Working The Trapline — Troubadours & Crooked Trees

“Country music, to me, is simply … the roots of American music. And that paints a broad picture.” 

— Charley Crockett

Finally. Seeing Turnpike Troubadours live has been an important thing for me for years — including the long time gone when they had to hang it up while Evan Felker got his shit together. A certain nuptials last July prevented a trek to see them at Under the Big Sky — but damned if they didn’t show up 25 miles down the road in Redmond for the Fairwell Festival.

Ceili and I pushed up into the scrum and took in a killer show. Trigger from Saving Country Music opines that Turnpike Troubadours are the best country band on the planet — and he’s right, by Crom!

They kicked it off with The Bird Hunters, which is probably my favorite of their songs — a four-minute short story. I got frisson chills so hard…

So here’s a cool thing: Son-in-law Jarod Gatley was tapped to man a stage-right-front camera for the Jumbotron feed on the main Deschutes Stage for the whole festival. Cool gig, and a fine feather in his cap. So Ceili and I cheered certain shots as loud as the music…

That’s Jarod with camera down at the edge of the stage.

Also really enjoyed Molly Tuttle and Golden Highway. I am particularly taken with her song Crooked Tree. There’s more than one around this camp fire, including me. Here’s to ’em.

Charley Crockett is another artist I had’t been able to catch up to until the weekend. Like Sierra Ferrell, he started busking on the street and now he’s playing big festivals in front of thousands of people. He rolls out Bakersfield country music, infused with some blues, traditional jazz and some Mexican trumpets that stir a Frontier Partisan’s blood. The eclecticism pleases me mightily — and I’m clearly not alone.

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Right here in my stompin’ grounds is evidence that this region has been stompin’ grounds for human critters for a loooong time — longer than previously supposed. I love this sort of thing, as you know. That and the constant discovery that trade networks were wider and more active than we had known always trips my trigger.

Stone tools and the teeth of an extinct camel and bison discovered in central Oregon show that people were living in North America 18,250 years ago, new research finds. Although this is not the earliest date for human occupation of the Americas that has been proposed, the finding, which is not yet published in a peer-reviewed study, appears to be thousands of years older than any other archaeological site in Oregon.

Archaeologists made the discovery at the site of Rimrock Draw, which includes a rock shelter that researchers have been excavating since 2011 under a partnership with the Bureau of Land Management. Initial investigations found stone tools from the Paleo-Indian period (15000 B.C. to 7000 B.C.), but the geology of the site suggested that there were sediment layers dating to even earlier.

 

 

https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/stone-tools-and-camel-tooth-suggest-people-were-in-the-pacific-northwest-more-than-18000-years-ago

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You know how sometimes you can tell you’re going to like something by the content of a negative review?

Variety served up a “review” of Taylor Sheridan’s Lioness that made me laugh out loud. Oh, man, Alison Herman really hates ol’ Taylor and everything she believes he represents. I’ll just give you a snippet of her snark, but you should read the whole thing:

In the single chapter of the eight-episode season provided to critics — despite a two-episode premiere — there’s no hint of curiosity about the circumstances that pit the Lioness team against the Islamic State in Iraq despite the lip service paid to establishing a democracy after the fall of Saddam Hussein. There is, however, a stunningly ham-fisted scene in which a younger Cruz runs from her violent abuser and into a recruitment office, where an imposing officer scares off her persecutor before coining the kind of faux-profound bon mot that’s a signature of Sheridan dialogue: “In war, if you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’.” Cruz quotes her onetime savior when Joe explains the premise of the Lioness program, underscoring the implication that it’s a global superpower’s job to look out for the underdog by any means necessary. If you don’t agree with that vision of U.S. hegemony, this is not the show for you.

A couple of things cracked me up about this. One, do we really need to have “curiosity about the circumstances that pit the Lioness team against the Islamic State in Iraq?” They’re orcs. Really bad feminists, too. Mind you, I was on the record before the invasion against the campaign in Iraq. Thought it was dumb and unnecessary and that the Bush Administration was way too cavalier about the potential fallout, including the creation of more and more virulent terrorists. However, I have never had any trouble recognizing that stacking the demon progeny of Abū Muṣʿab al-Zarqāwī is a benefit to mankind.

I wear a hat, so Ms. Herman might have to help me with the big words and hard concepts, but I think this is the “ambiguity ” of which she speaks. Maybe paradox, even.

And that bit about “if you ain’t cheatin’ you ain’t tryin’’: There’s no reason that Ms. Herman, given her background and interests would know this, but that ain’t a Sheridanism. It’s a cliché, sure, because everybody who’s ever instructed tactics has said it at least once. It’s also the fundamental premise of Frontier Partisan warfare, which offended the hell out of “civilized” practitioners of the military arts when they encountered it from North America to New Zealand and South Africa. It’s a sentiment that Robert Rogers, Ensign Langy and Geronimo would resonate with.

In other words, it’s exactly the kind of thing that characters like those Ms. Herman cites would say.

Kind of reminds me of the people who criticize Jack Carr’s writing for “gear porn.” Clearly, such critics don’t hang around shooters much…

Anyway… It’s always good fun to watch certain sectors of the commentariat fall into paroxysms of pearl clutching.

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Lioness does pose a problem for Clan Cornelius. We’re behind on Outlander, behind on Justified, and haven’t cracked the final season of Jack Ryan. And now this. We’d better simmer down the live music and settle in for a few nights…