((((((Jamming Shepherd I))))))

Ain't no party like a Taj Mahal Travellers party. They are tits. Set aside 103 minutes of your life and watch TAJ MAHAL TRAVELLERS ON TOUR. Released in 1973. VW bus jams for the ages.

(((Now Be Thankful)))

26.01.08. :: Late-nite viewing of "Tout va bien." Written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin. Released 16.02.73. The story is in the details. The mess of thorny brambles is the story.

I recall, in my submarine consciousness, the Wolfking (MT; of Brooklyn) having this poster hung upon his wall.

The mailman often has to come up our long dirt driveway to deliver things that I've ordered. One day he asked, "Are those flags meant to keep away evil spirits?" I replied that they were.

As it turns out, he knows a lot about arcane things like ley and dragon lines and the folks that write books about them like John Michell and Alfred Watkins. In fact, he said that he went to study with some of these fellows in England in the late 1970s. He told me that most of the people in the town of Glastonbury (a spot where ley lines, Arthurian, and Biblical myth collide) didn't take kindly to the longhairs invading their spot.* They just wanted to drink their cider in peace. Then we talked about Stonehenge for a while like it was the most normal thing in the world to be chatting about on a Wednesday afternoon.

He also knows a lot about dudes like Captain Beefheart, Roky Erikson, and the Clarence White-era Byrds. He's pretty cool.

*(See the "Glastonbury Fayre" documentary for evidence of said invasion; notable for providing Nicholas Roeg with his first photography credit, and ripping performances by Terry Reid, Fairport Convention, and Traffic, among others).

History is not the past. History is a story about the past, told in the present, and designed to be useful in constructing the future.

(((or)))

Mr. [Hugh] Nolan was a saintly man and the great historian of Ballymenone, a patch of green hills and white houses in the County Fermanagh, just north of the border breaking Ireland. His delight in youth, he said, was listening to the old people talking. From them he assembled the history of his place, and in old age his delight, he said, was speaking the truth.

The truth, he knew, is not the same as the factual. The past is gone, the facts that remain might be wrong, but you learn and ponder, doing the best you can. The truth, he said, is what you are willing to live by, and in speaking on the truth, Hugh Nolan claimed and was granted the name historian. It is the will to the truth that makes historians, separating them from other tellers of tale. Mr. Nolan did not falsify by omission. The historian, he said, must tell the whole painful story.

-Henry Glassie, 1999

Where You At Mule??

Our salvation abides in the darkness.
-Henry Glassie, 1999