Hey folks! Just to toot our own horn for a minute, the cut "Build Me A House," penned by our very own Kim Treiber-Thompson and featured on Kim and the Caballeros' newest CD, the live-recorded-here-in-Taos Honky Tonk Breakdown as well as viewable here at you tube, won "Best Live Recording" at the New Mexico Music Awards on Sunday, May 17! Congratulations to our fine engineer, Omar Rane! (Needless to say, we sent him home with the trophy!) Come on out and check out Taos' finest in Big Ol' Twangy Country Music, y'all!

Well, it's been a great run for a few years, but I must inform all you faithful out there that I have left the band Bone Orchard.

I've had a big ol' blast playing this fine music and getting my doubleneck-guitar-Jimmy-Page jones out of my system, but it's time for me to move on. I've been wanting to devote more time to my own music for quite a while (and my recent trio gigs with my lovely wife Kim and cellist Mark Dudrow are the beginnings of that... check the gigs page for more!) and with my current straight job at the nursing home I hardly have time and energy just to make it to the couch every night to watch "Deadwood" DVDs, much less start my own rock band. Now, maybe I'll have a little more time to get the Feast back together and rocking the roadhouses of New Mexico with some serious electric folk-n-roll! Let's hope so anyway....

Our parting is entirely amicable, and I wish Dan and Carol all the best in the future... hell, I'm looking forward to getting to go hear them as a fan again, which is how all this started with me and them in the first place.

I think Dan's music is just fantastic - somehow incredibly evocative of both the ghostly wild west and the psychedelic days of San Fransisco, not to mention the dark, gothic sensibilities of everyone from Lou Reed to Nick Cave. And that's just what's obvious on the surface... there's so much there it's just crazy. I've said "...damn... I wish I'd written that song..." more often to Dan than just about anybody else. The man can write. And play. And sing.

So, if you were Bone Orchard fans before I was a member of the band, then this will just be another step on the journey for you. If you became a fan while I was a member, then be strong and know that Dan is on top of things and whatever incarnation Bone Orchard takes next will be just as great as each previous incarnation. Stick with 'em, and they'll take you places. Dark places... and absinthe will be served by a mildewed hand....

As for other news, there ain't any. I apologize to you all for taking so long between posts, but the above-mentioned straight job is taking some getting used to. I'm limping along with several projects, and there's still gigs-a-plenty for y'all to come to and kick back and here some tunes, but most of what's going on with me at the moment isn't worthy (yet) of continual updates. I even have some opinions and ideas that might merit blogging a bit, but again - most of my energy for artistic expression is being "banked" for some bigger moments to come in the year.

Hang in there, y'all... I'm still kicking and there will be much more to come a bit later. Adios once again to my friends in Bone Orchard, and I'll see all of you not too far down the road.

We've lost Andrew Wyeth, the great man himself and one of my biggest heroes.

Say what you will about his art (and Goddess knows, much has been said) he was an indisputable American icon. Even folks who gag at the thought of his "populist illustrations" know Christina's World and the "Helga" paintings.

My own artist father very much admired the work of all the Wyeths, and I was brought up with books and posters of his art all around me. They were discussed and debated and, in my case, dreamed about, for many years. After all this time, his work has been as much of an influence on me as most of the music I love.

I don't feel the way I felt when George Harrison died. I couldn't even conceive of a world without Harrison, and I was utterly crushed for a few days. But I knew I'd read Wyeth tributes someday. Wyeth lived a long, full, life, and the obituaries say he died peacefully in his sleep.

I've been working in a nursing home for the last two weeks, and who knows when I'll be able to get back to my real work - music, writing, and art - full time. Hell, I may be painting walls there for years, the way things are going. I try to be strong, but being around a lot of decay is getting to me, and the stench of stale piss seems to cling and follow me home every night. I worked in a nursing home when I was a kid, and I hardly thought about it, even though my job then was much more directly connected to the old residents. But now I'm forty-three and the sights and sounds and smells of slow death are all around me, and hard to shake when I flee at the end of my shift. I'll take falling off a cliff or being hit by lightning or almost any option other than the ignoble decline of shitting myself to death in a lonely room at the Taos Living Center. Maybe I'll get to go like Wyeth.

I never met him of course, but I loved him. He was strong. He was a true hero. Wyeth was never afraid of decay and painted beautiful images of decay all his life, and now he's gone back to the earth, "...the bone structure beneath the landscape..." he so yearned for. I imagine him beneath the weeds and snow, grinning at the gothic beauty of it all and impishly haunting the hills of Chadd's Ford. Life goes on, and I don't know what else there is to say. I've opened his books to my favorite paintings and laid them out to contemplate, and put on Barber's Adagio For Strings, and I guess all I can do now is go wash the dishes.

It's been a long, strange year, 2008. I'm delighted to have shared last year with all you BanjoSnakers... I put myself out there, too: I played 100 gigs in 2008! ONE HUNDRED! HOLY CRAP! Thank you all so much for your attention and interest and support this past year, and there are plenty of projects in the works from Ars Banjosnake House for 2009... in fact, I don't know how I'm gonna keep up with all of 'em!

But 2009's also gonna be another weird one... apparently, things are about to get ugly economically, and I'm just hoping we can all hold it together and not shoot each other in the streets over old cans of dog food if things turn really rough. Kim and I are doing fine in the long run, as we invested wisely when I sold my house early in the year. Despite that, and despite those 100 gigs, on a day-to-day-bill-paying basis we're pretty broke. For the first time in 20 years I'm gonna get a straight job. I'm wondering how I'll feel about losing control over my own time, but I'm pretty zen about it so far... I'll be painting the walls in Taos' nursing home, and I think the work will be easy and zen-ish in itself, and I tend to like being around those old folks. Kim and I have solid savings, it's true, but we'd like to use those bucks to add on to the house or something, and don't want to just sit around and live off 'em like pampered pussies. I posted a blog earlier in the year called "How Much Coin Does A Man Need" that provoked all kinds of snarky comments and well, y'all are getting your revenge... time for me to work like a real human.

Lots of good things happened, and I'm thrilled to have experienced them: I got married to a great lady that I constantly delight in, and we honeymooned in Ireland for a couple of blissful, whiskey-soaked weeks. Great stuff. As I mentioned, I sold my beloved but somewhat elegantly-decaying old hacienda and moved in with Kim. I've missed my adobe compound, but not even close to what I thought I would. Playing those 100 gigs was sometimes trying, but usually fun and sure as hell beats cleaning toilets for a living, even at worst. I got my first colonoscopy... really odd to see my insides on a TV screen! And we went to the polls and elected a black man to be president of the U. S. of A! Damn straight! Made me proud to wake up on my native soil once more, I'll tell ya.

But even with fantastic highs that I wouldn't have missed for anything, the day-to-day life of 2008 was often a gray drudgery, and reading over my diary I often noted depression, or that I felt bad physically. Life is a challenge, both personally and collectively. That's just the way it is, and I'd better get used to it.

Towards the end of 2008, with excitement and hope about Obama in the air mixed with fear and loathing of the endless war and the economic meltdown, I saw a few comparisons of the times with the sixties, so I read a few books about the decade of my birth and now I think: these times aren't anything like the sixties!

I am very fond of the art, the music, and the social changes that the sixties brought this country and the world, but I actually believe we might be on the brink of far greater change and shining times than we saw in the sixties.... I've got my own personal fear and loathing, but I really think we might turn things around over the next few years. I'm not sure what I'll contribute to the hoped-for change; I don't know if the hoped-for change will benefit myself and my loved ones, if it happens at all; and even though it may all crumble to the ground like twigs and ashes, I 'm happy that optimism seems viable again.

I'm not altogether happy with this post, and that in itself reflects to me the confusion of this past year. It's always about hopes and fears, folks, and so tempting to start psychotheraputically listing all my perceived failures and "new year's resolutions" (guffaw) and dumping that load of shit on y'all. But what the hell would that do except exhaust you and effectivly prevent you reading this blog for months? Perhaps the operative quote for 2008 is that from The Joker in Batman: The Dark Knight when he hisses "...whatever doesn't kill you makes you... stranger." In the aftermath of one crazy, pissed, happy, busy, lazy, confused-as-shit year with its sky-highs and subterranean-lows and lots of fog in between, I'll take that as a legacy worth hanging on to, or at least keeping in the back of our minds. Thanks for sharing the ride with me, and stay tuned... there's lots more art and writing and deep-fried, golden-brown folk-n-roll... and strangeness! to come!

Happy New Year, y'all...
Chipper

Above these words you see #148 in my series of drawings that I have posted over the last couple of years. I have so far refrained from comment on these works. These drawings were initially a mystery even to me, but I gradually realized I was doing studies for a future series of fine art pieces. That series of studies is now concluded, and I have started the formal series. This series is simply called: DOCUMENTS.

A few technical points: The studies as you see them are on various different papers, and vary from about six-by-eight inches to about two-by-three inches. In my experimentation, I used a variety of inks and colored mediums as well as several different metallic foils and such on the works. They were then glued into an old ledger book, hence the numbers that appear in the upper corners (some of the pages were missing from the old ledger, therefore: the gaps in the numbered series). In a nod to the "internet era," the works were dated on the day I posted them on this blog, not necessarily the day they were completed. In fact, I finished this one, #148, well over a month ago. On #148, you will notice a stamp of my own design in the lower right corner, which contains the number and date of the piece, as well as my signature: "R.E.C. Thompson." This stamp will appear on every one of the formal series of DOCUMENTS. What finally shook out of the studies as the "standard" approach could be described as: watercolor, archival ink, and gold foil on paper.

My certainty that mystery is often just as good as exegesis - at least where art is concerned - is in conflict with my natural motor-mouth tendencies, and I could no doubt go on and on ad infinitum about this work and what it means to me and the myriad of influences that make up "what it's all about." Again, I am going to refrain. As I have shown this work to my friends and colleagues, I've discovered that the feelings the DOCUMENTS evoke in others, and the imaginative responses the work elicits, are at least as interesting as what I myself would say about them. (My favorite comment, courtesy of G.D. Armstrong, luthier: "It looks like if you laid them all out in the right order you could... build something....") However, I will say this: I have loved all the comments about this work that some of you have left here, and I deeply appreciate that anybody out there is paying attention to this kind of stuff.

Take a good last look for now, my friends: Over the next month I'm going to slowly delete all but a few of the works (just for spice!) from this blog. They are studies, after all, and while I'm glad you've all enjoyed them, it's time to focus on the "real thing" now.

My hope and fantasy was that I would only post this final study to the blog when I had secured gallery representation for my work, and that I could announce the good news. I have finished and beautifully framed six of the DOCUMENTS at this point, and the initial response from galleries is overwhelmingly positive as far as the actual art goes, but alas: we live in hard times. I actually had one gallery say "We love these, we know just how we'd hang them and market them, but we're letting people go, and certainly not taking on anybody new. Sorry! Good luck to you!" I still have high hopes that some Santa Fe or Taos gallery (at the very least!) is going to soon take a chance on this work, tough times or not. Needless to say, I will post a big ol' banner blog to announce the great event when it happens.

In the mean time, if you'd like to purchase an original DOCUMENT they are currently available directly from me, and if you own an art gallery and would be interested in showing my work, please call or use the contact page of my website to get in touch, and we'll talk about what I've got for you!

Thank you all for your curiosity, support, comments, and love of art through the posting of the entire series of studies for DOCUMENTS. There's more to come!

Yr Humble Servant, Chipper

Hey there, and Holiday Greetings to you, O Patient Ones...

I'm delighted to announce that finally, after years (literally!) of stalling and foot-dragging and plain ol' laziness, yours truly has at last signed up with CD Baby and you can now easily order my music on-line with your credit card!

My trusty webmaster over at Zoo Pilot Design has, in the most rapid yet elegant manner possible, added some friendly little "Buy It!" buttons to my music page, and a simple click will take you directly to the CD Baby page for any particular recording of mine you might want - and once you've arrived, you can order the entire lock, stock, and barrel of the CD or just download the individual songs you want, one-by-one!

Geez! How simple it is to join the New World Order! Barcodes and all!

Anyway, there's more big changes coming soon, lots more gigs and events in the upcoming year, much more spouting of my big-mouthed opinions right here at the Banjosnake Blog, and until then, BanjoSnakers, have a great New Year and celebrate and be happy and hold your loved ones close,

Adios, Feliz Navidad, Happy Chanukah, Happy Yule, etc. etc. etc.
Your humble servant,
Chipper

This is going to be the corniest thing you've ever read from me, and reveal me to be the geekeiest fan-boy you'd always feared, but what the hell:

In the 1981 movie "Excalibur" there's a scene where Arthur's knights gather on a hill after the last great battle to re-claim the land, and there, standing in torchlight and cheering, Merlin appears to them, and quiets them, and says:

"...look upon this moment.. savor it... rejoice with great gladness... great gladness! Remember it always, for you are joined by it. You are one, under the stars. Remember it well then, this night, this great victory, so that in the years ahead you can say 'I was there, that night with Arthur...'"

We made history last night. We had a great victory, and we are joined by it. We are one, under the stars. We elected a black man to the highest office in the land, probably the most powerful office on earth, and his name is Barack Hussien Obama. And I voted for him. I will remember it always. And I was there.