Saturday, March 20, 2010

Riding the Muse, or Gangbanging Her... Your Call

My friend Laird alerted me to this wonderful video of Townes Van Zant singing and then talking about a song of his called "Mr. Mud and Mr. Gold."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJtDWusEFkE&feature=related

It's a song about a poker game, told as though it was a Greek mythic tale, or maybe that story about the sun and the wind betting on who can get the Jonah to take off his coat. The images are so fast and furious it should be listened to several times. I love the way Townes brings the perspective back to gritty reality at the very last moment. I've had a few moments when songs wrote themselves like he describes. It hasn't happened in a good while, and there's no "making" it happen. I think you have to be in some kind of open state of mind that isn't easily called up. There was a period of time in my life when I was writing almost a song a day. It came and went. I made a CD out of some of them, and there's at least another very solid CD I should make. For a few years I went out and played solo gigs, performing a whole bunch of my songs. It wore me out, so these days I do one or two when Libby and I play, and one or two with the boys (Craver, Hicks, Watson, Newberry Band). There's so many other songs I'd like to be doing, but it's a thankless job as far as I can see, at the moment. All my extra energy goes into picking up rocks right now, but we did get through the winter and there's not much need for more firewood till October, so maybe I'll find some time.

Anyways, aside from just the fact that it's a great song, I like the fact that Townes just trusted the magic and laid it out for us. That's what we all should do more of. I'll get to writing about some movies that do that one of these days, because they're so damn hard to find. At the moment I want to say a little something about a TV show on FX that takes the other, dark road. "Justified" started last week. It's set in Harlan County, KY, more or less in the present but with elements of fantasy rather like how "Firefly" manages to be a Western and a spaceship story at the same time. Tim Oliphant is repising (more or less) his character in "Deadwood" (one of the greatest series of all time--topped only by "The Wire"), but set in a present which somehow allows him to practice the old-west code of the fast draw, i.e., "He drew first so I shot him dead." Oliphant is exiled to a place so wild that such a code is still acceptable, namely, Harlan County, KY.

When Oliphant arrives there--and it turns out he's actually from there and knows most of the principals in the first episode from childhood, having "dug coal" with one of them and probably spent some intimate moments with another, the pretty blonde, hard-drinking self-widowing woman who greets him with a long tongue-kiss when he walks up to her door--he's right back home. His "opponent", played by Walter Goggins from "The Shield," is a racist, neo-nazi skinhead stone-cold killer. But he has great teeth--apparently he doesn't do meth. We meet him when he shoots a missle at a black church conveniently run by a dope-dealing rastah, then shoots his companion in the back of the head afterwards well, just because. While this is going on, the widow lady is trying to get Oliphant upstairs, after describing how she killed her abusive hubby with a shotgun while he was eating his favorite meal at their dining room table. There's quite the bloodstain on the rug, another reminder of "Deadwood," where they were always mopping up the blood.

So the confrontation ensues in the time allowed, and the quick-draw is accomplished, but the bad guy doesn't die, so maybe there will be a rematch. I doubt I'll watch. It's not that there aren't some good things about "Justified." There certainly are nazi skinheads around, and they are rarely admitted to the culture-mirror that is television. This one gets to actually say the stuff they believe--mud people, Jewish conspiracy theories, pretty much the whole nine yards, then conveniently rebutted by Marshall Oliphant in a minute or two, so's to get on with the shooting. But all this shit is being filmed in Harlan County, KY, or at least some place that looks a lot like it. That is, this show is using the real locations. But it's suggesting that all you'll find in Bloody Harlan is federal marshalls and nazi skinheads. And if you think that's true, you should watch a real documentary about the place, called "Harlan County, USA."

"Justified" reminds me of two things. One is the Cohen brothers' travesty, in "Oh Brother," of putting Ralph Stanley's voice under a klan hood, singing "Oh Death." I'm sorry. That's a turd in a punch bowl. The other thing is the old Mitchum movie, "Thunder Road." That's another Appalachian cliche of a story, with nothing but moonshiners and marshalls and fast car rides. I'm not saying there isn't violence in Appalachia. Hell, Ralph Stanley's wonderful lead singer Roy Lee Centers was murdered back in the '70s, and I went to a fiddler's convention in Independence, Va., one time where there were competing circles of entertainment after the actual contest was over: in the middle of one circle was a jam session; in the other there was a knife fight going on. But I've spent more than enough time in Appalachia to know that the skinheads are still few and far between, that mostly it's good people living in a beautiful if rugged place. "Justified" is way way too easy. How convenient that the bombed church is "really" a phony church. How convenient that no one is in the least emotionally touched by the swirl of violence--that a pretty widow who just blasted her husband with a shotgun can still swill bourbon with the Marshall in the middle of the afternoon, and suggest a roll in the hay.

Go watch "Harlan County, USA." Consider the scene when the striker who's been shot in the head is lying in the hospital on the ventilating machine, or the moment when the camera finds bits of his brains on the asphalt. Understand the context of that moment when the wife of a striker pulls a pistol out of her bra and brandishes it in front of the strike meeting. "Justified" suggests that its arch villain started out a coal miner, and became embittered to the point of embracing the swastika. I realize, of course, that the writers just want to give us some semi-realistic context for the gunplay that is the raison d'etre. But really, what an insult to Appalachia generally, and Harlan County in particular. If they'd wanted to make a better start with this idea, maybe they should have used Steve Earle's "Copper Head Road" as the theme song, and taken it seriously. Instead, it's just cheap thrills and a bid to draw in the "Deadwood" crowd with Oliphant.

In my book, you gotta know when to hold 'em. Now there's a popular poker song, huh? Townes is dead, Kenny Rogers is alive and living in Las Vegas.

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