Table of Contents
This is an index of my published writing. To begin reading, select a title below.
Featured
Mountain Top Renewal
Love (video)
Published Work
Mountain Top Renewal
Coal People
Over Here Son
Stripping the Splintered Stocks
Amen
Unclaimed World
Unpublished Shorts
The Laying of Hands
Beauty
Moths
Mini Essays
James Joyce Hacks Reality
Kill Your Television
Against Specialization
Thoughts on Fire
Columbus and the Apocalypse
Bones
Features
Book Reviews
Travel & Nature (Photos)
Letters
Music Writing
Miscellany
Coal People
Those who talk of clean coal have never lived near a coalfield. I was born in Eastern Kentucky just after the miner’s strikes against the Duke Power Company down in Harlan County, Kentucky. My family lived on the rim of the Appalachian Plateau, so my dad’s job wasn’t to dig the coal from the mines but to haul it all across Kentucky and West Virginia, sometimes up to Ohio and even down to Indiana.
By the mid- 1980’s the coal boom that swept through Eastern Kentucky in spurts from the turn of the century to its peak in the 1970’s was well on its way to drying up.
Dad lost his job when the trucking company he had worked for since he was a teenager went bankrupt. The coal that was left in the mountains was getting harder to reach, and unions had won little victories over the years that made the cost of extracting that coal steeper for the coal companies. It would be nearly a decade before the companies would launch a new campaign, Mountain Top Removal, and this time they wouldn’t need so many workers to drill into the side of the mountains to remove the coal. In this new world, instead of drilling, the company would just level the mountain and take the coal from the center.
On the way down Lucky Holler to the nearest mouth of the Licking River we pass a small wood house with a tin roof and a ringer-washer on the front porch. Boyd and Kathy live here alone in this old holler.
They don’t have electricity or running water, so they pull their water from the creek and sit around at dusk by lantern light, head to bed before the stars come out.
By the mid-1980’s most of Eastern Kentucky doesn’t look much different than anywhere else. McDonalds opened in my home county when I was in High School, and a few small chains followed. A Day’s Inn was built a few years ago and by all accounts these harbingers of progress mark a minor boom unparalleled since the discovery of coal in Cannel City in the 1920s. Still, in the deep hollers there remains a class of people who don’t think much of this change. They’re dirt poor, always have been, and always will be.
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We are on our way to a wedding deep in Owsley County, Kentucky one of the poorest counties in the nation. I have never been there, though it’s just two counties southwest of where I was born.
We drive from Lexington to the Bluegrass Parkway, follow it to the Natural Bridge exit and then travel by county road through Booneville, where Daniel Boone passed through more than 200 years ago. Unlike many towns in this region, Confederate Rebels did not sack Booneville during the Civil War. Instead, both sides of the war used the town as a stopping point on their way across the Appalachians. Just over 100 people live there today.
We leave the town in our rearview and keep driving into the Appalachian foothills, eventually coming to a dirt road where a sign reads “End of County Road Maintenance.” We navigate the rough dirt road deep into the holler, along a steep and winding drop-off.
We pass a smattering of trailers along the hillsides. At one, a goat stands on top of a rusted car in the driveway. At another, a man and woman sit with their shirtless and thin teenage son in the front yard of their singlewide trailer, gawking as we drive past. Trash flows from the trailer’s door into the yard, so that the door won’t shut because of it. Inside the trailer the family has tacked insulation to the ceiling. There are dismantled cars and appliances in the front yard and when we pass by again after the wedding, some five hours later, the family still sits in their folding chairs.
Despite the coal being taken from these hills, these hollers are home to the worst sort of poverty: dirty, apathetic, ignorant, hopeless, generational poverty. Every few years some outsider points their lens this way, rolling out the stereotyped images of Next of Kin, The Kentucky Cycle, the work of Shelby Adams, and Coal Miner’s Daughter. These portraits, though true in their own ways, do not touch the essence of Eastern Kentucky. An outsider cannot know the forces of pride and desperation constantly at war in these places.
There’s a scene in the documentary Harlan County, USA, a documentary about the union strikes against the Duke Power Company in Harlan County, Kentucky in the 1970’s, in which an old-timer narrates his experience in the mines before an earlier, and bloodier, strike in the 1930s.
It was custom for boys at that time, ten years old and younger, to work in the mines. Their most common job was to separate the coal from the silt dredged up from the depths of the mine. For long hours each day the boys sat in the dark caves and worked the wet silt. A foreman watched over them and if a boy missed a piece of coal the foreman would strike him with a cane.
The pictures from those mines show a generation of young boys who have now passed on, their faces and clothes covered in black coal soot. Some have black eyes and most have bleeding hands.
These same boys grew up to become the men who worked in the mines until their bodies broke, leaving them with black lung and not much else. How long can a people endure this way before they become too broken? How do those of us who escaped a similar fate reconcile this bloody heritage of Appalachia with our own privilege?
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Coal has been the great maker and breaker of the Appalachian people. In one respect, the industry brought jobs when there were none and with those jobs came roads, electricity, plumbing, television, and all the modern necessities we take for granted today—certainly all the kind additions that made my life as a child of that region much easier. But with the jobs came consequences: a depleted land, the dissolution of the sacred mountains, and the spoil of the rivers.
Where the poor of the region once subsisted on small farms, they now relied on coal companies for a living wage. The land that had been handed to them—by those who killed the Indians and named it first in the name of the Christian God—was sold to the coal companies for pennies on the dollar of what it was worth. The law and those who slipped money into the pockets of the law pushed out the few old-timers who resisted.
Now there’s just a choice between jobs at Wal-Mart or the prison. Some turn to Jesus Christ, others turn to Crystal Meth; either will soothe the pain but neither does much to change anything.
The people could demand justice, but they know that there’s no justice for the poor in this lifetime. The Lord will set it right in the afterlife, when the rich men try to shove their camels through the eyes of needles.
In Boone’s time Kentucky was still a paradise, the bluegrass fields were stocked with deer, elk, and bison. The rivers, clean and clear, watered mighty forests and bounties of fish and fresh-water muscles. Indian tribes had used this land for hundreds of generations as hunting grounds. The land’s fertility was turned to myth, myth that hummed in the ear of young Daniel Boone and led him to look for this paradise known as Kentukee.
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Today, swaths of this golden land are in ruins. The very mountains that Boone first crossed have been leveled, gone are the herds of wildlife and the pristine forests, gone are thousands of streams buried by mountain top removal. Yet, despite all the “wealth” this mining has produced, the people of Appalachia remain among the poorest and sickest in our nation. In the past speaking out never got them very far, for people on the outside never seemed to care too much for the poor, common people who lived in the hills. Well, it’s time to change that.
Join the fight against Mountain Top Removal in Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina by visiting ilovemountains today. There, you will find ways to contact congress, as well as all the links, articles, video, and photographs you need to get informed and join the cause.
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Scraps: Bodies
Every night there are more dead bodies on TV. Bodies that have been beaten, bludgeoned, mangled, bodies in various states of decay. And we call this macomb display entertainment. The pictures make it real. The video lets us believe what we are seeing.
There is always a good cop and a deviant, a noble defense with psychoses and trauma. We believe in justice, but not in the abstract. We need the real body, the maggots in the belly, the dried blood on the scalp. We see these signs of evil in the world and we wait for justice, delivered at the 55 minute mark, with a revelation and a showdown.
We click off the television set after the hero makes his witty quip and squints into the nearest camera. We sleep better at night—knowing there is brutality in the world, but that it will be contained. There is a dead body, but it is not ours. The dead come home from Iraq under the cloak of darkness and there are no cameras, no video-recorders, no documentation of these real sacrifices our county makes so that we might sit at home and watch tv.
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Music Writing
Most reviews, samples, concert write-ups, and music videos can be found in my notebook pages by sorting with the ‘Music’ tag or by clicking here
Ties That Bind, The Music of Clarence Kelly
A&E by Goldfrapp
Children Running Through by Patty Griffin
Snowmen
Delicately we line the snowman’s coat with gravel, buttoning each to his frozen belly, an old farm hat to his head, and sticks to his arms. He is perfect when we get him built.
We go to my great-grandfather’s funereal in the old church up the road. Everyone is crying. I’ll miss the marshmallow circus peanuts he always carried when he stopped by our house.
A snowman cannot outlast the winter, just as we do not outlast our lives.
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Miscellany
Art
The Infinity Rooms of Yayoi Kusama
Theory
Environment
Misc. Writing
Day One: Right Elements, Wrong Order
Day One (Redux): The Importance of Good Beginnings
Day Two: Revelry and Resistance
Days Four and Five: Breaks For Inspiration and Grounding
Day Six: Biorhythms and Little Breakthroughs
Politics
Biden and Palin: Unlikely Bedfellows in the Fight for Gay Rights
When Beauty Queens Talk Foreign Policy
Elitism and the First Wive’s Club
Obituaries
James Baker Hall (1935-2009)
Dora Belle O’Neal Kelly (1930-2009)
J.G. Ballard (1930-2009)
Paul Newman (1925-2008)
Letters
Travel & Nature (Photos)
Angel’s Rest and Devil’s Rest in the Columbia River Valley, OR May 2010
Portland, OR to San Francisco, CA May 2009
Sea Kelp on the Oregon Coast March 2009
Signs of Life: Mid-Spring in Forest Park, Portland, OR Spring 2009
Mount Hood, OR August 2008
Multnomah Falls, OR July 2008
Cross Country 08, Part One: Chicago, IL to Rice Lake WI July 2008
Cross Country 08, Part Two: Rice Lake, WI to Mitchell, SD
Cross Country 08, Part Three: Mitchell, SD to The Badlands, SD
Cross Country 08, Part Four: Wall, SD to Billings, MO
Cross Country 08, Part Five: Billings, MT to Butte, MT
Cross Country 08, Part Six: Butte, MT to Eastern, OR
Over Here Son
This piece was published on wunderkammer as part of a ‘writers as kids’ curated show. The full piece, with photos, can be read here
Over here son. Now smile. But you never do. Just that smirk that seems wiser than you are. How much can you know already?
Someday you will wear a shirt like mine every day, then it won’t be special like it is today. Someday when your arms are long and your chest broad, you may not even fit in a shirt like this. You have your mother’s features, not mine.
You want to wear the shirt now, you say “Dad can I put it on again?” in your socked feet outside the bathroom in the morning. So I let you put it on. You wear it all day until your mother makes you come inside and put something else on. She’s worried that you’ll stain all of my shirts. I don’t care.
The shirts are not to be celebrated—they’re uniforms we grown men wear as we drive to our jobs in the city and back to our homes in the suburbs. We’re all playing make believe, son. My father fought in the War to End All Wars. He killed eight men in the South Pacific. He said “It isn’t hard to kill somebody. You just pull a trigger. The hard thing is to live with it.” He never talked about the war more than that. You never met him but he was a good man. He didn’t talk much, so I don’t know all of his stories. When I’m gone, will my ghost remember all the stories I should have told you? Will there be anything in my life worth telling?My old man risked his life in the War to End All Wars. I work in an office park.
This is the world my father left me. What world am I leaving you, son. What will you be when it’s time to wear a white shirt, just like all the other drones, out into the world we call “real.” Is there a world for you beyond office parks and war?
25 Essential Albums 2000-2009
1. Neon Bible by The Arcade Fire
Someday when our children ask us how it felt to live in the post 9-11 America of George W. Bush, one of our responses might be to give them a copy of Neon Bible by The Arcade Fire. In a decade marred by wars and threats of wars, by loss of civil liberties, and by the encroachment of corporatized Religion into our government and daily lives, Neon Bible was a voice for the angst that many of us felt. At the core of the record is an immense spiritual longing, a desire to do right in the world even when our actions—and certainly the actions of our culture—produce dire failings.
There has always been a tension in this country between the pious religious masses—who want nothing more than to install their own particular creed as the foundation of an American Theocracy—and the rebellious and free American soul. In an age where all of our institutions have been corporatized, this tension is more pronounced than it has ever been—particularly when a sitting President and political party manipulate this tension for war, economic control, and political gain.
But for all of this background information, Neon Bible is also just a brilliant rock record. The ten members of the touring band flood each track with an array of sounds from drum, bass, and guitar, to orchestras, choirs, grand church organs, esoteric percussion, and even clogging. The album is at times as jubilant as it is bleak, and the record’s peak moments come when these two waring emotions cross (such as the revival-spirited Antichrist Television Blues).
For nearly every reason that I listen to and critique music (songwriting, lyrics, composition, sonic variety, cultural relevance) Neon Bible is the best record I have heard in a very long time. My love for the record was not immediate (I scored it behind Bloc Party in my “Best of 2007” list), but the album will withstand the test of time. Even with the nightmare of the Bush era behind us, Neon Bible connects me to a universal anxiety about the world—an unnamable dread that hung over our nation for much of the last decade. But, in the end, we have only the chance to move forward as the chorus sings on the penultimate track “ I don’t know where we’re going! Let’s go!”.
2. Give Up by The Postal Service
The 2003 record Give Up by the Postal Services manages a rare feat; it is simultaneously one of the best indie and pop records of the decade. Such a rare feat in popular music makes sense when given the collision of talent that made the record possible: Death Cab for Cutie vocalist Ben Gibbard just before his band broke the MTV mainstream, Jimmy Tamborello of the band Dntel who can produce great noise-pop but lacks the sophistication of the pop hook and melody, and backing vocals by child star turned vocalist Jenny Lewis of the band Rilo Kiley. Gibbard and Tamborello are creative yin and yang—Gibbard gives Tamorello the much needed hooks that will make his sounds memorable and Tamorello gives Gibbard the experimental sonic pallet he needs to stretch the emotional allure of his songs. At its core, Give Up is simply a breakup record—a record of romantic fantasies, recollections, and acknowledged mistakes. The band has lazily worked on a second record but at the end of the decade both artists seem to be backing away, and maybe this is for the best, for, as a pop anomaly, Give Up is a record is as much about its time as it is its content: that brief moment just before the pop and indie worlds collided.
3. Dear Science by TV on the Radio
I am always hesitant to say that any recording is sonically perfect, but it is difficult to find a flaw on TV on the Radio’s 2008 opus Dear Science. For nearly an hour the record builds like a summer storm in long, steady waves that push through myriad musical movements. Unlike the band’s previous records, though, Dear Science resists the impulse to be lost in this droning beauty for each track is driven by a propulsive rhythm section. Lyrically, the record is open-ended enough that songs open themselves to new and differing interpretations upon each listen—like the best modern poetry. This uncanny combination of lyrical opaqueness and a broad sonic pallet of funk rock that combines the modern (electro, dance, digital manipulation) with the classic (funk horns, strings, choirs) makes Dear Science a deeply perplexing and enjoyable record.
4. Medulla by Bjork
There are records that change the sonic landscape forever and then there is Bjork, who with each release lays bare what she has done before and fearlessly goes after whatever impulse guides her in the moment. With Medulla that instinct was the human voice. This is a record of astounding complexity with almost no instrumentation to speak of. Instead, Bjork focuses on the human voice in all of its astounding complexity: beat boxing, throat singing, vocoding, electronic manipulation, and big haunted chorus make up this record. The influence of Medulla is hard to map, but elements of what she did here can be found in traces from groups such as Sparks, Bloc Party, and a hundred indie bands in between. This album changed how musicians think of vocals, and in a career that is speckled with landmark albums Medulla may, indeed, be her greatest artistic achievement.
5. The Last Resort by Trentemoller
Anders Trentemoller is hands down the most sophisticated electronic musician of the decade. After a string of high energy dance remixes (The Knife, Robyn, Royksopp to name a few) brought him fame, he released his debut album The Last Resort to little fanfare in 2006. For those who were expecting a hard-hitting dance record the album may have been a letdown. Instead, he delivered a low-end ambient record of subtle and extreme beauty. Trentemoller describes this record as “a record for lovers” and I will only say that as a soundtrack for conjugal visits I can think of none better. The record is a beautiful late-night record and one of the decade’s most underrated gems.
6. Sound of Silver by LCD Soundsystem
LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy is an odd man: a white boy with soul equally versed in 70’s funk, early 80’s punk, and the rave rock trend of the aughts. What sets LCD Soundsystem apart from the pack is superior songwriting and a knack for combining all of these disparate elements under one funky banner that’s difficult not to dance to. Shake your bootey, but don’t be surprised when you find yourself unexpectedly moved by touching moments such as “All My Friends.”
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7. Come on feel the Illinoise by Sufjan Stevens
I wanted to hate Illinoise—the album that made hipsters swoon, Pitchfork saw it as the second coming, and the whole concept—at best—came off as hopelessly pretentious. But when I came to the record on its own terms I found an album of profound poetic lyricism, lush and sophisticated instrumentation, and subtle and profound emotional depth. Illinoise creates a world of its own, a love letter to the Illinois of old, and a record that is difficult not to be consumed by.
8. A Weekend in the City by Bloc Party
Bloc Party’s sophomore album “A Weekend in the City” is an eloquent meditation on how it feels to be a young man in a culture that seems destined to plummet into ruin. This is a life of decadence and ruin, war and racism, and debilitating isolationism. At the core of the record, though, is a live heart yearning for more than quick material fixes and anonymous physical encounters. The hyperbole of Kele Okereke’s lyrics are muted by the drama of the band, who play better on this record than they have on any of the band’s releases. It was a strong sophomore record, one that was largely overlooked by the mainstream presses, but an album, nonetheless, that is dear to many of us.
9. New Amerykah (4th World War) by Erykah Badu
The men of hip-hop may have won the bravado war this decade, but any critic would be hard-pressed to find an album by any of those blusterous men to match the originality, daring, and relevance of Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War). With this album Badu recreated herself as the high priestess of soul, and in doing so delivered a sermon on the mount to black Amerykah. This album is a catalogue of the state of black America in the year that a black man ran for (and won) the presidency. With grace and elegance and some (much needed) self-deprecation Erykah is goading her people to take accountability for their actions while saying “enough” to the oppression that has plagued them.
10. Kala by M.I.A.
M.I.A. and her producer Diplo have taken world music and stripped it of all the Enya/Yanni/Riverdance cliches to form the most vibrant and original genre blending form of music to arise this decade. In these tunes you will find elements of hip-hop, rap, afro-beat, disco, tribal drumming, throat singing, and oblique references to New Order and the Pixies. The songs are highly energetic, danceable, and driving them all is M.I.A.‘s politically-charged class smashing lyrics.
11. Takk by Sigur Ros
Sigur Ros have a patented formula behind all of their work: dramatic walls of sound, painful yowling—in a language you can’t understand—full of woe and jubilation, melodies that wrap you in them completely, and songs that fill you with longing, dread, and euphoria. The band’s fourth record, Takk…, is arguably the strongest in their cannon, and the only moment when all of their disparate tendencies has come together in one unified recording.
12. Haunted by Poe
Your father is an acclaimed documentary filmmaker with a stormy career, who, upon his death, leaves a box of audio cassettes—lectures, letters to his children, ramblings—that you find in an attic. What do you do with this material? If you’re Poe, you go into a studio for 5 years to make one of the most complex, enjoyable, and cathartic concept records of all time.
13. Impeach my Bush by Peaches
Peaches was a novelty at first—the self-proclaimed Queen of Electrotrash who wanted to fuck your pain away. Despite some killer singles, her first two albums were not good. That changed with 2006’s Impeach My Bush, a trashy punk-rock/electro album where virtually every song could be a single (if American airwaves were not ran by Puritains that is). It’s a fantastic records and one of this decades most subversive releases.
14. Seventh Tree by Goldfrapp
Seventh Tree cannot be listened to, only experienced. It’s a breezy summer day, 70’s softlighting, AM Radio for the Eurotrash crowd. It’s also stunning and lovely.
15. We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank by Modest Mouse
We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank takes a harrowing look at our cultural and reports back with a moody, often dark, testament to the world around us. At it’s best, this lyrical introspection marries beautifully with a band who has never sounded better than they do on this album.
16. Third by Portishead
Portishead took an eleven year hiatus between their second record, 1997’s Portishead, and their third record, 2008’s Third. This was not the best career move and the industry they left in 1997 bore little in resemblance to the one they returned to in 2008. Still, Third is an inspired, haunting record that lays waste to the band’s catalog—building a dense, hypnotic, and moody record from the dismantled foundation of the 90’s trip-hop movement they helped pioneer.
17. Silent Shout by The Knife
Karen Dreijer Andersson is perhaps the most original song writer of a generation (her fantastic solo record Fever Ray was released in 2009. That album would also have made this list, except that I committed to the restraint of only listing one album per artist). When her songs are joined by the moody beats and low-end bass of her brother Olof Dreijer, the result is a nightmare wonderworld where dreams stand up and dance.
18. Before the Dawn Heals Us by M83
Before the Dawn Heals Us is a concept record about… a car crash? an nightmare? a David Cronenberg film? It doesn’t matter. If you play this album at night it will cast a spell you cannot turn away from.
19. Fasciinatiion by The Faint
“i been around a mirror enough to know it’s hard to change
bq. we’re like magicians when we dream
bq. but we wake up and nothing’s different”
20. Bad Blood!!! by Gerling
Franz Ferdinand received much of the credit for pioneering a “rave-rock” sound that brought Rock and Dance music into a tentative alignment. Franz Ferdinand, however, have never made a record to compare to the brilliant Bad Blood!!! by the little known Aussie band Gerling.
21. Confessions on the Dance Floor by Madonna
Madonna is a vampire who sucks youth from an orgyistic string of victims. In this case the victim (producer Stuart Price) is stronger than she, which leads Confessions on the Dance Floor to stand as a trend-setting, trance-inducing dance record—despite Madge’s overblown and self-important hyperbole.
22. Robyn by Robyn
Robyn is what happens when a 5-foot, sweet lookin’, Swedish girl throws down the brassiest, funkiest, hip-hop/electro fusion record of the decade. As sweet as she seems one thing is clear—don’t fuck with Robyn else she might kick your ass with a wink and a smile.
23. Fantasies by Metric
The cover of Metric’s 2009 album Fantasies is a photograph of a light bulb. The bright idea, it seems, was to cut all of the flourishes and record a straight up, no-holds-barred rock record. As such, it’s the strongest record yet from one of this decade’s best new bands.
24. Actor by St. Vincent
In the original Grimm’s fairy tales Snow White’s evil stepmother is forced to wear hot iron shoes until she’s dead.
25. Impossible Dream by Patty Griffin
Patty Griffin will break your heart, this much her fans know. At no place in her cannon has Patty sounded more confident, assured, and relevant than 2004’s Impossible Dream. A record for getting by.
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