The singular Genius of Norm’s Burt Reynolds impersonation: Hick as Hick
Speaking of Outlaw Country, Norm MacDonald is a legendary Hick… I mean comic. Born on a farm to dirt poor school teachers outside of Quebec City, Canada and an apologetic connoisseur of outlaw country western, Norm doesn’t grandstand his hick roots as David Spade does in his trucker cap. He is both authentic in his Hick sensibility as he also carefully cultivates his self. And charmingly at the odd incendiary moment he reveals his monumental vocabulary, intelligence and Christian literacy. For Norm winning Who Wants to be A Millionaire was not an accident.
(I know he came in second. And yet is was a terrific win as well.)
Though Norm embodies Hick he is also aspiring. Country dumb, but trying hard to learn and to learn how to learn. His critique on Last Comic Standing are the most nuanced. Especially look at his opinion on the use of scripture. And observe the Trumpist Rosanne Barr’s synaptic disfunction.
Norm ran the talk show circuit a while back deconstructing what it is to go to a play. It is a perfect example of his genius. On a bit you can see him practicing on Youtube in a number of different venues such as the Daily Show with John Stewart (who accidentally skewers it) Here it is on this clip with David Letterman (who is always his perfect foil. A fellow Huck.) It’s called Norm MacDonald hates Broadway plays and queues at 1.26 min
He sets up the bit by explaining that he likes living in the city, but sometimes his mom from the boonies of Ottawa comes down to visit. “She’s not big city people like us, Dave.” He play acts as a big city guy taking his hick mom to Broadway to appeal to her petite bourgeois sensibility. He describes the polite fictions we are asked to believe about theatre. For example, that a table and chair is an office and a little picture with a moon behind it must mean we are in the nighttime. “But it’s not really night time, Dave.” And then he says, and this demonstrates his surgical thinking “I was just sitting there wondering what it would really look like on the tv.”
With this fell swoop we are lost and at sea in a world of truth. What is truth now? What is real? Isn’t the TV a more real experience of a thing then our actual encounter? What is actual?
Above is So What played by Jerry Garcia.. what they call in the biz: the call back
Norm’s best friend is Billy Jo Shaver he says.
(Fuck Adam Egot, Norm’s ostensible best friend and sidekick on Norm has a Show—did anyone believe that Ed McMahon was Carson’s best friend? Especially after the skin stripping Hank Kingsley received at the hands of Larry Sanders, right? Jeffrey Tambor’s scintillating caricature of Ed McMahon was dangerously honest and hilariously offensive to the man. Ah no.. he’s good guy.)
Billy Jo, however, is a kind of psychedelic infused, hick flecked natural, and authentic Hick. Someone who somehow became sincerely Hick and yet is also still getting into fights authentically at Honkey Tonks. Not like Mick Jagger, but definitely like Keith Richards. How can someone be authentically Hick when the form itself is inseparable from contrivance? “He is an old chunk of coal that will be a diamond some day.” He is a diamond you see. He is a genius and his “fake” or to say.. his Hick move, is that he is country dumb.
Sid Siddens—country hick, Illinois country dumb, natural frack millionaire. My in secret stepfather. Shit, he was so wily. He was “county” dumb.
Carried a six pistol to shoot cats on his compound, encouraged me to drive his four by fours ‘round the property, and taught me to ride horses and gamble and play slots and cards. Just like my grandparents taught me how to drink and play pinochle, Sid taught me about the inherent value of country dumb. He explained how useful it was that that your competitors think you dumber than themselves, not less intelligent, but dumber. Not provincial, or less articulate or even well-read and informed, but a dumb hick.
Jerry Garcia and David Grisman playing the “country dumb” dozens
And, what a sparkling game Donald Trump plays! His constant self-aggrandizing braggadocio and claims of natural genius lead one to assume he is some kind of stupefying simpleton. He must be retarded we think. Yet he mopes there as President of the United States, illiterate, and standing on 4 billion in laundered Russian investment plus another 3 billion in paid debts. Incredible. All he has to do is play nice to them.
What I mean to say here about Hick and Norm MacDonald and country dumb is that Hick is an affectation. It is something you become and it is self made and self aware in its performance as real life. and in its performance as something real. In the second section here I will just pivot to the Chicago transplant LA artist H.C. Westerman and his own self construction.
In Russia there are no illusions
A pivot to H.C. Westerman:
Dennis Adrian, the great midwestern Art Critic, would hate that introduction. His love of Chicago was antagonist to the New Yorker whom he saw as provincially limited. The New Yorker only look to themselves. The Roman who refuses to see the frontier is a shame! The Gallic Celt who refuses to look in their backyard is a travesty. So too did Dennis loathe the Chicagoan who spoke French as a pretense and ignored the art of the local scene. Be ashamed if you don’t know the Hairy Who, the Chicago Imagists, Ed Paschke and Leon Golub, and then dare sit pretentiously on the board of the Art Institute of Chicago! The dumb Hicks.
If there is one man who both personifies the Hick and the great American, the transplanted Chicagoan, and the provincial genius is H.C Westerman—See America First. The inventor of low art that transcends high art. His great champion was my “lover” Dennis Adrian. My favorite courses from him in Chicago: Myth in Art, and Survey of Modernism: I adored his constant taunts and insults of the peanut gallery (We—his boonie Hick students) and his completely novel definition of Modernism: (novel to me) that modernism exists outside a sphere of historical time and is instead a sensibility. Modernism is tearing down whatever monument is set up in support of power for a new version of signifier. The metric system for example, or the French Revolution. Cutting off Marie Antionette’s head is a supreme example of rational disquisition and organization. As with the Romanovs ultimately the State’s logical decision is one of waste management.
(This is why campaigns hire social media managers. The politician needs to know how their tie and waistcoat will play in the irrational minds of the consumer. How does a steel worker insistently choose a representative who works against their own best interest?)
After I graduated, in 2000 I teased Dennis so hard at an opening I got what I deserved in an ante bellum me too age—a good ear tongue torking that left me literally squealing into the frigid Chicago night.
Oddly, this continues to happen to me. Like an evening in Carlsbad with the Late Louise Hay for example when she also tongued my ear. She was 87 at the time.
Here below: this stunning portrait of Dennis. The perfect painting at the perfect time:
Ed Paschke Adria 1976
The horror of the girl gone wild.
Horror is Hick (Horror is a great many things, but Hick rents Horror as well) I gave up the horror of pornography. Perhaps this happens to some men, that they fall in love so hard that other women become an obscenity.. Just meat on a stick. When I encounter it now, to paraphrase Louis C.K. I see a girl in need of a tucking in to bed.
“I would totally fuck you though. You won’t fuck me anyway so fuck you.” Louis C.K.
In every scene now of a young girl writhing on a pole and cooing contrived coughing utterances from their mouth holes (as Milan Kundera might have described it.) I see a father’s daughter. A girl whose beauty is no privilege. I see a beauty whose chest is a burden not a gift. You can walk through Juarez and see a similar sort of violence. It’s the rape and ravage done to feed the appetite of the numb and desensitized American. This is horror.
The horror is not that Americans are numb its that our most vulnerable are debased and abused; though at least the debasement is mutual. As Norm said of Bill Cosby “I heard Bill Maher say last night that the worst part is the hypocrisy. I don’t think the worst part is the hypocrisy. I think the worst part is the raping.”
My mother informed me that her clients in Detroit preferred her cocaine cut with amphetamines. Americans seem to dislike the sensuality and love play of pure cocaine for something more wired. The hyper-processing of the prefrontal cortex was more their speed. Speed is structurally the same chemical formula as Ritalin, by a random act of god its effect is to increase circulation and blood flow in the prefrontal cortex. This decreases vagal tone and satisfaction. It elevates the need to problem solve so much so that we clean our rooms, and do our homework.
Marlon Brando mouths the atrocity “the Horror” in his final moments as the final Hick standing, Charlie or Marty Sheen or whoever, bloodlets him on the floor of the Heart of Darkness. Brando’s affected pleasure at that act of evisceration is offputting to say the least. This is an example of someone whose parasympathetic nervous system (The vagus nerve) is so stimulated that the pain becomes synonymous with pleasure, with pure sensation. Like the Buddhist monk who sets himself on fire. This position is antagonistic to Hick. The Hick in her aspiration is never satisfied. She is always uncomfortable.
“My father was such a Hick from Pontiac that his platoon gave him the compass. None of the city kids knew how to use it. Dad is a natural survivor and though everyone from his bootcamp managed to die in VietNam he managed to get himself sent to Germany when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and later deported for smuggling Moroccan dope to serviceman. He was perhaps more Beat than Hick.”
Ultimately H.C. Westerman saw violence as the final betrayal. Perhaps in his first tour in World War II service had a patriotic duty to it, but after his tour in Korea he came away completely demoralized and disgusted with the MacNamara business model and subsequently strongly discouraged his son from entering VietNam.
His works examine the feeling and the sentiment that comes from witnessing stupid deaths and institutionalized murder. He witnessed the USS Franklin go down and 800 men die in the water. Western explores these themes though his work is not kitsch. He does not pretend to feel. He does not ask us to be complicit in feeling. He sees America First. (see Westerman’s series of drawings) He feels and crafts his handmade thoughts. What bears the most interesting fruit for Westerman is the mythic portent of his work that transcends the minefield of kitsch.. leapfrogs it.
H.C. Westerman Memorial to the Idea of Man if he Was an Idea 1958
See the acrobat inside the Cyclops. (He reminds me of the blowup dolls and nudie bars of my youth in New Orleans) This is Ulysses among the bottlecaps, among the feminine, among the discarded hymens. This is the man who uses his wit and sheep’s clothing to escape the ravenous claw of the Giant Polyphemos. All this done after escaping a ten year war, all this done while an army of suitors takes on his wife at home. All this while maintaining virtue at sea. #fail
Kirk Douglas does an extraordinary job depicting the captain in the eponymous film of 1955. I have vivid memories of him stomping grapes and pulling the strings of the palintonos bow. Douglas, the spitting image of Westerman himself. The double recurve famously deadly as an ancient tech. H.C. Westerman was a gifted contortionist and acrobat and engaged with his wife on USO tour in Shang Hai where, cut from the same cloth, they cavorted on the rings.
Their divorce later in America was a bitter thing. Rings joined and rings pulled apart. Two LA acrobats relocated to Chicago struggling with the craft market, with children, with poverty. Their lives ostensibly more Beat than Hick, but you have to see the picture.
H.C. Westerman around 1955
The acrobat and the craftsman suggest something less than authentic. It suggests self-made. Like the nueroscientist Robert Sapolsky reading the tea leaves in our endocrine system. Our hormonal aspect changes our personality. So then… we are made?
Likewise, the notion of samskara pervades our images of our self, that we are created by our environment and our genetic history so much that even our thoughts and choices are premeditated, preordained, and fated: the pattern is there for us. Changing the pattern of our innate habits is as difficult as even changing the quality of our hair. To decide one day to work as hard as possible to grow naturally curly hair. To make the follicle thin versus oval.
Putting that to one side there is something sincere and Christlike about sculpting the self, changing and transmuting form by heat and fire and tapas. Is this real?
Is this Hick real?