The subject of this first installment of RtR was sent to me by friend and fellow Harry Crews admirer Maud Newton. It was the front page story a few weeks back in an LA alternative weekly known as Los Angeles CityBeat. Part Shelby Foote obit, part dissection of "Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus"*, it's a pseudo-iconoclastic jeremiad written by one self-proclaimed expert on The South, Cole Coonce.

Cole Coonce, for your information, was born and raised in Hollywood, CA, according to his bio, but don't let this fool you: he attended school in Mississippi and knows a lot about cars! This provenance is what permits our swaggering Southern Californian dyspeptic to call bullshit on "modern itinerant Southern troubadors" and to deem Harry Crews "the biggest fraud of a Southern writer ever to score a book deal." He knows frauds, this Coonce. I'm tipping my hand, here, but there it is. You fuck with Harry Crews, you fuck with me. You fuck with me, you fuck with you, pal.

He begins with a recollection of conversations he's had with his "avuncular" Southern uncle**, a philosophical contemporary of Shelby Foote. I have no truck with the greatness of Foote, so I'll leave this part alone.

He proceeds with an anecdote that I, a non-Southerner and a non-Californian, still feel qualified to call bullshit on: A young black man takes him to task for the Dixie flag decal on his car. After schooling him on the semiotics (during which he addresses him as "bro," a certain white male affectation that rankles me to no end) of the Stars and Bars, Coonce tells him blithely, "You've got your X, and I've got mine." You know where I've seen this chestnut before? At an outdoor Georgia fleamarket, in a booth owned by the finest purveyor of KKK bumperstickers and faux-Nazi memorabilia this side of the Great Racial Divide. Coming from Coonce, the exchange has the patina of myth.

Now to the meat: Coonce's point, which is not unlike my opinion, is that Southern Gothic (or how it's represented in "Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus") is dead. David Johansen? A "carpetbagger." The Handsome Family? Charlatans. All the other artists in the movie? "Artistic gravedigg[ers]." Oh, and Southern Gothic? Dead. Dead! I tell you.

In fact, he tells us that Southern Gothic is dead three times in as many paragraphs, using six metaphors in four sentences at one point, surely a record of some sort. It's this beating of a dead horse that made me question such fundamentalism. Only a man uncertain of his conviction would knock himself out with his own chest-thumping.

His argument disintegrates as the article progresses, which leaves him with nothing to do but stab at the soft, pink parts of the subject. In his estimation, 16 HP, Johnny Dowd, and Cat Power can't live in the same universe as Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard. "The wrong people are being sent to jail!" he concludes. Um, excuse me: Merle Haggard? Brilliant musician, sure. But the man was a bankrobber! As fun as it would be, you can't imprison people just because their albums were released by Bloodshot instead of Sun.

Shortly before Coonce peters out, he tells us a story about necking with a girl in a forest that once served as the hiding place for Confederate soldiers. This non sequitur, reader, is what makes Coonce "proud to be a rebel." Well, I've taken a piss in CBGB...it don't make me Debby Harry.

It's a shame that Coonce writes such impotent blather, given that he and I essentially agree. (In fact, one of the notes I took during the screening reads "David Johansen needs to shut the fuck up.") But he doesn't do anything beyond griping like he's Jim Goad's Mini-Me. Or as one of Coonce's avuncular Southern brethren put it, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

*See my review here.
**Um, what? /pedant