ponding

I’ve been in Ann Arbor a week tonight. I went out on Barton Pond for the second time today. It’s dam-slacked water on the Huron River, and I can get my canoe on it in about 10 minutes flat, from garage to glide. It’s pretty nice. Two days ago I went downstream and back about an hour all told to Barton Dam, the little generator spillway that holds it back. Today I put in at the same little railroad bridge and went upstream, about an hour to where the current started running too riverlike to want to work against it, then turned around. I took some pictures. I’ve been thinking about putting together a series called “floaters,” of stuff floating on water, and the feather will definitely be in it.

THE GOOD ONES ARE ON MY FLICKR PAGE.

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mas agua, too

Right now this is my favorite photo from my recent canoe trip on the North Fork of the Flathead River in northwest Montana, even though it’s one of the few that wasn’t taken from the boat.

This is from the drive up, where the pavement stops, looking across the North Fork into Glacier National Park, maybe 20 miles south of Polebridge, which is about 16 miles south of the Canadian border, which is where we put the boats in.

We spent two nights and parts of three days on the river. THERE ARE MORE PICTURES ON MY FLICKR PAGE.

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mas agua

 

The end of the Blackfoot

 

 

I’m in Missoula Montana at the moment, sitting on the front porch of my friends Al and Ginger’s house. It’s just as pleasant as could be. This is the 11.5th day of a 12-day trip, three quarters of that sick with an unseasonal head cold, one day deathly, the others just stuffy and fogged.

I’ve lost $120 over two nights playing poker and never once been in danger of winning. Goddamn I love it here.

I found and bought some sweet books but I don’t have the scanner with me so those will have to wait. I’m having two small boxes shipped back to me in Austin, so that I can pack them in a U-Haul and drive them to Ann Arbor in a month. Makes perfect sense to me.

There’ve been two river trips, a 2-night on the North Fork of the Flathead and a day raft on the Blackfoot. I got sick fast driving up to the North Fork and by the time we made camp on the river that night I thought I was going to die. My throat turned raw and my head clogged up and I got terrible heartburn and I threw up twice and I couldn’t sleep because the mucous kept trying to drown me and all things considered I think it was the worst night I have ever spent in a tent. I got zero rest and spent the next day in a small bad place floating through the middle of a very large best place.

The Blackfoot was as splendid and sunny an afternoon booze cruise as ever was launched.

MORE BLACKFOOT PICS ON MY FLICKR PAGE.

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swamp things

This is Caddo Lake, in northeast Texas, near the township of Uncertain. You probably recognize it from the picture, which looks almost exactly like 48 quadrillion other pictures of Caddo Lake. It’s sort of a ridiculous place to take pictures.

But a friend and I went up there last weekend and paddled around and took some pictures anyway. Here’s another one.

This was a little sloughy connector between higher-traffic channels. It had some current in it, which I wasn’t expecting, and this was taken after we’d paddled upstream and intersected a waterway called Government Ditch, which was a mostly straight-edged cut through the swamp buzzing with bassboats and jet skis. Man I fucking hate jet skis.

We’d just turned around and were headed back downstream toward the main lake when I took that picture. In another 20 minutes we’d pass again an alligator that I’m putting at a considered and solid 10 feet. It just sank and swirled when we’d passed it coming upstream, and surprised us, since the local word is that gators are a rare backwater sight, despite the place being lousy with them. When we passed it going back we didn’t even see it, just suddenly heard it over our right shoulders on shore, thrashing like something very heavy trying to snap something else’s neck. That time put the heebie-jeebies into me.

At the flea market in Uncertain, headed out of town, I found this absolute score for the budding river books collection. The subtitle—”A history of the conquistadors, voyageurs, and charlatans who discovered, opened up, and exploited the Father of Waters”—is worth the $2 all by itself, even if it weren’t a first.

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the pits

Every year (at least it seems like every year), Texas Monthly magazine puts out a servicey cover story on the best BBQ n Texas (to go with their servicey cover stories on the best swimming holes in Texas and the best tacos in Texas, etc. etc.)

Requisite snideness aside, these listicles are super-useful, not necessarily as reliable assigners of superlatives — feel free to like some other taco better — but as catalogs or, even better, suggested itineraries.

Despite the photographic primacy of Wyatt McSpadden’s gorgeous work (he’s really good at conveying the medievality of the retail meat-cooking business), that’s how I’m presently using the new book Texas BBQ, too. Back on pages 156 and 159 there’s a handy index of the establishments photographed in the book, including addresses and phone  numbers. Though some of these joints obviously have them — and the inevitable mail-order meat and tourist-trade merch that comes with them — no websites are listed. 

photo by Wyatt McSpadden, from Texas BBQ

Screw surfing. These are roadmaps made for the Sunday drive, and though it’s Saturday, that’s what I did this morning. Got up just before 7 a.m. and left the house a little after 8 and by 9:30 I was sitting outside at a picnic table in Lexington, Texas, at Snow’s BBQ, shooing away flies and eating, all in all, the best BBQ I’ve ever eaten. No question about the brisket. Sausage, definitely. I might like the pork ribs at Smitty’s just a little better, and am looking forward to making a confirmation run to Lockhart soon, but it’d be close.

In a surprise move, Texas Monthly named the relatively new and more or less unknown Snow’s the best BBQ in Texas last year. The New Yorker thought that was interesting enough that it sent Calvin Trillin down to take a sniff. Neither Calvin nor I seem to be able to find any reason to quibble.

Snow’s isn’t in Texas BBQ, but Louie Mueller’s BBQ is, and three and a half hours (and two good bookstores) later I was 31 miles north in Taylor, at an indoor picnic table there, rain pounding the steel roof, eating more brisket, more sausage, and a beef rib that weighed almost a pound and looked like something I could kill a possum with.

I’m not passing final judgment on Mueller’s yet. It looks right, and everything’s got a heavy peppered crust and they give every plate a charred piece of brisket heel, and that beef rib is like a steak built from butter, but 1) I was already pretty full, so I didn’t have the seasoning of appetite, and 2) there’s still the Taylor Cafe’s highly reputed BBQ around the corner from Louie Mueller’s to try before I even know what BBQ I like best in Taylor, never mind Texas.

photo by Wyatt McSpadden, from Texas BBQ

So far I’ve tried Austin’s Salt Lick (meh), Lockhart’s Black’s (great pork chop, pass on the sausage), Meyer’s Elgin Smokehouse (not so much), and Luling City Market (pictured on the book cover above, and plenty good enough to go back).

I’ve got to try Lockhart’s Kreuz Market (that’s their woodpile at left) soon. Texas BBQ essayist John Morthland says their pork chop is the best BBQ in Texas, and though I’m a little uncertain about a pork chop being BBQ, precisely, few Texas BBQ places seem to share the qualm, and John Morthland should know better than I.

I’ve got pounds to eat before I’m well e’t enough to judge, but so far it feels like a statistical dead heat between Snow’s, in Lexington, and Smitty’s, in Lockhart. Smitty’s get extra points for the dungeonality of their premises.

I’m trying to eat as much Texas BBQ as I can before I leave for Michigan this fall. They didn’t know BBQ in Montana and I’m betting they won’t know it in Ann Arbor, either. I may get Snow’s to mail me some meat up, but I’m betting it won’t be the same.

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onion creek

    

Took a BIKE RIDE along Onion Creek with my new camera today. No books.

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a good place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there

Two somewhat unlikely facts that I suspect make me slightly less than fully human, but oh-damn-well: I have never broken a bone (unless maybe a toe bone that you never know for sure and can’t really do anything about anyhow), and I have never spent a night in jail.

Knock on wood.

Read my Missoula Independent review of Dark Spaces, Montana’s Historic Penitentiary at Deer Lodge.

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the wide open, great and elsewise

 I’ve driven me some plains. Nebraska stands out, in an outstanding in its field sort of way. North Texas/Oklahoma/Kansas.

Pretty friggin boring, driving, but not near as boring as I-10 between Fort Stockton and San Antonio Texas. Or hell, El Paso, though I did get woke up in the middle of the night by a freight train on that stretch, sleeping in the back of a pickup with a pretty girl, on the way home from a fine weekend in Albuquerque, so there was that. 

I got to review this book this week. I liked it, which is thankfully sort of beside the point. You can read that here in the Missoula Independent if you like.

Yup, I’m reviewing books with pictures now. Don’t worry, it’s all part of the plan. 

There’s a lot of good writing in here, or out there, and b&w photography worth looking at—I especially enjoy the idea of city boy Lee Friedlander traipsing around eastern Montana, always half-cocked for some sort of road out.

I’ve driven through, but the plains was never my place. I tend to think the plains aren’t most peoples’ place, not permanently, and I suspect the demographics will bear me out.

“Great Plains” is, however, the title of one of my all-time favorite books, by Ian Frazier. Annick Smith, Missoula’s literary den mother and co-editor of The Wide Open, called Ian “Sandy” when I asked about his absence from the new anthology over the phone. Sandy must have been busy.

Who isn’t? Can I call him Sandy now too?

The plains have inspired a reasonable amount of unexpectedly interesting American literature, of which I’ve read shallowly, but not disinterestedly. And here’s a related curiosity: a book I have read, but don’t possess (seems bassackwards, don’t it?): Jonathan Raban’s Bad Land: An American Romance. (And I dare anyone to write me a better sentence including three colons.) (And yes, I ripped off Raban for the review’s headline.)

It’s been so long since I’ve read the Frazier, though, that I can hardly remember with any specificity what I liked so very much about it. I think it has something to do with Sandy’s genuine interest in meeting people, an attribute I share only imperfectly. That, and I think I just love the company of his voice in the middle of all that nowhere.

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singing pictures

One of the best things about the work I do is that people and publishers send me books for review. A lot of what they send — like a lot of pretty much any cultural product you can imagine — is crap.

But some of it is unexpected treasure, like the labor of Lead Belly love at left, sent last week by author/researcher John Reynolds, a New York landscape artist and flower arranger who also just happens to have spent 50 years collecting the photos and memorabilia presented herein — everything from the first known photograph of Mr. Huddie Ledbetter to portraits of his huge 12-string Stella to his 1935 wedding certificate to a 1925 pardon letter from Texas Governor Pat Neff. Lead Belly — known in that context for reasons unclear as Walter Boyd — was in a Texas prison in Sugar Land, outside Houston, for killing one of his relatives over a woman. He later stabbed a man in Louisiana and earned another executive pardon from Angola. He must have been one charming motherfucker.

And man it’s a beautiful book, with an intro by Tom Waits, a bunch of insanely imaginative poems by Tyehimba Jess, facsimile handwritten and typed letters to and from the likes of Woody Guthrie and, obviously, a trove of rarely seen photos.

I had been unfamiliar with publisher Steidl, but I’ll be looking for their stuff from now on, especially since I see that they’re in the midst of a Robert Frank re-release project. I already had one of their books without having noticed who put it out: The Americans, which I bought new recently to replace the college-era paperback I seem to have lost somewhere along the way. I arrived at Frank through Jack Kerouac (who wrote the introduction to The Americans), and my Frank obsession has long outlived my wannabe Beat affectations. Steidl is reissuing pretty much everything Frank ever published, and I want it all, and I can’t afford it, and I feel too guilty to ask for review copies knowing I’ve got neither the expertise nor the venue to pretend I might actually review it. Thus, I suppose, do wish-lists grow.

I’ll never be able to make this transition work, but stick with me: During more or less the same time I was discovering Jack Kerouac and Robert Frank, I was getting interested in the underground comics of Robert Crumb (think of this as my mid-1980s crash course in the culture of the late 1960s). Crumb, it turned out, was not just a comics guy; he also had and has a lifelong jones — as a player and collector both — for vintage American music of the pre-war 20th century.

Crumb drew the portraits in his Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country (that’s Tennessee bluesman Frank Stokes on the cover) in the 1980s, though this wasn’t published until 2006, and I bought it with a gift certificate last month at Austin’s MonkeyWrench Books, a volunteer-run collective named after Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, once published in an anniversary edition with illustrations by — yup — R. Crumb. I stole that one outright — just put it down my pants — from a Houston BookStop (note from legal: no I didn’t) during late high school, when my friend P.G. and I used to drive into town from the suburbs in one or another of our mothers’ cars and steal books (note from legal: no we didn’t). I don’t know where that copy is now, but I haven’t seen it in a long while, and I’d sure love to find another one. I’d even consider paying for it this time.

Crumb’s book, like the Lead Belly volume, came with a CD. In Crumb’s case, it’s 21 of the artist’s hand-picked faves, stuff like the Cannon’s Jug Stompers’ “Minglewood Blues” and the East Texas Serenaders’ “Mineola Rag” and the Parham-Pickett Apollo Syncopators’ “Mojo Strut.”

Lead Belly arrived with an apparently home-dubbed CD of Leadbelly — (the one word vs. two presentation is sorted out in the book) — playing at the University of Texas at Austin on June 15, 1949, his last live performance ever, about 6 months before his death from Lou Gehrig’s Disease. It’s got “Goodnight Irene,” “Skip to my Lou,” “I Don’t Want No More Army Life” and a nice version of “John Henry,” alongside another dozen tracks.

For some reason, Lead Belly isn’t included among Crumb’s 112 heroes of blues, jazz and country. Maybe Crumb calls him folk. He sounds more like a category killer to me.

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purty pitchers

It took me a while, but I’ve recently discovered an especially soothing salve to the raw bone of contention between my desire to buy books and my inability to justify each and every purchase by reading them: photography books. This should have come as no great shakes in the surprise department, given that I minored in photography in college, studying under badasses Geoff Winningham and Peter Brown. But I guess I just hadn’t been looking in the right used bookstores. Goodwill rarely has anything in the photography vein that you’d want to admit to looking at, unless you like cats more than you really should, aside from the occasional hardback National Geographic photo essay on The World’s Secret Corners or somesuch (more—much more—on that series in some later post).

But Austin’s North Lamar 1/2 Price Books has been a revelation, with a whole fat section of used photography books, and a decent amount of them reasonably priced. There’s nothing much more fun than scoring an $80 book for $12.95, and if you look closely, you can do that at 1/2 Price. You can also spend $100 pretty fast watching those $12.95 books pile up.

This bargain’s not quite that dramatic: a $9.95 paperback volume (marked down to $2.95, and clean as a whistle), #7 in the Aperture Masters of Photography series, on Edward Weston. It’s just a tight little pleasure to handle, not so big that it take a table to hold it, but not so small as to get lost in your lap. And unlike a lot of these slim bargain collections, which tend to lose whatever majesty their photos hope to convey in cramped margins and intrusive gutters, the Aperture series runs these black and whites as big as they’ll fit on these 8″-square pages, and that’s plenty big enough for $2.95. There’s a nice mix of Weston’s desert shots, his nudes, and his vegetables—including that incredible bell pepper portrait—and an essay by R.H. Cravens if I ever get around to reading it. Plus, it’s part of a series, so there’s the promise of other numbers to hunt down, which is about 80% of the point in the first place.

In the meantime, you can flip through this in under ten minutes and see more beauty than you’re likely to find in the rest of your day. Purchase justified.

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