Well, gas is cheap right now and the roads are empty…
Attended a function down at a Rod & Gun Club outside of Harrisburg, PA @ 2010 where Uncle Ted gave a political speech for about an hour, gave a bow hunting demo and then gave all 200 of us a meet and greet with a handshake and autograph pic. Great dude.
Got tickets for a Black Crowes concert at the end July in Western NY, hopefully it’ll happen but the bastards are cancelling everything. Got us in a goddamn stranglehold.
Uncle Ted’s doing pretty well for 70+ though, wot?
I used to know a gal who worked for Fred Bear back-in-the-day. She said he was the best boss she’d ever had and she was stupid to have quit.
AnneApril 28, 2020, 2:53 PM
Just a thought to add to this day. It is the anniversary of Harper Lee’s birth and I thought it would be good to post this from her . . .
“There’s no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There’s no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.” Thank you GV for helping to keep it alive in my life every day.
Iowa SquireApril 28, 2020, 3:54 PM
At a time when the walls feel like they are closing in, there’s no denying the palliative efffects of a dose of Uncle Ted. Thanks!
Snakepit KansasApril 28, 2020, 6:35 PM
Sweaty Teddy is good live. Although sometimes the melodic original lead cannot be much improved upon.
David SmithApril 29, 2020, 3:21 AM
Great Bob Seger! Wonderful keyboard. Harkens back to bicycle rides in Michigan’s Upper, across Big Mac from Mackinaw City. Rode in yesterday’s sunshine, spring a long time coming after snow in April 14.
Teri PittmanApril 29, 2020, 9:48 AM
I take the dogs out for a truck ride every Sunday. What I’ve been doing is using the Map app on my phone to go to a town nearby and having the app chart the way without using freeways. It’s been interesting. I know how to get to these places on the freeways, but haven’t driven the back roads. We all really enjoy it (although I learned one dog gets carsick on windy roads.)
Ghostsniper’s Fred Bear link; Guess when one has a certain number of years behind them good words/music resonates bringing back grand memories.
Listening I thought of Henry Baley, an Eskimo from Noatak I used to hunt with.
Riding behind him on a Polaris snowmachine getting my feet knocked off the running boards by foot tall hundred year old spruce trees on a high plateau right at the edge of the tree line (Most Eskimos, back in the day, figured snowmachine’s had two speeds, off and full throttle) and him stopping occasionally, walking a circle around, checking the tracks of the caribou we were following. Fifteen, twenty miles later, five caribou, seventy five or so yards off. My .308 FN, his .30-06 Springfield. dropped all five in their tracks. Him, field dressing them in far less time than it would take to tell (I learned his technique but never approached his speed.), two trips sledding them back to the pickup truck and a great addition to the winter’s supply of meat for both our families.
& that brought back memories of one time when Henry, his wife, Edna, me and my wife were down at Chitna dipnetting salmon. Climb down a two story cliff, brace you net in a back eddy, haul it out when a salmon bumps it. When day’s done, haul them up the cliff (20 or so salmon per person limit back then.) etc.
So! As we were spending a long day at the bottom of the cliff I collected some nice dry driftwood making a fire so we could have some tea and coffee. Remembering well the woodcraft I’d learned as a Boy Scout, I proceeded to slowly and carefully make a fuzz stick shaving a twig with my knife, leaving the curls of shavings attached to it all around. Edina asked me; “Whatschudoin’ ?”. I explained I was making a fuzz stick to get the fire started. She told me, “No, that ain’t the way to do it.”, taking a kleenex or a paper towel out of her pocket, putting it under the kindling & igniting it with her lighter, -with the dry kindling and the river wind, a roaring little fire in seconds, yep, everyone, including me, had a great laugh at my expense!
Thanks Ghost, thanks Ted!
ghostsniperApril 29, 2020, 1:28 PM
The first time I saw Ted do Fred, heh, it was the electrified version and worth it’s weight but the one I posted here is far better. Just Ted. With a box guitar. Sitting at a camp fire. Doesn’t get more basic than that. When you strip away all the showbiz he is still a good guitar player and song writer. Personally though I don’t think I’d get along with him very well. He’d get on my nerve pretty quick.
Fluella De VilApril 30, 2020, 7:50 AM
The essential American soul is soft, ovine, libertine, and a suicide. It has melted in a puddle on the floor. Bummer.
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
— WH Auden
TWAIN IN TESLA’S LABORATORY
from “Chimes of Freedom”
Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
An’ the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting
Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
The painter stood Before her work She looked around every where She saw the pictures and she painted them She picked the colors from the air Green to green Red to red Yellow to yellow In the light Black to black When the evening comes Blue to blue In the night
To the Stonecutters
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Search American Digest’s Back Pages
Contemplation of the Sword
Reason will not decide at last; the sword will decide.
The sword: an obsolete instrument of bronze or steel,
formerly used to kill men, but here
In the sense of a symbol. The sword: that is: the storms
and counter-storms of general destruction; killing
of men,
Destruction of all goods and materials; massacre, more or
less intentional, of children and women;
Destruction poured down from wings, the air made accomplice,
the innocent air
Perverted into assassin and poisoner.
The sword: that is: treachery and cowardice, incredible
baseness, incredible courage, loyalties, insanities.
The sword: weeping and despair, mass-enslavement,
mass-torture, frustration of all hopes
That starred man’s forehead. Tyranny for freedom, horror for
happiness, famine for bread, carrion for children.
Reason will not decide at last, the sword will decide.
from Preludes
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
from Canto CXV BY EZRA POUND
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”
Ferreya
ARTIST: GIBSON
Edwin Deakin, American
Hillegas
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
from “Chimes of Freedom”
Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
An’ the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting
Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
![That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/welcometohell-150x150.jpg "That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]")
Gerard Van der Leun
Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
The scientists are in terror
Comments on this entry are closed.
Well, gas is cheap right now and the roads are empty…
Attended a function down at a Rod & Gun Club outside of Harrisburg, PA @ 2010 where Uncle Ted gave a political speech for about an hour, gave a bow hunting demo and then gave all 200 of us a meet and greet with a handshake and autograph pic. Great dude.
Got tickets for a Black Crowes concert at the end July in Western NY, hopefully it’ll happen but the bastards are cancelling everything. Got us in a goddamn stranglehold.
Equally atrocious on an acoustic, see here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyNYzcXAPf4
Uncle Ted’s doing pretty well for 70+ though, wot?
I used to know a gal who worked for Fred Bear back-in-the-day. She said he was the best boss she’d ever had and she was stupid to have quit.
Just a thought to add to this day. It is the anniversary of Harper Lee’s birth and I thought it would be good to post this from her . . .
“There’s no substitute for the love of language, for the beauty of an English sentence. There’s no substitute for struggling, if a struggle is needed, to make an English sentence as beautiful as it should be.” Thank you GV for helping to keep it alive in my life every day.
At a time when the walls feel like they are closing in, there’s no denying the palliative efffects of a dose of Uncle Ted. Thanks!
Sweaty Teddy is good live. Although sometimes the melodic original lead cannot be much improved upon.
Great Bob Seger! Wonderful keyboard. Harkens back to bicycle rides in Michigan’s Upper, across Big Mac from Mackinaw City. Rode in yesterday’s sunshine, spring a long time coming after snow in April 14.
I take the dogs out for a truck ride every Sunday. What I’ve been doing is using the Map app on my phone to go to a town nearby and having the app chart the way without using freeways. It’s been interesting. I know how to get to these places on the freeways, but haven’t driven the back roads. We all really enjoy it (although I learned one dog gets carsick on windy roads.)
Ghostsniper’s Fred Bear link; Guess when one has a certain number of years behind them good words/music resonates bringing back grand memories.
Listening I thought of Henry Baley, an Eskimo from Noatak I used to hunt with.
Riding behind him on a Polaris snowmachine getting my feet knocked off the running boards by foot tall hundred year old spruce trees on a high plateau right at the edge of the tree line (Most Eskimos, back in the day, figured snowmachine’s had two speeds, off and full throttle) and him stopping occasionally, walking a circle around, checking the tracks of the caribou we were following. Fifteen, twenty miles later, five caribou, seventy five or so yards off. My .308 FN, his .30-06 Springfield. dropped all five in their tracks. Him, field dressing them in far less time than it would take to tell (I learned his technique but never approached his speed.), two trips sledding them back to the pickup truck and a great addition to the winter’s supply of meat for both our families.
& that brought back memories of one time when Henry, his wife, Edna, me and my wife were down at Chitna dipnetting salmon. Climb down a two story cliff, brace you net in a back eddy, haul it out when a salmon bumps it. When day’s done, haul them up the cliff (20 or so salmon per person limit back then.) etc.
So! As we were spending a long day at the bottom of the cliff I collected some nice dry driftwood making a fire so we could have some tea and coffee. Remembering well the woodcraft I’d learned as a Boy Scout, I proceeded to slowly and carefully make a fuzz stick shaving a twig with my knife, leaving the curls of shavings attached to it all around. Edina asked me; “Whatschudoin’ ?”. I explained I was making a fuzz stick to get the fire started. She told me, “No, that ain’t the way to do it.”, taking a kleenex or a paper towel out of her pocket, putting it under the kindling & igniting it with her lighter, -with the dry kindling and the river wind, a roaring little fire in seconds, yep, everyone, including me, had a great laugh at my expense!
Thanks Ghost, thanks Ted!
The first time I saw Ted do Fred, heh, it was the electrified version and worth it’s weight but the one I posted here is far better. Just Ted. With a box guitar. Sitting at a camp fire. Doesn’t get more basic than that. When you strip away all the showbiz he is still a good guitar player and song writer. Personally though I don’t think I’d get along with him very well. He’d get on my nerve pretty quick.
The essential American soul is soft, ovine, libertine, and a suicide. It has melted in a puddle on the floor. Bummer.