The Blog

I was spellbound for two hours last night watching Martin Scorcese’s Bob Dylan documentary “No Direction Home.”

Maybe it’s because of my age — I was sort of there for the original events — but I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. What a thrilling time that was, and how exciting it must have been for young Bob and the others who speak in this film: Dave Van Ronk, Maria Muldaur, Suze Rotolo (she’s on some of the old LP covers), Liam Clancy, Joan Baez, Mavis Staples – more than I can recall. New York City, 1963. The baton is being passed from the Beat Generation to Dylan and his circle. There are a million places to play. Dylan and the others are sponges, soaking up the old guys like Woody Guthrie, and each other, learning new music, new styles, new voices, and actually saying something in their songs. It’s not a concert show, but I was still fascinated and hugely entertained. Catch Part Two tonight (Tuesday, September 27, 2005) on PBS. In Los Angeles it’s on KCET, Channel 28 at 9:00 PM, but I think it’s a national presentation. This is history, folks, but fresh enough to feel contemporary. Most of the original players are still with us.

While I’m at it, I just want to say “Hurray!” to National Public Radio’s coverage of the ongoing hurricane disasters on the U.S. gulf coast. These stories, mostly on the afternoon news show “All Things Considered,” are precious documents. Heart-warming, heart-wrenching, visceral, surprising, maddening, informative, in ways I just don’t see the mainstream media doing. The 79-year-old woman who lived alone, floating inside her one-story home on her Stearns and Foster mattress for eight days before she was rescued (“It must have a lot of wood in it…”). The New Orleans pump station worker caught by NPR’s reporter dozing on the job – because he had not deserted his post for three weeks nonstop. The man who sent his family to safety and doesn’t even know where they are, while he stayed behind to assist whomever he could in his 9th Ward neighborhood. This is why we need public radio and television, my friends. Tune in and see for yourself.

As always, my heart is yours alone. And again, I might owe some of you an apology. Please forgive my transgressions. I am socially inept, and I should know better.

Avast, me hearties!

Did ye know it’s Talk Like a Pirate Day? Skuttle me skippers if it ain’t! Arrrgh…

I’ve been feeling funky, and not in a good way, since the Katrina disaster.

(Click here to play background music.)

It’s none of my business, really. We all have our disasters to cope with – hurricanes, typhoons, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, suicide attacks, not to mention our personal tragedies. Most of the time we are simply aware that shit happens, and we grieve, we deal, we move on. That’s what I do.

But there are facets of this particular mess that linger and sting past the usual spoil date, and as I go through my daily motions I have this nagging heaviness that makes everything seem off, somehow. I am too scattered to make a lot of sense of my feelings. I don’t get paid to make sense. So here’s a list of thoughts:

• A beautiful, atmospheric, historic city has been so heavily damaged that the pain has shot through our entire national nervous system, jolting even the jaded Californian, the preoccupied New Yorker and the usually sanguine midwesterner. I have not wanted to say this in public, but for therapeutic reasons I think I have to: I believe that New Orleans can never be the same. Something will be rebuilt there, for political and economic reasons, and feisty residents as well as outsiders will give it a go, but it won’t be the city of my dreams, the one I never got to see in person.
• The administration that scared the shit out of everybody and then sold itself as the only possible protector of America in the event of another huge disaster seems to be exactly as unprepared for Katrina as it was for the attacks of September 11, 2001, even though this time they were warned days in advance. Four years later they still can’t read the signs, they still have no coordinated plan, rescue personnel are still talking on different radio frequencies (that is, they are not talking to each other), and the best they can muster is a lame duck figurehead with nothing to lose “taking responsibility.”
• Twenty-eight percent of the population of New Orleans was living below the poverty line, a line the right wing cannot lower fast enough to keep people above it. Yeah, they were mostly black, but black or white, they have had to leave. I’m a middle-class guy, and I figure I could hold out maybe three months in another city before I would have to restart my life. New Orleans won’t be ready for a year, which is about 51 weeks longer than those lower-income folks can afford to wait. They will make homes and lives wherever they happen to be, and they will never return. On so many levels, that will kill the spirit of the city.
• Forgive me for focusing on New Orleans. It’s just that the city is the icon, not the Gulf coast. I am aware that this tragedy extends for many miles along that coast, and that only compounds my depression.
• Are we all criminals? People were stealing televisions.
• Wherever you go in this country, for all of our self-satisfied posturing, the black people are the poor people. But don’t worry: Soon the whackjob Right will control all the branches of government, and they will begin to create a whole bunch of poor white people, too, a new world order in which 85% of us live in poverty, 14% are unthinkably rich and one percent are untouchable.
• And speaking of controlling the entire government, could John Roberts please answer one question about how he intends to act when he is the fucking Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court for life? Any question, instead of this mannered dance he is doing with the Judiciary Committee. Based on what he has told us so far, I wouldn’t hire him to flip burgers. And yet he is a lock to be put in charge of the Court until your childrens’ 20th high school reunion. He will have no boss, he will answer to no one, and he can’t be removed except by impeachment, and yeah, that’s going to happen. For those not paying attention, he seems to want to reverse abortion rights, the Endangered Species Act, protection against the government taking your property and giving it to a corporation. He thought it was funny when he worked for the Reagan Administartion to call undocumented aliens “illegal amigos.” If anyone doubts whose pocket he is in, consider this: He was in secret meetings with the White House this summer about being nominated to the Supreme Court at the same time he was sitting in judgment on a case that named George W. Bush as a defendant, and he failed to disclose this or recuse himself.
• All the politicians touched by Katrina are acting like, well, politicians. They are all taking full blame except for the things they can’t be blamed for, which turns out to be everything. So they can’t be blamed for anything. How dare they try to score points with something like this? Is there no end to their venality? Even the new FEMA guy, despite his decades of emergency management experience, has turned into a brown-nosing toady overnight, cuddling up to the President on his recent tour of the disaster.
• Hospital patients and old people in a nursing home died because they weren’t evacuated. Hey Doc: First, do no harm, remember?

I don’t know if this is all out of my system yet. I hope it is. I want to move on. Life is precious, and so damned short. If you clicked on the “play” button at the top of this (and if your computer is capable), you’ve been listening to Paul Simon’s “Take Me to the Mardi Gras:”

C’mon take me to the mardi gras
Where the people sing and play
Where the dancing is elite
And there’s music in the street
Both night and day

Hurry take me to the mardi gras
In the city of my dreams
You can legalize your lows
You can wear your summer clothes
In New Orleans

And I will lay my burden down
Rest my head upon that shore
And when I wear that starry crown
I won’t be wanting anymore

Take your burdens to the mardi gras
Let the music wash your soul
You can mingle in the street
You can jingle to the beat of the jelly roll

As always, my heart beats only for you, the things we have lost, and those we still seek.

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The past two weeks have been a sort of gray blur.

I’ve had a huge amount of work to do both at My Crummy Job and around the house, getting ready for the huge Labor Day bash. There have also been peripheral issues, a summer cold, emotional aches and pains and, of course, Hurricane Katrina.

The destruction of New Orleans is not a sharp pain for me. I have no relatives there, no roots. And although I’ve wanted to for years, I’ve never even been there. So, not a sharp pain. But the place is part of the soul of this country, the sweaty engine room of hot jazz and rock’n’roll, a mirage of dancing, laughing, singing and partying, a magical city where the laws of gravity seem not always to apply.

And when I see the mess that has become of that city, and I read and hear, day after day, of the chaos and suffering with no realistic end in sight, it just weighs me down. I can get through the days, of course, and so can the rest of us, but it feels to me as if the whole country has been harmed and saddened by this disaster. We can still laugh and sing, but everything is dampened a little by the specter of this tremendous loss. Maybe I am only imagining this, but it seems to me that everyone is at least a little down. Anyway, I know I am.

The entire city has been deserted. It will be rebuilt, of course. That’s what we do. We stand in the face of adversity, and build an even bigger edifice, just to show who’s boss. We’ll put up new buildings, pile up higher levees, grade new roads, dedicate new schools and talk a lot about the resilience and spirit of the place and its people. And one day in the future New Orleans will be a real city again, with a genuine past. But no one today will live long enough to see this. For us, what has happened is effectively permanent. The old city will now be folded into history.

Long may its legend live.

I probably won’t be able to write much this week, due to work and social pressures.

Who am I kidding? It’s due to work. I owe my soul to the company store.

But I’ve been wondering about this: Would you like to read a novel or see a movie in which all the characters have what they want in life or are happy with what they’ve been given? In which everyone is confident that they are loved, and no bad guys are around to upset things? If the protagonist surmounts all his daily difficulties with a smile and any little hurt is smoothed away by the end of the scene? Would such a story hold your interest?

Mostly we don’t want to read or see that story, because we want to see conflict and the testing of spirit by adversity.

But are we looking for an idyllic world in our real lives? I think we think we are, and therefore we are always surprised when we – or someone we respect – goes and does something that can only lead to conflict and drama. Maybe they tell off their boss. Maybe they don’t adhere to the dress code at the country club. Maybe they pick – or choose to stay with – a bad boy/bad girl lover, one who’s sure to mistreat them, and hurt them.

Should we be surprised? Why do we do these things that lead us down the road to heartache? Do we need such pain in our hearts?