krewe of kid March 2, 2006
Check out this great set of photos from St. Anne’s, by jonno:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonnodotcom/sets/72057594072516927/
The 10th photo is a shot of Steve and me with Jackson. It looks like we are deep in negotiations with his majesty.
if there was no mardi gras, we would have to invent it
Back when I was working a lot in theater, I used to love to see and read absurdist plays, with their gobbledigook speeches, their turning convention upside-down and inside-out, and their freedom of abandoning logic. Camus captured how meaningless and absurd life is, with all values and morality constantly changing. Harold Pinter and Edward Albee are my favorite playwrights in the genre because they, along with Samuel Beckett, can make these crazy verbal constructions have the authentic ring of truth. Someone is onstage twisting and contorting and mangling words nearly beyond recognition, and you sit in the theater thinking, “yes, I’ve heard this before, just the other day.”
Sometime around 2000, when George W. Bush was installed, I lost my taste for absurdist drama. Real life began to seem like the most cynical theater of the absurd. The stakes were too high for us to be riding in the backseat while this drunken cowboy was driving the country. The world. Talkin’ and talkin’ and not sayin’ nuthin’. Outrageous lies routinely swallowed whole. It seemed to me like language had begun to turn back on itself and give up any meaning it ever had. One reason I was drawn to law is that its language, though dry and stilted, still has meaning. In the legal world, you can’t answer a different question than the one that was asked. You can’t lie and then go back and say you were misquoted. You can’t pretend to listen and not; you can’t hear something different from what was said; you can’t assume the answer you are expecting and ignore the one you get.
In everyday life outside of the law, we are still constantly reminded of the limits of language as a means of communication. We are also reminded of the limits human beings face when trying to understand the meaning of existence. Some of us can’t find a meaning and so we invent one or join a group that claims to know. Some of us, myself included, accept the fact that we’ll probably never know. It comes across to us as a loss when we realize that we are inhabiting a universe that we will never fundamentally understand. Cynicism is always at the door, but I have some kind of persistent remnant of joy that keeps it from moving in. When I lose it, Lucinda Williams can always get it back for me.
Law and art are my balm for this disconcerting condition, but my antidote is Mardi Gras. I always make a costume that turns good taste and fashion-sense inside out. I adopt a state of mind where color, light, texture, weight, originality and visual impact are more important than comfort, cost, permanence or modesty. I stop listening to words and just hear sounds - sighs, oohs, aahs, and music. I obey David Byrne’s command to stop making sense. People always look at my costume and say, “what are you?” I’m abstract.
Sometimes there is a confluence of absurdities that lets me know I am on the right track. On the day before Mardi Gras, my phone rang and it was a number I didn’t recognize. I answered and a deep, male voice said:
“Mrs. Naomi Marshall, please.”
“I’m sorry. Mrs. Marshall was my husband’s mother. She passed away in early January. May I ask who’s calling, please?”
“Thank you, ma’am. I’m Reginald Something from Some Forgettable Company. I’ll just call her back later.”
“Uh. OK. You can try calling her back later. But she’s dead.”
I hung up the phone and laughed so hard I had tears in my eyes. Naomi, who always took herself very seriously, would not have appreciated it. Oh, Naomi, I just told a man you are dead and he thinks it’s a temporary obstacle keeping you from listening to him on the phone.
Why should it make any sense? I went back to washing out my ruffled white bloomers. I needed those bloomers for Mardi Gras Day. I wore them on the outside.
