Vacketta Family Blogs

“At first the music is shocking in its bitterness, in its refusal of comfort or kindness. Then it settles …

The story opens with the singer walking dead streets and ends with hiim walking the streets of an almost deserted city: “Must be a holiday,” he mutters to himself, as if he couldn’t care less if it or not. Images of homelessness and pointless wandering drive song after song. Sometimes that motif suggest a man who doesn’t want a home (“I know plenty of people,” he tells you in a way that says he knows you won’t believe him, “put me up for a day or two”), sometimes it calls up the tramp armies of the Great Depression …

When Time Out of Mind plays another country comes into view. This is a land as still as the plains, its flatness broken only by a violence of tone or the violence of syncopation, of hard trugths or a band’s rhythms rushing up on each other like people running out of a burning house.

The country that emerges is very old, and yet fresh and in sharp focus, apparently capable of endless renewal.  At the same time the place is very new, and all but worn out.  “I got new eyes,” Dylan sings cooly, in one of the deadliest lines of his writing life.  “Everything looks far away.”  Verbal, melodic, and rhythmic signatures from old American music, from ballads, blues, and gospel, fit into the songs of Time Out of Mind as naturally, seemingly as inevitably as breaths — say in the way a betrayed Dock Boggs, standing on the railroad platform of his “Danville Girl” in 1927, passes the song’s cheap cigar to the betrayed singer now “Standing in the Doorway,” trying to live his life “on the square.”  That the reappearence of the forgotten past in an empty present is the talisman of Time Out of Mind is deated by the artwork imprinted directly onto the disc: Columbia’s “Viva-tonal Electrical Process” label from the late 1920s, a label gthat fran one series for “Race” or Negro recordings, another for “Old Time” or country.  Dylan’s record spins on that labal in the way certain of its choruses and verses seem to write themselves, tossed off with a throwaway gruffness that says Dylan trusts that after hearing half of a line the listener will automatically complete it even before he, Dylan, has sung it: “That’s all right, mama, you do what you gotta do,” as he drawls in “Million Miles.”  But the label also spins in reverse, until nothing on it can be read.  For all the occasions where the music draws on some collective, illiterate American memory, as many incidents in the music seem to vcome out of nowhere, the nowhere that is both the present and the future of a country where the sgtory Dylan is tellinbg takes place: “Maybe in the next life,” Dylan sings elsewhere in “Million Miles,” “I’ll be able to hear myself think.”  From song to song, with resignation and a shy twisting humor, with the flair of a Georgia fiddle band or the dead eyes of a gravedigger, the singer poses the same question, sometimes almost grinning, as when he asks “if everything is as hollow as it seems?”"

This is the music my Helen danced to the day before yesterday.  The prose is Greil Marcus’s (in “Double Trouble” published in 2000) and the references are mine, from first to last.  What I couldn’t add to the conviction that this was indeed a great advance in the effort not to lose essential American memory and rhythm was the movement of Helen’s ass, on and off the hood of a Japanese best-selling automobile,  just before the crash of its stock-market value, while waiting for the earthquake and the tsunami.   (It seems to me, and it would be great to hear from you on this one, that the situation in Japan and in the States is much more similar than dissimular.  We’ve had our share of storms.  And most of us are working from out of the highlands, willing and ready to accept compromises with respect to what the highlands promised, and promise still.)

Well, at least I am. And that means the server is. There is going to be a period where the sites I host will be offline for a few days starting this Saturday. I’ll work to get them back online as soon as possible, but don’t be surprised if you can’t reach the site.

Tony

Tomorrow we will hear if Marin get’s into Vet school. The University of Georgia sent the letters, both welcoming and rejecting on Monday. Tomorrow should be the day.

This past Saturday I received an email from our neighbor Debbie in Westville. Her husband Gerry went to the hospital the previous Monday for a sore leg. To make a long story short, this strong healthy 58 year old has cancer, a kind the doctors have never seen before. It started in the leg and has progressed through his body in a week’s time. Like all of us, Gerry is going to die. Yet, he lives knowing that his time is so very near, that he can’t even start a bucket list.

Florence was in Florida with Henry when I learned the news about Gerry. She was scheduled to be back in Atlanta on Tuesday so I awaited her arrival and together we made the night haul to Westville. Eight and a half hours by car in the rain. Not the kind of time Bea’s boys make, but not bad.

I never really thought about it, but I was a community project. After dad died, John and Frank, Kaye and mom did a pretty good job raising me. The fact they didn’t kill me is a testimony to their patience. Gerry, our neighbor also had a strong influence.

The lessons I learned from Gerry came in many forms. I guess you could say his assignments were biblical in manner. Some times you had to interpret his actions as points to follow. Other times, he worked in a this-is-how-to-really-fuck-up / don’t-try-this-at-home scenario. Thankfully, I was a good study and knew which was which. We never talked about it, but like the old saying goes, “A friend will bail you out of jail, a good friend will help you hide the body.” Gerry is a good friend.

I was happy to see upon my arrival that he is still very lucid. Having only received an email and not spoken personally with his wife, I was not sure what to expect. I told him I brought a suit and I was glad I wasn’t going to have to wear it.

Returning to Westville this afternoon I received a call from a company I have been interviewing with over 6 weeks. I was told, though I was an excellent candidate, they chose another for the job. C’est la vie.

On my way back to the hospital tonight, I received a call from Jeff Cooke, Joe’s son. Joe was Florence’s partner for the past six years. Jeff informed me that Joe had had a stroke and died this morning. I will have to break the news to mom tomorrow.

One of my little theorys on life is that I experienced lots of death at an early age. The deal with God was that because I had so much at a young age, I would not have to experience it again for a while. I guess I had a pretty good run. And though, losing a job interview isn’t anything close to death, I am going to toss it in the bucket and say my bad luck came in three today.

Tomorrow is a new day. I hope the postman has some good news for Marin.