From the Land of Cowboys to You; or, The Modern Buckaroo’s Guide to the World
Life must have been easier in the 1950s. Within half an hour, it was possible for a good guy to vanquish a bad guy, be a role model for youngsters, and look good in a holster.
Have Gun Will Travel reads the card of a man.
A knight without armor in a savage land.
His fast gun for […]
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 […]
…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 […]
To cowboy up means to get going. Get the job done. Get into gear. No matter what.
Sundown Jim, by Ernest Haycox
Cover illustration by Jerry Allison
Pocket Books, 1958
from the collection of es
A good friend of ours has cancer–the late-stage, not-very-posterchild-like kind–and he and his wife have to cowboy up on a daily basis. I can’t always […]
In times of moral confusion, I turn to my collection of a gajillion western paperbacks from the 1940s and 1950s*. Their bold colors and bolder titles (such as Action by Night, Gunsmoke Justice, Dig the Spurs Deep) bring me back to my center. Good/bad. Right/wrong. Yes/no.
The one-two punch of pulp writers, who must have banged […]
Shoot from the Hip, copyright es 2008, based on Italian movie poster for A Fistful of Dollars
Everyone’s jumping on the presidential and vice presidential candidates: too cool, too hot-tempered, too much woman, too little man. And like a phantom, the Mythic Cowboy rides through before fading away into the mists of the collective unconscious.
Thomas Friedman, […]
In an American headline world dominated by an Alaskan governor, in the face of tragedy on the floodplains of India (three million people displaced), and escalating tensions worldwide, it’s time to escape into a good western, where problems can be solved in about ninety minutes.
In this Wild Western world, a newspaper might have these headlines:
Top Headline:
COWBOY […]
All it takes is some spaghetti western soundtrack woo-woo, and my eyes refocus to squint into the distance–which invariably becomes dry, dusty, prone to wavy mirages that look like tall trees or figures, and super far away. With mountains or buttes. Way off there. Way, way, way…way far away.
Whatever I’m dealing with at the moment shrinks to the […]
I’ve been unwilling to saddle up the presidential cowboy analogies for some time–Dubya too easy of a target–but THANK ALL THAT IS COWPOKE for recent presidential candidate news.
Barack Obama resists the cowboy hat–all I can see him as is the lawyer/Dude from a big city, or maybe as a laid-back (yet pistol-packing) James Stewart in Destry Rides […]