journey to a humid civilization March 20, 2006
Dangerblond is getting over yet another allergy attack and can’t come up with anything tonight except random musings from a Benadryl-induced funk.
Loki from Humid City was nice enough to link to my posts about the garbage and to comment approvingly. I read his site daily. I wondered for a few days if I was too fixated on the garbage issue, or if I should just change the name of the blog to Garbageblond. Then, Chris Rose wrote a column in yesterday’s paper describing almost the exact same experiences and feelings I have been having regarding garbage and the importance of its timely, regular removal to the smooth functioning of civilization. Well, I felt better after that. If Chris Rose and I are thinking along the same lines, then that’s good enough for me.
I developed a close, personal relationship with Rose when I was in Houston. Every morning, I would wake up, put on the coffee and download nola.com to see if he had written anything new about the state of things back here. If there was a new piece by Rose, I felt he had written it just for me. When a few days went by without a new column, I worried that he had been hired away by the NY Times. After a while, I began to fret about the stress all this must be causing him. I wrote him a fan e-mail and then deleted it because I didn’t want him making fun of me to all the other columnists. I’m kidding, but I and my roommate seriously considered Chris Rose’s columns a lifeline during that time.
I also discovered a New Orleans blog called A Frolic of My Own. There is a link there to a very interesting, and very long, article about Mardi Gras 2006 by Matt Labash, writing for the Weekly Standard, Will the Good Times Ever Roll Again? He pulls a couple of boners, like saying that Kimberly Williamson Butler, god forbid, is the chief elections official for the state. I bet Al Ater would roll over in Fox McKeithen’s grave if he read that. The guy has an interesting take, even if he does get things wrong, and it’s worth the read.
Apropos of nothing, I’m still fascinated with Katherine’s taste in music. It’s like a trip down memory lane. In Houston, she played Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’ and Faithfully every day, faithfully. She has an unhealthy fondness for The Carpenters. Since we’ve been home, she’s been listening to Dionne Warwick’s Burt Bacharach and Hal David Songbook. I hadn’t heard these songs in years and I had no idea that young people even knew about them. Upon hearing the opening chords, however, all the words to these songs came right back to me. Immediately, I started torturing Katherine by singing along, lounge lizard-style.
With Journey, I associate the memory of riding around in someone’s car, drinking beer and being bored. The Carpenters made me remember my cousin, Martee, playing the piano and following along with The Carpenters Songbook while I turned pages. The whole family would actually gather around the piano singing Carpenters songs.
Dionne Warwick was my mother’s favorite singer and she played the Bacharach-David vinyl LP until the grooves wore off. I knew all the words to their songs by the time I was nine. I remember trying to read the album covers. I imagined Burt Bacharach and Hal David living together in a big Hollywood house like the one where Sharon Tate was killed. I don’t think I thought of them as gay, I just thought they must live together so they could always just say, “Hey, Burt - listen to this….” They had a piano and a small stage, and they would invite Dionne over for dinner and then they’d sit down at the piano together and she’d go up in the stage and they would try out songs together. I remember asking my mother what “lyricist” meant and she said, “I don’t know.”
Cornball oldies music is making a comeback, I think. We have been watching Big Love, the new HBO show about a polygamist family. Their favorites are John Denver and Lynn Anderson. Along with garbage roulette, this trend must stop. Civilization depends on it.
