As a New Orleanian who was able to evacuate, August 28th was, in many ways, the eventful day. It included some action on our part. Everything that followed followed while I sat in front of my computer in my parent’s dining room, refreshing nola.com over and over again. But on the Sunday, August 28th, we were on the move.

Up until that morning, we had planned to stay in town. We had booked a hotel room downtown, where we’d heard power was likely to stay on. There were two major contributing factors to this decision. First, real New Orleanians don’t leave. Everyone wonders why so many insisted on staying, but staying has long been a sign of strength. And of the seemingly endless rights of passage it takes to become a local, this was one we hadn’t gotten to yet. Second, our car was in the shop, so there didn’t seem to be a way to leave, anyway.

But Sunday morning, we woke up with the sun, and the storm was a Category Five. We knew we had to go. Outside, our neighbors, who never, ever leave, were panicking their way between house and car, piling sleeping bags and photo albums in the trunk of their Civic. It wasn’t a good sign.

By then, I had figured out that my friend Jennifer was out of town that weekend, and had left her car behind. Her friend had keys to her house. If I could find him, I could get in, where she was almost positive there was an extra key swimming around in her junk drawer. I called the friend. He was home so I jumped on my bike to meet him. Adam stayed back to work on the yard. We had roughly 30 potted plants hanging around, all of which would become property-destroying missles in 70 mph winds.

My bike ride was furious, pedaling past house after house with boarded up windows. There was no one left, it seemed. People had spray painted messages to the storm on the plywood that protected their homes: Fuck you Katrina! being the most popular refrane. I didn’t let myself think too long about what we’d do if I couldn’t find Jennifer’s car key.

I met the friend, got the house key. But when I got to Jennifer’s house, I couldn’t make the key work. I called her on my phone. What’s wrong? The key won’t work. The key. The key won’t work. Fuck Fuck. Do you mind if I break a window? And of course, through talking to her I calmed down, the key turned and within moments I had located the keys to the Camry.

No car has ever felt so wonderful.

We were calmer, then. I left my bike in her house, drove to the gas station, which seemed to be the last populated part of town and waited an hour for gas. In the past, I’d evacuated to Nashville to be with family, but I thought this time we should go to Houston, because it sounded like fun and because Adam still needed a suit for our upcoming wedding and the shopping there is fabulous. I called him to share this brilliant idea and he said calmly, “Except we don’t know how long we’ll be away.”

I think what he really meant was, it could be a week.
With our car all packed, we had our last two experiences in the old New Orleans. One of our neighbors, a wine distributor, gave us a bottle of champage and wished us luck. Then another neighor, across the street poked his head over the fence. I’d never talked to him much before. Our front door was opposite is back yard, which was protected by 8 foot privacy fence. He was old, and he peeked over his fence (he must have been standing on a chair) and said, “Y’all leaving too?” I told him we’d held out, but yes, we were leaving too.

“Damn,” he said, “Seems like everyone’s leaving for this one. But my wife won’t let me go. I’m thinking I’ll break in over there to get us to high ground,” he said, motioning to the elementary school across the way. I told him I supported that idea. I wished him the best of luck. But I didn’t offer him a ride. And I knew a little bit even then that I would regret it.

Then we hit the road. We listened to local radio for the first hour or so, as Nagin and Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard admonished people to leave. Time was running out. While we were crossing Lake Pontchartrain, they started telling people to make sure they had hatchets, or axes. They would be good for breaking through to the roof of a flooded house. It was a more innocent time, and I’d never heard of anything so horrible.

Then we just drove. We drove for hours. We made quiet friendships with the cars we rode beside. For a while, we were behind a pickup truck with about 9 kids packed into the bed. It was already raining and at the time, I thought they had it pretty bad.

After 10 hours, we had made it to Birmingham, normally a four or five hour drive. We were exhausted. My mom worked a miracle and found us a hotel room. We snuck the cats into our room and slept because there was nothing else we could do, but we didn’t get much rest. I set the alarm for 6AM, because I wanted to be awake when the storm hit home.

The territory of anniversaries, if you’re lucky, is the return of a sense memory. I don’t want to feel this way forever, but I need to feel this way sometimes.

The City of New Orleans, along with the Republican Party, wants the send out the message that we’re “open for business”. They want the world to believe we’re thriving. But even I — someone who lost nothing other than a broken car, someone who had a place to go to, someone whose whole life was not wrapped up in this city — even I am no where near over this hurt.

Posted by jackson on 29 Aug 2006
Filed Under: New Orleans | 1 Comment »

On Project “Momway”…

Posted by jackson on 25 Aug 2006
Filed Under: Hug Your Television | No Comments »

Life moves fast. So said Ferris Bueller and so say I.

Nine years ago I didn’t even know how to ride a bike. Between my being inordinately stubbon as a young one, and my mom being a bit lazy and disinterested in teaching me, it just didn’t happen. Odd, but I know I’m not the only one out there.

When I did learn, I was so excited I ran out and bought a brand new GT maroon cruiser. It has always been the only bike I can ride with any confidence. And not really with that much confidence.

Be that as it may, 9 days ago, when Adam starting talking about doing a charity bike ride together, I was interested. When we found the MS150, and discovered it was the weekend of our first anniversary, I was sold. 150 miles in two days for a person who mainly uses her bike to make beer runs to the A&P? It may not seem like an obvious choice, but therein lies its beauty.

Since then I have fixed up an old Giant Cyprus DX and ridden a total of 65 miles. What’s most impressive to me, I’m starting to master the reach-down-and-grab-of-the

-water-bottle without stopping. Really, that is something I never, ever thought I would be able to do.Also, the whole bit is for charity. And we’re trying to raise $1000 between us. Click on our fabuous team logo for information on how to donate!

Posted by jackson on 24 Aug 2006
Filed Under: Miscellaneous | No Comments »

Not too terribly long ago, it was Donald Trump who was talking about dividing his reality contestants into teams according to their race. In fact, it was the subject of an early post from this very website. Having learned so much about Venus and Mars from dividing contestants by gender, Trump saw the move as a natural progression for The Apprentice.

We here at Honky Tonk Chronicles weren’t going to bite. We concluded that such a program would never, ever make the light of prime time. Someone, surely, would stop the madness.

The concept is as maniacal as it is egotistical and thankfully, I think the PC police will reign this one in at the end of the day. “Needless to say,” says Trump, “not everybody thinks it’s a good idea.”

Oh, the halcyon days of 2005.

In what Jeff Probst calls Survivor’s “freshest idea since Season One,” the show is riffing off (read, ripping off) Trump’s lunacy with its own Battle of the Races. The new round of contestants will be divided into four teams: the Asian-American Team, the African-American Team, the Hispanic Team and the White Team. I really, really wish I were making this up.

Perhaps forseeing that this could be controversial (ya think?) Jeff Probst is making the PR rounds. Interviewed by Harry Smith on The Early Show, Probst gives a shruggy, smug “hm” when Smith questions the wisdom of the idea. As if to say, “Really? Well, that’s odd.” As if Smith was the first person to look at him and say, Are you out of your fucking mind?

It’s hard to know where to start with this, but it does bring to mind 1987 sci-fi hit “The Running Man”, which is the first place I ever remember seeing reality television. I will never forget the brief ad for Climbing for Dollars, a show in which contestants panic their way up a rope, toward a load of cash, and away from the foaming team of rabid Dobermans at the bottom, hungry for the flesh of the weak. It was supposed to be ridiculous.

(It’s worthy of note that in “The Running Man,” almost all the reality contestants are convicts. Because obviously no one would ever volunteer for such crap.)

All that just seems the stuff of prescience now. And also sort of sweetly naive. That the worst of reality TV would be ravenous greed? We should have been so lucky.

Posted by jackson on 24 Aug 2006
Filed Under: Kill Your Television | No Comments »

There was a time in my life when politics ranked higher than, say, the career choices of David Boreanaz, on the list of things I spent time thinking and writing about. When I lived in Minneapolis, Adam and I used to get together semi-weekly with our friends from The Junior Varsity to drink beers and get worked up over the finer points of Minnesota politics. Come to think of it, my job was also in politics.

But then a couple of big things happened. First, there was presidential election in 2004, which was a real stomach turner. I couldn’t bring myself to read anything on Salon other than The Fix for months. I think that’s pretty understandable. Like, my mom got food poisoning from take-out sushi 2 years ago, and she still can’t say the word “wasabi” without getting queasy. And I haven’t eaten Chick-fil-A since 1993.

Still, I knew it was my duty not to give up, and I kind of gave up anyway.

I was just returning to my regularly wonky self when “it” came. That’s what we call it now. I got sick of saying her name months ago, and starting calling her “the storm,” which eventually morphed into “the thing” which is now pared down just to “it.” Anyway.

It spawned a whole new kind of news-watching — namely, cable news-watching. I’ve always kind of hated cable news, but after the storm, it was difficult to avoid. Having evacuated to my parent’s house in Nashville, we were living with other people’s television habits. CNN, MSNBC, not too much Fox News, thank god. It was the first (and hopefully last) time I ever really wanted to watch the newsreels instead of read them. But, well, our viewing situation was less than ideal. Since their nice TV broke three years ago, my parents have been squinting at a 13 incher that used to live in my teenage bedroom. Watching a great city tear itself apart is horrible on any screen, of course, but thirteen inches with the constant commentary of my well-meaning pops? I am forever scarred.

Since then, well, it’s about all I can do to keep up with what’s happening in New Orleans. And it’s all too murky and depressing to talk about with friends over beer on a Friday night. We do it sometimes, but after a while someone will say, “Fuck! It’s Friday night. Can we talk about porn or something? Anything?”

But I gotta tell ya, Joe Lieberman may have gotten me out of my funk. First, he loses the primary (wahoo!), then he threatens the seat by registering to run as a independent, thereby potentially splitting the Democratic vote. Who does this guy think he is?!

Even better are the reactions from the right, who as a group must be scared shitless right about now. All those polls that say people are fed up with the war in Iraq are more than just hot, un-American air. Dick Cheney says Connecticut is encouraging “al-Qaida types” by not voting for his friend. The Weekly Standard says Lieberman lost because he’s decidedly “pro-American.”

Is it just me, or do these guys sound decidedly anti-democracy to you? Are these the same guys who used to nail the left for not trusting voters enough? For being pompous? And now they’re criticizing an entire state for voting wrong? That’s rich, pals. But useless, because I’m about to get hopeful again and we’re going to kick your ass.

Posted by jackson on 12 Aug 2006
Filed Under: Politics | No Comments »

Click on this link and watch this fabulous video, just shared with me by The Junior Varsity.

Posted by jackson on 10 Aug 2006
Filed Under: Dance Dance Revolution, OK Go | No Comments »

At this point, I really will watch anything with David Boreanaz in it.

I don’t think it’s possible to have watched as much Buffy as so many of us did, and not sort of fall in love with Angel. I don’t care who you are, or what your type is. (Like me? Beefcake’s not usually my thing.) He’s the love you can’t quite reach — and not because he’s emotionally unavailable, but because he’s physically unavailable. He’s the ultimate one who got away.

Which is also why, I’d venture, he’s one of the few Buffy cast members that the world really needs more of. (Another is Anthony Head. I nearly bust a gut when he showed up at the end of Woody Allen’s Scoop.) We simply are not done with David Boreanaz. Because, to be frank, we never got to bed him.

It’s a bit of frustrating, though, to see him chose the role of Seely Booth in the new (and renewed!) CSI-but-with-people-who’ve-been-dead-longer drama Bones. Not so frustrating that I don’t TiVo the goods, but still. While Booth can physically do the deed without risking the apocalypse, he’s also stuck in a Moonlighting will they/won’t they with his co-star Emily Deschanel. This is to say, they’re not going to do it for ages and when they finally do, all of the show’s spark will be gone.

It wouldn’t be crazy to suggest that Boreanaz try to steer clear of hero roles for a while. Not just to avoid being typecast, but perhaps also for some, you know, satisfaction. Just as Peter Parker — sometimes even when the hero gets the girl, he still can’t get laid. Looking at Boreanaz’s IMDB page, it seems that he and his agent agree. In between his TV hero roles are a handful of straight-to-DVD romance movies in which, it appears, he gets a ton of ass.

I saw one of these movies last night. “These Girls” is an odd little Canadian picture in which three sweet and barely legal best friends blackmail our hunk into a rigorous summer-sex-a-thon while his wife works the night shift. It’s sweeter than it sounds. Sort of a sexual coming of age.
The best scenes are between Boreanaz and the baseball-loving born again who’s curiousity has gotten the best of her. Even in bed, she calls him “Mr. Clark,” which is perfect. Their sex is like a classroom experiment, in which Boreanaz talks her through what’s happening and asks for her thoughts on the subject. We all should have been so lucky to have a first time like this.
In terms of the larger Boreanaz picture, “These Girls” takes all the potential energy he’s built up over the years and finally makes something of itself. We even get to see his butt! And yet, it isn’t all its cracked up to be. When you turn Boreanaz into just some dude who’s a pushover for the ladies, that’s all you get. Some dude. A seriouslly hot dude, given. But, as Angel (and Booth), Boreanaz’s looks are just the decadent icing on a cake made of duty, honor and trustworthiness. As a hot guy, he’s basically pudding.
So, that’s it. The gypsy curse lives on. It’s frustrating, but it’s what keeps me tuning in.

Posted by jackson on 09 Aug 2006
Filed Under: Movies, Starf-cker | No Comments »

I used to watch scary movies a lot. I would voluntarily rent them with my friends, and then I would get irrationally, intensely terrified. Come bedtime, I would hover in my doorway for a while, working out the ten foot leap I’d need to make to get to the bed — the only way to avoid the ankle-grab from the beast under the dust-ruffle. Then I would spend a few hours in a sweaty debate with myself over which was the safest way to fall asleep. Like, is it better to face the door so I can see the ax murderer/rapist/Satan Spawn coming, and therefore be better able to defend myself. Or, is it better to turn away, and maybe slip under the evil radar? Should I be completely under the covers, protected by blanket-armor, or should leave one foot out just to show them who’s boss?

This is not, unfortunately, a description of myself at 8 years old.

A couple of years ago, I wised up and realized that I am not, as it turns out, required to put myself through this ritual of terror. For some people, getting a little scared is fun. For me, it is always more than a little scared and is decidedly unpleasant. So I stopped watching scary movies. What a revelation! There’ve been some exceptions, of course, (for some reason, I have seen the “Dawn of the Dead” remake twice) but I have largely avoided this genre and I haven’t missed it a bit.

Unfortunately, I am married to someone who really love scary movies. What’s worse, he is bar none the worst person in the world to watch scary movies with. A chronic older brother, he delights in making the movie even scarier, grabbing my arm suddenly during the high-tension hunt-down, or reciting eerie dialogue for hours afterward. Such antics actually made it easier for me to draw the line on horror flicks. But lately, he’s really been laying it on thick. “I never get to watch scary movies anymore!” Last night, he whined, “The only people I ever lived with who liked to watch scary movies are my mom and Tom.” Of course, this represents roughly 75% of his life, but he was making a point! And so after a number pinkie swears and “no-joke promises” to, seriously, no seriously, not do anything to scare me any further than I would undoubtedly already be, I agreed to flip through OnDemand and pick a scary movie to watch together. He would have to make the popcorn. In two different flavors.

I drew an immediately line at “Saw”. I don’t even remember what it’s about, but I remember it sounded pretty horrible. Won’t see it. So it was between “Hostel” and “The Hills Have Eyes”. Adam was rooting for “Hostel” but a quick look at the trailer revealed it to be about torture. Gross. Won’t see it.

Obviously, I’m not really up to date with what’s what in horror flicks these days, but I have my ear close enough to the ground to suspect that they traffic primarily in crossing the line. If it’s not beyond the pale, it’s on the cutting room floor. Maybe we have “Scream” to blame for this: having spelled out in schlocky detail the rules of horror movies, it must have made them less fun to follow. But of course, there are myriad reasons why people have to go so far to be shocking these days. Video games, gangsta rap, Cosmopolitan, Telletubbies. It’s a mean old world.

*
(For those of you who have not yet seen “The Hills Have Eyes” and are under the impression that learning its finer plot points will detract from your potential viewing pleasure, I’m about to lay down some spoilers. Consider your sad-self warned.)

We have a family on a road trip, and under the guidance of their ex-cop (and Republican) dad, they have not only gotten off the interstate for a scenic desert-route, but have taken the advice of a creepy gas-station attendant to take a short cut on the short cut. So, they get stranded, and there’s a bunch of genetic mutants around who, despite their resemblance to Sloth from The Goonies, are still pretty scary looking. They also appear to be cannibals, and pretty single-minded ones at that.

*
Adam and I spend the first half of the movie trying to guess who’s going to live and who’s going to die, and in what order. He thinks it’s a tough call, since they’re a family and “killing families is kind of hard core.” Maybe, he says, they’ll just all go through hell, but make it out alive. I think this sounds like a nice theory, but I should have known better. It takes a while for the blood bath to get going, but once it does, we see the following: Dad burned alive on a stake, the pretty blonde youngest sister getting gang raped by mutants , the mom shot gunned in the stomach, and the older sister/new mom having to sit there while one of the mutants drinks milk from her breasts while holding a gun to her infant’s head.

*
It is, Adam said, tough to be in horror movies these days.

Even tougher to watch them, I’d say. I know it isn’t completely fair to lump all of these movies together. I even get why catching all the heavy-handed symbolism and weak attempts at allegory is fun. The family in “Hills” owns two German Shepards named Beauty and Beast. Beauty is killed off instantly, and Beast, naturally, is set free. Also, there’s a sort of confused political message swarming about. The torched-Dad was a gun toting Republican, constantly belittling his weak-willed (read, Democrat) son-in-law. And of course, the mutant’s existence is the result of years of nuclear testing. The fun, in theory, is to watch the Brady Bill-loving cell phone salesman break down and bear arms to save his baby from the monsters that were created by politics he doesn’t share. But it isn’t campy enough to be fun, and it certainly isn’t interesting enough to make the above mentioned gore-fest worth watching.

I kind of can’t help seeing it as blood-porn, where everything surrounding the money shot (you know, the pick axe in the eyeball!) is just a way of getting to the money shot. Maybe that’s what it is, and I’m just not that into it.

So. As for the last part of my deal with Adam: the eraser film, which in this case was Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic. Trafficking as it does in shock, it is a funny eraser for “The Hills Have Eyes.” But, luck for both of us, it’s also just damn funny. Come bedtime, however, I hadn’t gotten the money-shots out of my head. When I refused to go downstairs alone to get a glass of water to take an Advil I really needed, Adam started to laugh and tell me I was being silly. But, because he is basically a good guy, when he noticed the tears welling up in my eyes he laid off, got the water for me, and curled up close for sleep.

Posted by jackson on 08 Aug 2006
Filed Under: Movies | 3 Comments »

Three years ago, almost to the day, Adam and I were sitting at the bar at Monahan’s. It’s a bar lover’s bar, nothing special to it. Situated as it is, half a block off the bad bands and big boobs of Bourbon Street, it is a relief of a joint. The jukebox at Monahan’s is pretty good, and just then Johnny Cash’s cover of Bonnie Prince Billy’s “I See a Darkness” came on. We stopped talking about whatever it was were were talking about, whispered how beautiful this one is, and sank into the tune.

*
Beginning with, “Well, you’re my friend/and can you see/Many times we’ve been out drinking/Many times we’ve shared our thoughts/But did you ever, ever notice, the kind of thoughts I got?” it’s a song about a friendship between two men, and the quiet, steady nature of it. And then comes the moment where they break through to something bigger, where they cut to the quick of each other, and Cash stops calling him “buddy” and instead uses “my best unbeaten brother.” Will Oldham weeps the backup during the chorus (”Do you know how much I love you?”), and sitting there at our first favorite New Orleans bar, we weep too.

Johnny Cash is on my mind a lot lately. My friend and co-worker recently gave Adam and I a wedding gift — a framed photograph of Johnny Cash’s childhood home by Dero Sanford. It now hangs above our dining room table. My friend said, “I figured something Johnny Cash would be a safe bet with you,” and of course, he was right.

And then this week I’ve been reading an article by David Kamp “American Communion”, about Cash’s relationship with producer/friend Rick Rubin. It was a feature in Vanity Fair and then anthologized in the 2005 edition of The Best American Magazine Writing. Like, “I See a Darkness” it is a dirge of a love song.

Kamp tells the story of the two visionaries from the moment they meet, backstage at one of Cash’s concerts. According to Kamp, “They exchanged hellos…and then stared at each other silently, for a two solid minutes.” And that, of course, was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, even more so than the music they made together. Which is saying something because, the products of their work are roundly stunning. Most famous are Cash’s unlikely covers of songs by musicians like Depeche Mode, U2, Nine Inch Nails and of course, Bonnie Prince Billy.

Kamp gets it right when he writes of Cash’s ability to completely alter the original tone and meaning of the songs he covered. Owing much to Rubin’s idea to have Cash sing “naked” — that is completely alone, without reverb or echo — Cash’s covers are unavoidably about Cash himself. “Hurt” transforms from a song “sung by a junkie clear-eyed enough to recognize the ruin he’s made of his life” to a one sung by “an old man lamenting his mortality and fraily, feeling he’s outlived his usefulness”. Tom Petty’s “I won’t Back Down” becomes a powerful statement of faith. Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” ceases to be a sendup of organized religion, and begins anew as a testament to a close relationship with Christ. And after reading Kamp’s article, I’d say that “I See a Darkness” transforms into a song not just about two men, but about Cash and Rubin themselves.

*
Oft lampooned in movies with a back slapping hug and choked-back tear or two, abiding friendship between (straight) men is the sweetest kind because it’s the unlikliest. It isn’t, of course, actually unlikely, just underrepresented. Kamp weaves a tale of two friends who not only create the work of their lives together, but who understand each other’s abiding, though wildly different, faiths, who trust one another as they take turns leading the way through unfamiliar territory. Throughout the article, Kamp writes of their daily habit of taking communion together. Rubin contines to perform this ritual after Cash’s death, in honor of his best unbeaten brother, who he misses terribly.

Posted by jackson on 05 Aug 2006
Filed Under: Johnny Cash, New Orleans | 2 Comments »

I woke up this morning to the sound of my older, calmer cat Cosmo, scratching at the bedroom window, whining to get outside. Luke waited behind him, also anxious. I rolled out of bed and opened the window, watched them both scramble over the windowsill. Once outside, they turned around and looked at me, worried-like.

I don’t wake up at 6AM unless there’s a flight to catch, so I crawled back in bed. Usually in this situation I would be back asleep in seconds, waking up just in time to be 15 minutes late to work. But not today. I felt nervous, worried-like. I started rehashing stories in my mind I usually rehash when I’m looking for something to feel bad about. Finally I gave up and went down stairs to check the news. One look at NOLA.com and I knew what it was. There’s a hurricane again.

They say it is weakening, which is good. But I still think we’re in for some sleepless nights, if nothing else, then for the memory.

Posted by jackson on 03 Aug 2006
Filed Under: New Orleans | No Comments »