I just had a bizarre twitter encounter with a fancily-titled music writer that made me feel … old. See below.
Instead of engaging in further back-and-forth I’m taking it here to my safe space. My first comment was a little flip, I admit, but them I spent a few minutes coming up with a conciliatory follow-up, which was met by an even more spectacularly tourrettes-y outburst, and lots of faves for the eruption. Some jolly folks chimed in to make light of “this guy,” (i.e. me).
I’ve gotten more mentions on this encounter than in my entire previous twitter history…
The experience made me feel like the Dude in The Big Lebowski in the Biennale scene. Lots of stuff whizzing past his ears that he doesn’t get, except that it’s clear he’s the butt of the joke.
And yet… I still feel like I’m right. Why would you credit the Jam with David Watts’ “critique of masculinity” just because they covered a Kinks song…
This is the time of year when I am overwhelmed by the fecundity of the world. Calves dropping, bees swarming, grass growing what seems like inches every day. Nothing to complain about, just that it’s a pretty intense time in the cycle of the farm.
So far it looks like four cows have calved without major complications. Only fifteen (or more) to go.
There is always a dance involving me and the mama cows, who tend to hide their calves in the first week after birth. Our farm is 20-some acres of pasture surrounded by hundred of acres of crops farmed by renters. Right now, the winter wheat is two or three feet high, and offers a tempting place for a calf to crawl off to and sleep away the day. The problem is that the pasture and the crops are separated by a single electric wire. Sometimes the calves scoot under the wire, and the mamas are left on the other side.
Often the cows get agitated by this situation, but just as often they’re cool with it. There has only been one time when a cow has lost her calf, but I am always worrying that will happen. I try to keep track of the calves twice a day, and sometimes have to follow the cows I know have given birth. Sometimes I’ll get lucky when they stare in the direction of where the calf is hidden, but other cows are cool customers. What? A calf? There’s no calf around here! I have known cows that will look in another direction to throw ME off.
I don’t want to call my tracking wasted effort, but sometimes it is. By dusk, cows and calves are usually together, and the babies gambol gaily (never used that phrase before, but it’s apt) and the mamas call for them with their low moo, which quickly becomes a bellow if the calves aren’t paying heed.
Of all the famous folks I waited on when I worked at L’Hotel Sofitel in Bloominton, Minnesota–and that includes the Stones, the Eagles, the Cars, Kenny Loggins, and televangelist Rex Humbard (lousy tipper)– Andre was by far the coolest. He sat by himself in the no smoking section, and ordered two main courses (saucisses de Toulouse aux pommes), three orders of Profiteroles, and four triple cognacs…. I still marvel at the size and beauty of his snakeskin cowboy boots …
***
Just need to share this incredible photo, which came up on the often terrific Facebook Old Minneapolis group:
The subject is Sherwin Linton, who has been performing folk, country, rockabilly cowboy and gospel music in the Upper Midwest (and for some time nationally, touring with Roy Acuff) for sixty years. His own annotation for the photo is priceless:
There is an amazing thing about this photo. t I did this routine frequently in 1958 at The Rail Inn Tavern on Central avenue in Minneapolis.. As you look at the photo the customers at the bar were like “Ho Hum. here he goes again. Some goofy guy with outlandish cowboy boots dancing up and down the bar playing a guitar upside down. He better not spill my pitcher of beer”.
The wicked year of 2016 has taken another great one from us.
A couple of years back, John Spong wrote He Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere, a terrific piece on Guy Clark as he looks back on what was an amazing life: full of art, strong friendships, lots of chemically enhanced fucking up, and dark, sad times when first Susanna’s and then Guy’s bodies gave out.
I’ve added three Clark songs that I personally adore to the end of this post. I can’t claim any special knowledge or insight into Clark. I’m just a fan, who was lucky to see him play once, with Townes Van Zandt at the Bottom Line around 1990. I listen to Texas Cooking, Old No. 1, and Boats to Build all the time, and I’m sad that he’s gone.
Photographs by Wyatt McSpadden
But the Susanna Clark living upstairs when Sampson came to write scarcely resembled that woman. In the early 2000’s, reeling from the twin defeats of a debilitating back condition and the early death of her and Guy’s best friend, Van Zandt, she’d taken to bed. Though she eventually quit drinking, she upped her intake of pain pills to a point beyond lucidity, seldom leaving the bedroom or changing out of her white cotton nightgown. Then came lung cancer and her refusal to stop smoking. Through much of that time, until his own health turned south, Guy was her sole caregiver. When he went to the basement to work, she’d call on his cellphone and ask him to cook for her or sit and keep her company as she moved in and out of reason. On his walk to the stairs, he’d pass by that Polaroid. It was taken, he told visitors, one afternoon when he and Van Zandt were day-drunk and acting like assholes. She’d had enough and was ready to get as far from the two of them as she could. She stands center frame, arms crossed, glaring at the camera like she might make the photographer’s head combust.
Sampson’s line could only refer to that photo. Guy started into his writing ritual, spreading out sheets of draftsman’s graph paper and grabbing one of the music chart pencils he orders special from California. Methodically, he wrote in all caps, giving each letter its own box on the page.
My favorite picture of youIs the one where it hasn’t rained yetAs I recall there came a winter squallAnd we got soakin’ wetA thousand words in the blink of an eyeThe camera loves you and so do IClick
“The whole song just kind of poured out,” Guy explained one afternoon a few months ago, sitting in the same workshop, holding the same photo. “I didn’t have to think too much other than to get it all down. Then I went upstairs, sat on the edge of the bed, and played it for her. She said she liked it, I guess. Whenever I wrote about her, she was always . . . I don’t know if ‘touched’ is the right word. She was always flattered. Usually she said, ‘Well, it’s about time.’ ”
That was particularly true in this instance. Susanna’s slide out of life lasted just another year and a half. In June 2012 her heart gave out, and it’s hard now to listen to “My Favorite Picture of You” and not think of it the way Guy describes “The Randall Knife,” as a cathartic piece of writing. Only he wrote “Randall Knife” a couple of weeks after his dad’s death. With Susanna, he tried to say goodbye while she could still hear him.
“I never was much for moaning and crying with this kind of experience,” he said. “This is the only way I know how to deal with it. To get it out.”
Update, July 14, 2016: The news today is that Hillary Clinton’s once-formidable lead has shrunk to basically nothing, in a contest with a candidate who is pretty obviously trying to gift her the election.
From time to time I wonder about Trump being a put-up job. Look at the circumstances today.
If you are casting about for explanations of what is it about HRC that fails to connect with the voters, I’d like to re-up a little thing I wrote a couple months ago…. Bernie Sanders is apparently out of the race now, but that does not change the basic fact that Hillary’s is the “You’ll Get Nothing And Like It” candidacy.
***
Everybody’s got Hillary Clinton all wrong. So many words spilled about Hillary’s emails, sure, but nothing about Hillary Smails! There is only one letter that’s different! I have googled around and have not seen this argument advanced anywhere, so let me be the first to assert that Caddyshackgives us the key to understanding the 2016 race for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Hillary’s email issues are not nothing, especially for a politician who was high-handed and hawkish when it came to, oh, say, Snowden’s leaks. Definitely, Snowden has a point: “Others get prosecuted for what Hillary Clinton did.”
I don’t know the status of the investigation, but a potential FBI indictment is a hell of a thing to have hanging over a campaign, especially for a candidate widely considered a lock for the nomination.
Let those chips fall where they may. I’m with Bernie: enough with this talk about Hillary’s emails. A single letter is the difference between Hillary’s emails and Hillary SMAILS. And THAT’S what I want to talk about.
Hillary Smails, as in Judge Elihu Smails. Don’t go saying Murray or Dangerfield or, God forbid, Chevy Chase was the star of Caddyshack. They were all good, but Ted Knight so completely ruled.
THIS SCENE!
Feel free to savor this terrific compilation reel of Smails highlights at your leisure. I started the clip at 1:30, where there are three straight scenes where Smails’ nervous little non-verbal chortles are just genius. “Ohh? Ho Ho. Ha Ha!” And of course at 2:38 comes the line that defines the character. “You’ll get nothing and like it!”
Now, cue up the all-but-certain Democratic nominee, SHOUTING something like Elihu’s catchphrase: that single payer “Will never, ever come to pass.” You can see her crew nodding their heads sagely. Tsk. Tsk. Those silly single-payer dreamers. “You’ll get nothing and like it!” is an applause line for her! Last week we learned that consultants working for the Super PACs backing Hillary Clinton are joining in the battle to defeat a single-payer proposition for the state of Colorado. So not only is it, “Single payer is never ever going to happen.” It’s “Single payer is never, ever going to happen, because my people are working to prevent it from happening.” One wonders how that would play as an applause line.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG7w3Oey3xs
Just as Judge Smails had a foil in Dangerfield’s crass interloper Al Czervik–utterer of the the film’s ultimate line,“Hey everybody, we’re all gonna get laid!”–so too does Hillary have a a foil in Senator Sanders, portrayed (widely and wrongly) in mainstream accounts as a naif promising everybody “free stuff.”
Even as the consensus says he has no path to victory, he continues to surge, filling stadiums, dominating primaries as he did Tuesday, winning every county in West Virginia. West Virginia! (I know. It’s become home to racists since Hillary won there in 2008, apparently, a state of affairs that can only be explained by Carl Diggler.)
My admiration for Bernie is neither absolute, nor unconditional. I don’t agree with him on all policy fronts. There’s the gun control thing, and the fact that he’s a little too accepting of the foreign policy consensus–drone bombing, extrajudicial assassination, and whatnot. But all in all, for a candidate that actually still has a (slim) chance to win the whole thing, I mean, my God. He has ideas, good ones, and speaks his mind. This is a once-in-a-generation politician.
Whatever happens over the next 180 days or so, Bernie has changed the expectations of what government can offer. His proposals for tuition-free public college and single payer are far from idealistic, or unrealistic. They are what governments offer in virtually every other civilized country. Sanders putting those ideas out there is an embarrassment to Clinton and the DNC, and their promise of nothing–of basically not being Trump. (Do I even need to say I find Trump terrifying? But he is a symptom, not the disease.) I may be wrong, but there’s a fair bit of evidence that the neoliberal experiment–from the Atari Democrats forward–is in its last days. Add up the Sanders and Trump supporters, and you’ll find something like two-thirds of Americans are contemptuous of the pitiful things the Democrats (and their Republican partners) have offered in exchange for economic security. You may have lost your job and your pension, but LOOK: NAFTA and 401(k)s!
Hillary’s going to get the nomination. The MATH! They say. And she will go on to win easily. If you say so.
Ignore all the polls that have Sanders easily beating Trump head to head, and Hillary struggling. Just today a Quinnipiac poll reveals that Clinton’s until-very-recently substantial lead is gone: she and Trump are virtually tied in three key swing states, and yes, that Bernie beats Trump in all of them.
Contrast the images from, say, the Sanders rally in Washington Square Park with this pitiful clip from an appearance by the front-runner in Los Angeles earlier this week. Which candidate looks like a future president?
LA doesn't seem to like Hillary Clinton..her campaign rally today lasted less than a minute. This is over half of it pic.twitter.com/5IwqTTuTqv
I’m probably unable to process Prince’s passing with the requisite amount of grief, coming as it does hard on the heels of Merle Haggard’s death. Two of the brightest stars in my musical sky, gone. Poof. Within a couple weeks of each other. I am still stunned.
Well, hell. This week! This month! This year!
It’s been quite a cull of beloved musicians. Can’t recall a year like this. Maybe Fall of 1970, Jimi and Janis, which I only dimly remember. I delivered papers then, the now defunct afternoon daily Minneapolis Star. “Bad news on the doorstep” — I lived that! Weekly body counts in the bottom right hand counter.
I have a sense just about everybody will see Lonnie Mack‘s name on the list of Entertainers Who Died In 2016, and say, “Wait! When did THAT happen?” The day everybody was talking about Prince.
I must get this out of the way first: even though I am a massive fan and have had plenty of opportunities to see Prince, I never went to a show. Hockey rink shows are never ideal, and I probably still would not go out of my way to see anyone in a really big venue like that. But seeing Prince in the First Avenue Main Room! Where Purple Rain was shot! I passed on more than a few chances to see him in that fantastic venue.
To my shame I think I have to put it down to my Midwestern, penny-wise, dollar foolish attitude to spending money. Are you kidding me? They want fifteen bucks for those tickets. Figure in three or four Special Exports and I’ll be laying out thirty bucks for the night.
Yes, I am a garbage fan who never bothered to see Prince perform, but (I maintain) there remains some (pathetic) evanescent connection.
Prince and I were born 10 months and a couple miles apart in South Minneapolis. He went to Bryant, the public junior high school on East 38th Street. I went to Incarnation, a Catholic grade school a mile west on 38th St., on the other side of 35W, the freeway that pretty much separated black and white Minneapolis. I remember Bryant came to Incarnation once for a scrimmage, either in late ’72 or early ’73. The racial situation in Minneapolis was edgy at best, owing mainly to the ignorance of white people. Black Panthers! Rumors of black gangs riding around in cars with machine guns. (This predated Sign ☮ the Times (and crack) by more than a decade but looky! another connection — “high on crack totin’ a machine gun”). Of course our basketball team was nearly all white kids, terrified of black people in general, and more than a little intimidated by our opponents.
Prince with his Bryant teammates.
In addition to their massive afros, and generally being much taller and/or muscular, I remember all the Bryant players wore boxers under their uniform shorts so they stuck out. A bit of sartorial flair that I had never seen before, or since. I wonder who might have started that trend?
I was the Big Man on this team, 6′ 2″ and 140 lbs. dripping wet.
I told everyone for years, “I played basketball against Prince.” Now I am not sure I was on the court or if I (Blue team) was watching the Gold Team play Bryant. At any rate, I was there, but not necessarily playing. I did reach out to a couple of old Incarnation classmates on Facebook. My my best grade school pal, now a lawyer, wrote back, in very lawyerly terms, “This is consistent with my recollection”–meaning (I like to think) that we, the Blue team, were in fact the team that scrimmaged Bryant. But, for what it’s worth, his memory was that we played at their gym, not ours. I also must add that he had no memory of the machine gun rumor, so that might have been my own individual racial panic dream.
Bryant mopped the floor with us of course. The core of their team went on to form a fabled Minneapolis Central team that was undefeated but lost in the region finals to North. I was at THAT game, for sure, at the old Met Center. Johnny Hunter, Pastor and Founder of First Community Recovery Church, had the game of his life.
I always thought Prince didn’t play in high school, but today I entered a few obvious search terms and learned that Prince indeed played at Central, at least up until his sophomore year. Al Nuness, a legendary player in his own right for the Golden Gophers, was Prince’s coach for the sophomore squad. Nuness told the StarTribune Prince was “a darn good basketball player. The problem is he just didn’t grow.”
Basketball’s loss was everyone else’s gain. That seems obvious now.
Over the years I’ve come across more than a few doubters of my modest connection to Prince, and even more who could not believe that the diminutive Prince had ever played competitive basketball, so when the fantastic Chapelle Show Charlie Murphy bit came out, I felt vindicated.
UPDATE: I wasn’t going to go there, to mention the other famous music person of my youth (and in fact of my twenties, when we lived across the street from each other), but I just read what Paul Westerberg wrote about Prince and it makes what just about everything everyone else wrote kind of pointless. Heartfelt, observant, poignant and funny as hell. What you would expect.
The first time I met him was at a urinal at a nightclub in St. Paul. There he was, and I said, “Hey, what’s up?” And he answered, “Life.” One word: “life.” And I can’t say that we went on to be pals. But we did record a lot at Paisley Park, and he became comfortable enough to grace us with his presence, not bejeweled and not dressed up. He’d be wearing maybe his jammies and sweat pants or maybe a pear of jeans and sneakers. He could sort of just hang out. He may have been a little more normal than he would’ve liked people to know. That’s the treasure that we got, to be able to sit in the big atrium where you’re taking a break and Prince shuffles by in his slippers and makes some popcorn in the microwave. My sister’s a disc jockey, and he would pass by and say, “Tell your sister hi for me.” People like to paint him as a reclusive this or that; I think he was genuinely truly, truly shy. But one thing says a lot about him: I was there making a solo record a few years later, and I got a message that said that my friend had just died. I was truly rattled, and the next time I went back into the studio, he had filled it up with balloons. Now I’m gonna cry.
Paul Westerberg in the 1973 yearbook. All the way on the left.
There’s been a gleeful sense of schadenfreude in the coverage churned out by left-leaning outlets in particular. How lovely it has been to watch the conservative movement’s house of cards fall into shambles!
The problem, of course, is that Republicans aren’t the only party facing an historic rift. Over the past two weeks, it’s become increasingly obvious that grassroots liberals are thoroughly disgusted by their own party establishment.
The Republicans no doubt face a brutal convention, in which they must either nominate an unpopular candidate or incur the wrath of the masses by handpicking an establishment figure.
But the Democrats already face a kind of inverse dilemma. Barring a miracle, they will nominate an establishment candidate who is at best tepidly supported, and at worst reviled, by those who have rallied behind her insurgent foe, Bernie Sanders.
Remember, the whole primary season is designed to consolidate support behind the frontrunner. At this point in the race, with only one opponent—an elderly socialist from Vermont with a degree from the Larry David School of Charm — Clinton should be turning her attention to the general election.
Right wing pundits—a sad and desperate lot at the moment — eagerly compareSanders to Trump. The idea here is that the widespread disgust with Washington’s dysfunction has opened the door to outsider demagogues who spout lurid promises.
In fact, Sanders and Trump have about as much in common as George Wallace and Eugene Debs. Sanders isn’t trying to sell steaks or live out some Reality TV fantasy. He entered politics from the tradition of social justice .
The reason he keeps beating Hillary Clinton is because a huge portion of the electorate—particularly young voters—is yearning for the kind of explicit social justice he’s prescribing. To put it bluntly: he’s articulating a moral vision, not an electoral path to the White House.
And that, frankly, is what the Democratic Party used to do, back in the era of the New Deal and the Great Society. It offered as its essential pitch to voters a compassionate and responsive government that sought to combat — or at least mitigate — the corrosive values of a capitalist theocracy.
What does the modern Democratic Party offer? The strategy put forward by Bill Clinton was called “triangulation.” And while it may have worked in an electoral sense, the de facto result was a strategy of appeasement that left Democrats pushing conservative policies: welfare reform, tax cuts, financial deregulation.
Obama’s signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act, is essentially theprogram Bob Dole proposed back in 1993. His solution to our suicidal dependence on fossil fuels—cap-and-trade—is yet another recycled Republican idea.
The modern Democratic Party, in other words, has chosen to enable — and in many cases sponsor—policies that have allowed capitalism to act like a giant centrifuge, concentrating wealth and power in the hands of the few to the detriment of the many.
Not entirely bad news, this implosion. I guess I have my own twisted version of the schadenfreude regarding a party whose leader Debbie Wasserman Schultz carves up legislation to benefit PAYDAY LENDERS–in an election season. Is that party — or the dominant DNC wing — really worth saving?
But I will confess to getting sad in advance at the prospect of Hillary barely surviving Bernie’s challenge, thanks in large part to mastery of the arcane anti-democratic machinery of primaries, caucuses and superdelegates, and limping to the presidency. Where I have every confidence she will be terrible.
But should that happen, I’m hoping to see follow-through with the 80-90 percent of young voters who favor the Sanders view, that there will be progressive candidates winning the seats the Democratic leadership can’t even be bothered to contest, obsessed as they are with the spoils of presidential politics.
Not giving up on Bernie, though. If the Dems REALLY cared about guaranteeing a win for the party in November, he is their guy. If he falls short, it will be a race between two candidates everybody hates.
My optimism is stubborn, though. I hold out high hopes for the Mark Ruffalo/Rosario Dawson ticket in 2020.
It’s from an incredible, appalling true-life James Ellroy story taking place in Orange County. The bruised face belongs to defense attorney James Crawford. On Wednesday, according to the Los Angeles Times, Crawford was beaten bloody by a cop working for the Orange County district attorney’s office, after Crawford got charges dismissed against his (Crawford’s) client. The Times says Crawford’s client’s acquittal is the latest “humiliation” for the DA’s office, which “has seen case after case unravel in an ongoing scandal regarding the misuse of jailhouse informants.”
The DA investigator–whose name is still not public and who has not been arrested for this beatdown–“made more than $206,000 in total compensation in 2014.” The sheriff’s union head speculated that “this is an effort by a criminal defense attorney to drum up a payday.”
Bear with me here. I see that bloodied face serving as some sort of metaphor for Donald Trump’s campaign and movement, after the truly awe-inspiring direct action by teachers, unions, and activists in Chicago Friday night that forced Trump to cancel a rally of his supporters. Whatever else comes of this– more good than ill, but more violence seems a given–at the very least. seventy-plus-year-old rednecks will think twice about sucker-punching young black men.
I also imagine bloodied is a good description of how the Hillary Clinton campaign feels in the wake of its Very Bad Day yesterday, which began with Hillary praising Nancy Reagan–Nancy Reagan!!–for starting a national conversation about AIDS.
Uh. No. Writes Sam Biddle of Gawker:
In an interview conducted at Nancy Reagan’s funeral today, Hillary Clinton recounted a version of history that didn’t happen, lauding the former first lady’s “low key advocacy” for the cause of HIV/AIDS awareness. “Low key” is one way of putting it. In fact, the Reagan White House is infamous for its lengthy, deadly silence on the epidemic.
It took twitter no time to erupt in a chorus of near-universal derision. Hillary actually sort of apologized, saying she misspoke, but nah…
Her political acumen, such as it is, was on display yet again in the evening. The streets of Chicago were filled with Trump supporters and the aforementioned protesters. It was all everyone on twitter could talk about. One got the sense (or I did, anyway) that the game was changing. Trump had absolutely paralyzed the parties and the elites, and here a bunch of kids, and workers, and teachers had stood up to his bullying, ethno-nationalist steamroller and turned it around. Bernie Sanders happened to be on the scene, at a pre-scheduled rally that ended in great good cheer and a rousing version of Woody Guthrie’s should-be national anthem “This Land Is Your Land.”
Clinton got it, that she had to do SOMETHING to respond to the moment. So she issued this:
If anything, this made her look more out-of-touch than her afternoon debacle. Here’s a representative reaction:
Protesters shut down Trump bc he emboldens coward racists like Dylan Roof, how dare you use CHARLESTON to shame them https://t.co/MzFwfVziLq
Lost in the big news day, this: it emerged Friday that feminist trailblazer and icon bell hooks announced that she can no longer support Hillary.
I don’t find it productive to criticize Hillary on her personality or “leadership” qualities because these terms are so nebulous, useful only in narrowly-defined horse-race discussions of the relative merits of the two (only two) candidates pre-selected by the major parties and their donors. Policies. Let’s talk about policies.
In Hillary’s case, her policies are a smoldering garbage fire of corporatism, interventionism, neoliberalism and vaguely uplifting platitudes. The events of Friday convinced me that, even if her policies weren’t awful, Hillary seems overwhelmed by our particular historical moment.
I find many of Obama’s policies reprehensible, but I never doubt his capacity for understanding what’s actually happening around him. With Hillary, the events of Friday, and her tone-deaf reactions to them, make me question her basic grasp on reality.
Of all the candidates running, only Sanders seems to have any sort of clue. Events might be too big for him as well. We’re looking at a 1968 kind of year. And yet I’m pretty certain that people working on his campaign are going to come in to work this week with a sense of destiny and purpose. Really don’t think you could say the same for the Clinton campaigners.
Both of us had forgotten to get milk, so I went into the pantry for a can of the sweetened condensed, something I am secretly glad to be forced to consume with morning coffee. No sooner had I popped the top, I looked to see Heather standing next to the teakettle, having just opened another can of the sweet sticky goo.
It’s unseasonably warm, and Theo and I had a back and forth about turning on the propane. “I’m cold. I want to sit on the heating vent.”
“We don’t need the heater. It’s already 58 degrees.”
…”and why are those dogs barking?!”
Oh. Ohhhh.
Just outside the kitchen window, a trio of bovines munching contentedly. SOMEBODY (uh, me) had forgotten to latch the gate. There’s a grown cow right near the open gate, and I go for her first. She’s easy enough to coax back through the gate into the pasture, but when I turn my attention to the other two, the cow edges back into the yard, resumes grazing.
The Other Two are:
a. the baby bull–oh, hey, he’s getting some good size on him–, and
b. the biggest (and wildest) of the yearling heifers.
I sigh. First, the cow (again). Then the baby bull, who is frisky, snorting a bit, and starting to buck. I see a chance to open yet another gate, and give him a minute to discover the opening. He does, and saunters through with a body language that says, “I’m going through this gate because I want to, not because you made me….’
Feeling good about this. Can already taste the coffee.
Only the crazy heifer, who… Ah, geez, no. She’s ambled past the beehives and started up the driveway, which becomes a narrow lane for a couple hundred yards, and then opens into the road, likely at this hour to have cars and trucks driven by inattentive drivers going sixty on their way to work.
I have to get around her, but I need my phone. And the keys to the Subaru.
Upon reentering the house, both boys are tickled: “we saw your amazing running, dad….” No one thinks to volunteer to help. Back out I go, start the Subaru, and creep behind the heifer. She slows down at the bend, so I get out of the car, and clamber over the fence into the pasture. The old wire and rotting posts hold, thank god. I walk briskly, parallel to the heifer’s path, hoping to get in front of her. But she’s having none of it, and now decided she wants to see what’s out there, in the wide world beyond the end of the lane.
Back over the fence I go, and run to the car. By which time that damn heifer is ambling up the road, a quarter mile, maybe two thirds of the way to Johnny’s farm. A car is coming from the north but the woman driving (maybe Johnny’s wife?) knows what she is doing. She’s got the heifer turned around, and is following slowly and 40 yards behind.
I’m blocking the driveway now, so I shoot out across the road, pray that the soil beneath Hurley’s winter wheat is firm, and do a quick fishtail, and wait. The heifer hustles past. By now it’s clear, she’s a little freaked and wants back into the comfort of her herd. She turns into the lane again. The lady passes. I wave. The lady smiles, or grimaces, I’m not sure. And I pull into the lane behind the heifer. I get Heather on the phone. “Come on! get the gate.” She does, but is standing too close. I get on the phone to tell her to step away, but she has already done so. The heifer zips through the gate, back into the pasture.
The phone beside me on the seat, “What? What do you want?”
The kids are already in the minivan. Heather closes the gate and climbs in. They won’t even be late. That coffee is going to taste amazing.
Any god or demigod worth a damn comes in multiple manifestations. You got your young, sneering Elvis and your sequined jumpsuit and scarf Elvis; you got your baby Jesus and your bearded sandal-wearing Jesus–and even your t-shirt and tuxedo-wearing Jesus. So it is with any figure who exists in a space between man and myth. Jesus, Elvis, Merle. You could certainly come up with more names, but those three for sure.
I’ve been thinking and worrying a lot about the only one of that trinity still living, who has gone into the hospital and cancelled his March tour dates. The 78-year-old Merle Haggard, indefatigable musical genius and ornery old American treasure, ranks up there with the coolest human beings on the planet, but I also have a soft spot and fascination for the just-starting-out Merle. You can get a sense of what I mean in these two vintage shots, part of a series of weird outtakes from his Branded Man album that is reproduced in the excellent booklet accompanying the Bear Family Untamed Hawk box set.
You might expect the handsome unlined face, intense gaze, and the full head of hair, but might find surprising the urban attire, the windbreaker and the pointy-toed Cuban-heeled boots. At the very onset of his career, Merle seemed to have kicked back hard against any sort of “country” image. “I’ve never been in the hills in my life. I’m a city boy. But I’m a real country singer,” quoth the notes from Untamed Hawk, unsourced alas.
On a recent drive to and from Nashville (a place Haggard notoriously hated fwiw) I became obsessed with “Today I Started Loving You Again,” spare and minimal but absolutely perfect: the simplicity of the loping guitar line; the echo accentuating the purity and ache of Hag’s voice (what a glorious instrument it was back then, before life and the road took away the higher part of his register); those accent harmonies, a genius musical idea that was apparently a gift from Buck Owens. Oh, and nailing those accent harmonies, none other than the former Mrs. Owens, then Mrs. Haggard, who was a bigger star than either of them when it all started, and somehow wound up “washin’ and ironin’ and pickin’ up” on the Haggard tour bus….
(That “washin’ and ironin'” line is from a wonderful Laura Cantrell song about Bonnie called “Queen of the Coast,” which I can’t recommend highly enough.)
Unbelievably, TISLYA was a b-side to “The Legend of Bonnie and Clyde,” which was a #1 hit on the country charts, but not much thought of now. TISLYA is now one of his best-loved songs, and it nags me to think it might have been an afterthought. A b-side? I wonder if Haggard and the guys in the studio know they had something special, or did they just record TISLYA as another song to fill up an album. Haggard brought his band into the Capitol Tower for 21 sessions in 1968. The core band of Roy Nichols, Bonnie Owens, Jerry Ward, Roy Burris, George French, and Norman Hamlett, sometimes joined by Glen Campbell, Billy Mize, and James Burton. It was a period of ridiculous creativity, and it might have been hard for the musicians to separate the great from the ordinary. Making immortal music was just a day’s work.
“I had a pain that went all the way around from my belly button all the way around to my back.” Haggard told Rolling Stone in February. “I asked the doctor, ‘What was that pain?’ He said, ‘It was death.'”
It’s the second time this year he’s had to check in to sort out his pneumonia. I can only hope, maybe even pray, Hag kicks death’s ass one more time.
He flopped his wings and raised a whoop. ‘Come here!’ he says, ‘Come here, everybody; hang’d if this fool hasn’t been trying to fill up a house with acorns!’
If you have never read Jim Baker’s Blue Jay Yarn, there is no better introduction than having it read to you by Walter Brennan.
Although the more I think about it, the more I see differences between a blue jay trying to fill a cabin with acorns and whatever crazy Call of Duty-inspired schemes the Pentagon is seeking to fund with billions and billions of taxpayer dollars. The blue jay was operating in good faith. Not sure I can say the same about Ash Carter, or whoever sits at his desk at any given moment.
Creating enemies who are periodically capable of spectacular acts of cruelty, but who present no significant (‘existential’) threat, then fighting that enemy, in a war you announce at the beginning cannot possibly have an end point. That seems more like a racket–a way to guarantee that the contracts keep rolling–than an earnest attempt to win. Winning the war on terror would be the worst thing for the Pentagon budget.
I expect to hear absolutely nothing about the $582 billion budget presented by Ash Carter from the GOP debates, except demands that it be larger still, but am a bit disappointed, if not surprised, that the two remaining candidates for the Democratic nomination are not talking about reducing it.
I honestly was not going to go there when I started writing this piece, but a quick search on Sanders and “military budget” lead me, indirectly, to a David Swanson piece laying out Green Party candidate Jill Stein’s vision for dramatically reducing military spending. Everything Stein says is spot on, and her proposals–to reduce military spending by half, mainly by shutting down military bases abroad, and reducing the nuclear arsenal–are rational and considered. What reasonable person could object?
My enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders is substantial, but not unconditional. I can understand why he would avoid confrontation on military spending because he prioritizes his domestic agenda. But a sizable percentage of the funds to finance his single payer and free college proposals could be found in the bloated, wasteful Pentagon budget, if only he were bold enough to go there.
But this is a good time to remember that Stein was arrested in 2012 for trying to attend a Presidential debate, as was Ralph Nader a dozen years previously.
So … back to Mark Twain …
“You may call a jay a bird. Well, so he is, in a measure– but he’s got feathers on him, and don’t belong to no church, perhaps; but otherwise he is just as much human as you be. And I’ll tell you for why. A jay’s gifts, and instincts, and feelings, and interests, cover the whole ground. A jay hasn’t got any more principle than a Congressman. A jay will lie, a jay will steal, a jay will deceive, a jay will betray; and four times out of five, a jay will go back on his solemnest promise.”
Update, July 14, 2016: The news today is that Hillary Clinton’s once-formidable lead has 
