Jasper's Satellite

"Memphis"

Potawatomi County, Oklahoma

I just wanted a ride

I just want you to know
I got nothing to hide
I got nowhere to go

There's a piece of my mind
The world can't erase
I remember the time
And the look on your face

Headin' for home
Starlight and stone

-from “Starlight and Stone”

by Kris Kristofferson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4XtRhl6aRU

Bluebonnet Bar

Norman, Oklahoma

In Kuwait a man with a long beard walked up to me. He wore a flowing white robe, sandals and a trucker’s cap. “Bedouin hipster?” I asked. He replied, “How can you tell?”

Tanner Miller

Singer-songwriter and proprietor of the Bluebonnet Bar

Norman, Oklahoma

Stripping the world away within the sacred confines of the Bluebonnet. Temple to everything I love about Oklahoma, about the world. Nothing but Oklahoma singer-songwriters on the jukebox and everything plays for free. The musician-poet Nathan Brown used to play here. Tanner told me he was once very happy to receive a C in Nathan’s literature class at OU when it should have been an F.

Tanner Miller singing "Drive":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azoKm9R36X4

John with my old pair of boots

John's Boot Repair

Shawnee, Oklahoma

I wore out two pair of boots in Afghanistan walking on course gravel. So, I paid a visit to my friend John who has a tiny boot repair shop in Shawnee. He’s nearly crippled from back problems, so he can only resole two pair of boots a day. It takes a few weeks to get your boots back. But he’s the best in Oklahoma because he learned from the best, from a hard-drinking Comanche in Lawton in the sixties. He let me take a few photos of his shop if I’d run him around the block in Memphis.

“I don’t know what I’m doing but I can’t stop doing it. I’m like a blind sculptor hacking away.”

-from Just Kids by Patti Smith

Stitching Machine

Said John, "It's like sewing blind upside down."

“Ray had that human saxophone thing. You could feel his improvisational ease the way language spilled out like linear notes.”

-from Just Kids by Patti Smith

Beautiful stitching

My Nocona Lizard Boots

“[Robert Mapplethorpe] never seemed to question his artistic drives, and by his example, I understood that what matters is the work: the string of words propelled by God becoming a poem . . . To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind comes a light, life-changed.”

-from Just Kids by Patti Smith