#tim barrus art in appalachia

[timbarrus]

There is no art in Appalachia. There is corruption though. Some of these suits are more crooked than a barrel of fishhooks. Unless you view what are, in fact, trinkets, or photographs of water running pastoral streams and dreams through the deep woods. Anyone can do those those things. That is only one story. Let’s switch out your eyes and replace them with digital sensors. The normal eye hides so much from us. Homo sapiens sapiens are essentially blind and walking crazy and lurching through the shadows. The gallery itself does have art, but there is no art in Appalachia that renders what you see as transformational. What you will see with the Tourist Eye will be two photographs of bears. Old postcards of bears. And an oil painting of a bear. What actually brings a visual voice to this part of America. The tourists can buy some plastic versions of Mickey Mouse in the general store. Knock offs. The McFaddens are cooking a pig tonight in the ground. Jack Daniels and sweating oak casks. Fiddledeedee. Southern Comfort knocks me on my ass. Sweet and a little mean. I do not eat meat. Because I do not eat meat. Of any kind. You’all don’t really know art. Like Southern cooking. I thought I was going to hate sweet potato pie. I love sweet potato pie. I now make my own in a woodstove. The oven is two hundred years old and it’s creaky. But every pie comes out differently. It’s not homogenized and scaled up to reach 593,102,798 trillion people by noon tomorrow. I make mine with %-%3Moon&@111Shine627. This stuff is more clear than water. There is a rumor that NASA wants to buy whatever is available. No one is that thirsty. There are a lot of artists who live up here, and I think most of them are prone to do what I do which is hide out from the Tourist Hell Called Town. The artists are all up in these hills, and I have given lessons in how to build a treehouse. The one caveat is the noise. My tree creaked and groaned before I built the treehouse. Just from moving around, and every treehouse will talk to you about world events. Release the doves.

[timothybarrus]

Tim Barrus. The Great American Novel

[timbarrus]

My personal take on this photo has to do with class. Americans live in a Somalia of our making. The Appalachian poor have suicide rates that only keep going up. Those figures kickass Up&Up&Up&Up. Appalachia wrestles with deeply ingrained medieval poverty like no other place on earth. Social statistics for Appalachia are the same as for Somalia. Often, people here live in hovels, abandoned cars in the woods. And dirt floors. Hey, American Assholes, you live in Somalia.

[timbarrus]

I do not know if anything as we know as it exists in physics, can prevent a diaspora because there's a subliminal connection to entanglement itself. The operant word here is entanglement which is far, far more an unstable state than the Chaos Theory of stable unknowns. Like stability is even a thing. Our species will destroy anything in its way. That is a diaspora.

[timbarrus]

[timbarrus]

Tim Barrus: Dirt Bike Town

[timbarrus]

The trees in winter on this mountain are a great folding up against a melancholy wind. I know they are only there soaking up -- just like the rest of us -- every sunrise they can get.

[timbarrus]

Tim Barrus Art

[timbarrus]

I live in Appalachia. Supposedly, this, too, is North Carolina. I live here because it's cheap. Economics is the great leveler. I eat what I can grow. Why is that supposed to be a humiliation. This is the land of No One Makes Much Around Here Anyway. We are not a museum. We see our village in travel brochures. The whole thing is one big hoha. How someone votes is seen as a private piece of business. They are not going to tell you and all of them are armed. I already know how every last one of my friends and neighbors will vote. It's not a secret. Mainly, they won't vote. I cannot even think of a time when people just spit on the ground. Try it. It says everything. I want to see the number of hands go up who think most of us low-lives will tell the truth to a journalist. Football used to attract us. Spit on the ground. We only have one issue that is tearing up the countryside. And you cannot even see it. City managers are the enemy. Garbage collection will be choked back because they need 12 million more chicken guts to build a new tourist office. And then, they need money to staff the place and tell lies about how friendly it is. The Grand Dragon city-manager loves development because development is money. The old oaks go first. Not unlike the rest of us. One piece at a time. One vote at a time. One forest fire at a time. Everything wrong with you comes down here. Stop it. Don't come down here with your politik and your arrogance. Pull what weight. It's raining bullfrogs.

[timbarrus]

Most people will not have a clue as to what I am talking about, but Blue Ridge Baby is being shaped in my head where I can get informed or more informed by stuff getting chewed on upfront.

This is hard to do when they are always, always trying as best they can, to shut you up.

Where I live, it’s ordinary.

[timbarrus]

Appalachia has a bad rep. One that it deserves. Herbert and Helsinki live on their weeny boat. They barely fit.

[timbarrus]

Foster children in Appalachia are three times more likely to be removed from the custody of their familes to the custody criminals than any other place in North America. 

[timbarrus]

Photographic Art Shoot. Dealing with magazines.

[timbarrus]

Tim Barrus: Make it bleed. Color as defined by the Protons are collected in a mirror and, you can snort blue cosmic dust right before your livid eyes.right off the thing that sees quite through you. The cowboy has become undone.