HumidCity

So it’s August and the big anniversary is coming up. Me and the family usually head to Gulf Shores, Alabama to lie on the beach, count our blessings, and forget. We really don’t need a flashy annual reminder of what turned our lives upside down.

I understand the desire to commemorate what happened, and to pay tribute to the lives that were lost. But that’s really not us, y’know? This is the land of jazz funerals; where the usual drill is to look death in the eye, thumb our collective nose at it, and strike up the band. All this commemoration stuff is a just a flat-out bummer, and it’s out of character.

This year, let’s do what we do. Turn the beat around. Take a sad song and make it better. Transform our blues into a turbo-charged, sugar-frosted luv-mo-sheen. Let’s take the anniversary of the worst thing that’s ever happened to this city and make it a day that promotes change for the better and celebrates the power of redemption over catastrophe. Let’s be a city of wise-aching smart alecks. Yes, this is what we do.

I have a proposal for my fellow New Orleanians.

This year, on August 29, instead of mulling over our misfortunes, let’s take a cue from the president. Let’s follow his lead – with an act of solidarity and tolerance that will push the boundaries of human comprehension.

This August 29, let’s shuffle off the collective gloom by having a citywide party that celebrates the birthday of John McCain.

Huh?

Pop quiz: Where was President Bush when the big storm hit, on August 29, 2005?

Answer:

(actual photograph taken on August 29, 2005)

He was in Arizona having a piece of birthday cake with his buddy, John McCain.

The president didn’t get caught with his pants down, the storm did not take him by surprise. Everyone saw it coming, knew exactly when it would make landfall. The president’s master plan for zero hour was, apparently: Gotta get me summa that cake!

I’m not sure if I blame the president. Think about it. John McCain, in effect, lured a mentally-disabled manchild to Arizona with the promise of a tasty hunk of birthday cake. How can we expect a feeble-minded person to resist such yummy temptation?

I’m not sure if I blame Senator McCain either. When you reach his age, you really have to celebrate each birthday as if it might be your last – bodies floating down the streets of a major American city be damned!

So this August 29, let’s follow the example of these two great Americans – one who is president, and the other who will be the next president if we’re not careful.

Let them eat cake. And let’s have some, too!

Start making plans. I want to see McCain birthday parties popping up all over the city this August 29. It will be a chance to turn a frown upside-down, and to provide the sort of high-minded, outrageous political mockery that New Orleanians have always been famous for.

Start blogging about your McCain Birthday Bash plans, set up websites, and spread the word!

Come as you were: life preservers and air-mattress-as-flotation-devices are optional but recommended! Don’t forget those pointy little paper birthday hats – and be sure to bring lots and lots of candles!

If our citywide McCain Birthday Bash makes the national news (as it should!), it will be an opportunity for us to remind the rest of the country (in a very important election year!) what Candidate McCain really thinks of American citizens who are staring down the darkest moment of their recorded history: Not much!

He didn’t let us ruin his party, so let’s not let him ruin ours!

If we play our cards right, we can: pass a good time, make a point about the common-decency-deficit in the Republican party, help get Senator Obama elected, let the world know we’ve still got a sense of humor, and wish an old man a happy birthday.

Everybody wins!

That’s right, New Orleanians, this August 29th we can save the human race with a good old-fashioned hunk of birthday cake. It’s not been done before, but there’s a first time for everything…

- Louis Maistros

http://louismaistros.com

These things may not be right, but they are true

*

The Sound of Building Coffins Louis Maistros is due for release by The Toby Press in March, 2009

(Originally posted someplace else on May 1st, 2008)

This is the kind of scene you occasionally find yourself stumbling into when you live in the greatest beat-up beat-down city on earth:

(photos on this page copyright 2008 Louis Maistros)

Me and the wife are minding our own business, performing our evening ritual of snagging some joe and peace along with Chalmette the misfit pooch down at the Sound Café a few blocks down, and what do we happen upon through pure serendipitous dumb luck? Maybe the best brass band on earth slamming down right there on the coffee shop floor. As if this weren’t heaven enough, jazz legend Dr. Michael White is there, too, sitting in on clarinet. Moments like this cannot be bought with mere cash-money – and that’s alright, because in New Orleans the best moments always come free of charge.

The Hot 8 Brass Band matters. Everything that is good about New Orleans is embodied in this little band of regular neighborhood guys. They’ve been to hell and back, have even lived through the senseless murder of their friend, teacher, leader and drummer Dick Shavers, and yet they keep on with this music, this amazing, uplifting, truth-giving music. This is cool jazz, funked to the core and set ablaze, but it’s something much more than that. It’s the rawness of the street shot out through the business end of a tuba. It’s Tabasco spiked with tears and gasoline. It’s love. It’s war. It’s life and God and the devil and everything else in the world that matters and some things that don’t and a few that fall in between and ask me if I give a damn about whatever it is because the reasons, the causes, the rationales, if there are any, can’t possibly matter in this singular moment that puts this whole fucking mess in one simple context, on one single page, down and clear and all right there. These guys are not always in tune. They’re not always sober. They’re not always tight. But they are always, always just right. In the moment. In the pocket. In the heart. My heart. Yours if you’re lucky.

So the night is cool and rare, the sun’s creeping down the sky, and it’s one of those gray, gray pissy southern skies with a dirty tint of orange twilight like a slow-rotting peach that I’ve only ever seen in New Orleans, and I’m having an epiphany moment.

I’ve had days where I’ve pondered the wisdom of staying here, days where it seems best to pack up the kids and take them somewhere/anywhere up north and just be done with it already. I’ve had days like that, and I guess I’ll have a few more.

But today is not one of those days.

Thinking about leaving is something I sometimes do. Staying is what I do every day without thinking.

Today my heart is clamped to my sleeve and bulletproof. I’m seeing and hearing this neighborhood band, these normal guys, blowing out through those horns, wailing away, kicking through songs of the 1920s like “Girl of My Dreams,” ripping them to pieces for this modern-fucked-sideways world, I’m hearing the hopped-up rage of their own songs, like “Ray Nagin,” a song that can make you cry and scream and dance all at the same time, and I’m hearing the pure funky hotgoddamn of “Let Me Do My Thing.” I’m going all the way back then fast-forward to here, ten minutes past now, with outrageous brassed-out covers of everything from “High Healed Sneakers” to Marvin Gaye’s disco sin, “Sexual Healing,” and I’m hearing my wife say over and over, “I never liked this song before, but I love it now.” I’m knowing that they’ve been through so damn much, these guys, these normal fucking guys, much worse than the troubles suffered by me and mine, but they just won’t stop, they can’t or won’t, they just keep going, taking all those hits – from behind and above and below – and they still come back up again, over and over, these guys, these normal everyday fucking guys, still raging, still preaching, still high, still defiant, still towering in spirit like it’s just another day on the job. And now I’m thinking: How dare I bitch about a single bad day? My problems are reduced to shadow tonight and these guys have lighted the way. I’ve done nothing for them, but they give me this. They give me this without even knowing who the fuck I am or that they are giving anything to anyone at all. They’re just playing. They’re just doing what they do.

And that’s New Orleans tonight.

Go visit the Hot 8 at their MySpace page where you can listen for free in streaming audio. If you get what I’m talking about, buy their CD or download a few tracks off iTunes.

Here’s the thing:

Some types of truth cannot be told in the usual way.

Louis Maistros

http://louismaistros.com

These things may not be right, but they are true.

The Sound of Building Coffins by Louis Maistros is due for publication from The Toby Press in Spring 2009.