Dirty South Bureau

Allright, so enough of this politics-wonk stuff about the coming election. Those of us who’ve had the luxury have been thinking more about music for the past two weeks anyway.

Jazz Fest ended on Sunday. I had forgotten why I don’t go to big concerts- because they are overpriced, though $45 per day is not as expensive as usual in the era of the Ticketmaster monopoly, but more because they attract an aging frat boy demographic, in this case hundreds of thousands of them. It’s depressing to look around you at the sea of folding canvas chairs, straw hats and t-shirts emblazoned with lame statements (my personal favorite was Homer Simpson inside a deadhead symbol- an admittance of the owner’s lack of creativity and intellect, or a statement about American cultural decline?) and to realize that these are the people who drive the New Orleans economy- whether at Jazz Fest or on Bourbon and Decatur streets. I know, this is our hustle, one that the whole city is in on- but having to deal with these fools must bring even the girls at Hustler Club down at times.

And the beer selection- since Miller was one of the main sponsors, you had to walk half a mile to get anything but Miller Lite at the one hidden but widely-used tap that had Pilsner Urquell, unadvertised of course. And I thought waiting in lines to get one standard, low quality product was something from the former Soviet Union.

Regardless, the music… Irma Thomas belting it out made the hairs on the back on my neck stand up. I have to admit that I often enjoy listening to recorded music more than the imperfections of live performances, especially ones this large, but Irma was tight.

As usual what was much better was the late night shows at the clubs. Fema Kuti was at One-Eyed Jacks, and Kermit Ruffins played at Blue Nile- both sharp performances, both on top of their game, but the highest praise I have to reserve for the Soul Rebels Brass Band who played at Café Brazil. There isn’t really a local band that I’ve gotten excited about since I first saw the Morning 40 Federation three years ago, and they’ve gotten boring. But the Soul Rebels one of those rare bands that pushes limits artistically and succeeds. The blending in of hip-hop, the contemporary New Orleans music into brass band, the old-school New Orleans music, is so natural as to seem obvious in afterthought and is done with grace and intelligence. And there is still something in there that I have to categorize as soul- at times the meter is slow enough and the horn section drops into moody melodies.

I don’t know what will happen with these guys, or if this will evolve into a style. It would be interested to see if anyone else can pull it off like they do.

Today the weather was simply exquisite. We rose in our hangovers to a mild breeze, sixty-something weather outside, just cool enough to be refreshing. The recent rains have cleaned the streets. And, admittedly a little late, I had my first crawfish of the season.

Crawfish. As a child I caught them in streams in Oregon, much larger ones than the Louisiana crawfish, but in our northwestern cultural primitiveness we did not know about Crawfish boil, the seasonings that are added to the water they are boiled in down here, and thus we had a fraction of the experience that natives of Louisiana have daily every spring.

I cannot tell you how good they tasted. We spread newspaper on the table and my housemate and I ate them with a greedy slowness. Break the tail off, extract the meat with your teeth and a little pinch of the fingers, and then suck the juice out of the back of the oversized head.

Yes, the world has fallen apart. But we have crawfish.

Crawfish says a lot about us. Other Americans get squeamish about eating from the heads of animals. We have no such reservations about this, just as we have fewer reservations about poverty and sex. When eating crawfish there is no way to stay clean, as ones fingers always get wet with the residue. We typically eat crawfish in large groups, in semi-public places. It is a shameless and entirely un-Protestant activity, like much of our lives.

This is how Louisiana survives. Things have always been a mess here. This hurricane was bad but not as bad as the plagues that hit in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where in one bout of yellow fever ten thousand died. And the city kept going. Who else could shake the world with music played out of abandoned confederate army brass instruments? Who else could make a delicacy out of red beans?

Yes, yes, I know- City council is trying to get rid of the poor people by mandating the demolition of their homes, there are still folks in OPP who have not been charged with a crime from before the storm, we won’t have adequate levees for hurricane season, I know all that.

But… Jazz Fest starts tomorrow.

I think I finally have figured out what I like about Ray Nagin. Lately he has developed the air of a man who has been through so much shit that he is simply no longer able to take things as seriously as others think that he should, including himself. His flippancy suggests either wisdom or insanity, both of which are respected here. In that way, he is one of us.