Mortality Watch

Two more really cool men in their 80s have done the unthinkable and demonstrated that the human body can only take a lickin' and keep on tickin' so many times before it just gives up the ghost. Read about British comedian Spike Milligan and pop-savant Arthur Lyman and weep at how the world sucks just a little bit more now.

Oh Yeah...

This thing exists, and that, my friends, is fucked.

Knee-Deep In Robot Parts

New phrase coined yesterday during lunch at Sake Cafe (stunningly good sushi place on Magazine Street, located in a former K&B drugstore) with Chris, Tim and Rhianon. Tim mentioned that our friend Robert, who was supposed to join us for food, was probably absent because, "he's probably knee-deep in robot parts." Tim ment this literally, but I took it to metaphorically mean that Robert was, um, "doing the do" with a girl. Hilarity ensued and, voila, an in-joke is born.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, yesterday was fucking excellent as well. After sushi, Chris and I visited Patricia at Winky's where I bought a pair of vintage glasses frames, then we made our way uptown to visit the crew at More Fun Comics. In the true tradition of New Orleans, these three tasks took us five hours to complete. Later in the evening I went to dinner with Mike Hurtt, his girlfriend Courtney and their friend Melanie at Jacque Imo's, an uptown soul food/New Orleans eatery. Jacque Imo's is famous for its long waits, it's lowbrow atmosphere, it's relative priciness and the jaw-dropping quality of its food. Well, lemme tell what: the stuffed porkchop (filled with ground beef and shrimp) with butterbeans and rice and collard and mustard greens on the side was seriously as close as you could get, in my experience, to having a "best-sex-in-my-life" experience with food. And everybody I ate with pretty much agreed. After the meal, we rolled on over to Butler's, a dive on Tchoupitoulas, for their Midnight soul night, then had nightcaps at what is reapidly becoming my favorite bar in town, the Saint. In bed at 5:30, up at 10, and here I am now, waiting for a FedEx. Slayer!

A Man Can't Belong To Enough Secret Societies (Ain't That the Truth)

Heard about an hour ago at Pal's bar up here in Bayou St. John/Mid-City, New Orleans, Louisiana:

Q: What's the last thing a redneck says before he dies?
A: "Hey, y'all, check this out!"

Another day draws to a close, and this being New Orleans and things being lazy as they are, the days never really end until four o'clock the following morning. Ah, good times, good times. Today was spent in the usual fashion. Breakfast, wandering, und zo. Visited old friend and playwright Rob Tsarov at his day job at Tower Records and discussed his family (his beatiful wife Max, daughter Annabella), Spanish absinthe and his dislike of Proust's use of semicolons as walked along the Mississippi. Sat at the Shim-Sham Club and visited with Chris (he was working the bartending day shift) and also got a chance to visit with Morgan Higby, the club's owner, my former employer and very good friend. Watched Office Space with Eliza, a new friend, at her house, came back home and spaced out to Music Has the Right to Children, the first record by Boards of Canada, ate, drank some, made plans to dance to soul music tomorrow night after eating at Jacque Imo's, a restaurant that many consider to serve the finest soul food in town. Life. Is. Fucking. Nice. Knock wood.

Shit. I just realized that I'm just listing things and not providing the slightest bit of insight. Oh well. More tomorrow.

Hubig's Pies and Circle-K Coffee

One of life's great pleasures is waking up at 10:30 in the morning and rolling on over to the Circle-K on Magazine Street in New Orleans and grabbing the breakfast of champions: a Hubig's Pie (flavor your choice) and a small cup of their surprisingly good gutbusting java. I'm currently enjoying that combo as I type, and I'm in fucking heaven. The temperature is starting to drop outside, the sky is beautifully clear, a gentle-almost-pushy breeze is blowing and the city smells like flowers whose name I've never been able to remember with certainty. Going to have pull a Brady Bunch and go outside for a walk now.

So... Yesterday I spent much of the early portion of the afternoon visiting with Wade Hammett, a guy whom I pretty much consider my brother from another mother. We met ten years ago at college in Southern California, and he's directly responsible for a number of things that I think help define me here and now, from taste in music to, well, my love of New Orleans (he's a native, and back in 1993 I agreed to accompany him on an end of school year roadtrip back home; from the first minute I stepped out of his car in the middle of that May almost ten years ago, I knew I had found the PLACE, you know?). Anyhoo, Wade and I hung out at his job at the Louisiana Children's Museum (a talented artist, Wade runs the Art Lab there, teaching kids and getting them to do stuff like draw Cubist portraits of yours truly) and drive around, listening to music the whole time, both his (he's a great musician as well, natch) and stuff we thought each other would like. His wife Emily cracks up when we get together because we get so excited. It's weird, like we're both 8 years old.

After making plans to have a little barbecue and 4-track recording session at his place on Saturday, I took my leave of Wade, wandered, walked to the French Quarter and dropped in on my friend Lippy at The Magic bus, his record store, and then wandered back on home. Once there, I devolved into a PlayStation 2 playing slug until it was time for Chris and I to drive over to the Saint and interview Chris and Benji Lee of Supagroup. The interview was conducted, beers were consumed, old friends were run into, a little bit of dancing was done, and then Chris and I came back to our 'hood and stopped into Pal's, a new neighborhood bar, for many nightcaps. Laura Izzo was bartending, Chris's friend was sitting at the bar, and our old friend Mitch (part owner of the bar) dropped by to close the place up. I walked home happy, with a pleasant feeling of well-being percolating inside.

Everything Is Starting to Run Together

Over the last few days I've been thinking more and more about knuckling down on two projects that I've been thinking about writing: a print version of good ol' Bitchinville here (featuring in-depth articles about the dumb stuff I dig) and a book that's a collection of 100-word essays on anything: people, places, things, art movements, whatever. A sort of poor-man's version of Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. New Orleans is doing this to me, and I like it.

Highlights of the last few days (which probably won't mean anything to anybody but me):

-Watching my friend Settly's band Zoom play a great set of 60s-style mod/grage rock at El Matador.

-Visiting Steve Thomas at More Fun Comics, a former place of employment, on Saturday.

-Having a conversation with a dude named "E" at the back bar of El Matador about pouring spaghetti sauce on women. You had to be there.

-Seeing the legendary Laura Izzo bartending at the Shim Sham Club.

-Witnessing basically everybody at the Shim Sham Club (Matt Vaughn, John Deal, Chris Cummings, Denver) run around and try to stem the mighty flow of a backed-up toilet in the men's room. More entertaining than it sounds.

-Sitting with Tracey Nielsen at the Big Life Toys across from the big Rue on Magazine on a stunningly lovely Sunday afternoon, cracking wise.

-Finding Patricia Vaurigaud at her job at Winky's a little further down Magazine, meeting her workmate Jessica (stunningly lovely and too damn nice to boot; seriously: mrrrowr!), and her new boyfriend Paul and Paul's 6-year old daughter Grace.

-Spending hours upon hours upon hours after the above sitting at The Saint and running into friend after friend after friend and getting kinda tipsy, but charmingly so, and meeting a beautiful and talented and interesting bartender (and friend of my host Chris) named Christie.

-Finding a small button representing Snakefinger, the guitarist of the Residents, on the bar of The Saint. An omen, obviously.

-Waking up without hangovers the last two days due to prudent consumption of water.

Christian Blowjobs at the Club Ritz...

Was a phrase uttered by a girl named Melanie as Mike Hurtt and his girlfriend Courtney were being kind enough to drop both of us off at our respective places of residence. Melanie lives in the Ninth Ward and I'm staying in a part of town called Bayou St. John. We'd all been drinking at The Saint (mentioned below), and on the ride home, we inevitably started talking about Christian metal bands, their groupies and the differences between hummers given by heathen and Christian girls. You know, pretty standard stuff. The Club Ritz Melanie mentioned is a very dark and very nasty French Quarter club where old strippers go to die and men who should know better pay for the privilege of bearing witness. At the time the phrase made perfect comic sense, but I guess you had to be there.

Fuck!

Legendary Warner Brothers animator Chuck Jones died yesterday at the age of 89. Lemme say it again: Fuck!

Enjoying the hell out being in New Orleans, though. Yesterday I woke up damn late, drove around with Chris Cummings and had a pleasant afternoon beer at The Saint, a new bar run by Chris Lee of local cockrockers Supagroup. It was their first day open, actually, and I think we were two of the first customers. The place features a stellar jukebox, a foosball table (4 bits a game) and interior design that suggests the foyer of a Mexican restaurant in rock 'n' roll hell. It's a great spot. Later on in the evenign Chris and I made our way to El Matador and witnessed the noisy fury that is The Immortal Lee County Killers. Drank some, tried to pitch some woo to a girl (didn't work), fell asleep sitting up while watching Chris's new Streets of Fire DVD. Life is bitchin' down here in Bitchinville.

New State... Literally

I'm now in New Orleans, Louisiana, after a 30-hour train trip. Yep, 30 hours. The less spoken about it the better, but needless to say, when I leave here for New York I'm taking a goddamned airplane.

So... I'm going to be here for a week and a half. I haven't even been here for 12 hours and I'm already hungover, but delightfully so. As it's before noon as I write this, I'm going to shuffle out of the house in search of coffee and a po' boy to soothe my aching skull. Fuck, it's nice to be home. Hung out all night with friends Chris Cummings, Susie Black, Matt Vaughn, Robert Starnes and John Deal, saw many more folks who were, amazingly, delighted to see me (as I was them), drank at my old place of employment/roosting, the Shim Sham Club as well as the dark and dank Abbey (which I also worked at for two weeks, now that I think about it). Also found out that legendary New Orleans bar entrepeneur/asshole/vsionary Jim Monaghan died a couple of months ago. That guy was a dick, but he ruled.

"Whiskey Crickets"

I woke up with those words and their definition going through my head. Apparently, in my dreamworld, whiskey crickets are people who get louder as they get more and more drunk. It made perfect sense in the dream, and on reflection I think it's a nice little phrase.

Yesterday I watched Larry Clark's latest movie, Bully, and it destroyed me for the rest of the afternoon, a review which you can consider both positive and negative. Maybe it was because I was hung over, but later, walking the streets of East Village, everybody around me seemed like a creep and a weirdo. People walking towards me on the sidewalk were headed straight towards me, looking for a collision. Everything seemed sinister and somehow wrong. Then I started getting super-sensitive, and everything around me was heartbreaking; the doofus punk rockers handing out tattoo shop flyers on St. Marks, the guy trying to sell a cheap drill set on Avenue A... it all just seemed so beautiful and hopeless, it killed me.

By the way: It's my 29th birthday today. Slayer!

Audio Collage, Hillbilly Spoken Word Art and Dancin' Building Blocks

This is going to have to be brief. Go to this site and download the "Smells Like Missy" and "I Just Can't Get Enough Pills" MP3s. Groovy, huh? Now got to www.ubu.com and find Jim Roche's long-lost rant record Learning to Count in it's entirety, amongst other verrrrry interesting things. Then go to this website to see the Lego animated video for the White Stripes' "Fell in Love With a Girl." Ohmigawd!

Spread the Lies (and Don't Forget the Innuendos)

...is going to be the name of my fake autobiography. It'll only be about 200 pages long, but it's going to be a fun read.

Aryan Women Are Sooooo Fine

This afternoon while browsing through See Hear, a zine shop in the East Village, I ended up flipping through a copy of a white racist skinhead magazine. I was attracted by the clerk’s claim that the magazine included a centerfold of a bunch of "Proud Aryan Women." The publication itself was filled with depressing/hilarious rants about Zionism and black welfare babies, the type of shit that really makes you realize that some people are truly wasting their lives. The centerfold itself was a collage of snapshots of, honestly, really cute white girls, and I had to shake my head in sadness. I felt bad that they’d probably never know the sweet caress of a colored man. Putting the magazine back on the shelf, I purchased the latest issue of Cometbus and a cheap Staple Singers gospel CD and took off.

Now that I’m back home, I’m going to watch Sam Peckinpah’s The Ballad of Cable Hogue and try to reassure myself that most people aren’t complete shits.