Let Me Throw An Apple At Ya

Arcadia Books & Cafe, Spring Green, WI

I just played a few folk songs out in beautiful Spring Green, WI, in support of my author friend Alex Bledsoe. Alex was giving a reading for his new book The Hum and The Shiver, which refers to a bunch of great old folk songs in its storyline. The mixture of music and story brought out the idea, yet again, of how intimately these are connected. Music is story. Story, like music, has a certain arrangement that affords its greatest impact.

"We all carry a landscape within us," said Bruce Springsteen last year (11.15.10) in an interview with Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air. I very much agree. "I felt like my own identity was rooted in that sense of place," The Boss continued. Music has been such a rich way to convey place and historical time, as much of Springsteen's music shows. Many great artists are rooted in a landscape of place. Think of Gauguin in Tahiti, or Remington's Old West. Of course, Lou Reed's New York City, and the many laureates of Texas, of which Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, the Austin Lounge Lizards, and Willie Nelson are only but a few.

Spring Green, WI, is a great little artistic community on the banks of the mighty Wisconsin River along Highway 14 in southwestern Wisco. The reading took place at Arcadia Books which is one of the BEST INDEPENDENT BOOKSTOREs in the area. They're new. Very nice people serve up literature and what looked to be very delicious food, much of it locally sourced. They have good wines, local beers, and great ambiance.

My interests in 'sense of place,' both personally and professionally, align with other recent popular movements emphasizing "local" foods, beers, and many other non-big-box forms of economic support. It's part DIY zeitgeist, part awakening from the consumer culture malaise that has gripped the U.S. for the past 50 years. Here in Wisconsin, there has even been a little boom in local booze. Several new distilleries make spirits using regionally sourced ingredients. Yes, please! This theme, in my mind, connected me to Alex's work and his reading because The Hum and The Shiver is very rooted in the Smokey Mountain hollers of East Tennessee. That's Appalachian territory (say it with me: Appa-latch-ann, NOT App-a-lay-chin).

The music, the story, fantasy and history all combine, as they do in this melting pot of Americana, to bring out the best (and sometimes the worst) in people. Pride, jealousy, rumors, deceit - all that small minded stuff gets mixed up with altruism and heartfelt loving-kindness to offer up our modern conundrum of capitalist status quo balanced out by egalitarian social infrastructures. I just hope this modern love of local continues to flourish and turn this "get big or get out" mindset into more of a "get real, get sustainable" way of doing business. As we approach the upcoming holiday season, we can all do our part to catalyze this paradigm shift: Buy Local!