Life in the Hills with Remarkable People
The Painter, The Horse Whisperer, The Songwriter and The Conservative Dad | march15.2023
By Douglas John Imbrogno | Longtime WestVirginiaVille.com readers will note that the publication has been missing in action of late, not keeping up with last year’s regimen of monthly issues. I could blame a months-long bout of Influenza A, since this Winter’s flu—perhaps annoyed COVID was getting all the attention— came roaring back, in a super-charged version with enough phlegm to last a lifetime. (T.M.I., I know). That was partly it. But the main reason is that I have launched some other Big Projects Eating Up All My Available Time. (B.P.E.U.A.M.A.T.). Let me flag your attention to them if you’d like to follow along, since these B.P.E.U.A.M.A.T. are pretty cool. Plus, WestVirginiaVille is back in (digital) print with some new guest essays (see below).
‘HOUSE IN THE CLOUDS’ documentary premieres Sept. 17, 2023
REGULAR READERS MAY RECALL in-depth profiles and photo essays on the life and artistry of Robert Singleton. At age 85, Robert continues to paint at the top of his game, while continuing to live atop a West Virginia mountain in a house he built in 1978 (which looks like a villa that blew in from Tuscany). My AmpMediaProject.com partner Bobby Lee Messer and I are working on a full-length documentary on Robert’s story and his terrible challenges growing up, in a hateful environment that might have crushed someone else’s spirit for life. Instead, after twists, tribulations, and turns, his spirit manifests at this point in his life in luminous paintings, while his good humor and good will is manifest moment to moment.
Our documentary, “HOUSE IN THE CLOUDS: The Artistic Life of Robert Singleton,” will receive its world premiere Sunday, Sept. 17, 2023. It will be hosted by the the W.Va. International Film Festival in a dramatic setting: on the main stage of the Clay Center in West Virginia’s capital city of Charleston. Follow along as we move toward this event and other screenings in other venues (knock on digital wood), and as we fund-raise to support the film’s completion and further promotion. Here is the trailer.
FREE SUBSCRIBE TO THE DOC’S WEBSITE HERE: houseintheclouds.substack.com
CLICK TO VIEW ‘HOUSE IN THE CLOUDS’ Trailer
In the Heart of the Hart of the Country
SPEAKING OF PEOPLE doing world-class work while also being world-class people in the West Virginia outback, check out TheHartoftheMatter.substack.com. Bob Webb and I just launched this multimedia oral history project, profiling another amazing life and man, Bill Hart. Below is an excerpt from my introduction to Bill at the new site/newsletter:
From ‘TheHartoftheMatter’:
I like to say that [Bill Hart] is among ‘The Five Most Interesting People I Have Met in My Life.’ (And that list includes a 95-year-old, internationally beloved, Buddhist abbot-scholar-meditation master, so he is in good company.) Yet a snapshot recitation of his life’s resume will only hint at the complexities, the wild and weird depths of this multi-instrumental master luthier, electronics prodigy, polymath thinker, horse whisperer, and escapee from the Matrix. Born in Naples; served in the Coast Guard; raised intermittently by a father who commanded a key Vietnam Era battleship; rejected his Dad’s posh, upwardly mobile career and a whole lot else of society’s strictures; landed deep in the hilly West Virginia outback; mastered the art of shoeing horses while also mastering the art of hand-making world-class instruments, breathing into them the schema of a mind that speaks native electronica. I could go on …
FOLLOW ALONG, AS WE GO ON: thehartofthematter.substack.com
GUEST COLUMN: ‘Sermonizing on what Joni Mitchell said’
WESTVIRGINIAVILLE.COM just awoke up from a months-long slumber with some guest columns. In ‘Sermonizing on what Joni Mitchell said,’ we note that it is not often a Joni tune makes a central appearance in a sermon at an Appalachian church. When the guest minister is Doug Minnerly, a longtime Joni Mitchell fan, standing in the pulpit of Kanawha United Presbyterian Church in West Virginia's capital city, the results are powerful. In October 2022, Doug spun up a sermon from how Joni's song, “Passion Play (When All the Slaves are Free)," speaks to the mandate from Jesus to reach out—as the stories of his life show him doing constantly—to those whom the powerful and mighty continually consign "to huddle in darkness." Doug's sermon weaves around the insistent theme from the song: “Who you gonna get to do the dirty work when all the slaves are free?” What, then, are we called to do in our own lives faced with those consigned to darkness?
READ ON HERE: https://westvirginiaville.com/2023/03/what-joni-said/
GUEST COLUMN: ‘Dad, Donald Trump and My Mountain Mama’
I AM REALLY NOT TRYING TO solicit ministers, hither and yon, to submit guest essays on timely topics. But West Virginia native Steve Edington, Minister Emeritus of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua, New Hampshire, sent in a thoughtful piece. He ponders whether his uber-conservative father, struggling but determined to raise his family, might have voted for Donald Trump, as so very many West Virginians have done in recent years. Below is an excerpt from his conclusion — and his message to past Trump supporters as The Donald’s latest trainwreck candidacy comes crashing along in search of voters:
TheStoryIsTheThing.com illustration
REV. STEVE EDDINGTON: Look, according to something called the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, as of March of 2021 Donald Trump was worth $2.3 billion dollars—with $413 million of that inherited from his father over the years since his father’s death. He has a global empire of hotels, golf courses, and who-knows-what other similar kinds of real estate. His mismanagement of his empire has cost him dearly from time to time, but an empire it remains.
Why, then, do you think he gives two hoots in hell about you? Trump has gotten to where he is by using the people who happen to be useful to him at certain times in his life. When it comes to his Presidential ambitions you happen to be useful to him—no more and no less. He has no knowledge and no feelings for the culture—okay, cultures—of West Virginia than I would have for a Martian culture, if such a thing existed.
He knows—or thinks he knows—that all he has to do, when it comes to courting your allegiance and your vote, is to offer some empty slogans about making America “great” again and “owning the libs.” It’s a cynical move: Tell people who may not be feeling that their lives are all that great that he is going to make America great again, and they’ll think this “greatness” will somehow rub off on them.
C’mon, surely you are able to see through all that. Really, does wearing a MAGA hat, or a sweatshirt like the one I saw being worn in a shopping mall not far from where I live here in New England that said, “Make a liberal cry” give your life some kind of an uplift? Does it really make you feel better about yourself? Once you take off the hat or the sweatshirt or the T-shirt, is your life in any kind of a better place?
My guess is that when you get up in the morning, you’re like my dad on many mornings of his life—still getting up to face another day of hard work just to stay afloat. And Donald Trump couldn’t give a rat’s you-know-what about any of that.
READ ON: ‘Dad, Donald Trump and My Mountain Mama’
PS: Take a sidetrip to Paris, circa 1986
ANOTHER ‘B.P.E.U.A.M.A.T.’ CONTRIBUTING to an intermittent publishing schedule for WestVirginiaVille (and possible hiatus in later 2023) is a “sorta memoir” book-length manuscript I am racing to complete and get to an editor/publisher. Tentatively titled “Confessions of a Failed Boulevardier” (a too-esoteric title likely to change), the ‘autofiction’ book details some checkered and colorful, as well as catastrophic, living abroad in France and Ireland in the last century. The book dips backwards and forwards into my own biography to figure out why. Below is a link to an excerpt from this ‘fictionalized non-fiction’ work-in-progress:
‘Looking Down on Paris, 30 years gone’: Exiting the spartan, Napoleonic era apartment building I have sort of broken into, I head for the highest hill in Paris. I am intent on seeing what I can see this Christmas Eve in Paris, 1986, while my Moroccan fellow traveler, Abdul-Ghani snores toward Christmas Day, as we take a welcome break from helping to build a Buddhist temple in a Parisian suburb.
Thanks for this issue. Enjoyed it all especially the Hart piece…