It’s only a matter of time before the bimonthly County Highway newspaper runs a 7000-word feature on Ree Drummond, “The Pioneer Woman,” whose Food Network TV show (set at her enormous 43,000-acre rural Oklahoma ranch) tickles me every time it’s on background in our bedroom. She’s the de facto heir of “cracker cooking” Bad Girl Paula Deen, whose voice was silenced in 2013 after racial epithets she made were uncovered on social media. Just last Sunday, while it was pouring outside, I took in Drummond’s “game-day” recipe for corn dogs, an atrocity I’ve sampled just once, years ago on the Santa Monica Pier on a visit with my wife and kids to see the in-laws.
“The Pioneer Woman” laughs at her own jokes, which I appreciate, and isn’t concerned about calorie counts or catering to the more “sophisticated” Food Network viewers who tune in for recipes that incorporate apricot or cauliflower “essence” into a minuscule portion of pheasant, polenta or a chocolate torte. I like “essence” dishes, and when we lived in Manhattan often dined at swank restaurants like Bouley, Chanterelle, Periyali, The Quilted Giraffe and Primavera, for example, but Drummond’s suggestion that it doesn’t matter who wins the “game” (meaning football, I assume) as long as her corn dogs, jazzed up with a jalapeno (canned or fresh) fried batter and accompanied by only mustard or ketchup are devoured before the first quarter is finished got my attention. No idea why. Her presentations aren’t as dramatically unhealthy as Deen’s, but they wouldn’t win any nutrition awards.
The September-October issue of County Highway arrived last week, and, as usual, there was plenty to read. I especially enjoyed Sam Sussman’s engaging essay about growing up a Yankees fan during that team’s (horrifying, to me, as a Red Sox fan) dominance in the late-1990s and into 2001. (The two teams are in the midst of a wild-card playoff at Yankee Stadium as I write, and though the Sox had that miraculous 32-3 run in mid-summer, I’m not optimistic.)
Sussman, 35, wrote a well-received autobiographical novel, Boy From the North Country, which explored his fanciful question of whether Bob Dylan is his biological father (Sussman’s mother crossed paths with Dylan in the mid-1970s and again nine or so months before the author was born). Sussman details his fanatic allegiance to the Yankees, his collection of baseball cards, memorization of the statistics of every player, worship of Jeter, Williams, Pettitte and Rivera, listening to WFAN and winning tickets to a game at Yankee Stadium, and then gets to 9/11. (The 25th anniversary has passed, but a leadtime is a leadtime.) He stayed up until the seventh inning of the seventh game of the World Series between the Yanks and Diamondbacks, and fell asleep with his team winning, and the next morning assumed New York had clinched another championship. He checked ESPN.com and MLB.com, which showed a distraught Rivera, and thought “something was wrong with the internet.” His sudden fears were soon confirmed by the newspaper outside. (I also conked out before that game ended, and like Sussman, figured the Yanks won again, and fist-bumped myself when I saw the Snakes prevailed. I was 46, and it still mattered!)
Looking back, he writes: “Today, I see my devotion to the Yankees as my first apprenticeship as a writer. My childhood belief that rooting for the Yankees could influence the outcome of the game was my first exercise in the imaginative thinking that every writer must possess.” That’s kind of grandiose, but what the hell; this was the best baseball essay I’ve read in years, which is saying something since my contempt for the Yanks is as extreme as Sussman’s pre-teen hero worship.
Elsewhere in the current County Highway, editor/co-founder David Samuels, one of my favorite working journalists (those that write, as opposed to tap out a story on their phone) has a twist on the long practice of newspapers putting pre-written obituaries of notorieties “in the can,” so that just a brush-up is necessary when the person in question hits the end of the line. (Dailies that still function, say The New York Times or Wall Street Journal, have at the ready tributes to Clint Eastwood, Paul McCartney, Jane Fonda, Warren Buffett, Woody Allen, The Fonz, George Will, Steven Spielberg and so on—the premature death of maybe Mark Zuckerberg or AOC would require a quick shuffle.)
Samuels’ article, “The White Man In the Hoodie,” loosely about a Bob Dylan show he saw in Nashville this year, functions as an obit, and I suspect the author knows that. It’s not Samuels’ best; the prose veers into the purple, the 50 or so Dylan allusions aren’t that original, but he’s not going through the motions. He writes: “In his 80s [Dylan’s 85], he’s a one-man traveling medicine show, which features organ-grinders, cowboys, Indians, painted ladies, and the Jack of Hearts, all of which live on inside a self-made mythology that feels increasingly a time capsule of the old, weird America.”
That sounds like a cross between Nat Hentoff’s early-1966 Playboy interview with Dylan, or the million words rock critic Greil Marcus has written about the living legend. I’m not at all suggesting plagiarism on Samuels’ part, he’s too smart for that, but it could be some of his research just stuck in his head.
It’s his conclusion that functions as a pre-obit (not only for Dylan but an entire generation): “In his old age, he has become the symbol of our estrangement from love, from the certainties of youth and consolations of old age, from the myths on which we were raised, from the good and evil of the America that is fading before our eyes. That long black cloud is coming down, but we can still take a moment to appreciate what we have, before it is gone.”
That’s too rich for me, but when Dylan does knock off, Samuels’ story, flaws and all, will trounce the print/digital obits, to say nothing of the inane social media posts, which will persist, every 10 minutes, for at least two days.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023