I first saw Dave Mallett perform in 1978 in a club below street level on Fore St. in The Old Port area of Portland, ME., below my favorite record store (whuzzat?) How good could someone from Dover-Foxcroft be, anyway? The answer was "Pretty damn." Since then I've seen him a number of times, though not for a while--when I lived in CT, at the Folkway in Peterborough, and one time I even ran into him in Cap'n Bullfrog's, a fabulous record store (a what, now?) in Brattleboro; the first bin I saw him check out was his own, which I found amusing. He was pretty interested in the John Prine album I was getting, though, when we chatted.
Once when we saw him at the Folkway, we got even closer than chatting. That was a great club, the Folkway--good food, great music, intimate atmosphere, which of course guaranteed that it couldn't last. The prime table was right in front of the center of the stage; Alice and I had gotten there early to have dinner before the show, and we snagged that table. When Mallett started his set, Alice had her feet up on the chair opposite her, which apparently happened to be touching the mike stand (I refuse to use the current vogue spelling "mic," which to me is pronounced "mick."). Each time she moved her foot in time to the song, it moved the stand, which was disconcerting to Mr. Mallett. More disconcerting was when the mike bonked him in the nose, at which point each realized what was happening, to her great embarrassment and his great relief when we moved the chair away.
But I didn't come here, as Arlo would say, to talk about Dave Mallett, specifically, or mikes, or any of that: I came to talk about gardens. I'm taking suggestions (sort of) from Fran and Antonia's replies to my last post. At first I thought "animals," from Antonia, which I like and will use in the future. But with Memorial Day weekend upcoming, and that being the traditional date in these parts to safely put the bulk of the garden in, I'm going with that.
As I've said and you've noticed, I like to be topical and provocative, and I wondered how I'd do that about something as seemingly innocuous and uncontroversial as gardening, but of course everything is political. Where we get our food, how it is grown, whether it is genetically modified, how far it has traveled, whether we should eat foods out of season--all of these are complicated and potentially controversial issues. Even the question of when to plant ought to make us think: we really don't need to wait till Memorial Day anymore. We've warmed the planet so much by our activities (an arguable assumption for some) that we can plant earlier with less chance of a killing frost than ever before, and we can grow some things that didn't used to be grown around here 'cause the season was too short. Plants too are moving north and up (in elevation) at a shocking rate. Turns out that Ents aren't the only movable flora.
It's heartening that the above issues are being considered and discussed and are leading to action. More people are eating organic and local, so more people are growing organic; groceries and restaurants (like Popolo) are buying and serving locally produced foods as much as possible. Young people, like Jake's friends Connor and Brenna are starting organic facilities, though the effort required is much greater than on enormous Califlorida tractory farms. Even cities are getting into the act; Detroit, of all places, is in the forefront of the Urban Gardening movement. Abandoned buildings are being replaced by community and even commercial gardens. Sometimes good things come from hardship and human folly. Can it be that I'm writing a post about something positive? 'Twould seem so.
So this week, "garden" songs, like ( we've just been waiting for it to come around on the blog again...here it comes) David Mallett's "Garden Song," "In the Garden" (various versions), "Johnny's Garden," "Royal Garden Blues," (Duke and The Count), "Thorn Tree In the Garden," and the like. But NOT, definitely not, oh no, NEVER "Octopus's Garden," even though I'm wearing my Abbey Road tee shirt as I write this. Oh yeah--and the Beach Boys' "My Favorite Vegetable" and "Call Any Vegetable." C'mon along: Tuesday, noon till two eastern on 100.1 FM or www.wool.fm on the webs.
...Call it by name.
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