Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

Culture

Music

THE BEAUTY MYTH:

Can’t Live With It, Can’t Live Without it – The Grateful Dead (Graeme Tait Can’t, 2/05/25, Americana uk)

“American Beauty”, the band’s fifth studio album, was released in November 1970, barely four months after the release of their previous offering “Workingman’s Dead”, and the two albums are seen very much as companions, some would say like brother and sister. The comparison is understandable, as prior to these recordings the band’s legacy had been forged on the stage rather than in the studio, mainly because they used their songs as starting points for improvisation that suited their psychedelic sound, of which they were the original true explorers, rather than ideals simply to be duplicated. However, the fading embers of the 60’s marked the beginning of the end of the ‘Hippie Dream‘, requiring the band to take stock and, in the studio at least, find a new approach. Crosby, Stills, & Nash had long been friends with the band, especially Garcia, who was particularly impressed with how the trio used their vocal harmonies, and was looking to embrace a similar approach, while the band’s lyricist Robert Hunter began incorporating more American folklore into the narratives including trains, guns, gambling and alcohol, using the country’s geography and religious symbolism to help create a visual soundscape full of American myth. The musical arrangement was also changed, now drawing heavily on the Bakersfield sound, a sub-genre of country music developed in the mid-to-late 1950’s in California defined by its use of electric instruments, and strong backbeat, being highly influenced by rock’n’roll, and born out of a reaction to the slickly produced sound emanating from Nashville.

“Workingman’s Dead” proved to be a resounding success, but in many ways it was a just template for what the band would create just four months later, having moved the recording process to Wally Heider Studios in San Francisco and choosing to co-produce the album with staff engineer Stephan Barncard, rather than previous producer Bob Matthews. They had also just discovered that manager, Lenny Hart (father of the drummer Micky Hart) had renewed their contract with Warner Brothers Records without their knowledge, before skipping town with a sizeable amount of the band’s wealth.

Like it’s predecessor, “American Beauty” was innovative for its fusion of bluegrass, rock’n’roll, folk and of course country music, though where “Workingman’s Dead” mixed the grittier Bakersfield sound with the band’s psychedelic roots, the new release was mostly acoustic in nature, with Garcia replacing his electric guitar for a pedal steel, while there was a greater focus on major-key melodies and folk harmonies. Drummer Bill Kreutzmann later explained, “The singers in our band really learned a lot about harmonising from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, who had just released their seminal album “Deja Vu”, (recording their vocals around a 360 degree mic, before adding identical overdubs at 3/4 of the level). It was also on this album that Garcia first collaborated with legendary mandolinist David Grisman whose playing is heard to great effect on the tracks ‘Friend Of The Devil’ and ‘Ripple’.

Just as significantly was the increased writing input from the rest of the band which was in stark contrast to previous albums where almost all the songs had been composed by the songwriting partnership of Garcia and Hunter. This was immediately apparent from the opening number, the sublimely beautiful ‘Box Of Rain’, co-written by Hunter and bassist Phil Lesh, it was the first Grateful Dead song to feature Lesh on lead vocals. Harmonies were provided by Bob Weir as well as Garcia who also played piano, while David Nelson (of New Riders Of The Purple Sage) guested on lead guitar. As recently as last year ‘Rolling Stone Magazine’ ranked this song in the ‘Top 500 Songs Of All Time’. Second track ‘Friend Of The Devil’, a song written by Garcia and Hunter along with John Dawson, (also from New Riders Of The Purple Sage) opens with Garcia playing a delightful descending G major scale in the bass register, while Hunter’s lyrics skilfully succeed in connecting the fatalism of the physical frontier with the wonder of the psychedelic one. Third track ‘Sugar Magnolia’, with writing credits shared between Hunter and Weir, who also supplied the lead vocals, has long become one of the band’s best known songs and remained an integral part of their live set throughout the following decades while fourth number ‘Operator’, was written and sung by co-founder and original frontman for the band Ron McKennan (aka Pigpen). In truth, this was his only real contribution to the album as by this time his role within the band had become vastly diminished due to his deteriorating health. The first side of the original vinyl album comes to a close with ‘Candyman’, another classic Garcia/Hunter track with its beguiling structural simplicity and sweetest of melodies encouraging the listener to just drift away on a warm summer’s breeze.

Books

IF HE’D BEEN A GOOD MAN HE’D STILL BE ALIVE TODAY:

How we misread The Great Gatsby: The greatness of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel lies in its details. But they are often overlooked (Sarah Churchwell, 1/22/25, New Statesman)

Many of our most recycled, plagiaristic observations about Gatsby miss the point, failing to read between the lines. For example, it is often noted that Benjamin Franklin’s schedule for self-improvement provides Gatsby with a manual for upward social mobility, that he is a representative American who buys into the nation’s founding dreams. But Jimmy Gatz’s plan focuses on physical activity and hard work, omitting the spiritual dimension of Franklin’s schedule, who asked himself every morning, “What good shall I do this day?” Franklin centred morality as well as industry, and Fitzgerald expected his audience to recognise what was missing. The Great Gatsby renders a society that has confused material enterprise with moral achievement. Gatsby, like the country he embodies, forgets that he should be trying not just to be great, but to do good.

This is why it’s a comedy not a tragedy. Gatsby is just a social climber focussed on personal wealth rather than his soul. (Sound familiar?)

Books

IT’S HIS ENTIRE INTENT:

Actually, Master and Commander is a Domestic Fantasy About a Codependent Life Partnership!: Olivia Wolfgang-Smith on the Queer Subtext of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin Series (Olivia Wolfgang-Smith, February 4, 2025, LitHub)

Concerns aside, as someone who enjoys both historical fiction and not being straight, I was ready to give the books a chance to charm me on both fronts.

Here’s where I ended up, three months and seven thousand pages later: the Aubrey/Maturin series is not only a military-historical epic but also—I would even say primarily—a work of domestic fantasy about a life partnership so codependent it breaks the space-time continuum.

First: this story is, indeed, a romance. (This is almost certainly against O’Brian’s intentions, but—here we proclaim the mystery of queer resonance in fiction—the characters speak for themselves.)

All great literary romances are about the love between/among men: it’s the text, not the subtext. It just isn’t sexual.

Art

BIZARRO HOPPER:

The Secret Painter by Joe Tucker review – art for art’s sake (Andrew Martin, 27 Jan 2025, The Guardian)


“The Secret Painter” here is Joe Tucker’s uncle Eric, apparently the most unaesthetic of men, inhabiting the most unaesthetic of places, the industrial town of Warrington, Lancashire. He kept his trousers up with a rope; his habitual bomber jacket was patched with sticky tape, as was the cracked rear window of his car. He worked as a labourer and his regular haunts were Warrington pubs, the rougher the better, and the local Betfred.

But when Eric Tucker died, aged 86, in 2018, more than 500 paintings were found in the small council house he had long shared with his mother. The works, of the highest quality, depicted mid-20th-century working-class northern life. Many showed blurry, smoke-filled pub interiors, beautifully composed and full of slightly grotesque figures, typically side-on to show their strange profiles. They often look pale (except for red noses) and pensive, but they all have one another, and here is the first of many paradoxes about Eric Tucker.


He depicted scenes of sociability yet he himself was an uncommunicative loner with few close friends.

Books

INTREPID:

The prescient politics of Tintin: The character was in effect Hergé’s alter ego, reflecting his intense interest in news and contemporary affairs (Michael Farr, January 9, 2025, The Spectator)

Already in that first Soviet adventure, we have the Bolsheviks seizing the grain of the peasant farmers for their own stockpiles, leading to famine and starvation. Hergé had read up on the Soviet grain procurement crisis of the previous year (1928) and in his narrative anticipates the alienation of grain and property from the kulaks, the land-owning peasantry, that came in 1930-31 after the book’s publication. The Great Famine of 1932-33 that killed millions of Ukrainians and others followed as a consequence of Stalin’s policies, exposed by Tintin and condemned by Hergé.

Politics was never far from Hergé’s agenda. National Guardsmen drive Native Americans off the reservation at bayonet point after oil has been struck on their land in Tintin in America (1932). But the next deep political involvement came with The Blue Lotus in 1934. Here, against the trend of western sentiment, Hergé sided with the Chinese against Japanese agitation and aggression in Manchuria. He depicts the staged Mukden incident when in September 1931 Japanese saboteurs blew up the South Manchuria Railway tracks. […]

Politics was also at the core of King Ottokar’s Scepter (1938) inspired by Nazi Germany’s Anschluss, or absorption of neighboring Austria, in March of that year and anticipating its takeover of the Sudetenland and the threat posed to some of the vulnerable kingdoms of central Europe. Tintin thwarts the plot hatched by the unsubtly named fascist Müsstler — an amalgamation of Mussolini and Hitler — allowing the king to retain his throne and his kingdom, the fictional Balkan nation of Syldavia, to remain intact.

Sex

FREAKY FARM WIVES:

Is the Tradwife just a kink? Don’t underestimate the happy housewife’s power (Poppy Sowerby, December 30, 2024, UnHerd)

The “traditional-wife” lifestyle has recently become a cultural juggernaut. Born of the reactionary idea that women must stay at home to care for children and the household, it teenaged into an aspirational trend which involved everything the dream Fifties stay-at-home mum did plus a soupçon of farmgirl hardiness (the most viral tradwives are those who run homesteads, muddy, ruddy and graceful). In 2024, she came of age, with Mormon model Nara Smith becoming one of TikTok’s top influencers by baking in exquisite ballgowns, baby perennially on the hip. Hannah Neeleman (or “Ballerina Farm” on Instagram), then broke the internet in July. An article in The Sunday Times profiling this “queen of the tradwives” crystallised the fantasy. It kept X busy for at least two weeks, as commentators argued over whether the newspaper had unfairly implied that Neeleman was oppressed. For part of the fascination these women hold is the conviction that beneath their mild and milky exterior, torment and frustration must surely lurk. As a result, the article focused heavily on Neeleman’s pre-trad career as a ballerina at Juilliard; look what you could have been, the piece seemed to say — and you packed it all in… for this? Feminists have, after all, been trained by Betty Draper, Mrs Robinson and the Stepford wives to spy the Prozac-popping crackpot beneath the painted-on smile; exposing the tradwife’s purgatorial “real life” has become a favourite pastime of internet curtain-twitchers — not out of concern, but prurience.

But speculation that these influencers are trapped by male fantasies is all part of the grift: it is no coincidence that Neeleman wore the infamous milkmaid dress on the cover of Evie last month, with the headline “The New American Dream”. Flirting with the aesthetics of Simone de Beauvoir’s archetypal housewife — a woman condemned to “immanence”, a passive and internal state of drudgery — is a deliberate provocation by influencers like Neeleman: dressing like a milkmaid transfigures the common-or-garden microcelebrity into both a sex symbol and a challenge to modern feminism. This is the secret to their success.

Inevitably, then, pulling off the “homesteader” vibe has become the focus of a multimillion-dollar industry, with blogs and books springing up left, right and centre — well, mostly on the Right. But the guides betray an irony of this trend: the real tradwives aren’t just about frilly dresses — there is a serious and sober set of moral values at the core of trad ideology, one shot through with puritanical and paranoid beliefs about the state, Big Pharma, the food industry and so on interfering with the closed, controlled unit of the family. This, after all, is why Nara Smith spends four hours making her kids cinnamon-toast-crunch cereal from scratch. Being this evangelical takes dedication. So the delusion that young mums can dip into this aesthetic without engaging with the conservatism at its foundations is worth a lot of money.

There’s a reason that the tradwife’s appeal has endured — it has, let’s remember, been a trend for a decade or more. It’s partly because the media adores the whiff of oppression that clings to her, hence the Ballerina Farm hysteria. She is also an ideal foil for feminism — beautiful, natural and meek, she is everything conservative men love, and everything radfems hate: perfectly poised for virality. And that’s because her role as a lifestyle guru means that her actual values — though generally Mormon, conservative and modest — are mysterious and therefore intriguing. Her fans are not looking for direct precepts; being told that abortion is wrong, or that premarital sex makes you worthless, would not be appealing. Instead, they want to cosplay a nebulously traditional woman by baking rye bread in a long dress.

Food

BRINE BUSHES:

‘One of the most amazing things in terms of food in this country’ — How a tower of thorns makes salt (Ben Lerwill, February 27, 2024, Country Life)

On the west coast of Scotland, facing out across the Firth of Clyde towards the Isle of Arran, there stands a wall of thorns. It is manmade, but otherworldly, like a vision from a Gothic fairy tale. Its dark tangle of barbs reaches up to a height of 30ft and stretches more than 100ft across. Is it an art installation? A giant instrument of torture on the outskirts of Ayr? The correct answer is far simpler: it makes salt.

The history of salt production in Scotland dates back almost a millennium. Before the arrival of refrigeration, the mineral gave a vital means of preserving meat and other foodstuffs. Sea salt was, therefore, harvested along both coasts of the country — using salt pans, shallow containers in which seawater could be heated by fire and evaporated — and, by the end of the 18th century, the commodity had become Scotland’s third most valuable export, behind only wool and fish. Then came a steep decline, as demand waned and the market was overtaken by cheaper rock salt. The last Scottish salt-pan works was closed in 1959.

Back to the present-day Ayrshire coast, where Gregorie and Whirly Marshall are quietly changing the narrative.

Christmas

A REAL CHILL DUDE:

‘Look out! Look out! Jack Frost is about!’ (Deborah Nicholls-Lee, December 21, 2024, Country Life)

Depictions of Jack Frost might vary, but all evoke the wonder of the mysterious crystalline carpet that appears overnight on our lawns and sugarcoats our trees and shrubs. This glittery covering is simply ice crystals formed by water vapour coming into contact with a surface that’s below freezing, but its sudden arrival can feel otherworldly and curious legends have been attached to it.

Some believe that Jack Frost may originate from a character, also called Father Frost, in the Russian fairy tale Morozko. He rescues a young girl abandoned by her wicked stepmother and cuts a benign, elderly figure with a cloak and a long, soft beard. Others look to Norse mythology, where fantastical frost giants roam an icy realm and Kari, a wind god, sires sons named Jokul and Frosti.

In other folklore, Frost is closely connected with autumn. In a 1922 drawing by American cartoonist John T. McCutcheon, he perches on a maple branch painting autumn leaves with a palette of warm shades. It’s a depiction that echoes Birdie and his Fairy Friends (1889), by Margaret Canby. In ‘The Frost Fairies’ chapter, set in ‘a cold country far to the North’, the clumsy fairies spill colourful jewels belonging to the king, Jack Frost, all over the trees. An initially angry Frost is soon taken with the effect and determines, once a year, to paint the trees ‘with the brightest layer of gold and rubies’.

Books Religion

THE FISH DOES NOT KNOW IT’S WET:

Death at Yuletude: T.S. Eliot and “The Journey of the Magi” (Nayeli Riano, 12/14/24, Voegelin View)

Art, after all, is the way we cope with the world. It is not faith whole, even if art does, in the best times, impart the undeniable need for Christianity without proselytizing. Art can either hand us a little piece of light that lingers in our minds or hearts for some time, or it can be completely devoid of joy or hope, leaving us empty and seeking something more. But this is only the opinion of someone for whom excessively devotional pieces miss the necessary mark of suffering that makes for the best art, be it musical, visual, or literary. The great canon of Western literature is, for the most part, an ongoing conversation that is agnostic at best about hope or salvation despite it being rooted in Christianity; herein lies the paradox about Western civilization that, I believe, has rendered it the legacy that it is. What we inherit is the quality of conversation through art and philosophy that allows us to doubt and to interpret pain and suffering in ways that turn out to be, no matter how hard we try to shake it, hopeful, and beautiful—as though God’s grace is never really gone from our efforts to create meaning and to understand the world.

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