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Morning, Noon and Night In his new book, Scene contributor Michael Sims follows the sun

 

 

In This Issue

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Mystery Séance Theatre Their latest album proves that the Legendary Shack Shakers don’t faint at the sight of a little blood

The Spin

Greetings From Tennessee ’90s power-pop wonders Superdrag are back

Drastic Elastic Devendra Banhart’s latest bends and stretches, but doesn’t break his spell

Yellow Fever California Pizza Kitchen brings its sunny concept to Nashville—this is Nashville, right?

Morning, Noon and Night In his new book, Scene contributor Michael Sims follows the sun

Best of Nashville Arts & Entertainment

 

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by Michael Ray Taylor

When T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” was published in 1922, critic Charles Powell panned the poem’s disjointed, cryptic passages as “so much waste paper.” But Edmund Wilson believed Eliot had captured the essential desolation of modern life, that he had walked the desert of urban London and, “like Buddha, he has seen the world as an arid conflagration.” Within a decade of its publication, the poem came to represent an era.

Different times call for a different sort of Buddha. Just ask any “Achiever,” as the oddly rapturous fans of the 1998 film The Big Lebowski call themselves. The clueless, bathrobe-wearing, white-Russian-swilling Buddha they follow is The Dude, portrayed by Jeff Bridges. The film—which also starred John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Sam Elliott and Philip Seymour Hoffman—was released on the heels of Joel and Ethan Coen’s Academy Award winning smash Fargo. A box office flop, it was generally dismissed by critics. (The New York Times called it “loopy.”) Nonetheless, Lebowski went on to build a cult status of the sort enjoyed by The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Since 2002, fans have gathered in Louisville for the annual Lebowski Fest, celebrating all things Lebowski, with similar events held in Los Angeles, London and other cities.

Ben Green and three fellow creators of the original Louisville event have now penned I’m a Lebowski, You’re a Lebowski: Life, The Big Lebowski, and What-Have-You (Bloomsbury, 256 pp., $16), an astounding compendium of trivia, actor interviews, still images and assorted rites and rituals to be followed by aspiring “Achievers.” (The name is a reference to a charity mentioned in the film, the Little Lebowski Urban Achievers.) Bridges wrote a forward to the book, and he took many of the cameo images from the film set as well.

Readers who have not seen the movie several times—or at least rented the DVD recently—will be hopelessly lost, and those who don’t enjoy absurdist humor mixed with flashes of Eastern mysticism and bowling may wonder what the hoopla is about. But for everyone else, the Dude lives. As the film’s enigmatic cowboy narrator, played by Sam Elliott, puts it, “I won’t say [he’s a] hero, ’cause what’s a hero?” He is, instead, “the right man for the time.”