01/14/2016

Sometimes it's difficult to know exactly how much someone means to you and how much impact they've had on your life until they're no longer there. Unlike, say, the Beatles, I can recall a pre-David Bowie world. Therefore, I can say without reservation that the world was a much more interesting place with David Bowie in it. Now, sadly, we are in a post-David Bowie world and I am all too acutely aware of how much he meant to me. It would be cool to be able to relate some sort of direct, personal account of Bowie but, alas, I have none. We were once in the same room together, albeit quite a large room, and some people that I know knew him, rather well as it turns out, but for better or worse I never met the man.
01/12/2016

Ah, dear and Gentle Reader(s), I am returned from an extended hiatus from the posting of ruminations and lists of play upon these pages. The reasons for this extended silencio are various and sundry, but included amongst them are a) travel, b) more travel, c) distraction, d) physical malady, and e) (most dreadfully) f) deficit of inspiration. The travel is not a problem but whenever I think I'm going to get some writing done on the road I typically find that I am sorely mistooked. That's where the distraction comes into it—too much other stuffe to do and think about. The holidays snuck into the mix somewhere around the 25th of December as they are wont to do, and upon that very selfsame evening, right smack in the middle of Birthday o' Jebus observations, a rather dreadful throbbing began to manifest itself in the region of an upper right pre-molar, the lower portion of which had decided to bust a move for the Great Outdoors back in September (quite possibly inspired by a fairly dull Keith Richards documentary I had been watching on Netflix). The throb evolved into a mindbendingly dreadful pain that had Your Humble Narrator stumbling and mumbling about in a humble little mumble circle in his living room, groaning in agony—a state of affairs that continued intermittently throughout Jebus Birthday weekend. Timing, as is oft noted, is everything, and in this case the timing could scarcely have been worse. I survived till Monday when good Doctor Doug Reid was able to extract the offending article with dispatch, ending my holiday weekendus horribilis. It is said that if it don't kill you it makes you stronger and I am feeling quite strong at the moment.
11/18/2015

Gentle Reader(s), since the last installment of this weekly-ish report from the trenches of Santa Fe musical subterranea I have once again ventured to and from the land of my birth, the city that puts the 'Id' into 'Humid,' New Orleans. The day before my impending departure I woke to the sad news that a true titan of the city's music scene—the great Allen Toussaint—had passed away suddenly following a gig in Madrid. There are few passings that could shake New Orleans to the core quite like the passing of this extraordinary man. He was an integral part of the city's rich cultural life for 60 years, starting off as a fill-in sideman in Earl King's band in 1955. Toussaint was a pianist, vocalist, composer, producer, arranger, and musical ambassador for his native city, but above and beyond all that, to all reports (and I have heard a few) he was a lovely, humble, soft spoken person and a true gentleman. Toussaint didn't shy away from stepping out in a bit of boldly colorful couture once in a while and his trademark about town was his succession of Rolls Royces, but he was a down-home guy and absolutely not a single person that I have ever spoken to has ever had a bad word to say about him.
10/09/2015

Texas, baby. It's there, it's big, it's not going anywhere, and, if you're driving to New Orleans from New Mexico, there ain't no way around it. Of course, you actually could go around it but that would require either a sea worthy sailing vessel or a profound preference for the scenic pleasures of Oklahoma (I've long thought that the highway sign marking the Oklahoma state line should read 'Welcome to Oklahoma—It's Not Texas!!'). Being possessed of neither a sailing vessel of any degree of worthiness nor the patience for an Oklahoma detour, I decided to address the situation full on for my first ever driving trip from Santa Fe to my hometown. The Inky Prius was washed, recharged with fresh oil, pumped full of high octane Chevron petrol, and on a bright Saturday morning of mid-September in the Year of Our Lord 2015, off I went into the great semi-unknown.
10/05/2015

Not surprisingly, the arc of media fascination with New Orleans and all things Katrina-related has surged, peaked and quickly faded. The storm made landfall on the Gulf Coast on the 29th of August, 2005, conveniently providing the entire month for build-up to the tenth anniversary of the cataclysm. Media outlets around the country and around the world weighed in with reportage, retrospectives, editorials, polls, photo essays and then/now updates to assess the near-death experience of one of the world's great cities and a decade's worth of efforts to rebuild, renew and protect the City That Forgot to Care. The conclusions to be drawn present a decidedly mixed bag.
09/05/2015

Strangely enough, tis a quandary, Gentle Reader(s). The situation is quandrous. Your Humble Narrator is quandrified. I am in a state of quandrification. Why, wherefore, and of which? you might well ask. Well you might. As previously established (see the March 5 posting on this page), YHN is a fan of the Great American Game of Baseball. The team to which my allegiance has been allegied for lo these many years is the Cubs of Chicago. One of the great institutions of this nation, the Cubs are the oldest active American sporting club, established in 1874 and having remained firmly rooted in their namesake town for the entire duration. They are also a storied hard-luck crew. They last appeared in the World Series in 1945 and have not been World Series champions since 1908. That's 107 years of woulda/coulda/shoulda tough breaks, bizarre incidents, self-induced collapses, purported curses and just plain rotten luck.
08/30/2015

Gentle Readers,   I am back in my customary spot on Magazine Street in the Rue de la Course coffeehouse, amongst the tattooed, the pierced, the dreadlocked, and the tragically hip. I feel right at home. THESE are my people. I shall never sleep again. I shall never move from this spot. [Much to YHN's dismay, the Rue de la Course closed down for renovations a few years later and never reopened on Magazine Street. Their new location is Uptown at Carrollton and Oak but I haven't been in yet.]   So, after my report yesterday I hooked up with the folks back on St. Charles and went out to a classical music recital at Tulane. It was the first post-Difficulties event presented by the Friends of Music, postponed from the original starting date of the series in October of last year. The Enemies of Music are having a thing tonight but I'm going out to dinner with the Commodore instead—those EoM events tend to be a bit confrontational. The Acquaintances of Music opened their season last week but I understand it was rather a lukewarm affair.
08/29/2015

Coming to you from a coffee house on Magazine where all the young hipster/slacker/yuppie-types (plus the occasional old fart like myself) hang out and surf the internet on the free wifi. One thing I'll say for the City That Forgot to Care, it still has its share of fabulous babes. I see more attractive women in this place in any given hour than I do in Santa Fe in an entire week. But then I don't get out much. Makes me pine for the olde dump—this dump, that is—a bit.   Yesterday was the day that your intrepid reporter girded his loins, loaded his Polaroid SX-70, grabbed his brand new Casio digital, and set forth upon the Grand Tour. The expedition was led by the Commodore his own self with the invaluable aid and moral support of Brother Danny Dog. I had dinner with Brother D and Nona and the kids on Saturday night—the Commodore was supposed to be in attendance but was suffering from a severe case of alcohol poisoning from the exertions of the two previous evenings and was unable to muster much more than a groan down the beleaguered phone lines from Jefferson Parish. Down for the count.
08/28/2015

Gentle Reader(s), as many (?) of you are certainly aware, this Saturday, August the 29th, marks the 10th anniversary of a very dark episode in the history of this country and of Your Humble Narrator's benighted hometown in particular. The events that led up to and followed the landfall of Hurricane Katrina have been examined and agonized over in excruciating detail ever since. What really did and did not happen; what could have, should have and did not happen to prepare the city for the calamity; who was to blame for the critical lapses that resulted in the loss of the lives of over 1,800 citizens; the nature of the victims and the varied nature of their victimhood—all of it remains in heated debate to this day. The same is also true of the recovery from this unprecedented disaster. How real is the recovery and who has benefitted from the billions of dollars of aid money that have poured into the city since 2005?   Debate aside, one real thing that I can offer to you is a firsthand account of the city and its environs reported during mid-January, 2006, when the situation in New Orleans appeared to have stabilized sufficiently to make visitation reasonably viable. Mayor Ray Nagin had given his (in)famous Chocolate City speech on MLK Day, just a few days prior to YHN's arrival. The Chocolate City Report was written over the course of a week in the form of three extended emails sent out to fellow native New Orleanians, Brother LowRent and Brother JB, living in far-flung locales. The Chocolate City Report is here offered in its three original installments with additional commentary and updates where deemed appropriate and/or necessary.
08/19/2015

La Ciudad Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Assis is not a town that suffers from any lack of fascinating, unusual and talented people. Over the course of the past 180 years or so (give or take a decade) New Mexico at large has earned an enduring reputation as a mecca for creative types and eccentrics of all sorts. The list of painters, sculptors, printmakers, photographers, musicians, artists of the folk, dancers, writers and nut jobs that have called the place home over the years presents an impressive roster indeed. Starting with the likes of John Mix Stanley (circa 1840s) to the Meow Wolf collective (circa present and future), the artists have come to this place, drawn by whatever unique combination of physical, metaphysical and ineffable intangibles are manifest in this place, variations upon which have drawn people to places such as this place for as long as people have been drawn to such places as this. Or words to that effect...