By David Mudd

Robbie Fulks: Bring On the Shoe Goo

editor — Fri, 5 Sep 2008 10:25:01 -0700

Robbie Fulks came in from Chicago and tore it up on a stage flanked with straw bales
Photo: Russ Riddle

It takes a knock on the door of the master playwright himself, William Shakespeare, for words to do justice to alt.country rocker Robbie Fulks’ appearance in Millville, Kentucky, last Saturday night (Aug. 30).

Recall the Crispian’s Day battle scene, and King Henry the Fifth’s rousing speech just before he leads his men into a mismatched fight against the French at Agincourt (Kenneth Branagh did a spine-tingling, spit-flying rendition in the Merchant/Ivory movie a few years back). Death is surely awaiting many of them in the field, the king admits. But that’s where the glory lies, too. And Henry V predicts that in years hence, no matter the outcome, their countrymen, “shall think themselves accursed they were not here, and hold their manhoods cheap,” because they were not among “we happy few,” on such a occasion.

I was part of the happy few at the Millville community center Saturday night, and if you weren’t, you might as well start feeling accursed now and forever more, as well as holding whichever sexhood you’ve got cheap, because you missed an absolute barn-burner, head-turner and booty-shaker of a show. And surely one of the most enjoyable aspects was that so few even saw it coming.

Backyard Burial ~ What a Way to Go

editor — Tue, 13 May 2008 09:18:09 -0700

Wisteria, spring 2008, Blacksburg, Virginia
Photo: Jennifer Schwanke

When you’ve reached a certain age and leave a place you’ve loved, keeping in touch with friends left behind can involve as much heartache as pleasure. Deaths become a depressing staple of the news they pass along. And given that the place I left a little more than three years ago is Blacksburg, Virginia, there’s been awfully much in that category to report, most of it inspiring as much bafflement as heartache.

Even before last spring’s massacre at Virginia Tech, there was the still-unfathomable rampage by a young local named William Morva. I didn’t know Cho Seung-Hui or any of his victims, but I did know William. Blacksburg’s a small town and I was a regular at the same downtown coffee shop he haunted. I talked to him often. He charmed my toddler daughter. He had some strange ways noticeable even to her; she once wondered aloud why she had to put on her shoes before going out to play when had we both witnessed William strolling barefoot in a snowstorm. But harmless eccentricities were all they seemed to be.

Then William went bad crazy. First he got himself locked up in the local jail for attempted burglary. One night a while later he allegedly gunned down a hospital security guard during an escape. The next morning, the first day of Tech’s fall semester, he allegedly ambushed and killed a local deputy searching for him along a nature trail near campus. He cowered in the woods until he was caught hours later, but not before Tech went on lockdown and rumors swirled about a gunman taking hostages in various campus buildings.

Only months later, of course, that very situation would come eerily to pass.

Considering all that, the news in January of the death of my friend Trev Smith’s 73-year old mother Dawn came as a kind of relief. It wasn’t a happy occasion but it was expected, and peaceful. And if not for a rich vein of self-sufficiency pumping through at least a couple of generations of the Smith family, it might even have been ordinary.

But it wasn’t ordinary at all, at least not by modern American standards.

Sunday Dinner: Local and Outstanding -- Do It Again

editor — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 15:07:44 -0700

Open-air dining @ $150 per plate: a Sunday dinner prepared by Louisville chef Kathy Cary
Photo: David Mudd

Sunday dinner on the 16th of September at Smith-Berry Vineyards in Henry County, Kentucky was a local affair staged by some continental drifters.

The butternut squash soup, the roasted and pulled chicken with garlic and arugula, the slow-cooked lamb with dark almond sauce and cucumber cilantro yogurt plus roasted potatoes were all locally-grown. And the after-dinner goat cheese ice cream was local, even if the crisp it accompanied depended on apples from Michigan because a spring frost this year killed most of Kentucky’s apple blossoms. The cook was local, too: Kathy Cary, chef and owner of Lilly’s Restaurant, 40 miles down Interstate 71 in Louisville. And the wines served were from grapes vintner Chuck Smith harvested from the vines surrounding the 60 diners.

But the continental drifters—three young women and one very happy man who collectively call themselves Outstanding in the Field—were out of California.