Year: 2015

Jim Crow, Treme, Iago, Dr. John, and I-and-I

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James T Crow, Spiritual Advisor

James T Crow, Spiritual Advisor

Last night the shamanic JT Crow, one of my spiritual advisors, came over for pizza, and we started yapping about the HBO series Treme, which chronicles the travails of (perhaps too many) characters trying to get their lives together in those wretched days just after Katrina wasted New Orleans.

Although Mr. Crow, who goes by Jim (and, by the way, voted for Obama), and I agree that New Orleans itself is the protagonist of the narrative and that the music [cue James Brown] is bam BAM BAM BAM BAM! – OUT-OF-SIGHT!!!! – we mildly disagree about the overall quality of the production.

For one thing,, I think some of the acting sucks — the Hindenburg of my disbelief has crashed a few times.  For example, the Davis McAlary character’s parents don’t seem like the decadent uptown parents of a wastrel son but like actors playing the decadent uptown parents of a wastrel son. I start wondering where they’re really from, if they get along off the set, etc.

Even Declan MacManus doesn’t do a very good job of playing Elvis Costello.

Davis McAlary played by Steve Zahn

Davis McAlary played by Steve Zahn

Anyway, the most interesting difference of opinion between Crow and me concerns the above-mentioned character Davis McAlary, whom Jim likes but whom I’d like to see sporting orange overalls and a leg shackles while gigging trash amid swarms of mosquitoes on the side of a desolate Louisiana road.*

Do I need mention that Jim’s nicer than I am**?

Jim considers Davis a good person at heart, but to me his picture should appear next to asshole in the American Heritage Dictionary of Vulgarity.*** Because of some sort of megalomaniac disorder, Davis feels entitled to ignore the playlist of the radio station where he works because the playlist isn’t authentic enough, never mind that it’s during a Beg-O-Rama (aka Pledge Drive) and the station is teetering on the edge of financial collapse.   Davis feels entitled to steal a bottle of $200 wine from a lover’s restaurant even though it’s teetering on the edge of financial collapse (though he does leave her as compensation some vintage out-of-print music he looted from a record store). He also aims his speakers outwards from his windows towards his neighbors’ house and blasts them with New Orleans’ hip hop. Working as a concierge, he sends young Mormon volunteers to authentic but dangerously located clubs so they can experience the real New Orleans, etc.

The would-be cat ain’t got no clue about existentialism. He’s about as tolerant as Boko Haram.

 *Obviously, Zahn is going a terrific job of acting if I’ve developed such an animus towards his character.
** E.g., I was sitting on Jim’s couch one evening getting machine-gun blasted with hate tweets from a disgruntled former colleague, and when I started punching in a retaliation, Jim stopped me and said, “Don’t do that.  The poor man is suffering.”
Also, Jim has seen two seasons as opposed to my two episodes.  Maybe Davis changes as the narrative progresses (but it seems to me to be dramatically viable it would take a road-to-Damascus Jesus-hurled thunderbolt).
***Aaron James’s definition from Assholes, A Theory: n., a person who “allows himself to enjoy special advantages and does so systematically” because of “an entrenched sense of entitlement,” and who “is immunized by his sense of entitlement against the complaints of other people.”

But then, sitting there with Crow, I had to concede that if Davis lived on Folly Beach, my little slice of purgatory, it would be fun to hang with him on a casual basis, given his passion, knowledge, and exquisite taste in music. That got me to thinking about some less than noble characters I hung with in my troubled youth, which, of course, got me thinking about Shakespeare’s Othello.

[Feared reader response: WTF! Huh? Time to click out of this joint].

Sample Page from Shakespeare Insult Generator

Sample Page from Shakespeare Insult Generator

As it happened, Jim’s Xmas present to me, a Shakespeare Insult Generator, was on the table next to us, and it got me to thinking.

A SIG allows you to randomly select two adjectives from any play in the canon and affix them to a Shakespearean noun to create curses for, as PEE WEE GASKINS might say, “them what we love to hate.” For example, flipping through the kit with my left hand as I type, I see I could call Davis a “churlish, beef-witted braggart” or a “mammering, hollowed geck.”

One of the adjectives in the kit is “swag-bellied,” which I actually recognize from 2.3 of Othello. In the scene, Iago, as sociopathic a character in all of literature, is regaling his comrades with descriptions of the English’s domination in the consumption of alcohol over formidable but lesser rivals:

Cassio: Fore God, an excellent song!

Iago: I learned it in England, where indeed they are most potent in potting. Your Dane, your German, and your swag-bellied Hollander – drink, ho! – are nothing to your English.

Cassio: Is your Englishman so exquisite in his drinking?

Iago: Why he drinks with facility your Dane dead drunk; he sweats not to overthrow your Almain; he gives your Hollander a vomit ere the next pottle can be filled.

Let’s face it, if you were on Iago’s good side, i.e., if he’s not robbing you blind or plotting to bring about your total destruction, he’d be an entertaining drinking buddy, much more clever than pretty boy Cassio.

Ah, but here’s the rub. Shakespeare inserts this true-to-life comic skit in the infernal machinery of a tragedy, the skit underscoring dimensions of character, e.g., Cassio’s naivety and Iago’s verbal cleverness.

Shit, then, why am I watching Treme when I could be watching Henry IV, Episodes 1 and 2?

Because, for one thing, Falstaff can’t rip up a piano and sing like Dr. John.

Oh yeah, Mac Rebennak does an Emmy-deserving job of playing Dr. John in Treme.

 

 

Copping Hamlet’s Rap

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Art by DP Sullivan

Art by DP Sullivan

For the last 30 winters I have taught Hamlet to high school seniors. Obviously, this cat Hamlet has his issues — we all do — but I think the world of him, and unlike a lot of people, I don’t judge him, don’t consider him a coward or a misogynist.

Let’s face it: Professor Naysayer Ph.d. might not be so rational if he lost a beloved father, had his mother remarry of all people his uncle within the time frame of one menstrual cycle. Follow up that trauma with getting dumped by your girlfriend — and to escalate matters to the unbearable — receiving a visitation from your dead daddy who informs you your mama was fucking the above uncle before that uncle offed your daddy by pouring a leprous distillment into the porches of [his] ears.

Oh, yeah, and the ghost daddy guilt-trips poor Hamlet into promising to go all Beowulf on the uncle’s ass by revenging his murder, even though Hamlet, unlike Othello, has moved past all that Medieval shit into a more progressive, less-tribal sensibility.

But I’m not here to sparknote the play but to share with you some ways you can have fun with the text of Hamlet because what I love most about the poor boy is his way with words.

Not surprisingly, I have recorded in the book and volume of my brain many of the Prince’s quotable quotes, so much so that when I’m teaching the play I can recite in context line after line with my eyes fixed, not on the text, but on my students to determine who’s got a soul and who ain’t or who might be thinking about transmitting some surreptitious text neath the seminar table.

But here’s the thing; you can take Hamlet’s words out of context and slip them into your rap and nobody knows you’re echoing or alluding — they just think you’re incredibly articulate or incredibly weird.

Before I give you an example, I’ll go ahead point out something I reckon should be obvious: I express myself differently at school than I do at home, and I speak differently when I’m hanging with real cats like JT Williams, JT Crow, Keefus Sanders, Mr. Jim Klein, Ed Burrows, and Furman Hurry-Curry Langley than I do when I’m talking to my wife Judy Birdsong. In fact, this is the first post in the history of this blog where I’m indulging in my [warning: Un-PC terminology alert] redneck negro lowcountry gumbo patois.

PorterGaud-495x400Okay, here’s an example of co-opting lines from Hamlet to spice up (or obscure) your speech in everyday life. This morning I’m walking at a brisk pace from the faculty parking lot towards the vaguely Disneyesque facade of the school, walking briskly because it’s -5 degrees C. in Charleston, South Carolina, and we ain’t used to Arctic air.

I enter the double doors of the lobby and somebody says “good-morning, how ya’ doin’,” and I say, “Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart.”

They smile, I smile, and head to my room. Truth is, though, not only is it bitter cold but I am truly sick at heart. After school I’m driving straight to Summerville to visit my mother who’s lying in a hospice-supplied hospital bed and on a sort of bummer LSD death trip in which she thinks I’m her daddy, can hardly utter an intelligible word, and tries vainly time and time and time again to rise from bed to be somewhere else.

But back to the exchange of morning greetings. By copping Francisco’s lines to Bernardo from 1.1 in the play, I can comment on the weather in a more interesting way than my typical “damn it’s cold,” I can be completely honest in my answer about how I’m doing without being specific, and I can treat me and my greeter to metrical music:: tis BIT-ter COLD and I am SICK at HEART: bum-BUMP-bum-BUMP-bum-BUMP bum-BUMP bum-BUMP.

Or, you can use it as I did forty years before as a pick-up line in a university bar. Talking about an ice-breaker.

But you can also take quotes completely out of context and apply them to completely different situations. For example, dig this great prose speech when Hamlet’s explaining to his treacherous college acquaintances Rosencrantz and Guildenstern why he’s been out-of-sorts, the most eloquent description of clinical depression out there:

I have of late–but

wherefore I know not–lost all my mirth, forgone all

custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily

with my disposition that this goodly frame, the

earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most

excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave

o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted

with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to

me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.

Okay, let’s go with “a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.”

Examples:

Colleague: You think this Congress might get something passed this term?

You: What? That foul and pestilent congregation of vapors?

Or somebody has farted and you demand to know who is responsible for the foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.

Ever been hunched over a book in an outside venue and some total stranger comes up and asks, “What you reading?”

Look up at him looking crazy and say, “Words, words, words.”

I could go on and on, but it’s been a rough day so I’m bidding adieu, but returning to my poor mother’s condition, no one has ever put it better than my princely pal:

If it be now,

’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be

now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the

readiness is all . . .

She’s headed, of course, to that undiscovered country where no traveller returns, and a helluva lot of people are going to miss her.

Mama

Mama

The Parakeets’ Funeral

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1957-Ford-Station-Wagons2In Summerville, South Carolina, way back in the early 1950’s, when my consciousness slowly awakened and started taking note, you couldn’t drive up to a gas station in your spanking brand new Ford station wagon and fill her up yourself. No, when you pulled up to the pumps, you were met by a worker in overalls who would not only provide you with fuel, but also check your oil, fan belt, and tire pressure. He would clean your windshield, take your cash, and bring you your change.

Where Highway 78 splits into West 5th North Street and Richardson Avenue, my mother’s parents owned such an establishment called the Nation Station and actually lived within its confines. When you entered the front door, you encountered a white-washed wooden counter and a cash register where my grandmother Hazel Hunt Blanton sat perched on a stool. Behind the counter a sheet-like curtain separated a space where tires were stacked, and beyond that was a door leading to three rooms, a hallway with steps, a “living room,” and a kitchen.

Those steps led steeply up to the bedroom — I only remember one – a cavernous barn-like space with a sink that stood out in the open. There my Scots-Irish grandfather Kistler, a bantam rooster of a man, ruddy as a crake, would apply frothy cream with a brush and shave himself with a straight razor that he would snap shut with authority when the ritual was over.

Red-Necked Crake

Red-Necked Crake

The sleeping arrangements were peculiar — a less decorous narrator might use a stronger word.   I don’t remember where my grandfather slept. My grandmother slept with my aunt Virginia, who was only six years older than me.*  A ratlike (redundant?) Chihuahua named Perfidia also shared the mother-and-daughter’s bed. Why they would name a dog the Spanish word for “faithlessness” is beyond me.  “Here, faithlessness!  Come faithlessness!”

I do know why “Fiddy” slept in the bed with them, however. It was for medical purposes: Chihuahuas were supposed to be good for asthma, which periodically plagued my grandmother, sometimes resulting in stays at brown-bricked Dorchester County Hospital. I can see her now, encased in an “oxygen curtain,” wheezing, gasping for breath.

In addition to Perfidia, my aunt kept two parakeets whose whistling provided a sonic counterpoint to Fiddy’s high-pitched yelping. They resided in a cage near one of the windows and spent the long, long, days of my fifth year pecking at bells and suet (and, of course, defecating).

One day, when Virginia got home from school, she discovered to her horror that both of the birds were drenched and behaving oddly. She went into a frenzy — and for good reason. My toddler brother David had given them a “bath” with a Black Flag insecticide sprayer. Of course, Virginia directed her inchoate rage at David rather than my grandmother who had left the poison within a toddler’s reach.

il_fullxfull.298559756We have no idea what David’s motives were. They could have been altruistic (the birdies looked like they needed a bath, though in that case mangy Fiddy seems a more rational target.) At any rate, I’m fairly certain David didn’t make the connection between spraying the insecticide and killing its recipients.

So I stood around and watched the birds have spasms amid the Euripidean howls from Hecuba Virginia.   There was nothing anyone could do. How much does a parakeet weigh? What antidote was there? Eventually, the spasms ceased. The soon-to-be uncolorful birds lay still on the newspaper lining the bottom of their cage.

No doubt the Station sold cigars because Virginia had used a cigar box for the birds’ coffin. Behind the Station (whose “front yard” was a slab of triangular concrete narrowing to the intersection of the two highways) was a small area with one fairly substantial tree. Beneath it Virginia dug a hole and buried the gauze-wrapped birds side-by-side like Abelard and Heloise.   Dirt thumped upon the lid of the cigar box, Virginia said a few words, and a marker was erected.

She told me that in a few months we could dig them up to see their skeletons, but thankfully, we never did.

My Uncle Jerry and Jack Delk in front of "The Nation Station" in the 1950's

My Uncle Jerry and Jack Delk in front of “The Nation Station” in the 1950’s

* Though grammatically incorrect, “me” sounds so much better then “I.”

5 Healthy New Years’ Resolutions That Virtually Everyone Can Keep!

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article-2561201-1B9107F900000578-416_634x4971. Resolve not to visit North Korea.

Not only will you save a couple of grand, but you also can avoid the possibility of being arrested and thrown into a prison that makes Kafka’s Penal Colony seem like Club Med in comparison.

2. Refrain from making that donation to Pat Robertson’s Regent University.

These quotes from its founder suggest that your educational donations might be better spent elsewhere:

“The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”

“You say you’re supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense, I don’t have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist.”

“Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians! It’s no different! It is the same thing! It is happening all over again! It is the Democratic Congress, the liberal-based media and the homosexuals who want to destroy the Christians! Wholesale abuse and discrimination and the worst bigotry directed toward any group in America today! More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history! … And it is happening here and now! Same thing, but directed against Christians by the liberal government and media! Send money today or these liberals will be putting Christians like you and me in concentration camps!”

3. Don’t beat up on yourself for eating poorly, drinking too much, and frittering your life away on Facebook.

Masochism is an even uglier bad habit.

4. Promise yourself to quit mowing your lawn.

Here’s what Naturalist Dave Crawford of Minnesota’s Wild River State Park has to say about lawn maintenance:

Help_selling_house_8_369273Your lawn makes you into a bad citizen of Planet Earth. If you pour water on a driveway and measure how much runs off compared to how much soaks in and replenishes soil moisture, and then do the same test on a mowed lawn, you’ll find that lawns don’t hold water much better than driveways do. That means the free water you get from rain is mostly wasted, because most of it runs off instead of soaking into the ground where plants can use it. It also means that all the rain and sprinkler water that runs off your lawn carries anything that’s on the lawn with it into storm sewers and ditches and eventually into lakes and rivers. That includes fertilizers which cause algae to clog rivers and lakes, insecticides which kill fish and the insects they feed on, and weed-killers that are harmful to animals and kill aquatic plants that many animals depend on. Even if you don’t fertilize your lawn, the runoff contains nutrients from decaying leaves and grass clippings which will cause algae blooms in lakes and rivers.

In other words, quit being a selfish bastard and recycle that lawnmower.

5. And finally, don’t make any resolutions that you’re fairly sure you’ll fail to keep, e.g., resolving to sit in the full lotus position under a bodhi tree until you discover the meaning of existence. I tried that last year and was done in about the time that your typical NFL wide receiver covers 100 yards.

Happy New Year!

Wes Buddha -meditate-under-a-Bodhi-tree