I got some great pictures from Poverty Point

This is Mound A, the "flying bird" mound, 72 ft high, shot from atop Mound B, the "ball court" mound, 11 ft high.

I chaperoned Maya's class field trip to Poverty Point in North Louisiana, about a three-hour bus ride drive from here.

It is one of the oldest hunter gatherer settlement sites in North America, dating back to 1400 BCE. The village of 1,000 took the shape of concentric semi-circles, which you can still see in the fields on the way to the two massive earthwork mounds at the site. The staff and museum are informative and understated, which I appreciate. Let the giant mounds do the talking.


Cropduster that kept buzzing us while we were up on the mound.


These barrels represent posts of something they just found at the site. I'm fairly certain UFO's land there at night as well.


Wild purple hyacinth with the mounds in the background.



Figurines in the museum


I was trying to capture this kid standing alone on a stump when suddenly these kids ran up and formed a star.


Sound advice.


The drive up will fulfill your needs for experiencing in-process industrial decay and how societies and brick and steel are involved in the Alchemy of charm. I regret not getting a shot of the seafoam green front of the Cave Theatre in Dephi, but then I get to go back.


There was some real magic hour light out on the vast flatness of the Louisiana delta, a part of the state whose surface I've barely scratched.

the best afternoon soundtrack in a while

Tindersticks, "Show Me Everything"

Tindersticks, The Something Rain
Helado Negro, Awe Owe and Island Universe Story One


Helado Negro, "Dahum"

Duane Pitre, Origin
Calexico, Spoke


Calexico, "Removed"

Nina Simone, Moonsong


Nina Simone, "Don't Smoke in Bed

Louisiana Saturday Night Book Launch Party

Louisiana Saturday Night Book Launch Party

Saturday March 10, 2012, 8pm until at Teddy's Juke Joint

Celebrate the good times only found in south Louisiana's juke joints, honky-tonks, and dance halls with the author Alex V. Cook, the legendary Teddy Johnson, and the sounds of One More Time. Patrons will be able to purchase an autographed copy of LOUISIANA SATURDAY NIGHT at the event.

Free and open to the public!

For more information, visit http://www.lsupress.org/ or call (225) 578-8282

Here is the Facebook event.

Edited to add: I have a loose agreement with Teddy that he's gonna let me wear one of his capes.


If not for me, come out there for ol' Teddy.

her and she and hey and yes

Al Hansen, Calliope Venus... Lick Me Momma,1968, Hershey wrappers and sliver paint on plywood
27 x 25 inches (68.90 x 64.14 cm) ARG# HA1968-002 from the Andrea Rosen Gallery site

I had a dream last night that I'd acquired Calliope Venus at an estate sale. The estate sale people thought it was something one of the kids of the family had done. I will say that it was considerably larger in my dream.

As it happens, Maya was playing with the leftover foil from a Hersey's kiss in the car on the way to school this morning and asked if anyone had ever made a sculpture out of Hershey's kiss foil and I told her about Al Hansen, how he generally had one artistic end in mind - big booby lady silhouettes - and a number of means to get there - cigarette butts, text from magazines, arriving at Hershey wrappers because he could make her and she and hey and yes. 

I had it in my head (and dream) that the silver negative space was made from the candy wrapper foil.  The effluvia of silver paint is better. It is the reflective world forming her bombshell presence. The pronoun that is her silhouette. The world looks to be as thick as a lava flow, settling in pools to cool around her. It is she who is the hey and her and yes and most important to understand, hers, while the world is just whatever the world is. Boring without her in it.

for your float viewing pleasure

Frankenstein Float, Krewe of Houmas, Mardi Gras Day 2012, Houma

Friday:
Fugazi, In On the Kill Taker and Instrument Soundtrack
Marginal Man, Identity
Dag Nasty, Can I Say
Bad Brains, I Against I
Hüsker Dü, Candy Apple Grey
Sugar, Copper Blue
The London Suede, Dog Man Star
Public Image LTD., The Flowers of Romance


Detail of "Civil War" float, Krewe of Kajuns, Mardi Gras Day 2012, Houma

Tuesday:
Ramsay Midwood, Larry Buys a Lighter (4 times)
The Allman Brothers Band, Eat a  Peach
Now Ensemble, Awake
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!


Cops arranged in a Fibonacci sequence before the Krewe of Houmas, Parade

Wednesday:
Warren Zevon, Excitable Boy
Talking Heads, Fear of Music
Galactic, Carnivale Electricos
The Quantic Soul Orchestra, Stampede
Alice Russell, My Favorite Letters
Otis Taylor, Otis Taylor's Contraband
Tindersticks, The Something Rain


The purchasing of plastic swords at Krewe of Houmas

I don't have much of a Mardi Gras wrap-up thesis statement to make. I had a 10% inclination to go to New Orleans this year, but really I love the way Mardi Gras Day plays out in Houma. Sweet, hodgepodge, a little trashy, the streets alive but not clogged with whole down-the-bayou families that otherwise don't venture into town except to party it down. Here are a few others for your float viewing pleasure.






Maya and her friend "goin' walk" - their first stab at the great MG tradition of aimlessly traipsing the route while waiting for the parade to start.

This year's Forever

Around the corner from Maya's school next year.

Thursday:
Otis Taylor, Otis Taylor's Contraband
Black Truth Rhythm Band, Ifetayo
Gary Smulyan, Smul's Paradise
Tord Gustavsen Quartet, The Well
Corea, Clarke & White, Forever


I'm letting DownBeat's February editor's picks do some of the driving today. Otis Taylor is the grooviest, weirdest guy in grown-folks soul blues. You really gotta get with this record. Black Rhythm Truth Band is all four of those things coalescing into a fifth radiant orb of music. Lately, my fifty-cent words have been "manifestation" and "coalescing." At least I've been giving "synergy" a rest. I may start swapping out "radiant" in favor of "luminous" even though neither really says the thing I'm trying to say. "Magnetic" is more like it, without the extra-magnetic connotations "magnetic" has. I want to convey feeling affected physically by the presence of another thing, which is what magnetism really is. All light really does is fry you or cast a shadow. But, I like the way "luminous" feels in my mouth, or at least in the mouth of my mind when I type it. I never feel I have the right vocabulary to describe jazz. I think the fact that jazz is a vocabulary might be the issue. Regardless, the Gary Smulyan album says all the things you want a jazz album to say in a way that makes you like them to say them.

The Tord Gustavsen Quintet's album wasn't on the list; it was an ad on the side of the list. It sounds like its coming from down a well - muted, not really happening in the same space you are listening in but connected in an inconvenient way.  Forever won the best jazz instrumental album Grammy. Each year, I always go listen to the jazz Grammy winner. It's the bare minimum we can do for poor old jazz. Here is something I wrote about Herbie Hancock's River: The Joni Letters when it won five years ago. Forever ago. This year's Forever sounds like jazz played with chamber music precision and yet remains still loose enough to still feel like jazz.

If I made a jazz album, like right now instead of doing this or whatever I am really supposed to be doing besides this, I would call it Cheap-O-Mart and have the players' names placed in a sans serif font under the above picture on the cover. The music would be a pale imitation of jazz I like, as that photo is a pale imitation of the bleached-out pictures my friend Frank McMains takes. He did the cover photo for my book, the thing that makes it look like a real book. My photo above looks likes a fair-to-middling photo filter job; his photos look like they are developed on high-thread count linen.

Poetry is not in the details but how the details are presented. The Truth is in that poetry. Maybe it's the same thing. Maybe I don't have the right vocabulary for this either. Or maybe I do. I just got word that a new book contract is in the works, and I wasn't going to say anything until it was signed and everything. I was going to hint at it obliquely, but I'm trying to correct the general/specific conflicts in my writing and say what I'm saying and so on. I'll make a more formal announcement when there is ink on paper.

teenage danger activity

All it takes is a lava lamp and a spooky tree to reveal the true nature of a place.

Wednesday:
Various Artists, John Cage at Summerstage
Kraftwerk, Radio-Activity and The Man-Machine
Jean Michel Jarre, Oxygene
Yello, Solid Pleasure



Yello, "Bostich"  - I've been trying to find this song for decades. Not trying all that hard, mind you, but still, effort was put toward it, and I just happened upon it. I remember sitting on the floor in my cousin's boyfriends's apartment while they made out or did drugs or engaged in some kind of teenage danger activity behind a screen as the 12" of this played on the record player.

Also, did you know that one of the guys from Yello was a Swiss millionaire industrialist, gambler and national golf pro? I'm resisting the urge to make some sort of "oh yeah" comment.

---

Wednesday, I was invited to talk about my work at a local Catholic girls' school. Lately, my work is talking about bars, which is a perhaps dicey thing to be doing in a chapel with  reasonably bored teenage girls assembled before me, Jesus Christ bowing his head on the wall behind. I tried to pick the least salacious piece from Louisiana Saturday Night that made my point about writing, a bit about the Cajun barn dances at Lakeview Park and Beach RV park in Eunice. It was derived from this Country Roads article from two years ago, and it wasn't until I was reading it aloud did I remember it had this bit about an RV park in Colorado

The same in which, in the post campfire dark, among the din of tree frogs and cicadas, I managed my first real kiss off a girl from Denton, Texas, whose dad also had a taste for the mountains

They (students + staff) took it in stride; either they weren't listening or their resolve is strong enough to weather the regaling of teenage urges. Right before the talk, I asked if there was wi-fi in the chapel. "No Internet here," the event organizer said. "The only connection you can get in here is to God."

That point about writing: you go to a place or do a thing, real or not, and write all the facts down and then later arrange them in a way that a Truth emerges.  Thanks to St. Joseph's for having me and the Advocate's  Danny Heitman and Corinne Cook for being such great company on the panel.

---

Another point about writing I said somewhere else and I'll stop: "Place" is everything that isn't you. It's why everyone experiences a place a little differently; they are all peering at it through a differently-shaped missing chunk.

---

Edited to add: any discussion mentioning teenage urges and/or Denton, TX is remiss if this is not included.


The Mountain Goats, "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton"