My supposition was that nobody ever came here to look at these scribblings but as it turns out, I was wrong.  People have too much time on their hands.

So I say to anybody who might come here with a torch to look for long abandoned painting of Lascaux, I will write again.  Just not now.  I’m swamped.

Recently, I took on the challenge of interviewing Ken Burns for our community radio station, WOOL.

It just so happens that Ken Burns is a neighbor of mine and lives at the end of my road. One might think that in a small village like this one, two people who live at either end of a road might in fact meet. This is not the case and I think I’ve only said hello to Mr. Burns a couple of times, mostly in passing at a local restaurant. I’ve wondered at those times if he questioned who I was or knew I was a neighbor or if, instead, he just put me in a broad category of people who acknowledge him because, well, he’s famous.

Though I can’t say I’m particularly knowledgeable about his work, I at least know what Ken Burns does and have seen example enough of his oeuvre to get the point of his style and substance.

Sometimes I’m annoyed by the ideology of Ken’s films and he seems to me to be significantly more up-with-people than I am. I suppose with his responsibility as America’s public historian, he HAS to be up-with-people. A cynic like me - I’m more in the camp of fed-up-with-people - would captivate the public’s attention for all of a minute and last only that long because people were busy gathering their pitchforks and torches and trying to find a brush with which to tar me.

But I volunteered to do this interview and, via his handler (a lovely woman named “Pam,”) he agreed to do the interview with our puny (but proud!) station that, though local, has no obvious bearing on the success or failure of Ken’s new series, THE WAR.

I’ve seen THE WAR coming and it approaches the public with a fraction of the subtlety of a new Madonna CD. I think there were ten pages of advertising in Harpers magazine and enough media attention to eclipse the appearance of Haley’s comet which is, fortunately for its own PR, a century away.

In truth, and on balance, I’m happy about Ken’s projects. They make people think about history and they remind us that, oh yeah, something happened before yesterday. They bring loads of information to bear on the subject they explore and they’re very well made in a mass market sorta way.

What bums me out about the work is a couple things: the first is that, ideologically, they are not very brave. Things should be said about the history they attempt to explain - ugly things about America that, though I hear will be touched upon in the series, THE WAR, will no doubt be rendered dilute so the pitchforks and torches are held at bay. I’ll withhold judgment until it’s over.

I know that people feel like there was no other solution to the historical circumstances of WWII than for us to march off to save the day. But of course I don’t agree. How did we get to that point, anyhow? We got to that point by allowing knuckleheads to run the world, come to power, encourage the bloodlust, negate our common humanity, and then, after all that, tell us there is no other choice but for us to go to war. Sound familiar? It should.

Well, I’m sure that there are people who would love to tell me that the Nazis HAD to be stopped and that WE didn’t start it. But that just neglects the truth that we’re all in this together, as when we let Hitler rise to power in the thirties. And we’re all in this together with the people who let Bush drag us into this stupid Iraq war. And we’re all in this together with the people who will no doubt shove us headlong down the path to some other ridiculous and bellicose decision in the days to come. *1 See Below

Just shut up and stop telling me what is a “necessary war” and what is not. If we didn’t do stupid shit we wouldn’t have to undo it and this is what gets my hackles up so often when I think about history. I have such limited patience for people who present the impetus to fight as faits accomplis, like there was no alternative.

So here’s the interview I did with Ken but, instead of lambasting him for his absent or subliminal ideology, I congratulate him repeatedly for the quality of his work. Why would I do that? Because he deserves it. I really do think his heart is in the right place and he wants the world to be at peace and to remember the mistakes of the past in order outrun them. I have no way of knowing whether or not Ken’s personal analysis is less generous than his films because he is an absolutely fabulous interviewee. He’s prepared with his talking points, he speaks in an unimpeachable Clintonian stream of consciousness that mesmerizes as much as persuades you. The guy’s truly a brainiac in his ability to mold a thought like a snowball on the side of K1. And so he doesn’t really share his doubts in interviews, if indeed he has them (and I bet he does,) about what his films DON’T offer. Maybe he’s just whatchacall “savvy.” I’m thankful that Chomsky and Zinn don’t care about ratings, though, or it’d be hard to know what else was out there in the perspective department.

I don’t know Ken Burns from Adam but I’m sure he’s not the first guy to take a kid-glove approach to ideology in order to make friends with the so-called students of history. You can only do so much. And it’s rumored that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar…but why do you want flies, anyhow?

I’m not the greatest interviewer, clearly, and I only had a minute to talk to him (and, man!, can that guy talk.) He was in a limousine on a cellphone and I was in the barn at the end of my long street, wearing headphones and talking into a microphone like I was in a freaking spaceship. It was no way to meet a neighbor.

I wanted mostly to ask whether he felt guilty drenching the ugly visual moments with the big schlocky strings. But I didn’t or, rather, I didn’t ask it that way. You see, I worry about that because I think that, in an epistemological sense, your knowledge of this stuff is grossly distorted by putting big musical sentiment behind it. In truth I did this experiment: I took a short film of my donkey eating from his bucket. Behind it I “laid-in” in the same music that Ken uses. Afterwards, I realized just how strongly I felt about my donkey eating from his bucket and nearly wept in the knowledge that donkeys that eat from buckets are true examples of the dignity of all living creatures. (Of course I’m joking but, for a moment, before I realized I was being manipulated by the music, I had some weird feelings that made me feel unique in being champion of the obvious.)

In the interview, I ask Ken specifically about William Walton’s The Death of Falstaff which is really a big Godly piece of orchestral music. As it turns out, Walton was commissioned to write the piece for Laurence Olivier’s Henry V and was paid by the British government in 1944 to do it (well it’s slightly more complex, but…). Things were rough in 1944 and the British government was shoving out the propaganda to try and keep the whole country from sinking into a miserable depression. (I mean, how much firebombing and starvation can you take, anyhow. I might order out for some propaganda at a time like that, too; you gotta do something to take market share away from Triumph Of The Will.)

But then, sixty years later, the composition ends up in Ken Burns’ history of the war and by now we’ve forgotten that the music is a vestige of a propaganda campaign. In fact we’ve forgotten whose side we were on, we’ve forgotten why we were fighting, we’ve forgotten what propaganda IS. All of a sudden, we graft the propaganda onto the history and the ideological message is, well, shall we say, blurry.

History is about perspective, of course, and I say that all the time. Claiming to be a historian is something like claiming you have an opinion and a handful of facts. Critical thinking seems sometimes much like the ability to make a compelling argument; Truth - if there is such a thing - is removed to a safe distance.

But at such remove from our close inspection, how are we supposed to bring history to bear on our current decisions? Answer? We don’t. And so maybe we need to recapitulate the maxim from Marx: History repeats itself - the first time as tragedy, the second time as documentary.

Here’s the interview. Cut me some slack since I really just want Ken to like me. We’re neighbors.

www.fortapache.net/burns

___________________________________________________________________________

1 Why do we let people get away with so much?

Here’s a good article for the uninitiated. From London’s newpaper, The Guardian:

How Bush’s grandfather helped Hitler’s rise to power

Here’s another one: Kodak’s Nazi Connections

Oh, and here’s one: Ford and GM Scrutinized for Alleged Nazi Collaboration

Want another? Ford ‘used slave labour’ in Nazi German plants

And if that’s not enough: IBM Technology Aided Holocaust, Author Alleges

but it’s getting to the point where the peas must be planted, and so must the rest of the beans and carrots and parsnips and peppers and eggplant and tomatoes and cukes etc. so i set out this morning to do just that, having bought a carload of seedlings and a bushel of seeds. at some point i had to stop and water everything because it was just wilting in the hot dirt. “plant at night!” the locals say, like i’d really be out there with a headlamp and a trowel.

while the sprinkler was running i went in and changed out of my sweaty clothes since the vet was on her way to look at ida. ida’s has to be one of the sheep species quirkiest examples. she’s like a dog only she has horns and she never bites. sheep
only have bottom teeth and, as biters, they’re a complete failure.

ida’s been sickly since a lamb but now and then she rallies into near perfect health. she had two ram lambs but couldn’t nurse them because she’s got nipples the size of mandarin oranges and the poor little things couldn’t get their mouths around the teat.
lately, though, ida’s been chronically sick. she’s lost so much weight she looks more like a cardboard cut-out of a sheep. at halloween, the vet came up to have a look and said just three words: “dig a hole.”

but i care about ida and i refused and bought me a bottle of penicillin and some syringes and the vet shot her up with some hi-octane wormer. ida rallied but again some time in february she fell ill and stood for long periods of time staring into the corner of the stall and grinding her teeth. once again we gave her the wormer and the penicillin and sure enough, it worked. so i figured today i’d drag the vet up here with the fancy wormer and the penicillin but when i called the animal hospital they told me my vet had been in a car wreck and couldn’t be contacted. no one knew what it was she’d given ida and no one there was good with sheep so they sent me to another clinic.

after i changed into some clean clothes i waited for the substitute vet. she arrived in the classic vet pickup truck with the covered bed full of drawers and doors and all animal medicines known to man. except of course, the cure-all for ida which no one knew. i held ida by the horns while the 20-something vet checked the sheep’s temperature rectally. ida’s narrow carriage of skin and bones squirmed against the stall door and i held on tight. then the vet took a fecal sample by putting two fingers deep into poor ida’s ass and the poor sheep looked up at me and bleated, sorrowfully.

a pill the size of a pack of cigarettes was administered using a long metal device that the vet shoved deep into ida’s mouth and, when it was over, we headed to the truck with a latex glove full of sheepshit. pretty scene. meanwhile my ailing sheep seemed much less sheepish than the vet who, it turned out, was here from illinois and who arrived just months ago after leaving vet school. there is no color green which corresponds to her level of initiation into the field of animal care. nice woman, i think, but she had no idea what was wrong with ida and neither did i.

“perhaps you should think about the quality of ida’s life,” the young anti-Herriott offered. i wanted to say, “perhaps you should think about the quality of your work.” instead, i said something like, “would you like an ice tea?” to which she said, “yes, please.” always in james herriott’s all creatures great and small people were offering pie or beer or cake to the vet. it seems appropriate.

i locked ida back in the stall where she lay on the ground sullenly. i walked sadly back across the field to the house, stopped to turn off the garden sprinkler, and that’s when i noticed the chickens in the garden eating the tender young seedlings in the muddy beds. i shrieked like a girl and, arms flailing, shoo’d them back to the barn where the corn-fed novice was drafting my invoice inside her truck. “chickens!” i exclaimed but i don’t think she saw me.

we eventually sat in the kitchen, drank iced tea and talked about how much “less conservative” was this area than illinois. that difference pissed the vet off and, in turn, her unelaborated conservatism pissed me off. undoubtedly, she missed the fans of the president back home. when i think just how conservative is my little town i get dizzy imagining a place much worse. i wrote the check for a hundred bucks and she left without giving ida a single shot.

the normal stress of my day, coupled with ida’s illness and the garden-wrecking chickens was enough. i decided to do some retail therapy and go buy myself a new weedwhacker. as it turns out, a professional weedwhacker costs more than $400.00. so i bought one, having tired of my previous cheap model which seemed to have only two functions: 1. to increase my shoulder pain from repeatedly trying to start it and 2. to dispense, willy nilly, that green plastic string that is actually the element what purportedly whacks the weeds. You can’t prove it by me, though since I only see it lying around in the garden or coiled in a knot in the package. I’m convinced that the weedwacker people are in league with the computer printer people who just find ways to waste the disposable components they offer for sale. after years of constantly refilling the awkward and sadistically engineered reel of toxic green plastic line, I decided to get something more formidable and worthy of the task of whacking this big place.

the machine, which cost $419 (PLUS the cost of the plastic stuff), came equipped with a harness which goes over your head and clips around your waist like a deflated airline lifejacket. unfortunately, i think the manufacturer expects children to operate this device because the harness was not made for an adult male. restraining my anger amid this deeply insulting design flaw, I finally managed to stretch and wiggle the moderately adjustable straps until I could just barely snap the buckle but didn’t dare breathe a breath for fear one of us would be injured. I attached the machine to the clip on the harness where it bobbed and swung like a drunken prom date during the last chorus of “hiway to hell.” i took it off several times before i finally got the damned thing running but when i did, i sensed i was in the presence of power. we did the foxtrot over to the edge of the driveway, me holding the two bicycle handle grips and preparing to engage the cutter. i gave the rogue greenery one last look of pity
before it met it’s match. i leaned back, squeezed the yellow handle and the plastic twine rotated immediately into action at a speed otherwise reserved for centrifuges and bedspins. i aimed carefully, swinging the long pole from side to side and the grass went flying first all over my face and safety goggles and eventually, with some practice, all over my pants and shirt. i obliterated it.

that’s when i realized that hidden in the grass was brand new, juicy, bright red, three-leaved poison ivy which i had minced into a cloud of oily airborn death. i might as well have put it in a waring blender and drunk it, pureed. so off comes the machine. off comes the harness. i fly into the house and find the rubbing alcohol and the paper towels and spend ten minutes pouring flammable liquids on my face and hands. then the cold water, still no soap. then i carefully stripped off my sullied clothes and get under the icy shower.

i’m told i won’t know for days if i got all the oil off. it takes a while to turn into blistery pustules. so now i’m back in the kitchen, immersed in the safe and sanitary environment of my computer and sharing with you that it’s not all so great here in heaven.

don’t quit your day job for a life in paradise. not yet..

Across the valley I can see stars emerging from this long and overcast day. Contrary to everyone’s worst predictions of sweltering afternoons and a globally toasty future, we have, instead, a customarily frigid March. It came in like the MGM lion roaring over Al Gore’s independent and Inconvenient Truth. Those of us willing to be swept away by the hysteria of certain doom now stand here with frozen egg on our faces shivering in our Rumsfeldian conviction that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

I know, I know…we mustn’t miss the point. It doesn’t need to be hot every day, just on average. I read Mother Jones, too. I get it. Nevertheless, as winter drags on in New Hampshire, I wonder when the warming will start. I yearn for hell fires to melt away my icy discontent. Perhaps it will get worse before it gets better. I hear that happens, too.

The literal truth of this is not to be trivialized. Evidently, when the winter is in its last couple months it seems much worse. (Here I draw facile parallels to the political winter we’ve endured for too long: now that the demi-Republicans are whispering that the war must end, we’re all supposed breathe easier and look forward to a springtime of change. But to me it seems so much worse - now that everyone knows. I mean, the public mandate’s clear but still no one’s doing what should be done, to wit, slapping that miserable idiot’s face and sending him to Siberia. And even though villains are now in plain sight, we stand here frozen like the victims of some funny freezing bad guy in a farcical Batman cartoon. The truth of the matter is decidedly chilling. )

One might surmise that by now I’d be used to it, bundled up as I am in my woolen scarf and moose-plaid Elmer Fudd hat. But one would be wrong: when I see the sheep huddled in their hay, their sad, sour faces turned away from the sub-zero landscape, and the donkey wheezing in dismay, I feel more culpable for this global calamity than any CFC-spewing Styrofoam factory. Surely their misery, hot or cold, is my fault and its mitigation my responsibility.

(So where was I when protestors were marching in Washington? I was probably curled up in a blanket watching recent episodes of sweaty beachbound survivors. Or maybe I was shoveling snow off my porch and path and watching the sky for a next storm. Like everyone else, I could have been putting grit down in front of my own back door and letting the public plows deal with the narrowing street. Go figure.)

In protest the chickens have stopped laying. Their energy-hungry water-heater, which I bought just a month ago, already has quit working. The hens are living on snow and whatever else I bring them for chicken feed. Another farmer recommended this regimen while he squinted and speculated that snow is what foul might drink in the wild when the thermometer drops below freezing. My chickens would sooner rent a ranch in Crawford than wander in the wild in winter and they, too, blame me for the cold, I’m sure. “We have a deal, “ I remind them, “I feed you and you feed me.” They turn a deaf ear.

Obviously, none of my animals like the white stuff. They stand at the barn door and look balefully across the paddock, refusing to leave their cozy cubbies. Not a single hoof or foul footprint defaces the frozen, fenced-in wonderland but one has still to wonder if any of them remembers spring or has an unshakeable faith that this season will pass. One could wonder the same about me.

But there across the valley two stars have come out of the dark, somewhere over the mountains. I scratch my head and wonder what stars these are since they’re as bright as the headlights of the wide Walpole plow making its way towards my house in a December blizzard. Unless I’m mistaken these are the stars we only see in springtime. Ursa Major is waking from her winter hibernation and warmer weather cannot be far behind. Repeating this to myself, I turn my collar up and shuffle in my winter boots towards the kitchen.

It’s true that the Fort Apache website has been offline for several months. There’s a long story behind that but probably not of much interest to anyone. The short story is that we closed our Bellows Falls, Vermont, offices last year shortly after closing The Windham, a wonderful little music venue we’d opened in an old hotel on The Square there in Bellows Falls.

At the moment there is only one management client associated with Fort Apache and she is the ever-wonderful Tanya Donelly whose newest release, This Hungry Life, was recorded live at The Windham, and is available for sale through Tanya’s website and also at fine record stores distributed by 11:30 Records.

For those folks who’ve followed some outdated information to get here, we no longer manage Natalie Merchant, Juliana Hatfield, Bill Janovitz, or Polara. Equally important to note is that at the moment, the studio is not open to commercial clients. The studio is assembled and there has been some recording but for the time being it’s not taking walk-in clients.

Though there were years during which the staff balooned to dozens, at the moment, thankfully, the staff is really just me, Gary Smith, holding the torch and contemplating what should happen next. Some days it seems I should simply tidy things up and let Fort Apache be an epoch with a beginning and an end. On other days that seems too dreadful to consider and I imagine another phase in which Fort Apache might make some other contribution either as an artist management firm, a recording studio, a web presence, or something not even yet conceived.

Today I visited Wikipedia and found a Fort Apache entry strangely foreign to my own memory of the place over the last twenty years. In truth, though I certainly didn’t found the place in 1985, I started recording there that year and officially working there as studio manager shortly afterwards, in January of 1987. I became a co-owner that same year and continued to work there even to this day, February 3, 2007. That’s a long time and my memory is chockablock with stories of exhilarations and disappointments, with the knowledge of good and bad decisions, and with an unyielding if rarely-spoken pride in how I’ve spent my worklife.

Meanwhile, this online “encyclopedia” reduces our long and proud history to a couple paragraphs mostly favoring the early participants in the enterprise, particularly Joe Harvard: a wonderful guy but surely one whose influence on the place was short-lived and not nearly as significant as the producers and artists who worked there many years more than did Mr. Harvard. I mean no disservice to Joe whose bravery and inspiration were undeniably crucial to the inception of the place and I am eternally grateful for his bringing me on board. But Paul Kolderie and Sean Slade - both of whom were there as founders - carried the studio into international acclaim. I, too made many records there, a few of which I think are nice contributions to 20th century music but really I think my most substantial contribution was as the manager of the place and the fellow who had to steer the financial course through some very stormy waters on more than one occasion. Unimpeachable evidence of the deficiencies of Wikipedia is obvious in the absence of Billy Bragg’s name, Billy came in like the day-saving cavalry to help share ownership and rescue us financially at a time when things were most dire. In brief, my visit to Wikipedia this morning raised my hackles and reminded me how easy it is in this funny age to be written out of one’s own story. And for a couple paragraphs I need to set at least that record straight, not for bluster but for clarity.

Frankly, I wonder if a comprehensive history of Fort Apache will ever be told but I know for a fact it is NOT the one you might find at Wikipedia or at anyone’s website who may have seen part of the picture but certainly not all of it. History is unfortunately about perspective; consequently the truth - if it exists at all - is elusive.

While I sit here complaining and waiting to decide what should happen next in the history of Fort Apache, I’ve moved some equipment and personal attention to our community radio station up here on the Vermont / New Hampshire border. WOOL is a member-run, not-for-profit, community based, low-power FM radio station that does, indeed, carry on the spirit of Fort Apache. At WOOL, people are empowered to build their own presence on the air. Though at Fort Apache, perhaps, such efforts would be aided by the experience of engineers and producers, the Fort’s general faith in the DIY spirit closely parallels what’s going on at WOOL now. Back in the 80s we needed a people’s recording studio. Most studios were too expensive and their staffs were bullies. Though DIY music had changed the dynamics of rock n roll, that spirit had yet to infuse much of the recording industry. Fort Apache was, I think, a people’s studio and an early entry into the pack of other places that pioneered the way to home recording.

Like the music committed to tape over twenty-odd years in the Boston area, not all of WOOL is listenable. Unlike Fort Apache, WOOL has yet to propel a single indivual into an international reputation dragging with it the whole artistic endeavor. While I wait for that to happen, I’ve coined my own motto for community radio: Nothing For Everyone. Wrestling the radio back from giant corporate media raptors is a challenge of our age and won’t be won just be launching another inconsequential website. Wanna know more about independent radio? Visit Prometheus Radio. Contemplate becoming part of a movement to find some grassroots authenticity on your radio dial.

In many ways, and I’m sure any reader of this will agree, the landscape of independent music has changed drastically since Fort Apache was conceived in the summer of 1985. The internet has provided the means but not necessarily the reality of a new movement in music. Perhaps I’m mistaken and that movement is a collection of individual, decentralized, and non-aligned artistic endeavors; but, really, is that a movement? If there’s some other musical movement being born online, I have not seen it yet. I’m all ears, though.

“Online community” is an oxymoron and, though I loathe the possibility that I’m clinging to nostalgia and to my youth, I still believe that community is about real people - not avatars - meeting in real space - not virtual - and making real connections - not electronic - with one another. I firmly believe that Fort Apache was a state of mind, not a place or a business. And that state of mind embraced community.

Email me at thenextphase@fortapache.net. Tell me what you know of the place. Tell me what you think might have been its value, if any. Tell me how that value could carry forward into this new millennium and into the uncharted territory of music and its distribution. We are not without resources, the most powerful of which is experience, but there is a regrettable shortage in the inspiration department.

These are peculiar transitional times and I think we need a peculiar transitional strategy to keep alive the state of mind that is Fort Apache.

Be right back.