October 2024
Volunteer State, Johnny Cash, Never Post
Weeks pass quickly once the school year is running at its regular pace. How is it already this late into October?
For those not in Tennessee, fall finally arrived. I watched baseball and football games on TV, showing people in New York wearing jackets while I was sweating it out at 88 degrees. But the heat finally broke here. I am the fall/winter person in my house. The next six months are for me. Should the sun set at 5:00 PM? Yes, that seems about right. Do I think Daylight Saving Time should be discarded? Yes, I think it should.
The primary art news for the month is a show I will be having at Volunteer State Community College in Gallatin. It will open November 11. The gallery is located in the Steinhauer-Rogan-Black (SRB) Humanities Building, the #7 blue building in the center of this map. If you want to see the show, go to the #2 red building to get a parking pass from campus police. The police office entrance is on the outside of the building near the parking lot and is clearly marked.
The show does not include new work. It is composed of graphite drawings from the past ten years. This show was a last-minute opportunity, and I thought it would be a good time to reevaluate some work.
I cannot remember when the show closes, but it will be in early 2025, so there is time to visit.
The secondary art news for the month is the book I have threatened to publish. The issue for someone like me is that it is about art but also about me. I’m not nervous about discussing myself, but I vacillate, thinking it is either a good idea or self-indulgent. We blast our lives and opinions at one another 24/7 now. Does the world need one more log on the fire? Here is the resolution I have negotiated with myself: serialize it on Substack. If serialization was good enough for Dickens and Dostoevsky, it is good enough for me. I can make a physical version via print-on-demand later if I want a hard copy.
The book is a collection of essays. Beginning in January 2025, I will publish an essay a month. I intend to post them in addition to this regular monthly writing, but I may also use them as a substitute. I cannot remember how many essays are in the book. Off the top of my head, it is 14 or 15. It will take over a year to get it out there. The essays are arranged in the order they were written. This is not chronological with my life. The intentions of the essays changed as I wrote them. The initial pieces are more formal and less personal. They grow more personal as they advance. Hang in there if the first two or three feel dry to you.
Kris Kristofferson died at the end of September. I can’t claim to be a huge fan. I know his songs and understand his legacy. His death reminded me of a time in the early 90s when my mother was invited to go to Johnny and June Carter Cash’s house because June was selling some of her clothes. This was possible in Hendersonville 30+ years ago, and we found nothing odd about it. A country music legend would invite strangers to her house to sell her clothes to them. I don’t know how my mother wrangled this invitation, but I know I have never seen my mother wear anything in the style of June, so I assume she went because when else would she be invited to the Cash’s house?
We all knew where Cash lived. You had to drive by it on your driver’s license test. The red pin in the map below shows where the house once stood before being accidentally burned to the ground. You will see Shute Ln in the top right of the map. Where Shute Ln. meets Vietnam Vets Blvd is the former location of the DMV. It was relocated when Vietnam Vets was extended. A Hendersonvillian’s driver test wound you through the neighborhood to Johnny’s and then back to the DMV. No parallel parking required.
I remember June’s clothes were laid out on the furniture so the ladies could walk around a couple of rooms and look. At some point, June said, “Ladies, Mr. Cash said he would love to meet you, but he is just so tired and would like to take a nap.” My mother looked out a window to the yard to see Johnny throwing a football with Kris Kristofferson. It is great to think of these guys throwing a football, particularly now, because they would have been in their late 50s/early 60s. We are about ten years away from guys that age *not* getting together to play Call of Duty, which is not half as cool as the Man in Black throwing a football in his yard.
In a further quest to dumb down my phone, I removed the web browser. I keep a notepad to write down questions to look up later. I have yet to write down a question. It ended up that my brain was using the internet to answer any unnecessary question that popped into my head.
In addition to everything else I have removed, I recommend ditching the web browser. It is the final boss of the perpetual distraction machine. My hesitation was in accessing QR codes. Every parking lot in Nashville works from a QR code or a text that sends you a link to a website. I usually know in advance if I will be in that situation, so I resigned myself to downloading Safari whenever I got to a parking lot. That will not be necessary. For better or worse, you cannot completely delete Safari from an iPhone. I assume it needs it for functionality. You can delete the Safari icon badge from your screen, but it is still at work. Delete it. Swipe to your app library. It is still there. It is out of sight, out of mind, though. I know it is there, but I don’t see it, so I don’t use it.
I am now back to about 40 minutes of screen time a day. That 40 minutes is work email, personal email, texts, phone calls, and maps. I can accept this. What I have regained is focus, and that has changed a lot in the studio. My last show consisted of large, hard-edged, organic abstract paintings. Currently, I am making small, tightly rendered graphite drawings of trees and teaching myself egg tempera painting. This is more in line with how I worked 12-13 years ago. Guess what I got 12-13 years ago? My first smartphone. Maybe I just focus all of my frustrations on this stupid box, but I feel it slowly chipped away at my ability to concentrate on the work I made for a decade before its insertion into my life.
Never Post podcast:
I don’t listen to many podcasts. I subscribe to six and rarely listen to two of them. I might listen to half of the others. I can only listen to podcasts in the car, but I would rather listen to audiobooks at that time. The subject and title of a podcast episode have to resonate with me to hit play. No single podcast inspires daily or even weekly loyalty in me.
I searched for ranking information about the Never Post podcast but found nothing. Forgive me if this is the hottest podcast in the country, and I am just learning about it. I am not tech-savvy. My students had to explain Cash App to me last week. I am still not sure why you use Cash App instead of any of its competitors, but I at least understand that Cash App is probably more popular for Gen Z, while PayPal and Venmo are for old people. But do I also need Cash App? That is yet to be determined. Anyway, Never Post focuses on news related to the internet and everything that means. The first episode I listened to focused on young people giving “FindMy” access to their friends. A new normal for them that I would not entertain. If you are not married to me or I am not your parent, you do not need to know if I am at Kroger. That might change when I am old enough to qualify for a Silver Alert. But Never Post is the kind of podcast I respond to: suspicious of anything related to internet and tech development.
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I have not had time for much new media this month.
I am halfway through Amor Towles’ short story collection, Table for Two. It is somewhere between a Chaplin movie and an episode of Frasier, which is right in my wheelhouse for entertainment. I am listening to it in the car, and they found a good collection of readers who can express the properly insufferable transatlantic accents.
The only movie I have seen is Wolfs, which seems built for 50-year-old dudes who wanted to see Brad Pitt and George Clooney in a ‘90s indie-budget movie. It works.
I haven’t liked any new albums lately besides Michael A. Muller’s Mirror Music and T-Bone Burnett’s The Other Side. The only music I have enjoyed from this year is work that either reminds me of older music, was reissued, or was made by old people. So, I finally hit that age. I am just waiting for the new album by The Cure to be released on November 1.
See you next month.
Good to see you - I look forward to seeing your show, though it will have to wait due to knee surgery Nov 12. Aging!