the above gleaming pyramid

At St. Louis Cemetery

Friday:
Kanye West/Jay-Z, Watch the Throne
Curren$y, Pilot Talk II
UGK, Jive Records Presents: UGK Chopped & Screwed
Lee "Scratch" Perry, Kung Fu Meets the Dragon

Saturday:
Sane Our Cemeteries St. Louis Cemetery Tour, New Orleans, LA
Reuben at Stein's Deli, New Orleans, LA
The Myrtles and the Graveyard Lovers at Chelsea's, Baton Rouge, LA

Sunday:
Hot sausage breakfast platter at Franks's
David Bowie,The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars
Thin Lizzy, Jailbreak
Bruce Springsteen, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J.
The Hold Steady, Boys and Girls in America
Bob Dylan, The Basement Tapes

• A whole album of chopped & screwed remixes is a long slog just to hear UGK's "Fuck My Car" given the codeine reggae treatment but it's kinda worth it. Sometimes it takes degradation to reveal what's inside a thing.
  
  
  
  
• Though, there are so many things in the world to enjoy, like the St. Louis Cemetery in New Orleans which I've never visited before this hot weekend, things bigger than the myth of Marie Laveau the Voodoo Queen
  
  
  
  whose tomb is generally rendered a low-rent Twombly with XXX's scrawled by dumbasses looking to participate in easy goth hokum. Um, don't desecrate graves?
  
  
  Maya akimbo, surveying a crumbling city of the dead...
  
  
  ..right next to where Homer Plessy is laid to rest.
  
  
  
  Nicolas Cage bought himself a plot right around the corner in the same storied cemetery and had built upon it the above gleaming pyramid, something between a pile of cocaine and a manifestation of pure ego. No one dares desecrate Nic's grave, for he might actually have a secret entrance to it so he can wait inside in a state of ecstatic readiness, poised to go Face Off 2: Electric Boogaloo on any who but uncap a Sharpie in the radius of his divine sensitivity.
  
  
• The more I listen to Ziggy Stardust, the more I think it might be the greatest rock 'n' roll album ever made, fully understanding that it is meta-rock of the highest order. I also understand I might like meta-rock more than the thing itself.
  
  
  
  But really, what doesn't "Starman" have within its bounds? We will be singing the chorus as a lullaby to post-Earth children tethered to their cribs in the space colonies.
  
  
• It was a weekend of swimming pools and lawnmowers and great breakfasts and friends and after the last swimming party I found myself in the position of bringing all the girls home, or at least four of them including my own (which seems a weird thing to say because, own? In what sense is that true even if it's the right word for it?) scattered around the city and it took a full hour of driving, listening to the conversations shift and bob with each drop-off and I'm thankful for a lot of things in my life, but maybe most of all is I love all these kids with which mine is enmeshed. They go to a parfait of schools and the circle remains unbroken largely because the parents all like each other. We are all just off enough to fit with each other and not really fit elsewhere, which is a particularly sweet spot in which to live.
  
  
• Speaking of all that, I watched every clip available for Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow, a documentary on Anselm Kiefer who, like Bowie, engages in a sort of meta-art, creating art that trumps the art it meta's. This clip gives me chills.
  
  
  All other art making is like watching paint dry.