Blood Jump #5: Into the Country
Hell or High Water. Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Billy Strings.
Blood Jump is an independent and free publication, but writing has value. Solidarity with the WGA and everyone striking.
Country culture has largely existed, for me, on the other side of the screen. My father blared John Wayne movies through Zenith TV speakers, I would catch bits of pop country songs on the bus and in friends’ cars, I’d read about dime-store Westerns in books that weren’t dime-store Westerns. I largely preferred it that way: Country and Western makes for an easy punchline but one I was happy to participate in, and the vile jingoism so often packaged with its products made it easy to dismiss the genre across most media.
It's not revelatory to admit that of course country music and Western stories have merit beyond the “Willie Nelson’s good, I guess” stock response I’ve employed over the years. Yes, like every genre, country is vulnerable to punditry and polemics. But the sadness that even pop country can render in a minute or two can kick my Elliott Smith ass out of the city; writers from Larry McMurtry to Flannery O’Connor to Cormac McCarthy have turned in the best and bleakest visions of the American heartland; The Wild Bunch speaks for itself. And country is crumbling away from its nationalistic traditions, at least on the fringes. A new generation of queer cowboys are carrying the Lavender Country torch for LGBTQ+ twang, and country superfan Holly G created the Black Opry to showcase Black talent historically ignored by traditional Western music.
Still, it’s not a genre I reach toward out of habit, which means that most of the C&W culture with which I interact come via a friend’s suggestion. My dear friend Eggy convinced me to read Lonesome Dove; my brother endeared me toward John Denver. It serves to imbue my increasing love for the genre with a sense of serendipity, a magic that rises from the dust like heat waves. Everything featured in this issue comes via a loved one’s suggestion. Get along, little doggy.
This week’s Blood Jump kicks it into yeehaw mode. Hell or High Water. Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Billy Strings. Let’s begin.
No Country for Chris Pine
Hell or High Water does not trade in subtleties, nor does its thesis. “3 TOURS IN IRAQ BUT NO BAILOUT FOR PEOPLE LIKE US,” reads graffiti in the 2016 movie’s opening shot. It’s scrawled on the wall of a Texas Midland Bank, a scarlet letter pinned to the lapel of the Sheriff of Nottingham. The screed burns hot through Hell or High Water’s runtime, preserving what might have been an ode to American individualism instead as a brutal indictment of capitalism, neoliberal policy, and a country rich off the dollar of those earnest enough to buy into its broken promises.
That same Texas Midland Bank will soon be robbed by brothers Toby and Tanner Howard (Chris Pine and Ben Foster, respectively), who may as well have tagged the graffiti themselves. Their mission is one of storied justice: After oil was struck on the Howards’ late mother’s ranch, Texas Midland pulled some foul but legal strings to foreclose on the property. Toby, a stoic but righteous man, enlists the in-and-out-of-lockup Tanner as muscle to rob a series of Texas Midland branches and pay off the bank with its own money. The brothers make for quick but sloppy thieves—“Y’all are new at this, I’m guessing,” says a teller on their first job—and the law is quick to scent their trail. Rangers Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) and Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham) take the case. They are a dusty mirror of Toby and Tanner, men at the end of their line and hung out to dry by the state they love and serve.
The cops-and-robbers setup of Hell or High Water is commonplace; what makes the film remarkable is its sensibility. Toby and Tanner are built with the bolts of right-wing demigods, the wellbeing of their family cradled like a chalice as they hold up banks and launder the money through casinos. Their rationale is almost conspicuously pure. When the ranch is secured, Toby intends to sign it to his ex-wife and sons to give them the life he never had; Tanner is simply there because his little brother asked him for help. Throw in a dirt road and a rack of Coors and call Morgan Wallen, he’s got his 40th slur-proof hit of the year.
But the brothers’ sovereignty is held in check by Hamilton and Parker, who function not as arbiters of justice but as solvents for moral neutrality. Hell… doesn’t deign to pretend to back the blue. The Texans the rangers meet while tailing the Howard brothers are rightfully and refreshingly wary of the police, happier to see someone stick it to the banks that have kept their town poor than to respect a badge in service of arbitrary ideology. Hamilton and Parker themselves are hardly beacons for the thin blue line. Bridges plays an ailing cop to an almost alarming physical perfection, wheezing his way through the case, dogging Parker’s racial makeup and clinging to his job for fear of a lonely retirement. Parker, half Comanche, is just as critical of the banks as the Howards and all of Texas, bitter toward a country that stole the land he walks from his ancestors. The film’s only allegiance is with the people nursing wounds from a nation that’s failed to serve them, and its insistent avoidance to bend toward conservative values charges the venom it holds toward a failing government.
Political missives aside, Hell or High Water is a technical marvel. Bridges and Foster are phenomenal, and Chris Pine offers such a convincing performance that I could weep scrolling through the MCU credits that dominate his filmography. Director David Mackenzie and cinematographer Giles Nuttgens make a rare but convincing case for shooting digital, painting Texan prairies as brutal as they are beautiful. But it’s writer Taylor Sheridan (Sicario) that keeps the movie’s engine humming, employing more acidic one-liners than should be legal and balancing conviction and nuance on the tip of his finger like a Globetrotter. Like Clint Eastwood, Sheridan is often and perhaps unfairly maligned as a right-wing filmmaker (though both could do better to fight the case), accusations that discount the motives and statements of their output. But Hell or High Water is a movie too furious with the people marked as collateral damage from bank bailouts to concern itself with punditry. There is no good and evil here, there is no law—only those who have been taken from and those willing to take it back.
Thank you, again, to my dear friend Eggy for turning me on to this excellent movie. I wouldn’t have seen it without you.
Ode to Observance
Annie Dillard writes about sight as if it were a skill she’d recently acquired. In fact, she devotes a segment of her 1975 Pulitzer-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek to just such a phenomenon. Citing Marius von Senden’s Space and Sight, Dillard shares details from some of the very first Western cataract surgeries, noting that many newly sighted patients didn’t know what to make of the sensation.
“In general the newly sighted see the world as a dazzle of color-patches,” Dillard writes. Patients lacked understanding of depth and shadow; they could distinguish a cube from a sphere by running their tongues across each shape, but not by sight. The surgeries often resulted in a good deal of existential nausea, with many patients preferring to navigate their own homes with their eyes closed. Some patients, though, were met with astounding epiphany. One girl was excited to tell a blind friend that “men do not look like trees at all.” Another was sublimed speechless, “an expression of gratification and astonishment overspread her features; she repeatedly exclaimed: ‘Oh God! How beautiful!’”
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is suffused with a similar drunken wonder. The book is a non-fiction testament to nature in the tradition of Transcendentalists like Thoreau and Edward Abbey, a collection of details and observations in the woods over the course of a year or so in Roanoke, Virginia. Dillard writes of water bugs that drain frogs through their skin, of the patience needed to watch a muskrat, of fecundity’s dance on the edge of horror and hallelujah (of which she sells effectively via salmon breeding). She writes about light and sound and heat and time with prose that cracks open into verse and rapture. The book is not a pedagogy but an exultation, a scale of reverence that tips into the sensibilities of a zealot. Because, of course, you cannot take such effort to detail creation without considering a creator.
Thinking about God makes me feel very tired. My parents are kind people bound to queasy ideology, and years of processing a devout evangelical upbringing have left me at a generous “I don’t know, man,” in terms of personal belief. Still, the coding is there. My brain is hardwired to engage with some idea of a creator, a pull toward belief bubbles in me like a river flowing under ice.
So it’s a rare joy whenever I’m able to engage with a faith-adjacent text that doesn’t trip any number of my Baptist-flavored alarms. “The question from agnosticism is, Who turned on the lights?” Dillard writes. “The question from faith is, Whatever for?” Dillard’s perspective is an earnest blend of both questions, and she assumes no authority in her explorations, citing Kabbalah, the Koran, disciples of Christ and those of Buddha with equal measure. Her agnosticism is not one of Coexist bumper stickers but of humble inquiry, and she marvels at a prospective creator with as much fear and loathing as she does glory. “What if God has the same affectionate disregard for us that we have for barnacles?” she asks. “What if this world, my mother, is a monster, or I myself am a freak?” There is beauty in the decay of a coot’s corpse, there is anguish in the budding spring.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is almost completely devoid of biography. Reading the book, you’d assume that Annie Dillard had sequestered herself remotely in the Blue Ridge Mountains, perhaps on some spiritual journey, perhaps in response to some personal tragedy. It wasn’t until reading a 2015 profile on Dillard by The Atlantic that I learned Pilgrim was not written in a remote wilderness but in suburban Virginia, her accounts of nature not buried miles into the wilderness but within proximity of her home with her husband, Richard. This act of curation is far from a betrayal; in fact, it’s directly within the lineage of Thoreau himself, who wrote Walden in a well-developed New England. Dillard’s selective omissions only serve to score our own proximity to wonder, if only we’re inclined to look.
Thank you to my best bud, Austin, for gifting me this book in a time when I very much needed it.
He’s Bill and It’s a Thrill
At the last stop of his spring tour, at Chicago’s Northerly Island amphitheater, Billy Strings pauses a song halfway through. A fight has broken out among the rail riders, a fans’ term for the gaggle of wooks who, through some tincture of grit, privilege, and aggression, manage to make it front row for every stop on their jam-band tour of choice. Stopping concerts for the safety of the audience has become more and more common in a post-Astroworld landscape, but Billy seems beleaguered. His scene is growing fast, and its bones are aching.
Billy Strings is a bluegrass wunderkind, selling out arenas without a drummer in his band and twang-pilling normies with little interest in the genre (raising my hand, here). It’s hard to overstate how good this guy is on the gee-tar, and if you don’t believe me, there’s bound to be an uncle in your life who can back me up. Strings was born William Apostle into a small-town, Central Michigan life overstuffed with the same struggles and sorrows that stamp the jug-band standards that account for about half of his live sets. His father died of a heroin overdose when Billy was two; his mother and stepfather battled addictions of their own, with other drug users in and out of Billy’s house before he could learn their names. Strings himself started dabbling with drugs himself before he hit 10; the first time he tried meth was with his mother. But in a whirlwind of a childhood, music was steady ground.
“I was this 5-year-old learning to play guitar so my parents would pay attention,” Billy tells the New York Times in a 2021 profile. He learned to play from his stepfather, no slouch on the strings himself, eventually snowballing a career serious enough over a decade or so to encourage Billy to ditch the substances that characterized his childhood in favor of fast picking. The party life proved to be worth giving up: In February of this year, he released “California Sober,” a 420-friendly ode to cleaner living, with his hero Willie Nelson.
It's hard to pretend that a bluegrass player can break through our hyper-fragmented culture with enough force to ever be considered mainstream, but there’s something wild to Billy Strings. He’s as charismatic as he is talented, packing tours with upwards of 200 shows a year tagged with yips, woos, and a conspiratorial grin. His original music dresses the bones of the Doc Watsons and Bill Monroes of his roots with metal and psychedelic sensibilities; he bangs his head and rips acoustic solos through nearly thirty pedals during 100-year standards stretched into double-digit minutes. He’s featured on songs with Nelson, Luke Combs, and RNR. Marc Maron has sung his praises; Post Malone wears his shirt on stage. Strings takes notes from both the jam band and bluegrass sides of the unwashed aisle, but his output is thoroughly unique, a quick-strumming thrill of focus and instinct that makes bluegrass, if you can believe it, thoroughly exciting. He is shooting in all directions and hitting more targets than he has any right to.
The fight in Chicago dies as soon as Billy calls out the troublemakers. He’s annoyed but jumps right back into the song—crowd favorite “Hellbender”—and it’s not long before the vibes are restored. He tears through the end of the first set and comes back for an even longer second and encore, pulling his five-piece band through a show model tried and tested by Phish and the Grateful Dead. Like so many others on his tour, this amphitheater was sold out, with secondary tickets reaching double their nearly $100 face value. The crowd buzzes with the kind of energy that comes with discovering something big, even among 15,000 people making the same discovery. Strings plays fast and he ain’t slowin’ down.
Thank you to my beautiful partner, Sarah, for making me stick with bluegrass until it clicked.
Sample Draws
I always feel like a dope recommending a bona fide classic. Ever hear of The Beatles? Pretty good, right? Anyway, sometimes The Greats are The Greats for a reason, and it’s a real treat when a blind spot in the canon lives up to its reputation. I watched The Last Picture Show for the first time last week, and it thoroughly leveled me. Watch it if only to see the hottest cast ever committed to film.
I can say with confidence that this one is more of a diamond in the rough: My film club covered the 1989 Bollywood epic Parinda recently. It is explosive, beautiful, and hilarious, a clear seed for RRR and an essential watch for anyone curious about the genre.
Not a rec, but a note: This will be the last Blood Jump for the month of July. We’re off to San Francisco next week to catch the end of Dead & Company’s last tour and to hike and drive our way down the coast until we hit LA. Traveling is such a restorative privilege, and I hope you’re able to get out somewhere this summer, too.
Thank you for reading Blood Jump. If you enjoyed this issue, please encourage a friend to subscribe. I will see you again the week of August 7 for the next issue.