Bourbon Street Is Decadent and Depraved

Second day in New Orleans, first full day of sight-seeing (and only, as myself, my sis and her finance plan to abscond with the loot...I mean, leave town tomorrow after my Jeopardy try-out. Yeah, that's the ticket), and I know that technically we didn't do a whole lot of venturing beyond Canal Street and a side-jaunt down Bourbon Street, but we got to do more than enough.

The trip down was much better than any previous long-ass trip in a car during which I was a participant (I think it helped that we were all well past the age when farting in an enclosed space was a source of amusement, though that did not preclude any involuntary passing of gas). Georgia minus Atlanta was rural but pleasant (our path through ATL was nice because we didn't have to deal with traffic. My thinking is we won't be so lucky tomorrow). Alabama was notable for a couple of things: the fact that my future brother-in-law and I wore Clemson shirts in Auburn was not received kindly by the locals at a Firehouse Subs there (much harsh stares and possible brandishing of nooses could be inferred), and the stretch from Montgomery to Mobile (which I took over on after my sis expressed exhaustion at having driven so far, because she thinks I drive too slow for the interstate) was devoid of anything besides trees, more trees, grass, the occasional wild goat, and trees. Not even a fireworks warehouse billboard to liven up the scenery.

That particular stretch of Alabama answers my question "why do people take drugs?"

Mississippi was a revelation; as a kid who watched Mississippi Burning at a tender age, I've always been under the impression that you don't want to make a Mississippian angry (also, they still have the Rebel flag on their state flag). But the Gulf Coast, at least, was awesome; sandy beaches with gentle tides coming in, not at all like the Atlantic at Myrtle Beach (also, a significant lack of tacky tourist trappings at Biloxi, where we stopped). After that, it was on to Louisiana and New Orleans...where we happened upon Canal Street overrun by young college-age men in red dresses. Either it was some sort of charity/fraternity thing, or their drag queens have really quite trying.

Culture shock, thy name is New Orleans...

Today was a little better in that regard, NO is both urban enough to feel like a big city and Southern enough to be weird about it. I know we won't be doing much more while we're here (the Jeopardy thing is in the morning, and we all miss my niece something awful), but I want to come back, at my leisure, and see all the stuff that's here. It helps that none of us had an agenda (i.e., "I wanna see some big tourist trap!"), but I will be back sometime in the future. While wandering away from the excess of Bourbon Street (best way I could describe it: Clemson on a Thursday night, magnified by a large percent. The country boy in me is coming out, but really, apart from a trip to NYC and a passing familiarity with DC, ATL, and Greenville, my frame of reference was pretty small before now), I happened upon a little bookshop that had some long aisles I wanted to wander down, had I more time. Alas, I bought a book by a guy about New Orleans jazz because I figured that's what you do in New Orleans (plus, I already own and cherish a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces). This city is amazing, and while we did a lot, we just scratched the surface.

Anyway, long day ahead first of Jeopardy, then driving home (not sure if I drew the short straw on that yet, though it's the least I could do). Tom-Tom should be programmed to take us through a more-wild-goat-infested part of Alabama on the way back (or steer us to the nearest Jareds Galleria of Jewellry), and I pray for patience while trying to navigate through ATL, whether as driver or passenger. But hell, this has been a kick-ass trip all around, and whatever happens with the show, I'm glad I got to take it.

Could've used some Skinimax on the hotel cable, though ;-)

“Rednecks”/”Birmingham,” Randy Newman, and Southern Identity

The thing about the South is, we know we’re idiots. Not that we ourselves are stupid, but that’s how we’re viewed by the rest of the country. No one ever says someone from Oregon is an inbred cracker, for instance. Midwesterners may be boring, but they never had a major network television show dedicated to glorifying bootleggers running corn across Iowa county lines, for instance. No, we Southerners have a lot to answer for, but we’re not the idiots that a lot of people think we are.

Sure, there was that whole slavery thing (really, we’re sorry about it. White people have had a long history of being too lazy to do things when they could just get someone from another group to do it, for less pay). And we dropped the ball on integration for about, oh, a hundred years. And we still embrace the big, dumb, and loud when it comes to politics (Dubya is one of us, like it or not). Randy Newman is one of us, too, a New Orleans boy by way of Los Angeles and back again. So on that basis alone, I give him a free pass on “Rednecks.”

If you haven’t heard it…first off, he uses the n-word. He’s writing from the point of view of a typical good old boy (in fact, that’s the name of the album the song comes from, though I got it from a best-of compilation), and I can see where it wouldn’t necessarily be high on a lot of people’s playlists because of that (I saw him on “Austin City Limits” refusing to do the song, because “why do you think I can’t sing it?”). In that sense, he’s echoing Mark Twain, who used the n-word with such stunning regularity that people still have issues with “Huck Finn.” I didn’t get the whole controversy until I actually read the book, and then I understood. Twain sets a record for using the n-word, surely, though I’m afraid he might still be lagging behind any association of white people in the South (or the North, for that matter) who like to dress up and scare non-white people. Larry the Cable Guy fans, for instance.

The South is defined via pop culture as backwoods, infested with toothless morons who live to drink moonshine and knock up their first cousins. And with any groundless rumor and unwarranted stereotype, this one has basis in fact. We are backwoods, and proud of it. We went to freaking war with the rest of the country with maybe one gunsmith in Selma and a couple of fellas in Waycross who could whittle rifles real good, of course. When “The Dukes of Hazzard” is the single most important television show set in your neck of the woods, and “Deliverance” was filmed just down the road, you tend to be self-conscious.

Of course, we’re not all idiots down here. I recently read a couple of books by Lewis Grizzard, a Georgian (but we won’t hold that against him) who was pretty funny and insightful, even if I suspect him of having political views that I wouldn’t necessarily agree with (side note: I get tired of people lazily using “liberal” as a pejorative. Come up with something more clever, such as “practitioner of fellatio on small woodland creatures,” for instance). As he points out, and as Newman does in “Rednecks,” racism isn’t just a Southern thing. Y’all Yankees got nothing to brag about, basically is what each is saying.

On the flip side of that coin, “Birmingham” is both a gentle poke at the Southern attitude (who in their right mind would call Birmingham the equal of Paris or London?) and a celebration of said attitude (well, it is the greatest city in Alabama, when your competition is Montgomery, Mobile, and maybe Muscle Shoals, where Stax Records was located or recorded or was somehow or another connected to Muscle Shoals, I’m blanking on which of those options is the correct one). Once again, Newman inhabits a character, a regular working guy (the kind that Mitt Romney knows well, because he fired them a lot), a guy who don’t want much out of life except to work at a steel mill and go home to his wife and his dog Dan (the meanest dog in Alabama, naturally). Newman, by the way, is Jewish, something that still seems alien to a lot of Southerners even though they’ve been around since the beginning. But like any good writer of fiction, he inhabits the roles of both the redneck of “Rednecks” (who, after the jaunty first verse about how stupid he is, proves himself to be smarter when he talks about the North’s “enlightened” policy of putting blacks into ghettos in major urban areas) and the common man of “Birmingham” (a guy who really doesn’t have to answer to anybody for anything), and he does so with that rollicking, easy-going vocal delivery that “Family Guy” parodied so well in their Y2K episode (you know the one, where he’s writing songs about Lois getting an apple from the tree, because he just sings about whatever’s going on around him).

God help me, I love to listen to “Rednecks,” even though I wouldn’t do so in mixed company (it’s easy to see where someone might not get the premise of the song and think that Newman is actually espousing the views he posits, or at least they just don’t like the use of the n-word in the song). “We don’t know our ass from a hole in the ground” is a Southern-ism, and it’s appropriate for my hometown as much as it is for anywhere else. But as much as I take joy in that part of the song, I tip my hat to Newman when it comes to the second verse, because it would be easy to take pot-shots at the South without acknowledging that the North isn’t the land of opportunity that it was promised to be for freed slaves after the war. A dirty little secret about American history is that while many abolitionists were in it for the liberation of the slaves and wanted them to have every opportunity to make a good life for their families, some were secretly doubtful that the black man lacked the “mental capability” to live independent like the white man. Of course, this was a view that the slaveholders shared, because as long as they thought of the slaves as “children” it was easier to justify to themselves the conditions under which they “owned” them. Newman makes it clear that, yeah, us Southerners have a lot to be ashamed of with regards to slavery and segregation, but Northerners need to ask themselves why the urban landscapes of cities such as New York and Chicago suddenly became less desirable for white families to live in once blacks and other minorities started moving into the inner city. The distance between what we believe and what we do is something that this country needs to work on.

Must Be the Money

"Jeopardy" is a little over a week away (or is it two weeks...no, August 13, which is a Monday, so...wait, how do I carry the square root...I may be in more trouble than I think), and in all the time I've had to think about the ramifications that possibly appearing on the show could have (assuming I make it past the audition stage in New Orleans...in the middle of hurricane season. I am a master of timing), my own personal philosophy about wanting to be on the show has changed over the years.

When I first started trying out for the show (online testing), I was interested in acquiring a record total, something not quite in the Ken Jennings territory but close (in other words, I didn't want to have to work again). Now, as I actually stand on the precipice, I'm more inclined to believe that money doesn't buy happiness (though it can buy you peace of mind...hey, maybe I should write commercials).

Granted, I still want to do well, very well indeed, should I be picked to be on the show (and the waiting period could last long enough that maybe I'd actually have something approaching financial stability whenever I get on, but I wouldn't bet on it). But in life in general, after having seen up close (from a very non-likeliness of participation in the riches viewpoint) how money and wealth don't always mean your problems go away, I just want to make enough out of life to not owe anything when I'm gone (many, many centuries from now) and to take care of my family, should I happen to have one (working on it as we speak, though I've said that for years now). Most of all, I want to be able to avoid the pitfalls of believing that, if I just get this or that opportunity to make money, all my worries will be gone.

Just take a second to check out any of the news outlets devoted to celebrities, the ones who are famous for being famous (or Kim Kardashian); theirs is a whirlwind circle of seeking attention by being fame whores who get paid to be fame whores and who don't really contribute anything to society (unless you count reality shows as contributions to society, and I'm inclined to disbelieve that notion). Who wants to do that, really? All the money in the world, and the minute the cameras shut off it's like you're nothing. Until the eventual reunion show.

God help us all...

Anyway, looking forward to the trip there and back (I always wanted to see Mississippi, though preferably through the rearview mirror), and I'm hoping at the very least I have a hell of a (responsible) time in the Big Easy.

I Heard the News Today, Oh Boy

I don't want to talk about the Colorado "movie massacre" because I wish it didn't even happen, but it did. Some nut with something to prove (namely, how violence can solve low-self-esteem issues, I gather) took it upon himself to ruin the lives of innocent people who were just trying to see the new Batman movie. And now, once again, we're left trying to figure out "what this means about" modern American society.

The easy thing to do would be to blame society, what with our violent video games (though I'm guessing a majority of the people who play them don't want to see what it would really be like to go on a rampage, with real people taking the place of flesh-munching zombies or Russian super-spies), violent movies (though again, most people who see movies don't feel the urge to act out what they see onscreen once they get past the age of seven), or rap music (hey, because, well...it's violent, right?). Like I said, it's the easy thing to do.

Another easy thing to do would say that it's somehow the fault of gun makers, though (as it turns out) the gunman (whose name I will not dignify here, because that's all he really wants, the attention) purchased them legally. So banning guns isn't the answer (though maybe doing a better job of vetting the people who buy them wouldn't be such a bad idea, as we seem to agree in the wake of every mass-shooting).

It's not the fault of art that this guy went nuts, though yes we do have violent movies and violent video games and they are easy enough to identify and paint as the villains in this debacle (while absolving the folks who maybe should've seen this coming). I have watched well over two thousand decapitations, gunshot wounds, axe-wielding lunatics, cannibalistic space aliens, and Michael Bay explosion-porn epics to well qualify as potentiallu under the influence of such images if I so chose to enact something on this level, yet I never have and never will (and it's not just because I don't like guns that much; in theory, when you're a kid, they're cool, but when you actually shoot one and it feels like a sledgehammer to your shoulder blade, you kinda lose interest). I was brought up to have respect for human life, a basic decency that transcends whatever religious or cultural imperatives that might argue otherwise. Do I like to play video games where bullets take apart the skulls of my opponents? Yes. Do I want to see that happen in real life? Not a chance.

Art can trigger someone's deep-seated notions of depravity, this is true. But let's not issue blanket statements that it is the sole cause of last Friday morning's bloodbath. This was someone with an axe to grind, a call for help that grew into something much worse when he couldn't find another way of making himself heard. The dude needs to go away for a very, very, very long time, and not even sniff a chance at life outside prison walls. But we also need to do a better job of recognizing those around us who could see such beauty in chaos, not on a movie screen but in real life. That's when we stop this crap from happening, not by taking away violent entertainment.

Scientology, Penn State, and the Olympic Uniforms

First: Katie Holmes got out from the grasp of/divorced Tom Cruise in rapid time this past couple of weeks, with one of the stipulations being that she couldn't allegedly badmouth Scientology (I'll admit, I'm not up to date on my celebrity gossip). My question is, what the hell is she going to reveal that's so damn bad? Who the hell knows what Scientologists believe (I doubt they know)? Scientology was started by a fourth-rate sci-fi writer as a way to make money off gullible people (as are all organized religions, when you come right down to it). Also, he may have diddled with little boys, but there's nothing official on that. When John Travolta is your religion's main spokesman, you're in trouble.

But Scientology is apparently big stuff in Hollywood, and if I know anything it's this: celebrities are idiots. That tells me everything I need to know about Scientology's belief systems, and yes I'm saying all this as a member of the Illuminati (which controls Scientology, the world's banking systems, the careers of Jay-Z and Beyonce, and Dunkin' Donuts).

Second: A report that came out about the Penn State cover-up says Joe Paterno knew in 1998 what Jerry Sandusky was doing in the showers (i.e., "rough-housing") and thought more about protecting his college win record than the victims of Sandusky's devious behavior. My thinking is, burn Penn State to the ground. Short of that, take down the statue to Joe-Pa that stands outside the stadium. No one should be that big that they can cover up something like that because they're more worried about themselves than what harm is being visited upon young children. Yes, it's human nature to not want to believe the worst about someone that you're close to, that you consider almost a son. But once the facts were in Paterno's face, unblinking and not going away, he should have cut Sandusky loose to the DA and saved his reputation that way. Penn State will never really live this down, and they shouldn't. Shame on Paterno and all the men in charge who did nothing for so long.

Finally: The Olympic uniforms...is this really an issue? They look ridiculous (that I would have expected) and they're made in China (like everything else). Why is this a problem for Congress to investigate? Because it means avoiding the real issues, I guess (god help me I sound like a conservative blowhard, but I don't know what their take on this is. Maybe Sean Hannity can take time out of his busy neck-expanding exercises to register an opinion, but I think not).

Not to get off on a rant here, but...:-p

The Songbook Strikes Back: "Under Pressure," David Bowie and Queen

(Note: This is a note. Also, this is the first of maybe four or five essays I wrote before my computer's untimely or timely end. I will publish them sparingly, and then return to poop jokes and worries about all those erectile dysfunction emails I get. How did they know?)

Sometimes you listen to songs on your iPod that no one else has ever heard of (or at least no one in your immediate social circle; maybe the people in far-off corners of the indie-alternative music world have heard the same song you’re listening to, but they’re too cool to admit it). But sometimes, for every Neutral Milk Hotel and Belle and Sebastian song that you claim as your own, your very own…you listen to an anthem beloved by millions. The kind of song that gets used in commercials, say, or blasted at stadiums when a team scores a touchdown or avoids getting embarrassed. Such songs are clichés, overplayed and devoid of any personal import you can bring to them as a fan, right?

“Under Pressure” is one of those songs that I’m sure anyone reading this has heard, and not just heard but over-heard (as in “heard over and over and over and over ad nauseum”). It’s so familiar because it’s got a distinctive bass line (just ask Vanilla Ice how distinctive it is sometime), it’s got two of the all-time greatest ambiguous-sexuality singers in duet form (well, there was nothing ambiguous about Freddie Mercury, even before the Village People-style moustache, but I think it’s safe to say that David Bowie was bisexual because it was trendy to be so in the early Seventies if you were in rock music), and it’s an advertiser’s dream: plenty of bombast and quotable lines that can be isolated for identification with your product. Even if, somehow, you’re a space alien just arrived on this planet from millions of galaxies to the west of Tucson, you’ve heard this song.

It would be easy to hate this song, really easy, and yet…

I think something that my fellow self-styled music “experts” and “critics” tend to ignore when they get “serious” about music is the fact that it’s supposed to be fun to listen to. Chuck Klosterman gets it (why else would he devote an entire book to heavy metal, the most maligned form of rock music outside of, say, dance music?), but try getting Greil Marcus to wax poetic about anything the Black-Eyed Peas have done and you’re barking up the wrong tree. Music doesn’t have to have a “message,” it can be big and dumb and loud and stupid and fun and about Fridays or telephone numbers or girls dating some guy named Jesse. Because a lot of the time, the songs that supposedly have a “message” just don’t work. When was the last time you voluntarily listened to “We Are the World?” Exactly.

In the Eighties, rock music suddenly became About Something. It didn’t matter if it was aid to starving Africans or AIDS awareness, so long as it was About Something. Not that music wasn’t About Something before; the Vietnam War did a toll on the young men able to avoid service in the armed forces but physically incapable of not forming a band during the peak period of 1966 to 1971. Message songs about the war (most against but some, like the bizarre “Ballad of the Green Berets,” pro-war) were serious (except when they were funny, like “Fixin’ To Die Rag” by Country Joe and the Fish), and that’s why when you hear them today, they seem silly and outdated. Sometimes when art tackles a serious subject head-on, it ends up looking ridiculous in retrospect.

So is “Under Pressure” a serious message song? If it is, the subject it’s addressing seems to be…I don’t know, be kind to people? It was the Eighties, and the bizarre confluence of Reagan-era “optimism” and conservative “get it your own damn self” made for a Up-With-People approach to social problems, like “we’d sure cure that pesky gay disease if we just made a song about how important it is to love Jesus, and turn it into a Broadway show.” Live Aid, noble as it was, was less about the cause than the chance for celebs to look like they Gave a Damn, that it was all About Something. You could say the current bumper crop of reality-TV shows, for which shame is not an emotion you could feel regarding your status as a font of ridicule by the public at large, got its start when Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie said “hey, people are dying in Africa. Wouldn’t it look good if we wrote a song and got Bob Dylan, Springsteen, *and* Dan Aykroyd to sing on this?” I remember a P.J. O’Rourke essay about the “We Are the World” video and how satisfied the people involved were with themselves, that they were showing that they cared. You could transpose that to any second of any broadcast of any episode of “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” and the words would still apply.

So after all that, do I like the song? Yes, of course: it’s awesome. Never mind the odd and frankly hard-to-decipher “message” of the song (I’m still leaning towards “random acts of kindness” or “pay attention to depressed people, they need love too”), the song itself actually seems to be About Something, but that’s more about what you bring to it (or, in keeping with the theme, What You Bring To It). Yes, it’s over-used by commercials (the one where the Muppets sang it was pretty funny, but still). Yes, it’s a relic of a time when superstar collaborations were a rarity, not a weekly occurrence (and when the word “superstar” actually meant something, Nicki Minaj. It meant something that you will never, ever qualify as). But it moves me, and I can’t say that about “Eve of Destruction” or “Do They Know It’s Christmas” or whatever the title was of that dumbass British Christmas-themed song. I like it, I guess, and I hope you don’t mind but I don’t give a damn if you do (now see, *that’s* Eighties).

America, Heck Yeah!

This past week, the nation celebrated the birthday of our founding, the Fourth of July. I celebrated it by riding around a few hours, doing something close to nothing because it was as hot as an oven...and everything was closed. Except the mall: the mall never closes.

Anyway, after all that, you'd think I'd be content to settle in for a quiet night of just reading (because both the lack of original programming and the ability to get in a majority of the channels has limited my TV viewing options since about at least late May. Thanks again, thunderstorm). You'd be wrong.

My uncle got a pool put in a while back, and I'd been meaning to get my toes wet in it for a while. But various things kept coming up, such as my lack of swimming trunks and ability to swim (lack thereof). But on Wednesday, in the midst of "maybe the Mayans were right" hot weather, I managed to scrounge up some trunks that might belong to my n'er-do-well younger brother and I set out for the pool.

I spent about an hour in the water, just chilling. When I got out, I was sure I'd have some additions to my farmer's tan, like maybe a little blistering but nothing too shabby. Nature was cruel to me: not that I got too pink, but that I didn't get pink at all. I still look like I'm wearing a tan, flesh-colored hairy shirt.

Gosh darn it.

Anyway, I had a genuinely good time Wednesday, and I even got a little into the patriotic spirit (because, as you know, I voted for Obama, and anyone who does that is a Godless commie liberal gay-loving French-food-eating tutu-wearing cut-the-military-budget pansy). America may not be the best country in the world, but we're not the worst. That honor belongs to Andorra.

Go look it up...