So, you guys digging The Road Southern’s renewal? I know, I know. We’re only, like, two posts in, but they’re good ones, no? I’ve decided in its new incarnation I’ll be doing some journal blogging (j’ogging?), because this site is my wall & I got all this spaghetti to throw at it. Spaghetti that’s inside me. Soul-sketti.
Wow, I had this idea of doing an epic stream of consciousness post, but it turns out I just wanted to justify the term soul-sketti. Shit, what else?
My after thoughts of the last installment, that being about Mary-Elaine Jenkins, are these. I didn’t recognize anybody at Rockwood save for MEJ & her mama. I thought I’d feel uncomfortable, but I enjoyed it. Perhaps because most, maybe all, of the South Slope, Brooklyn singers & pickers I used to write about are gone. In my mind the community, as it were-as it was, had come to an end. This isn’t true, though. Roots Cafe‘s new operators are wonderful people: artists, photographers, & poets. The packed house at MEJ’s showed me the Americana scene is plenty strong & enduring. Good things.
It does not do to bemoan loss & vacancy in this city for too long. If I haven’t written before that this town is like a river, well, let me do so now. All that rushes out is replaced by all that rushes in. All the good people I seen go are duly missed, but here come some good people around the bend. That’s comforting. Know what I mean?
Jeepers, I got a little deep there. What else?
I got a new bicycle!
Love, love, love,
J
One of the first pics I snapped when I moved here. These bikes & the one I’ve had for all ten years in Brooklyn are gone now. It’s cool tho, I got a new one. It’s better. Because rivers.
It’s stopped raining, and with that I take the last beer in my fridge to my apartment’s small balcony. I like the earthy aroma that rains kick up, which I’m told is from bacteria spores lying dormant in the ground until a summer storm churns them into the air. In Brooklyn, you don’t always get such a natural delight, especially in smells, but my tiny balcony overlooks Greenwood Cemetery, which is old and larger than most of the city’s parks. The brief afternoon storm has driven everyone off the grounds. Usually, at dusk I see art students in groups with their sketch pads and charcoal, tourists, neighborhood walkers, and, here and there, one or two folks paying respects to the deceased.
The dead are not in the well-kept ancient graveyard, either. But, they wouldn’t be. That’s not where they horribly died, if they died horribly. I’ve been privy to dealing with and studying the dead for nearly twenty-five years. They don’t hang around cemeteries.
A year and a half-ish. That’s a long time for a blog to go quiet. Most of the people I’ve written about in these pages are gone. Nearly every one of them. You’re all gone now. It makes sense. This was mostly about Southern and/or country-ish music. I don’t really get out to see anybody play anymore. No time.
I write now. I’ve been working in earnest on a novel. I think I’ve mentioned it a couple of times in previous posts. It’s a ghost story. I like it so far. Maybe I’ll make this blog about that. Is that interesting? To talk about my wannabe writer life? Maybe I’ll comment on some shit I see out there in the world and on the news. I’ve decided not to let this blog die, even though with everybody gone I feel like it should.
We’ll see.
Here’s a Southern gent I can’t get enough of right now.
Internationally he was known as El Tigre. (this is not made up)
I met Mike Windham in the early 2000s, but had heard tales of him for years prior when I lived in Atlanta. His daughter is my best friend. She beamed when she spoke of him, and I must say I liked the man, too. What struck me first about him was how little fat there was in anything he said. Every word from him was necessary toward his meaning. Yet, he wasn’t dry. He was not a serious man. He was too intelligent for that.
Last week he lost his fight with cancer. My heart goes out to my best friend and her family who are rocked and robbed by this disease. I know a good man’s gone.
El Tigre held dominion over all cucurbitaea, which enabled him to rally and command pumpkins, gourds, and squash. (also, not made up)
We traded books. I still talk about the first thing he recommended for me to read, Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold.” I was surprised and thrilled when he read the first thing I recommended to him, Nick Tosches’ “The Devil and Sonny Liston.” He gifted me a subscription to The New Yorker when I moved here, so as to help me acclimate to the city. I returned the favor by signing him up to the Oxford American. He told me he was glad I was doing this blog. He was my first vocal supporter. Kindness and faith in his family and friends, those things he took seriously. He was smart like that.
Amanda Neill of Barefoot & Bankside, asked me to impart: “While I don’t have the words to heal, I do know, somehow, strangely, music has the power of soothing. My prayers are for you, your family, and my friend Jody.” El Tigre has told me on more than one occasion how he enjoyed her songs.
When I learned he was to start chemotherapy, I knew he’d be spending many hours a day in a chemo chair. I asked the musicians I was just getting to know from doing this blog if they’d donate some music and merch to a care package I was putting together for him as he very much enjoyed their music, and they were gracious enough to do so. I sent it to him with two of my favorite books (“Sometimes a Great Notion” by Ken Kesey, and “Shadow Country” by Peter Matthiessen), and some special mouthwash to counter the cotton mouth I knew to be a side effect of the chemo treatments. I hoped for him, and I hoped for my best friend.
It is unfair.
El Tigre knew exactly how to set the scene.
He let me know how much he enjoyed the blog, and how much he enjoyed my writing regularly. It was an honor that made me bashful. He was the best kind of reader. It’s a rare thing to feel that kind of support when you know you’re nobody. I don’t say that cynically. I mean to convey what it’s like to be cared about by that man. He makes you feel like somebody.
Every time I was able to hangout with him and through our correspondence he made me laugh. In fact, when his daughter told me he had gone, the first thing that went through my head was a time when we were at her place in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and her visiting father spat his chewing gum at her apropos of nothing, but to signify that he was very bored. It was the first time he’d made me laugh so hard from the gut that I couldn’t stop. I think it’d have pleased him that my first reaction to his death was to replay this moment in my mind all day.
Should you see his daughter, spit your gum at her. She probably won’t get the homage, but it’d make me laugh.
Mike Windham was strange and brilliant. He was a good thing in this world. He saw a good thing in me, and this blog. In those moments that I would seriously reconsider whether or not I have the time and inclination to continue writing here, it was his encouragement, his enjoyment of how I write and what I write about that has helped keep this going. I always knew at least one person was reading my stuff, and that it was the best kind of reader doing so. And to know his daughter, equally strange and brilliant, is to know he was the best kind of father. He is missed.
The Road Southern 