Stranded in Canton (Level Third): Black Oak "Blocked Memory" Arkansas

I recovered a memory (with a little help from Pillow). Evidently, last year, a few days post Thanksgiving, I saw Jim Dandy (pictured center) and Black Oak Arkansas (note the hilariously long list of former band-members) open for friends of ours at cavernous college dive, Newby's. This photograph was taken a few short months before that night; so, I think it is an accurate description of his appearance in November, 2007. I will also attach a video, because the sound of him, along with the unseemly vest and pants, account for the memory loss I experienced thereafter. This is a special instance of "Stranded in Canton," a bridge between the past and present, a document of the constant, forgettable madness that goes on down Memphis way . . .

Stranded in Canton (Level Second)

Stranded in Canton (Level First)

Lady Russell, semi-famed semi-transvestite of late 20th-century (countercultural) Memphis and New Orleans, one evening, punchy on quaaludes, coined a phrase--"Stranded in Canton." A sort of self-conscious touchstone for the marginal, it became the title of William Eggleston's sole video piece, filmed in the Delta in 1973 and '74; Stranded in Canton has been beautifully edited (after years of wrangling with Egg and his "predilictions") by our friend Robert Gordon.

The meaning of the phrase/title (its mystical interior narrative?) is, for me, obvious and nourishing, in the manner of a found poem that, upon review, seems to be of your own hand. To live in Memphis is to be a citizen of a colonial outpost, across a wide Sargasso Sea, in the heart of darkness, etc. It is gauzy, hot, bourbon-ed, lazily wild, tortured and slow, jolie laide. It is, all at once, the burning, crazed sinking vessel and the settled, shimmering shipwreck. This over-verbose swill I'm casting out cannot properly describe what it is to be "Stranded in Canton." So here begins another of my cracked theoretical series of crystalizing image, song, and speechification---