Bouquets & Brickbats
To Timothee Chalamet. We like Timothee Chalamet, even though the costs of approval can often seem exorbitant. We don’t understand why sane people are supposed to enjoy the experience of spending five hours and twenty-one minutes watching sand, or whether the giant sandworms that occasionally emerge from this bleak landscape are good or bad. We’ll tolerate the fact that he shows up regularly on Celebrity Row looking like a refugee from a Livestream where he ate Tide pods. We’ll even tolerate the double “e” in his first name. Such is life in these United States.
On the other hand, we thought that Timothee Chalamet’s version of Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown was better than anything that the master himself has made available onstage for the past 25 …
Billy the Kid, With Chaser
Six cigarettes in the ashtray next to a Frank Stanford biography
The dirty realism of Wes Tirey
Alt Country enters its Cormac McCarthy phase
Wes Tirey is a cowpunk troubadour from the Midwest. An Ohio native, he rode the hillbilly highway in reverse, crafting gorgeous and haunting songs on his way to Asheville, North Carolina, where he now lives. Tirey is 39, wiry and taut, gray-grizzled a bit beyond his years. “Hard living,” he explained, ramming a cigarette into an ashtray.
Tirey reached out to me last summer to discuss literature. I’d recently published a biography of Frank Stanford, the charismatic and troubled Ozarkian poet with a fierce cult of acolytes, a man dead by suicide at 29. Tirey admired Stanford’s backcountry patois, his violence, and his all-or-nothing obsession with craft.
In a request that revealed Tirey’s own aesthetic philosophy, he asked me to share some unpublished Stanford poems — scribbles, drafts, outtakes, maybe a drunken ramble or two. He wanted something of Stanford’s that existed as far from …
Death to Hogs!
Hellish plague of feral hogs was unleashed by the Spanish conquistador de Soto
The population of Texas may soon be replaced by super-tough, super-intelligent feral hogs with vitals armored by plates of gristle and tusks that can reduce your innards to jelly.
Millions must die.
The year was 1539, and Hernando de Soto knew not the wrath he had already wrought upon the New World. The Spanish conquistador had sailed west to plunder and colonize the Americas; unknown to him, aboard his armada were the makings of an epidemic that would lay suffering upon the American Heartland for centuries to come. Not as the result of smallpox nor influenza, though the sailors were surely rife with those diseases. It was the domesticated Sus scrofa — otherwise known as the European boar, three hundred of which made the 1539 voyage with de Soto before he released them into the Texas wildlands with the hope that they would proliferate enough to provide sustenance for coming generations of conquistadors.
Over time, these once-domesticated boars sprouted sloping snouts, grew coarse hair and brutish tusks, and proliferated with exponential zeal throughout the woods and grasslands of …
