X is Coming To An End and Potatoes Rule

 Not the Elon Musk monstrosity, but the band: LA punk legends X: ‘The violence didn’t bother me as much as the spitting!’

Los Angeles was so foundational to punk-rock pioneers X they named their 1980 debut album after it. For Brooklyn-raised bassist/singer John Doe, the city held all the promise of a new frontier. “I’d seen Talking Heads at CBGBs, the Heartbreakers at Max’s Kansas City,” he says. “I wanted to be in a band, and I packed up my shit and moved to LA because I loved movies and literature, and because there was no punk scene there, yet.” For singer Exene Cervenka, it offered salvation from a deadening existence in St Petersburg, Florida. Restless, an inveterate hitchhiker, she was “always searching, my antennae open, just looking to see what was out there in the world”.

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Now though, the group are releasing a new album Smoke & Fiction. Billed as their last, it is remarkable: a dialogue with their past that never descends to mere nostalgia, a record that somehow sounds as lean and poetic and fiery as their debut. “It’s made by the same people,” deadpans Cervenka, by way of explanation. “None of us died, so we got lucky on that end.”

In many ways, I prefered LA punk to New York. Time is passing. Emblaming in a museum awaits. Butwe are not there yet:

Speaking of New York, Kim Gordon: ‘My most controversial pop culture opinion? I’m not really a fan of Taylor Swift’

My ancestry is Scots-Irish-Swiss. We always had potatoes in the house. I have them now. I do believe I have cooked or eaten potatoes in every form possible. Reading JStor Daily's Potato Power!, I felt in the mainstream of history.

CC is sick, again. The leg continues to be a problem. She was to come by last night and I assumed she had gotten called away. None of this I knew until I recharged the phone.

A deputy came by to make sure I still lived here. They have come by here more than they did at the motel when I was technically homeless. Is it because I no longer report weekly?

Since I was a kid watching The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Prisoner, I have liked spy stories. JStor Daily published Lai Teck, International Man of Mystery, a story I never heard of and has more than few points of interest:

“According to Chin Peng’s account, Lai Teck was inadvertently strangled to death when he put up a fierce struggle to avoid being apprehended,” writes Comber. “He added that Lai Teck’s body was placed in a large gunny sack and thrown into the Chao Phya River.”

He muses, “Lai Teck’s career as a transnational spy still raises complex questions of loyalty and collaboration which have even not yet been satisfactorily settled, but it is clear that his extraordinary masquerade of identities, loyalties and deceit … in the end caught up with him.”

But one last, tantalizing mystery remains: The cash and gold that Lai Teck stole have never come to light.

In Streaming Behind Bars by Phillip Vance Smith, II, I recognize a smiliarity with Fort Dix FCI. That is where the federal government imprisoned me. I understnd the Bureau of Prisons has now allowed tablets. We used to have instutional movies, cable TV, and whatever was bootlegged by the guys with cell phones and thumb drives. They were like electronic Valium.

Entertainment helps break the monotony of prison life. North Carolina does not allow incarcerated residents to buy personal televisions. In prisons across the state, I have sat in groups to watch films on cable television, on DVD, and sometimes projected on a theater-size movie screen. I’ll never forget the raucous laughter of 70 prisoners in my cellblock after Kevin Hart slapped Ice Cube in Ride Along 2 (2016). I still think about our tears when watching Lupita Nyong’o being whipped in 12 Years a Slave (2013). Films unearth buried emotions, even when we want to hide them, and they also help us escape the reality of incarceration.

In 2019, prison technology changed my movie-watching experience for better and worse with the introduction of tablets by ViaPath (formerly GTL or Global Tel Link), a company that provides telecommunications to prisons, including phone and payment services. Now I can choose a film from a limited selection to watch at my leisure. But this convenience comes at a high cost. Normally, people subscribe to an app for a monthly fee. ViaPath apps in North Carolina prisons work a lot differently. Each prisoner is assigned a tablet free of charge, but to watch films, we must buy a bundle of minutes.

I can buy only 500 minutes of the Premium App Bundle for $10, which hosts three film apps. The Classic Movies app offers black-and-white films ranging from the silent era to Orson Welles’s Macbeth (1948). The Films & TV app is made up of B-movies like Riverworld (2003), a horrible science-fiction TV pilot that ViaPath lists as a “feature film.” Those two apps are never updated with new films. Their selections remain the same in perpetuity. The Premium Movies app hosts an assortment of films such as High Noon (1952), starring Gary Cooper, and The Dark Tower (2017), featuring Idris Elba. It swaps about 10 films every 60 days, but never adds new releases. Happy Gilmore (1996), Major League (1989), and Jaws (1975) were a few of the latest films added to the Premium Movies app in March 2024. We must use all 500 minutes of the Premium App Bundle within 30 days or forfeit them.

I went out around 3:45 and came back around 5:15. Off ot Staples - where I didn't get everything I meant to get - and to Payless for dinner fixings and pop. Over dinner, I read some articles brought me by email.

The email brought me a newsletter from The Cleveland Review of Books. I started reading The Size of Life: On Dino Buzzati’s “The Singularity” by Ben Cosman until I realized I had read another review of this book, and skimmed the remainder. I do like this paragraph:

With The Singularity, Buzzati makes a case for the necessary limitations of the “wretched flesh” in which we experience life, experience that cannot be reduced to the digital binary—singular experience. It’s the experience of Laura that Endriade misses, and it’s the experience of life outside military zone 36 for which Number One yearns. If the aim is to defeat death, then the Singularity is only a consolation prize. Endriade promises Number One not only an everlasting existence, but worship as well: “You will be the most powerful being on earth. … Glory! Glory, don’t you see?” Yet if it is Laura inside Number One, then the resurrected dead do not desire such transcendence: “Glory be damned,” the machine retorts. And then: “How come I can’t hear my blood pounding in my veins?”

With J.D. Vance now running as Trump V.P., and having read Hillbilly Elegy, I decided to read Dani Lamorte's A Paris, of an Appalachia (or How to Go to Hell). I also noticed it was about Pittsburgh, where once upon a time my Uncle Bob and Aunt Mary Ellen lived close to (Bethel Park, actually). I almost gave this up until I ran across this passage:

Appalachia, after all, needs fixed. In 1965, President Johnson signed the Appalachian Regional Development Act (ARDA), creating an interstate governmental body tasked with distributing funds to some of the nation’s poorest counties. Though the string of member states roughly follows the Appalachian mountains, inclusion in or exclusion from the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) zone was a political matter, not a geographic one. Northern Mississippi’s inclusion, for instance, is a tale of anti-Black racism and forgery. As Justin Randolph explains, white Mississippi politicos were aggravated by Office of Economic Opportunity funding made available to Black Mississippi communities—funding they could neither control nor easily co-opt. The same men, seeking ARC funding they could control, drew imaginary mountains on a map of Northern Mississippi counties. The map made its way to Washington and, even after the deceit was revealed, convinced members of Congress to make Mississippi Appalachian for the first time. A cooked-up map and an Old South greed combined to push Northern Mississippi uphill and into Appalachia, even as Black Mississippians opposed the move.

The ARC, as a solution for Appalachian poverty, functioned on the premise that Appalachia’s problem came from within, not without. Appalachian author Harry M. Caudill disagreed with this, and called the ARDA a “grim hoax.” According to Caudill, the money ARC directed towards new roads and hospitals distracted from the real problem: the region’s “wealth—and it is almost immeasurable—is in ‘foreign’ ownership,” with the “foreigners” being corporations in the American Northeast and Midwest. Industrial giants elsewhere held deeds to massive tracts of Appalachian land and mineral resources. Appalachians might work to extract and sell those resources, but the actual profits of sale ended up outside the region.

Caudill’s comments foreshadowed “internal colony theory”—the theory that Appalachia might be best understood as a colony within the boundaries of the imperial nation state. Resources are extracted for energy, industry, and trade, but the people who live along the coal mines and corporate scars are denied access to the resulting wealth. Mary Anglin writes that internal colony theory appeals because it shifts the blame for Appalachia’s troubles from Appalachians themselves (characterized as lazy, dim, and shifty) to external forces keeping Appalachia from its potential success. However, this shift is accompanied by a sort of “militant particularism” which takes a snapshot of these oppressive power relations and positions it as the story of Appalachia. The bearded white coal miner with a vaguely non-northern accent, living hand to mouth, body broken open like a coal seam, becomes Appalachia’s avatar. Necessarily, this setup renders illegible the stories of Black Appalachians—both a condition for the creation of the white Appalachian avatar, and a powerful result that makes “colony” sound incautious in this context. The term also risks obscuring the political insecurity and material deprivation to which “external” colonized territories, such as Puerto Rico, are treated. Anglin goes on to argue that, in economic terms, Appalachia isn’t all that unique. It’s “one space of poverty and disenfranchisement among many.” Recontextualizing Appalachia as a data point rather than a whole story, “in turn, fosters appreciation and curiosity about modes of solidarity that might traverse different social and geographic settings.” In other words, Appalachia is not a colony in the way that Lebanon was once a colony, but the commonalities between our experiences of Parisian exploitation are worth considering.

Which overlaps very much with a piece on MSNBC written by  Willie Carver about J.D. Vance.

Unlike me, Vance is not Appalachian.  He was born and raised in Middletown, Ohio, well outside any maps of the distinct geographical and cultural region. Trump picking this Rust Belt charlatan as his running mate Monday sparked a resounding and unifying rant among conservative and liberal hillbillies alike in my social media feed: We do not acknowledge him. 

Why would we? Vance introduces his reader to Appalachia by immediately profiling the worst behaviors of each of his uncles, including a scene of grotesque violence. He calls us a “pessimistic bunch” living in a “hub of misery” (p. 4), and over and over again he uses a wide brush to paint Appalachians as lazy, ignorant and unwilling to try at life.

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... After all, the narrative of the lazy hillbilly has existed for as long as rich folks outside of Appalachia needed an explanation for mountain poverty that doesn’t include blaming themselves. 

Having fixed dinner and started on re-arranging the front room, I came to the email and blogging. Story submissions are coming up. I hope!

 

sch 8:28