If The River Was Whiskey

Grand Gulf isn't just a military park. They have lots of interesting local artifacts there.

Do we need any further proof that there was serious money in bootleggin'?

Prohibition didn't end in Mississippi until the 60's. That don't mean there weren't a thriving, and well regulated, brown liquor market in the state. Far from it... Black Market Tax . In fact, it was a raid on a Junior League Ball, attended by the Governor, that finally forced the state's hand. There was no rush to legalize akahol. The bootleggers were getting rich, the state and state officials were getting their cut, and the Baptists were happy (the last thing they wanted was to have to buy theirs in a public establishment...hahaha. Do you know why you always take more than one Baptist fishing at a time...because if you take just one he'll drink all your booze. :oohyeahthat'sagoodone:).

A family friend, who died recently, used to get paid 50 bucks to run a trunkload of whiskey from Vicksburg to Jackson when he was a teenager in the 50's. You can still get moonshine here without much trouble.

I think it's also important to mention that we have a short but significant history with submarines. The Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley was the first submarine to ever sink a ship. It took down the USS Housatonic....known up until that point for seizing a British blockade runner that was trying to deliver two ship engines for Confederate Inronclads. It was a serious blow. Take note Scots...it was one of your ships the bastards stole. Sadly, neither the crew or the submarine survived the exchange but they sank that b**CH!

While we're briefly on the subject, today in 1865, William Catledge of the 5th Florida Infantry, CSA, was paroled at Appomattox (one of 53 men that were left of the 5th). He was my Grandmother's maternal Grandfather. He wasn't the only Catledge that fought and her paternal side was also well represented but, it's William's name that appears, after about 6 pages of Campbells, among the list of those that were present at what amounted to the bitter, bitter end.

 You would be forgiven for thinking that this was a portable torture device carried by the U.S. army used to extract intelligence from the locals but...NO! This torture device was willingly worn by our Belles. That's what was under the hood of those old gorgeous hooped dresses.

Residents of the area remain on guard from attacks to this day. There's a nuclear power plant just a few miles from the park. She is ready for shenanigans...in fact, she kinda looks like she wakes up every morning hoping somebody will try her.

There's Yankees to worry about, terror attacks...it's like the Devil's petting zoo around there...

...it is going to Flood!

Then there's us....a danger that, while it may be unintentional, can never be dismissed.



We are them. Those of us who weren't kidnapped from West Africa are anglo-celts who were too poor and rowdy to live in Scotland, Ireland and t'North of England...who have spent the last 200 years procreating in swamps. We have moonshine, guns, submarines and a nuclear power plant! What could possibly go wrong. HA!

Warrior's Shadow

It doesn't come up much on here but, I was high-ish-ly trained in history...the work of it...the craft I reckon. My studies focused on the British Empire in the 19th century. It was just a good piece of luck that William Storey was at Millsaps College when I enrolled. Thanks to him and his encouragement I was able to turn my own interests into a legitimate pursuit.  One that eventually led and allowed me to study under people like Mridu Rai*, Jonathan Spence, Paul Kennedy, etc.

One of the biggest advantages I had though...was speaking English.

I don't speak Japanese. So another keen interest of mine, Sengoku era Japan, has gleefully remained a hobby. There comes a point where if you don't speak or read a language...you hit a ceiling. So instead of learning Japanese...I just watch samurai movies.

 

My historical interests are not particularly sophisticated. I have no interest in how people used to wash up after supper or how their traditions for washing up were actually invented by their oppressors and therefore aren't really Real traditions. I like battles. I want WAR!...not anthropology and political studies. Just as in the heyday of British Imperialism...Sengoku Japan's got plenty of that.

One of Lincoln's more enthusiastic thugs, who freely talked about the need to exterminate Southerners and then Indians, famously described war as Hell. Which, as Clyde Wilson points out, is a sly dodge of responsibility for burning people out of their homes. Wilson contrasts this with a quote from Nathan Bedford Forest..."war is fighting and fighting means killing." No dodge...no outside force that dictates or excuses the most extreme behavior.

Lee got closer to our looming point, when he said, after another fantastic victory at Fredricksburg, where he was outnumbered by 40,000 men, "it is well that war is so terrible, else we should grow too fond of it." Lee, like so many of the Confederate generals, was a throwback, a true warrior...not a thug, a murderer, an annihilationist. Without losing sight of its cost, I think Lee did love aspects of war...and what it required...sacrifice, honour, courage...selflessness.

Of course there's also the spectacle. It's the masculine drama...the stakes are ultimate and you get to put your pecker on the table while waving a flag. 

Nobody's ever done it with more style than the Samurai.



There's an outstanding book by Joanna Bourke called an Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in the Twentieth Century. One of the things she demonstrates through interviews, letters, diaries, etc is that combat veterans are often reluctant to talk about their experiences not because they are horrified by them but because they enjoyed it. They power was seductive but so was the aesthetic experience.**

 

The actual Battle of Nagashino was not directed by Kurosawa and was probably not so stylishly metaphorical. The Samurai rode these little pony's that could barely carry their weight...and they were surrounded by retainers jogging along with them in a charge. There would have been thousands of foot soldiers at the palisades with the hand gunners...who would have come out to finish it off by hand.

Still he hasn't made it up from whole cloth. If you've ever seen the old screens you know there were high style elements to the chaos. Perhaps more importantly it's closer to how these events persist in the imagination. In the film, the shadow warrior, the Kagemusha, demonstrates the highest qualities of a warrior. It's an act that is utterly futile...on every conceivable level. If only we could mount up and ride with him.

Who doesn't love Samurai movies...oh yeaaaaah.



*One of my favorite recurring scenes from graduate school was her pulling a pack of Marlboro Reds out of her sari. She's obviously razor sharp but, she was just a fun lady.

**I recently listened to a podcast on Greek Hoplites...the issue of post-traumatic-stress-disorder came up. I thought I was gonna eat my car keys. It's the worst kind of anachronism because you can see the legs on it. By the time they were done...it was probably on psychopaths that thrived in war.

NHS Glasses. Do What?

There seems to be a consensus, among our readers, on the U2...that they're vile. These clowns, I'm guessing, are a more complicated proposition. Before we pick up this tar-baby I'd like to explain how it happened that I've posted a picture of The Smiths on this blog.

It's the fault of Swiss Adam at bagging area . Last week he had a series of posts featuring The Clash...the last one coming on Friday.* I spend most Friday's confined to my office with little to do. I watch a lot of videos and documentaries on Youtube. So, a week ago, after reading a post on Rock the Casbah...I found myself searching for Clash documentaries.

I have issues with The Clash that sometimes spoil a listen...these, I believe, are probably mine alone but, I am fascinated by their story and the disintegration of the band. It still boggles my mind that Mick Jones was told to get out. Splits happen but in what dimension is it a good idea to fire Mick Jones? I still don't understand exactly what happened...and then there's Strummer in the Medicine Show video...like what, months later?

Anyway, there are bands, like the Clash, whose story is as interesting to me as their music. I went through documentaries on early Who...then Quadraphenia and the Mod revival in the 70's.. a little bit about The Jam. One on Mods, Rockers and Beatniks in 60's England. On the sidebar...the Smiths kept popping up. I don't know how I feel about The Smiths as a band...I can't decide, but their story, the phenomenon, and the convoluted bits about their break up I knew made them perfect for that day's viewing...then the next and the next.

The more I heard the more confused I became.

Everybody kept talking about how they were unique for presenting themselves as average Northern, working class kids...so, your average Mancunian swags around with a fragrant bouquet in his britches?**
Of course, everything has it's context

 

Compared to the new wave acts they charted with...it's a fair assessment. Besides Marr and the other two do seem right off the road. Even Morrissey with his flowers and Mardi Gras beads doesn't seem that flamboyant. Them glasses. I didn't think anything of them. Then I heard they were a prop...and now I know they were NHS glasses. At the time I wouldn't have understood what that meant. If he had been swinging a block of government cheese...that would have translated. Well, there's no hiding your glasses so, now I can see it as a very decent, or maybe a very clever, gesture. These things we're completely lost on most of us.



A lot of this is hindsight from the late 80's early 90's. I was 9 in 1982 and only bought one Smiths record while they were still together...a 12" single for Panic. (A song that still tickles me). By 1986 I was practically living in a record store and I know how they were thought of generally.  Not only were they grouped in with The Cure...but also with New Order.

So, it made me laugh every time they would talk about The Smiths as a guitar band or when Marr would go on a tangent about New Order. Looking back it's easier to see just how different they were but, at the time, to half of the underground, indie, whatever, record buying public they were just another Depeche Mode.

I don't know how bands like the Smiths viewed their success in the States but, in that world, the college radio world or whatever, they were like superstars. They had catchy songs, videos, and they were used to presenting themselves to wider audiences. MTV did the rest...which actually lagged behind the life of the band.***

There was a level of resentment from certain quarters toward all these "English" bands. On More Fun in the New World, X complains with I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts...

"The facts we hate
You'll never hear us
I hear the radio is finally gonna play new music
You know, the British invasion
But what about The Minutemen, Fleasheaters, DOA, Big Boys and The Black Flag?
Will the last American band to get played on the radio please bring the flag?
Please bring the flag!
Glitter-disco-synthesizer night school"

The obnoxious kid from Salt Lake City Punk (set in 1985)...gives a very foul-mouthed taste.



The funniest and most childish outburst came from The Dead Milkmen...You'll Dance to Anything. If Marr was aware of the song I'm sure he was horrified to have The Smiths grouped in with Book of Love and the Communards. Ha. Yeah in comparison to Human League The Smiths were a back to basics guitar band...but, it didn't really translate and nobody confused them with Husker Du or Sonic Youth.

We still bought the records though. The Cure, The Smiths and Echo and The Bunnymen...Joy Dvsion via New Order were in the collection of every teenage record collector. We didn't share the older kids resentment. Most of us came up on New Wave. Duran Duran is the reason I started going to real record stores as a little kid. It was almost inevitable that the next round of American bands would be steeped in British post-punk or indie-pop. You could see it coming with the Pixies. Nirvana pimped the Vaselines and Raincoats...Pavement were obsessed with TV Personalities, Swell Maps and of course The Fall.

Still, Morrissey was a special case. Try for a moment, to imagine that he isn't in the music papers, that all you know of him is on the records. The public spats, the punch lines, the self references and...none of it translates. There was little nuance and humor for an audience so far out of the loop. He just seemed like a self-obsessed, melodramatic, bore (which I suppose he is everywhere to some extent). As far as I know, in the States, Marr is still held in the highest regard while Morrissey has no presence to speak of except among a small obsessive following. I was completely taken aback to hear that his most obsessed fans in Britain were male...that point kept coming up. I liked the Smiths alright and I knew other fellas that liked them but, the obsessives were always girls.

Anyway with some distance and reams of context...a lot the songs seem more clever and even funny.  I still can't listen to the songs that are driven by Morrissey meandering through a maudlin melody...or the songs where the band fades to background music but, I have developed a new appreciation for songs I hadn't thought about in years.



"the grease in the hair
of a speedway operator
is all a tremulous heart requires"

That's pretty good...I can't deny it.

That's also enough of this rambling mess.

__________________________

P.S. It was the sweet Southern husk of Mary Huff's voice that also made this post possible...she broke the noise lock that morning on the way to work...when this one slipped past the censors.



Not entirely inappropriate...if only Morrissey had actually been a girl. They may have been the perfect band.

* It's actually the week before last now.

**As a Southerner...Morrissey is obviously Truman Capote (don't be fooled by the exotic surname...he was born a Persons). Not in any way typical but, still a legitimate Southern character. If you're wondering Mark E Smith is Mary Flannery O'Conner.

*** See Perks of Being a Wallflower for an example of how The Smiths were still a living entity in the minds of U.S. high schoolers as late as the early 90's.

Slip It To The Andriod

Yet another week where I've worked more than 20 hours. Y'all I didn't make it back to the house until 9:30 on Thursday...then turned right around and worked for five hours on Friday. It's like I'm making Nike tennis shoes in China. There's nothing for a week like that but liquor, smoke and Chrome.

Our friend from Satellite of Love is back...only now, he loves her even more. So Sweet.

Beat yer head on that for a while.*


Mainly I've just been beating my head against this laptop and blogger...and idiots. Below is not a sketch as such...but, a material artifact of a conversation between me and Martha. Through a convoluted series of links I ended up on an article from, where else, Salon, that blamed all of America's wars on Southerners. Why? Because we are the dregs of Scotland, Ireland, Wales and North and West England. We like to scrap. The author had just read Albion's Seed. The last decade or so has been a real revelation for the Yankee. Through the publication of a few books and essays (see: See Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell or Better Off Without 'Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secesion, Albion's Seed, etc.) the Yankee has finally come to understand that flawed as we are...we aren't flawed versions of them. We are different from them. We are still, to a large extent, the same people that were too poor and rowdy to live in the poorest and rowdiest parts of Britain (or kidnapped from West Africa). New England, and the United States of God Almighty America and the whole of the Western Hemisphere was invented by the Puritans...the better sorts of England...the sober and industrious and, above all, the Pious. The example to all...they founded a shinning city on a hill. A beacon for the rest of us struggling in the dark. They will save the world...even if they have to burn it down to do so. From Calvinism through Transcendentalism to Statism...they haven't changed a lick. Some of these people were sent out to save the Great Lakes region (the Midwest)while others stayed back to get the minds of wave after wave after wave of immigrants right. They pulled that shit on the Italians and Poles...found ready allies in the Germans of 1848 but, we instinctively knew why they'd been kicked out of England in the first place. F***ing witch burners. We've never wanted any part of it...and that is our great and unpardonable Sin. We aren't just different than them...we don't want to be them. That's Cardinal. That is what they are finally coming to realize. One of the reasons we don't want to be them is that their Piety is literal minded and dull. They're not Righteous. They're busybodies.* Their industriousness, their solid work ethic, looks an awful lot like grasping, rapacious, greed. In short, they're the kind of people who would invade, conquer and occupy Sovereign States, slaughter indigenous peoples, go on rabbit hunts in the Philippine, send gunboats to South America, Vietnam, and on...all in the name of Abolition or Manifest Destiny or making the world safe for Democracy or etc. etc. etc. and BAAAAAAAAAAAAAhhhhhh. Now matter how dastardly...they can always come up with some cockeyed Moral Justification paper over their Imperial compulsions. We're the warmongers??? Pound sand dickh**ds. Anyway...the above is what you obviously see in those scribbles. We will revisit all this later. We gotta clear the air in here... Stay tuned...I didn't want to sully F-Word's efforts with all this nonsense but, next up...we will be examining a piece of his excellent work that purchased recently. *You may be asking yourself...Isn't the Bible Belt in the South...isn't the South hyper-religious. One, there's more than one religion (see the State). Two, much of what passes for religion in The South is not naturally Southern...fundamentalism, for instance, is a product of modernity and a Midwestern import. Three, we go to church because we, as individuals are Sinners, not to plot the salvation of the world. Jesus handled that...without any help from Cotton Mathers even. Again, we will be discussing all this in the future.

Cookies are not Biscuits

A cynical person might think that there are elements among us who don't believe these particular people are capable of pondering Universal questions at a high level...all I'm sayin'...get the same shit with "Folk" art...and with Country music...only that's been a bald face con perpetrated by...anyway. We'll save it.

Beale St...Martha and the Boy a couple of years ago.

The Boy tries to convinces his Moma that he is indeed big enough to go into the bar.


Brace youselfs...this is the cut. When he hits the first fanfare you will think you're high. The Delta Force article named Junior Kimbrough as Fat Possums greatest discovery. No doubt, Junior Kimbrough was a balls out genius but, R.L. Burnside was capable, when he cared to, of making you feel like you've heard an echo of God's voice (and he knows it too...watch his face)...an affirmation of reality.

Maybe it's just me...that's possible too.

These People Need Jesus...

but, for now, all they've got is me.

And I'm making a hash of it.

Somehow a sketch that had life and tension in it became this staid yawner. Booo Hissss Boo!

See how the hair in the drawing is a cohesive shape that could stand on it's on...a swoop with a contained explosion.  In the painting it's just a textury mess. No movement...no life in her body at all. This painting makes me want to punch myself.

We'll be taking the scraper to it tonight.

The image comes from the brawl at the Ascot in 2011...which I've only just discovered. Not on a bet could I have come up with something better than people in top hats and tails trying to crush each other's skulls in with champagne bottles.

We have had a winner though....

(That's better...the other picture is so murky)

Of all the paintings that have come out of my garage in the last two months...this, is probably the only one I truly happy with. It still wants a few touches when it dries...so there's still time to ruin it. Fingers crossed.

Next up...why you will never want to hear 12 bar, Delta Blues again.

 

Drunk Brits

I don't mean your average functioning alcoholic. I mean the binge drinking cocktail dresses that show up in the Daily Mail once or twice a year. We've all got 'em but, with the possible exception of The Grove at Ole Miss, your sots are the best dressed.

This poor girl is so drunk she's got two right feet.



Here she is again with two left shoes.

For the Mail and The Sun these pictures are a real scandal....to me they're brilliant. Girls throwing up in tiaras...come on man. There will be more.

Bet on it.

I may also try and recreate some scenes from the riots a couple of years ago...like when Adamparsons made those elderly people strip naked before he robbed them.

Then we'll head to Ibiza.