There are many days it seems to me music is helpless against the daily worldwide onslaught of human beings acting like cruel demons. Yet the promise of coming together to experience the communion of shared and transporting musicality is certainly not nothing.
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Here are some snapshots, hipshots and night shots, from wandering the highways, byways, and lifeways of the world through which my iPhone moves, in the small towns, small cities and hills of West Virginia.
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A couple of eightysomething artists refuse to stop being wonderful, while the capital city of West Virginia pays colorful homage to the passing of another master artist.
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On the way to a jam in the Appalachian outback, I pass the House of Prayer Full Gospel Church. Wait—are there 'partial gospel' churches out there?
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One apartment complexity; one bridge I once ascended; one very black Tuxedo Cat; one father-son rolling encounter; one dulcimer dude; and one fencing match in the green, green hills of Earth.
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The only sounds I hear while standing at the foot of the silos is the whip and whoosh of occasional traffic on W.Va. 2, a trail mix of various birds charting out their personal space in song, and now and again the wind whistling through the portals of these abandoned legacies of a pre-industrial rural heartland.
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From where I recline in my living room right now in the West Virginia exurbs, I hear the tree frogs rasp outside on a starry night, clinging to the scaly bark and branches of sycamore, pine, and maple trees on our property. Time to think of something other than the news ...
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Looking this way and that, high and low, up and down and all around on a recent walkabout in downtown Cincinnati: A Photo Essay
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Lakes and oceans talk to us in a language we don't understand with our cognition, but with our bodies. To be more specific, with our very cells. You might say it is the soothing language of negative ions. Here, try it ...
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What does it take to get a book into the world? A little help from St. Joseph the Worker, plus inspiration from an Old World wine vat on a steep Calabrian hillside. That's a good start.
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A StoryIsTheThing Public Service Announcement: It's Booking Day in NYC today! That will mean much malevolence, much media blathering, much of way too much muchness. When you need to tear your eyes from the spectacle, here are four images to ponder.
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I should be meditating. I should be writing a new chapter in my 'sorta memoir.' Or polishing an old one. I should not be eating pretzels & pepper jack cheese after 10 p.m. I should be sleeping. I should not be posting yet another black-and-white Instagram photo ...
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Taking a stroll through some definitive black-and-white moods, from across a couple of states and several states of mind.
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You need to drop in a human figure, here and there, into any collection of shots of the grand Keith-Albee Theater in Huntington, W.Va. There's no other way to get a sense of the sheer ambitious size of this theater, which is surely on the short list of Coolest Theaters in North America.
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I was up early at 5 a.m. I stood, barefoot, just outside the doorframe to the house where I was staying, deep in the West Virginia hills. No traffic noise since this was the heart of the heart of the country. Only a rural road curved around the house ...
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