cheese it, the cops!

escape!

cover of my next book (a collection of less, but not non, academic essays), due from suny in november.

sorry for slow/no blogging. i shall return.
so today: a mardi gras piece from last year. prof longhair: "she walks right in"

 

 

btw i got to see prof a couple of times in the seventies, with my bro adam who was a huge fan. he was amazing, one of the best performers i've ever seen. marion and i sat down over the weekend and watched spike lee's "when the levees broke," a very strong, good piece of work.

no

my piece on mardi gras and new orleans is up at creators. it's a little more "written" than my average column. as those who know us might guess, it forms a contrast to marion's piece in salon.

so i came away thinking that new orleans will survive. it may be that its spirit will even be intensified: it has always partied in the face of death. it's really truly fucked up, though, and the "federal response" hasn't gotten a bit more timely or efficient. hey if you want to see a lot more, read marion in salon. score.

we went to a party at a house on st. charles, and saw endymion and bacchus. janie was way way into it for a while, then got overwhelmed and retreated. we got all kinds of cool beads. i guess it's temporary or perverse: people are happy here. i'm happy here. this morning me and jane took a walk over to lake pontchartrain and watched the gulls and ducks. there were no cars on the street, no kids on the sortafuckedup playground. jack told me that this is the center of the universe and he wouldn't be anywhere else. i ntend to take a harmonica and a deck of cards and busk the quarter today. i spent a year making a living as a busker in the london underground, but i feel that this professor gig has made me fat and stupid.

so marion, jane, and i are staying with our friends jack and sue. the water stopped on their doorstep. they came back in january. anyway we went to a couple of parades this afternoon(toth, for one): jane caught necklaces and stuffed toys! the spirit was beautiful: so gentle and generous. marion is a maniac for loot: she started running toward the floats when we got a to a block away. or she's a maniac for this particular party.

this place is astonishing. you hear and see this stuff on tv or whatever, but nothing really prepares you for the miles of dark ruins that were neighborhoods, the piles of debris. you sort of turn easily to the survival and revival: the optimistic conclusion to the 3-minute piece. maybe so, but it's a long long way from here to there, and the human cost is astronomical and incurable. there's a bit of devastation tourism going on: we were in a little line of cars trolling by the breach in the 17th st canal. people stopped to take pictures of the cars up to their doors in mud etc. then on the other side we ate dinner at  a hopping r&o restaurant, where everybody was wearing beads and smiling at each other.