Thomas Cave's Tattoo: The New WPA

"Thomas Cave's Tattoo"

I've started a blog that discusses what I call the New Great Depression - the idea that the next few years will constitute a Depression era, and not simple recession. I believe that to understand it in that way will enrich it, and encourage everyone in this country to make this era a creative period, a positive time, an act of construction, and not a cause for panic, chaos and fear. This is a chance for renaissance.

If the New Great Depression produces art, literature, theater, film, community, and a discovery of human value, as the first one did, who wouldn't want to be a part of it.

I am here to barter, trade, share, talk, listen, discuss, argue, understand, make fun, and make peace with the lack of the old prosperity. It was corrupt, and corroded, and it's gone. The dead weight of spoils has been lifted.

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

"About Thomas Cave"

Mr. Cave is the gentleman in the photograph that graces this home page. The photograph was taken by the American photographer Dorothea Lange, who so powerfully documented the country and its citizens during the Great Depression. I found this photograph at www.shorpy.com, a website with a specialty in Depression images. According to Shorpy's site, the Lange photograph, titled "535-07-5248 and Wife," was taken in Oregon in August of 1939. The gentleman is described as an unemployed lumber worker. His tattoo is his Social Security number, by which he is referred to in the title of the photograph. A public records search conducted by Shorpy's revealed that the number belonged to Thomas Cave, who was born in 1912 and died in 1980 in Portland. His wife's name, Ann Kathryn, who died in 2000, appears on their tombstone, a photograph of which is appended under Shorpy's readers' comments.

Mr. Cave is 27 years old in Lange's picture.

Thursday, February 5, 2009

The New WPA

Welcome to the New WPA. I promised you a treasury of American drinking songs. I don't know if this constitutes a public-works project, but, so it begins. This was performed for me in the comfort of someone else's living room, by one of the surf-mama Courages of San Diego. The lady will remain anonymous, out of propriety 'from another age,' but suffice it to say, she goes by the name "Nolans Mom" in some circles. She adopted a full sailor's tilt in her stance when she prepared her audience to hear her rendition. For the musical, I'm trying to get you a recording too. In an e-mail message, Nolans Mom explained that her great uncle taught her the song in the '80s, when he was in his 80s. And her father claims he learned it in med school in the '40s.

Attention Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress: The Drinking Song Archive. "T'was a night in late September"

T'was a night in late September,
and a night that I'll remember,
when to bed to walk to home I vainly tried..
As my feet began to stutter,
and I lay down in the gutter,
a pig came up and lay down by my side.
Oh we talked of stormy weather as when two friends get together,
and a lady passing by was heard to say:
"You can tell a man who boozes by the company he chooses,
and the pig got up and slowly walked away....he walked away

Thank you for listening, ma'am.

Thomas Cave's Tattoo