Letter to Editor: Palo Alto Daily News - 1/25/2008 - published

I saw this last week:  A middle-aged Hispanic woman leaves a large home in Atherton (wealthiest community on the surface of the earth) well after dark on a rainy night.  She walks across busy six-lane roadway El Camino Real in the pitch blackness - there are no streetlights, only the flash of passing headlights of cars going fifty miles per hour.  She must walk alongside one hundred foot long puddles of water along the roadway (no drainage system).  These puddles are three feet wide and occupy the “pedestrian” zone.  She walks inches from the traffic to avoid the deep puddles / ponds / pools.  A bicyclist passes her in the dark swerving into the traffic lane to avoid her.  She stands in the total darkness in the rain waiting for her bus. Suggestions:

1.  El Camino is a California State Highway and warrants  civil improvements, (drainage) superior to those of a Bulgarian village.

2.  Install a paved sidewalk at least five feet wide on at least one side of El Camino starting in Menlo Park and extending through Atherton to Redwood City.  Illuminate this sidewalk at night.

3.  Provide a well-lighted bus shelter.

Certainly, if one assembled the hard-working, intelligent residents of Atherton, they would agree that their nannies, cooks, carpenters and gardeners deserve a safe walk home.

Warm Regards,

Jim Blake

( two years later - Still no drainage or lights or sidewalk or bus shelter )

Anxiety of Influence - de Kooning / Picasso

Willem de Kooning’s access to Cezanne was blocked during his formative years, the 1930s and 1940s, by the feverish cult of Picasso thus he never saw Cubism for what it is, Cezanne shorthand, not some cosmic invention from whole cloth.  Jackson Pollock also suffered from this myopia. These two painters banged their heads silly against Picasso like loose shutters in a hurricane while the magic, beauty and grace of Cezanne eluded them thus de Koonings un-mooring after his great masterpiece “Excavation” and the early “Woman” series.  Arshille Gorky,  de Kooning’s mentor, was completely obsessed with Cezanne to the point of mimicking his imagery in a very accurate manner.  Gorky’s obsession with Cezanne turned out to be an excellent launching pad into an original vision.  Gorky could instinctively avoid the dragon’s lair of Picasso.

"Waveland" - Frederick Barthelme - Letter to Author

“Waveland” - Frederick Barthelme - Letter to Author I was gripped by your fierce, ornery precision and also the similarities between your protagonist Vaughn and myself re: age, education, divorce.  Your description of Hurricane Katrina devastation put me right in the middle of it.  The link between the hurricane of a marriage and a real hurricane is strong thematic adhesive.  I was impressed by Vaughn’s diplomacy during the middle of the night visit by his girlfriend’s violent ex-lover.  Most people would have simply called the cops.  There is a brand of fiction that is super-realism as opposed to surrealism ie, a story rings so true it aches, it resonates.  It is commendable when an artist can demonstrate a comprehension of two hundred years of fiction and apply a concentrated focus to such immediately ordinary events thus making them extraordinary.  This is what all modernists strive to do and so few actually achieve.

Your novel is interesting on a number of levels.  Now that I have read the recent biography of your brother Donald I have a useful though narrow knowledge of your family structure.  I am an architect and studied with a few professors in the mid-seventies who were true believers in Modernism like your father.  I know how passionately indelible these men were.  They were true believers in the Eric Hoffer sense.  This Modernist army was on a religious crusade, one that was very serious and often mean.  Modernist notable Paul Rudolf was a critic at one of my final reviews at the Harvard Graduate School of Design - Mr. Rudolph was a real sour pot of milk.  These men took themselves too seriously and in many cases were not naturally gifted.  I don’t know about your father, Donald Sr.  I have not seen his work.

It is interesting to experience your writing style, with its roots in Hemingway and compare it to Donald’s with his roots in Kafka, Kierkegaard, Beckett and Joyce.  Donald is a CitraModernist ie Postmodernist: work with roots in Cubism, ambiguity, multiple station points, etc  You are an UltraModernist: Apollonian, orthographic, stripped-down, “ornament is a crime.”  You have an insurmountable task in Bloomian terms of having to swerve from both a Modernist (father) and a Postmodernist (older brother)  simultaneously, an inconceivable task.  You lean away from your older brother and toward your father into a powerful place as an artist.  Thank you for an excellent reading experience.

"Gulag" - Anne Applebaum - Letter to Author

Your book Gulag is a remarkable achievement.  It is a new and very large lens through which to view 20th century history.  I am embarrassed for the U.S. education system that Soviet history was so neglected in our curriculum.  I was led to believe that the U.S. military practically defeated Hitler’s army single-handedly.  We were not taught that Hitler’s army had been eviscerated by the Soviets at the expense of six million Red Army soldiers during four years of brutal, widespread fighting on the Eastern Front prior to D-Day. Your book tells a remarkable story of that devastation and the price paid by the Soviet people for Stalin’s towering battles with Hitler’s forces.  The timber, oil, gold, silver, bauxite and coal that fueled the Soviet war machine, all extracted by the slave labor of millions of Soviet citizens.  I assume that the machinery itself: tanks, aircraft, artillery pieces, ammunition and the machine tools required to make it all also had a sizeable component of slave labor.  The dams, roads, canals, tunnels, highways and railroads, the whole shebang - GULAG!  What an astounding revelation - who knew?  Your marvelous book should be required reading in every high school in America.

The Soviet people made a colossal and awful sacrifice without which, our “Greatest Generation” would have been chewed up by Hitler.  I have a few questions, perhaps you have some insight.  1.  To what extent did Churchill and Roosevelt know of the great sacrifices in the Gulag and the Red Army?  2.  Was it their intention to allow these two nations destroy each other?  In retrospect, it appears that our lend-lease provisions bought the lives of allied soldiers at the expense not only of the Soviet army but of the workers in the Gulag system.  3.  Was Stalin an evil man or was he caught up in a great natural culling of an overgrown population?  4.  How might Stalin have otherwise procured his nation’s most inaccessible natural resources,  material that he needed in a hurry, if not by slave labor?  5.  How many victims of the Gulag would have died of starvation in their homes during the years of great famine?  6.  Do you think that if it were not for Stalin’s brutal policies regarding his own citizens that the Soviet Union would have been devoured by its neighbors during the 20th century along all of its borders?

In summary, the United States rode to victory on the sacrifices of tens of millions of suffering Soviets,  who received NO credit from Americans.  The Soviets, from my earliest memory, were seen as “the enemy” bad guys, huddle under your desk.  In a larger sense, might it be that the population of the now former Soviet Union is composed of people destined to submit to totalitarianism and once they have submitted, to treat one another very poorly on a scale so massive that it must be blamed on national genetic traits rather than a few bad policy makers?  According to your book, whenever a Soviet individual had a chance to make life a little nicer or a little more miserable for each other, they chose the latter on a grand scale.  I don’t imagine that it is easy to be nice when the temperature is fifty below zero and there is little to eat.  I am reminded of the words of late, great comedian Sam Kinnison screaming about the starving Ethiopians:  “WHY DON’T THEY JUST MOVE!!”

Miscellaneous ramblings:  Kleb Boky, the chubby Chekist who watched his enemies twist in the wind.  Couldn’t the bedbugs and lice been added to the soup for some protein?  I was disappointed to read your questioning of the validity of Racwicz’s story told in his marvelous book  The Long Walk, which I read in high school.  Is phony spelled with an e before the y - you have it both ways throughout your text.  Aluminum is not mined.  The mined mineral component of aluminum is bauxite which,  after an energy-intense industrial process,  is transformed into aluminum.  The great dams on the Columbia River in Washington state generated the electricity for the aluminum used in our World War II aircraft. I  Loved your great book - thank you.  I am enclosing a drawing inspired by your text.  I apologize for its vulgarity but, of course, it is a subject rife with vulgarity.  I am left with one over-arching question:  What is it about Russians and suffering?  I am currently working on an essay titled “The Tragedy of the Chosen Child: Frank Lloyd Wright, Joseph Stalin, Douglas MacArthur.”  Your book was intensely illuminating regarding the scale of Stalin’s influence on the Soviet people -this story has a certain peculiarly feminine, smothering vastness.  Your book is a great blessing.  Warm Regards,  JB

"The Rest is Noise" - Alex Ross - Letter to Author

I enjoyed your book.  Lots of excellent mini-bios and bracing descriptions of a wide variety of important modern composers and their musical compositions and performances.  Your book is an excellent catalog for tyros such as myself.  I found it odd that you appointed yourself as the out-meister for 20th century composers.  Was this a bone tossed to your gay readers?  I would think that if these homosexual composers wanted to be out they would have taken care of that during their lifetimes.  The first half of your book is brimming with vitality, the remainder is depressing.  It seems like many 20th century composers fell into the trap of oppressed minorities everywhere tearing at each other like crabs in an over-crowded pot,  pulling each other down from the lip lest they escape into public recognition.  Boulez comes across as the quintessential art-thug, one of so many examples.  You are a bit of a thug yourself from your bully pulpit at the new Yorker and in this book.  It is hard to hear the music through the hate, fear and backbiting you so thoroughly relate.  This is unfortunate, when all is said, Jimi Hendrix and Duane Allman had greater musical gifts than the whole menagerie.  I must admit, however, that your book offers an excellent education to a novice.

Humor? - An Imaginary Telephone Call

A telephone call from Joseph Stalin to Dmitri Shostakovitch in the middle of the night during the 1920s - think Bob Newhart’s telephone comedy routines. Stalin: “Dmitri - This is Joseph - Joseph Stalin.  How are you this evening?  I saw your new opera last night - too many notes Dmitri - too much dissonance and what is it with these twelve tones? - You are our national hero composer.  I should think you would write for the workers Dmitri - a music for the people.  Are you with me on this?  You continue being creative - release your genius for the people - do we see eye to eye on this Dmitri?  Anymore dissonance and I’ll have you shot and if it’s atonal I’ll shoot you twice.  Good night Dmitri - pleasant dreams.”……..this is not funny but accurately conveys Stalin’s intimidation of artists during his years as leader of the Soviets.

Letter to Author - Peter Mathiessen - "Shadow Country"

Letter -2/23/2009 - Shadow Country is a marvel, a great reading experience.  I am amazed by this feat of sustained concentration.  The story got so intense at one point, I had to put it down, go to my favorite watering hole and have a shot of rum - straight up.  Bloody Watson reminds me of two men:  Joseph Stalin and my grandfather Bob Gilliland, a Scotch-Irish logger who rode out west from Kentucky in 1916 on an Indian motorcycle.

I have recently read a few books on Stalin and it appears that he lived out his destiny by re-creating his horrible childhood for as many Soviets as he could herd through the Gulag archipelago (20 million).  Stalin was beaten by both parents and his father could have been the model for your character Ringeye.  The Watson plantation experience, for his sugar cane workers, reads like a Gulag story.  Once a person is exposed to the incredible violence as a  child, the memory persists for the duration of the abused person’s life. In your novel,  we get a notion of the psychic horror that often drives a difficult adult.  Much is explained, little is forgiven.  These people make our lives miserable (and wonderful)  Your novel struck very close to home.

Watson could have been a family member of ours (except for the murders).  The steely, alcoholic orneriness, vicious hard work and massive ego, dashed dreams, abused children, fighting in bars and poverty - the cauldron of Oregon lumber camps.  Have you read Thomas McGuane’s novel Ninety Two in the Shade ?  It is one of my favorite novels, Shadow Country reads like the brilliant backstory.  My grandfather was a logger.  He worked one end of a twelve foot long steel hand saw from dawn to dusk.  He sawed trees with a legendary vengeance exhausting two or three partners a day.  He always sawed through lunch time and allocated the money he earned during these hours to buy whiskey on Friday nights when he would drink and fight each weekend for recreation,  He was an abusive father who launched my mother into ten years of mental institutions.  Your novel helps explain him to me.  I was riveted to this novel for weeks.

Jim Quotes - 2

1.  Hard liquor - Flu in a bottle 2.  A person draws the beast out of the heart of their mate and battles it thus experiencing therapeutic catharsis.  Best to seek catharsis elsewhere.

3.  It’s all I can do  to do what I don’t do . 4.  Man to acquaintance:  “You look just like Stalin - and I mean it in a good way.”

5.  The Fakery Bakery - cooking up a bunch of stories

6.  DDDT - My motto - Don’t do dumb things

7.  Douglas MacArthur in Korea - A rotten banana surrounded by tarantulas . 8.  Galaxies as an aerosol being sprayed from black holes ( rather than Big Bang)

9.  Little things are everything.

10.  A great painting is a reciprocating engine of line, color, composition, technique, idea

11.  An alternate to Darwin’s notion of Natural Selection:  Blake: Visceral Intention - generating antlers, protective coloring, opposable thumb from internal cosmic fear rather than from mutating genes via external cosmic ray impact.

12.  Bumper sticker:  If Jesus didn’t die for your sins, who did?

13.  One priest to another:  “Did you get your exorcize today?”

14.  Success:  The ability to recognize and tolerate and savor  your blessings.

15.  If a person has enough money  not to have to worry about income, employment or career, they are re-absorbed into themselves and may implode creating a black hole sucking innocent people into their oblivion.  This may may happen regardless of net worth.

16.  Which doesn’t involve brainwashing: Stalingrad, Leningrad, Harvardgrad.

17.  A novel: “On the Rodent” by Jack Kerorat…………sorry

18.  Ever seen a creeping nowwhat - a furry little beast that appears at the completion of a large enterprise.

19.  Passion erases doubt

20.  You can easily over-think a problem.  Excessive thinking may cripple intention.

21.  We do not owe black people reparations but we DO owe them back payment with interest for cotton picked, coal mined, trees logged, roads built, limestone quarried for which they were not paid as they were illegally indentured to companies throughout the south from 1900 until 1944.  Let’s take half of the current defense budget (the surplus) and pay these families and their descendants.  This would boost our economy.  Alternate: forward sixteen billion dollars to the United Negro College Fund.

22.  Mind over monday

23.  It's clear as a bell the world's crazy as hell.

" Sex and the Coal Mine" - a screen treatment

Charlotte falls for an African American bond trader at Lehman Brothers in new York City One week after they meet and fall madly in lust / love, Ron has to travel to  his home in Cottonwood, Alabama to visit his dying mother.   On the train ride to his home town, Ron’s train enters a time-warp and arrives in Cottonwood in the year 1925.  While at the train depot in town,  he plays a quick game of dice with his old high school buddies.  Ron and his friends are picked up on vagrancy charges by the local sheriff and they get sentenced to ten days in jail and fined $75.  The sheriff doesn’t accept American Express.  After two days in a fetid town lock-up,  eating very bad food, Ron is sold to an itinerant labor broker and then leased to a labor boss at Bama Lime and Brick Manufacturing Company.  Ron is transported along with a dozen other unfortunate souls of color to a hellish complex of brick-making ovens where he is chained to seventeen other African American men.  Ron protests and is whipped on his bare back while bent over a hot fifty gallon steel barrel……meanwhile, Charlotte is at lunch in Manhattan with her three friends wondering why her new lover hasn’t texted her.  She frowns. Cut to - Ron being whipped again for not meeting his quota of five tons of coal a day. Cut to - Deep in a remote deep, narrow mine shaft where Ron is at the end of a twenty-five foot long tunnel trying to swing his pick.  His partner touches a live electric wire and is electrocuted.  Ron panics and makes a run for it down an adjacent shaft filled with slaves - hell itself:  men fighting, a pick enters a skull, young slaves are being sodomized by the older ones, a tubercular wraith wanders amid the chaos. Cut to Charlotte - She is on the phone to  Ron’s mother who hasn’t seen him at all.  Charlotte packs her Gucci overnight bag with an extra pair of Jimmy Choos and grabs a taxi for JFK. Cut to - Jet landing in Atlanta Cut to - Charlotte boarding a train to Cottonwood. (The time - travel express) Cut to - Rickety, run-down train station platform in the year 1925. Cut to - Local  sheriff’s deputy glaring at her. Cut to (five short scenes) - Charlotte talking to many locals in an attempt to learn Ron’s whereabouts. Cut to - Charlotte crawling down a bleak mine shaft going from gang to gang asking about Ron.  She calls out in a remote shaft.  Ron calls back.  They meet up, escape to the surface and daylight through an abandoned shaft.  They are chased by bloodhounds.  Charlotte stumbles and is attacked by ten dogs - they only want her shoes.  Ron beats the dogs with a tree branch and the two lovers continue running through the pine forest. Cut to turpentine making facility in a deep backwoods logging operation where dozens of black slaves are beaten, cursed and murdered.  Ron and Charlotte run away until they reach the edge of a big swamp, dogs are barking in the distance, a big, long water moccasin droops from a tree branch into Charlotte’s face - she screams - they slog on through the swamp and night under a full moon as they reach the far side- quicksand!  Ron pulls Charlotte out while he grips a low hanging branch.  They reach a clearing where the see an endless cotton field in the moonlight.  They make their way to the field hand shack to the sound of barking dogs.  They see more black men in chains - the farmer comes out to the shack to investigate the commotion accompanied by his teenage son and nubile teenage daughter. Cut to - Three friends having lunch at Elaine’s in NYC. Carrie - “No word from Charlotte - she said she’d text me as soon as she got to Cottonwood. Samantha - I think we should all go down to Alabama and se what’s going on - something doesn’t pass the smell test. Cut to - The three women exiting the train to Cottonwood in the year 1925 wearing their finest, sporty clothes - Manolos, of course. Cut to - Slave shack on the plantation Farmer - “You tryin’ to stir up mah men, Buck?  What you doin‘ here anyhow?”  and you young lady - what you doin’ runnin’ round with this here boy?” Teenage son - “She’s a  n****r-lover pa.” Daughter - “She’s a slut-whore papa, she ain‘t no Christian.” Farmer to children - “Get back in the house you two - go on - git” Ron grabs Charlotte by her arm and they run off into the darkness to the sound of shotgun blasts and barking dogs. Charlotte’s cell phone rings - “Hey - Where are you?  We’re all here - we’re worried sick about you - why didn’t you cal?“ Charlotte - “My god - my god - You won’t believe it.“ Carrie - “Where are you?  We’re here in Cottonwood at the train station. Charlotte - “I don’t know where we are - out on a  farm - I hear dogs - they’re coming after us again.” Carrie - “Turn on your GPS Char.” Cut to Ron and Charlotte arriving at a sharecropper’s shack - safe at last. Cut to  - next day - OZ like scene Ron and four beautiful women walking along a dirt road a la  Wizard of Oz characters to the tune of “Zippedy do dah”  Up rolls a model-T flatbed truck, it stops alongside the group and two men in dusty denim bib overalls walk up to Ron and knock him to the ground. Farmer -   “He’s the one been stirrin’ up my n****rs. Amid screams and kicks from the four women. Farmer - “yo comin’ with us boy - git on the truck!”  The farmer’s partner slams Ron in the side of the head with the butt of his shotgun and locks a ball and chain around Ron’s ankle.   Ron (knocked out)  is lifted onto the bed of the truck as the four women kick and scratch and scream at the two men to no avail.  The truck drives away,  leaving the girls in a cloud of dust…. To be continued……

Jim Quotes -1

1.  Chandleresque detective to colleague: They want me dead….and I can live with that. 2.  Her hesitant affection smacked the nape of my neck like a damp mackerel…and it wasn’t fishing season.

3.  Greatness consists of patiently answering the little voices emanating from a work in progress that say  “Help me! - help me”

4.  Mothers create the sons they need.

5.  Prayer:  Maximum grace on a daily base.

6.  It’s turning into a scatter of insanity.

7.  Exis - stench - ialism : The philosophy of stink

8.  Surf the moment

9.  To thine own self…be reasonable.

10.  Emotional strength:  The ability to feel loved in the face of overwhelming information to the contrary.

11.  I’d rather a person be a blatant jerk than a latent jerk.

12.  Education is a process of becoming schizoid in an organized and methodical fashion ie hearing voices and answering them in your work.

13.  Albert Kahn designed over 2,000 factories between 1900 and 1940

14.  Braque - Obama : The Cubist ticket  2012

15.  There’s more BS in orbit around the art / architecture world than socks around Saturn.

16.  As everyone knows, context is everything and our law admits no context - Just the facts ma’m.

17.  Instead of giving your child an ice cream cone get him/her a whipped hummus cone….just kidding.

18.  Mediocre art violates principles in an insipid manner.  If one is going to break rules - do it with gusto.

19.  Cattle muscle tissue fills with the molecules of doom prior to their death in Cowschwitz (you’ve all seen it - just off the Grapevine along Highway five)  When you eat this beef you ingest an array of dire chemicals of mammal anxiety, fear, terror as well as the residue of dozens of bovine pharmaceuticals (Google these!) Wonder why you feel tired and cranky after a big burger.  The question is not   “Where’s the Beef?”    The question is:  “Where’s the beef been?”

20.  We live in a mediocracy.

21.  Amateur painting:  Everyone knows how to plant and grow but few know how to weed.

22.  Once you chicken out,  it’s hard to chicken back in.

23.  Guy  to ex-girlfriend:   “You made messing with my mind a full-time job!” Girlfriend to guy:   “That would only be a part-time job.”

24.  Impulse control - don’t leave home without it.

25.  I walk into a ghetto - all I see are nine mm pistols - I’ve got Glock-oma.

26.  To leave your adrenalin un-metabolized is a crime against your soul as well as a burden to those around you.

27.  Designing a new home in Silicon Valley is like throwing a chunk of raw beef into the Amazon.   (The Planning Departments are voracious and want to design your house for you)

The Age of Shiny Stuff

Americans have become obsessive about shine, gloss, polish, smoothness and superficial flawlessness.  Our new cars are very shiny, our magazines are glossy, our music is aurally spotless our art museums celebrate the machine made Warhols and now Murikamis and Koons.  The printing industry and commercial photographers have made shine a religion.  Legions of amateur painters obsess over quasi-photographic mimesis and spray this work with retina-scarring high- gloss varnish.  What are we trying to conceal in this collective fever, our consensus trance that must close all doors and windows on the uncertain or ambiguous?  Our gutted humanity?  Our emptiness?  We obsess about gloss as if we were only a single generation away from life in an earthen hovel with shine and polish being refuge from a collective memory of a daily struggle with cleanliness.  The problem with polish and shine is that, in this towering effort to obliterate imperfection, we are allowing  a smothering omnipresence of imperfection into our lives.  We live in glossy denial of our human touch, our marks and traces, of our imperfections.  The evidence of our being and our uniqueness as individuals is our uncomfortable secret. The essence of the modern movement in painting, manifest in the late paintings of Cezanne and Cubist painting and collage, is the destruction of resolution.  This principal of modernity still perplexes and frightens most Americans.  Cezanne re-introduced the notion of the human touch to painting.  He edited out polish, that had characterized western art for four hundred years for a deeper resolution.

We are now drowning in shiny stuff.  Our food is polished to its flavorless detriment.  The multitude of packages in a supermarket blow out our brains in their agonizingly competitive polish and shiny, glaring color.  Popular songs are polished by sound engineers until the music sparkles with vapid aridity down to the digitally accessible one-thousandth note.  The most popular television shows sparkle and shine from the layers of kleig-lit glass in every other scene, to the stretch and puff of every botoxed, lifted, implanted, nipped and tucked actress.  Actors abound with fluorescent teeth who could illuminate a scene by opening their mouths.  The set of every television talking head from sportstalk and national news/opinion bloviators to late night funny guys,  is a train-wreck of clashing, super-saturated color with colored patches crawling across the screen or flashing behind their heads.

We now swim like a great school of seduced, drugged, woozy fish following a vast array of spinning lures dipped in shiny shit of processed and poisoned substance and imagery as we swim into a vast net of financial oblivion.  Americans are force-fed shine and polish and specular reflection along with railroad tank carloads of cellulite-breeding, organ-clogging corn syrup as though we were pate’ geese, our ankles chained to our jobs (what jobs?) with our mouths forced open by a brain-numbing media onslaught - a shiny shitstorm of television, movies, magazines and all variety of consumer products.  The message:  If it doesn’t shine, it is not finished.  If there remains a micro-flaw, then truth will get in and destroy the beast or humanity might escape and nurture someone’s soul - heaven forfend!  If there exists in the product’s message an opening, a trace of the modern, of ambiguity or uncertainty then it is flawed, not yet ready for mass consumption.

We live in the age of the polished turd.  Ideas, products,, images, stories are all shined until antiseptic, soul-less and dead.  All information that issues from the corporate beast, the “vampire squid” of global capitalism must be shined, made palatable and seductive.  Shine glosses over evil or banality - take your pick.  The fact of shine reveals indefensible assertion, fear of ambiguity, a fear of open-ended soul-power.  Why is Cezanne widely acknowledged as the greatest painter of our epoch?  He faced down the purveyors of the paradigm of shiny shit and showed the world something deeper, something better, something more honest thus more beautiful.  Cezanne’s ragged, open-ended late landscapes invite the viewer to participate in the dance of creation, to “finish” his work in our own hearts.  In Steve Earle’s great anti-establishment anthem “Copperhead Road”, his rebellion is most deeply expressed, not in his gunning down U.S. government ATF agents who raided his pot patch but by the fact that he “shot a coat of primer” onto his Dodge Hemi (a black matte finish where shine goes to die) rather that submit his wheels to some conventional “Dukes of Hazzard” shiny paint job.

Erie Canal Builds America

Bond of Union, Gerard Koeppel, 2009 Jesse Hawley first proposed a canal across central New York state linking Lake Erie with the Hudson River in an essay published in the newsweekly "Commonwealth" in 1807.  He used the alias "Hercules" to maintain anonymity for such an outrageous idea.  After much politicking, construction was begun on July 4, 1817 and completed in October, 1825.  The Erie canal became a powerful link between the eastern and western states.  The commerce that flowed through this link created New York City as "The Big Apple", created a truly united states by breaking the economic isolation caused by the Appalachian Mountains.  The Erie Canal propelled the North to dominance over the south that had opportunities during the previous fifty years to expand routes of commerce to the west but failed to do so.

I was not taught much, if anything about the first twenty five years of our nineteenth century history in school but, after some study, it appears to be a vastly important era.  It was the time when the Marshall Court created the foundational jurisprudence for the nation.  It was the age of the development of the steamboat and steam locomotives and it was the age of the canal, best exemplified by the Erie Canal.  It was the proliferation of canals throughout the U.S. that gave great voltage to our economic growth.

Your next project awaits.