Up from the grave

February 16, 2023February 17, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments

This is what comes of watching zombie shows on TV.

Radio Free Dogpatch keeps trying to claw its way out from under its tombstone, and I guess I got tired of beating on it with a shovel and burying the sonofabitch again.

Basically, I just wanted to see whether I (a) could remember how to do a podcast after taking two years off, and (2) could keep from getting too deep into the audio-technical weeds.

There’s something about having a dedicated “podcast studio” with a Zoom PodTrak P4 hooked up to a MacBook Pro lashed to a 27-inch monitor and Hindenburg and cables running ever’ whichaway that leads to delusions of grandeur, is what. Chiseling away at the stone, you think you’re Michelango revealing his David, but what you you wind up with is Clarabell honking his horn.

Anyway, a small notion caught up with me while I was running the trails on Tuesday and when I got home I just kept on running with it. Ira Glass is still out there somewhere. Dude just couldn’t keep up. Sucks to be him, hah?

Anyway, this is the scenic route to announcing: Yes, yes, yes, it’s time for a special Undead Episode of Radio Free Dogpatch, another toot on the rusty tin whistle souring the globe-spanning, star-studded orchestra that is podcasting. My heartfelt apologies in advance.

P L A Y R A D I O F R E E D O G P A T C H

• Technical notes: I didn’t know how into it I’d be after two years off, so I set up shop on the dining-room table, using a Shure SM58 mic and the Zoom H5 Handy Recorder. Editing was in Apple’s GarageBand, with a sonic bump from Auphonic. Zapsplat, Freesound and Voice Memos on the iPhone provided the music and sound effects, with the late Donna “Hot Stuff” Summer singing backup for Thomas “Keep the Change” McGuane, who remains very much with us.

Be here when?

April 10, 2022 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments

On Saturday I was making breakfast and mulling over Ken Layne’s latest Desert Oracle podcast when I smelled something burning.

The Wirecutter boyos say you can’t buy a proper toaster anymore, whether you spend a lot or a little, and I believe them. If I don’t keep an eye on and make adjustments to this cheapo Cuisinart what I wind up with is either lightly dried bread or a blackened slab that looks like a smoking shake shingle from a lightning-fried cabin.

A little thing, to be sure. Hardly the foundation for a thumbsucker The New Yorker might buy. And never mind writing about it — simply thinking about it may be a red flag, or so posits the Desert Oracle:

If you don’t have any sense of mission or destiny, or religious faith, or really any sort of sustainable lifetime philosophy, then the small stuff is all you can think about. Because no matter where you are in life, at one time or another you are going to have all the usual problems: health, money, sorrow, disgust, anger, gum disease, athlete’s foot, too much house or none at all. Your dog either up and died or it’s neurotic and full of hate and will outlive you by decades. Everybody’s out to get you or nobody pays any attention at all. The entirety of modern technological society has brushed away and marginalized the personal practice of philosophy. So we lose the plot while we’re in it. It’s like one of those Disney “Star Wars” movies.

I’ve had all of these problems, except being outlived by dogs. And that rough beast is bound to come slouching around one of these days, because Herself wants one, even more than she wants properly toasted bread in the mornings, slathered with Irish butter and French spread.

Maybe I should relocate to one of Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville-branded “active-living communities,” a paradise for Parrotheads, which is a philosophy of sorts, maybe even a religion.

I had a brief Buffett period, and still enjoy his early works, like “He Went to Paris,” “Cuban Crime of Passion,” and “Death of an Unpopular Poet.” He may have foreshadowed his future as a geezer miner with the lyrics to “I Have Found Me a Home”:

And I have found me a home

Yes, I have found me a home

And you can have the rest of everything I own

’Cause I have found me a home.

That song and the rest of my best-of-Buffett list are from his 1973 breakout album, “A White Sport Coat and a Pink Crustacean,” which features, among others, Steve Goodman on acoustic lead guitar, Vassar Clements on fiddle, and Thomas McGuane on liner notes (“We are beset by the quack minstrels of a non-existent America, bayed at by the children of retired orthodontists about ‘hard times’ and just generally depleted by all the clown biographies and ersatz subject matter of the drugs-and-country insurgence that is replacing an earlier song mafia,” and if that isn’t vintage Captain Berserko I’m a Daytona Beach Realtor.).

The folks who live in Buffett’s beach-bum burgs out there in Disney country certainly seem to have a philosophy that works for them. In his New Yorker piece Nick Paumgarten quotes Stuart Schultz, Latitude Margaritaville’s head of residential community relations (and a former summer-camp director), as saying that living in a Margaritaville property is “like being in college, but with money and without having to study. You have a great dorm room, you never have to go to class, and there’s always a party.”

Hm. I dunno. An earlier version of me never went to class but took in many a party, so I feel like I’ve done my time in that dorm room. And like the toast from my Cuisinart I have the scorch marks to show for it.

It’d probably be smarter to stay put. Get a philosophy. And maybe a dog.

Unhorsed

October 26, 2020 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments

Don’t get wisterical. It’s just a little snow.

We were on something of a weather carousel here this morning, a slowly revolving lazy Susan serving up blue sky, clouds, rain, sleet, and snow. Don’t like what’s set before you? Patience. Another option will be coming around directly.

Eventually, ol’ Suze coasted to a stop … on snow.

Oh, well. It was bound to happen eventually. It’s October, f’chrissakes. Cyclocross season in an ordinary year, which this is not, with the Giro just wrapped and the Vuelta ongoing.

I got my cyclocross in yesterday before the weather went all to shitaree, rolling south on the foothills trails past Copper and back again.

No running, thanks all the same. Not even a hike-a-bike. The weather was cool, but the ground was dry, alarmingly so, and there wasn’t anything I couldn’t ride on my trusty Steelman Eurocross.

Alas, as Thomas McGuane has written, “sometimes a man needs to be afoot to keep from going broke, get down and go to his tasks, instead of posing on the horse. …”

So today, no horsing around. I pulled on some long pants, grabbed the push broom, and herded some snow off my driveway. Yippee-ki-yay, etc.

‘Bigger even than I had feared’

September 30, 2020September 30, 2020 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

Flush twice, it’s a long way to the Commission on Presidential Debates.

The headline is taken from the 1978 Thomas McGuane novel “Panama.”

Chet Pomeroy, a performer on the skids whose act has included, among lesser spectacles, crawling out of the ass of a frozen elephant in his underwear to fight a duel with a baseball batting-practice machine, is stalking his ex-girlfriend Catherine Clay through the aisles of a Key West grocery.

She clocks him, he asks to use the bathroom, and … well, just read the book. It’s a lot more entertaining and informative, and at its most outrageous less grotesque, than last night’s “debate.”

Not even McGuane the essayist could’ve covered that raree-show, assuming he could resurrect his long-dead alter ego of Captain Berserko. Hunter S. Thompson might have managed, even participated, but sadly he is no longer with us.

It may have been the single worst thing I have ever invited into my home, and that is a fierce competition indeed. Miss Mia Sopaipilla blew a hairball. I dreamed of Nazis. Herself told me first thing this morning that CNN’s Dana Bash had called it “a shitshow,” which I thought generous and profoundly understated.

Still, I’m glad to see the mainstream media has finally copped on, albeit a trifle late. McGuane had it figured out back in 1971, when Bash was born, seven years before he would publish “Panama.”

Queried about his politics by comrade Jim Harrison, as part of a faux interview for the literary magazine Sumac, McGuane replied thusly:

“I suppose I am a bit left of Left. America has become a dildo that has turned berserkly on its owner.”

R.I.P., Russell Chatham

November 13, 2019November 13, 2019 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

“Crazy Mountains in March” by Russell Chatham, 1991.

The IRS can’t get Russell Chatham now. He’s skedaddled with his paints and brushes, vamoosed to a secret place where his creditors will never find him.

His flight west hasn’t interested the big boys yet. The New York Times, once Johnny-on-the-spot when it came to obits, hasn’t uttered a peep.

But his old hometown newspaper finally got around to writing a little something, days after the San Francisco Chronicle noted his passing.

It was apparently the dementia that got him, among other things. Once a Montanan and rounder, an artist and writer whose running mates included the likes of Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane, and Rick Bass, Chatham died Nov. 10 in a memory-care facility in Marin County, Calif. He was 80.

Chatham’s landscapes adorn many a book cover, when they aren’t busy elsewhere, selling for tens of thousands of dollars. Indeed, it’s hard to find a Harrison book without one, and he dedicated “Sundog” to Chatham.

The artist also makes frequent guest appearances in Harrison’s essays. While fly-fishing for billfish off Costa Rica both men contracted bad cases of turista, but Chatham’s was by far the champeen, if you believe Harrison. In “The Tugboats of Costa Rica,” he wrote:

“I shall never forget his pathetic yelp in the night as he pooped his bed during a feverish dream about trying to eat a giant Mindanao clam that wouldn’t stop moving,” Harrison wrote. “This artist is a walking field day for a psychotherapists’ convention.”

In his essay “Seasons Through the Net” McGuane described Chatham as “a man who has ruined his life with sport,” a relentless angler and shootist “who “skulks from his home at all hours with gun or rod.”

“Russ never thought of painting as a career. It was just something he did,” said McGuane.

Bass called him “the greatest living landscape painter in America, famous for his outlandish appetites for food, wine, travel, art, music, literature, and the sporting life.”

And Chatham? He was busy doing the somethings he did, sport and art. Working without a net. Everything else would have to take care of itself.

“I’m not a businessman,” he told Charles Schultz for the Point Reyes Light. “If any money crosses my path, it is gone faster than butter in an oven. I have no savings, no retirement. I have whatever’s in my wallet. To a lot of people that would be frightening.”

He added: “The artist has absolutely no safety net.”

This didn’t mean that he was unaware of the ground down there waiting for him. In a chat with Todd Wilkinson for the Mountain Journal, Chatham said:

“Early on, I was never concerned about having a career, so I didn’t have one. And now nothing could interest me less. But I think we all have a programmed tape running inside us, and most of mine is now stored on the right hand side of the cassette. I finally feel I know enough to paint what I could only dream about in my twenties. People say it’s time to slow down, relax, go fishing. Well, I took the first forty years of my life off and went fishing, and now my tape is telling me to finish what I was put on earth to do. Before, time didn’t matter. Now it does.”

It’s fish-thirty, Russell. Time to wet a line.