Mostly tha Voice: On Guru, "Hard to Earn" and the Passion of my Little Brother

Being a hip-hop fan was no easy task in the mid-1990s Brooker household. Like a lot of parents of the era, my folks were extremely wary of this profane and relatively new genre. Relentless media scaremongering about rappers’ glorification of drugs, violence and misogyny led them to institute a fairly strict censorship policy: Christian rappers like Michael Peace were embraced, all-audiences acts like Arrested Development and MC Hammer were grudgingly tolerated, and anything meriting the infamous Parental Advisory sticker was outright banned. In hindsight, I’ll admit that they were partially right to worry – Too $hort and Eazy-E probably weren’t appropriate listening material for middle school kids – but that didn’t dissuade my younger brother in his quest to become the biggest hip-hop head in Sparta, Wisconsin.

Gang Starr’s Hard to Earn was the first hardcore rap album to slip under the radar. My then 13-year-old brother used some of his birthday money to buy it on cassette at Musicland during a family outing to Valley View Mall in La Crosse. Thus began an extended exercise in musical obfuscation. The album sleeve and its telltale advisory sticker quickly became kindling for our potbelly wood stove. In their place, my brother fashioned a homemade sleeve with a blank sheet of yellow legal paper and a Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers playing card. Realizing that the very name “Gang Starr” would be a red flag, he scraped the ink off of the cassette itself, obliterating the track listings and artist information. He then stashed the album in the back of his tape box and only listened to it on his headphones or while riding in my car.

Yet somehow our parents sussed out the offending tape and promptly confiscated it. Undaunted, my brother snatched it back one day when they were out. By now he’d started building a fairly sizable hip-hop collection on the sly. He kept it under wraps O.G. style, stashing any CDs or tapes that might be deemed questionable in a beaten-up guitar case he’d inherited from our grandpa. My folks made several more attempts at shutting him down, but his dedication to hip-hop culture eventually won out. By the time he graduated high school, my brother’s bedroom walls were plastered with magazine clippings of Redman, Canibus, Brotha Lynch Hung and other hip-hop heroes, with his own hand-painted portrait of Ol’ Dirty Bastard as a centerpiece. That old copy of Hard to Earn still maintained a prominent place in his music collection, though by now it had been played so many times that the cassette had to be held together with masking tape.

I relate this story to demonstrate the kind of passion Gang Starr and the late, great Guru could inspire in a pubescent white kid growing up in backwoods Wisconsin. Hard to Earn was a perfect musical gateway drug for my little brother and, to a somewhat lesser extent, for me. There was something about the combination of Guru’s literate, monotone flow and DJ Premier’s jazz-soaked production that made Gang Starr slightly less intimidating than a lot of other rap groups. I can see how my parents would have been put off by the profanity and references to drugs and violence (though all were quite mild by general hip-hop standards), but under that gritty surface I found a thoughtful, soulful work of art that resonated on a surprisingly universal level.




I was especially fascinated by “The Planet,” a song recounting Guru’s youthful move from Boston to Brooklyn and his early struggles breaking into the rap game. Guru eschews the angst and melodrama common to so many “back in the day” tracks (i.e., Coolio’s “I Remember,” Ghostface’s “All That I Got Is You”), instead painting a picture of that odd blend of exhilaration, desperation and boredom that comes with being young and on your own for the first time. I consider the song a masterpiece of subtlety, filled with evocative, identifiable images (“Kissed my mother / Gave my pops a pound / Then he hugged me / Then he turned around”). That’s pretty much how I regard the whole of Hard to Earn and the Gang Starr canon in general. Guru and Premier simmered while other hip-hoppers boiled, creating a sound that struck a delicate balance between intensity and detachment. It was a style without precedent at the time, and one that’s never been equaled since.

That’s why Guru's untimely passing earlier this week hit me harder than celebrity deaths usually do. I celebrate the entire Gang Starr catalog, as well as Guru’s rather daring Jazzmatazz side project, but it’s Hard to Earn that earned him a place in my heart, both for the brilliance of the music and for my memories of the passion it inspired in my little brother.

R.I.P. and F.A.L.A. to a real MC.

“Jughead Jones: Superhero” or “Mr. Jones and me look into the future”

I’ve read a lot of articles trying to explain the endless appeal of superhero comics. Hardcore comics fans frequently cite lonely or traumatic childhoods that left them feeling largely powerless. They claim to have been comforted by the idea of super-powered beings who could cast off the bonds of everyday life and fight the forces of evil on their own terms. Every outsider group seemed to have a tailor-made hero: science nerds had Spider-Man, kids who’d lost loved ones had Batman, gay teens had the X-Men, rage-filled youngsters had The Hulk, straight-up sociopaths had The Punisher and so on. In the most overt instance, Captain Marvel’s secret identity was Billy Batson, a scrawny, handicapped child who could transform himself into an all-powerful über-man.

I liked superhero comics quite a lot when I was a lad, but I can’t say they ever connected with me on exactly that level. I dug Spider-Man because he cracked wise, slung webs and had a cool-looking costume. Oh sure, Peter Parker’s geeky background held a certain appeal for a bookworm like me, but I was grounded enough to leave his adventures mostly on the printed page. That isn’t to say that I never had a comic book role model. It’s just that my hero was of the non-super variety.

For me, Jughead Jones occupied the role that Daredevil and The Flash filled for other kids. As I’ve mentioned before, I was and am a huge fan of Archie comics. I found the antics and adventures of the denizens of Riverdale comforting and familiar, though I started reading their stories when I was much younger than the teenage protagonists. Even so, I probably would have quickly outgrown Archie and the gang if it wasn’t for Jughead.

There’s really nothing all that remarkable about the students of Riverdale High. From Archie’s clumsy amorousness to Reggie’s status-seeking misanthropy to Veronica’s mindless opulence to Betty’s apple-pie goodness, the main cast is a pretty bourgeois bunch. The tertiary teens who hang around the core group aren’t much better, as each is mostly defined by a trademark trait or two. Dilton is super smart, Moose is dumb and jealous, Big Ethel is ugly and infatuated, Chuck is a jock (and later an artist, for sensitivity’s sake), etc. None of that detracted from my enjoyment – in fact, the easy characterizations have always been a big part of Archie’s comfort factor – but it was Mr. Jones who really cemented my love of the medium.

Much like my peers and their superheroes, I saw in Jughead a projection of what I might be in an idealized fantasy world. In reality, I was a nerdy little kid growing up in the backwoods of Western Wisconsin. I wasn’t exactly ostracized at my tiny country school – with only five boys in my grade, there wasn’t much room for outcasts – but my bookish ways and vaguely hippie upbringing placed me about as far on the outskirts as possible. I recognized early on that I was doomed to be the “weird kid” in most social settings. That might have been a major downer if I hadn’t had Jughead Jones’ example to follow.

Along with fellow oddballs Gonzo the Great and J. Wellington Wimpy, Jughead (especially as depicted by the amazing writer-artist team of Frank Doyle and Samm Schwartz) taught me that weird could be OK. More than that, weird could be cool. Alone amongst Riverdalians, Jughead ignored the passing trends and teenage silliness that consumed his classmates, opting instead to float around the periphery of the high school experience. To paraphrase Sterling Hayden in Dr. Strangelove, he did not avoid his classmates, but he did deny them his essence. He indulged in bizarre hobbies, ignored the constructs of fashion, refused to be drawn into the quagmire of the dating scene and generally marched to his own beat. Jughead was not without his failings, sloth and gluttony being his deadly sins of choice, but even these became more like charming quirks when paired with his personality.

Despite his contrary nature and odd predilections, Jughead was not the outcast one might suppose. As a matter of fact, he was a fairly popular kid who might even be called a local institution. Sure, Reggie and Veronica needled him from time to time, but only because Jughead was one of the few who was neither impressed with nor intimidated by their wealth and prowess. Ironically, his very refusal to seek the approval of his peer group made him one of the best-liked people in town.

That struck a resonant chord with my adolescent self. As I sprawled on my parents’ bed, paging through my stack of Double Digests for the umpteenth time, I imagined myself growing into that same kind of cool, confident teenager. I dreamed of a day when my artistic nature and offbeat sensibilities would merit more than just a teacher’s scrawled “Very creative!” in the margin of a fourth grade essay. If I just played it cool and embraced my inborn weirdness without flaunting it, I figured I could make it through the minefield of high school relatively unscathed.

And you know something? I think it worked. I know that trying to gauge one’s own high school popularity is a fool’s game, but I believe I emerged from four years at Sparta Senior High with a solid Jugheadian reputation – an odd but entertaining guy who was at least well-liked enough to be voted graduation speaker for the class of ’97. Maybe that doesn’t sound like the most impressive accomplishment, but Jughead also taught me to keep my fantasy within the realm of possibility. My dreams may not have been as lofty as those of my superhero-obsessed brethren, but I guarantee I came a lot closer to living the life of Jughead Jones than they ever did to leaping tall buildings in a single bound.


Note: As evidence of my ongoing obsession, pictured above is the rear wall of my home office, complete with hundreds of Archie comics, 12-inch Archie and Jughead dolls, a portrait of Jughead painted by my sister-in-law Diana, and my new prize possession, Samm Schwartz’s original artwork for my all-time favorite Jughead story, 1983's Crowning Glory (frame pending).

Meditations on Lou Reed’s “Hudson River Wind Meditations”

I’m writing this on Lou Reed’s 68th birthday. As I’ve discussed before, this has long been an important personal holiday for me. For more than 15 years, I’ve celebrated Lou surviving another spin of the globe by buying one of his albums. You might think I’d eventually run out of purchasing options, but a steady stream of mediocre live albums and back catalog reissues have kept me rolling thus far. Up until this year, though, there was one Lou Reed album I resisted: 2007’s Hudson River Wind Meditations.

It might seem odd to a modern observer that one of rock music’s preeminent provocateurs would release an entire album of instrumentals intended as backing music for t’ai chi exercises, but those were different times back in the mid-Oughts. The Chi-sploitation boom was in full effect. Everywhere you looked, the entertainment industry was pumping up the hedonistic T’ai Chi Lifestyle, with all the cheap thrills and crazy risks entailed by moving very slowly in a public space. One might have hoped that a genuine artiste like Lou would have had the integrity to resist cashing in on that kind of glitzy trend, but the man’s not made of stone.

All kidding aside, I can’t fault Lou Reed for dedicating his musical talents to something he’s truly passionate about. I’ve seen a number of interviews in which Lou professes his love for the discipline and philosophy of t’ai chi, even going so far as to say it saved his life. That’s how I eventually convinced myself to set aside my doubts and lay down ten bucks for Hudson River Wind Meditations. I figured that this project means a lot to Lou Reed, and Lou Reed means a lot to me, so I may as well give it a go.

Now that I’ve listened to the album in its entirety, I’m beginning to suspect that Lou Reed and I are very different people. It’s not that the appeal of t’ai chi is entirely lost on me. The demonstrations I’ve seen make it look very peaceful, and I admire the kind of mental focus that must go into keeping one’s movements so studiously controlled. But if the music on Hudson River Wind Meditations is an accurate indication of the t’ai chi experience, I think I’ll stay on the sidelines.

The opening track, “Move Your Heart,” is not much more than a gentle sonic pulse. As such, it’s quite soothing. It definitely makes for a few minutes of pleasant listening. Problem is, it goes on for more than a few minutes – nearly thirty, in fact, with the only changes being barely perceptible shifts in tone. Still, it accomplishes its goal of relaxation, creating an effect similar to waves rolling in on a beach. I can see how it would lend itself to a slow-moving martial art, but it ain’t quite my cup of tea.

The title of the free-form second track, “Find Your Note,” seems like a dare. I can find plenty of notes in it, but no two of them seem to belong together. Burbling about with a lot of meandering hums and high-pitched droning, this thing is slow and formless enough to make John Cage sound like Joey Ramone. Musically, it bears a fair resemblance to Lou’s notorious Metal Machine Music, but I like that recording much better. I think of Metal Machine Music like a piece of abstract art: spend a little time with it, and ideas begin to emerge from the chaos, revealing different things to different people. I don’t get that vibe from “Find Your Note.” Instead, it walks a fine line between soothing white noise and headache-inducing squall. I believe I’d have to abandon any workout with this as the soundtrack for fear of full-on madness. Lou closes out the proceedings with one track that’s mostly the sound of blowing wind and another reprising the undulations of “Move Your Heart,” in case the first 30 minutes left us hungry for more.

Look, I understand that I’m not the target audience for this album. I don’t do t’ai chi, so I don’t know if there’s some kind of psychic relevance that’s just going over my head. For all I know, Lou Reed has crafted the definitive masterpiece of the genre. So apologies to any practitioners of the slow arts who might take offense; I’m sure Hudson River Wind Meditations will continue to be a boon to your maneuvers for years to come.

As for me, I’m tucking it in the Oddball File alongside Lou's weird stabs at stand-up comedy and literary theater. They may not generate a lot of listens, but at least they're evidence of an artist who's still trying new, very peculiar things five decades into his career.

Happy birthday, Lou, and long may you meditate.

Johnny Cash: Torturer – “Five Minutes to Live” and the Maniac in Black

Back in the days before at-home internet access was the standard and IMDb topped every cinephile’s bookmarks list, I was an avid user of the Videohound Golden Movie Retriever, an annually published compendium of films available for home video viewing. As a voracious young movie buff and aspiring critic, I’d spend entire evenings poring over and memorizing the casts, directors and capsule descriptions of thousands of films. I studied the 1998 edition harder than I ever did any schoolbook. Eventually, I could have my pal Joel flip to any page and call out a random title, and 90% of the time I could tell him the plot and principal cast.

That encyclopedic knowledge came in handy when I browsed the racks at my local video store, but it also made me realize of the shop’s limitations. Videohound clued me in to dozens of intriguing-sounding titles that were simply unavailable in most of the outlets I frequented. Those obscure objects of desire ranged from trash like The Rats are Coming! The Werewolves are Here! to artsy fare like Alex in Wonderland to the mellifluously titled Spaghetti Western You’re Jinxed, Friend. You’ve Met Sacramento.

One forgotten film loomed above the rest on my must-see list, a low-budget crime flick from 1961 called Door-to-Door Maniac. That’s an indisputably great title, but that wasn’t the primary reason I wanted to track it down. That honor went to the actor playing the titular role: none other than the great Johnny Cash. The title, the star and Videohound’s damning bone-and-a-half rating made me believe that this was a movie I needed to see forthwith. Back in 1998, however, that was easier said than done.

Twelve years later, I finally fished a copy of Door-to-Door Maniac (presented under its less exciting, if more accurate, original title of Five Minutes to Live) out of the Cult Films section at my local Cheapo Discs. I don’t generally buy movies sight-unseen, but I reckoned I couldn’t really go wrong for eight bucks. I reckoned right.

On its surface, Five Minutes to Live is a grimy but not especially remarkable movie. It’s the story of the Wilsons, a bland small-town family with a few skeletons in the closet. Dad (Donald Woods) is prone to weekday hangovers and is having what looks to be an exceptionally chaste affair with a matronly neighbor. Mom (Cay Forrester, who also wrote the screenplay) buries her discontent under a blanket of passive-aggressive over-involvement with her women’s club. Junior (Ron Howard) channels his rage into a shrill series of precocious wisecracks and plots to one day torment humanity by making a string of grotesque, soulless, mega-budget movies.

These folks are so relentlessly unpleasant that it’s much easier to root for the purported villains, a smooth talker named Fred Dorella (Vic Tayback, looking especially large-faced) and a psychotic fugitive from New Jersey (!) called Johnny Cabot (Mr. Cash). Dorella has hatched a plan to knock over the local bank without pulling a stick-up: Cabot worms his way into the Wilson house and holds Mrs. Wilson hostage. Meanwhile, Dorella calmly orders her bank vice president husband to hand over $70,000 or his wife has five minutes to live. (Hey, that’s the name of the show!)

What follows is sort of an early ‘60s take on the techno thriller, with the perils and foibles of person-to-person calling at the center. As robbers, solicitors and nosy neighbors play a deadly game of phone tag, Cabot entertains himself by smashing Mrs. Wilson’s precious knick-knacks and torturing her emotionally, physically and possibly even sexually (the latter is only implied – this is a sleazy movie, sure, but it’s still 1961). Ultimately, it’s not a perfect B-movie – the ending is a cop-out that lets Dad off way too easy – but it’s sure as hell a memorable one.



It’s the Cabot character and Cash’s performance that establish Five Minutes to Live as something special. Forrester’s screenplay is surprisingly slimy, especially coming from a female writer of her time. It doesn’t try to pawn off a neutered, watered-down villain like many products of the era would. Within the first ten minutes, we see Cabot machine-gun a cop and shoot an unarmed woman in cold blood. This is a violent, remorseless and sadistic guy, and Johnny Cash is fully up to the part.

The cinematic vaults of the '50s and '60s are lousy with half-assed vanity projects for the era's pop stars, but this part bears little resemblance to Mel Torme’s frog-faced hood in Girls' Town or Roy Orbison's weirdness in The Fastest Guitar Alive. Sure, Cash is saddled with singing a tie-in title tune, but he makes it into a bad-ass meditation on evil and existence. In several chilling scenes, he taunts Mrs. Wilson with the song, looming close, strumming softly and reminding her she’s down to her last five minutes. It’s a brutal, muscular performance that sometimes goes over the top, but never egregiously so. There’s every reason to think it could have been a stepping stone to a long career of playing celluloid heavies for the Man in Black, had he chosen to take that route.



So how come nobody’s heard of this movie? It’s hard to say. My best guess is that Cash wasn’t particularly proud of Five Minutes to Live, not because of his performance, but because of who he was at the time. When Johnny Cash died in 2003, the few retrospectives that even mentioned his acting career focused on his '70s and '80s output, which ranged from half-respectable Westerns to made-for-TV garbage. In those later films (not to mention his prime-time variety show), a clean-and-sober Cash played variations on his somewhat tongue-in-cheek ‘70s “outlaw” persona. Five Minutes to Live, on the other hand, captured him at his pill-addled worst. The Johnny Cash of 1961 was a man of many demons, and they’re all right there on the screen. Later on, Rick Rubin helped him embrace his innate darkness while still walking the line, but it’s not too shocking that Cash would prefer that this documentation of his ugliest days stay buried.

Ordinarily, I’m all in favor of respecting a dead man’s wishes. In this case, though, the ongoing obscurity of Five Minutes to Live does a disservice to lovers of Johnny Cash and trash cinema. This movie needs to become a full-on cult classic post-haste. I encourage you to spread the word. After all, not everyone has time to sit around memorizing Videohound guides.

You can watch the entirety of Five Minutes to Live right here. You should do so. Right now. Come on. It isn’t very long.

Criticizing Dave Eggers' critique of critics

For someone who seems to be a pretty genuine and decent guy, Dave Eggers inspires a weird range of emotions. I know plenty of people who regard him as the living embodiment of all that’s wrong with modern literature. I know just as many who think of him as the voice of his generation. I have mixed feelings about his work, but I definitely side more with the supporters than with the haters. I have nothing but admiration for the youth writing programs he’s helped foster across the country. I thought his A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was a very good memoir, even though I disliked its quirky footnotes and meta-textual devices. I like a lot of the work McSweeney’s has done, but I’m not much for its postmodern affectations.

Recently, though, I came across a quotation from Eggers that rubs me every which way but right. It’s from a lengthy 2000 interview in the Harvard Advocate in which a question about “selling out” prompts a passionate response. Eggers makes some excellent points about a particular, poisonous breed of hipster criticism, specifically citing an acquaintance who haughtily dismissed The Flaming Lips because one of their songs was used in an episode of Beverly Hills 90210. He rails against those who would place limits on an artist based on an arbitrary code of authenticity or assail someone’s work to gratify their own egos.

I’m with him most of the way. His irritation with the ever-hypocritical “sellout” refrain is fully justified. His tone is pretty defensive throughout, but that’s at least partially excused by the interviewer’s own palpably smug tone. But when Eggers starts taking broad swipes at the institution of criticism, he loses me in a big way. I find this comment especially galling:

“Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy. Do not dismiss a book until you have written one, and do not dismiss a movie until you have made one, and do not dismiss a person until you have met them. It is a fuckload of work to be open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting, but Christ, that is what matters. What matters is saying yes.”

There is so much I disagree with in that passage, I’m not even sure where to start. I guess my biggest problem is with the idea that anyone who hasn’t written a book is unworthy of criticizing someone else’s. He does acknowledge elsewhere in the interview that there are some helpful critics in the world, but still holds that “by and large, the only book reviews that should be trusted are by those who have themselves written books.” So then, if I’m not allowed to dismiss a movie without having made one, am I also unqualified to embrace it? Am I within my rights to complain about my malfunctioning DVD player even though I’ve never built one myself? Is it OK for an author to perform a satirical reading lampooning Dick Cheney (as I saw Dave Eggers himself do in Chicago a few years back) even though the writer has never been Vice President of the United States? Eggers’ stance is elitism masquerading as populism, and I find it disingenuous and insulting.

I’ve been both a working artist and an arts critic for my entire adult life. Few things bug me more than artists casting criticism by “non-artists” as irrelevant. First of all, that suggests that criticism is not, in itself, a form of art. In my estimation, a well-written, well-reasoned piece of criticism can very easily stand on its own as an artistic statement made in reaction to someone else’s artistic statement. If the film writing of folks like Roger Ebert, Nathan Rabin or Jaime Weinman is somehow invalidated because the writers are not filmmakers themselves, then I’ve wasted an awful lot of reading time over the years. (Yes, I know Ebert dabbled in film early in his career, so maybe he gets a pass by the Eggers standard.) Actually, an argument could be made that non-artists sometimes make better critics. People who work within the same discipline can be too close to the subject to view it objectively. I’ve had plenty of conversations with writers whose critique of others’ stories boils down to, “That’s not the way I would have written it!”

Eggers’ statement about his critical “rage and envy” also hits a sore spot for me. One of the most common knocks I hear against the institution of criticism is that all critics are failed artists lashing out against the world that rejected them. Maybe that was true of Eggers, but that doesn’t mean critics as a whole are a spiteful den of vipers – it just means Dave Eggers was a bad critic. As much as I like the idea of some shadowy cabal of critics plotting revenge on the art world like so many scorned supervillains, I think questioning anyone’s motives for writing anything puts one on shaky ground. Heck, half of Eggers’ piece is a defense of making art for money. Critics gotta get that dollar too!

I’ve worked with a lot of critics in my day, and in my experience there is no more enthusiastic group of art lovers in the world. One of the greatest periods of my creative life was when I worked as a music writer for Where Y’at magazine in New Orleans. On at least a weekly basis, one of the other writers would pop some hot new find into the office CD player and insist that the rest of us gather ‘round and share in the glory. Sure, Michael Dominici, the magazine’s Music Editor, sometimes used his podium to utterly savage albums he found lacking, but anyone who heard him gush effusively about relative unknowns like jazz singer Lizz Wright or swamp rock old-timer Joe Barry could have no doubt about how much the man loved music. Mike didn’t scorn or envy successful artists. He celebrated them and made it his mission to share just what made them and their work so special.

Maybe I’m misreading or oversimplifying. I know Eggers is specifically addressing people who turn up their noses at things that are perceived as too unhip or mainstream, but it seems to me that his argument also precludes artistic criticism, at least of a negative bent. Earlier in the interview, he says that “the critical impulse… is to suspect, doubt, tear at, and to take something apart to see how it works. Which of course is completely the wrong thing to do to art.” I disagree. That process describes exactly what Donna Bowman does in her exceptional, ongoing analysis of one of my all-time favorite TV shows, NewsRadio. Some might argue that Bowman’s approach is fussy and overly analytical, but no one could claim that she doesn’t truly love her subject matter. Her in-depth look at what made the show tick makes me reflect on the particular greatness of NewsRadio’s writing, cast and direction, and that only enhances my viewing experience.

In my estimation, Eggers’ stance supports the creation of art but puts strict limitations on how we should evaluate it. If every piece of art is left to bob around the world, seen but unanalyzed, does it even count as art? If we regard every creative endeavor on an even plane and keep our negative opinions to ourselves, don’t we effectively stifle an important, culture-wide dialogue? If we give the failures a free pass on the grounds of being “open-minded and generous and understanding and forgiving and accepting,” don’t we do a disservice to the good and great works sharing the same stage?

Look, I know I’m getting a bit too worked up about a decade-old comment from a writer I generally admire. I really don’t intend any of this as a personal attack on Dave Eggers. He’s a sincere, hardworking writer who’s done as much good for writing in the past decade as just about anyone. It’s quite possible that his opinion has changed in the past ten years. He’s recently given a fair bit of time to The AV Club (my favorite arts publication, if my links weren’t enough of a clue), so it’s clear that he doesn’t eschew the critical establishment entirely. It’s just that I’ve seen too many artists blindly bashing critics over the years, and this piece happened to hit most of my hot buttons.

I understand that it hurts to have something in which you’ve invested your heart and soul assaulted on a public stage. I’ve gotten my share of negative feedback, and it’s never pleasant. It depresses me, angers me and puts me on the defensive. But it comes with the territory. Job evaluations are a part of every career. They help keep us at the top of our games. If my boss at my office job gives me a negative performance review, I don’t have the option of brushing it off as jealousy or ignorance or irrelevancy, even if I believe all of that to be true. Instead, I have to get my act together or risk dismissal. Criticism ideally serves a similar purpose for artists. We don’t have to take every negative word at face value, but we should at least acknowledge that there’s something to be learned from a reasoned critique. It’s just a fact that those who choose to share their art with the public will have it evaluated by the same. If you can’t handle seeing your work torn apart or otherwise “dismissed,” then you may have chosen the wrong path.

By the way, I’m pretty sure I’m authorized to make these comments, because I have written a book. Of course, my book hasn’t yet been published, so maybe I don’t make the cut. It’s a tricky gray area, that.

Note: I briefly posted a slightly different version of this entry earlier, then took it down when I decided it needed some clarification. Apologies if that created any confusion. Though I can't imagine what confusion that would create.

Of hunting carols, Turdy Point Bucks and the cultural currency of the Upper Midwest

I have never been a deer hunter. As a matter of fact, I’ve never so much as held a gun. That made me quite the anomaly growing up in my neck of Western Wisconsin. In that particular nook of the Upper Midwest, deer season is a half-step removed from being a religious holiday. Maybe not even that – I know plenty of people who devote more zeal to buck-bagging than most folks ever do to church, state or fellow man. It was pretty much a given that the populations of classrooms and workplaces would drop drastically for a couple of weeks every November. “Gone huntin’” wasn’t regarded as a medical excuse per se, but there was an unspoken understanding.Even though I didn’t hunt, it was impossible to avoid the impact of deer season. The normally quiet woods and fields surrounding my family’s house suddenly teemed with blaze-orange blobs, their stocky frames standing in sharp contrast with the dirty white snow of early winter. Every time I left the house, the sound of rifle shots echoed in the distance, making the trek to the school bus feel like a bit like a sniper scene in some Vietnam movie. When we took our dog (a Viszla whose coat was only a shade redder than that of your average deer) out for a walk, we tied a red bandana around her neck and popped bright orange stocking caps on our own vulnerable noggins. November was an unusually tense month around the Brooker compound.

But the oddest manifestation of deer season, culturally speaking, would have to be the hunting carols. That phenomenon is exactly what it sounds like. Every year, all of our local radio stations, regardless of format, slipped two hunting-themed tunes into their regular playlists. For two weeks a year, “The Second Week of Deer Camp” and “Da Turdy Point Buck” dominated the airwaves just as surely as “The Little Drummer Boy” and “Feliz Navidad” would a few weeks later.

“The Second Week of Deer Camp” is a venerable classic, an accordion-driven, ramshackle accounting of how a bunch of shiftless hunters spend the titular time period. (Spoiler: They “drink, play cards and shoot the bull, but never shoot no deer.”) This one has been getting major play on Wisconsin airwaves for two decades now, even though the band responsible, Da Yoopers, isn’t technically Wisconsinian. “Yoopers,” in fact, is a nickname for the residents of that eerie no-man’s land called the Upper Peninsula, more commonly known as the U.P. Technically speaking, it’s part of Michigan. Geographically speaking, it should be part of Wisconsin. Realistically speaking, it’s not much more than an afterthought for anyone but the people who live there and the scads of hunters who invade its teeming woodlands every November.


Anyhow, Da Yoopers have actually recorded a fair number of musical comedy albums and garnered a cult following in the upper Midwest. “The Second Week of Deer Camp” is arguably the shiniest jewel in their crown (their Christmas carol “Rusty Chevrolet” also gets a good bit of airplay come December). An amiable romp through a drunken week when most of the sportsmen have given up all pretense of actually hunting, the song is punctuated by frequent belching, Spike Jones-y sound effects and some unfortunate outhouse imagery. The action, such as it is, unfolds over a simple accordion rhythm and is narrated in a thick Northwoods accent that makes Fargo seem subtle. It’s appreciated both by hunters who don’t take themselves too seriously and by the folks at home who always assumed there wasn’t a whole lot of deerstalking going on. It’s lowbrow for sure, but the rhymes are pretty funny and it succeeds in making a week of drinking in a cabin sound like a lot of fun.

If “Deer Camp” is the tried and true classic, “Da Turdy Point Buck” was the glitzy blockbuster. Often mistakenly credited to Da Yoopers, this laconic rap parody is actually the work of another U.P. group called Bananas at Large. A loose narrative of one hunter’s ill-fated encounter with a deer “created by God just for outdoor magazines,” this song was absolutely unavoidable in Wisconsin the winter of ’92. The cassette single – packaged in a blaze orange label, naturally – never got widespread distribution, but it was available at all of your finer gas stations and convenience stores.


The song essentially takes every element of the Yoopers tune and cranks it up a little: the accordion accompaniment is even sparer, the accent even thicker, the belching even ruder. In other words, it contains all the elements of a Wisconsin cult classic. Most of my middle school classmates (the male ones, at least) could recite the “Turdy Point Buck” lyrics word for word, adopting a deep-woods ‘Sconnie accent that really wasn’t too far removed from the way most of us talked normally. In fact, listening to the original recording now, I realize the cadence I’ve stored in my memory banks is actually that of Tim Schendel regaling me with his version during lulls in Mrs. Gatzke’s Earth Science class. I can’t deny that I loved it wholeheartedly when I was a youth, or that some of the imagery has proven remarkably enduring. Living in Chicago made me especially appreciative of the passage about the narrator’s “no-brother-good-in-law… from Illinoise.” (No offense to my actual brothers-in-law in Illinois.)

Putting it in hip-hop terms, “The Second Week of Deer Camp” is “Fight the Power” and “Da Turdy Point Buck” is “U Can’t Touch This.” The former feels lived-in and true-to-life, while the latter is just kind of derivative and silly. “Buck” is probably the more widely known amongst Midwestern rifle-toters, but both have worked their way deep into the fabric of Wisconsin’s holiest holiday.

Don’t think I’m being dismissive of either. In their own way, these hunting carols represent a unique piece of Midwestern culture. They’re a bit of a throwback to the early days of rock and roll, when radio stations were allowed to choose their own playlists and it was possible to have such a thing as a regional hit. Sure, these songs fall quite a bit farther on the Blue Collar Comedy side of the spectrum than my usual tastes, but I like having a pop culture reference point that’s instantly recognizable to every one of my rural grade school classmates and completely foreign to my big city friends. Call it flyover country all you want, but we’re every bit as capable of producing a distinctive musical mythology as anyone else is. Ours just involves a bit more beer and deer than most.

Of Virgil Trucks, the Detroit Tigers and the meaning of life

I think it’s generally agreed upon that sports metaphors are more overused than the Cleveland Browns’ punting unit. Rare is the modern business meeting that does not include a mention of tossing Hail Marys, sending in the B-team or making a game-time decision (I’ll admit to being a frequent abuser of that last one). Hackneyed or not, these metaphors serve their purpose. It’s a little easier to pretend that life makes sense when it’s framed in the context of an organized athletic competition. Plus, describing an overly complex planning session as “having 12 men on the field” will get me many more knowing nods than will comparing it to the audio track of an Altman film or the first half of The Sound and the Fury.

And sometimes a sports metaphor can be more than just convenient. I’m thinking specifically of Virgil Trucks’ 1952 season with the Detroit Tigers, a campaign that I believe may provide me with a model for life itself.

Virgil Trucks has led a pretty interesting existence by just about anybody’s standards. A native of Birmingham (reputedly the greatest city in Alabam’), Trucks was a Major League pitcher for 17 years. He played in two All-Star games, brought home a World Series ring in 1945 and almost certainly would have won a Cy Young Award had it existed in 1953, when he finished fifth in MVP voting. He also served honorably in the Navy during WWII and even has a tangential connection to the modern jam band phenomenon: Virgil is the uncle of Allman Brothers drummer Butch Trucks and the great-uncle of guitar-slinger Derek Trucks.

That's all well and good, but I choose to cherish one of Trucks’ more ambiguous achievements. You see, in 1952, Virgil Trucks finished with a disappointing record of 5-19. Two of those wins, however, were no-hitters. Throwing one no-hitter is a rare feat. Throwing two in a season is something only four men have ever done. And throwing two in a decidedly losing season is my new ideal.

As I see it, in the game of life, there’s not much point in playing to win. Hard work and good intentions will only get you so far. Ultimately, the breaks are going to fall for you or against you, and you really don’t have much say in the matter. You can change up speeds, try a different grip on the ball, even file it down with an emery board in your effort to win, but the odds are that you’re going to rack up plenty of losses and no-decisions.

Some people are going to find a groove and pull off something spectacular, like Denny McClain’s 31-6 season with the ’68 Tigers. I don’t believe I know anyone personally who fits this profile, but I’m sure they’re out there. Other people are helpless to do anything but watch the losses pile up, like Adam Bernero’s 1-12 2003 campaign. This is how I picture life for that poor Star Wars kid from the YouTube video, or those guys who are always smoking cigarettes outside the weekly-rates hotel up the street from me. Those scenarios are, I think, beyond anyone’s control. Winners win, losers lose, but I don’t think many people fall completely in either category.

It seems like most people dedicate their lives to breaking even, like Paul Foytack going 14-14 for the 1959 Tigers. It’s not necessarily a bad goal. Closing out a season with 14 wins is pretty impressive. Losing 14 games isn’t great, to be sure, but at least you didn’t finish below .500. For a lot of folks, that’s enough. But me, I’m not content with aiming for the middle.

To me, what Virgil Trucks accomplished in that 5-19 effort is far more impressive. 19 is a lot of losses, and Trucks had enough success in his past that I guarantee every one of those blown games stung like hell. There must have come a point when he realized that his 1952 season was a wash-out, that there was no hope of him turning it around and posting a winning record. From that point on, I bet even the wins felt bittersweet, a reminder of what good pitching was supposed to feel like, and what it wouldn’t feel like until at least the start of the next season.

As a writer, that’s how I feel every time a rejection letter arrives in the mail, or a form e-mail from a literary agent shows up in my inbox. I count my losses with every story that writes itself into a corner, every line of dialogue that sounds embarrassingly stilted when read aloud, every scene that plays great in my head but falls flat on paper. Expand the metaphor to life in general and I could rattle off an endless litany of losses both tangible and intangible. Sure, I have some wins under my belt – more so than a lot of people, if I’m honest with myself – but most days the won-loss record feels even more lopsided than Virgil Trucks’ 5-19.

What pulls me through are those two no-hitters. Sure, 1952 was a lousy season for Virgil Trucks, but twice that year he achieved something very close to perfection. In those two games, he accomplished something that only a handful of human beings have ever done. The feeling he must have had when he recorded the last out of his first no-hitter is something few of us can conceive of. The feeling after the second one must have been indescribable.

That’s what I want out of life. I want my two no-hitters. Sure, it would be great to post a winning record too, but if tossing my gems means I lose in the long run, so be it. I will suffer my defeats with gratitude, so long as they’re in the service of two moments of ultimate, near-flawless success. Until then, I can only hope the sun keeps shining, my pitching elbow stays strong and the league doesn’t go on strike.