Black Lives, Lonely Art, Red Hats
A WestVirginiaVille.com Reader for Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2020
Greetings. Here’s a round-up of recent posts to WestVirginiaVille.com, a multimedia magazine on life, creativity & work with a connection to the Village of West Virginia. (If forwarded this email, subscribe for free at WestVirginiaVille.substack.com)
1. The List
This video is only 1-minute 37-seconds, but packs a wallop. It shows more than 100 names of Black people killed by police, painted on a Charleston WV street. It’s set to a haunting score by Jarren Jackson with West Virginia-based band The Heavy Hitters. Pass it forward. There are lots of names. They keep on coming, don’t they?
The video marks the debut of Project Justice, a multimedia WestVirginiaVille series devoted to Election Year 2020, Black Lives Matter, and racism in America.
PS: After posting this to Twitter, someone from out-of-state responded: “Wow. That's quite shocking coming from a state that voted overwhelmingly for Trump!” I posted back: “You’d be surprised. Scrub the grime & lies of Trumpism off many a West Virgina family & you’ll find grandparents & great grandparents who heeded the empowering words of Mother Jones. Or marched on Blair Mountain or risked all to stir the labor movement to life in America.”
What would you have responded? Send to: heythere@westvirginiaville.com
2. The Artist
‘Illustrations’ is our series on notable illustration and graphic work by artists with a West Virginia connection. I’m a big fan of Sharon Lynn Stackpole, whose latest work I’m always glad to see on Twitter. Sharon is a mental health counseling grad student at Marshall University, a disability advocate, artist, and writer. For more on the work below, read the related post. See more of her work at sharonlyn.com and here.
3. The Cartoon
Back in the day, as an ink-stained wretch covering the arts in one of the heydays of the Charleston Gazette (R.I.P. Don “Marsh” Marsh), I kept an eye peeled for the most creative folk I could espy. Sam Holdren, who worked with the late, lamented WV Film Office, was one. Sam is now a film industry location manager based in New Mexico. With extra quarantine-time on his hands, he crafted the remarkable, old-school-style, 8-minute cartoon you’ll see at this link. My reaction when I first watched it after Sam sent it to me: “Damn, Sam!”
To view the video, click the link in red that follows or the poster above, where you’ll also find a wide-ranging interview with this thoughtful, creative West Virginia native: “THE BALLAD OF KYLE T. MaGATT: About a Deplorable Fellow in a Little Red Hat.”
Here’s a little of our Q-and-A:
WVVILLE: Who exactly is the audience for the cartoon? Progressives do a lot of preaching to the choir on social media, but while there is some ‘red hat’ send-up and mockery in your “Ballad,” your aim seems bigger than dissing ‘MAGA’ folk.
SAM HOLDREN: “… yes, my aim is definitely higher than simply eviscerating a group of people with whom I strongly disagree.
“The piece—even the process of making it—is completely disposable if I don’t have some kind of compassion for Kyle MaGatt. My emotional core for the entire cartoon is that no matter how frustrated, angry, and exhausted I am by the Kyle MaGatts (and Karens) of this country, I don’t want them to die.
“Especially not because of a preventable virus. Not alone. For nothing. Even with its satire, the story is a tragedy …
“All the topical political and social satire and the Seussian rhymes and styling is really just a smoke-screen for a portrait of someone unable or unwilling to grow beyond a thick cartoon outline presented to the world, suffering a lot of pain and confusion that he isn’t capable of expressing in a healthier way.”
4. The Garden
Sassa Wilkes paints every day. Now, she’s painting in a different fashion, using the Earth as palette. We recently published a multimedia portrait of this many-talented Barboursville-based artist, who is growing things in a big way for the first time, thanks to Covid-19. Below is a video portrait by our chief videographer Bobby Lee Messer:
See Connie Kinsey’s portrait of Sassa, and photos of the artist growing things by Kim Wilkinson, at this link: CHARACTERS: A Portrait of the Artist in Her Garden.
5. The Snapshot
The roadside stand considered as a work of art. Johnson’s Produce, along WV 2 in Mason County WV, was looking quite fine one day as I passed, stopped, and returned. I loaded up with corn-on-the-cob, plums, tomatoes, and “pluots,” a colorfully mottled cross-breed of plum and apricot (which their sign called ‘Dinosaur Eggs.’) They also had free-range chicken eggs, which I snapped up. The flavor differential of free-range produce stand eggs and store-bought is quite distinct. “My dad,” said the produce-stand lady, “is proud of the eggs his chickens produce.” Rightly so.
ALSO
READINGS | “Nous Celeron”: '.. you, bright flower of La Nouvelle France, come to assert your king’s prerogative and historic claim over these wild lands and untamed rivers. ‘Pour Retablir La Tranquillite Dans Quelques Villages Sauvages.’ Yet not all Indian ‘savages’ esteemed your buried plates, claiming rights to rivers they’d given other names.
GUEST POST: The Not-So-Natural Gas Boom: Natural gas and the fracking boom have changed the landscape, politics, and economics of West Virginia. Sean O'Leary of the Ohio River Valley Institute addresses the claims of "a veritable rock star proponent of 'the natural gas economy.” And finds all nine of his "irrefutable energy truths,” in fact, quite refutable.
READINGS | Two by Kiley Lee: Twitter can be a whirlwind of woe. It can also be a place of discovery, of encountering creatives working in West Virginia whose work is worth checking out and lifting up. Here are two poems and two photographs by Kiley Lee, of Paden City WV.
Be well, stay safe, wear a mask in public like a superhero or superheroine. Reach us and suggest stuff at: heythere@westvirginiaville.com. Subscribe for free: westvirginiaville.substack.com. | Douglas John Imbrogno, editor & co-founder, WestVirginiaVille.com