Bent Notes

Rusty Zinn’s great version of “You’re Just Too Good To be True.”

I interviewed Rusty for Indie-music.com a couple of years ago, when his Zinfidelity Vol. 1 album on the Bad Daddy label was current.  Great guy.  I was turned on to him by Mindy Giles, a high-school buddy of mine that I still see every few years.  She’s had an interesting career.  Worked for Alligator Records in Chicago for a few years.  While there, was involved in the production of some great records by Albert Collins, among others.  Then moved on to the now-defunct Black Top label.  Now she’s based in Sacramento and writes about music and promotes concerts.

Neo-neocon has offered her response to Bookworm’s post about staying in the closet as a conservative in the Marin County neighborhood where she lives.  Neo-neocon, who likes and admires Bookworm, nevertheless takes her to task for hiding her lamp under a bushel.

It’s a fine line.  Actually, all any of Bookworm’s neighbors would have to do is come across her blog and she’d be outed. 

 I run into the same quandary.  I’m a blues and jazz guitarist, an arts journalist, a food-show host and a cultural historian.  Most of my associates live and work in a university town and a tourist area.  My work environments are wine bars, art galleries, and university classrooms.  I don’t advertise my ideology in that milieu, but, hey, there’s a link to this blog from my main website.

Actually, I have made the acquaintance of two great guys about my age, guitarists, one from Asheville, North Carolina, and one from Minneapolis, who, after meeting me on musical ground, came here to BN, had a look around, and got back with me to express their solidarity.  They, too, say they have to be careful in their musical lives about letting their devotion to freedom, common sense and the great body of Western tradition show amongst their colleagues.

This arangement actually allows me to do some stealth research into the minds of left-leaners.  Little questions can be asked that offer clues to the depth of their thought processes without giving away my assessment of the quality of their conclusions.

For the first several installments of my newspaper column, I kept to innocuous subjects - my relationship with technology, why I play jazz, stuff like that.  Gradually I began wading into areas that required more honesty of me - gender differences, nuclear proliferation, the fallacy of greed as a factor in economics.  At this point, I pretty much let ‘er rip.  My last column was on the virtues required of individual people for a safe and fair society.

If you have an array of outlets of expression, what pans out is the different markets for the things you do.  My audience for Stirring Something Up, my readership for my column, my readership for my magazine work, and the fan base for my music have areas of overlap, but are mostly distinct from each other.  It’s working out nicely so far.  Something for everyone, I guess.

However, regular BN readers know the degree of my concern for this country and the civilization of which it is the vanguard.  I must say what I conclude as I survey the scene in this day and age when utter nonsense gets the same knd of hearing as adult discourse.  So I do know where my priorities lie.  Stating the plain truth for the record must be done.  The creativity will have to adapt to the reality of the world in which I practice it.

My review of Brian Butler’s Axuality is up at Indie-music.com.  Sweet, gentle, quirky guitar explorations.  A link to his website.  He got in touch with me after he saw the review, and it’s clear from his correspondence that he’s a genuine good guy.  Check him out.

My article on the ins and outs of playing jazz professionally in central Indiana is in the premier issue of Here There, a Chicago-based arts magazine.  Check it out here: http://www.heretheremag.com/music.htm

The editors / backers/ contributors had a big launch party at a nightclub in Chicago last night.  Wish I could have gone.

The biggest delight of my work as a writer for Our Brown County is meeting so many people who fly under the radar screen of our assumptions.  Who, for instance could imagine Jerome Sanderson?

I’m not sure how I could add anything to what Roger Kimball has to say about the novelist who passed yesterday at age 84.  From his desire to overcome his childhood self-image as a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn to his preoccupation with buggery to his woefully underbaked views on the Vietnam conflict and America’s feelings about it, to the gargantuan vanity of his lifeong quest to write the greatest novel ever, Kimball has it covered.

I might have an observation or two about his place in the overall culture.  BN readers know I’m currently making my way through Diana West’s supremely important Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.  She looks at such cultural unfoldments as the advent of rock and roll (and she’s thorough, going back to the birth of BMI in 1940 and what ending ASCAP’s monopoly on royalty clearance did to American music), the impact of Lenny Bruce, the rise of mass media geared to teenagers and the pervasiveness of consumerism.  Where does Mailer fit into all this?  He exists at an interesting nexus:  he was clearly trying to emulate Hemingway, with all that boxing and carousing and boozing.  His rise on the cultural radar screen loosely coincides with that of the actor Robert Mitchum, and they share in common aspects of the pot-smoker-with-the-volatile-personality persona.  Mailer got going on his leftist bona fides early on with the founding of the Village Voice.  On the other hand, he relished building up his creds among the New York intellectuals and the east coast glitterati.  He loved nothing so much as an A-list cocktail party.

We can definitely say that he was self-absorbed.  I think what we ought to find noteworthy about that was the success with which he got American culture to be fascinated by his self-absorption.  Even in Armies of the Night, when writing about this Pentagon demonstration the perceived nobility of which he ostensibly wanted to impart, it wound up being all about Norman. and that’s what critics were left with to write about.

His passing marks a good occasion for asking a question that’s more pertinent by the day:  Isn’t it time to quit ascribing depth or even cleverness to artists who spread chaos to all they touch in the name of making a statement?

Remember my link to my Our Brown County article about Lotus Petal Cinema?  I’ll be providing music before the 7:30 and 10 PM showings on Sunday night.  It’s the theater’s first weekend in business.

My piece on sculptor Bill Holmes is in the Spring issue of Into Art.  (Sorry, no website for the magazine, although it’s a sister publication of Our Brown County.)  He’s doing some cool work through a fund that a local businessman set up through the Columbus Area Arts Council.  Bill does busts of clients of Developmental Services, Inc., an area agency that helps folks with various challenges participate as fully as possible in society.  His biggest satisfaction in doing it is seeing the glee and fascination with which his subjects react to their likenesses.