The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was over at a friend’s house up on the North End, looking at his newly crafted cigar box banjos. I know what you’re thinking … and yes, I do have friends on the North End. And no, these cigar box banjos weren’t some thrown together in a drunken afternoon cheeseballs masquerading as musical instruments. They were objets d’art first of all — and first of all they were musical instruments, from the tuning pegs to the piezo pickups that allowed them to be played through an amp, which gave my buddy’s slide blues a nasty growl. You’d think you’d landed in a late night bar on the Lousville waterfront next to the Ohio River in 1920.

I’m forever amazed at how many folks are out there, just out of sight, doing their own thing, not for remuneration or accolades, just for the sheer joy of it. Folks who never joined the Arts Associations, folks who work with woods and metals and found objects and cigar boxes and whatever else comes to hand. My pal told me the story of a local artist at a la-de-da soiree asking what he did after crowing about her own artistic achievements so he mentioned a few projects he’d completed recently. “Oh,” she said dismissively, “you’re a crafts person.”

We so-called artists like to draw a distinction between art and craft. As if they’re inescapably discrete and inviolably separate. It’s a boring argument, trust me, like arguing religion, fit only for adolescents and morons with an ideological bent. But I do know this: there are people like my cigarbox buddy who apply a spark of creativity to everything they touch. They probably can’t help it, it’s as natural as laughing. The old adage that something worth doing is worth doing well rolls off their imagination slightly differently. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing with p-zazz.

My own definition of an artist — and it’s the same for a craftsman — is a person who creates their life. In their own image. Meaning, with their own imagination. They make the world around them. They create. They don’t do it so they can say at some party they’re an artiste. They do it because there’s no other way to do it. And when I’m fortunate enough to be around them, they’re an inspiration. Those cigarbox banjos — they belong in a museum. But meantime, they got some blues waiting to come out, stuff that will make a toe tap, stuff that will make you smile, stuff that will make a guy like me want to try to make one myself. It’s about all I can ask from art.

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Almost all us old farts that use a computer these digital days are basically self taught. The student becomes the teacher. The blind, of course, are leading the blind. Most of us think a computer is a mail shortcut — we open it up, check our e-mail (mostly jokes and political rants), maybe forward a few, then go back to CNN or Fox News on the TV. Some of the more adventurous of us learn to download photos or music, maybe catch some internet news or use Google, but really we barely dip a toe in the oceanic vastness of what is someone’s Brave New World but certainly not ours.

We’re just tourists skimming the surface of a planet we don’t know how to land on, whose language we’ll never learn, whose inhabitants won’t notice us beyond the mosquito buzz we generate as we hover over a Mac or a PC or a smartphone. Meanwhile the world below is morphing before our eyes, but we have no clue and Wikipedia and Google aren’t much help.

Even the kids don’t really scratch deep. Oh, they learn a smidgeon of a complicated program for a job, Photoshop say, or Publisher, but beyond their current needs, the complexity is too overwhelming to retain if it’s not repeated day after day. The world is moving too fast now to keep up.

Maybe it always was. Gramp had to learn to drive the new fangled tractor, then he had to learn how to fix the danged thing. Most folks couldn’t change a tire much less tear down an engine. The computer goes blue or malware invades its brain, we’re adrift without compass or GPS in a forest at night, hopeless and helpless.

And totally dependent. We’ve become the children of the machine. It’s a loveless bargain, but … they’ve closed the orphanage and there’s no going home now.

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The South End Grange has been shrinking faster than our old growth nettle forests, which may be a meaningful correlation … unless you’re of the mindset that thinks science is a hoax foisted on you by us radical liberals hiding here on the hedonistic head of the island. Membership keeps declining and it’s harder and harder to recruit the agrarian-minded now that the family farm has gone the way of Eisenhower Republicans and McGovern Democrats. Desperate times, of course, call for desperate measures. Who you gonna call??

The South End String Band, of course. Which is who the Grange called for its loco-ly known high powered PR Machine. When old time fiddle music seemed poised for extinction, they brought it back from the precipice, dressed it up as South End Roots Music and made fortunes on CD’s, T-shirts and memorabilia before offering shares on the Chinese stockmarket. Obviously they had the savvy to save the Grange from the dustbin of history.

Following a four hour brainstorming session at the Mabana Yacht Club’s exclusive Pilot House Lounge, the Band emerged into the early afternoon sunlight with a Plan, one deceptively simple, almost painfully obvious and no doubt destined to serve as prototype for marketing strategies at the Harvard School of Bizness and the Phoenix School of mail order agricultural degrees.

Cannabis. The New Pharming. The most lucrative crop in America, bigger than corn, bigger than soybeans, bigger even than medical nettle. And for the past half century, the only crop on the South End. And now … LEGAL. Welcome to the 60’s, y’all! Agriculture is King once again and the Grange and the lava lamp are both coming BACK!!

So dust off those bellbottoms, bro, unpack those tie-dyes, sister, turn on the blacklights, dude, clean up the hookahs, Alice, cause the South End String Band is playing a Strange Grange Ganja Gig Saturday, Nov. 1. Come on down and join them in a return to the Age of Aquarius. The Past was nothing but Prologue and the Present is nothing if not Psychedelic. The South End: where the 60’s met the Sound. And the Sound is the South End String Band!!

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A few of the Boyz were gathered at the South End Brewery’s Tasting Lounge this week, what Hophead, the brewmaster, refers to as the Test Lab. Try out some of his 10 gallon experiments on us layabouts and see if our finely attenuated palates approve before going into full bore production. Heavy Nettle IPA, Habanero Hefeweizen, Sinsemilla Stout — they all made it through our rigorous if hazy sampling regimen before hitting the consumer market with our rave review seals of approval.

Gary the Growler was opining over his Honey Nettle Lager how Pabst Blue Ribbon had just been sold to the Russians. “This is what it’s come to,” he lamented, peering into his glass with its frothy head as if consulting a liquid oracle. “Budweiser sells out to the foreigners and keeps a red white and blue can like we’re too stupid to see patriotism as an advertising ploy and now Pabst is bought up by the communists while they’re annexing pieces of Ukraine.”

“Business as usual, Gary,” Randy sniffs cynically. Randy’s van sits outside the taproom front window.     DON’T ROTO-ROOT IT      LET RANDY DO IT
Randy fell on hard times as a plumbing sub contractor when the housing bubble burst. He makes ends meet with pick-up jobs, clogged drains, kitchen remodels, toilet repair, but most afternoons he’s down at the Tasting Lounge licking wounds and foam. “The people who run this country would sell their grandmother for a buck fifty.”

“But Pabst Blue Ribbon, man,” Gary is saying. “That’s as American as apple pie. Maybe more American. My first beer was a PBR.”

“The beer that made Moscow famous,” Randy says, shaking his head and sipping his pint knowingly, a man who knows the game is rigged and not in his favor.

Hophead pours me a dark Heavy Nettle. “Don’t worry, boys,” he announces cheerfully. “This brewery is staying right here on the South End. I guess since we’re at the end of the island at the far edge of the continent, we’re the last beer in America.”

Randy shrugs. “If you think the South End is still in America, I guess. Some folks don’t. Me, I don’t know what America is anymore.” I raise my glass. “Drink up, Randy and cheer up. This isn’t the last beer. Not in a long shot. Next one’s on me and my capitalist cronies.”

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