All in Writing
I bring up these old memories because even in liberal Hollywood, cowboys are cool again. Yellowstone – a TV show I’ve never watched and have no interest in seeing – has reinvigorated America's fascination with ranch life. Beyonce posed wearing a cowboy hat astride a horse on her latest album cover, Cowboy Carter. It seems America’s Culture War has returned to an old battlefield – the idea of the cowboy.
There’s not much chance to turn around until you reach Cedar Key, which looks exactly as you might imagine it: Everything built out of that dark, weathered wood. You see kids with coolers selling various morsels like oysters and clams on the side of the road. You drive on bridges running over muddy shoals. This article first appeared on darrenwhitecreative.com on Feb. 11, 2013.
They were not mythologized like the Western cowboys or the Irish and Italian immigrants of the Northeast. And yet the modern stories of struggle that the 2017 film The Florida Project are based on seem to echo Priscilla, Ida and Louvenia’s story. We all come from somewhere, some from wealth and some from poverty. Some from sickness and some from health. I come from these women and I come from this story.
I watched Yacht Rock: A Documentary on Max this weekend, and I thought it would make for a good opportunity to reflect on this odd little subgenre that has become its own cottage industry over the last decade or so. The documentary focuses on a certain type of bouncy, smooth adult contemporary music popular in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. This is the music that filled radio airwaves right after Motown’s classic era ended and right before MTV changed image-making in music forever.
How can one of the biggest media markets in the nation produce such ineffectual, booster-happy journalism? How can a city with limitless financial resources fail to build anything beautiful in brick-and-mortar? How can a place that hosts concerts daily fail to capture the national imagination with any consistency?
For me, the answer is easy – I don’t have any other marketable skills. I am unfit for manual labor (tried that), my math skills are remedial (that means bad) and I’m too honest for sales (didn’t get past the interview). Writing keeps the lights on, even if they aren’t burning brightly.
As I was eating two tacos and a bag of store-bought chips – which cost me, all told, about $22 – from a food truck with an absolutely horrible name, it occurred to me that I cannot remember the last time I had a good meal from a food truck.
Japandroids released their fourth and final record, Fate & Alcohol, last week and so it seems like a good time to write about this band, the emotions their music stirred in listeners and who at least one of those listeners was.
