ENTER, stranger, and hear the haunts of nature - AMY ANNELLE - news http://highplainssigh.com/news.html AMY ANNELLE: news Jannis' PHPRss class - http://www.jannis.to/ Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:02:29 -0800 Amy Annelle SXSW 2010 http://highplainssigh.com/news.html#45


Amy Annelle SXSW 2010 Austin Texas USA


Music Showcase--Friday, March 19 7:30 p.m. at Stephen F.'s Bar at Intercontinental Hotel, 701 Congress Ave.


Sweet Relief Acoustic Stage/SXSW Interactive--Monday March 13 4 p.m. at the Beacon Lounge in the Austin Convention Center, 500 E. Cesar Chavez St.


Free Show--Sunday 2.21 7:30 PM at Flipnotics South, 1601 Barton Springs Road

]]> http://highplainssigh.com/news.html#45 Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800 ENTER, stranger, and hear the haunts of nature - AMY ANNELLE - news a sister from the very same pasture http://highplainssigh.com/news.html#43 OKEMAH, OKFUSKEE COUNTY, OKLAHOMA USA I met woody guthrie's sweet baby sister mary jo guthrie  at the Okemah Shamrock gas station.  she god blessed me and said she loved me and all musicians and sat with me a minute and gave me a little card with woody's photo and her address and a red heart and on the back was a version of the Optimist Creed. "my father raised all us kids on this," she told me, and that she passes it on to folks she meets. now i believe the Optimist Creed was written in 1912 and i don't know much of it's history or politics. this is personal. please don't overthink it. take ms. mary jo's words to heart and follow the straight line they make to a certain place: the guthrie family kids getting raised up in hard times, in a house on a hill in okemah.  (some of the story: "Bound For Glory" by Woody Guthrie)


here's what it says on the back of the card ms. guthrie gave to me:


TO BE so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.


TO TALK health, happiness and prosperity to every person you meet.


TO MAKE all your friends feel there is something special in them.


TO LOOK at the sunny side of everything.


TO THINK, work, and expect only the best.


TO BE just as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own.


TO FORGET the mistakes of the past and look to the future.


TO WEAR a cheerful countenance always and give every living creature you meet a smile.


TO GIVE so much time to self improvement that you have no time to criticize others.


TO BE too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.

]]> http://highplainssigh.com/news.html#43 Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700 ENTER, stranger, and hear the haunts of nature - AMY ANNELLE - news further denatured http://highplainssigh.com/news.html#42
And welcome, those of you new to the High Plains Drifter Newsletter. It was really something, this last tour of America's oft-overlooked Great Plains (and some mountains too). Summoning songs with you in abandoned churches, art spaces, backyards and the odd dive bar. Thank you for being capacitors, and making it happen.

when i got back to texas though, i got whipped up in the whirlwind. and oh, i got tired. maybe you too would like to be let off the hook, to forget for a moment about the ephemeral billions being slung around Washington and Wall Street, indeed the world. the unfathomable debt in which we are, in a way, drowning. money, it seems, has grown tired of all the fuss, the discrepancies. money is flown off to some theoretical nest no economist can reach and it ain't coming down. encouraging in its absence the development of other currencies: self-sufficiency, creativity, friendship, thrift.

this is not to belittle the troubles of any given individual. indeed, we got big problems. but this is not all there is to it. there are happenings in other orbits. it's a warm morning here, and the mexican woodpeckers and grackles are up in the oaks babbling their cryptic liquid songs. selfish, it could be said, or self-preservative to focus elsewhere, but do try.

i would like to tell you what the great plains did to me. plains of earth, not air. i could tell you all kinds of stories, about the fishermen in thailand who, upon pulling up the day's catch in their big nets, pick out the stingrays and throw them like frisbees about the ship deck; or i could tell you about the geezer hobos i met under the Highway 969 bridge, who have been there since 1978 with one guitar and one styrofoam cooler, exploring their endless repertroire of obscure country songs. but these are of another plane. so, i will stick to the earth.

* * * * * * * * * * *

it was a hell of a drift, this one.
from the Balcones Escarpment to the Livingston Range,
by way of Sand Hills, open range and Bad Lands;
rivers Red, Arkansas, Milk, Missouri;
through the main upthrust of the Rocky Mountains
and her many drifting island offspring.

Threading it all together are plains so vast as to wipe off the map the heavy-handed boundaries of states, the dotted lines of latitude and longitude. Skies so wide as to reduce to a whisper those wildcat oil towns, handsome brick-laid cowtowns, fur trading outposts and county seats. sightlines so long as to dismiss the last hundred and fifty-odd years of white settlement that led up to the settled American Great Plains of today, the Greatly Unsettled America of today. The fear-mongers' voices do not carry far on a prairie wind, and if they do, it's because you're listening for them.

But then the traveler tops a rise and falls into region of endless corporate croplands. a stillness descends. the spirit of the land dies. it's the same sort of feeling you get when you see your first open pit mine or old growth clear cut: it has to come from somewhere, my dear. many plains farmers today are laying their bets on biofuels. this is the source of one kind of "green energy", oceans of it stretching endlessly (though when ripe, the strange sorghum heads are more of a pinkish-purple).

and then a town grid rises from the flat monoculture palatte and you temporarily inhabit it, and start to meet more kids at shows and folks gas stations of Indian descent. you enter and leave whole other nations: Omaha, Cheyenne, Lakota. or hear, from a highway worker in the Nebraska panhandle, of an isolated all-white town called Whiteclay (pop. 14), located just a few hundred feet from the Pine Ridge Oglala Sioux reservation, where 4 million cans of beer are sold each year*.

history is alive, the people and the land are breathing, at times singing their death song. and simple distinctions between past and present can't be made; suffering and injustice, sacrifice and windfall all wrapped up in the person next to you at the cafe or listening to you sing. No, it wasn't so long ago, and the book is not closed. The Great Plains are a Great Paradox, and my love for them, conflicted as it is, grows deeper still.

a version of the vision:
FURTHER DENATURED
http://www.highplainssigh.com/photos-group-47.html

* * * * * * * * * * *

On the plains today you might still see for yourself how our history's writ in blood in many a meadow and creek bed and sacred, holy place. America has managed to hide the bones of ten million massacred buffalo. and the truth too, shrouded in shame and apathy, when it comes to the wrath loosed upon the Plains Indians, the war we waged on their ground. "Threats, deception and murder"...i don't mean to preach, but if you aren't sure what happened on the plains in the 19th century, you might ought to start asking, reading, finding out.

"redman vs. bluecoat in the Wild West, a few battles ensue and America completes her mainfest destiny, under the auspice of the christian god": this was the lie we were fed as schoolkids, a story that might have stretched from p. 402 halfway down p. 404 in your grade school textbook of US history. this rendition of historical fiction affords much romance to the prairie sod buster, the Sooners racing for their Oklahoma land claims, wily scouts and lone rangers who made the plains "safe" for white expansion. this fiction casts the Indian character as carved of wood, some mysterious wildman who pops out of the bushes in his full feather bonnet, a half-wit with a hatchet and a peace pipe, a willing, doe-eyed squaw played by a white lady with braided hair dyed black.

Of course, the nation had much to gain by dehumanizing the Plains Indian--America coveted the land they lived on and the untold riches therein--and dehumanizing is an essential component of genocide. in the century and a half since, tens of millions of settlers, tens of billions of dollars of resource exploitation and agriculture do make a lot of historical noise, threatening to drown out anything that doesn't substantiate it.

Quiet, quiet. what remains is the impact of deeper harmonics, the legacy of an american "victory": reservations carved like gristle out of the plains, accounts of the miserly rations doled out by agencies in the midst of blizzard or drought; the empty treaties, the forced marches, the massacres. and most of all, the descendants of those who survived. No, it wasn't so long ago, and the book is not closed!


* * * * * * * * * * *

Please drop a line if you are so inclined.

Fare Forward, Voyagers!
Amy Annelle

* * * * * * * * * * *

*more on Whiteclay: http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t30469.html]]> http://highplainssigh.com/news.html#42 Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700 ENTER, stranger, and hear the haunts of nature - AMY ANNELLE - news US High Plains Tour Dates http://highplainssigh.com/news.html#40
I write with word that a tour of the High Plains and Rockies draws
nigh for some friends and I.

Me and Ralph White will be playing solo sets through North Texas and
Oklahoma into Kansas, where we will be joined by dear friend and high
order songmaker Michael Hurley. We continue as a threesome, treading
a faint path 'cross the sea of grass and lightning wrath and cradle of
nomadic horse culture, with a final transect of the Rockies (from
whence the horse cultures descended).

My new album is not quite finished, but I'll be peddling a new very
limited edition tour compilation called "SOME FROM THE STREAM". This
is a drift through my recorded output, from the gloaming of the
twentieth century through the day before yesterday, including several
unreleased tracks.

If you find yourself an inconvenient distance from the high plains,
you may mailorder a copy here:

http://highplainssigh.com/products.html

Also will have a collage notebook series exploring the hypnaogogic
state, based on paintings of exotic deer from the 1920s. see for
yourself:

http://highplainssigh.com/photos.html

We'll see you out there, friends, in your imagination, or physical
manifestation.


HIGH PLAINS & PEAKS US TOUR

* with Ralph White || www.ralphewhite.com
** with Michael Hurley || www.snockonews.net

FRIDAY, AUGUST 8TH, 2008
DALLAS, TX
*Lee Harvey's
Theater Fire's CD Release Show

SATURDAY, AUGUST 9TH, 2008
DENTON, TX
*Dan's Silver Leaf

MONDAY, AUGUST 11TH, 2008
OKLAHOMA CITY, OK
*Sauced

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 13TH, 2008
TULSA, OK
*Sound Pony

THURSDAY, AUGUST 14TH, 2008
WICHITA, KS
*The Artichoke

FRIDAY, AUGUST 15TH, 2008
KANSAS CITY, MO
**The Brick

SATURDAY, AUGUST 16TH, 2008
LAWRENCE, KS
The Replay Lounge
~~Precious Blood, Michael Hurley~~

SUNDAY, AUGUST 17TH, 2008
LAWRENCE, KS
**Love Garden Sounds

MONDAY, AUGUST 18TH, 2008
OMAHA, NE
**P.S. Collective


TUESDAY, AUGUST 19TH, 2008
VERMILLION, SD
**Washington Street Art Center

FRIDAY, AUGUST 22ND, 2008
FORT COLLINS, CO
KRFC FM
1--3 PM
~~Precious Blood & Michael Hurley play live & disc jockey~~

SATURDAY, AUGUST 23RD, 2008
CENTENNIAL, WY
Beartree Tavern
Arthur Magazine Presents:
the 9th Annual UPLAND BREAKDOWN - 2 PM
~~PRECIOUS BLOOD plays Carducci & Lightbourne's atavistic music
festival with Michael Hurley, The Stop & Listen Boys, Al Rivers &
friends~~

SUNDAY, AUGUST 24TH, 2008
DENVER, CO
**Sliding Door Gallery

MONDAY, AUGUST 25TH, 2008
DENVER, CO
**Lion's Lair

TUESDAY, AUGUST 26TH, 2008
LOUISVILLE, CO
**Waterloo Ice House

THURSDAY, AUGUST 28TH, 2008
SALT LAKE CITY, UT
**House Concert

SATURDAY, AUGUST 30TH, 2008
WEST GLACIER, MT
**Lake Five Resort
Outdoor Concert on the Belton Stage


Fare Forward, Voyagers!
Amy Annelle]]> http://highplainssigh.com/news.html#40 Tue, 05 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700 ENTER, stranger, and hear the haunts of nature - AMY ANNELLE - news creole acolyte http://highplainssigh.com/news.html#38
perigrinate, we, to new orleans

to pay homage to jellyroll, bix and magee

breathe of the pineywoods and lowland cajun prairie

tread lightly past water moc and allagata'

and put on harmony with katydid and ciccada



we hope to see you in NEW ORLEANS, friends, and friends thereof:


AMY ANNELLE, RALPH WHITE, LADY BABY MISS
Saturday, June 28 10 PM
Dragon's Den
435 Esplanade Ave.
New Orleans, LA

there's talk of a Precious Blood hootenanny Sunday somewhere.

Fare Forward, Voyagers!
Amy Annelle]]> http://highplainssigh.com/news.html#38 Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700 ENTER, stranger, and hear the haunts of nature - AMY ANNELLE - news a way, i say http://highplainssigh.com/news.html#39
the moon has made its final ptolemic aspect and is now Void of
Course. slow down, it says, and use your intuition. the moon has
nothing to fear of earthquakes, snakes or fakes.

amy annelle will be playing tonight in austin, texia:

FRIDAY MAY 2 (Void of Course moon)
Hello Lovers CD release party
with Amy Annelle, Silky and Fiction
Emo's
603 Red River
Austin, Texia

doors at 8, show at 10.

fare forward, voyagers!]]> http://highplainssigh.com/news.html#39 Fri, 02 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700 ENTER, stranger, and hear the haunts of nature - AMY ANNELLE - news the chthonic state http://highplainssigh.com/news.html#37
it's roundabout time to get things in order for a summer tour.

if you have written before about having a show in America (for now)
or would like to put one on, please drop a line:
booking@highplainssigh.com

surely some conventional bookings will come into play too. but we're
most curious about the good people and things waiting behind your door
when you open it. be it a house concert, art space, party in the
woods or meadow or what have you.

Amy Annelle will be playing all new songs, songs that are nearly done
being commited to the recorded format [------>now perhaps you are
thinking about being commited elsewhere, like the octagonal Insane
Asylum on Roosevelt Island in 1839]

Ralph White too will be playing songs from his forthcoming solo
album.
myspace.com/ralphewhite

And they will probably do a few shows as the duo Precious Blood,
which is another thing altogether: "Precious Blood is steeped in folk
music's strange past"~~Adam Schragin, Austinist
myspace.com/preciousbloodmusic

***********************
2008 Summer Tour of the Chthonic States

Amy Annelle solo, Ralph White solo
(and some shows as Precious Blood)

Fare Forward, Voyagers!
and thank ye!
xxamy annelle.

***********************
*chthonic...typically refers to the interior of the soil, rather than
the living surface of the land, or the land as territory. It evokes at
once abundance and the grave.

The term 'chthonic' can be used to describe the spirit of nature
within, the unconscious earthly impulses of the Self, one's material
depths, but not necessarily with negative connotations. In the
positive sense, it appears as a 'spirit of nature', creatively
animating Man, things, and the world.

(from the Greek khthonios, of the earth, from the earth; pertaining
to the Earth)]]> http://highplainssigh.com/news.html#37 Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700 ENTER, stranger, and hear the haunts of nature - AMY ANNELLE - news still the storm http://highplainssigh.com/news.html#31 this: a pack of mules falling from a ledge into the abyss. two
separate storms speaking lightning together over the high plains. a
refractory pattern and an overtone. a whole lot of feedback and then,
static.

I will be singing in Jandek's band for his SXSW performance Saturday
March 15.
Jandek show info here:
http://2008.sxsw.com/music/showcases/band/69298.html


a house concert:
Amy Annelle w/ Hello Lovers, Aaron Blount
Friday March 14
11 PM
104 Chicon St. (@ Cesar Chavez)
Austin, TX


A new duo of Ralph White & Amy Annelle:
PRECIOUS BLOOD. digging deep in the traditional music game bag for
the ones with the lean muscles and the beautiful hide.

PRECIOUS BLOOD
Friday March 14
3 PM
FXFY'all
1306 E. 6th Street
Austin, TX
free all day party on the east side. From downtown, walk 4 blocks
east of the freeway.

Precious Blood has a new myspace music page:
myspace.com/preciousbloodmusic

fare forward, voyagers!]]> http://highplainssigh.com/news.html#31 Fri, 14 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700 ENTER, stranger, and hear the haunts of nature - AMY ANNELLE - news the rigging and the aerial http://highplainssigh.com/news.html#32 the I's have nothing to do with it.


Friday March 7
10 p.m.
AMY ANNELLE with AARON BLOUNT, HELLO LOVERS
The Mohawk
912 Red River St.
Austin, TX
www.mohawkaustin.com

Saturday March 8
9 p.m.
AMY ANNELLE with RALPH WHITE, CHRISTINA CARTER (Scorces,
Charlambides)
house concert at Shawn McMillen's
1011 E. 14th St. (Navasota)
Austin, TX
ralphewhite@myspace.com
www.wholly-other.com


fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
into different lives, or into any future;
you are not the same people who left that station
or who will arrive at any terminus,
while the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
and on the deck of the drumming liner
watching the furrow that widens behind you
you shall not think 'the past is finished'
or 'the future is before us'.
at nightfall, in the rigging and the aerial,
is a voice descanting (though not to the ear,
the murmuring shell of time, and not in any language)
'fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
you are not those who saw the harbor
receding, or those who will disembark.
~T.S. Eliot]]> http://highplainssigh.com/news.html#32 Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0800 ENTER, stranger, and hear the haunts of nature - AMY ANNELLE - news Secret Show Austin TX http://highplainssigh.com/news.html#33 TUES FEB 19
9:00 PM
LARKSPUR, AMY ANNELLE, RALPH WHITE

at an abandoned (for now) hobo camp on the east bank of Bouldin
Creek
South Austin, Texas USA

Access the trailhead at the back of Elk's Lodge Lot, where it comes
to the edge of the dropoff to Bouldin Creek. Go South (Left) just a
little ways. the nigh-on-full moon will surely get you there.

The Elks Lodge is at 700 Dawson, just up the hill (South) from Barton
Springs Road. This is near Lamar and Barton Springs Road.
l

Weather is going to be good. There will be a campfire.


Fourth in a series brought to you by The Austin Secret Show People
myspace.com/theaustinsecretshow

Fare Forward, Voyagers!]]> http://highplainssigh.com/news.html#33 Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800 ENTER, stranger, and hear the haunts of nature - AMY ANNELLE - news