the old-school guestbook archives
my amazon wish list... my favorite astrologer... my favorite artist... yerba mate revolution! erowid: a travel guide for interior journeys... no more war: MoveOn.org United for Peace and Justice True Majority seek the truth: Common Dreams Unamerican Activities The Nation people I adore, diaries I read: rev.raikes ariana cubiclegirl epiphany glitter333 laurakay wammo the music: the asylum street spankers backyard tire fire blue highway bill camplin wendy colonna freedom tribe joules graves guy forsyth band hamsa lila hanuman libby kirkpatrick leftover salmon pamela means medeski martin & wood the motet the nice outfit nickel creek open road rose polenzani railroad earth south austin jug band string cheese incident taarka tha musemeant the devil makes three tim o'brien band trolley wild sage keller williams yonder mountain string band |
utah phillips and radio games ~ 2001-04-29 - 7:02 p.m. it's amazing what you can find on the radio. Chi is the second car in a row that I've owned with a broken tape deck, and so over the last couple of years I've developed quite a relationship with the radio. I play "seek tag" a lot... that's where you whack the button, let it scroll through the available stations, giving you ten seconds of everything, and then whack it again when you it hits something worth hearing. if it doesn't sound like this requires skill, you'll have to trust me on it. there's an art to teasing the tidbits out of the scant and scarce stations you can pick up on the highway when you're passing through someplace like, say, nebraska. your hearing becomes sensitized, so that you can recognize quality in that crucial few seconds before the scanner moves on... because if you don't whack the button in time, you may lost that hank williams (senior, of course) tune forever. you learn to make fine, split-second distinctions, between NPR and christian talk radio, between authentic, old-school country and glam pop-country crap, between classical and muzack. you wind up hearing things you'd never hear otherwise. rare bluegrass. bizarre country. surreal talk shows. flying like a bat out of hell down the coast, trying to make it to a gig in southern cali and hallucinating due to sleep deprivation, I happened across a radio station with my name: Kelly. the commercials started going "KellyKellyKellyKelly93.5!" it was eerie. my friend gerry told me once he had to stop going to dead shows (back when jerry was still kickin'), because he couldn't take the thousands of people screaming his name while he was tripping his brains out. it was kinda like that. I stumbled across something gorgeous on the radio today, while I was giving ariana a ride to campus... utah phillips, one of my all-time favorite people, storytellers, and free spirits, has his own radio show-- loafer's glory-- "the hobo's jungle of the mind". after I dropped off ariana, I picked up some lunch and pulled over on a quiet sidestreet full of wildflowers, and just lounged in the sun and listened to utah talking and musing, playing folk and bluegrass full of the spirit of resistance and refusal, reading ogden nash's poetry, and just being gloriously utah. if you're not familiar with utah phillips, you should really become acquainted. there's no telling how much longer this glorious and wild spirit will be walking the earth with us. I came to utah through ani difranco, when she set a collection of his stories to her own music-- "The Past Didn't Go Anywhere", on righteous babe records. he's a folk musician and a storyteller and a beautiful human being. listening to his stories gave me faith in the fact that my determination to live life in my own way and have as little to do as possible with the institutional machinery of society is part of a grand old tradition that stretches back through history. as long as there have been institutions, there have been free spirits who refused to be contained by them. me and clare got to see utah perform in santa cruz a couple of years ago, and before the show we gave him a card, telling him how much his stories mean to us and how grateful we are for what he's given us. it led to a really beautiful and deep conversation with him about resistance and refusal which I will always remember. his words echoed messages that the universe had been sending me from every direction. he said: "refusal, definitely, but when we talk about resistance, we usually mean resisting the "mega-society". and we can resist the "mega-society" for the rest of our lives-- and we will-- but the "mega-society" will always be there, and it is in the interests of the machine to keep us in a posture of resistance. if, instead, we turn that energy towards creating small systems which meet our needs, that's how we effect real change." and that, to this day, is how I live my life. I opt out of the machinery of the "mega-society" to the extent that I can, and I work to build real connections to the people around me, to live from the heart, to do the things which nourish myself and others. I find what inspires me and share it with those I love. so check out utah. because I love you.
(((rings))) |