#bluecowboy

[wino-strut]

Lost Durango Piece: 24 1/4” Tall x 23 1/2” Wide 3/4” Profile Piece with Frame: 26 1/2” Tall x 25 3/4” Wide 2 3/8” Profile Oil, Pencil, House Paint, Acrylic On Wood By: David Phillips (wino-strut) www.wino-strut.com 11/2022 #bluecowboy #contemporaryart #babyblue #customframe #winostrut #blueperiod #oilpaint #housepaint #woodworker #stetson #wrangler #resistol #western #rare #unique #bluesky #discovery #durango https://www.instagram.com/p/ClHOdMZPf29/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[qaaba]

#throwbackthursday #tbt #sevenyearsagotoday the Cowboy. #bluecowboy is not blue. (at The Point Tent & Trailer Resort) https://www.instagram.com/p/CSwoDrYLgzk/?utm_medium=tumblr

[dailydsports-blog]

The #BlueCowboy begins his 41st big league season today. #mlb #joewest #baseball #umpire

[zeemonkey1]

Hoedown

           He has returned. For a while there I thought I was done with him—it’s been over a month, after all, and the last time I tangled with Curious George all I got was a public domain parody poem that permanently and exasperatingly rings in my head over and over like the time I fucked up on Jeopardy.

           But it’s personnel, kid. George and his crew have come at me, right where I live.

           They had a hoedown.

           I think the creative process went something like this: one of the numerous executive producers, maybe Ron Howard, had a nephew or cousin or something that once told him at a wedding that he wanted to get into screenwriting. Maybe it’s Clint’s kid. Maybe Clint has a kid; I can’t be bothered to IMDB every damn thing so we’ll say Clint Howard has a college-age kid who goes to NYU and is majoring in film studies. Let’s call this kid Steve. Steve is a bit awkward and is just about to slough off his high-school-emo-poetry-writing stage for good and metamorph into the kind of cringy hipster bullshit that infects people with too much money and too little self-awareness. Steve has only left Manhattan once in his life: four days ago, in fact. He took the train to Boston to watch a guy he met on Grindr play the overly rapey bad guy in Oklahoma! Steve sat through five performances, including the matinee that had the understudy take over when Mr. Think He Cute started yelling about tinnitus.

           It went well. Back home after a very eventful weekend, Steve looked at his email. “Hey Steve!” says Ron Howard textingly, “pulled a few strings and can get u writing credit on Curious George. Send a script next Monday.” Now, Steve’s been under a lot of pressure lately. His uncle is Ron Howard and his father is Clint Howard and they don’t need to know what he’s been up to in the six days since that email was sent. Also it’s 1:00 Monday morning and Steve’s roommate is in the Hamptons somewhere but his bottle of Adderall ain’t and maybe he won’t notice if Steve takes four of them.

           This is how the Rankins ended up hosting a hoedown in their barn, and all manner of canon and continuity were destroyed. The Rankins are Yankees to the depths of their rhubarb-eating souls, with downeast accents so thick they could talk a clown up out of a stormdrain. They have no reason to appropriate southern culture unless, for example, somebody behind the scenes watched Oklahoma! five times. So let’s pretend hay bales are benches, and let’s shuck-and-jive and wear our jeans tucked into our boots and yeeee-HAW! We don’t need Ali Hakim we got a monkey

           Allie Whoops and George were hanging Christmas lights in the barn rafters when the entertainment showed up in the dadgum Doodlebops bus. The entertainment for the evening, MYH was kind enough to tell us, was the Uptown Bluegrass Band, just a-pickin and a-grinnin atop the only double-decker bus on the Eastern seaboard. This is how our writer conceived of a bluegrass band. Behold:

The fiddle-player was a grown Tinkerbell in Molly Ringwald’s pink dress and Lisa Loeb’s hornrims. She looked like she was about to go on America’s Got Talent and lose to the cutest little Beyond Belief dropout ever to plié.

The banjo player was Betty Rubble in Back to the Future cosplay. She was not wearing overalls, nor a straw hat, and therefore had to be faking the banjo picking.

The mandolin player was Andy Richter, only fatter and quieter and more plaid.

The bass player was black. The only black person at the hoedown plays the bass. No wonder Token had one in his basement.

Oh and then, O Lord, their leader. Perhaps he was actually from Kentucky as his fake-ass accent purported, because his cowboy outfit was a bright Wildcat blue. Within two sentences he had introduced his guitar. Its name was Beau.

probably a les paul

“But yee-haw shucks and bless mah soul,” quoth the Blue Cowboy, “we shore gon have us a hoedown yippie-kay-yay. Ah reckon you Yaller feller oughta play the gee-tar with us this evenin, ho dee do.”

“Howdy howdy y’aaaaaall,” he added.

I wanted to kill them. I wanted a time machine so that I could murder Steve at the moment of his script’s conception, assume his identity, and rewrite the hoedown episode so that all the guests, and the band, and the monkey, and Allie Whoops end up in the Event Horizon universe for all eternity, and the poor Korean animator forced to bring my vile dreams to life would gouge out his own eyes just to make the visions stop.

But then Allie Whoops and George find MYH’s guitar and destroy it by giving it a bath.

And I then knew the deepest parts of my rage, for I could tell that the guitar existed only so that Georga and Allie could bathe it, and until this episode MYH played the fucking tuba but now he plays bluegrass guitar well enough to be called up on stage with the band, and the very concept of a hoedown in the Curious George universe is contrived so that all of this could come to pass and give George a reason to build a replacement guitar out of shit he finds around the house.

A shoebox. Chopsticks. Dental floss and yo-yo string and picture wire. All lovingly assembled by a monkey, who thus created such a miraculous instrument that when MYH and Blue Cowboy see the warped and peeled mess that was MYH’s guitar, they are not angry. They do not beat or kill George. They are thankful.

It is good the monkey did that. Whatever the monkey does is good. MYH plays the new guitar perfectly onstage, and the song they sing is about the guitar’s construction.

How deliciously meta, Steve.