Snakes on a Plaque
Amazonian refugees abandoned on the Walk of Fame.
Meanwhile, scaly serpents slither through Hollywood.
Charlie Sheen, Kevin Spacey, Ellen DeGeneres, and Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs all have a place here. But woe to the golden boa constrictor.
Beginning in the late 1950s and early ’60s, a group of entertainment industry boosters seeking to increase tourism in a less-than-glorious section of downtown Hollywood concocted a psychologically brilliant scheme, inducing well-known figures from film, TV, music, radio, and sports to pay for their own symbolic entombment in a kind of living mausoleum. Name by name, colossal ego by colossal ego, the infernal, ingenious scheme paid off, and the result was the Hollywood Walk of Fame — an unparalleled monument to human narcissism consisting of almost three thousand plaque-like “stars” (with more to come!) fashioned from bronze inlaid in pink terrazzo.
As countless visitors to the Walk well know, it is not a particularly peaceful place. The nearly two-mile long stretch of sidewalk along Hollywood Boulevard and part of Vine is a decrepit hub for hawkers, peddlers, hustlers, touts, and noisome …
John Fahey’s Blues Rally
He discovered ‘Blind Joe Death’ after the Sligo River flood of 1927 and picked on a guitar made from a baby’s coffin. Or so the legend goes.
White boy music answers to the pathos of the suburbs and the weird monomania of record collectors.
Still, his myth lives on, as does his unique feel for the guitar.
John Fahey’s best-known composition is a deceptively simple one. It’s in standard tuning, modulating between C, F, and G, the first chords someone learns when playing guitar. “Sligo River Blues” starts at a slow clip, no faster than a train rolling out of the station. Fahey probes at the fretboard relentlessly, alternating his thumb between the upper strings to provide a sense of propulsion, while the melody unfolds underneath.
“It’s the most basic chords,” fingerstyle guitar torchbearer Hayden Pedigo tells me, “but he’s able to make the most basic chords sound brand new.” With a droning syncopation, the song captures an intense form of suburban melancholy. His compositions, a style he coined “American primitive,” are shrouded in otherworldliness. There’s no other player that sounds like Fahey, though many have tried.
“It appears a lot easier than it is,” collaborator Glenn Jones says …
Strait is the Gate
A fence in Davidson County offers lessons in responsibility and transience to a young man with a wondering mind
There was no proper latch
If you wanted to run the tractor someday, the gate was where you started
It was eight feet wide and a head higher than the fence. It was made of aluminized steel. In a long line of pine boards painted white for a while and black for longer, its six round bars were cockscomb red. Struck by a stick or a cast-off apple core, it let out a metallic ding distinct from the common thuds and cracks of stone and dirt and lumber. There was no proper latch. A rusty chain hanging from a nail attached it to the post.
Most of the time, it stayed shut. There were other ways of getting to the other side. You could climb the fence, jump it, crawl underneath. To fill the horse troughs with water, you could run a hose through. The smaller gate by the greenhouse, so squeaky on the hinge, gave quicker and more convenient passage to the dog pens, and there was a field gate just off the main road, but to get a tractor or a truck to the back pasture or the pond, you had to pass through the red …
