New Orleans or Nah Orleans

     I was born in New Orleans, in 1951.  I grew up in tight cultural orbit of The Crescent City with WTIX The Mighty Six-Ninety and WYLD radio as soundtrack, listening to Jock-a-Mo before it became Iko Iko, Ernie K-Doe, Fats Domino, Al Hirt, Irma Thomas (whom I met 24 years later in Memphis, along with her musician father, Rufus Thomas of Funky Chicken and Walking the Dog fame), and young Aaron Neville (Tell It Like It is), and many others, while in my childhood bedroom or while fishing from the T-pier dock by my house near Biloxi's Back Bay, pullin' crabs outa da net, hooking a flat flounder or watchin for the shiny specs of speckled trout glimmering in the sun, and reelin' in hardheads, saltwater catfish, and trying to avoid getting gored by its sharp top fins, and pray if you ever step on one that you're not barefoot or wearin' thin sole tennis shoes because you won't ever forget it again.

Sometimes I felt far from home but most of the time felt as if I'd never left New Orleans and was only on an extended nature vacation in Biloxi fit for a kid.

     Music can be that, be a lifeline to the soul, and New Orleans radio never let me down.  I once even won a tiny Japanese transistor radio from The Mighty 690 in a contest.  Visiting my grandparents in New Orleans regularly also helped me stay close to my roots, including trips to Audubon Zoo with my Papa and eating at the tiny counter at the casual and cramped nearby Camellia Grill afterward with him not far from the zoo and park and from Tulane and Loyola Universities.

     It didn't hurt the cause that I learned to play pool in New Orleans on a 1930s antique Brunswick-Balke-Collender table Papa kept in his aboveground basement that my mother had learned to play on.  In a way, it felt like I had New Orleans itself as grandparents. Nor did Biloxi let me down, the small city having absorbed the laidback vibe of its Big Easy neighbor while savoring its own coastal savoir laissez faire milieu.

     Musically, I inferred that the whole world sounded like Allen Toussaint and Professor Longhair and what a disappointment to later learn otherwise.  I also half-assumed the whole world got to hear "Carnival Time" by Al Johnson every springtime while it blared from my transistor's tinny speaker and later felt the world had been cheated by half because it hadn't.

     Not only was New Orleans in my blood, but I was also in its blood, whether it wanted me there or not. I wasn't an antibody or even a free radical but happily just along for the ride. I eventually came down with Beatlemania, also through the groovy graces of WTIX, and in its throes evolved 'uniquely', as did most of the rest of the world.

     I moved back to New Orleans as soon as I could, not just for Mardi Gras, but for college, studying among other liberal arts the observable effects of legal alcohol for 18-year-olds.  I rode the Freret Jet city bus at night down Freret Street to the Quarter and back, once standing next to one of the original Ink Spots coming home from a gig still wearing his tux, and next to who knows who else in this city of perpetual characters. 

     I only stayed a year then but moved upriver to Baton Rouge within drunk-driving distance and enrolled at Louisiana State University, where I graduated, and later moved back To New Oeleans for another unique year, all this being before designated drivers became common.

     My father, from the Mississippi Delta, speaking of music, once lived upstairs in the French Quarter across from famous Court of Two Sisters restaurant.  My mother grew up in New Orleans a block away from Notre Dame Seminary and the Archbishop's residence near the end of the St. Charles streetcar line at Carrolton and Claiborne Avenues. This intersection is where the streetcar turned around and began making its way back uptown to Canal Street, across from which began the living time capsule of the French Quarter.

     My Nana, who perfected a gumbo for which I still have the recipe if not the touch for a perfect roux, later ate lunch with Pope John Paul II at the Catholic rehab facility next to the seminary while she mended a broken arm. She said it was an alright lunch but wasn't particularly impressed with His Holiness, which she expressed as a half-hearted shoulder shrug and slight tilt of the head sideways.

     She'd known actually spiritual rabbis in her life, you see. Rabbi Feibelman at Temple Sinai, about a five- minute drive away, was wise, quiet and humble and didn't have to wear garish costumes in public and rode in a Buick, with no need for a bubble-top rabbi-mobile. Her tastes were more down to earth, but the baked chicken was pretty good, almost up to her own kitchen standards cooked in her venerable huge gas oven and stove which weighed about as much as a small military tank.

     My Papa, whose industrious hobby was raising prize-winning camellias in the deeply dug fertile ground, layered in historic Mississippi River flood events across the whole city. He was vice president of Standard Coffee Company on Magazine Street for 30 years, including the summer of '63 when Lee Harvey Oswald, aspiring patsy or not, worked there as a machine oiler.

Standard Coffee's owners, the two Reily brothers who also owned Luzianne Coffee, extolled him as a true marketing genius because he expanded their regional door-to-door coffee and home goods sales business from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. That gave him license to argue loudly and repeatedly with the brothers in board room meetings, leaving the rest of the staff outside the room wondering if Mansfield was going to be fired this time. Luckily for Papa, the Irish Reilys loved their Jewish sales savant and they never tired of each other.

     New Orleans, for me, beyond the family connections and stories, and the old city's Strange Times On The Bayou mystique, had a 'Fast Times At Contact High' flavor and was a peculiar delight of a city with its extrovert originality reinventing itself every morning-after. I wouldn't tire of meeting new people, for five minutes or five years, because the city's free-riffing casual candor of trusting individuality was alive and thriving. No Two People Alike could just as easily be the city's real nickname, which remains The City that Care Forgot.

     The Crescent City will always be the wind-beneath-my-whims and precious behind-the-levees dry land of my birth and of a few risky years of teenage debauchery and intrigue, including my secret Fat Tuesday forays with best friends driving from Biloxi to New Orleans at Mardi Gras, and its lush black subtropical bottom river-wash soil, the kind my Papa's blue-ribbon prize camellias grew in, may yet end up holding my own dusty grounds.

     My thoughts of post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans are these:  I'm happy for the people who still get to live there and visit there and wish them all very well.  I'm very sad for The Diaspora who were forcibly displaced and prevented from returning if they wished to or otherwise couldn't.

     The corporate buskers of the new city, as nice as it may be getting, have created more or less a Nah Orleans, rather than a new New Orleans.  Nah Orleans is a partly big Potemkin village alcohol-laden hologram and represents a commercially driven social-engineering feat of partial ethnic-cleansing, though someday the city could regrow its soul, but only if The Diaspora are properly mourned and redressed.  Talk about a need for a Right of Return.  And an argument for better levees.

     I wish for a new generation of leaders, who aren't driving drunk with absolute bottom-line corporate power, to help New Orleans regenerate its former more diverse self, keeping the positive changes, but retrieving its soul, because the city and its people deserve it, especially including The Diaspora storm refugees.

______________________________________

-- In 2nd photo:  Harry Tervalon, Sr., right, with his longtime grill-mate, Wildred Batiste.  Tervalon, who worked the first day Camellia Grill opened, stayed there and worked for another 49 years.

-- If I Didn't Care, by The Ink Spots -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvwfLe6sLis

-- Carnival Time, by Al Johnson -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccu2_MRMF5Y

-- Lower 9th Ward Blues, by Al Johnson -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvXjNfAXc_k

* "The legendary Joe Banashak held auditions for his Minit Record label at WYLD in the fall of 1958. The line-up included the cream of the crop of New Orleans R&B artists—Irma Thomas, Aaron Neville, Ernie K-Doe, Jessie Hill, Benny Spellman and Allen Toussaint, who became the arranger for the label. WYLD was the harbinger of the black music scene in New Orleans".

http://www.offbeat.com/articles/radio-history-black-radio-and-new-orleans-music/

Quack PAC Backs Trump Dream Team!

[Art and script are from Larry Ray's iHandbill site]

Quack PAC Backs Trump Dream Team!

  The Republican presidential primary herd of wanna be winners of the GOP Presidential Candidate nomination are kicking up more dust and dirt than a Texas cattle drive. And at the head of the noisy scramble is Mad Bull, Donald Trump, who has now succeeded in insulting and infuriating all but the still active and sizable far right and angry fringe Tea Party dregs. 

  Trump set off a firestorm of criticism, even from the GOP, as he insulted Senator John McCain's military service and years as a POW in Hanoi by snidely uttering, "He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” His insane tirades and gaffes continue almost hourly.

http://theihandbill.blogspot.com/2015/07/quack-pac-backs-trump-dream-team.html

We Have Always Been At War With....(Fill in the blank)

     I'm realizing most people don't understand what the Bush-Cheney-neocon power play in Iraq was basically about, and that makes sense because there's a gauzy veil of imposed ignorance and a practiced sleight-of-hand propaganda enveloping the area and the subsequent events. My limited understanding of it follows.

      The neocon Iraqi power play was about blowing up a regional nation-state in order to sow chaos and destruction in the region. The neocons wanted to sow chaos and destruction in the region, thereby setting the various indigenous power groupings in the region against one another, in order to overall weaken the region and ultimately make it more vulnerable than ever to neocon machinations and interests.

      One short-term result of this was the U.S. having to shed some immediate sense of control over the regional players, but this is only a stage. At the same time U.S. influence is being shunned or downplayed by most of the regional leaders - because they and their populations see more clearly than ever that the U.S. is not a real ally but a destructive powerbroker - new regional power alliances are being nascently formed within the region and with the U.S., with both tacit and active U.S. assistance and approval.

      And as some of these new and growing alliances will predominate someday, the U.S. influence with them will again grow and they will become first policy allies and eventually become the new regional power alliances with which the U.S. will wield as much or more control as prior to Bush-Cheney-neocon destruction of Iraq (Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, et al). It will be a brand new ballgame but with some of the same teams and some new ones, but, crucially, with the same rules.

      This was the intention, even before 9/11, because Bush-Cheney-neocons realized there was already underway a large regional movement away from U.S. hegemony. So Bush-Cheney-neocons acted to forestall this, like experienced forest firefighters would do in the face of a coming conflagration, by intentionally setting buffer and other directionalizing fires to direct the conflagration against itself, causing it to burn itself out quicker than it would have otherwise and to minimize the effect the coming regional conflagration would have on U.S. hegemony.

     That the governing neocons committed horrendous mass-murder international war crimes in the process was of no concern to these self-righteous and self-interested narcissistic personality disorders.

     This neocon strategy is now in its waiting phase, while the U.S. still feeds the buffer and other directionalizing fires with enough fuel and assistance to hopefully manage the conflagration. Managing a conflagration is not a guaranteed success though, but the empire is very patient when it comes to knowing and getting what it wants. Sitting atop possibly the hugest pile of money, influence, and power in recorded history, as well as with much successful ancient and modern historical precedent, the empire has a better view of the possibilities and acts accordingly in exceeding self-interest.

      Julius Caesar used basically the same strategy against the many tribes and their leaders in Gaul and against the Germanic peoples of the time [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commentarii_de_Bello_Gallico]. It's a tried-and-true power play on a huge scale, part divide-and-conquer and part anarchy-management with favors and scheming.

      The neocons actually began this current 'Grand Chessboard' strategy [http://www.amazon.com/The-Grand-Chessboard-Geostrategic-Imperatives/dp/0465027261, by national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski] in the late 1970s under President Carter, when, along with the House of Saud, they began organizing extremist religionists in Pakistan from throughout South Central and Near East Asia to threaten the Soviet Union's influence over its own majority-Muslim border republics. This goaded the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan to prevent its becoming an armed jihadist staging area on the Soviet Union's vulnerable southern border.

      In other words, anti-Soviet neocons, with largely meta economic interests in mind even then, and with their Cold War mindset and moral bankruptcy, set this Middle Eastern fire a long time ago. Though exactly how the fire would spread was not specifically predictable, its general nature and direction would prove very useful and remains so to neocon goals, which are to further secure by hook or crook the economic realm for U.S. energy producers and their guiding energy and military-armament political controllers back in the U.S.

      That's a primary reason why U.S. presidential elections and Congressional elections are so tightly scripted and controlled: There must not be room for independent thought or action, or the neocon, energy, and armaments interests might have to cede some power. This is an effective 'prevent defense', to borrow an American defensive football term, and it's a continual if not eternal desperate all-or-nothing best-defense-is-a-good-offense strategy.

      So now that those U.S.- and its ally Saudi-created forces that goaded the Soviets into invading Afghanistan are now at work furthering chaos and U.S. and Saudi influence in the nearer Middle East region, seemingly at cross-purposes to neocon interests, ultimately they're actually working for neocon interests. These forces are the buffer and other directionalizing fires that the neocons and the Saudis are content to allow to burn out as planned, leaving the region firmly under neocon control.

     It's a gamble, to be sure, but the odds of its evil success are much better than even, even at the cost of an uber-destructive regional war between Iranian influence and Saudi Arabian influence. It's a war of gradualism and tentative allegiances in the meanwhile.

     And if the U.S. finds itself someday seeming to side with Iran more than with Saudi Arabia, temporarily or not, then we shall all innately understand that we've always been at war alongside our ally East Persian Gulf Asia and against our enemy West Persian Gulf Asia. It all depends on the fires and the prevailing winds.

After Me!

I just don't know which way to go
I just can't think here on the brink
am I deranged or mad
if so I'm glad
don't know what else could feel so bad

The paranoids are after me
they want me in their paranoid society
if I can't refuse what would I lose
I mean what's so great about my sanity

But you can have fun out on the run
no you can't stay here they're much too near
can you call a friend
better think again
you never ever know where they have been

The paranoids are onto me
they'll want you too (if you follow me)
so don't act coy or get annoyed
and above all don't get paranoid

Have you got heart and think you're smart
been in good cheer looking in the mirror
cause you can count
on their amount
Uh Oh what happened to my bank account

The interest rate is killing me
do I have to stay in this economy
and if I live under some bridge
can the paranoids still raid my fridge

Oh it gets too expensive living on the defensive
and you can't have quiet unless you buy it
you may just laugh
but I hope you see
that the paranoids are really truly after me

The paranoids are really into me
they'll chase me through infinity
they like my tone hey I'm in their zone
and when I die they'll simply make a clone
The paranoids are afterDelivery status notification (Failure)
delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
alt.conspiracy.us

                               

                                      Turtle Mother

                        We Are Her Sisters and Brothers

     In the photo, I see such a stalwart gal, despite the presence of its paparazzo audience, depositing its progeny into the uncertain future.  A very handsome mother she is too.  The land is green there, I note, lush, thick with dewy grass.  Very fertile soil.  So different than the thin limey dust barely alive leaf, pebble, twig and insect shell detritus of far west Austin soil where I live over the limestone of the Balcones Fault.  I have to use a pickaxe to break in.

     Yet, the creek-lagoon turtles (species unknown to me, and to them) who ply confluent Lake Austin manage to dig their nest holes here over the Fault and lay their eggs with focused effort and only small paddles and short claws with the relentless ability of a little steam shovel.  I've seen them many times in various stages - near water's edge and deep into the woods across hard roads, and in transit either way - digging, scooping, mostly using back legs, sometimes their snouts (they fill back in the holes with front legs too), sitting at the slanted upward angle headfirst, their tailsides dipped into the dug hole.

     I'm not sure I've seen the actual laying (no thrust and retraction noticed), but they are indeed steadfastly resolved to stay in place and let me be the more transient one once she'd dug the thing and begun the laying, or the waiting to lay (as opposed to laying in wait).  Sometimes after seeing them and allowing them their privacy, I'll come back later to an empty open hole because, I think, she had been 'discovered' and felt that the spot would no longer be secure, or maybe the laying had been physically thwarted by the stress of having uninvited company.

     Most fascinating and known to me is that their nests are often dug right into the flat, rock-hard walking path above and along the lagoon (cypress-lined along with various stakeholding flowering 'weeds' [who you calling weed?], Virginia Creeper [unfortunately renamed American Ivy; what could be a better name for ivy than Creeper?], what's called cleavers, junipers mistakenly called cedar, irrepressible ligustrum and nandina, Mexican redbud, diminutive oaks, mistflower bush, Turk's Cap, and whatever else has dropped and floated onto and washed down the slope onto the flatter ground throughout the years).

     Yet turtle releases a modicum of preserved water, thereby muddying the top dirt layer, and soon she sits, either to abandon a beautiful perfect little hole, or a partially dug one, or, best for her and me, I return much later in the day or evening, or at least a day later, and, despite knowing exactly where her spot had been, for the life of me I can't spot where it was.  The cementing job has so perfectly camouflaged the nest that if it has completely dried from the original mud work, it's practically impossible to spot.

     Only months later when the hole is plowed from below upward and opened by the little ones having first broken through their shells (releasing fluid in the process to aid digging through hardened dirt) can that be determined, unless some sharp-sniffing raccoon, armadillo, or possum has happened by and dug it up prematurely, which sadly but business-like does happen from time to time.

     But when Mother Turtle has been extra lucky, then there is her hole empty but for some crumbled dirt and about 10 to 12 empty soft but fibrous and tough opened curled and folded-over oblong egg shells, bisected roughly longitudinally, in and around the hole.  There is no proud mother waiting nearby, of course.  She is going about her present business in the creek or lagoon or far away down the lake, and often I wonder if by sheer chance or some more programmed odds there will be a reunion, especially when I see a full-size turtle swimming by with a much smaller one trailing only very slightly behind, or stopping together to sun their hopeful heads, before moving on or diving, which I see often, and sunning on logs together comfortably, and allied.

     So there has now been another Spring, The Spring of the Eternal Turtle, Queen of Turtle Island, and however uncertain the future is, it's tellingly likely there will be Turtles in it long after we may be gone.  Nature blesses Herself as She can, and we're all the Blessed Beneficiaries.  We can remember that and work to live by it and allow such Sacred Attunement and Relational Respect to become our First-Nature.

     I also wonder what keeps Turtle going, and what She really stands on, and where, as she holds up The World.  I believe She stands over her completed perfect nest as she readies to return to the creek and let The Future take care of Itself.

Larry and the Tramp

- The Beach Life & A Few Amazing True Stories
About My Best Friend Ever -

     Dogs are so smart!

     I lived in a little Florida beach village on the Gulf of Mexico called Mexico Beach in 1976-77.  My otherwise empty fourplex was about ten yards from the white sandy beach and warm salty waters.  It was just a terrific place and time.  No more than a couple of hundred people lived in the village, mostly retirees on a budget and some young Air Force couples from Tyndall Air Force base about 14 miles away.  The air was clear and the breezes invigorating.  The water was pristine and you could feel the healing power of the salt and minerals.

     There's something special about immersing yourself in the warm briny water, part of the greater body of circulating water holding life together as we know it, with its contents having about the same saline solution as your blood.  It conjures a balance that you feel working its way into more of your life than you realize.

     As the planets and constellations slowly wheeled overhead every night without deviation or hesitation, which you would soon learn to intuit even when cloudy, and the moon phases regular and prominent and a satellite or two following their calculated tracks directly overhead faithfully night after night, the immersion into a balanced sense of life merged with an unhindered awe of how natural and easy life can become, how much sense it can make. 

     Tramp, my scruffy and sensible little tan terrier, lived with me.  Truth be known, I was at least as scruffy as Tramp and likely not quite as sensible, and in that way our lives at the beach were a continuation of our lives next to my college campus, where he had become somewhat of a local legend among those in the know.  In a way, I played a close second fiddle to my amazing wonder friend.

     We'd walk to my classes every day, he with his red bandana around his neck and me with my books and bellbottoms.  When I disappeared into the buildings, he'd run across campus to the coeds' cafeteria and be fed by young women eager to please this resourceful little cutie.  When my classes were over, he'd be there outside the building again waiting for me.  Sometimes there'd be a note from my sister, who also attended LSU, or friends tucked into his bandana.

     One day my sister walked into a basement classroom on a rainy day.  There on the floor at the foot of her specific desk was Tramp, wet and lying peacefully, though she had never even seen him outside the building before.  One night he showed up alone at the apartment of a friend of mine on the opposite side of campus where he'd never been, and I wasn't even there.  He started barking, and they opened the door wondering what was going on.  There was Tramp, looking for me.

     When Tramp and I lived further from campus, he and I would ride the free bus to school.  One day when I was sick and stayed home, Tramp got on the almost full bus by himself, an English doubledecker, walked up the stairs, and hopped onto a seat next to a surprised young woman.  She looked around to see whom he was with, but to her surprise she was his only traveling companion.  Tramp rode the bus to campus, got off as usual, no doubt went to the cafeteria, probably the motive for his trip, and at the end of the day rode it back home.

     Even knowing well Tramp's incredible omniscience-like state - and we were completely in sync as friends and allies, as each other's alter egos, instinctively understanding what the other was intending and who each other was and who we were together - I was floored to hear this tale of the doubledecker bus ride about my very best bloke friend ever.

     Now at the beach, Tramp joined in the liberating pursuits and communal life of a small diverse group of dogs, whose humans understood the joys held in promise for their animal friends in this paradise.  They roamed at will.  To not let Tramp roam in such an idyllic place would have seemed cruel.  He and his friends didn't wander away.  Nor did they turn wild but instead simply enjoyed each other's company and would explore and play all day and often sleep on the beach together at night.  Tramp would come home to eat almost every day, and sometimes spend the night, but he just thrived with and loved the freedom and companionship of his fellow dogs.

     One day a new dog showed up, a little thing, perhaps abandoned or lost, and it must have recently been rolling indulgently in dead fish, because it was the foulest smelling thing I've ever come across even since. And not just pungency but intensity as well. It was so foul and strong that Tramp and his group of friends couldn't stand it. It must have been especially horrible for dogs, with their powerful sense of smell,  and as the little dog tried to follow them around, they kept discouraging it with fanged feints and low growls.  Yet the little dog kept following them.

     One day I was fairly astonished to observe the original dog group skillfully herding the new dog toward the edge of the water.  It became scared with the other dogs forming a crescent wall around him and not letting him break through their ranks. Soon the little dog had to retreat into the shallow water of the Gulf to keep away from Tramp and his friends. At that point, the dog became soaked in saltwater, which began to clean him of his stench. After a few minutes, the dogs let the little dog back onto the beach.  It rolled exulting in the sand with the dogs standing all around it, and they all then went on with their day together.

     I'm so glad I got to let Tramp have that kind of freedom, one that so few dogs experience, and without their having turned wild and harmful, but instead showing the essence of compassion and kindness.  They made sure that their lost new friend would have a place alongside them, cleverly doing what was necessary, without harm or cruelty.  And with all their homes, there was plenty of food to share and go around.

     Tramp and his friends would later help me out of a sticky situation as well.  One night, out of a year's worth of nights, I singlehandedly and singlemindedly became roaring drunk on wine, not for any particular reason, and I found myself running with abandon under the stars back and forth on the beach along the edge of the water.  I would run a long distance in one direction, turn, and then run back.  It was exhilarating, my body in wild motion, caught up in the salty warm breeze with the crashing waves the soundtrack, one of those moments you feel you can run if not live forever.

     After a few back and forths like this, on the run back, I began to feel very woozy and quickly became semi-conscious mid stride.  I fell down on the sand and passed out.  I tried to wake but couldn't.  I don't know how long I was lying there.  I don't think it was an especially long time, but what woke me finally was Tramp and his friends licking my face.  They'd come essentially out of nowhere, and with me on the ground they went about their devoted and slobbering rescue work.

     I'd become stinking drunk, and as with the little dog they found a cure for what ailed me.  I was stuporously amazed and entirely aware of what they were doing and why and could see how incredibly happy they looked doing it, as I was still lying there and eye to eye with them.  Their cohesion as a group and the beneficence of their purpose was transcendent to experience.

     I had been entirely in love with these little people prior, but the love expanded even moreso in that moment, permanently, their ways, wiles, and exuberant love an expression of their souls, and it was like becoming joyously accepted into a group of people whom I greatly admired, and perhaps envied a bit, more than anything in the world.  I belonged.

     With their persistence and encouragement, and after profusely thanking them with drunk loving words and drunk hugs and strokes, I managed to stand up and walk home to a good and dry night's sleep, instead of perhaps drowning in the tide, amazed all the way home and into my dreams.

     Why do dogs act this way?  The answer really can't be put perfectly into words.  I believe though, when given the chance, they learn the greater purpose of life, to live fully in the moment and essentially do no harm, and in the process gratefully become as integral and positive a part of life as is doggedly possible.

     Tramp was not only my friend.  He was my mentor, and as dear a love as there can be.

     I'll always be grateful to you, my profound sweet best friend.

#