I’ve written before about The Trend, easily 1982’s best power-pop band in Kennett, Missouri. They were, well, kinda awesome. (Got $1.98? You should use it to buy the two songs of theirs available on iTunes: “She’s Hi-Fi” and “(I Feel Like A) Dictionary.”)
Anyway, Kennett’s finest are playing two shows over the next week, in Kennett and Nashville. If you are a Kennetter or Nashvillian, dude, go.
A really nice piece in Businessweek on the fundamentally Caribbean way of life of New Orleans:
The lost housing of New Orleans is quite special. Entering the damaged and abandoned houses, you can still see what they were like before the hurricane. They were exceedingly inexpensive to live in, built by people’s parents and grandparents or by small builders paid in cash or by barter. Most of these simple, pleasant houses were paid off. They had to be because they do not meet any sort of code and are therefore not mortgageable by current standards.
It was possible to sustain the unique culture of New Orleans because housing costs were minimal, liberating people from debt. One did not have to work a great deal to get by. There was the possibility of leisure.
There was time to create the fabulously complex Creole dishes that simmer forever; there was time to practice music, to play it live rather than from recordings, and to listen to it. There was time to make costumes and to parade; there was time to party and to tell stories; there was time to spend all day marking the passing of friends. One way to leisure time is to have a low financial carry. With a little work, a little help from the government, and a little help from family and friends, life could be good! This is a typically Caribbean social contract: not one to be understood as laziness or poverty — but as a way of life.
The same holds true of the towns of southwest Louisiana, where I grew up and where the cost of decent living is still lower than in New Orleans. That frame of mind is really what separates south Louisiana from les americains to the north.
Thanks to inheritance, I own two small tracts of land in Rayne, my hometown. They contain a ratty, 30-year-old trailer and a gas station that closed in 1968. Someday in the future, I’ll inherit the house I grew up in, whose current assessed value is around $18,000. If I ever feel like being a real estate magnate, I may buy my great-grandmother’s old house, which is a bit larger and worth about $28,000. They’re both rickety structures by American standards — tin roofs, no central air or heat, uneasy wood framing. But they’ve also been paid off since the ’60s, at least. More likely since the day they were built, since the men in my family made them themselves. Property taxes are maybe $100 a year.
You can understand the occasional appeal, perhaps, of quitting my job, setting up shop in the Louisiana countryside, and writing a few novels. (Or, alternately, running off to Colonia or Santa Teresa. Maybe there’s a reason I find Latin America so alluring.) Getting off the treadmill and all that. That’s the sort of mindset that can create a great culture.
It may not be good for the quarterly GDP numbers. But contrasted with the stereotypical style of les americains — Buy all the house you can! Keep up with the Joneses! Can’t you hear that plasma TV speaking to you? — it seems downright noble.
While my college friends in Sea Ray hung up their indie-rock overalls a little more than two years ago, I’m happy to say their music lives on — as backing music for a Saturn commercial.
Here’s my so-so column from today’s paper. As you can see, I followed the Columnist’s Axiom — namely, when in doubt, reference your own life:
As I type these words, I have an excruciating toothache. And it’s made me realize that we blame schools too much for our children’s problems.
(Keep reading. That’ll make sense eventually.)
My dentist was impressed this morning that I’d gotten my tooth into the newspaper. I was less impressed at the $1,200 in dental work she said I needed.
The trailer for the new This American Life TV series, set to debut on Showtime in March.
Given the low overlap between dorky TAL fans and Showtime subscribers, I predict this series will rank No. 1 all time in the percentage of its viewers who download the show illegally via BitTorrent.
And a second trailer:
James Fenton (a crabwalk.com favorite) writes about W.H. Auden on the centenary of his birth. Best line:
When a lover once complained to him that, for a poet, he was not very romantic, Auden replied: “If it’s romance you’re looking for, go fuck a journalist.”
Had a story in Sunday’s paper:
When the state employee in charge of the TAKS test resigned last month, the official word was that she would be missed.
Education Commissioner Shirley Neeley called Lisa Chandler “a tremendous asset to the field” and said her exit was “a great loss for the agency.” A Texas Education Agency representative said that Ms. Chandler’s departure was of her own volition and that the agency was happy with her performance.
But documents obtained by The Dallas Morning News tell a different tale. They show that her departure was engineered by Dr. Neeley herself. At least as far back as November, top agency officials were planning to remove Ms. Chandler because of complaints from school districts, other TEA officials and her own staff.
The documents include typed and handwritten notes by Tom Shindell, an agency human resources official, from meetings both before and after Ms. Chandler was pushed out. They provide a unique window into TEA’s efforts to remove her from her post.
“Was I a scapegoat?” Ms. Chandler asks at one point, after she’s been told to leave. Then later: “Where was the due process?”
Happy Mardi Gras, y’all.
For Lent, I am giving up the blinding toothache that has completely wrecked the last four days. I wonder if I can sue my old dentist for (a) giving me a “incomplete” root canal five years ago that apparently requires a second, shock-and-awe root canal ASAP, and (b) apparently doing such a bad job on a crown that my new dentist says “I understand why you’re in excruciating pain — I just don’t understand why you haven’t been in excruciating pain for the past five years.”
Also, Vicodin is not nearly powerful enough, in this reporter’s opinion.
“The Art of Writing a Story About Walking Across Andorra,” a very fine travel piece by Friend of Crabwalk Rolf Potts.
Also, an announcement of another piece of his, which borders on stealing one of my more inspired fiction ideas, concocted last October in a Brazilian taxi. (This is no fault of Rolf’s, of course, since I’d never mentioned it to him. Great minds think alike, etc.)
For all the attention that the big rock festivals of the ’60s and ’70s get (Woodstock, Altamont, etc.), I’ve always been more interested in their black equivalents from the period.
I’ve written before about Soul to Soul, the 1971 concert of black American musicians held in the freshly decolonized Ghana. Hell, I wrote the damned Wikipedia entry for the thing. (Featuring Wilson Pickett, crabwalk.com fave Les McCann, Ike & Tina, and the unjustly forgotten Staple Singers.)
So I was interested to read this Smithsonian piece on “Black Woodstock,” a massive concert in Harlem in 1969. (Featuring Sly & the Family Stone, B.B. King, Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, the Staple Singers, and Pigmeat Markham. Geez, that’s some talent.) A film of the concert is supposed to be released sometime soon (when it will be purchased by me):
The footage shows seas of some 100,000 blacks whose dress and manner blend a Fourth of July picnic, a Sunday Best church revival, an urban rock concert and a rural civil rights rally. “You see the generations teetering,” said [producer Morgan] Neville. “As opposed to, say, Wattstax, where you see a kitschy funkifying of 70s America. This is different: the tension between soul and funk, civil disobedience versus Black Power, the tension of Harlem itself at the time.”
Ah, Wattstax — another great “Black Woodstock” of the period. (Music available for download. It’s solid, and Rufus Thomas’ “Do the Funky Penguin” has made it onto several of my mix CDs. Also featured: the Bar-Kays, Albert King, Carla Thomas, Isaac Hayes, and again the Staple Singers, who must have had a good booking agent back in the day.) Here’s the trailer:
Most interesting to me in that clip is the appearance (at 0:49) of Ted Lange, who apparently was an activist in the early 1970s. He seems like a cool guy, with quite a few directing credits and such. (Graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, author of 17 plays, etc.) But since he’s best known to white folks like me as the oversmiling bartender Isaac (1:23) on The Love Boat, it’s still a pretty dissonant image.
Peanut Butter Wolf has posted his Valentine’s Day mix, which — combined with his Christmas mix, is what I hope is the start of a holiday trend. (I anxiously await the Memorial Day mix, for example.) Featuring Archie Bell & The Drells, Marvin Gaye, the Miracles, and Stereolab, among others.
Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Captured Koala. (Stick with it — it’s worth it.)
Have you ever asked yourself: “What would it be like if Arrested Development’s Tobias Fünke joined the Canadian rock gods Sloan? (Whose new album continues to impress?) And what would it be like if this combined phalanx of rock force decided to sing the soundtrack of Jesus Christ Superstar?”
Your answer is below, in so-so-quality audio. Seriously, though, I fear this is the product of someone tapping my brain waves to determine what crosscultural mashups I would consider most unspeakably awesome.
(For the original, go here.)
For reasons that may one day be explained here, I had makeup applied to my face and a flat iron applied to my hair at work today. I felt like a Goo Goo Doll or something.
I believe this means that the Village People are officially the Second Coming. (The falcon cannot hear the falconer, indeed.)
I’ve been known to spend too much time tracking college basketball recruiting — the better to prepare for smashdowns like tonight’s — but college football recruiting has always seemed like too much of a timesuck for me. There are way too many high schoolers to track — who wants to invest time in knowing the 34th-best offensive tackle in Arkansas?
But I do feel it necessary to point out that the son of former New Orleans Saints quarterback Bobby Hebert — one of the great Cajuns in modern athletic history — signed up with LSU today.
And, even better, his name is T-Bob Hebert. Yes, T-Bob. Awesome.
(For those who don’t know, a Cajun son who shares the name of his father is traditionally prefixed by “T.” It’s short for “petit,” which is French for “little.” So if I ever had a Josh Jr., he’d be T-Josh. My first cousin is named Ronald, same as his dad — and despite the fact he is now 30 years old, he’s very much still T-Ron.)
I enjoyed this story in The Times Magazine — on the origin of General Tso’s chicken — until I saw it was written by someone named Fuchsia Dunlop and, thus, obviously fictional. I mean, why not Cerise McGee? Puce Smith? Magenta Jones?
Calvin Trillin, interviewed by Mark Singer (MP3). (Singer took over the U.S. Journal gig at The New Yorker after Trillin left it; to my mind, that remains the best job in all of journalism.)
Had a short story in Friday’s paper:
Saying he is tired of being labeled a “caveman” and a “recluse,” voucher supporter Jim Leininger is ready for a public relations offensive.
Joshua Benton is the director of the Nieman Digital Journalism Project at Harvard University, among other things. Before that, he was a staff writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News. (More.)
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06 Aug: COLUMN: A year’s wait can make all the difference for your child
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