Art of the mundane
There is a certain reduced excitement to a day of the semi-skill of copy cataloging. One that requires practicing the art of the mundane. I usually enjoy the time-warping subroutine of working on gift collections. Often these are from a professor, who on retiring, bequeaths his or her magic horde of books to the library. In this case the Charles Keesing Collection for the Performing Arts Library. One book in particular caught my attention a while back: Arts Integration Curriculum in Connecticut Public Schools. A yearbook covering the year 1973
Artists in the classroom [University of Maryland, College Park]. I flipped through it. There's always time in the day for a little of that. 1973: These are days I remember - however dimly - from similar halls and class rooms only one state further north. I like things that can collapse and compromise time, rolling it up like an old rug, so that a single step might take you across it. The absolute present-minded and event-documenting sense of the book gave up a feeling like one of Frederick Wiseman's films "High School" or "Canal Zone". An encounter with artifacts possessed of the power to put you in a place. After I had glanced through the book, stuck a barcode on it set the item record in the catalog, I went on to other books. An hour or so later, I felt a strange pull to look at the book again. There had been a picture that had been a cut above the rest. Most were simply illustrative. Snapshots in a random state government document. This one had the dignity or perhaps sympathy of a portrait. A subject seeming to have a certain reserve of character. He was a musician, a folk musician. A genuine mandolin handling folkie. I have a soft spot for musicians. Especially for anyone daft enough to try to make a living that way. He seemed that sort. I neglected to make a copy or scan of the picture when I still had it in hand, the book has gone off to a branch library elsewhere on campus.. From memory he was a young man perhaps in his late twenties. A full but understated beard that declared earnestness and dedication to craft. He rather reminded me of a thinner version of my high school geology teacher Mr. Tosti. His clothing I can't recall exactly, but I want to say it was a dark corduroy jacket and a hat. Something of the nature of a Greek or Portuguese fisherman's cap I studied at the picture for a few moments trying to draw some conclusion out of it the nature of which I couldn't identify. There is some scattered evidence that I was around during the late sixties, but I do not remember them, not culturally. That is, there is nothing out of the ordinary I remember of them. I had limited context for things. I do not remember protesters or flower children, hippies or yippies. I remember the tribes of the sixties only as they were just a few years later in the seventies. The war over, revolution in the rear view mirror. A world and a lifetime ahead of them. I thought of a visit down to Spartanburg in 1977 to visit my friend George who had moved down there the year before. We made a trip up across the North Carolina border to Saluda or Ashville to visit a young couple who taught high school down in Inman school system but lived up in the mountains. There they lived a a quiet vegetarian semi off-the-grid life. It made a significant impression on me at the time and I began to imagine thereafter there were many such souls hidden away in various off-beaten tracks.
A few weeks afterward I came across the scrap of paper on which I had written down the musicians name. Good, I thought, this is 2009 the second decade of the age of the Internet. Until the shadows fall across the world again and our cell phone and laptop screens darken, nearly all is discoverable. I typed the name into Google and got a hit:
Bill Wallach (2003). I only needed that first hit. No need to rummage through the man's privacy. From 2003 it was clearly the same person. The same beard - thirty years radiantly on. The same mandolin, I believe, as in some of the old pictures. Still a musician, still a folkie. It would be interesting to see what a typical Bill Wallach set list looks like, bluegrass, Renbourn? I couldn't say. The picture is from a website calling itself Forum Coffee House, a Hartford thing I believe. The two pictures form a self-contained testimony.
Bill Wallach belongs to an American cohort prior to mine, the early boom generation - generations really. This "boom" was so large and varied that there is no one narrative that tells the story. A great deal and a great many from it just seemed to quietly go to ground as the seventies ran on to the eighties and again to the nineties. The cultural eye moved on. The thousands of movie screens, and millions of TV screens reflected other things. Little of it ever seemed to be talking to me. Sometimes I set to thinking how big a crowd I need before its worth raising a toast to the Soft Boys or the Replacements. A bigger and harder to find crowd than for the Holy Modal Rounders? I couldn't say. Large enough.
A toast for today. Although you can't prove it through iTunes, Dave Thomas from Ohio's Pere Ubu once did a record with Richard Thompson (and Mayo Thompson). Not a thing that likely exists digitally, but a record in the back of somebody's closet I'm sure.
11:34:33 PM  ;;
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