Semi Soul Train

There’s a scene in I’m Gonna Git You Sucka when Jack Spade shows up for a showdown with a twelve-piece band trailing him. “My theme music,” he says. “Every hero should have some.”

After a great deal of deliberation, here’s mine:

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Joe Loco – Chua Chua Boogaloo
from Boogaloo Pow Wow: Dancefloor Rendez-Vous in Young Nuryorica | buy it
A sweaty b-side from 1968, via yet another sterling compilation on the Honest Jon’s imprint.

Last night I sat in a car headed to a Honduran restaurant somewhere in New Orleans. Turning onto St. Bernard Avenue in the 7th Ward, we ran smack into a thumping racket: feathers flew, beads sparkled, headlights flashed, and people beat on drums. The driver said “Look, Indians!” and hit the brakes and jumped out of the car. We followed the crowd. Men thundered in towering plumes and capes, stomping and chanting. Incense and dope smoke clouded the streetlights and people hollered wild things as we snaked through neighborhoods that have been historically beaten up and flooded. They are the Mardi Gras Indians and every year they march in jaw-dropping costumes on the evening of St. Joseph’s Day. They’ve been doing it since the 1870s: The tradition was said to have originated from an affinity between Africans and Indians as minorities within the dominant culture, and blacks’ circumventing some of the worst racial segregation laws by representing themselves as Indians. There is also the story that the tradition began as an African American tribute to American Indians who helped runaway slaves. An appearance of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in the 1880s was said to have increased the interest in masking as Indians for Mardi Gras. More » It was one of those unexpected moments when I wished like hell I had a camera. These photographs were the best I could manage with my telephone. Hopefully they convey some idea of the wild energy that night on St. Bernard Avenue. The proper daytime parade goes down on March 28.

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Dixie Cups – Iko Iko
Redbird Records, 1965
Here’s the famous 1965 cover of a song that describes the clash between two Mardi Gras Indian tribes. Learn more about it on the internet.

September 2009

March 2010

Last night I purchased my first radar detector at a mall in Florence, Kentucky. He weighs 4.2 ounces and I’m going to name him Fritz. After three hundred something miles along I-71 and the back roads of Tennessee, Fritz alerted me to five cops hiding in the bushes with stun guns. I love him.

And check out these wonderful specs, all of which would make great techno song titles:

• IntelliMute™ False Signal Rejection System
• POP Mode Radar Gun Detection
• Spectre Alert™ II Undetectable
• VG-2 Alert®
• Strobe Alert®
• SmartPower™
• LaserEye®
• Ku Band Detection
• Dim Mode
• System Ready Prompt
• Ultra Performance

I’m not sure what any of that means, but I think it gives me license to drive like an asshole.

Welcome to your friendly neighborhood market outside of Louisville, Kentucky.

Introduced in 1998, Neighborhood Markets range around 40,000 square feet, which is a quarter of the size of a typical Wal-Mart Supercenter in the United States. However, in many countries, stores of this scale would be classified as superstores or “compact hypermarkets.” Neighborhood Markets employ 80-100 employees and offer about 28,000 items.

Maybe the word ‘neighborhood’ is permanently deformed. Perhaps it’s worth rethinking what ‘neighborhood’ means in an age of predatory hypermarkets, oceans of free parking, and the world wide web.

Bop me on the head. Hit me with chloroform. Put me in a drawer. Wake me when we get there. In the meantime, I prefer to drive.

Every few months I must sing the praises of Adult’s masterwork form 2001, Resuscitation. One of my favorite things to do is to race through the looping motorways of Detroit on a cold night with Adult blaring on the stereo. The corridors of I-696 are good for this. So is the part where the Lodge snakes into the city or I-375 swoops under Cobo Hall.

Unfortunately, I got tagged for speeding somewhere around the three minute mark of ‘Skinlike’, which might be the all-time best night driving song ever: “Sometimes I drive so fast I feel like I can’t even breathe the air. There are times when I can’t leave my house for a day or more.”

Someday I want to live in a world where if I’m stopped for speeding, I can point at the radio and the fuzz would hear that arpeggiated synth and Nicola’s voice and say “I understand” and let me go. Write your congressman.

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Adult. – Skinlike (Equation Mix)
from Resuscitation. Ersatz, 2001 | buy

A factory in Detroit

After sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Lodge Freeway, I’m even less convinced by Julian Temple’s bad poetry about Detroit in the Guardian: “Eerily empty ghost freeways . . . the glazed eyes of the street zombies . . . Law and order has completely broken down.” Detroit faces plenty of real problems that need attention; the last thing it needs is people exaggerating and making things up. Zombies? But if ‘empire in decline’ stories are your bag, then read this: Kansas City plans to shutter nearly half of its schools. Here’s the sentence that should be ringing alarms across the nation: Schools in at least 17 states have opted for four-day weeks. But dig the hate mail some third graders are sending the Museum of Natural History after Pluto was demoted from planet status: “What do you call Pluto if it’s not a planet anymore? If you make it a planet again, the science books will be right.” (Texas might be on board with this logic.) More science: Should we clone a Neanderthal? And look at all the things you can do with a pig. (Ammunition, medicine, photo paper, heart valves, brakes, chewing gum…) Even if our schools tank, we can still improve ourselves, thanks to Better Me, which might be the single most horrible site on the internet.

Many thanks to Ballardian, Jordan Claire, Andrew Sullivan, Candy Chang, Ana Andjelic

This edition of internet hyperlinks will be scored by the Detroit Escalator Company:

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Detroit Escalator Company – Tai Chi and Traffic Lights
from Soundtrack 313 | buy mp3s
Many of the tracks from Neil Ollivierra’s gorgeous slow-motion debut LP can be found on the Excerpts collection from 2000. Get them.

Somewhere in Kentucky

Listen closely to the health care discussion in America:
“If the health care bill passes, it will murder every single American.”
“That’s not true.”
“So? I’m saying it anyway.”
(mumbling)

Repeat this scene, louder each time.

Here’s an example: I visit my 92-year old Polish grandma. Die hard Catholic. Lifelong Democrat, until last year. Now she keeps FOX News cranked in the background. “It keeps me company in my lonely house,” she says, shouting over the TV. While we chat and eat coffee cake, four pundits scream that Obamacare will pay for everybody’s abortions and bankrupt the nation. My grandma points at the TV. “Do you see? I hope Nancy Pelosi and these Democrats fall on their nose.” She claps her hands to illustrate the point. This is tough talk for my grandma.

I bite my tongue. I want to remind her of the family we lost. I want to suggest that if we didn’t live in fear of high premiums and red flags and pre-existing conditions, if our treatment options weren’t yoked to our jobs, if we lived in a culture that encouraged regular check-ups and preventative care, then maybe…

But she knows this. The photographs sit on her mantle. She still wears black, mourning for her husband. And for her daughter and my mom.

We live in hyperbolic times. Politicians exploit religion. They exploit patriotism. They prey on fear for the benefit of insurance companies. People should not be afraid of their health care system, but many of them are. This modest reform bill is watered down and defanged, but we need it badly. Regardless of what happens with health care in America, I hope that one day these Republicans will be held accountable for the bankrupt and the dead.

Greetings from the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes outside of Empire, population 378. In a rare burst of activity, I climbed to the summit of this thing and got tired and needed to sit down.