Versace goes cowboy (sort of....)

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Italy's Versace fashion house has gone cowboy (sort of) for its Men's Fall/Winter 2014-2015 collection that was shown yesterday in Milan.

Click here to see a video of the entire 10-minute show

The collection features narrow suit jackets sprinkled with rhinestone cactus, horseshoe and sheriff's star designs, and with shoulders broadened and enhanced by what looks like leather. Some of the models wore necklaces with big shiny stars -- I guess they were sheriff's stars, but they look like enormous Stars of David.

And then there are skin-tight tank tops -- and underpants -- in classic bandana-style prints. And oh, boy, the butt-baring chaps!

Actually, I likes some of the clothes -- especially the jackets with the leather shoulders, and some of the long, frock-coat length jackets.

But the rhinestone devices are pretty much a cliche -- I imagine they were supposed to be ironic comments, harking back to Nudie et al, but I don't think they were ironic enough, at least not on the bodies of the Ken-doll-like models who rather reminded me of Star Trek the Next Generation's android Data, but without as much personality.

Associated Press correspondent Jennifer Clark, however, called the collection "outrageously fun, even by Versace standards" and mostly "a camp celebration of manhood in many forms."

"Our cowboy is macho, he's a biker ... he doesn't have a horse," designer Donatella Versace said backstage after the show.
Donatella's cowboys wear their boots with sharp, tight suits decorated with rhinestone horseshoes and cactus plants on both front and back. These cowhands head out on the town wearing red leather chaps over their jeans, or sometimes just over their bandanna-print underwear. Cheeky indeed!

Read full article


Hmm. Well. I think I'll stick with Nudie.

Italian country (sort of). Max Pezzali "i cowboy non mollano"

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Released Jan. 10, the latest single -- and video -- of the Italian popstar Max Pezzali is a country-style song, with the video filmed at an Italian wild west theme park, the Cowboys' Guest Ranch in Voghera.

The song is a single off his album Max 20, one of the top 10 selling albums in Italy in 2013.





Pezzali is not a country singer, and as far as I know none of his other songs approach the country music genre or use wild west props in the videos.

According to a quote carried on his web site,  the new song reflects the fact that "in these difficult times, the world seems like a gigantic Far West without certainties or points of reference: charlatans, hucksters, and thugs of all types rage in the boundless prairies of the third millennium. Luckily there still exists a silent majority of people who tend to the facts, concreteness and hard work, getting up every morning without ever giving up. Because cowboys don't let go."









,

Eric Hobsbawm on the Mythic Appeal of the Cowboy

Fans at the Mragowo Country Piknik festival in Poland, 2006. Photo © Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

When the communist historian Eric Hobsbawn died last autumn at the age of 95, he was putting the final touches on his last book, Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the 20th Century, which was published in March in the UK. (It will be published in the US next year.)

The book is a collection of essays on a wide variety of topics -- one of which is the creation and worldwide appeal of the myth of the cowboy.

This, of course, is one of the things I have been exploring in this blog and in the research I've been carrying out on and off over the past decade. 

When the book came out, the Guardian newspaper ran a lengthy excerpt from the Cowboy chapter.

There is ... no shortage of potential cowboy myths in the western world. And, in fact, practically all the groups I have mentioned have generated macho and heroic semi-barbarian myths of one kind or another in their own countries and sometimes even beyond. But none of them has generated a myth with serious international popularity, let alone one that can compare, even faintly, with the fortunes of the North American cowboy. Why? 

Our starting point is the fact that  in and outside Europe, the "western" in its modern sense – that is, the myth of the cowboy – is a late variant of a very early and deep-rooted image: that of the wild west in general. Fenimore Cooper, whose popularity in Europe followed immediately upon his first publication – Victor Hugo thought he was "the American Walter Scott" – is the most familiar version of this. Nor is he dead. Without the memory of Leatherstocking, would English punks have invented Mohican hairstyles?

The original image of the wild west, I suggest, contains two elements: the confrontation of nature and civilisation, and of freedom with social constraint. Civilisation is what threatens nature; and their move from bondage or constraint into independence, which constitutes the essence of America as a radical European ideal in the 18th and early 19th centuries, is actually what brings civilisation into the wild west and so destroys it. The plough that broke the plains is the end of the buffalo and the Indian.

It is well worth accessing the Guardian web site and reading the whole essay (I don't have copyright permission to run it here). Hobsbawm elegantly touches all the expected spots, from Buffalo Bill to western imagery in advertising -- for a detailed discussion of this, see the essays in Western Amerykanski: Polish Poster Art & the Western, the wonderful catalogue of a 1999 exhibit at the Autry museum.  I'm not at all sure I agree with everything Hobsbawm says, but he makes some interesting points.

what carried the west into the hearts and homes of five continents was not movies that aimed at winning Oscars or critical applause. What is more, once the late western movie had itself become infected by Reaganism – or by John Wayne as an ideologist – it became so American that most of the rest of the world didn't get the point, or, if it did, didn't like it. 

In Britain, at least, the word "cowboy" today has a secondary meaning, which is much more familiar than the primary meaning of a fellow in the Marlboro ads: a fellow who comes in from nowhere offering a service, such as to repair your roof, but who doesn't know what he's doing or doesn't care except about ripping you off: a "cowboy plumber" or a "cowboy bricklayer". I leave you to speculate (a) how this secondary meaning derives from the Shane or John Wayne stereotype and (b) how much it reflects the reality of the Reaganite wearers of dude Stetsons in the sunbelt. I don't know when the term first appears in British usage, but certainly it was not before the mid-1960s. In this version, what a man's got to do is to fleece us and disappear into the sunset.

Artist tracks "end of cowboyism"

Not Arizona, but Death Valley... Photo © Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

An installation by the artist Ibrahim Quarashi uses the iconic American highway to track what he calls "the end of cowboyism."

Quirashi, described as a Pakistani now based in Europe (Berlin and Amsterdam) was born in Nairobi, according to the web site of a gallery that represents him. The "enigma of the Western cowboy" is said to have long been one of his obsessions.

His "Dreaming of Arizona" installation dates from 2009, when it was first shown in Amsterdam, but it has recently been mounted in Massachusetts.

It is yet another example of the many ways in which people around the world are caught up in the mythology of the American West and the Frontier; with the "highway" often playing a mystical as well and mythical role, redolent of all sorts of symbolism.

In Dreaming Arizona, Quarashi states on his web site

a metaphoric journey through the legendary Highway 64 is created to expose the end of cowboyism through a series of 7 films within 7 different time frames and 7 sets of photo prints.

It seems to me that he may actually mean legendary Route 66, since, coming from the east, Highway 64 stops at the Arizona border. Oddly enough, an article about Quarashi and the installation in the North Adams Transcript refers to -- and quotes Quarashi as referring to -- the highway at Highway 67, which in fact runs north-south and also does not enter Arizona....

The article, by Jess Gamari, quotes Quarashi as saying:

In Dreaming Arizona, I aim to simultaneously expose the structures that influence how we see the codes of an American Cowboy, with references from to Spaghetti Westerns, homo- eroticism, and pop culture like Andy Warhol [...] It gives a sense of how travel is so connected to the desire of an ideal that is perhaps never reached in the world of modern cowboys. I suppose Dreaming Arizona is a metaphoric journey through the legendary Highway 67 to expose the end of cowboy-ism through a series of seven films within seven different time frames, structure and inner sequences.

The exhibit, he added

looks at "the spatial analysis on the structures that influence how we see a world, a particular space wanting to metaphorically indulge in the illusions of a cowboys' hyper-masculinity without any of its real responsibilities," he said. " [Traveling through the American heartland] is a contemporary metaphor for an endless road trip that hold a very religious resonance is definitely subconscious but always present in the psyche.

Gamari writes that in 2007, Quarashi rented a white Bronco and traveled through Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Texas and Colorado, and later took a closer look at Mexican cowboys in Yucatan, Veracruz and Oaxaca.

Here is a video of the installation, from Quarashi's web site -- the text at the beginning and end of the film is also interesting as a description of the project.

Kids Cowboy Costumes Stolen in Scotland

Hmmm.

Police in Scotland say hundreds of pounds' worth of children's cowboy dress-up costumes were stolen last week in the break-in to a shed in the northern town of Fraserburgh.

STV news quoted a police spokesman as saying:

“As a result of the incident, a quantity of children’s black and white cowboy dressing up costumes, worth a low three-figure sum, were stolen.”

Italian cowboy exhibit at Western Folklife Center

Andrea "Drew" Mischianti on the fence, Western Games, 2005. Photo © Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

An exhibition of Italian "cowboy" life will open at the 29th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering at the Western Folklife Center in Elko, Nevada. The exhibition will then run from Feb. 1 to Sept. 9.

It was put together by Andrea "Drew" Mischianti and his wife, Natalia Estrada, and is based on photographs taken by Estrada. They document the "butteri," or Italian mounted shepherds/cowboys of Tuscany's Maremma region, but also the U.S. West-style round-ups and cowboy life lived in Italy by Mischianti, Estrada and other enthusiasts. (Call them "spaghetti cowboys"....)

Here's a video the couple put together about it:

I met Mischianti on several occasions, when he was working for a "ranch" near Lake Bracciano, west of Rome. He was a prime mover of the Western Games held there for several years -- rodeo and riding competitions, with lots of other attractions, stalls, Indian dancing and the like. I think I still have a text message saved on my cellphone when he invited me to come there to watch (or take part in) branding.

Disembodied Headdresses at the Western Games near Rome. Photo © Ruth Ellen Gruber

Mischianti has been very active in the Italian western, horse, riding and cowboy scene for many years and long wrote a column about the cowboy life for an Italian wild west magazine. He and Estrada run a "Ranch Academy" to teach and take part in "buckeroo" skills and lifestyle. They also take part in competitions and exhibitions of skills.

Oh, Those Czechs...

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Oh, those Czechs.... I love this! "Kovboj z Teplic" by Kamil Střihavka and No Guitars. 1995

UK -- Cowboys and Cowgirls to Perform for Queen Elizabeth's Jubilee

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

A group of cowboys and cowgirls from California will take part in celebrations in May to mark Britain's Queen Elizabeth's Diamond Jubilee, performing a 6-minute wild west show at Windsor Castle.

Reports the Visalia Times-Delta:

Queen Elizabeth II will celebrate her Diamond Jubilee — 60 years of reign — with a 90-minute show focusing on equestrianism throughout the world. And representing North America is a group of cowboys and cowgirls who will look to impress the queen with an entertaining, yet authentic look at the American West. "The queen was specific, she wants real cowboys at her party," said Clay Maier, who is organizing the North America portion of the show. "We've been working on this for two years to get it right. We want to be authentic."

The article says that to "ensure authenticity" the group performing May 13 will include 12 Native Americans, five cowboys, four Texas longhorn cattle, four trick ropers, an Abbot-Downing Concord stagecoach and four pinto horses.

The performance will hark back to Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show's command performance before Queen Victoria  on May 11,  1887, during celebrations that year marking Victoria's Golden Jubilee.

Buffalo Bill's Wild West, including his full crew of 97 American Indians, 180 horses, 18 buffalo, and, of course, Chief Sitting Bull, Geronimo, and the sharpshooter Annie Oakley, was the central attraction in London's American Exhibition in Earl's Court. Two days after its opening, Queen Victoria visited the exhibition for a private showing of the Wild West.

That the event did not take place in Windsor Castle, requiring Her Majesty to travel to see it, was remarkable. Cody thusly explained in a press release: This show "was altogether too big a thing to take to Windsor Castle, and as in the case of Mahomet and the mountains, as the Wild West Show could not go to the Queen it became absolutely necessary for the Queen to go to the Wild West Show if she desired to see it, and it was evident that she did."

As Robert Rydell and Rob Kroes put it in their 2005 book Buffalo Bill in Bologna: the Americanization of the World, 1869-1922, it was the first time since her husband Prince Albert had died 25 years earlier that Victoria had appeared at a public event.

Her attendance at the Wild West show was news everywhere in the English-speaking world, and the fact that she made her apperance in the context of the celebrations that marked the Jubilee Year of her reign only added more weight to the occasion. And what an occasion it was. When the show began and a rider entered the arena carrying the American flag, Queen Victoria stood and bowed. The rest of the audience followed suit, while British soldiers and officers saluted. As Cody described the moment:

"All present were constratined to feel that here was an outward and visible sign of the extinction of that mutual prejudice, amounting sometimes almost to race hatred, that had severed two nations from the times of Wahsington and George the Third to the present day. We felt that the hatchet was buried at last and the Wild West had been at the funeral."

Russia -- US Cowboys (and the cattle industry) bring ranching to Russia

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Yee-haw!

Voice of America -- VOA -- reports that Americans are bringing cowboys and cattle ranching to Russia:

Darrell Stevenson, an American cowboy and cattle rancher, is not riding the black earth country of Russia to film a western movie.

He is bringing American-bred beef cattle, American ranching technology, and American cowboy knowhow to Russia.

Music -- Nice piece on the multi-ethnic background of cowboy songs

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

NPR runs a nice piece (with music) about the surpisingly multi-ethnic background of classic cowboy songs, from The Streets of Laredo to Cotton-Eye Joe.

a close examination of early cowboy music reveals details about some of the very first cowboys that don't fit the usual stereotypes. [...]


No one is sure how many African-Americans worked as cowboys in the trail drives, but estimates run as high as 1 in 4. [...]


The trail drives were a unique moment in history that brought together a diverse lot of men, including freed slaves and confederate war veterans. And, while some cowboy crews were segregated, photographs of others show black and white men working side by side in [...] "range equality."

Brazil -- country and western rodeo culture

This is another geographically far-flung post -- Reuters runs a piece about U.S.-style wild west culture in Brazil. It's everywhere!

By James Matthews

Reuters
Tuesday, July 13, 2010; 3:22 PM

GUAXUPE, Brazil (Reuters Life!) - From close up you can hear the rasping breaths of a 450-kilogram (990-pound) bull as it bucks and whirls under the bright arena spotlights and struggles to unseat its plucky rider. Stand even closer to the rodeo and you might get a showering of grit scooped up by a large hoof and flung through gaps in the sturdy metal railings.

Guaxupe is a sleepy agricultural town in Brazil renowned for its yearly ten-day rodeo festival that brings together some of the country's most skilled professional cowhands and popular Brazilian country music singers. The town is in southern Minas Gerais state, the heart of Brazil's coffee growing region, and home to the world's largest coffee cooperative, Cooxupe.

"It's the craziest week of the year," said Ana Paula Chagas, a resident and employee of Cooxupe. "We are mid-way through the coffee harvest and everyone has money to spend." The rural festival in Guaxupe underscores the vast cultural differences across Brazil's enormous land mass.

From abroad, the country is often stereotyped as a destination for sand, samba and caipirinhas, but it is also a land of tough working cowboys and millions of passionate country music fans.

Read full article here

Cowboys in India -- Another Movie Report

Picture from Indiaglitz.com

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

Here's another of my sporadic links on Cowboy Movies in India, specifically in the Tamil film industry in southern India. This time it's to an article at the Indiaglitz web site, reviewing a movie called "Super Cowboy," by the director Chimbu Deven (also written Simbudevan) -- which I posted about a few months ago, when it was in production. It is the first Tamil cowboy flic in something like 36 years.

‘Super Cowboy’ is the rebirth of the cowboy films in Tamil cinema, a movie that is a mixed bag of entertainment.

Hollywood is a kingpin in the cowboy genre, with a lot of heroes in fact carving a niche for themselves including Gregory Peck, Clint Eastwood and a host of other cowboy heroes. ‘Super Cowboy’ is an inspired movie of one such page from the big book of cowboy history. Firstly, credit and two thumbs up to director Chimbu Deven to make such a movie that needs a lot of effort and specially attention to detail. He has brought out a wholesome entertainment.

Starting the movie with the narration from the director himself about the evolution of cowboy culture in the world, he gives examples of different cowboys in different countries with conclusion of the narration with cowboys in India, in particular south India. Here is introduced Jaishankarpuram, a village that has a lot of cowboys (even cow woman) and horses! Jaishankarpuram is in the clutches of the villain Nasser as Nalla Trachu who lives in the ‘Iron Fort’ in USApuram. Nalla Trachu also dictates terms on five other villages. He is a wicked man, mind you! With only one eye and the other being a dummy!

There's fuller description of the film HERE.

WATCH THE TRAILER!

Meanwhile, Simbudevan is quoted as saying

“We chose 18th century subject and bringing out the film as a comedy adventure. We are showing Red Indians in a never before manner. We prepared a fantastic set with the help of 300 workers in Kerala on Hollywood style. It is the biggest set in the entire film industry’s history in India. We also shot the film in Thenkasi, Thada, Madhya Pradesh, Rayachoti, Sathunur, Bengaluru, Pune, Nagpur, Palghat, Amba Samudram and Pondicherry. Ours is the first unit to shoot in Kandi Canal in Kandikota of Vijayanagar dynasty. We took several risky shots in this 30-foot depth canal. We gave training to all the artistes in horse riding.”

And the India Times runs a story about the female lead in the movie, the actress Lakshmi Rai, commenting on her role:

“A cowboy film is being made in Kollywood after a very long time and I’m sure audiences will find it refreshing. Actually, I wasn’t really sure how it would fare at the box office when I first heard the script. But, the research that director Simbudevan had done on the subject assured me that it would turn out to be very interesting and fresh,” says an excited Lakshmi.

A French TV documentary about a Texas Rodeo Cowboy

This is a trailer for a documentary that was shown on Arte television in August...

USA - Movie cowboy stamps go on sale April 17

 

The new US postage stamps honoring western heroes of the silver screen go on sale Saturday, and there will be ceremonies and celebrations in several places around the country.

The stamps honor the movie cowboy heroes William S. Hart, Tom Mix, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.

All four of the honorees had an enthusiastic following outside the US as well as at home.

Hart and Mix were before my time. But Roy Rogers and Gene Autry were childhood favorites of mine, and I still love their movies, which I now watch on DVD --  and I've got Gene's CDs on my IPod. Autry of course went on to become a fabulously successful businessman. In 2004, I had a visiting scholar fellowship to the Autry National Center/Institute for the Study of the American West, a wonderful institution in LA that Autry was instrumental in founding.

One of the ceremonies celebrating the stamps will take place at the Autry -- see the program by clicking HERE.

This is the first time Gene Autry has been featured on a postage stamp, and the Museum of the American West plans to recognize this important milestone with a lobby exhibition that will remain up through Founder’s Day in October. The cameo will include artifacts relating to all four cowboys, focusing on different aspects of their illustrious careers.  Gene Autry was a success in entertainment and business, and he always made time for his fans. He toured across North America, giving children of all ages the chance to see their favorite cowboy in person. Items on display will include a child mannequin with a Gene Autry Official Ranch Outfit and a Gene Autry Monark bicycle.

Other ceremonies will take place at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Norman, Oklahoma and at the William S. Hart Park and Museum in Newhall, California. Maybe elsewhere, too!

India -- Cowboy Hats Are the Rage

Photo: IndiaGlitz

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

I love stories about the Indian "Cowboy" films and embrace of Wild West trappings by "Kollywood" (southern India's Tamil-language  film industry) and the vast subcontinent as a whole: they demonstrate the universality of the American foundation saga and the global embrace of the mythology and its trappings.... Here's another. According to a web site called IndiaGlitz, cowboy hats are currently all the rage  -- "that essential Prop" even in movies that do not have a cowboy or western theme.

Its retro mode in Kollywood and guess what is the most happening ‘property’ our stars are using, eh sorry, wearing!

Call it the trend or a fashion statement - our heroes are wearing the Cowboy hats., more often than not All you Tamil Film loyalists, rewind to times of Jai Shankar, possibly one of the first cowboys of Kollywood, He wore it for his most coveted cowboy role and then continuing his legacy was Rajinikanth in ‘Thaai Meedhu Sathyam'.

Well those were the days when stories were given the importance and costumes were naturally imbibed in the story. And now, Cowboy hats everywhere. The hero wears the cowboy hat and dances with the heroine in hilly areas, or you see him wear the hat as a ‘prop’ (short for property) and smoke a puff, typically wild... wild... west! [...] 

Cowboy hats are a style symbol. Hats have always been an accessory to mankind, but as a property in movies, especially songs, cowboy hats fill the blank. Spot the actors, be it the hero, the heroine or even the villain in the movies with the cowboy hats on, in upcoming releases. The tradition has been continuing for ages now and just like sky, the hats are here to stay. At least in Tamil Cinema.

Read full story

 I have posted in the past about some of the films and actors mentioned in this story -- such as the recent movie Quickgun Murugun.  I know very little of this subculture -- but the pictures and description of the film plots are wild (west)!

 Photo: IndiaGlitz

Britain -- the Cowboy as Political Symbolism (again)

 

 "Shock and Awe" by Richard Hamilton. Photo from Daily Mail web site

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

An image that stands out in a retrospective show by "The Father of Pop" Richard Hamilton  at the Serpentine Gallery in London, is "Shock and Awe" -- a portrait of Tony Blair portraying him as a gunslinger against an apocalytic landscape. It's such a cliche -- even critics point this out, as in the Times of London:

But are Hamilton’s political messages still relevant? Can his satire still sting? In one of several recent works produced for this show, his 2007 Shock and Awe, Tony Blair straddles the horizon, hands on hips like a Texan gunslinger, set against apocalyptic skies. The message is plain. Yet we have seen too many such pictures. This work feels more like a starting point for Hamilton’s unsatisfied intelligence.

What's different is that the painting uses the cowboy image to pillory a British prime minister not an American president. Says the Daily Mail:

The message of the image, which shows Blair in a cowboy shirt, jeans and boots with two holstered guns, set in front of an ominous, smouldering landscape, is clear. The portrait also has an undeniable link to one of America's ultimate cowboys, former U.S. President George W. Bush.

But such imagery directed against American presidents is ho-hum stock in trade that goes back many, many decades, long before George Bush. It is so predictable!

But fascinating.

The Autry National Center in LA held an extensive exhibit in 2008 exploring "Cowboys and Presidents" -- the positive and the negative  connotations. The exhibit web site is still up -- click HERE to visit.

The exhibit explained

how the presidency became intertwined with the emerging image of a heroic American cowboy at the turn of the twentieth century and will explore the ways that U.S. Presidents have used this powerful iconographic symbol to define themselves and their administrations to the nation and the world. It will also show how the press, foreign governments, and domestic political opponents have found cowboy imagery useful in criticizing presidential policy and leadership.

 Cowboys, it noted

performed an important function as the United States expanded west during the nineteenth century, but they had an unsavory reputation. Cowboys were blamed for a variety of offenses, from shooting up cow towns to participating in range wars. Around the turn of the twentieth century, the image of the cowboy began to change. The popularity of dime novels and Wild West shows shifted the image of the cowboy from a violent outlaw to a hard-working, self-sufficient man of the people. No one did more to legitimize the image of the cowboy than President Theodore Roosevelt. With the help of fine art, film, and television, the cowboy ultimately came to be seen as the personification of America, both home and abroad. American presidents, not surprisingly, have used the image for a variety of purposes. Nonetheless, the negative association of the cowboy never fully disappeared. To supporters, a cowboy president represents bravery, ruggedness, and a love of freedom. To critics, a cowboy president is juvenile, reckless, and dangerous. The popularity of the cowboy image has ebbed and flowed with the politics of the time, and a white hat-black hat duality exists to this day.

Background to Indian Cowboy Movie

I posted recently about a new Indian (subcontinent) cowboy flick -- Quick Gun Murugun.

Here's an article about the background to the character, by Anindita Ghose: "How the iconic dosa-eating superhero, Quick Gun Murugun, broke out of his shelved television avatar on to the big screen." The article also provides biographical info and an interview with the director. (The photo is from livemint.com)

Seems Quick Gun Murugun started out as promotional spots for a new TV channel.

The promos were a comic juggernaut. Featuring an over-the-top character called Murugun fashioned on B-grade Tamil film heroes, they were designed to counter similar MTV spots, albeit with an Indian flavour.

Telugu actor Rajendra Prasad plays Murugun on the big screen. A veteran of over 200 Tamil, Telugu and Kannada films, the 57-year-old portrays the swashbuckling hero with alarming comic effectiveness. The story revolves around an epic battle between vegetarianism and non-vegetarianism wherein gunslinging Murugun fights against all odds to prevent his nemesis, Rice Plate Reddy, from opening a non-vegetarian Udupi joint, McDosa. The film also marks the return of actor Rambha (Mango Dolly), back after a sabbatical and donning a stunning blonde wig that the producers claim cost Rs15 lakh (it was sourced from Los Angeles). Other characters, such as Gunpowder, Masala News Reporter and Locket Lover, complete the array of Tamil movie clichés.

Read full article

Thailand -- More on Cowboys There

I've written on this blog about cowboy theme parks and how the Imaginary Wild West is alive and well in Thailand -- but it turns out that there is much more there than I had known about (or imagined)!

There was even an article last year in The Atlantic by Joshua Kurlantzick-- called (what else) "Thai Noon"....

It’s 7:30 on a humid April evening, and the line dancing has begun. Women in cowgirl dresses sway to the music, mouthing the words as they step backward and forward in unison on the stage. After a while they sit down, and I hear whinnying in the distance. A group of horsemen in chaps and buckskin coats thunders up atop black-and-white steeds. Surrounded by guests in bolo ties, I watch, transfixed. It’s my first evening at the Pensuk Great Western Resort—a 40-acre spread in the heart of Southeast Asia. The “cowgirls” are graceful Thai women, the “cowboys” slight, lithe Thai men.

Read full article

This article reads remarkably like the piece I wrote for the New York Times some years ago about Wild West theme parks in Germany and the Czech Republic, called "Deep in the Heart of Bavaria":

IT'S nowhere near high noon, but a tough-looking hombre in a black leather vest, black stovepipe pants and a black cowboy hat is sauntering down the dusty length of a frontier Main Street, a gun belt slung low on his hips. He strolls past the sheriff's office, the Palace Hotel and a saddled horse hitched loosely to a wooden railing, then pauses for a moment at the broad covered porch of the Black Bison Saloon. Entering, he strides up to the bar and places his order. ''Ein bier, bitte.''

This is Pullman City, a theme park in southern Germany where more than a million visitors a year step out of 21st-century Europe into an American Wild West fantasyland of stagecoaches, gunfighters, mountain men and Indians.

Read full story

I've just been contacted by Erik Cohen, an emeritus professor of anthropology (and expert on tourism studies) at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who lives in Thailand and has included a lengthy -- and fascinating -- description and analysis of "Thai Cowboys" in his book Explorations in Thai Tourism, published in 2008 by Emerald, Bingley.

The Economist on Cowboy Poets

Lone Pine, California, 2007. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

The British newsweekly The Economist has an interesting take on the phenomenon of Cowboy Poetry at a time when -- it feels -- that cowboys otherwise are disappearing from popular culture....

The rise of the cowboy poet coincides with the virtual disappearance from popular culture of another Western figure. Hollywood used to churn out dozens of films a year about square-jawed gunslingers. It now produces almost none, and there is currently no new Western series to be found on broadcast television or basic cable. But the departure of the heroic cowboy has opened some room for gentler, more reflective voices. Although it is growing, their audience is smaller: unlike Western films, cowboy poetry is mostly produced by Westerners, for Westerners.

Read Full Article

New or Newish Italian Wild West Themepark

Saw a big advertisement for a new wild west theme park in Italy. Or at least I think it's new. I may have heard about it earlier this year. It seems to be open into the fall, on weekends, so I'll try to get there -- the northern city of Voghera -- and report. Meanwhile we can all visit the website -- www.cowboys.it (am having trouble posting the link....).