Midlife Crisis Month: Best of the Beards #1: Kristofferson

Do they still do that thing of growing mustached for prostate cancer awareness in November? My sober anniversary month, November 17th, is always stained with the rainy teardrops of shaking and quaking; it's the usual marker between my manic and depressive phases, such as they are. Rough times, man. October is my favorite month, November my least. But what is Heaven if not Hell finally accepted? The flaming beard of the sage is as a nest for the bird of wisdom. Rant against cigarettes and condomless sex still the cows come home, o Safety-First Clydes. Gives a flying fuck doth the sage? No sir. He accepts his pile of Hell fully it so it morphs into a slice of heaven. Or as Kristofferson put it:

"I ain't sayin' I beat the devil, but I drank his beer for nothing.Then I stole his song." 

In November all I do is sit around and watch World War Two documentaries and Vin Diesel (he's our century's John Wayne and don't make me prove it), Tennessee Williams movies, James Coburn, John Huston, Voight, Reynolds and the man with the best beard of all, Kris Kristofferson. (1) See, the man Kristofferson is from a different time. His beard is a different breed from the quirky hipster's. It's all there in the movies of the 70s when country songwriters could still be men. In the movies today the good old boys can only play extremes of the type, so they're either twitchy meth dealers who abuse their wives and children or serious, hard working sober Christians in flannel who just want to teach the son of the hot single mom how to fish, whittle, and tune a guitar before he has to ride into the sunset or take one last shady job to pay for the boy's operation. There is no middle ground today. There is no man who is both reveler and decent guy, spiritual seeker and hedonist, not a cliche'd everyman but a dude who's genuinely free, able to drink and smoke without the score or subtext condemning him. That's why LEBOWSKI would be nowhere without Sam Elliot to supply the narration and Saspirilla drinkin'. The sanctification of the country hombre, old Sam's the link we need. We'd never see the straight line woven along from Bogart's Marlowe to Gould's Marlowe to Bridges' dude to Phoenix's Doc. All we got now is Adam goddamn Sandler and his saintly manchild contingents.

Back before that manchild thing, back in the 70s, if you wanted to tell a story about a raunchy team in the flyovers you could make them hard drinking, brawling, smoking ten year-olds or coaches who'd just as soon call the game off and pass out than snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Those were real men! Even the twelve year-olds. I blame insurance companies, nanny state hyper-parenting, and academic overreach. It takes longer than ever to grow up.

And so it makes sense, it being November, to honor the facial hair not of the co-op hipsters that haunt the coffee houses of Williamsburg, for they'll never be a step away from dyin', or as Kristofferson says in the great and underseen Alan Rudolph film SONGWRITER:

"Do you suppose a man has to be a miserable son of a bitch all the time just to write a good song now and then?"

The hipsters today don't need to be miserable anymore, they got antidepressants and Cialis. They'd never be sons of bitches for the hell of it and they'll never get the nicotine and cyprine stained beards of the 70s dads and groovy football-when-it-was-cool older brothers, the beard that cares without being a pussy about it, the beard of a man had 'passed' his acid test and who was no longer that into looking young and gorgeous. He's above all, too lazy to shave.

So who gives a fuck about that little pisher Jesse Eisenberg throwing his lot in with the UWS bourgeoisie and their smug piddly ass New Yorker subscriptions and their tired tweed jacket self-importance and knowing chortles? Soon my kind will drop 'em down before we too drop, and the new generation of ten thousand talkin' and nobody listenin' will swallow them like the tide swallows the drunken bather. Kristofferson is still the coolest man on TV. And all you have to do is watch THE VOICE and how regularly lanky Blake Shelton wins against the crushingly insecure and narcissistic manchild Adam Levine. I'm no country music fan in general but between who I'd both pick to drink with and have as an AA sponosr, it's old Shelton. You just know he'd be able to talk about more than how you like his hair and what people are tweeting about him.
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(From SEMI-TOUGH): 

"The "loving fight" concept was huge in the 1970s, especially, as I've noted before, in Burt Reynolds movies like SEMI-TOUGH. This was the age of bloodless bar fights, where chairs break easy over heads, and people fly through storefront windows with the carefree abandon of a kid jumping into a summer lake. Everyone makes up outside in the parking lot, their macho fury soothed with some good old fisticuffs in the grand drunken John Ford tradition. And SEMI-TOUGH has the coolest two guys and a girl group bond since DESIGN FOR LIVING. It's a trick that we've forgotten in the manchild 80s thanks to George Lucas, who's jedi Luke refuses to fight his father, even though fighting with fathers is a great way to train and get in shape. Didn't Lucas ever see SWORD OF DOOM? Killing can be an art devoid of passion or hate. John Ford knew it, and Reynolds and Kristofferson know it. Because they're perfect.

The 1970s dad was peaceful enough to understand the need for these sorts of outlets for his children and friends. In our more "enlightened" times no one is allowed to fight or have raunchy sex without consensual agreement in writing beforehand, and gloves on all contacting parts, or even the compulsive need to boast, overthink, drain the spontaneous joy out of it, and feel guilty afterwards, second-guessing and self sabotage all because we drank the nonsmoking manchild/perfect man dichotomy rom-com Kool Aid, which is exactly how European men describe the American woman's attitude towards sex. For all it's tossed-off clumsiness and Burt's intentionally shocking freedom with vulgarity and the N-word, SEMI-TOUGH is a rare document revealing that if only for a decade, we had sex like the French and fought like Americans instead of the sad reverse." (MORE)

COOLEST COUPLES: DINA SHORE and BURT REYNOLDS

We can see dim shades of it in Demi Moore and Ashton, but that's far more about, or seems about, two insecure narcissists desperate to connect. Modern Ashton and Burt in 1974 share a certain immature rawness, where you could understand an older woman going for it, because she knows she has something worthwhile to give them in return for suckling on their youth, more than money or maternal support they offer a kind of knowing sexual and professional wisdom. But there's no comparison beyond that because unlike Ashton, Burt was/is a real man. And here on Larry King he's being more emotional than Shore was, and that's why it's so brave, why it brings me almost to my knees to read that interview above because it reminds me of something our 21st century man has yet to find. Male sensitivity now is inescapable, and therefore worthless. What once was manly grace is now just passive-aggressive snickering boy nonsense wrapped in high-voiced ectomorphic pretentiousness. Dinah would bitch slap the lot of them, while Burt cracked up in the background, and because she's not here to do it, we all mourn. (more)

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1. I should add I'm very unnerved by Kristofferson when he's clean shaven. I know laudable critics from Kim Morgan to David Thomson love the naked faced KK in films like PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID and CISCO PIKE... maybe I will too, one day.

Semi-Great Dads of the 1970s #2: Kris Kristofferson in SEMI-TOUGH (1977)

Dad in this case can loosely encompass older brother and Cool Drunken Friend of Your Father (CDFYF) figures... for Kris Kristofferson is not exactly in responsible father mode as Burt Reynold's football teammate, recently EST-enlightened quarterback and DESIGN FOR LIVING-style menage-a-trois member in SEMI-TOUGH. But, he's still warm, tough and dependable.

I recently re-watched the film (after 20 years) and was shocked at how badly its blocked and paced. Sloppy stuff these redneckish Reynolds vehicles, the 1970s equivalent of our Adam Sandler/Judd Apatow "crank 'em while they're hot" sports/sex satires. The cool thing about SEMI-TOUGH is that it's made in 1977, so unlike the Apatow/Sandler age of Puritan inhibitions masked by potty talk bravado, people do actually have sex, lots of it, with no guilt or pregnancies. Hell, we even see Reynolds--then "the world's sexiest man"-- resign himself to the "large fan," (Mary Jo Catlett), by virtue of default. Burt's characters horny, used to bedding a random fan at hotel bars after games, and she's the only one left. Hell, he still gives her the full measure of his charm, and even some warmth.

Most dudes would just call it quits; Burt's ability to even want to keep the lights on while getting busy with her in his hotel room shows he's no diva; his sexual appetites have turned him more into a European style swinger, where they enjoy having sex more than bragging about it. Imagine if Adam Sandler ever shagged a girl less attractive than he was! Horrifying, but deserved; yet even as a monosyllabic glassy-eyed idiot manchild he scores off babes like Winona Ryder and Christina Applegate.

But mainly, sloppy sex comedy chaos or no, Kristofferson shines, allowed to radiate all his Christlike calm and country rock mellow. A beacon of 1970s suave, his character's been converted to a new age path shortly before the film begins; one of the largely forgotten 'encounter group' weekend intensive workshop fads of the 1970s-- EST. As a result, everything he does is... "perfect."

Which brings me to the key scene that gets Kristofferson the Semi-Great Dad #2 nomination: The party scene where T.J. Lambert (Brian Dennehy), the misogynistic creep linebacker has gone nuts and is holding some bikini-clad chick from the party over the second story balcony, threatening to drop her on the concrete below, no doubt for rebuffing his date rape advances. No one knows how to talk him down and get him to pull the girl back up, but Kristofferson does; he calmly climbs up onto the roof and goes to stand next to Dennehy and just looks at him with love shining in his Kristofferson-blue eyes. "If you want to drop her, if that's right for you, go ahead," he tells Dennehy. "Because you're perfect." Dennehy's oaf--so used to abuse and ugliness--is so moved, realizing someone finally thinks he's perfect, he pulls the girl up and is all friendly and apologetic to her --his first step free of the trap of misogyny/self-hatred, all just because of Kristofferson's perfect faith.

I can't imagine any actor of the era pulling this hat trick off as well as Kristofferson. In fact, I've talked more than one person off a ledge of one sort or another (in my LSD guru days) by imitating Kristofferson in this scene. He's just mellow and laconic enough to be able to say that sort of stuff without having to put hipster italics on it to keep from sounding corny or square.

But how can we condone a man who condones violence in others just because it's "their trip?" Well, see, a great dad has faith in his kid, and in his own ability as a father. He assumes the role of a benevolent authority figure, which is such a rarity these days we may even have forgotten what that means. It means "through me, thou art good." This is, ultimately, the true meaning of non-violent resistance, or "turning the other cheek." Even in the sense of actively engaging in combat this can still be practiced. One can bestow blessings on one's enemy even as one twists the knife into their heart (i.e. the German killing Adam Goldberg with a gentle shhhh in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN).

The "loving" violence concept was huge in the 1970s, especially, as I've noted before, in Burt Reynolds movies like SEMI-TOUGH, SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT, HOOPER, great shit like SLAPSHOT, BAD NEWS BEARS, etc. This was the age when Monday Night Football became bigger than any televised sport ever and the media was shocked by its Roman barbarity. The screens were alight with bloodless bar fights, where chairs break easy over heads, and people fly through storefront windows with the carefree abandon of a kid jumping into a summer lake. Everyone makes up outside in the parking lot, their macho fury soothed by the high only a mix of alcohol and sharp hits to the head can provide.

The 1970s dad was peaceful enough to understand the need for these sorts of outlets for his children and friends. In our more "enlightened" times kids aren't allowed to have realistic looking toy guns; no one is allowed to fight or have raunchy sex without the compulsive need to boast, overthink, drain the spontaneous joy out of it, and feel guilty afterwards. For all it's tossed-off clumsiness, SEMI-TOUGH is a rare document revealing that if only for a decade, Americans lived like Europeans do now.

So here's to Kristofferson, the mighty. Hell, he is such the man that he even manages to make his biker rapist character in BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA sympathetic. God DAMN. His is the mix of charisma and humility that tempers all judgment against him. Here's the kind of a man that you could get in a knockdown fight with but then you'd go get a beer together afterwards and know he was your friend for life. Kristofferson, in short, is the ideal 1970s older brother, which is why he's only a "Semi-Great" 70s dad, but still...by any stretch of the cinematic imagination... perfect.