February 2012 – Ken Rodgers

February 24, 2012

On El Greco, Aretha and Art in the Bar

Last Saturday Betty and I hung her photography exhibit in Boise at an event titled Art in the Bar V at the Knitting Factory Concert House. It turned out to be a 15-hour event and it took us a few days to recover from that experience.

Betty shared booth space with her photographer and writer friend, Sheila Robertson. This all took place in a larger space with a wild and diverse mix of artists and arts from tattoo to performance art. There was zombie art, nude photography, surrealistic paintings, horror photographs Photoshopped from various other photographs, metal sculpture, jewelry, funny political and pun drawings, found art sculpture, ceramic mosaic and a lot of stuff I don’t know what to call.

There was a lot of what I will call digital art. The man in the booth next to us, portrait photographer Allan Ansel, said to me, “Digital is the new canvas.” I had to think about that for a while. El Greco and Velasquez and Rubens painted on canvas. So did Picasso and Matisse. So did Jackson Pollack. A wide variety of ages, philosophies and methods, but they all painted on canvas. Why can’t modern artists paint on canvas?

I think about El Greco who was painting in Spain four hundred years ago, and how his highly dramatic and expressionist paintings brought consternation to his contemporaries, but we like him a lot now because much of our present work finally caught up with him in the 20th century. I think what I am getting at here is that what seems foreign and new and weird now might be acceptable, even revered down the road. So if digital canvas confounds us now, maybe it won’t later.

When I was in Vietnam I remember waking up from a nap hearing Aretha Franklin sing “Respect,” over and over and over and over. While she was singing out of a little battery powered portable record player, a bunch of Marines and Corpsmen were singing along with her, over and over and over and over.

At the time I really liked soul music from singers like Sam Cook and Smokey Robinson, but Aretha was something else again, a wild-bird-flying-up-loop-de-loop voice that sang that song like avian acrobatics. It was different, and they played it, they sang it, over and over and over and over again. I jumped off my cot, groggy, my head banging inside and I screamed for them to “Knock it off.” Lucky they didn’t get all over me and whip my butt for my behavior.

One of the men singing the loudest had come to our company from another battalion that had done some serious damage in the A Shau Valley…some damage that could (but didn’t) have caused a My Lai kind of reaction from the American public. At least that is what that Marine and the other Marines that came with him told me. I remember after I jumped up and shouted at them to turn that horrible music off, he stopped and laughed at me. Let’s call him A. A laughed at me.

And I can remember four months later hearing the Beatles singing “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band” and the Jefferson Airplane singing “Somebody to Love,” not knowing if I should like it or disdain it for the break with what I thought was real music.

I remember A standing up there as I obviously showed some confusion about what was and was not proper music. He grinned and his gold-capped teeth caught the glint of the sun, and he raised his long muscular arms over his head, and showing off the twin, silver plated, .357 Python revolvers snug in their shoulder holsters, he said “Brother, you can’t stop the train that’s coming. Music brother, music, like you’ve never heard it. Can’t stop. Love it.”

I think of El Greco and Aretha and John Lennon and how A was right, you can’t stop it even if you want to. It’s coming at us like a freight train. Nor can I stop digital media, digital art, poetry slams, techno-thump-boom-boom-thump-thump music, or tattoos.

Sitting in a chair watching all the people come up and look at Sheila and Betty’s photos, I observed the wide variety of folks: old, young, children, Ivy League, cowboy boots and hats, people struggling with walkers, and the illustrated people with all their piercings and tattoos. Even though I had decided that I needed to accept the wild art I was exposed to, I still wasn’t sure about the colored, tinted, narrative skin I kept seeing on the young men and women.

I noticed a young man—a big strong man—carrying a little boy in a backpack. That young man had things in his ears that looked like they’d let fifty-caliber machine gun bullets pass clean through, and his skin was tattooed on the arms, the neck and who knows where else. I wondered why he did that to himself and I wondered how it might feel to have all those tattoos removed.

He came up to a neighboring booth and took his backpack off and picked up his son and hugged him. They looked at some digital art and then the illustrated man whispered something to his little boy, and they laughed. They smiled and they laughed and laughed and laughed.

February 17, 2012

Real Cowboys Didn’t Go to “Cowboys”

Last weekend I attended a workshop given by teacher, raconteur, cowboy poet, rope twirler, guitar picker, yodeler and warbler extraordinaire, Ernie Sites. The event was held in downtown Boise and sponsored by Elaine Ambrose of Mill Park Publishing in Eagle, Idaho.

I like to write poetry but the cowboy poetry genre often confounds me. I’m not sure if it’s the rhyme and meter of it or something else. When I first started penning poems I guffawed at rhyme and metrical schemes as flighty and unavailable to me in terms of expressing true, angsty meaning…mine or any other poet’s. But after some time studying Shelly and Wordsworth and Yeats’ poems and cowboy poet Buck Ramsey’s masterpiece of the cowboy genre, “Anthem,” I have changed my mind. Not about writing such poems, but about rhyme and meter’s importance in the larger genre of poetry.

Rhyme and metrical schemes place restraints on the composer and like so much in life, constraints of many kinds force us to be creative. That doesn’t mean I’m going to write rhyme and meter, but it does mean I appreciate the poems more for what they say and how they say it.

I wrote a poem in that workshop and although it was metrical and had internal rhyme, I wouldn’t name it cowboy poetry. There were some good poems composed by almost everyone in the session and some of them fit the classic definition of cowboy poetry.

Along with poems and music, there were cowboy hats and boots one would expect at a celebration of something cowboys call “Cowboy Halloween.” The boots especially, bright red boots, Lucchese boots.

I really like how things cowboy keep working their way into milieus that are not western at all. I wonder if the cowboy scene is making a comeback, like it did in the mid-sixties when I was, to quote an old cowboy homily, feeling my oats. A lot of us bought boots and wanted to bronc around on wild horses and not knowing fear, threw ourselves into the world of rodeo, bull riding and calf roping and bull dogging.

Non-cowboy cowboying made another comeback with the general public in 1980 with John Travolta and Debra Winger as Bud and Sissy in Urban Cowboy. People who had never owned a set of cowboy boots or hat were now walking into their offices hoofed in Tony Lama full quill ostrich leather boots with a riding heel and widebrimmed black Stetson cowboy hats. Mammoth honky-tonks with mechanical bulls opened all over the country. Charlie Daniels and Merle Haggard and the Statler Brothers, among others, were wailing Country and Western music out of radios and boom boxes. Folks thought it was Cowboy Music. It wasn’t, but it didn’t matter to the consumers as they danced the Cotton-eyed Joe and the Texas Two Step.

I lived in Arizona at the time and they opened a big cowboy bar in Tempe called “Cowboys.” I was working in the livestock business then and had been for a number of years. I figured the joint had nothing to do with the real cowboys I hung out with and worked around. But still, it was a bar, and still, I was curious.

One of my best friends at the time was a real cowpoke named Ray Fred Kelly. Ray, who passed on to the Happy Roping Arena late last year, much to my sadness, was raised in the cattle business and could build a loop and throw a Houlihan with the best of them. At the time, Ray was managing, among other things, an animal health wholesale outfit in the Valley of the Sun. One afternoon I went up to argue bid prices on health products with him for a feedlot I was helping run. After we argued in his office, we began to argue in a local bar, and as the argument went on, we proceeded north for several hours, hitting most of the bars he knew about. Arguing all the way.

About eight in the evening we got tired of wrangling and decided to head home but before we did I said I thought we should go check out this joint called “Cowboys.” I wanted to see some cowboys in downtown Tempe.

Fred chuckled and said, “There aren’t any real cowboys in ‘Cowboys.’ Real cowboys don’t go to ‘Cowboys.'”

But I was fired up and liquored up and, since I was driving, demanded that we go to “Cowboys”. He chuckled again and I drove over there. The parking lot looked like it could serve the needs of a college football stadium and the cars were Chryslers and Fords and Camaros. As I parked my pickup in one of the only open spots, I noticed a paucity of pickups, and deep down inside I probably knew right then that real cowboys didn’t go to “Cowboys.”

At the door, two very large men stood in fancy boots and hats, western suits. They didn’t smile and they had their hands crossed in front of them like undertakers do when they are running a burying.

Ray Fred wagged his head as if we were walking into an ambush, but I stomped right up to the front door and pulled it open. The men each threw their long and massive arms up and held the door closed.

I said, “What’s the matter?”

Ray Fred stood back.

One of the bouncers barked, “No Levis.”

I said, “What? No Levis? What kind of cowboy doesn’t wear jeans?”

Both the bouncers looked at me, then one of them pointed at Ray Fred and said, “Besides, he’s wearing tennis shoes.”

I looked at my manure-caked boots and said, “What about these?”

“Nope. They are not clean.”

I snorted as Ray Fred cleared his throat. I walked up to the one who was doing the talking and wagged the index finger of my right hand right beneath his nose and said, nodding back at Ray Fred, “That man is a real hand. He can build a loop and doctor sick calves, he can sort and brand and castrate and…can you do that? And,” I said, “he can throw a Houlihan.”

The man just frowned at me. As Ray Fred cleared his throat again, I went on, “You gunsel SOBs wouldn’t know the butt end of a steer from its head. You wouldn’t know a bull from a cow and you ain’t ever sat a horse that knows how to cut and sort.”

Earlier in this essay I talked about constraints and how we are forced to adapt our actions to reflect those restraints.

When neither of those gunsel bouncers moved their arms from barring the door, nor wore any kind of expression other than no expression at all, we left, me throwing cuss words and indignities over my shoulder as Ray Fred said, “See, I told you. Real cowboys don’t go to ‘Cowboys.'”

February 10, 2012

On Elko

The halfway point of winter in the northern hemisphere has arrived here in Idaho with dry and warm weather. Trapped in some kind of drought, I suppose I should be saying stuff like, “We need snow in the mountains, we need rain on the flats,” or maybe I should be circling around dancing with my arms stretched towards the sky. But I am a pilgrim here from southern climes and must say that I enjoy the mild weather.

Last week we peregrinated down to Elko, Nevada for the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering and the mild days and cool nights were much to my liking. We still got to take photos of the snowy flats below Wild Horse Crossing, and the blood red and yellow-orange willows that ganged the banks of the frigid east fork of the Owyhee River. We captured images of lipstick red berries backed by river ice. We shot pictures of horses and pronghorns and starlings and eagles and the thin clouds that scraped the blue like whispered rhymes from the mouths of poets.

We took photos of poets, too, and cello players and singers. We took pictures of partiers, painters, big Stetson hats, red cowboy boots, gold-tinted neon signs and all manner of other things Elko. We listened to an array of tunes from traditional drover songs to a capella pieces redolent with the new that lives in the old west…we heard jazz, the blues, folk, cowboy music, Mexican lullabies and Crow Indian chants.

I think the number of visitors to the Gathering must have been down this year because things seemed a little less frantic in Elko as we trooped around and met with old friends and new friends. That’s one of the most important things Elko is to me….friends. An amazing compendium of styles…political, poetical, musical, philosophical and generational show up and mingle. A tolerant mood holds forth and accepts long hair and short hair, cattle rancher and sheep man, octogenarian folk singer and yodeling ten-year-old.

Elko is surrounded by mountain ranges that capture snow and shadow like a painter’s canvas. When the winter light lies down at low angles, the land seems to smother the sheen, leaving a splendidly muted scene where ice and rocks and cottonwoods meet. The long draws and dips of the foothills remind me of a soft-voiced mother singing a lullaby to her child.

There have been years when you could hardly get out of Elko because of the snow and the wind. One year I set out south to view the Ruby Mountains, but a gale got up and drove the snow so blatantly as to blind me. That year it seemed to snow every night, all night and it was a chore to clean off the windows of the car so you could make it the half mile to the venues to hear Paul Zarzysky recite his poems. Or Henry Real Bird chant in Crow, or Wallace McRae throw down a bucolic challenge to oil and mining companies ravenous for the raw fuels that percolate beneath the surface of the west.

This year, the Western Folklife Center brought in a lot of performers from the southwest and that fluttered the chambers of my innards. I lived many years in Arizona and New Mexico, so the music and the poems and the stories all delighted me, drawn from agricultural milieus flavored with the curious mingling of Spanish, Anglo and Native American.

That stuff makes my blood run hot. Takes me back to a memory home. A place I can only return to in my mind. The wild land as remembered is now homes and cars and racetracks and highways, but in my mind, my memory, I can see blankets of sheep cover the draws beneath the conical hills of the Sonoran Desert. I see the pine-clad peaks that jut up like isolated islands in a sea of ocotillo and saguaro. I can hear the songs of tamales and conquistadors, of the time before the white man, before the Native American tribes now on the land, the time before….the time of Anasazi, Hohokam and Mimbres culture…petroglyphs and rock art and primitive irrigation systems that served thousands, adobe castles crammed into the naves of canyon rock.

It was once my land, the land in which I lived, and still it’s the land of my mind.

All hail Elko…where memories rear up out of verses of poetry and song.