Story written by Howard Waldrop

Howard Waldrop is one of the best writers that I have ever had the pleasure of reading. His prose sparkles and remains direct. His words flow like salmon heading upriver to spawn, with brilliant leaps and stunning movement. You could read him for the shear experience of the tales, letting them wash over you.

Of course, they don’t simply wash over you. Howard Waldrop is challenging. He primarily works in the sub-genre known as alternative history. Every story asks questions that lead to a deeper contemplation of our shared experience on this planet. Because the stories inevitably present a life very similar to the reality that we have all agreed upon, the slight (or extreme) difference more often than not forces a consideration of why things are the way that they are. Must they be so?

More than merely questioning our past, Howard Waldrop asks a lot. He also puts a lot into his stories. Frequently, he has discoursed on the importance of research in order to provide the proper backbone for whatever form of fiction you are creating. Writers are no more industrious than anyone else and Waldrop comes up often enough as the exemplar of our accuracy aspirations. As a reader, it is helpful to remember that you don’t need a doctorate degree to enjoy the stories. Accept the fact that the author did the homework and you are allowed to see the result. Don’t worry- you won’t miss the part where your reality is different.

Howard Waldrop stories resonate. Just watch someone else read one of his stories. You can tell the moment they finish, because they slowly lower the text and stare off into the middle distance. A few brain cells are now firing in new ways. Then their eyes refocus and they look at you with a vague smile like maybe you understand, too.

With this series, I am only writing about those artists who have resonated for me, but Howard Waldrop is another thing entirely. Like Dickens and Monet and the Beatles for me, Howard Waldrop changed my life. I knew that Kurt Vonnegut had somehow stumbled from science fiction into literature, but he seemed to work awfully hard at leaving all that genre labeling behind. Waldrop seemed to drag science fiction along with him into literature and didn’t give a damn what you called it.

Having said all that, you may be the sort of person who has already gone looking for Waldrop work and noticed that a) there is not a lot, and b) it is hard to tell where to begin. If you can find Night of the Cooters, then maybe start there though Things Will Never Be The Same looks like a good way in also. Besides, that title is likely to define your experience of the work within.

Decades ago, I had the privilege of hearing Howard Waldrop read one of his stories out loud to a small room of admiring readers. Writers do not often make the best readers of their own work. A penchant for isolated scribbling does not translate to a talent for public performance. The shear joy that he brought to being there infected everyone. You could see the magic that went into the writing. Like Dickens (perhaps the greatest of all author readers), who also attacked difficult terrain, Waldrop has the ability to bring life to what so many of us beat down to two dimensions with our dogma and disdain. If nothing else, I have learned to love those moments when I can feel the actor inside come alive as the words pour onto the page.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 274 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

Song performed by Los Lobos
Written by David Hidalgo and Louis Perez

I cannot think of another Eighties rock group that started out with such an amazing string of recordings as Los Lobos. (They continue to produce amazing music, but those first albums touched my life.) I had heard about the EP, …And A Time To Dance, and even managed to hear some of it on the radio. As a side note, I can only say that radio stations were different in those days. Then, I bought How Will The Wolf Survive, their first full-length album and played it over and over again until, well, now. Don’t Worry Baby is one of the great opening tracks that gets your heart moving from the get-go while giving notice that the band knows where music has been and can help it move into the future. Multiple lead singers, ever-changing instrumentation, masterful arranging, and style-hopping to keep the ears engaged made them seem like the second-coming of the English invasion of the sixties, only updated to the times- sort of like what Prince was doing in his world. Of course, they presaged no such thing. Being Los Lobos then or now is not easy.

Back to the music- Will the Wolf Survive?, the final track on the album, was the perfect stunner to close out the proceedings. Before that, the ballads and dance tunes and rockers merely declared that these guys had a future.

By The Light Of The Moon was not as adored by the critics, as its predecessor had been named album of the year by many. Listening to it then and now, I have to wonder what they were missing. Set Me Free (Rosa Lee), Shakin’ Shakin’ Shakes, and One Time One Night are great. All right, the first album was a mind blower, and this was simply grand.

Now might be the time to mention that Los Lobos also put on fantastic concerts. They are surely in the running for the greatest band ever to grace the planet. Outside or inside, they demand that you dance, polka and corrida, before they kick out the jams. If you’re lucky, they might even cover some Neil Young for you.

After the second album, Los Lobos appeared on the La Bamba soundtrack, which seems to be what most people recall. They followed that with La Pistola y El Corazon which covered more traditional songs with folk arrangements. The next album was The Neighborhood. While all the others before it remain on my playlist, The Neighborhood is simply indispensable to me- yes, this is one of my desert island discs. Deep Dark Hole has probably saved my life. Emily is arguably the greatest song for driving home. They brought in John Hiatt (never a mistake) for Down on the Riverbed. Not to shortchange the rest of the songs because the only thing that they do is remind why art and music allows me to be a human being.

So, here’s the other thing that I think about sometimes. I was this incredibly pale-skinned kid in southern Ohio that found so much wisdom and peace and beauty in the work of these older Chicano guys from Southern California. How else does that happen except through brilliant, open-hearted art and mass media?

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 275 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.

Located in Cooperstown, New York

We all know architecture can be art, though we are just as likely to argue for practical use ahead of beauty. Art museums perhaps have the most asked of them in that we expect art when we are outside the edifice, but still expect a pleasing experience navigating the collection. You could argue that art museums have it a bit easier once you pass through their portal because the collection will inspire and seduce you. What though of a museum whose collection is not explicitly art?

Cooperstown is a lovely Finger Lakes town with a downtown dominated by baseball, as the museum draws a lot of visitors year round despite being fairly far from major population centers. The museum is attractive enough from the outside, but something unexpected happens inside.

I will leave a discussion of the art involved in the act of sport for another time, but I feel comfortable saying that Ty Cobb’s bat is an object of historical interest (specialized at that) and not particularly artistic in and of itself (let the collegial debating begin). So, the museum must work harder for an aesthetic experience.

Allow me to digress. I cannot deny that baseball is intrinsically American and that the museum does little to place the sport in any sort of global context (with the exception of nods to Canada, Japan, and Latin America). So, the emotional pull of the collection probably does not carry over to those without a predisposition to be moved by the sight of Roy Campanella’s glove. If you fall into this category, then the museum is not going to work its magic in quite the same way, but the Jackie Robinson display ought to move anyone, just as his life transcended the sport. Of course, you are welcome to go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or Tennis or, even, the Ham Museum, if that floats your boat.

Whatever the subject of your museum, the curators always aim to tell a story. In large, multi-subject palaces, the story is broken down into distinct galleries and those don’t always carry over from one to another. Like that display of Edvard Munch drawings next to the Medieval Icons… all right I could see someone making sense of that…

The Baseball Hall of Fame takes you through the history of the game with diversions into cultural history that place the game in the world that it traverses. Sure, the Ken Burns documentary on baseball was lovely, but the actual holy relics of the sport somehow carry a power that cannot be denied. These institutions always save the plaques for last. After you walk by Babe Ruth’s locker (and consider how many youngsters would have given their back teeth to stand where you are), you enter the holy sanctuary where the names and accomplishments of the elect line the walls.

If the museum does it right, the experience is akin to walking the labyrinth in one of the great churches. Maybe it is better than that.

You’ve Got to Check This Out is a blog series about music, words, and all sorts of artistic matters. It started with an explanation. 276 more to go.

New additions to You’ve Got to Check This Out are released regularly. Also, free humor, short works, and poetry are posted irregularly. Notifications are posted on Facebook which you can receive by friending or following Craig.