I am far from competent -- far, far, far from competent -- to discuss the proposed $700-billion bailout proposal being rammed through Congress by the same Administration which swore it had incontrovertible evidence Saddam Hussein possessed and meant to use weapons of mass destruction.

The three-page legislation drafted to authorize this contains the following language:

Sec. 8. Review.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

What that means, for the two or three of you still following at home, is that it is seriously proposed that in order to save our economy from the next Depression we should give the Secretary of the Treasury -- an appointed cabinet official who serves at the pleasure of the president -- unbridled authority to spend $700-billion (or more). With complete immunity from meaningful oversight. By anybody, save the president he or she serves. No Congressional oversight. No judicial review.

We have eviscerated much of the Constitution driven by our fear of terrorism.

But this is outrageous on the face of it, and I have spent much of the afternoon reading liberal and conservative blogs on which this is argued.

I fear what the other hand may be doing while we fret over this language. Regardless, this clause, at least, must be stopped dead in its tracks.

Because otherwise I might have to buy that damned shotgun.

Write those who must be written. And store food for the winter. It could be a long, dark season.

Fast forward a dozen or more years. I have fallen in with a family more closely attuned to the rhythms of nature, and settled into a pleasant corner of Appalachia. They garden; we garden. As noted previously here, we started with chickens last fall, and now are nourished by their eggs and their flesh, and I seem to have survived my first morning helping with that harvest with no long-term psychological damage.

We have been, this week, handed several further reminders that the economic underpinnings of our society are rusting through, and that we have largely forgotten how to make steel. The reminders out here in the country have four legs and empty bellies.

See, my inlaws live on top of what's called a mountain here, though it would be only a nameless foothill back west. It's a pretty place, connected to town by a long and winding road that is barely wide enough for two cars, which is how they build 'em out here in Kentucky. For the decade I've been a member of this family, and the four and a half years we've lived here, they have had one dog, and somebody dropped it by the side of the road a dozen or more years back. She's a nice dog, not very smart, and not much of a guard animal (she was chased around the house and bitten in the back by a deer, after all).

But even though we live in an especially poor section of Appalachia, to my knowledge that has been the only critter dumped on their 70 or 80 acres in a decade.

Until this summer.

Six weeks ago I went out to the barn to feed the chickens and found two starving puppies under one of the condo units we built. You could count their ribs, and yet they were still sweet wiggle dogs. Later I ran onto two more, who turned out to be their parents. The bitch had a bloody spot on her back, probably from going under a fence at a high rate of speed, and I saw the father only once. In the end, because our daughter has doting grandparents, they kept the little female, found some college girls to take the little male, and took the mother to the local shelter. Since I spent part of my junior high years volunteering at the PAWS shelter in Seattle, I suffer no delusions to her fate, but it was the best we could do.

The new dog has some terrier in her, and having sat through the French film Baxter long ago at the Seattle International Film Festival (sitting in the middle of a row, surrounded by people I knew, and so unable to leave), I have some misgivings about her, but she's a very sweet animal and our daughter adores her. Her brother's tail had been bobbed, and I have minor fears that the family had been raised to fight. Hopefully they were dumped by the side of the road because they were bad at it.

Sunday morning, anyhow, I went out to feed the chickens, harvest okra and peppers from the garden, and finish bushhogging; the rest of the family was at church, but I prefer to do whatever worshiping seems necessary in private. From beneath one of the chicken condos emerged one of the skinniest cats I've seen in many years. Purring. Mewling. We happen to have (courtesy of a local distributor, a friend of the family) some old bread which we keep to feed the chickens, or add to the compost pile, depending on how green it is. So I fed her a piece of bread. And then another. Slowly. Six or seven by the time I was done with my day.

She's an ordinary cat, a tabby. Nothing special. She has sharp teeth, but enough sense to nip, not bite. She's not feral, and didn't use her claws on me when I picked her up (though that's how I came briefly to be acquainted with her teeth).

Now, I know there are far worse things in the world, like the torture program promulgated in our name by the Cheney-Addington cabal.

It is telling, to me, however, that people are dumping animals in increasing numbers just now (ours is not the only story along these lines). And it doesn't speak well for those doing the dumping. But what it really suggests is how desperate times are here, and how much worse they can get. The cat and the dogs dumped on us had been well-tended, and probably well-treated; you can tell when an animal's been abused or neglected, and they're dangerous to rescue. Something happened, and the furry ones had to go. Maybe it was a marriage gone south, but far more likely it was an ugly choice between feeding animals and feeding children, or maybe homes lost to the mortgage crisis and landlords unwilling to house critters. Tough luck, anyhow the story went.

Unemployment went up to, what, 6.1% today? There was a piece in the Lexington Herald-Leader over the weekend arguing that the real unemployment rate -- counting partially employed folks or those who have quit looking or run out of benefits -- is a hair over 10%. So I understand why people can't feed their animals.

I just wish they had the basic decency to do something more responsible with them than dump them at the side of the road.

That seems a metaphor for our whole society, just now. But it's a good thing I'm a pacifist, and it's a better thing that I'll never know who dumped those poor little animals.

(This was originally posted, in somewhat different form, on dailykos.com.)

And in that absence, I've been busy.

The greasy beans are now picked, though we might be able to scrounge one more mess of them for dinner in a couple nights. Today I went through the cranberry beans, an heirloom sent kindly by a seed saver up east who I've never met and picked them, and began to shell them. Colorful, they are, though I've no idea yet what they taste like. And I pulled all the popcorn we planted, though I've no idea how much of it the bugs left alone nor what my wife means to do with it. (It was, I'm told, a great exercise for preschoolers.)

Having worried all summer that we would not have peppers and okra, it's now finally time to begin harvesting those happy vegetables, as well. This morning I cut up three cookie sheets of okra and put them in the freezer. With the half-dozen chickens now roosting in our freezer, that pretty much guarantees a pot of gumbo at least once a month over the winter.

The tomatoes...well...we planted poorly, too many heirlooms and not enough simple red canners, but we'll fix that next year. I mean to keep a notebook next year, so as better to know what we've done and what didn't work.

When it's all done, we'll have to burn the garden this year. Too many bugs, especially those little yellow bean-eaters. And then we'll spread leaves and chicken manure over it, and begin the process of setting new fence posts and doubling its size. Mostly so we can keep the blackberries we planted down the hill away from the deer.

In the evenings, I've been reading. And, of course, watching the political conventions. (And we tore down a wall in the Fuzzy Duck over Labor Day. There's that.)

A couple other times I've written here about torture, and my simple but acute horror that our nation, our people, our government, has found it necessary and appropriate to engage in this practice. The irony that the ruling party has nominated a former POW, that I watched Fred Thompson speak last night at some length about the horrors of Senator McCain's treatment by the North Vietnamese...all that makes little sense to me.

Regardless, I am here to beg.

Please read Jane Mayer's The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals.

Please.

This is not how government is supposed to work, and it is especially not how our government is supposed to work.

And if torture is the new norm -- if we really and truly believe this is how to combat Islamic extremists -- it's something we as a society should have a long and profound discussion about.

I am not yet through with Ms. Mayers' book. It is difficult to read, shattering even to an old cynic's ideals.

As a tonic, I have taken up Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin. It is a kind of updated and nonfiction version of The Ugly American, though that old Cold War classic is usually misunderstood in caricature: The ugly American was the hero of that novel. Greg Mortenson offers a different solution to our relationship with the Muslim world.

Both of these books are selling well just now. Our hopes and our fears.

Please read them. Please make time.

This is the season of hope, possibly our last season of hope.

The album is called Como Now: The Voices Of Panola Co., Mississippi, and it is formally released on Tuesday, August 19 by the Daptone label.

Panola County, Mississippi, was the site of several Alan Lomax field recordings in the 1940s and '50s. It is, apparently, a citadel of gospel singing. Como Now was recorded during on July 22, 2006, and offers 16 a cappella tracks from a variety of strong, singular voices, from the aged and revered Brother and Sister Walker (whose harmonies remind me of Blind Willie Johnson) to the extraordinary Como Mamas, who sing counterpoint to the equally extraordinary Mary Walker.

It is a funny thing, coming to gospel as an unbeliever. As a nonbeliever. As someone who does not seek, does not need that kind of truth. I would argue generally that mine is a simple faith: That things work, that doing right is worth doing for its own worth. That if there is a god, he or she or they is unknowable, and none of our human efforts to describe the such a being have done any justice to the job. Nor led to much justice, for all that.

But I love the music, when it soars. (Hell, I love all music when it soars. When the magic is in full force.) It is possible that I am now drawn to gospel because it is sufficiently close to the other sounds I have spent the last 13 years listening to that it is familiar to me, and sufficiently removed from those sounds to be new. All that said, I have to trust the evidence of my once-trained ears, and this is a striking album. Whether one believes, or not.

Como Now is not a field recording, though it was recorded in a small brick church, and the best of the region's singers are said to have shown up for the occasion. It is neither professional, nor unpolished. There are times when one yearns for slightly better microphone placement, but they pass quickly.

I would particularly like to draw your attention to Irene Stevenson's "If It Had Not Been For Jesus," which she wrote. Of course she wrote it. It is too personal, too private a testimonial to learn from a book.

And to draw your attention to "Trouble In My Way," with the trio of Como Mamas backing Mary Moore, the most extraordinary and exhilarating song on the album. Had I any formal musical training, I could perhaps explain how the harmonies work, but I don't, and they work fine without my knowing how. It's not quite call and response, more like question and answer...the chorus isn't simply a counterpoint to Moore's leads, but a full-throated response. The song spins around a simple riff (the answer is mostly "Jesus, he will fix it"), and then, after a litany of woe, resolves simply and beautifully not with "Jesus, he will fix it" but with a tempered line of acceptance: "After a while."

Ah. And the John Edwards Singers' "New Burying Ground," which I so much wish to start a radio show simply so I can segue into "Wreck On The Highway," and maybe the version Jon Langford sings.

I may no longer be a good judge of such things, but this is -- by far -- the best album I've heard this year.

Dan and Marge have a nice log house on a fair bit of land, and own two businesses, but his greasy beans are the legacy which most concerns him, at least this season. The thing he is most proud to hand down, the treasure of his family. The greasy bean appears to be one of the treasures of the Appalachians, and the name seems to cover a handful of somewhat different heirloom beans. You cannot buy them in the store, that much is certain.

They are delicious, to my taste.

We have come to find out that beans, like churches and child-rearing practices, are a very personal taste. Sometimes an acquired taste. It is not true that my wife's family hoards greasy beans, but it is true that they share them only with their closest friends, with people who appreciate them. They are the only beans we eat; last year we canned 100 quarts. This year, it appears, we will put up a bit more than that.

And we will serve them to friends who come to dinner. Fresh, they are cooked in the pressure cooker, with new potatoes on top, and salt, a little oil.

Dan's mother is 95. She has been eating greasy beans all her life. His mother-in-law is, well, well into her 80s, and eats them as well, though I'm not sure she was raised with them. I do not mean to suggest they are some kind of fountain of youth, but clearly the eating of such things has served these two formidable women well. (Now if we could convince little Maggie to eat them...but at five it's more important to her to say no than to try new things.)

Full greasy beans are tight to the touch, and you can feel the peas well formed within the pods. Having picked only ten or fifteen gallons of them in the last 48 hours, I am far from expert in these matters, but have been advised by the canning contingent of our little commune -- the women, that being their chosen but not designated side of this work (except my wife, who both gardens and cans, twining her family's traditions) -- that the beans are good, I am well pleased.

They finish at the base of the vines first, and the vines rise a good four feet. Which makes the first two pickings, at least, stoop labor. Because we hurried -- fighting a wet spring, and still dodging a wet summer (not likely to be a good year for peppers) -- the rows, they are a bit tighter together than we might now wish. There are six rows in the garden, plus another row we planted later so as to have beans further into the season. Two of the rows run the full 100 feet of the garden, the other four are cut short by the asparagus and rhubarb patch, where we harvested garlic and failed to grow much lettuce. Not that short.

We pick, mostly, sitting on plastic pickle buckets, and it is possible to fill one of these five-gallon buckets on a long row just now.

When I was a boy I picked blackberries, almost obsessively. My mother -- a child of the depression -- did not waste them, but I am sure she did not feel the need of as much blackberry jam as I provided the means to make. As I got older and more clever I took to borrowing the garden shears and cutting the vines back so as to get to promising troves of blackberries. Now my brother lives in the apartment buildings they cleared that patch to plop down in the middle of suburbia, and so it goes. (We have had some difficulty growing tame blackberries down by the orchard.)

Picking the beans reminds me of that. It is a meditative time. Susan has come out with her iPod, and we have a second one which I could load and figure out how to play, but I like the silence. Rather, I like the noise of the place. Because it is bloody hot here still, and humid, we tend to pick at the end of the day. (I haven't entirely given up rock 'n roll hours, and early mornings are tough, still.) As the sun sets we can hear the chickens scurrying up in the barn, where Survivor #1 -- the rooster we will keep because he was the lone living chicken out of the first 25 we bought -- is teaching the young hens the arts of chicken love, which sounds to be a one-sided pleasure but is just beginning to produce eggs. And the frogs down at the pond below, they chime in. And then, as the sun sets more, the rest of the forest begins to make its night sounds, and sometimes they are fearful sounds.

It is a meditative time, and that word "full" has been ringing in my head as I bend over to lift up leaves and hunt for ripe greasy beans. This is a full life, just now. Without the visible stature I once had as the co-editor of a small music magazine -- not so much status, of course, but it's funny to watch it drift away, nevertheless -- it is still a full life. Not simpler; often more complex.

Close readers will have observed my obsession with artists who continue to produce past the flush of youth. Sometimes I think I have come, by a quite random road, to this small town to learn about the second half of life, and how it ends. Perhaps.

But my days are full, and my hands are sore, and my back is tight in new places, and as I watch from the sidelines while my two partners work to make this website a viable and interesting business, I am grateful.

Full is also the title of Jon Dee Graham's last studio album, and I am mindful, as I sit on my bucket and pick beans, that he lies in a hospital bed in Austin recovering from an automobile accident. We are not friends, have only really met once, but we are almost the same age and I am somewhat acquainted with some of his demons, somewhat acquainted with the nature of his journey. He is, I think, one of the most spiritual men I have spent time around, and that includes a friend who is now a priest. Deeply conflicted, I would guess, and unresolved. I cannot guess how badly hurt he really is from the spare reports I've picked up from Austin, and I do not wish to pry. Being in a hospital is bad enough.

I am not a praying man, but I am on my knees here in the field, and he is often on my mind. Maybe that's praying.

That story I wrote about Jon Dee, it was the hardest thing I've written in years, and I still think I only got it half-said. "All of this is confusing enough" he sings in my ears, and I know his voice is not for everyone. But, as I wrote to a friend in Texas, his voice sounds like I imagine mine would, if only I could sing. And I can't.

So I will listen to Jon Dee in the silence of this morning, and pick beans. And hope for the best.

It's a really strong memory, too, a song I heard him sing with the line "work your fingers to the bone/and what do you get?/bony fingers!" that I typed out at my typesetting terminal and printed out and waxed and pasted on the console of the Comp IV that my friend Betty worked on at SeaGraphics. I think her name was Betty. She was an older woman, a kind woman, a good typesetter, and the only person at that shop who took the time to teach me that setting type was more than simply typing the words right. And she had Sonics tickets, back when blue collar types could afford such things; one night she either gave me tickets or let me drive her to the game, I can't remember.

It was probably Hoyt Axton singing, now that I think about it, and I note with barely restrained anticipation that the fine folks at the Australian reissue label Raven are about to reissue Axton's Fearless on one of their splendid two-fer LP packages. I'm hoping I'm still on their mailing list, and, by way of further digression, was delighted to note that Darrell Scott pointed to that album in the liner notes of his new album of covers, which he calls Modern Hymns and which is being released by Appleseed. (Although I think Mr. Scott rushes his take of "The Devil" a bit, but it's a quibble.)

Randy Travis, of course, had his first #1 hit in May of 1986 with the masterful country song, "On The Other Hand," part of country's brief new traditionalist movement. (It went #1 almost in time for his 27th birthday; Randy Travis and I were born a few weeks apart in 1959, and on Tuesday Susan and I sat in church pews to say goodbye to a friend who was born those same few weeks, so I am keenly aware of that time just now.) By which point, the spring of 1986, SeaGraphic had long gone down the tubes and I'd started my own typesetting shop, and was already in the process of selling the equipment to an office partner. I listened to a lot of country music, on KMPS, back then, even took another office partner to see the Judds' final tour, with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, sat with her in the third level of the Paramount Theatre trying to remember why I liked live music and wondering why she kept dating some guy who wasn't me, even though I was hardly her type. (Nor she mine, to be fair.)

The point, I guess, is that it feels like Randy Travis's voice has been a part of my life forever. He's right in there with Hoyt Axton and Don Williams (and not so far from JJ Cale, though I've never bought one of his albums), one of those easy, calm, inescapably masculine voices that strokes the psyche and is carefully unafraid to betray emotion.

In the main, Travis has ended up being a mainstream country artists whose career is best summarized by greatest hits packages, and I can't remember the last time I played a new release of his and could hear more than a trace of the electricity and craft and beauty he can bring to a song. Even, oddly enough, in his gospel albums.

So I didn't have a lot of hope for this new one, Around The Bend. But I was doing some typing here and his is a comforting voice to work to, and it had come in the mail, and I was tired of all the stuff on the shelves that also came in the mail from people I've never heard of that none of the rest of y'all will ever hear of, but whose dreams will not easily be rebuked by the likes of me.

They'll call this one a return to form, I suppose. And I suppose it is, though I can't guess and no longer care whether country radio will notice. But in these friendly confines I'd like to encourage you all to notice, for he still has that great, deep, resonant, kindly voice. And, this time, he has some songs which deserve that voice: "You Didn't Have A Good Time," a tri-write from Kris Bergsnes, Jason Matthews, and Jim McCormick about the drunk we all used to hang out with (and some of us still do); "Every Head Bowed," a wry memory piece by Brent Baxter and Brandon Kinney; "Faith In You," an intriguing tri-write from Tom Douglas, Joe Henry, and Matt Rollings (the last of whom is best known as Lyle Lovett's keyboard player); and the spectacular "From Your Knees" from the pen of one of Nashville's two or three best country songwriters, Leslie Satcher (and I suppose she'll never get to make another album on her own; more's the pity).

There's some dross. He doesn't do much with Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," and the opening "Around The Bend" (from Tania Hancheroff, Marcus Hummon, and Tia Sillers) begins in wonderful voice, but settles into a hackneyed chorus, supported by a chorus of voices.

But it's a pretty good record. Hugh Prestwood's "Love Is A Gamble" is a sweet song, the kind of thing John Anderson could turn his voice around, too. "Everything That I Own (Has Got A Dent)" is the kind of loser's anthem that Jerry Reed made a nice and somewhat improbable living singing (this one's from Tony Martin and Mark Nesler).

It's a pretty good record, and sometimes that's a pretty good thing. That's what Travis makes, pretty good records. And every once in a while he nails a song. The thing I like about Around The Bend is that it's alive, again. That the three songs stickered on the cover as potential singles aren't the ones that I would pick, that the choices aren't obvious, that the filler is only barely filler, for the most part. That I'm pretty sure if I were to make a compilation that tried to justify my fondness for his voice, three or four of these tracks might make the cut. That's a significant accomplishment for a guy whose first country #1 was twenty years ago.

And if you don't love that voice when it's rippling through the speakers...I can't help you.

I started to title this little digression, "Why Randy Travis still matters." But I'm not sure he ever mattered, not the way George Jones or Billy Joe Shaver or Loretta Lynn matter. Mattering isn't what it's all about, not all the time. Sometimes it's just nice to hear a friendly voice offering a few well-chosen words.

It is, I would add, an interesting thing to compose words anonymously in the dailykos world. I have come to take for granted the premise that most of my readers in the ND community either know me or have a working familiarity with my writing persona. As a confessional writer, I find anonymity a curiously limiting construct. But a useful learning tool, as it were.

In 1942, as part of the war effort, John Steinbeck wrote a book called Bombs Away: The Story Of A Bomber Team, reprinted in 1990 and picked up off the remainder table in a weak moment because for some unknown reason I had gone on a mild Steinbeck binge. And because it was cheap. An extension of my "rescue good literature from the thrift shop" school of acquisition.

(And I note, in passing, that Steinbeck was part of a war effort, that there was a war effort embraced by artists and artisans and even most partisans; and that there is not now, has not been for decades.)

The premise of Bombs Away, in any event, was that American men entering the military in 1942 would find that their natural-born civilian skill-sets translated nicely into the component parts of a bomber team; and that not everybody should want only to be a pilot, that there was honor in each job on the plane.

I was struck, reading the book so many years after the last good war, that much had changed. That I had none of those skills -- not the hunting and shooting, nor the repairing and welding of things, nor even the physical fitness that comes with labor -- for they were no longer a part of the life of the typical American suburban kid.

Much has changed since 1942, and much since Steinbeck's book was reprinted in 1990.

But I was reminded of it a few weeks back when my wife broke up a long car trip by reading to me an essay she had found on the back page of the summer edition of Spin-Off magazine. The author's name is Abby Franquemont, and the headline reads: "What Are You Doing? And Why?", not coincidentally the same question my wife would ask were she to walk into my home office just now and find me writing for free again, but no matter. Ms. Franquemont was explaining why she likes to spin her own yarn, and snapped:

"Look," I said, "do you want to live in a cave, wearing skins, without fire, knapping flint to enable you to hunt and gather, and be dead by age twenty-five? Because this -- this right here in my hands -- this is why you don't. Without this, that is all you can do. Without this, there is no civilization, no technology, no history, no agriculture, no animal husbandry, no permanent settlements, and the whole of human history just did not happen. Without what I'm doing right now, making yarn, there is no life as we know it."

Textiles are at the root of many essential advances in civilization, both in terms of the textiles themselves and the technologies needed to create them. Cultures lacking in textile production capability don't generally advance beyond hunting and gathering. Which is fine, but given a choice, few of us today would opt to live such a life.

The full substance of her argument is well beyond my competence, and it is not clear to me whether textiles are an indicator of the possibility of civilization, or a prerequisite to its development. Nor, for my purposes today, does it matter.

Fourteen years ago I left Seattle for a job at RayGun Publishing in Los Angeles. I brought with me my books and my records and my CDs and my power tools -- not so many tools, then, just a drill and a saw, really -- and not much else except the cabinetry to hold all that stuff. And though I was theoretically a member of the senior staff -- indeed, though I had broken a finger playing basketball (again) -- when we added staff and needed new office furniture assembled, it fell to me to do the job. Because I could read directions, because I had tools and knew how to use them. (I also cooked. I was a freak. I didn't mind being a freak, that part came naturally. LA, on the other hand...)

Today, we are well down the road to losing most of the hand skills necessary to function in the world we have built. Or paid others to build on our behalf. Children aren't taught to drive a nail, or change a toilet, or even to change the oil in their car (which I did all of once, and stripped the bolt). We're not taught how to make things, how to cook food from fresh ingredients, how to sew. Which is, to a degree, fine. Some people shouldn't drive cars, either.

Two problems, though: First, we -- as a culture -- devalue those people who do know how to fix and make things. (Unless and until we need them; and then they are talked down to, and about, and we don't understand what they're doing, why it works and fails, nor even how to communicate clearly and honestly with them.) In passing, this has made it easier to undercut the union movement. And we have whole-heartedly embraced the exportation of those jobs abroad, ensuring -- much like the capital flow T. Boone Pickens laments on television each night -- that the skills necessary to build and operate and staff a modern manufacturing enterprise are no longer native to our shores.

We're forgetting how to make things. On purpose. (Unless it's a hobby, or a quaint anachronism; or unless we're trying to get off the grid, still very much a minority position.)

What's been offered instead is an information economy, a service economy, a world -- ah, the pristine vision -- built around intellect.

An illusion, that.

My stepmother clipped a column from the July 7-14 Newsweek, written by a man named Sal Nunziato, who until recently owned a CD store in Brooklyn with which I am otherwise unfamiliar. He writes eloquently about knowing his customers, knowing their tastes and temperaments well enough to suggest music they might like, to order things specially for them, to nurture their community. And like many CD stores, he is out of business, his specific knowledge of that community -- and of the music in the marketplace -- lost to that corner of Brooklyn, lost forever.

Replaced, perhaps, by Rhapsody and Amazon, both anxious to use mathematical equations and the science of the computer to do the job of a smart and intuitive human. Of a man with taste.

Having labored as a music critic for 21 years, I feel Mr. Nunziato's pain.

Friends of ours own a bicycle shop. We live in a small town. They are the local experts in bicycles and canoes and climbing equipment. People come to their store and talk and talk and talk. And then they go online and distill that knowledge into a purchase that does nothing to support the local business.

Do we really value knowledge?

Surely the present administration did not value nuanced views of Iraq, does not value the science behind global warming, and a dozen other things we might profitably carp about another time. Indeed, Mr. Bush behaves like a mediocre student who is unable to make sense of competing and complex theories about a system he is studying, and so decides simply to go with the answer he wants to hear, seeing instead of the anarchy of the intellectual process the arrogance of a salesman.

Because it's all about the sale, isn't it, in America?

Here's the question, then: Who's going to fix it when it's broken? Who's going to build the new one?

This, in part, is why I now refer to myself as a semi-retired music critic, and an apprentice farmer. Which is not to say that I aspire ever to sell what we grow; but which is to say that I hope to learn enough to grow what we eat, should we wish to do so, and to share whatever bounty we may unexpectedly have with our neighbors. Which is not to say that I ever wish to work on my car, but which is to say that I have no objection to changing out the toilet should it need doing again.

Hand skills are not my gift. But I played basketball from the time I was seven or eight year old well into my 40s, and it wasn't until some point in my mid-30s that I finally figured out the mechanics of a jumpshot, the part where the jumping helps to propel the ball toward the hoop. I have put out publications of one kind or another since 1974 or 1975, and yet only in the last few years would I have suggested I was anything more than a hack designer, and I am barely better than that, even today. A certain tenacity is, apparently, my gift, and like every student I believe that if I apply myself I will acquire knowledge. Though, in fairness, that never worked in physics class. (Bad teacher, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.)

It has been a very different process, a very different thing, than producing the magazine. Easier, I think. Possibly.

We made it easier, that's part of it. And book pages don't all have to end neatly at the bottom when the story's done, as magazines do; and the columns are wider; and I choose to construct a fairly simple structure and restrictive rules around which to design the bookazine. That last is a reflection of the uncertainty that comes with doing something for the first time. Next issue, perhaps, I'll play faster and looser with the page structures. Or maybe I won't; maybe the simple elegance I was hoping for will actually come off. (Nah.)

But one of the things that I was acutely aware we no longer had to contend with were ads. Which is a funny thing. If you've not juggled file formats with frantic designers around the country (and occasionally around the world) on deadlines that they didn't know they had until somebody they work for or with told them at the last minute that something needed to be done yesterday...well, then you'll not understand some of it.

But having designed publications of one kind or another, going back to the Streaker's Digest at Thomas Hunt Morgan Junior High School (my first publishing venture, a typewritten two-page gossip sheet, modeled after the hip kids' Cliff Times -- they smoked at the Cliffs, see, and nobody knew what Cliff's Notes were, I guess...) since 1974 or some such foolishness...having designed publications for a long time, I like ads. They do nice things on the page, properly disciplined. They provide extra balance points; they allow text to sit simply without seeming unadorned, since there's that riot of color and/or type adjacent.

Working without them, for the first time in a long time, was...odd. Perhaps, next time, it will seem freeing. But just now it felt like a friend was missing from the room, expected at any moment, but never really going to show up.

(I used to have friends like that.)

So we'll see.

The other thing about ads...they paid the bills. They subsidized the writers and photographers (and, yes, editors and art director) who produced ND. A university press budget doesn't really make up the difference, and that's not at all meant to be disrespectful to the kind folks in Austin. That's just part of the challenge. But the cover price will be more than the cover price of a magazine, and that's why.

We have no idea what you'll make of this thing when it's done and available at your corner bookstore for fondling. I'm not sure what I'll think of it when I see it. But it's good work, and I liked doing it, and I am pretty confident you'll like reading it.

And I'm real confident that you'll tell us what you think, when it's time.

Now...about cleaning that office...

Not counting two trips to Starwood, an outdoor lawn and band shell outside of Nashville, where we went for sport to see a tour that included Ratt and Poison and, I think, Great White (and one more), and where I saw Sonic Youth open for Pearl Jam, the best I can remember is that I went to some suburban Los Angeles shed to see KISS, which would have been ten or eleven years ago. And that was my last arena show.

Long have I held to the belief that there's little point in going to such places to see music, because music cannot happen on such a huge stage, in such a vast room; and because few among the audience go there for the music. They go for the event, for the proximity to fame. They go because it's the only context in which they understand music to be offered, and sorting out the confusing array of clubs and emerging (or submerging) performers is too much trouble for the casual listener. (And, anyway, in Lexington, the Dame has been closed and will shortly be demolished for some enormous block-sized structure that it is not clear the city needs, nor its citizens want.)

Once I expressed this opinion in a piece David Menconi wrote advancing the Down From The Mountain tour, which by then had run a great many miles. That, and my suggestion that O Brother was analogous to the "Dueling Banjos" flurry following Deliverance in the mid-'70s inspired T Bone Burnett to e-mail a couple of angry notes my way.

(I seemed unable to make him understand the Deliverance reference, but Eric Darling's soundtrack album -- or whatever it was -- was hugely inspirational to me as a child. I took up the banjo, through sixth and seventh grade, tender years, which, at least, finally allowed me to practice upstairs where my parents could hear that indeed I had no talent, not for that and not for the piano downstairs I had been banging on for six years, and so I was allowed to quit and take up typing. Deliverance was the album -- I've never seen the movie, nor read the book from which it was adapted -- which cracked open the door to roots music a little further, past creeping down to my dad's office and listening to Tiny Freeman on Saturday nights. So it wasn't meant as an insult, suggesting O Brother would have similar impact, but I suspect Mr. Burnett had hoped to change the world a bit more this time 'round. And, perhaps, he has.)

It is also true that my tastes in music are not so broadly shared that the artists I wish to see are often asked to play in basketball arenas.

And so, having seen the Robert Plant and Alison Krauss tour open its run across the state in Louisville -- a beautiful but inevitably tentative show which I inexpertly reviewed here -- we came to Rupp, gifted unexpectedly with wonderful seats, not so much expecting to see great music as to see what great musicians had done with themselves in the intervening weeks. Last night's show was the penultimate on this swing, which concludes tonight in Nashville, and then they all take a break. Or at least pause to do other things for a while.

Let us not pretend that we were anywhere but a partially-sold arena. The top level, where we occasionally sit to see Coach Gillespie confound fans and critics alike, was curtained off. There were seats available elsewhere. The fellow next to me had a piercing whistle he offered regularly by way of approval, but it happened to be in my good ear -- not the one the .357 went off near some years back (OK, I shot it, but it was supposed to have a .38 load in it, and that's about all I know about guns) -- and I hadn't thought to bring earplugs to an acoustic show, and the middle-aged couple in front of us were as engaged in their own betrothal as they were the show. Same as it ever was.

All that's true.

But this is also true: T Bone Burnett was, much as it pains me to admit...Burnett was right. Music can happen on an arena stage, and this slowly dawned on me as the evening wore on. The trick, which I should have seen coming, is to place six of the best musicians at work on the western half of the planet in one place, let them get to know each other -- but not too well, I suppose -- and, providing the egos stay in check, fun will be had. (I am not sure how often this trick can be repeated, nor if it should be tried by anybody else.)

The show -- Plant called it a revue, which is what it is, and what it can still grow into being -- has much evolved since Louisville. I can't speak to the set list because, again, I don't take notes at concerts, save to suggest that they weren't all the same songs, not even close. More than that, it is now clear that Raising Sand is no longer the purpose for the tour, it's the pretext on which they are allowed to continue having fun in public. (And, of course, get paid handsomely for their efforts. Though I suspect the principals might still do better financially as solo headliners; that's not the point.)

And, this night, anyhow, the dynamic has changed, the focus has sharpened. Burnett took only one song at center stage ("Let The Good Times Roll," only he introduced it by its Cajun French name, which I am unable to render accurately), which works better for the flow of things. Plant and Krauss are clearly much more comfortable with each other, more certain where the other will come in and step back, able now to joke because the quality of their work together is comfortably assured. And Plant, to his credit, has shed the arena rock moves which were still his instinctive response to songs -- especially those from the Zeppelin catalogue -- in Louisville.

That focus also means they lean less heavily on the sidemen, which is probably a good thing, though, inevitably, I'd like always to see more of Stuart Duncan and Buddy Miller. Other times, in other contexts. In the meantime, they keep learning new songs, new ways to play with each other, and the audience -- wherever and whoever it may be -- is virtually irrelevant. Fun is being had on stage. Music is being made, music of the highest possible quality.

Even in a basketball arena.

Which was fine. The point seemed made that Buddy was (in the Young Fresh Fellows line) a man who loved music.

Despite the inevitable ups and downs of the recording process, I'm confident that Buddy thoroughly enjoyed making Nashville with Solomon Burke. Thoroughly enjoyed. And had plans to make another.

"I think we're going to do...I mean, he told Rolling Stone that we were doing a record together, a gospel record," Buddy said back in March. "I mean, we were all talking about it. Julie said, 'Yeah, we'll set up a tent outside and set up chairs in our room, and we'll do a live gospel record here, you just come in and preach and we'll play and back you up for a few days, and we'll have a record. I'll write the songs.'

"It was like we were getting a plan together, and I said, 'Yeah, I'll put up a banner out front: REVIVAL TONIGHT WITH SOLOMON BURKE.' And we may still do that.

"We cut 'Dirty Water,' that song of ours which can be looked at any number of ways, I think politically is how he was kind of [looking at it], and that's the kind of gospel record he wants to make, things that tie in that aren't, well, I shouldn't speak for him."

Not long after that last issue of the magazine showed up on my doorstep, I opened a package from Shout! Factory containing Solomon's new Like A Fire. Produced by Steve Jordan, and not by Buddy Miller. I felt an immediate sadness, though it would be presumptuous (no, silly) to suggest that Buddy and I are more than slightly acquainted with each other.

Maybe Buddy knew it was coming, maybe he didn't. Certainly Buddy has a hectic schedule, and Burke is hardly obliged to do anything, much less wait for Buddy to have time to make another album with him. And, regardless, the existence of Like A Fire in no way closes the door to Buddy producing a gospel record on Solomon Burke. They still might, and I still hope they do.

But, as I played the album over and over again driving out to the farm this spring, I couldn't get past my prejudice that it wasn't the album I wanted to hear from Solomon Burke. And, in the main, I think David Cantwell's review (elsewhere on this site) says most of what I would have said on that subject, had I gotten 'round to writing one myself.

Nashville was full of life, as Solomon Burke clearly is. Like A Fire is, in the main, not. The title track seems, no matter how often I listen, like a mistake, for Burke's voice sounds thick and old and uncertain, and it's not a great song, much less so strong it begs to be the opening number, the theme for the whole work. It is followed by the most country number of the album, a Keb' Mo/Alan Dennis Rich co-write called "We Don't Need It" that will pair nicely with Charlie Rich's "Life's Little Ups And Downs" (yeah, I know Rich's wife wrote it) if I ever get on the radio. (Which I probably won't.) Except that there is redemption in Burke's song, and resignation in Rich's.

For the rest, there's a fine gospel song with Ben Harper, "A Minute To Rest And A Second To Pray", and the album closes with an awkward kind of Ray Price shuffle, "If I Give My Heart To You". And after all those trips to the farm the six other songs just blur together.

Cantwell is right. Time is running out, don't waste it on mediocre projects.

That said, I am once again reminded that we have lived through an extraordinary patch of muscular, knowing albums made by older artists. Ray Price has given us one, Johnny Cash gave us a good handful -- make what you will of American V, but remember what the singer knew about himself as he made it, that he knew well what he sounded like, and that he consciously, carefully worked with that. I'd toss Bettye LaVette into that mix, but she's not really of that generation. Porter Wagoner's last, to which we owe Marty Stuart a considerable debt, for I have been in receipt of a number of other late Wagoner offerings which existed simply to be sold off the merch table. Same, I fear, with Ralph Stanley, but, again, ponder the power of "Oh, Death." The knowing behind his rendition.

That, anyhow, is what I hope for from the next Solomon Burke album. That knowing and caring, and commitment.

We three here at home were in the midst of an impromptu cleaning frenzy. We had just installed a new CD player which holds five discs (a duplicate of the one we bought for the bookstore, days earlier), and Susan had turned it on so as to make the work go more pleasantly.

It was the sound of Greg Brown's voice which reminded me. It reminded me of my friend and our contributor, Mike Perry, whose path off the grid is much further along than mine will ever be -- but he has the advantage of having been raised on a dairy farm, not in the suburbs -- and whose last major piece for ND was a fine interview and character study of Mr. Brown.

And that reminded me, for reasons I shan't trouble the synapses to explain, that there sat in my fax machine a contract for Susan and me to sign. And so we did, and faxed it back.

With those signatures I ended my ownership interest in No Depression. I have troubled in the following days whether to mention this, and, if so, how best to do so. Because this has always been a deeply personal matter -- the writing and designing and publishing of our little magazine; the sense I have ever carried with me that I spoke to and with and among a community of friends, known and unknown -- I find that I cannot leave it unsaid.

So the first thing to be said is that I leave No Depression in good hands, in the care of people sworn to do right by our legacy. My leaving has to do with choices I wish to make in my life, and under no circumstances is it meant to suggest anything else. I asked to leave. It is time, and maybe I shall explain that at some later point, and perhaps you reading today have read enough of my musings these last few months, these last few years, so as to know already why that might be so.

The second thing is that I will not be entirely gone. With the forbearance of my remaining partners, I will continue to blog on this site. Sometimes I will even write about music, for it remains a fundamental part of who I am, if less a part of how I work toward the end of each day. And I will continue to design and co-edit (mostly design, this first issue) the bookazine we have engaged to publish through the University of Texas Press.

In this it should be clear that, for good and ill, I am a print person. And I am stepping aside because what No Depression needs right now is a web person. Persons, probably. They are on schedule -- as much as such things adhere to a schedule -- to relaunch this website come fall. But as I have watched this process unfold, it has become painfully clear to me that I haven't the stomach for it. It's not what I do, not who I am, not who I'm going to be.

And so I will step out of the way.

Here at home, when the cleaning was done, we opened a couple bottles of Hennepin, which claims now to be a saison though it's really a pretty good North American knockoff of the Belgian Duvel (so good a knockoff that Duvel now owns the brewery), and I never thought of Duvel as a farmhouse ale. No matter. We had a glass, and saluted.

For the rest, I am tanned, rested, and ready for what may come. And patient enough not to hasten its coming.

Y'all be good. I'll be watching. Listening.

Nevertheless a couple readers have been very kind and sent music by way of thanks. This morning I opened a typewritten package from a man I don't know, name of Thomas R. Smith, which included a two-page note and a burned copy of the first Julie Miller album, the one I've never heard. He says he is not much of an internet consumer, and so he may not stumble upon my thanks, but I am most grateful nevertheless.

And I wanted to quote one part of his note here:

"I bought my first No Depression off the newsstand in November, 1997, which, being pre-Bush, now looks like some halcyon past golden age. I felt at that time that alternative country (or whatever) music was helping to heal some old class wounding in America and bringing North and South a little closer than they'd been for a while. The crowning public moment for that movement was O Brother, Where Art Thou?, I think. The election of 2000 and subsequent events, of course, turned back that momentum, leaving us, as a nation, arguably more divided than we've been since the Civil War era. But it's to No Depression's credit and yours that through the past eight years' nightmare of division and national animosity you managed to keep that middle meeting ground open in your pages, so that the dream of reconciliation could stay alive while "red" and "blue" went for each others' throats. With any luck (and an Obama presidency), we may see the end of that nightmare estrangement. Meanwhile, you can take satisfaction in knowing that No Depression succeeded in doing a hard job in hard times."

I suppose it goes without saying that I have chosen to place Mr. Smith's words above because I agree with them. More than that I am glad to have been understood, though I suspect in hindsight that we did not -- that I did not -- really understand what small role we might play (and a small role it was) as a national meeting ground until we made the apparently radical step of endorsing John Kerry for President in 2004. I had not known, not really known, the kinds of divides we straddled until the fallout from that decision. Which wasn't as severe as it might've been, but which was, still, bracing.

I have always wanted the writing about music to be about more than music. I have sometimes understood that those of you who read such things often wished the words only to be about the music. But none of it happens in a vacuum, not the creative process, and certainly not our lives.

Finally, I should like also to thank Joe Goldmark, who sent along a copy of his enormous project -- 16 CDs, in all -- compiling pre-1975 country music. As he said in his kind note, it's perfect for road trips. At $4 a gallon gas, I'm not sure how many more of those road trips I have in my future. Perhaps I shall have to rig the tractor for sound, but I think that's probably the wrong thing to do to a 50-year-old Ford. (I know, I know, I could get an iPod. I suppose I could. But I don't want to!)

So I read the whole thing this morning, including two nice obituaries for George Carlin (one of them even front page). Only, later, when I looked to see whether it might rain on our garden, did I notice that it was Tuesday's newspaper. And today is Wednesday.

What with open windows and singing birds and a five-year-old who seems to wish to eschew sleeping at all costs, we wake early here. And it's not uncommon for me to beat the delivery person to the box where the newspaper rests.

So after breakfast I walked back down the driveway, and there was today's newspaper.

I wondered, as I walked, as fuel prices and -- I presume -- coming fuel shortages change how we live, I wondered just how many more years the Herald-Leader will deem our little market at the edge of their readership worth serving.

And whether I will miss it when it's gone.

Our local paper is, of course, dreadful. And the meme is now well circulated that newsprint is dead, the internet can do that job better. And maybe it can. Maybe.

Until I spill coffee on the keyboard, anyhow.

I've spent small pieces of the last three days bushhogging one section of the farm that we don't use for anything except collecting butterflies and deer droppings. It's a long trip down and back, and bumpy. And every time I get on the tractor, I think of Merle Watson.

Today, I was alone out there, nothing but me and the sun and Survivor #1 cockadoodling back in the farm. I went out because the chickens needed feeding and watering and my in-laws had gone for the day; and I went out because driving back and forth and slowly getting something done is wonderful therapy.

Driving (ah, Pearl Harbour & The Explosions!) is still one of the great calming pleasures. My wife does yoga. I drive things. Her meditation is, of course, better for the planet. Mine works. Yesterday I took my solo voyage on the four-wheeler they keep to run from the house to the barn, and I can guess why people die on those things. Trees don't move, and it goes (or seems to go) fast. Another thumb throttle, which takes getting used to (I never rode a motorcycle; my father long ago decreed that he'd disown his sons if he caught us with tattoos or riding motorcycles...he's mellowed on that, a little, but not much).

Anyhow. The tractor is nimble and goat-like and in the middle of going back and forth I stopped to look at the phone and picked up a message from my father-in-law, reminding me to be careful, not to go where I shouldn't (like into the pond), that what I was doing could be dangerous. And I thought of Merle Watson, again. Every time.

It's an old tractor. There's no dead-man switch, so if I come out of the chair for any reason it keeps going. Quite clearly it is more capable of climbing and descending hills than I am of judging that it can do so safely, and so we work slowly together, and I try to gently figure out where the limits of the thing are so as never to tempt fate. Long ago a chainsaw went into my right leg, and I'd like to use that for an explanation of my basketball career, but when you don't figure out the mechanics of the jumpshot until you're thirtysomething, no more explanation is necessary.

But the sun's not too hot, the beans are coming up, the okra didn't seem to take, and we got our first banana pepper yesterday. And there's a new Solomon Burke album in the little red truck, spinning around as I come and go from the farm. One of these days I'll bring it in and write about it.

Right now, I've got fresh strawberries to eat. And maybe I'll open some of the mail. Nah, I'll just eat the strawberries. If Maggie doesn't get 'em first.

Nothing about this is very exciting, and it's certainly not punk rock. But it does feel good, like honest work, and if the weather holds we'll eat well all winter.

Now, I never have spent the time to see how the question was formulated, which makes a difference. Depending on how it was written, for example, some may have voted against Obama because they believe his race makes him a target for violence, and they would prefer not to see that happen in these turbulent, divisive times. But that's probably wishful thinking. Probably Kentucky voters were just a bit more honest and a bit less...evolved is the word which wishes to be typed, despite the presence of a huge museum to the creationism movement up Covington way.

All of which is relevant here, in a place where we talk mostly and peripherally and at least occasionally about music, in this way.

Last week, before we decamped for the beach, downtown Morehead hosted the Clack Mountain Festival. And let me digress just one moment further to note that everything you've heard on album or heard about Chris Stapleton's vocals, Stapleton being the Kentucky-bred lead singer of this particular Nashville bluegrass super group (and I'd forgotten Tammy Rogers played fiddle and sung harmonies, but she was terrific, as always), everything you've heard is true. His is one of the great voices of our generation, and I do not succumb to hyperbole. He's just that good. Rumor has it their next album might not be bluegrass, or that Stapleton himself wants to make a southern rock record, or whatever. Rumor being rumor, I don't care. Whatever he wants to sing, I want to listen to.

Not what I came here to type, though.

The Clack Mountain festival had booked the Carolina Chocolate Drops in the slot before Ralph Stanley & the Clinch Mountain Boys, and, especially after the primary, some of us had some concerns that they would be too warmly received by some of our less evolved neighbors.

First song, the cloggers came out. Not just at stage left, where they had been keeping themselves, but stage center. First song, all the older men and (and few women) who seem mostly to be the only people keeping this tradition alive, who dance mostly by themselves and in some veiled competition with each other (if only, now, to see who can keep going longest), all the folks who one might caricature all kinds of ways in a racially charged environment, they came right out to dance and had a big time the whole set.

Now, surely somebody will note that African-American performers have always been enjoyed by a racist society, and maybe that's part of it. But I prefer to think the music did the talking, and the music won out.

At one point Rhiannon Giddens introduced a song with the notation that it was one she'd known for a long time, but recent events had made it reasonable to sing. And I thought, ah, she's going to obliquely comment on Obama, and sat back expecting, I don't know, "A Change Is Gonna Come" or some such. Instead, she cut loose with a version of "Single Girl, Married Girl" that I hadn't heard before.

A good time was had by all, and I took that for a good sign.

A postscript. At the end of the day I happened to notice Mike Farris's Salvation In Lights sitting on my desk, because I'd been talking about him with a friend and had played a song or two. So I tossed it into the CD player, that being easier than, y'know, filing the thing. There it was: "Change Is Gonna Come." Now, the Chocolate Drops surely don't need me making repertoire suggestions, but, that said, it would have been the right song to hear that night, at least for me. And I think Mrs. Giddens could nail it. Of course she could.