Year: 2004

• Shared bathroom with
Bill O’Reilly

• “Mission Accomplished”
branded into flesh

• Kidneys pecked out
by Lee Atwater

• Daily brunch with Dick Cheney

• What’s left of hair pulled out
by mixed-race love children

• Steady audio feed from the
Hillary Clinton Presidential Library

For many years, country music was one of the shibboleths of the alternative nation: If you were born after 1950, lived in a city, and considered yourself smart and hip, you’d say you liked “all kinds of music”—pause—“except country.” There were almost as many “Country and Western” jokes as knock-knock jokes. And the folk revolution of the late sixties was remarkably irrelevant to mainstream country. (Vietnam, the great divider of that generation, pitted cowboys squarely against hippies.)

Like the new Imax film Our Country, the whole genre has too often been a self-parody. That makes it hard to take seriously, and it’s a shame. If you look no further than the far right of the FM dial, there are lots of reasons to hate country. The great decline really started in the seventies and early eighties, culminating in gone-to-seed dudes like Mac Davis, Conway Twitty, George Jones, and Glen Campbell. At the time, it was the men who were the derelicts of country music, not the women. (God bless you, Dolly, Tammy, Loretta, and Emmylou.) The same reasons to loathe country music persist today in the saccharine pop of straw-stuffed FM stars like Shania Twain, Toby Keith, and Garth Brooks. (I’ve found a simple formula to distinguish the good from the bad: If it sounds like a commercial for Ford or Budweiser, it probably will be one before long. This is bad.)

We might have dismissed mainstream country the same way we’ve dismissed classical music. In the nineties, though, something funny started to happen. Young urbanites, especially those who’d been steeped in punk rock, were forever on the lookout for novelty. Moving forward often requires looking backward; some musicians began to study older forms of folk music. Eventually, they got so far as to punkify blues (Jon Spencer, not to mention his less-deserving copycats, the White Stripes) and jazz (Medeski, Martin, & Wood and protégés like the Bad Plus and Happy Apple).

And somewhere along the line, an earnest new generation of musicians got sucked into one of America’s great and durable traditions: electrified folk, otherwise known as true blue country music. A band like the Jayhawks helped launch alt-country, with garrisons in Wilco, Joe Henry, Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, and many others. For the urbane and curious, these artists opened the doors to historical country music, and, frankly, made it cool again. I think it’s fair to say that the alternative-country gang, no matter what their pretensions, helped to reclaim American country music as it was played up until about 1970—that is, before a whole lot of coke and sequins got snorted off the coffee tables of huge record companies in Nashville. Needless to say, the Jayhawks’ Gary Louris probably has more in common with Hank Williams than Keith Urban does.

Then again, so what? That rare insight may scratch a certain kind of elitist itch, but it doesn’t much explain country music today—not the brand most Americans would recognize, anyway. Which brings us to people like George Strait and Tim McGraw. Modern fans of Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family likely avoid the lo-cal molasses to be heard on country radio today. Still, as off-putting as it might be to city slickers, the fact is that contemporary country radio covers a massive swath of the nation. I’ve come to think of it as a harmless little diversion—like petting zoos and the New York Yankees and Ted Turner and other easy-to-digest artifacts of life in the USA.

Sure, a song like “Suds in the Bucket” or “Live Like You Were Dying” is simply high-shine pop music sung with a bizarre (and carefully calibrated) redneck twang. But for whatever it’s worth, modern country music is admirable, at least on a mechanical level. It is some of the best-written and -constructed music today, and it makes most rock and pop seem like it was written by a sixteen-year-old. (As indeed, it often is.) This does not necessarily make country good, nor rock ’n’ roll bad.

Enthused amateurism is one of the great achievements of punk rock that was stolen from folk music, and country doesn’t want it back. In every other genre of pop music, especially rock, jazz, and hip-hop, the expectation is that a band writes and performs its own material. But even at this late date, country music continues to operate with a Tin Pan Alley/Brill Building model. A glance at the current top twenty country songs shows that more than half were written by someone other than the recording artist. Nashville is lousy with agents connecting songwriters with song performers.

The result is a specialization of labor—call it an assembly line—which makes for an end product that has its selling points. The songwriting itself is often polished and clever, and the instrumentation and production is the best that can be had from studio session professionals. What makes most of this material sound so much like pop music is that it is seamlessly orchestrated. In other words, it’s built to the same factory specs as bubblegum pop. It should sound the same. Most of it is created the same way as “product” from Linkin Park and Destiny’s Child.

Even with all the pop obfuscation, there are still certain conventions that signify a song as country: a fiddle, a banjo, a Dobro, or that twangy accent. With modern production and polish, though, it’s the last of these that is often the only identifying characteristic between country and, say, adult contemporary. I’ve long been obsessed with the “redneck” accent that rural populations affect from Mankato to Missoula, Atlanta to Calgary, Austin to Washington D.C. Some think of it as Southern or even Western, but it is a state of mind, not a state of place—the linguistic equivalent of the pickup truck. I’ve heard it from the mouths of cabdrivers and steelworkers in midtown Manhattan. I believe I’ve even heard it from the mouth of our Connecticut-born, Yale- and Harvard-educated, superrich president.

Beyond country’s musical conventions, there are the hackneyed characters, themes, and storylines that still flourish like crabgrass. Country music today reflects a certain set of values that we’ve come to associate with rural life and Red America. These read like a Republican stump speech: self-sufficiency, fidelity, hard work, a firm sense of right and wrong, family values, respect for God and country. In country music, the bad guys are always irredeemable rascals who can’t give up the bottle or the wandering eye or the rambling road. In country music, the heroes are the World’s Greatest Husband and the Most Loyal Wife in the Universe—and, in times of war, American soldiers and the Almighty, who must look an awful lot like Uncle Sam.

It’s telling that country is such a huge radio phenomenon. Country radio reaches seventy million listeners nationwide, almost half the entire adult population. Together with right-wing talk, it rules that medium. It doesn’t have as much impact elsewhere, however. Rock and pop, for example, outsell country by a long shot in the CD store and the iTunes queue. On the concert circuit, heavy metal puts to shame the box-office loot from country. But nationally, no other genre even comes close on the radio. In the Twin Cities—remember, a non-rural metropolitan area of around two million pairs of ears—country station K102 is second only to classic rock KQRS.

Country radio is especially interesting to consider from a demographic point of view. Advertisers have known forever that modern country has a huge appeal to women, particularly suburban soccer moms. I credit all those sentimental, tearjerking odes to simplicity, fealty, and family, as well as the bitter laments about cheating, lying, rambling men. Country deals in these stereotypes comfortably and openly and can always be reduced to the essential tension between the happy home and the open road, between putting down roots versus moving on West.

Nor is it surprising that, if all other music genres are infes
ted with Democrats and lefties (try to imagine a conservative answer to the “Vote for Change” lineup—Ted Nugent?), country music is the bailiwick of conservatives. I despise the equivalence of “Republican” with “patriotic,” but I’m intrigued by the simple pun offered by “country” music—country as in not the city, but also country as in nation. It is a triangulation that doesn’t always make sense, particularly with the rise in the seventies of outlaw country, on the one hand, and rope-smoking hippie folk like John Denver on the other. Then again, commercial country during that period was not particularly nationalistic. Certainly not like it is today.

If there was ever any doubt about the general political leanings of country as a whole, it was swept away in the outrage that has dogged the Dixie Chicks, ever since singer Natalie Maines made it known that she thinks George W. Bush is lower than a snake’s belly in a wagonwheel rut. It is one thing for some Euro-fag like Bono to shamelessly diss a sitting Republican president, but quite another for one of country music’s biggest stars to go all lefty. Disloyalty and dissent don’t sit well with country musicians or Republicans these days.
If you listen very closely, you can hear Woody Guthrie spinning in his grave.

Our Country is a strange, superficial overview of the history of country music currently playing at the Minnesota Zoo’s Imax theater. If you saw it, you had a good time, but you didn’t learn much. And you wondered why it was necessary to play what amounts to a thirty-five-minute music video (lightly salted with an instantly forgotten thumbnail history) on the world’s largest movie screen. You would have wondered why such a shallow treatment of such a massive subject needed to be told with six-story-high images, and you would have been left with the main impression that it was in order to show you Lee Ann Womack’s breasts the size of two Harvestore silos.

The main attraction was the music, of course— some of it good, some of it atrocious, most of it pretty conventional, all of it contemporary. More than a hundred current stars make cameos (Dwight Yoakam, Lyle Lovett, Alan Jackson, Crystal Gayle, Loretta Lynn), playing standards or dressing up like dead heroes such as Patsy Cline or Hank Williams. The overall effect of this long, uneven exercise in “Where’s Waldo?” is one of penance-paying. For all the depredation they have visited on the genre, particularly from the stage of the Grand Ole Opry, the unidentified stars of the movie take their turns playing real country, or a semblance of the same. Country music, like so many other things these days, relies on a reputation for being simple and real, but it’s just show business after all, and just about as fake as a three dollar bill.

Maybe the strangest aspect of the film is how it compresses the origins of country music into a single, breathtaking, narrative-free panoramic shot of what is supposed to be Ireland, but looks suspiciously like New Zealand. Apparently, fiddles and pennywhistles made it to the New World by way of a single desperate Irishman who had his Da’s fiddle pressed on him as he shipped for Ellis Island. Thirty years later, Jimmie Rodgers invented country music somewhere in America, and you eventually get Willie Nelson, voilà!

Needless to say, there isn’t much of a storyline to this history. It’s simply a diversion between scenes in the real show—for example, an astonishingly decadent, “We Are the World”-style jam to Pete Seeger’s “Turn, Turn, Turn,” starring everyone from Dolly Parton to Roger McGuinn. A lovely song, but one that’s hardly relevant to the origins of country music, and not considered part of the contemporary canon. There are so many stories to tell along the way—from how country begat rockabilly which begat rock ’n’ roll, for example, or how gospel and swing were folded into various forms of country. As I say, it’s a huge story, and probably one that can’t be told in any amount of footage of any caliber.

Like modern country music itself, Our Country is pretty inoffensive. It could have been a lot worse. Even the film’s attempt to link country music with God-fearing patriotism is so slight and random—“This generation had its own Pearl Harbor” (September 11), cue “Living in the Promiseland”—as to seem absurd. I guess I can continue to ponder the paradox of what necessary connection there is between conservative politics and country music, and I won’t let it bother me that Lee Ann Womack’s barn-size breasts heave in my face as I do so. That, I think, would be un-American.

I am not a sex-advice guy, nor am I an expert on intimate relations. I’m just a regular married guy, trying to tell it like it is from my point of view. I’ve got to get something out in the open, though, and it’s going to sound kind of obnoxious. OK, I’ll just say it: Married women don’t enjoy sex enough. I don’t mean they can’t; they just don’t. (I also don’t mean to generalize, but what the hell, I did it anyway. If you’re an exception, lucky you! Write a letter and tell me about it.) But I think there is a very easy solution to this, uh, widespread problem.

Men have long had a reputation for being selfish about sex. We want it, we gotta have it, we resent foreplay, we want to cut straight to the main attraction, and so on. (A corollary of this, by the way, is that women make love as a “favor” to their husbands—a favor they are happy to withhold, if necessary, in the usual give-and-take of the household. Can you imagine a man doing that? Not me.) Well, here’s a secret for all you married women: Men, despite (or perhaps because of) their somewhat simple wiring, are turned on by a partner who is turned on. Married men are too polite—and often too desperate—to say so, but it is not much fun to make love with someone who either isn’t enjoying it, or isn’t letting on that she’s enjoying it, even if she is your soul mate. Sub-secret: We tend to assume that she is not enjoying it, if she doesn’t make it fairly obvious.

Ironically, men are so selfishly focused on the finish that we assume women are incapable of faking it for the long haul. Even setting aside the orgasm issue, the fact of the matter is that it is easier for a woman to tolerate bland sex than it is for a man, just as it is easier for her to fake enjoying it. You could consider this just another example of male pig-headedness—he wants proof from you that he’s an irresistible, orgasm-inducing sex machine. Or you could take the opportunity to let yourself go and have more fun under the covers.

I freely admit that this may merely be a “reporting problem.” In fact, we all tend to be self-conscious about expressing desire and pleasure, in the heat of the moment. I know that most of my friends have worked really hard most of their postcollegiate lives to be sensitive to the women around them, maybe especially in our most intimate moments. We don’t want to be perceived as boorish or self-centered, and we don’t want our women to feel threatened or turned off by aggressive sexual behavior. But is it possible to be a good, liberal, sensitive male, and still be noisy and naughty in bed? A lot of us struggle with this, and we’d like a little help from our women.

Ladies, one of the nicest gifts you can give your beloved is to tell him—better yet, show him—precisely what it is that turns you on the most. We are so accustomed to being secretive about pleasuring ourselves that ironically we won’t do it in front of the one person we entrust to do it for us. It’s like: You own that beautiful instrument, but I’m the only one who ever plays it! I’d like to see how you play.

The underlying assumption here is what therapists and couples’ counselors have been saying for decades: Make a special effort to do it the way your partner wants to do it. Get outside yourself, amd try to speculate what might really turn your lover on, and then do it. But in my opinion, this suggestion should be directed squarely at men, not women. Women need different, opposing advice: Figure out what most turns you on, and then beg your husband to do it for you, and then, for once in your life, ignore him. I don’t mean forget him, but let yourself go a little bit, and don’t worry so much about whether he’s enjoying himself. If he’s a real man, your pleasure will directly fuel his.

If he isn’t that kind of man, find one who is. Love, marriage, and sex are a two-way street, and you owe it to each other to be honest about what really turns you on. You owe it to yourself to go ahead and do it. Life is too short and difficult to be shy in your own bed.

In the end, sex is one of those strange human transactions where the sum of the parts adds up to more than it should. Our mutual pleasure is an exponential thing; it’s a turn-on to participate in someone else’s turn-on. I’m certainly not expert enough to figure out what part of my pleasure is made up of my lover’s pleasure. I just know that, like a good movie or a funny joke, it’s a lot more fun when you can share. Here endeth the lesson; go forth and multiply.

When I was in the throes of young motherhood, raising three little kids and editing a parenting magazine from home, I signed up for a bunch of email groups for moms. I wanted to tune into what parents were talking about and arguing about. I wanted to know which issues packed the most punch among mothers like me. The flood of email that began arriving helped a lot in terms of story ideas and even finding contributors for the magazine, but it also got me wondering about where some of these women found the time to contribute so voluminously to so many email groups while also pulling babies away from outlets and wringing out the cloth diapers we were all so dutifully committed to. Some of those moms, I came to think, were actually addicted to email and the escape it must have offered from the isolation of being home all day with babies. I thought someday I might write a feature story on this topic, but it never materialized.

Since then, my work and family life have changed. The kids are busy with school and sports and music lessons, and I’m busy teaching most of the day. Although I’m still writing, I use email less than I used to. But I still like it quite a bit, and probably depend on it more than I should. It’s a habit born of many years of being self-employed and working from home. I check my messages first thing in the morning and last thing before bed, and multiple times in between. I’m always hoping for some piece of good fortune to arrive in my inbox. It could be an acceptance letter on a query I’ve sent out, or a kind word from a reader, or a letter from my sister or a friend. It could even, these days, be a note from one of my kids. Even though it’s usually just a lot of work-related documents crossing the transom along with offers to enlarge my penis, I still check with a sense of inexplicable anticipation…which usually ends in disappointment.

So now, it’s Google I turn to most for the possibility of enlightenment and surprise. I love Google. Oftentimes, when I should be working, I find myself Googling instead. I can’t be bothered with advanced search techniques involving signs and symbols. I prefer a more esoteric approach, based on a belief in serendipity and fate. I have Googled everything from “good ideas” to “meaning mystery life.” I particularly enjoy Googling for obscure beauty secrets and the diagnoses for any ailments that might arise in the family. With Google’s help, I have accurately identified everything from ingrown toenails to more complicated problems, such as hair dye gone wrong. I know that my stepdaughter Lily was especially grateful when I Googled her green hair and determined that professional intervention was advised. My son Max was less impressed when I misdiagnosed his poison ivy as ringworm, but the mistake was quickly remedied by our corner pharmacist. No lasting damage was done, except to my credibility.

All this Googling is decadent, I’ll admit, and usually an extravagant waste of time, but sometimes it pays off. About a year ago, in the midst of Googling the day away, I stumbled upon a potential client for my grant-writing business. I fired off a letter of interest and within twenty-four hours had secured the largest single deal I’d ever made, plus a stream of ongoing work that continues to this day. Sometimes, since then, I Google words like “jackpot” or “lots money little work,” just in case. I can’t deny that a couple of times I have Googled myself, but, as often seems to be the case, results on my big sister are more impressive.

Something tells me there is a limit to the usefulness of Google, and I might be approaching it. But it’s not easy to quit. Real life is full of complicated situations with no apparent answers. Families are hotbeds of emotion and need. The political world is highly complex, to the point where I often feel powerless in my efforts to get true clarity and effect meaningful change. Work is a reliable source of anxiety, as are questions about whether or not I’m doing enough well enough to hold my own in a competitive economy. For God’s sake, the male fish in Britain are turning into females and the microbe responsible for mad cow disease is proliferating in our food supply as we speak. In a world that seems increasingly out of control, Google is an escape of sorts. It’s a place where answers are free, easy, and instant—if only I can stumble on the right question.

The 1992 telling of this anti-holiday tale on National Public Radio launched the career of author and commentator David Sedaris. His look at Christmas from the perspective of a verbally abused adult, one wearing the curly-toed shoes and green tights of a Macy’s Christmas Elf in New York City, is hilarious and uniquely Sedaris. Bryant-Lake Bowl’s version of his modern classic will make you think twice before you stand in line to sit your kids on the lap of a strange fat man. 810 W. Lake St., Minneapolis; 612-825-8949; www.bryantlakebowl.com

If you’ve always thought of jazz dance as a bit too, shall we say, jazzily mainstream, then you haven’t seen Danny Buraczeski. Steeped in dance history, he has been called “the thinking man’s jazzman.” His desire to share that history and his many years as a teacher bring a distinctive character to his choreography and his performances. This time out, his troupe performs “Blue on the Moon,” set to music by Sidney Bechet (now casting his own shadow instead of standing in Louis Armstrong’s); and “Ezekiel’s Wheel,” a signature tribute to James Baldwin. And while last year’s “Swing Concerto” contrasted “Old World” Yiddish folk with new-fangled swing, here Buraczeski unveils a new work exploring Swing’s late period and its transition into bebop, with a score by Mal Waldron and Thelonious Monk. College of St. Catherine campus, 2004 Randolph Ave., St. Paul; 651-690-6700

Though we usually tend toward the testosterone, we’ve been getting in touch with our feminine side around here lately. Manicures and massages, girl-power nights—we even broke in our new “Smart Women Make Changes” eraser by rubbing out the groveling ex. So we’re eager to see this theatrical take on the sexual revolution, blending fact and fiction and told variously by a fifties-era psychotherapist, his wife, their daughter, and a contemporary single mom. Picture Freud in a nightie: It’s got nothing to do with the performance, but it sure is funny!