Murals

I remember passing a cornerstone on the edge of Main Building at my high school, a stone that read "something something something 1929".  I knew that my high school was built way back then and had these murals in the auditorium on either side of the stage.  At the time, it was all so long ago and such funky looking paintings that I never really paid any of it much mind.  

But then I got to college and started learning about things like the Great Depression, FDR, and The New Deal....and then my memory clicked.  It clicked even louder the first time I saw the 1999 film Cradle Will Rock.  For those who are unfamiliar with this interesting little gem, it stars Hank Azaria and John Cusack and is set in NYC during the worst of the Depression.  It's about the Works Progress Administration, the Federal Theater Project, and an actual play called Cradle Will Rock. Azaria is the playwright and Cusack is Nelson Rockefeller.  The cast of characters includes Diego Rivera (and a cameo by his wife, Frida Kahlo), Orson Wells, and even an imaginary Bertolt Brecht.  For those who know me well, I could never pass up a film like that.  But what made my memory click was the theater and some of the (arguably) communist-esque imagery.  That's when I remembered those murals on either side of my high school's stage.  Well, I dug up some images of them: 

 This one is called "Energy" by James A. McLean, painted in 1934.  If I recall correctly, this is on the left-hand side of the stage.

This one is called "Education", by the same artist/year, on the right-hand side.

I can only blame egotistical teenage self-absorption for letting these slip past me for so many years.  I shake my head now to think where my head must have been back then.  I can't count how many assemblies I went to and stared right at these paintings without registering even so much as curiosity.  I was such an idiot back then. But then again, no one pointed them out to us.  No one, not any administrator or teacher, drew our attention to them.  I think the adults were as blind to these paintings as we were.  And that's a shame, because these images are time capsules.  I sincerely hope there's someone at that school today who's teaching the kids about the significance of New Deal murals in their auditorium.

Blast from the Past

A long time friend managed to dig up a poem I wrote at age 17.  It brought back a lot of feelings, intense and mixed.  The year was 1997 and it wasn't a particularly kind one to me. 

At any rate, it's a very strange thing to see your handwriting and read impassioned words you wrote over 15 years earlier.  It's also fascinating to realize just how effective a time machine some handwriting on a piece of notebook paper can be.  It's so much more evocative than this digital text I'm typing--it's more than words, it's the product of my very own hand rather than a keyboard and word processing program.  So, I'm posting it here as an image, instead of typing it up.  
*the text of the poem I post without comment or further context, so...*

Artifact

In one class I'm taking, we have to write a poem about ourselves...a poem that the professor calls an "artifact"; a term said professor did not bother to define.  That bothers me, because I'm such an academia-nerd that I need unusual or unusually-used terms to be defined.  A dictionary definition of artifact reads: An object produced or shaped by human craft, especially a tool, weapon, or ornament of archaeological or historical interest.  I'm going to assume this is what professor meant.  However, my poem is not a tool and I sincerely hope it's not a weapon.  As to it's being an ornament of any kind of interest, I will have to leave to others to decide.  At any rate, I wrote a free-form poem about myself.  Here it is.

I am from tarheels,

From basketball and tobacco.

But I matriculated there from tides and tigers

(Crimson, orange,

Foothills and deep South).

I am from the American and

Industrial Revolutions,

With lost battles and textile mills,

That make public parks and winter coats.

I am from Cheerwine and Joe Camel,

But I spent dedicated years with the Marlboro Man,

In mountains and along triple coasts

That make graveyards under water.

I am from the pirates and the draft-dodgers,

The Lunch Counter Heroes

And the Wizard of Oz Populists.

I am from lilted l’s

And the halfway drawls

And the pseudo-yankee nasals.

I am from high school jazz band concerts

Framed by New Deal murals

And marching in rain and mud to revamped disco.

I am from handwritten high school English papers

And paper-card catalogs

And corded phones with answering machine boxes

And Number Munchers

And getting my first email in college.

I have traveled from “I wish I had a pager too”

To “I’ll never use a cell phone”

To “I need to check my texts during this show.”

I have been a member of Skipping School

And Sneaking Into Night Clubs

And Carolina Bible Camp

And Rainbow Of Christians.

I heard the songs called “sit up straight”,

“be quiet”

“raise your hand” and

“pay attention”

And along the way I forgot the tune of these

While changing my address from:

What Do I Want

To:

I’ll Make What I Want

And in the moving van, I packed:

One grandfather’s tuneless whistle

Two grandmothers’ home cooking

And

One grandfather’s stubborn energy

And took these with me on the family highway of collective independence.