Hello cowboys & vampires!

Goat Mountain by David Vann is a dark, brutal, crackling story about a boy, his father (and his friend) and his grandfather who go deer hunting in the mountains of California in the late 70s. Kathleen read it, liked it, and then recommended I give it a try because she thought I would appreciate the similarities with my own childhood. As I’ve described to her, probably to the point of mind-numbing boredom, I grew up on a ranch in Montana in the late 70s.

I read it in one sitting on a flight to DC (the very best circumstances to have a great book in your hands) and, more than finding a few similarities, the story at times felt like a cut and paste of my life. The set up is that the boy, excited to make his first kill, is given the opportunity to look at a poacher through the scope of his fathers’ hunting rifle. Bad things happen and it all quickly spirals out of control into madness and violence.

Here’s the crazy part: I have a vivid memory of deer hunting as a boy on some private property up in the mountains – this was probably in Junior High — when I saw a friend across the canyon confront a poacher who wasn’t supposed to be there. Read the rest of Clark’s soapbox post>>deeo.ru

Stylized image of hyperconnected neural networks, from Wired Magazine,

A new imaging study shows that people tripping on magic mushrooms have a “hyperconnected” brain, creating temporary networks between regions that don’t typically communicate with each other. Another recent study showed that the “hot” neural areas for mushroom trippers are associated with emotion and memory, specifically in discrete areas usually most active when we dream, the same areas some people call proto-evolutionary, meaning, the roots of human consciousness.

Many of us who have experienced trips understand this on some instinctive level, though we may not have articulated it well. And that’s probably how these studies came to be. Eventually, enough trippers, writers, philosophers, dreamers and other people say things about their experiences, a hypothesis is articulated and a study is designed to explore the underpinnings of that which people have experienced. Put data on it. Categorize it. Prove it. Regulate it. That’s the way science progresses.

With human consciousness, however, this process has been halting and labored. In part, it’s because of the challenge to the buttoned-up establishment that psychedelics posed when they first emerged as a tool to manipulate our senses in the 1960s and 1970s. Timothy Leary and his ilk started down a path of inquiry that was cut off hard by the criminalization of this class of drugs. Read more of this post>>seo компании

Day 50!  Love this sketch of Clark and Kathleen driving off into the blue sky somewhere in the vast American west. Woof! Rex running to keep up. It’s a good life…this 50th day artist is “dougmcclain” working from Canada.  See all the 50 gigs here. 

The backstory: We stumbled across Fiverr a few months ago and were blown away by the orgy of creativity pooled there under the rubric of $5 bucks gets you a ticket in, a taste and a tease of talent. Obsessed at first sight, we traded our good sense and used up our (sadly, limited) marketing budget on 50 talented (and a few eccentric) artists, asking them to focus their creative juices on The Cowboy and the Vampire. Total = $250. Why?

Because it’s fun. ART ATTACK! Rap, video, puppetry, poetry, performance art, faux-newscasts and cartoons (lots of cartoons) from artists working in LA, the Philippines, London, Mumbai and more.  We were fucking blown away. You will be too. The show commenced on October 1. One gig a day.  See all the gigs posted here, one new one each day.  And follow at #50daysofFiverr.

Oh, and yea, we’re running a contest. We’re tracking retweets, facebook shares and Instagram likes. For each one, you’ll be entered into a drawing at day 50 for a $50 gift certificate at the vendor of your choice! So for 50 days, be inspired and amazed, and share the love. Share the art love!продвижение с оплатой

Requirements for this list: great prose and good storytelling for both fiction and non-fiction, and — when the last page is turned ­— something within us should be changed: an opinion, an understanding, a geographic point of view, a cultural appreciation, or if it’s really good, a revelation. These listed books — presented in no particular order — leap over one or all of these criteria. We don’t worry about when they were published, only that either Kathleen or the Cowboy read the book in 2014. We offer thanks (with a little wide-eyed envy, at least on Kathleen’s part, the Cowboy never gets jealous) to these sixteen writers.

Limonov: The Outrageous Adventures of the Radical Soviet Poet Who Became a Bum in New York, a Sensation in France, and a Political Antihero in RussiaEmmanuel Carrère, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Truth is stranger than fiction. Through the lens of a single life story, an alternative everyman perspective on Russian history and culture, and a piercing glimpse into the country’s proud, contrarian, artistic soul.

Back to Back 
Julia Franck, Grove Press
Sister and brother Ella and Thomas are innocent, young and happy children when post-World War II’s newly borne East Germany begins its descent into isolation, paranoia and institutionalized cronyism. Even as a translation from the German, a nearly perfect and wrenching book. Not to be missed. Read the rest of this entry »

Cowboys are enjoying a surge of popularity, particularly in the land of romance. Right now, an explosion of popular books on Amazon feature six-pack ab-adorned cowboys with steely blue (or green) eyes, staring out from the covers seductively and with promise. They all look vaguely related, too.

While these romances are flying off the e-shelves, it’s made us think a lot about the cowboy icon. Why is this myth so persistent? Especially when, by and large, moody, gym-going cowboys without shirts never really existed? And we should know. One of us is a true-blue cowboy, albeit lately lapsed due to love, and he never looked – or acted – anything like these romantic heroes. The other one of us is a born and bred city girl (and the cause of the cowboy lapse), a doe-eyed slightly-lost-in-the frontier just shy of pretty type usually cast as the romantic heroine in the ab-adorned books.

Ever since we met, we’ve been debating these questions: What is a real cowboy and are there any characters in books that capture that essence? The answers don’t come from romances, although they are fun to read. The first thing we agreed to agree on – in order to answer the two questions – was cowboy history. Read the rest of this entry »