Bottlecaps

Journalism and beer

Somebody wrote this story in Sunday's Austin American-Statesman.

That feller sure is clever.

Click on that link if you want to read about bars in Austin.

Crazy Heart

There are several things that I want to blog about: 

I'm feeling better and will have finished my drugs by the time most people read this, though I will still have to wear my glasses until Saturday. 

The boy and I went to the new Backyard for about 45 minutes on Saturday for his first concert (sorta) and my Picnic research. 

And we are in Texas, damn it. If you don't have the good sense to live where you love the barbecue, then don't bother to try to convince me that you are a barbecue expert. If you want to prattle on about pigs, then do it in the southeast.

I want to blog about all that, but I must blog about "Crazy Heart."

You know the movie: Jeff Bridges plays Bad Blake, a once-famous, broke-down country singer who travels the road alone in his old Suburban, playing dives and bowling alleys, drinking himself blind instead of writing songs.

What kind of country singer? Bridges says he studied Kristofferson, and I can hear it in his voice, but who I see is an old Waylon. One who never did get sober, never did keep Jessi, never did walk the line. 

Bridges goes beyond totally convincing. Love interest Maggie Gyllenhaal looks like that Batman chick. Robert Duvall is Robert Duvall — there's no hiding that anymore. Bridges? He vanishes into the role. For his part, it could be a documentary.

I'm no musician, but from what I've seen and what I can recall, the movie just flat-out gets it right. Gets it right — at least those scenes set out West. I've been in dive bars and seen small shows out there where the sun sets, and nothing I saw rang false to me.

I can't really say that I know those people. We didn't have an equivalent to Bad Blake come through San Angelo. Well, we had Johnny Rodriguez, but he had fallen farther and lacked any residual charisma, I'm sorry to say (although he did come drink a beer at one of my parties). And we had Johnny Bush, but if he had fallen, his dignity would never have let you know.

I can't really say that I know those people, but pretty close. I had to grin when Bad's character pulls his old Suburban into the lot at the arena where he'll be opening the show … and his truck is dwarfed by tour bus after tour bus. I've seen that scene more than once.

(You know, it just occurred to me, that I could totally see Bad Blake in San Angelo, going on one helluva bender with Blaine Martin.)

There's another key scene involving that Suburban for me: Bad is talking to his protege, who remarks that he's glad to see Bad still has that beat-up old truck. "Runs just like a top," Bad says. Now if that's not a direct wink to the Guy Clark song "Stuff That Works," I'll be very disappointed. It damn well ought to be.

I'm rambling now, but that's because I'm at work without a proper cup of coffee and a chance to compose my thoughts. 

One of Bad Blake's songs in the movie (all of which sound great, by the way) goes "Ain't it funny how falling feels like flying, just for a little while?" 

I know, he knows, this movie knows … that line doesn't have a damn thing to do with gravity. It's the kind of truth "Crazy Heart" is full of.

Anyway, it's an excellent movie. Not something I'll watch over and over again, though I'll see it once more, at least. 

Damn. I need another Texan to talk about this movie with. 

All I got around here is people who can't get their barbecue straight.

"Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia"

This is what I forgot to mention.

Saw this a little while back and was completely flummoxed.

It's a Peckinpah movie (only reason I watched it) and I was so sure that I would like it, I ended up getting a DVD of it for Christmas.

But, to tell the truth, I wasn't quite sure what to make of it.

This happened before, with Segio Leone's "A Fistful of Dynamite" … that overlooked Western of his with Rod Steiger and James Coburn. The difference, though, is I was pretty firmly on the side of not liking "Dynamite" and yet wondering what all the fuss was about and whether I was missing something.

With "Alfredo Garcia," I wasn't quite sure that I didn't like it, even as I cursed the incoherence of the movie and squirmed through the uncomfortableness of the last 45 minutes or so.

I'm not going to review it, there's no shortage of self-important pontificating on the Internet here. But for those of you looking for the short recap:

It's a modern-day Western (or was, when released in 1974) set in the interior of Mexico. When a powerful Mexican jefe (drug lord? land baron?) finds out that Alfredo Garcia has impregnated his daughter, well, it ain't gonna end well for Alfredo.

Bounty hunters spill out of the jefe's compound to secure Alfredo's head, and, ultimately, our anti-hero Benny (Warren Oates pictured below) gets caught up in the quest.

 

The whole movie is coated in dust where the blazing sun beats down and covered in grime where it don't.

It has its moments, for sure. Moments of brilliance. But I couldn't embrace it, like the other Peckinpah films I love so. "The Wild Bunch" is my favorite movie. "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid" is like a Western made specifically for me. "Junior Bonner" spoke to me on a personal level. I adored all of them immediately.

I've kept a safe distance from "Alfredo." And yet I can't quite turn away from it, either.

Sure, one critic called it one of the 50 worst movies of all time. But good ol' Roger Ebert called it a masterpiece.

And I have to find out why.

Think I'm gonna have to watch this one again.

Tarantino's next movie

I watched "Inglourious Basterds" the other night.

(It was good, by the way, if wordy.)

And I came to one conclusion: Quentin Tarantino needs to make a Western.

Sure, large swaths of "Kill Bill 2" and "Basterds" have Western influences, some of which are remarkably adept at, if not matching, then at least imitating the feel of the best of the old Western movies.

And that's the point. If Quentin can do that for a few scenes, why not do it for a whole movie? 

I wouldn't expect it to be a full-on authentic Western, of course. Personally, I don't believe anyone could do another that would be half as good as the classics. The culture has just moved on. 

But even if it's mashed up with kung-fu and gangster influences, a Quentin Tarantino Western would be a lot of fun to watch.

Who's with me on this? It just needs to happen.

Top 10 CDs of the decade

Honestly, I should be watching the boy. But after 2.5 days of constant engagement, I think he's sick of me. He's playing in his room.

My list of my Top 10 favorite CDs of the decade is a little off, I'm sure. First, as always, it's based on a rather cursory search through my CDs. Really, I could spend all day going through each CD, listening to them, putting them in little stacks, etc. … but the boy wouldn't allow that.

Second, my list is skewed toward the first half of the decade. In 2000 and 2001 I heard almost every CD that came out that I had any interest in. I even got some for free because of my gig in San Angelo. In 2002 up through 2005, I bought most of the CDs I wanted to. Then … we bought a house and Shannon was pregnant and the kid came along … in fact, I'm pretty sure I only own two CDs that came out in 2009 (though I'm hoping to get a few more for Christmas, so this list could change).

So, this is not meant to be a comprehensive list, just my personal favorites among the ones I own …

Favorite re-issue: Townes Van Zandt, "Live at the Old Quarter." 2002. Twenty-seven songs from Townes when he was at his best.

Favorite box set: Willie Nelson, "One Hell of a Ride." 2008. One hell of a set.

Circling the pack: Hayes Carll, "Trouble in Mind." 2008. And Max Stalling, "Sellout: Live at Dan's Sliver Leaf." 2005.

TEN: Ray Wylie Hubbard, "Snake Farm." 2006. I'm sorry, I'm a guy. And I dig it.

NINE: Robert Earl Keen, "Gravitational Forces." 2001. Still digging this over "The Rose Hotel."

EIGHT: NDC, "Blame it on Blaine's." 2001? (those dorks didn't put a date on it.) If the measure of an album is how often you're drawn to listen to it, then my friends in San Angelo had a damn good one.

SEVEN: Todd Snider, "Peace, Love and Anarchy: Rarities, B-Sides and Demos, Vol. 1." 2007. Snider put out seven albums in the 2000s, all of them were about 50% sheer brilliance. So I don't know what it means that my favorite of the bunch is this throwaway for fans who will buy anything.

SIX: James McMurtry, "Childish Things." 2005. The protest song "We Can't Make it Here" is such a good song that McMurtry wrote a couple of bad ones for the next album, just trying to match it. And "Six-Year Drought" is just as good.

FIVE: Shaver, "The Earth Rolls On." 2001. The last album to feature Billy Joe and Eddy Shaver, it was released after Eddy died. Billy Joe hasn't reached this level since.

FOUR: Bruce Robison, "Country Sunshine." 2001. You know, I got to thinking about how pitch-perfect this whole album is, when I realized I hadn't bought a Bruce album since. Damn. He's had four CDs since then. They might all be this good.

THREE: Steve Earle, "Transcendental Blues." 2000. One song after another is fantastic. It's kinda a chick album — not much getting drunk or killing people — but so damn cool, that it hardly matters.

TWO: Mark David Manders, "Chili Pepper Sunset." 2000. I was in on the party, so maybe I'm just biased, but nothing has so ever perfectly captured a town and a time like Manders, this album and San Angelo in 2000. This CD was lightning in a bottle and why it didn't make him a bigger star, I'll never quite know.

ONE: James McMurtry, "Live in Aught-Three." 2004. I've praised this CD on my blog recently. I'll just say, yeah, it hasn't left my vehicle since I bought it. I know every note on this one.

Robert Earl Keen: The Rose Hotel

((UPDATE: I went back to look, and, yes, Keen's last two studio albums — "What I Really Mean" and "Farm Fresh Onions" — were produced by Rich Brotherton. I listened to them both again yesterday and, yes, they are still my two least-favorite Keen albums. Sure am glad to see Lloyd Maines again.))

I had the perfect opening for this.

You know, after hearing the saxophone-tainted title track on Robert Earl Keen's last studio album "What I Really Mean," I had said way back in my previous blog that Robert Earl Keen had gone and gotten old on us, or grown up, or moved on, or something.

And I have experiences with that. Witnessed it first-hand with Jerry Jeff Walker, who, sometime about 1996 decided that he'd had about enough of being "Up Against The Wall, Redneck Mother," had about enough of those assholes sloshing their beer and shouting "Sangria WIne!" and decided to write and perform what and how he felt like. About 1999, he growled at us all in a San Angelo honky-tonk, something to the effect of "I played the shit you want to hear, now I'm gonna play what I want."

And I'm cool with that. I can't expect Jerry Jeff (or Robert Earl) to stay unchanged any more than I can stay the hellraiser that I was in the 1990s.

Anyway, so when I hear two songs from Keen's newest album, "The Rose Hotel" — the title track and the blissful "Village Inn" (yeah, basically the hotel/motel set) — and they have an "old Keen" feel to them, I'm really excited.

I'm thinking, I'm gonna write "Did Robert Earl Keen go back to his old sound, or did I grow up, too?"

Well, it's not that simple, of course. I opened up the CD after I bought it yesterday to see it was produced by Lloyd Maines (score!) and the musicians included Bryan Duckworth, which just made my heart glad. (I never knew why exactly Duckworth left the band, but I'd always imagined something bad.)

And true enough, "The Rose Hotel" on one end of the album, "Village Inn" on the other end and "The Man Behind the Drums" have an old-school feel with Keen's unapologetically Keen-esque (sorry, I just ran out of adjectives, good thing I didn't try for that music writer gig) voice front and center.

But then there's the odd cover of Townes Van Zandt's "Flying Shoes." Really, I don't mind re-imagining a song at all. In fact, I think a cover should re-imagine a song. (Can you imagine why George Strait would have covered Keen's "Maria," and, with all that Strait had at his disposal, have it sound just like Keen's version?) But the heavy drum track just doesn't fit. I mean, if you could separate the song from Van Zandt, and take it on its own, I guess it would be pretty good. But this is one of those songs that can't be separated from the despair and the ache that Townes infused it with. Besides, Lyle Lovett's cover of the song on "Step Inside this House" is pretty definitve.

And "Throwing Rocks" is a a rock song indeed, complete with background singers the Stones would have been proud of. It's not a bad song at all, I kinda dig it. Maybe an old Keenoid can move on, after all.

Since "Gravitational Forces," Keen can't resist the oddball song, and while "10,000 Chinese Walk Into a Bar" is not as weird as the title track to "Gravitational Forces" — beautifully described by Texas Music magazine as a "spoken-word stream-of-somethingness" — it's just not doing it for me. No, not even with supporting vocals by Billy Bob Thornton. Or maybe because of that.

"Something I Do" is the flip side of "Dreadful Selfish Crime." An ode to time wasted, without the regret or the soul of the earlier song, but with a smart-ass attitude and a faint reggae beat.

(You know, back in the day, my favorite San Angelo band, NDC, spontaneously performed a reggae version of a Robert Earl Keen song. They just made it up on the spot and it KICKED ASS. Or I thought it did. The fact that I can't remember what song it was, might be a clue to whether it was really good or not.)

I haven't given the back end of the album as much of a listen as I should have yet. I still haven't figured what "Goodbye Cleveland" or "On and On" are about.

But Keen leaves us laughing with "Wireless in Heaven," the countriest song of the bunch, descending into a bluegrassy number that Bill Monroe could not have predicted and would definitely not approve of.

So, is the album any good? Yeah, I think you'll like it. It's definitely Keen's best album since he released "Gravitational Forces" on Sept. 11, 2001.

(Note to reader: It is nearly impossible to write about music while listening to your 2-year-old play 3 musical toys at once. Elmo is a terrible background singer. Maybe later tonight I'll clean this blog up a bit.)

Night worker's lament

You know, I was just thinking the other day that it's been a long time since I settled in with a good movie that I haven't seen before, and watched it all the way through. I mean, I saw "Junior Bonner" at the end of August, and loved it, but that was in typical dad 30-minute installments.

I'm talking about getting totally absorbed in a good movie (and by good, I mean something I like, not Swedish cinema).

I was even looking forward to my second viewing of "The Dark Knight," but I ended up seeing that in 15-minute installments, in "Pulp Fiction" time sequencing, over the course of a month on HBO.

And so what then? Do I have an hour for a well-done, nice documentary or some other enlightening program?

(In case you don't know, I don't watch reality shows, sitcoms, prime-time dramas, etc. About as close as I get to popular television is my when-it's-convenient love affair with The Simpsons.)

Yeah, I can probably find an hour. But what's out there is terrible. I mean look at the History Channel. On any given night, you'll have "The Universe" (which, I guess is history, though slightly larger in scope than what I care to watch), some UFO shit, "MonsterQuest" and the worst knockoff ever, "Ice Road Truckers."

Where's the HISTORY? Hunh? I've said it before about UFO shows on the History Channel: it's not history if IT DID NOT HAPPEN.

Used to be, the joke was that 84% of History Channel programming was about Hitler. But hell, now I would settle for a good documentary about Hitler, unless of course he was driving a truckload of UFOs across the frozen tundra while being pursued by Yetis.

(Come to think of it, I guess I would watch an episode of that. Can you imagine Hitler in the cab of a Peterbilt in a whitout? Attacked by Yetis? "Achtung! Gott im Himmel, was ist das?" Aieeeeee!")

The best documentaries now are found on the National Geographic channel. Of course, I'm sure there's an old-school NatGeo fan writing in his blog right now, "Hey! Where are the fucking ANIMALS? This isn't National GEOGRAPHIC!"

Well, I guess we all can't win.

At least I've seen a few good football games.

'Junior Bonner'

"Junior Bonner" is …

A) Set in the 1970s West

B) with a go-for-broke rodeo star (Steve McQueen) 

C) going his own road, against the advice of all others

D) trailing the path of his ne'er-do-well father

E) returning to his hometown

F) to find that progress is eating away at his past and all he loves

G) but he rides on.

And, oh yeah, it's directed by Sam Peckinpah.

Does anyone want to guess how I reacted to this film?

Yes, I loved it. It's my first Peckinpah movie where a pair of punches to the jaw is the most of the violence, not the least. And it proves that it's not the violence that draws me to Sam's movies, it's the man vs. progress thing. 

I had such a good time watching this movie, I caught myself smiling, more than once. They don't make 'em like this anymore. Not with Ben Johnson and Robert Preston and … would you guess, a good performance by Joe Don Baker?

This pretty much clinches it. I'm gonna work at seeing the rest of Peckinpah's work, by which I mean the movies he directed. I've seen four westerns ("The Wild Bunch," "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," "Major Dundee" and "Ride the High Country"), but it looks like there's plenty more to go.

Going through imdb.com and weeding out the TV shows, it looks like he directed 16 movies, two of which are marked as "uncredited." I understand some of the later ones came toward the end when his skills had diminished but … I'm gonna try and see 'em all.

And if anyone wants to send me a "Junior Bonner" DVD for Christmas, that would be fine. Just saying …

Filler blog goes here

OK, I still feel like crap. Allergies are starting to piss me off.

I don't feel like exercising, I don't feel like cleaning up the house, I don't even feel like going to work.

Good thing I have today and tomorrow off. Whee, "vacation."

In the meantime, I'm gonna give you this filler blog, just so it looks like I'm doing something.

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Got to say, I feel pretty good about Entertainment Weekly's "25 Manliest Movies" ever made. You can check out their list right here.

I mean, ordinarily their lists are heavy on popular culture and pretty far off the mark, as far as I'm concerned. I feared, based on their past lists (and I am a sucker for lists), that they would consider some crap like Shithead LaBeouf's "Transformers" or maybe even some crappy comedy to be "manly."

But their list is about 75% dead-on.

There's some old-school classics: "Spartacus," "Dr. No," "Bridge on the River Kwai" and "The Great Escape."

There's some new-school victories: "Inglourious Basterds" (the reason for the list), "Reservoir Dogs," "300," "Fight Club" and "Gladiator."

But a good portion of the list reads like a list of Mr. Bottlecaps' favorite movies: "Patton," "The Magnificent Seven," "Predator," "The Thing," "First Blood," "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" and … of course … the best of 'em all, "The Wild Bunch."

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I don't care if it was preseason. I watched every moment of the Cowboys' "victory" over Tennessee on Friday night. And I enjoyed the hell out of it.

For all I know, the Cowboys might suck this year. And my Texas A&M Aggies are certainly going to be, uh, less than good. I'm gonna enjoy whatever victories I can.

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Fantasy football draft is on Sunday. I think there's a pretty clear set of "Top 3" running backs. I have the No. 4 pick. And I just know I'm gonna end up drafting a running back who was good last year and this year is gonna suck. I'm just not feeling the mojo this year.

11 books

So the Facebook quiz/list thing came around to me: Name 15 books that "will always stay with you." (Or something of that nature.)

Of course, you were supposed to name them off the top of your head, but I lost too many brain cells in my 20s to think that clearly at any given moment. And even by going through my bookshelves, I couldn't really come up with 15 that are of a life-changing nature.

So here's my list of 11, in no particular order.

1. "Letters to a Young Poet" / "The Art of War," by Rilke and Sun Tzu: This is the pretentious part of my list. I don't go around quoting them at dinner parties, if that helps, but I've read both a couple of times and they stick with me.

2. "Cash," by Johnny Cash: Yes, I've read at least four biographies of Willie Nelson, but the Man in Black is both mysteriously bad-ass and capable of writing like he's mysteriously bad-ass. I once had a friend tell me he was going to try to seduce a woman by reading her the liner notes of Cash's "Unchained" album. I don't know how that worked out for him, but I wished it was my idea.

3. "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," by Douglas Adams: I'm not gonna say I write like Adams, but this was the first thing I read where I thought "I want to write like this." I tried to do just that for awhile, but I think by my mid-20s I fell into a style that was my own.

4. "Lonesome Dove," by Larry McMurtry: I don't know if I ever will be as excited about reading fiction as I was back in my high school days, but this novel brought me back for at least as long as it took me to read the series.

6. "Death in the Long Grass," Peter Hathaway Capstick: I haven't read this in 20 years. I loaned it to a friend about that long ago, and never saw it again. But I can remember the passage where he talks about an elephant's willingness to "stomp you into guava jelly" pretty damn clearly.

7. "The Jungle," by Upton Sinclair: Well, not really. But I just wanted to say, one more time, "Poor little Stanislavos, got drunk on alcoholic backwash and was eaten alive by giant rats." Seriously, I read a lot of the classics in my first 20 years, but few really made a personal impact on me.

8. "Into Thin Air," by Jon Krakauer: This made me realize A) I should not climb mountains. B) I love to read about climbing mountains. I love most travel writing (Bill Bryson comes to mind), but if it's death at 24,000 feet, I'm totally reading it.

9. "Uncle Shelby's ABZs," by Shel Silverstein: Seriously, Silverstein wrote some of the best children's books of all time. Then he was a country musician and songwriter. And a cartoonist for Playboy. And then he comes out with this fantastic faux-children's book. Dude was a renaissance man.

10. "The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock," by Jan Reid: The first edition, of course. My first edition is dog-eared and worn, splattered with Lone Star beer and Stubb's barbecue sauce. My second edition has been read once. Simply put, it's the bible of Texas music.

11. "Desert Solitaire," by Edward Abby: Cactus Ed is (was) sort of like the James McMurtry of environment/American West literature. No, I don't mean Larry McMurtry. I mean his son. The ornery and fiercely private and prickly songwriter. You could read and appreciate all you want, but if you were to try to get at the root of his genius (back when he was still alive), you were liable to pull back a bloody stump.