As mentioned before, anyone concerned with rural issues owes a huge debt to The Daily Yonder and The Rural Blog. From the latter comes this news of photographer David Stephenson:
Pictures of the Year International has honored David Stephenson, Kentucky Kernel photo adviser and former Lexington Herald-Leader photographer, with first place in its "News story - multimedia" category for 2009. The winning project, "Cutting through the competition," below, is a multimedia report by Stephenson and Herald-Leader reporter Amy Wilson about a tobacco-cutting contest in a state that no longer relies on the crop. It originated from their preparation for Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues seminars in October about storytelling.
Mr. Stephenson is able to, in a few minutes of film, both tell a story and to present the landscape and community in a breathtaking visual form. Here's his film, produced with Amy Wilson:
Editors note: this is a first in a new series of posts that we are hoping to function as virtual newspaper clippings--articles and perspectives that we are passing along to our readers to share and discuss.
By Ian Halbert
More to chew on in our investigations into Farmville, USA.
Jamie Oliver, as highlighted in our last Farmville post, is mounting a new effort (complete with a companion series on ABC) to reform our dysfunctional relationship with food and our food’s dysfunctional relationship with industry. Consider the following preview clip concerning school lunches and “chicken”:
Now contrast this state of affairs with an Orlando prison:
That’s right: in this country, farm-fresh healthy produce and livestock are denied to our children, but freely provided to those who have broken the law. The newscasters’ focus on the economic advantages of using locally farmed and harvested food, while simplistic, is not surprising. There is a strange irony here: as thousands of families have been and are being dispossessed of their farms, we offer farming as a punishment to prisoners, to correct for the cost we bear in keeping them out of our communities.
Me and my band were living out of our Suburban four years ago.
By the time Ryan Bingham spoke to reporters at the Academy Awards he was already a long way from the hard times of bullriding and roadhouse tours. Having won the Oscar for Best Original Song, for "The Weary Kind" from Crazy Heart, 2010 is shaping up to be a banner year for the young songwriter. He's set to have his Are You Sure Hank Done It This Waymoment later in the summer as he joins the Country Throwdown Tour, and a new record is reportedly on the way sometime after that.
It's hard not to place this event alongside the passing of Mark Linkous in some ways; while Sparklehorse took the conventions of various forms of rural music and pushed them into the stratosphere, Ryan Bingham's work shows a willingness to accept and respect these same conventions and to work within them to leave this own mark on that tradition. In both cases, the results are honest--not contrived.
Yet Bingham is also a product of the small towns of New Mexico and Texas, and he stands now as perhaps one of the most prominent new figures for a term we're hoping to explore here at The Art of the Rural: the rural diaspora. Here's Scott Gold, writing of Bingham in the Los Angeles Times:
He was born just across the New Mexico border, in the boom-and-bust oil town Hobbs. His grandfather was a cattle rancher and owned 72 square miles, each more stark than the last, between Hobbs and Carlsbad.
Bingham's family lost the ranch amid a money dispute and would soon see more bust than boom. His father became a roughneck, an old-fashioned oil field worker who chased his work, first to Bakersfield, Calif., then to Texas -- to Midland, Odessa, Laredo. They never stayed anywhere long; Bingham eventually stopped unpacking, then reduced his belongings to a cardboard box that he carried from town to town.
His parents, he said, "were not mean people. They just couldn't get it together." Trouble came in heaps: "Fights. Pills. Alcohol." One day, he came home and slumped on the couch. The TV wasn't working but something underneath the set caught his eye. It was a mirror topped with a pile of cocaine.
"I thought: 'Well, no wonder the electricity got turned off again,' " he said.
Before his 17th birthday, he dropped out of school, where he'd grown tired of being the new kid in a small town, and left home for good.
Years of touring on the bullriding circuit and hawking his cds in the parking lot outside followed, and finally, after a few false starts and flirtations with cramming his music into a "Nashville" sound, Bingham met Joe Ely and was taken in by him and a number of other Texas songwriters. The results: his first two records on Lost Highway, Mescalito and Roadhouse Sun. Here's two songs to enjoy:
Exhibit K: The video above is from the first episode of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver's new series Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution. Here, Oliver is offering a first grade classroom in Huntington, West Virginia a pop quiz on basic vegetables.
Exhibit L: An excerpt from "Not Quite Urban Farming," an article by Rachel Brugger in the Spring 2010 issue of Urban Farm:
When the Zynga company came up with the farming concept, they believed it would unite people from different backgrounds. As players have found, the game can be quite addicting, but not necessarily reflective of life on the farm.
"It doesn't deal anything with crop rotation to save nutrients in the soil and erosion from over-farming. You get the same price whenever you sell or harvest crops," says Kristen Everman, a Farmville player in Ohio who spent summers on a real farm growing up.
Exhibit M: But that's not to say that experts aren't available to "help you feel great about your farm:"
It wasn't as though we had plotted out a story were going to tell about prisons -- a prison came to our community.
Thousand Kites is a project based out of Appalshop that, as the above video explains, began with the hip-hop show that Nick Szuberla and Amelia Kirby hosted on Appalshop's fantastic community radio station WMMT (which is also streaming online):
In 1998, as co-hosts of the rural, Appalachian region's only hip-hop radio program, Thousand Kites media artists Nick Szuberla and Amelia Kirby received hundreds of letters from inmates recently transferred from distant cities into two new, local SuperMax prisons. The prisoners’ letters described racism and human rights violations, and Szuberla and Kirby responded with artistic projects, including bringing hip-hop artists together with mountain musicians and organizing radio broadcasts for prisoners’ families.
In prison slang to "shoot a kite" is to send a message. Thousand Kites is a national project that works directly with stakeholders using communication strategies and campaigns to engage citizens and build grassroots power. It uses performance, web, video, and radio to open a public space for incarcerated people, corrections officials, the formerly incarcerated, grassroots activists, and ordinary citizens to dialogue and organize around United State’s criminal justice system.
"Hill-Hop," this coming together of hip-hop and mountain musicians, was documented by Howard Birkus in an NPR piece a few years back--and many more cuts from these collaborations are available on the Holler To The Hood page.
From the original point of inspiration, Szuberla and Kirby's project has sprouted into a multi-disciplinary artistic endeavor, and is working towards asserting these issues on a national level. The Thousand Kites site features a project asking citizens to help record prisoner poetry, a database of the calls that are broadcast, and resources for downloading and performing a play composed of prisoners' stories. There's a wealth of stories and songs contained within this gorgeous and uplifting site--and many opportunities to bring these discussions on criminal justice sytem into your own communities.
Mark Linkous took his own life on Saturday evening in Knoxville, Tennessee. Born into a coal mining family, Mr. Linkous lived in Andersonville, Virginia and later in Hayesville, North Carolina, where he established the Static King recording studio.
Mark Linkous was known for his work under the moniker of Sparklehorse, whose debut record Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot was widely heralded upon its release in 1995. As with the four records which followed, the songs may have contained foundations of country and blues but they were propelled by a kind of aesthetic that was entirely of Linkous's creation: an aesthetic that used radio static and found music, children's toys and effects pedals, in such a way that it sounded gorgeous, emotionally coherent and surprisingly organic. Upon the achievement of that record and 2001's It's a Wonderful Life (his other masterpiece) Linkous was highly sought after as a producer. Whether he was behind the controls or not, many contemporary recordings bear the subtle yet indelible mark of his influence.
Sparklehorse emerged onto the music scene during the high tidal-wave of the "alternative country" movement of the mid-1990's. Though most of those bands came and went, Mark Linkous's music survived that moment--largely because his songs, even in their darker and more abstract moments, felt honest. Though many of these bands adopted the conventions, poses and accents of country music, and, whether from rural america or not, worked to appear "authentic" to the tradition, Linkous had none of that posturing. He actually lived in rural Virginia, but he went wherever the muses took him: sometimes to pondering small town life, as in "The Most Beautiful Widow in Town," but just as frequently to visiting places where the commonplace objects transcend themselves and become universal and strangely moving, as in these opening lines from "Spirit Ditch:"
I want my records back
and that motorcyle gas tank
that I spray painted black.
The owls have been talking to me
but I'm sworn to secrecy.
I woke up in
a burned out basement
sleeping with metal hands
in a spirit ditch.
If you've never heard the song "Spirit Ditch" before, please give it a listen.
Below, you'll find a segment from a Dutch documentary that features the black motorcycle and the landscapes that always haunted his lyrics: abandoned houses, wounded hawks, sheds full of engines. Many reviewers would reference the "southern gothic" quality to Mr. Linkous's lyrics, and while that is a justifiable reference, I always saw the work of Sparklehorse through a different lens. When I began to be a "serious writer" (whatever that might be) I lived with my grandmother in our family's century-old farmhouse. Mr. Linkous's music, especially Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot back then, seemed to speak to a challenge that a lot of younger artists from rural america face: How do we reconcile a ghosted past with a strange and alienating present? How can the arts deal with the baggage of modernism but still retain a feeling that is local and honest? How do you represent a rural space that is, unlike many urban expectations, not entirely "natural" or "pastoral" anymore; how do you describe those "metal hands?"
One of the moments that best captures for me how Mr. Linkous worked through all of these problems appears towards the close of "Spirit Ditch." Through the whispered lyrics and the shimmering guitars, the song reaches the point where we expect to hear a well-placed guitar solo, yet Linkous defies that convention to breathtaking results. In place of a guitar, he patches in an answering message his mother had left for him earlier in the day, where she describes a bad dream she had had about him as a boy. And as the chords swirl under and over her grainy voice just before the chorus, we hear, in an unmistakable southern accent, his mother reaching out: it was like years and years ago, and it was so funny, but I can picture it right now. It's the moment that I'd offer in memory of Mr. Linkous's music. That voice: sad, but relentlessly beautiful.
Ogden Marsh is a small farming community in central Iowa. Compared to many other rural communities of it's size, its chamber of commerce operates an extensive website where visitors can discover "The Friendliest Place on Earth."
You'll also find a link there, through the Ogden Marsh Gazette, to Kim Jonson's blog. She's a local citizen organizing against some environmental abuses in the region. Below, she puts her own local perspective to work on the 25th anniversary of one of the most devastating environmental disasters in recorded human history:
I remembered today that December 3rd marked the 25th anniversary of Bhopal, and it makes me so angry that after all these years, and all the terrible repercussion we have seen from that disaster, that we do not have comprehensive regulations for toxic chemicals! It totally freaks me out that something like Bhopal could happen here in Ogden Marsh because the government hasn’t taken appropriate action to protect its citizens. It’s crazy that these chemical companies are still trying to keep dangerous chemicals on the market just to make a buck. Remember when chemical companies spent millions of dollars to squash a bill in California that would ban toxic flame retardants from furniture? Why? I understand industries need to make a profit, but why at the expense of public health?
The Ogden Marsh Chamber of Commerce site is part of the "viral marketing" campaign for the new horror film The Crazies, which, like so many recent Hollywood projects, is actually a remake of a previous concept: George A. Romero's The Crazies from 1973. Instead of using any of the very real environmental challenges (or otherwise) facing rural americans, the filmmakers have chosen to use the "secret government project" conceit familiar to many horror/science fiction films. Though it certainly links to contemporary conversations about the environment, it may miss the mark in how it adapts this line of concern to a rural community--as the success of this website relies heavily on its (largely urban) viewers believing that this town could exist in their vision of rural America. A kind of filtered verisimilitude is on display here.
On a positive note, the film doesn't seem (at least from the trailers) to be trafficking in the long and all-to-familiar Hollywood stereotypes of hicks, rednecks and hillbillies. Yet, a larger cultural anxiety speaks through the director Breck Eisner's own synopsis of the movie's horror potential. It's a mix of a traditional american "pastoral" sense of the rural, but also a real sense of alienation that exists upon the thought of being disconnected (physically, technologically) from an urban center:
There is this husband and wife, David and Judy Dutton, and they are in this town of Ogden Marsh, in the middle of these cornfields, in the middle of Iowa. They are trapped not in a box, not in a small underground bunker, they are trapped in the midst of these epic landscapes and these fields that go on forever. To get away from the crazies is this dangerous journey across these epic and open landscapes. There's nowhere to hide. There's no trees, no houses, no buildings. You can walk down a road and you are seen for thirty miles.
