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January 7, 2006

The unfairness of things (4) Marlin Wallace

"THE TRUTH THAT MUST BE TOLD" begins the text on the plain black and white cover of what is apparently a single disc (31-track) summary of the work of a Springfield, Missouri, eccentric named Marlin Wallace. "My mother was against communism, but she was badly deceived by the concealed communists around her. When she died of heart trouble in 1977, I attributed her death to the red conspiracy. For two years while I stayed at her house, the reds had tortured me with invisible radiation attacks. There was nothing to prevent the reds from using lasers and microwaves on my mother."

Caricature of madness? Oddly enough, I just finished reading Haynes Johnson's Age of Anxiety, which may be why this particular curiosity surfaces again this morning. A quick Google search answers little enough about Mr. Wallace -- least of all whether this is some elaborate hustle, though I think not. Mr. Whitney (Lou, I presume) is among the trio thanked at the end of the liner notes, but I do not imagine even he has time to amass such a body of work simply as a provocation.

Wallace's biographical paragraph says, "Music has always been part of my life. I was born in Springfield, Missouri on August 12, 1937. At an early age I learned to play the violin; later I took up the guitar and soon, began writing songs. I established "The Corillions Music Publishing And Recording Company" in Springfield, Missouri on November 9, 1973. He also mentions a three-month stay in a red asylum and shock therapy that a stepfather authorized when he was 15, and claims a number of his songs have been plagiarized.

So presumably he is among the lesser-known outsider musicians, spiritual kin to Hasil Adkins and Daniel Johnston and Wesley Willis, all of whom occupy no small amount of shelf space here. But little of that is audible among the recordings, for there is no edge here. Really, he sounds like an aspiring country songwriter from the early 1970s, and some of the numbers here might have been good enough to get a cut here or there. Perhaps. Wallace has a pleasant voice, shaded somewhere between Burl Ives and Tennesse Ernie Ford, and his songs are pretty well-recorded and played. Clearly he has been able to involve other competent musicians in his vision, though they are uncredited here (and it's possible, I suppose, that he's playing everything)...and speaking of credits, each song has a name attached to it but it's far from clear what that names mean (are they the songwriters? I think not).

The material seems to draw largely upon an easy variety of traditions, from the flying saucer rock 'n' roll of "The Planet Mars" (though Wallace's song is hardly rockabilly) to the topical "Mekon" to the country "Georgia Corn Liquor Man" to a Chuck Berry answer, "Wildcat Mabellene" that does have a little rockabilly twang. Despite four-pages of anti-communist text, the songs Wallace offers here rarely hint at his politics (with the exception of track 28, "The Russian Bear"). Snippets of familiar riffs woven occasionally through his work, which I suppose is part of the fun. And the URL for this release, www.rasslinrecords.com, leads to some kind of web security firm whose mysteries I lack the patience to seek to penetrate this morning.

Marlin Wallace is, apparently, famous in the same obscure way that Jandek is famous. But his music isn't, well, weird enough, I guess, to make him anything more than one of those obscurities that collectors and nattering critics gossip about.

Posted by Grant at 12:23 PM | Permalink

January 3, 2006

The shotgun dilemma

Writing briefly in #61 about our family's new orchard and James Howard Kunstler's book, The Long Emergency, occasioned a too-brief but very enjoyable exchange with Mike Perry. Mike is probably best known for his wonderful collection of essays published as Population 485; when he's between books and at loose ends we occasionally lure him back into our pages. He writes (as do Silas House and Bill Friskics-Warren) with a kind wisdom that I much admire, and cannot hope to duplicate.

Mike was also raised on a dairy farm in Wisconsin (and cowboyed in Wyoming), while I come from suburbs just north of the Seattle city line. Which puts him in a fine position to laugh at my feeble attempts to return to the soil, though he's been too kind to do so in my hearing.

But we both have families now, both of us live in small towns, and we both wonder what best to do should Kunstler prove anywhere near right about our future. The steady drumbeat of natural disasters and Atlantic magazine cover stories proclaiming various dark dangers to the declining American empire (China, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, the former Soviet Union; our own inability to come to grips with -- or even, really, to talk about -- our proper role in the world) do not bring ease to my nights, nor do the rising price of gasoline and heat. Nor does the possibility that I have devoted my adult life to the pursuit of skills which may prove utterly useless. (And, as I struggle to set up this new computer, it has been made clear to me that even those skills are modest and inadequate.)

The problem is that I cannot look out my window into the gray clouds settling across our holler and see a future that is not shaped by Kunstler's central argument, that our society is about to be crippled by its dependence on dwindling petroleum stocks. Major oil companies (or at least BP), probably defending their post-Katrina windfalls, are buying print and TV ads proclaiming even their awareness of this fact, and seeking to reassure us that they're on the job. That everything will be OK.

Maybe it will be. Maybe they'll reinvest these temporary but obscene profits into post-fossil fuel energy sources. Maybe.

Maybe the housing boom won't crash. Maybe interest rates won't go up, driven in part by the deficit we've run up to pay for the invasion and rehabilitation of Iraq, and the reconstruction of the gulf region (and let's hope it's not just New Orleans being rebuilt, and let's hope it's being done right; and let's be sure somebody is watching the money trail), because if interest rates go up than there's bound to be a housing crash and all those folks refinancing to pay off high credit card bills or struggling to buy houses they can barely afford are going to be back renting apartments. Let's hope the stock market, which I thought was over-valued at 2,000, doesn't fall precipitously from 10,700 or wherever it is. (That goes to prove how little I really know about the markets, and how seriously you should take these briefly expressed concerns, I suppose.) Let's hope new jobs are created that pay living wages. Let's hope we can afford decent education for our children and decent care for our parents. Let's hope.

But let's not be stupid about it, eh?

This could go very bad, and it could happen very quickly. Watching New Orleans after Katrina, from the safety of my living room, it was possible -- easy -- to see how wrong things might go.

So there are practical problems, like how will I feed my family and can I learn enough to sprout seeds and keep the deer from eating everything we grow, and will anything grow in this soil? Like, could I learn to butcher animals? And then there are what remain, for the moment, only ethical dilemmas.

Which is where the shotgun comes in.

See, my brother and I were raised by parents who were strongly opposed to firearms. There were none in our house, not even toys. Bryson is five years older than me, which meant he faced the possibility of the Vietnam draft, and I did not. (Nor did he, really, just young enough to have missed it.) In one of those wonderful nature-nurture curiosities, Bryson became a gun collector and a lifetime member of the NRA. At one point he owned several hundred firearms, though that number has dwindled substantially as he has sought to rebuild his life. But maybe the one thing Bryson taught me was a single word: pacifist. And it fit me, though it came not to fit him. It still does. I have no church to go with it, no long-considered philosophical structure upon which to erect this conviction. But I have been a pacifist since I knew the word, for it fit me.

It was, I suspect, the exact balance I needed for the berserker rage within.

And so I have never had a fight, and have never owned a gun.

Well. It is not so simple as all that. I have never had a physical fight, have never struck back when hit (twice, both times on basketball courts, after which I learned to quit playing defense with my mouth, though it works). I am, to be sure, only an average-sized man, which makes physical altercation unwise. But do not take from that the sense that I am particularly kind, that I turn the other cheek. Alas, no. I found that my mother's advice was exactly wrong, that sticks and stones might break my bones, but that words could really hurt. (The one time I repeated her phrase out loud the neighbor kid ended up rolling me through a pile of dog manure, and Bryson was sent out to restore order before the school bus saved me from further defeats.)

Nor should you conclude that I am altogether unacquainted with firearms. All those days and weeks we spent along the north fork of the Skykomish River, we spent with guns. The first time I was taken there by neighbors, I was shown the shotgun over the door, and the special shells on the mantle, and told if I saw a bear to put the shells in the gun and do the best I could. It was many years before I actually fired that shotgun, but in the meantime we put a lot of holes in beer cans with a .22. And, later, a .357, which accounts for the fact that, though my hearing is still very good, my right ear has long been less acute (the gun was loaded with .38s, except for the last slug, which was full strength, and nobody told me; it was funny, to them). And some other weapons along the way. We had fun, learned rough safety rules, and somehow nobody got hurt, even when we started bringing bottles up there. And, in the main, I could hit what I aimed at.

But here's the thing: Pacifism is a luxury of civilization. It is a luxury that the rule of law and the men and women of our armed forces afford me. It is a philosophical position -- a part of my nature, I hope -- but it will not shield my family from those who neither know about nor respect my hard-won peace. I have long argued that any situation that I couldn't talk myself out of was already over and decided. I am not so cocky these days, nor am I alone in the world. I'm pretty sure that if somebody went to hurt our daughter I would find a way to work through my aversion to violence pretty quickly. Even as I hope I would be smart enough to find another way.

Another way.

If Kunstler is right, if civilization is about to decline, if we're about to go medieval on each other in a real hard way...how much of my self (of our essential selves as human beings) will I have to sacrifice?

I hope not to find out.

My hunch is that things will decline much more slowly than Kunstler envisions. My hope is that leaders -- in politics and in industry -- will rise to the challenge and actually lead. My guess is that more of us are experimenting with horticulture and insulation than one might know from the New York Times. My trust is that our better natures will get us through these crises.

My eyesight is bad and my aim is not all that true, and it's been a long time since I knew where the safety was on a firearm. Still, I am reduced to bringing home a shotgun one day, we'll know what has been lost, and how wrong we have been.

Of course nobody will notice. I will be one among many, and this venue to share my concerns with strangers will long before have disappeared, as will the leisure time that goes with it.

So I think I'll listen to some of those Merle Haggard albums from the '60s that Capitol just sent out. Maybe that'll help. Maybe we'll make it through December yet.

Posted by Grant at 10:21 AM | Permalink