Slowly Going Bald

I hate country music. My sister and I were forced to listen to it in the car when we were young, and prolonged battles finally allowed us to switch the family station to oldies. But from 1987 to 1996-7, I was immersed in mainstream country music, and that history gives me the license and more than enough motivation to say that country music, as it is known, is genuinely awful. It's cloying, derivative, poorly written and cheaply made. It panders to the uneducated, and revels in it.In fact, country music isn't actually country music: it's watered-down, heavy-handed, disposable pop with a few steel guitars instead of Britney's syncopated moaning. For all of the antagonism most country fans show pop music (traceable to country's grasp on Middle-America's hearts, minds, votes and wallets), modern country music and Top 40 pop have more in common than either would like to admit. The strongest example of this is the latest single from Tim McGraw featuring Nelly (or Nelly featuring Tim McGraw, depending on which station you listen to): it's a bad song about missing someone, with the drum loops and twangy groans in perfect balance. This stuff flies off WalMart's shelves.But real country music today mostly goes by the title "alt-country" ("whatever that is"), and contains more heart and skill than any thousand songs by Toby Keith. Keith, it should be noted, is symptomatic of the arrogant xenophobia so popular throughout too much of America today; he's Bill O'Reilly's musical (barely) counterpart. But I digress.So, I'm here to offer some help. Below are some simple tips and suggested listening for anyone who believes that music with a steel guitar can and should be good, and anyone who hates anything about what passes for country music these days.1. Stay out of Nashville.This is fairly obvious, but that's why it tops the list. Nashville is a cookie cutter for country stars, a tired old assembly line where no singer writes their own songs and no songwriter holds their head high. The town produces bland, tasteless, downright godawful music about subjects best left to Hallmark cards or White House press releases. If you want real music, you won't find it here.2. Cut off contact with modern country.This means no radio, CD purchases, etc. Overhearing the latest Brooks & Dunn masterpiece while standing in line to get your oil changed is forgivable; nodding your head to the beat is not. This brings me back to...3. Seriously, stay out of Nashville.Pick up the latest issue of No Depression, a magazine that claims to be unable to define alt-country, though it does a great job representing the cause. Listen to bands from Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona ("all roads lead back to Tucson," after all), or anywhere. But chances are the salvation you seek cannot be found in Tennessee.4. Listen:The beauty of alt.country is its wide net of inclusion; it's more of an anti-movement than a movement. Give the following a look.Uncle TupeloWilco (particularly A.M. and Being There)Son VoltThe Refreshments (particularly The Bottle & Fresh Horses)The Jayhawks (particularly Tomorrow the Green Grass and Rainy Day Music)Ryan Adams (particularly Heartbreaker)Old 97'sWhiskeytownRoger Clyne & the Peacemakers (particularly Honky Tonk Union)Bright Eyes (particularly I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning)The PistolerosJohnny Cash (particularly every record he ever put out, but get a hold of the American recordings)Gram ParsonsThe Byrds' Sweetheart of the RodeoAnd those are just the artists or albums that fall under the general heading of alt-country. Songs that fit the bill pop up everywhere, from "Rain King" to "Hung Up On You." The trick is knowing where to look, and where not to look (e.g., don't look in Nashville. Ever.).Regular visitors to this site might recognize some of the above names, which is a sad indication that they visit this site too much and should be doing better things with their day, like going right out and buying the albums I've listed so that their lives might be considered worthwhile.

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After prodding from the people that prod me, or one of them anyway, I humbly offer a list of appropriate phrases that should provide the reader with some idea of what life might be like in Abilene. Don't forget, I should be doing actual work instead of this.1. Abilene: Enjoy Leaving!2. Abilene: Have Fun Driving Through Us On Your Way To Nowhere!3. Abilene: Because You Can Never Have Enough Churches4. Abilene: Now There's A Starbucks!5. Abilene: Why?6. Abilene: Prone To Flooding7. Abilene: Because Sometimes You Make Bad Choices8. Abilene: Come For The Schools, Stay For The Poor Economy9. The Occasionally Friendly Frontier10. The Friendly City (Because The Frontier No Longer Exists)11. Abilene: We Let Students Pick Our Slogan12. The Genial Frontier13. The Complacent Frontier14. The Semi-Positive Frontier15. Abilene: Everything Is Brown Here16. Abilene: One Day At A Time17. Abilene Schmabilene18. Abilene: The Key City To A Door You Don't Want To Open19. Abilene: More Crime Than You'd Think"We may be through with the past, but the past ain't through with us."

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Dear Grammy Voters and Any Who Help Produce The Show,You suck. You are lame and you suck, and your lame suckiness reaches hitherto unexplored realms of craptastic lame suckiness. Suck.You are old, and out of touch, and have a curious penchant for heaping awards on dead people. Ray Charles didn't become great because he died or somebody made on overrated movie about him; he's always been great. But giving him eight posthumous awards, like when you threw a few statues to the Johnny Cash estate a little while back, is just confusing. It's like you sense a trend about to pass you by, so you might as well jump on it for a little while. You're like that guy who finally bought a trucker hat in late 2004, only to realize that whole thing was long over and that kids who wear trucker hats are bad people. You guys suck.Another example: last year you gave Fountains of Wayne a nod for Best New Artist, despite the fact that their first album came out in 1996. But they land "Stacy's Mom" on the radio, not even their best work, and you guys go bananas.And why give an award to that creepy moaning song from The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King? You're, like, a year late, you old sucky losers. And the song's not even good.And what do your categories even mean? What's the difference between Record of the Year and Song of the Year? Or the difference between R&B Album and Contemporary R&B Album? You guys suck so much. No one watches your show, and all musicians everywhere are disappointed that the only award they can shoot for is the one you losers hand out.Thanks For Your Time,Daniel Carlson

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Hey, I found the WMDs. I thought I'd already looked everywhere, but apparently I missed a few places. That's always the way, I guess; things are always in the last place you'd expect.

Here they are.

At least Iraq's elections will provide some stability to the region. After all, as the New York Times reported in 1967, U.S. officials were encouraged when South Vietnam held presidential elections, and the trouble surely couldn't have gone on much past 1967, right?

[Here's a link to the Times page, or you can read the article here in its entirety.]

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Million Dollar Baby

Starring Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman

Directed by Clint Eastwood

4 stars (out of 4)

Geoffrey: “You fool. As if it matters how a man falls down.”

Richard: “When the fall is all that’s left, it matters a great deal.”

—The Lion in Winter (1968)

On the heels of last year’s Mystic River, director Clint Eastwood offers up Million Dollar Baby, a simple elegy more reminiscent of his Oscar-winner Unforgiven (1992). Eastwood stars as aging boxing trainer Frankie Dunn, but he’s really William Munny resurrected: one man, damned and riding the plains looking for salvation, performing rituals of atonement even though none ever comes.

“Everything in boxing is backward,” we learn from Frankie’s partner Eddie “Scrap Iron” Dupris (Morgan Freeman), with whom Frankie runs a small gym. Scrap narrates the film, bearing witness and recounting the events to someone we will learn about later. And indeed, things do seem to be backward, with very little sweet left to the science: Frankie’s best fighter leaves him after an 8-year partnership to be with a manager who’ll give him a title fight; Frankie hasn’t seen his daughter in years, and all his letters to her come back unopened; and Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank) shows up asking Frankie to train her, despite being, at 31, too old to begin training.

Maggie has no friends, and her family back in Missouri consists of a lazy mother, Earline (Margo Martindale), and cruel siblings who mock her even as they leech money from her. She waits tables, saving the scraps for herself. Frankie eventually gives into her persistence and begins to train her, and what happens to them over the next year and a half is the stuff of heartbreak and beauty, of love and loss, and of man’s simple attempts to achieve ever greater heights. Maggie fights because it’s all she knows, and for that reason she becomes one of the greatest fighters Frankie has ever trained.

The only thing Frankie does regularly, besides train fighters, is attend daily Mass and ask pointedly annoying questions of his priest. Frankie’s playful impieties are met with constant scorn from Father Horvak (Brian O’Byrne), a younger man too concerned with other things to genuinely care about an old trainer. Frankie says he’s been writing regular letters to his daughter, a truth Horvak doesn’t believe because he’s already made up his mind about the old man. It’s no wonder Frankie’s faith needs mending: he’s been turned away by the one organization that’s supposed to accept everybody.

Earline and Horvak are the film’s nods to convention, each a two-dimensional force provided to progress the plot or let the characters express their feelings. Unfortunately, too much weight is given to Earline and not enough to Horvak; she plays a substantial role that doesn’t need to exist, and he is tragically underused as Frankie searches for hope and finds none offered. Families and churches are pretty big on abandoning their own in the world of Million Dollar Baby, leaving us to forge our own networks of support in whatever ways we can.

A slim young man, nicknamed Danger (Jay Baruchel), also works out regularly at Frankie’s gym; he’s a sweet-natured, loud-mouthed Texas boy who proclaims he’s training for the welterweight championship. Most of the other fighters mock him, but Scrap is content to let him box air and show up whenever he wants. Scrap knows that Danger is harmless but loyal, and letting him work out at the gym hurts no one and gives Danger a sense of belonging. One night a group of fighters jump Danger in the ring, beating the pup bloody until Scrap rushes in to stop what would be the senseless murder of another mockingbird. Scrap picks the boy up, telling him: “Anybody can lose one fight. You’ll be back, Danger.” This moment exposes the film’s heart, the slowly beating thread that runs through it all. The big moments are unavoidable; it’s what we do right after them that defines us, and determines what our lives will be.

Eastwood celebrates his 75th birthday this year, and Freeman will turn 68. Too rarely do films show older actors playing characters their own age; a lesser producer would want to pair Eastwood and Swank as love interests, apparently convinced that the audience will swallow anything. But Frankie’s eventual love for Maggie is different, deeper, than that: she is his family, his blood, his darling. The two become family in every best sense of the word: each a place for the other to find something they’d lost.

The film ends much differently than you’d think, but Clint Eastwood would never make Rocky. Million Dollar Baby is a hard film, one that literally pulls no punches, but a film worth seeing and celebrating for its honesty. I will not obviously enter here into details of the film’s final act, except to say that Eastwood has sewn together parts that form a much greater whole, a story of the truth of human emotion and the chances we are bound by fate to take.

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Dear Mr. President,

I watched most of your State of the Union address last night (I caught the gist after the fifteenth smirk), and I'd like to offer the following reflections:

Nuclear. Noo. Klee. Ur. Nuclear. You were born and educated in Connecticut, man.

Please stop embarassing people from Texas.

Also, if you want to make the case that the U.S. intervened in Iraq for humanitarian reasons, and not to chase phantom WMDs or fail to capture the man behind 9/11, you probably should have started that ball rolling a while ago. As it is, I think we're all pretty confused.

Sincerely,

Daniel Carlson

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1. Gorky Park (1983)

2. The Contender (2000)

3. The Deep End (2001)

4. Miller's Crossing (1990)

5. The Mission (1986)

6. The Candidate (1972)

7. The Paper Chase (1973)

8. Shallow Grave (1994)

9. Whale Rider (2003)

10. Three Days of the Condor (1975)

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