[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bczvAmX-7wc[/youtube]
Tag Archives: Books
God’s Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre
God’s Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre by Richard Grant
It’s no great feat for a travel writer to make me long for white-sandy beaches, warm turquoise oceans and ice cold cervezas. It’s a much more challenging feat for a writer make me want to risk my life and travel up the Devil’s Backbone, Mexico’s violent and exotic Sierra Madre Occidental, where last of Geronimo’s Apache braves are rumored to have taken refuge and the birth and assassination local for Pancho Villa. Richard Grant, a ex-pat Brit and freelance journalist with a pair of balls as large as his sense of adventure and and equal measures of level of self-delusion and self-preservation has done just that.
When French surrealist André Breton visited Mexico he commented, “Our art movement is not needed in this country.” Grant gives truth to this statement with his fantastic book “God’s Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre” by delving into a land of contradictions, desperate poverty, elaborate narco-mansions, and levels of casual cultural violence that can only be paralleled to America to the 17th century wild west or the current history of parts of the Middle East. People are killed, woman are raped and then forced to marry their rapist, goofd people are forced into raising “the crop that sells” just to feed their families and the locals shrug their shoulders in the existential futility of ” ¿Qué puede ser hecha?”
Poor farmers, forced by the drug cartels to grow marijuana and opium, are harassed by the police and military when rival drug lords pay them as muscle to destroy or simply steal their crops. These same families follow chains of revenge that wipe out entire families and the drug lords pray to their own “narco-saint”, Jesús Malverde, so the federales will not see their crops and that their bullets fly straight and true.
Young men are hired as narco-vaqueros and lurk the streets as muscle blaring narcocorrido (A Mexican version of Gangsta Rap) blaring from 30k trucks speakers and brandishing their “cuerno de chivo” which translate to “goat’s horn” and refers to the curved magazine clip in the armament of choice, the AK47. The danger is tweaked upward with handfuls of cocaine chased down by cases of beer and Lechuguilla, a variety of potent bootleg tequila that, if drunk right from the still, can permanently damage your throat.
It’s not all dire, the Gringo meets up with some interesting and funny characters not least of all author and real cowboy Joe Brown. And his direct translations of the colloquial curses are hysterical.
During his journey into the place where “first the event happens, then it is denied, and then the myths are created” Grant reflects on his bourgeois ennui that set him on his treacherous journey and ultimately attempts to make more out of it, something more noble then just a Gonzo walkabout. His attempts at nobility are arguable, but there’s no debate that it led to a great story.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2KBtzEQNAs[/youtube]
Willie Nelson: An Epic Life – Contest
As part of the all month celebration that is Willie Nelson’s 75th birthday I got my hands on an extra copy of the just released biography on the Texas Yoda “Willie Nelson: An Epic Life” by by Joe Nick Patoski. The book will go to the first peron to correctly answer the following:
We got a winner. Congratulations Patricia! Way to know your Willie!
Can you match Willie’s duet partner with the songs below (in order)?
- Seven Spanish Angels
- Beer for My Horses
- Touch Me
- I Gotta Get Drunk
- To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before
- Old Friends
- Boxcar’s My Home
- Pancho and Lefty
- You Left Me a Long, Long Time Ago
- Bob Wills Is Still the King
Dixie Lullaby – Review
Dixie Lullaby : A Story of Music, Race, and New Beginnings in a New South (Free Press/Simon & Schuster) by Mark Kemp
Kemp is a native of South Carolina and born in 1960 and came of age at the time the civil rights movement kicked into the high gear and the old Jim Crow order of the South was breaking down. During a time when kids are trying to find their identity it was even more difficult for a son of the South during those turbulent times.
Kemp found refuge in the then burgeoning Southern rock bands, led by the Macon, Georgia’s Allman Brothers Band and followed soon after my Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Charlie Daniels Band, Black Oak Arkansas, Molly Hatchet, Blackfoot, the Marshall Tucker band. Though also infatuated with many of the British Invasion bands these other bands were
tapping subject matter in styles that working class white Southerners could use to help the transition of identity in the New South.
The seemingly paradoxical identity, what Patterson Hood of the Drive By Truckers refers to on the bands opus “Southern Rock Opera” as the “Duality of the Southern Thing” manifested itself in a generation of young Southerners that are both proud of their environment but ashamed at the history that haunts it. Kemp grows to reject Southern music and much of his heritage, moves to New York City where he lands, and due largely to drug problem loses, his dream job at Rolling Stone Magazine. Kemp’s personal journey is nicely paralleled with his Southern travels with his Dad and interviews with musicians and
key individuals like Charlie Daniels, Warren Haynes of the Allman Brothers Band and Gov’t Mule, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Ed King and so many others. Some of the highlights of the book is the conversations with Phil Walden, former manager for Otis Redding and the Allman Bothers and founder of the fabled Capricorn Records and his 1992 interview with testy Black Crowes singer Chris Robinson who apparently bristles at the Southern Rock moniker.
I’m within a few years of Mr. Kemp and grew up in a suburb of Dallas, Texas, and I can attest that the stories in “Dixie Lullaby” ring true to experience in leaving the South for New York City (as Kemp did) and carrying a sort of defensive pride for my roots. This comes out most prevalently was what I like to call the “ugly sister effect.” I can talk shit about Texas all day long (corrupt politicians abuse of the death penalty for one), but it makes me mad when others not from the South, and sometimes never been South of the Mason/Dixon, talks trash about the region. Like I can say my sister’s ugly (she’s not though, sorry sis) but by god if you do you’ll get your ass handed to you. Complex, no?
Dixie Lullaby is a great piece of Southern cultural history well told.
