Fragonard, 2007

The Post-Modern movement was built upon a series of fits of destruction. With Conceptual art, ideas destroyed visuals. In Pop art, visuals destroyed the sacred weight of the subject. With Appropriation, artists took the work of other artists and labeled it as their own, thus destroying the notion of artist as genius.

Once the smoke cleared, almost every over-reaching, Modernist myth had been debunked. Authorship, visual pleasure, the authority of the museum, and even artistic quality were all deemed fabrications of cultural chauvinism. That’s why it’s so tough for us to figure out if the carelessly-made object before us is an act of conceptual brilliance, or just lame. Too many quick quick-cut collages tell us only that we are less than the sum of our parts.

Unless you follow contemporary art the way I follow Mad Men, you may find yourself standing before a monument to Anti-Monument, thinking it isn’t worth the styrofoam it’s made from. That was my sense of under-whelment from viewing Thomas Shutte’s recent, 18’ high “Man in Mud” this past August at his exhibit at House de Kunst in Munich.

So it comes as a huge relief when an artist is willing to offer a nugget of meaning without irony. Dickson Schneider’s current series of paintings, of fashion models sharing space with works of fine art, offer just that.

He puts the two cultures of visual beauty together. Both the contemporary models and the fine art, modern and classic, are given equal but different values; he treats both with exquisite care. The result is an opportunity to feel the connection without any overt instruction from the paintings themselves.

The fashion models in Schneider’s paintings are imagery from advertising poses. The models are glorious and bizarre, as they are in life. Their unnatural proportions are mesmerizing; their long, adolescent legs, like stilts, retain a human appeal in spite of the perplexing distortion.

In the painting “Fragonard,” Schneider places an African-American model with straight blond hair and blue eyes before a backdrop of 18th-century pornographic fine art. In the background, plump, naked women frolic weightlessly in a wooded glade as the contemporary model in pink looks self-consciously, just a few degrees to the side.

This is so wrong it thrills me. Two sexual ideals, from different times and tribes, placed together. Our contemporary woman’s gaze breaks the reverie. It’s a brilliant touch: showing both the foreground figure as fitting into and rejecting a sexual fantasy idea is one of the best aspects of Schneider’s work. Every time I look deeply into the implications he presents, my eye is teased away by some different layer of a painted morsel. Distracted, I find myself thinking: “Cool purse.”

Sebastian, 2007

The same thing happens in his painting “Sebastian.” Using centuries-old iconography, a bevy of beautiful people from current times share play space with St. Sebastian, who, as usual, is tied to a post and skewered by a dozen arrows. A female saint grieves… Great shoes.

Similarly, in Isenheim a young woman with a perfect, vacant look for our times leans into the frame, causing her top to slip and expose her breast. Behind this image of current commercial beauty extends the arm of the crucified Christ as seen in the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grunewald in 1512-16; Christ’s arm is covered in syphilitic sores.

The juxtaposition doesn’t scream, it just waits for us to notice it. The two periods, the two elements, are treated with even weight; every thread of runway couture is treated with the same reverence as the robes of the Virgin.

Isenheim, 2009

Paintings by Dickson Schneider are now on view through the end of December at Sohbert’s, 144 King Street, in San Francisco. Gallery contact here.

Katina Huston is a visual artist who is very, very close to Dickson Schneider. She attests that the foregoing is completely true.

If you live in Los Angeles long enough, the language of the billboards — the competition for space and the meaning behind them — all becomes clear. And these days, the signs are all about movies, fall-schedule TV shows, and fashion. Sorry, but it seems the music industry has no clout anymore.

On weekend nights, the Strip is packed. But at six in the morning, you can lie down in the street and stare up at the billboards–nobody would notice except the vampires heading home.

You would be able to see how Jay Leno’s billboard is in two separate places on the West Hollywood Strip. No one seems to be watching the show on NBC, though.

Meanwhile, the original British version of The Office is a show unknown to most Americans. It airs on the Cartoon Network during their time period known as Adult Swim, which is their programming for grown-ups. The reference to Adult Swim is down in the right hand corner and hard to see. This is an insider reference for hip people in-the-know about both the original Office series as well as Adult Swim.

This iPod ad occupies what is probably the most famous billboard spot on the strip. For years it was a six-storey tall Marlboro ad, on the first curve as you head west on the Strip towards Beverly Hills, just past Laurel Canyon. Because of the curve, the billboard seems to appear straight in front of you. It’s also right next to the mythic Chateau Marmont, the oldest and most famous hotel on the Strip.

The sign for Chateau Marmont was big and prominent in the 1930s, when the Chateau was built. Looking east on the Strip, it’s now dwarfed by a billboard for Gucci. Currently, the Los Angeles City Council is studying a proposal to ban signs that cover entire sides of buildings.

This billboard is also on the eastern end of the Strip, and for as long as I can remember, it’s been a Calvin Klein underwear ad. Of course, not everything on the Strip uses sex to sell.

For example, this big ad for Banana Republic seems hip, but squeaky clean.

And the enormous movie billboards aren’t nearly as sexy either, even when they feature heartthrobs like Matt Damon, in The Informant, or George Clooney, in Up in the Air.

These movie ads are all over town, and each movie has two on the Strip itself.

Similarly, the television ads are more about male action than sex appeal. This billboard is for a reality show, where Steven Segal is an actual police officer in the New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. It turns out that Segal has been a bona fide law enforcement officer for many years, and now he can also play one on TV.

You may have seen ads and marketing materials for the movie 2012, with a storyline tied to the Mayan Calendar, which ends in 2012. That, to some people, portends the end of the world. It could also mean the Mayans just got tired of counting.

Presumably, the Mayans somehow knew when the world would end, but they didn’t know enough to keep their own civilization from collapsing. Naturally, fear and superstition are always effective storytelling tools. Ghosts, monsters, boogie men and aliens fall into this category.

Animal rights advocates also know the power of shock value. This fearsome image sits at the famous spot where Tower Records once stood. It was vast, but now it’s gone. Book Soup, the independent book store across the street is still going strong. Virgin Records, at the end of the Strip, is also doing well.

Still, this was the only music album billboard I could find, on the outside of the famous club, Whisky A Go Go. It’s about eight by ten feet, at street level, so it barely qualifies. It’s aimed more at people standing in line than at cars driving past.

And here is another small one, a poster not far from the sidewalk. It’s an ad for Henry Jaglom’s latest film. He was one of the original independent do-it-yourself filmmakers; his film Can She Bake a Cherry Pie? from 1983 put him on the Hollywood map. Like Woody Allen, he’s popular in France and cranks out a movie every two years or so. His ads have always been on the Strip when his films come out. They’ve never been huge, but he’s still doing his films the same as he’s always done them. Stars and movies crash and burn on the billboards high above and flame out never to be heard from again, but Henry’s been doing his thing for over 30 years now. A good story, good acting, no special effects, low budget… and a gigantic body of work.

Web-based shows like Suzie Cocktail are even more of an unknown. At some point, we’ll all be watching on the web, but right now, none of these shows is really making any money. That means nobody is sure how this new way of watching programming is going to work.

In the cable TV arena, Showtime has overtaken HBO as the subscriber network with the hippest shows. That means series like Weeds, Californication, and Dexter. Personally, I find the Showtime shows all bleak, with dark souls. None of the characters are redeemable and I feel like taking a shower afterwards.

In Dexter, a serial killer has been urged by his now-deceased father to steer his murderous desires to kill only “bad” people who deserve to be killed. And now, Dexter is a father. Welcome to 2009. I sound old, but this is the kind of poster that would not have been possible when I was young. The image here implies that Dexter and his baby son are both drenched in the blood of someone Dexter has just killed; that they are posing for a happy family picture is supposed to be humorous.

There are other examples; horror movies, and torture movies like the Saw series are now part of popular culture, and their posters are everywhere. For Saw III, the gigantic poster showed three chopped-off fingers standing up on end in a small pool of blood. People drove underneath the ad for months without pause. It’s hard not to interpret our culture is one where blood, murder, guns and torture is normal. If so, then we are ancient Rome.

In my view, torture is another pornography, and cuts through the boredom of our cubicle lives.

The real reason I like this billboard for Virgin Australia is because there are hot chicks in it having fun. It’s a sort of nostalgic and refreshing throwback; images of attractive women are still being used to sell beer and cars, but it’s been some time since airlines used sex to sell their services in the United States.

I spotted this on the side of The Roxy Theater, another of the famous clubs on the Strip. I’d much rather see a billboard of sexy women (and men) than see babies drenched in blood.

Donald Bull is a husband, father and TV producer who has lived in Los Angeles for the past twenty years. As they say in Hollywood, you can “imdb him” here. He has made countless drives up and back along the Sunset Strip.

Watch a documentary about a life on the Strip here.

Eugene Hicks, 65, leans on the front counter of his Clarksdale, Miss. restaurant, and his elbows thud on the wooden countertop. Hicks is a large man, and his establishment, Hicks’ Hot Tamales and Barbeque Banquet Hall, is a local institution. With one meaty finger he scratches his chin and moustache, thinking. The scratching sounds like sandpaper on wood.

“I don’t rightly know, but I suppose the hot tamale came up to us in the Mississippi Delta from Mexico. At least that is how I heard it.”

When? During the Mexican-American War? Brought by returning soldiers or captured Mexicans? Migrant laborers?

Hicks raises his eyebrows. He doesn’t know. Like everyone I talked to in the area, he is not certain how the hot tamale—traditionally a south of the border food staple—traveled to the Mississippi Delta. Neither guidebooks nor history books have an answer. Not even an Internet search was able to crack this enduring mystery.

Eugene Hicks talks about his Delta tamales with great pride, but like everybody else, he can only speculate about its origins.

Whatever its origins, Delta hot tamales are now a ubiquitous presence in this land of the blues, cotton mills and southern fried everything. No matter how small or remote the town, there is guaranteed to be at least one place that serves this spicy treat.

I decided to seek out the hot tamales establishments and find out for myself, and score some samples for myself in the discovery process. Hicks’ place is my first stop in my search for the ideal Delta tamale and the roots of how the heck they got here.

Steamed chili and corn meal fill the air in Hicks’ restaurant. I order a half dozen. Traditionally wrapped in a corn husk, a hot tamale is corn meal surrounding chili sauce and meat boiled to greasy perfection. Hicks explains that while the hot tamale has only a few basic ingredients, there has to be the right mix of meat and spices.

“No one has ever told me that they didn’t like one of my hot tamales,” Hicks says. “That is, to my face.” I don’t doubt this. Hicks’ hands are the size of compact cars.

There's no argument. Hicks' hot tamales are famous.

When I’m done, I walk outside, my stomach filled and my mind sleepy. Running alongside the restaurant is the Sunflower River. The water is so still, though, that “run” is just a traditional term.

Known worldwide as simply “the Delta,” this northwest quadrant of Mississippi was an uninhabited wilderness before the Civil War. Yearly floods from the Mississippi River kept away would-be pioneers. With modern levees and dams, early settlers transformed the rich land into an agricultural bonanza. Swamps were drained and trees removed, revealing farm-friendly alluvial soil created by centuries of river flooding.

When the Delta opened up, African-Americans, Italians, Germans, French, Chinese, Lebanese, and Russian Jews flooded the land as the river had before them. The economy boomed. Huge cotton farms were built between the years 1865 and 1930. The owners became rich. The share-croppers merely eked out a living.

Hot tamale fame is everywhere in the Delta, including Vicksburg, Mississippi.

John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance, has researched the topic and theorizes that African-American share-croppers most likely picked up the recipe from migrant workers from Mexico some time after 1920.

Yet the Mexican tamale is a different than the Mississippi Delta tamale. Wrapping corn meal in a corn husk or corn “shuck” is standard for both, but Mexicans fill theirs with combinations of pumpkin, chocolate, meat, pineapple, raisins, vegetables and green corn to name just a few of the possible ingredients. The Mississippi Delta tamale, on the other hand, is filled only with beef, chili and spices.

Hicks: Presiding over an institution.

Barreling down Highway 61, I hear the snap-snap of insects in the 100-degree heat. Ribbons of soybeans, corn and rice spread out seemingly forever into the flat horizon. As I drive, I see surprisingly few cotton fields—the fields where Latino migrants might have once shared tamale secrets with share-cropping African Americans.

Agriculture has become mechanized and the vast cotton crop is all but gone, replaced by newer, more lucrative crops. As I drive through the tabletop vistas, I imagine that somewhere, in one of these farm fields, the Delta tamale tradition was planted alongside “king cotton.”

Plain on the outside. Delicious on the inside.

If I listen closely, I can make out the low hum of giant automated farm sprayers shooting water over the fields. Every now and then, an old moss-covered sharecropper home rots in the distance. Even less frequently, I see shacks that have been transformed into lodging for intrepid tourists.

The demise of the cotton crop led the occupants of these shacks—the African-Americans who created the blues and the Delta hot tamale—to move to large American cities such as Memphis, Chicago and New Orleans. Their remaining descendants are spread throughout the multitude of small river-hugging towns across the region.

Willie Harmon, in front of his hot tamale restaurant in Hollandale, Mississippi.

I’m driving toward one of these small towns to speak with the self-proclaimed “King of the Hot Tamale,” Willie Harmon.

Part businessman, part raconteur, and part preacher, Harmon, 64, sits across from me in the shade of the tamale restaurant he is building in Hollandale, Miss. The tiny town teeters on the brink between civilization and reclamation by Mother Nature. Many of the buildings are boarded up and abandoned.

Locals drive by in cars and call out, “Hey, Hot Tamale Man!” and Harmon gives them a slow, regal nod. He leans forward and places his hands together. The knuckles on his right hand are still crooked from a brawl at a juke joint he owned before he became a hot tamale man.

“When I was a young man I met a traveling man,” he relates. “The traveling man told me that if a man could sell hot tamales in a place where there was no hot tamales, well then, that hot tamale man could make a lot of money. I couldn’t stop thinking about how hot tamales were my future.”

Heaven in Greenville, Mississippi.

Harmon says he’s been selling hot tamales out of his car and from carts in these small towns for the past 35 years. He believes the hot tamale came to the Mississippi Delta from Mexican workers, but he doesn’t agree that the tamale is a purely Mexican dish.

“As far as I know from a Mexican up the street, Indians in Latin America made the first tamales and they were the ones who showed the Mexicans how,” he suggests. “Actually, the tamale is an Indian dish.”

Did Native Americans really make tamales? Did the recipe emerge independently of the Mexican version? I try to imagine Choctaw Indians showing Delta settlers how to make them.

“Could be, could be,” Harmon says with an uncertain shrug. Lawns and hedges are growing wild here, and sidewalks are broken. Gypsy moths have enveloped a large oak, making the tree appear as if it is covered in fog despite the bright sunshine.

Homemade signs are as authentic as the food.

I’m getting hungry again. I tell Harmon I am hunting for the history of the great hot tamale of the Mississippi Delta. He laughs and tells me his son Willie has a hot tamale stand, called “Hot Tamale Heaven,” just up the road in Greenville.

It sits amid a strip of fast food joints, between a Wendy’s and a root beer shop. I order half a dozen from Willie’s air-conditioned stand. Today, everything is locked up tight against 100-plus degree heat. No children are playing outside in the Delta summer sun.

Willie’s hot tamales are fat, and the meat is loaded with cumin and garlic. They’re delicious, but I’m on a mission. I set off for Nelson Street, in the old part of town.

The wide street once bustled with musicians, field hands, hustlers and juke joint owners. Now the juke joints are boarded up, metal bars cover broken windows, and shingles are falling from the sides of dilapidated buildings.

Doe's Eat Place, which started in Greenville, Mississippi, has been discovered and written up.

At the end of the street is a small white house; the sign says “Doe’s Eat Place.” There are Doe’s franchises throughout this part of the Deep South. But this one is the original, started as a juke joint by Dominick “Doe” Signa and his family.

Doe’s wife, Mamie, developed a still-secret hot tamale recipe, and by 1941, the couple ran a steak and tamales restaurant out of the back of the house. In those segregated times, the sit-down restaurant was only for white people. It became so profitable Doe and Mamie shut down the juke joint.

I walk into the front parlor and I see a large woman stirring a large pot on a large stove. She doesn’t want to interrupt her preparation for the evening meal by answering questions.

Cathy Wong, the manager, comes over instead and explains how her family, from Hong Kong, was friends with the Italian-American Signa family. I ask about this southern cultural mix in the south as she shows me around the living-room-like restaurant, where four women are rolling tamales by hand.

By hand, of course.

Wong, 55, explains that many immigrants—Lebanese, Italian, Chinese and Jewish—opened up shops in poor parts of Delta towns, and catered to working-class African-Americans. Since Italian and Spanish are similar languages, was it easier for Italians like the Signa family to learn the tamale recipe from Mexican workers?

Noted Mississippi Delta documentarian Amy Evans thinks the language connection is likely, although proof of the origins remain a mystery. Evans has logged many miles on what has been dubbed “The Mississippi Delta Hot Tamale Trail.” 

At Doe’s, the hot tamales have paper wrappers instead of the usual corn husks. The tamales appear rather slender and light, but they are laden with oil, and the seasonings are subtle.

They make a wonderful afternoon snack, and I’m overly fortified for my next stop, in tiny Rosedale, Miss. My stomach gurgles for the help of an antacid. The main street there is named Joe Pope Boulevard, in honor of the man who founded the “White Front Café.”

The town is tiny and pushed up against the Mississippi River levee. The trouble is, I can’t find the café. I see no gaudy signs or flashing lights. Finally, a local points me to a non-descript white house with the tiniest of signs over the door. By the time I walk in, even my sunglasses are dripping.

The price is always right.

Inside, Barbara Pope, 64, is gathering a few dozen hot tamales for a customer. She is the sister of Joe Pope himself, and she says nothing when I introduce myself and explain my hot tamale mission. She goes back to serving the customer in front of me.

Another customer pipes up. “These here are the best hot tamales anywhere. Ms. Barbara don’t even send these tamales in the mail. You have to come here with your own pot to her shop.”

Ms. Barbara sits down and silently turns the pages of the Bible, writing down verses. I bite into one of her hot tamales and I am amazed by the mix of spices and meat, filling but not heavy.

I am finally out of questions. Ms. Barbara stands before my table. Sunlight shines in from the doorway across her face and she smiles. I know I have found what I am looking for, and it doesn’t come in the form of an answer.

Barbara Pope in Rosedale, Mississippi, lets the hot tamales speak for themselves.

Sean David Hobbs is a writer currently based in New Orleans. He has also lived in and written about San Francisco, Berlin, and Istanbul.

City 17 Depot. Based on Half-Life 2,
a post-alien-invasion first-person shooter game.

Megaton. Based on Fallout 3, a post-apocalyptic role-playing game.

Q: Are any of these scenes from real life?
A: Unlike the painters whose styles I steal from wholesale, I don’t spend much time wandering the idyllic countryside. All of these views exist in the video games I painted from.

Mercy Island Docks. Based on City of Villains, a massively multi-player on-line game.

Q: The video games provide you with the scenes?
A: Yes, but they aren’t simple screenshots from reviews or websites. I walked around within each game until I saw a view worth taking a picture of (unfortunately, there are no “Scenic Viewpoint” signs in games). I positioned myself to create the composition from within the game, and that’s what I used as a basis for the painting.

Port Oakes. Based on City of Villains.

Q: Are you going for a Van Gogh style in “Port Oakes,” with the boat scene?
A: Actually, I was going more for Maurice de Vlaminck [a charter member of the Fauves a century ago], but what anybody sees is their business, not mine!

Michelle's Place. Based on Grand Theft Auto 4,
an amoral New York City-based sandbox game.

Q: How long does the process take you? And what do you use?
A: Each one takes about 5 to 25 hours depending on size, not counting the time spent in-game stalking the elusive perfect composition. They’re all oil on wood panel.

Canal Barn with Figure. Based on Half-Life 2.

Q: Some of them seem true-to-life in that they are recognizable. Does that mean we’ve come a long way from Pac-Man?
A: We have, but I get frustrated by three-dimensional games that slavishly imitate real life. You have teams of artists and designers; why just imitate normal old reality? Come ON, people! Do something weird! Games like Braid have expanded that boundary by introducing painterly artwork. Fortunately, even some 3D games have started to move away from representational rendering into more fanciful and interesting styles.

Goldrush. Based on Team Fortress 2, a squad-based multi-player shooter game.

Q: So does some of this work approach that issue, of how much imitation games should provide?
A: I think there should be flexibility either way, and maybe you can get that from these paintings. But, really? Artists should just shut up and make pictures.

James Barnett. He always looks like this.

James Barnett is a painter and nerd and lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, where it is very hot in the summer but less so in the winter. Among other sites and publications, he has been written up in Wired magazine. His alter-ego, El Rey, can be found here.

Hello Kitty started life in Japan as an image on a vinyl coin purse.

A Hello Kitty house.

Thirty-five years later, Hello Kitty has developed into a brand character with huge clout but no visible mouth, who lives with her parents and twin sister, and who offers everything from pencils, appliances and credit cards to a Hello Kitty jet and a Hello Kitty-themed maternity hospital near Taipei.

A Hello Kitty plane.
(Photo: Yamaguchi Yoshiaki/Wikimedia Commons)

Until this year, Hello Kitty lacked only one thing: her very own tartan. That’s now been taken care of, as the Scottish Register of Tartans can attest.

Now, there's a Hello Kitty tartan.
Designer Yuko Yamaguchi assists with the announcement.
(Photo: Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images)

If wearing Kitty’s pink plaid doesn’t appeal to you, you can get a tartan of your own, as long as you can pay for it. Design and registry is $1,500, plus another few hundred dollars for the actual fabric: silk is more than twice the price of wool.

Compare Hello Kitty's tartan, center, with the one for Coca-Cola, left, and whiskey, right. (tartanregister.gov.uk)

There’s no requirement to belong to a Scottish clan. Cities, police and firefighting units have their own tartans. There’s a Jewish tartan, and a Coca-Cola tartan in a rich, chocolate brown, with a bit of classic caramel and a hint of Coke’s signature red. So refreshing.

The Whisky tartan, introduced in 2007, is an example of how the use of color tells how the whiskey is made: the five yellow lines stand for the fields of barley; the black squares, for the peat or coal used to dry it. The blue stands for the natural water; the black lines, the warehouse walls; and the small white lines are for the bottle.

That’s not such a stretch, really. Weaving is a near-universal craft, dating back at least 5,000 years. Colored stripes were incorporated into a plain weave to indicate a wearer’s rank. The more colored stripes, the more status.

Globe-trotting tartan, comfortable on the Masai. (Via kiltmaker.blogspot.com)

Tartan is the globe-trotting cloth, found in 14th century Spain and 18th century Japan. There are tartans in the kingdom of Bhutan and among the Masai of Africa. It is said that tartans originated in the Caucasus Mountains of Southern Russia, and migrated through Europe and central Asia.

Fun with sheep. (Via arbroath.blogspot.com)

Things didn’t really get cooking until sheep herds increased in size. More wool meant the that the fabric which had started as the size of a small rug could now be a long piece of material between 12 and 15 feet long. Highlanders pleated this around their waists in folds. They pulled it over their heads like a hood. They used it for a blanket at night.

Colonel William Gordon of Fyvie, by Pompeo-Batoni.
(The National Trust of Scotland)

By 1730, the linen plain weave had evolved into a sophisticated twill weave, and the patterns had evolved from simple stripes and patterns into recognizable tartans (from the French word tartaine). The sequence laid down by the numbers of colored threads wound on a piece of wood, or sett-sticks, determined the pattern.

Tartan status: Hello, Kitty?
(Holt Renfrew Canada)

You can imagine how a lowly sheepherder would yearn for such magnificence. Certainly we do, or Burberry’s registered tartans wouldn’t induce such high prices.

Naturally, Hello Kitty finally had to have a tartan to call her own.

Tartan gets around. (Photo: LokiVHS)

Kerry, 7, learns drums from Travis Calvin, 19.
(Photo: Shane Hennessey)

“Hey, look at you,” says the desk manager, by way of hello. “This is the first time I’ve seen you come in on time all year.” This is no ordinary clerk, though: this is Bob Kimbrough, the accomplished blues harmonica player.

Like all the teachers here at the Blues Arts and Education Program, both men have a comfortable, Mississippi Delta accent—and a ton of talent they’re ready to share. The program started in 1986; it operates out of the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi. It’s part of an effort to keep a hallowed, American genre alive amidst the onslaught of commercial rap music.

Railway cars still run near the Delta Blues Museum,
a former freight depot.
(Photo: JosephA, via Flickr)

Calvin begins tapping out beats until his six students show up. He’s only 19, but he’s a blues prodigy who won a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music. He has been playing guitar since he was eight years old; he says his mother wanted him to find something to do.

“I grew up in a bad neighborhood,” he explains. His hope is to tour as a professional musician, and then come back to Clarksdale and open up a music school.

Calvin’s students are grade-schoolers, teenagers, and a 60-year-old woman. Some of them share his story, and use the class as an ad hoc after-school center.

Robert, a seven-year-old bluesman. (Photo: Michael Perlstein)

“He’s always playing the drums,” says Teresa about her son Kerry, 7. She says she had to buy a new trash can after Kerry beat it to death with his drumsticks. “I’m really busy, and this way they come home at five o’clock all excited,” she says. “That’s all they want to know: ‘Is it class today?’”

Teresa also drops off her ten-year-old daughter, Keana, and Kerry’s friend Robert, 7.

Convenience might be a factor in shepherding kids to class. But the final effect serves as a cultural bloodline for this region’s amazing cultural gift to the world: the blues. They were birthed here in the Delta and the sound ultimately gave rise to rock-and-roll, blues rock, the British invasion and endless mutations of popular music that followed.

For the first ten minutes of class, teachers work with the students individually, giving them tips as they play. From behind his own bass guitar, Crisman directs Kerry on his drums, in the way a band member might.

The kids giggle at his jokes; sometimes they get excited and run around, banging their drum sticks on everything in sight.

“The beginning class is kind of a headache,” says Crisman, “but the headaches are worth it.”

And in fact, the cacophony magically unifies every now and then; the one-on-one jam sessions melt into one song as the students naturally pick up on each other’s looping chord progressions. Crisman is always at the mic, singing and playing guitar, while Calvin hops around on drums, piano and bass.

Christone, 10, mimics Crisman’s chord progressions, and moves his fingers quickly along with him as he breaks into a fast improvisation. Both throw their heads back. It’s a bit of joy for them both.

Jerry Fair playing with his band, the Mississippi Blues Crew. He teaches guitar licks to youngsters every week at the B.B. King Museum.
(Photo: Michael Perlstein)

This informal, master-pupil apprenticeship system is how Crisman, Calvin and their colleagues are passing on the blues torch. It’s what brought up such greats as Robert Johnson, Son House and Muddy Waters.

Down the road in Indianola, that’s how blues guitarist Jerry Fair teaches an evening guitar class at the B.B. King museum.

Poverty is rampant here; many of the downtown main streets of blues incubator towns such as Clarksdale, Cleveland, Greenwood, Greenville and Indianola are boarded up and half abandoned. A generation of youngsters would rather write rap songs than blues licks. It creates a concern that the blues are becoming a lost, or at least struggling, art form.

Baptist Town, where blues legend Robert Johnson played—and died.
Teens, in the background on the right, now listen to commercial rap music.
(Photo: Michael Perlstein)

Sylvester Hoover is a convenience store owner, tour guide, and cultural preservationist in Baptist Town, a collection of shotgun shacks just outside Greenwood. He says nearly all the young people there listen to rap music.

But here, where Robert Johnson played his last gig and then died after being poisoned, Hoover has seen a few of the teens add blues into their hip-hop, creating a hybrid he calls “blues rap.”

“It’s in their DNA,” Hoover says. “It’s part of their heritage even if they don’t realize it.”

A video of the program is available here.

Katie Urbaszewski is from New Orleans, where she’s a mass communication major at Loyola University.

The Comedy Corner, where I face the bull in the ring that is the mic on stage.

Comedy host walks into a bar.
Bartender says, “Where are the laughs?”
Host says, “it’s open mic night—there are no laughs.”
Ba-dum-bump!

But seriously, folks.

I know what you’re thinking. What would possess me, an unemployed former TV show host, to grab a microphone and risk being laughed at?

Mainly, I thought doing stand-up would make me feel productive, that it would keep my writing and performance skills nice and sharp. I’ve been curious about it for years, and friends always urged me to give it a shot.

In March, I dared myself. Then I realized that my experience addressing a camera had been limited to 20-second stretches. Five minutes was going to be an eternity, because I wouldn’t have the crutch of an interviewee.

Then I found out I had to vacate my apartment by the end of April. So I told myself: June, and no going back on it.

I scouted out a club. The recon made me anxious, but also relieved that I was finally going to do it. I watched one kid bomb. He left and went to catch another open mic somewhere else. It was an inspiration. He goes up week after week and he does it for himself. He didn’t get a single laugh, but he went on to try again.

Waiting to go up on stage and... kill?

I told myself that my attitude alone would get me at least one laugh.

I didn’t work anything out in front of the mirror. That’s just too Raging Bull for me. Instead, I just sat on the subway (now that I live in Harlem, I ride the MTA 6 train so much I should just get my mail delivered there). Sometimes I wrote notes, and sometimes I just thought a set through in my head. When the day came, I was definitely nervous. But I had told so many people, I couldn’t chicken out.

I got to the club, and there was a brutally long list of people waiting to go up on stage. I had to sit and watch and wait 90 minutes before I got called. I guessed I was ready.

Of course I was nervous. It was the day I had my first mammogram, so I wanted to work that in. Problem was, the audience was made up of 22-year old men. When I mentioned the mammogram, I heard crickets and got dead stares. So I reminded them that we were just talking about titty pictures. That got them right back in it with me. I proceeded with my stuff and—joy!— got some decent laughs.

I wasn’t great. I didn’t kill. But it was my first time; I told the crowd that and I told myself that. Now I see that the first time is all about getting up there and surviving those five minutes. Then you can do anything.

New York City offers at least 60 open mic nights in any given week in NYC. They are charted here. Many of them let the audience in for free (on some nights, it could be argued that the audience should be the ones getting paid) but charge the comic $5 or a mandatory drink for five minutes at the mic. You pay five bucks, you get five minutes. You can go up there and take a nap if that’s how you want to spend your five minutes—they’re yours. Some places don’t charge for the time but you have to email or call ahead to reserve a spot.

The terror that is the audience waiting for me to be funny.

Now that I’ve done my first open mic, I feel like a seasoned veteran. Here’s a sample of my expertise:

Do Some Recon.
Get a sense of the host and the crowd. If the crowd is under 30 and male, save the menopause jokes for another time, and add a few about internet porn. Or not getting laid, not getting laid enough, or not getting laid by cute-enough girls. Did I mention internet porn?

Do Some Writing.
Write down your jokes or stories and review them a few times prior to game night. If it doesn’t resonate a day or two later, cross it off the list. It hurts, but not as badly as getting the fish-eye when you’re on stage. Sometimes you can shelve it for later improvement.

Pull Yourself Together.
Being a slob doesn’t help the funny factor. Comb, tease, or epoxy your hair, and put on a clean shirt. Go commando, or whatever it takes to get into your mood. I changed into monster heels before going up, because I thought sneakers wouldn’t be slutty enough for my set.

Stay Loose.
Don’t memorize every word. The audience hears it and it sounds canned. Have the audience clap for the host. Not only does it keep your audience awake, it ingratiates you to your keeper.

Work Off of Others.
Try to make a joke or comment on another comic’s set. It’s like push-ups for your brain. It shows you can think on your feet and it will sharpen your improv skills. Try to do it every time in at least some small way.

Catch Your Crickets.
When a joke bombs, take note, literally. Make a note after the show. Do you toss it altogether? Do you re-work a line or two? Change the punchline? That’s what open mics are for: experimenting with material.

Be Gracious.
If you slag off your audience, you’re done. If they don’t laugh, it’s your fault, not theirs. Some audiences are tougher than others but if you remember they’re the guests and you’re the entertainer, you won’t insult them and you will do better at making them laugh—even if it’s out of pity. Compliment other comics and thank your audience.

Kill Them!
That’s the goal. To kill them. To slay them. Don’t let them breathe! Go for it, and show no mercy.

Okay, thanks, everybody—you’ve been great!

I’d like to say that I’ll be here all week, but I’m not there yet. You can catch me at the NYC Comedy Corner, Wednesdays at 7:00.

That was ME! I was on stage, getting laughs!

The Noble & Cooley drum factory, built in 1872.

(Granville, Mass.) Tre Cool of the band Green Day bought his favorite snare drum for $600.

If you’re listening to him, or to Phil Collins, Paul McCartney, Sting, Billy Joel, or Van Halen, chances are you’re listening to a drum made by Noble & Cooley.

They are mythic drum-makers, and their story is a very American one.

Noble & Cooley is Jay Jones’s company. “Our drums go to tape very nicely,” he says mildly. “They are solid wood, steam-bent drum shells. Drums made from cross-ply just sound like cardboard.”

At first, the company was a small New England start-up, manufacturing in the kitchen—of Silas Noble’s house, back in 1852.

Jay Jones, drum-maker to the stars, using an 8-color printing press that is also a family heirloom.

Noble was a master mechanic. His partner, James Cooley, was Jones’s great-great-great grandfather. Cooley ran the business side. After two years of making toy drums, the partners built a proper factory in 1854. They made drums for the Union Army; these were Civil War times.

Jones himself used to trot over to the factory after school. “I was a 4th-grade pain-in-the-butt,” he admits. By the time he was 16, though, he spent his summers there, working the old machines from the 1870s that cut wood veneer, shaped metal, printed, steam bent hardwoods and mechanized assembly.

“A piece of wood that’s steam-bent has its own ring and pitch, and the pitch has real clarity,” he explains. “It takes 12 to 16 weeks and about 37 steps to build a drum from start to finish.” It takes that long because the wood needs ageing and curing before the drum is glued and assembled.

Even the weathervane on top of the factory has a drum.

Just about all drums were built this way until World War II changed all that. Needless to say, computers aren’t involved in Noble & Cooley’s manufacturing at all.

The area itself is extremely rural. Granville is a little town in the foothills of Massachusetts’ Berkshire Mountains, not far from Connecticut. The remains of stone walls demarking fields farmed during the Colonial Period are everywhere. The soil around here is thin and “grows rocks,” which rise to the surface after the winter freeze and thaw. The rocks were “harvested” with the help of oxen, and used to build those stone walls.

It helps a potential drummer understand why Noble and Cooley preferred to leave the agricultural life behind and turn to making drums. Like many others of their time, they could have moved to New York or Ohio, where the topsoil was deeper.

The factory: making money out of water.

Instead, like other Yankee problem-solvers, they noticed how much water flowed through the brooks and rivers, and used it for power. Water mills powered saws (as a former “pit-man” in a saw mill, I know how it feels to be covered with sawdust and sticky resin). Mills also helped grind grain, full cloth, mill snuff, and card wool. All this ingenuity helped make up for the lack of capital and people-power.

Noble & Cooley had that same spirit, and used water to power jigs and fixtures and a steam engine. By 1873, they were turning out 100,000 drums a year. In 1915, they added an electric generator. All of this equipment still works, and visitors can see it.

A printed metal sheet from the 1920s, that would have been formed into a cylinder to make a toy drum.

During World War II, Noble & Cooley made wooden reels for primer cord, and used paper and cardboard instead of metal to make their drums. When foreign competition started to heat up in the 1980s, they adjusted their business goals.

“We decided the world didn’t need another mediocre drum,” says Jay Jones. In order to pursue professional drummers, he simply refurbished the old machines from the 1880s to steam-bend the wood. They teamed up with the Avedis Zildjian Cymbal Company to create snare drums made out of their secret cymbal alloy. The very limited quantities of these drums make them very collectible.

This printed theme was for a toy drum made in the 1930s.

These days, Jones’ son, Nick, works part time at Noble & Cooley. They still make drums, and on holidays they operate as a museum, where anybody can watch how the old machines still work. No computer de-bugging is required.

Tours—and drums—are available by appointment at Noble & Cooley. On July 4th, the staff will make a toy drum in five minutes, using 15 steps.

Robert Stewart is on the board of the Society for Industrial Archaeology.

Visitors come for music even more colorful than the stained-glass light.

The choir has sung, a five-member band has played, and the preacher has risen from his high-backed leather chair. And now, after the organist delivers a single, gut-quaking chord, the Reverend Al Green, 63, enters and approaches the pulpit. He wears a red-trimmed black bishop’s robe and flashes the electric, toothy smile that once caused female fans to swoon at his steamy soul concerts.

He screams into the microphone before turning to his seat at the front of the choir. The crowd is jolted to its collective feet. This may be church, but Rev. Green is still a masterful showman, and this is one of his last appearances before the dreaded slow-cook of summer arrives.

The man who left the top of the soul and pop music charts more than three decades ago after being badly scalded by a bitter and love-sick girlfriend still has every bit of voice he had during his superstar years. And today, 32 years since he founded his own church in south Memphis, Green still flaunts the charisma he had during his heyday.

Come for the spirit, stay for the singing.

“He’s an excellent speaker,” says Earline Reynolds, an elderly longtime church member. “But above all, his singing keeps me coming around.”

The band ratchets up the intensity. Green gets up and screams soulfully. He does it again. People in the pews start swaying, clapping and dancing. Congregants shout “amen” and “praise the Lord” with each surge of music and emotion. A woman in the front row convulses in a rapture bordering on hysteria, tears streaming down her face.

The organist blasts another chord and holds it as the guitar and drums riff rhythmically. Green jumps back to the pulpit, pounding his fist to the beat.

It's called rapture.

“Go ahead sister. Let God have his way,” he screams. “Forget about what’s in the church program. I feel something in this house today. I feel the Lord in this house.”

Green plays. He toys. He teases. He preaches the word of God. He sings “I Saw the Light” by country great Hank Williams, but not straight through. Every few bars he interrupts himself by incongruously belting out, “Yee-haw.”

“You’re in the South now,” he says in a sing-song voice. “This is the only church in America where you’ll hear yee-haw. You see, we can do whatever God wants. When you own your own church, you can do what you want.”

The Full Gospel Tabernacle Church stands about mile down Hale Road in a neighborhood just five minutes from Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion. The magnolias on Hale are in full bloom and the aroma of Sunday barbeque fills the air. Jesus is waiting.

The Rev. Al Green, baptizing and blessing. (Photo: Garrett Cleland)

Part church service, part gospel concert, Green turns over the stage to his rousing choir and a succession of female soloists. He gives a nod to his band as they kick up the energy. “Give them a hand. I know they’re expensive, but God deserves the best.”

Just as the room seems ready to explode, Green turns down the temperature and introduces Sister Edith Wilkins, who reads the announcements: Vanetra Macklin will graduate from Whitehaven High School. Anyone wishing to donate to the food bank can contact Sister Josephine. The juvenile court ministry meets every third Saturday except for May. It’s a reminder that the Full Gospel Tabernacle—despite being led by a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member—is a neighborhood church.

The service is Evangelical, but leans toward Pentecostal. Church elders place golden collection plates on a wooden platform in front of the pulpit and greet those who make offerings. There is a laying of hands as a young man in a white t-shirt is baptized and his mom is blessed. But there are plenty of casual touches, too. Green asks guests in the pews where they’re from. Today, there are visitors from Denver, Los Angeles, Chicago and New Orleans.

Green’s one-hour sermon veers from untethered emotion, to humor, to an intense stage whisper. He intermittently breaks into song, and the church band launches into melody at the first sign of Green’s characteristic, honey-dipped falsetto. But it’s more of a tease than a true display of the pipes that created chart-toppers such as “Let’s Stay Together,” “Call Me,” and “Take Me To The River.” Still, his voice tickles the soul like a feather. The entire sensory and spiritual effect is over the top.

Earline Reynolds, the longtime church member who comes mainly for the singing, dances throughout the entire service.

Steve Heath is a recent graduate of Loyola University in New Orleans. This is his second story for NewsPlink. His first was on juke joints of the Mississippi Delta.

Photography by Michael Perlstein except where noted otherwise.

Why not a Jungle Room? (Photo: Elle Maloney)

There is the so-called “Jungle Room,” with shag carpeting setting off the foliage and thickly carved furniture. Elvis’ TV room has three television sets, so he could watch each of the major networks. The racquetball court is now a two-story shrine to his dozens of gold and platinum albums.

It’s not clear that Graceland is enduring a graceful middle age into modern times. Most middle-class families in America have three TVs nowadays. And every garden-variety rocker or athlete builds a personal bowling alley, tennis court or basketball gym to suit their workout dreams.

Graceland is, at its essence, a vastly over-glorified McMansion. Yet the man’s home has been turned into a cash turnstile of excess, making public his most private sanctuaries, possessions and keepsakes. The surrounding restaurants, exhibits, and countless souvenir shops offer Elvis newsletters, and deals for hundreds of dollars off of the next visit. The gift shops sell mugs, shirts, clocks, ashtrays, snow globes, refrigerator magnets, playing cards, purses, lamps—all bearing likenesses of Elvis and his famous mansion. What must all those Chinese factory workers think as they produce this schlock?

People come to gawk in droves. Typically, they wait for an hour or more for their number to be called, and then they are herded onto vans to see the inner sanctum. They are outfitted with audio tour headphones and they smile for a souvenir photo in front of a photo mock-up of Graceland’s front gate. All the while, they are barraged by satellite attractions designed to pluck a few more dollars from the purses of the King’s most loyal worshippers.

Why the pilgrimage to blingdom? What is it about Elvis, a talented but flawed mortal, that drives millions from around the globe to happily pay a minimum of $28 per person just to look at his stuff? And pay more to see such things as Elvis’ his and hers airplanes?

At the time, state-of-the-art. (Photo: Elle Maloney)

“He was inventive,” said Jerry from Mexico. According to Jerry, Mexican Elvis fans have such reverence for the King that entertainers who cover his songs refrain from translating his lyrics into their own languages; they preserve the tunes the way their hero originally emoted them.

Anita, from Bulgaria, was in Memphis celebrating a friend’s birthday. She carved out time for a visit to Graceland.

“I’m still in love with him,” she confessed. When asked exactly what Elvis had done to achieve his legend, she echoed Jerry from Mexico: Elvis was great, he was inventive, he was the King.

For dining on peanut butter sandwiches? (Photo: Elle Maloney)

Plenty of other rock stars, from the Beatles to the Ramones to James Brown, have been inventive. But there aren’t many other dead music celebrities with a cult of followers who insist their long-dead idol is still alive and living under cover. Even a disillusioned tourist, appalled by all the commercialism, is easily moved, even speechless, while standing at Elvis’ gravesite, gazing at the eternal flame.

“I don’t know much about the American mind, you know,” confided a Frenchman. “But to me, Elvis, he’s religion. Elvis is religion here.”

Lord have mercy, one might say.

Sean McNamara is a rock guitarist from Connecticut, currently in his junior year at Loyola University in New Orleans. His major is Music Industry Studies.

Elle Maloney is a photojournalism major in her junior year at Loyola University in New Orleans. She is from Connecticut and aspires to live in both Tokyo and New York City.

Reverence with headphones on. (Photo: Shane Hennessey)