1. Someday, I'll read up on the subject and come to an understanding of what criteria a country music singer/songwriter/performer meets to be regarded as "outlaw". A little while back, I watched the 1975/6 documentary, Heartworn Highways, a loving portrait of the early days of the Outlaw Country movement. I don't remember how, but when I watched Heartworn Highways, I discovered that a sequel of sorts was made and released in 2015. I leapt online and ordered discs of both movies. Today I watched Heartworn Highways Revisited.
The director of Heartworn Highways, James Szalapski, died in 2000. Experienced music video director Wayne Price took up the project of directing the sequel. He focused Revisited on a circle of musicians playing out of East Nashville and built the movie around contemporary Outlaws John McCauley and Jonny Fritz and also featured a generous number of their fellow musicians, including Shovels & Rope, Justin Townes Earle, Nikki Lane, Shelly Colvin, Robert Ellis, Andrew Combs, Bobby Bare, Jr., and more. In addition, Wayne Price brought original outlaws Guy Clark, David Allen Coe, and Steve Young into the movie, a brilliant move.
Heartworn Highways Revisited introduced me to every one of the contemporary musicians. I enjoyed their work and look forward to paying more attention to them. But, for me, the emotional heart of this film was the aged Guy Clark. My tears flowed when he played and sang "LA Freeway" and a number of the young performers joined him. I loved the interviews with Clark and how the film flashed back to Clark as he appeared in Heartworn Highways. Likewise, I loved how Wayne Price brought Steve Young and David Allen Coe into the story. It gave this movie both a sense of deep history and gravity.
2. I let Heartworn Highways Revisited settle inside me and then returned to the Criterion Channel's menu of neo-noir offerings. Having just watched Gene Hackman in The French Connection, I decided to watch Night Moves, an Arthur Penn movie he appeared in about five years after The French Connection.
My sense is that the neo-noir directors seek to complicate the traditional film noir stories and conventions and that is certainly the case in Night Moves. Hackman plays a private investigator named Harry Moseby and, as the story developed, I began to realize that this was the story of a detective where a significant gap exists between his sense of himself as a competent detective and his actual incompetence. I found the movie's story confusing, but, as I looked back, I enjoyed this confusion, found it compelling, actually, because my confusion was also Harry Moseby's confusion. As a viewer of the movie, I could acknowledge my confusion, step back, and try (unsuccessfully) to piece the story together, but Harry Moseby can't step back and sinks deeper into the murky waters of his investigations and deeper into the consequences of events he never understood.
Traditionally, detective stories give us the pleasure of witnessing a knot being untangled, of confusion being clarified, of the unknown becoming known. We witness a case being solved. In this way, many detective stories are literary comedies.
But this neo-noir movie, similar to many others in this genre, is more complicated, more existential, more tragic. To me, Harry Moseby is portrayed, yes, as unheroic, unable to comprehend, let alone solve the mess he dives into. He's unheroic but not a fool. The twisted situation he's investigating overwhelms him. The gap between what he believes is true and what actually is turns out to be emblematic of so much of life itself -- certainty is a fleeting and rare experience. Heroism is rare.
3. Meagan bought crowlers (not growlers) of great beers at MickDuff's in Sandpoint about ten days ago and tonight I popped open the 25 oz can (it's a crowler, not a glass growler!) of Lake Paddler Pale Ale. As I drank more deeply into this crowler/can, and, as the beer warmed up a bit, its malty-ness began to assert itself and I had moments when drinking this beer called up memories of drinking McMenamin's Hammerhead, my all-time favorite pale ale.
The pleasure of this beer was surpassed only by the pleasure of tuning in to tonight's Tree House Concert. Because of the pain and other complications Bill Davie is experiencing because of having MS, he has cut back on his Tree House Concert performance schedule. He's giving these concerts twice a month now instead of every week.
Bill has trimmed back on how many songs he plays per concert The limitations the MS impose on him dictate his selections. Tonight, he played gems, including "Learn to Say Goodbye", "The Mud Song", "Fascination", "The Only Magic I Know", among others. It was a superb playlist, perfectly complimented by the handful of "Body and Soul" poems he read from the stunning anthology, Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, edited by Neil Astley. It was a powerful hour and, judging from the comments they made during the show, Bill's audience loved it. I know I did.
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