Star Spangled Bangers July 5, 2009
Posted by Mark in NOLA, New Orleans, Toulouse Street.Tags: fireworks, Fourth, Fourth of July, July 4th
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I wouldn’t say that I’m fascinated by fireworks. Compulsion is probably a better word to describe New Year’s 2000, sticking Roman candles into a bucket not of sand but of loose snow in my backyard in Fargo, N.D. I don’t think it was exceptionally cold: probably hovering within ten degrees of zero give or take. When I lived up north I had to remember to buy enough Roman candles and fountains and rockets to have some left over for New Years and store them carefully in the garage. Fireworks are not a big tradition in the frigid New Years night. There is something obsessive about setting off fireworks under those circumstances.
There is something almost religious in my zeal, although I don’t suffer for it living here as I did up north, part of it the ritual nature of shooting off one’s own. First there is the obligatory trip across the river to buy them (as they are illegal in Orleans Parish), taking my son along to initiate him into entire event. I usually purchase the same sort of things: ground blooming flowers (crackling and plain), fountains, Roman candles, the little ground effect items–hens laying eggs, rocket propelled race cars, tanks spitting sparks–that my son loves. I select the items not for their explosions but for their spectacle.
On the trip back the car is filled with the fine silver smell of gunpowder, not the essence of the individual constituents but a smell in its own right. I won’t smoke in the car even though the fireworks are in the back, this small denial allegedly so I don’t set the car on fire but also a part of the liturgy, and so I can breath the aroma and begin to build the anticipation. Like any pleasure which must be deferred–dinner before seduction, waiting patiently for cocktail hour–the build up enhances the satisfaction of the ultimate moment.
Then comes dusk. Perhaps it’s just my German ancestry that makes the preparation and presentation as carefully choreographed as a fine meal or a high mass. The fireworks are laid out in such a place and such a way to make them easy to select and keep them away from stray sparks. I chose the pieces in certain orders not only for variety but also so that one thing flows naturally into the next: first a few of my son’s sparkling cars, them some ground blooming flowers leading up to the fountains. A break for beer, bathroom, and more ground blooming flowers while we wait for everyone to reassemble and the cycle repeats until all of the fountains are gone. The Roman candles, my one remaining fascination with aerial effects, come last.
There is a ritual aspect to the lighting as well: carefully unfolding the red paper to find the green fuse, placing the item just so in the street (checking the overhead wires, and for oncoming cars), then kneeling before it with a cigarette or smoldering punk in hand to light the fuse. Then I stand up, bent over slightly to watch that the fuse is good as I step back carefully and watch the sparking light disappear into the tube or box and wait for the powder to ignite.
Then comes the reward: the first small sparks and the whistling hiss of the escaping gas as the colored cinders launch up and out, the plain yellow of the burning powder turned to flowering blues and greens, reds and violets by the mix of powdered metals, the sharp snapping and popping and occasional big bang of the reports. Good fireworks have an arc of presentation, the initial trail of sparks building as colors are added onto colors and the tiny explosions of the crackling fountains and loud report of the Roman candles popping off high in the air.
God, I love it.
So the same preoccupation that sends me over the bridge to Gretna twice a year to buy fireworks will find me on the river levee Fourth of July waiting for the big show. My own little presentation is really just the appetizer for the big event, for the carefully choreographed presentation over the river. New Years is a bit more complicated. I will buy fireworks of my own, but my preference is to stay by the house for the more atavistic Mid-City Bonfire. On that night the fireworks just over the tree tops down the site line of Orleans Avenue are just a side show, although the street in front of my house will be littered with the charred shells of one firework or another. The big show is the great blaze of Christmas trees.
When we lived in Washington, D.C. we of course had the big national show, although it was difficult for plain folk to get close enough to see the orchestra it was piped in at various spots along the mall to you could hear the music. My wife remarked last night that it just didn’t seen as fine with out the Boston Pops banging out the 1812 Overture. But as we wandered back down the Algiers levee the riverboat Natchez calliope let loose with Stars and Stripes Forever just behind the batture trees, so everyone was pleased.
When we lived up north public fireworks were exclusively a Fourth of July event, and we first lived in then kept a boat at a small town called Detroit Lakes which hosted a passable show. Mostly the town was overrun on Independence Day by teenagers and 20-somethings in search of the beach party once written up by Playboy as great destination. The locals lived in fear of this event, stretching what we called up there snow fence (that orange webbing you see around construction excavations) across their yards to keep people from defecating, making love or just passing out on their laws.
I found the whole thing pretty tame but then I was used to Mardi Gras Day downtown. I would sit on the stoop of my 1910s house just up the block from the lake and watch the crowds pass back and forth. And of course, come fireworks time, we would wander down to the lake shore with all the other families. After we moved up to Fargo we would watch it from the cockpit of my little 18-foot sailboat Tchoupitoulas parked in the Detroit Lakes marina. (There were just too many damn pontoons rafted up in the lake all day for a late comer to try and get a decent spot).
Now I get my fix of large pyrotechnics on the Mississippi River levee if only once a year now but I also remember the time before riverfront redevelopment when the holiday fireworks were a feature at Pontchartrain Beach and were watched instead from the levees along the lakefront. Fireworks on the river are tied to the World’s Fair of 1984 and the subsequent redevelopment. The Moon Walk was built in the 1970s but until the downtown wharves began to be replaced with the open promenades and shopping gazebos there was simply no place to put all the crowds.
As I’ve grown older there is a memory that always comes to me as I watch the fireworks over the water. Some quick arithmetic tells me it was New Year’s 1967 somewhere along Lakeshore Drive with my family, a boy of 10 who marveled at what looked to him like the explosions of distant stars. While we waiting in the gathering dark I was talking to my father, and we wondered what the fireworks on New Years would look like in the year 2000, at the turn of a millennium. We wondered how long and loud and extravagant such a display would be. And we figured out that in the year 2000, I would be exactly the same age as my father was that day–45–and would probably be sitting with my own son watching the show.
When 2000 came, there was no big fireworks show in Fargo, N.D. Instead my family watched me crowded around a basement window in the fireplace room, kneeling in a row on the sofa as I ventured out into the white-breath shivering night in Fargo to put on my own little show. It was not extravagant by any means. A handful of fountains and two packs of Roman candles. I knew as early as July that I would be the only fool out in the cold, and I wanted the extra Roman candles not only for my neighbors to hear but to be able to see the stars bursting overhead if they stepped outside to figure out who was crazy enough to be out in that weather lighting fireworks.
That would be me. I just can’t help it.
July 4th, 2009 July 4, 2009
Posted by Mark in 8-29, Federal Flood, NOLA, New Orleans, Sinn Fein, Toulouse Street, We Are Not OK, je me souviens.Tags: Fourth of July, Independence, Independence Day, July 4th
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On this day, I will remember the heroism of the Coasties and the moment Lt.Gen. Russel L. Honore told the soldier at the Convention Center “put down that rifle, son. This is a relief mission.” I will remember the tens upon tens of thousands of good Americans who have come on their own time and their own expense to rebuild a city.
And I will remember that at first the Guard came with rifles and no water and until Honore came they watched the people die in fear and horror because no one in command could figure out what to do. And I will remember the photograph of the elderly woman at the Convention Center, her body hidden beneath the American flag. I will remember the other pictures I have seen of bodies hidden under flags torn down to cover them because after the storm the flags were still there.
I will remember it wasn’t much of a storm here in town (never forgetting the rest of the coast, the Hiroshima barrenness of Waveland) but instead that here the Federal levees failed. And I will remember that this city has largely been rebuilt by the survivors and those church groups and earnest college kids while the central government discovers new ways not to compensate us for the failure of their works. I will remember they rebuilt Hiroshima, and did not need fraternities and church clubs from the Midwest to do so.
And through all these thoughts I will join the tens of thousands of others and Go Fourth on the River to watch the fireworks because if you detect feelings of ambivalence here you are fucking well right, but America is not something I left behind because I think I’m so damned smart and Euro-leftie-sophisticated. It is something that was brutally taken from me, the last illusions torn away by the Federal Flood and its never ending aftermath. I still miss it sometimes.
So I will stand on the river levee and watch the rocket’s red glare and bombs bursting in air here on this transient earth in the only place to which I can honestly and without reservations still pledge allegiance: New Orleans.
You may roast your weenies. We will boil our shrimps. Eh la bas.
The Tower June 29, 2009
Posted by Mark in New Orleans, Toulouse Street, literature.Tags: azarnoush, Iran, Iran Election, iranbaan, Jorge Luis Borges, persiankiwi, Salman Rushdie, The Tower
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A Dream
by Jorge Luis Borges
In a deserted place in Iran there is a not very tall stone tower that has neither door nor window. In the only room (with a dirt floor and shaped like a circle) there is a wooden table and a bench. In that circular cell, a man who looks like me is writing in letters I cannot understand a long poem about a man who in another circular cell is writing a poem about a man who in another circular cell
. . . The process never ends and no one will be able to read what the prisoners write.
Translated, from the Spanish, by Suzanne Jill Levine.
This appeared today in the Poetry & Fiction RSS feed from The New Yorker. I’ve thought about Iran a lot lately–remembering our own fascination with the original revolution as young journalism students, watching students (radical Islamist students, yes, but our peers) take over the embassy and a country. Our views were naive, the views of students, of the young: the Shah was one of the creatures of the CIA, so whatever overthrew him must be an improvement.
I now follow a handful of on-the-ground activists on Twitter, remembering my foolish and simplistic view of the world in 1979 and recall that Mousavi endorsed the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. And still the resistance of the young people of that country to an oppressive culture is an amazing thing to watch. They shout “Allah o Akbar” from the rooftops, taking and tossing back the cry of the original Islamic Revolution into the face of the mullahs as if throwing back a tear gas grenade.
Twitter and Facebook and all the rest are just conduits for words. Believe in the transformative power of words.
Charity and the Expressway June 24, 2009
Posted by Mark in NOLA, New Orleans, Toulouse Street.Tags: Charity Hospital, Claiborne Avenue, Clairborn Expressway, Riverfront Expressway, Second Battle of New Orleans
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Driving up Tulane Avenue to work I pass the Charity Hospital complex regularly. But first I pass under the Claiborne Avenue Expressway. Seeing these two great masses of concrete in the same frame sets my thoughts going about preservation and unintended consequences.
In 1960, the Chamber of Commerce proposed a riverfront expressway as part of New Orleans Interstate highway system, and approved as I-310 in 1964. The suggestion that a six-lane freeway would run along the river in front of Jackson Square.
Preservationists immediately rose up to object, and the famous Second Battle of New Orleans was joined. There’s a bit of family history here. My father was president of the New Orleans Chapter of the American Institute of Architects and was among the preservationists. He famously challenged the head of the downtown business group to a debate on WWL-TV.
In the end, the preservationists won. The riverfront expressway was blocked and the French Quarter was saved.
And Treme was nearly destroyed.
The compromise solution was to build the connection from the Pontchartrain Expressway to Interstate 10 down the Claiborne Avenue corridor. Prior to the construction of the expressway Claiborne Avenue was a thriving commercial corridor serving the Black community who was not, during Jim Crow, welcome on Canal Street. Lined with oak trees and a neutral ground promenade, it was the sort of picturesque street the city is famous for.
Today, this is the view of North Claiborne Avenue.
As I eyeball the great art deco monument of Charity, standing on a corner in the footprint of the 73 acres of demolition in lower Mid-City proposed for it’s replacement and looking at the Claiborne Expressway in the same frame, I have to wonder if we are going down the same path my father’s generation did, one of unintended consequences.
I don’t disagree that the Charity complex should be saved. I don’t disagree that we need a hospital. I don’t disagree that vernacular architecture should be preserved in lower Mid-City. I only wonder how long will the working people of New Orleans have to wait while both sides dig in their heels and refuse to compromise, how long the children and grandchildren of those who once shopped on Claiborne or strolled beneath it’s oak trees will be left without a hospital.
Somewhere in this problem is a compromise that saves the Charity buildings and builds a hospital and preserves a neighborhood. I just wonder if the failure to compromise, or worse the ultimate nature of the compromise, will leave the people most in need of that hospital standing under that ugly, rumbling expressway waiting for the bus that takes them far away to see a doctor.
Those Many Mansions June 21, 2009
Posted by Mark in Dancing Bear, Poetry, Toulouse Street, cryptic envelopment, writing.Tags: Ted Hughes
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It is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the doors of all those many mansions in the head and express something – perhaps not much, just something – of the crush of information that presses in on us from the way a crow flies over and the way a man walks and the look of a street and from what we did one day a dozen years ago. Words that will express something of the deep complexity that makes us precisely the way we are “
- Ted Hughes, From: Poetry in the Making
The Slow Noon Burn of June 16 June 20, 2009
Posted by Mark in NOLA, New Orleans, Toulouse Street.Tags: Bloomsday, June 16
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Canal Street in the slow noon burn of June. Thin dribbles of tourists pass up and down, hug the narrow ledge of shade along the buildings as if some abyss yawned at the curb. A handful of hotel workers in dull uniforms colored maroon and dark blue shuffle unhappily toward work or tiredly toward their bus stops and home. There are few suits on the street, no conventioneers with plastic badges swinging from their necks our for lunch. Two men in wilted jackets, ties-loosened, pause outside the Palace Café; they consult the burning blue sky, one’s watch, the cool, dark windows of the restaurant and decide to slip inside. I imagine the spicy fried oysters nestled in a bed of cool greens and blue cheese, a sweat-beaded glass of tea besides. The café tables on the street are empty; pigeons huddled under the canopy pick at the crumb-less pavement. The birds outnumber the people passing by.
Canal passes like a diorama: the peppery aroma of Popeye’s Fried Chicken is followed by powerful cloud of patchouli coming from the Hippie Gypsy shop, then the more delicate smells of browning butter out of the Palace Café; music passes like the tuning of a radio, bars of Cajun from one and jazz from another of the progression of tourist shops with names like Gumbo Bayou and Jazzland and Dixie Market with their racks of tacky t-shirts and windows garlanded with beads; in between ageless Levantine gentlemen stand stiff and mute in the doors of electronics shops like sentinels in crisp cotton shirts and slacks, windows blazoned with No Tax! 220v! PAL Format! waiting patiently for sailors who no longer get shore leave from the mechanized container ships. They watch the masts slip past just over the floodwall up the block and wait.
By midday the sun has warmed everything until the heat no longer comes from above but radiates from every direction: down from the sun and up from the pavement and off the sides of passing windows and we pass in the middle like loaves through some mechanized oven, perfectly browned on all sides. In the distance a church chimes and as if part of the clockwork the last thin ribbon of shade slips under the buildings and there is only the harsh glare off the pavement. I stop and listen to the fading echoes from a dozen buildings, try to think: which church, St. Louis Cathedral to my left or the Jesuit Church behind me on Baronne Street?
I remember as a child my grandmother and I catching the old green Perley Thomas cars at Cemeteries for the trip down Canal. She would shop and we would eat lunch at the K&B Drugstore counter or the lady’s cafe’ in D.H. Homes Department Store but my clearest memory is Immaculate Conception; the dark, narrow Jesuit church filled with flickering red glass candles, my grandmother lighting a taper to Mary while I studied the procession of men who stood, heads bowed and murmuring prayers with one hand on the foot of Saint Joseph. To this day every time I see a status of Joseph I study its feet, notice how generations of hands sliding on and off have worn the wood.
I don’t remember it being this hot when I was a child. I study the parents leaning heavily on the handles of strollers, the women’s sun dresses collapsed damply over their bodies as toddlers skip happily away over the roasting pavement toward traffic. To a child this weather is as natural as the damp warmth of the womb, they see the sweat on their bodies as beautiful dewdrops, tiny sunlit jewels. I stop and mop the inside of my hatband and then my brow, watch anxious parents corral the children back into the stroller and set off grimly for the Aquarium and the promise of air conditioning and the cooling illusion of immersion. I squint over my shoulder back toward Baronne Street and imagine for a moment stepping into that dark nave, into the cool innocence of my own childhood, then turn back to continue my trudge toward the river.
I am not on vacation. I have no lunch date. I am walking away from work but only for a while. I have, frankly, no good business being out in the mad dog sun except to walk and watch and listen. It is June 16, and I am taking my own advice, spending Bloomsday not reading about Dublin 1904 but setting out on my own ramble through New Orleans, to capture a snapshot of this city in June 2009. There is little to see except the street itself. The heat has driven all but the desperate indoors, and those who are out in the sun don’t waste their energy talking. I walk on.
The first and last real crowd I pass stands in the plaza of the last tall high rise before the river, the office tower disgorging lunchtime smokers onto benches. They stand alone or in small knots, and I wander in and through the crowd but there is not much conversation. It is all they can manage with a full belly in the noon sun to get the cigarette up to their lips and back down to their sides, blowing smoke up into the sky to carry away the extra heat. I bum a light to excuse my intrusion and perhaps pick up a bit of conversation but all I get are grunts of assent, and a flame held at arm’s length. I puff, nod and walk on.
The last block to the river passing the humming utility substation is empty. A lone vendor eyes me excitedly, waving dripping bottles of water in my face for only a dollar, coldest on Canal he promises and the last chance, he throws in. I smile back (his the only smile seen today on the street, and my reply is equally forced). No, I manage through my pleasant grimace and head up toward the place where the streetcar and Public Belt Railroad tracks both cross Canal. I stop and look both ways but there are no cars or trains in site, the empty tracks remind me that the river is no longer the city’s big business. The Aquarium across the tracks and it’s tourists are now our stock and trade, the stores where my grandmother once browsed are now Gumbo Bayou and the Hippie Gypsy.
Here on the plaza another vendor paces up and down shouting his own cold drinks, water a dollar and Powerade available, but he’s on the wrong side of the square. I walk alone into the middle of the plaza while the scattered tourists make directly for the shaded overhangs of the Aquarium where they huddle under the arcade, lining up to escape into the promise of frigid air.
I head straight for the railing along the river, hoping to find a consoling breeze there. I can see it out on the river where the wind stirs up a tiny, rippling chop amid the swirling flat water where the confused current prepares to make the hard bend at the Gov. Nicholls and Esplanade wharves before heading down through St. Bernard and Plaquemine to the Gulf. I light another cigarette and watch the wind but it stays over the main stem away from the riverfront. I pull off my hat and mop again, then start walking along the water’s edge. Usually you can smell the river but today is so hot the creosote is oozing out of the timbers that edge the dock and its aroma overpowers everything. I am alone on the promenade.
There is no traffic on the river. I crane my neck to look upstream but nothing moves. Even here where tourists often congregate it’s deadly quiet; no buskers out playing or liquor-loud knots of bead wearing young people in from the dry north. The riverboat calliope is silent. I am startled when the ferry hoots its horn, ready to cross. Usually the pigeons that swarm here for the lunch leavings would launch themselves into disturbed whorls at the sound, but they are nowhere to be seen, have found shade somewhere else. Realizing I have less sense than a pigeon, I turn and start to head back to work.
The only action is a woman who poses in front of the aminatronic dinosaur advertising an exhibit at the Audubon Zoo and starts hollering, “Help mommy! Help mommy!”. A small toddler grabs his father’s hand and starts tugging him. “Help Mommy, Daddy, help Mommy”. Then the plastic raptor lifts it’s head and let’s out a roar and he freezes even as mother squeals louder, “help me, help mommy”. Not yet two and already he’s torn, facing his first betrayal: the woman and love or his own skin. You don’t get to save a pretty girl from a dinosaur every day and if you don’t you might wind up a lonely pair of eyes, one of the solitary watchers of the world walking alone at lunch, instead of one of the heroes.
I root for innocence and heroism but I need to find the water man, coldest in town and only a dollar, before I start my march back to the office, before the wriggling lines of heat invade my head and start to spin like disturbed birds. I need to replace the bucket of sweat the day has taken out of me, and to wash out the taste of cigarette and creosote. Before I turn the corner I look back to see how things played out but the boy and his parents are gone, into the aquarium where the monsters are kept behind thick safety glass.
Sax in the City June 19, 2009
Posted by Mark in 8-29, Federal Flood, Hurricane Katrina, Jazz Vipers, NOLA, New Orleans.6 comments
Americans will probably continue to use economists’ numbers to measure recovery from the current recession. But as we debate what to do for the millions of homeowners who are “under water” — owing more on their homes than the homes are worth — we could learn from a city that knows a thing or two about being under water. New Orleans can teach us that the life we build with our neighbors deserves at least as much attention as our endless thrust towards newer and bigger.
–Dan Baum, The Way of the Bayou , New York Times
Yeah, you right.
Except, Dan, “the Bayou” to a lot of folks is a place you get to be crossing over to the West Bank and heading down Highway 90: Cajun Country. You’ve been down here long enough to know that, but I guess Big Apple headline writers are too busy rudely shoving people out of the way to snatch their cabs to whisk them to Tavern on the Green for lunch, or some such goofy stereotype.
Hell, forget about Irvin Mayfield running for mayor. I nominate Joe Braun of the Jazz Vipers. He may be the my generation’s equivalent of a trustafarian, but then he doesn’t really need so steal anything. He’d make sure the important things–music, food, the real life down here–were put first. Joe doesn’t strike me as the political type, but he did make a fine speech at Jazz Fest in favor of reopening Charity Hospital “where so many jazz musicians were born”.
And Dan: you can’t honestly say people down here don’t want change. It’s just that we don’t want change on the terms of a lot of carpetbagging architects from up north who only know how to build a movie facade retail “towne”, or bulgy eyed school reformers looking to start the Ayn Rand Charter Academy of Applied Objectivism.
We want the things most people want. We just want them on our own terms because frankly we’ve figured out what everyone else in our neighbor to the north only dreams about: not how to work and get ahead, not how to pay for it all, but how to live. Sure, things change. The Spotted Cat is no more and I hear there’s been some falling out with Bruce the clarinet player and frankly, a band like that needs a clarinet player (paging Dr. Micheal White, paging Dr. Micheal White). But usually that vanished clarinet player or chef just shows up down the street, and life goes on.
So be sure to come back and visit us. Maybe you can stop by Rising Tide IV this August 22nd. We’ll try to have some bagels and “Northern Coffee” for you.
Bloomsday June 16, 2009
Posted by Mark in Ireland, NOLA, New Orleans, Toulouse Street, books, literature.Tags: Bloomsday, James Joyce, Ulysses
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“Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read…”
– Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
And so it is Bloomsday and there is nothing going on in New Orleans. No, that is not true. In this city there is always something going on, at this time of year when everyone is out on a stoop or sitting under a shady spot on the neutral ground or strolling in the shade of Audubon Park or Lake Vista, in spite of the dreadful heat that has finally arrived there are people everywhere, somewhere people are cooking, many others are drinking, and somewhere there will be something very like a parade (I think of the bicyclists I saw the other night coming out of the Marigny at Elysian Fields, of the woman who had dressed a tricycle out as a white fairy horse and rode it in a diaphanous Princess Buttercup gown into the Quarter. Never say “nothing is going on” in this city; ask yourself why you are at home telling yourself that).
I forgot to ask Amy at the bookseller’s party Saturday night why she was not holding a Bloomsday party this year and of course last year I didn’t go and there isn’t one this year and let that be a lesson to you, that if you see something good happening in this town and you do not go it will be your own damned fault if next time there is nothing, you will be one of those “if only a few more people had shown up” and you’ll have no one to blame to yourself. That was part of the long conversation I had with the famous geographer who came to collect his book award (and that long conversation part of the reason I forgot to ask Amy about Bloomsday), and he asked why I came home and I told him I was afraid for the city, that if there was not a critical mass of people sufficient to sustain the place it might fail and I wanted to be here, to help tip the scale toward survival. So if you don’t go, its your own damn fault when its gone.
So if there are no Bloomsday readings, not even a handful in a bar with broken copies sprouting yellow post-it notes and pouting favorite passages then maybe what I need to do is something solitary (no, I’m not going to go stand on a street corner and read into the crowd as I once suggested when no one answered my online queries, but if you see someone doing this somewhere tonight buy them a drink, will you?). The story of Ulysses is not just the story of Bloom the unlikely everyman or Daedalus his chronicler but also the story of the city, a picture of Dublin on June 16, 1904, the day James Joyce met Nora Barnacle, and the story advances as much by the action of it’s characters in the context of the street as by their interaction with the other characters, the city unfolds not when Bloom and Dedalus meet but as they each make their separate walks though it. Ulysses is probably the most ambitious and famous example of capturing the “the genie soul of the place“.
What I should do is not worry about the Dublin of 1904 but about the New Orleans of 2009. I should take myself out and walk some familiar street as I once walked the streets of Rehoboth, Delaware on our last trip to the ocean before we left for Fargo, to walk with a mind to build a perfect mental picture of a place I was afraid I might not see again. I should pick somewhere (perhaps a circuit of the French Quarter, or a walk the length of Magazine, somewhere there are certain to be people) and just take careful mental note of everything and everyone I see, every bit a conversation overheard, to do what I pledged to myself long ago but don’t do enough now (life is too busy: the counting house, the kids, her crazy job I have to hear about for hours every night) which is to be myself a chronicler of place, of people in a place, to tell the story of a city.
So don’t sit inside tonight reading about a city an ocean and a century away but set out down some street here in this city, your city–down your street, or an old street of fond memories or a new old street your barely know–with your warehouse eyes bright with Arcadian rum and drink it all in, let the city wash over and into every pore. Be a part of the city’s story, then tell it. There is not one great work of a single hand like Ulysses that tells the story of New Orleans and may never be, but there are a hundreds of bloggers each telling a small piece of the story of New Orleans. Step out sometime today into the city and remember all you see. Try sometime this week to tell a small bit of the story of June 16 in New Orleans
15 Books in 15 Minutes June 11, 2009
Posted by Mark in New Orleans, Toulouse Street, books, literature.2 comments
Ok, I’m not crazy about memes but the delightful Grace Athas (spouse of Peter aka Adrastos) tagged me with it on Facebook so I feel I should and it seems to be on topic with the general direction of the blog lately.
Fifteen Books in Fifteen Minutes: list 15 books in fifteen minutes that have stuck with you through life, books you keep returning to.
Easy enough, that.
The Long Way by Bernard Moitessier is one of the great sea adventures and one of the great journeys of personal discovery. He set out in the first “around alone” sailboat race in the 1960s with no radio, and quit before the end to stop in Tahiti a profoundly changed man.
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon is the great book of our generation, hands down. An encyclopedic and cryptic synthesis of everything wrong with modern life. If you want to know how to survive postdiluvian New Orleans, read this book. We are In The Zone.
100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez really needs no endorsement from me. If you read this blog you’ve probably read this book. If not, you can borrow my copy.
Little, Big by John Crowley stands equal to 100 Years in my mind as a profoundly imaginative work of fantastic fiction in which the characters live and breath as true as anyone you know. Of all the books I have read the world of the Drinkwaters is the one into which I would escape into if I could.
I had best not let poetry wait until the end. The Collected Works of Wallace Stevens is one I turn to again and again. I still have the wing-ringed and cigarette burned Selected I first read in college. Read Sunday Morning at my funeral.
The Dream Songs by John Berryman is the most remarkable use of the vernacular in poetry since Virgil. Well, I think so, but who cares about my opinion? Read one for yourself. (You can read this at my funeral as well. Damn I’m in a morbid mood, but if I don’t write these instructions down somewhere everyone’s going to forget in the hurry to figure out where to go drink after the funeral).
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. Not a book you should try to model your life after. At least, not for an extended period of time. Just sayin’.
I don’t know whether to select the short story collection Blow Up or the novel Hopscotch by Julio Cortazer. The latter is a difficult novel to read in any order of the chapters, but I find it the most fascinating study of a set of bohemians anywhere. Given the choice of spending time with these people or with the Beats, I think I would chose The Club. And I see myself too clearly in Horacio.
Under the Volcano by Malcom Lowry. If you’ve even spent significant time in close company of an alcoholic, the truth of this book will get through to you. It is another dark book with a subtheme of the state of the modern world in the 30s. Think of it as a prequel to Gravity’s Rainbow. I also found an echo of postdilluvian New Orleans in this book once as well.
I can’t pick a single book by Carlos Castaneda, but I have a spine broken copy of the first three books that replaces my original copies lost back in the days when I thought they were an instruction manual. It turns out they were; I was just following the wrong part of the instructions. (Update: Yes I know its a fraud. No that does not change it’s impact on my life.)
I have a slim Selected Poems of Frederico Garcia Lorca (the Modern Library one) that is the one book I have probably taken from my shelf more times than any other volume. I really need to pick up the new thick paperback of the Collected en face.
Modern fantasy is a lately acquired habit of mine and it would be hard to single out one book by either Neil Gaiman or Charles de Lint, but I want to list both of them here. And I keep picking up Gainman’s recent Fragile Things collection over and over again when I need something to read. It is making it’s way onto this list. Pick up just about anything either have written for guaranteed enjoyment.
On the subject of fantasy, I’ve never gotten over Tolkien Trilogy and then some. He is the original master.
As much science fiction as I read in my youth it seems odd that nothing comes to mind as a book imprinted on my consciousness. I tend to gobble them up and spit them back out like potato chips, even to this day. Dahlgren by Samuel R. Delaney is probably the single work which can just barely claim the genre that has really made a mark, and led me to read it more than once (and it is a difficult book).
Howl, by Allen Ginsberg, I will offer up as the placeholder for everything by the Beat generation. I haven’t read On the Road for quit ea few years, but have pulled down Howl many times.
Wow, this took way more than 15 minutes, but I can’t just make a list without offering some comment. That’s just who I am.
On further thought (and after a pointed comment) I will note that when I first typed this then clicked it stupidly into the ether directly on Facebook, Confederacy of Dunces was on the list. This time it didn’t pop into my head with the other books. But then fifteen is such are arbitrary number. If I had to strike one book (based not just on initial impact and lifetime re-reads but how recently I’ve re-read it, we’ll strike Malcom Lowry for John Kennedy Toole.
Also omitted is Jorge Louis Borges, who really should be on any list of mine. We’ll just pretend I mentioned him in the context of Neil Gaiman like I did when I first wrote this.
Chalk it up to free association.
Everette’s ghost of awe plays pachinko June 8, 2009
Posted by Mark in Everette Maddox, Poetry, Toulouse Street, poem.1 comment so far
As I usually do when I find that the site www.everettemaddox.org has gone down, I shoot off an email to the fellow who keeps it up and let him know. And when he gets it online again I celebrate by posting up one of Everette Maddox’s poems. This being Monday the idea of actually having to think through and write something, well, that transgresses the fine line between propriety and masochism.
Here’s one I like if only because the poet and I appear to both suffer the odd symptom of spending most of the night in REM sleep, and being woken all the time by our dreams. Dedra tells me this is a symptom of sleep deprivation and she more than anyone would know, but I like to think of it as part of the lucky curse of an over active imagination. All that stuff just rumbling around somewhere behind the daily grind of the counting house has to pop out somewhere, if not here.
I love the line “the ghost of awe” in POEM. It has a certain musical ring that I don’t have a technical term for (near assonance?) but which lights up my synapses like a digital pachinko, a vibrational affinity that sings as clearly as an easy example of assonance. (My favorite example of that being Bob Dylan’s “the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face” which I like partly because of its wonderful mix of assonance and the soft alliteration of “s” and soft “c” sounds. Just my personal favorite. There are better technical examples. Try googling “Sound and Sense” if you must have one).
So now I’ll just do my lazy online jig of joy (Cntrl-X! Alt and Tab! Cntrl-V! Cha-cha-cha!) and offer this up from the Everette Maddox Songbook. (It’s in my Amazon wish list for only two hundred and some odd dollars if you’re feeling guilty about missing my birthday, or just won the lottery and are thinking of ways to share the joy). Oh, and if you can identify the line in this post above this point that is a quote from Everette Maddox, I’ll buy you a scotch, from the well, at the Maple Leaf. Oh, and you’ll be entitled to give this post a more sensible title.
POEM
After everything quits,
things continue
happening. The phone
rings. A knock comes
at the door. Lightning
flashes across the bed
where you bend, looking
at the dictionary.
Asleep, you keep waking
from dreams. The surface
of your life keeps
being broken, less and less
frequently, at random.
Raindrops after a storm:
surprise: the ghost of awe.
Not just another one, but someone June 5, 2009
Posted by Mark in 8-29, Federal Flood, Hurricane Katrina, NOLA, New Orleans, Toulouse Street, We Are Not OK, je me souviens.Tags: John Dauns
3 comments
Today one of the closest friends of one of my oldest and dearest friends died. His certificate of death will read cancer but in his story we see he was in part another victim of of Hurricane Katrina and the Federal Flood.
His story as told by Victoria Slind-Flor is here. It says, in part:
John never recovered from Katrina. Every task of daily living was three times more difficult for him. He had constant car trouble, and sometimes had to take his bicycle long distances to any of the stores where he could buy groceries. He began eating only one meal a day, and because shopping was so difficult, his food choices became more and more limited. The first time I saw him post-Katrina, when he came out for a visit, I was appalled as he’d lost so much weight and had such ill-fitting clothing. And he seemed so much more anxious than he’d ever been before. Each time he came out to California, he saw more risks, more dangers, more causes for anxiety in all directions. I’d go out into the garden to water and come back inside finding him sitting in exactly the same rigid and vigilant position he was in when I left. He didn’t sleep well at night when he was here, constantly waking and looking around anxiously.
There is a hidden pattern in this story that perhaps only I see, a revelation that the events of 8-29 were one of the last great events of the 20th century. John was certainly marked all his life by his experiences in World Word II as a child. His life, it seems, was booked marked by great upheavals. Epochs do not end neatly in years which end in zero, and I think the failure of our Twentieth Century engineering and the reaction of our governments, hamstrung by the great, late-century conservative revolution of sabotage by tax cut, all brought us to where we are today. The story of New Orleans is as as much a disaster of the Twentieth Century as the burning of the Hindenburg.
And John, like so many of our oldest citizens, survived but just barely, less well equipped to survive the vicissitudes of life. I am reminded of the friend of my mother’s who died well after 2005 but who’s family marked on her stone “victim of Katrina,” of the story someone told at the Rising Tide conference two years ago of the elderly gentleman who simply gave up trying to rebuild his own home and calmly walked into the river.
If you have been here long enough you will know that part of what I do here is in remembrance of 8-29-05, in remembrance of The Dead. My friend Victoria is a Pagan and tells us herself what she will do come Samhain this year, not too unlike what I sometimes do here: Remember.
Every year at Samhain, it’s my privilege to stand on the top of a mountain under the stars, in the middle of a circle of friends, and call out the names of the Beloved Dead, who have passed from this life during the previous year. This year, John’s will be one of the names I will call. And my friends will slowly dance a circle around me, chanting softly “What is remembered lives” at each name. John, you will always be remembered with love and affection. Thank you for the gift you were to me, and to many others.
Je me souviens.
s
Being There June 4, 2009
Posted by Mark in Bloggers, NOLA, New Orleans, Toulouse Street, cryptic envelopment.Tags: blogging, Facebook, Koyaanisqatsi, Proust, twitter, web 2.0
10 comments
By way of Twitter, direct from the online site of New York Magazine, which I began reading on my Blackberry but finished on my desktop while a mail and file search absorbed my laptop, which never the less managed to chime and pop up ghost summaries of emails as the Blackberry pulsed to warn me of my next meeting, and topped like a cherry on a sundae with a picture pulled via Google from Flikr, comes this interesting article on what digital multitasking is doing to our minds.
I defy you (as the author does in his opening paragraphs) to read it all the way through, online, without stopping to wonder if someone has answered that email or topped your clever comment on Facebook. ——————————— Sorry, I had to stop and check the chime on my Blackberry, reserved for certain important messages. I’m back. I swear.
These are our Modern Times. We live in a world in which The Man has figured out how to speed up the virtual assembly line, and if we wish to maintain the lives we have grown accustomed to–pay the mortgage, educate the children, enjoy our few pleasures–we have no choice but to deal.
Our modern times–if we were to remake the classic film Modern Times today it would be a single, fixed shot of the eyes of Chaplin, the story told by scenes on his computer screen reflected onto the spectacles of our modern anti-hero, the only real movement would be by his eyes. Perhaps his hand would rise up to touch his Bluetooth headset or push his glasses back up his sweaty nose, but nothing more. We would tell the entire story of our modern times projected a few small pieces of glass to one man, alone, flashing by in a fragmentary mosaic. (Cue score of Koyaanisqatsi.)
Pistolette , who found this article, is rightly concerned with how this is all impacting us. I have not gone fully offline in a long time, but I used to envy a woman I shared an office with once who would take a week off every summer and go to a secluded cabin sans husband and children with a big stack of books. That seems idyllic to me.
I don’t worry too much about how all of this obsessive multi-tasking and media overload is impacting me. I work with a scattered team at work and having a rich set of channels to manage that life–email, instant messaging, wireless phones–seems to help enormously. It does require that I shut down some channels when I really need to focus. I moan that the firewall blocks Facebook and Twitter but its probably for the best.
I feel scatterbrained lately but that has much more to do with stress unrelated to my online life. Most people in New Orleans seem more scattered than people elsewhere, but living here where It’s After the End of the World seems to have that effect on people. It is not caused by a rich digital life but by the stress on the streets, in our daily life, not precisely post-traumatic because the emergency never seems to completely end.
In this one central piece of my wired life on Toulouse Street, the serendipity of the moment often informs what I write, and that is why this one paragraph in the long article jumped out at me. Read it and judge for yourself, but I think I will continue to both walk the streets of my city as well as wander the virtual channels of the Internet, drinking it all in and waiting for the intuitive flash of that bright moment in which we know our doom.
The prophets of total attentional meltdown sometimes invoke, as an example of the great culture we’re going to lose as we succumb to e-thinking, the canonical French juggernaut Marcel Proust. And indeed, at seven volumes, several thousand pages, and 1.5 million words, À la Recherche du Temps Perdu is in many ways the anti-Twitter. (It would take, by the way, exactly 68,636 tweets to reproduce.) It’s important to remember, however, that the most famous moment in all of Proust, the moment that launches the entire monumental project, is a moment of pure distraction: when the narrator, Marcel, eats a spoonful of tea-soaked madeleine and finds himself instantly transported back to the world of his childhood. Proust makes it clear that conscious focus could never have yielded such profound magic: Marcel has to abandon the constraints of what he calls “voluntary memory”—the kind of narrow, purpose-driven attention that Adderall, say, might have allowed him to harness—in order to get to the deeper truths available only by distraction. That famous cookie is a kind of hyperlink: a little blip that launches an associative cascade of a million other subjects. This sort of free-associative wandering is essential to the creative process; one moment of judicious unmindfulness can inspire thousands of hours of mindfulness.
Crow June 1, 2009
Posted by Mark in Poetry, Toulouse Street, poem.Tags: Crow, Ted Hughes
3 comments
If we seem obsessed a bit with crows of late here on Toulouse Street, well, a person has to be obsessed with something, just as stones are obsessed with their spot, plants with the day star, cats with their creeping prey and crow, well, Crow I think is obsessed with us: watching, askance and laughing.
Crow Blacker Than Ever
By Ted Hughes
When God, disgusted with man,
Turned towards heaven,
And man, disgusted with God,
Turned towards Eve,
Things looked like falling apart.
But Crow Crow
Crow nailed them together,
Nailing heaven and earth together-
So man cried, but with God’s voice.
And God bled, but with man’s blood.
Then heaven and earth creaked at the joint
Which became gangrenous and stank-
A horror beyond redemption.
The agony did not diminish.
Man could not be man nor God God.
The agony
Grew.
Crow
Grinned
Crying: “This is my Creation,”
Flying the black flag of himself.
An Odd Fellow’s Memorial Day May 25, 2009
Posted by Mark in 8-29, Federal Flood, Hurricane Katrina, NOLA, New Orleans, Remember, home.Tags: Memorial Day, New Orleans cemetery
6 comments
I was born in 1957 and so I am reckoned one of the last of the baby boomers, that generation borne by the parents who went through World War II. I grew up in a neighborhood full of fathers who had served in World War II, some later in Korea, and frankly I do not remember anyone making much of Memorial Day.
It was the sort of day when the grownups would sit outside, cocktails in hand and laughing; one of the last days before the heat became unbearable, when they could reenact the ritual they knew from the days before air conditioning of sitting out and visiting with the neighbors; a day when the children would run wild up and down the lawn-flanked, oak-shared lanes that ran behind all our houses, as tipsy as our parents on the first days of summer freedom. The fog man might come by in his war surplus jeep pumping God only knows what sort of poison out in a bright, white cloud to keep down the mosquitoes, and the kids would run after him and into the cloud yelling, “the fog man, the fog man”, our small bodies sucking up the DDT while our parents drank bourbon and branch and let us run wild.
Most people’s childhoods must seem an idyllic time looking back from the age of fifty-something but ours seems particularly so as I watch my children grow up without a pack of children on the block and among neighbors who mostly don’t socialize as our parents did. The place we grew up, the upper-middle class suburb of Lake Vista with its cul de sac streets and the shaded sidewalks called lanes that ran behind the houses and up to broad parkways that bisected the neighborhood, was certainly Edenic compared to most every other place I’ve lived.
By the early 1960s it was full of families whose fathers had made something of themselves after the war, professionals and small business men who had done well. These were not people who came home and joined the Veterans of Foreign Wars or the American Legion, the ones who kept their old uniforms and decorations to pull out on Memorial Day to parade down the street. Those were not our fathers: men who after the war were busy trying to finish school or start careers with small children and wives they married so young, who were busily trying to sort out and make something of their life. No one in our neighborhood joined those groups or marched in those parades.
Our father’s did not talk much about the war to us even as we ran through the neighborhood armed with plastic replicas of the very weapons they had carried, acting out the hundreds of old war movies that were a staple of television of the time. We did not much go in for Cowboys and Indians, but preferred to play act the battles of the TV show Combat! For my own father perhaps it was the one experience he told me of, huddled in a beet furrow somewhere in France pinned down by machine gun fire and raked by mortars. He huddled in that furrow, dug small shelves into the mud and lined them with tissue and tore down his Browning Automatic Rifle which had landed in the mud.
He was one of the few survivors of that event, and while he never spoke of it except in outline (and to proudly recount how he cleaned his BAR) I can readily imagine laying there in the dark and the rain, cleaning his weapon while around him most of the young men he had trained with for this day lay dead or dying, some of them perhaps crying out, others fingering the rosaries like the one I still have, the one my mother made for my father to take with him. If to these men Memorial Day was not a time to remember what they went through but to celebrate their survival, to relish friends and family over cocktails on a buggy, summery afternoon I can find no fault in that.
I grew up in an era when the little cardboard bank calendars, the ones with the bank’s name in faux gold leaf and a mercury thermometer in the frame, still listed Confederate Memorial Day (observed on Jefferson Davis’ birthday on June 3rd in most of the South, so soon after the current observance). Perhaps that is a small part of the lack of enthusiasm for the official Memorial Day. And this far toward the equator a Monday in late May is not the first day warm enough for the beach or a big picnic in the park, not by a long shot. If anything, Memorial Day is likely as not to be the first truly miserable day of summer, when the mercury in those little calendar thermometers would first climb above ninety and the breeze in from the lake was as full of water as the pitcher that sat on the patio table and we were just as sweaty.
So come Memorial Day down in New Orleans we might catch the President laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns on the 10 o’clock news as we crawl into bed, stuffed with grilled steak and itchy with bug bites and sleepy from too much beer in the sun, but the reason for the day will largely escape our notice. As the air conditioning whistles us to sleep it might occur to us that summer, at last, has truly arrived, as wet and heavy and ominous as a blizzard turned inside out.
Memorial Day has a new and special significance for me: this is the day I arrived home. In May 2006 I left the children with their grandparents in Fargo, N.D. to be put on a plane later, hitched the boat to the back of the car and started south. Three days later on Memorial Day, 2006 I parked the boat in a marina yard in Mandeville, and made my way across the lake to the small house on Toulouse Street that is now our home. When I sat down to write about it this time last year the real significance of the date finally began to sink in. The first years it was, “oh, this was the week the kids and I got to New Orleans”, but not a day fraught with meaning.
I read those old words (trying to recall how many beers in the sun proceeded that post) and I once again recall that drive as if it were yesterday. It occurs to me that taking a short cut down Polk in Lakeview–over broken streets that already looked like Patton’s Third Army had rolled over them 20 years before the flood, lined three years ago with houses that looked like the combat-broken landscape of the war movies of my childhood–I had missed passing all of the large monuments of the cemeteries.
I can’t quite name them all unless I jump in the car or on the bike and ride up and down City Park Avenue but a few some to mind, the firefighter’s memorial from the days of the old volunteer fire companies and the mounded hill that covers the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks mausoleum in Greenwood, the tall Grecian column just across the street that memorializes I don’t know what (but will have to wander over later and find out), the pharaonic family tomb that squats in a corner of Metairie Cemetery just off of the interstate.
Somewhere behind the perpetually uncared for broken clock that stands at the head of Canal Street in Greenwood Cemetery lies the Hilbert family tomb where my father and brother lay with my mother’s family. Someday when my mother and her sister are not around to question me I will put up a stone that says Folse atop the one that reads Hilbert, but I don’t want to be buried there among the Hilberts. I have no idea what anyone reading this should do with my remains, but that tomb is not the place. It will not be my own tiny monument in that field of raised tombs.
I often spoke of building a raised tomb when I lived in Fargo, anxious that I might just be tossed into the ground like the rest of them, wanting my far off branch of the family to have a proper memorial of the sort someone from New Orleans expects. Now I think: better to be cremated and hope I have friends who survive me who will know what to do with those ashes, the places that were significant enough to me to be fitting. The thought that those friends will know what to do is probably memorial enough, to know I will be remembered.
For now the only personal monuments I care about are the ones I have built here, the Wet Bank Guide and this one, Toulouse Street, and the pieces out of the Wet Bank Guide that make up Carry Me Home. I don’t want to be remembered for myself but rather as just another of the people who came home, that one cross you see in some pictures with a flag planted, or a spray of flowers in the endless fields of green and white that are military cemeteries. I want to be remembered as one of them all, as someone who helped to tell their story.
As we planned for the next Rising Tide conference the other night, the talk turned to how New Orleans has changed, and its people with it. Someone madet he comparison that occurs to me over and over again: that of the people of the Federal Flood to those of the Greatest Generation. Orleanians are thought indolent and silly with our devotion to festival and food above all else but all around me are people who have been through a profound trauma most Americans can barely imagine. They survived the biggest displacement Americans seen since the Civil War, returned to a city more like Europe after the bombardment and battles of WWII than anything ever seen on this continent, have struggled for years (still struggle today) to live here and rebuild.
These are a people who have seen death and devastation, known loss and disappointment that is painful to catalog, suffer from a traumatic stress that is not post traumatic stress because it is not yet over, may never be over for people of the generation of the flood, and still they get up on certain days and march down to the appointed place and eat and drink and dance and are happy. They are at once not that different from my parents sitting out on Memorial Day and at some deep level they are profoundly transformed. As we approach the fourth anniversary of the Hurricane Katrina and the Federal Flood they are people who have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and made the case for why we should be here. Few people since the days of the pioneers have a stronger claim to a place.
Some will think it irreverent and disrespectful to say this on Memorial Day, even as soldiers patrol in far off lands and on this day sacred to soldiers some may die, but I have said it before and I will say it again. I look at the people around me and all they have been through and all they have accomplished to remake their home and I think: there is no finer place to be an American today than in their company, here in New Orleans.
* Yes, I’ve cribbed this title from last year’s post, but it still seems apt. I will leave it to the burrowing graduate students of New Orleans history, the ones I imagine pouring over our blogs a hundred years from now as our own generation scoured the letters of civil war soldiers, to figure out if I was onto something or just lazy.
PARK BENCH POEM May 20, 2009
Posted by Mark in NOLA, New Orleans, Poetry, Toulouse Street, cryptic envelopment, poem.add a comment
Busy and a bit cross-eyed and at a loss for words. Thankfully, others have come before us and found all the best ones. The rest of us just collect and rearrange them, like old homeless men shuffling in their carts to make room for one bright shining bottle among the crushed cans.
PARK BENCH POEM
By Everette Maddox
Mind if I put up
a park bench
in your mind?
I mean, if
the mind is a park,
why not have a poem in it?
After all, when
you get through
buying hotdogs &
getting a load
of the swans
you’ll want
some place to
sit down. It
ought to be fairly
comfortable by
the time a few
generations of
transient assholes
have worn it
smooth, & the paint
off – though
the original idea
was to advertise
my product: my own
green life, now
flaking into winter.
On another note, EveretteMaddox.org is down again. I have to hunt up that guy’s name (lost in the last hard drive crash) and remind him to check the site.
A Tale Of Ill Will May 14, 2009
Posted by Mark in Toulouse Street.Tags: A Tale of God's Will, Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, Terence Blanchard
2 comments
Dear Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra,
You don’t get it, do you.
Earlier this week I got emails from You Tube informing me that your organization requested two very-low-fidelity excerpts of the 2008 Jazz Fest performance of Terence Blanchard’s A Tale of God’s Will be taken down.
Both ere posted there so that I could embed them in two blogs posts, one as an update to a post pimping Terence Blanchard’s performance with the LPO while I worked on a second post, a glowing personal review of the event.
It’s sad that an organization that has struggled terribly in the recent past would essentially waste time chasing down my crappy little camera videos, which I had put up on You Tube only so I could embed them in posts promoting and praising your collaboration with Terence Blanchard.
Some people just don’t get this new media thing, and cling to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other protections like someone cowering behind a triple locked door thinking that will solve the crime problem outside, thinking it will save their little corner of the music industry. It will not. Instead, you spurned my small act of promotion for your participation in this event.
Hell, you’re not even the copyright holder. If Terence Blanchard had complained, I would feel a bit better, but would probably write to ask him why. He probably has more sense that to yank my two tiny, tinny recordings out of what is otherwise a glowing review of the event.
If the Jazz & Heritage Festival had done it, well, I’ve said enough bad things about their management, and using my $100 camera to capture two minutes excerpts of Jazz Fest performances explicitly violates their policies. I would not be surprised even though they would also be spurning free publicity from the one part of the public media that is actually growing in reach year by year while television, radio and the prints shrivel.
Fine. I have removed the embeds for these, and I repeat myself, very low fidelity video excerpts (placed per my statement of Fair Use below on the right) from the posts We Will Drown the Bitch in Beauty and A Tale of God’s Will and replaced them with more of my own still photography which is explicitly allowed by the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. And I will remove any references to the LPO from those posts, lest you come after me for the unauthorized reproduction of your name.
If you and the RIAA and others (the Associated Press comes to mind lately) think you can quash reasonable fair use by bloggers, good luck with that. The Internet was designed to survive a nuclear war. I think we can survive you.
Your’s Truly,
The Big Scary Blogger Trying To Steal Your Soul with a $100 Canon
Find someone or something to cling to May 9, 2009
Posted by Mark in 504, 8-29, Bloggers, NOLA, New Orleans, Poetry, Toulouse Street, We Are Not OK, cryptic envelopment, poem.Tags: Ashley Morris, Kim Addonzio, Ray Shea, Storm Catechism
2 comments
Purloined from today’s Poetry Daily (see the RSS feed down the gutter at right), something in this piece at the bottom of this post seems to speak to this day in New Orleans like an especially apt horoscope. The news that another one of us is leaving, torn away by the whirlwind of a bitter child custody dispute, reminds us that we defy the gods to be here and risk the price they can extract.
When I first moved here and through some contacts in the media was interviewed as a willing transplant to a disaster zone, I was asked if I knew of any other post-Federal Flood arrivals. I always recommended Ashley Morris and Ray Shea.
Ashley died last April. In the afterword to Carry Me Home, I recalled something from his funeral:
Three of us were written up by the Los Angeles Times: Ray Shea, Ashley Morris and I. Ashley died April 2, 2008 at the age of forty-four of a heart attack. As we listened to the Hot 8 Brass Band playing at the cemetery after wards, someone came up to me and said, “Now it’s just you and Ray.” It sounded not precisely like a curse, but certainly an unlucky thing to say in a cemetery in New Orleans….
Does that make me the last man standing? By no measure. NOLA is full of people who love this place madly, who by words or paint or music or food or costume or dance live out that madness in a very public way. Its not only false, its a vain conceit, and if one is even a bit superstitious perhaps a dangerous one. Not precisely a curse is what I wrote last year, but Ray’s departure still seems a reminder of the potential price of our defiant stance here on this uncertain ground.
May he, like Odysseus, return home.
Storm Catechism
The gods are rinsing their just-boiled pasta
in a colander, which is why
it is humid and fitfully raining
down here in the steel sink of mortal life.
Sometimes you can smell the truffle oil
and hear the ambrosia being knocked back,
sometimes you catch a drift
of laughter in that thunder crack: Zeus
knocking over his glass, spilling lightning
into a tree. The tree shears away from itself
and falls on a car, killing a high school girl.
Or maybe it just crashes down
on a few trash cans, and the next day
gets cut up and hauled away by the city.
Either way, hilarity. The gods are infinitely perfect
as is their divine mac and cheese.
Where does macaroni come from? Where does matter?
Why does the cat act autistic when you call her,
then bat a moth around for an hour, watching intently
as it drags its wings over the area rug?
The gods were here first, and they’re bigger.
They always were, and always will be
living it up in their father’s mansion.
You only crawled from the drain
a few millennia ago,
after inventing legs for yourself
so you could stand, inventing fists
in order to raise them and curse the heavens.
Do the gods see us?
Will the waters be rising soon?
The waters will be rising soon.
Find someone or something to cling to.
Five Points
Vol. 12, No. 3
Figured It All Out (Sort Of) May 7, 2009
Posted by Mark in Dancing Bear, NOLA, New Orleans, Toulouse Street, cryptic envelopment, music.Tags: Blows Against the Empire, Jefferson Starship, Paul Kanter
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As I sit around desperately Trying To Figure It Out (and realizing I am neither Einstein nor Buddha so I am never going to figure IT out and this is a form of procrastination bordering on mental masturbation and well…). Damn. Time to put on a record. And get another beer.
If I’m going to figure anything out I think I need a bit of space to work in, and what better space than the one figured in Paul Kanter’s pompously perfect space opera Blows Against the Empire, possibly the most star-studded studio record of the whole San Francisco era.
And if in fact I am not going to figure IT out (that much we have arrived at by long and careful consideration), at least not tonight (and by counting the empties on the porch), then I might as well Dream…
Have you seen the stars tonight? Would you like go to up on A Deck and look at them with me?
La Dolce Vita May 6, 2009
Posted by Mark in 504, New Orleans, cryptic envelopment.Tags: Federico Fellini, La Dolce Vita
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Sometimes at night the darkness and silence weighs on me. Peace frightens me. Perhaps I fear it most of all. I feel it’s only a facade, hiding the face of hell. I think of what’s in store for my children tomorrow; “The world will be wonderful”, they say; but from whose viewpoint? We need to live in a state of suspended animation, like a work of art; in a state of enchantment… detached. Detached.
— Divine Comedy The Certainty of Chance Lyrics
as a speech by Steiner in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita
No, I am not about to violently snap like Steiner in La Dolce Vita. The speech always struck my differently, perhaps the way it struck Marcello in the film before the tragic murder-suicide, not as advice but as a framing for a life in a seemingly pointless universe. Isn’t that the way Marcello chooses to live in the end, almost in a state of suspended animation?
I have always found a strange sort of solace in what others might find depressing. I do not seek the peace which passeth understanding, except perhaps in despair as one might seek solace in drink or in death. I understand the attraction of satori but it strikes me as ultimately dehumanizing. I am not ready to surrender up my self and my suffering for an empty bliss. Instead I need to learn to survive in this world where the first noble truth is inscribed like scar tissue somewhere deep beneath the skin.
Here in the original land of misfit toys we call New Orleans we need to find the truth hidden in Dante’s speech as filtered through Fellini’s Steiner, not as Marcello did by embracing the emptiness but in our own way; not in a state of suspended animation but instead isolated from the sterility of late American culture; by defining our own space, “like a work of art; in a state of enchantment…. detached”; defining our own fourth noble truth, our own Way of celebrating through the darkness that leads us to the light; leads us not to Fellini’s monster on the beach, but to the innocence of the girl on the strand.
We must not detach from our world, but from theirs, must insistently be ourselves at whatever cost.
Originally published in a slightly different format as Fellini’s Beached Monster in November, 2007 I revisit this often enough that it merits reposting, with some edits.
504ever May 4, 2009
Posted by Mark in 504, NOLA, New Orleans, Toulouse Street, meme.Tags: 504ever, 504ward
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Because today is 5/04, the 504ward group is asking people who Twitter (where I am @wetbankguy), to write up their best reasons to live in New Orleans, limited of course to 140 characters. I rarely do memes (with one recent exception), but thought I’d tout this one as it sounds like a fun challenge.
Here’s my entry. You can make your own by going to your favorite Twitter client and entering your own with a hashtag (keyword preceeded by a hash or “#”) of #504ward.
@WetBankGuy Food smells and horn swells over the funky shuffle drumming parade in the bright costume of naked joy, down to the river, forever. #504ward
Mystery Street May 2, 2009
Posted by Mark in 504, Jazz, Jazz Fest, NOLA, New Orleans, Toulouse Street, music.Tags: Jazz Tent, Jimmy Cobb, Kind of Blue, Miles Davis
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The Jazz Tent can be a lonely place (however crowded) when most of your friends are off shaking it at Dr. John or Zachary Richard. If Mrs. Toulouse were coming she would come sit with me most of the afternoon, but I’m solo today. That will not, in the end, keep my away from the last tent by the Mystery Street exit.
I will try to catch Zachary Richard and Bonerama early so if you see an old geek in a Tilley hat doing the solo stoner shuffle that will probably be me. And at some point this afternoon I will find myself bidding farewell to all that and will head across the baking concrete of Heritage Square (thanking the Boggess for the good beer booths there) toward the Tent, getting ready to hear Jimmy Cobb’s tribute to the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue.
If you want to hear people who know their stuff talk about the record, you can jump right down to the short documentary at the bottom of this. This is the one jazz record you can buy at Target, has become iconic of jazz in so many minds of Jazz (capital J intended) because its just so damned perfect. The line up is an all star roster of the time (1959): John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderely, Bill Evans and Wynton Kelly on keys, Jimmy Cobb on drums and Paul Chambers on bass. The sound is perfect late 50s-early 60s Cool, so its easy on the ears as a Jazz 101 record to give friends, but sufficiently complex and damned near perfect that it bears up to listening to over and over again however deep into jazz you are.
Part of my musical experience is the transcendental sound of much of later 20th century jazz. As Americans drifted out of the old churches and into the secular world in that period we fashioned as we went our own pantheon and replacement religions. Out there somewhere behind the Cult of Kennedy, the Temple of the Most Noble Quarterback and the Shrine of the Four Liverpudlians is a path that takes you away from the noisy temple square and down toward a quiet and secret place. Before the arrival of the Merry Pranksters and the jam bands, jazz was our first mystery cult.
I am at best a minor acolyte, lacking the musical training to take apart recordings like diagramming a sentence or the inclination to memorize song and sidemen lists that jazz aficionados share with baseball fans. This record has much that captures my own call to jazz: that mystical something that draws the listener in, a captured vibration as old as Bog’s Big Bang; a swing that makes your feet move and your head nod, not danceable but a rhythm that spreads though the body like the a reverb heavy remix of your own heartbeat; the sparse notes building enormous colors that are wall of sound turned inside out, and solos like the high point of low church, a call home of tremendous voice and power to persuade.
Kind of Blue is just the record for initiates of the lowest order, and still speaks to the most high (many quoted in the brief film). If you don’t have a copy you can buy it at Target for chrissakes. Today the last surviving member of the session, drummer Jimmy Cobb, and his band will present a tribute to the record and I know I will be at the Jazz Test early to make sure I can claim a seat. If you don’t know the music but I’ve stirred the tiniest bit of curiosity come on by. Yes John Mayall will be next door and the O’Jays right over at Congo Square, but if you’re going to come to the Jazz and Heritage Festival (remember the name, right?) you should make at least one stop in The Tent, and this will be a good one.
So if you think you’re ready for your initiation, come on down toward the Mystery Street Gate (natch), last tent on the left. Initiation begins at 5:40.
Fess Up May 1, 2009
Posted by Mark in 504, Jazz Fest, NOLA, New Orleans.Tags: Fess, Jazz and Heritage, Professor Longhair
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What the hell are you doing sitting at a computer reading this. Yeah, I’m got the Counting House’s Future of Shirk ankle bracelet on here on Toulouse Street, but if you can plead, beg, cheat or lie your way out of work today, you had best get busy. Gates open in just a couple of hours.
To get you ready here’s one last piano player who will not be on any stage at the Fairgrounds this weekend but if you want to find his spirit, throw away the cubes and follow your feet until they bring you to the place where they can’t stand still.
United Our Thing Will Stand April 28, 2009
Posted by Mark in Jazz Fest, NOLA, New Orleans, Toulouse Street.Tags: "James Booker", piano
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To follow up on a Jazz Fest related post Forty Years Down the Road from a few days ago, here’s another legend of New Orleans gone from the ranks: James Booker. These days we get Billy Joel on the Acura stage instead.
Fess and Booker and all the rest are more than a set of cutouts in the infield, or a face hanging above a stage. They float over the Fairgrounds like the clouds of May, a subtle presence most Big Chiefs from Kansas City never notice but which subtly touches everything at Jazz Fest worthy of the name.
or at these independent New Orleans bookstores:
