Crow Pot Pie Christianity

Even though most of my writing wrestles with Catholicism, I’m not a Roman Catholic. As I’ve made clear. As a teenager, I made it clear to the administration at my Catholic high school, too. Nonetheless, owing I guess to their saintly Francis-like ecumenism, when I was a senior they let me (a heathen!) run a lecture at the freshman retreat on the subject of music and faith.

I say I “ran” it, but I guess they didn’t trust me all the way, because they had me co-present with a youth leader from a local Catholic church. Still, it was a big event for me, my first experience standing in front of a classroom. I wrote a detailed lesson plan, anticipated questions I might get, even thought of contingency plans in case the school’s CD player malfunctioned.

The youth leader’s presentation was what you’d expect: he tried to sell Contemporary Christian music to the freshmen by convincing them that wholesome music could be cool. I took the opposite tack. My thesis was that the act of taking these bare materials (notes and words and effects) and trying to turn them into something with meaning necessarily takes a sort of faith and that, therefore, music is almost by definition religious. My point was that we can find faith all over in music. For examples, I played Lenny Kravitz and Jimi Hendrix, and I argued that Stevie Ray Vaughan’s version of “Little Wing” is essentially a prayer.

(Listen again if it’s been a while and tell me if you disagree)

I thought of this recently when a friend from those days sent me a link to his new band’s demo, which reminded me a little of a Denton-based band called Slobberbone.

I first saw Slobberbone at the Impala in Fort Worth after my junior prom. In fact, it was the night the Impala opened, and the show had been publicized for weeks. Jello Biafra was going to be there. 

Except my date and I got there late, long after Jello had gone, when there were only about ten people left in the Impala’s back room, watching this country-punk band fall apart on stage. The band members seemed beyond drunk. At one point, the bassist, who is about six-foot-ten, just sat down on the stage, while playing, and then tipped over on his back. He kept playing from the floor. 

The next day I found their CD, Crow Pot Pie, at CD Warehouse on Berry Street and listened to it almost daily for the next year or so.

I looked them up on Spotify after my friend sent me his demo to see if they sounded the way I remembered. One thing I had forgotten is just how thoroughly Christian language and themes run through their songs. I don’t mean that you can interpret them as Christian if you try—I mean that Christianity is an unmistakable obsession in their lyrics.

In “Stumblin,’ they sing, “So I picked a fight with Jesus Christ / Now I’m thinkin’ I was wrong.”

And in “No Man Among Men,”: “I know I ain’t no man among men / Jesus, I pray you’ll take me in.” 

Then, in “Dunk You in the River”: “I finally found a drink to wash away all the world’s sins / And I’ll dunk you in the river once again.”

How did I miss that? I bet I didn’t really miss it, exactly. I think their religious emphasis probably just didn’t stand out. For an Episcopalian acolyte attending a Catholic school in an Evangelical city, hearing about God—even if it was hearing someone reject him—was pretty normal. There was no such thing as secular or agnostic there. The champions of the Fort Worth music scene in those days were the Toadies, who certainly fit Flannery O’Connor’s description of the South: they were God-haunted. Listen to the songs off of Rubbernecker. No word matters more in those songs than Jesus. On the other side of the metroplex, the biggest name in Dallas music was the Reverend Horton Heat, who parodied baptisms on his album covers and exorcisms at his concerts.  

But back to Slobberbone. Understand, this is a band I remember as an absolute human train wreck (that I loved!). Their songs are politically incorrect, often violent, occasionally leaning towards a (hopefully) tongue-in-cheek misogyny. In no way am I endorsing them as moral exemplars, anymore than I would endorse Billy Joe Shaver or someone like that.  Still, while songwriter Brent Best doesn’t seem to take much seriously, I don’t detect a lot of irony when he’s singing about religion.  

And I have no idea what Best’s faith (or lack of faith) is like. I don’t know what Cormac McCarthy believes, either, or what Fyodor Dostoevsky did (I mean, officially he was Orthodox, but c’mon. Don’t you wonder?). When Best sings “He said trust in me I’m the King of Kings, and you my friend are in a rut / But what I was looking for was the King of Beers, so I said won’t you be my Bud” I don’t know if he wants me to cheer or shake my head. But I know that if I’m going to learn anything about religion it’s probably going to come from someone like that: someone who sometimes feels like blowing off Jesus for a twelve-pack of Budweiser. Or let me rephrase that: if you can’t sing about that twelve-pack like maybe it’s the better choice, then I’m afraid we might not be wrestling with the same questions.

One More for the Hymnal: Linda Ronstadt y Mariachi Vargas, "Y ándale"

En el ciberc@fe

Cybercafés. Do they still exist? Now that we all carry the internet around with us? I found a reference to one in Enrique Vila-Matas’ París no se acaba nunca, from 2003 (Never Any End to Paris, 2011, translated by Anne McLean). If they’ve disappeared, it wouldn’t be too sad—there’s something disordered about them in the first place, something so antithetical to the spirit of a bar. A waitress comes and takes your order, you mumble something without turning away from the computer screen in front of you. The closest comparison I can think of to them is a bar I know in Fredericksburg where they have video poker, and where one afternoon I watched a woman, a regular, get transfixed by the game. She was there without being part of the group; any time she participated in the conversation at the bar it was in the same disdainful way a teenager responds to her parents from the couch without looking up from her iPhone. 

Still, I have to feel some personal sadness since I went to Spain during the height of the cybercafé’s relevance, in the summer of 2000. That was how I talked to H while she was back in the States: most days, at an appointed hour, adjusted to account for the time difference and her summer work schedule,  I would be hunched over a screen at a  cibercafé in the Huertas neighborhood in Madrid. Chatting. On Yahoo. 

[Note: sometimes she went to a cybercafé, too, the only one in the US I ever heard of. It was in Georgetown, Texas, and it was a “Christian” establishment—which meant that they were vigilant about not allowing anything unseemly on their computers. Which meant there was very little privacy there. Which was ironic, because she only went there when she was staying at her parents’ house in Georgetown and, therefore, needed to get away to get privacy.]

My cybercafé had a decent menu. I usually ordered gazpacho, but I also remember having patatas bravas, and croquetas, and a tortilla sandwich. I think I drank beer there, too, but maybe not. I went to a few other cybercafés when I was out in different parts of the city, too. My second night there, my exchange program met downtown for a get-together night out, a small walking tour followed by drinks. And I remember that the penultimate bar we visited that night was a cybercafé.

Isn’t that funny? It was a night like so many out of books or whatever, a bunch of Americans out in a European capital, drinking too much and then staggering home on the metro. But in the middle of it, we all agreed to pause the merriness and spend a few minutes checking our email, absorbed in the blue glow of the computer screens which (for some reason I remember) were embedded in the tables of this bar. Then, finishing one-by-one, we each patiently waited for the others to complete their business. We came back together at the bar’s vestibule, a mass of young people heading rosily back out in the summer night.

Anyway, the reference from Enrique Vila-Matas comes early in the novel: the protagonist and his wife are trying to find the Dingo Bar, where Hemingway supposedly met Fitzgerald, on the Rue Delambre in Paris. The wife says, "You know what, I'm going to look up the Dingo on the internet, I'll go to that internet café on the corner..." The bar is gone, but the fact that they find it on the internet is I guess a commentary on how we've moved our lives online. Still, it already feels like a pretty dated detail to me.

Happy Hour in Havana

My latest at pterodactilo is a how-to on drinking in la Habana. A sample:

So here’s what you do: when you’re done researching and writing for the day, and the sun is starting to set and the heat is starting to fade, grab your colleagues or the friends that you’ve made on the island. Buy a bottle of Havana Club and some cans of TuKola. Go down to the malecón, where it will seem like the whole city is out sitting and talking and laughing. Claim some space. Face the city, not the sea. Open a can of Cuban coke, take a swallow, and pour the rum into the space you’ve just made. And there you go: a makeshift cuba libre.

Read the rest at blog.pterodactilo.com .

Beer in La Habana, at the Café Literaria, en la Calle G.