In Praise of Manboys

Because Bob's kitchen and beyond is currently gutted, being cleared of its lead paint, and otherwise off-limits, he cannot access his CD collection in the basement. If he could, he intended to post Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul's song, "Men Without Women," to go with the post. He hopes to continue post music at some point in the near future.

It is no great revelation to point out, as popular culture has done for decades, that our society is full of men who refuse to grow up in one way or another. But it may be a bit of a surprise to realize that I am one.

Not that, as someone who has taken a "mancation" to New Orleans for the better part of the past ten years should be at all surprised to discover his own boyishness. But, as the famous writer once said (I'm updating the English), "The life so short, the craft so long to learn."

Now, at the risk of glossing over the subject, I'm going to summarize those trips fairly quickly--drinking, gambling, overeating, oogling, bead-soliciting, sports watching, women watching, sex joking, fart joking, gay joking (about sharing a bed with another man), carousing, karaokeing, spending, public urinating, boasting, sarcasticing, batchelorette-party crashing, bragging, jukeboxing, masturbating-joking, strutting, risqueing, lawbreaking (real or imagined), bow-necking, and probably some other equally-long list of related gerunds.

In fact, I was sitting in a bar in New Orleans with a former student and his girlfriend (hopefully, soon fiancee) having a few beers with them when the boyman's parents and sister came into the bar. I had met them years ago when he was a student and they remembered me and we greeted each other and they knew their son had been drinking all day, so as they passed on through, they cautioned him, "Be careful." And then his mother looked at me. "You be careful, too," she said.

That's when you know that you are a manboy.

But all of that serves as an admission. Yes, I am a manboy. Tell me something that I won't acknowledge with a little prodding.

What I hope to do, though, is to offer an impassioned defense of this phenomenon. Manboying is good. Manboying is productive. Manboying is essential.

Today's man is a heavily-controlled creature. His boss owns him, the days of a participative work environment having long since passed in favor of the tight reins of economic fiscality. His parent or parents still want to see him as a son who will react positively to all of the advice that they have to offer about child-rearing, investing, relationship-managing, and any other life lessons that haven't quite taken hold yet. His wife lives in the fear that if he gets too far off the leash, he will implode in some significant way, endangering both family and future.

And so, if he can get off into an environment that is relatively-safe but with a lot of freedoms for just a few days where he can just be one of the boys, that is an effective carrot to dangle in front of him to keep him in line much of the rest of the year. And when he gets to that few-day escape, society expects the worst of him. Those close to him really don't want to know what goes on. If it's true that "what happens in the French Quarter stays in the French Quarter," then the real reason is because no one is asking. When he leaves town, the responsible safety net around him takes a collective deep breath and can only fully exhale when he returns to the fold safe and sound.

But that misunderstands the purpose of such a trip. All of those behaviors I listed up above, for the most part, are minor, occasional, sometimes only-happened-once aspects of such a trip. They are not the focus. They are not sources of danger or risk in any significant way. Yeah, one of our ranks almost got kicked in the head by a police horse, one regularly embarassses himself on the karaoke stage, one tends to drop a couple of hundred dollars in the casino each trip, one likes the cheap drinks in the Chart Room, but so what?

What really happens, what really makes a manboy trip so productive is that the men involved compare notes. They spend perhaps 80% of such a trip doing exactly that. Men need to debrief with each other about work (theirs and others), about marriage, about children or career paths, about, in the broadest sense, what is working and isn't working in their lives. While those on the outside think that their men are off doing things that they need to turn a blind eye (or several) to, in fact, their men are rejuvenating themselves for nothing more than a return to the fold. With nothing to hunt, with nothing to gather, they are simply out in the "wilderness" reminding themselves of what is there as a rev up for domesticity. And so, manboying is essential.

Sure, when he gets back, your man may be a little coarser, may drive a little faster, may go to the fridge for one more beer than he usually has, but those are just leftovers. If anything, as this last trip demonstrated, men disappoint each other more than anything else. They arrive in the Emerald City with grand visions of debauchery and end up (for the most part) in bed before midnight, bloated on beer or po-boys or maybe just freedom. They can't gorge on too much of it before their bodies shut down.

Or, depending on their ages, they may reach that crystalline moment when they realize, hey, I'm the oldest person in this bar or hey, this song I'm singing is older than most of the people in this room. Or, hey, it will be nice go to bed a little early and sleep in as long as I want and maybe eat something tomorrow that someone might tell me I shouldn't be eating, but this one time I can enjoy it guilt free. Is that rebellion?

I know nothing of women trips. I only know that my wife went on one and really didn't like it. But I can only hope that, in their perfect state, they accomplish the same things our manboy trips do--allow us to talk way more about doing than what we'd actually ever do, enable us to talk safely about sensitive issues, push us to step only tentatively and slightly across whatever lines we might have drawn for ourselves. And go to Krystal at midnight for a double cheese Krystal and a Chili-Cheese Pup, if we so desire. Somehow, that's living.

See you next year, boys. I hope. Or men.

Dear Mr. Olyphant...

Dream On Cowboy - Flesh For Lulu (mp3)
Bad Boyfriend - Garbage (mp3)

For the fourth time over Spring Break, I found myself drifting back into the land of the vulgar and wild west known as DEADWOOD. Or, what I’ve called The Greatest Show Ever On Television.

The only current television show I’m watching with loyalty is JUSTIFIED, currently in its second season on F/X network.

These two shows have many things in common, but one stares at you with piercing eyes so potent you actually worry your corneas might bleed if you stare back too long. The owner of those eyes is Seth Bullock a.k.a. Raylan Givens a.k.a. Timothy Olyphant.

I’ve never been shy about my man crushes because they’re not particularly sexual in nature. It’s possible for a man -- on an admittedly rare occasion, I grant you -- to actually find himself drawn powerfully to another person without it having the slightest thing to do with his pecker. I get the impression women are generally more comfortable with this feeling, some strange mixture of admiration and attraction. Men don’t seem willing to cop to it as easily.

When I first witnessed the storm that is Timothy Olyphant in the prurient yet highly enjoyable teen flick “The Girl Next Door,” I certainly hoped I was making acquaintance with a man I’d meet again. He managed to make the bad guy both frightening and charismatic. He was both bully and enemy to fratboys and preppie snots the world over. He was the kind of character who, in an S.E. Hinton novel, would have had a compelling back story and been the protagonist for whom we cheered.

“The Girl Next Door” wasn’t his debut. He cut his teeth slowly up the ladder, including a related if slightly more sadistic and evil version in GO. But TGND was the film that launched him into the next level.

Since my obsession with DEADWOOD began, I’ve managed to watch almost everything Olyphant has been in. It’s weird how that works. And it’s not just this one guy.

I chase around Ian McShane a.k.a. Al Swearengen, too. Hell, I watched every minute of that show KINGS. I think I was the only human on the planet who did, and I still argue that if McShane's character was just one time allowed to say "c**ksucker," ratings would've shot through the f**kin' roof. And if Nathan Fillion sneezes on camera, I’m likely to be sure I see it at least once. I don’t even think CASTLE is that good a show, but I watch because I loves me some Nathan, and his cop pal ain’t so bad herself, neither.

But Olyphant’s collection is especially impressive for being both understated yet strong.

Stop-Loss. A Perfect Getaway. The Crazies (as zombie horror films go, this one’s very good and unusually accessible for the non-zombie types out there). A turn in the second season of Damages. And then his portrayal of a Kentucky lawman come home to roost in JUSTIFIED.

F/X just announced that they have renewed ol’ Raylan Givens for a third season. Ratings for season two are up. Even though I don’t think this season is one hair’s breadth better than the first, I don’t mind if some folks are late to a great party so long as the party keeps going.

Dude, you can even make a friggin' STAR WARS reference and still bleed coolness!



Don’t worry, Timothy. I don’t want to marry you, and I don’t want to be some repressed Felix Unger in your midst. But even if you’re only half as damn cool and charismatic as the characters you play, feel free to upload some of that into the cloud and share it with all us nerdy scrawny awkward types. We sure would be mighty obliged.

Rorschach Test

Melancholy Bridge - Kacy Crowley (mp3)
Lonely Boy - Andrew Gold (mp3)

An old man lives there. His clothes are raggedy, and he wears a moth-eaten sportscoat over torn white pajamas. His hair and overlong beard are more salt than pepper. And overalls. He has overalls on, too. But not a dog. His dog died many years before. As did his wife. She died many years before the dog. And he didn’t have any children. Or maybe he did, and they left him. They gave up on him. Maybe he wasn’t there enough for them, and now it’s irreparable.

It’s quite possible I have crossed over Thrasher Bridge a thousand times in my life. The bridge, which crosses over the Chickamauga Dam in Chattanooga, looks out to the west upon a railroad bridge some 300 yards away. Atop that old, bronzed and rusted metal structure, in the middle of the water’s width, sits a once-white house now gray from time and pollution. The house has no yard. It has no porch or deck. It barely has room for a front door and a walkway wide enough to stand outside.

I first remember seeing it when I was five or six. No telling how long it had been there. Must’ve been a bitch to build.

In railroad-speak, I’m sure this house has a very specific and vital function. In fact, it’s probably not called a house at all. Probably has some railroady name like “overlook station” or something. But I formed my story on this one early in life, and I’m not about to go let an education get in the way of my imagination in this particular instance.

Because this house has been the focus of my attention off and on for more than 30 years, how I see it and the characters I’ve invented to live in that structure have become an undeniable Rorschach Test on where I am at a given moment.

As a small kid, I remember thinking that house must be awesome. It’s so high up you could see practically anything. You had this awesome pool surrounding your house. You could dive in right off the front stoop. You could hop a train as it passed underneath and travel practically the whole world. Anything was possible.

In my teenage years, I thought more about Rapunzel. The house was a prison, and some teenage boy had been locked away up there. His job was merely to observe and report on all he saw from his perch. His punishment was to be limited in his interactions to merely that: observing and reporting. He could never actually do. Only see.

In my 20s, I thought the house would make the perfect location for a superhero base. He could get anywhere in the city quickly by way of rail, water or roadways, and the metallic column supporting his house could easily hide vehicles specific to each need, because no one looked that closely. He could have a secret drop that went alllll the way to the bottom of the river -- kinda like the firepole Batman would ride to his cave in the TV show. It was both the perfect Fortress of Solitude and efficient gateway to anywhere.

Lately, I’ve seen that sad old man. Loved ones have died. He’s living up there by choice, a prison of his own choosing. In some sense, he’s similar to the Rapunzel character of my teenage vision, but now he’s his own warden, his own captor, and the only reason he doesn’t come down is because he doesn’t want to, or can’t find the courage, or doesn’t see the point.

Prior to this latest version, the house's primary resident has always been some direct version of myself. The wild and fancy free version of childhood. The trapped teenage prisoner. The superhero atop a world of possibility. But this last one, the old man, I try to imagine him as someone else.

At times, I think this is because I’ve grown wiser, that I've begun connecting the house and its fancied inhabitant with the people around me, with circumstances beyond my own self-absorption. Other times, I’m pretty sure it’s because I’ve memorized that scene from The Empire Strikes Back, and I know if the light saber slices off that old man's facade, the face emerging from the smoke just might perfectly reflect my own.

Anyways.

Anyways, it's a cool house to stare at whilst driving across the bridge.

How It All Ends

James Vincent McMorrow--"This Old Dark Machine"(mp3)

It started with a question from the guy selling the movie tickets: "Adult or Senior?"

I paused for a second. "Adult," I finally answered, but I had my own question, internally, which was, do I look like a senior citizen.? Gray hair, for sure, but beyond that? I don't know. I think my step is still pretty spry, but then, so are many of theirs. And I don't really know when the "Senior citizen's discount" kicks in at a Florida movie theater. 55? 65? Do they keep pushing it upwards like my Social Security-related "retirement age"?

There was a time about ten years ago when I relished being both "carded" for a drink and offered a "Senior citizen's discount" at a movie in the same week. Clearly, those days have passed.

No matter. I headed towards my movie, Martians Invade L.A. To Find Moms, or something like that. Hey, it was a Spring Break afternoon, I wanted to see a movie, so I picked one that looked like it would be okay, based on the poster outside the theater. But when I walked into the theater, which was all the way down at the end and then all the way to the right, there was no one in there. No one. I don't know about you, but that kind of creeps me out. I don't know what I think would happen, but whatever it might be, nobody's coming to the rescue.

So, I punted, went with my second choice, The Lincoln Lawyer. I'm not a fan of Matthew McConaughey's acting ability, but I figured he had the natural chops to play a sleazy lawyer, and I do like Marisa Tomei's chops. So I decided I deserved some popcorn and a drink to go with my new movie.

Armed with some sustenance, I entered my second theater. It, too, was hardly crowded less than ten minutes before it was supposed to start. An older couple sat a couple of rows up; another older couple a few rows above them. I decided on the second row of the risers, second seat in. Now, I know that violates the "creeper rule" I've often explained to my children (you never sit next to an open aisle seat because it leaves you vulnerable to the late-arriving solo weirdo), but I figured it wasn't going to be crowded, so what difference could it make?

An older gentleman arrived and sat in the row in front of me, a few seats over, in one of those stadium seats that reclines back. He kept looking back at me, but I didn't know why, so I concentrated on my popcorn. Within seconds, a trio of elderly women arrived, or maybe two older women and a daughter, and, surveying the mostly-empty theater, decided that they were going to sit in my row.

"I'll bet you can't believe we're going to sit here," one of them said as I rose and they slid past.

"I am surprised," I said. They sat, the closest with one seat between her and me.

Then the two women that the gentleman from the row in front had been waiting for arrived with their snacks, and they settled in, and leaned back in their recliners. This caused some consternation among my three row mates, who, after some raised eyebrows and whispered discussion, looked my way and then all moved one seat closer to me. "They told me to sit next to you," the closest one said.

"No problem," I responded lamely. Within just a couple of minutes, I had gone from sharing the imminent film with my popcorn and root beer, to having 60% of the audience in a room that seats hundreds sitting within ten feet of me.

Then another threesome of mixed elderly people entered from the left, and took the three recliner seats in front of me. My next-door-neighbor leaned over and said confidentially, "Watch out. If they lean back, you're toast." I watched out.

Then, I guess an entire bus arrived. In streamed some 15-20 more senior citizens who scoped out the whole theater and decided to sit, you guessed it, in the two rows directly behind me. I started to sweat, feeling the slightest bit claustrophobic and wondering where I could flee to. Back to the Martians? My neighbor must have noticed, because she remarked, "You're really in the thick of it now."

"I didn't expect to be so popular," I said.

"Maybe we're after your popcorn."

I had no response, and, really, none was needed, because the population of my movie sub-division had reached some kind of critical mass and suddenly burst into a dozen or more overlapping conversations on topics I can't remember, until we got to the previews and I could hear various women's voices commented on the trailer ("That looks good" or "Isn't he handsome").

I began to wonder if everyone would keep talking during the movie. Oddly, I was the irritated adult and they were the teenagers having too good a time to be clued-in to their surroundings. I guess that's how it all ends.

But, no worries. When the movie started they all settled down and we all settled into the plot. My elderly compadres enjoyed the same one-liners that I might have laughed at were I not so self-conciously not a senior citizen. "You got more balls than a Chinese ping-pong tournament!" another character told McConaughy's lawyer at one point. That certainly brought some giggles. It's all context, you know. If you work a movie theater in a town full of retirees, of course you're going to ask if someone is a senior citizen or not. And, if you are visiting that town for Spring Break, no worries for you either. If you keep coming back over enough years, eventually you'll fit right in with those seniors.

A Very Happy Birthday To Me

Hello world.... oh, and Happy Birthday to me!

Yes, it's true, March 25th is the day of my birth.  As you can see, I'm only three...  still a bit young and naive about the world, but hey - I'm gettin' there!  Haha...  Yes, today is my birthday and I'm another year older and wiser.  I've got the day off from work and right now I'm about to go for breakfast with the love.  Later I'll lay out by the pool and do some gardening - perhaps succulent planters.  And hey, I just might go get myself a cupcake from the delicious Clarabelle's Cupcakes (a post on that later)!  Anyway, most of the day remains to be seen, but one thing is for damn sure...


Tonight.... tun tun tun..... THAI!  That's right....  I eat it allllll the time, but believe it or not I can never get enough.  And so Thai is what I choose for my birthday dinner.  Now I must decide between the two contending restaurants.  Heh.

Okay, ciao!

FROM THE ARCHIVES: Floridaville

Vic Chestnutt--"Florida" (mp3)
Guadalcanal Diary--"The Likes Of You" (mp3)

Back in the 1980's, when my grandmother lived in Ft. Lauderdale and my in-laws were just settling into their new condo in Venice, Florida, the concept of "Floridaville" smacked me in the face.

What is it, you ask? Floridaville is the idea, conceived by real estate developers, that old people don't want to have to drive very far for the services, stores, and entertainments that they desire and require, and so it becomes possible and profitable to repeat those same stores and services every few miles.

At that time, 20 or more years ago, this was only happening in Florida. And it has never stopped. I noticed during my trip to the condo this summer that now there are two Publix grocery stores within 2 miles of each other on the same road, just in opposite directions from the entrance of that large retirement community.

Now, of course, we all live in Floridaville.

Whether it's Starbucks or Bi-Lo, McDonald's or Panera , we can climb into our cars and pick four or five different directions to get to one of our favorite franchises. And now that they've got us hooked on so many prescription drugs, we can find drug stores a block away, across the street from each other, down the road, and every place in between.

This strikes me as insidious. You may remember that scene from the movie, Brazil, where the main character is driving out of town and lining both sides of the road are non-stop billboards. But, hell, we don't even need that. Why advertise a place on a big sign when if people will just drive a little farther down the road, they'll run into it anyway?

Or, take as an example, Starbucks. I know many of my compadres enjoy the convenience of a close-by Starbucks (remember when there was only one Starbucks outpost in all of Chattanooga?) for upscale coffee and romantic trysts, but, in spite of Starbucks' ability to imprint its brand and make it ubiquitous everywhere from Target to Timbuktu, Starbucks only seems like good coffee until you taste great coffee, and then you realize that Starbucks over-roasts their beans and clings to the notion that bitter=gourmet. Most Chattanoogans will never figure that out because the lag time just to get Starbucks here means that we still think it's cool to go there. And, heck, you'd have to drive across town to have even a shot of getting a better cup.

See, what you gain in Floridaville is convenience, but what you lose is choice. Or maybe something worse is happening: when you live in Floridaville, you lose your desire for choice.

Because now choice requires effort and choice might cost a bit more and choice is unpredicatable. You know you'll get the exact same breakfast at every Cracker Barrel from Minnesota to Mississippi; in fact, the menu is pretty much imprinted in your brain, if you're like me, so why take a chance on some seedy-looking place along the side of the road that looks like it's been there forever and needs a paint job? So what if their biscuits are far superior to what comes out of the Cracker Barrel box?

Perhaps all of this seems like much ado about nothing when the examples concern food and drugstores. Though, as we all know, it is easy to add clothing, books, cars, phones, colleges and God knows what else to the list.

If you've ever read Brave New World, then you know that we're living it. But here's the twist: instead of cloning us, as the societal directors do in the novel, manufacturing the human race using the assembly line techniques of Henry Ford, they've cloned everything else. Just about every single aspect of our lives has been cloned. And in doing so, they've pretty much succeeded in cloning us. They've achieved the uniformity of thought and behavior that they desired, but they did it through products, stores, good, and services, through brands and labels and logos of status.

And, cleverly, they've put so many products on the shelves and so many different chains to shop in that they've succeeded also in creating the illusion of choice. My daughter came home from school the other day furious that one of her friends was wearing the same thing that she already owned and that her friend had seen her wearing. 'She shouldn't have bought it,' the thinking goes, 'I had it first.'

But when we've been conditioned to act so that people of the same class and status shop in the same stores, drink the same drinks, swallow the same pills, how realistic an attitude can that be?

FROM THE ARCHIVES: The Trouble I Seen

The following was originally posted on February 19, 2009.


Fall on Tears - Love Spit Love
King of Pain (live) - Alanis Morrissette

Random things I've recently witnessed and can't shake:

A spider was spinning its web between two of my office chairs the other morning during a meeting. A co-worker bent down, pulled the spider up by its thread, and dangled it for everyone to see. Then he took that spider, placed it in a corner, and let it crawl away. I would have just stepped on it. My choice would likely have gone unchallenged, and no one would have been too upset with me. Just a damn spider, after all. But my co-worker's actions inspired us all to pause and consider what he'd just done. Mercy is a quiet but powerful force.

A bulldozer spent the weekend leveling an area across the street from us. It would scoop up dirt, drive up the hill, and dump it onto a mud pile. Several times it scooped up some plastic tarp that had been laid out. At one point, the dozer dumped out the dirt, but the tarp wouldn't come off. It had just barely wrapped itself around one of the teeth, and most of it was dangling on the earth pile. The dozer's driver was shaking that blade up and down, back and forth, but the tarp wouldn't come off. At some point, I expected him to step down and pull it off with his hands, but he never did. He just kept jostling that blade for several minutes. Finally, he backed up and then drove the blade right into the dirt mount with speed that suggested tremendous frustration. When he backed up a second time, the tarp was gone, buried underneath the pile. Even with our biggest and strongest technologies, we still get caught up on tiny distractions.

A squirrel failed to properly latch on during what looked to be a routine tree-to-tree jump outside our house. It fell some 30 feet, thudding onto our back yard. It stopped for only a second, perhaps to catch its breath or make sure all its body parts were in tact, before running like hell back up the same tree out of which it had just fallen. Even squirrels must believe the devil you know is better than the devil you don't.

At the casino last week, I entered the restroom to attend to personal matters only to open a stall door and see a large pile of pudding-esque shit on the tiles two feet before the toilet. As my eyes scrolled up to the toilet, I saw that the guilty party had removed his underwear and simply dropped that soiled item into the water. Some elderly man must have held on a few seconds too long, perhaps for one extra spin on the slots, and failed to make it in time. He chose to go commando rather than try and find some other way out of that bathroom with any of his dignity in tact. Acceptable loss. Collateral damage unavoidable.

On our drive home, on the side of Alabama Highway 27, a mangy dog gave one last try at standing up. It had been hit, and fairly recently. Although there was no blood, the back half of its body had clearly been crushed by the impact. None of us had a way of putting it down, and it would never have made it to a vet, so we kept driving. I looked back to see the tan, short-haired dog -- must've been part Boxer, maybe part Lab -- merely lay down on its side and put its face down onto the cold gravel. I kept staring back at him until we went over a hill, but he never moved again. Watching a creature suffer prior to an inevitable death is always more agonizing than seeing it already dead, even if we have no control over either situation and exist only to serve as a witness. Yet, if given the choice, we would always want to be with our loved ones in their final moments.

Driving the four blocks from home to work and going slowly over a speed hump, I passed a Barbie doll, completely undressed, sprawled out on the curbside, inches from the road. Her hair was tangled and wild. One of her shoes had fallen into the road. Otherwise no clothes were around. The life of a homicide detective must be like placing your heart in battery acid.

"Fall on Tears," one of my favorite songs from the '90s, is from Trysome Eatone. Alanis' version of "King of Pain," which is certainly not as good as the original but not at all bad, is from her MTV Unplugged album. Both can be found on iTunes or Amazon.com's mp3 site.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: Divine Inspiration?

Louque--"Cry, Cry" (mp3)
Louque--"Time Will Take" (mp3)

You know, we are coming up on our 1-year "Blog-a-bration (yes, good seats are still available, but we don't know where it will take place)," and I would be remiss not to dip my toe at least a little bit into the pool of our inspiration.

Billy and I have been friends for years, and way back when, I was even his teacher and he was my student. But, that was a long time ago, and those roles have changed sometimes, become blurred sometimes. I admit, for example, that I knew nothing about Hanson until I read of Billy's hero-worship for those land-locked boys from the Midwest.

But the idea for the blog came to me in New Orleans, that greatest of American cities. It was down there on our annual pilgrimage that I thought, 'Ya know, Billy and I might be able to make some beautiful music together.' Beautiful or not, here we are almost a year later.

I feel like New Orleans hovers in the background of almost every post we write. It has probably been six months or more since Billy and I took stock of the blog, and he said,"And, you know, we haven't even talked about New Orleans yet." That was when we wondered if we would have enough topics to keep going.

I was at a concert the other night, a Dan Crary concert, at a strange little venue just down the street from school. Sidebar: Dan Crary is one of the great flat-picking guitarists of the last 40 years, and it was quite an honor to experience the range of his abilities (For those keeping track of my New Year's Resolutions, that is Concert #2 in 2009--I've got to do better). Anyway, I ran into a friend there, a woman whose conservatism is currently consuming her like a fatal disease, and among her many rants over a 10-minute monologue was the anti-Global Warming rant, which centered on her visit to New Orleans this year, where she argued that it was ridiculous for us as a country to spend one dime on a city like New Orleans that is not "viable." I wanted to punch her in the face, something I have rarely done to a woman (or a man). In fact, never.

New Orleans holds such a place in my psyche that I cannot imagine it not existing. I cannot imagine people existing who don't want it to exist. When I think of going places, it is the place that I want to go to. During Katrina and the aftermath, I never turned on the television to see the devastation. Neither did any member of my family. We heard, but we didn't want to see. We bought a book a couple of years later and were amazed at what we saw. But, I guess what we should have realized is that floodwaters and tragedy merely (and I don't mean to suggest lighty, but rather matter-of-factly) add another layer to the city that evolves more overtly and quickly than any other place I've been.

There is a temptation to say that New Orleans is most like a European city and that that notion explains its charm. I disagree. While it has some of the age and the history of a European city, New Orleans' own qualities are unique because in some ways there has been more of a compression of time, so that not only have all of the different layers of culture followed more closely upon one another, sometimes they have not even followed, but existed concurrently. This is why the food, the music, the architecture, the people, the outlook are so different from anywhere else. Unlike, say, New York, which will have its Italian sections and its Russian sections and its Middle Eastern sections and every other section, in New Orleans, everything has always blended together. There is no Chinatown in New Orleans. If and when there is a Chinese, or as is currently the case, an Hispanic influence, it will almost immediately be assimilated into the other influences already in place. Which is not to suggest any particular tolerance or acceptance, since races have struggled against each other in New Orleans since the start, and, in many ways, that still continues.

Somehow, when I'm in New Orleans, I feel more alive. I never hang out in my hotel room; to do so feels like I am cheating myself and wasting life. Even the very basic decision of where to eat lunch can be a crucial decision, a chance for enlightenment, a reach for transcendence. Perhaps because of the quirks of its history, New Orleans seems like a place that, paradoxically, never takes itself for granted while also resigning itself to forces and changes beyond its control. And, I've come to realize that like every other thing of beauty, New Orlean's beauty is dependent upon that very transience and fragilty.

If you are coming to this post a little late, by the time you read it, with any luck, both Billy and I will already be in New Orleans. Rest assured that whatever happens there, we will have stockpiled enough posts to see us through those days and until we return to this outer world with its washed-out colors and muted tastes and sameness of days.


Louque's one and only CD (that I know of) is availabe at Itunes. They are a contemporary band from New Orleans.

Delicious Dining Rooms and Nooks Part II

Didn't get enough eye candy in the Delicious Dining Rooms and Nooks Part I??  I hear ya.... So here's round two!  I've rounded up a bunch more beautiful, glamorous, eclectic, funky and all around SEXY dining rooms for your viewing pleasure....

It's amazing what you can do when you break the rules of dining room convention, for example mis-matching chairs and tables, creating funky eclectic vignette centerpieces, hanging an art wall gallery for coziness or just adding some color!  The possibilities are endless, so if your dining room/nook isn't making you swoon - scroll on, get inspired, get in there and get creative! 

Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(All images via a Google image search or where otherwise cited in the image file name)