Charlie
Charles Hood Whittington (9/16/1948–2/11/2019)
I’m not going to lie to you. I’m tired. Weary of thinking about death, writing eulogies. But then I remind myself celebrating death, a death in the specifics, or in general, is the same thing as celebrating life. As life is part of death. I meant to write death is part of life. Like a sphere in the mirror, this sentiment looks the same, even in mirror-reverse.
So, Charlie. I tried to write this in 2019, after he died. Like some works in progress, the process is leaving it be for weeks, months, years, not sure if you’ll ever come back to it. And now it’s not 2019, it’s 2023. And Michael Crossley has newly published his BOOK OF AINT to which I contributed three illustrations + one foreword. I should mention Michael dedicated this book to the one: Charles Whittington.
When I jumped in to help set up the Lexington, KY stop for Michael’s tour, we landed on the September 16th date to fit his schedule. It was Alex, Charlie’s surviving son, who asked Michael if this was intentional. What intent? Alex reminded him/us that Sept. 16 would be Charlie’s 75th birthday, had he survived. I can remember the voice of Charlie in my memory, in life, joking about whether or not the dead still have birthdays. It turns out they do. At least in mine or Michael’s book or books, BOOK OV AINT or otherwise, and as far as Charlie’s milestone that he didn’t quite get to in life: we’ll get him there, or be there for him.
Then, Lexington-based artist Bob aka Robert Morgan indirectly reminded or informed us that 215 North Limestone, the current locale for Institute 193’s new-ish space (as opposed to the original, 193 North Limestone space, which is also still part of the Institute), was in fact the precise location of Whittington’s former, infamous Lexington book store. As Micheal and I agreed, while Lexington always was and is a small place, these coincidences seemed to be planning us more than we planned anything.
Loved him or hated him or love-hated (or hate-loved) him or not know who the hell or what a Charlie Whittington is or was: Saturday, September 16th 2023 will be/is/become Charlie’s day as much as it is ours. Or his day is also ours.
I’m going to kick-off this old as new writing following with a quote from Corso. Charlie always said most of the Beat poets you can toss out with yesterday’s papers, but he assayed that Corso’s verse will remain, rising above his contemporaries into futurity. To say Charlie was well-read was like saying the Pope has a grasp of Roman-Catholic bureaucracy. That doesn’t really cover it.
And I know for a fact that Charlie always believed Michael to be a poet, and he always believed, maybe more accurately to say that he knew, that Michael would write something as substantial as the 120 page BOOK OF AIN’T. This is what Charlie expected. And he’ll be, and is there, even if he’s not there. Or ain’t there.
Now I’m just going to let Charlie rest and let my stories rest as minor moments, perhaps captured. To Charlie (and Michael and the rest of us, all of us, remaining or otherwise).
*****
I schemed escape.
I schemed climbing impossible mountains.
I schemed under the Virgin’s whip.
I schemed to the sound of celestial joy.
I schemed to the sound of earth,
the wail of infants,
the groans of men,
the thud of coffins.
I schemed escape.
— from “Transformation & Escape”
by Gregory Corso, as published in The Happy Birthday of Death, a New Directions book, 1960.
*****
1.
The year is most likely 1994 or ’95. The scene is Lexington, Kentucky. Jeffrey Scott Holland, (an artist/writer/musician, later the author of the Weird Kentucky installment of the Weird U.S.A. series), my cohort in our two-man performance act, Cheeseburger & Fries, relates fables to me about this character, or more accurately, this character and his bookstore on North Limestone Street in Lexington, KY. I am 18 or 19 years old.
“Man,” Jeff says. “I gotta get you over to this guy’s crazy bookstore. You go into the shop & books are stacked all over the place. I’ve spent hours in there. When I find a book I want to buy, I take it up to him & then he snaps, ‘I’ve been looking for that one; it’s not for sale,’ and then snatches it right out of my hand. He’s great.”
Sold on this mythology of an eccentric bookstore and its proprietor by Jeff’s sales pitch, we schlep ourselves over there to this fabled place of bizness in my ’84 Mercury Topaz, only to upon arrival find the door locked. We peer into the windows, peeping the books denied to our browsing & possible disallowance to purchase, even if the doors were open for either business or bizness.
But while we’re window-peering, the name himself on the sidewalk out front of the shop appears. The man informs us the doors are locked for good, the store is no more open for business or bizness. This is the first time I encounter Charlie Whittington.
2.
My front door is open & the screen door is shut, keeping out the bugs. Quietly collating together several collections of pages are a few people in assembly-line style, of what are to be a couple of new self published pamphlets released at one time, authored & illustrated by J.T. Dockery, he himself (that’s me) with an industrial strength stapler, stapling together the collated contents, as the last stage in the assembly-line process. A slightly out of tune & ancient (or at least dating to the late 19th century or early 20th century) upright piano (survivor of a fire in its past) tucked in a strange catty-corner of this living room with its hardwood floors is Charlie. He plays melodies, jazz, boogie, some tunes recognizable to me, some unrecognizable to me, from busted up keys coming and dispersing as his own stream of consiousness connects the dots between flux of mind and discipline of fingers & the limitations of his particular in-the-moment instrument.
The piano floats over and around us and drifts, the reverbeations, out the door to who knows anywhere, everywhere. The sound from the piano floats not the piano itself floats, I should say. None of us are that high.
The year, if I am going to apply a name to it, is something akin to 2002. The street address is certainly 324 Preston Ave., in the town of Lexington, in the state of Kentucky, in what we call the United States, on Plantation Earth (to rob a phrase from Rahsaan Roland Kirk), in some solar system in some galalxy in some universe we don’t really understand enough to be in the business of speaking of/about/to in informal terms.
There in that house (circa 2001–2004) people came come and go, scarcely speaking of Michaelongelo, some of them secretly famous, obviously interesting, and/or otherwise. Hasil Adkins stays in the upstairs guest bedroom often enough that we refer to it as “The Hasil Adkins Suite.”
Bands rehearse in the basement. The signs of Lexington clubs from the semi-recent past and recently passed, as in no longer there, like The Wrocklage and the 37 Center, hang out and hang up down there, along with fliers covering the walls of shows, although we did not put the signs there, that putting have been put by tenants and/or owners, previous.
I put out word that it this event was to be a collating party. For anybody willing to show up and help staple a few hundred books together, they’d receive free pizza, beer, and copies of the finished books to take home when done.
Was there any instrument Charlie couldn’t play? He certainly couldn’t resist putting his hands on any given instrument around. So as we’repreparing to get the assembly line going, pages in order around the room for one person to pass to another person to at the end of the line become bound by the person on the stapler (that would be me), Charlie hits up the piano.
Then Charlie makes motions to get down from the piano bench towards the floor to get a spot on the line. I stopped him.
“Ya know, Charlie….why don’t you just keep playing the piano?”
“Really?”
“Yeah, man. I can’t think of a better soundtrack. That’s what we need from you more than we need a guy collating pages.”
The task is at hand. And Charlie is a part of it, a player. Charlie is a part and a player to many moments in my life in Lexington. But this is one of my favorites, Charlie playing piano that drifts out the door from then to now.
3.
I hit legal drinking age, fresh-faced & thirsty & a small bar opens on Upper Street downtown in Lexington what goes by the: “Hip Joynt.” I don’t know how I get there for an open mic on a Tuesday night, but I do. The Master of Ceremonies (or just as often is said of Charlie: “Monster of Ceremonies”), but it’s the same Charlie Whittington of “Whittington’s Books,” or more accuarately, “Not Whittington’s Books,” as I know him, at this point.
I am not much for open mics. But Charlie is the captain of a different kind of ship. He heckles performers while on stage. He blasts you if he thinks that you aren’t putting on a show for the people. He doesn’t care if you are reciting a poem that is well-crafted verse, as that don’t amount to squat, in his estimation, if you as performer aren’t performing it well; otherwise, leave it on the page & stay at home, Prissy-Pants.
Charlie rocks an attitude of “this is show business; you’re here to put on a show.” But he also takes time to give constructive criticism intended to help whatever given performer achieve a stage presence.
Lift up the work, prod the worker, get in the workshop & work it out. This is his attitude. Let the worker be seen in the workshop, Rumi be damned. He wishes a performer to go over, for the crowd’s attention to be demanded. He doesn’t want performers to fail. He wants them to get/be better, to succeed. He wants the performer to be fully herself, himself.
Fragile flowers need not apply on a Charlie show. If you can’t accept criticism and/or you are going to wilt under the pressure of heat lamps, the inattention of the present audience, go plant yourself somewhere else to dig, is his/the attitude. For those of us who become regulars there, whether one loves us or hates us, or loves or hates the master/monster of ceremony, Charlie creates a scene in which he creates as we all create. Various writers and musicians make it, with Charlie as ringleader, one of those temporary points of light that flashes in any give town/venue/scene.
For everybody that is ever offended/gives up in disgust/does not dig the hot-house atmosphere, never to return (and to trash-talk the Hip Joynt/Charlie open mic scene in the wake of the trauma of it all), I also wtiness those who are offended/initially balked then what return to tighten up, toughen up & become better performing artists and join in the ranks of the disparate elements that come together in that time & that space of late 90s Lexington thinktank/debauched art & life-styles laboratory.
4.
My two-man band with cohort Brian Manley, the Smacks!, becomes born’d in that hot-house/Hip Joynt, playing in front of an audience in that guise for the first time on Tuesday, May 5th, Cinco de Mayo, 1998. We have previously been performing there as Cheeseburger & Fries and/or Cheeseburger & Fries w/Eggroll or, alternately, Eggroll & Fries.
That’s altogether another fistful of stories, just as it would be a whole lot of stories to name/mention all the other peformers who appear there, but, there is a whole bunch, chock full o’ nuts of us, passing ships, and many of us are still out there afloat in many ways/many guises/performing various crafts and forms of the arts/show business out there.
Anyways, this night, as Eggroll & Fries, Brian Manley are on stage at the Hip Joynt for Charlie’s open mic. Manley’s rocking the riff for Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills.” I’m bellowing in my best to Bruce Dick-in-son the vocals. The bar-audience, despite our audacity and blatant affront to good taste, are, mostly, ignoring us.
This gets my goat & I increasingly turn aggressive, and Brian & I know we’re only ever going to cover this once, so we’re gonna sell it no matter who, if anyone tonight, is buying. By the time we hit the repitition of the chorus after the “solo” (quotes invoked for our version), I’m frog-leaping forward into the crowd seated at tables and at the bar in this small joint, imploring, rousing them from their inaction/inattention. I’ll be damned if we’re too be ignored.
This tactic works. The bar erupts into applause as we wrap it up in the culmination.
A young lady asks me as I’m ordering a beer right after, “Did you study theater? I can tell that you did by your facial expressions and emoting.” Thanks, darling.
Charlie comes forward, who wouldn’t know Iron Maiden from a hole in the ground in the United Kingdom or out back of the University of Kentucky & says: “I liked that. Sort of…Brechtian.” Is this the only time Iron Maiden or anyone else doing “Run to the Hills” gets compared to Bertolt Brecht? Probably so, but in a weird way, Charlie hits the nail on the head of the song, or, at least, our performance of it that night, and not only our performance of it, but also of Maiden’s original, which, again: he doesn’t know from a hole in the ground.
Eggroll & Fries have a hit with the Hip Joynt with our rendition of Memphis Jug Band’s “Cocaine Habit Blues,” and we perform the theme from “Fall Guy” and it hits, but we also one night cover the 80s “hair” metal band Poison’s power-ballad, “Every Rose Has Its Thorn.” Brian actually switches it up from mandolin to acoustic guitar. For whatever reason or set of reasons it goes over big. A young woman slides up to me later after our rendition and tells me how she and her best friend in high school used to play pool at the local poolhall and play “Every Rose” on repeat on the jukebox. Maybe I leave with her later that night, but that’s later.
Charlie sincerely tells me after, “I don’t have a good godamn idea what song it was that you were singing, but, I gotta say, usually you don’t sing. You’re not a singer.”
“Yeah, I know. I perform.”
“That’s a polite word for what you do, Doc, har-har. But that song serves your voice well. I was actually surprised you can sing.”
“Thanks, Charlie.”
Another time, I can’t say why exactly, Charlie and I are out beside the bar while the open mic is going on. Maybe Charlie’s just getting some fresh air. But either way, we’re standing by the trashcans outside. Charlie’s bothered by mine & Brian’s choice of song, a Neil Diamond standard. Maybe “I’m A Believer.”
I try to make a defence of Diamond. Charlie’s having none of it.
“He’s crap. He’s a hack. He’s a crap-hack. He brings down the value of tin in the pan-alley. You kids and your damn-fool irony.”
He turns, in semi-mock/semi-seriousness, to walk away. I spill some of my cheap beer as I remove the cigarette from my mouth as he’s entering back into the bar, yelling at him from behind:
WE’RE NOT BEING IRONIC!
6.
Charlie saves my life one night in the Tuesday/late 90s Hip Joynt era. Or at least, he saves me from going to jail.
I am out in my thrift store/70s style three piece suit (Charlie says it looks like I have “raided Al Pacino’s yardsale”). Not only a three piece suit but I am sporting a walking cane, not just to look a sport, but practial because among other things I am a young man with complicated arthritis ailments.
I am not in a great mood. Most likely it’s ah-cause of drama/tension with a young woman I am dating: I am in my early 20s, after all.
I kick off the night with the bartender Bob ordering a double Early Times on the rocks, so I open up the throttle out of the gate to rip this Joynt & I am in it to be the fastest hoss for that evening’s Drinking Derby, if that’s what we can call winning it.
What I am here to do besides acting like whiskey is a river and that I am thee diving duck, is to perform in the Eggroll & Fries guise a cover of “Kentucky Rain” as popularized by Elvis Presley, with Brian on mandolin, the only instrumentation to our rendition. Of course, many songs we do, Brian and I only work up once, never to repeat, as we genuinely experiment with what we present to the audience, always switching it up, with just a few staples we’ll repeat more than once in the mix.
I exit the bar after last call to go find my buddy, let’s call him Tony, who disappears/cuts out previous to me to go to an after party. He is hot to trot to follow a young woman who is siren-calling him to follow after her & he doesn’t wanna wait on me last call chit chatting it up at the bar, hanging around yacking at Charlie and others as we all finish our drinks. I have some vague private calculus computing in my noggin that this party at which I am to rejoin with my pal/my ride home is happening upstairs around the corner, close. In these boozy calculating (or rather mis-calculating), I figure it’s a piece of piss to find said after-party simply by looking up from the street at windows above the various shops and businesses by virtue of a light glowing out a window in an upstairs residence.
As I stroll along the block with my cane peering up at windows, I’m sure I cut quite the, uh, dashing figure. Dashing enough to at least catch the attention of the audience of a police officer in a car cruising the spill-out of a last call hour on a sleepy Tuesday evening. As I am looking for this fabled party/my buddy-my ride, it hits me: I gotta piss like the racehorse proverbial. But no more places of business are open.
I realize that if no businesses are open still, there was nothing stopping me from ducking into this parking garage in front of me. In more mis/calculating, I am figuring: “Okay, whiskey duck yourself in there, stand with back to the cars so I’m not auto-exposing myself, take a leak on a wall, no fuss no muss: piece of piss, indeed.”
I’m standing taking the piss & casually observe patterns of light on the concrete wall I am looking at while leaking & despite the non-reflective surface, it is just reflective enough to reveal to me the unmistakable pattern of a cop car’s lights behind. Not turning head or body, I zip up, as if I don’t notice a thing in this world, and, careful to not run but walk (at least in the fastest biggest strides a man with arthritis rocking a can take but not actually break into a run) and take off minding my own bizness down to the corner, leaving the cop only three options (in my mind, which we’ve established is not hitting home runs in the calculus department this evening), basically which are: pull the car out and drive the wrong way down a one-way street to follow me, follow me on foot and leave his patrol car parked or (which I’m hoping will be the option the peace officer chooses): give up as “not worth it” and let me disappear into the night.
I make it around the corner, thinking: “Shit.” But lucky duck Dockery me, bartender Bob and Charlie and a few others are still inside the Hip Joynt. The door is locked, but I give it a knock & they let me back in. I don’t say anything about the pissing/police incident, but mention I lost track of my ride home.
Charlie sez, “I’ll give ya ride!” But he is still finishing his drink, so I was sticking around with him. Occassionally, I take a glance outside and see a cop car passing by, but in that moment my only thought is, “you didn’t catch me, copper!” & the private, smug fantasy of any dialogue, interio/imagined:
“You say I was pissing against a wall in public in front of god and everybody: PROVE IT. That was some other guy in a three piece suit and walking cane you saw. I would never engage in such uncouth behavior as urinating in public. We still live by the golden rule of innocent until proven guilty, do we not? Are we not men? I am Kentucky gentleman of the first order & obviously & more importantly an obeyer of both god and man’s laws & regulations, which as an enforcer of various codes and statutes, I’m sure you appreciate. Thank you and may I depart now so as to not interfere with you tracking down this gross transgressor of micturation for whom you seek to reprimand to the fullest of extents available. And not only than you sir/officer, but thank, officer/sir, you for your service.”
When Charlie is done with his last call for alcohols, he & I exit the bar on our way to his car parked on the street within view of the Hip Joynt; as we approach the corner of Upper & Vine (his car is parked on Vine), who/what appears out of the thin blue lines of darkness, but the officer and his car, lights flashing.
In the way that only a naive/young/drunk white man can be in the face of an officer of the law, I don’t budge. And this time it ain’t fantasia. I act INSULTED that this officer is wasting the time of myself, obviously an innocent man.
While I am walking and talking, standing upright even, the fact is, I am D-R-U-N-K. My bravado in the face of an officer of the law at his juncture is only equal to my level of drunk more than my level of white.
The scene becomes a kind of extended perfomance, with Charlie as the “straight man.” I’m spewing total comedy/tragedy at the officer. Charlie’s saying things behind me as I deny having been the same person the officer saw pissing in public. Charlie says things like: Just tell him you peed. He doesn’t want to arrest you, dummy. He just wants you to admit it was you. But I figured the officer was going to arrest me, either way, and if I was going to be arrested, I wasn’t admitting guilt TO SHIT. Or, well, to piss. But you know what I mean.
The officer finally gets around to making fun of my suit and my cane. At which point I snap at him, “Hey, man: do you have arthritis? Do you an illness that causes you to need to walk with a cane?” At which point I could “see” the officer actually back down a notch, as he realized he may have actually be dealing with a disabled dandy, not just a dandy sans affliction. Once he cracked that one bit, I also simultaneous, finally ‘hear’ the sense in what Charlie is saying behind me.
So, I admit it and throw myself on landmine of the mercy for the transgression of public pissing. He inquires if I have a ride home. Charlie, acting very sane & patriarchal (and sounding sober) says, “Yes, sir. He’s a performer at my open mic. He’s a weird kid, but a good kid. He’s not normally like this, he’s just had a bit too much to drink tonight.”
In my head, Charlie’s kind of cracking me up, because even in that moment, I’m aware Charlie’s been steady-drinking all evening long, for hours.
The peace officer relaxes further and says, looks at me, “Well, you’re not drunk enough to arrest. And if he’s giving a ride home, I’ll let him take you.”
I’m astonished. Not only am I drunk. I’m at my highest, near-zonked level of drunk in public. But I suppose I’d learned already how to perform when my brain pan was marinated in the groove juice, so, no matter how bat-shit what I was saying was, I could make my speech sound articulate and coherent enough to pass for “not drunk enough.” If he had given me a breathalyzer, he may have been concerned for my health.
We get in Charlie’s car, and he turns to me, pointing his finger, “Well, now that I kept you despite your best efforts from getting arrested, the question is: do you want me to take you home or do you want to go with me somewhere we can get a drink?”
“I’ll take the drink option, Captain. ONWARD!”
He drives me to some house. To this day, I don’t know where we went. We drink at a small party for hours. As the sun is coming up, he drops me at my place.
Years later Charlie would quit drinking. But this story became one of his favorites to repeat, even in his sober years, when it came to me and my name. With Charlie gone, I get a partial last laugh, as once more it gets repeated, with me on the butt-side of the joke, but in my words as my memory, not his. Sorry, Charlie. And: thanks again for saving my ass even as you got my ass deeper in the drinky hole that night.
Also, don’t drink and drive. Although I once quoted a Sam Kinison joke from the stage that made Charlie laugh and he repeated it back to me 1000 times: “I don’t endorse drunk driving. I just haven’t figured out any other way to get home.”
7.
One of those uncommon moments of quiet, insofar as exchanges between Charlie & I, as opposed to the clanking boister of clamour with our usual word-jazz.
Charlie says, “I think what artists do…”
He allows the sentence to stay put there, in its dangling.
I look at him, waiting for him to jump back in and finish the sentence.
“What artists do…is keep one foot in time & one foot outside of time…”
Charlie’s reading whatever my face is doing on its surfaces, with me allowing more air around to see which way the wind blows.
“You think?” I ask, as it doesn’t seem like verbal elaboration is coming back around anytime soon to his rumination/s.
“Yeah. I do think that. Artists live outside of time.”
“I’ve been listening mostly to jazz & classical music lately,” I say to Charlie, but it’s not the same day as the day Charlie is talking space-time before, but stay with us.
I continue, “Lots of different forms and eras of it, but mostly that.”
I tell him: “I’ve not had much capacity for ‘baby, I love you’ or ‘baby, you done left me and done me wrong’ songs, or even lyrics in songs, in general. I’ve just been listening to: sound, to melody, to the absence or subversion of melody & listening to combinations and explorations of sound, music that is about anything/everything.”
Charlie smiles. Then he laughs a big laugh. It’s his usual laugh and I’m certainly used to it.
“You know why that is, don’t you?!”
I know here his pause after the question is just rhetorical device, just a set up for a punchline if not a kick to my soft white underbelly:
“YOU’RE GETTING OLDER!”
Charlie’s laughter, at his own punchline, infects me; I laugh with him.
But now we are further back in time, in this now & Charlie’s looking over the first collection of specifically drawings/gag panels/comics I ever put together, “Somebody Died in Here.” The year must be something like 1997, maybe ’98. This collection predates the staple party books I mentioned before.
We’re at a party in some apartment. Chatter of friends and random passers-by in the background, behind our conversating. I ask Charlie what he thinks of the self-published book of mine that he’s perusing.
Maybe a slight flash of pause, of reflection & he says: “You need to work on your lettering.”
I not only do not disagree with him, I agree with him, but also I enter into evidence in my defense, ladies and gentlemen of the jury (well, in this case Charlie being the sole juror): “Well, hell, man: I’ve got more response — and more positive response, at that — from this book than I have my other books of strictly writing.”
Charlie says, “You-know-why that is, don’t you?”
& inserts a “I-know-that-you-know-I’m-about-to-joke and/or fuck with you” smile…
“No, Charlie…why is that?” Me, the straight-man here in the whirlwind of routine Charlie is pulling me into.
“NOBODY KNOWS HOW TO READ ANYMORE! Of course they’re going to respond more to a book of drawings!”
& laughs that stock barrel’d belly full of monkeys laugh of his.
Flash forward to a few years later when I release my next collection of comics/drawing/gag panels, Gag me with a Voluptuous Schtick! (this was one of the books being collated at the staple-piano-party), Charlie looks at me after looking at the book & remarks:
“I can see you’ve been working on your lettering.”
Just the other day, I was showing a few of my more recent books to another artist, a printmaker. He pauses a minute and says, “You’re typography is incredible. You should make a font of your lettering.” I don’t mention Charlie as this guy never met him, but in that moment, I say to myself:
“Thanks, Charlie.”
8.
Now (and, stick with me, this, again, is, again, a different “now”) we’re hanging together around Third St. Stuff, a coffee shop in Lexington, and Charlie’s detectably glum — uncharacteristiclly glum in public — which I recognize, by his lack of yacking & yucking it up. It’s sometime between 2013–15. It’s just he & I in this moment, the exterior patio otherwise empty.
We’re talking something about the processes of making art and getting it out there, particularly my art, due to circumstance/s, as this is the period in which I am involved in my three volum’d body of work DESPAIR, with each volume coming out in the spring of those three years (2013–15) and promoting those books each year as the corpus went from inception to finale, and he’s to a lesser degree fucking with me, painting me as a kind of hustler and/or propagandist of ego, even taking the easy road/joke of putting a “messiah complex” on me (so this is 2015 and after the 3rd volume, come to think on it, as that volume features a guest appearance by a character he may or may not be Jesus the Christ, and, either way, finishes with a cartoon crucifiction of another charater who may or may not represent J.T. Dockery).
At which point, I step forward to proverbial podium pitch and with a wave/s of my hand/s & state that, putting it in front of whatever jury (slight return) be listening:
“I’m only trying to do as much as I can do and do what I can do with the time and whatever gifts mixed with dedication to craft that I got, to bring forth what is within me. And that’s it, man.”
This seems to satisfy Charlie. In his glumness this day he tells me he wonders what is his, what will be his legacy, what did he do, and did it/will it ever mean anything.
I can tell Charlie is feeling mortal and/or puny. As this is not that kind of thing one often hears him say/admit (or for that matter even sport a glum countenance).
I tell him the truth that, if nothing else, the way he’s hipped aspiring creators and other folks to read certain writers, discover books, listen to partiuclar music, experience cinema that said aspiring creators and thinkers otherwise would not have found on their own, sparked them to pursue arts, performers he’s pushed to bring it, the performing up to the brag (to steal a line from James Baker Hall) and/or up to and/or beyond the aspiration. And, with Lexington as a dot on a map, it serves not just merely that dot, but the dot as a center in a circle, a radius, that sprials out across the nation, across the globe, with Kentucky being simply something of a counterweight on a balance.
I point out that I’m aware of a whole network of people taking influence from him, whether or not they mention it in their official press releases, and that’s a helluva thing to do, a person to be. Like a preacher without a church, a teacher without an academy. Like a Diogenes of Lexington. Besides all the music tha he himself has peformed, audiences he’s entertained. I remind him: all of that counts.
I add, “Life is just a series of moments, like now is a moment.” I wave my hand in the air. “It’s here and just as we experience it, it’s gone.” I pause. “But then art, it’s just…art is…”
Charlie finishes for me:
“Art is moments captured.”
