Sherry Chandler

Another of those pesky cross-quarter days, this one also sometimes known as Beltane.

The Baltimore Orioles have breezed into town, as they do every year about this time. They seem to stay, in our yard at least, only a couple of weeks but while they’re around they make their presence known with their splashy colors and much raucous singing. It’s a simple song but lovely and it’s always a joy when the birds return.

(I give you a photo stolen from the US Geological Survey. Not much way that I could get a shot, I think. They like the upper terraces of the tall wild cherries and the old black locusts that are just about to bloom now in our yard.)

We have also seen a hummingbird, probably a female ruby-throated since they are the ones that range in the east, feeding on the last few surviving redbud blooms. Most of the blooms were killed by the 5-day freeze we had mid-April.

May Day is also a worker’s holiday in many nations around the world and so demonstrations are planned around the nation for immigrant workers. [Added: Or, if you're a hard-nosed capitalist, you can celebrate Law Day, mandated by Eisenhower to co-opt the socialist May Day.]

It also means that NaPoWriMo is over and I hope all of you who participated got some good stuff going.

And speaking of gaudy male display, this is the fourth anniversary of Dubya Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” appearance on board an aircraft carrier, the Abraham Lincoln, carefully positioned to look as though it were out to sea, proving once and for all that an action figure doll does not make a good president.

To commemorate that event, I give you words from the inaugural address of our new Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere:

But now that I have achieved virtual immortality, or mortal virtuality, my first act as laureate is to declare power, as we know it, bankrupt. I realize I am among the choir, but I find it important, especially now, to point a finger at the war the U.S. began, and maintains at extreme cost, on false pretenses and without the support of the countries seated at the United Nations’ table, since we are nearing a voting period. The “Policeman” of the world has ridden its course, and we have to start an articulate buzz about the demise of this kind of brute, money-motivated power – among ourselves — so that we can begin re-building our international diplomacy skills, and most vitality, engage the next generation of U.S. citizens in the process.

I listen to NPR some mornings and report war details, including death tolls, to my students now and then. Once in awhile, a handful will get flustered and demand to know why “we didn’t know these details before,” especially in relation to the genesis of the war. These outbursts are common enough that I think, If just a few more adults were talking to young adults about the specificities and the perils the war will provide for their futures, maybe these Millennials won’t be so easily media-duped once they truly become the voting majority.

Back in January 2006, when Frontline first showed David Sutherland’s documentary, Country Boys, Brooks Carver sent me an e-mail in which he said, in part,

if they run that coal train through there once more I’m going to throw my shoe at the screen

Turns out he wasn’t the only one who thought there was a little bit too much train.

Last night, just sort of browsing through the stacks of books we have lying around, I picked up a copy of Appalachian Heritage from Spring 2006 and found this statement in a review of Country Boys by Tim Skeen:

My father lived in Garrett [home town to one of the "country boys"] when he was a child. He thinks Sutherland’s film was, shall I politely say, not very complimentary to the town. “For one thing,” my father said, “there are only a couple of coal trains that pass through that town a day. [From Sutherland's film] you’d think the trains were going through there all the time.”

Country Boys has come back on my radar screen because The Oxford American Southern Movie Issue has picked it as one of Thirteen Essential Southern Documentaries, Part II. Reviewer Kevin Brockmeier says:

But as the film progresses and you become more and more immersed in the stories of the people involved, something happens and all the broken things begin to change. They seem to reflect the light rather than absorb it. It is as if they have been invested again with all the promise they must have displayed in their infancy. The feeling overtakes you that the world you’ve been gazing upon is slowly piecing itself back together. It doesn’t last, this feeling. It can’t. The difficulties of life keep rising up to reclaim the story. But by the end of the movie, the erosion you see in every frame means something different than it did at the beginning. Maybe the world is broken, you think, but it’s our world, it belongs to us, and we have to love it anyway.

Tim Skeen taught two of the principles — Cody Perkins and his girlfriend Jessica Riddle — at Prestonburg Community College. In the film, you see Cody and Jessica visit the college and look over the class catalogue. Skeen found them intelligent and savvy and he had a high opinion of Jessica’s writing talent. His review in Appalachian Heritage, entitlled “Stereotypical Images Prevail,” [link is to PDF document], is not so enthusiastic about the film:

For all of his considerable effort, Sutherland’s film says more about him than the people he filmed: that he’s grateful to be an outsider, dismayed by the abandoned cars, the monstrous, coal-laden trains, the roadside advertisements for Social Security disability lawyers and Jesus. I don’t blame him. It’s complicated, and he’s not alone…

…other than an Andy Hardy Hey, let’s put on a show! mentality, I’m not sure why he came to Appalachia. In a January 1, 2006 article about the film in The New York Times, Sutherland is quoted as saying, “Everyone wants things to be all black and white, but with me everything is nuance. This film has a lot of that: you get a take on something and it can be wrong.”

Skeen, whose collection of poetry Kentucky Swami won the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, might be accused of reflecting the native’s resentment of outside meddlers, as illustrated brilliantly in Appalshop’s Stranger with a Camera. At the time he wrote the review, Skeen was living in California (a fact that has no relevence whatsoever).

In our household, the problems with the film go back to those trains. Sutherland may have thought they were atmosphere. We thought they were filler. The film seemed as long and slow and draggy as those coal trains and, while our hearts ached for the boys, we weren’t as moved by the visual atmospherics and nuance as we might have been. Maybe because that “broken” the landscape is the one we live in…