« December 2006 | Main | February 2007 »
January 28, 2007
The curious case of E.M. Washington (courtesy Chuck E. Weiss)
Ah, the joys of the fine print. Still best known as the title character in Rickie Lee Jones' sly and joyful hit, "Chuck E.'s In Love" -- and I have been astonished to find how many of my younger friends have no memory of that song -- Chuck E. Weiss has finally managed to release the third album of his career, titled 23rd & Stout.
I am not, for the moment, interested so much in the music, but in the text of his CD booklet. The cover is a somewhat imprecise computer-aided knock-off of a vintage detective magazine. Inside, Weiss has written a small commentary, which begins:
"Marshall McLuhan, What are you doing?
"I'm a stickler for facts.
"A lot of history is mostly myth. Andy Warhol did not coin the phrase 'Fifteen minutes of fame'...Marshall McLuhan did, Kennedy was not the youngest president, and Allan Fried did not coini the term 'rock 'n' roll...."
On the following, final panel appears a 1920s-30s woodcut of an African-American street scene, credited a few pages earlier to E.M. Washington. Innocently enough, I wondered if Mr. Washington were still among us, might be a working illustrator who I might occasionally lure into contributing to our pages.
What I found, via a quick Google search, was a much more interesting story.
The work of Earl M. Washington was initially presented as the disovery of his great-grandson, who claimed his relative had been an African-American wood-engraver and printer (1862-1952) who had, for various reasons, ended up with an enormous collection of original blocks as a kind of archivist and friend to better-known artists, including Rockwell Kent, M.C. Escher, and Eric Gill.
It is not, however, clear that E.M. Washington ever existed, much less that he was in any way related to the artist in Monroe, Michigan (most recently, anyhow), who has apparently created 70,000 of these prints (if you search a bit you'll find a 1500-word piece in Forbes which documents much of the story). Several dozen are available on eBay this morning, a number which has been more or less consistent since I began looking last week. Some sellers disclose the fraudulent nature of the work, others give you enough information that you could be expected to figure it out, and others are either ignorant of or complicit in the fraud. Because they are lovely and so inexpensive, I am tempted to buy one.
What I can't figure out, however, is why the fellow who really cut these blocks finds the fraud more interesting than the production of his own work, for he is clearly not without talent. Perhaps it is more lucrative, or perhaps he's merely wound that way.
The curious postscript is that the journalist who did most of the work uncovering the E.M. Washington story himself went to prison for defrauding friends out of close to $30,000.
We live in a curious world filled with interesting people. And most days, I am deeply grateful for that.
Posted by Grant at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
January 19, 2007
An interrogatory disgression on the new impermanence (appended)
What follows is a continuation of ideas westled with in the essay I wrote for our year-end poll, but I should like to put this in the form of a long question to readers, and to request that you e-mail responses to me should they occur. It is, I suppose, properly a matter for librarians and historians, both of whom have been singularly important to my upbringing, and who are often to be found among our readers.
The question is this: In an age of electronic data, how will historians go about accurately reconstructing events?
By way of explanation, my father is a mostly retired professor whose historical specialty has been the economic history of the expulsion of the Jesuits from the Portuguese empire i n the 16th and 17th centuries, though he has branched far from that work as his curiosity drifted (he has these last years been hard at work on the repatriation of slaves from the Barbary pirates). This, I think, explains my fondness for dust. Almost everything dad has learned has come from rare books carefully stored in archives all over the world, the existence of which allow him to follow the flow of monies and slaves and agricultural goods and government edicts.
We have had, here in Kentucky, a minor scandal involving our incumbent governor and his alleged desire to hire supporters in the transportation department, contravening statutes which require that such appointments be made on merit. A columnist at the Lexington Herald has dubbed this Governor Fletcher's "Blackberry Jam," and the governor has been obliged to pardon everyone involved, save himself; a friendly judge then declared the governor to be immune from prosecution. Point being that some of the conversations and, then, documents presented by the attorney general to the grand jury came from the governor's Blackberry and e-mail transmissions.
But let us move forward ten or twenty years, or fifty. Or a hundred. An enterprising scholar like my father wishes to reconstruct early 21st century politics in Kentucky, say. But there are no archives, there are no hard documents. Or rather, only the official documents are on paper. All the discussions happened on hard drives that are now landfill, on operating systems that are antique, on devices so outmoded that only their digital photograph remains as a memory of their existence. How, then, will history be written?
Carry this further. Newspapers wither and become, as it is widely anticipated, nothing more nor less than websites. Where will those stories, of greater and lesser importance, be stored for the future?
Or...this: A blogger, say, or an unwary reporter, accidentally libels somebody online. The post stands for an hour or so, is read by a few hundred people before the error is found and corrected. And then the original no longer exists, right? (Maybe it does on a server somewhere, but let's assume that when one deletes files they're really deleted.) Is that actionable? What is libel law like in the electronic age? Further, how does one PROVE to a court of law that the original version of the story even existed? Surely you and I could doctor a laser print to make things appear any way we wished, for example.
Or, say...there is a change in government somewhere in the world (OK, I watched a little of "24" earlier this week) and for one reason or another certain components of history are, um, scrubbed from the electronic world. How is history protected against such things? How are we, in a free society, to be protected from our history being transformed in such ways?
It is true that I have a fondness for apocalyptic fiction (and non-fiction), and that I worry too much.
But somebody has to!
We have turned off the response mechanism to these blogs because most of the responses we got involved underage sex or various other unsavory offers we didn't wish to spend part of each morning blocking. But I'd be delighted to read your answers (and will post some of the dialogue which follows, if any) should you feel like e-mailing grant at no depression dot net.
And so...updating on the fly...here are a couple interesting responses. They don't make me any happier about things, but...
Stacia M. writes:
Are you familiar with the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org/index.php)? These folks claim to store more data than Google. You can download bootlegs for free, look at old versions of web pages (all the way back to the beginning of time--the mid-90s!), and now even read books.
And for the record: the problem isn't that we're becoming more digital -- the solution is that we're becoming more digital. We need to digitize all 78s, 45s, 33 1/3s, rare books etc. to save them. But you may already know that.
Part of my point in bringing up the Internet Archive is to show how often internet data is cached (saved). Search anything on Google (or Yahoo, or Ask...) and you can view a cached version of just about any website. Most web publishing applications (blogger, geocities, etc.) auto save as you work. Google or Yahoo can probably bring up these saved versions when asked. It's like in a word processor where you can click "undo" until you're back where you want to be.
I am quite sure that if a libel case as you brought up came about, the internet company could probably find a cached version of that published website. I highly doubt that would be a problem at all. And even on your hard drive - when you put something in the Recycle Bin or Trash Can, it's not really deleted. It's not even deleted when you empty said bin or can -- you have to try really really hard to actually wipe data from a hard drive.
It's really hard, but not impossible. I suppose we do run a risk of nasty governments destroying records - but we've always had that risk. Hello - shredding and burning? It's probably easier to recover digital documents than physical ones.
Tom G writes:
Times change, people and things move on and adapt, that is just the way our percieved world works… With each change, everything in our world learns to adapt, or is phased out, or is it? I'm sure someone in one of the centuries long ago bemoaned the fact that "if the masses [poor people] can learn to read our scrolls, how will they remain sacred?" well they did and they did (think on that one for a moment) or "why would anyone read (or pay for) a book when they can easily read a newspaper watch TV" or "Now that we've invented these nice vinyl plastic long playing records, what shall we do with our black tar 78s?" or even better "now that we have CDs what are we to do with our wonderful vinyl plastic long playing records?"
I did a gig last night opening for Bottle Rockets (nice guys, by the way). We played to about 75 people in a theater that holds roughly 200. Anyway, Brian Henneman thanked the audience for coming out to the show and leaving their computers, Myspace, iPods, and large screen TVs to come and watch this antiquated thing called "live music." At first I laughed with everyone else, but on the ride home I got a little upset 'cause I though "what if he's right, what if this is a dying art form, and some day people just stop showing up?'"
I was still thinking about it this morning and I've come to a conclusion: stuff only dies or gets phased out when no one has any use for it anymore, but, if only one person wants it, it's still useful. Live music will be around as long as at least one person (and that person can't be performing on the stage) wants to hear another play, or act or whatever (write in an online magazine). If someone writes a blog or stores pictures or whatever on a hard drive and someone else wants that info centuriess from now, he or she will find a way to retrieve it, so until the last human decides it's not useful or beneficial or there's no money to be made from it, it will remain.
It's very easy to say "gosh our world is just moving too fast and all that I love will soon disappear." Believe me, I've said it and thought it many times. But I think the real thing to do is to find a way to manuver in a world that changes fast. Be as fast a thinker as you can be, ideas are great and unlike beliefs you can change 'em, so embrace them and look for the answers. Hey the fact of the matter is that both you and I have another 40 years left on this planet if we're lucky, then depending on what you believe, poof! it's somebody else's problem!
Posted by Grant at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
January 14, 2007
The unfairness of things (5) Johnny Berry
Ahem...my fifth visit to the stack of CDs I somehow seemed unable to write about in print, does not, let us be clear, lead to an exultation crowing about the 1990s country singer from South Carolina, John Berry. No, our Johnny Berry hails from Flaherty, Kentucky, but now lives in Louisville, where he fronts a versatile honky tonk trio called the Outliers. On the stereo again this morning is last year's release, his second as a leader, called Fegenbush Farm.
Mr. Berry turns out to have an interesting pedigree that includes three years at the long-closed Opryland theme park (perhaps he worked there the same time Chely Wright was impersonating Minnie Pearl; it wasn't paradise, I gather, and closed not long after I moved to Nashville ten years ago, but they paved it to put up a shopping mall). And then a season playing bass with Doyle Lawson and another stint with Charlie Sizemore. He settled back in Louisville, first playing bluegrass, now honky tonk, and presumably clutching to more stable employment to go along with his wife and child.
He sings in an easy, gently swinging bass that draws unnecessary comparisons to Johnny Cash (and cutting "Mean Eyed Cat" does him no favors). Berry's voice has neither the edge nor the gravitas of Cash, and pushing its tonal similarity seems an unnecessary distraction. (Maybe it would help to think of him as a more tuneful Ernest Tubb who didn't smoke, though you'll hear some Buck Owens, too. And he could've fit in had the Derailers auditioned him.)
Regardless, it's a pleasant voice, perhaps a step short of being extraordinary (there's not even a hint of crazy here), but surely more than good enough. More striking, however, is the genuine grace with which Berry writes. We have lived through an era of low-rent honky tonk revival, and all the caricature which sometimes goes with that. Berry's songs -- mostly from his pen, occasionally with a co-writer -- are well-rooted but strikingly timeless. Not affected, but effective. Conscious, but not self-conscious.
His voice alone got me to the third track some months back, but "Lying Down," and the verse, "You're the only thing in this world/I'll take lying down/I still bring you flowers/and hold you for hours in my arms" -- either an evocative expression of love or a very disturbing graveside vigil -- revealed a particularly gifted songwriter. The seventh cut, "Roanoke On The Run," was already a first-rate badman-on-the-run song (and reminding me of Paul Burch's "Percy Lynn's Run") when the phrase "murder of crows" went by. That happens to be exactly what a gang of crows is called, which I suspect to be a fairly arcane bit of trivia (and there's no telling why it stuck with me, though it does turn out to be the title of a murdery mystery and a Cuba Gooding film, so...). It is also the perfect phrase in the right song, and Berry has the great good sense to draw absolutely no additional attention to it. It's just part of the song. He doesn't repeat it, doesn't highlight it, just leaves it there as a singular and brilliant line. The keyboard line beneath the guitars is as carefully considered, and well-played.
He'll do. One of these days when I'm in Louisville for more than to visit the airport, I'll find that corner bar where Mr. Berry holds court. As I recall there are a couple first-rate IPAs brewed in Louisville. Could be a right fine night.
Posted by Grant at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
January 7, 2007
The unfairness of things (4) Marlin Wallace
"THE TRUTH THAT MUST BE TOLD," begins the text on the cover of a plain black-and-white four-page booklet accompanying a single-disc, 31-track retrospective from Marlin Wallace, apparently a self-releasing eccentric from Springfield, Missouri.
"My mother was against communism," Wallace begins, "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."
Uh...OK...
But the recorded work is hardly the freak show the liner notes suggest. Mr. Wallace's music is disarmingly normal -- hardly the stuff of, say, Hasil Adkins or Wesley Willis or Daniel Johnston -- and might have come from the files of any Nashville publishing house active in the early 1970s. Indeed, it's not entirely unreasonable to suspect that one or two of these songs might have made their way onto somebody's album here or there.
For his part, Mr. Wallace offers only a brief biographical explanation: "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 mentions earlier that he spent three months in a red asylum when he was 15, courtesy a stepfather, where he was subjected to electro-shock therapy.
Apparently his private releases have come to the attention of eccentric record collectors (or, perhaps, collectors of eccentric records), those curious souls seeking the next Jandek or some such. But his songs are disturbingly normal for all that (and a thank you to Mr. Whitney -- presumably Lou -- at the end suggests the possibility that this is all an elaborate sham, though I'd be surprised to find anybody had this much time to create such a thing). "Mekong" is a topical period piece, "Georgia Corn Liquor Man" is straight country corn, and "Wildcat Mabellene" is a kind of answer to Chuck Berry in rockabilly time. Only "The Russian Bear" (at track 28) hints at Wallace's political concerns.
His voice is measured and pleasing, somewhere between Tennessee Ernie Ford, Lee Hazlewood, and Burl Ives. The recordings are of decent, professional quality, which suggests either that he's pretty good on his own or has enlisted tolerable musicians to further his vision. Either way, there are no credits, save for a single name following each song (the pseudonym under which he published it?).
And so it's all a bit of a mystery (OK, a minor mystery), but it made a nice accompaniment to Haynes Johnson's Age of Anxiety. And the URL for the releasing label, www.rasslinrecords.com, leads to some sort of internet security firm and makes no mention of Mr. Wallace. So we may never know.
Posted by Grant at 10:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)