The Last American Cowboy

What is a critique of masculinity? Is it trying to get men in touch with their feelings? Is it simply a rebuke of violent solutionism? An exploration of power as a simple machine for leveraging positive outcomes, and the  historic/cultural distribution of the means of that power to men? Perhaps on one level. Or is a critique of masculinity a look at the way social constructions of manhood, maleness, and masculinity create a severely limited menu of options from which to process emotions, traumas, and joys? Perhaps it is both. What I do know is that a ‘Critique of Masculinity’ has become something of a filmic buzzword over the last, let's say half decade. If the article “Men are in Trouble and Hollywood Wants to Help” , written by Manohla Dargis for the New York Times in 2019, I am not alone in my estimation that trying to get men in touch their feelings has become a very prevalent artistic framework. 

Questions such as these, mean a great deal to me. I am a butch transgender dyke. I have not undergone hormone therapy or any surgeries and I got deeper into masculinity as I came into my own womanhood. To me the pop cultural lens around masculinity is gendered to a level that might never be separated out. It makes me dysphoric. In the article Dargis talks about what critic Raymond Duggan called ‘male weepies’, the kind of bloody and emotional action films that have been the mainstay of dad and uncle dvd collections for years. Something like Saving Private Ryan. I have always loved that hard edged masculine tenderness which exists in a war flick, a position that plants me, critically speaking, in maleness. We hav known that butchness is nonbinary, so not much new there. I thought Tom Hanks' casting in Saving was transcendent when I first saw it in honors American studies. I couldn’t quite explain why until now, because of the way Hanks has alway represented what can be seen as the best facets of American hetero normative masculinity, in additon to the great things Hanks brings to a role as an actor. He is comforting and sensitive while still being a firm figure. I think groups of women make me feel ousted more often than not. So something like a male weepie lets me see emotions, lets me feel a way into a story without feeling like a wolf in a hen house, as I live under two layers of predatory conditioning. First as a tranny and second as a dyke. Both identities paint me as a predator. 

The idea of the male weepie places this current wave of masculine critique firmly in heteronormativity. Which isn’t necessarily bad. Cishet dudes are, as much as some queers like to joke, people too. And have a right to process and berieve the way, to quote myself here, they are victim to patriarchal self-cannibalization. A phenomena I noted in instances when men I knew growing up would indicate moments of feminist double standard around things like hair length and piercings. What they were really pointing out were moments when they themselves had butted up against the limits of patriarchal framework, calcified as a cultural subject in the form of masculine norms. That is to say, however, I am interested in a conversation around masculinity that recognises the limit of a gender essentialist framework.   

Cowboy is, in essence, about two men chasing down the destinies of their fathers. Loren frames this, sometimes convoluted, story around the American mythic image of the cowboy. Loren does well handling the genre. To get more specific with the plot. The movie follows the misadventures and meanderings of Jerry ‘Jericho’ MckJunken, played by Hunter Slattery, as he follows the instructions of his deceased father and follows his dreams. Those dreams take him to Claremont, South Dakota (New Hampshire) in search of cattle to rustle and seeds to sow. After a comedic understanding with a dude that is honestly doing a pretty decent midwestern accent, leads our main (anti?) hero to turn to the life of an outlaw. From here we are introduced to the second cowboy force of our epic. The man in black. Com-eddy, Played by Edward Ferland. In search of a pistol to carry out his outlaw schemes, he happens upon Com-eddy telling jokes in a town square, getting pelted by tomatoes for their terribleness. Bonding over their shared cowboyness Com-eddy just gives him a handgun. Then he attempts to rob a train at the Claremont South Dakota (NH) Amtrak station. After having failed to rob a train, he retires to a sandpit, lights a fire, and has a tomato thrown at him. Out of the shadows steps Com-Eddy. Who shoots Jericho, the squib in this scene is dope. Thus ending our first chapter. 

Oh yeah. Cowboy is told out of chronological sequence as; prologue/ chapter 1/ chapter 2/ chapter 3. The slashes represent the scenes where Jericho is talking to the detective, the first chapter is Jericho describing his call to action. The dream he has where a cowboy talks to him. I’ve seen the movie twice now and I honestly can’t remember what the hat says. The story catches up with itself in chapter 3. 

Com- eddy, through some shadowy connection, comes to find that Jericho's dad is not dead, and he was the man who orphaned him (referring to the car crash in the prologue). By affixing his critique to the penultimate American symbol of masculinity, the cowboy, and its advertising avatar the Martlboro Man, Loren can be braud in his technique. The clearest running thread I saw was how, in giving himself over to his cowboy ideation, Jericho literally did not know what the fuck was going on. When he gets to the Restaurant in his first scene, he can’t tell that its a restaurant, too fooled by what he wants it to be, i.e. a ranch. He doesn’t know that they don’t transport treasury bonds by rail anymore. He has been actively placed in the past. A scene in the very real sweet fire BBQ reveals that Jericho never really had an I.D.

Loren makes what I find to be a mistake common amongst cis people when critiquing masculinity. They throw the baby out with the bath water. Masculinity is seen as a realm of danger. Much in the way stupid atheists see the church or religion as itself the inherent ill, rather than all the systemic, tangible, forces around these non tangible essences. Like what the fuck even is masculinity. I’m a trans woman and a butch dyke and I don’t really know! So how can we create such negative implications to something that is hardly even knowable. Masculinity is harmful in and of its rejection of femininity, of its womanness. And it's here that Loren might have failed to interrogate his subject matter to the degree he should have. 

While the structure is clever, the script is less elegant. What feel like large incidentals, or constraints of working conditions make it harder to tease out deeper meaning. Some of the dialogue can be stilted, or a little less eloquent. I am a sucker for the cowboy gunfight monologue. Its honestly one of my favorite things in fiction. Com-Edy strikes such an alluring facade as the man in black. His ‘man on the other end of a gun’ speech at the Climax could have been so incredible. But, ‘sell em cigarettes to make their dicks bigger’ felt lackluster. They had a fire, it looked great! 

The two cowboys eventually have their gun fight. Jericho inching out a victory. Both men having to contend with the cycle of violence that the generation before them had wrought onto their lives. Though not by exploring those feelings or even ‘doing as the cowboys did’ (what Jericho was referring to that is unclear as I thought having gunfights is what cowboys do and Jericho never seemed particularly interested in historic awareness). They feel out this familial trauma through the gunfight. And when Jericho walks away he completes the ultimate cycle in the annals of toxic masculinity: the oedipal, he kills his dad. Annihilating himself in essence. Completing a small tragedy. In the end he couldn’t escape the cycle. Watching the film is like watching him walk unknowing into the destruction of himself. Though we aren’t left with the sense that Jericho has learned anything which drove him to kill his own father, the very reason he set out on the chain of events we have just watched, a fact Jericho himself notes just before he kills his dad. 

There is a playful Nihilism to Loren’s work, so I don’t think the world of Cowboy is one where people learn lessons in the end. Its one where delusional men are ineffective to stop the dangerous events they set in motion. Pointing back to the article I mentioned at the top, Loren manages to leave women wholly out of his critique of masculinity, save for the mother in the prologue, who is abandoned by the killed father, to pursue his dream of becoming the Marlboro man. But she is dead before our story even really kicks off, a dead mother as motivation. No woman really has a character to play. And when talking about masculinity, or specifically the gendered understanding of that dynamic, as a thing men do to women, or patriarchal reaction to the degradation of womanness, then why leave women out? Why give no woman anything really to do? I suppose because the pain men cause each other, the pain fathers cause sons, is just as integral to the communal healing of men. 

  I would also add no character in the film seems like they have much to do. The characters don’t seem much like characters save for maybe Jericho and Com-eddy. Outside of those two every other person is a cardboard cutout on a stick designed to populate the world and to move it along the path toward the climax. fleeting machinery pieces. The expositional nodes on Loren’s map. I’m not going to hold that against the film, as a slaving regard for realism in a story isn’t a particularly interesting way to look at art. When you realize that realism isn’t the be all, end all of artistic storytelling, you become open to a whole other world of possibilities. Perhaps what we’re being shown is that the masculine script makes people more into cardboard cut out versions of themselves rather than their actual self.   

The Last American Cowboy is a project borne from the deep love of its creator, and that certainly shows. As a first feature it shows tremendous promise and I hope Loren is given the opportunity to expand his reach. Given more resources to execute his vision, and given more time to mull over just where next that vision can take him. 

some thoughts on a justin long movie

 Okay so 2000's films fuckin suck. except there is an equal proportionality of unsuckness the exsists in tandem to the degree to which they FUCKIN SUCK, the way in which they flatten reality and make it unreality. ungodly. everyone becomes whiter, lighter, and more objectable. so all this to say that i hate that i love that jonah hill and jutsin long movie accepted so much. i watched it with my girlfriend and i loved it. loved it! it made my brain wriggle with ideas about the contextuality of association, communalism, communism, communes, and how we make our institutions. i did not expect  this from the movie with the line 'ask me about my weiner' in the trailer. 

wait. no. quick aside. fuck highbrow/lowbrow. though...  i still believe we can criticize our media. i suppose my theory is more like junkfood/nutritious food. wait yeah that axis works beautifully, in that i do believe there is a place for one to consume the things which they love to eat though might not be good fuel for the body, they should maybe just know that what their eating isn't gonna give them what they need in the end. and on the same token, i find people who peddle 'healthfood' solutions to problems with far broader causes tend to be full of a lot of shit. life, and art, is made more rich with a nuanced and caring understanding, that perfection isn't an achievable goal, that towering oneself off in an aesthetic of superiority is damaging. okay back to the matter at hand. accepted and hierarchy of art. this film, as i was getting to above, is an amazing example of that. packed with ideas and all the weighted male gaze and white washing of a film which lacks even the performitive gloss of wokeness of todays hollywood output. 

quick rundown. a guy, justin longs character, can't get into college, and so photoshops himself a fake acceptance letter to a college that doesn't exist and it gets out of hand and so he has to make a fake college. and that's the movie in a nutshell. there in lies the beauty. it's a simple, deceptively linear story. sure it has the 'big center lie' but there isn't some massive run around. most of the movie is spent just yukking it up with everyone at south harmon istitute of technology. also the 'big lie' comes from Justin longs characters care for the people he saw before him who needed a place to belong, who need shelter from rejection. and of course that comes in the form of dudes staring at chicks at the pool and skinny women who are offered up for their sex appeal... and also their own unique desires. like the former stripper who gets into fashion design or the school freak who takes up meditation. everyone gets to make of their time what they will and the anarchist in me loves it. the 'what do you want to learn' white board is genuinely amazing and inspiring and lovely. truly. it makes me weepy. an institution dedicated to allocating the funds its participants give it to the interests of those participants. a community which comforts and values its members. a fucking dream, and one i do not see stoked in media all too often. 

I also want to talk about the mailability of reality in this movie. how a lie, in earnest intention, became reality because of the collective intent of a group of people. goddamn that is energy i want to see more in the world. i don't think communalism would be easy, but i don't think it would be any harder than the world at large. life is painful and hard in society as it is. i annoy easy and get overwhelmed by a deeply paranoid and exhaustive brain. but one of the best decisions, one of the best things about my me, is that i decided a long time ago that i would always let my higher ideals guide me. that i would never let myself become one of those 'that's not how the world is' one of those 'if only' people. the world can be whatever the fuck we want it to be, and not in that bullshit rightwing libritarian way. fuckin free staters overrunning my fuckin home. fuck them. i mean it in a way that i think i read in the writing of alok vaid-menon, by engaging my radical imagination. we hold this world in our hands, and we have immense power just in that. and accepted was one of the most unlikely places i have learned this. 

this 2000's raunch-comedy, illustrated perfectly a kind of ontological modality that i certainly do not think it was trying to. and that's why we need to destroy notions of high and low art. our art reflects to us the things we wish to see from it. consider your art a frame from with to put things in or to put things outside of. maybe my junkfood/ healthfood dichotomy wasn't so useful. we're onto ponds or mirrors or hearts. things which echo and flow.  i do wonder if the team (it had to be a team) of people who wrote this were thinking about any of this. this was just a fun party flick. but hey it made me almost cry. and point my eyes toward the horizon and that supersedes any creator intention.         

Bourdain and Bradbury

 I really like anthony bourdain. who fuckin doesn't. but frankly i don't care why you like him. in that way i'm a prick like tony. it's similar as how i really really really don't want to hear about what weird ass tattoo your gonna get. i hate hearing people tell me about their sleeve plans. fuck that. in any case i am a cook, and as such, he is a patron saint of sorts to my brood. a figure we all know in our hearts had, at least on some abstract level, love for us, was rooting us all on. he told us we were fighting the good fight. waking up and slinging hash or washing dishes and godbless us for it. and for me he painted a picture of a path up. planted an ambition in me to make it to the bigs. he told me there were bigs. i blame him for not being able to sigt still in a shitty reasturant. if some place feels like it doesn't suit me i just gotta get the fuck out of there. no, me, i'm gonna be cooking good food. if i could be a prep cook in a thomas keller kitchen i would. a david chang joint. of course. i have sky high aspirations on some level. and i blame tony for that. reading his shit some part of me knew that if i grinded out and worked hard and had just a pinch of luck i could get closer than a dish pit in some grocery store kitchen. 

All this to say i think he is probably the greatest chronicler of food culture that ever lived (certainly the most famous), comparable to the titan ray bradbury in the world of genre fiction. bradbury was marked by his poetics, fine and delicate understanding of the vast exsistention mechanics which inhabit all of us. to paraphrase someone else writing about bradbury, he didn't write about rocket ships he wrote about the people in them. all the evidence one could need is the harrowing and heartbreaking short story 'rocketman' from the illustraded man book. fuckin hell. it gave us the elton john song! enough said right! or the one he wrote about those space explorers who land on a planet just after some great devine being (an unamed jesus i assume) was there and brought a great unending peace to the people and the captain of the mission can't believe it and loses his mind and races off to catch this great being knowing that he will always be just a few moments too late.... come the fuck on! a space story about faith and greed. and like that tony wrote about cooks. but also he wrote about all of us. about society and the canon of our collective thought. our anger and greed and our. he was so deeply a hypocrite it made his writing a sterling charm, an illuminated manuscript. 

My great example of this is how he ends kitchen confidential, his peice on scott bryan and veritas. by that point the book had wound down. you had imbibed tony's intoxicating prose-cocktail of bravado, machismo, piratical tales of the kitchen. and you drank heartily. letting that shit run down the corner of your lips over your chin and onto your shirt. i know i did. it's why i'm in the game right now. why i own fancy german, french, and japanese knives and i keep them in a handmade leather knife roll. because i drank the potion and bought the line of bullshit he was selling... and then he procedes to discredit and undo all the grand wisdom he's been laying on you like your dads friend who smelt kinda like weed and would tell you about cars and drugs and girls but you later relies half of what you said was utter bullshit. well tony does the work of time for you and basically calls himself on all his self mythological bullshit. a classy motherfucker. 

Scott bryan was a chef from my moms hometown of brookline mass. he came up poor, like my mom and unlike tony. a fact which he highlights, pointing out his own lily white upper-middle-class-i-not-just-upper-class origins. bryan learned to cook in a vocational class at his technical college, deciding between cooking or being an electrician. a choice tony points out he never would had to make, believing in his rich upbringing, believing that the world would supply him with gainful and enriching employment. those realities did not penetrate the projects of boston jack. and so bryan went to work in kitchens, working under impressive chef after impressive chef. upon tony's observence of the veritas kitchen his story of pirate crews in basement kitchens start to crumble. it all comes down. pretty much everything tony said in the whole damn book become accutley knows as contingent on a certain   set of circumstances. mainly that you don't work in the bigs. that in fact you are in a luke warm middle of the kitchen world, working the kind of places you work when you never worked under a world class chef, as tony never did, admitting he was too attracted to the title of chef, and the money it brought, to swallow his pride and take the pay cut needed to work a lesser station in one of the countries great kitchens. with this one piece he shows you the wizard behind the curtain. it takes a lot to basically call yourself a peddler of myths and half truths and still maintain your credibility. and for that tony is one of the all-timers.  

not everything tony wrote was a lie or a half truth or a myth. his tone was one of authority and by the end  he essentially undercuts the two hundred odd pages that came before it. a ballsy and all time move. a book length poem about reality about perspective and honesty. you can't beat that can you. rest in peace tony. i hope i get to meet you when i die and tell you all this. 

The Michael Character

 I frittered through New England d.i.y music in my younger days. I went to shows in Keene at Local Burger a bit. Those shows were pretty amazing, especially when you had dope bands roll through. I can't drive and never have been able to really so I never got to just roll around and cruise the wider New England d.i.y scene. My brother did drive me to a show with Ramshackle Glory in Worcester Mass. I feel some kind of way about my place I guess. I never had friends in Highschool who liked that kind of punk shit. it would be College before any of my peers cared about that kind of thing, or that seeing bands in cramped gross basements would be considered cool. I only cared because my upstairs neighbors were in a band I loved. Inspite of  a more tangential relationship, I still have such a big open soft spot in my heart for New England d.i.y music. I think that's why the new album from The Michael Character is blowing my doors off. or well part of it anyway. 

The Michael Character are a punk outfit from Mass. I know very little about them other than Oh Shoot is their 13th album. I have never seen them live. It was released last month on Dollhouse Lightning Records (or printed on physical media through that label). I know when I was in highschool they were on a comp called Please Make Sure Someone's Singin' Somewhere For You, which was more or less my window into the Worcester area, and the broader New England, d. i. y scene. It was a benefit record of sorts for artist Gregory Mckillop, who was a pillar in that scene (and makes music under the name R.U.U.N.E these days). Somewhere recently I found my way listening to them again on Bandcamp and then tonight I saw they had released a new album and here we are. Its 2:29 am and I had to write about them and their intensely political humanity. (It's now December 2nd as I take another swipe at this .(It's now the next year as I take another swipe at this.)  

It's noon the next day (the 24th). I am on my second listen of Oh Shoot! today. I was listening on the couch in the living room of my mom's house where I live and wanted to cry so I ran upstairs to grab my laptop so I could write this. Never have I heard music so explicit in its political language be so effective emotionally (well outside of rap). I tend to find folks using the language of politics in describing that which is inherently political breaks all emotional spells they could have cast.

 I think the magic to this record is because of the particularly radical nature of the politics and the deep self critique that is on display. This isn't some obtuse liberal protest song. This is a kiln of self imposed pressure about how we as people seeking a radical change in the world go about dedicating all the limbs of our life to that change. A concept that I find carries a lot of weight as a masc white girl. My body just isn't on the meat grinder like some others are. Do I really care enough? I know I care. I read things. I think about things. But do I CARE. That's how white supremacy works, I am draped in security and privileges and wealth. These days I am so comfortable. Am I doing enough inspite of my privileges' and comforts is the greater point here, the songs dealing with this idea of how to know if you are living to your ethics ENOUGH. And deal, in a different way though deal none the less, with the emotional and psychological investments of radical politics. Of course I know these aren't the questions being asked by the singer, but it is how I feel about them. The interior journey I take with my own sense of failure and a deep, almost unyielding desire to recede from life. What the hell can I do for anyone anyway. 

I digress. The album doesn't pose these exact questions. If you aren't new to the blog you understand what's happening. I don't really write reviews. 

Every track is worth while, there are no duds on this album. There's a bonus track on the Bandcamp now that's kind of annoying. It's now 2 pm. I am on my eight or ninth listen through to Oh Shoot!. Some favorite tracks are starting to emerge. The beauty of this album, as with all great albums, is that every song makes an amazing case for itself, all the while making a singular coherent message. Oh Shoot! is itself a singular entity, made up of some really steller tracks that you can latch onto as individual pieces. The two standouts to me at this point are 'The Social Wage' and 'My Conspiracy Neighbors'. Both I find make a micro cycle for the albums themes of revolutionary politics, critique, history, introspecting, and a deep commitment to the politics of the personal. 'Neighbors' is a particularly vulnerable look into the intersection of radical politics and personal, communal relationships. "Problem is I kind of feel like I am better." I feel like its a rarer cut to admit you're the asshole in any situation. That you're the one looking down or out at someone else. I will never not respect that kind of transparency in songwriting. 

A similar moment happens on 'New Song 9' when the singer belts " When I can barely make it through a day without a lie like/ 'climate crisis is gonna wait for me to buy a house or retire or live a normal life (yeah, right...)" It's probably safe to say we've all thought too little about any of this. All thought climate crisis would stave until we build our pillars of life. Our families, our carriers. Our loves. But alas. Nah. It's coming. Anyone can say they are scared of the coming climate crisis, but not everyone would say they participated in the illusions which keep us from really acting. Political and confessional songwriting that is strengthening, damn near healing.   

I love this album. It's frankly probably my favorite album of last year. It sound amazing; the guitars are chunky, the little sounds and noises add beautiful texture as do the pianos, the bass keeps the low end full and moving, what sparse percussion all fits perfectly, the singing is breathtaking. The recording was limited due to Covid restrictions, done in a more decentralized manner. it's so wonderful to behold the byproduct of met and surpassed limitations. The songs feel so whole and of themselves, not lacking or in need of anything else. Whatever the influences are doesn't feel painfully obvious or overly flaunted. They just feel like beautiful songs. a record which seamlessly runs the gamut from the historical macro to the neighborly micro. As essential a release as I can imagine for our times. In the liner notes it says that this isn't considered a full The Michael Character record. I can't decide if I find that derisive to this masterpiece that is Oh Shoot! or gets me really fucking stoked for their next full record.