Spaghetti Cowboys: Country fest in Bologna.

The arrow points the way

Last Sunday I spent an afternoon at a country western festival in Bologna, Italy. It was the very last day of the two weekends that the festival took place, and I was eager to see what it was like: though I have been to wild west and country festivals in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, France and the Czech Republic, I have only been to a couple of them in Italy.

This one, called "Festival Country," took place at the Bologna Fairgrounds, and it shared space in a cavernous hall with a sort of "October Fest" beer festival (featuring what was presented as German food). In a separate cavernous hall there was a so-called "Irish Festival."

The path to all three led through the grim industrial landscape of the Fair buildings.....

Once there, what did I find?

The scene -- at least on the day I was there -- was a sort of distillation of all the most common stereotypes associated with "the west," "the frontier," "country-western," and, in a certain way, "America."  It was almost "paint-by-numbers"-- but refreshingly, in contrast to festivals in other countries, I only saw one Confederate flag.

I was hit by a fist of sound as soon as a entered -- from a band (whose name I didn't get) playing on a stage in the middle of the hall: playing so loud that that the sound was utterly distorted, with only the bass and the beat discernable.

The web site promised shows, concerts, food and drink, "pioneers and westerns", Indian traditions, games, and handicrafts.

At the entrance to the cavernous hall stood a manikin of a Native American, posed outside a tepee as if to pounce.

Nearby, there were basic-type mock ups of a Saloon, a bank, and a corral -- which is where, I believe, shows were staged.

All around the edges there were stands selling cowboy boots, cowboy hats, T-shirts, "western attire" and the usual type of wild west tschotsches -- most of which I rather assume were made in China or somewhere. Unlike at some other festivals I've been so, there was not much of the participatory or performative dress-up.

There was a dance floor for line-dancing (increasingly popular in Italy) in front of the band-stand.

And beyond this were  lots of tables where people could eat -- the "western" fare included a variety of (mainly) meats, giant hamburgers and other dishes that to me seemed pretty unappetizing (I ate fish & chips in the Irish festival). This being Italy there was also pasta -- but thanks to the Americanness of it all, it was the first time I have ever seen "spaghetti and meatballs" in Italy.

One thing that was different from some of the festivals I've gone to elsewhere was a series of lectures given on "western" topics, such as western movies. I dropped into one of them -- where an Italian from an organization called Sentiero Rosso (Red Trail) that supports Native American rights was talking about how his group brings aid to Native American families.

 

I was planning to stay at the festival until evening (the last train back to Florence was at something like 9:30 p.m.), but in fact, I only lasted a few hours....I'm sad to say that was it all so empty,  stereotyped, and  superficial that it wasn't really fun.

Spaghetti (& Meatballs) Cowboys: Country fest in Bologna.

The arrow points the way

In late October I spent an afternoon at a country western festival in Bologna, Italy. It was the very last day of the two weekends that the festival took place, and I was eager to see what it was like: though I have been to wild west and country festivals in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and the Czech Republic, I have only been to a couple of them in Italy.

This one, called "Festival Country," took place at the Bologna Fairgrounds, and it shared space in a cavernous hall with a sort of "October Fest" beer festival (featuring what was presented as German food). In a separate cavernous hall there was a so-called "Irish Festival:" vaguely Celtic music, and stalls that mainly seemed to sell "Lord of the Rings" type clothing.....

The path to all three led through the grim industrial landscape of the Fair buildings.....

Once there, what did I find?

The scene -- at least on the day I was there -- was a sort of distillation of all the most common cliches and stereotypes associated with "the west," "the frontier," "country-western," and, in a certain way, "America."  It was almost "paint-by-numbers"-- but refreshingly, in contrast to festivals in other countries, I only saw one Confederate flag.

I was hit by a fist of sound as soon as a entered -- from a band (whose name I didn't get) playing on a stage in the middle of the hall: playing so loud that that the sound was utterly distorted, with only the bass and the beat discernable.

The web site promised shows, concerts, food and drink, "pioneers and westerns", Indian traditions, games, and handicrafts.

At the entrance to the cavernous hall stood a manikin of a Native American, posed outside a tepee as if to pounce.

Or, of course, post for pictures.

Nearby, there were basic-type mock ups of a Saloon, a bank, and a corral -- which is where, I believe, shows were staged.

All around the edges there were stands selling cowboy boots, cowboy hats, T-shirts, "western attire" and the usual type of wild west tschotsches -- most of which I rather assume were made in China or somewhere. Unlike at some other festivals I've been so, there was not much of the participatory or performative dress-up.

There was a dance floor for line-dancing (increasingly popular in Italy) in front of the band-stand.

And beyond this were  lots of tables where people could eat -- the "western" fare included a variety of (mainly) meats, giant hamburgers and other dishes that to me seemed pretty unappetizing (I ate fish & chips in the Irish festival). This being Italy there was also pasta -- but thanks to the Americanness of it all, it was the first time I have ever seen "spaghetti and meatballs" in Italy.

One thing that was different from some of the festivals I've gone to elsewhere was a series of lectures given on "western" topics, such as western movies. I dropped into one of them -- where an Italian from an organization called Sentiero Rosso (Red Trail) that supports Native American rights was talking about how his group brings aid to Native American families.

 

I was planning to stay at the festival until evening (the last train back to Florence was at something like 9:30 p.m.), but in fact, I only lasted a few hours....I'm sad to say that was it all so empty,  stereotyped, and  superficial -- and that, despite the razzle dazzle and noise, there was such a lack of energy -- that it wasn't really fun.

Stunning 19th century photos of the American West

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The Daily Mail newspaper online has published a series of stunning photos of the American west taken mainly in the 1870s by Timothy O'Sullivan, a pioneer of  U.S. field photography. Click the link to see the marvelous pictures of landscapes, raw towns and mining camps, and portraits of Native Americans.

"Not only was O'Sullivan one of the most intrepid and successful of the U.S. government expedition photographers who roamed the West under appalling conditions in the late 1860s and 1870s," wrote Margaret Regan in the Tucson Weekly wrote in 2003, "he was one of the best of the Civil War photographers. His photos of the war's anonymous dead, lying bloated in the bloody fields of Gettysburg and elsewhere, are emblazoned into the consciousness of Americans."

O'Sullivan,  Regan wrote, worked  with Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner.

Brady had a nasty habit of not crediting his photographers for their work, and Gardner soon broke away from the studio, taking O'Sullivan with him. The young photographer went on to shoot gripping images in the aftermath of most of the war's major battles, from Second Manassas to Appomattox.
"There are no actual battle pictures," Etherton notes. "He did camps, troops and atrocities, not the battle while it was happening. That would have been incredibly hard. With the camera and the wet plate negative in the field, that was not going to happen." 

Until the Civil War, photography had been a refined, mostly indoor craft, geared toward people in their Sunday best stopping by the studio for a family portrait. The Civil War changed all that. Its photographers essentially invented photojournalism, though McElroy says they were not always above staging their scenes. In these days, the wet-plate collodion technique required them to haul around a portable darkroom--the soldiers nicknamed them the "what-is-it wagons"--to develop the glass negatives right after shooting the image. 

The drill, says McElroy, went like this: Set up the camera. Quickly coat a glass plate with gooey collodion. Put the glass in a plateholder. Insert it in the camera, expose it for some seconds. Rush the plate to the darkroom tent and immediately bathe it in the developer chemicals and the fixer.

Later, he accompanied survey and exploration missions into the West.

In 1867, Clarence King, a 25-year-old Yale graduate, hired the Irish tough guy for his Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel. Funded by the War Department, the plan was to survey the unexplored territory between the California Sierras and the Rockies, with an eye toward finding the best place to lay railroad tracks while gauging mining possibilities and the level of Indian hostility. In May, the party sailed to Panama, crossed the jungle by narrow-gauge railroad and continued on to San Francisco. There, O'Sullivan bought a leftover war ambulance to serve as his traveling darkroom, and four mules to haul it. 

Beginning the climb up the Sierra Nevada mountains in July, the team crossed the Donner Pass at night, "when the mountain air froze (the snow) into a crust firm enough to support them," writes Snyder. Most of the crew, excluding O'Sullivan, came down with malaria in a mosquito-plagued valley, and King himself was struck by lightning on Job's Peak and was temporarily paralyzed.

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.

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

REAL western towns, that stll figure in the imagination

True West magazine lists its Top Ten  real "wild west" towns that retain the look and feel that sparked the imagination -- plus a long list of other town to watch.

Number One is Virginia City, Nevada

Boardwalks still line the streets, showing off the remarkable collection of 19th-century buildings, abandoned mine shafts and thousands of archaeological sites. Some of its most notable buildings include the First Presbyterian Church, built in 1867 and one of the few buildings still standing after the Great Fire of 1875; the state’s oldest hotel, the 1861 Gold Hill Hotel; and the 1885 Piper Opera House. The Barbary Coast archaeological digs in 2000 have allowed for greater interpretation of Virginia City, where ethnicities mixed freely, as proven by one of the dig sites, the black-owned Boston Saloon.

Read full article here