Who's The Boss? Authentic Narrative in Popular Music

[written in conjunction with Dr. Shelley Armitage's Memoir and Identity seminar; Union Institute and University Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies program]

 

 

now they’d come so far and they’d waited so long

just to end up caught in a dream where everything goes wrong

where the dark of night holds back the light of day

and you’ve gotta stand and fight for the price you pay

(Springsteen, 1980, “The Price You Pay”)
 

            Works of art and culture require introspection of their maker: the sculptor seeks to represent forms he has witnessed or imagined, the musician upon instruments sounds out the beats and notes floating within his or her head. The blank canvas is transformed by the painter, into a blistering—however vacant or sparse—and likely colorful account of their world. We have stories to tell, and we have new means with which to do the telling: the academic and social legitimization of our autobiographical accounts, coupled with the technological means to tell them, has left some perplexed. Does social media intend on doing the work a memoirist once had to perform, in the compiling of their original blurbs and anecdotes, but rather reference the uploaded representations of one’s actual life? If an audience member may scan an artist’s Facebook pages, YouTube presence, blogs, and critical scholarship prior to attending a gallery opening, how might a viewer’s autobiographical expectations of the artist’s work change? What stories are we going to expect from another’s art, if we have already learned so much about their story?

            Scholars seeking to identify and define the role of autobiography in modern works of art and culture may be challenged by the extent to which technology and the expansion of mass media have permitted, and in some ways, encouraged, individuals’ creative expression of autobiographical narratives. Philosophical paradigms established by Facebook, YouTube, and other sites themselves deserve separate and complete study; for this reason, this discussion will provide a limited contextualization for the role of autobiography in popular recorded music. A comprehensive tracing of themes, of autobiography and identity, across works by the first generation of artists working within popular recorded music may as well be too daunting a task: separate studies of Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Patti Smith, and Lou Reed , among many others, may each aid in framing artists’ efforts of identification and narrative across this emergent genre. This discussion will focus on the public career of Bruce Springsteen, utilizing Elizabeth Bird’s 1994 essay as well as Springsteen’s own 2012 comments at SXSW, an annual music and arts festival in Austin, Texas, seeking to understand the extent to which one may be able to establish authenticity within one’s own autobiographical narrative. 
 

 The Art of Constructing Narratives Within Popular Recorded Music       

“America’s future rests in a thousand dreams… It rests in the message of hope in the songs of a man so many young Americans admire—New Jersey’s own Bruce Springsteen. And helping you make those dreams come true is what this job of mine is all about.”

                                    --Ronald Reagan, September 19, 1984 (as cited by Bird, 1994, p. 44)

            During the months prior to the re-election of Ronald Reagan, the former-actor-turned-politician solicited the support of key cultural figures, requesting the presence of both Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen in the Rose Garden, for remarks, commendations, and photo opportunities. While Jackson, by then fully pronounced as “The King of Pop,” agreed to Reagan’s offer, Springsteen declined; weeks later, Reagan utilized Springsteen’s widespread fame to his advantage, within a campaign stop in northern New Jersey. Bird (1994) notes this careful choice as critical to determining “The Boss’” ethics of self-identification: while Springsteen’s morality extended far to the left of the popular President, many fans simply dismissed the musician’s vision of society.

            The dilemma of establishing “authenticity” in popular recorded music may have evolved from the earliest efforts of commercialization and commoditization of the form: the role of social commentary and political critique in song became increasingly widespread in the 1960s, as artists embraced the genre. By 1980, works of recorded popular music had played a large enough role for Lester Bangs to name rock music “the ultimate populist art form” (p. 21), within his work of biography and contextualization, of Debora Harry and the group Blondie. “Rock is for everybody, it should be so implicitly anti-elitist that the question of whether somebody’s qualified to perform should never even arise” (1980, p. 21). If a genre of creative expression maintains an implicit tenet of narrative accessibility—regardless of special or technical skills—one may trace its embrace by artistic communities during different political and social climates.

            Political and social ramifications of one’s narrative may engulf original intentions: “Lest we too easily hail the metaphorics of coming to voice as a self-liberating gesture, we might keep in mind that testimony also involves telling stories that put the narrator in jeopardy because what is told is in some sense publicly “unspeakable” in its political context” (Smith and Watson, p. 85). Reagan’s use of Springsteen’s success in the weeks prior to his re-election illustrates the use of one’s autobiographical narrative by another, for public contextualization and understanding. The ways in which readers consume and understand sustained works of autobiographical narrative may continue to change, based upon current events and political climates:  “And so, when we read or listen to autobiographical narratives, we need to attend to methods of self-examination, introspection, and remembering encoded in them through the generic conventions” (Smith and Watson, p. 91).

            The “ultimate populist art form” (Bangs, 1980, p. 21) may have been Springsteen’s specialty; Bird (1994) explains the artist’s spike in popularity following Born in the USA as due to “a misinterpretation of the message” (p. 45). Citing Robert Rauch and John Mendelsshon, Bird’s contextualization for Springsteen’s maddening popularity comes due to either the public’s ignorance of the musician’s lyrical and political messages, or the public’s expectations of the form: “a live rock concert is not an occasion for thinking about political issues; rather it is an opportunity to be temporarily transported. Springsteen himself may not have appreciated that fully; he was often apparently frustrated by the failure to get his message across in his songs and his regular monologues that introduced them” (p. 45). Beyond the complications of collective and interactive presence in popular music, the artist’s role in telling their own narrative may become less clear: one may forge one’s story, but one may hold less control over how and why the public interprets, and identifies with, a given narrative. Springsteen denied American car manufacturers use of his patriotic anthem in television commercials, turning down a $12 million dollar offer from Chrysler (Bird, 1994, p. 48); one year after the release of Born in the USA, Chevrolet had commissioned a new marketing campaign, based loosely around Springsteen’s themes (“the heartbeat of America/today’s Chevrolet”). “As Safeway, Stroh’s, and Miller’s, among others, developed the theme, it became impossible to tell the difference between the opposite but merging images of Reagan’s and Springsteen’s America that were evoked” (p. 48).       

The Boss in Present Tense: Forging the Postmodern Authentic

            While a full contextualization of Springsteen’s career may identify attempts at conveying authentic narrative in popular music, Bird (1994) summarizes the artist’s career following Born in the USA as having unsuccessfully provided audiences a clear explanation of his story: beyond commercialization and commoditization of Springsteen’s patriotic message, “along with the transformation and multiplication of meaning came the proliferation of images and the shattering of the coherent image of authenticity” (p. 45).  Stuart Hall (1997) describes a “profound historical decentering in terms of social practice” (p. 43), in part because the “individual or collective subject [is lodged] always within historical practices, as we individuals or as groups cannot be, and can never have been, the sole origin or authors of those practices.” Acts of self-definition, identification, and the explanation of narrative are, according to Hall, to be eternally linked, traceable, in tandem with other individuals, moments, and works of expression that have come before: regardless of whether or not anything exists in our culture that we may have previously agreed upon. Elizabeth Bird’s (1994) contextualization of Springsteen’s career is important, both as a historical and critical analysis, but also for its consideration of ‘The Boss,’ as a musical, cultural, and political figure.

            Nearly thirty years after the release of Born in the USA, in April of 2012, Bruce Springsteen delivered the keynote address at the Austin, Texas music and arts festival South By Southwest. As a springboard to his remarks, “The Boss” used music critic Lester Bangs’ grave characterization of creativity and a solipsistic climate of representation and identification within the genre, following the untimely death of Elvis. Bruce Springsteen cited Bangs’ final paragraph, which appears here unabridged, published originally in the Village Voice on August 29, 1977:

                        If love truly is going out of fashion forever, which I do not believe, then along with our nurtured indifference to each other will be an even more contemptuous indifference to each others' objects of reverence. I thought it was Iggy Stooge, you thought it was Joni Mitchell or whoever else seemed to speak for your own private, entirely circumscribed situation's many pains and few ecstasies. We will continue to fragment in this manner, because solipsism holds all the cards at present; it is a king whose domain engulfs even Elvis's. But I can guarantee you one thing: we will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won't bother saying good-bye to his           corpse. I will say good-bye to you (Bangs, 2003).

As we seek to create new methods of self-identification and representation, to what extent are our narrative impulses influenced by others in our intellectual environment? Have readers, listeners, and viewers’ expectations of representation in art changed since Bangs described a culture of fragmentation and solipsism; do we expect to see ourselves when we read, watch, or listen? Or, have we come to expect creative expressions of self-definition, across genres, to resemble each individuals’ coming-to-realization story of their connectedness? If audiences do maintain such expectations, Bangs’ comment on how culture may come to nurture a “contemptuous indifference to each others’ objects of reverence” remains, unfortunately, salient.

            As Stuart Hall (1997) asks, “what is this never-ending theoretical work which is constantly losing and regaining concepts?” (42), complicated situations  regarding individuals’ identities and abilities of self-expression arise. An elusive comment on this dilemma of self-determination and representation comes in assessing modern mechanics of identity creation, of how and where we state and make known our unique abilities, insights, and narratives.

            The action of transformation and emergence in the construction of autobiographical narrative may be the result of acknowledging a Derridadian ‘difference,’ which Toni Morrison describes eloquently: it is the close and trepidations relationship between the author and their representational narrative she seeks to represent in her works, as well as the histories she may encounter and, by necessity, represent: “when you kill the ancestor you kill yourself” (1984, p. 497). When one seeks contextualization for one’s own life experience, a keen sense of precedence, and what has come before, is essential. Morrison’s role of memoir “It [memoir] should try deliberately to make you stand up and make you feel something profoundly in the same way that a Black preacher requires his congregation to speak, to join him in the sermon, to behave in a certain way, to stand up and to weep and to cry and to acede or to change and to modify—to expand  on the sermon that is being delivered. In the same way that a musician’s music is enhanced when there is a response from the audience” (Morrison, 1984, p. 494). This ‘enhanced’ retelling of individuals’ narratives of autobiography and memoir may be subject to climates of political, social, and economic identification: does popular recorded music still enable and condone authenticity?

            One answer comes in Springsteen’s recent comments in Austin: according to “The Boss,” our aims of expression and individual narrative come amidst a “post-authentic world. And today authenticity is a house of mirrors. It’s all just what you’re bringing when the lights go down. It’s your teachers, your influences, your personal history. And at the end of the day, it’s the power and purpose of your music that matters” (Springsteen, as cited by Powers, 2012).

    

Works Cited
 

Bangs, L. (1980). Blondie. New York: Fireside.

Bangs, L. (2003). Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader. Ed. J. Morthland. New York: Random House.

Bangs, L. (29 August 1977). “Where Were You When Elvis Died?” Retrieved from http://josephwaldman.livejournal.com/43782.html

Bird, E. (1994). “’Is that me, Baby?’: Image, Authenticity, and the Career of Bruce Springsteen.” Kansas University Journals. Retrieved from https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/amerstud/article/viewFile/2821/2780

Hall, S. (1997). "Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities." Culture, globalization, and the world system; contemporary conditions for the representation of identity.41-68.

Morrison, T. (1984). “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation.”The Woman That I Am, ed. D. Soyini. Madison: St. Martin’s.

Powers, A. (15 March 2012). “Bruce Springsteen on the Meaning of Music.” NPR.org. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2012/03/15/148693171/bruce-springsteen-on-the-meaning-of-music

Smith, S. and J. Watson. (2010). Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2^Nd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Springsteen, B. (1980). The River [vinyl sound recording]. New York: Columbia. 

The Commemoration of Irene: August 28, 2012 (Chandler Center for the Arts, Randolph, VT)



Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin, Senator Pat Leahy, Lt. Gov. Phil Scott, Representative Peter Welch, and Senator Bernie Sanders, at Chandler Center for the Arts in Randolph, Vermont (August 28, 2012)

 One year has passed, since Tropical Storm Irene traveled in from the ocean and almost exactly up the path of Route 100 in Vermont. On this anniversary, a crowd of around four-hundred filled Randolph’s Chandler Center for the Arts, beneath a few rolling clouds on a late August afternoon. Food vendors filled the small space between Chandler and its neighbor, a popular Laundromat, including Randolph’s own Valley Bowl, American Flatbread; one of the state’s largest corporations, Ben and Jerry’s, distributed ice cream pops, gratis. A banner, affixed to the stone block wall that is the front façade of the building, towered over the gathering Congressional delegation: Senators Bernie Sanders and Pat Leahy were joined by Representative Peter Welch, Governor Peter Shumlin, and Lt. Governor Phil Scott. Church bells rang, inside steeples across the Green Mountains at 7 PM, shortly before the program commenced, creating a soundscape of echoes and tones more pleasant than the tumbling of river rocks, rolling beneath the flow, one year prior.

It had been a freakishly strong storm: one that made it rain for hours, turning ditches to creeks and streams into rivers, scooping up structures and vehicles, carrying possessions into the Connecticut and the sea beyond. Governor Peter Shumlin praised the rapid relief effort and its dedicated volunteers: “we are a tale of two states,” he described, in that those who have been able to get on with our lives, and still clearly those who continue to anticipate and wait. The Governor urged his people to “remain generous,” attributing any progress so far as being due to the work of “extraordinary volunteers.” Announcing 3.6 million dollars had been raised, towards a 10 million dollar goal, Shumlin advocated citizens purchase the limited edition “I Am Vermont Strong” license plates, to help contribute: “we will use the spirit and the goodness […] to insure we leave nobody behind who got whacked by Irene.”

"America's Senator" Bernie Sanders speaks with Representative Peter Welch

Jeffrey Domoto directed the Vermont Youth Orchestra through a dissonant rendition of Samuel Barber’s unnerving and pensive Adagio for Strings, followed by Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus: the tension in the first work was modern and appropriate, as ascending lines of counterpoint grew, and gave rise to a feeling not unlike a mudslide, or heap of broken blue Styrofoam insulation, one of my memories, as this debris served as the longtime high water mark of the flood that followed the storm. The few final strands of Barber’s work famously feature a lone violin, sounding the root note of the unsettled chord. The young man at work in the important First Chair, First Violin trembled; the fingers of the entire ensemble wavered at times, seeking to accomplish the tremolo intended by the composer. One’s experience amongst this music seemed as fragile as a streambed, ever risking disintegration and collapse. Mozart’s illustrious segment was more stoic, as the stands of telephone polls installed by a crew from a faraway land. A boy—he could not have been older than fifteen—bowed away at the double bass, singing as well as playing the bassline. Later in the program, Shyla Nelson, a soprano whose remarkable natural yet unsettling vibrato reminded me of the violins, sang “Amazing Grace,” following a moment of silence, honoring the six Vermonters who lost their lives in the disaster (Nelson is currently working on a massive, synchronous, global event of singing, to take place on the Winter Solstice). Longtime Vermont performer and songwriter Jon Gailmor appeared late in the program: whether one is musically inclined or not, one could not help but appreciate Gailmor’s earnest and heartfelt efforts. He performed a new song about the tenacity of our statewide community, “A Year Later,” acapella and without a microphone; on an acoustic guitar, he accompanied himself through a song of tribute to Vermont, “Long Ago Lady.” Gailmor is one of the state’s finest musicians, not necessarily for his technical ability but because his aim is obvious—communication with those before him, be them children or adults, an action he described as a “sublime and indescribable honor” to accomplish at this event. The program ended with Diane B. Martin, co-author of the Vermont State Song, belting it out from center stage, and across “These Green Mountains.”




Senator Pat Leahy shares a photograph he took, and used on the floor of the U.S. Senate, to gain support for federal relief funding following Tropical Storm Irene. The homemade sign read, "Thank You Volunteers/ You Give Us Hope." "It kind of gets you right here," he said to those of us nearby, pointing to his heart with a closed fist.

Peter Shumlin appeared to be the event’s de facto emcee, introducing the Congressional Delegation. Pat Leahy admitted to chasing down members of Congress, to lobby for and secure federal disaster relief funding following Tropical Storm Irene. There have been generations of Leahys in Vermont, he told the crowd, “and I wasn’t going to be the one who let it fall apart.” Bernie Sanders characterized 8/28/12 as a “day to […] give thanks for the extraordinary efforts,” and to commemorate moments now entrenched in our collective memory and history as times when “people who were not hurting [were] helping those that were.” What has, and will continue to ensure the success of Vermont, is the “human resillency and human spirit” available to us all: “if we focus we can, in fact, prevail.” Congressman Peter Welch heartily congratulated “Chandler Music Hall” on its recent renovation, praised the Vermont Youth Symphony Orchestra for their accomplishments, before admitting that “none of us know why that [the flooding] happened.” “Will we have the character to remember,” Welch asked, the goodness of our efforts? Perhaps most provoking were the comments of Lt. Governor Phil Scott, who likened August 28, 2011 to the events of September 11, 2001, as both events “proved our strength and inspired our people.”

 Others, including David Coates of the Vermont Long Term Disaster Recovery Group, Greg Sharrow of the Vermont Folklife Center, and Staige Davis, Chair of the Vermont Community Foundation, spoke briefly of their organizations’ experiences in collecting, interpreting, and assessing stories of the flood—Coates was the only one who specifically thanked the Waterwheel Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the popular Vermont-based jam band Phish, whose October 2011 concert raised a full million dollars on its own, toward relief efforts. During the second half of the program, Irene Recovery Officer Sue Minter served as emcee; her glowing introduction of Hillary Laggis, a University of Vermont student, stopped short of assuring us of Laggis’ future success in democratic representation at the national level: Laggis, through a class on Service Learning, documented some Waterbury residents’ stories on video. While not expecting her to be a scholar, and to describe an ethical framework that would explain the remarkable volunteerism following Tropical Storm Irene in Vermont, Laggis’ comments and video clips were quick and shaky; one fellow student was projected on screen, describing the “altruistic high” produced by getting involved; a flood victim admitted volunteers had helped immensely, but work had progressed “slower than [she] wanted to have it fixed.” While I appreciate UVM’s involvement and participation in service learning, the dichotomy between the country mice and the city (read: Burlington) mice in this state may have been an understated nuance in Laggis’ lengthy comments.

The legacy of a tragedy has come to necessitate commemoration, and has helped define the importance of the action of gathering together: I would have been interested to know what towns were represented, within the audience; I would have applauded loudly any member of the audience who had been physically displaced by the flood. I was, however, proud to live in this small and beautiful state, ripe with the tenacious and the empathetic. Irene Recovery Officer Sue Minter: “Vermont is a state where love abounds.”   

Come Back, Elvis!

“all that remained I fancied from the wreck of a rowdy world” –Thoreau, Cape Cod

(Graceland, August 15, 2012; Associated Press).

Last week was the 35^th anniversary of the official death of Elvis Presley: after days of reclusion in the bedroom of his Memphis mansion, Graceland, the King of Rock and Roll was said to have been found slumped and unconscious upon his holy throne, by his girlfriend, Ginger Alden. A last game of racquetball, a few gospel songs around a piano in the lounge by the court, and packets of Dilaudid pills remain the scant details available about the King’s last morning. By some accounts, Elvis disappeared in the bathroom at 9:30 AM, on the morning of August 16^th; by most accounts, the arrival of the ambulance took remarkably long, and few emergency personnel (if any?) attended to the lifeless body in the upstairs bedroom. Presley was pronounced dead within four minutes of arriving at the Baptist Medical Center in Memphis; within one hour, Presley’s father Vernon stood before reporters and confessed tearfully to his son’s death. The King of Rock and Roll had vanished from the public and musical sphere, long after his rise to fame and the ignition of the pop genre he carried. Recordings of his final concerts still ring of a Blues-Brothers-style massive orchestral rock outfit, replete with male and female choirs, singing the words as Elvis fumbled around lyrics and with the fans, his hair still slicked and black like his teenage crooner idol, Tony Curtis. The innocence of the 1950s, with which Elvis and others Rocked Around the Clock, had long been shattered by the postmodern and the psychedelic: the fuel for the engines that carried the Beatles to America in 1964—a diversity of pop music conceptualization—may have also been the fuel used in the steam shovel that dug Elvis’ grave, in his backyard at Graceland. Had he been reading Frank Adams’ The Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus, or The Shroud of Turin; was the National Enquirer’s cover photo, of Elvis’ open-casket funeral and bloated face in repose, provide evidence of a wax-figure forgery; did the limited recordings—the only gold and transparent vinyl ever pressed by Sun Records—by a masked singer (“Orion”) following Elvis’ death actually contain sessions by Elvis, and who asked the Jordinaires to attend a recording session of Christmas music in 1978, and whose voice got layered over the tracks later?

[…] In 1976 Elvis had become a part of a sting operation orchestrated by the FBI against the Mafia. Vernon had needed to raise some extra cash since the private jet that Elvis was leasing was a major hemorrhage in their expenses. Vernon was approached by Fredrick Pro, president of Air Cargo Airlines out of Florida. Fredrick was known to the FBI as Alfredo Poc, president of Trident Consortium in New York, and under investigation for racketeering, fraud and other Mafia activities. An agreement was reached between Vernon and Fredrick on how to refinance the plane, lease it to Fredrick, and gain an extra $10,000 a month on the plane. AT first Vernon was completely naive of what Pro and his cohorts were up to. As checks that were promised to come in from Pro were either not appearing or were bounced. Vernon had contacted the FBI.

The FBI had been monitoring Pro and his other Mafia connections since the mid 1960's. The FBI assigned two of their best Special Agents to go undercover in Elvis's entourage to infiltrate the mob activities. Vernon and Elvis were briefed on the continuing investigation and were excited to help the FBI in their operation.

By July 1977, the FBI felt it had enough evidence to arrest and convict the world wide Mafia ring that defrauded the Presley family of over one million dollars and many other organizations around the world.

Arrest warrants for everyone in the fraud ring were issued on August 16, 1977 […] (elvis-is-alive.com, 2012).

These and other stories are ripe for the picking, across the ‘Net. There has never been a full and serious documentary regarding the last days of the King: perhaps Elvis Presley Enterprises, an unrivaled economic engine still churning up wealth thirty-five years later, is too powerful, and has squashed any attempts at the retelling of the Presley narrative (one film, “Elvis Meets Nixon,” accomplishes—by way of Dick Cavett, and without the use of copyrighted material—a telling of the tale about Presley’s White House visit; market value of the out-of-print VHS on Amazon.com is typically close to $100). We thirst for the truth, about what happened to the King of Rock and Roll, if only because the deaths of Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston have proven how callous and indifferent we may be, when necessary. We heard the details—of the prophenol tents, of Houston’s uncontrollable urges—and may perhaps feign a grin when we see, upon a tall commemorative Pepsi can, the likeness of the King of Pop. We are losing our ability to remember who we are, based on the scant few decades of American idols available: it is the loss of someone to wonder and speculate about, someone whose works and career are not fully substantiated, have not been rooted in anything but the grainy and un-nutritious soil of shifting sands. Electronic Dance Music has tightened its grip on too many eardrums, with its bass resonance and skill coming not from any musical performance, but a technical beats-per-minute guru who splices and cuts tracks together like any given disco dee-jay.  

I beg of you, Elvis, make your return: if all we are to endure is the post-authentic, the former video game chip-turned music, the punk-grunge rehash decades hence, the psychedelic legacy of the nomadic drug-enthusiast soundscape jam bands, and the experiential electronic beat-thrashing gatherings that are EDM (a scene Moby wants nothing to do with), we may be doomed to each being the center of our headphone'd universe. If the 1960s had “love-ins” and “be-ins” as events of socialization and interaction, that accompanied and complemented the latest pop music, one need look only as far as any given night on Phish’s recent summer tour, to witness what could be called a “ME-in,” where one’s own entranced and enraptured head bobs and nods to the shifting patterns of instrumental interplay that all end up sounding basically the same.  

Without clear narratives surrounding the makers of our popular music, we risk becoming emboldened American Idol wannabes, waiting in lines standing on concrete, waiting for our auditions and moment of fame in faux-participatory schemes of celebrity and judgment. We need to know that there is more than just the reiterations of other generations’ music, and more than emulation alive in the characteristics and personalities of musicians: Aerosmith’s Greatest Hits emerged first in 1980, after the band ripped off all it could from The New York Dolls, and sanitized the punk movement. Stephen Tyler, the group’s big-lipped figurehead, has (following a spat of unexplained in-concert moments when he couldn’t manage to stay onstage) has come to be one of our culture’s literal prophets and judges. At this rate, we risk losing all ability to know what we look like: as if we never moved our chairs to avoid high tide at the ocean, and have found ourselves neck deep in the waves of our own salt brine, in waters radiated by cultures beyond our own, an experience we’re told is enjoyable. The taste of the salt water, and the succumbing of musicians to asphyxiating and tides of monetization, is what we name “culture.” 

And so: Elvis, I beg of you, please emerge from behind the marketing scheme of your disputed death; please, if you are out there, disavow the Colonel’s eternal flame of commerce and the commercialization of legacy; please, come out from beneath your witness-protection moniker after those shady deals over airplanes between you, some Italians, and the US Government went south. Let us know you are still there, if you are, and that the symbol of American musical success might still be a truck driver from Memphis making a record for his mother. We need to be reminded that any of us, who know three chords or thirty, could still become heir to a new and unexpected fortune of evolution in music and pop—that it can still, or at least once has, happened. We need you, Elvis, to reveal yourself once again, if you are able, giving us intrinsic reasons to once again pick up our guitars and strum. 

Elvis-is-alive.com. (2012). “Proof: Elvis is Alive!!” Retrieved from http://elvis-is-alive.com/

Associated Press. (2012). "Gallery: Elvis fans gather for candlelight vigil." Retrieved from http://projects.accessatlanta.com/gallery/view/music/elvis-vigil-081612/

The American Celebration on Parade: Photos from the Summer of 2012

"The American Celebration on Parade" was a month-long road trip across these United States, for both business and pleasure. Destinations included the Aspen Ideas Festival, and my penultimate eight-day residency, within Union Institute and University's Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies program, which took place in Cincinnati, Ohio. Along the way, my partner, Jennie Harriman, and I visited family in Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Kansas, and finally Vermont.

"The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are." --Samuel Johnson

"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." --Robert Louis Stevenson

Becoming Fame-Us in western Pennsylvania; there was a Moe's Southwestern Grill next door. 

Big Oil bears its teeth! Outside of a station in northern Virginia.

 Sauntering through the neighborhoods of Cincinnati, Ohio.

WPWA 1590AM (Aston, Pennsylvania), formerly WCZN-- "Your Country Cousin."

Hillside Motel, near Skyline Drive, Virginia-- too rainy to live it up by the pool.

Wandering the streets of Lexington, Virginia.

Beside a gas station, somewhere in southern Virginia.

Discovering who the "Invaders in the Circle of Life" are, while exploring Cade's Cove, within the Smoky Mountains National Park.

 

"The journey, not the arrival, matters." -- T.S. Eliot

Nesting, among and upon systems of public address!

New business coming soon, near Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

While getting an AC recharge at a Subaru specialist near Kodak, Tennessee.

Not just Good, but MEGA.

The facades surrounding Dollywood.

 

Great Smoky Mountains National Park, near the TN/NC line.

"A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving." --Lao Tzu

At the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, in Cherokee, NC.

Tennessee Flea Market.

"Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life." --Jack Kerouac

Official radiation device of the American Celebration on Parade.

Stopped in Asheville long enough for a gelato, and to take a photo of this sticker.

Staying calm in western TN, with a fine Pennsylvania lager and a black widow spider.

Official off-world exploration team of The American Celebration on Parade (Michael Shanks substitution).

In the rear-view mirror, an antique economy of videotape!

"A place where even squares can have a ball..."

Former telethon king and legend Jerry Lewis was to appear at the Firelake Casino.

The lavishly industrial and creative Oklahoma City home of Wayne Coyne, ringmaster of the Flaming Lips.

Fine dining in western Oklahoma.

Imagine peanut butter and chocolate pudding in a blender, and turned into a pie.

Shamrock, Texas storefront.

 

"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware." -- Martin Buber

Near XIT, the mammoth cattle ranch established in north Texas in the early 1900s.

100 years ago in Dalhart, Texas...

My neck of the woods.

After the WWII base was closed, the local sheriff's department was given this real Tommy gun.

Dallam County Sheriff "Dick" Stout.

Brief moments in New Mexico.

Backstage at the Fox Theater in Trinidad, Colorado.

[see separate posting in this blog, for more on the Fox Theater of Trinidad]

 

"One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things." --Henry Miller

 

Continuing west, driving into the sunset, and into the Rockies.

“When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” --D.H. Lawrence

Crossing Independence Pass around midnight!

Moon photography at 12,000 feet, featuring unknown green dot (?).

Awake and alive in Aspen.

[see a separate posting on this blog, for more on the Aspen Ideas Festival]

"To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world." --Freya Stark

Aspen Institute chairs, perhaps formerly located in the library at Vermont Tech?

David Gergen and Robert Putnam, the latter being one of my new heroes, for his theories on the investment within social capital ("Bowling Alone" is a good read).

It's a Dog's Life in Aspen, among the economic 1%.

Fanciful residential gateway reminded me more of an anarchy symbol than "A is for Aspen."

Freshly installed bomb shelter (?) in the front yard.

Teaching capitalism to children on a Saturday morning in Aspen, lemonade stand prices range from $1 to $5/glass.

Rocky Mountain High.

Rocky Mountain Way.

Back across Independence Pass.

"Travel is glamorous only in retrospect." --Paul Theroux

Having turned east, more moments on the road, with the Rockies at my back. 

Lunch with my Dad, in Lawrence, Kansas!

Throwbacks to another time, through reviewing photos at my sister's condo in Kansas.

 

My grandfather Stanley C. Bentley, relaxed in the late 1950s.

Abandoned Lincoln Town Car limo, behind an aspiring Missouri winery.

Breakfast on the Fourth of July!

With my sister, Elizabeth Smith, in Overland Park, Kansas.

 

With my sister Jessica Smith, at the Episcopal General Convention in Indianapolis.

 

Seersucker suits, on the floor of the House of Deputies, at the Episcopal General Convention.

Tedium in Cincinnati: PhD residency.

Extensive banner-like poetry seeks interdisciplinary understanding.

Beside a nightclub in Sharonville, Ohio.

Ye who never left his neighborhood, of Clifton, Cincinnati, Ohio.

 

Leg-oriented statue in downtown Indianapolis.

My sister Jessica, with massive onion rings.

Interdisciplinary campus, Cincinnati.

Corporate light fixtures, Kingsgate Marriott.

Putting the "gate" in Kingsgate, Cincinnati.

"Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quietest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey." --Pat Conroy

"Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen." --Disraeli

Home in central Vermont by midnight, July 14th.