"Before Canadian musicians like Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen, there was Ian Tyson."

"Mr. Tyson... began his music career as half of the folk-era duo Ian and Sylvia and went on to become a revered figure in his home country.... [His] song 'Four Strong Winds' in 2005 was voted the most essential Canadian piece of music by the listeners of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation public radio network...." 

From "Ian Tyson, Revered Canadian Folk Singer, Dies at 89/A rancher for most of his life, he began his music career as half of the folk-era duo Ian and Sylvia and was also celebrated for his commitment to the culture of Canada’s ranch country" (NYT).

 

"In 1962, they moved to New York and became mainstays in the emergent American folk scene, and friends with Bob Dylan and his girlfriend Suze Rotolo, who described Mr. Tyson as 'movie-star handsome' and 'the best looking of all the cowboy dudes in Greenwich Village' in her 2008 memoir, 'A Freewheelin’ Time.'... 

"A 2008 profile in The Globe and Mail when he was nearing 75 captured some of the details of it at his T-Bar-Y ranch: The 6 a.m.-to-6 p.m. work schedule. The Monday washing (five pairs of Wranglers to get him through the week). The 'mean, garlicky' buffalo he cooked... 'I became a historian, a chronicler of this way of life... and this way of life is just about over. The cowboys are all gone.'  It was a theme he often came back to. 'People tell me, Tyson, you’re always longing for the old days... And they’re right, that’s true — I live in the past. And it was way better.'"

"Bidin' My Time."

That amazing video was entirely new to me and just uncovered as a consequence of getting involved in the word "abide" — see the first post of today — after Elon Musk used it in a tweet that polls about whether he should step down as "head of Twitter."

And please note: I had absolutely no thought — until I began this sentence — of gesturing — even in the slightest — at the homophonic name of the President of the United States. But feel free to rewrite the Gershwin lyrics... or just leave them as is:

Next year, next year
Somethin's bound to happen
This year, this year
I'll just keep on nappin'

"There are a lot of things that are too cowy to run on National Public Radio, like talking about cow poop too much. For example, I can have someone slip in poop, but not have someone slapped in the face with it."

Said Baxter Black, quoted in "Baxter Black, Who Elevated Cowboy Poetry to Folk Art, Dies at 77/His wide-ranging work, including books, speeches and regular appearances on NPR, celebrated cowpokes, feed lots and life on the range" (NYT).

"I’m sorry, he was being a little bit of a B-I-T-C-H. He’s not a cowboy; he’s an actor. The West is a mythic space and there’s a lot of room on the range. I think it’s a little bit sexist."

Said Jane Campion, quoted in "Jane Campion Says Sam Elliott is ‘Being a B-I-T-C-H’ With Slam Against ‘The Power of the Dog’" (Variety). 

Here's my post from 10 days ago about what Sam Elliott said: "What the fuck does this woman—she’s a brilliant director by the way, I love her work, previous work—but what the fuck does this woman from down there, New Zealand, know about the American west?" 

"What the fuck does this woman—she’s a brilliant director by the way, I love her work, previous work—but what the fuck does this woman from down there, New Zealand, know about the American west?"

"And why in the fuck does she shoot this movie in New Zealand and call it Montana and say, ‘This is the way it was.’ That fucking rubbed me the wrong way, pal. And the myth is that they were, you know, these macho men out there with the cattle.... I just come from fucking Texas where I was hanging out with families.... Not men, but families—big, long, extended, multiple-generation families that made their living, and their lives were all about being cowboys. And, boy, when I fucking saw [Power of the Dog] , I thought, ‘What the fuck? Where are we in this world today?'... I mean, Cumberbatch never got out of his fucking chaps!"

Said Sam Elliott, on Marc Maron's podcast, quoted in "Sam Elliott Proclaims ‘Power of the Dog’ a ‘Piece of Sh-t’/The veteran actor is not a fan of Jane Campion’s Oscar-nominated cowboy movie" (L.A. Magazine).

Elliott complained about the "allusions to homosexuality throughout the fucking movie," and Marc Maron suggested "that’s what the movie’s about." And, really, why can't a cowboy movie be about anything? I guess it's irritating to see excessive honoring of a movie that's in your genre and made by an outsider to that milieu. But why can't that be the artistic leverage, the filmmaker's outsiderdom?

"You know what's nice? A horse trough. Sit out in that. You change the water every day. Siphon it out. Use it in the garden."

Said Meade, when the topic of inflatable backyard pools came up in a news report (they're selling well, these days, we're told).

This guy did it — spent $29 [OR: did he say $129?]:



ADDED: I did a little more googling and am seeing this referred to as a "hillbilly hot tub." I say that to Meade, and he says "I invented it — 40 years ago," then adds that a lot of other guys also "invented" it. And now that I'm thinking about it, I remember seeing many TV/movie cowboys getting immersed in a horse trough (against their will). Something about like this...



That's the sort of high jinks I'm picturing for our backyard. You can play too!

BONUS: If you scroll back to the beginning of that cowboy video — for the non-horse-trough part of the fighting — you'll hear different music. I was trying to figure out what that song was, and the lyrics came to me... He's the pip... he's the king, but above everything...



Notice that Top Cat's trash can is made of galvanized steel — same as a backyard guy's horse trough.

"The Compton Cowboys, a close-knit club of friends, joined thousands of people for a peaceful trip through Compton on Sunday."

"The club, which formed in 2017 to dispel stereotypes against black people, welcomed all riders for a march from Gateway Towne Center to Compton City Hall."

"I wasn't that comfortable with all the psycho polemic babble. It wasn't my particular feast of food."

"Even the current news made me nervous. I liked the old news better."

Wrote Bob Dylan in his great book "Chronicles." I don't know if the Nobel Committee included that book in its reasons for giving him their big award, but I loved "Chronicles" and blogged it in detail, chapter by chapter, back in 2004. You can find all the old posts with the "Dylan's 'Chronicles'" tag.

Ah! That tag got me to a 2013 post reacting to a NYT piece by Bill Wyman (not that Bill Wyman) about how Bob Dylan could win the Nobel Prize for Literature. I said:

It's hard to believe Bob Dylan would like the Nobel Prize. It's just a topic to write articles about and to get traffic flowing wherever they're published. Remember the backstory to the song "Day of the Locusts":

"Sara was trying to get Bob to go to Princeton University, where he was being presented with an honorary doctorate. Bob did not want to go. I said, 'C'mon, Bob it's an honor!' Sara and I both worked on him for a long time. Finally, he agreed. I had a car outside, a big limousine. That was the first thing he didn't like.... When we arrived at Princeton, they took us to a little room and Bob was asked to wear a cap and gown. He refused outright. They said, 'We won't give you the degree if you don't wear this.' Dylan said, 'Fine. I didn't ask for it in the first place.'..."

Anyway, I was thinking about that line "There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke," as we were talking about the old aphorism "Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel" (which I attributed to Racine, and a commenter said was really from Horace Walpole). Bob Dylan also sings about getting a letter in which he was asked how he was doing: "Was that some kind of joke?" But there's more to comedy than jokes, so his contempt for jokes shouldn't mark him as a nonthinker, even if we take the old Walpole saying as gospel.

But back to that Dylan quote in the title. That's from Chapter 5, the last chapter of "Chronicles," blogged here (where there are links to the posts on the earlier chapters).

How people felt about Communists in northern Minnesota: "People weren't scared of them, seemed to be a big to-do over nothing." P. 271....

Dylan's favorite politician: Barry Goldwater. P. 283.

Why: "[he] reminded me of Tom Mix."

Meanwhile, back from the ranch...

... Meade brought pictures of the cowboy's dog:



More pictures of Rollo at The Puparazzo. I don't know who or what Rollo is named after — here's Wikipedia's disambiguation page for "Rollo" — but my first association is Rollo the rich kid in the great comic strip "Nancy":

"It's kept me for 30 years out of the dry embrace of the computer."

"It" = a Hermes 3000 typewriter, "surely one of the noblest instruments of European genius."

The quote is from Larry McMurtry, on the occasion of winning the Golden Globe award for the screenplay for "Brokeback Mountain." I'm reading that, from 2006, because I just got around, after all these years to making a Larry McMurtry tag for this blog. I dislike tag proliferation, and I avoid making a tag for individuals unless I think they'll be used a few times. It turned out there were 4 old posts with Larry McMurtry's name in them.

The other 3 are:

1. Larry McMurtry effusing over Diane Keaton: "She told me she hoped to be complicated, someday."

2. Larry McMurtry answering questions from a NYT interviewer, including ""What, exactly, do you think cowboys represent, other than the triumph of alpha males?" Answer:

Cowboys are a symbol of a freer time, when people could go all the way from Canada to Mexico without seeing a fence. They stand for good ol' American values, like self-reliance.

Maybe some American values, but you can't say that cowboys were ever interested in spreading democracy.

No, they were interested in spreading fascism.

3. Here's the good, timelessly timely one: "Larry McMurtry raves (literally) about Clinton's book." Clinton is Bill Clinton, and the book is "My Life." Let's go back and read what McMurtry banged out on his juicy Hermes 3000 back in 2004:

Undoubtedly he has occasionally made time for bedroom sports, but not much time. Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky may be three of the nicest ladies in America, but their "conquest," however we are to understand that term, does not make Clinton the world's No. 1 ladies' man, or even the No. 1 ladies' man of northwest Washington....

The very press that wanted to discredit him and perhaps even run him out of town instead made him a celebrity, a far more expensive thing than a mere president....

And somehow, vaguely, it all has to do with sex - not necessarily sex performed, just sex in the world's head. I doubt myself that Bill Clinton's sex life has been all that different from anybody else's: pastures of plenty, pastures of less than plenty, pastures he should get out of immediately, and not a few acres of scorched earth.

During the silly time when Clinton was pilloried for wanting to debate the meaning of "is," I often wondered why no one pointed out that he was educated by Jesuits, for whom the meaning of "is" is a matter not lightly resolved.

"What did Lincoln say at Gettysburg?"

A scene from the 1935 movie "Ruggles of Red Gap":

The climax of the film is Laughton’s recitation of the Gettysburg Address (something that does not happen in the original story). This occurs in a saloon filled with typical American Western characters, none of whom can recall any of the lines but are spellbound by the speech. Newly imbued with the spirit of democracy and self-determination, [the English butler, Marmaduke] Ruggles becomes his own man, giving up his previous employment and opening a restaurant in Red Gap.

The scene is unbearably, magnificently corny, to the point where... well, what did you feel? Did it get you in the end? There's the part where Ruggles is whispering the words to himself, as if he's praying, and the upshot of the recitation which is: I want to open a restaurant! A beanery!

Here's the original book — sans Lincoln rhetoric — by Harry Leon Wilson, whom I was reading about this morning as a consequence of my curiosity — see the previous post — about the phrase "as all get-out."

There's only one mention of Lincoln in the original. The "I" is Ruggles, the butler, who is reading a printed card headed "Take Courage!"

"Demosthenes was the son of a cutler," it began. "Horace was the son of a shopkeeper. Virgil's father was a porter. Cardinal Wolsey was the son of a butcher. Shakespeare the son of a wool-stapler." Followed the obscure parentage of such well-known persons as Milton, Napoleon, Columbus, Cromwell. Even Mohammed was noted as a shepherd and camel-driver, though it seemed rather questionable taste to include in the list one whose religion, as to family life, was rather scandalous. More to the point was the citation of various Americans who had sprung from humble beginnings: Lincoln, Johnson, Grant, Garfield, Edison. It is true that there was not, apparently, a gentleman's servant among them; they were rail-splitters, boatmen, tailors, artisans of sorts, but the combined effect was rather overwhelming.

"I liked Senator Goldwater because he was a rugged individualist who swam against the political tide."

Reading the previous post out loud to Meade, I get to that quote, and he says "Bob Dylan!" And I say, "No! That's from Hillary Clinton's memoir!" The post is mostly about Hillary, but Bob Dylan is in there too. Meade thought it was something Dylan wrote in his memoir "Chronicles."

What Bob Dylan wrote was:

I had a primitive way of looking at things and I liked country fair politics. My favorite politician was Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, who reminded me of Tom Mix, and there wasn't any way to explain that to anybody. I wasn't comfortable with all the psycho polemic babble. It wasn't my particular feast of food. Even the current news made me nervous. I like the old news better.

I'd blogged about that when "Chronicles" came out and Meade's Hillary/Bob mixup got me looking for that old post. Searching my blog for "Dylan Goldwater," the first thing I found was this post from June 2008, about none other than Hillary Clinton.  She's everywhere! Just then, she was withdrawing from the presidential race. She gave a good speech, and I'd said: "Oh, Hillary, why weren't you like this all along?"

There's no mention of Bob Dylan in that June 2008 post. And, interestingly, the first commenter is Meade (a man I had not yet met). He quotes Hillary's "So today, I am standing with Senator Obama to say: Yes we can" and adds "Gag me." Despite Meade's tendency to bring up Bob Dylan, it wasn't Meade who dragged him in. It was a commenter named L. E. Lee who hijacked the thread to say:

"I was even more surprised that Bob Dylan said that he supports Barack Obama this past week. I do not remember Dylan ever endorsing a candidate for political office before."

Meade responded: "L.E.Lee, It's widely known that, like Hillary..., Bob Dylan was a supporter of Barry Goldwater in 1964." Lee demands evidence, Meade tells him to Google "Dylan Goldwater Chronicles," and I make a comment:

If you do that Google search for Dylan and Goldwater, I hope you find this old post of mine where -- as I elaborately blogged "Chronicles" -- I wrote:

Dylan's favorite politician: Barry Goldwater. P. 283.

Why: "[he] reminded me of Tom Mix."

Bob Dylan song that mentions Goldwater: "I Shall Be Free, No. 10."

I provided the relevant lyric:

Now, I'm liberal, but to a degree
I want ev'rybody to be free
But if you think that I'll let Barry Goldwater
Move in next door and marry my daughter
You must think I'm crazy!
I wouldn't let him do it for all the farms in Cuba.

And that's what I said immediately this morning when Meade brought up Dylan and Goldwater: "But if you think that I'll let Barry Goldwater/Move in next door and marry my daughter/You must think I'm crazy!" Back in 2008, what I did was to go on to write another post, about Bob Dylan and Barack Obama, "What did Bob Dylan say about Barack Obama — and what did he mean?"

In the then-present, which was before dawn, I was reading the new post out loud to Meade, because I want his okay for the use of quotes from him, and the material you see above in this post seemed like it needed to go at the bottom of that post I was trying to finish. I was struggling to get to the end of the whole long string of Stringband-and-Dylan-and-Hillary-and-Althouse-and-Meade and "Fishes stop and ask me where I am bound"-sense-and-nonsense.

And Meade was piling on, saying things like:

The first President Barry was almost President Goldwater... Dreams from My Goldwater... Fishes swimming in the gold water....

By then, the sun was up, and the post was up, without the update, because the update itself would need another out-loud read, what with the additional Meade quotes. It was a new morning, and this is a new post.

Can’t you feel that sun a-shinin’?
Groundhog runnin’ by the country stream
This must be the day that all of my dreams come true

Are there fishes in the stream, wondering where you're bound? What does the groundhog say? And will the Dreams from My Goldwater ever come true?

Is it wrong to call the man who delivers the President's talking points his "point man"?

This question came up in this morning's post about "Meet the Press," where I'd written that David Gregory introduced Gene Sperling as "President Obama's economic point man," and I quipped "He's the 'point man,' on the show to give the Administration's points."

In the comments, Kevin said:

Cowgirls emailing cowgirls.

Neo-Neocon — a propos of my post showing me in cowgirl dress at age 4 — emails to show me her picture of herself at approximately age 4, dressed as a cowgirl:



She was inspired by Jane Russell (in "Son of Paleface"). I was inspired by... can you tell?... one of my readers could...



... Sally Starr.

"University of Colorado Boulder tells students to avoid costumes including cowboys, indians, white trash or anything potentially deemed offensive."

Reports the U.K. Telegraph. It's the U.K., so maybe something's lost in the translation. I see they don't capitalize "indians." (I'm offended!)

But what's offensive about cowboys?

A university spokesman called cowboy costumes a "crude stereotype."

Okay, I'll just go as a university spokesman.

ADDED: Here's a picture of me, back in the 1950s, before I learned about the horrors of crude stereotypes:

That story about Bin Laden wearing a cowboy hat needed a picture, "even if only an artist's rendering."

Said Freeman Hunt yesterday, causing me to invite artist's renderings, and then the artistic renderer of the idea that there should be an artistic rendering, emailed the very artist's rendering requested:



Freeman's subject line is "Osama Says Howdy," and she adds "Really more 'Hhoody.'" And I can trust Freeman not to trick me into putting up something... for example... racist. Or should I worry about that, in these last days of the Zimmerman trial... hhoody....

"This article should not have been published without a picture, even if only an artist's rendering."

"There's only one thing that anyone who clicks that headline wants to see."

Emails Freeman Hunt, referring to guess what headline?

"Bin Laden was in the habit of wearing a cowboy hat in his Abbottabad compound because he thought it would shield him from U.S. drones."

What exactly was the thinking there?

Strange ideas of the paranormal.

My Google alert on "roadside memorial" turned up this item at examiner.com:



I've already blogged about the underlying story (as another in my long series of posts about makeshift death-site memorials). This post is about the mistake of putting the story under the already stupid "astrology & paranormal" tag. Did somebody at the Examiner think actual ghosts — to the extent that makes any sense — were involved? Like, maybe it was some college town variation on the old "Ghost Riders in the Sky" legend:

"(Ghost) Riders in the Sky: A Cowboy Legend" is a country and cowboy-style song [that] tells a folk tale of a cowboy who has a vision of red-eyed, steel-hooved cattle thundering across the sky, being chased by the spirits of damned cowboys. One warns him that if he does not change his ways, he will be doomed to join them, forever "trying to catch the Devil's herd across these endless skies."

Here's Marty Robbins singing the song. Or if you prefer: Johnny Cash. Or here it is by the singer who possesses the voice that is the first singing voice that I ever heard and thought: This is the greatest voice ever. I must have been about 4 years old at the time, considering the year that the greatest recording ever — as I saw it — came out (1955).

But back to "Ghost Riders." Here are the lyrics. I'd love parody lyrics applicable to apparitions of college-town bike riders.

"Lots of photos of Perry having nothing whatsoever to do with this story, and not a single one of the rock. Well done, WP!"

The first comment at a Washington Post article about how Rick Perry, early in his career, used to host events at a hunting camp where there was a rock that had the word "Niggerhead" painted on it.

Ranchers who once grazed cattle on the 1,070-acre parcel on the Clear Fork of the Brazos River called it by that name well before Perry and his father, Ray, began hunting there in the early 1980s. There is no definitive account of when the rock first appeared on the property. In an earlier time, the name on the rock was often given to mountains and creeks and rock outcroppings across the country. Over the years, civil rights groups and government agencies have had some success changing those and other racially offensive names that dotted the nation’s maps.

Does this have anything to do with Rick Perry (who, asked about the rock, said the word is an "offensive name that has no place in the modern world")? Well, yes, if you're inclined to think that Perry's rural Texas background has bred something nasty into him:

Perry has spoken often about how his upbringing in this sparsely populated farming community influenced his conservatism. He has rarely, if ever, discussed what it was like growing up amid segregation in an area where blacks were a tiny fraction of the population.

So what's he hiding, eh?

Reading on, we see that — according to Perry — Perry's father leased the property in 1983, and the first thing he did was paint over the word on the rock. And every time Perry saw the rock, it was painted over. But WaPo found 7 individuals who say they remember seeing the name on the rock during the time when Perry's father's name was on the lease. And:

Longtime hunters, cowboys and ranchers said this particular place was known by that name as long as they could remember, and still is.

“The cowboys, when they were gathering cattle, they’d say they’re going to the Matthews or Niggerhead or the Nail” pastures, said Bill Reed, a distributor for Coors beer in nearby Abilene who used to lease a hunting parcel adjacent to the Perrys’. “Those were all names. Nobody thought anything about it.”...

“You know, Texas is a little different — you go where it’s comfortable,” Reed said. “. . . It would have been one thing if [the Perrys] had named it, but they didn’t. So, it’s basically a figure of speech as far as most people are concerned. No one thought anything about it.”

No one thought anything about it. Those who are looking for a racial issue to play know how to jump on a phrase like that. Okay, then, let him who is without sin cast the first rock.