AnimaMundi

Four Years On

 

 The Flood   Eilen Jewell

Scout Prime at First Draft Says Farewell

Via the Great Greek Adrastos in NOLA, comes the news that Scout Prime of First Draft is bidding farewell. I didn 't know that she was the inspiration for the Rising Tide Conferences  in NOLA. When I started blogging in the spring of 2005 my focus was non-focused. Then the levees breached and 80% of New Orleans was under water. After staring at the tube dumbfounded for days, I started reading some NOLA bloggers for what was really happening. I haven't approached anything remotely comparable to her expertise and diligence on behalf of the city and its people. I always enjoyed reading her posts because they were filled with passion, dogged determination and hope. She is a candle amidst the MSM bullshit. What happened to the city and its people has always and will always remain with me. The horrifically outrageous things I saw and read about gave me an impetus to write something, anything. I thank her and all the NOLA bloggers for the way they roll.  

The New Entreprenuers of New Orleans

Mark Folse has a gritty post up at Humid Beings about an article in The Atlantic. The author of the article should have consulted a few true New Orleanians before she typed publish. Outside entreprenuers with money are NOT the ones who are going to make New Orleans whole again. Sure, some outside investment is happening and will happen that will help New Orleans. It is the "200,000" who came back and started to gut their homes and businesses stud by stud. Those are the true people of the city. A New Orleans professor just returned to her house a few weeks ago almost 4 years after the flood. She cried the first night that she slept in her home with her children. These are the people rebuilding New Orleans. 

Allen Toussaint's "The Bright Mississippi"

Allen Toussaint's "The Bright Mississippi" album covers a lot of ground. From time out of time to now. In light of that, it's not easy for me to say something meaningful and not inane. What am I hearing here? Everything that I have listened to for the last 50 years or so. It's all in there. Like the turns of the river itself, Toussaint takes you on a fugue-slow-drag-funky-parade-strut ride in and out of the musics that have been created and transformed by the Crescent City. The maestro has produced a work of art that needs listening to, again and again. The bottom resonation is felt in the chords and riffs that are part of the whole of African-Caribbean-American musical story. It's a journey we all take when we listen to and hear what is being expressed musically. I can't do the album justice by trying to describe the circle it encompasses. I can only encourage you to buy the album and listen to an important part of African music via the Caribbean as it entered the grand old port of New Orleans and was transformed into a music for the whole world to feast on. For a more thorough look at the album, go to Offbeat:

Henry selected the songs for The Bright Mississippi with “Tipitina and Me” in mind. “There was a certain kind of beauty,” he says. “It sounded old world, it sounded classical, deeply rhythmic like tango, with New Orleans rhythm but also had a deep blues tonality."

Also reviewed at the NY Times and Times-Picayune.

Download 09 Bright Mississippi

Download 07 Blue Drag

Download 02 Dear Old Southland

 PS This album deserves more than I wrote. I will try to do better. I haven't listened to it enough. As I listen again and again, I realize this again and again.

 

Hiatus

I posted three times in April, an all time low for me. Allergies and outdoor work are the main reasons. It's not like I didn't hear lots of new music, drank some noteworthy wines, enjoyed some exceptional home made meals and discovered things on the Internets that I could have linked too. My ability to read books and longish web content is definitely affected by those microscopic bits of pollen and the detritus from last year. I pour loads of eye drops into my eyes everyday and take benadryl. My vision and neuron synapses suffer. So needless to say, I didn't post since what I would have posted would undoubtedly have been more inane than usual. This and Facebook.

So I will return to my impetus to start blogging in the spring-summer of 2005: New Orleans. That good ole warrior, Ashley Morris, would have appreciated this news about "The Wire", especially since David Simon wanted to speak with him about the city of New Orleans. Yeah mon, maybe the exodus will be stemmed and the TV wizard's wand will bring some of your city's soul into livingrooms around the planet. Maybe, just maybe, the rest of the country will finally realize how much the city has given it. There are so many things El Norte; as tangible as an oyster po' boy and as intangible as rolling a certain way.

Then there is that other word smith at Toulouse Street who continually lambasts my soul with his prose-poetry. He's always riffing on something that gets under your skin like scar tissue. His words rumble around within your head for days and weeks.

Oh, one more thing Allen Toussaint's "The Bright Missippissi". Listen to it a few hundred times.

 

"The portion we see of human beings is very small: their forms and faces, voices and words, their ages and race perhaps; beyond these, like an immense dark continent of which their obvious self is but a jetting headland, lies all that has made them--generations vanishing into the barbarous night; accidents and impacts not only on themselves but upon their forebears; the cry of the conqueror, the sighing of slaves. Even the chemical variation of substances--airs, food and waters--are all gathered to that point of light which is the person we know. He himself is unable to communicate, forced to use fluid words as if they were solid, and --if Anglo-Saxon and well brought up--is anyway not expected to wish to communicate at all. And when two human beings meet even in the most simple intercourse, it is not the tiny visible substances, but the immense invisibles that come together. It is these that must determine the liking or disliking over which we have so little control."

Freya Stark

Remember Ashley Morris

 

I miss Ashley Morris. I miss his style, humor and tenacity. He was New Orleans. He was no poseur; didn't have time for that. His rants are unique in the blogosphere. No one can touch him there. Not even close. I doubt that anyone who knew him in one way or another will forget him.

Remember Ashley Morris

He would have been pleased to hear of Wendell Pierce and The Wire's "Treme".

 

Thelonious Monk Institute NOLA

The Thelonious Monk Institute in New Orleans is graduating its first class. It's apt and appropriate that the Institute located in the city that gave birth to so much of this country's music. Thelonious would be proud and would probably write a song about it. You fans would know sort of what it would sound like.

Ersters at Cochon in NOLA

Dr. J at Do Bianchi dines at Cochon in New Orleans. He gets it and relates that fact in his contact with people in the wine business in New Orleans. Going on four years this 8/29. Things are still not ok. 

Happy Mardi Gras !! WWOZ New Orleans, HOTG, RFO-Gwada & Matnik + "If Ever I Cease To Love"

It's Mardi Gras in New Orleans! Remember those who have passed over and those who are displaced.

RIP Antoinette K-Doe who passed early on Mardi Gras Day 2009.

WWOZ streams

 

The Home of the Groove has some poppin' Mardi Gras music that is off da' hook. 

Then there are the Lesser Antilles in size, but not in groove quotient. The other stations that we like at Carnaval time are RFO-Guadeloupe and Martinique. No news or commercials, just music non-stop.

 

For those searching for what to sing after Rex, here are a few verses:

 

IF EVER I CEASE TO LOVE

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

 

If Ever I Cease to Love The Knickerbocker Cafe

Now if I were a self-serving ego-maniac obssessed with my blog stats, I would post with a title like the above. Those who know me know that I am that and much more. Music is the penultimate connector for me and always will be. The Knickerbocker to New Orleans. The dots are all connected. Let the good times roll.