Ghost Town

Guest blogging by Tom Michael

Well, thank you, mistersugar, for allowing me to guest-blog this week. It was a pleasure.

I leave you with the mystery of Lobo Texas. Officially, it’s a ghost town. But quite mysteriously, every few years, it is haunted by German-speaking ghosts.

I always leave Lobo with something of interest. Once it was a poem. Today it was an LP entitled Finnish Snow-Walks and Dances.

West Texas Traffic

Guest blogging by Tom Michael

This was blocking my way in Alpine Texas this afternoon as I drove 160 km to Lobo.

Note to Boomers

Guest blogging by Tom Michael

How many times must you reinvent middle age? I was looking forward to – and fast approaching – the traditional definition myself, but you keep moving the goalposts. Put it back and please act your age.

Reporting, not transcription

Guest blogging by Tom Michael

I understand the desire to “watch the watcher” but we ought to be careful when taking this approach.

After all, an interview is more than just getting the quotes right. If it helps for clarity, make adjustments to the quotes, too. It’s reporting, not transcription. I’ve patched together audio interviews, where the subject, and here’s a controversial statement, said something other than what they meant. No one speaks with exactitude and the best oral histories are largely edited.

And then there’s dialect. During the 1993 NBA Finals two Chicago newspapers took two methods to report a quote that I heard myself. Chicago shopowners, preparing for a victory riot, boarded up their store windows. The boastful Charles Barkley of the Phoenix Suns teased them and suggested they “remove the boards from the windows,” because the Bulls weren’t going to have a victory riot, because they weren’t going to have a victory. One paper transcribed it exactly as we all heard it on television, in full dialect. The other, better report, was more like the quote above.

Cinco de Mayo

Guest blogging by Tom Michael

Out here festivities include mariachi music, folkloric dance, a parade of lowriders, cabrito roast and kids recreating the Battle of Puebla with water pistols on the courthouse lawn.

Fleur-de-lis

Guest blogging by Tom Michael

OK, I’m still thinking about Louisville and that Derby Pie. And it’s reminding me of a recent visit by a Louisville duo (now living in LA): Chandra & Leigh Watson. The title song of their debut album, Southern Manners, is a sweet melody about pie; sample it here.

My southern manners do oblige
Won’t you come on over for a slice of pie.

Run For The Roses

Guest blogging by Tom Michael

Tomorrow morning my pal Camp is driving 200 miles in order to watch the prizefight between Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather. For me, though, this Saturday is Derby Day, featuring that shortest of sporting events: horseracing.

Horseracing holds a special place for me; my grandfather and then my father had a box at Arlington Park, and quite a few family tales flow from it. Here’s an odd confession: driving my 16-month-old daughter into town the other day, I had an overwhelming sensation to take her to the track. For other fathers I’m sure it’s the first baseball game or first time on ice skates.

No predictions here. Last week I had dinner with one of the owners of Churchill Downs, but forgot to ask him to handicap this year’s race.

Next year, however, my Louisville friend Whitney promised me a slice of Derby Pie, which is heavy with chocolate, pecans and apparently trademarks.

Tune in Now

Guest blogging by Tom Michael

You may be wondering what’s with the recent posts about Marfa Texas on a North Carolina-based blog. (For those of us living in and around this remote tiny town, sometimes it doesn’t seem so disconnected.) But in an odd coincidence today (thanks for the tip, mistersugar), there is a Marfa-NC link… but you must act now.

If you’re in North Carolina and it’s noon, you need to tune your radio (or browser) to WUNC (91.5 FM Chapel Hill, and elsewhere) to hear The State of Things with host Frank Stasio. You are in for a treat.

The very talented musician Tift Merritt will be on the show. She is working with our radio station, Marfa Public Radio, on a new program called The Spark. Tift is smart, sweet, hard-working and apparently too modest for not telling me about this appearance.

And if you miss it at noon, it reprises at 9 PM and afterwards can be found in the TSOT podcast.

West Texas Television

Guest blogging by Tom Michael

It’s been too long since I’ve been to NC, but quite a few bands I like hail from the state (more on that later). I once saw Vic Chesnutt play from his wheelchair at Cat’s Cradle, where this Sunday the stage is set for The Gourds, who I caught at Austin City Limits. The Gourds are the prototypical Austin band, and Gin and Juice, their bluegrass cover of a rap hit, is a local anthem in the Texas capital. Like the clerk in Woodstock NY who is a novelist or the waiter in Los Angeles CA who is a screenwriter, in Austin TX everyone seems to be a musician.

It’s drifted over into my part of the state, where around the “West Texas television” (i.e., campfire), I remain, according to my wife, “the only guy in town” who doesn’t play guitar. When David Byrne visited (& borrowed my bike!), he said much of the same:

It took me a bit to get used to this homey approach to music and performance. New Yorkers are sadly more “professional” in their attitude towards their art. … When I first encountered and participated in these campfire sings I realized the meaning and resonance of these things goes deeper — to some extent this is a way of resisting the century-old trend of produced and commodified entertainment and culture.

Texas

Guest blogging by Tom Michael

As guest blogger for the week, it’s nice to be on the same page as mistersugar. Because he’s one of the most avid readers I know, he may appreciate this tale.

I live in the Big Bend region of rural Far West Texas, in the state’s largest county, at a spot called Calamity Creek. Big skies, few people. The nearby towns are Alpine, Marfa, Fort Davis and Marathon. Add up all four towns and we still don’t reach 10,000 – even on our tippy-toes.

I serve on the board of a local library, which is raising funds to build a new facility to replace the little cottage that houses it. The other day, an old man from the senior center walked in. He announced he’d never been in a library and had only read one book in his life (the Bible), but he wanted to try another. The librarian gave him Texas, by James Michener.

Since he was in a library, he thought the proper thing to do was to sit down and read. And that’s what he did, page by page – more than 1,500 of them. He came into the library in the morning, left in the evening and said very little.

A few days later, he finished Texas and returned it to the librarian. “That was a good story,” he said. “This Michener fellow ought to write another.”

Why mistersugar? Why a pig?

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