Almanac For Moderns: Out Of All This Great Debris

[Editor's Note: I am working for the next few days on a borrowed PC, as the AOTR Macbook is currently under repair at a local shop. The style changes to these posts will be corrected when I am reunited with this laptop and its editing software. Thanks for your patience!]

November Twenty-Second

The end of autumn comes, and one by one the plants in their little stations and many small creatures hole up and turn to sleep. We feel a great longing for that sleep, in the woods, in the very air and the soil that nightly grows colder, a little less kindly. The year's great living settles to its close, and not alone because the harsher cycle demands it, but because it is in the nature of most things to rest. Winter has a meaning beyond the meteorological one; it is that surcease must compensate all this perfervid existence.

For many beings in the great packed store room, autumn represents finality. They will be thrown out complete as waste, all the annual plants, the ephemerid insects. They have their chance at immortality, I know, through seed and egg. But individually the time for them has come, the time to go. For species on the wane, each autumn, perhaps, represents a step toward extinction. So be it; it is written.

But out of all this great debris new forms will be made, as in the first place life took its origin in ways mysterious to us, and alighting like light from a star upon a dark dead world informed the water and the rock itself.

More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.

Rural International: Excavated Shellac

Felix Sunzu's Vejika 78 rpm record; Excavated Shellac

[Editor's Note: I am working for the next few days on a borrowed PC, as the AOTR Macbook is currently under repair at a local shop. The style changes to these posts will be corrected when I am reunited with this laptop and its editing software. Thanks for your patience!]

As folks who check in to our Facebook page may have already noticed, Excavated Shellac - an excellent online site for international vernacular music - has posted a series of thanksgiving videos from across the globe. Here's some gorgeous polyphonic singing from the village of Politsani in Albania:

The work of Excavated Shellac unites both our concerns on the rural - urban dialogue as well as the dynamics of international rural experience; Jonathan Ward's efforts to bring 78 rpm recordings to the digital realm have also expanded to include a few releases with the outstanding vernacular record label Dust-to-Digital. Last year's global review of sting music from the 1920's to 1950's in Excavated Shellac: Strings is joined this year by Opika Pende: Africa at 78rpm, a large and gorgeously presented collection of music from the continent, presented across 4 CDs and a 112 page book. This music has never been issued on CD, until now.

Here's Mr. Ward, in an excerpt from his introduction, followed by "Tu Nja Tengene Elie" by Mbongue Diboue Et Son Ensemble:

It is truly astonishing to consider the tremendous variety of music that was pressed to shellac discs on the continent of Africa. Popular songs, topical songs, work songs, comic songs, songs of worship, ritual, dance, and praise—the sheer range of musical styles resists any easy categorization. Further, African geography itself resists boundaries. The boundaries of cultures and languages are often far more complex than political boundaries. Complicating things further, entire countries seem to have been skipped over by both commercial 78 rpm record companies and ethnographers during the 78 rpm era. No doubt it was the same with many cultures. But that doesn’t mean that 78s weren’t everywhere, even in remote parts of the continent. By the mid-1960s, 78s were still a popular if not preferred medium in much of Africa, as a significant amount of the population still used wind-up gramophone players.

"Tu Nja Tengene Elie" by Mbongue Diboue Et Son Ensemble by dusttodigital

Alongside these releases, I would highly recommend paying a visit to the Excavated Shellac site and then also linking to their Facebook feed, which will offer, quite literally, a whole world of music to explore. What's so striking about meandering through this online archive is the immediacy and intimacy of the experience; like the song of family and friends gathered around a table in Albania, we find ourselves in the midst of a communal experience.

Ultimately, we also find ourselves far from the soft-focus rhetoric of "world music" as it was previously marketed - or at least as how I understood the genre as a young person. While part of the aim of those earlier releases were to suggest that we were living in a global artistic marketplace, there was also a bit of a "It Takes a Village To Raise A Child" sheen to it. Too easily, it became background music, or a soundtrack for a very different kind of film.

Exploring the work of these musicians on the Excavated Shellac site, we're faced with music and performances that ask for a deeper connection - a credit to the work Mr. Ward has done as a collector, audio archivist and curator. He describes this sense best himself, in his introduction:

It’s been my philosophy that good music is best when it is shared. Of course, nothing beats that feeling, say, when you alone break open that box from Turkey or Indonesia, place the fragile platter on the turntable, only to feel your hair stand on end when the music begins. The feeling that you’ve never heard anything like this before in your life; it transports you to a place where words are irrelevant. But part of that feeling is thinking how you’d want to share that with others, to have them feel exactly the same way. This music – old music – never sounds “old” to me, personally. In fact, I believe that it is music of THE FUTURE. Our future.

Hard Traveling

Hello folks--we hope your week is off to a good start. Unfortunately, the AOTR laptop is currently awaiting repairs at a local shop...which is going to delay this week's articles. We will try to amend this situation tomorrow; thanks for your patience in the interim. All the best, Matthew Fluharty, Editor

Maskers, Occupiers, Photographers

Painting a Thanksgiving Masker, 11 / 29 / 1911; Library of Congress flickr photostream

This Library of Congress archived  photograph captures a Thanksgiving tradition from one hundred years ago - children dressing up as Thanksgiving Maskers. In the era before Halloween rose to its cultural prominence, children would dress up at hobos and go door to door on Thanksgiving afternoon, asking for pennies and apples.

Thanksgiving Maskers Scramble for Pennies; LOC flickr photostream

The Bowery Boys: New York City History has recently published an excellent overview of masking in the city. Here's short excerpt from their article, I'll include their helpful links:

Newspapers advertised 'Thanksgiving masks' and 'lithographed character masks' for the tots. These featureless disguises were often sold in candy stores alongside holiday related treats like spiced jelly gums, opera drops, crystallized ginger and tinted hard candies.

"This play of masking is deeply rooted in the New York child," said Appleton's Magazine in 1909. "All toy shops carry a line of hideous and terrifying false faces or 'dough faces' as they are termed on the East Side."

Boys frequently wore girls clothing on this occasion, "tog[ging] themselves out in worn-out finery of their sisters" and spending their afternoon "gamboling in awkward mimicry of their sisters to the casual street piano."

The New York Times in 1899 found the streets filled with costumed tricksters that Thanksgiving. "There were Fausts, Filipinos, Mephistos, Boers, Uncle Sams, John Boers, Harlequins, bandits, sailors... In poorer quarters a smear of burned cork and a dab of vermilion sufficed for babbling celebrants." 

Thanksgiving Maskers; LOC flickr photostream

Scramble For Pennies - Thanksgiving; LOC flickr photostream

It's worth considering the reaction to this element of urban community in the mainstream press and city officials of that era - in an excerpt from this article posted in the comments section to the Library of Congress flickr photostream:

"Progressive era reformers regarded child begging on Thanksgiving as immoral and thought children who engaged in it should be arrested. Why were parents not able to control their offspring? the New York Times in 1903 wanted to know. The newspaper castigated parents who allowed children to demand treats or money as indecent. The police tried to enforce a ban against begging. In response to complaints from the public, the clergy, school superintendents, and classroom teachers issued warnings. The New York Times in November of 1930 worried that demanding coins could teach children to become professional beggars and blackmailers and that children were annoying the public. Begging, decided the paper, was a "malicious influence on the morals of children of the city." Boys' clubs and other child welfare agencies organized parades and costume contests as alternative activities. As a result of these efforts, child begging on Thanksgiving finally disappeared by the 1940s."

On this Black Friday, these gatherings and scramblings of Maskers makes a complicated parallel with the Americans congregating inside and outside of retail outlets today. Both the media forces behind the Occupy movement, on one side, and the conservative press, on the other, provide critical readings - yet each reading of these swarms of shoppers neglect the fact that many folks - perhaps out of work, burdened with debt - see these Black Friday deals as their best chance to afford these consumer goods. Certainly, this cultural phenomenon should be examined, but we should also recognize the force of necessity behind those lines of midnight shoppers.

A Thanksgiving Teaser

Folks, today is a day of rest at Art of the Rural Headquarters. We hope everyone has a peaceful and restive long weekend with family and friends.

Here's a teaser for a Thanksgiving ritual I will offer tomorrow that reminds me of one of my favorite photograhers. More soon...

In Brief: The Food Of A Younger Land

As folks may be preparing for family meals in the next few days, here's some news on The Food of a Younger Land, a book by Mark Kurlansky that examines a national food culture project initiated by the WPA that included the likes of Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston, and many local writers. Here's a portion of Maureen Corrigan's introduction to the work on NPR:

Nine years ago, when Kurlansky was doing research for an anthology of food writing, the author says he stumbled upon the dusty archives of the America Eats project — an undertaking of the Depression-era Federal Writers Project which was a wing of Franklin Roosevelt's WPA. The Federal Writers Project provided employment for over 6,000 out-of-work writers, among them Ralph Ellison, Eudora Welty, Zora Neale Hurston and Nelson Algren. During the 1930s, the Federal Writers Project produced those now classic guidebooks to all 48 states, but by 1939 it needed another assignment. That's when Katherine Kellock, the director of the program, came up with the idea of a guide to American food and eating traditions which would shed a light on everyday American society. 

A great idea; but America Eats was never completed. The deadline for all copy was Thanksgiving week, 1941; the writers, of course, dragged their heels and then Pearl Harbor and the start of World War II blew America Eats out of the water. The rough copy — typed, on onionskin — that writers across the country had sent into Washington was boxed up and shelved.

In this interview with Mr. Kurlansky in GOOD, offers a taste of America Eats:

Each entry offers a portrait of American custom and American food, before highways, modern agribusiness, or fast food. What people ate was seasonal and, above all, cultural-the traditions from one state to the next varied wildly, and reveal undiluted customs that are all but gone now. So, for example, you've got Choctaw, Sioux, and Chippewa foods; Nebraska pig fries; Florida hush puppies; Georgia possum and taters; and "Washington Wildcat Parties," whose signature draw was fresh cougar meat, which apparently tasted "a little like veal" with a "stronger odor."

Below, please find a link to an hour-long conversation with food columnist Rich Nichols, compliments of C-SPAN's Book TV:

Rural - Urban: Chris Crocker

Still From Me At The Zoo

When Michael Stipe and Mike Mills recently sat down to talk with Pitchfork about the R.E.M.'s retirement, I read that Mr. Stipe is working to help produce Me At The Zoo, a documentary about the internet phenomenon Chris Crocker (of "leave Britney alone" fame). 

What surprised me about the film's narrative is the backstory of Mr. Crocker: he's from eastern Tennessee, where he was raised by his Penecostal grandparents. Though he has engaged with various celebrity-media outlets (and is reportedly becoming an adult film star), he lives there -- and not in LA. He doesn't disclose his exact location, as he has received numerous threats for being openly gay, but he reportedly lives in a small town in this region.

It remains to be seen how the filmmakers choose to address the rural - urban dynamic (or the regional, Appalachian dynamic) but this might be a documentary for folks to keep on their radar. Here's the trailer: