Ideoblog

Illinois fall colors

Not to be outdone by Wisconsin's fall colors, how about this morning glory in the corn.

Notes from the "wasteland"

Busy day today, simultaneously celebrating Mother’s Day in Chicago, driving between Champaign and Chicago and back, and listening to James McMurtry’s “Live in Aught-Three.” 

James McMurtry obviously doesn’t buy his dad Larry’s romantic view of the West. The son's work falls into my category of “noir country,” in which the country is a dying, festering place, folks gripped by malevolent forces they can’t control.  Things started going downhill when the faraway bank foreclosed on the Jode farm, and then kept on going.  The standard country singers, who play to the actual farmers, preach hope, faith and pluck.  Noir country plays in urban clubs to a more jaded crowd.  For them, mainstream country music is the opiate of the masses.

Another example:  Drive By Truckers.  I listened to and loved their “Dirty South” on the same ride today. And you can hear a lot more stuff like this on the great local radio station.

I got hooked on McMurtry’s “Too Long in the Wasteland.” I thought he sounded tired on his next (Candyland), and lost track of him. But this live album is great.  When I first heard McMurtry, I was living in the hills of Virginia.  Now that I’m living on the plains, it’s irresistible.  Today, as I listened to McMurtry doing “Levelland” I was driving through a landscape that looked like this, a picture I found here. 

As for the economics of the central Midwest, I’ve spent some time visiting the dying farmtowns of central Illinois.   Now that machines do the work, you don’t need people.  And so here’s my picture of Fairmount, Illinois on a Saturday afternoon.

Since I’m comfortably ensconsed in a tenured position at the local law school I can relax about the employment situation, appreciate the stark landscape and see the economics as creative destruction at work.  I suppose I’ll never muster the authentic empathy of, say, the musician son of famous novelist.  But I still love to listen to him.

Dead skunk in the middle of the road

I've been meaning to post on my favorite radio station, WWHP, Farmer City, Illinois. (Factoid: this is the only city in the US named Farmer City.) I could no longer resist when I crawled into my car only to hear Loudon Wainwright III:

Crossin' the highway late last night. He shoulda looked left and he shoulda looked right. He didn't see the station wagon car. The skunk got squashed and there you are!

Sure, maybe you can get this on satellite radio, but followed by an ad from Butch's Pizza? And a hard rock version of Sunny Side of the Street (like a lot of the stuff on WWHP, I have no idea who did it)?

Fall in central Illinois

Lake of the Woods Park, Mahomet, Illinois.