On Avery Island on Avery Island

Wisteria bridge in the Jungle Gardens at Avery Island. It's the pan-continental garden manifestation of the wild ambitions of Tabasco pepper founder E.A. McIlhenny. The hot sauce is made in a  facory adjacent to the gardens on this little salt dome island down at the end of the road.

Yesterday:
The Beatles. The Beatles
The Rolling Stones, Exile on Main Street
Uncle Tupelo, No Depression
Pine Leaf Boys, Back Home
John Szwed, Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World


The Buddha on the grounds.

Today:
The Soft Pack, The Soft Pack
Neutral Milk Hotel, On Avery Island
Robert Pollard, Space City Kicks
R.E.M., Collapse Into Now
The Baseball Project, Vol.2 High and Outside 

Oh, hey, Baton Rouge, The Baseball Project, featuring R.E.M.'s Peter Buck and members of The Dream Syndicate & Minus 5 will be at the Manship Theatre tonight. Do it.





A gator coming up to eat us. They roam around the gardens freely, looking for dumbstruck locals fumbling with their iPhone cameras. Here's another shot. Last time we were at Avery Island, Maya was in a car seat and refused to look over at the gator just outside the window.


What the Buddha sees from his little temple.


Perfunctory. Those are a hundred egrets rooting on piers in the background


Bamboo vs. water oaks.


Female Papilio glaucus, or Eatsern Tiger Swallowtail


Maya posing with giant dinosaur berries


The urge to listen to On Avery Island on Avery Island was resisted. Later that afternoon, I failed to convince my crew to get milkshakes and then go through the car wash. I suspect they recognized that I really just wanted to do that because it would've been a good tweet/Facebook status, but c'mon, tell me you don't want to go do it now that I've said it.


We were hoping for an azalea onslaught but were about a week too early. I will note that I just sneezed from looking at this picture, so maybe that is a blessing.

The Alan Lomax biography arrived yestreday, sliding In Patagonia off the docket for now, though I should be finishing the lingering parts of my own book than reading about a guy who did it all first and better, but if we sweated that we'd never do anything.

I am Pardue, and I am a holy man.

Our next family adventure awaits!

Yesterday afternoon:
Lil Wayne, Tha Carter II

Dear Mr. Toilet: I'm the shit.
-from "Money on my Mind"

Lil Wayne, everybody.

Today:
Flying Lotus, 1983
Madlib, Madlib Medicine Show #5: The History of the Loop Digga, 1990-2000

Regarding D&D, we are looking to channel the collective World of Warcrafting into something new and when they deposited me in the D&D section of Books-a-Million to see what we need to get started a flood of muscle memory took over. I was shaken out of my haze with a text "you still looking at d&d stuff?" I was! Just like Tom Hanks in that Mazes and Monsters movie that my mom had me watch when I first got infected. I wanted to intone to her one night "I am Pardue, and I am a holy man." like Tom Hanks did right before doing the terrible things the game made him do, but I suspected she woudln't have found it funny.


So yeah, I was a D&D NERD for a few salient years in Jr. high. The beginning set from way back when, the one that came with "The Keep on the Borderlands" module,  had the same exact cover, like Gary Gygax must've had a trillion boxes printed back then, but it's kind of a different game now. There were cards and game pieces and a big map to lay out and show to the other players, to which I call bullshit! Get out your graph paper and try to remember where those goddamn orcs are and which way West is again and roll a d12 already. Maya immediately took to the dice before even knowing anything about anything. 

One thing that is interesting: Maya wanted to be a chaotic evil female dwarf fighter named Hamburger and my autoresponse was "There are no female dwarves!" before realizing how messed up that is. I distinctly remember something from my old Player's Handbook that female dwarves were rarely seen outside of the mines in which they kept their homes. The Reagan years in action. Maybe it was never an issue because there were no female D&D players around to protest.   

And so... we played the game again... for one last time. It didn't matter that there were no maps... or dice... or monsters. Pardue saw the monsters. We did not. We saw nothing but the death of hope. And the loss of our friend. And so we played the game until the sun began to set... and all the monsters were dead.
-Kate Finch, Mazes and Monsters

pack them down like brown sugar

Lost Bayou Ramblers, Vermillionaire
Hayes Carll, Kmag Yoyo (& Other American Stories)
Chuck Brodsky, Last of the Old Time
Owl & the Pussycat, Owl & the Pussycat
Elliott Smith, Either/Or
Malcolm Holcolmbe, To Drink the Rain

Last night Maya wrote a really good story about World of Warcraft: lots of details, jumped right into the action, led you into the heart of it, balanced the lingo with just the right amount of contextual explanation and even had a cliffhanger transition at the end. She told Jerri, "I like to put in as many details as I can and pack them down like brown sugar." I will be selling registrations for her writing workshop as soon as I can get it set up.

Kmag Yoyo is an acronym for "kinda makes a good yokel-oriented yellin' option." Also it might stand for "Hey, you like the old Steve Earle records? Me too!" if you look at it right.

Speaking of Steve Earle, No Depression reports:

Earle is making a two-track digital download of "Harlan Man" and "The Mountain" from his 1999 album The Mountain recorded with the Del McCoury Band. All profits will benefit The America Votes Labor Unity Fund via SaveWorkers.org.

Speaking of ND, former editor-of Grant Alden did a notably lovely review of Malcolm Holcolmbe's new record for Blurt. I caught him at a show at the Red Dragon back in 2006 and though I didn't mention it in the review, the thing I really took away from that performance was how he kept referncing sitting on the couch in the power spot, remote in hand and I get a shimmer of that every time I pick up the remote.

Speaking of the Red Dragon, I'm writing up a thing about Chuck Brodsky who is playing there in May and a song of his, or maybe just the power spot of one, made me think of this long forgotten album by Owl & the Pussycat, a side project of the generally unthought-of and wondrous Moore Brothers and how hearing this song on the radio made me turn around and go to the nearest place where I could buy the album and I'll probably listen to it 5 or 6 times when it comes up on the queue and I'm going to have to mope my way down via Elliott Smith just to get to Malcolm Holcolmbe's record.


Speaking of power spots, I suspect the true eschatologists (not just the ones that put that as their religion on Facebook) are having a field day all these floods and earthquakes and harbors choked with dead fish and Maybe come 2013 when aliens find this post poking out of the post-(Mayan Ragnarok) rubble will tsk-tsk and mutter, "So cynical... and all the signs were right there" but dude, Supermoon is about to f our s up next weekend and I got a lot to do before then, so I'll just go get to it.

in Bohemian splendor

Louise Attaque, "Du Nord Au Sud"

Various Artists, Blues Ramblers - The Essential Masters 
The Tom Fun Orchestra, You Will Land With a Thud
Gordon Gano & the Ryans, Under the Sun
Louise Attaque, "Du Nord Au Sud" from Comme on a Dit
Lost Bayou Ramblers, Vermillionaire

Not to be braggy or lookit-me or whatever, but I just got off the phone with one of my favorite indie rock people ever, Gordon Gano of Violent Femmes, and besides giving a great interview, he laid a bunch of cool French music on me that I would have never otherwise investigated. Tom Fun Orchestra is not unlike a French Tom Waits impersonator fronting a sexualized Arcade Fire channeling the Charlie Daniels Band. Louise Attaque makes me want to dim the lights, smoke Gitanes and invite the cool kids over to lanquish upon ratty couches in Bohemian splendor. I will half-liddedly drone to them, "There is wine on the little table unless the wine is gone, and then we shall have to find ourselves some wine."

Speaking of languishing and Bohemian, I started reading In Patagonia, a 1977 South American travelogue by infamous gadabout Bruce Chatwin. I was inspired to do so by this NYT review of Chatwin's letters that I just realized is called Under the Sun just like Gordon Gano's recent solo record and whoa, and then the only reason I mention it is because In Patagonia is a special, wondrous creature, a dangerously reckless and personal form of travel writing for a guy trying to finish his own travel book to be reading, but also because it opens with:

In my grandmother's dining-room there was a glass-fronted cabinet and in the cabinet a piece of skin. It was a small piece only, but thick and leathery, with strands of coarse, reddish hair. It was stuck to a card with a rusty pin. On the card was some writing in faded black ink, but I was too young then to read.
   'What's that?'
   'A piece of Brontosaurus.'

Which is awesome enough on its own, but there is eerie boxcar concordance with a detail of House of Prayer No. 2 where a kid brings to school for show-and-tell a piece of Nat Turner's skin nailed to a board, which made me also go whoa which led me to read a little more about Nat Turner's execution (WHOA if you don't already know) than I knew and makes me wonder what kind of skin is going to be nailed to what sort of next thing I come across.


Here is a previously-posted Mr. Gano with the Lost Bayou Ramblers back in January doing "Gone Daddy Gone" in Lafayette.

because they happen to also be the wolves

Maya's picture of me being bitten by a crawfish.

Joe Falcon, Cajun Music Pioneer: Live at the Triangle Club in Scott, LA

Louis from Lost Bayou Ramblers recommended this old Arhoolie Joe Falcon recording to me yesterday and I recommend it on to you to get your feral Cajun stomp on. I apologize in advance for the following possibly ill-informed political rant. I'll bracket it because I think political rhetoric needs bracketing, lest you confuse it with life.

Wisconsin, I don't know what to say. I was born in the Midwest and though I don't really claim it as where I'm "from" I still look to y'all from the weird, aggressively-seasoned margin of America to keep a level head about things. I remember in the middle of Reaganmania discovering with shock that my Missouri, church deacon, Masonic member, soybean-farming uncle, the one who wouldn't ride in a Toyota because he fought in WWII, was a staunch Democrat. "The Republicans are no friend to the farmer." It was not long after that I found our my uncle had a still on his property and at one of their kids' wedding, I saw my aunt get plastered on the product of that still around a motel swimming pool outside of St. Louis. It was also not long before most of his land was bought out by mega-ag corporations, at least the parts that he didn't retain to lease out to the Amish that lived around him.

In my teens I had an inkling about the Masons, I asked him on his patio if it was true that if a brother Mason was to ask you to hide him from the law, you'd have to do it, and he chuckled that he supposed so. Then I asked him if he ever hid anyone away in his barn, the same one where he kept an old playboy with Barbie Benton as the centerfold (I didn't mention that I knew about the Playboy but I'm guessing he knew that we all knew about it and maybe that's why it was there), and he got suddenly serious. "I can't tell you that."

It was an epiphany about the true nature of brotherhood. We have to be there for each other because everyone else is not there for us, and we become stronger the more interwoven and far-reaching our "we" is. It is sad to see such a thing go down and to see blue collar America buy into anti-union rhetoric, out of pettiness over not having the securities of a union (er, join one) or the general bullshit tactics: fear of gay marriages or abortion doctors or evolution or whatever imagined threat to your way of life behind which the corporate shills hide. You steadfast folks in the nation's core should know better.

Remember Detroit? Detroit worked when the worst of corporations and the most powerful of unions kept each other in check like binary stars revolving around the good people of Michigan who just wanted to feed their families and build the cars that were the symbols of America.

Or if you can't remember back as far as Detroit's heyday, back before it was receding into weeds, take it from an ex-pat who lives in a state that has sold itself out to corporate interests to a such degree that the residue of that deal is washing up as tar balls on our beaches and that our state is literally falling back into the sea; if someone takes away the barriers that protect that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to which we all aspire, they are not setting you free from a nanny state, they are throwing you to the wolves. They are doing this because they happen to also be the wolves.

See, I told you House of Prayer No. 2 will make you all you and you about everything. Good thing I'm such an expert!

Electric Carnival Jesus

Unique Dancers at the New Roads Mardi Gras parade. Somehow I'd gone this whole season without seeing my favorite independent Baton Rouge dance crew. I was supposed to do a story on them but I could never get in touch with anyone involved; I feared their candle had been snuffed, but fortunately I just had to be in the right place.

Partial Mardi Gras weekend extended soundtrack:
The Yardbirds, The Best of the Yardbirds Vol. 2
Various Artists, Rushmore soundtrack
Rockpile, Seconds of Pleasure
G. Love & Special Sauce, Fixin' To Die
T-Model Ford & GravelRoad, Taledragger

Today:
Nick Lowe, Jesus of Cool
Elvis Costello & The Attractions, Punch the Clock
Squeeze, East Side Story
The Records, Paying for the Summer of Love
Shoes, Present Tense/Tongue Twister

It might be heresy to say so, but I'm glad Mardi Gras is over; it was fun but it wore me out and I didn't even chase chickens in Mamou or have Electric Carnival Jesus appear a go-cup in New Orleans. I appreciated the jive-assedness of Southdowns and Spanish Town in Baton Rouge and the truck parades in New Roads, especially in contrast to the major spectacle of the big parades in New Orleans or even in my hometown in Houma. There is something beautifully let's-do-this-anyway about the absense of grandeur. The rain was brutal on MGDay in New Roads and only the they-did-it-just-right-ness of Rockpile's Seconds of Pleasure got us home through the deluge in one-piece. The driver and I agreed that every Nick Lowe album and every Dave Edmunds album has great songs sandwiched in with throwaways (I'm listening to Jesus of Cool right now to test taht theory) but Seconds of Pleasure somehow got them to just do the good parts. Even when it's kinda stupid, it's brilliant.


Rockpile, "A Knife and a Fork"


And wow, I forgot all about The Records and "Starry Eyes". That is how it sounds in my head when I play guitar.

Oh, and I finished House of Prayer No. 2. Mark Richard might be my favorite author now. As a whole, it does not quite have the potency of his collection Charity but in many, many, even most parts, it is up there with the greats and perhaps the only justifiable longform use of 2nd person in existence. You will be all "you" and "you" about everything when you finish, and that kind of firepower needs to be trusted to only the steadiest of hands.

Happy Ash Wednesday to all you papists out there, bless yr dirty little foreheads.

something between a cockfight and a wizard standoff

I took a million photos and videos over Spanish Town Mardi Gras but this one of a woman walking through the rain next to me encapsulates what it's about.


And this. I love my neighbors.


Some people are undeterred by weather.


And my buddy Dave's second line in the rain.

That night Clarke and Alex P and Guy and I hit the barn dance at the Lakeview RV Park in Eunice, LA for Red Stick Ramblers and Pine Leaf Boys.


Guy won third place in the costume contest. It was something between a cockfight and a wizard standoff.


Last song of the night with the Pine Leaf Boys.

Before all of that, gardening!





Camellias!



Here are the electric flambeau at the Southdowns Parade on Friday night. That's Chewbacca at 0:43. Love alla y'all!