Pack your bags Beer. At 8:00 AM this Saturday New Orleans will be hosting the second annual San Fermin in Nueva Orleans. It's an event very similar to the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, except the runners will be fleeing horned roller girls wielding whiffle bats. Por que no?And speaking of New Orleans, a city that is beginning to sound more and more like the land of dreams, and nightmares, here's a piece of musical performance poetry by the great Ed Sanders. Ed is another one of my real life heroes. This piece is taken from "Poems For New Orleans" a cycle of poems following the history of that city from the Battle of New Orleans through the wake of Katrina. The concept is a little more ambitious that I feel competent to explain, better to read the official explanation from Mr Sanders. This is one of the sillier moments as Johnny Pissoff tries to do right by the city of New Orleans. Ed has returned again and again to the theme of liberating the children of hateful rednecks. I believe this Johnny Pissoff is the fully liberated son of the queer basher named in the fugs song, "Johnny Pissoff and the Red Angel" The transformation of Johnny Pissoff is a recurring them in the work of Ed Sanders and his band, The Fugs. True Sanders fans will recognize that the name of this blog was inspired by Ed's 1960's literary journal, Fuck You, a Magazine of the Arts.
2 comments:
Hey Jon,
I guess I went home to New Orleans too early. I would have loved to do this, or at least witness it. This is something new that I've never seen down there.
New Orleans breaks my heart, but it's still home. I'd probably move back with a quickness if I could find a job to support myself.
I stayed at my sister's whose home is less than half a block from one of the levees. I reminded her that the Mississipi was flooding in other states and she promptly replied, "And...you were going to make a point, right?"
But that naturally N'Awlins.
Hi HD! I've never been to New Orleans, and I never gave it too much thought prior to Katrina. I heard it was hot there and that was all I needed to know. Post Katrina I started paying a lot more attention to the place. Started reading some blogs, read the Times Picayune when they only had an online edition after they were forced to evacuate. It does seem like a place where they know how to have a good time. It also seems sort of magical and dreamlike. The bodies floating in the water seemed like a nightmare while the krewes and the mardi gras indians seem like something beautiful floating up from our national unconscious. I'm curious how the races mix there. In any city where white people are the minority, the white people who chose to stay are often pretty cool. That seems to be true of the white people I've come across. Is that what it's like, or is it more like apartheid, with a tiny white elite? I can say that having lived in and around San Francisco for almost 25 years, the thought of living in a city that could be destroyed by nature is not all that unnerving. Hell, you live in LA. That's a city that is perpetually facing the fire next time.
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