And the power of Rock was bestowed upon her.
11.13.2005
The Learning Process
I see how lucky these girls are, everyday. I call it the learning process. And it goes, more or less smoothly, in both directions. And, boy, do we learn from them.
11.11.2005
Bindi, Stylist
And I think you'll appreciate my budding Stylist. She was integral to the shoot, as she's always been, but now it's more than just bringing a smile to my subject's face.
11.01.2005
We Would Celebrate None The Less
With the ultimate in fanciful creatures at our disposal, how could we not throw ourselves wholly into the season? This is the essence of all this business. There can be nothing but now, otherwise your children will grow right up past you. It's the only way to stick a foot into the business and that's to kick enough ass such that you're always there and present. Wouldn't want to miss a moment of the mischief. Here's three cheers to Harvest time!
Queen of the Fairies
Yet another of the several reasons I've taken this blessed woman as my own. How could I not when she's so blessed and I'm so blasted?
My Floating Tiny
There was a band in The Cornfields. They played music to accompany the landed space ship. There was free candy all around. This creature of mine was drawn to these like a Greek to libations. So recently unfettered by gravity, she shot herself across the fields as if floating in her ball gown. Every so often one small red leatherette shoe would show, but then just that lilt across the grass. From the candy back to the music again. The music was as big and queer-turned as anything the Velvet Underground might have done on a Halloween long ago. And Mette was stoned on her first free flow of chocolates and gummies. Christmas is good when the take's fine, but Halloween's always hallowed from that first novitiate's sweet tooth on. Possession and nine-tenths of the law. They get candy, they get it themselves without so much as asking, just a demand and take and sweets; some damn perfection from a child's perspective. Freedom in brightly fringed wrappers. Run Child, next, Run!
Fairy Family Holloween
On the spur of the moment - nightfall - Bindi no longer wanted to be a vampire.
"I want to be a fairy"
"Alright," says Papa. "We'll be a family of fairies."
"Pink fairies."
"Are there any other kind?"
Once dressed, Bindi looked up at Papa and said, "Daddy, you look like a Rock Star."
Right answer, kid. Right answer.
Fairy Princess Decor Especial
My fine big CHICK is so fine in her finery. She says, "When I grow up I want to be an artist. After I put up flowers, like mommy." She means landscaping, fantastic. Her mother says, "Pushing up daisies?" Mommy appreciates the irony to all our nonstop work. We're well pleased that it's all bound in daily reverence of the children, the CHICKS. My, my how your proffered youth that you give so willingly to your children slips quick and sleek over to them. I told a friend recently, "I had no hair on my chest when I started college. I had no white hair on my chest when I started pre-school." And now my Thumbelina's grown to be the queen of the tiny flower people. Art and flowers and my painted lady. It's Halloween every day.
3.27.2005
Death On A Small Roadway
March 25, 2005
En Route to Sea Grove, near Pottery, N. C.
“How about if my baby in my belly died and you were the only one who knew. O.K.? Let’s p-tend.” Ah, the whispered life of four-year-olds. Then just as soon all attention goes back to the tandem grooming of their matching white unicorns. Bindi and Kaelyn, mirror image Ackermann’s in so many ways. Sharing toys, “Oh Honey, what have you been doing today. I’ve got to brush your hair again; it’s so snotty today. Are you ready for your lessons? You know I’m so angry with you, my daughter. Now I’m snuggling up with you cause you ate a good dinner and I’m giving you a candy an tomorrow we’ll go to Disney Land and get you a lot of candy. But you’ve got lemon in your hair.”
Meanwhile, we’ve got ideas of death and dearth of our own. A nice big headstone with one name, Bland. A white poaching bloated deer roadside. A new spring lawn mowed down. A magnolia so wanting of sun that it might lay back to branch. A foot walk’s worth of daffodils so bright, but waiting to be trod or parked upon. A pretty yellow house with a crescent of matching workshops and a sign, “Faith Cabinet Works.” God in every drawer I suppose. A hollow laid low under that fettuccini of gray hair again. “It must be the Kudzu,” I remark to Ilse, hoping she’ll notice that I’m doing well in my schooling of flora that she’s so good to give me. I continue, “It must get all over its host in that embrace and then smother, smother until it’s host dies and the tangled Kudzu with it.” She parries, “Or it’s just hibernating.” And we pass on.
Ducks on rain ponds shriveling slowly toward summer. Goat mothers laid up sideways like child-sized mounds. Sleeping calves, their heads turned back on resting shoulder blades, as if broken back says my city eye, cowering from the lucky butcher. All the fields, now cute with small sheep or one Brahma bull, are all fields that might be battlefields – O! How I long for more history. A cute little white kitty in a jumble of its own cranberries, fetal near the centerline. A lonely A frame mobile home with big windows and no one in it. In fact, that’s the deathliest part, not a soul to be seen anywhere except for one corpse of a woman dragging from a butt on her impoverished porch off the lee side of her strip home. Rusted bus hulls beside foundering hay lofts. Empty parking lots of churches, Solid Rock Baptist Church, Kind Cross, White Steeple. A graveyard with is stones all festooned in ribbons and flowers like so many winners at a pony show. A wrecking yard outside Jugtown. Hulls upon hulls giving unto clear-cut swaths of the reddest earth.
Everywhere and everywhere, mobile homes, as much a blight as the Kudzu. The placement of a mobile home upon the land almost certainly ensures the withering to mulch of any other structures of ancestry still on that chunk of lot. There’s an amazing lie being passed down to the new generations, one that says vinyl will keep out the elements forever, the chicken coop will keep, the shed is leaning and don’t never mind, pappy’s old place is gone swayback too, and with pappy still in it – ain’t it all how it really looked! – and don’t you never mind no how. Yes, some houses, though so empty with neglect, looking like they must somehow be inhabited despite the tilt and toothlessness of the lost mortar between old timbers and you’d never think but for story books some old hobbit would therein lay up but for the small smoke rising from a bent chimney.
En Route to Sea Grove, near Pottery, N. C.
“How about if my baby in my belly died and you were the only one who knew. O.K.? Let’s p-tend.” Ah, the whispered life of four-year-olds. Then just as soon all attention goes back to the tandem grooming of their matching white unicorns. Bindi and Kaelyn, mirror image Ackermann’s in so many ways. Sharing toys, “Oh Honey, what have you been doing today. I’ve got to brush your hair again; it’s so snotty today. Are you ready for your lessons? You know I’m so angry with you, my daughter. Now I’m snuggling up with you cause you ate a good dinner and I’m giving you a candy an tomorrow we’ll go to Disney Land and get you a lot of candy. But you’ve got lemon in your hair.”
Meanwhile, we’ve got ideas of death and dearth of our own. A nice big headstone with one name, Bland. A white poaching bloated deer roadside. A new spring lawn mowed down. A magnolia so wanting of sun that it might lay back to branch. A foot walk’s worth of daffodils so bright, but waiting to be trod or parked upon. A pretty yellow house with a crescent of matching workshops and a sign, “Faith Cabinet Works.” God in every drawer I suppose. A hollow laid low under that fettuccini of gray hair again. “It must be the Kudzu,” I remark to Ilse, hoping she’ll notice that I’m doing well in my schooling of flora that she’s so good to give me. I continue, “It must get all over its host in that embrace and then smother, smother until it’s host dies and the tangled Kudzu with it.” She parries, “Or it’s just hibernating.” And we pass on.
Ducks on rain ponds shriveling slowly toward summer. Goat mothers laid up sideways like child-sized mounds. Sleeping calves, their heads turned back on resting shoulder blades, as if broken back says my city eye, cowering from the lucky butcher. All the fields, now cute with small sheep or one Brahma bull, are all fields that might be battlefields – O! How I long for more history. A cute little white kitty in a jumble of its own cranberries, fetal near the centerline. A lonely A frame mobile home with big windows and no one in it. In fact, that’s the deathliest part, not a soul to be seen anywhere except for one corpse of a woman dragging from a butt on her impoverished porch off the lee side of her strip home. Rusted bus hulls beside foundering hay lofts. Empty parking lots of churches, Solid Rock Baptist Church, Kind Cross, White Steeple. A graveyard with is stones all festooned in ribbons and flowers like so many winners at a pony show. A wrecking yard outside Jugtown. Hulls upon hulls giving unto clear-cut swaths of the reddest earth.
Everywhere and everywhere, mobile homes, as much a blight as the Kudzu. The placement of a mobile home upon the land almost certainly ensures the withering to mulch of any other structures of ancestry still on that chunk of lot. There’s an amazing lie being passed down to the new generations, one that says vinyl will keep out the elements forever, the chicken coop will keep, the shed is leaning and don’t never mind, pappy’s old place is gone swayback too, and with pappy still in it – ain’t it all how it really looked! – and don’t you never mind no how. Yes, some houses, though so empty with neglect, looking like they must somehow be inhabited despite the tilt and toothlessness of the lost mortar between old timbers and you’d never think but for story books some old hobbit would therein lay up but for the small smoke rising from a bent chimney.
3.25.2005
More Penn Warren's Trees.
Imagine the susurrous rustle when there was leaves and when there were fields of sleeping soldiers.
Cass's Trees
Virginia Tech has been watched over by these trees since it was a military acadamy, a fortress two thousand feet up the Appalachia spine.
Westward Urges.
How I sympathise with the Gentle South and the North's school taught moral superiority. Hell with it, I'm a California Man.
Ganges Headwaters
From this here Godhead do all my waters flow. I am a blue jacketed aggressor swarming on a single stead toward this belle on her bellum porch. Fortunately, she'd have me.
South Again On Small Roads
March 24, 2005
Virginia, just the bottom edge of it heading back to Chapel Hill
6:45pm on a small road, our favorite kind, the kind that make America so kind, toward Mt. Airy, Maundy Thursday, Spring making long and lingering of the light, still blue and suffused through these easy rolling Appalachians as if it mighten’d get dark at all. A young white calf breaks into a run towards its mother, that stiff high assing cow’s canter.
From Floyd in the last of the cool and butter warmed sun before the sun goes lower in the fine haired trees like the trees that you might find in Robert Penn Warren’s mind when he conjures up Cass Mastern’s time beneath them, quietly at his journals at night after war “by the dying campfire in some bivouac while the forms of men lay stretched on the ground in the night around and the night was filled with a slow, sad, susurrous rustle, like the wind fingering the pines, which was not, however, the sound of wind in the pines but the breath of thousands of sleeping men.” And we follow along through all these trees southward toward the N. Carolina boarder where instantly things want to be farmed and pushed down flatter and then at a bend you come across the most impossible lawn ornament acre, a sloping hillside parcel rising up to the horizon and the trees with gray sculptures waiting for homes and finishing. You can buy any genus of creature from griffin to gargoyle to mermaid birdbath or even a life-sized baby elephant; and if you accord the vendors any influence over’n yer aesthetic you’d paint that big mother pink. And as we descend through this flattening canyon toward Flat Rock there must be something to the rock in the soil here – everywhere, different species of rock, like India with its regional cows and sanctities – because, though none as fantastic and choked as that high country plantation of lawn fancy, there seem to be more of these types of awkward and front yard littering cottage industries using the goods of the earth for their kitsch quaint wares. And why not? It’s more and more like the Far East here with its homey and regional redundancy of commerce, whole villages given over to batiking…. Only there is a massive dearth of cottages here. Mostly it’s box homes with siding, and oftener an old beautiful place that’s crumbling to sod while a single-wide sits idylly by as the frontage anchor to a vortex of all life’s broken litter, just trash strewn everywhere in the post plastic era when the effluents will outlast the cultures that spat them out. The funny thing about all the pottery-esque lawn decoratives is that there are none to be found on any of the lawns of any of the homes anywhere for miles. How, in this regard, do they know any better?
Then just as the dark completely falls it’s Mt. Airy, the mythical Mayberry. Andy Griffith has a playhouse here, a parkway, several waterworks and an electric utility. It is in actuality the place where all things come to be reborn after death. Wherever they may die, they have hope of resurrection here in one of the two thousand thrift shops in the town of 500 people. Ilse and I make a pact to come back the two hours on the 52 some time soon for treasure hunting.
Virginia, just the bottom edge of it heading back to Chapel Hill
6:45pm on a small road, our favorite kind, the kind that make America so kind, toward Mt. Airy, Maundy Thursday, Spring making long and lingering of the light, still blue and suffused through these easy rolling Appalachians as if it mighten’d get dark at all. A young white calf breaks into a run towards its mother, that stiff high assing cow’s canter.
From Floyd in the last of the cool and butter warmed sun before the sun goes lower in the fine haired trees like the trees that you might find in Robert Penn Warren’s mind when he conjures up Cass Mastern’s time beneath them, quietly at his journals at night after war “by the dying campfire in some bivouac while the forms of men lay stretched on the ground in the night around and the night was filled with a slow, sad, susurrous rustle, like the wind fingering the pines, which was not, however, the sound of wind in the pines but the breath of thousands of sleeping men.” And we follow along through all these trees southward toward the N. Carolina boarder where instantly things want to be farmed and pushed down flatter and then at a bend you come across the most impossible lawn ornament acre, a sloping hillside parcel rising up to the horizon and the trees with gray sculptures waiting for homes and finishing. You can buy any genus of creature from griffin to gargoyle to mermaid birdbath or even a life-sized baby elephant; and if you accord the vendors any influence over’n yer aesthetic you’d paint that big mother pink. And as we descend through this flattening canyon toward Flat Rock there must be something to the rock in the soil here – everywhere, different species of rock, like India with its regional cows and sanctities – because, though none as fantastic and choked as that high country plantation of lawn fancy, there seem to be more of these types of awkward and front yard littering cottage industries using the goods of the earth for their kitsch quaint wares. And why not? It’s more and more like the Far East here with its homey and regional redundancy of commerce, whole villages given over to batiking…. Only there is a massive dearth of cottages here. Mostly it’s box homes with siding, and oftener an old beautiful place that’s crumbling to sod while a single-wide sits idylly by as the frontage anchor to a vortex of all life’s broken litter, just trash strewn everywhere in the post plastic era when the effluents will outlast the cultures that spat them out. The funny thing about all the pottery-esque lawn decoratives is that there are none to be found on any of the lawns of any of the homes anywhere for miles. How, in this regard, do they know any better?
Then just as the dark completely falls it’s Mt. Airy, the mythical Mayberry. Andy Griffith has a playhouse here, a parkway, several waterworks and an electric utility. It is in actuality the place where all things come to be reborn after death. Wherever they may die, they have hope of resurrection here in one of the two thousand thrift shops in the town of 500 people. Ilse and I make a pact to come back the two hours on the 52 some time soon for treasure hunting.
3.24.2005
Real History.
Salem - Old Salem - every Southern state has a Salem, but only the old Salem's are real Salem's. They are empty and cobbled with bricks made wih hay. They are ghostly and real and Historic and filled only with the sun we've brought from California and the two hundred year old sent of bees wax ovens simmering hot cross buns. Further North Salem's smell like crisped Witch. Here, further South, there were in all ways more gentle.
Lipstick & Fried Shrimp.
Eclipsing even a big basket of Barbies, Bindi's new found hot pink lipstick kept her avidly at the mirror in the Destiny Christian Consignment Store. Re-application after grease and salting is essential for thorough coverage. Pinking is close to Godliness. This Southern Gal'ness is forever seeping, as is the slightest balm in the air.
The North of The South
March 23, 2005
N. Carolina en route to Blacksburg VA.
There is an oil to this hitchhiker. Greensboro 6mi, Winston-Salem 33. Why on earth, among the seats set out to watch the interstate and the lonely yards of red earth digging machine, the million and two waiting trees, waiting for leaves on this drizzly March day in young, almost stillborn Spring, why would a body, knowing they might just as soon be left off by some beaver dam bog with its moss green white skinned trees and never make it to the crop of pretty white blossom lovelies that grow all around the Comfort Inn and exit of outskirts of Wendover or Guilford Tech Community College and their attendant go-karts and bumper boats - though what would a an oily, crank filled son of a biker hitchhiker want with small golfing? – when and why would the man, who might and might not have any sense of all the battles that were fought among these balling strips of same-same earth, this ever land that is not New England nor the Deep South, this land where as everywhere there is patentedly nothing to the world as seen from the interstate, as they’d have you think there was nothing, and absolutely nothing worth fighting for on a gray drizzling day on the flats of North Carolinian highway with broad shoulders where a man walks backward in a t-shirt and old jeans and some small satchel snatched across his crotch looking for a friendly ride. Friendly, for we are in the South. There is gentility here.
Then like someone striking a Bic lighter the magnolia trees burst into view. We’re off the highway now, meandering through Salem-Winston past all the tangled gray dead floss of some kind of ivy or long gone Spanish moss type garlanded pasta plant that is not but so much stricken fiber now on whole lumpy covered acres. It’s gray, but it’s pretty. Now off the through way we can see things, the things that have been here a long time and have taken on some character. Even the Waffle House yellow squares sign has a flirtatiousness about it, something that says, “Dorothy, this is the South, follow this road, it used to be dirt and used to have carriages that carted about proper gentlemen and ladies while their slaves kept good house for them on silent padding feet and sweat in the fields to bring in the cotton. This is where it all really happened. This is where, over and above, and abetted by but despite of its barbarity this country once really had Culture, finesse, refinement and the slow moving nature of people enjoying their days and times. This is and once was the vaunted South. People are friendly. The ARE friendly.”
As we approach the border a tremendous storm opens up on us. The day recedes quickly. Directly ahead is our first mountain. It looms, bulb capped like some shrouded sentinel. Lightning cracks across the sky in every direction, four and five bolts at a time. It must be Mt. Airy. The rain pisses and the thunder rolls over the sound of the HWY. Ilse tightens her grip on the wheel and eases off the gas. After a while she steels up to it and I can feel us accelerate a bit. A sign rears up out of the gloam, Pilot Mtn. It looks like a wee version of the one in Close Encounters. You might imagine that it was definitely a Civil War Stronghold, or an Indian good killing perch. We cover the hump next to it and the day lightens a bit, a white steeple comes out of the trees ahead, it all feels like salvation after our bit with Witch Mountain.
Virginia now! By Shot Mtn. and Fort Chiswell the land has turned beautiful. It’s all rolling hills up and down and after every rise another hamlet of farms and small red churches. The grass is different greens depending on how chewed down they’ve been and the cows are fat and happy. A field of deer. Porches falling off on one side of beautiful relic homes next to old sun crisped barns next to brand now mobile homes. Fish Hatchery Rd. has a sky full of broken and wet to dry clouds above it. The trees all along the spines of the hills are still nude and make for spiny limbs fanning each swell and nipple of Appalachia. I’d have to recommend the 77 N. toward Wythville to anyone on a half rainy day in early Spring. It will instill hope in them, sustain them toward April, and the sun lays down like a lion’s back.
N. Carolina en route to Blacksburg VA.
There is an oil to this hitchhiker. Greensboro 6mi, Winston-Salem 33. Why on earth, among the seats set out to watch the interstate and the lonely yards of red earth digging machine, the million and two waiting trees, waiting for leaves on this drizzly March day in young, almost stillborn Spring, why would a body, knowing they might just as soon be left off by some beaver dam bog with its moss green white skinned trees and never make it to the crop of pretty white blossom lovelies that grow all around the Comfort Inn and exit of outskirts of Wendover or Guilford Tech Community College and their attendant go-karts and bumper boats - though what would a an oily, crank filled son of a biker hitchhiker want with small golfing? – when and why would the man, who might and might not have any sense of all the battles that were fought among these balling strips of same-same earth, this ever land that is not New England nor the Deep South, this land where as everywhere there is patentedly nothing to the world as seen from the interstate, as they’d have you think there was nothing, and absolutely nothing worth fighting for on a gray drizzling day on the flats of North Carolinian highway with broad shoulders where a man walks backward in a t-shirt and old jeans and some small satchel snatched across his crotch looking for a friendly ride. Friendly, for we are in the South. There is gentility here.
Then like someone striking a Bic lighter the magnolia trees burst into view. We’re off the highway now, meandering through Salem-Winston past all the tangled gray dead floss of some kind of ivy or long gone Spanish moss type garlanded pasta plant that is not but so much stricken fiber now on whole lumpy covered acres. It’s gray, but it’s pretty. Now off the through way we can see things, the things that have been here a long time and have taken on some character. Even the Waffle House yellow squares sign has a flirtatiousness about it, something that says, “Dorothy, this is the South, follow this road, it used to be dirt and used to have carriages that carted about proper gentlemen and ladies while their slaves kept good house for them on silent padding feet and sweat in the fields to bring in the cotton. This is where it all really happened. This is where, over and above, and abetted by but despite of its barbarity this country once really had Culture, finesse, refinement and the slow moving nature of people enjoying their days and times. This is and once was the vaunted South. People are friendly. The ARE friendly.”
As we approach the border a tremendous storm opens up on us. The day recedes quickly. Directly ahead is our first mountain. It looms, bulb capped like some shrouded sentinel. Lightning cracks across the sky in every direction, four and five bolts at a time. It must be Mt. Airy. The rain pisses and the thunder rolls over the sound of the HWY. Ilse tightens her grip on the wheel and eases off the gas. After a while she steels up to it and I can feel us accelerate a bit. A sign rears up out of the gloam, Pilot Mtn. It looks like a wee version of the one in Close Encounters. You might imagine that it was definitely a Civil War Stronghold, or an Indian good killing perch. We cover the hump next to it and the day lightens a bit, a white steeple comes out of the trees ahead, it all feels like salvation after our bit with Witch Mountain.
Virginia now! By Shot Mtn. and Fort Chiswell the land has turned beautiful. It’s all rolling hills up and down and after every rise another hamlet of farms and small red churches. The grass is different greens depending on how chewed down they’ve been and the cows are fat and happy. A field of deer. Porches falling off on one side of beautiful relic homes next to old sun crisped barns next to brand now mobile homes. Fish Hatchery Rd. has a sky full of broken and wet to dry clouds above it. The trees all along the spines of the hills are still nude and make for spiny limbs fanning each swell and nipple of Appalachia. I’d have to recommend the 77 N. toward Wythville to anyone on a half rainy day in early Spring. It will instill hope in them, sustain them toward April, and the sun lays down like a lion’s back.
3.03.2005
Tanning with Baby Oil
Parenting is a process of entering ever higher echelons of a secret society. This society is full of knowledge beyond compare. As esoteric as the Sufi's, this knowledge is available only to the initiates. And there is only one sort of high priest or priestess that can fire brand you with this knowing: your own child.
Along these lines, other devotees proffer aphorisms like, "It goes so fast." What does that mean? Have children, you will know.
Recently, I've been offered this kernel from other knowing bicameral (or more!) parents, i.e. those with TWO. They point out that one of the reasons we as humans have more than one offspring is to return to that pulpy place of baby-parenthood; that place where our children are but chub and cuddles and toothless grins, when they demand nothing more than to eat and be held, when they haven't the foggiest notion of talking back and when they stay where ever they are put. This is told to me, of course, while the teller is staring down into Mette June's cherubic gob, making faces ten times funnier than hers.
I realize, of course, they're absolutely right. Bindi is a total woman now. Breathtaking most of the time is the only way to really describe it. And Mette June fosters again that feeling in us of possessing angel fat, of sunning ourselves coated in Cupid grease. We are taken back. And all this while we are so forcibly tied to the moment and ever going forward. Parenthood eclipses all as we star gaze our children
So in this vein, I delved into the archives and fished this up. Don't it take you back?: Young Bindi Movie It'll take a minute to load up - cause I haven't figured out the proper compression - but it's high res and pretty. As I said, it's pure conjured history.
Along these lines, other devotees proffer aphorisms like, "It goes so fast." What does that mean? Have children, you will know.
Recently, I've been offered this kernel from other knowing bicameral (or more!) parents, i.e. those with TWO. They point out that one of the reasons we as humans have more than one offspring is to return to that pulpy place of baby-parenthood; that place where our children are but chub and cuddles and toothless grins, when they demand nothing more than to eat and be held, when they haven't the foggiest notion of talking back and when they stay where ever they are put. This is told to me, of course, while the teller is staring down into Mette June's cherubic gob, making faces ten times funnier than hers.
I realize, of course, they're absolutely right. Bindi is a total woman now. Breathtaking most of the time is the only way to really describe it. And Mette June fosters again that feeling in us of possessing angel fat, of sunning ourselves coated in Cupid grease. We are taken back. And all this while we are so forcibly tied to the moment and ever going forward. Parenthood eclipses all as we star gaze our children
So in this vein, I delved into the archives and fished this up. Don't it take you back?: Young Bindi Movie It'll take a minute to load up - cause I haven't figured out the proper compression - but it's high res and pretty. As I said, it's pure conjured history.
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