The yellow-orange-pink-purple-blue sunrise through the wires looking down Government street.
The way the LSU Campus looks like a De Chirico painting when the students are not around
The cashier at the grocery store saying, "These people better love Jesus if they are in here this early!"
The same cashier remarking to the other cashier "That pawn shop on Plank? I got a good Smith & Wesson there one time!"
The grasp of situational ethics that my daughter is picking up from Star Wars. After asking what smuggler meant: "OK, but if Han Solo is a smuggler against the Empire, then it's good, right?"
The appropriate soundtrack for reading this list and contemplating the implications thereof is this recording of Folk Songs (lala) by esteemed avant-garde composer and puller of the loose threads found in the institutional and logical fabrics, Luciano Berio. I am liking this as well this morning, but not in the past tense, thereby making it exempt from the list criteria.
Shrimp and grits from the breakfast counter at the farmer's market. For all this week I've been eating like a sensible human being, vegetarian even, depending on where you stand with low-fat cheese slices, and on my way to get nice local freshness to continue this path, the siren call of shrimp and grits, and that call I gleefully answered. Buttery shrimp ettouffe over grits and scrambled eggs. I will stand that I am still eating healthier because I didn't ask for a link of sausage on the side.
Part of this healthy lifestyle bullshit is walking and walking and the other day when Maya and the dog and I were walking around the lakes, we were bowled over by this dramatic pink and blue and yellow and a little green sunset over the lakes. The inadequacy of the cameraphone camera does not give this thing justice. It was a sunset of the sort that destroys you with its brilliance, like when Zeus is coaxed by Hera to reveal his glory to his mistress Semelë thereby evaporating her, and the fact that are you are not destroyed and are still reading this is testament to the camera's deficiencies.
Donovan's "Wear Your Love Like Heaven." I have reached near saturation with my Arthur Lee infatuation this week, a sign of which was this song being stick in my head for two days. As masters of the form, Donovon is no Arthur Lee, but just as my wanting to be healthier doesn't equate orthodoxy and strict adherence, sometimes a good stab at an ideal is exactly what you need.
It has been made fairly clear to me that my job is rather secure so that mild anxiety has dissipated. It was really voiced here a couple days ago to purge it form the loop in my head. 2009, if it can be declared to be about anything yet, and hell why not do it anyway, is about filling in holes, and by extension, ruts that I find myself in. I also recognize this is something I always say because it is something that everyone says, but it is still worth saying.
Right now as I'm trying to think of a way to cap this all off, "Hurdy Gurdy Man" came on just as it started gently raining out my window, not like Zeus impregnating Danaë in the form of golden rain but as feathery touches whose intensity grew in perfect sync with Donovan in his tremolo fake nostalgia engine, and I'm about to go chop up some garlic and wither some spinach, both from the farmer's market, for lunch and that seems to be good enough.
PS: Donovon's "Epistle to Dippy", a song I'd forgotten completely about, is now my sanctioned and official jam.
California is a place much misunderstood in a similar way that Louisiana is misunderstood - the misconceptions are almost right but are just fictional enough to miss the reality entirely.
Where we go when we come here is central coast California - conservative, agricultural, suburban - in other words like the rest of the country except that is it California and bears the patina of the Promised Land upon it.
I go anywhere near the pacific Ocean and I cannot believe it is really there. It is an infinitude that is different than the brown, loamy gulf or the stern grey Atlantic - it is blue and green and coming it you with dramatic force. It is rocky crags and sand dunes. I'm compelled to go throw myself in it, but one toe in its icy water will chill you to your core, and in that I am blown further away by it.
Little scrappy beach towns could not be more charming in their precise stereotypes. I saw a Volkswagen van and a woody station wagon parked on a hill that my wife told me is a semi-secret spot for the local surfers.
This part of the country is the only other I have found that I would want to live in besides the dirty swampy South, and the longing that comes from it being too expensive for my pocket only serves to increase its allure.
Frank Stella is one of those artists whose work I like, but that I recognize I like for the wrong reasons. I find his work emotionally evocative, saying difficult and complex things that no other artist seem to be saying. I believe these are the wrong reasons to like this work because I have read consistently, from his straight-talking mouth, that his art is purely about the visual experience and it stops there. What you see is what you see.
When I find some resonance in a work of art, it is not because I am ringing its bell but because it is ringing mine, so maybe Stella is on mission and I am using it incorrectly. And I could argue that there are many ways to ring a bell, but a professional bell-ringer would shake their head no and take the bell from my hands.
Part of the problem I have with his expressed intentions, free as he is to have them, is that I can't believe that anyone with such a bloodless view of painting would bother doing it for so long and so well, such as the free-standing mural "Severambia" above that I had the fortune of seeing in person during a trip to New York in 1995 (discussed here), he seems unwilling to give up any fleshy exposures in his armor. It is in those fleshy exposures that I look for art. Stella is calling me out to face that I like my own interpretation of art in deference to the art being interpreted. And for whatever reason - lack of self-confidence, lingering suspicion that I am a fraud or merely an idiot laboring under delusions - that stings. I just suddenly remembered something about Frank Stella being a Judo master, and I was going to remark that my own weight was used against me, but a quick search revealed that no, Yves Klein was the Judo master. Frank Stella races cars. I've simply been out performed by a highly-tuned and specific engine.
This afternoon I read an interview with him in The Believer, where like in every other interview I've read with him, he generally (in this case not directly because the subject is dead horse material in Stella literature) dismisses the magic I look for in painting as hokum, sticking to his guns that paint is just paint, canvas is just canvas and things are just things. Without knowing him personally, he strikes me as kind of a jerk.
And like with most jerks, they leave an insatiable itch in my joints that they are right. His take on the practice of painting is not a Socratic win but a raw conclusion from the data. The magic of art is just that - illusions and allusions to illusions, the viewer summoning the ethereal out of pigment on canvas smeared that way for reason that have nothing to do with us or are likely to be revealed to us is like an alchemist cackling in his cave about gold conjured from lead. Stella is even gracious enough to lay out why his art takes the form it does - he likes the way it looks, and in that I wholly agree with him, and I believe in the middle of that circle I had to traverses to come to this agreement lies The Truth, and I have just missed at every turn. Stella would probably say I'm just walking in circles, and I'd be forced to admit, yes, you are probably right. Jerk.
I really like my usual barber, but because of my being without a car during the day and holiday closures I haven't been able to get over there. I suspected it was time, and that was confirmed when I went out the other night and got "Look, it's Gene Shalit!" and "Hey, somebody brought Mario with them!"
The barber shop at the union is convenient, cheap, and is satisfactorily manly as barber shops go. There are prices for a woman's shampoo and cut on the sign, but I cannot imagine any woman thinking this was a place where beauty is sculpted. This is a place where embarrassment is momentarily quelled.
The barber is practically a mute when it comes to small talk, which I like. I don't really talk sports or politics very well so unless I can come across a comparative lit doctorate who dropped out to become a barber, I'm happy with the silence. I did catch him looking up at the TV a number of times, which made me a little nervous, but mine is a simple razor cut with a wide margin for error.
Two amenities you don't get everywhere - straight razor shave on the neck and sideburns and a hot towel after. I heard somewhere that straight razor shaves are illegal in some places, so I hope I am not outing him to the Fuzz (as it were) . If I were implausibly more loose with my money, I would get a full shave at least once a week, for right now I can feel the vibrations of the cosmos on the back of my bare-naked neck. I can only imagine how vibrant the world would be with a full straight razor shave.
My favorite thing is the labyrinth one must traverse to get to the barber shop. The union is under massive reconstruction so the shop that was once off a main corridor is now deep in the bowels of the building. Here, come along with me!
After resisting the gravitational pull of my generation's mythology for seven years now, my daughter is into Star Wars after one viewing of The Clone Wars.
She is particularly into the much maligned Jar Jar Binks which I wholeheartedly support. If one is going to interface with mythology, one should find mythic counterparts for one's own character. She, like Jar Jar, is boundlessly bouncy, joyous and true blue. They both have a penchant for talking funny. They are both reliably game for any adventure. I much prefer that to the dour prissy princess who thirsts to be a lousy diplomat in faux-Indian getups, or dullard Jedi's and their tedious rules. Like most men of principle, Obi-Wan was only interesting to talk to when he was past his prime (and a hologram)
My identifying character was always the nerd translator C-3PO, a background figure whose presence always seemed to be the linchpin to resolving whatever conflicts arose. Sure, he always needed rescuing, but he was quick with the bon mots in over six milion forms of communication and protocols.
The original came out when I was my daughter's age, and I told her that Star Wars was all my friends and I talked about. Because of some pissing match between my parents, I did not see the actual film until its last week in the original year-long run in the theaters, but I had the comic books and action figures and could talk the talk even if I'd never been on he actual sidewalk. I have to think that experience prepared me for a lifetime of being a quick study in subculture.
She made two prototypes of Jar-Jar figurines out of air-dry clay after being dismayed at the lack of Jar Jar action figures on the rack at Target. "He's the main guy in the movie!" We went to Borders last night and she got herself the novelization of The Clone Wars, and got mad when I called her "Jar Jarina Binks" on the way back to the car. We have The Phantom Menace on TiVo, and she is stoked to watch it, well-schooled in the lingo after perusing some episodes of The Clone Wars on Cartoon Network's website. Surely every parent thinks this when they recognize their own childhood in their child, even when seeing it through the screen of your own personal Darth Vader mask, but I sense The Force is strong in this one.
Tasted - A Del Monte Harvest Selections Chicken Cacciatore microwave dinner. It is a little disturbing that the chicken contained therein did not need refrigeration, but really it was not all that bad. It offered the equivalent culinary sensation of something on the buffet tasting better than expected, which truth be told, I kinda like lukewarm crappy buffet food, and when it surpasses expectations, I feel a twinge of dicovery. Not that I would highly recommend this for lunch, but I certainly liked it more than this person did.
Smell - stepping out of my office after airing out the harvested selectness, I was accosted with what could have only been butthole-flavored microwave popcorn. I expected some student worker to come reeling around with a torn-open bag. "Want some? It's butthole flavor!"
Saw - the American fiction section at the campus library, and the row of Black Sparrow Press John Fante books. There are some folks who understand smart book design. Also the first couple pages of Last Evening on Earth by Roberto Bolaño, who is soon to be all the rage after the New York Times review by Jonathan Lethem of his gargantuan novel 2666 makes the rounds. Jonathan Lethem is taking up all my literary space right now: I read the aforementioned review yesterday morning at the coffee shop, started You Don't Love Me Yet last night, and this morning was swept up by this New Yorker fiction piece of his "Lostronaut" that washed up in my RSS feed. I tried reading The Fortress of Solitude a while back, and while the characters are still vivid in my head, I couldn't get into the story. "Lostronaut" however, has me convinced of his genius.
Felt - the burn in my legs from darting across campus and up all four flights of stairs to where the PS's are housed. The irony that embracing my full library-obsessed reader-nerd is the thing that finally convinced me to get off my ass and get some exercise at lunch is not lost on me, because after all, I am a library-obsessed reader-nerd now. Just because I am panting doesn't mean I don't know what irony is, ok?
Heard - On my way back into my building I heard a girl say into her phone, "You know... a Frito Pie" and the look on her face registered some guilt at this admission, like she became suddenly aware of her own lameness that she was reporting the eating of a Frito pie across a sattelite connection, beaming trough all of us, to a bored friend that was likely not even listening. I bet she would have envied my Chicken Cacciatorebut would have still felt superior to butthole-flavored popcorn. Now I wonder what Jonathan Lethem had for lunch?
My daughter has been very invested in this election to an almost Art Linkletter degree, saying things like "Someone at school said O-Rock Obama is going to race taxis if he gets elected. I think that sounds awesome!" She went in the booth with me to make sure I didn't fuck around and do something stupid with my vote, and even pressed final button with me. Racing Taxis! C'mon, how fun would that be!
I've never felt optimistic about elections before now in that I don't have much faith in the idea that society will hold up because it is profitable for powerful people to keep it held up. My experience with powerful people is that they will drop something the instant a better thing comes along. I don't believe Obama is Jesus or that he will bring about an era of hummingbirds and manna.
My biggest hope, and it's a meager one, is that he will not be an embarrassment of a President, that people around the world will be excited by the course our country is taking rather than cautious and guarded. I think its the least we can do after interjecting ourselves in every narrative and squabble possible.
I don't expect the world to be shaken out of old habits immediately, but I hope there are some black people that can get a cab, can enter a store without being followed, will no longer be "the black guy in my office," will not be assumed to be criminals or stupid or drug addicts or leeches on society. I hope the notion of things being better ripples through war-torn Africa, just the notion of a person with dark skin becoming President of the United States.
I like the sunshine and rainbow feeling I have about the election, how things seem to imbued with a positivity. John McCain even sounded excited about the results while conceding. I like how I came across the above Yoko Ono postcard that somehow got stuffed in with the pile of bills I had to pay, something a lot of people have vehemently proclaimed was going to be more difficult to do with this outcome, and I was compelled to hold it up to the sky and look through it.
My local crunchy black granola doom boys Thou are on the permanent tight list for being chosen to play with the mighty SUNN O))) at The Knitting Factory (along with arch avant-violinist Tony Conrad) and the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia (pictured above), even if the non-denominational higher powers that oversee such ecumenically hallowed (yet totally open-minded) ground elected to sabotage their fog machines. Couldn't have happened to a nicer horde.
I just went through orientation for my finally full-time job at the major southern university from which I graduated and found that besides being able to go to the doctor and having retirement benefits, I can now check out books and CD's from the library, a perk which I could not confirm I would have as staff until yesterday. Immediately after orientation I darted over there, thinking I would check out and checked out Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings ed. by Susan Sontag, the first book I checked out from there as an eager freshman, or Inifinite Jest (checked out, of course) so instead I got
The Aesthetics of Rock by Richard Meltzer, recommended by many a source over the years but until now, I could never readily source a copy. I tore through almost 100 pages of it last night, letting the stream of hyperactive analysis-as-jive, jive-as-analysis (or maybe even jive-ass analysis...) hit me like a firehose. I used to think Griel Marcus was the smartest guy to write about rock 'n' roll, but now I'm not so sure. It's a book I have a hard time following in the regular reading-a-book sense, so instead I will follow it like an eager little kid running after a cooler teenager popping wheelies on a rusted bike.
The new Of Montreal album Skeletal Lamping is even better than I tought it would be. I take a dim view of hipster dance rock bullshit bexcause it is vapid, reudundant, and a pale reflection of the joyless joy that this music embodied back when I was checking out Artaud books from the library. I am leery of Prince worshippers today, in that I think they are wanting it too much. Prince was brilliant, an era-defiant and -defining but besides a handful of songs, the material just doesn't hold up - it sounds thinned with time. Skeletal Lamping manages to capture the best of dance-rock and Prince worship, rubbing it all like a genie lamp/erect penis depending on how you want to view it, with a well thought out plan of what to do with what comes pouring out. More devious and less paranoid than Hissing Fauna, nakedly livicious instead of shrieking alone in his room, I really like it. He's like what Bowie would have been if Bowie would have actually told you anything.
I think its OK to get mushy if I start my list with doom metal - as always, my wife and daughter are on the tight list. I love them unconditionally anyway, but they both continue to amaze and inspire me, and I am glad they let me trail after them while they race around on their bikes.
My wife is the coolest, most awesome ever - a supporting loving partner and übermom in addition to being a badass history scholar with lacerating cultural insight. She frankly pwnz your wife wholesale. You should be a little ashamed at how your wife does not even measure up to mine. I mean, I'm sure your wife tries, bless her heart, but better is better.
I turned in a big article the other day, which means instead of listening to one band obsessively for an extended period, only listening to other things out of relief from that. After something like that, I can't listen to the band anymore - like I still can't listen to Daniel Johnston after last year's OA piece.
So I can listen to anything I want now, and right now it is the recent mammoth Of Montreal concert on NPR. I rather love Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? but have never really latched to anything else of theirs, so I'm not sure how much of this is new material vs. old, but it has a convulsive, good-side-of-the-80's, plasticine sheen to it.
Speaking of good side of the 80's (and late 70's), in researching the aforementioned article, I went on a friutless search for a cameo I swear I remember this certain band making in a terrible Starship video, and re-discovered Jefferson Starship. I knew a couple of their hits but didn't realize how many classic songs they did. I'm don't know who I thought did "Miracles" but I wouldn't have guessed it was them. Also, I didn't know moustachioed Starship pilot Mickey Thomas was the singer on Elvin Bishop's 1976 hit "Fooled Around and Fell in Love."
The glacial process of my job transition is over and I am officially "staff" now, soon to be blessed with insurance and benefits and all sorts of grown up accoutrements once again.
From here, and also on the first page that came back from a Google Image search for old blues records.
The discussion about modern blues records that I referred to in my previous post got me thinking about what I really mean when I say old blues records:
The common complaint with modern "slick" blues recordings is that the scratch and the lo-fiedlity of older recordings are part of the fetishization that goes along with the blues. The phrase blues records is often prefixed with old when evoking a positive description: Tom Waits style has the appeal of old blues records . When a contemporary rock artist gets a little too noodly for his (our) own good (taste), they are sometimes disparaged as haing made just a blues record.
And one should consider that the old blues record is a very conscious, mannered art form. In social practice, blues songs would go on forever, until the dancers left the floor, while the three minute-limit espoused by pop/rock conservatives was dictated by the limitation of what one could put on a side of a 78 (often songs were extended over to the second side when the session was cooking.)
Old blues records were very consciously recorded in studios, engineered to maximize their effects on the playback of the day, to maximize sales. I was listening Zia on KLSU today play (I think) a Sonny Boy Williamson side and the harmonica tore through the scratch and the hiss while the rest of the band existed as a burbling murmur that launched it. If you've ever listened to a blues 78 through the horn of a Victrola, you'll know why the harmonica is a weapon of choice; it rattles the whole machine and the room when it plays, much in the same way Enrico Caruso's voice did on his records. It's the same principle that makes Dr. Dre albums sound so good on a stereo with a heavy bass - it's a psychical exploit of the technology. Maybe if modern blues records were recorded with that sense of exploit in mind - see Duwayne Burnside or James "Blood" Ulmer (who might actually be meta-blues, but whatever) for examples of people who do - they might sound better to our ears.
Modern blues recordings are engineered usually to modern tech spec, where everything can be heard and it flies against what we (or I) think of as blues. Fat Possum and Bruce Dickinson have become legends replicating the lo-fidelity of old blues records in modern technology, Danger Mouse has revolutionized pop production by sounding old. The Daptone sound feels fresh because it is actually anything but.
And it could be that as a white guy listening to the blues, I have an unconscious desire for it (black music) to sound ramshackle, for there to be a noble savage aspect to it. A specific example of this: I was talking to Teddy at Teddy's Juke Joint about T-Model Ford, and brought him a CD hoping it would spur him to book Ford out there. Teddy, it must be said, is a masterful DJ, spinning records that weave a groove through the crowd as he narrates the evening into the mic. I've heard him go from Grover Washington Jr to Lil Boosie and it sounded not only inspired but organic. So I asked him to throw on "Cut You Loose" by Ford, a song where it sounds like his guitar is strung with barbed wire, and while I thought it was glorious coming out of his sound system, it fell completely flat on the largely black crowd who was thankful that T-Model Ford's old timey bullshit kept to three-minute limit. Teddy recognized this immediately and threw on seven minutes of velvet Pendergrass to clear the air. That old timey blues sounds like the ugly past, and it is understandable why any black listener today would want to distance themselves from that, and all too unfortunate that many white listeners embrace it. The real static, it seems, in my feelings about crackly, tinny old blues records, might not be between the needle and the groove, but between my ears.
I have been working on my resume for the first time in about two years, in that I have to apply for the job I currently have in what hopefully will be a simple lateral paperwork thing. I can work some paper, even do origami should the situation call for it.
This weekend is booked with the Oxford American parties where there will be pressing of flesh and the acknowledging of mutual genius and the furtive eyeing through the lens of obscure competition at The Ogden Museum on Thursday and at Tipitina's (NOTE: it moved to the uptown location) on Saturday night.
I just got the Lou Reed Berlin Live disc for review and man, it is really good, and not just in an I-worship-Lou-Reed (which-I-do) way but as a dutiful and impassioned recontextualization of an already difficult to process album. I wondered how he was going to treat "The Kids" a song that kills me every time on the original album, and well, lets just say he does a very good job with it. Antony Hagerty and Lou Reed might be my favorite duet partners, each sitting on on side of how Reed sounded thirty years ago, taking the ends to greater heights than was then possible, or something. Review forthcoming closer to the date, after I get the accompanying DVD directed by Julian Schnabel who made the smart move of stopping trying to become Rauschenberg to try becoming Scorcese.
The sickening flow of the election and the stock market mess (and the dismay that I am such a low-baller that it hasn't had any real tangible effect on me...yet) and everything has blown a wind into the red flag that apprently has been hanging limp from a stick planted in my heart. I looked up whether Jimmy Carter was wealthy before becoming President (he did alright) and have been moved to make political declarations on message boards, an activity I usually consider a succinct example of folly. Perhaps it is the breaking of summer by the twinge of fall that inspires this change of colors.
Modern Talking - "Atlantis is Calling (S.O.S for Love)" The Swedish exchange-student girl I dated in high school once heard this on a mix tape belonging to the Norwegian exchange-student we were hosting and spat in disgust, "Only a Norwegian would listen to music that stupid."
Earth & Fire - Atlantis This "Mellotron-heavy" Dutch prog rock band had the misfortune of having a name completely eclipsed by another that augmented it simply with "Wind" and made it perfect. "Maybe Tomorrow, Maybe Tonight" (performed above) from their album about the lost continent is an uneven mix of prog excess and Carpenters' insularity, sounding a little like Belle and Sebastian would if burdened with dreams of grandiose scale.
Sun Ra & The Afro-Infinity Arkestra - Atlantis I love Sun Ra unabashedly, as weird as he gets, I'm willing to go, but the 21-minute title track where Ra abuses his "Solar Sound Instrument" (early synthesizer) is too much for even this marathon-listening free jazz fool. But the shorter numbers, esp "Lemuria", are things of serpentine, post-funk beauty.
Henry Cowell's Atlantis The real reason for this post. I know Cowell for his surprisingly homey investigations into playing the inside of the piano, strumming it like a harp, setting things on the strings, expanding the already expansive instrument but I came across his rather ridiculous ballet piece Atlantis today and am stupefied. Singers growl and grunt pirate-battle-like "HAAAAHHHH's" and "HUHHHHHHH's" in a movement subtitled "Combat Between Earth and Sea Monsters." Super-awesomeness from the dark corners of American art music.
Donovan - "Atlantis" The undisputed all-time best interpretation of Atlantis in all music, ever. Hail Atlantis!
Jeff Koons, Hair,1999 digital flex print, 34.5 x 25.5 in From here
Wow., about David Foster Wallace. He was a guy I admired for his searing intellect and terrifying literary prowess, but truthfully, I could never get through his books; I'd get too mired up in all that thought and connections and crossed lines and tangled reality, and maybe he did too.
Lord!, about my daughter repeatedly listening to the first track of the latest solo album by Phish bassist Mike Gordon. "This music is so wonderful!" she exclaimed loudly, deafened by the oversize headphones at the Barnes & Noble listening station, jamming to the same 30-second snippet of "Another Door" from The Green Sparrow over and over, running the UPC code under the little scanner for another dose. I have yet to be convinced by numerous arguments in their defense that Phish is remotely worth the praise, and the solo work of its members seems a subset of that dubious worth. As a father, I feel I must guide a child in the few areas with which I have some arguable expertise, but a girl's jam is a girl's jam. I was just playing it and she burst in and flatly asked if I can burn it for her.
Whew! the wind is no longer howling, blowing trashcans into other trashcans in my subconscious. It still looks like a brown and green scribble with piles of brush everywhere, but thankfully the wind has subsided.
Hey! A television pleasure of mine that I supposed should not be admitted publicly is CBS Sunday Morning and this morning they came through with a smart profile of artist Jeff Koons and managed to not give in to the what-in-tarnation contempt CBS, or particularly Morley Saeffer did in his 60 Minutes profiles, has long had for contemporary art. It's not like they went real deep into it, and arguably, there's not a lot of depth there that you don't dig yourself when you are talking Jeff Koons, but his work looked great and he came off surprisingly enlightened.
Awww, while Maya was staying at a friend's house, perhaps learning other bad habits besides jam band fandom, Jerri and I were waxing romantic about Kansas City, a place we lived for four years and hated. KC was our planned evacuation destination, would Ike have come this way to destroy us, and we were dreamily mulling over what to eat - fried chicken at Stroud's, big sloppy sandwich from D'Bronx, some requisite BBQ from Gates but most importantly, a hamburger from Westport Flea Market, a definitive hamburger experience and a singular culinary superlative for the Kansas City metro area. We got excited about seeing the newly revamped Nelson-Atkins Museum, for whom Jerri worked as a security guard while pregnant with Maya. We listened to a rolling nostalgia soundtrack of The Bottle Rockets, Slobberbone, old Steve Earle and Uncle Tupelo. We may still go at some point just to do it, but for now, this marks one of the first times I've felt sweet about Kansas City since moving away from there.
Outlets - My week has been spent in search of outlets and car chargers with adapter plugs and cords and more cords, to charge phones, the computer, PSP, anything to plug into, connection with some system or subsystem that is operational. I believe I can now operate any electrical device, from a defibrillator to a corn dog broiler from the cigarette lighter in my car. It's like I've been in perpetual 2-hour layover mode, in fact, let me plug in my phone right now while I'm thinking about it. OK. Last night I went to get hot wings with a friend of mine and saw that our booth had an outlet next to it and I instinctively pulled the AC adapter out of my cargo shorts and plugged it in. My office is open now and has AC and a computer with a keyboard and I still have a lingering twinge that someone is going to come in and take it all away.
Furtive eying of lights - We still don't have power. Our neighborhood is in what is being commonly referred to as an "orange zone" meaning it can take up to 4 weeks to get the power back according to a very vague map Entergy published. I have worked in the customer service sector as an IT person, I know a bloated CYA estimate when I hear one, and know it's an infrastructure -out repair job. I saw lights a block over last night and I'd be lying if I didn't think of at least creeping up to their window and bellowing "I'M COMIN' TO LOOT YOU!" just to hear them scramble inside. But dig this: some white friends-of-friends bought a house behind the bus station in poor, black neighborhood (Baton Rouge's sole gentrificators, I imagine) that is probably a week or two away from getting power, race being only one factor in the delay. By some fluke of wiring, perhaps they are jacked into the bus station grid, they, the one white family in a six-block radius, have lights and rest does not.
The radio - We have been pretty glued to the local talk station which has consisted of DJ's at the bare thread operational status - I picture them running around naked with warpaint snorting the carpets in cluttered offices with hopes of cocaine residue, toppling the vending machine and engaging in bloodsport over the last bag of Andy Capp's Hot Fries - and it's pretty much an endless line of calls to see when the power is going to come back on in their neighborhood, and "I haven't seen any Entergy trucks on my street and I'm in a white zone" and so on.
The Republican Party - I'm not sure anyone in Louisiana right now cares remotely about Sarah Palin (I mean, I guess they do, Republicans are team players first) but Gov. Bobby Jindal is poised to be the Rudy Guliani of 2012. He's doing a great job casting the appearance of being on top of things, but one should be reminded that that is what the person in charge is supposed to do. If it is extraordinary that they are doing so, then you have what they call low expectations. Yesterday, though, I saw pasted on stop signs in an affluent neighborhood a bunch of orange stickers that said "NO POWER.... Jindal, this is unacceptable." Evidently someone stockpiling reams of fluorescent sticker paper and running their printer off a generator is no longer a team player when the shit goes down.
Getting back to normal - I've been pretty level headed with occasional bouts of panic all week, but emotionally I am a beat dog today. I think its stepping away from it - I had so much leaning up against the wall of Let's-just-get-through - is letting everything tumble off the end of the shelves. Plus I got three separate emails this morning of "so.....where are we on X?" and I'm tempted to say that that a tree fell on X during the storm and your particular need is in the "orange zone" for the time being.
The anticipation of it is almost worse than the aftermath (provided you don't suffer catastrophic effects of course. I don't mean to sound calloused to those that have suffered intangible losses in the past) I'm just saying we are expecting trees down and power outages and not much more in Baton Rouge, and it is a lot of little trips to the store that are increasingly crowded and bare and about to close and you have to fight the urge to buy things like a case of Spagettios. No one likes Spagettios, especially after the power comes back on in a few days. Spagettios are stacked in your pantry as a monument to folly until you clean the cabinet out or there is a show that is half-price with canned goods. Like I told a friend who answered his phone in line at Whole Foods buying water and corn chips as I was planning my own trip to Wal-Mart after work, there is no better solution to any problem than throwing money at it.
I started to wish that gorgeous giant Ansel Adams grade oak tree in the front yard had been cut down to a brutal stump by the electric company. The incomprehensible magnitude of a hurricane, existing as a giant bloody smear the size of the Gulf on Doppler weather radar before it arrives, screws with your sense of scale.
A hurricane fucks with the Nietzschean resolve that usually gets me through the day. That which does not kill me only makes me stronger doesn't really hold water because this is one of the rare times that "That which" actually sorta can.
Also, a hurricane makes one unnecessarily eschatological. Like there is a temptation to read The Road or Revelations in a lawn chair in the backyard until the wind blows the book out of my hands. I can't imagine what a grand bummer a hurricane must be to real doomsayers - black clouds are best framed by a sunny sky. Survivalists and guys that dress in armor and have lots of swords, however, are likely and rightly very Game Day about this shit.
The overriding unpredictability of the situation makes everybody a pesky expert and competitor in the preparation Olympics. I think tanking up cars and buying cases of Spagettios is to some degree, the hurricane equivalent of making the men go boil some water while the baby is being born - it keeps them occupied and out of the way of people who really do have something important to do right now. I was joking the other day with my wife, making up things I would do to prepare: "I'm gonna hard boil all the eggs!" only to find that my mom did that very thing before coming up here, and I just ate one, so who knows what all that says. I do know I'm hearing helicopters a lot today, which was the sound of Katrina in Baton Rouge, a subject succinctly and poetically explored by my boy Dave, and that is when things start to feel really real to me.
The Post Office is a startlingly anachronistic thing. I get that not everyone has a computer, and it is still necessary, but it seems all a bit forced to me. Like it's a back up plan being pushed to the forefront. I'm sure I'd think differently were I not electronically connected to the entire goddamn world at all times, and I find the concept of mitigating contact through the barrier of paper appealing, on paper at least, but standing in line to get two stamps seems Beckettian at best. Were I a Better Prepared Person, I wouldn't be in this mess.
Despite having just paid off a hefty tax bill, the two stamps needed to finalize the process was why I was even there, I think I might be a socialist, or more correctly, an anarcho-socialist as defined by Wikipedia - The People's Definitions. I used to think I might be libertarian, but I find libertarians to largely be wet blankets of privilege recasting their winning status as an idealism. Which is a picture of me, politically speaking. The feeling I get about anarcho-socialism is that we should all take care of each other, lift each other up but not make it our life's work. But again, maybe this feeling stems from my not being Better Prepared Person. BPP's generally eschew concerns for their fellow human because they got their shit covered, where I always keep half an eye on the ground to make sure I don't step in mine.
And though I am nibbling on this half-baked love of The People, I wish the mass of them newly ensconced on campus would get off the wireless network so Rhapsody would work. I am so ready to be all post-object about music, embracing the technology of license and access when it works, but like any great technological advancement, or system in general, it gets bogged down when people start using it. It explains why BPP's are generally conservative folks who don;t latch on to new things readily.
Because of this break in the chain, I have been trolling the loosely curated halls of internet radio and while WFMU is always a marked hit or a distinct miss depending on when one lands there, I have been perplexed by Edible Landscapes on London's Resonance FM, a field recording-y week-long gentle stab at a qualitative auditory assessment of what cultures in the North Western hemisphere of the globe might be listening to as part of their daily grind in the built environment. Basically it sounds like someone's phone accidentally dialed you while they sit in a cafeteria. It vacillates between soothing and maddening, but with sine wave smoothness. It's like John Cage's noisy notion of silence, except mediated, chained up. I'll say it is not an unpleasant substitute for listening to precisely what one wants. I'm sure the tape jockeys behind Edible Landscapes would be thrilled with that ringing endorsement.
The difference between art and subject, though, was deftly illuminated by my experience going to the cafeteria upstairs from the post office. It's crowded with new students and is generally a loud echoey place anyway, but sitting there, mildly bemoaning the breaking of the little connector that allows me to listen to music on my phone through headphones, I was overwhelmed with the din of people in there, and found it oppressive and a little depressing, whereas moments earlier, I found the broadcast of a similar soundscape curious, or at least ponderable. Which is why I temper my declaration of socialism with a "might be" and look with trepidation (and a little envy) at Better Preparedness.
