theology&geometry

Saturday was an adventure. I took the day off work so I could go photograph some living history events at the Cherry Mansion that my dad’s pals were going to be a part of. I was told to be there at 11 a.m., when photographers would be allowed inside the Cherry Mansion to take pictures with the re-enactors. I hauled ass and got there thirty minutes early, met up with my dad and brother and nephews, and began surveying the surroundings to try and get a good idea of what I’d shoot and where.

I was introduced to several people whose names I don’t remember. Everyone was nice for the most part, and I milled about, snapping pictures here and there of my dad and the group of people I was there to photograph. Then a lady who was a coordinator of sorts apparently mistook me for her personal photographer, and began art directing me and telling me who to photograph, and where, and from what angle. I went from confused to annoyed in a hurry. I’m not sure if she thought she was going to have access to the photos she was telling me to take or what. I was told that her photographer had flaked out, so suddenly it made sense why she would be encouraging me so boldly to take certain shots. I obliged mostly because I am non-confrontational like that, and for a while it was easy to take the shots I wanted to take while placating her with some shots she clearly wanted me to take. But eventually it got to the point where I couldn’t even break away to get a cup of lemonade without her calling after me, wondering where I was and could I come over here and take this shot and this shot and get over there and take it from that angle, too. (By then I had been there for three or four hours out in the hot sun with no food or water, and yes, I know that the crazy re-enactors were doing the same while wearing wool coats, but they are crazy like that and I am not.) I eventually had to just walk away and go about my business. I was being bogarted for big grip-n-grin shots while my dad and his fellas were standing by, and the whole reason I was there was to shoot his people. It was dumb. Plus I had an assignment over in Shiloh for The CA to get to.

Oh, one really funny thing happened. I was shooting a group photo of the Dixie Belles — you know, the ladies who dress up in hoop skirts — and some other photographer sauntered onto the scene with his camera and tripod. First thing he did was wander over to me and ask me, “What are you using?” I thought he meant a lens so I just held mine up because, you know, there it was. But he was talking about my settings, and leaned in and looked at my screen — WHILE I WAS WORKING — and read the shutter speed and aperture aloud. I was actually shooting on program mode (toggling between it and aperture mode because that is often my jank-ass way of getting my bearings in new settings) but he mistook it for auto (probably because I self-deprecatingly said something about shooting on auto, nyuk nyuk). And then when I was changing angles for another shot, he said, “Do you know how to use your manual mode?”

>.<

My patience was already growing then by that point. So I spat, "I'M SORRY, WHO ARE YOU?!" At which point he told me his name and then promptly shut the fuck up. I will not tell you his name or link to his portfolio because I am trying to make a renewed push to be a nice person these days. But let me get one dig in and say that, based on his portfolio, he had no business whatsoever readying himself to offer "helpful" suggestions to me, regardless of what settings I was shooting on. So, photographers of the world, when I want your help and condescending input, I will certainly let you know. Until then, put a sock in it and keep shooting your mediocre, soulless photographs. And I will do the same.

Ahem.

After a trip across the river to watch my dad and nephews shoot a cannon (photos to come eventually, after I edit all 600 of them), I grabbed a soda and some trail mix and headed to Shiloh with my sister in tow. After three inadvertent trips down the same one-way scenic route, we finally found the living history campgrounds, which were largely deserted, save for the fellas pictured above, and some other folks. I took some shots, scribbled down names and info, flicked a tick off of Krissie's hand, had a brief freakout thinking ticks were in my hair, and headed back to the car. My head was starting to hurt and my skin was starting to sizzle. I had to call it a day. That night it felt like my skull was trying to leap out of my skin. Chalk it up to being nannied for hours and hours in the sun without a break by people who were not my boss. I've really got to get over this mousey non-confrontational personality stuff so that I can better help people understand when they best be backing off.

[Project 365]

Lately we’ve been watching episodes of American Pickers on Netflix streaming, and even though I enjoy the show (okay, I mostly enjoy pretending that the hosts are secretly in love with each other and that every pick each dude makes is secretly an attempt to find the perfect gift for the other dude), there’s something I find unsettling about it.

I know the whole purpose of the show is finding treasure among junk and giving things new life. It’s the same thing with the house-flipping shows. I get that. And I appreciate that. Like any red-blooded consumer of stuff, I love browsing overcrowded thrift stores and antique malls and tourist traps that are teeming with crap. And I enjoy the personalities of many of the (usually) old people the guys encounter and try to haggle with.

But the whole thing just makes me sort of sad. Every time their weird little van pulls off on yet another country road and into yet another country driveway, I see sadness and decay. I see my home and my family history. As the pickers rifle through dusty junk in dilapidated barns with corrugated metal roofs, looking for knick-knacks with old advertising logos on them, I see an entire way of life that has all but evaporated. I don’t know. It feels like watching vultures feed on the carcass of agricultural America.

I know that sounds hyperbolic (it is!). I know I am feh-ing all over good, clean, enterprising American fun, but I get so profoundly sad sometimes watching these old people be nickel and dimed out of ancient relics that they have for whatever reason hung onto throughout their entire lives. These pickers go from rusty graveyard to rusty graveyard, prying gems out of headstones and leaving a few dollar bills under a rock. Granted, a lot of these sellers are making decent money from the pickers on the show, and in turn getting good exposure to other collectors who might be watching and researching. That’s nice.

It’s a business, I get it. But it’s a macabre one.

My family lives on one of these rural American graveyards. It might be a picker’s paradise for all I know. I just know this: It wasn’t always a graveyard. Once upon a time, those rusting heaps that are scattered throughout our sheds and barns and pastures were shiny and new (but not for long), and hauled hay, cattle, pigs, chickens, horses, corn, and soybeans all over the Mid-South.

The farm has gone from functional to almost completely symbolic in my lifetime. When I was born, my dad was a farmer. That was his job. As it has been his dad’s job. I remember when Dad wore big trucker hats to keep the sun out of his eyes as he maneuvered his tractor around the hundreds of acres he was responsible for tending. He sported the finest farmer’s tan known to man. (Seriously, you need to click that link. I’ll wait.) (Glad you clicked, aren’t you?) Even my sister was expected to help out with farm duties; some of my earliest memories are of going with her to slop hogs before school. I remember seeing pigs being born and playing in the grain bins.

When I was itty bitty, Dad got a job at the local paper mill, and his time spent doing farm stuff started to fall off. Eventually almost all of the livestock was sold off and Triple T Farms wasn’t farming nearly as many acres as it had been in the past. Equipment broke down and became too costly to fix and too expensive to replace and one day suddenly everyone in the family was punching the clock away from the farm, and we were surrounded by scrap metal being overtaken by vines and dust.

I’m not trying to over-romanticize farm work. It’s hard and it’s thankless and it’s constant. It’s tied to the fickle whims of nature. But it is honest work, valuable work. Necessary work. Work that is so organic that it puts you in touch with the very nature of life itself. These days, it is rare work.

I don’t know. It’s hard to think about how a place can become a picker’s paradise without having to confront the loss and pain that got it there.

But then again, that’s anything, I suppose.

When I was growing up, there was this book floating around our house called Speaking Southern Like It Should Be Spoke, and it was more or less a dictionary of Southernisms. What I can’t say for sure is whether or not it was mean or nice. Like, was it playful self-parody, or mean razzing from the outside? I’m not sure, and it’s even harder to tell since I can’t really find much out about that book online, almost like it only exists in my memory. And on this one random site. I’ll need to rifle through some drawers in my parents’ spare bedroom the next time I’m home to see if I can find it.

Anyway, what got me to thinking about Southernness was tonight’s potluck at the Yarbro-Dill estate, which was Southern-themed and so ridiculously delicious that it defies description. Maybe that’s just my own proclivities busting through the crust there; we’ve done an Indian food night and an Italian night (which I missed due to a case of the barfies) but I tell you, that Southern home cookin’ just practically begs to be lumped into a giant pile in the middle of your Dixie plate and shoveled into your mouth with reckless abandon. The color palate of all the food (save the pomegranate-cranberry deliciousness) was yellow in color and therefore simply had to be mashed together with a hunk of cornbread and shoved down the ol’ gullethole. I defy you to find a better way to feed yourself.

This idea of Southernness is something I find fascinating because I am one of these people who loves and appreciates where I came from and the undeniable Southernness of it, while still rejecting the idea that Southern equals ignorant and racist and hyperreligious. I did my fair share of rebelling against that idea in high school and college by purposefully altering my accent to squeeze out the majority of the drawl — saying “ahn” instead of “ohwn” was the biggest challenge of my life — but now I’m glad I’ve still got quite a fair amount of South in my speech. I never managed to get rid of it all and I can’t tell you how grateful I am because of that. I go home and people accuse me of being a Yankee (walking around downtown Saltillo on River Day with a camera I was told I seemed like a tourist); everywhere else I’m just a country bumpkin. So I can enjoy the awkwardness in both places, and take comfort in the knowledge that I have a home, but I’m not necessarily trapped by my roots.

As I left the potluck, I listened to this voicemail from my mom and grinned like a moron re: its country sweetness:

Southernistic from Lindsey Turner on Vimeo.

Part of being Southern is being told that you’re a joke. That you’re inferior. Southerners tend to shoulder an inferiority complex that most people don’t quite understand. I love knowing so many Southerners who are, in fact, fucking awesome, and who understand that the whole Southern underdog thing is just part of the story, not the whole story, and who blow right past that narrative and supply other much more interesting ones instead.

I’ll tell you what else I like: Going to a potluck where everyone else cooks amazing dishes, and feeling the need to contribute, and having the option to offer up pear preserves prepared from a harvest taken from a tree on your family’s land that’s been producing for four generations. And then having actual people enjoy that contribution. I don’t know. It makes the world feel a lot more manageable that way.

[for Friday, Nov. 23]

It is my contention that Vildo is one of the most unfortunately named towns in Tennessee.

Project 365

I spent the weekend with my family, which gave me a chance to listen to something other than the indie/emo/folk/anti-folk crapola on my iPod. Which is always kind of interesting; it’s like simultaneously being transported back to my delicately sheltered girlhood (where the musical stylings of Reba McIntyre and John Michael Montgomery had me singing along happily) and being bashed repeatedly over the head with the embarrassing lameness of nu-country or whatever the hell you call that country pop crap churned out by bands that look like the Goo Goo Dolls and sound like the Goo Goo Dolls’ even lamer redneck cousins.

Because that kind of country was just not around when I was a country music fan, and I’m wondering who to blame.

Anway, it’s time for some bullets.

• All this time I thought that “Lips of an Angel” song by that bottom-feeding power-ballad band Hinder was the worst song of the past five years (in other words, they’re the new Creed), and then I heard that song covered by this jackass and I decided that, while the country version is slightly less annoying than the Hinder version, I will still hate it more because WTF WAS THAT DUDE THINKING, COVERING SUCH AN AWFUL SONG.

• Garth Brooks has a song about statutory rape! I don’t remember being so scandalized when I sang along to this as a naive 10-year-old.

• “Have You Forgotten” is possibly the most unintentionally hilarious song of all time. From the nanosecond I heard it all those years ago, I snickered rudely at its ridiculous premise and strained rhymes (“forgotten” and “bin Laden”) but I had no idea that stations still played it without a touch of irony. But they do. And it is even funnier (not in a “ha ha” way, but in a “dear god, it’s worse than I thought” way) now in 2007, when things are so unbelievably FUBAR. It should be noted that I take particular delight in being a jerk about Darryl Worley because he’s from the same place I’m from. And clearly HE’S the loser, NOT ME! NOT MEEE!

[for April 9]

Taken at Shiloh National Military Park. We spent a few hours looking at some of the landmarks today. My dad knows that park like it’s his back yard. He can look at a completely unremarkable field and tell you what regiments fought there, who their commanders were, how many were killed, and who won. It’s pretty amazing how much he loves Civil War history.

Project 365

Project 365