Caveat Christianus: Hyper-Christians without a sense of humor, do not click this play button!

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Newspaper work can be filled with days on end of being chained to the desk, rewriting squibs, trying to ask just the right question telephonically to draw a gusher of a quote from a source on the other end of the county or the country. Then, escaping to Taylor Books to sit in the sun at an outdoor table toying with an espresso, pondering whether you should have gone into pulp and paper technology in college instead. Then, the longest-serving senator in U.S. history dies and you get to grab your trusty Canon G-11 and head south into West Virginia’s holler-land along with a reporter and a shutterbug to make a video about the backwoods town where the good senator checked in this world. That’s how I spent yesterday, the day after Sen. Robert C. Byrd died. Click on the image above to see the day’s work.

We poked around the nooks and crannies of Stotesbury, the former coal camp where Byrd grew up, and Sophia, where he worked in a butcher shop as a young man. That’s pronounced ‘SOAF-ya’ to all you media folk new to town, not ‘Sow-FEE-a,’ like that purty filmmaker. We kept bumping into TV news wagons and smartly coiffed female TV news readers (I think calling them ‘reporters’ is a bit much) wearing Sunday-go-to-meeting party dresses, stepping gingerly over rain-filled potholes in gravel parking lots.

Meanwhile, I was bleeding on my knees in the dust. Three lads in ascending sizes — medium, small and smaller — raced up to us on bicycles. They’d seen us hauling cameras, tripods and notebooks in the Stotesbury Community Church lot in Raleigh County, which is about as far out as you can get in West Virginia before you start heading back in. Moments later, two of them attended to the bicycle of the youngest. Then the oldest boy approached me: “Hey, sir, can you help us?” The chain had come off the tiniest of the bikes.

Since I had already taped my interview with Haley Bonds recollecting the time she cooked lunch for Byrd, I got down on my knees in the gravel and began wrestling with that oily chain and sprocket. I could relate.  I spent my summers as a boy on the back of a bike, from the newborn days of June to the butt-end of August. When the chain jumped the sprocket, that meant your horse was hobbled. Had to attend to that. After breakfast, I was out the door of our un-air conditioned house, blasting cool air into my face as I raced down the hills and dales of Winton Woods. Or I’d set off on urban commando missions in search of the latest Green Hornet or Justice League of America comic at the farthest drug store I could reasonably attempt to reach and return from before darkness set in or “Lost in Space” came on TV, whichever came first.

Click to enlarge

As my fingers turned black as coal dust from the chain, I kept hearing the boys chatter. “Yeah, that man was beat to death. I knowed him. D’you hear about that?” I had not heard about the local man beat to death. But speaking of coal dust, Haley had said in coal camp days you had to clean the coal dust off your porch. In the ’20s, when Byrd was the size of the bicycle boys, the quiet holler was a bustling coal camp, with a movie house, company store, community hall, a three-story foreman’s house and hundreds of coal miner houses, we are told. Now, you could hear the echo of the dog barking one holler over and the skree of red-tailed hawks rising on thermals in the cloud-piled blue sky above our heads.

I look down and see my fingers are not just oily black to the knuckles, but now ochre-red. I am bleeding,  cut by a sprocket tooth now dotted with my blood.  The boys are talking about Myspace. “What song are you gonna put on your Myspace?” one says to the other. How times have changed since Byrd left this holler, taking the road up out of Stotesbury to Sophia, one of the curviest roads I have ever driven in West Virginia, and I have driven some of the curviest. I count at least 9 to 10 S-curves, one after the other, like a monstrous anaconda curling down the mountainside. That’s the road Byrd took out of here to become the orotund esteemed Senator from West Virginia.

My how times have not changed at all. With a little help from the fingers of my colleague Larry the photographer, we finally get the chain back on. The boys re-mount their steeds. I had wanted to get video of them pushing off on their bikes from the church lot. Larry and I clean our hands with hand sanitizer and paper towels from my car, though my fingernails even now 24 hours later are still rimmed with grease like the hands of a car mechanic. “Ready?” I shout to the boys as they sit astride their bikes. Larry, too, has his big Nikon lens armed, up and ready to shoot. “Go!” I shout. And the three boys, gravel spitting, chains clinking, pedals pushing, spit off into the endless summer afternoon of a big sky June.

Peeling out | photo by lawrence pierce | click bigger

“800 MILES: An Epic Journey in Several Parts”

Part 1 | PART 2 | Part 3 | Part  4 | Part 5 | Part 6

Should your offspring’s car ever break down nearly 400 miles from home, I have a bit of advice. When you go to rent a U-Haul truck to haul his sorry-ass car back home from some godforsaken wrecker shop on the backside of Chattanooga, Tennessee, do NOT try and be parsimonious with the U-Haul fees by choosing to make the trip down and back in one day. Which, should you want to run the numbers, amounts to about 800 miles,  17 hours behind the wheel, 47 Peanut M&Ms, four sandwiches, 3 Red Bulls, two liters of Limeade,  a triple cappuccino and one large box of Boston Baked Beans candy.

It’s time like these when I think: my wife and I should have had more cats instead of having kids. Then we’d only have to worry about fleas, the rising cost of vet bills and kitty treats and that morning hairball on the duvet. What was I thinking? Actually, I wasn’t much thinking when my boy called the Monday after Bonnaroo from a Tennessee Taco Bell to say his new-used Honda had expired, the one we’d just bought him to replace the car he’d just totalled two weeks before.

Thinking, no. Cursing, yes. Fulminating. Fuming. Sputtering, too. Taking the name of several gods in vain. The car was inhaling oil on the way down, my boy says, the temperature gauge was rising. But he didn’t stop. Didn’t turn back. Gota get to Bonnaroo, baby! (Didn’t I give him the temperature gauge lesson, I ask myself?) The mechanic says the engine block has probably warped. It’ll cost thousands.I don’t know these guys. I gotta get that car back to my mechanic, who specializes in Hondas. What’s a parent to do in that situation?

“I’ll come get you,” I tell him. No, he and his three Bonnaroo buds had been in a convoy with a friend driving a pickup with a narrow jump seat. They’re coming home with him, leaving the dead Honda at the wrecker shop. But wait — the friend has two other people with him. That means seven of you in a pickup? “Me and Daniel will ride in the back,” says my son. No, it’s not safe, I say. “We’ll lay down flat. Dad, we’ve been in the sun for four days, we haven’t showered. We’re coming home.” Take the Greyhound, I say. “Dad, we’ll all starting to argue. Things are getting bad. We’re coming back in the truck.”

And so they do. Afflicted with sudden onset, full-bore PFO Syndrome (Parental Freak-Out Syndrome), I spend the next seven hours fretting that the phone will ring with a call from some drawling state trooper. Instead, sometime after 2 a.m., the living room curtains illuminate with the headlights of a vehicle turning in our cul-de-sac. I leap to the door, soothed by the arrival in my driveway of a pickup hauling the stinky, frazzled, bedraggled butts and precious cargo of a half-dozen local families. Two bodies pop upright from the bed of the truck. My son is neither one of them. What the…. Oh, wait. He’s behind the wheel. They’ve been trading off during the seven-hour escapade. Kids keep squirming and leaking out of the truck, looking like crumpled Kleenexes dropping onto my driveway.

I stand on the porch, arms crossed. “You know,” I say to them. “Twenty years from now, the trip you took today will be a legend.” A pause. “Tonight, though — not so much.” My son assures me that the pleasures of laying flat in the bed of a pickup truck while cruising north on Interstate 75 for hours upon end are underrated. “With the wind whooshing by, it’s kind of peaceful,” he says. “I slept,” says his buddy, Daniel, a soldierly grin crinkling his face. And so they all depart to their various homes. My son, thank goodness, heads for the showers. Their Great 2010 Bonnaroo Odyseey is done.

Mine, alas, has not even yet begun.

I decide I will retrace their journey to go get the dead Honda that Friday. Which is why I am the first customer through the door at 7:30 a.m. that day at the U-Haul on Hal Greer Boulevard in Huntington. I decide I will not do the math in my head on how much all of this is costing me as the friendly U-Haul Man starts toting up the fees. There’s the daily fee for the Ford U-Haul itself. The 30-some cents per mile after the first free 100 miles. The insurance for the truck, should you drive it into a church bus at mile 645 of your ill-thought-out, 800-mile, one-day Biblical journey to There and Back again.

The car dolly I will need to pick up in Tennessee. Oh, yes, and you should probably have insurance for the car dolly (do you want the $33 coverage for $5,000 or the $66 coverage for the $10,000?) in case you veer it into an 18-wheeler hauling Doritos while changing lanes. You might also like our ‘Going Postal Insurance,’ in case you, like, lose it in the sweltering heat of  a Tennesee summer and decide to ram your U-Haul into the rear of a state trooper because The Man is pissing you off with all his laws and rules, and besides that you’re not allowed to whack your son for whacking two cars in the space of one month because that would be, like, child abuse. Right?

I made that last one up.

We thought that the used Honda, found on Craig’s List, was a steal at $3,000. But once we got it home, it started stealing from us — hundreds for a new exhaust system. And, uh-oh, the driver’s side window had worked on the test ride — why is it NOT working now?! Dang-fecking#$$@!, what do you MEAN that the tire place says the two front tires need replacing?!

“Hey,” says my wife, who is in general a model of equanimity and equilibrium, a natural Buddhist. “It’s just money.” Me, I have to meditate several dozen hours a month just to get to the place she’s at when she rolls out of bed in the morning. Before I leave for the U-Haul that Friday, I tell her to keep an eye out for any roving bands of Gypsies coming through town. Didn’t you used to be able to sell your children to the Roma? We could get some of our costs back on this Honda episode were we to sell my son, I think.

It’s a thought … | To Be Continued

Part 1 | PART 2 | Part 3 | Part  4 | Part 5

Next to “Friday Night Lights,” my second-most favorite show on TV is “So you Think You Can Dance.” Don’t confuse this remarkable show with “Dancing With the Stars,” whose B, C and D-list celebrities tackle Vegas-cheesy dancing and which features such unedifying spectacles as disgraced Congressman Tom Delay busting a move (“My eyes! My eyes!”). SYTYCD is remarkable for a host of reasons, not the least that it is a spectacle of what some of the countries most amazing young human bodies are capable of doing: flying, leaping, twisting, contorting and sliding through the air and across the floor. The show is flat-out the best reality program on TV, mostly because of its serious judges, the aim of its mission and because its entry bar is so high. There is just no way you can fake being a brilliant dancer.

The preliminary rounds of each season are spectacular because you see such a wide range of dance styles, from ballroom to tap, crumping to hip-hop, classically trained to totally self-taught. But the show has a high bar awaiting those who get through to the Vegas rounds: you are then required, week after week, to take on new styles and ace them. It might be the rumba, it might be Bollywood. A hip-hop dancer from the streets of Harlem may be required to pull-off the tango. Better yet, each week features a new, original piece of choreography by a family of superb choreographers, from contemporary to classic. The judges are great, too, all of them dancers and choreographers whose advice is specific and to the point and worlds beyond the tired repetitions of “American Idol” (“Dude, I liked it OK, but it was pitchy in places..”).

The show can also be extremely moving, as dancers are pushed to the edge of their ability to take on new styles — and then push through to interpret not only the style but to become the characters envisioned in the original choreography. But there’s another component to the show that is also moving: sometimes in the initial rounds they get competitors who are brilliant and unique but who have no hope of going on to the semi-finals, which involves significant partnering. Brian Gaynor was one such entrant who

Brian Gaynor

showed up in auditions last year. He has some kind of growth defect and stands not much higher than four-feet tall. But, oh, how he has adapted, coming up with this robotic dance style in which he is able to isolate each of a host of body parts.

When he first auditioned, the judges — who can be very emotional — were flattened. They loved him. But they couldn’t pass him on the the later rounds. This year, Gaynor showed up again in auditions. Again, amazing. Again, as show producer and judge Nigel Lithgow told him, it wouldn’t be possible to pass him through to the partnering rounds. But Lithgow asked him what was new since the show had seem him last. Gaynor reported that he had a “a new crew,” called Remote Control. Lithgow, who I like a lot — he’s a serious judge who lacks the cruel streak that runs through Simon Cowell — was glad to hear that. He promised Gaynor he’d put his crew on as a featured act on SYTYCD. The video above features Steve Gaynor and Remote Control on the show earlier this week, as Lithgow promised. I’ve concluded something about Gaynor: he’s not from Earth. His two buddies are also ex-pats from another solar system. Nobody human moves like that.

To be honest, the only time I have ever heard OK Go was when I got turned on to this amazing, work-of-deranged-art video. So, my radar is up for anything new by them. The vid below — a staring contest breaks out between Animal from the Muppets and an OK Go bandmember at the Webby Awards! — is not brilliant, but is good fun. It’s a serious hit of daffy, and a fine way to start the day in a world where the latest dispatches from Badnewsistan otherwise makes you want to remain under the covers.