J.W. Burleson photo / Boquillas del Carmen, Coah.
Sunday, September 15, 2013
The Llano Estacado #1
Just back from a trip to the Llano Estacado. There will be a bunch of posts upcoming on this strange land. For one the thing the Llano--so high and dry--is a retirement community for old trucks. More on that in later posts.
I became aware of the Llano as a kid because my father, like millions of children growing up in Germany, was fascinated by it. The Llano, though most Americans have never heard of it, has been for more than a century a landscape of dreams for millions of Germans who came of age reading Karl May's Winnetou novels.
May was Einstein's favorite author. Also Hitler's. Also my father's. (I've written about my father and Karl May and The West in an essay you can read here.)
My father was brought into defeated, furious Gemany in 1919 as a nine-year old English schoolboy after his family (Anglo Irish mother, German father) were deported from England. He taught himself to speak German by reading the Winnetou stories and novels. Which have to do with the adventures of Winnetou, chief of the Mescalero Apaches, and his (German) blood-brother, Old Shatterhand, out on the Llano Estadaco, which sprawls over the Texas Panhandle and into eastern New Mexico. For most of the 19th century this was the heart of Comancheria, the Comanche empire. The Comanches were certainly the strongest nation in this part of the world until their final defeat by the US Army in the 1870s.
The Llano is a bioregion and a distinct geographic and geologic zone. One place to begin to read about it is Horizontal Yellow: Nature and History in the Near Southwest by Dan Flores. Essentially one huge mesa, the Llano is extremely level; without any significant rivers, lakes or stream. It is bigger than most of New England and separated from the plains surrounding it by sharp, steep red cliffs--the "caprock" which defines the Llano north, east, and west. (To the south, the Llano slopes indistinctly into the Edwards Plateau and the high plains of southwest Texas.)
I began with a hike in the Palo Duro Canyon, on the eastern perimeter of the Llano, about fifteen miles east of Canyon, Texas. This rugged red rock canyon is typical of the country at the rim of the Llano, but it is an unexpected surprise after crossing the wide open plains on top of the mesa
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Tony Hoagland's America
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photo: Peter Behrens
America
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Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison
Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,
And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,
He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu
Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them
Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels
Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds
Of the thick satin quilt of America
And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,
or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,
And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,
It was not blood but money
That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills
Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,
He gasped “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were
Clogging up my heart—
And so I perish happily,
Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—
Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad
Would never speak in rhymed couplets,
And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes
And I think, “I am asleep in America too,
And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”
And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:
“I was listening to the cries of the past,
When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”
But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
Or what kind of nightmare it might be
When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river
Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters
And yet it seems to be your own hand
Which turns the volume higher?
Tony Hoagland, “America” from What Narcissism Means to Me. Copyright © 2013 by Tony Hoagland. Posted on AL with permission of the author.
Cuba Cars: 1957 DeSoto, 1950 Chevrolet, etc
Thanks to Tim Pearson for these notes, and Seth Pearson for photos, from Cuba:
"As you can see most of the rolling stock is either pre-1960 American or pre-1991 Lada. Most of the vintage American cars lost their engines years ago. Many have Asian or European diesels under the hood. The 50 Chevy we are examining had a Volga four cylinder as its power source (an optimistic pairing given the weight of the Chevy and the lack of power delivered by the Russian four). My neck hurt the first couple of days from twisting my head to see all of the remarkable old cars. Cuba = Good cars, music, food, and plenty of decaying infrastructure."--Tim Pearson
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Rolling Thunder: Bob Dylan and Parking the Winnebago in Montreal
My Bob Dylan Autoliterate story? One night in December 1975 my sister and I were heading to the Montreal Forum (Home of Les Canadiens, back when they were a hockey team) to hear Bob and the Rolling Thunder Revue. We were on Closse Street, just behind The Forum, a few minutes before the show. I was getting a little spooked--as usual--at the prospect of having to deal with a crowd situation. I wanted to hear the Bobster, but big concerts and crowds of any sort have always made me a little...nervous. I'm a Lone Ranger kind of guy: one of the reasons I prefer the Llano Estacado to, say, Williamsburg.
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| Montreal Forum 4.12.75 |
He held a puppy in his lap as he leaned out the window. "Can ya help me park this thing?"
(All my life strangers have been asking me to help park their vehicles. This even happened in Holland, in Dutch. Maybe I look like a car jockey. Hey, if it was good enough for Neal Cassidy...)
So with a couple of whistles and some hand signals I helped the Bobster wedge that enormous thing into a tight Montreal parking spot. Took a minute or two. And...c'est ca. I mean we weren't uncool enough to ask for an autograph or anything. We went into the Forum, my sister and I, found our seats, and heard the show, which was kind of astounding (with a lot of Canadians on board....Joni Mitchell was there, Robbie Robertson and some other band guys....was Neil Young there that night?) Joan Baez was. There's a story that Bob tried to get Leonard Cohen, a Montrealer, to join the troupe but Lenny declined.
From Concert Vault: "Although debate continues as to which Rolling Thunder performances were greatest, most agree that the December 4th Montreal show was a peak moment, if not one of the best nights of the tour. When Dylan released his first seriously thought out career retrospective box set in 1985, "Biograph," the "Romance In Durango" and cataclysmic version of "Isis" from this night's first set were chosen to represent the era."
Living Large in 1974: Mercury Monterey & Chevrolet Impala
These were the dinosaurs, already rolling off assembly lines when the 'oil crisis' hit with the Middle East war in October 1973. and pump prices started going up. The Merc is an extraordinarily clean car, looks like everything's original, and it's for sale. The Impala is not quite as pristine but appears solid and original. Probably these were grandparent cars. A road trip in either would be like driving your living room cross-country. Found them within a couple blocks of each other, in the Patty Jewett neighborhood on Colorado Springs.
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