Photo by Glynn Wilson

The Magic City Blues Society staged a full house of local talent Sunday at Zydeco on Southside and two lucky acts will compete Jan. 31- Feb. 2 at the 2008 International Blues Challenge finals to be held in Memphis, Tennessee. Todd Simpson and Mojo Child, pictured above, took first in the Band category, followed closely by Dan and the Dusters in second and Midnight Train in third.

Glynn Wilson

With Bruce Andrews on vocals and blues harp and George Dudley on guitar, 2BLU came in first in the Solo/Duo category. Second place went to Sam Pointer. Troy Bland came in third.

The International Blues Challenge has evolved into the nation’s largest and most respected showcase for Blues musicians ready to take their act to the national stage, according to the Memphis Blues Foundation Website.

Note: Locust Fork News and Journal editor and publisher Glynn Wilson was happy to serve as a judge for the competition and would like to thank the Magic City Blues Society for putting on such a great show to promote the traditions of American blues. Like a lot of things in modern society, without good stewards, historic and cultural artifacts might be lost - including art forms like the blues.

Photo by Glynn Wilson

David Rae Morris in front of the Southside Gallery in Oxford, Mississippi and the image of his father, the writer Willie Morris.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means, and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again… Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal… This is the artist’s way of scribbling “Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.
- William Faulkner, from Lion in the Garden, 1968.

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

OXFORD, Miss., July 28 – Like overcoming our fears in life, escaping shadows is something we all must face - or die trying.

Driving across the landscape of northwest Alabama out of the shadow of Birmingham’s dark past and into the light of a place in Mississippi known for its literary giants, who cast shadows of their own for others to escape, it is the shadow of the South itself I long to escape. It may sound funny, but the only way I know how to do that these days is to drive a Chevy van with a canoe on top from one part of the South to another in search of stories and pictures.

Photo by Dave Stueber

Writer Glynn Wilson at the grave of William Faulkner in St. Peter’s Cemetary in Oxford, Mississippi.

It is hard to get away when some fortune teller long ago said, and she turned out to be right so far: “You will always be tied to this region, in spite of all your efforts to escape.”

Elvis Presley escaped by picking up a guitar and singing his way into history, although like a lot of us, he never really left.

The writer Willie Morris escaped by going off to school in Oxford, England and by going to New York, as all great American writers have done in the past. Morris regretted never having met Elvis, even though they were about the same age and both from Mississippi.

For David Rae Morris, an artist and photographer with indelible ties to this place even though you get the feeling he would like to escape it, his ultimate search for escape has been in some ways like the journey of the children of Elvis Presley, the attempted escape from a famous personage, his father.

Although in David Rae’s case, the shadow of Willie Morris the writer and teacher is not so towering as the shadow of the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll, who is known by so many people across the globe that the shotgun house of his birth in nearby Tupelo, Mississippi, along with the museum and chapel built there, stays busy year around.

So David Rae’s journey seems to have been as technically if not emotionally as easy as a lazy float down the Mississippi River into New Orleans. At least that’s where he found a city to call home that almost compared to the one he was born in, London, and the one he was raised in and would always judge other cities by, New York.

But it may very well be that the town where he is most accepted and welcome is Oxford, Mississippi, also known as the “Little Easy,” where the descendants of the people who knew William Faulkner knew Willie Morris better than anywhere else, including those in his home town of Yazoo, Mississippi.

Many of the photographs on display at the Southside Gallery on Oxford’s town circle, also known by locals as the “center of the universe,” show Willie Morris here, in black and white. Walking with his dog Pete, pointing a drunken finger at his son holding the camera, posing by Faulkner’s grave or gazing into the Southern horizon, the images show an extraordinary and contradictory man mostly past his prime.

Yet he seems content in his Southerness, more at home at the University of Mississippi teaching writing than he claims to have been in New York in the 1960s as the youngest editor in the history of Harper’s magazine in its heyday.
Read the rest of this entry »

Bloggers making Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the CIA will likely get them processed for free under new rules that broaden the definition of who is part of the “news media,” according to the Editor and Publisher trade publication.

Professional journalists have long been able to request free processing of their FOIA requests of the intelligence agency. As a general rule, they don’t have to pay fees for searching and retrieving files, although they may be charged for duplication costs.

Earlier this year, the CIA proposed a sliding fee scale that would likely have required at least some bloggers to pay for FOIA processing. But in an announcement in the Federal Register last week, the agency said it decided in the face of both negative and positive criticism simply to redefine “news media.”

“Since there was no support to proceed with the proposed rule as originally drafted, rather than implementing the sweeping changes set forth in the proposed rule, we have a more modest change by simply adopting the definition of ‘news media’ contained in the March 27, 1987, Office of Management and Budget FOIA Guidelines,” Edmund Cohen, chief of Information Management Services for the Central Intelligence Agency, wrote in the Federal Register.

This is the definition of the “news media” the CIA is adopting for FOIA purposes:

“Representative of the News Media refers to any person actively gathering news for an entity that is organized and operated to publish or broadcast news to the public. The term ‘news’ means information that is about current events or that would be of current interest to the public. Examples of news media entities include television or radio stations broadcasting to the public at large, and publishers of periodicals (but only in those instances when they can qualify as disseminators of ‘news’) who make their products available for purchase or subscription by the general public. These examples are not intended to be all-inclusive. Moreover, as traditional methods of news delivery evolve (e.g., electronic dissemination of newspapers through telecommunications services), such alternative media would be included in this category. In the case of ‘freelance’ journalists, they may be regarded as working for a news organization if they can demonstrate a solid basis for expecting publication through that organization, even though not actually employed by it.”

Makes one want to start filing FOIA requests on a number of topics, doesn’t it?

Hey Y’all,

I know it may sound strange to some that there is a such thing as a political left in Alabama, but there’s a fairly new blog you should check out called Left in Alabama. It lays claim to the task of “connecting progressive voices in Alabama.”

And they are now blogging about who might run to unseat that little right-wing scoundrel Jeff Sessions in the U.S. Senate.

Agriculture Commissioner Ron Sparks is on the list, as is state Senator Vivian Figures, although she seems to be in no hurry to make a decision.

Supposedly Rep. Artur Davis of Birmingham is off the list, since he would have to give up his House seat to run, although what the heck? Can he beat Sessions?

What about Joe Turnham, the party chair, or why not draft Charles Barkley? Maybe he could be convinced to go to the U.S. Senate BEFORE running for governor in 2014.

It might just take celebrity power to beat corrupt money these days, which is why we’ve already bet the Yuenglings on a Thompson v. Gore race for president in 2008. Not many people have taken that bet yet, btw, so it’s still open : )

And see, even our evil Repub state Attorney General Troy King had to deny he was for Thompson today in Mountain Brook - at a successful fund raiser for Thompson.

Thompson Draws Crowd in Alabama

He is committed to McCain, but everybody who is anybody knows McCain is dead in this race - and that Karl Rove and the Bush family are already lining up behind Tompson. It won’t take King long to follow…

It may take Al Gore’s celebrity power to trump the other candidate from Tennessee in ‘08. I know, I hate to see an all Tennessee race too - considering what I learned about that state’s politics while living in Knoxville for four years.

But that’s what it still looks like from Locust Forkland, where the river runs cold and true, the great blue herons dance like elvis and the people like to shoot the breeze (and they are usually right).