A Happier Collection of Nerds

Feria: It's the Shit

2008-05-25T14:40:00.005-05:00

A dispatch from early April. . .

Picture a county fair in a dusty, riverside city. Now replace all the rednecks and white trash in beaters and mullets with undeniably gorgeous Spanish women in traditional flamenco dresses and mullets. Wipe out the carnie tents and rides in favor of high-class 'casetas' that form an enormous grid of (mostly) private bungalows. They're basically mead halls made to be dismantled whose romantically-lit and tastefully-decorated interiors feature a bar / kitchen with a staff that busts its ass to snake through sardine tin conditions and serve; all this belies the typical caseta's unassuming and candy-striped façade.

What would a party in the south of Spain be without flamencoesque music? Bands of 3 to 4 guitarists play and sing while guests dance 'la Sevillana,' a four-phase romp that comes off as a more sedate and seductive version of what bailaores do on stage. My mastery of these four phases is key to my getting laid this week. The traditional drink is manzanilla, a stealthily potent apple wine that's occasionally mixed with Sprite to create the 'rebujito' -- the calimocho's blonde cousin. I hope to pound my fair share today.

I like zydeco now and spend my nights dancing among pretty cajun girls with snakes tattooed on their arms.
--My brother the med student, on doing his away rounds in Lafayette (LA)

I experienced what might be considered the Andalusian parallel of this not too long ago when I went to the Feria de Jerez. We hung out at a caseta staffed entirely by proud gypsies, so lo and behold, they got up on stage and performed flamenco. It was a down-home, super-authentic, tourists-need-not-bother way to wrap things up -- the singers still in their aprons and our bartender serving as the guitarist. One of their beautiful, brown cousins sat in the front row, taking it all in with feline eyes usually reserved for Egyptian deities. She looked absolutely stunning in a lime green flamenco dress. Two ladies from the crowd, one in modern clothes (read: too much denim and not enough discretion) and the other in traditional garb, took to the stage and improvised their own little moves to boot.

Luckily for you, feria season doesn't start up again until April of next year. So why not book that shit now?

¡Id a Galilea!

2008-03-23T15:40:00.006-05:00

Is what the priest said this evening in mass, the first I had attended in God knows how long. I figured Easter Sunday -- that's Resurrection Sunday for those of you following in Spanglish -- was as good an occasion as any to snap my heathen streak of countless, heathen months. I had shown up more out of secular fascination than pious guilt, to objectively observe how another culture carries out a centuries-old tradition that I used to on a weekly basis. Gimme bonus points since said culture is what I consider the cradle of Catholic zealotry: the south of Spain, specifically the town of Utrera in the province of Sevilla. It's the same town whose Holy Week celebration you get a taste of in the photo below, a very graphic step of Jesus getting flogged by pissed-off Romans. I've also got a flick of the woman who sang very passionately and sensually to this extravagant work of art. It's fun for the whole family! (Bring the kids.)

But I digress. A quarter of the way through mass, I realized I was wearing the same red pants and black jacket that had formed key parts of my Satan ensemble for carnival not a month prior. (So much for looking the part of nice, young Catholic boy.) By the end of mass, I had noted some subtle differences between it and its American counterpart. For starters, the songs are much happier . . . the Peace Be with You part colder . . . the homily more rushed . . . the flock fewer in number . . . and the setting far more hypocritically extravagant. Also, there wasn't a single good-looking parishioner whose Sunday dress curves I could deposit in the spank bank for later.

General Posas and the Utrera Kid

2008-02-11T17:54:00.006-05:00

It all started when you got to the municipal library just minutes before it closed, happy you had hauled ass down La Corredera. You paused at its wrought-iron gate a minute to catch your breath, crossed its miniature cobblestone courtyard and entered through its heavy, green doors riddled with golden studs you're more likely to see on a castle than anything else. The bald, bespectacled librarian inside said he'd be more than happy to let you print the script for tonight's rehearsal -- that is, if the place had internet access at the moment. He begins to offer some excuse about the servers being down, but you storm out too soon to give a shit. You curse a blue streak as you pass through Constitution Plaza; you know, the one presided over by the statue of a famous flamenco guitarist who was born and raised in Utrera. But you look past him and through the window of a somewhat hip clothing store called Clover, jonesing for a trendy argyle shirt with the following nonsensical English phrases strung together on its front: The Expert Far Fetch'd Express Hip Punto. You figure inquiring within about this waste of your money will calm your ire at being scriptless.

Enter Antonio Domínguez, former primary school teacher and biographer of the Utrera Kid. These days he's owner / manager of both Clover branches, so you ask him about the shirt in the ventana. Excitement wells up in his eyes at the chance to school a foreign youth like yourself, and he takes you by the arm so you can guide him to the item in question. Turns out the word ventana refers only to the windows of houses, while escaparata is what's used to refer to display windows. Right before you get ghost and put an end to his condescension, Antonio kindly leads you back into the store and asks you where you're from. His gorgeous cashier slinks down the stairs with all the grace of an ivory fox and says hola. She boasts a charming smile, almond-shaped eyes the color of mahogany, and (most likely) a boyfriend of many years. Either way, the girl's genuinely interested in hearing your story. Part of it involves sharing your apellidos with Antonio, who upon hearing your dad's, craps himself with excitement over such a coincidence: turns out a general of that same name once granted the Utrera Kid a private audience at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War just so he could hear him sing. Tré cosmic.

If you wanna define surreal, try this on for size: going to a bar called Latino in the middle of southern Spain to meet up with some friends, only to wind up catching a show that features the Rock N' Roll Dildos. Don't get it twisted -- the band's from Málaga and actually does a kick-ass job covering the following classics:

1) Do You Love Me? (Now That I Can Dance) by the Contours
2) Search & Destroy by Iggy Pop and the Stooges
3) Gay Bar by Electric Six
4) I Love Rock N' Roll by Joan Jett and the Heartbreakers

Two of the above are packaged in some iteration or 'nother of Guitar Hero, and the other two are bona fide crowd pleasers. Post your guesses as to which is which, and the winner gets Dio's oxygen tank.

Seriously, though, the shit rocked. Dildos' female vocalist crooned and cawed every last lyric in imperceptibly broken English, all the while channeling Mick Jagger's iconic strut as if it were buttressed by a pair of red stilettos and decked out in a black tee. (Come to think of it, that's not too far outside his realm of possibilities.) Their lead guitarist reminded you of every dime-a-dozen, hipster musician you'd seen crawl out of a hole in Long Island to land fame in a generic, 3/4 sleeve t-shirt and moptop. So good for him! At least he's Spanish. Kinda bothered you that he turned his back to the crowd every time a song called for him to solo, but in this respect you figure he broke away from typicality. Oh, Utrera: you never cease to surprise me.

And We Have Lift-Off! (Again)

2008-02-09T14:47:00.010-05:00

Día de la Paz 2008. (January 30th)
I present the kids with an activity about Martin Luther King, a brief resumé of his life that starts with an imagination exercise where they picture their own society as systematically discriminatory as his. The Sevilla Football Club / Real Betis Balompié rivalry leads to a divide in the quality of schooling each soccer nation receives, their parents get booted to the back of the bus for not being from Andalucía, and one of their playground water fountains bears a sign that reads "Blondes Only." I make sure they learn to pronounce CIVIL RIGHTS, NOBEL PEACE PRIZE, NON-VIOLENCE, and of course, I HAVE A DREAM. In some classes, I encourage the kids to read an abridged, Spanish version of MLK's famous speech. They show their appreciation for my hard work by calling one of my all-time heroes ugly, mistaking him at first for Pelé, and not paying attention in general. Let freedom ring, indeed.

Carnaval 2008. (February 2nd) With my so-fresh-and-so-clean-clean Lucifer costume pressed and ready to go, I decide to spend the afternoon helping one of my best friends here move out of a house he's only lived in for four months. In between chain-smoking a pack of Chesterfields I picked up for him and emptying his closet, he tells me the sordid tale of how the woman he lived with -- a nice lady, his girlfriend of damn near four years -- put horns on him. He calls her an egotistical, materialistic leech (Spanish word of the day: sanguijuela) for feeding off of him and his resources, those of the guy she was dating when they first met, and the poor schmuck he caught her in bed with after coming home early from a visit to Sevilla one day. They were smoking a post-coital spliff at the time. The other guy plays the piano, earns a fat headmaster's paycheck, and has the kind of friends who've formed a literary circle. To sum up, my buddy teaches me the following saying: "Es el tipo de mujer que no suelta un nabo hasta que agarre otro." She's the kind of woman who doesn't let go of one dick until she grabs another one. I refer to this as I help him pack up his fishing hats, one of which says "Huelva Blackbass Club: Catch And Release." I retitle it "Huelva Dick Club: Catch And Release." We laugh, I eat enormous olives on his tiny terrace, and am happy that we'll be roommates come March.

Enter Cádiz. The two-hour train ride I take to get there isn't half bad, and I manage to pull it off solo and sober. In my car is a cadre of professional cyclists who've emerged from a terrible crash covered in bloody gashes and with twigs in their helmets, a cow with a bullhorn, a sexy bee, a tranny nun, a belly-dancer, a rosy-cheeked cardinal, and some guy who probably meant well but wound up looking like a supergay country singer. We get serenaded by a traveling band of mobsters lead by a guitarist wearing a wig, and see a pair of shackled prisoners brutalized by the Spanish Civil Guard. Stepping off the train means joining a massive throng of revelers who've turned every platform and the entire station into something out of a witch's wet dream. Naturally, some women have taken the opportunity to slore out with suggestive costumes. God bless them. Case in point, I see a trio of Cani girlfriends in slutty cowgirl outfits sporting near-identical tramp stamps. Other highlights (lowlights?) include plenty of adults dressed as babies, an entire army of devils, the Simpsons, half a dozen high school buddies dressed as Hitler, blackface bush babies, the General and contestants from Takeshi's Castle / MXC, and a tour group of drunken American girls desperate to get stuffed by the Spaniards who're shooting fish in a barrel with their come-ons.

I drink the following, listed in chronological order: a rum and Coke for 4 euros, a liter of Andalusian beer for 2 euros, and an entire bottle of wine that my buddy Robert was kind enough to hump from Sevilla. No wonder, then, that I wake up the following morning with zero recollection of how I lost one of my devil horns and half a pint of blood through a cut in my foot. [Update: The fog of my hangover cleared, I remember that the latter is the result of stepping on a shard of glass vicious enough to slice through my shoe and knick the ball of my foot. I remember standing flamingo-style with my left sock off and watching droplet after droplet hit Town Hall Plaza before applying emergency gauze -- i.e., cocktail napkins -- to staunch the flow. The missing horn remains a mystery.] Robert helps me piece together the rest of the evening when he calls and thanks me for putting in work with a sweet-looking girl from North Carolina whose left tit wound up in his mouth on a couch somewhere in the Remedies.

Super Bowl XLII. (February 3rd) What I like to call the Surreal Bowl. Why? We watch Eli Manning lead the wildcard-winning New York Giants to a championship, for starters. We do so in silence for the first half thanks to noise complaints which are entirely predictable at 12 am on a Sunday morning, then move to a bar on Betis Street called Bogart whose owner happens to be Paz Vega -- a native of Triana. (I'm personally a Penelope Cruz guy.)

International Friendly btw Spain and France. (February 6th) The first time they met since the latter bounced the former out of World Cup contention in 2006.

Hip-Hop Night at Buddha. (February 7th) This means play vulture with a shit ton of American girls who've invaded Sevilla. Night winds up in a whore club around the corner from Robert's apartment, one I have to pull him kicking and screaming from because he's curious about the drugged-out first stringers who're comatose in the corner booth. He thanks me the next day.

"It's the Land's Fault" performance by GUATE at a theater festival in Two Sisters. (February 8th) Following a rousing performance, you celebrate with the gang and get drunk at Utrera's most prestigious elementary school. At Bar Latino, a former player tells you a hilarious joke about magical apples. (Turn it around!) This is after you translate, line by line, a saccharin American ballad he happens to know by heart.

Hangover-busting, afternoon run through town. (February 9th) You hear flamenco blasted from an Opel behind a Citröen that, in turn, is blasting a reggaetón song laid over the beat to "I Wanna Fuck You" by Akon feat. Snoop Dogg. It happens in front of the actors' entrance at the municipal theater, on Álvarez Quintero Street.

The Allfits perform at Sonic Banana. (February 9th-10th) You meet up with the cat arranging some promotion for the First Annual Utrera City Short Film Festival. Y'all bounce to Antigua, where you flirt with a gaggle of lovely girls via free pins and stickers. An older, tasty nighthawk sticks her finger in your beer to measure its head. You tone down the vulture act this time around, triumphing over it with less staring and more talking. At Latino 54, you run into Miriam. Then Carmen's friends. Then Carmen herself. None of the above recognizes you thanks to your recently shaven head. You don't quite remember what you said to Carmen while drunkenly flirting with her, but it was mostly in English. The point is that it made things crystal clear: you're hot for her, and have grown only more so with the passage of time.

(First) Haikubicon Submission

2008-01-24T17:26:00.001-05:00

Heath Ledger's dead now.

What's a Dark Knight fan to do?

Brokeback Mountain's gay.

Now They Say Brain Bleed

2008-01-22T15:26:00.000-05:00

Citing recent clinical research on what excessive Benadryl use can do to you, the title of this post is lifted from a frantic e-mail my mother wrote me from work. She knew I had been taking the stuff on a nightly basis to help me get over a brutal case of jetlag, and figured the above statement would conclude the following one quite nicely: "HIJO, WE'VE ALWAYS KNOWN THIS SINCE MED SCHOOL THAT IT INCREASES BLOOD PRESSURE FOR WHOMEVER TAKES IT." Awesome. I need a bleeding brain like I need another fucking hole in my head.

Had a wild dream last night, of the borderline nocturnal emission variety. Lemme walk you through it. You wade through subconscious haze to show up at a beautiful house that's eerily familiar, only to be greeted by an absolutely slamming and salaciously eager version of Laura Prepon. She's wearing nothing but a pair of tight, white work-out shorts and red nail polish with lipstick to match. After rubbing those gravity-defying tits of hers against you, she whips around and bends over to offer up her ass like holy alabaster. Before you know it, your dick's out and she's slid it between her thighs to get some glans-on-clit action mediated by nothing but a layer of lycra. Just as it's getting good, one of those pesky time lapses intervenes like a skipping record and you find yourself helping Chris Simonson out with his laundry. Turns out your old high school soccer buddy is Laura Prepon's brother. Naturally, I woke up with an erection that could split oak.

Carmen's been swimming through my head a lot lately. I had managed to block her out for a solid three days or so while tending to some important bidness, but she crept up on me ever so gingerly this evening. You want evidence? Picture this. I'm flying solo at Antigua on a Thursday night, staring like a perplexed manchild at my blurry reflection in a coffee machine behind the bar. The urge to see her, along with the fact that I can't, moves me so much that I actually mouth the opening words to that one Red Hot Chili Peppers song about heroine-induced longing as it plays on the house speakers. (I should probably be more specific.) "Sometimes I feel like I don't have a partner. Sometimes I feel like I'm all alone." Still can't decide what's more over the top about this moment: how pathetic it is, or how cliché. But don't consider it a cry for help. After all, I only paid one euro for a glass of Kronenbourg draft.

My friend Juan taught me the Spanish equivalent of sea clam vs. bearded clam as we wrapped up our early evening run through town tonight. "Hay dos tipos de almeja: almejas de la mar, and almejas de lamer." Get at me when you get the joke, which actually isn't all that different from its American counterpart.

The latest headline in the special needs middle school paper that is my life, reads something like this: CARLOS DECIDES TO MOVE TO SEVILLA The Impulse Could Prove Fatal. The drastic change would pair nicely with the shaved head I plan to sport in two weeks time for my Carnival costume. Cádiz, baby, Cádiz! UPDATE: I've since decided Lucifer is best interpreted with long, dark locks. The Brown neo-Nazi treatment has therefore been put on hold.

"Además, son preservativos de tamaño extra-grande." I had never re-told that story in English to my buddies, much less in Spanish to three co-workers with whom I have friendships of varying intimacy and depth. But we had just spent a half hour at The Little Corner Tavern for our customary post-school day, pre-meeting coffee break shooting the shit and swapping sex stories -- specifically the kind where you somehow get caught by your gal or guy's family. The dusty, cobblestone street lined with orange trees and lit on fire by the 3 o' clock sun seemed like the perfect place for me to share the following whopper. On second thought, that road bears zero resemblance to this blog so I'll kindly spare you the embarrassment.

“Me da mucho miedo la oscuridad!” said a kid.
“Vete a la luz, hombre!” said a clever octogenarian.
Today during my late night run, the town suffered a systemic blackout. It happened not an hour after I found out I’d be moving to Sevilla. Kinda reminds me of the time epic, November thunderstorms crippled Utrera on the same afternoon I finally decided to get over my ex. But back to the lecture at hand. Parents taking their babies out for a stroll at the time, store employees magically trapped behind automatic glass doors, old ladies staring down from their balconies — we didn’t find ourselves in the midst of nameless chaos, but instead brimming with a stunned, quiet appreciation of the fact that no one had any fucking idea what was going on. Liberating, really. The moment the lights came back on, I felt disappointment.

"No suelo hacer esto, pero... ¿te apetece un café?"
She was absolutely gorgeous, damn near perfect in every way. I wanted to pull a Florentino Ariza and take home the window that both our reflections sat in for a solid ten minutes. We had first exchanged glances while standing outside the on-board restroom. Then, I found a seat at Dos Hermanas. She found the one right across from me at Cantaelgallo. And so I spent the most scenic leg of my journey darting a furtive stare here and there. At her alabaster thighs. At her architecture textbook. At her dainty waist. At her white, cable-knit sweater. At her porcelain face, her doe eyes. Just when I couldn't stand plotting another cliché to describe her features later on, I noticed something: she had stepped up and begun engaging me in the same way. What had begun as something slightly sick and stalker-esque on my part turned into a surprisingly viable exchange. I could've spent eternity this way, flicking my pupils at her in forked tongue Morse code and shortly thereafter receiving a telegram of my own. "I'm out of your league. STOP And you know it. STOP But I love the attention. STOP And you're kind of cute." She turned down my invitation to coffee with a polite 'no,' a charming giggle, and a flip of her chestnut hair. We parted ways, and I walked back to my apartment happy for having dared.

2008 Rhymes With Coos Hounds're Great

2008-01-09T11:22:00.001-05:00

And you know it. Consider this a belated "Happy New Year!" to you and to the cosmos.

Since I tend to embrace blogging clichés, the following is a list of my new year's resolutions:

1. Eat healthier. Or is it more healthily? Whichever one makes me sound less like a whiny, fat chick.

~~2. Jerk off less.~~

2. Write more.

With that last one in mind, I present a list of things I've lost during my most recent stint in Spain. Behind each object is a story worth scribbling, the kind that may reach publication some day. Also behind each object is me cursing like a bitch at having lost it.

I return to Andalusia this coming Sunday to continue working as a bilingual classroom assistant, so let's keep our fingers crossed that they turn up some time thereafter:

An un-lined black journal left in the seat pocket in front of me on my transatlantic flight home. Given I had just started writing in it, the damage was minimal: an entry that turned a series of amateur bullfights I had seen solo in the main plaza of my town (tons of sand + collapsible bleachers = makeshift plaza de toros) into a second-person short story about longing to belong. And wanting to make out with your boss's fly-ass daughter.

A black video iPod abandoned on the seat of a Sevilla commuter train not a year and a half after receiving it for my birthday. How does one do that, you ask? It's easy when you're black-out drunk at 5:50 in the morning and getting kicked off your ride home by an ornery conductor who swears you don't have enough fare. I then Hulked out, kicked over a trash can on the platform, and became the victim of excessive police force. The perpetrator? A goddamn rent-a-cop.

A blue disposable camera, used and forgotten in my boss's brand new car the day of my school's Christmas pageant. It was a celebration, bitches, and I have photo evidence. Hilarious snapshots of pre-pubescent Spaniards getting hopped up on Fanta and going ape-shit since no real class was held for any of them all day. This may or may not include a disturbingly graphic scene (like something out of a discotheque for the under-aged) that broke out in the music classroom thanks to a mob of hyper 5th graders, a serious speaker system, and the same four reggaetón techno songs on loop. Update: I have since found the damn thing -- right where I left it -- and will post the choicest flicks once laws against kiddie porn relax worldwide.

My belief in man's dominance of the animal kingdom, as well as a pair of my favorite headphones, after seeing countless tourists deeply fascinated by the turtle pond in the enormous greenhouse that is Madrid's Atocha Renfe station.

Now on to this entry's conclusion. What better way to wrap up 2008's inaugural post, than by ripping off writers whose words are more thought-provoking than I mine? Here are what I consider the highlights (thus far) of Aaron McGruder's The Boondocks, currently in its second season.

"TOM: Well, I don't care how good your dribble is! There's no way I'm changing the team name.
RILEY: Suit yourself. I just feel sorry for them. They ain't never gonna get that win you promised them. And for what? One man's ego?"

"RILEY: Nigga, you know that wasn't no chain! That was a necklace. This'll be a real chain. Oo-hoo-hoo, man! I can't wait for niggas to start hating. I can't wait.
HUEY: So you judge your success by how much ill will you generate from those around you? RILEY: Hey, if niggas ain't mad at you, you're doing something wrong.
HUEY: By that definition, then, you have a very bright future."

"I had forgotten that a nigga moment cannot be resolved through violence, but wherever there's harmony and peace, a nigga moment cannot exist." -Huey Freeman

As a lagniappe, enjoy this threesome of quotes from the debut season of another Adult Swim toon I tend to watch: Xavier, Renegade Angel.

"Don't know if you know this, but I'm a survivor. We're a dying breed." -Xavier

"Life is just death in drag." -Xavier

"My beef is not with you. I'm woefully beefless." -Xavier

Throwback Post: "Deer Reader,"

2007-11-14T13:52:00.000-05:00

Above is your random snapshot of the day, taken by yours truly. You may say its composition is strong, but I enjoy the photo strictly for its absurdity.

Throwback Post: "Rebirth (Not Just a Brass Band)"

2007-11-14T13:49:00.000-05:00

Here we have an entry I published on my first personal blog, one I no longer have access to for whatever reason. I couldn't figure out a way to slide the damn thing seamlessly into the blog you're reading at this very moment, so sue me.

Wednesday, May 31st, 2006

The night he fucked Delilah Briggs marked a turning point in his young life.

Throwback Post: "Primer Contacto"

2007-11-14T13:43:00.000-05:00

Here we have an entry I published on my first personal blog, one I no longer have access to for whatever reason. I couldn't figure out a way to slide the damn thing seamlessly into the blog you're reading at this very moment, so sue me.

Thursday, January 26th, 2005

Greetings from Madrid.

For my inaugural update as a pseudo-madrileño, I'd like to point out two pecularities I've noticed since settling in here.

Right off the bat, I started dreaming the most vivid dreams that have ever erupted from my subconscious and flooded into my sleeping state. From chocolate-covered butterflies and ungodly ice cream flavors to faceless loved ones and gristly party favors, I've seen heard felt tasted and smelled it all. For better or for worse, I remember every damn one. Someday maybe I'll publish a comic book based on what I've dreamt here.

Secondly, I almost stepped on the carcass of an insect I had never ever seen before. It happened in the corner of my terrace, between the deck chair and a sliding glass door. The bug had purple metallic wings and jetblack fur that rots as velvet does. I only hope our cleaning lady didn't sweep it into her dustpan. Poor guy deserves better than that.

Throwback Post: "Hail the New Year, Bitches!"

2007-11-14T13:41:00.000-05:00

Here we have an entry I published on my first personal blog, one I no longer have access to for whatever reason. I couldn't figure out a way to slide the damn thing seamlessly into the blog you're reading at this very moment, so sue me.

Sunday, January 1st, 2006

Feliz año nuevo, amigos. Check out my new year's resolutions, then post your own:

1) Be honest with myself.

2) Give up chocolate.

3) Stop writing like some schoolboy bitch.

So far, so good. Smooth sailing to all.

Throwback Post: "He of the Hooded Eye"

2007-11-14T13:22:00.000-05:00

Here we have an entry I published on my first personal blog, one I no longer have access to for whatever reason. I couldn't figure out a way to slide the damn thing seamlessly into the blog you're reading at this very moment, so sue me.

Saturday, December 31st, 2005

Since the last time you and I spoke, the New Orleans lifestyle struck both my eyes with some sort of infection and left them red, their lids droopy. Maybe it's all the fecal choliform still hanging 'round. Seriously, though, the condition my condition was in fared better in New York than here: a small price to pay for trying to be invincible in my hometown.

There are few sounds in this world more enticing than the fresh rip that accompanies the opening of a ripe orange. The soft moan of my girlfriend comes to mind.

Speaking of she who will remain nameless, two guys fell in love with her on New Year's Eve. Within hours of each other. Oh, and she also went on the closest thing to a postmodern vision quest since the source material for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
God, I love that gal.

But, as Ali G says, I digest. And rather than go on, I'll stop right here.

End transmission. For now.

Throwback Post: "Oh, the Places You'll Go"

2007-11-14T13:05:00.000-05:00

Throwback Post: "And We Have Lift-Off!"

2007-11-13T15:13:00.000-05:00

Here we have an entry I published on my first personal blog, one I no longer have access to for whatever reason. I couldn't figure out a way to slide the damn thing seamlessly into the blog you're reading at this very moment, so sue me.

Saturday, December 24th, 2005

Alot's changed in New Orleans since Jazz Fest this past spring, the last time I visited. I remember back in early April I was welcomed by some wind and some rain.
This time I flew in on the prettiest day possible, only to witness the ugliest sight ever.
The place of my birth, the home of my people is depopulated and scarred and summarily wrecked. A bomb that no man made or will ever make went off in the most devastated areas.
Shout out to Lakeview and St. Bernard and the 9th Ward and Gentilly and the East.
It's as if the city underwent a facelift that went horribly wrong, leaving it much worse for the wear and deeply depressed.
To stave off that bummed-out feeling in a bombed-out town, we took to the streets last night. My friends dragged me to a trifecta of old high school haunts as if time were collapsing onto itself like space did when Katrina struck.
Shout out to Tuck's and TJ's and Banquette.
Lord, I missed the South. More specifically, I missed home.
I'm glad I bounced out when I did, but as the lady seated next to me on the plane said earlier this week,
"I had been planning on leaving town before the storm. But not now. Not like this."

Seems that nothing short of Archangel Michael himself could have protected us from the storm surge. Then again, a divinely-forged sword doesn't help much when you're battling the forces of nature.
What a blade. Eyeing the altar of St. Luis Cathedral tonight during midnight mass, I marveled at the way a sculptor conceived it and its wielder. The thing must have extended at least 6 feet from Michael's hand to the marble slab he stood upon. It held my gaze as Cardinal Alfred Hughes threaded through his Homily, comparing the dark days that enveloped Roman subjects at the time of Christ's birth to the umbra engulfing "our community" in the year of our lord 2005.
I'll give you one guess as to what long-haired, messianic figure steps in as the proverbial ray of hope made flesh, the one that the congregation was to look to for guidance and healing. It sure as hell wasn't Captain Planet.

The only unexpected bit of the Cardinal's speech came on the heels of talk of recovery. Citing a laundry list of things we ought not reiterate in the story of New Orleans as we rebuild, he litanized the following:

social inequity racial disharmony moral iniquity lewd behavior public drunkenness excess abortions

Funny thing is, 6 out of 7 of the above crystallize the identity of this town better than any shameless gumbo metaphor or jazz number. (Last time I checked, Louis Armstrong never recorded a massive hit with "Oh, When the Abortions Come Marching In.")
The recessional hymn finally ended mass when the choir began belting out a classic from on high in their third-story balcony, one whose lines I may have misheard after taking so many micro-naps in my pew:

Hark, the Herald Po' Boys Sing
Glory to the Reborn King...
Rey Nawlins, that is

Throwback Post: "Boom Lotta, Get That Ricotta"

2007-11-13T14:49:00.000-05:00

Here we have an entry I published on my first personal blog, one I no longer have access to for whatever reason. I couldn't figure out a way to slide the damn thing seamlessly into the blog you're reading at this very moment, so sue me.

Wednesday, December 21st, 2005

A complete stranger laughed at me today 'cuz I swung my foot at a pigeon on the sidewalk. I should have thrown flame on it, getting her to gasp instead of crack a smile.

Quote of the Day, a tasty assessment of the human species brought to you by the American Kennel Club:

"In comparing specimens of different sex, due allowance is to be made in favor of bitches."

Agreed. I only wish Congress could pass a law declaring this rationale to be decidedly American. We'd call it the Patriot (Bitch) Act. Or, No Bitch Left Behind. The rap industry would be its staunchest spokesperson, and Condeleeza Rice its poster gal. Once again, the same stupefying marketing power behind Ethiopian blackface minstrely rears its ugly head.

But enough about the current administration. Hush as Los takes the stage again.

Guava paste adheres his mother's coconut-hewn dentures to the roof of her sagging mouth. It flavors her spit with a fragrant and fibrous urgency, sharpening the island colloquialisms with which she skewers vendors at the weekly foothill bazaar. Sparse dead hairs dot the crown of her skull and fill the craters in her cheeks like a broom of reeds that swishes whenever she clucks orders at the Turks.

Los, whose jet black mane strikes a happy medium between the kinky and burnt steel wool of his charcoal ancestors and the flat platinum shards of his snail lineage, suffers his mother's public obscenities for the sake of going through the motions. Measuring test line, testing a net's tensile strength, weighing the necessary amount of vision herb, sniffing various vats of jelly fish milk, doling out flawed pearls as payment: they all waltz begrudgingly to the metronome of the market.

The day Los first saw indigo-canopied umbrellas with elephant tusks for handles form the bulk of his favorite vendor's wares was the day his gods decided to cast the fisherman into maelstrom.

Throwback Post: "Bitches, Get to Skitchen"

2007-11-13T14:36:00.000-05:00

Here we have an entry I published on my first personal blog, one I no longer have access to for whatever reason. I couldn't figure out a way to slide the damn thing seamlessly into the blog you're reading at this very moment, so sue me.

Tuesday, December 20th, 2005

Ready yourself for the second installment of Dubya Speaks...

"I see the consequences of those decisions when I meet wounded servicemen and women who cannot leave their hospital beds, but summon the strength to look me in the eye and say they would do it all over again."

And, scene.
Again with the eye imagery! I haven't seen a case of ocular obsession like this since back when the Three Stooges roamed the earth. You know, those idiots fond of jabbing each other in the ol' vision socket. In fact, surveys show that Larry, Curly, and Moe would do a better job running the country than their Texan cousin.

"Next to God, there is no greater protector than I." True story. Or what Mr. T's business card said at one point in his sterling career. You decide.

Now push play on the rip-roaringest title this side of the Pecos, "Of Pandas and People."

Once at the bus stop, Little Johnny Commuter never leaves his mother's side. He might wail and wail about forgetting to pack his favorite mechanical pencil, or run laps around the green faded bench that sags under the weight of time about three feet from where he eventually boards. On a prudent day he might even stow the chocolate bar he usually devours while rocking back and forth in his seat amidst other straphangers, in hopes of sneaking a few bites a few hours later between morning recess and lunch time. But he never steps outside the rim of a six-foot radius his mind has drawn around mommy with purple crayon since the first day of kindergarten.

Today's a little different. Johnny decides to stray a bit from protocol.

After launching his favorite Thundercats figurine headlong into the bushes outside mommy's violet veil, Johnny hears a familiar horn blast (the same driver knows he is picking up the same boy at the same time every morning) and looks up to see the city bus lumber into view on an asphalt horizon. He decides to take a risk, then calculates the time and pace needed to make it to the hedges and back without missing the hiss of the doors clean on his face. Johnny takes off at full speed and trips on an untied shoelace before he ever reaches Panthro. He lies sobbing and sprawled out on the pavement, licking the blood drawn by its kiss.

Johnny's mother nonchalantly waves off the bus, content to wait for the next one and ready to castigate her fallen child. She scoops him into the crook of her left arm and stomps his toy into the dirt in one fell swoop, condemning it to wait on the season's first snowfall for a proper burial.

"What'd you do that for?" asks Johnny, all the while blubbering.

"Two words," she mutters back. "Intelligent design."

Throwback Post: "Feel Da Riddim, Feel Da Rime"

2007-11-12T13:48:00.000-05:00

Here we have an entry I published on my first personal blog, one I no longer have access to for whatever reason. I couldn't figure out a way to slide the damn thing seamlessly into the blog you're reading at this very moment, so sue me.

Monday, December 19th, 2005

I got two vaccinations today and reported to work twenty minutes early, wearing the bandages like badges on my left shoulder. Trouble is, one's banana yellow and the other fluorescent pink. I'm not one to question the sexuality of anyone who appreciates either color, but I do lament the fact that gone are the days of flesh-colored band-aids. And by 'flesh-colored,' I mean racist.

Grate. Cheese. Faster. Harder. Than ever before. (Sorry for the tangent.)

And now an excerpt from Dubya Speaks...
"One Iraqi, after dipping his finger in the purple ink as he cast his ballot, stuck his finger in the air and said: 'This is a thorn in the eyes of the terrorists.' "

And, scene.
My eyes stung a little after reading this, probably from crying 'cuz bad rhetoric is like slicing onions.

Seriously, folks, what am I to think of a government that shits all over our common sense and better convictions? Keep in mind that this is a timeless circumstance. From Prez Washington to Coolidge, from Carter to Bush to Clinton to Bush, our federal government's dominance over all things rational has been a top priority. It's not so much a conspiracy as it is a god-given mandate. Seems no one can tell the difference.

Enter subsistence fisherman Los. He slices through fairly troubled waves in search of the meat that feeds his family. His lean, bronzed frame arcs to the sun in a makeshift, communal boat as he tends to his duty; mending nets and stalking prey and gutting insides and casting line is his occupation. He works shirtless and welcomes the melanoma that will eventually blanket his skin. To him, it's a simple matter of embracing his solar god and thereby quenching its boundless thirst for affection.

But nothing tops Los' list like his tendency to make things. Be they vessels or hooks or mistakes or children, Los sharpens his skills and lords over his domain every single day. The wifey, in the meantime, maintains the order of his hearth and raises a red flag any time anything goes wrong. It's a subjugated role, at most, but it's better than trafficking her own flesh in the slums of the city. She bats her eyes at the horizon while preparing for sundown.

Los doesn't know whether or not the sand makes him or he makes the sand. Castles form an anachronistic line of thought in his existence, so he's content crafting the most beautiful and benevolent sand volcanoes the world has ever seen. He takes a cue inherited from his father, the disgraced government official once in charge of all things aesthetic. Plastic surgeon, renegade artist, graphic designer: all of the above fall into the way Los conceives his father's former job description.

And nothing rocks the status quo harder than temptation. After thrusting himself onto temptation's easel every night, Los wears infidelity on his loins -- matte, crimson and indelible --- without knowing it. Seemingly void of consequences, such wreckless indulgence is the only smack his people can enjoy nearly 3 millennia before the drug's invention.

Throwback Post: "So You Wanna Be A Blogger..."

2007-11-12T13:06:00.000-05:00

Here we have an entry I published on my first personal blog, one I no longer have access to for whatever reason. I couldn't figure out a way to slide the damn thing seamlessly into the blog you're reading at this very moment, so sue me.

Sunday, December 18th, 2005

Today I listened to Johnny Cash's 25 Minutes to Go, a classic cut off his legendary Folsom Prison recordings. In other words, I lent an ear to the most bad-ass execution song ever written and rediscovered what a national treasure the man in black really was. Eat a dick, Joaquín Phoenix.

Going six feet under (as Mr. Cash himself would put it) so far this millennium is a bunch of so-called influential people, giants atop whose shoulders I will craft the legacy I leave this world. Pause and pour one out for the following folks snuffed out too soon, be they inspirational luminaries, fodder for the 24-hour news cycle, or no-longer-walking punchlines. You be the judge.

Ol' Dirty Bastard
Ronald Reagan
Pope John Paul II
Johnny Cochran
Rosa Parks
Mitch Hedberg
Barry White
Richard Pryor
Ibrahim Ferrer
Daniel Pearl
Luther Vandross
Mario Lopez's Career
Marlon Brando
Pat Morita
Pat Tillman
Stanley 'Tookie' Williams
Natalee Holloway
New Orleans, circa 1985-2005
Recquiescant In Pace.

On that note, I'd like to welcome anyone reading this to the community I hope to create with this blog. Think of it as our unified effort to be insightful and creative without taking things too seriously. Think of it as your invitation to (you guessed it) a happier collection of nerds.

Dispatches From Andalusia, Chapter 1

2007-10-20T14:02:00.009-05:00

Today I saw a typically good-looking Spanish girl (flawless complexion, pearl earrings, red ballet flats and long, chestnut hair in a high ponytail) riding a moped with her legs hanging off to the side. Guess vroom-vrooming through the plaza like that is the 21st century equivalent of noble maidens riding sidesaddle through the fields of their lords. In both cases, the bystander is left breathless with all sorts of dark thoughts.

So it turns out that the toothless idiots who pump gas in the southern U.S. while wearing tacky-as-sin, bald eagle-emblazoned baseball caps -- the kind who've spent the better part of their lives doing manual labor and meth -- have cousins in the south of Spain. Exchanged glances with a weathered 30-something who looks like he's 50+ as I ran past a BP today. He figured he'd snazz up the blue jumper issued him by the Andalusian Assembly to shovel shit with a baseball cap featuring the traditional bull silhouette on a fluorescent orange background. Its balls hung lower than the man's self-respect.

I imagine hurling a hatchet at the back of his head is one of the more graphic ways to kill a child. Sends a message, for sure -- especially to little boys who insist on butchering flamenco's deep song with awful, off-key wailing in the courtyard during my siesta. Do they think the shade of the enormous palm tree that they run around like retards protects them? Every day, it sheds more and more dates with no one to gather them.

A Taste of Mardi Gras

2007-02-19T22:18:00.000-05:00

Thanks for stopping by and peeping the flicks below.

The first set comes to you from the corner of Annunciation and Napoleon Streets, a stone's throw away from legendary music venue Tipitina's. They were shot while the Krewe of Muses rolled Uptown last Thursday.

Up next is a sample hit from the corner of Saint Charles Ave and Constantinople Street, shot while the city's biggest parade (Endymion) took the streets this Saturday.

And then there's the iconic Mardi Gras Indians, who appear here in archived images of Fat Tuesdays past.

And, finally, what Mardi Gras mini-collage would be complete without a shot from Bourbon Street?

A Sunday Afternoon Run

2007-02-15T19:57:00.000-05:00

“You done a good deed today,” she said, looking me dead in the eye before closing her heavy steel gate in my face.
The old lady wore a deep pink sweater matched with a black pair of Crocs and a shock of hair white as cotton. The wind spilling over the Chartres Street levy from the mighty Mississip had slammed shut her only entrance while she was out for a morning walk, somehow lodging the gate's handle behind an adjacent plank of rotting wooden fence that marked the perimeter of her property. So when I blew by the locked-out old lady on my second run in two days, her most immediate recourse was to holler at my back.
“Hey!” she implored with more grace than distress. “Can you help me out?”
Turned out all I had to do was pry the now-exposed end of her dilapidated fence far enough away from her gate to let its heavy steel door swing free, out onto the sidewalk. Right after our karmic exchange, I re-started the stopwatch I had paused before lending her a hand and went on my way.

This experience, along with other sights and sounds of New Orleans, made my fourth visit home since the storm a special one. For one thing, Thanksgiving was in the air turning leaves from green to orange to brown in time to mark the change awaited in a city fifteen months removed from absorbing the country’s worst natural disaster ever. More importantly, though, on this occasion I found small yet measurable signs of progress pushing through layers of shit and blooming in late autumn sunlight. As if setting an example for the rest of the Big Easy to follow, the residents of the Bywater had rallied in a grassroots effort to piece their neighborhood back together without relying on governmental aid that would never come.

This do-it-yourself attitude permeated what is known as the Upper Ninth Ward, with my neighbors at the helm of recovering what they had lost. I rounded the corner of Chartres and Piety streets, and the smell of fresh paint shanked my nostrils: a middle-aged couple, with the wife on a ladder and the husband helping from below, was adding a sky-blue coat of Sherwin-Williams to window slats beaten up by gale force winds. At times one needs to finish off nature’s demolition of something he held dear before building it back up again, a lesson I learned while passing by an old man in a faded LSU tee who chucked debris from inside his home onto an already impressive heap of bricks, mortar, glass, and wood.
As expected, the Bywater’s younger and more able-bodied denizens did their part to rouse that mythical beast of normalcy from its deep sleep. On a particularly sunny stretch of Royal Street, a pair of tattooed youths rocked out to Soundgarden blaring from their car while they sized up their next project. It sat with a T-square and blueprints on a makeshift work bench that spanned the entire sidewalk. Another young man on Royal closer to where it hits Franklin Ave cleaned the inside of his old Mitsubishi to the tune of Juvenile’s Rich Niggaz and the delight of his neighbors, all proud of the Ca$h Money Boys’ insistence on collaborations that rep New Orleans hard.

But the landscape of the ‘hood continued to betray signs of an old world struggling to adapt to new circumstances. As I reached the remotest part of my run, where I close the circuit on my course at Poland Ave. and start heading back to my place, alley cats eyed me at the threshold of their lairs and didn’t relent until I had disappeared. It’s as if, in the face of such a topsy-turvy environment, they had reverted to the basic instinctual urge to guard the place they considered home. For a trio of black-and-camo-clad migrant workers whom I ran by as they rifled through glass bottles and other junk gathered at the foot of a street corner trash can, home was a distant memory. The last thing I noted before getting back to the pad lay on the side of the road encrusted in prehistoric mud dredged up by Katrina, a discarded portion of fencing that was once the rolling gate section to an automated entrance.
If you're gullible enough to take Wikipedia’s word for it, the outlook for the Bywater doesn't so bleak: “The portion of Bywater on the river side of St. Claude Avenue was one of the few portions of the 9th Ward to escape flooding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and has made a more rapid recovery than many other parts of the city.” More rapid, as in, not stiff with rigor mortis like the rest of the city's.

To eulogize the portion of the Ninth that took cited flooding the rawest, I recall a run I went on the first time I visited home since the storm.
For starters, my starting point was at the time somewhat foreign to me. My brother and dad had signed the lease of ownership to a pleasant condo on Royal and Congress streets midway through August 2005, so the ink on the contract had hardly dried when Katrina made landfall on the 29th of that month. It would serve as my base of operations for any visit after the fact, since my mom had sold the Uptown house where I spent my middle school and high school. Over winter break ’05, just a handful of months after the hurricane roared through, I made my first acquaintance with the place and its neighborhood. The water it’s ‘By’ is the river, a location that kept it dry while, dozens of blocks away, storm surge from Lake Pontchartrain burst through the levees of the Industrial Canal and laid waste to the Lower Ninth. The official division between upper and lower is a broad and two-way avenue called Saint Claude.
As I breached this boundary between my new neighborhood and the one most ravaged by the country’s most devastating natural disaster on record, I steeled myself for the unexpected. What I wound up seeing just a dozen blocks past St. Claude, I still have trouble putting in words.

The whole area looked like the blast zone of a bomb mankind will never be capable of creating, a monstrosity that’s one part hell and three parts high water. Indescribable amounts of debris, formerly the stuff of people’s lives, lay strewn about on the sidewalks. Entire houses and cars had been lifted and plopped down haphazardly on each other like so many toys. A thin, filmy scum coated every exposed bit of anything and formed a water line that slashed its way across the facades of houses for blocks and blocks. I traced that line on my run, and stood breathless as I noticed how much higher it rose the nearer I approached where the levees broke. Roofs had been sheared off and found their resting place across the street in the neighbor’s lawn. Add to all this the smell. Not nearly as pronounced as what my friends and family reported in the weeks following the storm, the scent still made me feel sorry for dogs.
I ran through the surreal setting at a steady pace for about thirty minutes, all the while wearing a shirt with the word SECURITY written on its back. Ironically enough, I didn't need any since the neighborhood was America's newest ghost town. The late afternoon sun smiled down on me. At one point, I came across a bunch of young ones helping their grandmamá gut her house in preparation for demolition. I could’ve sworn one of the kids yelled at me from what used to be his porch.
"We ain't gonna hurt ya," he said. "Whatchou runnin' for?"
I'm still trying to figure out the answer to that question.

Fast forward one full year, to winter break ’06. I’m back in the city of my birth, staying at the same place that had me shake hands with a post-Katrina Lower Ninth, and still bent on running all over it. The holidays were in the air, so the hospitality identified with New Orleans year-round had elevated to a special level of fellow feeling. A pleasant greeting of ‘Afternoon,’ I gave to anyone on my route elicited a variety of good-natured and homespun responses, ranging from ‘Yep,’ to ‘Awright, baby,’ to ‘How ya feelin’?,’ to the standard ‘All right.’

In a town that has become the on-again, off-again charity case of the country, charity of the purest variety took hold this winter. On one of my favorite stretches of a run that cuts through the Faubourg Marigny, I passed by a couple on bikes begging for hand-outs—up to four dozen pies—at the employee entrance to the headquarters of Hubig’s Pies. The sugary and jelly-filled treat is a local icon on par with Philly’s Tasty Kakes or New York’s Krispy Kreme, distributed in trademarked wax paper wrappers to delis, public and private school cafeterias, and office spaces all over the Crescent City. The spectrum of Hubig’s loyal customers runs from Juvenile’s Ghetto Children all the way to Le Roux’s New Orleans Ladies, covering everybody in between.
Even more pressing than the holidays and more iconic than a pie, however, was a regional obsession that had everybody shook up with football fever until this year’s NFC Championship game. On my run that Sunday afternoon I lost count of the houses whose front doors were open with their screen doors shut behind them, sharing with the streets a broadcast of the New Orleans Saints’ final regular season game. We were play-off bound, baby! Others chose to worship a different god altogether that day, belting out Gospel hymns behind closed doors guarded by a multi-colored wood version of La Pieta. I swear Mary winked at me as I strode by.

As I hit the corner of Dauphine and Independence, I found history repeating itself: there he was, the same ancient black man wearing a knock-off Yankees ball cap and liming on the porch where I had seen him many times before. Speaking of continuity against all odds, what about that old lady in distress from the opening paragraph? I’m happy to report she’s since had her ratty fence re-done, foregoing a steel door entrance in favor of a sturdy and entirely sealed-off wooden perimeter.

I speak for all of us thriving in the Bywater and surviving in every other ‘hood in the city, when I say Sunday is meant to be spent at home. Our home. Our New Orleans.