Before I moved to Arizona, I’d never so much as touched a gun. But within a few weeks of my arrival, I found myself standing in a dusty valley, wearing a holster and safety goggles, while a man named Mule Train showed me how to cock the hammer of a revolver.
Back in November, I put together a miniseries* of sorts for KJZZ’s The Show exploring the role of guns in American culture. That’s obviously a subject that warrants far more than a miniseries. But for a daily program like The Show, where we can’t often dedicate extensive airtime to a single subject, it was a big deal to have the opportunity to dig into three interconnected character studies featuring people whose personal stories are defined by their relationship to guns.
The central characters in this piece are Deborah and Matthew Geesling. In their regular lives, they’re hard-working suburbanites. Deborah runs a non-profit, and Matthew heads a construction company. But on the weekends, they’re members of a band of benevolent outlaws - the Cowboy Fast Draw Association. They gather in the aforementioned dusty valley - and at shooting ranges all around the state - to fire off rounds, find community, and, in many cases, rebuild shattered lives.
In other news, regardless of whether or not you saw A Complete Unknown, I highly recommend this conversation between director James Mangold and Marc Maron. I’m admittedly a huge fan of the movie, but Mangold’s description of how he approached the script as a cultural ethnography focused on a particular historical moment - rather than a “biopic” (whatever that means) - is, in my humble opinion, a masterclass.
And I swear the movie is worth your time, even if you’re not a Dylan fan! I think the marketing campaign makes it seem like a microwave dinner Bohemian Rhapsody knockoff, which is a shame, because Bohemian Rhapsody is absolute dreck. What I love about A Complete Unknown is that it doesn’t try to make sense of Dylan, but rather to contextualize our relationship to his music, and his struggle with that relationship. I know I’m using the word “relationship” a lot in this newsletter, but we’re living through an absolute egg scramble of our relationship to everything in American culture…which is part of what makes A Complete Unknown feel like a timely meditation, and not just another mindless piece of celebrity hagiography!
I am grateful for your relationship with this newsletter. Thank you for reading and listening. And if I may, as you navigate the scramble, consider the wisdom of Mule Train: “Don’t aim.”
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*You can find the other installments of the miniseres here and here.
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