Since I had to represent the Foundation at Grassroots alone, though happily in the company of Nate and Marge, I took a few photos so that I might send you a report of this year's events.
If I could figure out the technology of sending you a sound-tracked slideshow. I would. But you'll have to turn on the soundtrack manually. Go right now to: http://www.myspace.com/heyslomo and play "Shine" while you are looking at the rest of this.
OK. Have it playing? They're by the band I want to tell you about: one of the peak experiences of all my years of Grassroots Festivals.
As some of you know from listening to my whining and complaining about getting it in teeth once again, staggering around Center City Philadelphia at six-thirty in the morning in mute howling pain and Vicodin haze for part of a week, I arrived here not in the most party frame of mood. In fact, four days of the sirens winding up left me, when it finally stopped, in sufficient shock that my resistance collapsed, adding an escalating cold to my generally mortal world-view. Why, as Yossarian argued, if God gave us pain for a purpose, didn't he just give us neon signs on our heads? Happy to be escaping Pennsylvania, which my primitive brain no doubt identifies with dentists, Nate and I drove on in the night, opened the place up, and crashed.
Next morning, we're both up at 11:00 and head over to T-Burg or a cauppicino-to-go at Gimmie, then on to Grassroots in time to see the HORSEFLIES at 1:00. We know we're getting close because the style of automobile subtly changes:
The Horseflies are rockin' and the audience is deep into the bugginess of the music, (Slide B, please:}
I am in heaven and Nate is polite (You just can't believe how damn polite that boy is now, as if he got all of the venom and spleen out in one long early adolescent tantrum mixed in with an attempt to warn me that my head was about to be bitten off like a praying mantis if I didn't Watch Out Soon, which I never did with women and surely wasn't going to this time, either) and we're sitting here when all of a sudden the most nesiniforous perfume drafts along the back row of the bleachers. I look over and there are three young college-age guys energetically vacuuming out the glowing contents of a pipe. The troopers stay out of Grassroots directing traffic out front, unless head of volunteer Security Tommy Mann hands somebody out to them who Just Won't Listen. (Tommy is suspicious enough about just about everybody, and smart enough to boot, to have been a chief of detectives somewhere if being a hippie hadn't kind of ruled that out.) So taking advantage of being in a friendly police-free community, I think what the fuck, go over and sit upwind of them.
The Horseflies finish their set. We wander through the dance tent:
And over the where the "Happiness Parade" is passing by.
I engage some kind of a fairy-with-an-attitude in conversation, promise to send her a digital photo of her and her friend.
I pass by an extraordinarily beautiful woman apparently getting some kind of a healing in the Healing Area, a photograph I take from a sufficiently grainy distance that I feel like a papperazzi. Oh, I know just the healing technique for her, you can be assured. Don't worry, Miss, I'm a doctor.
A little way's further along the path I encounter a sight that I realize I simply must take for you, Drew. So these young ladies agreeably posed for me, proudly telling me that they have painted this all themselves.
I don't care what RG Collingwood would say: this is Art!
Is that the faint sound of you eating your liver, Hart?
So then the three of us wander over to see "Blackfoot," a Navaho Rapper group belting out a combination of pissed-off rap, HI-YA-YA-YA injun tomahawk chant like-before-they-attack-the-wagon-train stuff, backed up hard-core metal. It's hard to imagine, I know, but try to imagine it, and it's just like that. Maybe with some vodka and 'ludes.
We pass a large depiction of Our Savior,
and some guy who is one of the reasons I feel so at home here and not in Central Pennsylvania:
Then over to the drivin' Cajun band straight out of the bayous, which you can tell, because people with those-shaped heads just aren't from LA.
Marge teaches me to dance.
After 'shakin it like my Sister Kate until we could shake it no more, we headed out to the Cabaret to see the guy the musician who run the Kimberton Cafe and who usually plays Grassroots as part of THE HICKS told me not to miss. Here's the guy himself- SLO-MO. That's the dude on the soundtrack who's playing the SLIDE LAP DOBRO, complete with pedals, only it's an instrument I have never seen before, but this guy's relationship to whatever this is resembles Jimi Henricks' relationship to the electric guitar, only not so limited.
Nate described them best, I think, when he said that all the band members were almost perfect types of completely different genres of music, who would never be together, Only here they are, like something out of the bar scene in Star Wars if they played and sang with the creativity of an electric dobro/rap Bartok and the power of the Mormon Tabernacle in a medium-sized room.
Wow.
At ain't everyday that Nate and I are mesmerized by the same thing.
Or, also, deafened.
Suffering from the temporary hearing loss that speech pathologist Marge labeled as "transient threshold shift," we drifted, dazed, to the calming ambience of some sitar group in the corner of an open stage.
Suddenly all of these dancers dressed and dancing as cats snapped on cables into the flies, and started doing some cat-dance, with monks and actors and guys twirling giant flaming batons.
Marge told me that they were acting out some ancient Indian story, with the Feminine Blocked and then Combining with the Masculine, I couldn't see it. Maybe you can. To me, I was mostly wondering if they were doing a late show at Kuma's strip club, after this. Now, that, I'd like to see. With faster music.
Next morning, my previous day's wiring down the circuit breakers finally gave out as I descended into cold-hood. Marge left some herbal poop on her porch. Maybe it will work. But Nate got to drive around the vineyards. We sat on her porch (She had enough strength to return to Grassroots for her fourth day) and looked at her flowers.
We went up to the Blueberry patch to see if the wild blueberries were ripe: they were, but I could find only a few. But the domestic ones on a farm up the Searsburg Road were bountiful:
Nate, unfortunately, descended into true fever and racked out on the couch. I walked down to the dock to watch the last on the sunset. My senses happily heightened, I gazed out at the shades of indescribable color pulsating in the sky.
I have enjoyied this second week now up here with Nate exceptionally. And apparently he must enjoy it, too. He seems to want to hang out with me for these weeks. He has passed the threshold of intellectual equality, and sometimes we walk like a young and old philosopher under the trees. He has his own thoughts, and things seem to appear to him naturally more clearly to him than they have to me, at least without a great deal of work. I hope that this will be helpful to him in avoiding maltreatment by others.
Nate, instance, on his parent's divorce:" My mom likes to be alone. You like to be with people: you have to be with people. What, was it going to last forty years?
Lord knows I've probably messed up at lot in that boy's raising, but I realize now that the one thing I have surely done is love him with every breath I have taken since he was born, and as thoughtlessly, and that not something that very many people ever truly experience. I didn't. Maybe the rest is not all that important, really. Oh, and if I haven't completely exemplified Helen Keller's observation that "life is either a glorious adventure, or it is nothing at all," at least he has seen me attempting to pursue adventure even if he occasionally has to avert his eyes when he sees me marching into the jaws of my predator. Oh, but I am a poster child for the universal law of predation. Seethright, for God's sakes, get me out of here! - Crack, fizzle, dissolve.
We went to the doctor's in Watkins and have had it confirmed that Nate has strep throat. So, just like when he and I were staying with you, Richard, I' propped him up on the couch and fed him ginger ale and antibiotics. Since we don't have a TV, we just came down to my sister's/mother's house. We watched the movie "A Prairie Home Companion" on the cable together, and I am writing this sitting with the laptop out on the porch, listening to the rain and looking out over the misty lake. It is comforting to be here, with Nate propped up just where I was when I was sick as a child. And it was right on this porch that Beth and I held his naming ceremony. Besides, Syl and Michael are coming back from California tonight, and it will be reassuring to have a capable mom in residence.
Like Nate turns to me and his family, you are all there for me, and through me, him.
An addedum:
Nate recovered quickly, and a few days later helped me coat the roof and put new pilings under the dock, lost in a winter storm.
He and Marge and I walked up along the Hector Ridge, and deep in the forest we came to the place where I cut the trees to build the house thirty years ago. The stumps were still there.
Oftentimes, I do hear
Time's winged chariot hurrying near.
if I recall my Andrew Marvell accurately.
So that's my report. They say that the fall is expected to be quite beautiful here. Come and see.
Love,
David
