From the Land of Cowboys to You; or, The Modern Buckaroo’s Guide to the World
Tony Hillerman, from laurieroberts.net
My mother read Tony Hillerman’s books–one after the other, like eating potato chips.* One quiet day in her condo** I stretched out my hand and picked up a creased paperback and immediately fell into Hillerman Country.
Hillerman Country is red and ochre and brown and yellow. Dusty and windy. Populated by buttes and washouts, [...]
Let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffalo is exterminated, as it is the only way to bring lasting peace and allow civilization to advance. –General Philip Sheridan
Buffalo skulls, mid-1870s, waiting to be ground into fertilizer
Here’s a more recent quote:
“I am especially concerned,” [Governor Palin] said in a written statement in August 2007, when [...]
Reach for the sky!
Cowboy Shoot ‘em Up with Stagecoach ©2008 es
Hey, that’s good advice.
All movies and stories (all that are worth hearing) have the common theme of conflict that leads to resolution and the return. A theater play with no conflict at all resembles virtual reality. Where’s the fun in watching that? Might as [...]
Mythology and ritual are the same thing. Take a look at Phantom Empire, 1935 Mascot serial. This twelve-episode serial is the worst Western of all time. But buried beneath its trick riding and kid-style secret club is a message as deep as the secret underground queendom of Murania. That’s about twenty-five thousand feet, way down [...]
…the strange Thunder Riders gallop across the desert. Their tracks lead back to the mysterious mountains–where no one has ever come out alive…
Plastic Hero in Red ©2008 es
by guest blogger batboy42
The rules of life are different for a hero, no matter how hard he tries to remain with the old neighborhood.
He’s walking like a hero [...]
Plastic Hero © 2008 es
Anything can look heroic–it’s all in the way the lights and camera work. Maybe that’s why cowboys in movies don’t say too much. All candidates on Campaign Trail ‘08 have to keep talking, but the more they talk, the less heroic they seem. It’s a problem, buckaroos and buckarettes. I think they [...]
MAVERICK. Ask not how many times you can say a word, but why you need to say the word so many times in the first place.
“Maverick.” Thou shalt not repeat a word in the hopes that it sticks.
“Maverick” took on a pop culture tone in the 1950s with James Garner’s hat-pushed back, insouciant gambler. The [...]
Cowboy boot hunting is a lot perseverance and a little luck. You have to have boot-mind. You have to have patience. You have to have a high degree of tolerance for cheap-ass mall-rat boots. You have to have a discerning eye, and the feel for boots within your fingers.
Some of my jillion boots were picked up in [...]
Cowboys are white. Thus proclaimed the thing with greatest authority in my life: TV programs. Even the Indians were white, and so were the chiefs and chiefs’ daughters (who were white enough to be loved by the white heroes). (Fact: Natalie Wood as Debbie Edwards in The Searchers, 1956) So imagine my surprise, at [...]