Each week we share selections from our Rural Arts and Culture Feed on Facebook and Twitter. What are we missing? Please drop us a line, and we'll add your links and connections to the Feed.
By Rachel Beth Rudi, Digital Contributor
• Setting a tone of thankfulness, we have this Wendell Berry interview with Diane Rehm via The Boiled Down Juice. "I think people don't take care of things they don't have affection for. And so affection, for me, begins all the arguments."
• Via Harry Smith's Old, Weird America: "The Carter Family recorded twice "Single Girl, Married Girl," the first time at their very first recording session in 1927 in Bristol, Tennessee, and the second time a few years later, in 1936, in New York City. It's striking to hear the differences between the two
versions."
• Poor Kids is an unflinching and revealing look at what poverty means to children. It broadcasted last week on FRONTLINE. Full documentary below:
"Art editors and cirtics – people like me – have become a courtier class. All we do is wander around the palace and advise very rich people. It's not worth my time."
Hickey says the art world has acquired the mentality of a tourist. "If I go to London, everyone wants to talk about Damien Hirst. I'm just not interested in him. Never have been. But I'm interested in Gary Huge and have written about him quite a few times."
If it's a matter of buying long and selling short, then the artists he would sell now include Jenny Holzer, Richard Prince and Maurizio Cattelan. "It's time to start shorting some of this shit," he added.
•Some thoughts, via The Association of American Cultures (TAAC): "Culture at its best should be about the dialogue by which diverse strands of thought become relevant to diverse people, and that is a matter oc actively connecting art to the realities of people's diverse lives. Right now our cultural sector seems to be failing at that mission, to its own detriment."
•MSNBC has reported tremendous news: "One of the nation's top coal companies, Patriot Coal, has just announced it will stop all of its mountaintop removal mining operations following a historic settlement with activists and environmental groups."
• From Toner's Bog to the Nobel Prize, Irish poet Seamus Heaney reading his ars poetica of agricultural practice, "Digging." Find more links to Heaney material at the Poetry Foundation & Poetry Magazine.
Each week we present a compendium oflinks and perspectives offered daily on our Rural Arts and Culture Feed. We encourage folks who have upcoming events (local or national) to contribute to The Daily Yonder Calendar.
By Rachel Rudi, Digital Contributor
•El Teatro Campesino
has created powerful, boundary-crossing work in San Juan Bautista,
California for over forty years. Below, composer Daniel Valdez
discussing Cancion De San Juan: Oratorio of a Mission Town.
Through CANCIÓN DE SAN JUAN: ORATORIO OF A MISSION TOWN, El
Teatro Campesino and composer Daniel Valdez hoped to honor history’s
forgotten voices by telling human stories through music and images –
evoking the moments and memories of real people who lived and died
staking a claim to this little corner of the world. Together these
stories, researched and collected by current residents of San Juan
Bautista, were woven into an epic tapestry that unfolded as a paean to
the rise, fall and constant rebirth of a small town in all its
multicultural glory. CANCIÓN DE SAN JUAN: ORATORIO OF A MISSION TOWN
explored the many transformations experienced by the people of this
region – and their perseverance, resilience and stubborn refusal to
cease existing in the face of overwhelming odds.
• "I wish a lot of people could see this. This is something that's going on in the reservation: This don't look too cool." Appalling news from Wyoming:
• "A hundred years ago, when extension was founded, one-third of our nation's population was involved in agriculture.... We need extension today, more than ever, because our society is growing not only in size, but also in the nature and complexity of its problems:"
• Shelby Grebenc, a Colorado poultry farmer in her teens, writes beautifully in The Denver Post: "If
you want sustainable, wholesome, pasture-raised organic, hormone- and
antibiotic-free food, you have to support it. You cannot get these
things by talking about it and not paying for it."
• A must-read: During World War II, the Rowher and Jerome camps in Arkansas housed over 16,000 Japanese Americans. An intern at the University of Arkansas's Institute on Race and Ethnicity considers the legacy of these camps and their relation to contemporary American life:
• "Even as cities from Philadelphia to Chicago to Detroit mobilize to hydrate the food deserts, it's becoming clear that even if you make fresh produce affordable, people may not buy it."
•"Kultivator is an experimental cooperation of organic farming and visual art practice, situated in rural village Dyestad, on the Island of Oland on the southeast coast of Sweden. By installing certain functions in abandoned farm facilities, near to the active agriculture community, Kultivator provides a meeting and workign space that points out the parallels between provision production and art practice, between concrete and abstract processes for survival Kultivator initiates and executes meetings between idealism and realism, hoping that fruitful cooperations should should take form."
• Welcome to Shelbyville"takes an intimate look at a southern town as its residents – whites and African =Americans, Latinos and Somalis – grapple with their beliefs, their histories and their evolving ways of life:"
•Mark Your Calendars: The 2012 Rural Arts & Culture Summit will happen this June 5–6, in Morris, Minnesota, hosted by the Center for Small Towns at University of Minnesota-Morris. We will be sharing much more on this event in the coming months -- please plan to join us there!
• This week in 1975, Waylon's "Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way" was the number one country single in the land. Via the essential Southern Folklife Collection:
• Last week, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson declared the city "America's Farm-to-Work Capital," kicking off a campaign celebrating Sacramento's vibrant restaurant culture and the bounty of the surrounding farms and agriculturalists. "The mayor and others said their general goal is to brand Sacramento as a food capital the way Austin, Texas is known for its live music scene and annual Austin City Limits Music Festival," writes Ryan Lillis in The Sacramento Bee.
• "Wendell Berry, the farmer/writer from Kentucky, is perhaps our nation's best-known advocate for small and mid-sized farms. In a recent lecture, Berry talked about how our rural landscapes have often been replaced 'with a heartless and sickening ugliness.' He offered what is needed to counter that ugliness: Affection." Here's the full op-ed written by Practical Farmers of Iowa Executive Director Teresa Opheim.
• PBS recently aired Rafea: Solar Mama, "a documentary funded by Sundance's Documentary Film Program and The Skoll Foundation's Stories of Change. This film is one of the first honored by the Hilton Worldwide LightStay Sustainability Award, an award created to acknowledge documentaries that showcase the connections between sustainability, economic growth and community development."
Brooke Shelby Biggs of the Independent Lens Blog discussed the making of Solar Mamas with producer Mette Heide; find the interview here.
• As the election loomed, Ray Ring of High Country News looked at the impact of the Latino/a electorate in the West: "When Sen. Jon.Kyl, R-Ariz., announced his retirement in 2011, pundits predicted the GOP would easily hold the seat this November. After all, Arizonans last chose a Democrat for Senate in 1988, when as The Wall Street Journal reminisced, 'gasoline cost less than 90 cents a gallon ... and stirrup pants were in.' Yet Democrat Richard Carmona – a former Surgeon General and Spanish-speaker of Peurto Rican descent – is running neck-and-neck with Tea Party Republican Jeff Flake, even though it's Carmona's first high-profile race and Flake is a six-term congressman."
• "Radio Tanzania was the country's only station from its birth in 1951 until the mid-1990s, when competing stations came on the air and state-controlled radio became irrelevant. The station's archives include poetry, drama, speeches and loads of the music now known as zillipendwa. The word translates literally to 'the ones that were loved'; a looser translation would be 'golden oldies.'"Listen to NPR's recent story about the Tanzania Heritage Project and its co-founder, Rebecca Corey of Dar es Salaam University, and the efforts to preserve some of Tanzania's most memorable sounds.
In this week’s update from the Rural Arts and Culture Map, we wish to (re)acquaint readers with Folkstreams.net,
one of the most valuable resources a folklorist, artist, or curious
person can find. Founded by filmmakers Tom and Mimi Davenport in 1999,
the site is a sort of “national park” for arts and culture documentaries
which arose during the folk revival of the 1960s. Such films didn’t fit
into conventional television schedules or immediately entertain average
theatre-goers, and thus Folkstreamswas
created, giving them a new home and providing commentary on films’
processes, subjects, and cultural relevance. Folkstreams’ mission statement describes the need for an online platform and the development of this tremendous learning tool:
Folkstreams.net
has two goals. One is to build a national preserve of hard-to-find
documentary films about American folk or roots cultures. The other is to
give them renewed life by streaming them on the internet. The films
were produced by independent filmmakers in a golden age that began in
the 1960s and was made possible by the development first of portable
cameras and then capacity for synch sound. Their films focus on the
culture, struggles, and arts of unnoticed Americans from many different
regions and communities.
The
filmmakers were driven more by sheer engagement with the people and
their traditions than by commercial hopes. Their films have unusual
subjects, odd lengths, and talkers who do not speak "broadcast English."
Although they won prizes at film festivals, were used in college
classes, and occasionally were shown on PBS, they found few outlets in
venues like theaters, video shops or commercial television. But they
have permanent value. They come from the same intellectual movement that
gave rise to American studies, regional and ethnic studies, the "new
history," "performance theory," and investigation of tenacious cultural
styles in phenomena like song, dance, storytelling, visual designs, and
ceremonies. They also respond to the intense political and social
ferment of the period.
The
filmmakers and the researchers they collaborated with explored
performances situated in a community's customary work, worship, and
play. Beneath their colorful surfaces often lie serious issues of
physical, psychic, and social survival under duress. For understanding
what they saw the filmmakers relied more heavily on observant and
knowledgeable community members than on outside "experts." They conveyed
understanding through action and symbol as often as by "talking heads."
SeeSelected Films.
Many
of the films, however, are linked to significant published research.
Folkstreams draws on this material to accompany and illuminate both the
subjects and the filmmaking. And the films themselves add powerful
dimensions to print scholarship. They offer a direct experience of
unfamiliar worlds. Many of these are now receding into the historical
past, but we hope the example of these films may stimulate alternative
filmmaking with subjects and approaches still ignored by mainstream
corporate media.
The Art of the Rural has featured Folkstreams films several times (see “Open Invitation to a Piedmont Blues Party,” “John Dee Holman,” and “La Charreada: Rodeo a la Mexicana”
for a few), as they so well marry various fields of study, media, and
experiences to promote a diverse community of folklorists. We relate to
Folkstreams’ mission and connect it to that of our own Rural Arts and
Culture Map, each anchoring story and tradition to place and deepening
our understandings of the history around us. We strongly encourage
readers to explore Folkstreams on their own, as well as their blog and YouTube page,
and we will continue to share their material on our blog and map. We’ll
leave you with selections from Tom Davenport’s 1985 film, “A Singing
Stream,” featuring the music of the Landis family of Creedmoor, North
Carolina.
Storytelling is a partnership between the person telling the story and the person receiving the story; each depends on the other. This exchange is not designed to be passive, unless the purpose is propaganda. “The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers,” wrote James Baldwin. Likewise, isn’t such questioning an important part of the artist–audience exchange? And isn’t the measure of the energy of such exchange an indicator of a culture’s vibrancy?
A new film, Beasts of the Southern Wild, furnishes an occasion to test this assertion. Beasts is the latest film fantasy about the rural South. I think it’s a depressing film, so I’m wondering why millions of viewers and the critics find it so exhilarating. A.O. Scott’s review for The New York Times is typical, “a blast of sheer, improbable joy.” Philip Martin writing for The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette seems to suggest that anything less than total buy-in is unpatriotic: “Wild is ... a visual tone poem. To try to impose any orthodox sensibility, much less political correctness, on the film is close to blasphemy.” Obviously, the movie has struck a mass emotional chord; as one of a handful of naysayers, what’s my problem?
Beasts of the Southern Wild is the story of six year old Hushpuppy. Deserted by her mother when she was a baby, Hushpuppy is being raised (jerked up is more like it) by her abusive, alcoholic father, Wink, who appears to think she is a boy, the fabled Man Child come as the Redeemer of the least among us. For her part, Hushpuppy tells us, “I can count on two hands the times when I’ve been lifted up,” and she means held in someone’s arms. (For a detailed analysis of the Hushpuppy character’s lineage in popular culture, see bell hooks’ commentary "No Love in the Wild".)
Beasts is in a line of popular movies about the rural South that includes Deliverance (1972) all the way back to D.W. Griffith’s silent The Harum-Scarum and the Mountain Idealist (1909). The music in Paramount’s candy-colored Li’l Abner (1959) was nominated for an Academy Award. The opening number:
Soloists: It's a typical day In Dogpatch, USA. Where typical folks Do things in a typical way. First we rubs the sleep from our eyes, Gets our grub, and shoos 'way the flies. We spend what's negotiable, Then we gets sociable, Sittin' around swappin' lies! And then we drops by to collect unemployment pay!
All: Which leads us to say it's a typical day In Dogpatch, USA!
Lonesome Polecat: Lonesome Polecat, Indian Brave!
Hairless Joe: Hairless Joe, me need’um a shave!
Both: We livin' an' sleepin' n' doin' housekeepin' in big subterranian cave! While Kickapoo Joy Juice we make’um is heap "grade A!"
Skraggs: Take us boys what's known as the Skraggs, Mammy said she had us as gags! Can't git that depressin' an' homely unlessin' ya comes from a long line o' hags! There ain't any widders or orphans we won't betray!
Moonbeam: Howdy boys, I'm Moonbeam McSwine, Sleepin' out with the pigs is my line. The fellas admire me, But they don't squire me Unless the weather is fine! But I does alright when the wind blows the other way!
All: Which leads us to say it's a typical day, in Dogpatch, USA...It's a typical day (echo: it's a typical day) in Dogpatch, USA! Where typical folks ( echo: typical folks) Does things in a typical way!
Fast forward more than half a century and the cartoonish Dogpatch has morphed into the Bathtub, something more akin to a graphic novel and now located near the southern Louisiana levees. Like the characters in Dogpatch, po’ folk in the ‘tub have the “typical way,” drinking from dawn until they collapse – plus now they have the added headache of the approaching Apocalypse set off by global warming. Thirty years before the Beasts, Hank Jr laid down the survivalist anthem:
The preacher man says it’s the end of time And the Mississippi River she’s a goin’ dry The interest is up and the Stock Markets down And you only get mugged If you go down town I live back in the woods, you see A woman and the kids, and the dogs and me I got a shotgun, a rifle, and a 4-wheel drive And a country boy can survive Country folks can survive
So who feels exhilarated by a film that appears to be a grab-bag fantasy about the end of time, poverty, and alcoholism? I hope rural Southerners, despite some affinity for the Book of Revelation, know too much about themselves to swallow the concoction. With more than 2.1 million Americans in prison, there’s no easy way for people who are part of communities with modest incomes to gloss the damage done by drug and alcohol addiction. Ask the school teachers here in Appalachia, and any one of them will tell you about the real-life fates of neglected and abused Hushpuppies.
Is the film, then, thrilling, “a blast of joy,” for penned-up, pent-up middle-class suburban and urban people ready to break free into a hedonistic wild? If this is the case, are rural people and their tourism bureaus prepared to fulfill this urban fantasy? In an era when pop culture and cosmopolitanism appear to be synonymous, what do rural people actually think about the way they are being portrayed in today’s mass media? Have the relentless stereotypes of popular culture finally hypnotized us all, rural and urban alike, erasing any sense of history and present reality so at any given moment we’re liable to turn into a caricature of ourselves? I realize these are heady questions when one could just relax -- hey dude, it’s just a movie. Meanwhile, tens of thousands are lining up to feel the beast, the hype is on, and I wonder what the fervor signifies.
Dudley Cocke is the artistic director of Roadside Theater, the professional theater wing of the multi-media arts and humanities center, Appalshop, in Whitesburg, KY.
• In celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month, the Florida Folklife Program produced a podcast with audio tracks from the Florida Mexican American Music Survey. “The [survey] was undertaken...to document the musical traditions of Florida’s various Mexican-American communities: Apopka, South Dade County, Immokalee, the St. Johns River Basin, and Central Florida. ... Among the musical traditions were serenatas, conjunto, Quinceañara ritual music, ranchera, Michoacana, mariachi, norteno, Tejano, and pop music.” The FFP is wonderfully active in promoting its archives to the public, and makes many materials available online at the Florida Memory site and Facebook page.
• Writing for The Atlantic Cities, Scott Reeder of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity investigated the dynamics of mom-and-pop versus box stores in the hunting industry. “A Bass Pro Shop opened in Bossier City in 2005,” writes Reeder, “after city officials promised to give the retailer $38 million to pay for the construction of the 106,000-square-foot store in this Red River community.” This particular David-and-Goliath struggle is set in rural regions:
Both Bass Pro Shops
and its archrival, Cabela’s,
sell hunting and fishing gear in cathedral-like stores featuring taxidermied
wildlife, gigantic fresh-water aquarium exhibits and elaborate outdoor
reproductions within the stores. The stores are billed as job generators by
both companies when they are fishing for development dollars. But the firms’
economic benefits are minimal and costs to taxpayers are great.
An exhaustive investigation
conducted by the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity found that the two competing firms together have received or are promised more
than $2.2 billion from American taxpayers over the past 15 years.
.....
Both firms have a history of
targeting rural or smaller suburban communities and negotiating deals that
involve extensive borrowing on the part of the municipality to build a store.
.....
For example, state and local
taxpayers borrowed $60 million to build a Cabela's store and its supporting
infrastructure in Buda, Texas. For that amount, every household in the
7,600-person community could have purchased a new 2012 Lexus CT Hybrid.
The Buda City Council even
agreed to take the town's name off its water tower and replace it with the word
"Cabela's." But government largess didn’t end there. The Texas Parks
and Wildlife Commission provided Guadalupe bass, the official state fish, for
the store's massive aquarium at no charge to the retailer.
.....
"Retail is not economic
development. People don’t suddenly have more money to spend on hip waders
because a new Bass Pro or Cabela’s comes to town," says Greg Leroy,
executive director of Good Jobs First, a non-partisan economic
development watchdog group based in Washington, D.C. "All that happens is
that money spent at local mom and pop retailers shifts to these big box
retailers. When government gives these big box stores tax dollars, they are
effectively picking who the winners and losers are going to be."
• The ballad "Barbara Allen" "has
been sung in parlors and on front porches for hundreds of years...It has
branched into countless forms." In this recent spotlight essay, the Southern Folklife Collection offered a trip through Charles Seeger's field recordings of this
song's many variants across the United States and British Isles. Here is
country singer Don Edwards singing a fairly standard rendition of the tune:
• Grist.org’s
Sarah Laskow covers one researcher’s examination of an ancient artistic process
where art is not created for a viewer’s sake, but because it is an integral
part of the architecture:
When Meredith Turk, a
Fulbright scholar in Slovenia, talked to local beekeepers about their
colonies, she found that their bees hadn’t been
mysteriously dying off in the same way that American bees have been. Now,
there’s probably a scientific explanation for this, but we’d like to believe
that the gorgeous painted beehives that Slovenes provide for their colonies
also have something to do with it.
“Slovenians have painted
their beehive panels for centuries, with the idea that bees have better
orientation when panels are painted bright colors. When the paintings first
appeared, the themes were drawn from Biblical imagery, held in high regard by a
strongly Catholic population. After Slovenia’s entry into Yugoslavia, organized
religion was banned and panel images depicted more cultural and landscape
scenes rather than religious ones prior.”
• Calhoun County, West Virginia is home to Heartwood in the Hills, a community arts school that has been “celebrating the artist in every
person since 1982.” For thirty years the organization has provided a variety of
dance, art, music, theater, and crafts classes to community members of all ages
and backgrounds, and its success is a testament to the transformative power of
art in any region. Heartwood’s mission statement should serve as a model for
all arts schools, rural or otherwise:
Heartwood embodies the ideal
that the arts belong to everyone and the artistic gifts in each person deserve
nurturing. Heartwood’s mission is to ensure that everyone has access to
Heartwood’s programs regardless of their ability to pay. Heartwood’s Board of
Directors and faculty are dedicated to keeping class fees low, ranging from
$3.00 to $5.00 per class. Full and partial scholarships are available to all
students. The Board and faculty are committed to providing scholarships to any
student based solely on need.
Exploring Heartwood’s website feels like leafing through a
family scrapbook, with old and new, sometimes blurry, photographs capturing
homemade performances. Schools and companies with this amount of outreach are
not uncommon in urban areas, though increasingly unaffordable, but the presence
of such organizations in rural communities nourishes homegrown creativity that
is as vital as the local foods movement.
A 2009 performance of “Min Nuit” by Heartwood in the Hills
students, performed at Calhoun County High School:
•Johnny Cash passed away nine years ago this
September. To conclude this weekly feed, we leave you with a heavy insight of
Mr. Cash’s, excerpted from The Winding Stream: The Carters, The Cashes, And The Course Of Country Music, a forthcoming documentary.
Mr. Cash’s words resonated strongly with us, and the hope he has in young
people, we feel, is reflected in so many of the stories The Art of the Rural works to report.
My biggest kick is
being in a record shop and watching the young people pick up a Carter Family
record or a box set, and stand there and read it – you know, read all the
print that’s on it, because they want to know. They’re hungry for it. And
they’re hungry for a culture, the culture that we have lost, that we have
abused, that has been taken away from us, that we’ve outgrown. With our money
and everything else, we’ve lost a great, great part of our culture – the simple
things of life, the simple things that are basic and fundamental to well-being
and happy living.
“Behind the high-flying legend lies a true-to-life saga every bit as compelling, one that begins not in the far reaches of outer space but in the middle of America’s heartland. During the depths of the Great Depression, Jerry Siegel was a shy, awkward teenager in Cleveland.” Much like a comic book origin story, thus begins Larry Tye’s Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero, released last June.
I grew up on comics. When I met others like myself, the inevitable question was “Marvel or DC?” Expected to declare an allegiance, I placed my loyalty with Marvel, avowing that they do “more human stories.” Spiderman grew up in a place on a real map (Queens) and generally seemed like me. Where was Gotham City? Aquaman from Atlantis? Wonder Woman was Amazonian? Why were the rest from space?
Superman seemed the height of this romanticism. He was a god with but a single weakness that seemed tacked-on so that writers could actually create stories (which, we all know, require weakness). To boot, the magnitude of superhuman power was grafted onto an utterly bland personality. He was a terrible combination of übermenschlich Everyman (Walt Whitman being a fantastic combination, for the record). At least Marvel’s equivalent, Captain America, came from New York City and fought in a war I’d heard of through grandparents. Even if Marvel writers risked the ridiculous by freezing Cap in ice, they revamped him through showing the moral and psychological tensions of dropping a robust member of The Greatest Generation into the 21st-century. Superman was from space and a fictional place blandly called “Metropolis.”
But he wasn’t just from space, which makes for the draw of Tye’s biography. Superman, the quintessentially red-blooded American, was created by two Jewish kids in Cleveland trying to fit in to a part of the country that too often considered itself quintessentially American. Ironically, in the process of trying to fit in, Siegel and Shuster stood two heads above all by creating a definitive American myth.
What’s more, Superman’s Jewish-Cleveland creators dropped their mythic creation from the starry heights of Krypton and into Kansas to be raised by humble farmers—not without significance. Superman would not be the same were he placed in Brooklyn like Cap. He’d be too earthly and less pure. As an Americanized Christ-figure, Superman could come from nothing short of a backwoods Nazareth, a pastoral landscape famed for supposedly producing the good, the representative, the plain, but also safely distant and ideal.
As stories have matured, writers increasingly paid attention to Superman’s earthly dwellings to ward off these potentially alienating mythic qualities. Smallville was perhaps the most popular renovation of the character, which materialized after series developers Gough and Millar pitched their "no tights, no flights" rule in the wake of a failed pitch for a Batman series.
The new film, Man of Steel (June 14, 2013), holds the promise of producer Christopher Nolan (of The Dark Knight franchise fame) and his trademark realist perspective on a story that is often too hard to make realistic. What can we expect? The recently released teaser-trailer focuses heavily on Superman’s rural origins (read, “cornfields”) but also frames a mythic struggle. In the American teaser, the montage features a voiceover of Superman’s earthly parent, farmer Jonathan Kent (Kevin Costner) telling his extraordinary son “you’re not just anyone.” The European trailer is identical, but with a voiceover from Superman’s celestial father, Kryptonian Jor-El (Russell Crowe) telling his son “you will give the people an ideal to strive towards. They will rise behind you. They will stumble. They will fall. In time, they will join you in the sun.”
By the teaser’s account, the film promises to be a balance between Superman’s mythic strengths and his earthly troubles, between Krypton and Kansas, between the ideal and the real. Although the teaser seems to emphasize Superman’s troubles fitting in to the Heartland, it also balances these human struggles with the mythic image of a god’s loneliness in sea, earth, and sky. The balancing act is a tricky one, but necessary for a figure both ideally mythic and near to our hearts.
• A final Midwest connection. Larry Tye also wrote an award-winning biography on Satchel Paige, a southerner who made his name as a wild pitcher for the famed Negroe-League Kansas City Monarchs and later, the Cleveland Indians and St. Louis Browns.
The Afrodrumming organization recently produced this video detailing two early recorded examples of Native American drumming. Many thanks to Kelle Jolly of Carpetbag Theatre for leading us to this video
Please find the video, alongside their introductory text, below. While the images are stirring in themselves, we would be very interested in learning, and sharing, more of the provenance and context of these clips.
Though the original footage is silent, music here is provided by The Hopi tribe of Arizona, Kerri Lake, Ephemeral Rift and Kevin MacLeod.
The following clip is the earliest known footage of ethnic drumming. At 17 seconds long, it features Native Americans Sioux Hair Coat, Last Horse, Parts His Hair and two unidentified drummers. It is dated 1884. The original clip is silent.
Hickey says the art world has acquired the mentality of a tourist. "If I go to London, everyone wants to talk about Damien Hirst. I'm just not interested in him. Never have been. But I'm interested in Gary Huge and have written about him quite a few times."
• Some thoughts, via The Association of American Cultures (TAAC): "Culture at its best should be about the dialogue by which diverse strands of thought become relevant to diverse people, and that is a matter oc actively connecting art to the realities of people's diverse lives. Right now our cultural sector seems to be failing at that mission, to its own detriment."
