If anyone out there witnessed any piece of the shooting of Callion Hamblin by law enforcement agents in Farmington, Missouri on February 20, 2012, or knows anyone who did who would be willing to come forward, we would be grateful if you would please be in touch with The Friends and Family of Callion Hamblin at:
hamblincallion@gmail.com
Thank you.
Witness
Martha Collins
If she says something now he'll say
it's not true if he says it's not true
they'll think it's not true if they think
it's not true it will be nothing new
but for her it will be a weightier
thing it will fill up the space where
he isn't allowed it will open the door
of the room where she's put him
away he will fill up her mind he will fill
up her plate and her glass he will fill up
her shoes and her clothes she will never
forget him he says if she says
something now if she says something ever
he never will let her forget and it's true
for a week for a month but the more
she says true and the more he says not
the smaller he seems he may fill up
his shoes he may fill up his clothes
the usual spaces he fills but something
is missing whatever they say whatever
they think he is not what he was
and the room in her mind is open she
walks in and out as she pleases she says
what she pleases she says what she means.
from Some Things Words Can Do, 1998
Sheep Meadow Press
What a brilliant party last Saturday night
at Poetic Skate Shop in Farmington where a buoyant crowd gathered to
fund raise for a new half moon pipe to be installed in the back room.
Half moon pipe to be installed in the back room! The pipe will be tucked in between two walls, so
there will be a “wall ride” as owner Adrian Ware termed it, where
they just might do the occasional “sticker slap” contest (the
winner's whoever slaps the sticker highest).
Adrian explained to me that the pipe
will be fabricated from pool coping which is like marble, ergo
“there's more stuff to skate on it, and it sounds better when you
grind it. Kids can come in here, especially when it's raining, learn
some new tricks and then take them out to the streets. And it's free,
whenever the shop's open the kids can come back here and skate.
Helmets and waivers for the kids under 21. They're always welcome to
skate here.”
Adrian Ware
(Image courtesy of Farmington Chamber of Commerce)
I asked guest Rusty Brotherton what skating meant to him. “It means everything! I've been doing it since I was 5 or 6
years old, it's what I'm all about. It's hard to put it into words.
It's a lifestyle, I found it, I enjoyed it, loved it and have never
looked back at anything else. I love all of it, the freedom, the true
freedom, zig-zagging back and forth, and having fun. You can go as
fast as you want down a hill. You can go to any random place and have
a conversation with another skater, a stranger, and it's an instant
connection. It's like a brotherhood.”
Cody Hardie, 17, goes to Central High
School and lives in Park Hills, and says he's been at the shop every
single day since it's opened. Having had a back injury in the past he
gravitated to skate boarding. “I'm not worried about injuries in
skating,” he explained. “You set goals, but you're not competing
with other people, you're besting yourself. It's one of the most
peaceful sports.”
I asked Cody what it means to have a
shop like this in the area. “It's fantastic! We don't have to get
cheap knock-offs at Walmart. It's a great relief to have access to
top-of-the-line merchandise. Adrian's a cool guy. He orders the best
stuff, goes out of the way to get the stuff for you.” Rusty added
that “Adrian's opening up professional skating opportunities. He
got me out there to the point where certain companies will say I
want this dude to ride for me. He does this for other kids too.”
Cody said the shop's “a cool place to meet other people. When it
rains, people come from all over. Today there were some kids up here
from Poplar Bluff.”
We all came out of the back room where
we'd gathered to watch painter John DeBold put the finishing touches
on his wall art, Pop Art-inflected images he'd created for Poetic of a screamin' red
rooster and a cupcake skull named Sweet Tooth. The main room, where more of John's artworks hung, had filled up with stylish young
people, and even before the musicians played the energy was charged. “Skateboarding, art
and music go together like peanut butter and jelly,” Adrian
quipped. He's planning on having bi-weekly
evenings at the shop where people can hang out and
talk and see a new art show like the current solo show featuring
John's paintings and drawings, maybe listen to some live music.
“I want to bring the kids here the best things I've experienced with
skateboarding in the city. So far, we've got two kids sponsored from
a company in New Jersey.”
Poetic Skate Shop in Farmington, MO, Photo by Steve Hull
Spirited groups of three, four, and
five mostly young men were actively looking at and talking about
John's work, moving up and down the exhibit, pointing back and forth
to various images, animatedly discussing what they were seeing. How
many Dumbo and Chelsea gallery shows have I been to where people
don't extend even more than a cursory glance to what's before them on
the walls, like the art is besides the point? At Poetic Skate Shop
in Farmington, Missouri, they were reaching for it!
I shared with Adrian the thought that
young people don't really need all this discipline frustrated adults were always looking to impose on them. Rather they need challenge; and if challenged, they'll happily discipline
themselves. To which he immediately replied, “Exactly. These kids
have got each other's backs. If one kid needs something for his
skateboard but he's short a few bucks, out come the wallets.”
There was talk that the next show just
might include Steve Hull's photographs matched musically with a reggae dub. Everyone's welcome,
especially men my own age in need of reminding what the exuberance of
spine-tingling freedom feels like in zig-zagging motion. And please feel free to
reach into your own wallets and peel off a couple of freshly-minted twenties for the
cause--installing the half moon pipe in the back room
at Poetic, and putting some sweet and toothy smiles on some random kids' faces.
Poetic Skate Shop is located at 1 North Jefferson Street in Farmington, MO. Soloists, bands, artists and shoppers can reach proprietor Adrian Ware at 636-359-1325.
Wow! Look what Fredericktown, Missouri can do when it puts
its mind to solving a “problem.” Within hours of the offending issue of my
newspaper The Madison County Crier, radical activists organized to put
me out of business (as if you can put a labor of love out of business).
Advertisers and points of distribution were confronted, the newspaper itself
was vandalized, I received a few phone calls calling me an idiot, demands were made for an apology to the Killians both via
letters to the editor and telephone calls, and all in all a river of stenching
pus flowed on Facebook and Topix (a local message board) to the point where one
of the corporate media outlets in Cape Girardeau roused itself to schlepp up
and around town to “get the story.” In my experience, when corporate media gets involved they're often trying to divert you from something even more significant. I've racked my brains as to what that might be, and the only thing I can come up with is the Fredericktown Zoning Commission citizen survey sham.
Fredericktown's Zoning and Planning
Commission is putting together a 20-year plan. Now, everyone whose been involved in
anything civic over the years knows that when governments start “planning” odds
are 50-50 or better that something's going to get stolen right out from under
the nose of the people. In NYC when Bloomberg put together his Vision 20:20 plan
for the Manhattan waterfront, coincidentally bed bugs spread in the public
housing projects that ring the waterfront, surveillance cameras were installed in some housing projects and now there's a press to install surveillance cameras in the projects without them (for their own protection, naturally, based on the results of what else? a citizen survey!). It's common knowledge that apartments have been warehoused
for years (not rented out to new tenants when people left), and just watch how this "reform" effort plays out. The Manhattan real estate
interests would give their left nut for a chance to sell the waterfront again,
and Bloomberg, who thinks nothing of hijacking public lands and resources for
personal gain or just pleasure, let them know via his “plan” that the
waterfront boondoggle was on. Using the illusion of transparency and citizen
input, he diverts the energy and focus of interested citizens who are tricked
into feeling that they have been consulted and provided with an opportunity via
hearings and meetings to provide “input.” Meanwhile the world within the world
is turning.
In Fredericktown they don't go to that much trouble to get
community “buy-in.” Somebody designed a survey, not worth the paper it's
printed on, which nobody much knows about (the deadline has passed) to use as cover later to show that
the people were consulted; even a few high school seniors were cynically used
as decoration to show they “reached out to the youth.” They're relying on
“apathy,” a constant ingredient in any civic project in Fredericktown, which
the leaders have cultivated over the years by a variety of methods, most
especially boring people do death with meetings in airless, flourescent-lit
rooms, and starting a bunch of initiatives that never go anywhere. That's how the "leaders" do
it, like taking candy from a baby. (And does it come as any kind of surprise to
learn that one of the biggest decriers of the newspaper, a “leader” who has
been on Facebook admonishing the people who brought me to Fredericktown, is
also a mover and shaker on the Zoning Commission?)
So when it turns out that The Crier is not
just about decorating their efforts, but really is asserting itself as a
change vehicle, helping to empower people with critical thinking skills (asking
tough questions) its credibility must be destroyed. Enter the “disrespect”
brouhaha. But weirdly, it's not working this time, the people aren't allowing
themselves to be fooled and manipulated so easily. It's true that some people had a
big emotional reaction, but now that the outrage
has subsided they're not so quick to want to let go of The Crier it
turns out. And what is also becoming apparent even to the bullies and the bullied cowards who "support" them, if they win, they too lose; they lose the chance to find out what opportunities could come next that are bigger and better and bolder than anything they can conceive of from the heart of their limitations.
I can sense the deep and rising undercurrent of support, and
consequently am taking the following actions: I'm changing the publication
date from Wednesday to Friday (so that in future issues I have the option of
pointing out in a timely manner the things that the local corporate paper has
not pointed out); I am increasing circulation from 1,500 to 1,800; and I'm
expanding distribution outside of Frederictown while constricting it inside of
Fredericktown. The paper will only be available at a single outlet, where it
will be given out one copy at a time and is guaranteed not to be vandalized by
the very same adults who cluelessly wonder why their kids are so destructive
defacing the doors and stalls in public bathrooms, and the like.
So why did I call this blogpost “Checkmate?” Because at a
fundamental level the many people who don't carve the pie and never get to “participate” in the spoils
well know that if they allow either through inaction, inattention, or stubborn wrongheadedness the powers that be to go forward unchallenged with their 20-year rape
and pillage fest of the commonweal, that they will pretty much lose everything that's left to
lose, everything that's not already nailed down by those same "powers." So here we are. Fredericktown either shakes off its emotionalism-induced stupor and braces itself for
its much needed growth spurt with the support and guidance of the many voices
in their very own free alternative community newspaper, The Madison County
Crier, or it continues to die a slow and agonizing death, with the vultures gleefully
feeding off the carrion of the roadkill of the townspeople.
A final note to the business owners who have clandestinely
offered us money to keep The Crier going. Stand up and be counted,
otherwise your money is worthless to us, as worthless as your flattery. To
everyone else, especially those who wish to remain neutral (there is no such thing in this scenario), Find your own way to use your outrage to help you find your
courage, it's in there somewhere; locate it and then stick to it, with full
knowledge that we've already won.
In the dream, Susan Sontag is standing outside the
empty shop window where Hunt and Gather on Jefferson Street used to be. I
recognize her by her hair's skunk white streak, and well, I just recognize her
from having read her critical essays and the novels, notably The Volcano
Lover. She's gesturing at the abandoned enterprise, like there was
something very particular she had been hoping to shop for there, some object
that she was counting on getting that she cannot now purchase. On behalf of the
entire town of Farmington, Missouri, I grab her by the hand and walk her over (it's
not far, I tell her, you could hit a golf ball from here to there, I
say) to a place, the only place this side of St. Louis, where I am certain she can fulfill her desire, whatever it may
be—The Vault—our local lunch spot cum nightclub, and so much more, our Ground
Zero for a diverse community who love live, original music and value its practitioners.
"Go with me to the vault." — William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act V, Scene 3
Her eyes soon travel admiringly past the compact food and
beverage kiosk where artist owner Kerry Smith
whips up her culinary wizardry—the beautifully composed
panini, gourmet hotdogs, and enticingly named salads—the Harvest,
the Lux. Kerry put the Mean Bean on the menu without even trying it herself
first,just because she liked the way the ingredients sounded together,
I tell her, and it's delicious!
KDHX St. Louis DJ Bob Reuter's Band is coming back to The Vault on March 9th!
Susan's big eyes scrutinize The Vault's
distinctive signature posters and banners announcing upcoming shows, all
designed by owner, bass player, and musical curator Tim Smith, and she gasps with pleasure at
the representations of burlesque troupes and bizarre circus emporia that have
moved so many people here, myself included, right out of our comfort zones. I
wonder if she's already noticed the same small hidden image Tim often includes
in The Vault's posters, the thing you can look and look for and not see, but
then when you see it, you see it always. She approvingly reads the canvases of
the other artists whose work the Smiths so generously feature on the walls of
their club, before giving her full attention to The Vault's focal point, its raison d'être—the custom-built stage.
Tim goes to the back and puts on a little Zoe Boekbinder for
her, followed by a little Shenandoah Davis, Hymn for Her, End Times Spasm Band,
then Sleepy Kitty, keeping it a mite cerebral just the way she likes it, and
she taps her foot while taking in the black curtains and spotlights, reveling
in the good acoustics and sight lines. Her face breaks out in a eureka smile
and she intones in a lofty voice that Kerry will mimic perfectly later, not
creationism, not intelligent design, but designed intelligently for
Farmington's evolution and flourishing. She listens as I tell her of seeing
a production of Waiting for Godot in Barcelona on my honeymoon, and that
it was performed in Catalan! And she's about to say something about Beckett,
about absurdity, about waiting, I don't know and never learn, because, in the
dream, Kerry comes over with an Apri-Goat with slaw and a Schlafly bitter brew
and Ms. Sontag hungrily devours it, muttering between bites and swallows of
beer, form, content, form, content, form, content...and
I wake up.
After this dream, at the sold out Whistle Pigs show Friday
night, I thought about how important nightlife is for adults if for no other
reason that when driving to The Vault you can look up to the night sky,
experience the expanding universe, see the stars and moon on your way to, on
your way fro. There it is— the Milky Way! And also for
the pleasure of the people watching, we are stardust, we are golden.
Seated in the row just in front of me Friday there were two middle-aged
couples, in their late 50's I would guess, and I couldn't help but notice that
in one, the man flung his arm around his woman and pulled her close every
chance he got (and she loved it!); in the other, the woman with outstretched
fingers on two amorous hands scratched her man's back without inhibition, while
he purred like a contented tiger.
At The Vault, grandmothers dance with their six-year old
grandsons, men and women flirt outrageously with each other, same sex couples
can feel at home. At The Vault we always laugh about something, we always cheer
each other on. At The Vault, someone in the band will invariably say how
attentive we in the audience are, how you can hear a pin drop, how they can't
wait to come back and perform for us again. And it’s true, we are— attentive and grateful for the chance
to feel and be part of the larger musical currents criss-crossing the country.
Also invariably, they will say thank
you, Tim and Kerry, and we love it, because then we can clap and stamp our
feet and whistle and woot-woot for The Vault and the Smiths, and express our
appreciation for their considerable aesthetic risk-taking along
with their daily sacrifices to keep the shows, excitement, and inspiration coming our
way. It's a labor of love, really and truly it is, and they lead from the
heart.
We've got some really great shows to look forward to here in
Farmington, Missouri, now that Tim Smith has single-handedly put us on the
musical map as a destination for national touring bands—the Black Belles, Eliza Rickman—those shows will sell out quickly. But it's the ones
in-between, the oddities, the acts you've never heard of until now, the things
that for whatever reason have caught Tim's interest that he wants to share with
us, these are just as much fun to go to, if only to see who else shows up! What a year in music I've had since the Smiths opened The Vault's doors on
March 22, 2011:
For me, Elkin, while an odd bird, is incantatory. Like me, he's a New
York/Missouri hybrid, and also like me, or me like him, he's absolutely
hunky-dory with over-the-top. This, in pregnant parentheses, no less,
from Stanley Elkin's 1991 novel (his late period)―The
MacGuffin:
(“What's this all about?” Loft, the director of the airport,
had asked. “A little slogan I thought up,” Druff said. “What? A slogan?”
'Change planes in our town and we'll show you a time'?” “Sure,” Druff told him,
“if they had even a two-or three-hour layover we could pick them up in buses
and show them around. No city in America has thought of this yet.” “There's
such a thing as turf, Druff. You're the street man here. You of all people
ought to know that.” So [Druff] took his case over Loft's head. “Look,” he'd
argued to a chilly City Council, “what's the worst that can happen? That the
bus has an accident and everyone in it is killed or maimed. Don't worry, it won't
happen, we'll use only the most seasoned drivers. It won't happen, but
even if, God forbid, it does, most of these people are covered by the credit
cards they use to purchase their airplane tickets, by their travel agencies, by
the bus company itself. I asked counsel to look into this and he assures me
we're in the clear.” Going at his job in those mercantile rooms of yore as if
City Hall were still a department store. He was a good old City Commissioner of
Streets and only wanted to be a better one. Why not? Streets were roads, roads
were what the Romans built, and he, Druff, was road man here, Imperial
Commissioner of the Way to the Empire! So give me a little credit please, he'd
thought. I understand about empire, why wouldn't I know about turf?)
Photos by Steve Hull
This past First Friday I traveled a recently
resurfaced country road―Highway OO―to one of the more
interesting, candid and boundary-extending conversations I've experienced this
year in Missouri. One almost hesitates to tell the truth about what happened for fear that some premise will be found to blow the candle out. Fredericktown
is one of many small towns around here already undermined and gutted by empire
and left to rot or cannibalize themselves. It’s a place where a tacit bargain's been struck: as long as the social security, welfare, unemployment, and other government assistance checks still trickle down, many people will remain fiercely and
willfully ignorant, blaming “muslims” or “illegal aliens” for their own sure and
steady downward spiral into the void where the center, the one that's most
assuredly not holding, used to be.
But wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, The Loft is a pocket of tolerance, or a pothole of tolerance
on the otherwise smoothed over road to extinction, in a place where a strict
and punishing conformism is fiercely policed by volunteer bullies patrolling the
local coffee shop, and law enforcement personnel cruising the desolate roads. One
man I know tells of being routinely beaten as a boy for the crime of riding a
skateboard, and decades later he’s still in the trenches. So one has to risk that which one
has to risk.
Having listened to the definitions and etymology of loft we
read aloud (some surprises there), after reading and discussing Richard Jones' poem The Loft, noting its theme of lies of omission, after reading selections
from chapters 2 and 3 of Cooperative Village in which the protagonist is
out touring the streets of her neighborhood accompanied by the corpse of her
dead neighbor on a luggage cart, “showing her a time” as Mr. Elkin says, we talked to each other about the possibilities for the future. I
heard someone say that we in America live in a culture of disrespect, and that that can change. I heard
someone say that she urges parents to pick up their crying babies in the aisles
of Walmart and that American children don't spend enough time embraced in loving
arms. I heard someone express a fear that many people don't know basic survival
skills―how to plant a seed, or fix a home-cooked meal. And in the course of the forthright conversation, a 14
year-old girl, a brilliant and serious girl who aspires to be a
neuroscientist, declared herself as an atheist.
What happened next was truly marvelous. No one demanded to
know who's been deceiving her. No one thumped a bible or screeched scripture
about Satan into her angelic face. There was a moment of profound silence, some of it pained to be sure because believers were among us (one man told me the
next day that he had gone blank when she said it, that he had to leave
the room he was so hurt for her), but the rush to condemnation was stayed. And soon after someone said that maybe The Loft could save Fredericktown.
We talked about confronting the absentee-landlords and
cycling the art currently exhibited in The Loft into the many empty storefronts
on street level. One painter volunteered to have her piece, an oversized color-saturated
landscape of pinnacles, moved to a vacant shop window. It was a hallelujah
moment, like the fine artists were just waiting for the literary artist
to replenish their vocabulary of hope and daring. One is giddy at the prospect
of the bullies stopping and staring at the unlofted art, unleashing their
ridicule at objects they can plainly see to be beautiful, well-formed, shaped
with intelligence and care, until finally, they get it out of their systems.And then...?
A business owner in Farmington, challenged me to
define a term I had used in the inaugural post of this blog: “What do you mean
by Police State?”
I was thrilled with this question. I adore questions
generally because they cut through the sameness and dullness, and proceed dispassionately to the
heart of the matter. Moreover, I not only welcome them, but listen for them.
Often one can hear a question (or questions) shambling around inside even the
most seemingly straight-ahead declarative sentence (e.g. the title to this
post). In some sense that's the most thoughtful aspect of the daring writer's
job: to be attentive enough to hear those suffocated questions, even at the
lowest of signal strengths, and to unearth and amplify them so others can hear
them too. Then the conversation becomes of the moment, it's fresh and alive,
and almost always transforming.
By way of answering the question, I offer a brief apologue. Some years ago, my husband and I spent a three-week vacation
in National Glacier Park. During the long flight from New York City to
Kalispell, Montana, Joseph had picked up the in-flight airline magazine and
read a horrifying account of a couple who'd gone there on vacation and were
mauled by grizzly bears on a well-trammeled wilderness trail. Both the husband
and wife were severely injured. Injured and grotesquely scarred, their wounds
requiring multiple surgeries and subsequent plastic surgeries. They suffered 10
years of lost productivity, living in a hell of pain—physical and
psychic—trying to forgive themselves for their lack of foresight.
It was August in huckleberry season and the bears—Grizzlies
and Brown—were out feeding in full force. After what Joseph had read, and had
forced me to read, we were determined to avoid proximity to them at all costs.
But what to do? Pepper spray, bells, walking with a heavy stomping foot,
hand-claps while calling “bear, bear,” and some of the other suggested
bear-repellent techniques struck us both as fanciful, at best. And at worst, a
marketing device for products in the park's many gift shops—on
a par with snake oil.
After days of avoiding the trails that would lead us
into the majestic forests and possibly onto the path of an oncoming bear,
Joseph confronted a seasoned, weather-beaten park ranger and said something on
the order of, “I've done the research, I've studied the products and
noise-making suggestions, and have come to this conclusion: It's up to the
bear, isn't it? Whether he passes you by or eats you for breakfast, the bear is
in control.”
To which the ranger, locking on Joseph's earnest and steady
gaze, replied: “Yes.”
A few weeks ago a local 14-year-old boy with Down Syndrome was suspended from his middle school in Park Hills for "sexual harassment" when in fact he had hugged the bus aide. The story appeared in the local paper, but was also all over Fox News and made it as far as the New York Daily News. When I heard about it, it reminded me of this story about a 12-year-old Queens girl arrested for doodling on her desk.
What is one to make of these absurd attempts to criminalize children for the crime of being children? Is it now happening to our kids because we were silent when 13, 14 and 15-year-old "terrorists" were locked up in Guantanamo and the keys thrown away, and remain thrown away 10 years later? Has the tortured spirit of Guantanamo finally settled upon St. Francois County, like a ghost of Christmas past, present and future?
