blacksundae

It’s me, your old pal Non-Shannon, back after a long absence!

I’ve been keeping busy with The Invincible Czars for the past few months, and I’m happy to report that we’ve finally put the finishing touches on our Nutcracker Suite CD! I can only describe it in vague terms as a sort of rock/klezmer/polka-y madness. I’m on it as a guest musician, since they’d started recording the album long before I became a member of the band, but hey, it’s still awesome!

We’re doing a plethora of shows in Austin and Houston in December playing exclusively Nutcracker stuff. Recently, we’ve appeared on KUHF in Houston (the NPR/classical station) and on Fox 7 News in Austin, so I’m, you know, famous now. No autographs, please.

KUHF appearance

Fox 7 video (their website)

I’m doing my best to try and convince you all to move to Austin. Is it working yet?

My co-worker Tommy changing the marquee at the theater where I manage.

This little bugger was clawing at the window of the theater the other night. I’d never seen one in the wild* before.

*If El Cerrito counts as “the wild.”

You may not know it, but I am the resident musician here at blacksundae. In fact, I’m sure you didn’t know that, as I’ve never posted anything remotely music-related. Well, my friends, that is soon to change.

In college, I played multiple wind instruments, took opera lessons, and even attempted the viola at one point, but ever since graduating I’ve felt out of the loop (all washed up, pink-slipped, etc.). When I moved to Austin, things seemed to get even worse–I landed the squarest job I’ve yet had, as an analytical chemist, and even though Austin is known for its vibrant music scene, I just couldn’t find the right band for me. I guess it must have taken me exactly two years to settle in, folks, because suddenly, things are lookin’ up for Old Gil!

Meet my new band, The Invincible Czars:

Oh, I do love them so. This is the first non-school-related band I’ve ever really performed with, so I’m all giddy like a meddlin’ biddy.

Anyhoo, what this means is that now that I am much BUSIER, I’ll be more likely to post here, especially relating to music in all its various, wondrous forms. Don’t ask me how that makes any sense. Oh, and they have a MySpace, too. I mean, WE have a MySpace.

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I had a dream last night. I was wandering around a cineplex looking for a specific theater. The cineplex was unique, as it was one theater stacked on top of another, twenty high, with a carpeted path coiling up around them like the exit ramp of a parking garage.

Each theater was decorated differently. I saw a few of them (a Tiki theater, a theater that looked like the deck of the starship Enterprise), but I couldn’t find the one I was looking for, which was covered in a dome of glass. Beyond the glass was salt water and fish and sea turtles. Kind of a reversed fish bowl. I had only seen pictures of this, and really wanted to see it for myself.

After searching for a while, I decided to ask someone and tapped a security guard on the shoulder. He spun around and, to my surprise, turned out to be Fred Ward. We talked about his career for a while. He was still bitter over the critical and commercial failure of Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, and blamed that for his having to do things like star in Tremors II: Aftershocks and work as a security guard.

I woke up right about then.

Speaking of theaters, some of you may know that I work at one now, and am a manager trainee there. Last night I was helping to clean up after a showing of The Simpsons Movie as the credits were still rolling. So I’m sweeping up, and this row of theater seats show up at the bottom of the screen and this pimply, animated teenager starts sweeping around them.

“Being assistant manager isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” he mutters.

I laugh, smiling a bit sheepishly, as I navigate around leaving patrons.

He continues, “Four years of film school for THIS?”

“Oh, COME ON!”

Not cool. Not cool at all.

My grandfather in 1940.

Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at the age of 84. Fittingly, 84 is also the age at which Vonnegut’s alter-ego, Kilgore Trout, died in the novel Timequake. Though it seems his plan to commit honorable suicide through years of smoking unfiltered Pall Malls didn’t pan out, complications from a fall finally took his life.

An August 2006 Rolling Stone article reported:

He has stalled finishing his highly anticipated novel If God Were Alive Today - or so he claims. “I’ve given up on it … It won’t happen. … The Army kept me on because I could type, so I was typing other people’s discharges and stuff. And my feeling was, ‘Please, I’ve done everything I was supposed to do. Can I go home now?’ That’s what I feel right now. I’ve written books. Lots of them. Please, I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do. Can I go home now?”

My personal obsession with his books began with an essay I wrote about Slaughterhouse-Five in high school–you know, the usual “I just learned the word catharsis!”-type fiasco. I think I chose the book off of a list after just reading the back cover in the library. The teacher loved my essay, probably less for its execution than for the obvious enthusiasm I had developed for the text. In college, my 4-year undergraduate boyfriend and I took turns reading almost all of Vonnegut’s works, which we checked out from the Loyola Library and pretended were ours, garnering astronomical late fees. But ah, I think it was worth it.

In Palm Sunday, ol’ KV actually graded his own works, stating that the grades “do not place me in literary history” but were meant to compare “myself with myself”:

Player Piano: B
The Sirens of Titan: A
Mother Night: A
Cat’s Cradle: A+
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater: A
Slaughterhouse-Five: A+
Welcome to the Monkey House: B-
Happy Birthday, Wanda June: D
Breakfast of Champions: C
Slapstick: D
Jailbird: A
Palm Sunday: C

My personal favorite is probably Galapagos (which came later), but that’s neither here nor there. I think what I’ve really always found compelling about Vonnegut is his unfailing ability to be both bitterly jaded and hilarious at the same time. He seemed to echo my mostly unconscious (back in high school) conviction that although life is basically a carnival of the grotesque, you may as well have a few laughs with the bearded lady. Y’know what I mean?

And so it goes.

T-P:

When Cita Dennis Hubbell moved back to Algiers in 1970 after living around the world with her naval officer husband, George Hubbell, she was dismayed to find her local library, the one she had spent so much time in as a child, shuttered by damage from Betsy.

Boards blocked the large front windows, and the library, at 725 Pelican Ave., was in a terrible state, George Hubbell recalled Wednesday morning.

Born on Belleville Street and raised on Elmira Street just blocks from the library, Cita Hubbell, a registered nurse, couldn’t stand to see the historic building, built in 1907 with a grant from the Carnegie Foundation, in such condition.

Determined to get the library reopened, she marshaled neighborhood support, including from the Algiers Point Association, which the Hubbells and other active neighbors had formed in the early 1970s.

The rest is history. Despite the objection of the city librarian at the time, the City Council, perhaps persuaded by the two busloads of people who lobbied in support of the library, provided money to renovate the branch. The Algiers Point library, which had been closed for a decade, reopened on Oct. 14, 1975.

Fast forward to 2005, though, and the scenario seems so sadly similar.

Like all New Orleans public libraries, the now Cita Dennis Hubbell Algiers Point Library, renamed for its longtime supporter after her death from cancer in 2001, was shuttered in the weeks after Hurricane Katrina.

“One of the first things the city did was lay off the librarians, along with hundreds of other city workers,” George Hubbell said.

But, struggling to bring back city services, even in a much reduced state, New Orleans officials announced in October that the Algiers Point Library would be one of three locations reopened in the city. The larger Algiers Regional Library had sustained heavy damage in Katrina and had to be gutted.

Upon hearing the announcement, Hubbell, along with other Algiers Point residents, immediately jumped into gear, determined to help keep the library afloat.

Jeez, Hubbells rock, don’t they? Yeah, I thought you’d agree.

NOLA.com [Chris Rose]:

We talk funny around here. I mean, where else but New Orleans could a man with a severe speech pathology — our beloved Buddy D — become a broadcast legend? Only to be replaced by a former Cajun quarterback who even fewer people understand — all this on the region’s highest-rated radio station, not just some curious and provincial late-night, roadhouse AM outlet.

While musing on these notions the other day, I was listening to WWOZ on my car radio. And, in chronological order, these are the names of the songs that played during the set I heard:

“Iko Iko,” “Ya-Ya,” “Ooh Poo Pah Doo,” “Cha Dooky-Doo,” “Ta Ta Te Ta Ta,” “Tee Na Na Na Na Nay,” “Look-a Py Py,” “Hey Pocky Way,” “Handa Wanda,” “Indian Red,” “Coochie Molly,” “Ki Ya Gris Gris,” “Ho-Di-Ko-Di-Ya-La-Ma-La,” and “Ya Herd Me.”

Each song was as familiar to me as a nursery rhyme, part of the musical backdrop of our lives. And it was all complete gibberish, made-up stuff, code language and vernacular indecipherable to your run-of-the-mill Harvard-educated linguist, yet I knew what it all meant in that sort of Jockomo Fe Na Nay kind of way.

[...]

The ‘OZ disc jockey for this show was Sherwood Collins. I tracked him down this week in Baton Rouge, where he was broadcasting in exile, to compliment him on his creative homage to the singular New Orleans patois.

“I got the idea thinking about how the city needed one voice to communicate its needs,” Collins said. “I kind of hit on how much our local vernacular adds to the esoteric nature of the city that draws millions of tourists down here.

“It’s that voice which speaks to every parade-goer — from 6 months to 60-years-old — to start shakin’ what their mama gave them. It’s something you and your mama can agree on, something that gives New Orleans a bit of its life.

“It’s that connective strand which makes us all Creoles. The history and melding of French, Spanish, African, Caribbean, Cuban, English, Irish, German, Isleno and Acadian cultures has created a culture with such a richness — which hangs on your tongue when you say Lagniappe or Tchoupitoulas or ‘tur-let’ — and that should somehow be manifested to help rebuild this city.”

Radio DJs — the rare few who still actually program their own music — are links in a great American cultural tapestry. They believe in what they’re doing, the message they’re sending.

Collins’ remarks remind me what a clich?© the term “unique” has become when used to describe New Orleans — particularly as the national media gazes down upon us these days. But it’s just so true.

We’re unusual, anachronistic and eccentric, often drunk and dirty. The longer you live here, the more unsuitable you become to live anywhere else — as so many of our people are discovering in far-flung cities and states.

And the reason I meditate on this today is to tell you that Collins’ aforementioned radio show is going to be replayed on Thanksgiving, at noon or shortly after. It’s at 90.7 on the FM radio dial and available on the Web at www.wwoz.org.

If you get a chance, listen to this amusing and essential reminder of who and what we are. It’s the most joyous noise you could hear — almost spiritual. (And it’s got to be better than watching the Cowboys and Lions play football on TV, right?)

Tell your friends in faraway places to listen to it online and to play it for the people they are with Thursday. Tell everyone you know that school is in session, New Orleans style.

In fact, tell your congressman to listen. And the president.

Not that they’ll understand any of it — or us — any better, but maybe they’ll begin to comprehend what a vibrant and unsinkable (but very floodable) cultural identity we’ve got going on here that’s never going to die — with or without their help.

Although “with” would be better than “without.”

Damn it! This is the second Chris Rose column that’s gotten me misty! What the hell is wrong with the world?

Via my Uncle Fwee.