RIP Nunu's

The scene at Nunu's in Arnaudville, 2007

I'm more than a little heartbroken over news about the fire that destroyed Nunu's/Town Market Centre in Arnaudville, LA over the weekend. Loved that place. Town Market Centre was (and I guess still is) a key place in my book in how it balanced maintaining tradition with revitalization. My thoughts go out to George and his crew in hopes that they find a way to rebuild, and understanding if they don't. I did a story on it for Country Roads back in 2007 that I couldn't find it online so here is the unedited copy. Here's the pics from that trip as well.

Making a New Tradition at Nunu’s
George Marks and the experiment in Arnaudville.

When we talk of attractions, we like to think that they are naturally occurring phenomena waiting there for us to discover them. That’s the perverse, egotistic joy of exploration: think some roadside restaurant or perfect riverbank or stretch of scenic highway has been just sitting there, muddling along waiting for us to happen along and complete the circuit. It’s a fallacy, of course, but one that works in everyone’s favor.

The truth is, most destinations come about as a mix of happenstance and determination. Someone has a place, an idea and then the river flow of the Universe turns it into what it will eventually become or washes it away. We, the travelers, are part of that river, with each paddle stroke, each time we pull over to shore, we help direct that river.

There is something to find at every destination for good and bad. On my way to Arnaudville to check out the scene artist George Marks has set up, I stopped at the Tiger Truck Stop in Gross Tete to witness the “live tiger exhibit” I’ve seen advertised from the highway for years but have always been too afraid to stop at. The truck stop is just that, a fuel-up station with a staggering assortment of beef jerky available at the counter, which would make it a favorite in my book were it not for the tiger pacing in the cage exposed to the elements, out between the trailer of trucker showers and the frontage road. It’s a painful tableau to witness, and while I have no doubt that the tiger is adequately tended to and cared for, this is the kind of attraction I can do without.

George Marks’ complex in Arnaudville is more what I was after. It started when the artist moved back to his hometown as a pit stop on his way to New York, and never left. He opened his gallery/studio in a building right on Highway 31, just before the bridge across Bayou Fuselier, titling it Town Market Centre. They opened a kitchen in the back (serving beer, wine and delicious pressed sandwiches. I got the grilled pork and despite the order from my taste buds, I couldn’t finish it) and started booking Cajun and roots bands in the cavernous main room, and Nunu’s was born.

The place has a smart, theatric yet homespun design that sets it apart from any Cajun dance club I’ve been to. Artwork from Marks and some of the other artists adorns the walls, and the dance floor, with its track light perimeter and black background is weirdly glamorous. “Preserve, promote and perpetuate, without becoming a theme park” Marks says of his club. “We want to be true to the area without being contrived.”

The locals seem to buy in. Nunu’s holds a table de Français on the last Saturday of every month for French speakers of all ages to meet, and gossip. “We had 73 people signed in.” says Mavis Frugé. “L.J. Melancon brought in his accordion and Louie Michot brought his fiddle and we had an impromptu performance.” This kind of spirit permeates the way Marks runs the business. “We had one group come in that asked if they could have a mandolin player join in on their Cajun group. I said, ‘Sure, why not?” and it was a hit with the audience.”

The truest test of community acceptance was passed that evening when the Lost Bayou Ramblers kicked in with their first waltz, the dance floor immediately filled up. I saw a number of familiar faces from other Cajun dance clubs in the area, mixed with a lot of younger people, some barefoot some in cowboy boots but all moving in that beautiful way the accordion commands of its listeners. The Lost Bayou Ramblers mirror Nunu’s in a lot of ways, they are definitely steeped in the traditions of where they are from, but they have a more playful, relaxed approach to it. Cajun bands often seem like they are trying to out-tradition each other, catering to the hotshots on the dance floor, but the Ramblers’ rhythms hover more toward mid-tempo, and was frankly more inviting than I’m used to. At one point, a line dance broke out with some joining in while others orbiting in two-step formation. It was a beautiful sight.

Marks says that Nunu’s and Town Market Centre is set up for possibilities. “We are talking about building a big screened in porch out back, and possibly having some floating kitchens out on the bayou,” he says. “One of our regular performers has mentioned wanting to barbeque out back, and I can picture him entering the dance floor discarding his apron and chef’s hat and taking his place on the stage. We are always trying to encourage people to do something they wouldn’t normally do.”

the molasses of Realization

Owen Pallett, Heartland
The Mountain Goats, The Coroner's Gambit
Nick Drake, Pink Moon

Last night I went to an Irish Film Festival held at Phil Brady's, a blues bar walking distance from my house, so I walked. I do like walking to a bar, but I like walking home even more. The combo unease of the dark + making use of the evening's special on Guinness makes it adventurous. The locus of the evening was my dear departed friend Terry Kennedy's unfinished documentary on Angola prison. Terry explained to me once that he used experimental editing and it does: scenes collide into each other mid-story, the voices sometimes are garbled beyond recognition.

The real meat of the thing though, were these extended slow-motion stretches of the infamous prison rodeo. They are shot from the bleachers with the support columns for the roof rendering the images as diptychs and triptychs in sync with the drama of stumbling prisoners and a batshit angry bull, all moving through the molasses of Realization. During one part where he watches an ecstatic gospel concert unfold, I swore I saw one person up in the stands who, in shadow looked like an A superimposed against the sky, and another couple sitting together that looked like an N. I probably could've found the rest of ANGOLA had I kept looking.

A number of stories by aging prisoners rattled off were accompanied by a distant din of wind chimes - for whom the bell tolls, perhaps and hallways and cells were shot with a lean to the left, as if the camera were becoming too much of a burden to keep straight under such narrative weight.

It goes on, much like the filmmaker would, but I think the hypnotic, even monotonous segments might be crucial in trying to imply the truth of prison. I'd sen most of it, or at least one version of it, with Terry when he was still alive. He was concerned about the editing; it apparently had put his impromptu test groups to sleep. I told him I thought that was a good sign - we are lulled into complicity with things like law and justice and the obscured mechanics by which they are run. No one fell asleep last night anyway, so that's something.

Got some really encouraging feedback on an article submission this afternoon, so we'll see. Also, because of that damn Nick Drake/fake-Christo & Jean Claude AT&T commercial, I have had it in my head to do a version of "From the Morning" except with brushed drums and cymbals replacing the guitar part. I don't know where the idea came from, but I have been walking around with it burning a whole in my potentiality. I do have a drumset at home... I don't know if this is a good idea, but ideas are good for something even when they aren't.

Here is Nick Drake impersonator Nicked Drake doing a more faithful version.

hard day for old bastards

RIP Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs



RIP Harvey Pekar

It's a hard day for old bastards. The rest of you old bastards: stay out of sight until the coast is clear.


Sugar Minott, "Lovers Rock"

I don't know if Sugar Minott was a bastard, but he died too.

out of the same shade of blue

The scene at Club LA

Peter Case, Wig!
Jan Mendelsohn, American Music

I know it's a terrible picture but the above accurately paints the scene of a backwoods zydeco club like Club LA in Cecilla, LA. The only light was a bare bulb over the pool tables in back and a clamp-on work light over the shots bar set up by the band in the murky distance, cut beautifully here by an old man rooster-walking the bar in a cowboy hat. Squint hard enough and you can see the five or six tension cables strung over the empty dancefloor holding the place together. The particular occasion was the dance after the Ropin Pen Riders's trail ride, which I did not attend because I don't have a horse. All I got to say is the soft jam zydeco variant provided by J. Paul Jr. and the Zydeco Nubreedz might be my favorite kind. A keyboard and a modicum of booty call harmony goes a long way to extend the loveability of the old chank-a-chank. More dark pics.


Chubby Carrier

We also hit zydeco longtimer Chubby Carrier & the Bayou Swamp Band at the Blue Moon in Lafayette, a markedly more kinetic take on the music. His washboard player is hypnotic to watch. More of that scene.

The evening was a living counterpoint between black Acadiana and white, how a single peculiar thing like zydeco is fractured on that point and channeled in radically different ways. My buddy Clarke and I were struck that at the two bars we visited, within 30 miles of each other, involved in the same music yet there was so little crossover. We wondered if anyone at either place had even heard of the other, much less been there. It's also the kind of evening that makes one look at how racist one actually might be (speaking for myself) making such deductions and broad assumptions, which is good too. The closest similarity between the scenes I could see at both was there were accordions involved and each cost $10 to get in.

The next day I was reading American Music, the new Jane Mendelsohn book (I've never read the old one though a lot of people have, I guess) in the blinding heat beside the pool, wearing down the vestiges of my earache. It's good (both the book and the earache, in varying degrees); about the evocation of stories/false memories/alternative realities through human touch and while reading it, I got a sudden flash to call someone I hadn't spoken to in some time. I used to think this kind of impulse was a throb of the collective nervous system, an autonomic response that one should heed immediately but have learned that, no, these things just happen and you should stay the course and besides, my phone battery was giving out. I couldn't if I wanted to.

Then, on the last shaded part of that battery I checked Facebook and saw that very person, out of the same shade of blue, responded to a post about the very scenes depicted above. A little freaked, but not too much, I dogeared the page and got in that pool, earache be damned.

Independent of scene and my place in one, I cannot get enough of the new Peter Case record.


Peter Case, "Dig What You're Putting Down"

he screams and takes his sledgehammer

This watermelon will haunt your dreams. From here.

John Martyn, Solid Air (Deluxe Edition)

Wow. It's not like me to re-report things like this but I have context. For my twelfth birthday, my mom took me to to see Gallagher in concert at the Saenger in New Orleans, at the height of his powers and it was the funniest thing I ever saw. I was rolling on the floor despite knowing all the jokes already. He was state-of-the-art participation comedy then - people brought rolls of Visqueen and raincoats - and I wore that teal Gallagher t-shirt until it was too small for me. I didn't really expect him to maintain velocity all these years, and I remember hearing about material theft by his brother touring as Gallagher II, but I was not prepared for the OG watermelon smasher to have become a paranoid, racist boor who turned his trademark act of timeless humor into

Then Gallagher gets a tin pie plate. He opens a giant can of fruit cocktail and pours it in. He opens a can of some Asian vegetable—water chestnuts, maybe—and pours that in, too. "This is the China people and queers!!!" he screams and takes his sledgehammer to the thing with a fury that is no fun at all.

Was he always like that and I just don't remember? Read more in this similarly pained realization in the Stranger if you dare, but it is a little like finding out Speed Racer was a Nazi or something. Speed Racer wasn't a Nazi, was he?

Dear old departed John Martyn will make it all better, deluxe edition style.

up on the Rumpus!

Love on fire in Fireworks City, St. Charles, Mo.

Adrian Belew, Desire of the Rhino King
Skipp Coon & Mr. Nick, Mr. Nick presents: A tribute to Stevie Wonder Vol. 1 (1961​-​1969)

Media Announcement: My favorite lit/culture site going is the Rumpus; a catch-all of egghead stuff that hits my buzzer button. In fact, I was perusing an article about the Russian Liberation Army linked from one of their work-daily Morning Coffee posts when notified an earache-influenced review of David Markson's The Last Novel penned by yours truly is gracing their pages. I'm thrilled to be up on the Rumpus! Toss them some money! Join their book club! Or even their poetry book club!

Not sure what message exactly this video is supposed to convey, or why "Adidas in Heat" was used as the soundtrack, but it is the kind of sense the 80s/90s made back then.


Adrian Belew, "Adidas in Heat"

Kinda like how this Stevie Wonder tribute thing makes perfect sense now. (HT to David "Gorjus" McCarty)

Gator!

Maya and her friends found baby frogs at the pool. No gators (yet.)

Joshua Cohen, Witz
The Who, "Who Are You"
Mute Math, "The Nerve"
King Crimson, Discipline

Media Announcement: My review of the Best of LSU Fiction collection is up at the Oxford American site. My outsize praise for it had to be whittled down for size but it is a much better read than the accurate but unavoidably insular, campus-gift-shop title implies. Speaking of the OA, should you find yourself near the sweaty regions of the Mississippi Delta this weekend, you should head to their Most Southern Weekend On Earth. I'd be there just to pretend I have any business hanging out with Peter Guralnick, but my maladies of late have knocked me off my rounds.

Awesome Man Vs. Nature Announcement: A seven-foot-long alligator waltzed into one of the buildings on campus yesterday, albeit a warehousey, down-near-the-river building, but still a building on campus. Gator! The subject comes up a lot in extra-Louisiana correspondence, so I'm happy to fuel the myth they are running around loose everywhere with the fact that they actually are running around loose everywhere.

Once I was teaching a class at an aluminum plant downriver and half my class was late/absent (typical at the plants, they have stuff to do and don't like to go to class) but they all trundled in giggling with a phone-cam picture of one of them holding open the mouth of a ten-foot alligator they'd found in one of the most assuredly contaminated cooling ponds around the plant. Contaminated alligator. Wrap your brain around that.

I'd forgotten how much I like the 80's Talking Heads/Pere Ubu upstager version of King Crimson until I heard a Mute Math song on the radio last night and was shocked it wasn't King Crimson. Adrian Belew was a brilliant frontman for those times - absurd against the grind, grinding against the abject. It succeeds where the Who sorta dropped the thread in 1978 with Who Are You.

The title song was playing on the radio at the pool last night and my friend Jack and I were discussing how anyone would write a song like that. It's not a bad song per se, certainly not the worst Who song, but who would sit down and write that song? The Who were always the greatest sort of train jumpers, firmly aping the trend with an eye on the next one, but "Who Are You" seems too much a crazy quilt. Wiki explaineth:

Who Are You was put out at a time when the two major camps of rock, progressive rock and punk rock, were conflicting due to their antipodal styles. Pete Townshend's compositions were written as an attempt to bring the two styles together.

Jack said he heard a radio interview with Pete Townsend once around that time (I am old but he is old as dirt) where he talked about going to a Sex Pistols show and that everyone there called him "grandpa" and spat at him and nearly ran him out of there and that really excited him, and then they played "Pretty Vacant" on the show, maybe for the first time on the radio in Gulf Shores, AL.

None of this factors into the plot or the understanding thereof in Witz, but I think everything else does.