout in a minute.” However, the man continues to stand there silently, which leads to the nurse to ask if he wants to brush the woman’s hair. Again, he doesn’t respond. Their interaction is cold and creepy.
Next, the scene shifts to an aerial view of a small Southern downtown as a woman’s voice narrates the background information that we need to know: in 1949, an outbreak of rabies occurred in the rural Georgia county where the story will take place. As the camera’s focus narrows onto a storefront, whose sign reads “Paris Trout,” then into the store itself, she continues to explain that no one seemed concerned about the disease, but since she had only been in the town for two years, she didn’t have a good understanding of the place— or of her husband. As she finishes the voice-over, we are watching Hanna Trout (Barbara Hershey) work in the general store.
Out the back door, her husband Paris Trout (Dennis Hopper) is finalizing the sale of a car to a young black man Henry Ray Sayers. Their conversation is at first playful, but it quickly turns dark after they come inside and into Paris’ office. The smiling young man can pay the $800 price for the car, since he works at the state mental asylum making $30 a week, to which Paris responds that he might get tired of “cleaning crazy people’s shit off the ceiling” and be unable to pay later. At this, the young man becomes more matter-of-fact, assuring the older white man that he can and will pay. Paris Trout then adds $227 worth of insurance to the deal, upping the total significantly, and declares the payments to be $17.50 a week. “That’s real money,” he says, before adding ominously, “Once you make a deal with me, I get m’ money.”
The third piece in the puzzle is put in place next, in a country field where two African-American children are walking through tall grass. The older boy in overalls Chester Sayers and the younger Rosie Sayers in a sack dress are brother and sister. She is taking a dollar to Paris Trout’s store to buy saltine crackers. Just then, as the brother is teasing his sister, a fox appears and chases down the girl, biting her on the leg. We sense the tension— there is a rabies outbreak in the county. Once she arrives in the store, wide-eyed young Rosie is alone, disheveled, and frightened. Despite her husband’s objections, Hanna Trout takes the girl to the clinic for medical attention.
At the clinic, the nurse who tends to Rosie is cold, then the doctor comes in with a massive needle, saying that she can either take a shot in the stomach or get a ride home from the police. The scared child chooses the ride home, leaving without treatment for a bite from a probably rabid fox.
When the police car pulls into the dirt yard of a cluster to rundown shacks, the array of black teenagers and children eye the arrival suspiciously. The young man who bought the car at Paris Trout’s store is wiping it down nearby. The officer lets Rosie out and gives her to her mother. Inside the house, her mother wants to know what bit the child, and the older brother (who climbed a tree then left Rosie alone) is there to say that it was a fox. Their mother quickly responds that the girl hasn’t been poisoned by the disease and not to worry. Despite the bad decision not to treat a child for exposure to a fatal disease, we understand that their poverty gives them little choice.
In the next scene, Henry Ray, who is Rosie’s oldest brother, has a carload of children at a gas station, where he is filling up and buying them popsicles. Everyone seems happy, until he backs away from the gas pump and into a large truck that was behind him. The fender bender results in the revelation that the car he bought is not in good condition as he believed, but has simply been painted over.
Returning to the back door of Paris Trout’s store, the young man explains the situation, first to Hanna then to Paris, and wants to invoke the privilege of his insurance. The problem is: he has not yet made a single payment, but just drove off in the car. Paris Trout refuses to abide his request, so the young man stomps off in a huff, telling Paris to keep the car, that he will not be paying anything. Shouting after him, Paris responds that he will indeed get his money.
That evening at the Trouts’ home, they are eating dinner together. Paris is obviously disgruntled, and the tension between the couple is clear. We know from the opening monologue that the couple has not been married long, though they are both clearly middle-aged. This brief scene develops their relationship a little bit and provides a calm before the storm that is coming.
The next day, a car drives up a dirt road to the black community’s shanties. The Sayer family is on the porch, and Henry Ray runs off immediately upon seeing the car pull up. Paris and another man get out of the car and proceed to the porch, where Paris snatches up Rosie’s soft-spoken brother Chester (the one who left her after the fox attack) and puts on a set of brass knuckles. He has every intention of beating the young boy until he confesses to where his brother might have fled, but Rosie begins to holler. Perhaps panicked or maybe just plain mean, Paris Trout first punches then shoots young Rosie, then his companion shoots her mother. Paris pauses, goes back to the front porch to speak to the man with him, though we don’t hear what they say, then Paris comes back into the house to unload a few more rounds into the two. When we leave them, mother and daughter are lying side by side in the backyard, clinging to life.
That night, Harry Seagraves (Ed Harris) comes to the Trout home to see Paris. Seagraves is a pleasant, smiling man who waits politely although he acknowledges that his business is urgent. Though at first he won’t tell Hanna what has happened, she learns about the situation as the two men speak. As we might expect, a recalcitrant Paris insists that he has done nothing wrong, and was only collecting a debt owed to him, yet Harry explains that killing two women in their own house, one of them only twelve years old, presents a greater problem. Paris then attempts to defend himself by claiming that Buster Devaughn, the man who was with him, committed acts that were just as serious. Harry contends that they may both be in big trouble and would do well not lean on each other. Paris asks Harry to leave and tells Hanna not to concern herself with it. Curious as to the truth, however, Hanna then goes to visit young Rosie at the hospital, but finds out that she has died, though the doctor allows her to see the bullet wounds as he explains how the shots killed her.
The next several scenes show us the callous nature of Paris Trout. First, Paris waits on Harry outside the courthouse and, with a fair bit of good humor, wonders out loud whether the matter is over. Harry tells him that it isn’t but Paris seems confused about why his actions will come back to haunt him. Next, we see Paris confront Hanna in the bath over her visiting Rosie, and for a moment, he violently attempts to drown her as he reminds his wife that she has an “obligation”— “’til death do us part,” he says. After this, Harry and Paris appear in the office of the young state’s attorney who informs Paris that he will be charged for the girl’s death and the shooting of her mother. Again, Paris’ response is sheer dismay, and he and Harry propose that killings are not uncommon in the black neighborhood— but the young DA responds that their explanation would mean that the mother shot herself in the back three times. Paris will have to face justice.
In perhaps an attempt to defend his client, Harry Seagraves then goes to the Sayers’ home to survey the scene. Henry Ray is there on the porch and tries to thwart him, but yields to a two-dollar bribe to let the lawyer in. Inside the house, Harry see the blood stains and bullet holes, and we understand that he is moved to pity by the helplessness of the family to face down Paris’ callousness. Further changes are foreshadowed when we next see Hanna attending the funeral of young Rosie.
Back at the store, Hanna shows up for work to find Paris severely drunk and belligerent. The wife tries to speak compassionately but honestly to her husband, but he is having none of it. Paris insists that his wife hates his strength and wants him “pitiful.” He tells her to to go into the store and get him something to drink. But when Hanna returns the angry, drunk man throws her face-down on the desk, lifts her skirt, and sexually assaults her with the glass bottle she brought to him.
In a voice-over that plays as we watch her pack her things, Hanna explains that she left Paris Trout that day. Though she does not leave town, nor even his home, but moves across the hall to her own bedroom. Yet, when Paris arrives home and finds what she has done, he beats on the door and screams at her through it.
By this point, about halfway through the movie, Paris Trout has revealed himself to be nothing short of a monster, yet his behavior will get even more bizarre and hateful. As Hanna watches out the window from her bedroom, she sees Paris and a black laborer unloading large sheets of glass from a truck and carry them upstairs to what had been their bedroom. The laborer remarks that he doesn’t see any broken glass in the room, but Paris tells him that it’s for later. Paris then is heard banging in the room, and when Hanna goes to see what he has done, she finds the glass nailed to the floor. And as she steps across it, her footprints marks everywhere she has stepped . . .
That evening, Hanna comes downstairs to respond to the sound of repeated crashing and breaking. Paris is in the kitchen, pulling the items out of the refrigerator and smashing them on the floor. When Hanna arrives in the room, Paris tells her suspiciously that he believes she is trying to poison him. During the tense scene, Hanna cuts her foot on some glass. Soon after, Harry arrives at the house, looking for Paris who has left, and he helps Hanna to get out.
Though Harry has stepped into the Trouts’ marital issues, and though he realizes Paris’ nasty personality, he still must defend Paris in a murder trial, which he sets about doing. In his opening statements at the trial, where Hanna sits quietly in the back row, Harry asks the jury to consider all of the times that they’ve done with business with Paris Trout and to then consider him a reasonable man who could not have done what he is accused of: maliciously killing a little girl and nearly killing her mother. After Harry’s opening remarks are over, Hanna leaves without a word.
From there, Harry goes to Hanna’s room at the boarding house where she is now staying. She invites him in, and as they talk Harry finds out more about Paris Trout’s insidious behavior against his wife, including the sexual assault with the bottle.
Back at the courthouse, the prosecutor first interviews soft-spoken young Chester Sayers, who explained that Paris Trout changed their lives forever. Contrasting his testimony, Harry reminds him that Paris had loaned their family money and helped them in other ways, then suggests that the family’s actions with respect to the car actually changed their relationship. But Chester retorts that it wasn’t the family’s life but “it was Rosie’s life.” After a brief interlude where we see Paris Trout sitting in the dark with his invalid mother, we hear the testimony of Mrs. Sayers, who describes the actions of Paris and Buster Devaughn, who shot them both in cold blood.
Later that evening, Harry stops by Hanna’s room again. He is confused and dismayed, and he begins to confess that he does not want to be obligated to defend the killer of a child. Harry also confesses that he has “personal feelings” for Hanna, and cannot get “the thing he did with the bottle” out of his mind. The two fall into each other’s arms and then into bed. The story just gets even more complicated.
Back in the light of day, Harry is talking to Buster Devaughn, who is on the witness stand. Buster is telling a series of lies to indicate that the whole Sayer family attacked Paris Trout, including stating that little Rosie Sayers had a gun. During his testimony, however, Harry makes a key mistake: he glances back at Hanna and smiles at her, and is caught doing it by Paris Trout, who is paying rapt attention to the defense. Harry then finishes quickly with Buster.
After a brief nighttime chat with Hanna in the car parked on an isolated road, followed by another round between the sheets with her, a clearly troubled Harry then allows Paris to read aloud from a written statement rather than testify. Paris’ statement makes little sense and centers on the idea that he has no idea how the actions unfolded. He follows that up with some babble about how he only tries to help people. Back in Harry’s office, a smiling Paris believes that he will be acquitted, but Harry warns him not to be so sure. Paris retorts that he has forgotten where they are – in the Jim Crow-era Deep South – and that he has also looked after Paris far less than he has looked after Hanna.
Paris then finds out that he has been convicted of manslaughter but walks out of the courthouse. A deputy has to go pick him up at his house to take him to prison. Paris calmly follows him, gets into the car, and they drive. At the prison, Paris sits calm until he is attended to by another man, and that’s all we see.
However, back at the Trout’s home, as Harry and Hanna collect her things to settle into a life without her husband in it, Paris appears at the screen door. His brow is furrowed and he snarls at Harry, saying, “I could shoot you like a common thief.” But the couple passes him on the porch without incident.
The conclusion of Paris Trout comes quickly. Harry and Hanna wonder what will happen since Paris has bribed his way out of serving any time. Meanwhile, the city’s leaders meet about a public celebration that is coming up, but the discussion quickly shifts to the fact that Paris appeared back home the day after he was carted off. Harry can only ensure them that Paris will stay to himself and likely not seek out any trouble. But that isn’t what will happen. As the celebration commences, a tearful Paris Trout loads his gun and his pockets with bullets, marches into his mother’s nursing home, carries her out in his arms, and takes her to Hanna’s room in the boarding house. When Hanna leaves the street party and goes in, she finds her mother-in-law shot to death on the floor, and Paris is there waiting for her, gun in hand. Soon, Harry comes in to check on his new girlfriend, and Paris shifts his attention to Harry, shooting him several times. As Harry bleeds on the floor, with Hanna attending to him, Paris tells Hanna, “You ain’t never felt sorry for me,” and puts the gun in his own mouth.
In the final scene, in the local graveyard, Hanna’s stands over a fresh grave as her voice-over comments on the deaths of Harry, Paris, and Rosie: “It’s the oldest lesson in the South,” she says. “It is easier to bury than to forget.”
The movie, which was released on the pay channel Showtime in April 1991, received a good bit of attention, not much of it positive. The Los Angeles Times called it “a dramatic reach deep into the dark hollows of racism, abuse and murder,” while The New York Times’ review had this to say:
But there are no sweet tales of racial harmony in this steamy exploration of almost pure evil. Although portrayed with subtle touches of sympathy by the riveting Mr. Hopper, Paris is a terrifyingly vengeful monster. His scenes of violence make the average horror movie seem like child’s play. Fat and menacing and devilishly shrewd, Paris is an unforgettably repugnant creation.
Perhaps more virulent was the Washington Post‘s review, titled “Paris Trout: Southern Discomfort,” which began:
One logical question provoked by a viewing of “Paris Trout”: “What on earth was the purpose of that?”
and later stated:
Although it does not claim to be based on a true story, we’re being asked to accept what happens as representative of all other violent injustices of the era, and to view Paris Trout as epitomizing the human race at its loathsome lowest. It’s very safe to make a film condemning the bigotry of another time, however. There’s more value in confronting the intolerance and inhumanity that still exist in the world. “Paris Trout” is a contribution to nothing but the bank accounts of the people who made it.
The Post‘s writer commented as well on how novelist Pete Dexter, who also wrote the screenplay, had “boiled [the story] down to gruesome simplistics, jettisoning most of the context,” which could explain some of the narrative’s difficulty (like the inexplicable presence of Paris’ mother who plays no real role in the film.)
As a portrayal of the South, Paris Trout certainly captures the reality of mid-century Deep Southern bigotry, as well as its attendant unjust legal system. However, the story also allows room for deeper inspection by offering the characters of Hanna Trout, who defies her husband rather than support his behavior, and Harry Seagraves, the lawyer whose conundrum connects his pangs of conscience to his inability to remove himself from participating in injustice. While Paris Trout does show us the differences in both standard of living and expectations of justice between white and black Southerners, and while it does lay out the ugliest examples of a social system based on white-supremacist patriarchy, it also centers its story on an atypical Southerner— Paris Trout is no more the average Southerner than Ignatius J. Reilly or Boo Radley. Instead, he is the sum total of the worst of all worsts, all poured into one man. We do get to see what he does, but in this film we never do get know understand why. And perhaps more importantly, we get almost nothing about what other the people in town think of him or how they feel about what he has done.
April 30, 2019
Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige
The character Quentin Compson is famously quoted as saying, “The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past,” at the end of William Faulkner’s classic novel The Sound and the Fury. The passage is often-repeated during discussions of Southern history, in large part because it’s true. In the South, we can draw direct lines from each historical event to the cultural and political features in the era that resulted, and those lines lead to here and now. Yet, in an age when imagery and immediacy rule, the relevant facts of history, particularly local history, can take not only a back seat, but are often left standing on the curb.
[image error]My newest book, Closed Ranks: The Whitehurst Case in Post Civil Rights Montgomery, was released six months ago, on November 1, and I’ve been interested to note the reactions to it. The book is about a police shooting in 1975 whose aftermath in 1976 and ’77 included the resignations or firings of the mayor, police chief, and nearly a dozen officers. Admittedly, the Whitehurst Case is a story of local import in Montgomery, but its uncomfortable familiarity – the shooting of an unarmed black man by a white police officer – brings the story out of the past into the present, and out of the local into the wider world. However, neither the book nor the story has yet transcended that gap by emerging into the national consciousness as a topic on the forefront of discussion . . . which has prompted me to wonder why.
Although recent years (and mobile technology) have brought our nation into fuller contact with stories like that of Bernard Whitehurst, Jr.’s death in 1975, our national “conversation” on these issues remains largely focused on incidents from the last seven to eight years, since the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012. However, it isn’t so easy to say that we don’t care about the past, since we’ve also seen massive amounts of attention heaped onto the Equal Justice Initiative‘s new Legacy Museum and Lynching Memorial, both of which offer opportunities to reconsider our past, including acknowledging previously unknown or lesser-known cases. So, here is what I wonder about: where does a man like Bernard Whitehurst, Jr. – whose family once did have a day in court, and whose case has been given not one but two historical markers – fall into this schema?
I’ve had people tell me that the Whitehurst Case is “just a Montgomery story.” If that were true, then Michael Brown’s killing should have been just a Ferguson story.
I’ve also had people to say that the Whitehurst Case upsets people, so they don’t want to talk about it. If that’s true, then why is the daily news chock-full of terror attacks, murder conspiracies, internet scams, toxic bigotry, and political failures?
Others still insist that Americans don’t care about “black history.” Then why did anyone build the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and moreover, why do so many people visit it?
No, it has to be something else . . . and I wish I knew what that something-else was. The reactions to Closed Ranks have so far been mostly positive, and sales have been good. However, my questions relate to the mysteries of why some cases garner attention and others don’t, of why we are outraged sometimes and others times not, of why some history gets to ride upfront while other stories are left on the curb. What determines which episodes from our past are held up for remembrance and which are allowed to slip into obscurity, that’s what I’d like to know.
“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige” posts will be published regularly on Tuesday afternoons.
To read recent posts, click the date below:
Or to find and read earlier posts, click here for a full list.
April 29, 2019
Now NINE Years’ Worth of Unapologetically Eclectic Pack Mule-ing
[image error]I remember thinking, after I Just Make People Up, Treasuring Alabama’s Black Belt, and The Life and Poetry of John Beecher all came out in 2009, “Maybe I’ll try this blogging thing.” Despite having three books published in that one year, I was also in the middle of editing Children of the Changing South, which came out in the fall of 2011, and didn’t want to take on another book project just yet. Something less voluminous, published in smaller increments, seemed particularly appealing.
The first post was published on this day nine years ago. However, what has been obscured by time is: I actually began two blogs at almost the same time. This one was an author blog and general repository for whatever was on my mind at the time, and its title then was Pack Mule for the New School. The other, something more like a single-author periodical for long-form nonfiction about the South, took its title from a Karl Fleming article published in Newsweek in the 1960s: Into That Passionately Alive and Violent Country. Since blogging was then new-ish, there was a fair bit of autodidactic on-the-job training, also a good bit of rambling and disorganization. In short, I had to learn as I went.
After a year or two, it seemed like a bad idea to continue maintaining separate blogs, so I merged them into one, carrying the latter blog’s posts onto this one, which presented another set of problems: a lack of editorial focus. Once the two projects became one, there were posts on topics ranging from ruminations on Southern culture like “The Spirit of Booker T.” and “How Cool It Was— Back Then” to brief commentaries on old 1950s movies likes “Paris Blues” and “The Defiant Ones.” The years 2014 through 2017 also included a weekly series of aphoristic quotations on writing, editing, and teaching that I pulled from my underlinings in favorite books, and in 2013, I began the Southern Movie posts after watching the remake of “Straw Dogs” and being disgusted by its inane stereotyping. In short, I was learning as I went.
[image error]By mid-2018, the disparate content necessitated that Pack Mule for the New School get a new name. The blog had begun at a time when my writing and teaching work focused almost totally on Southern social-justice subjects, but it had taken some evolutionary twists and more than a few off-road detours into other areas of our culture: the family history series Chasing Ghosts, latter-day reminiscence of being in Generation X, the Alabamiana posts, and the short-term Passive Activist and #newschool series. The title Welcome to Eclectic, which I got from the roadside signs outside of the small town of Eclectic, Alabama, seemed to describe it better. Keep in mind, I’ve been learning as I went.
Everything I’ve read about blogging says that you have to stay on topic, find a niche— don’t stray, it’ll confuse the audience. The problem is: I like watching Smokey and the Bandit and hokey horror movies as much as I like reading Southern history and Bertrand Russell and bell hooks. I like old movies and classic literature just as much as I dislike neophobia and closed-mindedness about new movies and books. I drive a truck and have a Southern accent, and I wear jeans and boots, and I read poetry and philosophy and the news, and I browse the state constitution for fun, and I write what I believe to be true. I doubt if I’ve ever made sense to people, but if someone wants me to do that so they can pigeonhole me and reduce me to a heuristic— that’s too bad. Welcome to Eclectic.
[image error]Nine years into these winding explorations of both the Deep South and my own mind, I’m still learning as I go. I don’t know whether it’s going well or not, and am not terribly concerned about that. But thousands of people have stopped by tens-of-thousands of times to see what I’m doing over here— so I guess I’ll keep on . . . at least for a while longer.
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April 28, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Unquantifiable”
Last week, I was reading an article in the Sunday, May 18 New York Times about the current fascination with digitized forms of data collection. As I read, my anxiety level was shooting the roof as the writer explained this near-rabid fascination with turning lives into statistics.
April 27, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “What’s it take to make it out there?”
[image error]Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a formula? Heck, even an instruction book! Here’s what you do, and you’ll be fine . . . Two centuries ago, the German writer Heinrich von Kleist called it the Lebensplan, the idea that planning one’s life extremely effectively could reduced or eliminate the pitfalls. We’ve been trying to figure these things out for longer than human history has been recorded; we’re still working on it . . . but we’ve got some good clues.
April 26, 2019
“My Source for Some Definitive”: 30 Years since “Closer to Fine”
In the “People” section of the April 26, 1989 issue of the Atlanta Constitution newspaper, the headline read, “It’s Full Speed Ahead for Local Indigo Girls.” The article below explained that the folk-rock duo of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers was on tour with REM, had an album that had gone gold, was about to appear on the David Letterman Show, and had plans to tour with both Bob Dylan and Neil Young. Furthermore, their first single “Closer to Fine” was scheduled to “be shipped to commercial radio stations nationally in late May.” That was thirty years ago today.
Other mentions in the Constitution from that summer shared that the Indigo Girls album had moved up to #74 on the Billboard charts by July, and in late August was at #55. As 1990 began, The Indigo Girls were Grammy-nominated, in the Best New Artist and Best Contemporary Folk Album categories. They won the award in the latter.
Though it never reached the top-ten on the Billboard charts, that album’s first single “Closer to Fine” may be one of the most influential songs from Generation X. Alongside “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “Teen Angst,” and “Alive,” “Closer to Fine” grabs at something that a lot of us felt as we foraged through our teenage years at a time when the cheesy ’80s were shifting gears into the fin de siecle angst of the ’90s. Music reviewer Tom Moon, writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer in March 1989, put it well:
The fact that it’s 1989 rather than 1970 becomes obvious in the sing-song opening track, “Closer to Fine.” Rather than talking in absolutes, or in the universal terms that dogged much ’60s message-music, the duo simply relates the product of its experience in the innocent language of a ringing, ethnic-sounding folk melody: “There’s more than one answer to these questions pointing me in a crooked line / The less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine.”
That same month, the Los Angeles Times described the song as a “wry, warm-spirited celebration of life and its mysteries.” The Austin American-Statesman called it a “philosophically uplifting tune” and remarked, “It features the strongest lyrics on an album that has a lot more to say than most records coming out on major labels today.”
Though I wasn’t exactly a late-’80s folkie, I did and still do like acoustic music, and this song resonated with me, too. It preceded “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” which was the opening track on 1991’s Nevermind, and might have been our generation’s anthem had Cobain’s quirky poetics and dissonant sound not caught on like it did. What was particularly appealing were these lyrics about seeking answers from adults, even the supposedly wise ones, and finding none there that satisfied the zeitgeist of an era defined not by Civil Rights protests and Vietnam but by the fall of the Berlin Wall, skyrocketing divorce rates, and “free” credit cards we could apply for on the sidewalk of the college campus. It was a time before cellphones or the internet, when drinking and reading were still source material for teenage searchers. Speaking for myself, I read both Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and Albert Camus’ The Stranger in 1988 and ’89 – I was in the ninth grade – and my half-baked brain then cooked up a bittersweet mental soup with those existential ideas, my Southern upbringing, and the rock-music imagery that cast an iridescent lacquer over everything we did. By 1989, our infatuation with the angry decadence of Appetite for Destruction had worn off, and the Sunset Strip had become less interesting to those who never planned on wearing skin-tight leather pants. I may not have been a folkie, but seeing the Indigo Girls standing on the railroad tracks and in back alleys in torn jeans and leather jackets, singing about their zigzaggy personal journey— it lit up my cerebral cortex.
For some of us in the Deep South, the Indigo Girls’ success was another fleck of gold-leaf on a countercultural badge of honor that our homeland never seemed to get to wear. The state of Georgia had produced REM and Widespread Panic earlier in the ’80s, and by the time “Closer to Fine” became a hit, both groups were touring nationally. Document and Green, in 1987 and ’88, had pushed REM all the way into the MTV-fueled limelight, and Space Wrangler came out in ’88, too. Moreover, The Black Crowes were right on the Indigo Girls’ heels, with Shake Your Money Maker in 1990. But the Indigo Girls were unique within this Deep Southern mini-barrage of alternative bands: not only were they female among a passel of raggedy, long-haired boys who built new sounds from their own eclectic record collection, the Indigo Girls were . . . lesbians. In today’s culture, that may sound passe to the point of who-cares, but in the South, in the era of The Christian Coalition and The 700 Club, it was a big deal— and to those of us who saw little appeal in mainstream attitudes, who were looking for a more inclusive way of living our lives, we were intrigued.
After the hubbub over their self-titled album died down, and listening audiences moved on to the next big thing — Jane’s Addiction’s Ritual de lo Habitual and Uncle Tupelo’s No Depression came out the next year, in 1990 — The Indigo Girls continued and put out a string of good albums. My personal favorite of their subsequent albums is 1997’s Shaming the Sun, in particular the songs “Shame on You” and “Get Out the Map.” All in all, “Closer to Fine” has aged well, appearing not only the radio from time to time, but also in commencement speeches and academic papers as us Gen-Xers get older and proceed to become the people who didn’t satisfy us when we were young.
