Xark!: Things I learned on vacation

The LEAF is amazing, if only for the fact that so many people from so many age ranges can spend a weekend together sharing port-a-potties without anybody kicking anybody else's ass.
If I'm just sitting around listening to music, I'm not partial to New Orleans style brass jazz. On the other hand, if I'm in a crowd of people and the band (the Madison Elites) is standing in the middle of that crowd bobbing and dancing and blowing with huge Dizzy Gillespie cheeks, that's a party.
If you lean your backpack against the wall and sit on a bench on the street in downtown in Black Mountain, N.C., nice people will stop and talk to you.
Tommy Womack is brilliant (Sloop played us the track Alpha Male & The Canine Mystery Blood and I was kinda amazed by how clever and honest and 40-ish it was).
The bluegrass group Chatham County Line has a really nice retro visual stage style and the members write their own songs. I remember when bluegrass groups tried to look like the Eagles and the fans complained when anybody played a song that was written after 1965.
The Carolina Chocolate Drops scored high marks for talent, but a couple of people said the members weren't all that nice when they talked to them around the campus. Which is one of the things about a festival, apparently: the performers get judged as human beings off-stage, too. Here's the interesting thing about my reaction (to me): I reserved judgment on their personal niceness, since I didn't have the experience myself, but when it came around to buying CDs at the tunes table, that negative report was probably the deciding factor in me buying a CD by the Duhks rather than by CCD. So accurate or not, that word-of-mouth influenced one of my decisions.
Ichabod's, which I remember as a dive bar in Blowing Rock, is now a dive bar AND an Italian restaurant. But the same owner is still there, and the people are still very friendly, and I had four PBRs and talked to three barflies and a bartender before 4 p.m.
If you go to the LEAF, the $25 culinary passport is a good deal, because you not only get three meals at Eden Hall, you also avoid having to pay by the pound for the food. But DON'T buy your passports online (you pay a $4.25 service charge on the transaction) and DON'T buy the five-meal pass, which actually has a HIGHER unit cost than the three-meal pass. I guess they're figuring that hippies don't do math... or maybe the people doing the pricing are hippies and don't do math...
The middle of May, just before Memorial Day, is a great time to go to the Blue Ridge, particularly early in the week. We had the run of everything, everywhere we went.
Coffee shops in Blowing Rock don't open in the morning.
A good place to get coffee in Boone is called Grateful Grounds, which is a Grateful Dead-themed coffee shop and a bead shop, on King Street. I make this statement because Sloop hates the Grateful Dead, but liked the latte he got there on Monday so much that he wanted to go back on Tuesday.
Robert Huffman might just have the funniest deadpan delivery I've ever heard. On Monday morning Sloop asked him how he'd slept. Robert's answer: "Like an old man in a tent." That's a funny line, but it's not nearly as funny if you didn't hear Robert say it.
If you attach a tin cup to your belt loop with a lash strap for a morning hike and then forget that you've done this, so that you go out in public with a tin cup attached to your belt-loop, you'll never hear the end of this from your old college roommates. Bastards.
If you're ever stuck in a downpour and you run into an event tent in the dark to get dry during a concert, you might get lucky and run into a really cool someone (Nicole) you met at Moe's Crosstown Tavern and her husband (Buck) and then get introduced to their really creative friends (Farrah and Mitchell), all of whom live in your neighborhood a couple of hundred miles away. So I recommend you try that sometime.
Farrah has a documentary out on DVD called Falling Together in New Orleans and I got to see it in the children's tent at LEAF on Saturday night. Wow. These are stories that I just don't get from the legacy media. Plus it's just exciting to find out about creative people in my own community. Still, it makes me wonder: Why do I have to go to the main event tent in Black Mountain, N.C., to find out about a documentary filmmaker from my own town?
There's a good place to stop for lunch in Old Fort, N.C. It's called the Trainwatcher Cafe, and Sloop says the vegetarian sandwich really is great, like it says on the menu.
The band that stuck with me the most from the festival was this group called Menage.
The old Holly's Tavern in Blowing Rock is now called Canyons, and Beth, the waitress over at Knight's on Main, says you can still sit there on the deck and have a beer, just like the old days. We never went in to check it out, but that really is the best view I've every seen from a bar.
John Sloop and Robert Huffman are both brilliant men, but neither one of them is capable of remembering how to get to the Blowing Rock Assembly Grounds, where both of them worked for months back in the 1980s. I'm not sure what that says about either one of them, but I do know this: I wouldn't have brought this up if it weren't for all the shit they gave me about that damn tin cup. Heh heh heh...
I get really confused by contra dancing.
WNCW FM 88.7 really is the best radio station on planet Earth. And you can listen to it on your computer via the magic of the Internets.