Foster Dickson's Blog, page 54
January 8, 2019
Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige
The Buffalo Springfield song “For What It’s Worth” begins softly, with the picking of an acoustic guitar and the bell-like harmonics of a second electric guitar. Slowly the song builds through the intro and into the first verse when Stephen Stills scratchy voice warns, “There’s something happening here . . . what it is ain’t exactly clear . . .” then beyond a few more words, it moves into a chorus: “I think it’s time we Stop! children, what’s that sound? / Everybody look what’s going down.” The punch of chorus comes through the otherwise mystical background music and implores us to move past our own peaceful complacency and into an awareness of the ugly danger that creeps all around.
Unlike a lot of Southerners, I wasn’t raised on the gospel music of the church. My family wasn’t a regular church-going sort, and when we did go, I don’t remember finding the stiff music appealing at all. As an adult, I’ve been in churches that either rocked it out with gut-bucket interpretations from the old hymn book or that warmed the heart with the country-bluegrass rhythms of the deep woods homeplace, but our Baptist church had neither. So, instead of being reared with a deep affection for “I’ll Fly Away” or “How Great Thou Art,” I planted my musical roots in FM radio and my older brother’s record and tape collection— 1960s and ’70s classic rock. And, as. I got older, it was the electric-fuzzy folk- and country-influenced tunes, like “For What It’s Worth” and The Byrds’ “Wasn’t Born to Follow,” that spoke to my soul in ways that Southern hymns must’ve spoken to other people’s.
Songs like “For What It’s Worth” are the measuring sticks with which I judge all popular music. Because those songs address something that exists deep in the core of all of us: a dismay at the world we see around us coupled with a recognition that we will do our best to find peace and happiness anyway. In the second verse, Stills sings, “There’s battle lines being drawn / Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong,” and though that was in 1966, it sounds a lot like now. Even more so, the third verse, which has “a thousand people in the street / singing songs and carrying signs / mostly say, hooray for our side.” In the 21st century, we’ve smartened it up by calling it “tribalism,” and coding it with red and blue, but I think Buffalo Springfield said it better. I’m no blue dot in a red state, I’m a human being who doesn’t like he sees around him, who wants to get along with other people, even those I disagree with.
Prior to closing with a few repetitions of the lines in the chorus, the fourth and last verse in “For What It’s Worth” leaves us with one more admonition:
Paranoia strikes deep,
Into your life it will creep.
It starts when you’re always afraid—
You step out of line, The Man come and take you away!
The song offers no answers and fades out instead of coming to a halt. Moreover, its enigmatic title phrase, a shrugging acknowledgment of the futility of trying make things better, never appears in the song’s lyrics.
What makes this song, which was popular well before I was born, one of my long-time favorites is: it only asks us to pause a moment and take look at what we’re doing, to ourselves and to other people. That’s all. It can be tempting to lean on dogma, the entrenched heuristics that we use to make quick judgments, but the human race is a messy, diverse, and ever-shifting target for the prophets of one-sidedness and their followers. And I think it’s much wiser to do what Martin Luther King, Jr. suggested and consider each person according to the “content of his character,” not by the color of his skin— or of his political party. I also don’t think what we need to focus on is waiting to “fly away” to the “by and by,” but instead on something closer to home: “I think it’s time we Stop! children, what’s that sound? / Everybody look what’s going down.”
“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige” posts will be published regularly on Tuesday afternoons.
To read previous posts, click the date below:
Or to find and read earlier posts, click here for a full list.
January 4, 2019
January-February Events for “Closed Ranks” around #Alabama
January 22
Homewood Public Library
1:00 – 2:00 PM
February 7
Center for the Arts & Humanities, Pebble Hill in Auburn
(Time TBA)
February 12
Alabama Department of Archives & History
(Time TBA)
January 3, 2019
#throwbackthursday: Five Points South Music Hall, 2009
This picture was taken in 2009, during a brief period when new owners tried to reopen Five Points South Hall Music Hall in Birmingham. The original venue closed in 2003, but somebody tried again in 2009 and 2010. My most memorable experience there was in 1997, going to see Son Volt in support of the Straightaways album, with Alvin Youngblood Hart opening up. I got off work that afternoon and raced up to Birmingham from Montgomery, since the ticket said 7:00 PM. Hart took the stage about 10:30, Son Volt at midnight.
January 2, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “My Two Cents and Your Two Cents . . . “
Last month, I saw this article shared by a friend on Facebook, and its title grabbed me: “Most Public Engagement is Worthless.” It’s a pretty bold statement, and I was inclined to read. The piece, by Charles Marohn of the organization Strong Towns, discusses the process of helping people to improve their own locale by realizing solutions to their needs. Marohn writes about focus groups and about how questions are framed, then toward the end, he provides this brief to-do list:
1. Humbly observe where people in the community struggle.
2. Ask the question: What is the next smallest thing we can do right now to address that struggle?
3. Do that thing. Do it right now.
4. Repeat.
January 1, 2019
Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige
We all know that New Years is a time for renewal – January 1 is a good demarcation point for a new promise to one’s self, a resolution – but what strikes me about the timing is something we discuss less often. Our new calendar year begins not in the spring, a time of new life, but ten days into winter, the season whose most notable features are cold, inhospitable weather and widespread withering and dying in Nature. The first eleven weeks of the year are spent among leafless trees and under gray skies. What this tells us is: before we can start anew, what once thrived has to diminish. After all, keeping a New Years resolution wouldn’t be nearly as difficult if we didn’t have to wipe away the old habit that the new habit is to replace.
[image error]As an amateur and self-educated gardener, my yard work in the winter consists mainly of doing what allows the dead things to nourish what will come in the spring. Instead of raking and bagging my leaves, I mulch them into the grass or pile them into flower beds in November and December. It isn’t until late February or March that I remove the crunchy debris and spindly thatch to reveal soil that has been fertilized by the organic matter and aerated by the tiny creatures that made the leafy shelter their winter home. Using what is fallen and dead is Nature’s way: dead animals become food, dead vegetation becomes fertilizer.
Likewise, we use our past to form the wisdom that creates better ways of living. Wisdom is not about knowing this fact or following that maxim, but about keeping what works well and discarding what doesn’t. In the Deep South, we’re familiar with the dying of old ways, yet so far we’ve been satisfied with allowing the fine tendrils of sameness to sprout untended from the shorn stumps, where they grow . . . and grow . . . and grow . . . until they re-emerge strong, with a differently shaped trunk and branches but the same roots. Here, now, on this day when we think about a fresh start, nineteen years into this 21st century, we’re seeing that it is past time to tend our garden and that we have set ourselves up for even harder work: uprooting what is misshapen and unwieldy, and filling those blank spaces with a compatible but elaborate mixture of the finest heirlooms and the fiercest unheard-of.
No rational person attempts to change everything about himself on New Years Day, only what needs to change, from fine-tuning to outright overhaul. Likewise, no rational person would suggest that we discard our best traditions – faith, family, food – in the Deep South. But we do have some habits that need fine-tuning, and a few that do need outright overhaul, because they’re holding back not just the obvious victims, which are smothered by another’s undisciplined prosperity, but all of us who are bent and distorted by our own attempts to find a parcel of precious sunlight.
“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige” posts will be published regularly on Tuesday afternoons.
To read previous posts, click the date below:
December 29, 2018
Southern Movie 31: “Preacherman” (1971)
Buffoonish, caricature, and hick are the words that come to mind when I think about 1971’s Preacherman, which exploits every two-bit stereotype of the redneck/cracker Southerner that most Americans can conjure up. This low-budget, poorly constructed, badly acted movie, which was directed by, written by, and starring , appeared in Amazon Prime search results one day when I was looking for another film, and astonished by the absurdity of its portrayals, I couldn’t resist watching the whole thing.
Our story, which is set in North Carolina, begins in a barn – of course – where the main character, the con artist/preacher, is getting it on with a pretty young blonde in the hayloft and is discovered by a sheriff’s deputy, who races back to the office where he informs the sheriff. Meanwhile, the girl lies half-naked in the hay with pulled-apart clothes, as our preacher is admonishing her not to tell anyone what has just happened between them. As she writhes around the hay and moans, the preacher dons first his hat then his clothes before running like hell to a hillbilly tune that sets up the plot: “You better run, preacherman, or the sheriff’s gonna do you in.”
When the preacher finally quits running, he scoots into a white clapboard church whose sign informs us that he is “Circuit Preacher Amos Huxley” and that his sermon is titled, “Beware of false prophets.” After the service is over, Huxley – who is decked out in a black coat with tails, string tie, and back wide-brimmed hat, looking more like a 19th century riverboat gambler than a 1960s preacher – is speaking to people on the way out when the sheriff – named Zero Bull – and the deputy show up to confront him with Bertha, the girl from the hayloft, who is the sheriff’s daughter! “Oh Lord . . .” the preacher says.
From there, Huxley is put in the car and driven to the Whiteoak County line, where he is informed that he should never return, or else the sheriff will beat him bloody. To make sure that he understands, they rough him up a little bit.
Next, the scene shifts to a man attempting to start a rickety truck in front of a rickety shack. After a moment, he succeeds and begins to beep the horn and holler, “Mary Lou! Mary Lou!” A buxom young blonde in a skimpy dress emerges from the house and answers, “Yes, Papa?” He tells her that he is heading into town and will be back that night, then admonishes her to keep the boys that have been sniffing around away from the house. Back inside, the girl pours a hot bubble bath in a wash tub and strips off a kimono-like robe to get in.
Mary Lou hasn’t been in the bath long when she hears a sound and begins to call out to know who’s there. She picks up an old flint-lock rifle to prove her point, then is not-so-surprised by four grinning brothers who appear at the window. When invited in, they attempt Marx Brothers-style to enter all at once, but she advises them good-naturedly to come to the door instead. These must be the boys who have been sniffing around.
Shifting the scene back to our protagonist, Mary Lou’s father finds the beat-up preacher on the side of the road and drives him back into the county that he was just told to leave.
However, back at the house, Mary Lou has bedded down with one of the four brothers, Clyde, as the other three play cards, drink moonshine, and wait their turn. Yet, they won’t get their turns, since Papa shows back up with the salacious preacher Amos Huxley! The brothers and the blonde scurry and clear out, just as the pair arrive in the truck— but Papa know what’s going on, and gets off two shots from his double-barrel shotgun as the four flee across the field.
In the bedroom, as Huxley is waking up, he tells a tale of being attacked by escaped convicts and eyes Mary Lou as his next conquest. The three sit down to a simple dinner at a shabby table, and Papa explains that Mary Lou has never been baptized— which must be why she has “an unnatural hankering for the men folk.” Huxley’s attention perks up, and he asks, “What do have to say for yourself?” Mary Lou attempts to elaborate on her lustful nature but is stopped by her father. Yet, enough has been said.
The conversation is interrupted when Martha arrives in her truck. She is a young but uptight woman who has gifts for Papa and a desire to sing at Mary Lou’s baptism. She also brings the news that the road block is still set up to check all comings and goings to and from the county – which we know is set up for Amos Huxley – and Papa declares that they must be looking for the convicts who attacked the preacher. Huxley feigns weakness and apprises the small group that he must stay longer than he thought, and that he will baptize Mary Lou while he is there.
On the evening after baptizing Mary Lou, Huxley sets about trying to seduce her. Huxley is rubbing her up and down, asking Mary Lou if she is willing to do the Lord’s work, and Mary Lou says that she is. He’s moving along pretty well, until her father bursts into the room and interrupts. But Huxley won’t give up that easily. He tells the ignorant pair that she must be visited by the angel Leroy, who comes about midnight and stays for a couple of hours. Then she’ll be ready.
Of course, the angel Leroy is really the preacher, and the visitation is really just him sneaking in her window, and he has his way with Mary Lou while her stupid father swings a lantern in the dark outside, while calling out for the angel to come.
Now, about a half-hour into the one-and-a-half-hour movie, we have the two converging plot lines, with Amos Huxley tying them together: the sheriff on the look out for the scoundrel who deflowered his daughter, and the seduction of Mary Lou under the watchful eye of her father. We also have our deeply stereotypical foils: the brutal county sheriff and his dummy deputy, Farmer John with the pretty daughter, and the local-yokel redneck boys.
The next morning, an exhausted Papa ambles in the door and asks Mary Lou if the angel came. She tells him that “he came right on time, and he left at sunrise.”
In the next scene, we find out more about the preacherman as a lawman in a black suit explains that Huxley is wanted as far south as Georgia. He has been contriving and conning for a long time. We sense that heat is getting closer to our hero.
That evening, we get a oddly placed and briefly sentimental scene between Mary Lou and the preacher, where she asks him about his personal life. It isn’t really clear whether we’re supposed to feel sorry for Huxley or whether he has changed after his night with Mary Lou. The next day, in an equally sentimental scene, Papa confesses how badly he has let everything get run down since his wife has been gone, but then says that he has something to confess before he starts fresh on the right path. He then guides the preacher to a big ol’ moonshine still in the woods, declaring that he will destroy it for the sake of living a Godly life— but the preacher stops him! No, he advises, they can use the still too to do the Lord’s work. They will make loads of money, the excited pseudo-preacher tells him, and use it to build a great church!
However, it won’t be so easy. The four brothers, who previously constituted Mary Lou’s love interests, show back up. Met first by Papa, who has his shotgun at the ready, the four young men are told by Mary Lou that she has been baptized and saved, wiping the goofy grins from their faces.
In the bluegrass-fueled next montage that follows, we see what it looks like to make moonshine for Jesus. Later, in the evening, Papa and the preacher acknowledge that they’re selling so much moonshine they need help. Papa suggests a neighboring farmer named Farley, who has no wife nor other family, and who it is implied has sex with his chickens.
Back at the still, and in broad daylight, the eldest of the brothers Clyde shows up to see what is going on. Yet, instead of catting around for Mary Lou, this time he is there to ask for baptism and to join in the work there. Understanding that “Mary Lou is off limits,” Clyde joins the hardscrabble crew.
And things are looking up all the way around! Martha tells the preacher on one of the their trips that countywide road blocks have been lifted. Their sales can now extend farther and wider!
But it won’t last.
Clyde proves to be the weak link. In a trip to town to get supplies, he is stopped by the sheriff and his deputy. The two have been on a bench conversing about how Papa hasn’t been in town lately, and how sales of moonshine in town have been down, so something muse be awry. When he is questioned, Clyde spills the beans, and that’s when he sees the wanted poster with the preacher’s face on it.
Back at the house, Clyde finds the preacher counting a stack of money and challenges him, telling the con man that he wants Mary Lou back. After being rebuked, Clyde then finds Mary Lou in the hay barn and attempts to assault her. She fights him off, but then hears him out, as Clyde explains that preacher is a shyster. Outside in the light of day, Papa finally professes his interest in Martha, an outcome she has wanted the entire movie, and they take a sunset walk in the woods.
As Preacherman comes to a close, we find out from a candid conversation between Huxley and Mary Lou that the preacher will be leaving with the money “for the church,” but they have one more thing to do: host a big outdoor service for one last take! As the service begins, we all get to see Clyde down at city hall, and we know why he is there: to tell the law where to find the preacher. Huxley gives one more trite and stereotypical sermon, then passes the plate, declaring, “I hear too much clanging. I want to hear the rustle of that green paper.”
Just then, the sheriff’s car pulls up, and he fires a shot in the air. Huxley tries to defend his position by calling the stand of pines with the cinder block-and-plank benches the “house of the Lord.” When Papa tries to step in to prevent the sheriff from taking the preacher, Huxley takes the money and the girl and sneaks away. Out in the woods, though, Mary Lou tells Huxley that she can’t go with him, that she loves Clyde, and with a sly grin, the preacher tells her that he left a package for her Papa. Last we see the fake preacher, he running down the roadside, and we get a deus ex machina ending: a scantily clad lady from the revival is waiting for him in a drop-top Cadillac to aid in his escape. The pair drives away, passing the county line as the sheriff stops there and watches them get away.
Notwithstanding the lack of cinematography, the unsophisticated acting, and the onslaught of stereotypes, Preacherman is still a bad movie. Put mildly, it is a poorly done movie version of Hee Haw where the women reveal more than the primetime show’s low-cut blouses do. The movie’s page on TCM.com gives the Lead Performers one star out of five, the Supporting Cast one star out of five, and the directing two stars out of five. Quite generous. Perhaps you can’t go lower than one star since there were actual actors in the movie.
As a document of the South, Preacherman stoops lower than Hee Haw, which debuted in 1969, and way lower than later incarnations of the rural Southern comedy, like Dukes of Hazzard and Smokey and the Bandit. In Hee Haw, the quippy humor was sharp and punchy— in Preacherman, it is not. Using stereotypes to create humor can be well done, if the writers and actors understand the real-life circumstances that underpin the stereotypes. That is absent in this movie.
The New York Times had a little bit nice to say about Preacherman in a November 1975 article titled “Good Ole Boy,” about the trend of early 1970s trend of Southern-themed movies, calling this one a “C-grade, R-rated rewrite of ‘Elmer Gantry.'” The writer also explained this:
The film was made several years ago in North Carolina by a company hastily thrown together by a Charlotte movie distributor, Robert D. McClure.
“I had seen how well a couple of major studio films about the South had done,” Mr. McClure recalls, “so figured I could make me some money by doing a few myself, especially if I turned out action thrillers filled with classic car chases, a little spin, some ‘shine, some bigbellied sheriffs, the usual Southernisms.”
[ . . . ]
“The director had to come down from New York,” Mr. McClure says, because somebody had to know what to do. The shooting took 16 days—about a fourth the normal time — and we brought the whole thing in for less than $65,000, which would last Burt Reynolds and the ‘Gator’ cast about two days.
However, as a person who likes bad movies for their bad-ness, this one bothered and bored even me. The only thing Southern about Preacherman is the desire to interpret something that its writers and directors didn’t understand. Not only are the portrayals of backwater hicks as cardboard as can be, there’s another element of Southern culture that is totally missing: race. There are no black people in this film at all.
If we say that Preacherman was just made as a throwaway moneymaker, I could see the throwaway part, but not the moneymaker. If this movie really grossed five-million dollars, like The New York Times said, there were a lot of pissed-off people leaving American theaters that year.
December 27, 2018
#throwbackthursday: Welcoming Chip
It was two years ago this month that we welcomed the furriest member of our family, Chip. He wandered up to some friends’ house in south Montgomery County, with no collar and wanting in the house. There’s no telling where he came from, though the vet thought he was only about a year old then. This was the day I picked him up and brought him to live with us. He wasn’t here twenty minutes before he was jumping up to give “hugs.”
December 25, 2018
Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige
When I converted to Catholicism in my mid-30s, the man who brought me to the faith was David Carucci, a ruddy-faced priest only a little older than me, with dark curly hair and a scruff of beard. My wife and I had begun attending Mass more regularly after our children were born, even though as a lapsed Baptist, church was not my favorite place to be. But Father Carucci’s dry, self-deprecating humor and the running nobody’s-perfect message in his homilies, combined with the beautiful formality of the Mass, reeled me in.
[image error]Among my favorites from Father Carucci’s messages was something he once said about light. I can’t remember the date, or even what liturgical season we were in, but in the homily, Father Carucci reminded us that light always conquers darkness. If you come home at night and turn on a lamp, the darkness could never push the light back into the bulb. Likewise, even a tiny flame flicking on the wick of a small candle overcomes a bit of the darkness around it. This message of hope was, for me, the eureka moment. He was right: light does always conquer darkness.
Whether we’re talking about a homily by a Catholic priest on an otherwise ordinary Sunday or something much more far-reaching, like the hymn made famous by Civil Rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer, “This Little Light of Mine,” the realization that light always conquers darkness is now at the root of my faith. I had never thought of it before that day, and I have not forgotten it since. That simple fact of the physical world is evidence of God’s superiority to all of the things that we regard as bad or wrong or evil. Each morning, the light from the Sun ends the night, and when night comes again, it is only because the source of light shifts in space, not because the darkness turned the tide in its favor.
Today, Christmas Day, is a day of light. It is the day that we set aside to celebrate the fact that the Son of God came to Earth to live his thirty-three years of life among ordinary people who misunderstood him, mistrusted him, and ultimately betrayed him. But light always conquers darkness, and though the people in Jesus’ life may have mistreated and abandoned him, the one thing they could not do was forget him. His light came into the world, and it can’t be extinguished or overpowered.
I hear sometimes, even in homilies in Catholic Masses, that the world is at war with Christianity and that secularism and subjectivity are beating back the ultimate truths of our faith. Maybe. But rather than harp on what I can’t control or change, and rather than assign motives to people I don’t know, I choose to root my thought and actions in Father Carucci’s inauspicious statement made on an inauspicious Sunday: the darkness will never conquer the light. Never.
“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige” posts will be published regularly on Tuesday afternoons.
To read previous posts, click the date below:
December 21, 2018
#poetryisnotdead (in #Alabama)
As Christmas approaches, we’re entering the last weekend before the holiday itself, and here at the last minute, we might think of going to the malls and online to buy clothes for moms and tools for dads, tech for teens and toys for kids, but there’s one more suggestion that the TV and the online ads are neglecting: books of poetry.
If you’re looking for direction for giving the gift of poetry, books by Alabama poets that have been published fairly recently include:
Mend by Kwoya Fagin-Maples
American Happiness by Jacqueline Trimble
The Myth of Water by Jeanie Thompson
Magic City Gospel by Ashley M. Jones
Americana by TJ Beitelman
Dear Slave by Irene Latham
Known by Salt (forthcoming) by Tina Mozelle Braziel
And if that’s not enough information, you can consider giving a subscription to or buying back issues of one of the state’s literary magazines:
Black Warrior Review (Tuscaloosa)
Southern Humanities Review (Auburn)
Poem (Huntsville)
Steel Toe Review (Birmingham)
Negative Capability (Mobile)
You can also link to the Alabama Writers Forum’s Contemporary Alabama Writers Directory, and visit the page for poets.
June 20, 2018
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Lost Things”
I wrote this poem in 2006 with an array of ideas and people in mind. Sometimes, people discard us, believing then that it is feasible and practical to do that, only to find out later that they need, or at least want, us back in their lives. This is a poem about letting go of those people.
Lost Things
Like stones that sink, I glow in the river bed,
and tinkling sunlight spreads out and stripes me
with gold.
Like weeds that plagued your garden,
was I pesky but now more useful since
you turned me under so I would refresh
the soil?
Like water in a drain, I left
as naturally as gravity, just
after you had used me, but you think about
me now and then, when your wasteful habits
become apparent.
Unless gliding off
a mountaintop is weak, neither am I.
No
more glory days, since one link in one chain
broke one time, and cannot be fixed now,
since the loose end was too short and useless
to escape the trash pile.
Now, returning
to the fountain, you can’t tell which penny
was yours.
I’m watching you, looking up at
your warped silhouette, and remembering,
which changes nothing.
We’re stranded in two
elements, and yours is dry, and that’s not
my problem.
That penny in that well, the one
you tossed so you could make a wish, is now
the difference between starving and not,
and that’s also not my problem.
I might miss you,
some days, but far be it from me to say :
Come live here with me, in this wishing well.
About ten years ago, I all but quit submitting poems to literary magazines and began sharing a few here. To read previous (Unpublished) #Poem posts, each with its own mini-introduction, click on the title below:
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Taking Root”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Sabbatical”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Southern Soil”
(Unpublished) #Poem: [Untitled]
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Reading Kenko”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Five or Six”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Curb Market, Saturday Morning”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “The Greatest Unknown
