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June 3rd, 2009
01:18 pm - Communities in the Virtual/Physical World
I presented a paper today at a conference held jointly at the UM-D campus in Michigan and in Second Life. The conference focused on "Using the Virtual World to Improve Our World," highlighting the Campus of Hope projected developed by faculty and students from the Computer and Information Science Department, with a grant from the Ford Motor Community fund.
( Find the paper here. )
Current Location: Campus of Hope, Second Life
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April 6th, 2009
07:42 pm - the holy host of others
(Photo: Ildar Sagdejev)
Hoagy has been much on my mind of late. Not surprising, because High Church Anglican liturgy and Carolina basketball were two of his favorite things, and both are in riotous bloom this weekend. Hoagy was my first and perhaps best friend in Chapel Hill, introducing me to the gay community, taking me to Chapel of the Cross for the first time, and making me watch my first Carolina basketball game. (Apparently, you could be gay *and* like Carolina basketball.) Six months after I met him, we were housemates; soon after that he hired me to work at his bookstore.
He was one of the wisest and most caring people I have ever known. I can still see the twinkle in his eye and hear him laugh; in my mind’s eye he is almost always laughing. (The other times he is arguing passionately about gay rights and thinking of ways to lift up the community.)
He would have loved the incense in yesterday’s Palm Sunday procession and the excitement of the Final Four. Somehow these rituals, shaping who we are and who we become so deeply, are woven together with the memories of the people with whom we shared them, and share them still. (And I know we grow tiresome on the subject, but there’s something about Chapel Hill that seems, at least to me, to be particularly productive of such nurturing moments.)
Yesterday at the Cathedral we sang the Byrd “Ave Verum,” which was sung at Hoagy's funeral on that April morning — can it be 26 years ago? I think that music has a way of connecting us with those ineffable ties that bind us, not only deep in our memories but in realities we see only dimly.
”O dulcis, o pie,
o Jesu, fili Mariae,
miserere mei.”
Hark, the sound; hark, they sing!
Go, Heels!
Current Music: James Taylor, “Carolina in My Mind”
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February 20th, 2009
04:11 pm - The Carnival
No, we’re not in New Orleans this year. And won’t even be celebrating in Dearborn, because I’m out of town on a professional thing.
And that’s OK, I guess. I’ve been aware of the schedule of parades, but not so much consumed about imagining what’s going on down there. I did change my Facebook status this morning to "Randy is thinking about the Avenue." This made one of my friends ask why I was thinking about a store for plus-sized women, and I responded:
Ah. As I tell my students, I should have been more specific, used concrete details.
I am thinking of St. Charles Avenue, graciously curving in harmony with the Mississippi River a mile away, the live oaks overspreading the streetcar tracks, the sounds of distant drums as evening settles in, the pungent smell of the flambeau lighting the way for colors, lights, tinsel, imagination, hands waving, people screaming, girls dancing, boys marching and the whole mad show of papier maché, cheap beads, cold fried chicken and spilled beer. And yes, my dears, it is the old Carnival come again with the spring.
And now I’m thinking it was more on my mind, than I realized.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/neko/kaokitty/thoughtful.gif) thoughtful
Current Music: Cowboy Mouth, “The Avenue”
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February 4th, 2009
08:13 pm - What mothers know
Every now and then, my mom would look out on a low grey sky (of the sort we’ve been seeing so often in Michigan in the last month) and say “That’s a snow sky.”
What’s odd about this is that she was looking at a south Louisiana sky, whence no snow would come. But that was something she knew, something she wanted to pass on to us. And after 15 winters in Michigan, I can say that she was right. Those are the kind of skies that bring snow, be it be a flurry or several inches or a blizzard.
I wonder sometimes where she picked up that knowledge. How does someone born in New Orleans and raised in Baton Rouge and often visiting the family home in Crowley come to know about snow? From the one winter she spent in New Haven? Perhaps. I like to think that her father, born in northern Tennessee with family stretching back up into Kentucky, told her that bit of useless information looking at those same grey south Louisiana skies.
It’s kind of a tease, telling a Louisiana child about snow, but you never know where life will take that child. I can imagine her looking out on a Connecticut sky 55 years ago and thinking, “Oh! That's a snow sky — Pop told me about those!” And so she told me, just in case, neither of us dreaming that I would spend these many winters in Michigan, or that my sister and her family would see so many Wisconsin snow skies.
More often, I remember her saying, as puffy thunderclouds seemed to fill the sky, threatening a cancelled picnic, or a valuable summer afternoon spent inside, "Look — there’s just enough blue to patch a Dutchman’s pants!" Even in those years before we learned about being politically correct, that seemed a bit old-fashioned to me, and I’m certain that was something she heard often from her mother or grandmother or great-aunt.
And oh, the storms that has gotten me through! Not the image of the Dutchman’s pants so much as that indomitable ability to look at the gathering clouds, to acknowledge the threats and darkness and coming wetness — and in the face of that, see the blue. As clearly as there was gloom, there was also a bright blue patch: the promise of hope, light, newness, change, all as incontrovertibly present as the looming thunderclouds. I think of these words: ”He, watching over Israel, slumbers not, nor sleeps” which I always hear in Mendelsohn’s setting in Elijah. We hear it too in these words, also memorably set: “The sun’ll come out tomorrow. Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there'll be sun!”
Someone asked me once how I remember her, how I miss her, how I grieve her. I was tongue-tied and confused and, as I recall stammered out not much of an answer. I should have said what was in my mind then, though it seemed not to be serious an answer to the question: Most often she is present to me singing. At times I can hear her voice as clearly as though she were standing beside me in the church pew, or sitting around the campfire: always joyful, always loving, always singing to that patch of blue.
And I can but raise my voice to join hers.
Current Music: Pie Jesu, Arleen Auger
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January 24th, 2009
01:47 pm - Breathtaking
It’s hard to know what to write now, after a week of such eloquence: from the President, from the Bishop of New Hampshire, from Elizabeth Alexander. (Her poem “Praise Song for the Day” can be found here.
Every day, the news brings amazing news of bold decisive moves by the President (less secrecy, more money for birth control abroad, no torture), simple acts righting a multitude of wrongs. And somehow, I don‘t know how to react; it’s so far beyond “I told you so” and into uncharted territory. My mind goes for comparable events to Disney‘s Sleeping Beauty and the climax where love’s first kiss awakens the country: the sun rises, the thorns fall away, the music swells.
And maybe that’s a little over the top, but it does feel to me like change of comparable magnitude.
Even as my sober rational mind says that the difficult problems are still before us, that there is still much darkness and difficulty and pain, there is an unaccustomed feeling deep within of miraculous contentment. Now, we can see our way plain to move forward.
As Dr. Alexander said on Tuesday:
We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.
We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.
I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.
And so it begins, a new thing, a rebirth, a second chance. By the grace of God may we do better.
The catchy tune I’m listening to now is by Chicago’s Occidental Brothers Dance Band International, with Congolese legend Samba Mapangala. I heard it on the All Songs Considered podcast; it’s available for download from their website.
If this is a dream, don’t wake me up yet.
Current Mood: high as a kite, still
Current Music: Obama Ubarikiwe - Samba Mapangala, Occidental Brothers
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January 18th, 2009
08:16 pm - It’s a prayer; it’s not HBO
A Prayer for the Nation and Our Next President, Barack Obama
By The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire
Opening Inaugural Event
Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC
January 18, 2009
Welcome to Washington! The fun is about to begin, but first, please join me in pausing for a moment, to ask God’s blessing upon our nation and our next president.
O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…
Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.
Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.
Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.
Bless us with humility – open to understanding that our own needs must always be balanced with those of the world.
Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance – replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger.
Bless us with compassion and generosity – remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable in the human community, whether across town or across the world.
And God, we give you thanks for your child Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.
Give him wisdom beyond his years, and inspire him with Lincoln’s reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy’s ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King’s dream of a nation for ALL the people.
Give him a quiet heart, for our Ship of State needs a steady, calm captain in these times.
Give him stirring words, for we will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.
Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.
Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.
Give him the strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters’ childhoods.
And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we’re asking FAR too much of this one. We know the risk he and his wife are taking for all of us, and we implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand – that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity and peace.
AMEN.
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November 5th, 2008
01:10 pm - Tell about the South.
Florida? VIRGINIA? Maybe North Carolina? That would be a shade of Carolina blue we never thought to see. They never tire of telling us that "The South will rise again!" Never in their nightmares have they imagined it would look like this.
So many images and emotions churning on this joyful day. My Composition class this semester focuses on reading and writing with and about images. We talked today about what images historians will use to commemorate this campaign. My choice would be the sight of Jesse Jackson in the crowd at Grant Park last night, slain in the Spirit, tears running down his cheeks.
As much as Obama's graceful evocation of King (and Lincoln) in his speech, Rev. Jackson embodied the moment for me: his the body that cradled the dying King, his the body propelled through a quixotic campaign for President, his the body standing in the night air, not posing and posturing for the cameras, not risking the role of Fool to make the points that needed to be made — lost in himself, in his memories, joy and sorrow flowing over his face.
Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr [ Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<a [...] lifetime"">') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.] Florida? VIRGINIA? Maybe North Carolina? That would be a shade of Carolina blue we never thought to see. They never tire of telling us that "The South will rise again!" Never in their nightmares have they imagined it would look like this. So many images and emotions churning on this joyful day. My Composition class this semester focuses on reading and writing with and about images. We talked today about what images historians will use to commemorate this campaign. My choice would be the sight of Jesse Jackson in the crowd at Grant Park last night, slain in the Spirit, tears running down his cheeks. <img src="http://images.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/11/05/obama/story.jpg" alt="Jesse Jackson at Obama victory rally"> As much as Obama's graceful evocation of King (and Lincoln) in his speech, Rev. Jackson embodied the moment for me: his the body that cradled the dying King, his the body propelled through a quixotic campaign for President, his the body standing in the night air, not posing and posturing for the cameras, not risking the role of Fool to make the points that needed to be made — lost in himself, in his memories, joy and sorrow flowing over his face. Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr <a href="http://www.theroot.com/id/48731" title="H. L. Gates, "In Our Lifetime"">articulates with such clarity </a>the historical moment: <blockquote>Nothing could have prepared any of us for the eruption (and, yes, that is the word) of spontaneous celebration that manifested itself in black homes, gathering places and the streets of our communities when Sen. Barack Obama was declared President-elect Obama. From Harlem to Harvard, from Maine to Hawaii—and even Alaska—from "the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire … [to] Stone Mountain of Georgia," as Dr. King put it, each of us will always remember this moment, as will our children, whom we woke up to watch history being made.</blockquote> It will surprise no one who knows me well that the words I can't get out of my head this morning are James Weldon Johnson’s: <blockquote>Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod Felt in the days when hope unborn had died. Yet with a steady beat ,have not our weary feet Come to the place for which our fathers died? We have come over the way that with tears has been watered; We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered: Out of the gloomy past 'till now we stand at last Where the bright gleam of our bright star is cast. </blockquote> Go ahead, sing the high note.
Current Mood: exuberant, exhausted
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November 4th, 2008
06:57 pm - Election stores
Something to read while we wait for news.
Yes, they both made me cry.
Avoting-place story from San Francisco.
This writer explains why he didn’t vote for Obama.
Here, have a Kleenex.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/neko/kaokitty/scared.gif) anxious
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09:51 am - Yes, we can.
8 a.m.
Precinct 17, Dearborn, Michigan.
Fifty people in line at my precinct, ten times as many as I've seen there in 15 year. An hour later, when I'm done (Voter # 129) , there are 60 people in line.
This is what history feels like.
Yes, we can!
Current Location: Dearborn, Michigan
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February 5th, 2008
10:12 am - Why is this day different from all other days?
I'm sure I've posted this before, but it bears repeating. This is from the late Phil Johnson, of WWL-TV:
Transcribed from broadcast.com video archive from the 12 noon newscast; Lundi Gras (Monday, Feb 15, 1999)
And what is there to talk about
except that which everybody else is talking about?
Of course -- Mardi Gras.
It’s that time again.
That wonderful, crazy, colorful, crowded, happy, mixed-up, but glorious time
When all New Orleans forgets itself for a day, lets its hair down,
puts on a rubber nose, a funny hat and walks around laughing at the
silly people and the crazy costumes.
It’s a day for contrast, a day for change;
a day when legions of quiet, timid, introspective, little men
forsake their neat clerks’ desks,
put masks across their faces,
and suddenly become Don Juan;
a day when a secretary can become queen of England,
a housewife, Annie Oakley.
Mardi Gras is fantasy in a fright wig,
reality with burnt cork on its nose,
a dream with a scepter in its hand,
pompousness about to be punctured.
Mardi Gras is fun, laughter, vulgarity, coarseness, color, light,
and -- at the end – quiet.
Mardi Gras is a state of mind, an attitude, a pose, an opinion.
But at its most basic and perhaps most satisfying of all, Mardi Gras is the one day in the entire year when New Orleans can tell the whole world, “We’re going to have fun.”
And we do.
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February 1st, 2008
03:32 pm - Hermes Friday
Dearborn, Michigan.
They were calling for as much as an foot of snow here today, but we got maybe three or four inches.
And I am in Michigan this weekend, not in Louisiana.
Either of these are sufficient reasons for the pot of red beans on my stove.
(Because they say that the way to overcome blogger's block is just to blog, and not try to summarize the missing 5 months. So here we go.)
Current Music: Marcia Ball, Right Tool For The Job
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September 3rd, 2007
06:30 pm - Back
What, no one else observed three months of blog silence in honor of Mike the Tiger?
Um, well, I didn't either. Summer happened. And trying to kick out some work on the book before the sabbatical ended. And trips and packing up and leaving Montgomery and driving the big U-Haul. Oh and watching Anderson Cooper on August 29 and nobody else.
Also, I've been spending some time in Second Life, one of those Virtual Worlds you hear so much about. it's amazing and engaging and perhaps just a little addictive. I’m thinking about ways to use it in classes this year. Here is my avatar, Rudolfo Woodget, in one of his favorite places in SL, the Big Easy, a recreation of several blocks of the French Quarter.
The Big Easy was built in Second Life soon after Katrina, as the centerpiece of fund-raising efforts. Sectons of it are quite compellng, including an SL Preservation Hall where you ARE the band.
And so I’m back in Dearborn, a hundred yards from where John and I lived for 13 years before. And he's down South, and we'll have to find a way to get through this year and end up in the same place again. Thanks to those friends, both in RL and SL, who thought good thoughts and helped me make the trip up safely. And thanks too, to Cher, who helped get those last 25 boxes of books off the truck. Because really, there’s nothing a gay man of a certain age can’t accomplish when Cher is singing “Believe” and “Strong Enough” on his iPod, nothing. And if I told you that the iPod chose to play "Strong Enough" just when I was unloading the box of Katrina books, well, you wouldn’t believe me.
Current Mood: complex
Current Music: Cher, If I Could Turn Back Time [Live]
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May 19th, 2007
02:04 pm - sad news
Mike the Tiger (the 5th of his line) has died at age 22.
I’m sure that a vigorous debate will ensue over the ethics of keeping a wild animal in captivity for reasons of school spirit — and even surer that sentiment (and big booster dollars) will prevail and Mike VI will be roaring in Death Valley this fall.
Certainly the animal rights folks have some valid arguments to make. But he’s a tiger. In a football stadium. And nobody else has that.
(And on November 15, 2008, they should open his cage and let him chase Nick Saban around the field..)
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May 17th, 2007
11:19 pm - the Motor City, again
Somewhat to my surprise, I realized today that I’ve missed Detroit in more ways than I had imagined. Of course, the city is easier to love when it’s not covered in ice and dirty snow. And the thought that one needs one’s winter wardrobe through May remains a daunting fact of life here. Given that I’ve spent more of my life (13 years) here than anywhere else (second place, New Orleans, 9 years), I guess it’s good that I do have some pleasant associations with the place: the Middle Eastern neighborhoods of Dearborn (Cedarland takeout for dinner tonight), the industrial theme park that is the Ford Motor Company campus all along the Rouge, the enormous decaying (and reviving?) concrete forest of downtown, the setting sun igniting the Great West Window at the Cathedral.
John and I walked past our old apartment this afternoon. Odd to see new furniture through the windows and a satellite dish on the balcony. Odd to think about all the changes since we first moved in there in 1993, in the first months of the Clinton administration.
I guess I've been lucky in enjoying all the places I’ve lived (if not every apartment): there are still moments when I miss Chapel Hill or Los Angeles desperately. I think that the only place that I wouldn’t eagerly move back to is Slidell, although that was a good place for our teen-age years to unfold.
Detroit isn’t easy to love; that’s part of its character, I think. It has been difficult to live up to the grand civic plan of parks and avenues laid out like a pioneering District of Columbia out here in the Northwest Territory; the neo-classical geometry of angles and arcs articulating the vacated dreams at the foundations of the crumbling ruins that mark the cityscape. Pioneers, visionaries, tinkerers with machines, sports nuts — such is our heritage. Although I don’t strongly indentify with any of those groups, I have grown accustomed to their faces.
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May 16th, 2007
06:57 am - Antarctica
I’m driving up to Detroit today for the 2007 Computer and Writing conference. My paper, “When MySpace is OurSpace” looks at some of the issues in developing a course on social networking, particularly the issue of using social networking to explore social networking. Some of the approaches are obvious (everyone keep a class-related blog and link/comment on your classmates’ blogs); others are dicier: what kind of research can/should students do using their own MySpace accounts? should I set them loose on editing Wikipedia?
It looks like it will be a little cooler there than in Montgomery. John suggests I bring something called a “sweater.” I remember hearing about those: perhaps I owned one or two in a past life?
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May 15th, 2007
09:40 pm - Ding, dong
And the little people add their condolences (courtesy of Americablog). Caution: some bad language
Current Music: Disturbed, "Liberate"
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01:36 pm - And you ain’t there, Jerry
ROY: What’s is like? After?
BELIZE: After . . . ?
ROY: This misery ends.
BELIZE: Hell or heaven?
(Roy stares at Belize, as in “What a stupid question.”)
BELIZE: Like San Francisco.
ROY: A city. Good. I was worried . . . it’d be a garden. I hate that shit.
BELIZE: Mmmm.
Big city, overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On every corner a wrecking crew and something new and crooked going up catty-corner to that. Windown missing in every edifice like broken teeth, fierce gusts of gritty wind, and a gray sky full of ravens.
ROY: Isaiah.
BELIZE: Prophet birds, Roy.
Piles of trash, but lapidary like rubies and obsidian, and diamond-colored cowspit streamers in the wind and voting booths.
ROY: And a dragon atop a golden horde.
BELIZE: And everyone in Balenciaga gowns with red corsages and big dance parties full of music and lights and racial impurity and gender confusion.
(Roy laughs, softly delighted.)
BELIZE: And all the deities are creole, mulatto, brown as the mouths of rivers.
(Roy laughs again.)
BELIZE: Race, taste and history finally overcome.
And you ain't there.
ROY (happily shaking his head “no” in agreement): And Heaven?
BELIZE: That was Heaven, Roy.
Tony Kushner, Perestroika III:v
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May 10th, 2007
01:17 am - the state of the city
If you’re a New Orleanian (in any form or fashion), you know this. If you’re not, you’re probably tired of hearing it. Tough: I’ll keep saying it. Things are still broken. Four of the five stories on the front page of the T-P this morning are storm-related. Only one is possible good news: the new head of the Recovery School district is some kind of super-hero. One is a wash: The highly ineffective Road Home Program has decided to stop TV advertisements touting its success. Two are disheartening: the school district seems unlikely to have enough room for all of the 18,000 students they expect to return next year. (So that red cape will come in handy for the new school czar.) And worse yet, the levees are still a disaster, in some cases, unlikely to withstand even a Category 2 storm.
Friends are discouraged at the slow recovery, the depth of the ineptitude, the difficulty of seeing any meaningful change anytime soon, at the continuing difficulty of doing just anything. And these are people who love the city, who revel in a sunny JazzFest afternoon in the same breath as they complain about how it's not as much fun as it used to be; people who are painfully susceptible to the magic of a New Orleans dusk —
— and you can tell it’s tearing them up inside to say out loud, ”I want to leave. . . ”
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May 5th, 2007
11:32 pm - Fest
Finally, I can say that I’ve been to JazzFest. Despite all my worries and all my friends’ complaints about how it isn’t as good/cheap/local/uncrowded as it was 30 years ago, I did have a very good time. But I think today will be all for this year. Two days back-to-back might be pushing things a bit, particularly with the Baton Rouge commute factored in.
On advice of counsel, I began the eating day with the combo plate of crawfish beignets, a crawfish sack, and an oyster patty. (There was no line at 11:05.) As tasty as this is, its real benefit is as a way to meet new people: each plate draws a minimum of 7 queries of “What is that?”
I had the crawfish bread, too, and I do understand why it is part of a traditional JazzFest diet, but — not the high point of the day.
A brief transit of clouds provided the pretext of coolness needed to try the heralded quail, pheasant, and andouille gumbo, which was indeed spectacular, even on a warm afternoon. It's by far the best of the Cajun-side gumbos I’ve ever had, and even makes the others better by demonstrating what they want to be.
The WWOZ mango freeze was a pleasant change after the gumbo, even eaten standing up in the Gospel Tent.
I’m in agreement that the andouille calas were the real treat of the day. Of course I always love finding something traditional like calas on the menu, and the savory variation was pleasing in all kind of ways. Chuck Taggart of The Gumbo Pages also gave them a rave review (and posted a picture) last year.
 Photo: Chuck Taggart
(Oh, and somewhere along the way I had the catfish almandine, also a treat! I can”t compare it to Galatoire’s since that somewhere else I haven’t been. Oh, the shame!)
Since I didn't finish my local’s list (maybe I wasn’t supposed to try it all in one day, Counselor?), I didn't have the chance, alas, to pursue the excellent suggestions from Up North. I’ll have to get an earlier start next year!
And there was music: old-line jazz from the New Orleans Jazz Vipers and Dr. Michael White’s band in Economy Hall. The Dixie Cups keeping it real lo, these many years and making the case that they are not, in fact one-hit wonders. And yet, watching them bust out “Iko Iko” like they did 40 years ago, up from the Calliope projects, brought tears to my eyes, thinking about all that has passed since then. I made several trips to the Gospel Tent: for the Franklin Avenue Baptist Church Mass Choir, 60 or 80 strong despite the diaspora of their members, for the fabulously raucous gospel brass band Elder Edward Babb and the Madison Bumblebees (with 12 trombones!) and the incomparable Irma Thomas saluting, nay, channeling Mahalia Jackson:
Irma’s white dress started up top like an elegant evening gown and somewhere along the way blossomed into a choir robe, in case there was any doubt that she was taking us to church. The tent was packed to the gills and beyond (as one security staffer quipped, “I didn’t know they were giving away government cheese!”) and Thomas set the place alight with fiery praise songs and heartfelt ballads that had us all clapping, dancing, raising our hands, and weeping, sometimes all at once. No one should ever be allowed to sing ”Precious Lord” again; they should retire it in memory of this performance. Transcendent.
Those were the highlights for me; there were also African brass bands, and local brass bands, and Mardi Gras Indians, and zydeco and Southern good-ol-boy rockandroll, and of course so many other acts I didn't get around to.
I will not wait 38 years to go again, I don’t think.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/neko/kaokitty/tired.gif) tired
Current Music: Irma Thomas in my head
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April 30th, 2007
10:23 pm - If food be the love of music, play on!
I’ve about decided to head down to Louisiana to catch at least a day of Jazz Fest. (Since I’ve never been -- oh, the shame!) On the plus side, there’s the music, and I could happily have spent all 6 days there, if music were all. But there are, I have heard, the crowds and the sun and the mud and lines and the parking.
But there is also the food. Merely reading the list of food vendors and their offerings is overwhelming. I’ve copied the full list below. As a public service to the LJ communitiy, I’ll offer to organize my menu around what you wish you were eating at Jazz Fest and report back.
Gentle readers, what shall we eat?
( What to eat @ Jazz Fest )
Current Mood: Hungry
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