Scene & Herd - West side stories of a priest,

To people who’ve never heard of it, I suspect that the words “cowboy poetry” strike a dissonant chord. Cowboys reciting poetry? That’d be like John Wayne sipping a skinny latte that he’d sweetened with Splenda.

I felt the same way until last Saturday night, when I experienced cowboy poetry for the first time. It turns out that cowboy poetry dates back to the 19th century. I suspect it was invented when a lonely Montana cowboy, jotting down his thoughts one evening, discovered that “boots” rhymes with “shoots,” and “streams” rhymes with “dreams.”

Though the West was tamed long ago and the word “cowboy” is now just a description of someone’s clothing rather than his actual occupation, cowboy poetry has managed to live on. I found it in the (western!) suburb of Douglasville at the Cultural Arts Council of Douglasville/Douglas County’s ninth annual Cowboy Poets Gathering at the City Conference Center.

Saturday night’s emcee was a man named Doc Stovall. Doc is a guitar-totin’ cowboy who took the stage between poetry readings and strummed cowboy songs. The one I keep humming to myself is a tune about a child’s cowboy fantasy called “Backyard Home on the Range.” While Doc sang, the cowboy poets sat at a table next to the stage. Wearing cowboy hats and boots, they sipped bottled water, snacked on pretzels and a couple had cell phones strapped to their belts.

All of the cowboy poems I heard that night (and subsequently read online) rely on stock images - men on horseback, men challenging one another to fights, and “good old days,” real or imagined. Though the poems are often sentimental, they’re just as frequently funny, often ending with punch lines. When cowboy poetry gets good (to my ears), it’s because the poet knows how to work a room or has excellent comic timing. Ray Barker’s performance of a comic poem about a cowboy named Purt Near Perkins (so named because he’d “purt near” been and done everything) exemplified that. The punch line was predictable about a minute before he said it, but Barker is such an engaging storyteller that it was still funny.

My favorite performers of the evening were Wisconsin’s KG & the Ranger. They’re a sweet, multi-instrumental husband/wife duo who play happy Western ditties with names like “Cowboy Jubilee” and “Happy Dreamin’ Cowboy.” Most of their songs include yodelling. I’m sure that sounds terrifying to some of you, but they’re actually fantastic at it. They’re two-time harmony-yodelling national champs, as a matter of fact. The Ranger (he’s the husband half of the duo) is also a talented stunt lasso-er. Their performance was very Garrison Keillor/Praire Home Companion, other than the lassoing, of course. That might not have been too good on the radio.

Rock: On Saturday night, two of the local rock scene’s critical faves played sets at Star Bar. Y-O-U (voted Most Difficult Band to Google Search for two years running) played a terrific power pop set. They’re harder and less goofy than when I saw them last. The best way I can describe them is to tell you that the band put a straight cover of Elvis Costello’s “Pump It Up” in their set and it sounded like one of their own songs.Hot Young Priest was the headliner. It took the bandmates a song or two to get warmed up, but once they did - with the chiming four-note riff from their tune “Sidewalk” - they were also in fine form. Not everyone in the crowd was patient. People started leaving, which was a bit of a buzz-kill.

Whiplash: As I’m sure many of you know, particularly those of you who work in the bow tie and bean pie industries, last Sunday the Nation of Islam celebrated its annual Saviour’s Day. Saviour’s Day celebrates the birth of NOI founder Fard Muhammed. According to his successor Elijah Muhammed, Fard Muhammed was “born to unite the lost sheep who went astray in 1555.” He did a good job. Seriously, when’s the last time you saw lost sheep?To celebrate Saviour’s Day, I went to the Ben Hill Rec Center to hear a satellite broadcast of a speech by America’s favorite calypso singer-turned-Jew-baiter, Louis Farrakhan. You can’t miss the place. It’s right next to Abdullah the Butcher Ribs and Chinese Food restaurant.

After a thorough frisking (did they think someone was gonna assassinate Farrakhan via satellite?) and a gauntlet of as-salaam aleikums, I took my seat in the gym. On a big screen was a satellite feed from an auditorium in Chicago with speaker after speaker warming things up for Farrakhan. The speeches were mostly about uplift and unity, but with some strange tangents. For example, Elijah Muhammed’s widow spoke about how the government is keeping information about UFOs quiet. Another speaker noted that black people were more beautiful than any other people on the planet. One speaker even paraphrased rapper Jay-Z, informing us that “America has 99 problems, but Minister Farrakhan is not ours.” OK.

When Farrakhan finally spoke, it was a bit of a letdown. I didn’t hear much invective, just the standard complaints about bloodsuckers and a promise that the next Million Man March in October will somehow transform Earth. Whatever.

Why’d I call this section whiplash? I left Farrakhan in the middle of his long, long speech and drove to Compound in West Midtown for an Oscar party. Since I had on a suit, I didn’t even stop to change. The party was “hosted” by Tupac Shakur’s mother, Afeni Shakur, in honor of the Oscar nomination of the documentary film Tupac: Resurrection. As a press-monkey, I was escorted to the “red carpet” area (actually a gray stone walkway) where I stood and watched people take pictures of party-goers as they entered. It was all very Jezebel.

While waiting for the celebrities who never actually arrived, PR people kept tapping me on the shoulder to tell me that the people on the “red carpet” in front of me were members of the rap collective Outlawz. One of the Outlawz calls himself Idi Amin. Why someone picked a homicidal African dictator to be his hip-hop namesake is beyond me. It’s like a klezmer band calling itself the Amazing Hitlers.

andisheh@creativeloafing.comFor more of Andisheh’s weekend outings, visit Scene & Herd at www.andy at andy2000.org.??