Archive for September, 2005
82 items.
There is a little place in Cottonwood, Arizona called Hobo Joe’s Coffee Shop. 660 E Mingus Ave. My dad, Marty and H.o.p. and I were pointed to Hobo Joe’s by my mother who had never actually eaten there.
I ordered the green chili omelette with cheddar and hash browns and biscuit. “Good choice,” said the blond waitron, whose name I forget but she is one of those few with the personality to make you feel that every customer she’s ever waited on was a friend frequenting the establishment for as many years as she’d been working there, the kind of waitron who if she ever changes jobs and goes to wait at another place, the customers pick up their chairs and follow her. She made me feel special by saying, “Good choice.” And she didn’t look at me cross-eyed though I was covered with hundreds of flaming red hundreds of hives.
They have the biggest biscuits in the world. Cross my heart, poke a needle in my eye if it isn’t the truth (don’t challenge me on this, please). The biscuit needed its own chair. It was about 4 inches in height. Who needs to be eating a Babe and the Blue Ox sized biscuit, I don’t know, but I was on vacation and vacations are for things you don’t normally do, even if it’s as mundane as eating a really big biscuit, and I was ready for it. And it was just right. I should have taken a picture but it didn’t occur to me until I was done eating it. The call to eat that biscuit was too strong to wait for a photo.
Marty had country-fried steak and hash browns, a couple of scrambled eggs, and his way of describing the biscuit is to say it was about the size of his head. He says the steak, was different from the southern style he’s used to, not quite as spicy, but he was pleased with it and devoured it all.
While we ate, late-morning stragglers, another table with a man in a wheelchair (easy access!) congratulated her and the cook on something they were eating which they said was the best of whatever it was that they’d ever had. I don’t know whether they had her call out the cook or whether the waitron brought him out on her own initiative but he appeared in his long white apron and soaked up the praise. I’m not certain the cook was the owner of the coffee shop but he sounded like he was. Appearances and feel indicate that Hobo Joe’s is a mom-and-pop coffee shop.
There was a mural and dozens of framed hand-drawn pics on the walls that I didn’t examine and wish that I had.
There was another Hobo Joe’s, a long defunct chain, based out of Scotsdale, Arizona, begun by Robert Goldwater, a brother of Barry Goldwater. A man named Applegate hooked up with Goldwater and a guy nmaed Martori in the 60s and Hobo Joe’s was born, each establishment apparently graced with the statue of a hobo. The Humpty-Dumpty Coffeeshops were also gratis the same team, and eventually Applegate birthed Applegate.
The Hobo Joe’s of yesteryear is mentioned in the 1977 book, “The Arizona Project”, by Michael Wendland.
It’s an old saying in Arizona that what money won’t buy, sex will. And the saying is not without merit. For in almost every aspect of the state’s business dealings being investigated by the visiting reporters, sex-in the form of well-paid prostitutes or carefully kept mistresses-played a major role. Without seeking it out, the reporters kept stumbling across example after example: a couple of extremely prominent lawyers who staged weekly sex-party poker games for their well-heeled business clients; a land fraud huckster who bought a Phoenix tavern for his mistress; a Tucson drug dealer who kept two Las Vegas hookers on annual retainers; an elderly judge whose vice was young girls; and a well-known Phoenix politician and businessman whose kinky sex habits were paid for in diamonds, thus earning him the nickname “Diamondman” in the trick book of almost every madame in the Southwest.
I would imagine that the owner of the Cottonwood Hobo Joe’s is aware of the legacy the Hobo Joe’s name carries with it so I am curious as to why the name was chosen.
If I lived in Cottonwood I’d be down at Hobo Joe’s several mornings a week, I think. As a shooter for every catastrophe in life I know I’d be down there.
9Comment
For the hell of it. Has nothing to do with Stone bridge (the blog) but saw this water tower somewhere just outside Memphis, was reminded of Stonebridge (the blog), and thought hey why not grab a pic of the tower as we went whizzing on by. Just barely got the shot. No time for framing.
Now to find my dental floss. I’d be in bed and catching some sleep before H.o.p. gets up but I haven’t been able to locate my dental floss in all our luggage. But it’s a good thing I was up at 6 AM as George dropped by, who had been taking care of our fish, was unaware we’d returned, and I was able to say thanks and give him a gift and get back our key.
I’d say the vacation made me miss being on the road except that being on the road you never have an opportunity to see anything at all. Ever. Nothing.
We’re back and our fish are still alive. My husband’s father has been battling ALS the past five years and landed in the hospital a couple of weeks before we were to set out on a long-planned vacation to the Ioway Fall Encampment in Kansas and then down to see my mother in Cottonwood and my father in Phoenix, Arizona. When the doctor said things were not critical, we set out on our first real vacation in I’m not going to tell you how long, but it’s been a very long time since we’ve had a vacation.
And man was it grand.
I checked email once, a week into the trip, and discovered that despite my setting the website not to allow trackbacks or comments by individuals not previously approved, the casinos had managed to find their way in anyhow and I had over 700 comments and trackbacks that I wasn’t going to be able to delete for another week. So tonight I deleted about 1200 trackbacks and comments total…
Now I’ve started transferring pics from the digital cameras to the computer. Am hoping I came up with a few good shots.
We hit (gasp) Ruby Falls! Indeed, the same that has long called for my presence from multiple tin roofs for many years but to which I’d refused to answer until a seven-year-old was in the car and I decided it was time, young son should see Ruby Falls, and though the cavern made me want to run screaming the first few minutes I preserved a brave, cheerful appearance for sake of young son and was soon enchanted by the tour guide who had the most profound southern accent I’ve ever heard. And we saw the Grand Canyon (not very many Americans this time of year, lots of Germans) where–unlike some tourists I saw who climbed out onto a rock ledge and encouraged their little boy to sit with his feet dangling over the chasm for a photo op–I kept yelling at young son, who wanted to throw rocks in it, not to get to close to the edge, and most of the time had a firm grasp on his wrist as the blustery winds made me nervous. We toured the Heard Museum in Phoenix and Frank Lloyd Wright’s western studio at Phoenix. And visited he International Museum of the Painted Desert (the private one).
We watched only enough news to know that returning by I-20 might not be the best idea after Rita and instead took the I-40 route back.
I managed to read a couple of books and start another, none of which had a thing to do with politics, but every so often stopped in front of a newspaper box when buying gas and coffee (do not purchase coffee ever in Oklahoma City because it may be guaranteed as hot and fresh but it ain’t coffee) and this AM Marty dropped in my lap the news that Tom Delay was indicted.
Just to show I was thinking of you, I whipped out the camera when we were buying coffee Wednesday evening and a Halliburton truck pulled up next to us somewhere in the middle of nowhere in the panhandle of Texas.
To prove I’d been on vacation, here’s a pic of me I permitted to be taken at Cadillac Ranch outside of Amarillo.
That’s my son throwing himself around my waist in a bid to get his face, for a second, out of the wind that was ripping at my sweater. Not that he didn’t enjoy the wind. He did. It felt good after days of 100 degree Arizona temps.
Not the best pic in the world, by far, but it’ll have to do.
I’ve always wanted to see the Cadillac Ranch. I ran around taking lots of photos feeling very happy that I was finally at Cadillac Ranch. We were all alone at the Cadillac Ranch for a good ten minutes before a tour showed up with cans of spray paint. We didn’t spray paint our names. I figured that they would shortly be painted over so why bother. I wasn’t there to make my mark, instead to let Cadillac Ranch make its mark on me, whatever that is.
Speaking of marks made, what you can’t see in the photo is the spider bite I received on my right hand the first day out, which conjured a nasty systemic reaction of hundreds of hives that spread all over my arms, chest, neck and part of my face, making me appear, throughout the entire trip, to be covered with several cases of pox piled on top of each other. Maybe it’s time to get some epinephrine to carry with me. I’ve had this reaction to bees and wasps and I’ve been bitten twice before by brown recluses and had some nonlocal reaction but not before to a regular spider bite, and I know this was a spider because I saw it land on my hand the first day of the trip, a teeny thing that I brushed off and didn’t realize until later it had bitten me, swelling nastily and turning a pretty ugly wound. But no necrosis as with the brown recluses. Being on my first vacation in years and years, I wasn’t going to let a systemic reaction get in my way and slathered myself with cortizone cream and aloe (did no good) and took Benadryl at night so I could try to sleep. We were almost always in 100 degree temps demanding sleeveless shirts so there was no hiding the reaction, but people were amazingly polite and didn’t flee in the opposite direction.
My mom’s dog ate the top part of my boots so I’ll be needing some new ones and I just missed walking through a proper doorway and gashed the lens of my glasses on a wall where air should have been so I’m going to need some new ones and my son took out my amber bracelet and placed it for “safekeeping” on a shelf in some motel and thus I lost my safely kept amber bracelet, and a pothole meant readjusting tires in Phoenix, but that’s all there was as far as mishaps.
Nothing like the West. I wanted to get out and start walking until I hit the far horizon and then keep on walking. It’s always painful tearing myself away and coming back East. And now that I’ve seen Arizona from one end to the other I’m crazy about it. I think it’s just about the best place in the world. You can forget about reading anything about politics for a while here. I’m going to post some pics from the trip. Hell, I may never post about politics again. I didn’t miss my blog not for one second…
But I have to admit my toes kind of curled tickly and I almost got gigglywhen Marty dropped the Dallas newspaper in my lap with that awful cute picture of Tom Delay puffing at a bevy of microphones.
You think I could get away with a cowboy hat, cowboy boots and a poncho or do you think people would make fun of me?
Circumstances have it where I likely won’t be blogging for the rest of September. Toodles.
Raise your hands if you saw the pics of all the looted televisions and microwaves piled up at the convention center
September 13th, 2005 |Posted In: General, Katrina and post-Katrina
Since Hurricane Katrina I’ve returned several times to look at the Pentagon’s study, published 2003, “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security”.
The paragrphs I’ve been drawn to are the following:
Steven LeBlanc, Harvard archaeologist and author of a new book called Carrying Capacity, describes the relationship between carrying capacity and warfare. Drawing on abundant archaeological and ethnological data, LeBlanc argues that historically humans conducted organized warfare for a variety of reasons, including warfare over resources and the environment. Humans fight when they outstrip the carrying capacity of their natural environment. Every time there is a choice between starving and raiding, humans raid. From hunter/gatherers through agricultural tribes, chiefdoms, and early complex societies, 25% of a population’s adult males die when war breaks out.
Peace occurs when carrying capacity goes up, as with the invention of agriculture, newly effective bureaucracy, remote trade and technological breakthroughs. Also a large scale die-back such as from plague can make for peaceful times—Europe after its major plagues, North American natives after European diseases decimated their populations (that’s the difference between the Jamestown colony failure and Plymouth Rock success). But such peaceful periods are short-lived because population quickly rises to once again push against carrying capacity, and warfare resumes. Indeed, over the millennia most societies define themselves according to their ability to conduct war, and warrior culture becomes deeply ingrained. The most combative societies are the ones that survive.
However in the last three centuries, LeBlanc points out, advanced states have steadily lowered the body count even though individual wars and genocides have grown larger in scale. Instead of slaughtering all their enemies in the traditional way, for example, states merely kill enough to get a victory and then put the survivors to work in their newly expanded economy. States also use their own bureaucracies, advanced technology, and international rules of behavior to raise carrying capacity and bear a more careful relationship to it.
All of that progressive behavior could collapse if carrying capacities everywhere were suddenly lowered drastically by abrupt climate change. Humanity would revert to its norm of constant battles for diminishing resources, which the battles themselves would further reduce even beyond the climatic effects. Once again warfare would define human life.
The scenarios of catastrophe which may be caused by global warming are less interesting to me at the moment than the relationship of warfare to carrying capacity laid out in what seems a neat and logical way, but is more like a slasher’s history of the world in which huge chunks have been excised as irrelevant. “Need that? Nope. Don’t need that, complicates things. Cut that.” I’ve not read LeBlanc’s book, so I can’t remark on it, instead I’m only remarking on this particular report. The History of the World is big and sprawling and I know very little of it, but from my untidy corner I’ve managed to carve out of in-the-box’s walls, over the years, a few windows, and reading the above paragraphs I noticed how it seems outstripping the carrying capacity of the environment infers real need, not taking into account conspicuous consumption, nor was distribution of wealth mentioned.
Reading, I had a rude vision of Bush flying over New Orleans thinking, “Readjusting our carrying capacity.”
Here is my history of the world–or at least what I know of the Euro-American world–and maybe Rome and some other assorted empires. I’ve not a single study to back me up. Not one. I can’t dump any sources on you. But here goes.
The well-to-do sit down to eat at a fine feast and they don’t know when to stop.
That’s it. That’s my course in economics.
And they complain that the impoverished have uncontrollable appetites which know no moderation.
When the slave class can no longer support the burden of the wealth of the rich, then the rich begin to talk “carrying capacity”.
Reading the report my thoughts didn’t go to warfare between nations but a class and race war that’s being waged within the United States.
Here in America some States exercise the death penalty against individuals convicted of certain extreme acts of violence. In the wake of Katrina, some public sentiment on the right has been tantamount to declaring a death sentence against any who are economically and physically disadvantaged. Not that this hasn’t already been the case in America, and Katrina exposed it.
There are some individuals who condemn the survivors and casualties trapped in the hurricane and flood for not planning ahead, state this is the number one reason for poverty, not planning ahead, and pretty much condemn them all to the waters that overtook them.
Rescue and relief is being talked about, by some others on the right, as if it is welfare.
In connection with Katrina aid, several conservative websites had links to Gerry Phelps’ “What the Poor are Like”. A sample of one of the postings is below:
Gerry Charlotte Phelps shares lessons learned the hard way about working with poor people. She’s not saying we can’t help the poor victims of Katrina better themselves once the immediate emergency is over. She’s just warning that it may not be as easy as some people like to think.
And from another site:
Here’s a sad — albeit eye-opening — post detailing just how different the truly multi-generational poor are from the Middle and Working Classes — published to help prepare those who are taking in Katrina refugees
…taking the poor out of the confines of New Orleans, and disbursing them throughout healthier environments may actually help the poor by exposing them to behaviors new to them (interactive child care, the virtue of work, etc). The whole idea about rebuilding N.O. and pouring the poor right back into their crowded communities — communities that reinforce damaging behaviors — may be the worse thing we can do to them. Perhaps N.O. should become a simple port city, with homes for oil rig and dock/port workers — and nothing more.
How does rescue and relief for survivors of a hurricane that affected 90,000 square miles, and the flood that swallowed most of New Orleans and the lower parishes turn into a “social experiment” ? The below is from a comment left on one of the above blogs.
Nothing can pop a rescue fantasy like hard reality. It is wonderful that people want to help the hurricane victims but the situation is more complicated than mere “rescue”, and after a few days, weeks, and conflicts later the reality will set in. I eagerly await reports regarding the success rate of this interesting social experiment.
Now, you tell me, please. What the hell does any of this have to do with rescue and relief of hurricane and flood survivors? And, no, don’t say well it’s because they were impoverished that put them in peril in the first place, don’t tell me that in the way the right intends it, because that is still putting blame on the impoverished for being victims of a catastrophe, and also neglects the fact that included among those unable to escape were the feeble, the elderly, the sick and the children.
No, what I’m saying is since when did rescue and relief from a disaster turn into a moralizing issue? As if the hand that comes along and plucks you from the flood says, “Tsk, tsk, we can’t make it too easy for you. It’s your failed morals that got you into this position in the first place, and in exchange for our saving you it is now your duty to reform.”
It begins to sound a lot like an old testament god sending the flood to wipe away the evil of the earth. Noah, the good, who planned ahead, made it out. But in the modern world, since god promised never to destroy all life again by means of flood, that means the riffraff are flushed to their roofs. Rescue them, as you humanely must, but convict them of their evil which caused their lives to be overtaken by the waters in the first place.
A posting that covers a number of bases in this regard I give below, in its entirety, becaust it’s exemplary of the above attitude.
Source: Mikesnoise
Two of the most disturbing aspects of mankind’s sinful nature are our willingness to covet, and our appetite for revenge. We’re seeing these two traits exemplified without restraint right now in New Orleans.
As I blogged earlier, the residents of New Orleans are disproportionately poor. About 1/3 of the residents live below the poverty level. Most of these are black. They have lived this way for generation upon generation, back to the days following Reconstruction. They are mostly working poor, depending on hourly jobs to barely make ends meet.
Ok, so far so good. Except that when you’re working poor you can’t barely make ends meet. The ends stay far apart and hell of a lot of needs fall, untended, through the gap between.
One of the most challenging aspects of working with the perpetually poor is that they hold a deeply ingrained belief that someone or something else — “the man”, “the system” — is responsible for their plight. They feel that they are trapped in a world where the priviledged strive to keep everyone else down, and they are convinced that, save for winning a lottery or becoming successful in show business or sports, they will always be poor for the rest of their lives. Such irrational beliefs often foster and perpetuate wild conspiracy theories – “George Bush and the CIA invented crack cocaine to kill black people,” etc. And being poorly educated, for the most part, doesn’t help.
The acknowledgement was made the working poor have it tough. Now, however, they are at fault for not pulling themselves up by bootstraps in a system that hamstrings through slave wages and a hacked up social safety net through which fall any experiencing the personal hardships of illness or periodic unemployment in these years of economic instability when job availability has been in the low-paying service industry.
Now that something threatens to destroy the only world that they know — jobs, family, community, neighbors, homes — what are they to do? The anger and resentment that the impoverished feel toward the larger world, a resentment that is nurtured by inadequate education and poverty-exploiting civil rights leaders, is usually dampened by law enforcement. But when law enforcement fails, literally all “hell” breaks loose, and the poor exact their “revenge.” Looting becomes less about finding food, and more about getting even. For these people, a stolen TV or Gameboy represents a piece of the dream that has been denied to them by the rich white man.
But what do they do next?
I find it utterly amazing that those in the middle of such a tempest of destruction and suffering can make pure materialism their most important priority. It’s fascinating to watch people carrying looted items on their heads because the streets are flooded waist-high. What on earth are they going to do with television sets or a microwave ovens when their houses are being washed away? Hasn’t anyone thought any of this through?
Indeed, I didn’t notice new televisions and microwaves piled high in front of the Convention Center, at the Superdome and on top of the roofs of flooded houses and apartments, which is odd because I’m certain if they’d been there the media would have zeroed in on them. When the National Guard said, “Sorry, can’t take your salvaged belongings with you on the bus, no room,” well, think of all those television sets taken from those arms and piled up high outside those buses. What a sight it must have been. I wish I had pictures. Where are they?
Sadly the answer is “no.” Impoverished people in the United States have long been obsessed with materialism. Crime is rampant in inner city neighborhoods because youths place such a high priority on expensive, showy items — cars, jewelry, shoes, electronics, etc. For them, it is less of an evil to break the law by stealing or selling drugs than it is to go without the “bling.”
Make a note of that. Only impoverished people are obsessed with materialism. The middle class and upper class are not. The middle class and uppper class may be stuffed full of goods but evidently one is not obsessed with materialism if one is able to afford whatever one might materially want or need. Also, the middle class and upper class don’t do drugs. Or when they do it is an illness. But when the poor or working poor do drugs then it is a moral failing.
Impoverished people in America also consistently fail to plan beyond the immediate future. There are a variety of reasons for this, not the least of which is the gigantic government entitlement safety net that we have created. The idea seems to be, irregardless of how frivolously I spend my pocket money, the state will always be there to pay for my food, rent, and doctor bills.
Pennies for pocket money doesn’t do much in the safety net and planning ahead game, especially if you’re looking under the cushions for pennies with which to buy necessities, like food. It doesn’t take much of a brain to calculate that even at $8 an hour (far above the minimum wage) you’re talking $320 a week is $1280 a month before taxes taken out. Subtract rent and food from that and let’s see how far you can go in the planning ahead department. Much less on minimum wage. There is simply no surviving on it. There is no “frivolous” spending on that kind of income because that kind of income simply doesn’t allow for it. I can tell you that life on welfare doesn’t look so hot to me either. If I was on a game show and someone pulled aside a curtain and said, “Your prize! Life in the projects! Rent and food on the state!” I’d pass. But if I was on welfare, despite real welfare payments having declined already by 50% between 1975 and the 1996 welfare reform bill, I’m telling you that life on minimum or low wages that would leave me unable to pay for even rent and food, wouldn’t be a great incentive for me to find work in a system in which the top 5% possesses more than half the wealth, the top 20% possesses more than 80% of the wealth, leaving the bottom 20% with no assets. The top 1% holds half of all non-home wealth, the top 10% own 85% of outstanding stocks, 85% of financial securities, 90% of business assets–a despicable inequality in distribution of wealth that surpasses any other any other advanced industrial country.
Those are statistics from 1998. The disparity is even greater in 2005. And I wonder if the statistics include the growing number of individuals who have fallen through the cracks and aren’t counted at all except for an occasional attempt at estimating the number of homeless.
But now the system in New Orleans has completely broken down, and the destruction has reached such an ultimate level that there is nothing but hopelessness and despair for many of its citizens. No one can magically replace their belongings, or guarantee them a job, or even restore the meager standard of living that they once had. For maybe the first time in their lives, the future is uncertain. Survival becomes — literally — every man for himself.
What the hell is this numbnut talking about? When are the lives of the disadavantaged not uncertain? And again, show me the pictures of the piles of looted electronics stacked head-high at the convention center and the superdome and on the interstates upon which rooftop survivors were dropped.
What in the world does any of this have to do with rescue and relief? Impoverishment, fragility, vulnerability has to do with why so many were left behind in New Orleans. It has nothing to do with rescue and relief.
Revisit the statistics on wealth in the U.S. from 1998 and let’s talk carrying capacity and who’s carrying who.
In class war or any other kind of war, I can tell you whose 25% of the adult male population isn’t and won’t be dying in order to adjust the balance.
Another survivor’s account is at Ratboy’s Anvil.
I subscribe to Robert Krampf’s Experiment of the Week newsletter. Today Experiment #442 Melting Ice was the offering. H.o.p. is game for anything to do with water and ice. Perfect.
We were instructed to put an ice cube in boiling water and hold one under a stream of cold water. The question was, which would melt the ice faster, the boiling water or the stream of cold water? H.o.p. said the boiling water. Krampf says the stream of cold water. He explains that though the greater the difference between the temperature of the ice and its surroundings, the faster the heat will move into the cube causing it to melt…
When you first put the ice into the hot water, heat moved quickly in from the
surrounding water, causing the ice to melt. That left it surrounded by a
layer of cold water from the freshly melted ice and water that had given up a
lot of its heat as the ice melted. This layer of cool water insulated the ice,
slowing the melting process.Even though the running water was cool, it was still quite a bit warmer than
the ice. It was flowing, so any melted ice was quickly carried away, and the
insulating layer of cold water did not form. The flowing water provided a
constant supply of heat to continue the melting process, so it melted the ice
much faster.
Ok. I set up with H.o.p. the boiling water, and for good measure a bowl of cold water in which to put a third ice cube. We took turns being the one to hold the cube under the flowing cold water. We did this seven times. We did the experiment seven times. At least. We kept repeating it because the ice in the boiling water kept melting faster. We kept hoping to get the correct result. We even tried it with water that was not actively boiling, which had been removed from the burner.
We are bad scientists. Only once did our flowing cold water melt the ice faster than the boiling water, and that was when the water wasn’t flowing, when it was instead turned up to a pelting furious rainstorm blast that would scour off your top layer of skin.
Footage from the restricted "Freedom Walk" which had restricted media access and from which the general public was barred
September 12th, 2005 |Posted In: General
The Rev. Mykeru’s Freedom Walk Video, Wherein your humble minister infiltrates the heart of thickness looking for recruits. Boys and girls didn’t flock to respond to Operation Yellow Elephant’s call for enlistee’s to fight their war.
With a nod to Dharma Bums who got me started thinking about it. Rexroth’s Daughter wrote a beautiful post on the how and why she is a collector of handshakes and her passion for it is a beautiful one unsullied by dropping-name ambitions, each handshake opening to the worlds of those others and the people with whom they’ve shaken hands, a the conviction of inter-relatedness symbolized in that brief touch, traveling on, connecting us with the journey and experiences of, eventually, everyone.
Anyway, this is something I’ve thought about putting together for H.o.p. from time to time, a brief collection of the people we’ve known and those tendrils. Because one day he may be curious. Or maybe not. And even if I don’t put it together, I for some reason have always thought I ought to write a brief piece here about Thumbs Carllile, so I will go ahead and do so. Don’t know why. He just has always come to mind in that way. A person you’ve known that ought to be remembered, and his family remarked upon.
Marty, my husband, sat in with Thumbs’ trio a few times and has played with his daughter, Kathy, in her band “Tabasco” in an off-and-on forever kind of way. She sings a shred-the-velvet-curtains blues, huge voice wringing out her diminutive frame until all that’s left is a halo of soul. Tammy, another daughter of Thumbs, and a hell of a singer as well, did the vocal for some music in a play of mine once. And I was present when Virginia, Thumbs’ wife, sang, “I’m so lonely I could cry” at his wake at The Freight Room in 1987, which is something I will never forget. Nor will I forget his funeral, which was a funeral one could respect, and that’s rare.
I’d heard that Virginia could sing. But Virginia was pure, unaffected, mortal intervention for us all, the-gods-must-turn-their-heads-and-listen transcendence.
The last time I looked up Thumbs’ name on the internet there wasn’t too much about him up there, which seemed such an injustice. But he has more of a presence now and there is a site selling rare, out-of-print recordings of Thumbs’ music. If you go over there, listen to “Me & Memphis” from “On His Own”, and “Curves Ahead” on “Jazz Carllile Style” is a nice one as well, despite the Fender piano, I’ve always hated Fender piano. Jazz and blues with an overtone of country influence.
Thumbs Carllisle was not only an exceptional guitarist, he was known for his unusual style of playing, sitting with his guitar in his lap and fretting, picking, strumming, twanging with fingers and thumbs. Thumbs is one of the guitar world’s greats and unfortunately one of the great unknowns. I read now of people who hunger for having seen him perform live or who treasure having seen him playing in Roger Miller’s band on television, and I feel privileged as Thumbs was playing Mondays at The Point when I was waitressing there back in 1987, so I got to hear him a number of times.
The Point was a rare little club located in Atlanta’s Little Five Points. My husband played and wrote music with Tommy Dean, a brother of the owner, Britt Dean, and because it was the kind of a club that would have Thumbs playing on Mondays is why I pursued a job there when I couldn’t stand the idea of another day gig from which I’d flee in horror after a few weeks. It was a middle-sized room with a nice large stage, a long bar at the back, a dance floor and tables between the dance floor and the bar, and was a venue where people did actually not infrequently go to listen to music rather than to just be seen listening to music. They certainly didn’t go there for the food, which though pretty good was an afterthought of a sequence of vendors renting out the kitchen.
Thumbs should have been packing out that room on Mondays, and that he wasn’t says something about the world because the quality of the music was stellar, but then his name did start getting around, people became aware of what was going on and attendance started picking up. It was the kind of music where you know you’re listening to its history and the history of music in the making, you know that someone should be there recording it for the future when people realize what they’ve missed and start turning over every rock looking for it. In that room was the history of the hardware of electric guitar, its knobs and strings, mixed with whispers of its fledgling players, of Les Paul who built one of the first electric guitars, and all the voices and hands with which Thumbs had made music over the years–they were all present on those Mondays. His wife, Virginia would sit at a table against the left wall near the front of the room. And sometimes Tammy would be there, and often Kathy would be as well, always barefoot.
Virginia is one of the most unassuming, genuine persons I’ve ever known–and whether it’s genetic or not I don’t know but her daughters and grandchildren are every bit the same. Still, she was always a bit of a mystery to me, not that she was sitting almost square in front of a door you perhaps weren’t supposed to notice. I would say it was only the night she sang that I felt there she was unbridled, but that’s wrong, for it is that genuineness which gave her voice such a spirit of truth, she opening the song to reveal its hidden parts, rather than it releasing something reserved in her.
Virginia sent me the above picture of Thumbs and it’s exactly Thumbs as I knew him, but the Thumbs in the pics on his albums also looks exactly Thumbs. “On His Own”, “Life and Times”, “Guitar Wizard”.
Below is a picture Kenneth Ray Carllile as a child on a tenant farm, stories of which were still close enough that they came up freely in conversation.
As you should have the vital statistics, here’s a brief bio of Thumbs from the Century of Country website:
Kenneth Ray Carllile (April 2 1931 to July 31, 1987)
Thumbs Carllile was a very talented musician who devised a style of playing guitar that would grace many a record and many a live performance. Thumbs grew up on a tenanted farm in Harrisburg, Illinois, where he wore overshoes made out of discarded truck tires. When he was 8, his sister Evelyn won a Dobro for selling Cloverine salve. He borrowed the instrument so much, that Evelyn hid the steel bar and so he started to play with his thumbs. His father later gave him a Sears Silvertone guitar but as Kenneth couldn’t curl his short, fat fingers around the neck he wore it Dobro-style and played it as if he was playing a piano. In recent times, only the blind Canadian Blues/Rock guitarist Jeff Healy has played like this. When he was 10, Thumb’s family moved to Granite City, near St. Louis, Missouri. He made his debut that year at the Music Box club in East St. Louis during a Ferlin Husky gig and played Sweet Georgia Brown. The audience was ecstatic. At 16, he was kicked out of school for “not shaving.”
When asked how he would make a living, he held up his thumbs. He did some gigs with Husky and then was discovered by Little Jimmy Dickens playing in a nightclub in St. Louis. It was Dickens who gave him his nickname, which he never really liked. He got the job with Little Jimmy after demonstrating that he could play both parts of Dickens’ twin guitar lines on his own. Carllile performed with Dickens’ Country Boys on and off from 1949 to 1952, including appearances on the Grand Ole Opry. From 1952 through 1954, Thumbs was a member of the Army’s Special Services. While on a base in Stuttgart, Germany, he met another recruit, Virginia Boyle, who was singing in an army show and they married in 1955. From 1954 to 1957, Thumbs was a member of Bill Wimberley’s Rhythm Boys. During this time, he also joined Red Foley’s Troupe and became a featured musician on the Ozark Jubilee. In 1961, Thumbs met Les Paul, who was excited by Virginia’s songwriting and Thumbs’ ability. He took them to his home in Mahwah, New Jersey and recorded enough material for two albums. That year, Carllile released a single on Epic with Ginny O’Boyle entitled Indian Girl, Indian Boy/Now That You’re Leavin’ Me. During 1963, he became a member of the Wade Ray Five and Wade Ray’s Las Vegas band. Shortly after this in 1964, Thumbs joined Roger Miller and stayed with him for eight years. In 1964 and 1965, he appeared at the Grammy Awards show with Miller when Roger swept the board. Thumbs also appeared on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show on NBC-TV five times between 1961and 1968 with Miller. During this time, Roger Miller got Thumbs signed to Smash Records. He released two albums for the label, Roger Miller Presents Thumbs Carllile and All Thumbs (both 1965). He also released one single for Smash in 1966, My Bossa Nova/Candy Girl. Several tracks that he recorded for Smash became popular, if not charting. These included Let it Be Me, Caravan, No Yesterday, Theme From Picnic, Blue Skies, Stranger On The Shore and Hold It. Two years later, Carllile signed with Capitol and released the album Walking in Guitar Land. No singles were released but again, certain tracks caught the public’s interest. These were It’s A Good Day, Work Song and High Noon. In 1980, Thumbs’ daughter Kathy had a middle order hit with Stay Until The Rain Stops on Frontline. During 1986, the family moved from Chattanooga to Atlanta, where Virginia had to work in a factory making springs. Thumbs had to undergo surgery for colon cancer, which, despite fund- raisers, left the family bankrupt; a sad thing to happen to such a talented man. He started to play on WRFG Atlanta’s Sagebrush Boogie thanks to David Chamberlain, who was a Carllile admirer. Chamberlain also arranged for him to open for guitarist Michael Hedges. On July 31, 1987, Thumbs suffered a heart attack and died.
I never think of Thumbs playing country, instead that jazzy-blues, but he was at the Grand Ol’ Opry for years. I’m not a musicologist, so if you’re looking for that kind of reading this is the wrong place, sorry, and I’m not a good one with anecdotes, but if you want a little story about his time at the Grand Ol’ Opry, Thumbs told Marty what when he started at the Opry there were three guitarists. One of them quit a while later, and they said, ‘Well, Thumbs, you can pick up the parts he was playing.” A couple of years after that the other guitarist quit. Again, they told him, “Thumbs, you can pick up the parts he was playing.” A while after that Thumbs realized he was doing the job of three guitarists. He went to management and asked for the pay of the other two guitarists since he was doing their job. The Opry management said no so Thumbs quit and went to work with Les Paul. The thing is, the way he played, he could play what three guitarists were playing.
The bio mentions Thumbs’ short, fat hands, and it’s true. I knew who he was before I met him, because of my husband playing with him. And when I met him I looked at those hands and wondered how and then you saw him play and would be transfixed, watching those hands.
Marty met Thumbs at The Point. Jerry Peek was the bass player in his trio, a jazz player who came out of the Steve Morse band. We don’t remember the name of the drummer.
The first time Marty played with Thumbs was a session for a simple little rock-a-billy song, a low-budget song demo for someone, Marty doesn’t recall who, and a drum machine instead of a real drummer. They started the first take and Marty realized half way through the intro that he wasn’t playing anymore, because he was so astounded by Thumbs’ playing. They started the second and third takes and the same thing happened. At that point, the bass player and Marty said they’d wait outside until Thumbs finished playing the basic track and then they’d overdub on it. Neither one of them could play with Thumbs, they were so overwhelmed by what they were hearing.
One more anecdote. A story of musicians being laid out by other musicians, Marty tells me, “Les Paul and Thumbs were driving down the Coastal Highway in Northern California and ‘Black Dog’ by Led Zeppelin came on the radio. It was the first time either one of them had heard the band and they were so overwhelmed that Thumbs told me they had to pull off the road and just listen until the song was over, they couldn’t even drive.”
Thumbs was a soft-spoken nice person, funny. He’d come back to the waitress station for coffee, water, whatever and chat and make jokes. I looked forward to his coming back and getting coffee. He always had a story. not spectacular stories that stand taller on a stage broadcasting over you. They were piece of sharing life stories, spontaneously taken from a shelf and dusted off in conversation, that make you feel comfortable with a person, so you look forward to chatting and hearing more of the same that you can piece together and make into a frame.
Things were going well. The air was gaining a burnished gold satisfaction that comes when people are doing what they love and things are picking up in the nice flowing way of tickets being handed out for front row center on something really good.
The music felt special. The room felt special those Monday nights Thumbs was playing.
The last time I saw Thumbs. He came back to the wait station between sets and he was telling me about how he was experiencing some angina. As the bio mentions, the family had gone bankrupt, and he was being seen by some doctors at Grady, where because you don’t have the money you see a different doctor every time and it’s rare if any of them care about who they’re seeing. He was talking about how he was trying to impress on another in that series of doctors that he was experiencing angina. And the doctor told him to run from one end of the hall to another. Utter disbelief at the kind of care he was getting. That’s the thing that’s wrong with medicine, I thought, they’re not treating the whole person, they don’t know who the person is, who Thumbs is, he’s just another body with symptoms, and I thought how wrong, how wrong that is. But he had finally gotten someone to listen to him, a cardiac specialist who had heard him play, who was treating him for free and thought he had a good handle on what was wrong. That week he was going to be going in for an appointment. He was relieved. We were relieved. Sometimes life was fair and did the right thing. Pass the smiles around on silver plates.
That week, a couple of days before the appointment, Thumbs was on his way back from Chattanooga with a car load of records, his newest release, when he had his heart attack.
It was a shock. We’d all been breathing freely, Thumbs had his appointment with a good doctor who could help him. Then before that appointment, he died.
Thumbs told my husband repeatedly that the time he spent in Atlanta was the happiest time in his life, a time he was able to do what he wanted musically.
Of course, we don’t have a single recording of Thumbs. Sometimes when you know people you don’t think to get the recordings, you just always assume you’re going to be hearing them and playing with them. And then afterwards, perhaps, one doesn’t think to get the recordings because you’ve already got the music in a way that a recording could never deliver. You’ve already eaten the one-of-a-kind meal.
And we’ve known Kathy and Virginia all these years, the family is still there.
So what’s the point of this story which is not a biography and not treasure fodder for musicologists. I don’t know. I’ve just always felt I should write a little something on those Monday nights when Thumbs would come in through the door of the Point and set up and play his history that wasn’t cool aloof jazzy blues, was instead warm, inviting, even joyful rich. And appreciative. Maybe that’s what I wanted to write about. There was something in Thumbs’ music, at least what I heard, that seemed a thank-you to I don’t know what, I didn’t know Thumbs well enough to be able to say, but seemed a song of rememberance and a message to the past, rather than from it as so many messages are, letting the past know that here is where he was, and all those years between refined into the then present tense was wonderful for all to hear, those who were privileged to be there and hear, such as I who had the honor on those Mondays.
I listen to “Curves Ahead” and when he bends those notes he still pulls a smile out of me.
“Me and Memphis” walks me somewhere, I don’t know where, but out of the apartment and down the stairs, into breezy visitations of angel feather notes separating dark from light, mixing the rough with glide textures into an easy flight through interstate long waiting rooms just this side of crossin’ the Mississippi heaven. Yeah, that where.
The man who told Cheney to go fuck himself is Dr. Ben Marble.
How do you follow up awarding a few Katrina clean-up contracts to Halliburton?
How do you follow up the “look at us flower with compassion” $2000 debit card for affected households announcement? The “We’re just beginning to help you!” song and dance. How many times has this been said? “We’re just beginning to help you! Long after the media has lost interest we’ll still be here helping out! Gush us with gratitude! C’mon do it! Let’s exchange huggy-hugs for the camera! Trent Lott, too! A big group hug here! Can’t wait to sit on the porch of your new house, Trent!”
President Bush issued an executive order Thursday allowing federal contractors rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to pay below the prevailing wage.
In a notice to Congress, Bush said the hurricane had caused “a national emergency” that permits him to take such action under the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act in ravaged areas of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Bush’s action came as the federal government moved to provide billions of dollars in aid, and drew rebukes from two of organized labor’s biggest friends in Congress, Rep. George Miller of California and Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, both Democrats.
“The administration is using the devastation of Hurricane Katrina to cut the wages of people desperately trying to rebuild their lives and their communities,” Miller said.
“President Bush should immediately realize the colossal mistake he has made in signing this order and rescind it and ensure that America puts its people back to work in the wake of Katrina at wages that will get them and their families back on their feet,” Miller said.
As Pam’s House Blend points out, these are also “right to work” states. So their wages are already for shit.
Update: The debit card idea has been sunk.
But there were still signs of confusion and uncertainty over government plans. FEMA’s director, Michael D. Brown, had said his agency would begin issuing debit cards, worth at least $2,000 each, to allow hurricane victims to buy supplies for immediate needs. More than 319,000 people have already applied for federal disaster relief, and many evacuees began lining up at the Astrodome, in Houston, early today in hope of getting cards.
“The concept is to get them some cash in hand,” Mr. Brown had said, “which allows them, empowers them, to make their own decisions about what they need to have to restart their lives.”
But this afternoon, FEMA announced that it no longer planned to issue the cards. An agency spokesman, David G. Passey, said that he did not know why the program was scrapped but that now “we believe that our normal methods of delivery – checks and electronic funds transfer – will suffice.”
Source is the New York Times article New Orleans Begins Confiscating Firearms as Water Recedes.
Oh yeah, that too. They’re confiscating legally registered firearms.
If you want to stay in New Orleans and walk around with a gun, consider joining a security firm.
But that order apparently does not apply to hundreds of security guards hired by businesses and some wealthy individuals to protect property. The guards, employees of private security companies like Blackwater, openly carry M-16′s and other assault rifles. Mr. Compass said that he was aware of the private guards, but that the police had no plans to make them give up their weapons.
