There is much to rue about living in West Virginia, run, as it is, by empty suits and chuckleheads. But every time I think of leaving for a bluer state, this one floors me with the views from being way the heck out in the Mountain State.
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There are many days it seems to me music is helpless against the daily worldwide onslaught of human beings acting like cruel demons. Yet the promise of coming together to experience the communion of shared and transporting musicality is certainly not nothing.
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I could be the man the boy / dreamed of being. I could be the / boy the man dreams of remembering. / I could be the man who saved his mother. / I could be the man who fought his father, / who finally and everlastingly / thrummed some sense into / that thick Latinate, hot-blooded, / black-haired head…
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As David Byrne cries in "Born Under Punches": 'I'm catching up with myself!' Below are some things I am catching up on, myself, after recently launching a world premiere in West Virginia's capital city which was fabulous and exhausting to birth.
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Here are some snapshots, hipshots and night shots, from wandering the highways, byways, and lifeways of the world through which my iPhone moves, in the small towns, small cities and hills of West Virginia.
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A couple of eightysomething artists refuse to stop being wonderful, while the capital city of West Virginia pays colorful homage to the passing of another master artist.
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On the way to a jam in the Appalachian outback, I pass the House of Prayer Full Gospel Church. Wait—are there 'partial gospel' churches out there?
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One apartment complexity; one bridge I once ascended; one very black Tuxedo Cat; one father-son rolling encounter; one dulcimer dude; and one fencing match in the green, green hills of Earth.
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The only sounds I hear while standing at the foot of the silos is the whip and whoosh of occasional traffic on W.Va. 2, a trail mix of various birds charting out their personal space in song, and now and again the wind whistling through the portals of these abandoned legacies of a pre-industrial rural heartland.
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From where I recline in my living room right now in the West Virginia exurbs, I hear the tree frogs rasp outside on a starry night, clinging to the scaly bark and branches of sycamore, pine, and maple trees on our property. Time to think of something other than the news ...
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About the night I never slept with Allen Ginsberg and the interview, song and music video this yielded after our encounter deep in the West Virginia hills in 1983.
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“You know ... ” the doctor says, leaning to speak into the young man’s ear as the song proceeds. “The bodhran was first used by Irish clans as a battle drum. It gave a steady rhythm for Celtic warriors facing conflicts. Warrior time.”
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Looking this way and that, high and low, up and down and all around on a recent walkabout in downtown Cincinnati: A Photo Essay
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"Let the boys have the damn song." How "Over the Rainbow" almost didn't make the cut for "The Wizard of Oz." A look back at a "sacred" song in the American canon, on the occasion of a down-and-dirty music video version by the boys.
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Here's a conversation with God about the whole idea of God. Raising the possibility that everywhere you turn can be an occasion for exclamations of 'Lo and behold ...'
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