Person Street rambles out to the big wide world!
Here we go and you are welcome for the ride. Raleigh Rambles. A Raleigh native’s rambles. Raleighites making art and making good. The city of Raleigh rambles out to the big wide world. The big wide world rambles into Raleigh. All of the above. This is my personal blog – mostly art and culture, but whatever else as well, because it is all good, all is good. Everything we do is art – or can be. Welcome to my new blog.
*************
This online world is a hoot and a holler, isn’t it? It’s been fun to watch and even more fun to join. I’ve been very lucky. My school had a Nando account, allowing us to use gophers and ftp’s to look at a few data bases, before the World Wide Web came to exist. I have watched my buddy Clyde take the Net by the horns and shake it like a money tree for some time, while building his hip hop web empire. My friend Richard has been hand-rolling a blog since before there were blogs – I guess that means he helped create the blog culture. Blogs seem very much to be the universal multi-media uberform that Clyde and I dreamed about in the late seventies. I like them very very much.
**************
Raleigh is blessed with great local blogs. Raleighing was fun while it lasted. New Raleigh does a most professional job, as recently with their slideshow of Rebusfest, and a review of my new neighbor, Rosie’s Plate. And RDUwtf, of course, has my biased adoration, and is back in business after a nasty spamlink attack. Here, I’m not trying to review Raleigh – I’m portraying myself and my cultural mileu as a native Raleighite.
************
A fine cultural mileu indeed! World class museums, enough of a city to be a city but rural scenes a ten minute drive away. Greenways galore, which I blog about at Raleigh Nature. A decent music scene, I understand, but you will not read much about any music other than jazz here. My favorite piece of Raleigh is the whole scene anchored by The College of Design -with Sadlacks’s as its lodestone. I love to run into old friends or find out what young art entreprenuers like Sarah Blackmon are up to. And I still get to enjoy catching somebody up on The Paper Plant and being reminded it is still remembered.
*************
So here goes my personal take on Raleigh, old and new, work and play – living the examined life in the New South. Join me when you have a chance!
CAM staying alive at Moore Square Museum Magnet
Lee Moore and Nicole Welch conduct an afterschool program each year at Wake County’s Moore Square Museum Magnet Middle School. CAM, Contemporary Art Museum, has sponsored art programs associated with the school “since its first conception,” said Welch at the recent culminating event for the program. It was held at the Raleigh City Museum, which was the perfect venue. Amidst large images of Raleigh’s history, the young students got up in front of a good crowd of parents, friends and artsy fartsies like me, and described their efforts at coming to grips with the real history of Moore Square, essentially part of their schoolyard, and also the ways in which downtown Raleigh operates. They shared research photographs, artwork and tales about the urban history surrounding Moore Square. The Raleigh trivia game they conducted was a riot, and it’s clear that Lee Moore has found a wonderful venue for her wonderful mix of interest and talents. Lee has enriched the Raleigh art scene in so many different ways, with her music, her art, her studio, curating and promoting art through Rebus Works, participating in global art exchanges which have brought fascinating and important art workers into the area – and so much more.
Lee Moore, artist and educator, speaks at the Raleigh City Museum
Lucky kids. And lucky CAM, which has used programs such as this to maintain a presence and demonstrate viability during its long hiatus as a public space. Hopes are high with the new director, who says work to bring the West Street building up to code will begin soon. NewRaleigh just posted on the most recent design plans.
Below is the window display at the Raleigh City Museum in the old Briggs building on Fayetteville Street.
The visual products of the program are on display at several locations in downtown.
Way to go, Lee, Nichole, and Luke! hang in there, CAM!
*******************
Elise Witt – local girl gone global
Elise
Elise Witt is a proud product of Knightdale, UNC-CH, and the Raleigh area. She is in Atlanta now and always doing amazing things. Her wonderful music is informed by classical training, world-wide folk traditions – and Elise’s unique, enthralling and amazing voice! She writes, performs and produces wonderful music, and betters the world while she’s at it – working with Alternate Roots over many years as it has grown, traveling around the country giving workshops about enriching your life with music, and exemplifying with her own life and career the commitment to enlightened, positive existence.
********************************
Where to start! In the last year, she has visited China:
From December 9-18, 2007, I was invited as a guest to fly to China, to sing with the Chiang-Su State Chorus from Nanjing, and the Beijing Central Conservatory Chorus, along with the Jiangsu Province Symphony Orchestra, with guests from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, and Russia, under the direction of reknowned Chinese conductor Mu-Hai Tang (former assistant conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, under Maestro Karajan).
She has sung in support of the natural environment.
She sang to help meld a world of differences.
She has also presented and/or participated in her usual plethora of workshops focused on using singing and music for personal enrichment, attainment of harmony and peace, and for plain old fun. Check out her website and buy her stuff! Go Elise!
Jeffery Beam helps us mourn Jonathan Williams
he done
what he could
when he got round
to it
Jeffery Beam is a wonderful literary character who works at UNC-CH and lives in Hillsborough. He has a book out of collected poems and has many interesting publications to his credit.
He is always alerting me to wonderful things, such as his readings for Groundhog Day, or a friend’s musical setting for a soldier’s last letter home, or the blooming of the Dove tree in the UNC Arboretum. Recently he gave me the news that Jonathan Williams had died. He knew the man and understood his importance as few do.
Here is the beginning of Jeffery’s obituary:
Poet, publisher, and photographer Jonathan Chamberlain Williams, founder of The Jargon Society press, one of the most renowned small presses of the last half of the twentieth century, and champion and publisher of some of the most important mid and late century poets in the United States and England, died on March 16, 2008 in Highlands, North Carolina. Williams, 79, began his avant-garde press while a student at the Chicago Institute of Design, naming it “Jargon” not only for its meaning of personal idiom, but after the French spring pear, “jargonelle” and the French “jargon,” meaning the twittering of birds.
Jeffery writes of his personal work, the incredibly important work of The Jargon Society press, but mostly he evokes for us the amazingly unique style and oulook of this man.
Williams’ interests and talents, revealed him as a Renaissance man – publisher; poet and satirist; book designer; editor; photographer; legendary correspondent; literary, art, and photography critic and collector; early collector and proselytizer of visionary folk art; cultural anthropologist; curmudgeon; happy gardener; resolute walker; and keen and adroit raconteur and gourmand. Williams’ refined decorum and speech, and sartorial style, contrasted sharply, yet pleasingly, with his delight in the bawdy, his incisive humor, and his confidently experimental and inventive poems and prose. His interests, in his own words, raised, “the common to grace,” while paying “close attention to the earthy.” At the forefront of the avant-garde, and yet possessing a deep appreciation of the traditional, Williams celebrated, rescued, and preserved, as he described it, “more and more away from the High Art of the city” settling “for what I could unearth and respect in the tall grass.”
***********
Just closed is a show whose prospectus gives some idea of the many dimensions of this man. Thank you, Jeffery, as we try to find the proper way to remember and honor this unique individual.
The Jargon Society has come under the wing of the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center in Asheville.
****
News from Jeff Beam
GREEN HILL CENTER FOR NORTH CAROLINA ART presents “If you can kill a snake with it, it ain’t art” – The personal art collection of Jonathan Williams
…this unusual, varied, and exciting collection of art collected by one of the finest poets of his generation, Jonathan Williams. Details below. Continue reading
Lt. Walsh’s grave – celebration and pseudo mystery
The media firestorm about the secret decoration each year of Lt Walsh’s grave in the Confederate section of Oakwood cemetery was a hoot to watch, since the “decorator” is a beloved private historian who has performed rituals in City Cemetery and performed last rites for bridges quite out in the open for all these many years. I certainly won’t tell you his name. But I joined a group of almost two dozen people at 4 pm on April 13 to listen to the history and context of this particular grave marker. We heard anecdotal history and a reading of the only eyewitness account from the time: the statement of Millie Henry, a ten year old servant girl. If Lt Walsh’s celebration reaches it’s twentieth year next year, and this blog reaches its first, I will post that text next April 13.
*************
The Oakwood gathering segued into a wonderful party in Oakdale with freshly shelled black-eyed peas and barbeque, both cooked in cast iron over a fireplace made that day out of loose brick. There was some wonderful meeting and greeting, but rather than gossip about it I will share some more graveyard images – some favorites from City Cemetery, where my Walsh friend used to hold candlelight readings of Poe. Truly local and genuine rituals – one of the things that makes Raleigh what it is.
raleighrambles.com
portrait by Guillermo Velasco
Raleigh Rambles 