One More Time

Whoa, so here’s a really extraordinary video of Furry Lewis doing “Going to Brownsville.” I really, really like Lewis. He’s got just a beautiful voice, so rich and lovely. It reminds me of a church voice–like you stand next to these ordinary men who don’t sing on any other occasion but church and you discover that they have these really lovely voices you wish they’d use all the time. Furry Lewis is a man with a church voice who somehow actually got to use it all the time. And his joke is hilarious. I know it’s kind of hard to make out, but he’s basically saying that he knows he’s going to play well tonight compared to the other night, because he didn’t play so well there because it was so dark. (How dark was it, Furry?) It was so dark that, when you lit a match, you had to light another one to see if the first one struck.

That’s hilarious. Anyway, I’m with the camera man. Just watch his fingers. Beautiful.

But I would be remiss to not add Janis Joplin to the mix, if only because I feel pretty sure she also thought it was Brownsville, TX. This doesn’t quite work as a cover for me and I normally love Joplin and think she can do no wrong.

But it doesn’t quite settle in my ear because I keep wanting to sing this song to her music.

Ha ha ha. But it’s a nice reference–bring up Kitty’s feelings toward the boy from New York City to give us a feeling for how Joplin feels about her man. I think the real reason I don’t like it is that I love that the woman in Brownsville has great long curly hair. And no one in Joplin’s version has notable hair.

That Right-Hand Road

Here is Sleepy John Estes’s song, in his own voice. And here’s the map between Durhamville, where Estes is buried (and likely grew up), and Brownsville.

Please note how, when you head out of town toward Nutly (home of Tiny Turner), to get to Brownsville, you do, indeed, take the right-hand road. I know that’s simple enough, but it makes me so happy. It’s a real place you can go and see. It’s a road you can take.

It just gives me a feeling that I want people to have when they read my work. I want people who poke around looking at the places my stories take place to find those streets and buildings and ways.

Trying to Give You a Hint of It - 6 photos »

Wherefore Art Thou, Sleepy John Estes

We went clear the fuck out to Fort Pillow, which was hot as balls. And I am covered in mosquito bites. Then we tried to find Sleepy John Estes’ grave and we finally found the cemetery and we looked all through it and even took the find-a-grave picture of his gravestone as a guide, but we never found it. We found other Esteses, but whether they were sleepy, I cannot say; their gravestones were silent on the matter. I took a few pictures of them. And we did see the oldest synagogue in Tennessee and it is charmingly small. Like a large gingerbread house. And, my god, we saw this thing. I don’t… I can’t even begin… You hear about folk art installations, but I’ve never seen anything like this. None of my pictures do it justice. And then I dumped Dairy Queen in my purse. And it was awesome and wonderful. And I am so tired. But I think Brownsville is now one of my favorite places in Tennessee.

Edited to add: And we saw a camel!

The dog sniffs around Fort Pillow.

The Professor laughs when I tell her I’m going to take a picture of her looking cross with the dog.

Here’s some part of the fort.

Okay, so this was cool. Out there is the Mississippi.

And over there, where the mist is is a lake that is actually the old river channel.

Here’s an Estes.

Here’s another Estes.

Was this his grave? Probably not.

But there were graves in the trees. So, he could be covered over.

Okay, this is that thing. It’s hard to explain. It’s like a deep, narrow lot of land with this extraordinary this thing.

I Will Be Bringing My Great Long Curly Hair

Today I learned that this is not Brownsville, Texas, but Brownsville, Tennessee, where Sleepy John Estes lived, way on back when. We’re going there tomorrow. While we’re there, we’ll see Tennessee’s oldest synagogue. Among other things.

WTF, TN?

I think the House just passed a bill that would let teachers carry any gun in the classroom and the school would not have to inform parents. Apparently there was some debate about whether this would include AK-47s, acknowledgement that it would, and still…

So, there you go.

Home Sweet Home to Me

It’s a thing you forget until you see it happen again, but the truth of the matter is that, if a band in this state plays “Rocky Top,” some old man is going to buck dance or die trying.

A Dog’s Gonna Bark

It seems to me that, when the overarching theme of someone’s legislative career is that women are lying bitches who need to be kept under tight control, and poor children are so problematic that they need to be starved if they don’t act right, and that gay people are such a menace that gay children need to be humiliated and treated like freaks, a dude has deep issues.

Not deep enough to send up a lot of red flags among his colleagues, but it should have.

So, I’m interested to see what happens when he’s now openly calling said colleagues stupid.

But I wonder what kind of politician does that? You get bills passed by building coalitions. How do you build coalitions with people you’ve called stupid?

My opinion is that he enjoys making people, at the least and to put it mildly, uncomfortable. If he’s got a common enemy with you, then fine, I guess you can just not notice his motivations. But when there’s no common enemy left? Then it’s you he’s gunning for. It’s just his way. It appears to feel good to him.

And that, my friends, after years of observing him, is what scares the shit out of me about him. He knows what he does hurts people and he does it anyway, because it feels good to him. Only now we know it’s not enough for him to go after abstract “women” or “poor children” or “gay people.” He’s willing to be shitty to, say, Glen Casada or his other colleagues.

Should we call that an escalation?

We Didn’t Get Married in a Fever, but We Did Go to Jackson - 26 photos »

Glass Mounds

I’m going to write about this for Pith, but it was really awesome. It’s weird how it’s one thing to know people lived here 2,000 years ago, but seeing something they built, seeing the wavy lines in the dirt that show how they piled baskets full of mud, is really something different.

I didn’t take as many pictures as I should have, because I was walking around talking to people and they were all saying really interesting things. But I fucked with the contrast on this one so that you can–I think, see the difference between the dirt that’s on the mound from years of erosion and maybe farming and the dirt that is the mound. In real life it’s easier to see, especially if you have someone pointing it out to you.

But if you look kind of below Deter-Wolf’s pinky (like below and to the right) you can see where one of the archaeology students drew a wavy line in the dirt to show the heaping basketful of mud’s top. And you can kind of see the difference between the soil piled by time, which is kind of light brown in this picture and, you know, Tennessee mud colored in real life, and the dark brown part under his hand, which is the old mound structure itself, which is a gray color in real life.

Tattoos

So, this morning, I went to a media thing at Glass Mounds, which involved a great deal of me getting up on the mound about half way and not being able to get back down. Thankfully, they don’t just let you die there, stranded on a burial mound regularly being pelted with golf balls. At least, not when other members of the media are standing there watching.

This, though, is not about that. This is about the completely unrelated awesome thing I learned from Aaron Deter-Wolf, who is an archaeologist for the state. He’s got a new book coming out from the University of Texas Press this fall about tattoo traditions in North America pre-Europeans showing up here (he’s an editor and contributor). But here’s the thing that blew my mind. He said that there’s a ton of evidence that North Americans were pretty commonly tattooed. But there’s nothing ever found at an archaeological site that’s been identified as a tool for tattooing.

Which is not to say that they haven’t found such tools–I assume the book is about what there is to see once you know what you’re looking for. But he told me that part of the problem has been these words they use to describe what they find at archaeological sites–specifically needles and pins. When archaeologists found what they had decided were obviously needles and pins, they got thought of as only sewing implements.

You could see how this could even happen to us. Say you knew very little about prison culture and you excavated a prison site and found ball point pen innards and pins in the remains of a cell. Those would get classified as “ball point pen parts” and “pins” and you might never know you’d just come across a tattoo kit, even if you knew prisoners were often heavily tattooed.

So, that is really awesome and I can’t wait to read it. I tried finding it at Amazon, but it’s not there yet, but when I googled it, I found a lot of interesting-sounding contributors. So, “Drawing with Great Needles: Ancient Tattoo Traditions of North America.” I’m going to try to remember that.

David Fowler Continues to Need a War on “Christianity”

I think Jeff’s 100% right here. Fowler needs an “oppressed” group of which he’s a part in order to fund-raise off that group. Winning–as he has–is literally the worst thing that could have happened to him. If there’s nothing to fight for (or against), there’s no need to donate to him. He’s got to keep drumming up crises which then only he can solve.

The fact that he’s putting people’s lives at risk to do so is pretty… well, amazing, to put it mildly. But he’s got no choice. If he doesn’t raise the stakes to some ridiculous level, how can he keep people’s wallets open?

Someday, there will be a scandal. A man can’t have that kind of single-minded drive to impose his morality on others without there being a scandal. And when it happens, I’m going to laugh and laugh and laugh for a million years.

The mysterious buildings

I upped the contrast on these buildings so that you could better see details. Noe how they just continue on down the road. Fairvue is behind me, so they line the road coming up to the house from the Nashville road. Behind them now is a golf course and then, down the slight bluff, is some backwater from the Cumberland river.

There’s a door on the bottom, small windows on each side of the bottom floor (they’re covered with a grate now, but I couldn’t tell how original that detail was). then, on the second floor, there’s a door (you can kind of see it behind the tree) and some slotted brickwork at the top. Here’s a closer view:

I had thought maybe they were pigeon coops, but why the hell would Isaac and Adelicia Franklin need like ten pigeon coops? I now have another theory. I think they’re tobacco barns. This guy took a picture of a slightly larger red tile tobacco barn in Georgia and it looks pretty similar. The only thing that makes me doubt this theory is that, if you look at that top picture, you can see that the third building down has no roof–it’s technically more a ruin than a building. And when I drove by, it appeared to have a second floor–not something a tobacco bard would need. Unless the staves were still in the building and when the wall caved in, it appeared to be a floor? I don’t know. I’m guessing some of you might.

This grave is in that cemetery. I just fail to find it every damn time I’m there.

In Which I Fail to Find Eliza Allen Houston Douglass Again, Even though I Know She’s in that Cemetery - 38 photos »

Steve Cohen Saves the State

Until yesterday, when people said “Tennessee” I’m sure you thought “jackass yokels who want to oppress gay people.”

And then, yesterday, we learned that Congressman Steve Cohen–already famous for smoking pot with local media back in the day–has a secret daughter with the ex-wife of Frank Sinatra Jr. Our cool factor just went up exponentially.

We’re all less than six degrees of separation from Motherfucking Dean Martin!

Wait. Is Will Pinkston about to go all Will Pinkston on Beth Harwell?

I have many feelings–contradictory feelings–about this. I like Beth Harwell and I have deeply negative feelings about Will Pinkston, and yet, I’m kind of rooting for someone to point his cage in her direction and throw open the gate.

Quick! Megan Barry, have another Christmas party!

Deny, Delete, Destroy

I feel a bit bad for Governor Haslam, as I’m sure that he didn’t intend for his “Running the state more like a business” strategy to mean that the state would be run more like Enron an hour before the Feds moved in. But here we are, learning that, when the going gets tough, the tough get deleting.

First DCS just left out whole swaths of information that was supposed to be public. And now Tennessee’s Virtual Academy, which was supposed to save us from the horrors of public school-dom, just deleted low grades so that it wasn’t immediately obvious how much they’re not doing what they’ve promised to do.

I have a theory that part of what’s going on in this state right now is that we’re living with an unfortunate error in judgement by Republicans. Rather than assume that most Democrats had been operating in good faith, most union leaders, most public workers–you know, most everyone who’s been on their boogeyman list over the years–they really did come to believe that those people were bad and that therefore the things they were doing were bad. And, as a result, whatever their buddies wanted to do that had been thwarted under the decades of Democratic rule must be good ideas unjustly denied.

Now, we’re getting their buddies put into positions of power–say at DCS–and their buddies’ “good” ideas enacted–like the Tennessee Virtual Academy. And their ways of doing things suck, much to the unpleasant surprise of Republicans. After all, they’re the good guys. How can good guys have bad ideas?

I think we’re going to continue to see this kind of shit until Republicans come to realize that even people ostensibly on their side can be doing the wrong thing.

The question then becomes whether Haslam is willing to concede that point and start coming down hard on this crap.

If We’re Not like the Soviet Union, Then What Are We Like?

Friend-of-blog, Mike Turner says, “It’s not the Soviet Union. We’re not a dictatorship. We let our people make their own decisions,” when speaking about Democrats who still will not fucking get their noses out of my vagina.

Mike, I love you, but I’m about three seconds away from setting up a reminder on my calendar so that I can send Charlie Curtiss a vagina status update once a day. Today’s would read “Thursday: My vagina is pissed the fuck off at Charlie Curtiss.” I’m going to guess that’s how tomorrow’s would read, too. Probably going to read that way for the foreseeable future.

So, Mike, you ask him whether he’d prefer to get my vagina status updates via text or email. And we’ll just time how long it will take for it to dawn on him that what goes on in my vagina is none of his business.

Meanwhile, having to report my vagina status to some politician sure does feel pretty fucking Soviet to me.

Representative Jeremy Faison is a Jackass

This:

The sponsors say they’re merely legalizing what is already a pervasive practice.

“Let’s be honest. There’s not a parking lot in Tennessee today that doesn’t have a gun inside the car,” Faison says.

Parking lots with weapons in glove boxes include the grounds of the state capitol. Faison admits to keeping firearms in his vehicle while in Nashville.

“I’m not ashamed of it. I’ll tell anybody that,” he says. “I’ll tell the highway patrol. Listen, that’s just part of life.”

Faison, however, would still be breaking the law even if his legislation passes, at least as written now. While the Cocke County representative says he’s “carried a gun all my life.” He says he’s never sent in the paperwork for his handgun permit.

“One day I’ll probably get caught if I don’t get a permit, and I’ll get in trouble,” he says.

He tells the media that he illegally keeps a gun in his trunk while at the state capitol, a gun for which he does not have a permit. This is a man who feels free to make laws that I have to follow. Fuck him. Under this logic, why isn’t weed legal in Tennessee? Hell, you’re a million times more likely to need weed to cope with driving in downtown Nashville than you ever are to need a gun.

Here’s the thing. There’s just an enormous unbridgeable gap between people who think they need a gun every single place they go because shit could break out at any moment and people who don’t. As much as I appreciate that people who carry would like non-gun people to acknowledge that there are safety issues, I think non-gun people would like some acknowledgement that, if you’re a 36 year old white guy who works in a building that already has armed guards, you’re not actually in that much danger from life. Which means you certainly have time–plenty of safe time–between the moment you decide you want a gun in your car and the moment you should actually put a gun in your car to get the proper permit.

I Could Watch This All Day

I have two words for Campfield now that he’s annoyed Ramsey, “Mae Beavers.”

Cultural Imperialism

We’re publishing this book at work that is about the Oportunidades program in Mexico, which is one of the programs Campfield claims to have based his starve-the-kids legislation on. I haven’t read the book yet, since it doesn’t exist, but I’m curious about the author’s claims that this program has strong ties to the eugenics movement in Mexico.

I tried to do some research on Campfield’s bill, to see if there were other bills like it at state level, because I have a hard time believing he wrote it. I think he’s advancing it on some group’s behalf. And I’m curious about that group. One of the things that’s obvious from the discussion surrounding it–even the discussions Campfield claims to be having on his blog–is how closely this bill is tied to the idea that there is some set of people who are “right” and other groups of people that have to be either abused or bribed into acting right, because they, intrinsically, are just wrong acting. The teachers, for instance, that Campfield claims have been calling him up in support of the bill because poor people just aren’t good parents.

You see how insidious it is–this idea that you have the standard for what good parenting is and people who fail to achieve it deserve to suffer. Especially because there’s no reporting if these are the parents of children doing poorly or if these parents are hurrying off to work or what. Always the assumption that, since they aren’t like the viewer, they are up to something wrong.

That push to make people act like you, even if–especially if–how they’re doing is working for them, is a wrong against them, is attempting to strip them of something that is recognizably them. You can see how that feeds into a lot of nasty shit.

In Which I Soften to Governor Baby

After my day in WTF? land–and can I just say that I felt so bad because I had coffee with one of my favorite people on the planet, someone it would have been completely inappropriate to tell about what had just happened, and I couldn’t pay a lick of attention to him. I was completely faking being interested while my brain echoed with, “My god! Why were you going to wipe that lump of earwax and plastic on my desk?! In front of me? Why god, why?!?!?!?!?!”s from earlier in the day. Not that god was going to do that, but… ugh… anyway.–I caught the end of Haslam’s State of the State.

Eh, it didn’t suck. His digs at the federal government are annoying and hilarious. But, in general, he said the things I would expect a non-evil Republican to say. And he seemed willing to put some skin in the game and ask the legislature for at least judicial reform to his liking (and against the liking of many of them). I think it’s going to be interesting to watch him position himself for the next election. Last night, he did some moving-to-the-center bits that made me laugh because it means that he thinks the Tea Party is over. Those folks aren’t a cohesive enough unit anymore to need his pandering.

The thing that’s got to be at the back of his mind–and watch for this because I bet it’s at the back of Beth Harwell’s as well–is that this state already has a large, disgruntled voting block with no state wide candidates that represent them. It’s not that hard to stand in front of the state and say, “Listen, you already know who I am. You already know all the ways my political beliefs differ from yours, so I am never going to unpleasantly surprise you. And look how I’ve managed to reign in the worst impulses of my party.” And it’s not that hard to believe that Democrats would respond to that.

Which, of course, then makes it more likely that Democrats will try to position themselves similarly–which is unfortunate–because you know they’ll think voters are responding positively to Haslam and Harwell’s positions and not to the promise of being who they claim to be and reigning in the far right. So, that’s going to suck and be hilarious.

But look for some reaching out to Democratic voters’ concerns. Haslam and Harwell want those votes.

Random Thoughts

1. Here’s the problem Rocketown has: these are their defenders in the comments. This is now the problem all people who aren’t comfortable around gay people have: you can either get more comfortable, decide that being uncomfortable isn’t worth fighting over, or these are your allies. It becomes a double-problem when your reason for being uncomfortable around homosexuality is that you’re Christian. Because, surely, if you are Christian and you find yourself on the side of the most hateful people in an argument, the ones wanting any excuse to keep hurting people, it must give you great pause. Even when Jesus admonished sinners, he never took a stance that would have left them publicly more vulnerable to harm. That the “Christian” stance is “leave those gay folks out in the cold” is a problem and its the kind of problem that Christians are going to have to wrestle with for themselves. Because, right now, a lot of people–many of whom are also Christian–are protecting people from Christians. Protecting from. If that doesn’t bother you as a Christian, I don’t even know what to say to you.

2. The Roy Herron thing. I think it just basically means that the troubles continue for the Democratic Party. Folks are rightly worried by a guy aligned too closely to Chip. But that the viable response you have to that is a guy too closely aligned to the bad old “Let’s just pretend we’re Republicans Lite” days is also not good. I mean, what does Roy Herron think a Democrat is? On the third hand, it may be that the Democratic Party does end up running some Republican Lites, because they figure out that they can’t win on their primary ballots, but have a shot at winning in the general. (I don’t think this is going to be true for a few more years, though. Republicans need to get a bit more codified.)

3. $900,000 for nothing? Lord almighty. As much as it pains me, you can’t say that voters were wrong to toss Democrats out on their ears. The level of lazy, genial corruption is just staggering.

4. But that kind of lazy, genial corruption is human nature. And a problem Republicans are going to have is keeping their members from indulging in it. If Tennessee threw Democrats out solely because it’s become a more conservative state, then Republican corruption won’t matter. But if Tennessee at any level threw Republicans out because they thought they were going to get more moral people, then Republicans succumbing to the temptations of office is a huge problem for them. And one they should not forget.

Oh, I Completely Forgot to Tell You about OUTRAGE AT THE STATE MUSEUM!!!!

People. The Tennessee State Museum has a portrait of Sam Houston that makes him look kind of… I don’t know… I look at it, and I find myself with a funny grin on my face. If Sam Houston asked me for coffee, I would not say no. If he wanted to hold my hand and stroll slowly through the museum with me whispering to me all kinds of gossip about his old compatriots, I would wear my good bra!

What the fuck?

I have no taste in history boyfriends.