Western writer inspiration #5

Here is this week's omnibus of #westernwriter inspirations posted each day at twitter [click to enlarge]. If you are on twitter, you can follow me @rdscheer.

Cowboy boots, (CC) Cyril Mayer

A Bronc to Breakfast by Charles Russell, 1912

Zydeco cowboy, Geno Delafose, (CC) I, Sumori

Buffalo Bill's Wild West; poster, c1899

Cattle roundup, Great Falls, Montana, c1890

South Dakota cowboys branding cattle, 1888

Texas cowboy by Stanley L. Wood (1866-1928)

Image credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Overland Journeys in Early Western Fiction

Photo-finish Friday: out and about

You know there's a movie shoot somewhere nearby when you see these parked along a street in LA or in a vacant lot. They are Star Waggons, which are mobile unit rentals for on-location filmmaking. They come in versions for the folks responsible for makeup, wardrobe, or production - or for the stars themselves.

These were recently in a lot near where I work. Hard to walk by them and not be totally curious about who might be inside.

Photo-finish Friday is the bright idea of Leah Utas over at The Goat’s Lunchpail.

Meša Selimović, Death and the Dervish

The psychological density of this suspenseful political novel captures well the paradoxes at the heart of human experience. For 455 pages the reader is immersed (almost imprisoned) in the twists and turns of one man's awareness of himself and the world around him. While it's a small world, maybe 17th-century Sarajevo (we're not sure), it is also a city under the heavy-handed governance of far-off Constantinople during the Ottoman Empire.

A reader familiar with the political realities of the 1960s, when the novel was written, can easily see it as an allegory of life in Soviet-era Yugoslavia. The dominant theme from beginning to end is a state of anxiety. One thinks of similar anxious and fearful moods captured in the compositions of the author's contemporary, Shostakovich.

Yet there's a universality that readers from any culture can recognize and identify with. The novel's narrator, Sheikh Ahmed, is tormented by his emotional conflicts, and much of his account of himself reads like Edgar Allan Poe. Like the humans we know ourselves to be, he behaves well at times and unforgivably at others.

Baščaršija mosque, Sarajevo (CC) Martin Belam

The morally right course of action is often clouded by self interest, so that our estimation of him varies sometimes from one paragraph to the next. The more admirable character in the novel is his friend Hassan, who represents a good-heartedness and depth of character free of ideology and religion.

Still, the novel wavers in its point of view. On the one hand is an earthy folk wisdom, which can easily yield to mob violence and other forms of depravity, as the novel illustrates. On the other is a moral code as provided by religious faith and transcribed in scriptural texts like the Koran, which can be misused for ignoble ends as the novel also illustrates.

Selimović addresses the central moral issue of any time and place - the great difficulty of choosing the right course of action when the consequences of that action are impossible to predict and potentially perilous. This is a fine novel that wants to be read slowly and thoughtfully. It may be set in Bosnia, but it is about everyone.  

First published in 1966, Death and the Dervish is currently available at amazon, alibris, and AbeBooks. Forgotten Books is the bright idea of Patti Abbott over at pattinase. 

Photo credit: Martin Belam from Chania, Crete, Creative Commons, Wikimedia Commons 

Coming up: John Neihardt, The Lonesome Trail (1907)

The Hired Hand (1971)

This is a re-run from over a year ago when I was a brand-new blogger and famous for being unknown. So, once more with feeling:

Peter Fonda directed and stars in this very authentic-looking and conceived film about two drifters who return to the wife and child that one of them abandoned six years before. Warren Oates plays Fonda’s friend and Verna Bloom is the wife. While unspecified in the film, we learn in Fonda’s commentary that the year is 1881, and it was shot in New Mexico.

The river in the opening scenes is the Rio Grande, and key scenes were shot in a dusty town of adobe buildings that the filmmakers found far off the beaten path. The bar where the men go for a drink is a haphazard construction that looks like it could tumble down at any moment.

Fonda also reveals that he wanted to create a new mold for the western by making it as realistic as possible in its details. Lovers of shoot-em-up action will be immediately struck by how slowly the film unfolds, reflecting the slower pace of life on the frontier, where almost nothing moves faster than a horse in low gear. Soft acoustic music plays under some scenes, but the film mostly captures the quiet of a pre-industrialized rural environment, the ambiance colored by birdsong during the day and crickets at night.

A. F. Miller store, Farmington, New Mexico, 1885

The two men may have worked as cowboys in their drifting, but we see them only as farmhands in the film, repairing a windmill, lubricating a wagon wheel, clearing brush. There are a few chickens, but no cattle. Their work clothes look worked in, although lean-legged Peter Fonda wears leather stovepipe chaps sometimes for no particular purpose (complaining about the heat in one scene, when removing them would have reduced his body temperature). 

Both men have brushy beards and hair that is appropriately long for 1881 (also fashionably so for 1971). Verna Bloom wears no makeup, looking as plain as possible when we first see her, the many years of hard work and the climate already making her age before her time.

There is menace enough to be found among unsavory characters the two men meet, but violence when it erupts is sudden and over with quickly. It takes a kidney punch – not a lengthy fistfight - to bring down a man who’s spoken ill of a woman. And there is little gunfire. We hear a couple of gunshots off-camera early on in the film, and about a half hour passes before there are a few more. While the gunfight at the end is deadly, it’s also realistic in its brevity and confusion.

Western writer inspiration no. 4

Here is this week's omnibus of #westernwriter inspirations posted each day at twitter. If you are on twitter, you can follow me @rdscheer.

Arizona cowboy. Frederic Remington, 1901

Cowboy, c1900

Cowboy. Thomas Eakins, c1890

Cowboy bar, Jackson, Wyoming (CC) Acroterion

Rodeo, Cody, Wyoming (CC) C. G. P. Grey

Cowboy, Yellowstone Valley, Montana, 1904

Photo credits: Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: John Neihardt, Lonesome Trail (1907)

Photo-finish Friday: food trucks

Don't know about other cities, but Los Angeles has become an epicenter of mobile sidewalk cuisine in the form of food trucks. We've had food trucks that make the round of construction sites for years, affectionately called "roach wagons." But the new food truck craze is something else, with a clientele of mostly young foodies ready to slap down $5-$10 for edible specialties that can be a little quirky and are a cut above fast food.

Food trucks usually have a jazzy look and playful names, like NaanStop, Crazy Creole Cafe, Global Soul Truck, Jogasaki Burrito, Knockout Taco Truck, Slammin' Sliders, Truck Norris, and Get Your Lard On. [For a little help with that last one, you may want to click over to wikipedia.]

They spend only a few hours in one place before moving on, and to keep track of your favorites, you need to follow them on twitter, as I do @SteelCitySndwch, which serves up an approximation of the famous all-in-one sandwiches at Primanti's in Pittsburgh (fries and coleslaw included in the sandwich).

In the photo above is No Tomatoes, which calls itself an Indian Cafe. They park sometimes near my office on Jefferson Blvd., late afternoons and evenings, and usually in a row of other trucks. Last night there were five of them. For a map of greater LA with the current locations of all gazillion food trucks, you can check online at Truxmap.

Photo-finish Friday is the bright idea of Leah Utas over at The Goat’s Lunchpail.

Mackey Hedges, Last Buckaroo

I posted a review of this book over a year ago when I was still a new blogger and before anybody knew I was here. Among many books about the day-to-day life of working cowboys, it's among the best. Out of print for many years, it's now back in print and, for all those reasons, worth a reprise:

Last Buckaroo purports to be a novel, with something of a story to follow. But once you get past the fairly far-fetched antics at the beginning, you're treated to an informative description of what it's like moving from one ranch job to the next -- each time getting used to a new boss, a new bunch of cowboys and horses, and the conditions of various kinds of ranch operations and cow camps in various seasons of the year.

There are a few digressions, as Tap the narrator in his sixties recalls adventures from earlier times. Mostly it's the absorbing accounts of working cowboys who seem completely real, like they could walk right off the page. The novel is set in the Great Basin of the West, so the lingo, the gear and the cowboy way are all buckaroo-style, harking back to the vaqueros from old California. The terrain is mostly Nevada and Oregon.

In northern California the two heroes take jobs packing dudes into the mountains. Later they settle down for a while working in a huge feedlot operation. There's also a side trip to Arizona, where our boys fetch up with an outfit of Apache cowboys, and the author explores in fascinating detail the uneasy relationship between white cowboys and their Native American counterparts.

It's also a story of friendship, as old-timer Tap acquires a young, greenhorn sidekick, Dean, who knows kickboxing but not much about what it takes to be a cowboy. Over the seasons and years, the boy learns a great deal, giving the reader a chance to learn some things along with him. Hedges captures the romance of cowboying without denying the discomforts, the dangers and risk of accident and injury, and the potential for conflict between men who don't get along. The novel is punctuated with several violent fights, and there are two or three accounts of accidents sending cowboys to hospital emergency rooms.

This book was a great pleasure to read. It's currently available at amazon.

Coming up: John Neihardt, Lonesome Trail (1907)