One for your here-we-go-again file…
New Regency is adapting Pulitzer Prize winner Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, widely considered one of the greatest works of American literature, as a feature film. John Hillcoat set to direct.
The film will be produced by New Regency, Black Bear Pictures’ Keith Redmon, and Hillcoat. McCarthy and his son, John Francis McCarthy, will serve as executive producers.
Published in 1985, the novel is an epic tale of the violence and depravity that attended America’s westward expansion, brilliantly subverting the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the Wild West. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a 14-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
Not sure this can be done. Not sure it should be done. As a Facebook friend noted, there’s at least the hope that Nick Cave and Warren Ellis will create the soundtrack.
And if Hillcoat delivers Tom Hardy as John Joel Glanton, well then we’ll have something.
As Gust Avrakotos, 1980s Afghan Task Force Chief for the Central Intelligence Agency (and a Frontier Partisan of a sort), might say…
“We’ll see.”
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April 27, 2023 – Battle Creek, Saskatchewan – “Tequila won’t get you across that desert / To Evangelina in old Mexico,” sings the rich Canadian baritone of Colter Wall in his brand new tune, “Evangelina.” The song, originally written and recorded by Hoyt Axton, paints a thirsty picture of longing and half-laid plans to chase down a lost love; all backed up by a band steeped in the traditional sounds of Wall’s prairie homelands.
“Evangelina” is the first release from Wall’s upcoming album, Little Songs which is due out on July 14 via Wall’s longtime label La Honda Records and new partner RCA Records. On Little Songs, fans of Wall’s will find the same hardscrabble voice they’ve loved over the years connecting the contemporary world to the values, hardships, and celebrations of rural life. From the titular track he sings, “You might not see a soul for days on them high and lonesome plains. You got to fill the big empty with little songs.” The ten-song LP features eight originals inspired by—and written in—Wall’s home of Battle Creek, Saskatchewan, along with the aforementioned Axton cut and a cover of Ian Tyson’s “The Coyote & The Cowboy.”
With his longtime touring band, Wall returned to Yellowdog Studios in Wimberly, Texas, where he cut his 2020, Billboard-charting album, Western Swing & Waltzes and Other Punchy Songs, to track the ten tunes that make up Little Songs. With co-producer Patrick Lyons, Wall tracked eight original songs and two fan-favorite covers from Ian Tyson and Hoyt Axton. Little Songs is an upbeat, sometimes somber glimpse into the rural work and social life of the Canadian West, and, more so than with previous albums, opens emotional turns as mature and heartening as the resonant baritone voice writing them.
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Well, that damn East India Co. Amazon Prime streaming thang delivered on Sunday evening. Lady Marilyn and I enjoyed a heavy dose of shit-kickin’ livestream of Stagecoach Day 3 from the deserts of Indio in Southern California. I think it will live on Prime for a bit, so you can catch it if you want to. It’s easy enough to jump out on the bro country and dig in on the good stuff.
We got us some Ryan Bingham…
The lovely hippie-hillbilly Lanie Wilson, who single-handedly brought bell-bottoms back…
The mighty, mighty Turnpike Troubadours…
And the mad hillbilly genius that is Tyler Childers…
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Rullman and I hit the theater for Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant. It’s a worthy tale of a debt that must be paid at any cost. It was filmed in some rugged and compelling country in Spain. There’s an extended manhunt through a maze of narrow canyons that’s as Frontier Partisan as it gets.
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Hawken Horse scouted up the work of an artist I was unfamiliar with — C. Michael Dudash.
I am quite taken with his work. The one HH kicked up is titled Scouting The Trapline.
He’s got a couple of Eastern Frontier pieces, one that goes with our current Long Hunter theme:
Another celebrates the riflemen of the Battle of New Orleans (looking at you Kasper Mansker):
I am particularly drawn to his many paintings of Apaches in the field.
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Ran across this heart-wrenching beauty. Read it aloud; it packs a punch.
I SPOKE TO YOU IN WHISPERS
By Neil AndrewI spoke to you in whispers
As shells made the ground beneath us quake
We both trembled in that crater
A toxic muddy bloody lake
I spoke to you and pulled your ears
To try and quell your fearful eye
As bullets whizzed through the raindrops
And we watched the men around us die
I spoke to you in stable tones
A quiet tranquil voice
At least I volunteered to fight
You didn’t get to make the choice
I spoke to you of old times
Perhaps you went before the plough
And pulled the haycart from the meadow
Far from where we’re dying now
I spoke to you of grooming
Of when the ploughman made you shine
Not the shrapnel wounds and bleeding flanks
Mane filled with mud and wire and grime
I spoke to you of courage
As gas filled the Flanders air
Watched you struggle in the mud
Harness acting like a snare
I spoke to you of peaceful fields
Grazing beneath a setting sun
Time to rest your torn and tired body
Your working day is done
I spoke to you of promises
If from this maelstrom I survive
By pen and prose and poetry
I’ll keep your sacrifice alive
I spoke to you of legacy
For when this hellish time is through
All those who hauled or charged or carried
Will be regarded heroes too
I spoke to you in dulcet tones
Your eye told me you understood
As I squeezed my trigger to bring you peace
The the only way I could
And I spoke to you in whispers……
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The Deschutes Public Library came through and got A Brutal Reckoning in my hands right quick. I can tell it’s going to have to be part of the permanent FP collection. Peter Cozzens is a heavy hitter. I didn’t know that he was a career Foreign Service officer and “in 2002 received the American Foreign Service Association’s highest award, given annually to one Foreign Service Officer for exemplary moral courage, integrity, and creative dissent.” That award is not bestowed lightly, and it means Cozzens is a truth-teller, even when people don’t want to hear it. That’s a valuable trait to bring to the table as a historian of the frontier.
There’s a lot of brutality and sheer meanness in the tale of the conquest of the Deep South, and Cozzens does not flinch from it. He fully illustrates the rapaciousness of the European-American invaders of Muscogee lands — from DeSotos Conquistators to Andrew Jacksons campaigns. He also does not elide the fact that the Creeks were a slaveholding people, and a slave trading people, who operated a kidnapping for ransom racket when the deerskin trade was down.
The frontier is no place to go looking for comforting morality tales. And Cozzens does not flinch from an honest depiction of what was unquestionably the most sanguinary Indian war fought in North America.
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I am going to delve into the cultural politics of frontier history on the Patreon page this month.
Matthew says
I’m not sure I want to see a Blood Meridian movie. I can deal with the extreme violence and depravity better in prose form. Also I would probably miss McCarthy’s prose.
Blood Meridian is certainly one of the most violent books ever written. I think the Religion and The Twelve Children of Paris beat it in shear scale of bloodshed though.
Of course, it may never be made into a movie. Others have tried.
J.F. Bell says
A second on the Blood Meridian movie. Some works are best left in the theater of the mind, namely those that work on such a visceral level. I have no doubt that a competent film crew could get the EVENTS on screen. I am somewhat less confident they could capture the STORY.
Incidentally, while we’re on the musical tangent, it would appear Gordon Lightfoot has left us.
He was perhaps not as explicitly frontier as some, though he did have a few, and moreover made up a significant chunk of my childhood musical library.
I was an odd kid, and if no longer a kid…still odd.
JimC says
I just saw the news about Lightfoot. One of the great ones.
Matthew says
A second on the Blood Meridian movie. Some works are best left in the theater of the mind, namely those that work on such a visceral level. I have no doubt that a competent film crew could get the EVENTS on screen. I am somewhat less confident they could capture the STORY. —
That’s a very good point. Some books beg to be made into a movie, but I am not sure Blood Meridian is one of those. It’s why I have mixed feelings on the Lord of the Rings movies. They got somethings right and they got somethings wrong. With Blood Meridian so much of the power comes from McCarthy’s archaic style.
Brian H. says
Blood Meridian is…many things. Filmable? Likely not. Although after watching Taboo maybe Hardy could indeed inhabit the bones of Glanton. You would need an equally heavy hitter for The Judge. Obviously our culture embraces blood and gore in the form of the thousands of slasher movies but when it’s offered to us in the form of something more “real” and “true” we cant stomach it. Perhaps that’s some natural breaking mechanism in our human psyche.
Matthew says
I have to wonder who could play the Judge?
Brian H. says
Christian Bale maybe.
Monk says
God Is A Bullet is coming out shortly, and the good
thing about that is that it is back in print.
JimC says
Whoa! That oughta film well.
Monk says
Crippled Jack is up for an award, as is Gone The Redeemer
by Scott Gates.
My mate Erik Kriek meanwhile got an award for The Exile.