Fence Post
A local boy was pulling weeds on the property when I left Mt. Pleasant this morning. There is an art to pulling weeds and I don't know if the boy is an artist. In time, I think, when I return to Mt. Pleasant and am able to school the youngster and his absent partner on what it is I am after, this little money I pulled from my wallet and gave to him might be considered a signing bonus, or money withdrawn from an on the job training fund.
Here in Fence Post, North Carolina there is still much work to be done and I am the boy. Not really an artist of anything but grunt. Whatever I accomplished on the last visit was at least enough to make my afternoon arrival less depressing than the previous arrival. Randy the renter did not remove anymore of his yard junk while I was gone, although it appears he did salvage some of his usable paint buckets, while leaving a most unsatisfactory amount of them behind.
There was a box of books waiting on my steps when I arrived. Shiny new books delivered from one of the Internet Book Giants. Some slave narratives, the U.S. Grant memoirs, a bestseller, a recently released New Orleans history book (which my sampling of earlier has left me feeling very enthusiastic about) and a Nelson Algren (which I have previously read but have decided to read again.)
I studied the basement briefly, the focus of this trip being its cleaning up and perhaps the securing of the broken door leading into it from the outside.
Still too much work ahead to be engaging in what I am almost artistic at, daydreaming, but I stare out the windows anyway and think about things and move about the small house and occasionally step over the exact spot where in early 93 I received the phone call from my father telling me he would be dead soon. I remember the exact spot for the first Kennedy assassination, and the King assassination and the house I was working on in a New Orleans suburb on September 11th, 2001. And the dirt alleyway behind the house in South Oak Cliff where I first kissed a girl.
I look out at my plowed but unplanted 15,000 square foot garden and wonder about the uniformity of the weeds growing in it. But then I go back to reading and sipping on this Scotch with a green label. God bless among other things, Scotland.
Later, at dusk, I walk outside half naked and offer myself to the tiny flying bloodsuckers. When I had earlier been looking out the window I noticed the corn in Danny Claypool's little sad patch of red dirt didn't look very healthy. Clearly they haven't had much rain out here in the two weeks I've been gone. Why it is that 50 feet away from Claypool's red clay/dirt my soil is brown and, if properly tilled, almost sandy, I cannot say. It is not exactly alluvial, my soil, but compared to those cracked clumps of dried up play-do next door I am bottom land next to the Nile.
As I might have previously mentioned, the Claypool's have always had a hard on for this land. The father did and now Danny is every bit his father's son in regards to encroaching on this property. His propane tank he placed just across the line on my property. Back when me and M lived here we had a lawyer advise us on letting senior Claypool curve his gravel driveway just a tad over the line, and the other brother, the part-time preacher, Douglass, has his house built as close to the line as possible (and I'm curious what a re-surveying would show) and pretty much uses a section of my woods as his front yard. He's real nice Douglass is and Danny has always been on one level a respectful neighbor but I'm pretty sure my apparent mellow nature is being seen as an inroads for the Clayton's to have what they have long ago decided should be theirs. But they don't really see paying for it as an option.
Hey, that's newly planted corn in my 15,000 square foot nearly alluvial garden. And although smaller, it looks on it's way to being way healthier than Claypool's. Of course, it's Claypool's corn in my garden and while I don't really give a damn, I give a damn. He will offer to give me some and I could say, some, I'm taking all of it you beer-soaked cracker. I can't really eat but a few ears myself though and it looks good having a crop out there and I'm not going to grow anything but shouldn't a person ask before he plants corn in your dirt? Randy the renter says Claypool would get drunk and till up the garden, sometimes after Randy had planted his own vegetable crop. Randy also told me that Claypool tried to convince him to let him cut down all my 60--80 foot white oaks, and the few shag bark hickories and the maples and the poplars and dredge it out and build a damn and have a pond over here in my sweet bottom land. His father had shared that same dream with me many years back. Randy cut down for firewood a few of my big trees his ownself (said the bugs got 'em), but luckily his dislike for Claypool kept that pond from happening.
The thing is, you can't really disappear without much of a word for fourteen years and expect things to be just perfect when you get back.
twenty years rule. tic tic tic...
What Algren book did you get?
It's strange the way one can remember exactly where one was at a certain time 40+ years ago. Ask me what I did last Sunday. ???
I was watching a little of "The Last Big Thing"
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0161743/fullcredits#cast
One of the punkers had "Bill Macy Rocks" on the back of his jacket.
Yeah, we tried to get around that squatting issue my giving the senior written permission to use it, or that's what the lawyer told us to do anyway. Algren is Walk on the Wild Side.
never heard of algren (so much for my cultural literacy) but his an algren was name dropped in a movie i was (re)watching yesterday in relation to an affair with simone de beauvoir and wouldnt you know it...
i was aware of the movie, the man with the golden arm, but a junkie movie starring sinatra didnt draw me in.
Algren hated it too.
i saw that. this was on an imdb review.
"Rather than go on location and make a realistic film about drug addiction in the Windy City, contrarian director Otto Preminger decided to go the opposite way and make his movie appear as artificial as possible, thus flying in the face of the fashion set by men like Kazan, Huston and Zinnemann, who were making their pictures all over the world. Nelson Algren, on whose novel the movie is based, went on record as despising it. What, one wonders, was Preminger up to, and why did he do the movie this way?
The sets in the film are so minimal as to suggest a Mr. Magoo cartoon. Louie, the drug pusher, is attired as to resemble the sort of gangster the artists at Mad magazine used to draw. Arnold Stang, wonderful comedian that he was, seems out of place in a serious picture like this, and his very appearance, topped off by an exaggerated and over-sized baseball cap, elicits laughter. Robert Strauss, another actor best known for humorous roles, is likewise out of place, as his large, heavily jowled face and Runyonesque delivery of lines seems more appropriate to a Jerry Lewis movie. Against all this, stars Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak and Eleanor Parker have to work overtime to just keep the viewer from snickering. Sinatra is jittery and manic throughout, suggesting a man ill at ease with himself, hence wholly appropriate for the role of a drug addict. Miss Novak, plant-like and sublimely deadpan, is sympathetic and seems a product of the artfully dingy slums she graces in the film. Parker is pure Hollywood and very hard-working as the crippled and crafty Zosch. She is never convincing, but then neither is the film.
I wouldn't recommend this movie to anyone interested in a realistic depiction of the lives of drug addicts in America. The Caligari sets alone make it unbelievable. Preminger may have been aiming for a dream effect, as the cardboard backgrounds give the proceedings the surreal feeling of a nightmare operetta, perhaps harking back to Preminger's early days in Vienna."
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A local boy was pulling weeds on the property when I left Mt. Pleasant this morning. There is an art to pulling weeds and I don't know if the boy is an artist. In time, I think, when I return to Mt. Pleasant and am able to school the youngster and his absent partner on what it is I am after, this little money I pulled from my wallet and gave to him might be considered a signing bonus, or money withdrawn from an on the job training fund.
Here in Fence Post, North Carolina there is still much work to be done and I am the boy. Not really an artist of anything but grunt. Whatever I accomplished on the last visit was at least enough to make my afternoon arrival less depressing than the previous arrival. Randy the renter did not remove anymore of his yard junk while I was gone, although it appears he did salvage some of his usable paint buckets, while leaving a most unsatisfactory amount of them behind.
There was a box of books waiting on my steps when I arrived. Shiny new books delivered from one of the Internet Book Giants. Some slave narratives, the U.S. Grant memoirs, a bestseller, a recently released New Orleans history book (which my sampling of earlier has left me feeling very enthusiastic about) and a Nelson Algren (which I have previously read but have decided to read again.)
I studied the basement briefly, the focus of this trip being its cleaning up and perhaps the securing of the broken door leading into it from the outside.
Still too much work ahead to be engaging in what I am almost artistic at, daydreaming, but I stare out the windows anyway and think about things and move about the small house and occasionally step over the exact spot where in early 93 I received the phone call from my father telling me he would be dead soon. I remember the exact spot for the first Kennedy assassination, and the King assassination and the house I was working on in a New Orleans suburb on September 11th, 2001. And the dirt alleyway behind the house in South Oak Cliff where I first kissed a girl.
I look out at my plowed but unplanted 15,000 square foot garden and wonder about the uniformity of the weeds growing in it. But then I go back to reading and sipping on this Scotch with a green label. God bless among other things, Scotland.
Later, at dusk, I walk outside half naked and offer myself to the tiny flying bloodsuckers. When I had earlier been looking out the window I noticed the corn in Danny Claypool's little sad patch of red dirt didn't look very healthy. Clearly they haven't had much rain out here in the two weeks I've been gone. Why it is that 50 feet away from Claypool's red clay/dirt my soil is brown and, if properly tilled, almost sandy, I cannot say. It is not exactly alluvial, my soil, but compared to those cracked clumps of dried up play-do next door I am bottom land next to the Nile.
As I might have previously mentioned, the Claypool's have always had a hard on for this land. The father did and now Danny is every bit his father's son in regards to encroaching on this property. His propane tank he placed just across the line on my property. Back when me and M lived here we had a lawyer advise us on letting senior Claypool curve his gravel driveway just a tad over the line, and the other brother, the part-time preacher, Douglass, has his house built as close to the line as possible (and I'm curious what a re-surveying would show) and pretty much uses a section of my woods as his front yard. He's real nice Douglass is and Danny has always been on one level a respectful neighbor but I'm pretty sure my apparent mellow nature is being seen as an inroads for the Clayton's to have what they have long ago decided should be theirs. But they don't really see paying for it as an option.
Hey, that's newly planted corn in my 15,000 square foot nearly alluvial garden. And although smaller, it looks on it's way to being way healthier than Claypool's. Of course, it's Claypool's corn in my garden and while I don't really give a damn, I give a damn. He will offer to give me some and I could say, some, I'm taking all of it you beer-soaked cracker. I can't really eat but a few ears myself though and it looks good having a crop out there and I'm not going to grow anything but shouldn't a person ask before he plants corn in your dirt? Randy the renter says Claypool would get drunk and till up the garden, sometimes after Randy had planted his own vegetable crop. Randy also told me that Claypool tried to convince him to let him cut down all my 60--80 foot white oaks, and the few shag bark hickories and the maples and the poplars and dredge it out and build a damn and have a pond over here in my sweet bottom land. His father had shared that same dream with me many years back. Randy cut down for firewood a few of my big trees his ownself (said the bugs got 'em), but luckily his dislike for Claypool kept that pond from happening.
The thing is, you can't really disappear without much of a word for fourteen years and expect things to be just perfect when you get back.
- jimlouis 6-27-2008 7:18 am
twenty years rule. tic tic tic...
- bill 6-27-2008 10:17 am [add a comment]
What Algren book did you get?
- L.M. 6-27-2008 12:02 pm [add a comment]
It's strange the way one can remember exactly where one was at a certain time 40+ years ago. Ask me what I did last Sunday. ???
I was watching a little of "The Last Big Thing"
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0161743/fullcredits#cast
One of the punkers had "Bill Macy Rocks" on the back of his jacket.
- Marco (guest) 6-27-2008 1:05 pm [add a comment]
Yeah, we tried to get around that squatting issue my giving the senior written permission to use it, or that's what the lawyer told us to do anyway. Algren is Walk on the Wild Side.
- jimlouis 6-28-2008 2:24 pm [add a comment]
never heard of algren (so much for my cultural literacy) but his an algren was name dropped in a movie i was (re)watching yesterday in relation to an affair with simone de beauvoir and wouldnt you know it...
- dave 6-29-2008 2:46 pm [add a comment]
i was aware of the movie, the man with the golden arm, but a junkie movie starring sinatra didnt draw me in.
- dave 6-29-2008 3:17 pm [add a comment]
Algren hated it too.
- L.M. 6-29-2008 3:41 pm [add a comment]
i saw that. this was on an imdb review.
"Rather than go on location and make a realistic film about drug addiction in the Windy City, contrarian director Otto Preminger decided to go the opposite way and make his movie appear as artificial as possible, thus flying in the face of the fashion set by men like Kazan, Huston and Zinnemann, who were making their pictures all over the world. Nelson Algren, on whose novel the movie is based, went on record as despising it. What, one wonders, was Preminger up to, and why did he do the movie this way?
The sets in the film are so minimal as to suggest a Mr. Magoo cartoon. Louie, the drug pusher, is attired as to resemble the sort of gangster the artists at Mad magazine used to draw. Arnold Stang, wonderful comedian that he was, seems out of place in a serious picture like this, and his very appearance, topped off by an exaggerated and over-sized baseball cap, elicits laughter. Robert Strauss, another actor best known for humorous roles, is likewise out of place, as his large, heavily jowled face and Runyonesque delivery of lines seems more appropriate to a Jerry Lewis movie. Against all this, stars Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak and Eleanor Parker have to work overtime to just keep the viewer from snickering. Sinatra is jittery and manic throughout, suggesting a man ill at ease with himself, hence wholly appropriate for the role of a drug addict. Miss Novak, plant-like and sublimely deadpan, is sympathetic and seems a product of the artfully dingy slums she graces in the film. Parker is pure Hollywood and very hard-working as the crippled and crafty Zosch. She is never convincing, but then neither is the film.
I wouldn't recommend this movie to anyone interested in a realistic depiction of the lives of drug addicts in America. The Caligari sets alone make it unbelievable. Preminger may have been aiming for a dream effect, as the cardboard backgrounds give the proceedings the surreal feeling of a nightmare operetta, perhaps harking back to Preminger's early days in Vienna."
- dave 6-29-2008 3:47 pm [add a comment]