Guests
by Ethan Clark, February 1, 2008 6:41 PM
I go to a show. Why Are We Building Such a Big Ship? at the St. Roch Tavern. Big Ship is the latest in a medium-sized line of bands made up of punk kids playing horn-heavy, Eastern Europe-tinged stomp-alongs. The St. Roch Tavern is an old-man neighborhood bar, the kind that has weekly shrimp boils and dice-game betting pools. In recent years, the place has doubled as a home base for the latest batch of local punks, the type who wear black Carhartts, ride around on mutant bikes of dubious construct and all have their own techniques for breaking up pit bull fights. Perhaps there is a contingent like this in your town, too. Here in New Orleans they are reasonably harmless, completely insular, and won't attack unless provoked. But now it is Carnival Season, which means that navigating the urban (or is it post-urban?) landscape of the city means contending not just with resident scumbags, but also every scumbag across the United States who has pulled his or herself out of a blackout long enough to realize that it is Mardi Gras. It's like there's some tractor beam, buried deep below the city that draws them here, pulling them along by the metal rivets on their Carhartt overalls. Or maybe it's a batman-esque symbol projected across the sky in the shape of a Miller 40oz or a big staph infection. Whatever it is, it works. They come here. Since the storm, there's been more of them than ever before. A lot came down to get work during the rebuild, but upon getting here realized that they still didn't know how to do anything. Others, it seems, just came to party in the rubble, getting off on the post-apocalyptic vibe. They line the streets, crowded into doorways or in front of corner stores, trying to figure out how to split a po-boy nine ways. Over on Decatur Street they line the sidewalks in front of flyer-covered walls and chi-chi boutiques, belting out old-time and gypsy folk tunes on fiddles, banjos, and accordions. Some of them have yet to hop on the neo-old-time-gypsy-Klezmer thing. These are the old-school punks who do nothing and ask for change ("spanging" used to be the annoying punk colloquialism for it), which, in a city with an estimated 12,000 homeless, a city full of people who've lost everything, is a pretty goddamned rude thing to do if you ask me. The traveling kids/crusties/gutterpunks or whatever you want to call them never bothered me too much before. I learned years ago not to let them stay on my couch (or bathe in my tub) and since then have successfully separated myself from them at a distance wide enough to not get involved, but close enough to enjoy their occasionally hilarious drunken antics (like when a friend of mine jokingly told a punk girl that she could have the dregs of his Old Milwaukee tall can if she punched her boyfriend in the face, which she did without hesitation). Besides explaining to them that they can't just have the bikes at the bike co-op or stepping over them to get into the anarchist bookstore, I didn't have much interaction. But this year there have been some issues ? some chinks in the crusty-proof exoskeleton that I've built around my life. At a show in a coffee shop in Asheville, I stood on the sidelines while my friends' band played and a bunch of traveling kids of the super-drunk, super-annoying variety known as "oogles" jumped around and threw their elbows and fists. They were shoving everyone else who was trying to dance, including ladies way smaller than them. I was off to the side of the dance floor, leaning on the condiments table, nursing a cup of free coffee. After the band, Reagan's Bones, had their equipment slammed into for the nth time, their guitarist, Josh, said something about it. But his lesson in punk etiquette fell on ears too drunk and adrenalized to understand what was being said. After a few more songs, without the oogles showing any noticeable improvement, I got pissed. I felt old, standing on the periphery of the show in my work clothes: button down shirt and jeans. Screw this, I thought, lunging into the mass of drunken, dancing bodies. A convenient aspect of gutter-punk fashion is that the clothes are covered in lots of dangly, handle-like accoutrements like wallet chains, bondage pant straps, suspenders and big old stretched out earlobe piercings, any of which can be grabbed and used to fling them away. This I did. One of the kids was scrawny and looked to be about 17. I'd seen him on Lexington Avenue for the last week. He had random lines tattooed all over his face. It looked like he'd handed a four-year-old a tattoo gun and asked the kid to draw him a map to China. I grabbed the guy by the straps of his Carhartt overalls and whipped him out of the crowd. Thinking that this was just someone's dance move, the kid shook his head like a dazed Scooby-Doo character and leapt back into the melee. A second later, though, he found himself flung out of the crowd again. And again and again. The kid, his mind bogged down by Steel Reserve, cheapest of the malt liquors available at the Shell station up the street, took a while before realizing that these repeat ejections weren't random. His colleague, a scraggly, bearded, kind of hippy-looking dude, was a little less beer-battered and saw what was going on. "Hey what's your problem dude?" he barked, putting his face so close to mine that his beard tickled my nose. His whole body shook with tension, like a wound up bungee cord about to pop. He was ready to throw a punch at the slightest provocation. "You guys are dancing like assholes!" I hollered over a wailing Reagan's Bones guitar solo. Then I quickly excused myself back to my old-guy-at-the-punk-show position next to the cream and sugar. Bearded gutter-hippy dude wasn't going to leave it at that, and followed right behind me, getting in my face. "Look, dude, it's not our fault if you can't hang in the pit. I never expected this place to have such a tame scene." In his wide, burning eyes, I saw myself reflected the way that he saw me: Slightly rumpled jeans, blue plaid shirt, poofy bowl cut, big thick Elvis Costello glasses. He probably took me for a college student, which, until recently, I had been. For two whole semesters. If I could've impressed upon the kid all the experiences in my life that would give me some sort of punk points in his eyes ? all the fights, the near riots at shows, the doorways, bridges, and cardboard dumpsters where I've slept, the ill-fated freight train rides I'd taken, and all of the maniacal freaks I've known, like "Jizz," the agro Philly guy with a penchant for stabbing his enemies with a fork ? then I might have done it. But all of those experiences, which I used to value so highly, don't add up to much in my mind these days. So I stood staring at the guy, saying nothing. Then my girlfriend, Nicole, singer of the band playing after Reagan's Bones, came up and laid down a bunch of hippy-dippy stuff about how we're all just little babies trying to take care of each other and love on one another. That freaked the guy out and he and his crew cleared out soon after, probably off to find the real, less tame Asheville scene. My second crusty issue came when I moved to New Orleans. I was DJing at the St. Roch Tavern. Around 11, the booze was hitting the brains of the
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Guests
by Ethan Clark, January 31, 2008 12:32 PM
"Wait a second," I find myself saying, rubbing my fluorescent-light-weary eyes. "Let's go over this one more time. OK, just humor me." Nicole laughs a little laugh, glancing at the customers in line behind us: A middle aged black woman in a jogging suit and aviator sunglasses and a young redneck looking couple, all of whom couldn't look less amused. The clerk behind the counter rolls his eyes, sighs and says flatly, "okay." This particular clerk, John, has been a fairly regular fixture in my life over the last year and, in the last week has become someone that I've had the unpleasant experience of dealing with two or three times daily. He's a memorable dude, not because he is the grumpiest clerk at the downtown Asheville Post Office (though he is that), but because he is almost completely unassuming looking, a husky late-middle-aged guy ? gray hair, bald on top, deep trenches around his eyes that if they were bird's feet would be a turkey's. Then there's the moustache. It's a fairly famous moustache, talked about all over town: a thin, meticulously maintained little pair of antennae that shoot straight out to the sides of John's nose then curl up like the toes of elf shoes. Like I said, if it weren't for the moustache, John would be pretty forgettable, just another dissatisfied bureaucrat slowly going mad from too much multiplying in multiples of 41. With moustache, though, getting talked down to and given the runaround by this guy makes one feel like an extra in the movie Brazil. Nicole and I had been getting to feel like that a lot this week. After over a year of dating, we were now more or less breaking up, and I was moving away from the little North Carolina town that neither of us could stand and back to my former home of New Orleans. For the last couple of weeks we'd been going through the whole fight, make-up, crying jag bit of disentangling ourselves from one another emotionally, and now we were disentangling ourselves logistically. This was, in many ways, more painful than the jaggedy ups-and-downs of the emotional part ? just the long days of separating records, clothes, returning loaned items, and now, dealing with my withdrawal from our shared P.O. Box. These mundane chores were really driving home the break-up, like that point when you're quitting smoking, and after several days when the tremors, chills and intense, ripping-out-your-hair cravings have subsided, you have to face the boring nothingness of just not smoking. Forever and ever. And John wasn't making it any more pleasant for us. In fact, he was making me want to smoke for the first time in four years. "So," I said, starting again, "we share the P.O. Box." John looked at me, unmoving, not even blinking. "And I'm moving." Still no reaction from John. "And she's not." "I'm not," said Nicole, shaking her head as though explaining something to a toddler. No reaction. It was like we were creeping out onto a frozen lake, expecting it to crack and drop us at any moment. "So I need to take my name from off the box, and leave her name on it ? and still be able to get my mail forwarded." At the last part, the moustache twitched and John's head batted back and forth. Sploosh! We were in the icy waters. Sinking. "Nope. Can't do it. No way," John said. "Arrgh!" said Nicole and I at the same time, covering our eyes as though we'd just watched a friend wipe out doing a skateboard trick. "Why not?!" I snapped, causing Nicole to pinch my outer thigh beneath the level of the counter. "That's not how it works," John said. "But it could! It could be how it works. You could just switch the names on this sheet of paper." I gestured frantically at the form I'd filled over a year ago. "And put a little yellow post-it note on the box with my new address! Voila!" The trio of waiting customers behind us looked as though their higher functions had all but shut down, their brains just sending off the slightest of electrical impulses necessary for maintaining a standing position. I did see the woman in the jogging suit grimace ever so slightly, though, as John again launched into his explanation of just why it was impossible, absurd, even, for us to keep the box open, which had something to do with the Patriot Act. "Okay," I said when he'd finished, and started to explain myself again, changing the wording as much as I could. I'd played a similar game dealing with cops, the game where you know that you can talk your way out of guilt if you can just pull from the stratosphere the right combination of words that will turn the rusty pins of the lock in the cops' minds, and open them. John was a tougher case than most cops (with a proportionately more flamboyant moustache), and it seemed like I might need the Rosetta Stone to find the combination. This time Nicole, who is much more patient and diplomatic, interrupted. "We just really need to keep the box open so that I can get my mail, but Ethan is going to New Orleans, so he needs his mail, so it needs to get forwarded to this other P.O. Box, which he already has, see?" She held up something addressed to my new P.O. Box, which I would be sharing with my friend and soon-to-be-roommate, Shelley. John blinked. "I just can't do that." We almost repeated the skateboarding-trick-gone-awry "Arrgh!" thing, but were cut short. "BUT," John said, "I could do this." We perked up. "I could close the box right now." "Uh huh," we both said, or at least nodded so as to imply. "I could refund you the remainder of your fee," he said to me. "Uh huh," we said. "She could pay for the box," he said. Nods again from our team. "And I could reopen it in her name." We stared at him, slack jawed. My head spun. I glanced at the clock. Had it been a pizza, the big hand would've swung over the breadth of three slices in the time we'd been dealing with this, dealing with John, and here he was suddenly having the breakthrough that he could do exactly what we'd been arguing about for the last twenty minutes. We filled out the proper forms, which took about ten seconds, Nicole paid the man, and we were out of there. Free. Pupils struggling to adjust from fluorescent mode to September summer sunlight mode.
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Guests
by Ethan Clark, January 30, 2008 1:00 PM
One unexpected side effect of the floods in New Orleans was the sudden proliferation of high-tech gadgetry. In the months after Katrina, the phone and power were out all the time. Soon some of the most Ludditical folks I've ever met could be seen tapping away on a MacBook at the coffee shop or struggling to maintain balance while text messaging on their bikes. Before the storm I would sometimes feel as though the whole town was on the verge of returning to the earth, succumbing to the will of the swampy, prehistoric pteridophytes that work their way up through our cracked and crumbling cement. Whether the day was radioactively sunny or deluged by the remnants of whatever tropical storm had just hit Florida, life in New Orleans ambled on like a tuba bass line, all half-drunk and in no hurry, far removed from the roar (or maybe whir) of the information superhighway. Then Katrina, by knocking out the traditional forms of communication, cut an onramp from the information superhighway straight through the middle of town. Next thing you know the city is a jungle of microtechnological quackery: Blackberries and Bluetooth, Skype and Wi-Fi and G4s and Mp3s and DVDs. The blatting of that drunken tuba was suddenly drowned out by the clacking of keyboards, the doodly-doos of dying batteries, the snippets of ironic hard rock erupting from cell phones. The great technological takeover was so quick and thorough that it was suddenly difficult to even remember that there'd ever been a time when it would've been considered odd for your back pocket to suddenly start playing an eight-bit version of "Paradise City." While many local conspiracy theorists whispered about the Army Corps and dynamite, I suspected that Apple or Microsoft might have actually been behind the whole thing. All these little gizmos certainly had a polarizing effect on the population, jamming a silicon wedge between those that embraced the conveniences of the information age and those diehards who hung on to their anti-tech ways, distrusting and maligning all technology invented after, say, 1989. I always considered myself to be in that diehard camp: From 1999 to 2005 I never owned much more than a bike (or four), some tools, books, and every T. Rex record. At the time of the storm, I had just (fatefully) moved to Asheville, North Carolina, and my house didn't even have a phone. Soon afterwards, I began putting together Stories Care Forgot, a collection of zines from New Orleans. I soon realized that to pull the project off, though, I might need a phone. Also a computer, which turned out to be a slug-slow PC with a dial-up modem and a bunch of photos on the hard drive from the wedding day of the co-worker I bought the thing off of. This felt, at the time, like some great ethical sellout. The hum of the thing's fan kept me up at night, and in its blank screen I was taunted by the face of my friend Shelley. Shelley and I had both been mechanics at a bike shop in the French Quarter where any customer who came in with any sort of gadgetry would be subjected to our less-than-subtle eye-rolling and mockery. I moved into a house full of maniac punk rockers where we couldn't keep the water on, much less a phone (see "Up Lee's Ass" in Leaning With Intent to Fall). When I suggested to Shelley that I was maybe, well, kind of sort of thinking about possibly getting a well uh...cell phone, she made me feel so guilty about joining the ranks of all those rude customers that were in the shop screaming into those things that I ended up instead getting a pager, circa 1990, that I bought for eight dollars at a barber shop, and which never really worked. When I came back to post-diluvial New Orleans, however, I found Shelley driving around in her truck with an arsenal of little plastic gizmos ? from cell phone to fancy digital camera. One day when the battery on hers died, she asked to use my phone. "Shelley," I said, "I don't have a cell phone." She looked baffled. "What have I been calling you on?" "That was my landline." I marveled that this was the person who, last time I'd seen her, had been living in a rundown shotgun house that she shared with a bunch of chickens, banging out her zine about bikes (Chainbreaker) on an old Coronamatic typewriter. In the backyard, she did her laundry with a bike-powered washing machine. Back then I would've been stunned to ever hear the words "land line" come out of her mouth. Now she stood looking at me like some alien creature and said, "Oh, no wonder you haven't been getting my text messages!" That's when I realized that yes, the information age was upon us, and the world was never going back. And am I complaining? Well, I'm not sure. My friend Dan, an eccentric geek of the "I can't go out tonight because I'm going to hole up in my room full of computers and read about Superman vs. Predator online" variety, recently moved back to New Orleans and began volunteering with the Tipitina's music co-op. There he helps local musicians navigate the crumbled terrain of the post-K NOLA music scene by teaching them HTML and helping out with their websites. And while yes, there is a little Luddite idealist inside of me whose heart pangs to think of aged Mardi Gras Indian chiefs and jazz musicians who don't give two shakes of a tambourine about technology, I don't think that even old Ned Ludd himself would want to deprive these musicians of the opportunities that the internet makes possible. Likewise for hundreds of other projects in town, from band's personal websites to greater efforts such as www.neworleansairlift.org ? a project that is trying to establish a sort of sister city exchange program for artists in New Orleans and Berlin. Once I saw the new technological world embraced by some of my most gung-ho, hell-with-technology friends ? people who used to make the Unabomber look like Inspector Gadget ? I hopped
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Guests
by Ethan Clark, January 29, 2008 11:51 AM
So I'd like to thank Powell's for letting me do these blogs. Also thanks to my loyal and patient publisher, G.K. Darby, who set this whole thing up, and then nearly had an anneurism the other day when I didn't get these blogs done on time. He told me that he was going to kill me, then told me my first entry was great, then lopped off the last three paragraphs of it when he sent it into Powells.com. So, on that note, here's a slightly expanded version of how yesterday's blog should've ended, which means that between the two entries I'm probably giving you more obscure New Orleans R&B knowledge than you ever really wanted in your life. Here we go: The 45 is the opposite of the impersonal, un-interactive, faceless MP3 file. Dusty and warped, spinning on a turntable, sending a signal through a tiny metal tube into your bedroom speakers ? you are like a little music-listening autonomous being. Each pop and warble on that vinyl exists only for you and no one can download that or check it out on MySpace, which is a rarer and rarer phenomenon these days. Hold a copy in your hand of the 45 "Don't You Just Know it" by Huey Piano Smith and tell me that it doesn't feel magical, like a little ticket into the past that you can redeem over and over again, a little telepathic message from old Huey himself, because he knew how important it was to communicate to you, fifty years down the road, the words: I can't lose with the stuff I useDon't ya just know it Baby, don't believe I'm wearin' two left shoes Don't ya just know it Ah ha ha ha Ay ay oh Doo bah doo bah doo bah doo bah Ah ha ha ha Ah ha ha ha Ay ay oh And who the hell cares what it means? That, in fact, is part of the beauty. These days you can get on the radio and say shit like "Soulja Boy up in that ho! Super soak that ho!" (whatever the crap that means) and put out records with lyrics like, "When your pussy pop you cause fights in the club." But back in the day, all those R&B and soul singers had to come up with arsenals of bizarre euphemisms for whatever it is that they were talking about. And these people were every bit as scandalous as your typical nowadays pop star. Amy Winehouse got drunk and said what? Shit, check out the picture of Ernie K. Doe holding a giant cake shaped like a big ol' pair of breasts. Britney's sister's having a baby? Hell, you ever hear of Bobby Marchan? He was a '50s New Orleans singer and drag queen who managed to sign a record deal without the label figuring out that he wasn't a woman. In fact, if Huey Piano Smith (who was backing Marchan up on, well, the piano) hadn't kept laughing, the producers might never have wised up. Even after they did, they still kept the deal with Marchan. And today we get to go back and marvel at these layers of code that singers were slipping into songs. Sure, the sex stuff is obvious. There are eight million veiled dances like the scratch, the popcorn, the dog, the cool jerk, the funky chicken, the funky penguin, the thang, the push and pull, the bump, the funky sissy, the humpback, the funky four, eight and even sixteen corners, the tighten up and the tighten up tighter, the funky robots. But then there's even weirder stuff hidden in the mix, like in the songs of Robert Parker, who seemed, more often than not, to end up singing about feet. Was there something more perverse than meets the eye in songs like "Barefootin'," "The Tip Toe," and "Steppin' Out"? We can only wonder. The irrelevance of these lyrics to this modern world is what makes them so amazing. The world will never go back, and I wasn't even a part of the history that I'm eavesdropping on (being born in the Eighties and all), but that is, perhaps, why I take comfort in those 45s. Since Katrina, I've stopped being embarrassed by the things that comfort me. I came up as a card-(and u-lock)-carrying member of the bike-punk subculture, conditioned to loathe all things internal combustion. And I've certainly spit on a fair share of SUVs in my day. But, you know, truth be told, I actually really like driving around with the heat on, listening to the radio. It makes me feel slightly comfortable in a city where full-time-mental-freakout is now considered normal. Also, I like fried food (and have even gotten back on the seafood), and most of all I like blowing all my money on crackly 45s of goofy old New Orleans music. So dooh bah doo bah doo bah, ah ha ha
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Guests
by Ethan Clark, January 28, 2008 1:19 PM
Growing up in Jackson, Mississippi, I was close enough to New Orleans to be splashed by the wake of her culture. Thus, I developed a pretty serious aversion to Dixieland jazz, brass bands, and funk. Later on, while visiting Dublin, I would see Irish friends of mine reacting to roundtable trad sessions the same way, cringing visibly at the pub as a bunch of old dudes with flutes and mandolins tuned up and launched into the opening notes of "Danny Boy" (later on, at a party, I would witness a room full of people shaking their heads in sorrow and hitting "skip" on a stereo that was blasting Johnny Cash's version of the same song). My hatred for the music wasn't really rational or based on anything ? it was purely rooted in overexposure. Musicians like Professor Longhair, Louis Armstrong, and Rebirth Brass Band never had a fair chance with me, starting way back in Kindergarten at St. Andrews Episcopal School, whose team was the Saints and whose song was, predictably, "When the Saints Go Marching In." My stance on New Orleans music was similar to the one I took on the writing of John Grisham, a stance I learned from my mother, which is basically: "Don't even grace this shit by acknowledging its existence." I actually copped that attitude toward a lot of New Orleans culture, even after living here for years. Mardi Gras? Gag me. Seafood? Eaten my weight in the stuff ten times over already. Chicory in my coffee? I'd rather drink melted tar. Second Lines? Done that. Hell, in fifth grade at St. Andrews, we had a second line parade for the fetal pigs that we had just finished dissecting in science class, marching them out into the woods behind the football field in little fetal-pig-sized coffins while "Saints Go Marching In" blasted over the P.A. Why the hell did I move here, you ask? Jeez, good question. I don't even know if I knew, except that I had some vague idea that New Orleans would be a good place to become a circus performer, which is what I thought I was going to do for the rest of my life. And I did become a circus performer, stilt walking and unicycling at conventions and in parades. For the most part, though, I was just walking around New Orleans completely untethered to its culture. I was a vegan, anarchist-leaning punk rocker whose head wasn't in the game of New Orleans because it was stuck so far up my ass. Then, of course, in the summer of 2005, a bunch of stuff you might have heard about happened that suddenly dislodged my (and millions of other people's) love for all the weird and beautiful New Orleans stuff that I'd taken for granted my whole life. And that was true, most of all, for music. The catalyst for my love of New Orleans music came in the form of a tape that someone left in my car (I was living in North Carolina at this time, right after the hurricane) and two collections put out by Soul Jazz Records called Saturday Night Fish Fry and New Orleans Funk. The albums run the gamut from super famous songs like "Big Chief" by Professor Longhair and the Dixie Cups' spooky-ass version of "Iko Iko" to treasures from the sixties and seventies like "Check Your Bucket" by Eddie Bo. The picture on the cover of Fish Fry is a weird photo of Lee Dorsey laughing and pointing a gun at you. This was a somewhat disconcerting image to look at in the days of sensational post-Katrina media freak-outs about looters and violence in NOLA, but I got over it. I bought both albums and the tape lived in the deck of my truck pretty much non-stop through a month and a half book tour to the West Coast. And that was just the beginning. Soon I was totally obsessed with old soul and funk, specifically stuff from New Orleans. Eddie Bo, Lee Dorsey, Chuck Carbo, Betty Harris, Irma Thomas, Gentleman "June" Gardner, Robert Parker, Bobby Marchan, Jessie Hill, Huey "Piano" Smith, Allen Toussaint, blablablabla... All my free time was spent aggravating my allergies by flipping through dusty piles of forty-fives in record stores and junk shops and thrift stores. A pair of used Technics 1200's were purchased and I started playing records at a bar in Asheville on Sunday nights. I'm not sure what it was that clicked in my head to suddenly change me from someone who didn't even have a stereo (when I was seventeen years old, in fact, I'd shoplifted a CD wallet from Radio Shack that held 32 CDs and, since then, I've just always had 32 CDs that were rotated by a sort of natural selection, with CDs occasionally getting lost and destroyed to make room for whatever people happened to give me) to someone completely obsessed with pop music that has been all but forgotten by most of the planet. I delved into the dorky spirit of record collecting, memorizing factoids about different performers, developing passionate opinions on things no one else I knew gave a shit (or wanted to hear) about, like how the Rolling Stones stole "Time Is On My Side" from Irma Thomas, or about who actually wrote "Pain in my Heart." In this hyper-modern world, obsessed as it is with information, technology and communication, it feels sometimes like we're all just little blips of information, all plugged into one another and running around on the same circuit, like in that movie Tron. I've bought into it myself, becoming one of those people who have heart palpitations if my wireless connection (well, my neighbor's wireless connection, actually) goes down or if I realize that I left my cell-phone at home. Even entertainment has turned into this strange, disposable, e-based thing, with bands being reduced to faceless little iTunes logos that you click on and listen to without having to interact with the actual people and feelings and spirit of the
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