Big E for Ex

My ex-husband, I’ve noticed, has lately been contributing record reviews on a semi-regular basis to the Village Voice. My inner Miss Catty has to comment that he’s got a great editor there, capable of turning his often rambling and incoherent prose into something readable. (Uh, yeah, I get your point.) Still, I appreciate that this is an unprecedented, redemptory career high for him. The Village Voice, journalistic home of his idol Robert Christgau! (Robert Christ-God, I used to tease.) The thing about my ex is that he really truly deeply loves the music, he’s not a poseur even when he’s incomprehensible. Good going, E. Congratulations.

Punks

I went to see a German movie called Head On, about a marriage of convenience, sorta, between two Turkish immigrants in Germany. It’s pretty good. My favorite scene is when the old punk and his young bride jump around their kitchen shouting "Punk is not dead!"

I don’t like punk music, but I’m sympathetic to the punk worldview. Young punks can be annoying, but some of my favorite people are old punks.

My favorite record of the moment is the new Morning 40 Federation CD. It incorporates tracks from a couple of their previous self-distributed CDs, repackaged by a label from Los Angeles.

They’re a New Orleans sorta-punk band, at least in spirit. Except with a baritone sax and sometimes a trombone or tuba. Their name references the practice of drinking a 40-ounce can of malt liquor in the morning. Their songs are mostly about being drunk and wasted. Or about being poorly groomed:

We been drinking, and we been stinking
That’s what we’re hearing from the girls around town
They ain’t lyin, but they ain’t mindin
Those same girls are always coming round

They say scrub them, scrub them dirty toes
And then you wash them, wash them filthy clothes
And then you blow that, blow that runny nose
And then god knows you might get clean

S tells me at the bari player/singer really is that stinky, though he is also a nice guy and a talented glass blower. But more on that in a minute.

I’ve seen them live four or five times in the past few years. They’re fun, but I can only take them in relatively short doses. They are a load, chaotic drunken spectacle, with head banging and sometimes slam dancing and leaps through the air and girls who get on stage and take off their clothes. Exhilarating at their best, but sometimes too much for me. (I’m old. I was born old.)

They used to be pretty bad, sloppy musicians, but now they’ve gotten good. They’re tight.. Their lyrics are funny. But it doesn’t matter if they’re tight or sloppy, the audience sings along "Sorry mom, but I’m drunk, a drunk…."

Live, it’s easy to miss the music for the spectacle. I like the record. (I’m old.)

There’s an irony in then being great poets of the fuck up. They’re not the ones passed out on my sidewalk. How much of a fuck-up can you be if you’re practicing and writing good songs and putting out records and touring all the time? And blowing glass while you’re at it, and playing on side projects? It reminds me of the quote about the Ramones being run like an army.

And ironic, too, that I enjoy them so much when I don’t want to drink anymore, and I’m not that excited about seeing them live.

Well, alcohol just doesn’t work that well for me but I appreciate the value and even the need to alter one’s consciousness with chemicals or whatever, to temporarily be free of one’s normal brain chemistry. That stuff is all dangerous, of course, can wreck your life. Risky. But sometimes the risk is necessary. I’m better off without it right now, but that doesn’t mean forever.

Oh, I’m so hyperconscious right now of my mortality, the speed of time passing, my aging, my temporariness and insignificance.

Retsina

Yesterday, the matted dreadlock guy-on-the-sidewalk was at the bus stop smoking a cigarette.

The grouchy old Norwegian guy who owns the laundromat turns out to be semi-fluent in Spanish. He’s giving this Honduran guy a lecture in Norwegian-accent Spanish about how if you use too much soap in your laundry you won’t get a good rinse.

He likes me, the Norwegian guy. He gave me a cart to carry my laundry in, and all the books that people leave at the laundromat. Mostly they’re crappy romance novels, but I scored a Modern Library edition of The Quiet American.

I hate going to the laundromat, though. Particularly walking to the laundromat. It’s a drag, and it makes me feel like a loser. The best thing about my new place is that it has a washer and dryer and a dishwasher, all for me and only me!

I wonder if someday I’ll be looking back with nostalgia on my afternoons at the Norwegian laundromat.

I had another dream about sex last night—another dream about fucking someone who wasn’t particularly into it. It’s depressing that even in my dreams I don’t have sex with men who wholeheartedly love and desire me. I guess it’s a matter of getting what you expect.

However, I have been sleeping soundly at night without sleeping pills, which is great. A reprieve from my chronic insomnia.

Last night I went to the Greek Fest with L and A. I’ve been avoiding drinking or at least limiting myself to two. Alcohol truly works as a depressant on me. If I drink enough to feel drunk, emotionally I feel like crap the next day. It’s not worth it. I would think L of all people would understand and respect this.

We got a bottle, then two, then three, of retsina. It tasted good to me at first, but gradually it seemed more and more like drinking pine-sol. They kept on refilling my cup, but I didn’t have any of the third bottle. I didn’t get drunk but the retsina made me feel sick. None of the fun and all of the suffering. And the food was only okay.

L got trashed, and I didn’t find it amusing or charming, but rather needy and annoying and dumb. A is nice but we don’t have much to say to each other. He did say he might give me his queen-sized bed, which would be nice if it’s less old and sprung than my current bed, which I bought used (yuck) when I arrived in Greenwood in 1998.

L dragged me out on the dance floor to do some kind of dance we didn’t know how to do. Normally I’m willing to dance to anything at anytime, but this wasn’t fun to me, It was too much like we were drunken boors making a spectacle of ourselves.

We ran into MP with his family and kid and girl-of-the-week. I used to want to warn his girls about him, but they may well know his reputation, and anyway they’re grown and it’s none of my business. The interesting thing about this girl was that she had a steel-grey pixie cut, but she was still hot. I wish I could pull that off.

L was loaded so A drove the Mighty Fury. I think it was the highlight of his night. We went to the Parkway Bakery, where J was playing. L’s idea. But it was an early set. They were packing up when we got there. J wanted us to meet him at Pal’s Lounge. But L wanted to go home. When we were halfway home she decided she wanted to go out some more.

Oy, I sound like a grouch. Let me say that L called later to apologize for being too drunk, at that she is still one of my favorite people, and that I am the grouch here.

Anyway, just as well that we didn’t go to Pal’s. J has given me a perverse lesson in how to keep a man’s attention. He has been infatuated with me for at least three years, despite the fact that I’m never going to give him any and have told him so quite clearly. I used to flirt back, but then I realized I was leading him on, which is, ya know, morally sketchy. Now I don’t answer the phone when he calls (twice in the last 24 hours) and I don’t respond to his invitations. I rarely go hear him play even though I love him as a musician. And he’s more devotedly smitten than ever.

If you don’t know who I’m talking about here and you think I’m being a hypocrite by dismissing the one guy who really is that into me, let me clarify that he is married. Also a bit too old, or let’s say aging badly.

He is the same number of years older than me as the Underage Deejay is younger than me. I think I ought not make a big move on the UD. A little flirting is okay, but if he really wants me he can screw up the courage to ask me out—or if he can’t, he’s too much of a wuss for me, anyway.

Today's news

Yesterday I saw a bumper sticker that read “Do You Know Today’s News? Thank a Journalist!” As a former and sometimes member of the maligned profession, I sympathize with the bid for appreciation, but knowing today’s news only makes me want to kill someone.

Anway:

-Priscilla Owen’s nomination was confirmed.

-The homeless guy on the sidewalk has not been spotted again.

-It’s been two weeks since I boldly declared here that I wasn’t interested in romance. Still true, but my peaceful indifference to men has been interrupted by the return of my libido.

Early this morning I was dreaming about a road trip to Baton Rouge with a group of eccentric men. We were at a strange museum filled with Catholic paraphernalia. I was flirting with a cute young guy and boldly reached out and rumpled his hair. But he rebuffed my advances and told me I should go out with a friend of his. The friend was a firebrand professor at LSU, he said, who was interested in another girl who was not interested in him, but I would be better for him. He talked to me as if I knew this professor, and I played along even though I couldn’t place him. I was willing to go along with this potential new romance, but when the professor came out of the museum he had a little monkey on a leash. He seemed a little too eccentric, and I waffled a bit. Then the cat woke me up.

Awake, I find this dream extremely irritating. I want to slap my dream-self. Why are you tousling the hair of a man who’s clearly not interested in you? Why are you willing to get interested in a man, sight-unseen, who is crushed-out on another woman, just because someone suggests him to you? Stop, stop, stop it already.

This dream might be relevant to the quasi-(possibly-semi-imaginary-)flirtation I have going on with a delectably under-aged fellow deejay. He just turned 24 and he looks even younger than that. He looks not yet fully formed. He’s even kind of dorky looking, but in a way I find almost unbearably delicious. One day I saw him on campus in a fresh pair of khakis and clean white shirt, and he was just like an unwrapped piece of candy.

He seems to think I’m a likeable, interesting person, at least. And I’m pretty sure he’s flirting with me, but whenever I try to give him an invitation to go further, he doesn’t take it. I think maybe I’m too cryptic or he’s too intimidated, but it might be that he’s just not that interested. Then I go round and round in my head about it, and the next thing you know I’m semi-obsessed with a perfectly nice but probably not terrifically exceptional 24 year old boy! And feeling rejected and insecure, too! Stop it! Stop it, stop it, stop it!

Sure, I’d like the chance to unwrap him and eat him up—and if I get the chance you know I’ll take it. Maybe I’ll make an overt move on him. Maybe I won’t. One way or the other, I’m not going to let myself get too worked up about it. Not until I’ve had the chance to unwrap him, at least, and he’s proven himself worthy of the hype.

Oh, there’s more to say—about work and school and real estate. But I’m tired of typing right now, and I know you really just want to know about sex and cute boys.

US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals

There's lots of brouhaha in the US Senate right now with conservative Republicans threatening to do away with the filibuster to keep Democrats from blocking Bush’s court nominations. A group of moderates from both parties have made a compromise to keep the filibuster as an option (to the dismay of the horrid Dr. Dobson who apparently believes the filibuster is an abomination in the eyes of the Lord—not sure where it says that in the Bible, but…)

The bad news is that now Priscilla Owen and host of other questionable judicial candidates will likely be ascending to high courts throughout the country. Priscilla Owen (who is against abortion, civil rights and environmental protections and has no qualms about using her personal values, rather than precedent or the letter of the law, in forming her judicial opinions) is of particular interest because she has been nominated to the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is right here in New Orleans.

The Fifth Circuit doesn’t get much local press, but its presence here is significant for lots of people, including law students and recent graduates, who potentially have the opportunity to clerk on a high level federal court without leaving New Orleans.

I’m not an expert, but I understand the Fifth Circuit put a lot of the muscle behind the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, so it has a pretty honorable history. Today, however, even without Priscilla Owen, it is a problematic court. It seems to get its wrist slapped by the Supreme Court on a regular basis, particularly over appeals of Texas death penalty verdicts. The Texas courts, of course, believe in toasting just about anyone they can get their hands on. If appealed, those death penalty cases eventually end up in front of the Fifth Circuit, which can be relied on to uphold the original decision, even if the convicted party is a retarded 12-year-old or if the evidence is pretty strong that someone else did the crime. At least, for now, the Supreme Court can be counted on to keep the Fifth Circuit in line.

I’m still interested in trying to get a clerkship at the court, it’s just going to take some figuring out which judges are alright and which to avoid. Judge Owen will be one to stay away from.

A post for JT, who misses New Orleans

I haven’t seen that man who was on the sidewalk since Thursday. So that’s not good. Also, I noticed that the bus stop shelter on Jackson where he used to hang out has been taken down.

The roaches are flying. The termites are swarming. Hank’s lost all his butt hair. I’m going through at least three t-shirts and taking at least three cool showers a day, and horniness has nothing to do with it. I’ve stopped cooking. My Entergy bill is $130. The summertime sauna has begun.

Crime is up. Papa Joe of Joe’s Cozy Corner died in jail. The cops are busting up second lines. Uptown and in Lakeview, white ladies are getting robbed while getting out of their cars in front of their houses. In the Marigny, black kids are throwing rocks at white hipsters on bikes. In Algiers, a Vietnamese girl working in a corner grocery got shot in the head during an attempted robbery. Dumbass shoots her before she has a chance to hand over any cash, then leaves without it. The ghetto thugs are at war with everyone, including and especially themselves. Even if you’ve got some good ideas about how to start fixing this mess, if you’ve been here awhile you start to accept that nothing’s ever going to change because any attempt to make things better will be co-opted by ineptitude, ignorance and greed. So then you’re just another person shrugging your shoulders and thinking about learning to shoot.

I did my regular middle-of-the-night radio show this weekend, and then I did Gentilly Jr.’s show last night. I’m going to quit deejaying when I move, because I’ll be farther away and because I’ll probably do better in school if I get in the habit of sleeping at night. I usually ride my bike to the station with a bag full of CDs strapped to the back. With so much mayhem in the streets, I’m thinking this may not be the smartest or safest thing to do, and I’ll be relieved to not do it anymore. But I’ll miss those late night trips, too.

I like going out on hot nights. When the sun is out, the heat is too oppressive, but after the sun goes down stepping outside is like stepping into a hot bath-- oddly comforting. I bike through the Lower Garden District, under the overpass, through the warehouse district and CBD and into the Quarter. The drunk tourists can be annoying, the quarter rats can be creepy, but I like the buzz of the Quarter at night. Then I ride through the park, past dignified and indignant geese and ducks walking across the street, napping on the lawn or floating in the lagoon. Then I get to the station and play my records and field phone calls from Norm from Algiers “pernt” and various other inebriated and unintelligible old men. I’ll miss all of that.

The man on the sidewalk

There are a couple of regular bums in my neighborhood who have been scuffling around it for as long as I've lived there and surely much longer. One in particular is a tall black guy, probably about fiftyish, with matted grey dreadlocks. Sometimes he pushes a cart around the neighborhood, singing to himself and picking up cans. Sometimes he's passed out at the bus stop. He doesn't speak, although that might be just because no one speaks to him.

This morning he was laying face up on the sidewalk on Constance Street around the corner from my house. I was on my way to work (late) on my bike. I didn't notice him till I was almost past him. I was noticing the barking dog next door, then realized the dog was barking at the man on the sidewalk.

I looked at him. Made eye contact even. Made a little "oh shit" face. Was about to double back. Then I stopped. Like my brain was weighing the evidence and judged this not a stop-worthy incident. He was awake, didn't seem upset or anything. There was some crusted blood around his nose--that's what made it at first register as something I should help with. But there were lots of other people out on the street. A couple of meter readers, guys across the street working on a house. Cars driving by. The garbage men had been by. If they weren't worried about this, why should I be? Of course, maybe they were thinking the same of me.

I thought of Adam in India, where presumably he walks by people sprawled on the street all day long. I thought about how I'd been reading about Paul Farmer and feeling inspired to do good, and here's my own neighbor on the sidewalk and I won't even stop to ask if he's okay.

But it's also important to not be too much of a sucker, so all the world's overwhelming dysfunction doesn't suck you in. Probably this guy just didn't quite make it to the bench in time last night, and just passed out there when he got ready to pass out. Now it's morning and he's going to shuffle on down to the shelter to get somethng to eat. I hope so. If he's dead on the sidewalk, the bad karma's on me.

You know, a few blocks later when I was turning toward Magazine Street, I saw MP crossing ahead, on his way to the Rue with his dogs. Now it occurs to me that I should have gone after him and asked him about it. Whatever else can be said about him, he's really good at balancing being an upstanding neighborhood guy with being a non-sucker.

Addendum: after writing this post I read the local news and learned that there have been four murders in the last 24 hours in the city. Bodies on sidewalks all over town.

The Battle of the Sexes

On Craigslist, a (presumably) young man confesses that porn has ruined him. He used to be turned on by ordinary-looking girls with personalities, now he requires big fake tits and an enthusiasm for anal sex. Rather than weep for the state of his own soul, he advises all those perfectly nice, normal women that if they want a man they need to get with the new porn paradigm. Similarly, on Fark (yes, too much web-surfing lately), another guy advises girls that they need to be willling to do whatever freaky thing he's into at the moment (no concern for what gets her freak on) because if she won't, another hotter girl will.

Now, admittedly, I'm probably a bit outside these fellows' audience, but for the sake of argument--let's say I accept the problematic assumption that I have only two options: Mold myself to fit some kind of banal male fantasy, or accept a life of lonely chastity. Why the hell would I want a man like that? If those are my options, I'd rather have my self-respect than a troglodyte for a partner. The pleasures of solitude are not insubstantial. The most exquisite orgasms I've ever had have been delivered to me via the bathtub faucet. Maybe that's too much information--but I'd like to be with a man who takes that as a challenge to do better, not a reason to shrug his shoulders. And who thinks that challenge is hotter than a pair of big fake tits. I have hope and faith that men like that will always exist, even if they're always a rarity.

It's not that I'm against porn, either. But I'm not the first to notice that the burgeoning of internet porn has had some negative affects. Nothing is mysterious or forbidden anymore--it's like we turned on the lights in the haunted house. Boring.

A post in which I demonstrate my earnest naivete

My big boss arbitrarily decided I should attend an expo, held yesterday, of women’s health research at Tulane and LSU. At first I was a little annoyed because there was no practical, job-related reason I needed to go. But then I started to think about it in terms of not having to go to the office on Monday.

The luncheon speaker was Vivian Pinn, who is the director the the NIH’s Office of Research on Women’s Health. She made the trip downtown worthwhile, though my impressions of her before she gave her talk were mixed. She was a very well turned-out woman in her late 50s/early 60s, the kind who makes you realize that being that age can definitely have its perqs. She was very chatty and social with us underlings. But the way she joked about taking home the leftover lunchtime jambalaya made me roll my eyes. It was bad jambalaya, okay? So it seems she is either disingenuous or has bad taste.

But when she started to talk (fast, and then faster as she tried to say more in less time) her great intelligence and savvy became apparent. She oversees this great complicated mess of research, and she seems to grasp the big picture and the details all at once, and navigates the science and the politics. At least that’s the impression she gave. Maybe she’s actually less than competent at her job, but I doubt it. She was a black woman who graduated from the University of Virginia medical school in 1967 and went on to have a big research and academic career. It would be pretty hard to pull that off with smoke and mirrors and good lighting.

People like her make me feel all naively optimistic and ambitious. Look, Virginia, people can make a difference! The government can do good things in the hands of good people! Do you want to smack me yet?

I’ve been feeling that way times a thousand because I’m reading Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder’s book about Dr. Paul Farmer, who is on a mission to bring first-world quality healthcare with no excuses to the poor of the third world, starting in Central Haiti. It’s a really good, engaging book, too—not too dry and wonky.

All that said, I have to admit that when the afternoon sessions got a little dull I snuck out and went to a matinee. Don’t judge me too harshly, I’m in the middle of working 12 days in a row between my two jobs and I’ve got to get in my goofing off when the opportunity arises.

I went to see The Ballad of Jack and Rose. It got some bad reviews, but maybe that’s because it’s a troubling movie. It bothered me, it creeped me out a bit—but I thought that was the point. It’s sticking with me, partly because of Daniel Day Lewis. I recently re-watched My Beautiful Laundrette, in which he was the gorgeous young (gay) gutter punk with a peroxide Mohawk. His hard-living scars and crooked nose were just beauty marks, highlighting his youth and beauty. In Jack and Rose he is gaunt, with lines on his face and incipient gray hairs. Devastatingly handsome still, but the “devastating” means something different in this reference.

He plays a 60s holdout who has raised his only daughter on the remains of a commune on an island off the coast. Now he’s dying and he invites his casual girlfriend, played by Catherine Keener, and her screwed up sons to live with them on the island—the idea is that she will tend to him in his decline and serve as a surrogate mother to his daughter, Rose. He pretty much buys her services.

The problem is that Rose is a dewy, beautiful, wild little fucked-up nutbar who’s in love with her dad. And he’s made her that way.

I almost wanted to identify with Rose, so young and lovely and full of fire and life. But she’s such a wreck. And when I was a little like Rose I was also a miserable wreck. And not a beautiful one.

Then I was disturbed because I saw too much of myself in Keener’s character. Needy and drawn to fucked-up men, trite and ordinary and unloved. I’m not going to be like her anymore. I refuse.

I sympathize with Jack’s radicalism. He’s right, those new houses on the island are horrid. When Jack and Rose go to the mainland and they’re driving down the strip and she asks him “why do people like things so ugly?”, that’s a question I’ve asked myself a million times, since I was little, and I want so much to do something about it, stop the cancer of that bad-development kind of ugliness.

I don’t think Jack’s answers are the right ones, though. I do understand the back-to-nature urge, and I'd hate to deny anyone their Walden. But the problem is that going back to nature can turn out to be selfish and elitist. Everyone wants their Walden, and the next thing you know Walden is circled by houses. We don’t need to go live in the woods, we need to repopulate the inner cities. Redevelop what we’ve already developed, not build even the humblest new shack in what little is left undeveloped. Cities are the places where we can live most efficiently and wih the smallest overall footprint. So let's stay and make our cities better, rather than running away from them.

Springtime in New Orleans

Yesterday was the first day of the year that was too hot. I ought not complain, as the good weather lasted longer than usual this spring. It was the nicest Jazzfest I can remember.

However. Yesterday was not only the first day it was too hot, but also the first day of termite swarming season. Imagine riding your bicycle down lovely St. Charles Avenue at around 8 p.m., just after sunset, and being pelted by kamikaze termites. Termites in your eyes. Termites in your hair. Termites down your cleavage. Some sort of graduation exercises were happening on Loyola's front lawn there in the termite storm. It's just part of the charm of Old New Orleans--land of plague and pestilence.

The point of this blog is that my life is on the verge of changing fairly drastically, and I want to make a record of it. I also want to keep writing even though I will no longer be getting paid to write. I want a reading audience, too, though I think I'll wait to inform anyone that this blog is here. Maybe someone will discover this by accident. One of my favorite goofing-off-at-work tactics lately has been to check in on Adam's blog and then hit the "next blog" link to whatever has just been updated. You might like to try it if you get bored with what I have to say, or you're just looking for something else to read.

Anyway, the changes: I'm quitting my job and going to law school at the relatively late age of 36. I'm moving (I hope, cross your fingers) out of my semi-squalid ghetto flat to an adorable little shotgun house near the Riverbend. But the most significant change is perhaps the least tangible one. I've stopped caring about love and romance. Really. Try me. It feels amazing. I want that shotgun house all to myself. I'm bored with difficult men, moody men, tragic men, immature not-ready men, flaky men, wimpy men, dominant men, crazy men with issues. I'm not even interested in normal men who are ready to settle down. Last week I was on a little road trip with two married women about my age. Only been married a few years. Both celibate and neither one particularly happy. Who needs that?

For now it feels freeing and peaceful and easy to just leave all that alone. It probably won't stay so easy, of course. I'm not ready to sign up for lifelong celibacy and I'm not interested in bar-tramp style promiscuity, so sooner or later I'm going to have to negotiate a relationship of some sort with a man. But not right now.