AnimaMundi

Nietzsche on New Orleans

Your Right Hand Thief is right on with this post. This is what New Orleans is all about. At least I get it and I've been known to be fairly thick at times. Why the hell doesn't middle America have a clue? I just answered my own question.

"No, the pretext was the football game, but folks instinctively knew that this gathering was becoming an important cultural celebration of rebirth and renewal. And that "New Orleans emotion" intensified enough to pierce through the corporate "veil" of a Monday Night Football telecast into millions of homes. But it wasn't just "raw" emotion. I think many viewers understood that New Orleanians are culturally unified in profoundly deep and unique ways. So, the delirium at the Dome was like the jazz dance outside the cemetery... we believe it is appropriate and important to celebrate like that-- especially after a tragedy! And... quite simply, no one else does it like we do."

"I Hate To Tell You, But That's Where You Are."

From Yahoo Sports "The Forgotten":

But as the announcers called attention to the devastation that still exists a year after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the city (please get the story right Yahoo-and the levees broke big time), here's what the cameras failed to capture in that same community:

A group of 30 people gathered to watch the game next to a FEMA trailer. There were residents struggling to rebuild their homes and volunteers there to help them sharing red beans and rice. It was a congregation cheering as if it were inside the Superdome instead of inside a garage.

Later in the broadcast, with more images of the Ninth Ward on the screen, one of the TV announcers described the neighborhood as "a graveyard of a community that no longer exists."

James Lemann Jr., who organized the gathering in his garage for the much-anticipated Saints home opener, turned to a visitor and said, "I hate to tell you, but that's where you are."

The Washington Post:

"Under the great roof there came a noise -- not a rumble, because the Superdome at 27 stories high tends to swallow the screams of 70,003 and make them sound more like a persistent howl. It must have been much like the roar the wind made that day 13 months ago as it tore its way into the stadium."

"Who dat say they gonna beat them Saints?

"Who dat?

"Who dat?

Win, Lose or Draw from Wet Bank Guide speaks to the point about the daily battle for the city of New Orleans.

Aluminum Foil

The other day I was wondering in my secret laboratory how aluminum foil is made. Now I know. Fantasticular.

Sacredome

The New Orleans Saints play the Atanta Falcons tonight on Monday Night football. This is the first game played at the Dome of ill repute and last resort since the Flood caused by the failure of levees built with 4th century technology by the infamous US Army Corps of Engineers. I hope the fans blow the top off the Dome to open the eyes and ears of the people north of New Orleans.

Update: Even though the coin toss by Bush the Elder was not in their favor, the NO Saints trounce the Atlanta Falcons. After the blocked punt and td, it was fate for them to win big. ESPN actually had Spike Lee in the booth and devoted some time to the fact that things are NOT hunky-dory in the city. There's jobs, but no freakin' affordable housing. People need homes in which to make a life, from which to go make a living and from which to send their children to a decent school. Amen. 

Poppy Z. Brite, author of Lost Souls, says that some things are more important than books. For an author to say this, it has to be something extraordinary, like her city of New Orleans.

Over at Harry Shearer's blog, it's Saints

Day.

We need to hook this woman up with a $million a day. She'll help the economy of NO toute suite.

Travelling Turks

I had never heard of Roberto DeSimone until I listened to a track of his first album in 20 years on the Rootsworld site the other day. I never buy Italian music. In fact, I avoid it for the most part. I cook and eat Italian food. I view Italian cinema. I have to take that back. On the recommendation of a knowledgeable music freak-friend, I did buy a best of Paolo Conte that I enjoy very much each time I listen. I highly recommend it. It's all over the musical map. But that's about it. All other attempts to listen to Italian music has driven me to food and wine. However, after two listenings to the DeSimone album, my hook into "La Turchi Viaggiano" (The Travelling Turks) is the track "Tarantella di San Michele". It's a slow rhythmic trance-like song with "Turkish" overtones. It brings back memories of my aunts and uncles dancing the Tarantella at wedding receptions. I remember it being danced somewhat faster than the tempo on the album. Years later in my early college days, I was in a loft in NYC and first heard Manitas de Plata, the great Spanish flamenco guitarist. He was accompanied by musicians whose descendents would become The Gipsy Kings. His music was another thing for me at the time. I had never heard flamenco like this before. There were the TV and Hollywood versions, but this music was more pure and raw. When I watch the 16mm film my father took of the weddings in my family, I see my uncle and godfather George dancing the Tarantella with great panache. The arm and foot moves are very close to the venerable flamenco and troubadors of Arles in Provence. The Spanish do stomp more forcefully though.

Here's an insightful quote from the liners of the album by DeSimone himself:

"In the course of the last 50 years our relationship with this work of art has changed considerably. It is constantly being caught in the trap of outdated profitability and ever more perverted by cultural arrogance, by interpretative and philological presumption, whilst it has completely lost its revolutionary substance and its function as a living bridge of understanding between the past and future.
Quite the opposite, the society of our age is abandoning itself to an absurd present to the exclusion of all else, in which everything has to coexist without the least reference to history or to those forms of expression which have characterised art for thousands of years.
There have been, incidentally, countless artistic works which have highlighted this problem over the past fifty years.
In fact, the music on these recordings gathers together stylistic fragments of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries at one and the same level, as well as harmonic projections of the same, rather like the reflection of a distorted TV screen. Every now and again the whole work is placed on an autonomous rhythmic track, even if this has been arbitrarily set to a style of composition in which the rhythmic - schizophrenically rhythmic - reference wants to take the place of a formal identity. It is as if we were no longer capable of satisfying ourselves with one single rhythm and that we are aware that sometimes time can exist on two or three different planes. Be that as it may, the ideology of Messianic well-being in the world of consumption propagates with cunning, so that precisely this, the highest human achievement of this history is not the History, whilst that one, in one way or another, continues on its path.
And the Turks? Has the time now come, as the western arrogance of exploitation is forced to settle its account with the Orient, with the Islamic world, with Africa, which have been the victims of violence and egotistical and cynical market structures for centuries? In consequence, a metaphor. Apart from that, the term 'Turchi' / 'Turks' has always symbolised a different nature, an obscure fear of a mixed, irregular rhythm, an unfamiliar heart, which is unsettling for the hypocritical certainties of a Eurocentric, or rather a western-centric culture."

White & Nerdy

Weird Al's new video.

New Orleans

I might not post about the city of New Orleans everyday, but the people and the spirit of the city are always with me. Via New Orleans truth comes Randy Fertel's "Katrina Five Ways".

Wet Bank Guide points us to a difference in demolition standards in New Orleans. Could it really be? Oh, the humanity.

What I Listen To, Mostly #3

This my last jazz (for now) "what I listen to mostly" post. This time out I'm just lsiting artists. I suggest consulting the All Music Guide for recommendations on specific albums. For jazz, blues and R&B, hip-hop and other forms of dance they're useful. Beyond that, they're useful but with qualifications. Their database is enormous and they can't be up on all the music on the planet. No one can. I know my lists are very limited, but hey there's lots of other sounds floating around that are equally engaging. Next I'll try to tackle some R&B, funk, New Orleans music followed by the French Antilles and Africa.

Richard Groove Holmes, Freddie Hubbard, Milt Jackson, Abdullah Ibrahim, Mahalia Jackson, Etta James, Al Jarreau, Louis Jordan, BB King, Meade Lux Lewis, Wynton Marsalis, Carmen Mc Crae, Bud Powell, Louis Prima, Ike Quebec, Sonny Rollins, Roomful of Blues, Jimmy Rushing, Lee Shaw Trio, Nina Simone, Jimmy Smith, Billy Taylor, Grover Washington, Ben Webster, Jimmy and Mama Yancey, Lester Young.

"the ghost of 'lectricity howls in her face..."

For me, Bob Dylan's essential sound was contained in three albums, "Bringing It All Back Home", "Highway 61" and "Blonde On Blonde." Dylan devotees will disagree. I didn't listen to Dylan in the early 60's. Those first four acoustic albums are sitting in my basement in virgin condition. I wish they were original pressings, but they're not. They were purchased in another decade and things had moved on musically. At the time, I was listening to the Beatles, Stones, Byrds and Doo-Wop. Ethnic folkie I was not. I enjoyed Baez, Judy Collins, Bert Jansch, Eric Anderson, Donovan, The Farina's and others before I got into Dylan much. Fraternity friends from NYC who had smoked pot when I was still drinking bad beer first introduced me to the velvet-voiced acoustic Dylan. Upon the first few listenings, I wasn't impressed and I also knew something was happening, but I didn't know know what is was. When I first heard "Bringing It All Back Home" I didn't have a clue to what he was singing about. "Subterranean Homesick Blues" eventually cracked open some dawn light. It might have had something to do with electricity or drugs or both. In addition, the air was beginning to become very charged.

From Louis Menand's New Yorker piece "Bob on Bob", a review of "Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews" edited by Dylan disciple Jonathan Cott:

"That mid-sixties sound, the sound of “Blonde on Blonde” and “Rubber Soul,” did not last. In 1978, when Dylan had just completed his second great three-album phase—“Blood on the Tracks” (1974), “Desire” (1976), and “Street Legal” (1978)—he was interviewed by Ron Rosenbaum for Playboy. Whatever else you want to say about the magazine, Playboy did give great interview, a product of stylish interviewers and brilliant editing. Rosenbaum gets off to a dicey beginning—“Besides being a singer, a poet, and now a filmmaker, you’ve also been called a visionary. Do you recall any visionary experiences while you were growing up?”—but, eventually, he gets around to the subject of Dylan’s sound: “The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the ‘Blonde on Blonde’ album,” Dylan says. “It’s that thin, that wild mercury sound. It’s metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up. That’s my particular sound.”

Was that wild mercury sound in “I Want You”?
Yeah, it was in “I Want You.” It was in a lot of that stuff. It was in the album before that, too.
“Highway 61 Revisited”?
Yeah. Also in “Bringing It All Back Home.” That’s the sound I’ve always heard. . . .
The period when you came out with “Highway 61” must have been exciting.
Those were exciting times. We were doing it before anybody knew we would—or could. We didn’t know what it was going to turn out to be. Nobody thought of it as folk-rock at the time. There were some people involved in it like The Byrds, and I remember Sonny and Cher and the Turtles and the early Rascals. It began coming out on the radio. I mean, I had a couple of hits in a row. That was the most I ever had in a row—two. The top ten was filled with that kind of sound—the Beatles, too—and it was exciting, those days were exciting. It was the sound of the streets. It still is. I symbolically hear that sound wherever I am.
You hear the sound of the street?
That ethereal twilight light, you know. It’s the sound of the street with the sunrays, the sun shining down at a particular time, on a particular type of building. A particular type of people walking on a particular type of street. It’s an outdoor sound that drifts even into open windows that you can hear. The sound of bells and distant railroad trains and arguments in apartment buildings and the clinking of silverware and knives and forks and beating with leather straps. It’s all—it’s all there. Just lack of a jackhammer, you know.
You mean if a jackhammer were—
Yeah, no jackhammer sounds, no airplane sounds. All pretty natural sounds. It’s water, you know water trickling down a brook. It’s light flowing through the . . .
Late-afternoon light?
No, it’s usually the crack of dawn. Music filters out to me in the crack of dawn.
The “jingle jangle morning”?
Right.

There’s not much to add to that."

"Highway 61", the historic blues road, was made even more accessible by having "Like a Rolling Stone" as the first track on the A side. It was also on the radio as an edit. Dylan was mining more of the wild mercury-street sound that was being born in those times. As Menand said, it was a good time to be alive.

BTW, Ron Rosenbaum has a new book out called "The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups". Here's a review.

"If Ever I Cease To Love" Redux

Last year, I posted something about the Rex's Mardi Gras theme song, "If I Ever Cease To Love". When I did this I didn't know the genesis of the song and that it has a life of its own, i.e. verses are spontaneously added. I've asked several New Orleanians for help on this vital topic, but no help to date. They have a few other important things to do. It's strange that this search has been one of the most popular on my blog. I had to confess to my millions of readers that I couldn't be of any further help in their quest. However, just the other day I got an e-mail from a Kid Dutch who asked if I was still searching for the elusive lyrics. I replied yes. He sent me what you see below and asked what I had already uncovered. I told him that the only verse I knew of was one of the ones that he had sent me. So, here ya go:

If Ever I Cease To Love -  comic song  by George Leybourne circa 1870, Published by White, Smith & Perry, Boston, MA

This particular set of lyrics is from a 1946 "Souvenir Edition"  published by  Dave Frank, New Orleans.
Authorship (improperly) attributed to "Rex Knarf" [franK backwards] and "Re' Kel"

Verse 1:
In a house, in a square, in a quadrant,
In a street, in a lane, in a road.
Turn to the left, on the right hand,
you see my true love's abode.
I go there a courting,
and cooing to my love like a dove,
And swearing on my bend-ed knee
If ever I cease to love,
May sheepsheads grow on apple trees,
If ever I cease to love.

Chorus 1:
If ever I cease to love,
If ever I cease to love
May the moon be turned to green cream cheese,
If ever I cease to love

Verse 2:
She can sing, she can play on the piano,
She can jump, she can dance, she can run.

For she's a wonderful girlie,
She's all of them rolled into one.
I adore her beauty, she's like an angel dropped from above

May the fish get legs, and the cows lay eggs,

If ever I cease to love,

Chorus 2

If I ever cease to love,

If I ever cease to love,

May we all turn into cats and dogs,

If I ever cease to love

Home

New Orleanians are a tough plucky lot. Lots of armchair observers have accused them of being whiney. Of course, these people have never set foot in the city and probably never will, which is good for the people in the Crescent City. They do not need these people. Professor Morris, always in the vanguard of rants and raves, offers this post on the return of the natives of New Orleans. Can you hear him now?

B Rox

Bart Everson and his mate Xy are the stuff that is New Orleans. These are some of the people who are rebuilding the city, a bit at a time. Tip of the hat to the people who edited  B Rox. I don't believe his graphic lines should have been edited at all. They tell the truth. We need more truth and less advertising. If you get into the archives of B. Rox, the videos tell some tales that are more truthful than any stupid reality show on TV. The truth has a funny way of revealing itself, sort of in between the ticks of the clock. Bart also takes fine photos, especially close ups.

9/11

It's not a great day to be watching TV. The media bath and mockudrama are upon us. Maud Newton in Brooklyn writes about 9/11 five years later. The quote from the NYT and Maximus' time lapse photos are worth a look.

If you click through on Kumar's links, this article from the NY Review of Books by Daniel Mendelsohn is exceptional in its comparison of the movie versions of Sept. 11, what really happened and their relation to Greek tragedy.

Born in Eleusis, Aeschylus' earliest surviving play is probably The Persians, which was reproduced c. 467 B.C. in the Greek theater in Siracusa on the island of Sicily. While visiting the archaelogical park that includes the Greek theater, my mate and I battled the September Sicilian sun to wander around the large site. But we knew gelato wasn't far away. As we roamed the huge Greek theater whose acoustics are reknowned, we heard a caretaker yelling at some very white Northern European tourists who were not listening to his cautions against climbing on certain parts of the amphitheater. Since his urgings were going unheeded, he then yelled several times in Sicilian "I'll kill you! I'll kill you!" Finally, it got through to the headstrong toursitas that they shouldn't be where they were and they relented. The young Sicilian was still continued to swear a little less loudly. We snickered to ourselves. I can still hear my Calabrian grandmother yelling this at her unruly grandchildren many years ago.

"What's Goin' On?"

The Dirty Dozen Brass Band's "What's Goin On?" (much better review at AMG) is a difficult album to listen to. It cries out with the pain and loss that only the people of New Orleans know about. The music disturbingly echoes all the images and posts that I've seen and read for the past year. The people of NOLA continue to know about the vital signs daily in their relentless struggle to survive. Yet, they persist and hang on like "bad grass", as a wise old woman from the 9th Ward said. The strength and tenacity of a no-failure-option is a tribute to the spirit and soul of this city of cities. The yeast of death flies in the wind and floats in the waters, yet this album somehow gets over this needless tragedy of neglect. It doesn't side step it. It goes through it to the other side and strikes the deepest wells of culture that beckon those who have landed in foreign places and keeps others firmly rooted in the city. Soul and deep-fried funk accumulate in the album and eventually gather into an unshakeable rock that is home, hearth and community. The music is calling people home and helping those already there to keep on working and holding on. Those who died in the flood and from the shameful continuing aftermath are remembered too.

Marvin Gaye recorded the album in 1971. That's why Dirty Dozen covered it and covered it well. They know that things haven't changed much in the interim. Yeah, now you can get paper or plastic when you check out with the groceries. How much more choice do we really have in the USA of the new millenium? "God bless the child that's got its own."

Philo Farnsworth

Today is the birthday of Philo Farnsworth. He developed the technology for TV. He died after GE and RCA ignored him. In later life, he was confined to an insane asylum after doing a lot of pills and drink. He never bought a TV and prohibited his daughters and sons from owning the TV wizard's wand.

Eight Things Meme

So, Traveling Mermaid was kind enough to tag me for this divulging meme.

1. I played Rumpelstiltskin when I was in the 7th? grade. Very humiliating being in tights that long in front of that many people for that many performances.

2. I can't swim well at all. I grew up on the Rhode Island coast within 5 miles of the ocean.

3. I had some friends throw me out of a car once. We did it in front of a guest house for elderly people at the beach in R.I. I just fell onto the curb and made like I was dead. They drove around for 10 minutes or a few hours (don't recall) and then dragged me back into the car. The old people were a little upset.

4. I used to wear Bass loafers in high school. I wouldn't be caught dead in them now, plus they're torture to wear. I also came quickly to appreciate the preppy ethic of egalatarianism that complemented oxford button-down shirts.

5. I used to play the clarinet until I hit high school. I'm thinking of buying a used one. I regret putting it away for the academic life.

6. Tom M., a college roomate, and I spent a night in the Westerly, RI jail one summer eve. We had just finished our freshman year at RPI in wonderful Troy, NY and thought that we could drink everywhere at 19. The NY State legal minimum drinking age at that time was 18, in RI it was still 21. So, we put some beer on the floor in the back of the VW and started toward the beach. As we near the beach there's a roadblock and we are caught with a 6 pack of beer. Since my hometown was/is small, I tell the kind officer that a cousin of mine (2nd or so) is on the force. He gives a stern warning and lets us go. Now, RPI students are supposed to have some smarts, non? We decide to attack the beach from the other flank. Possession of liquor by a minor. We are remanded to the newly built jail. One toilet, two metal slabs. Shamed and afraid, we call our parents in the morning. My uncle, who comes with my father, asks as he looks through the bars "No TV?" We appear contrite before the judge who issues a reprimand we never forget.

7. I was riding a horse once when the horse decided that the bugs were too much and he bolted toward the barn, with our without me on him. I jumped off the horse and somehow managed to stay on my feet while avoiding a large tree trunk.

8. I sometimes gently bite my dog, Aldo.

Slimbolala, Loki, Nolanik, Ashley Morris, Da Po' Blog, Adrastos

No Spitting

I took a drive to Saratoga Springs yesterday to have breakfast at Beverly's. They have some of the best blueberry pancakes that I've ever had. Alas, today's the last day of racing for the season. They say that Saratoga is the only place where windows clean people. I didn't make my annual contribution to the NYRA this year.

On my way back, I tuned into Harry Shearer's Le Show. When I tuned in a little late, he said something about the phenomenal condition of New Orleans' levees and that if you so much as spit in Lake Pontchartrain the levees would fold. A hearfelt thanks to USACorpseOE.