THINGS I HATE RIGHT NOW

NOSTALGIA: This is nothing new. I say this all the time. But I used to say it because I had this, like, moral aversion to nostalgia. Now I understand that the problem is much more serious. See, last week during a tech rehearsal, some folks started reminiscing about Schoolhouse Rock, and of course they broke into a chorus of “Interplanet Janet,” “Conjunction Junction,” and that adjective song that Blossom Dearie did. And I started feeling nauseous. Honest-to-goddess: nauseous. (Interesting side note: the “algia” of “nostalgia” technically comes from the Greek word “algos,” meaning “pain.”) So apparently I’m allergic to nostalgia. Too bad, because there great money to be made hosting dance nights with earnestly retro themes.

LIVE OAK TREES: In parks, they’re fine. On plantations, they’re fine. When they’re hanging over my backyard, shedding leaves and dropping stinging caterpillars and providing a home for loud, noisy crows, however…well, that’s a different story.

STUPID PEOPLE: It’s like they’ve been hibernating all winter and have suddenly awoken, but they’re not looking for food, they’re looking for ways to annoy me.

TWO THINGS

1. You know how you’re watching TV and there’s a story on the news about a child molester and they show a pic and it’s some typically dirty old man and you think, “Wow, that’s a dirty old man”? Well apparently, my generation has now entered the child molester age. Funny, it seems like just yesterday when we were the ones being molested…

2. We opened last night. It wasn’t always pretty, and it wasn’t always like we meant it to be, but we made it. Come join us, won’t you?

Man Taken For Mental Evaluation After Chasing Gulls Naked!

I swear, we didn’t plan that as a publicity stunt or anything. I was just out feeding the birds and…well, you can read the rest.

The language of persecution is a galvanizing force for groups of all sorts: political, religious, ethnic, sexual, and otherwise. Still, given martyrdom’s recent associations with Islamic extremism and the religious right’s marked fear/loathing of Muslims, it’s a bit unsettling to stumble across The Voice of the Martyrs–a Christian site that, with very few changes, could easily be designed to recruit suicide bombers for Jesus.

I’m so behind on email that I’m just getting around to one sent about a week ago by my friend Elizabeth, the de facto curator at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum. In said email, she mentions a New York Times article by David Brooks, one of the most admirable, thoughtful, level-headed, socially progressive Republicans I know (and no, believe it or not, those aren’t all oxymorons).

It’s a beautiful piece Mr. Brooks has written, summing up some of the feelings I have about life in general and New Orleans culture in particular. I’m posting it here in its entirety because it’ll be moved to the NYT archive soon and only available for paying customers. (It’s also available at something called the Daily Breeze, but, like, who are those people?) Anyway read it, ignore it, whatever. Frank Rich still ranks first in my book, but David’s jumped a peg….

SATURDAY NIGHT LITE

By David Brooks

Let me tell you a story to illustrate that we are living in a pusillanimous age. I was in New Orleans last Saturday night, dining with a wonderful group of people at a culinary landmark called Antoine’s. Our host had arranged for a remorseless avalanche of delicious food, served in prodigious 19th-century style. There were about six appetizers, including oysters, foie gras and various lobster confabulations. There were main courses aplenty – fish, then crab, then steak.

Then dessert floated onto the table: a meringue pie roughly the size of a football helmet. And with it came coffee, but not just any coffee. It was called “devil’s brew.” A copper bowl was put in the middle of the table with some roiling mixture of brandy-ish spirits inside. Coffee was poured in and the concoction set aflame.

The waiter thrust a ladle into the inferno and lifted up long, dripping streams of blue fire, hoisting the burning liquid into hypnotizing, showy cascades. He poured out a circle of flame onto the tablecloth in front of us. It was a lavish pyre of molten, inebriating java and then, when he swung around to where I was sitting, I turned and asked the climactic question:

“Is it decaf?”

I was sitting there in an orgy of excess. My head was fogged with wine, bourbon, conversation and a couple of hours at the craps tables at Harrah’s, but strong is the power of the zeitgeist. So I did what all of us middle-aged Prufrocks do when coffee follows dinner. I asked, “Is it decaf?”

In this circumstance, this was like Nero pausing during the incineration of Rome to worry about the dangers of secondhand smoke. This was like Henry VIII, lying amid a great mound of gnawed bones and empty steins, remarking, “I’ll take the low-carb mead.” This is like the Marquis de Sade fretting nervously over his leather collection because it might be an affront to animal rights.

If 18,000 calories and four kinds of booze didn’t kill me, there was no way a smidgen of caffeine was going to keep me awake.

And yet we live in the age of the lily-livered, in which fretting over things like excessive caffeination is built into the cultural code.

I blame the people at the top for setting the tone. We live in an age in which the White House is staffed by tidy-desked, white-shirted, crisply coiffed StairMaster addicts, whose idea of sensual decadence is an extra pinch of NutraSweet in the lunchtime iced tea. We’ve got a president whose personal philosophy is: freedom is God’s gift to humanity, but bedtime is 9:30.

This isn’t the empire of an American Caesar; it’s the empire of faux Caesar salad.

I blame parents. Kids are raised amid foam corner protectors and schooled amid flame-retardant construction paper. They’re drugged with a vast array of pharmaceuticals to keep them from becoming interesting. They go from adult-structured tutorials to highly padded sports practices to career-counselor-approved summer internships.

I blame the titans of corporatism. Fitness is now the prime marker of capitalist machismo, so the higher reaches of corporate America are filled with tightly calved Blackberries in human form, who believe that extremism in pursuit of moderation is no vice. They have become such obsessive time-maximizers that all evening, in what used to be known as social life, they keep an eye on the need to be up, fit and early, for the next day’s productivity marathon.

I blame the arbiters of virtue. Sometime over the past generation we became less likely to object to something because it is immoral and more likely to object to something because it is unhealthy or unsafe. So smoking is now a worse evil than six of the Ten Commandments, and the word “sinful” is most commonly associated with chocolate.

Now we lead lives in which everything is a pallid parody of itself: fat-free yogurt, salt-free pretzels, milk-free milk. Gone, at least among the responsible professional class, is the exuberance of the feast. Gone is the grand and pointless gesture.

But at least we have New Orleans. After stumbling out of Antoine’s, some of us headed across the street to a piano bar run by Gennifer Flowers, Bill Clinton’s old flame. And there was Gennifer herself in a black leather miniskirt, belting out a song called “Ya Gotta Have Boobs.”

It was a reminder that no matter how dull and responsible you become, an alternative and much stranger moral universe is always just one slippery step away.

An open letter to the Irish

Dear Irishmenandwomen of New Orleans:

Please stop celebrating now.

Don’t get me wrong, I love you guys. You’re always good for a joke or a drink or a joke about drinking. And baby, no one has looked that good in green since Tawny Kitaen.

But yo, seriously, cut it out.

Your parades, they’re all over the place. Everywhere I go, every backstreet I take to avoid you, I turn the corner, and you’re there. It’s a little like Aliens, but with green beer.

And your music at these parades–where’s the “Danny Boy”? Where’s the Clannad? Where’s the U2, for freakincrissake? All I hear is Lionel Richie, and honey, he may be black, but he ain’t black Irish.

I’m asking you nicely, now. St. Paddy’s Day is over and done. Please give me back my life and my streets and my regular, horse piss-colored beer. Don’t make me come out there with my tam-o-shanter and my cudgel–I’ll go totally druidic on your asses. I mean it.

Sincerely,

A Partially Irish American Who’s Totally Over It

Hey, if you think I’m quiet now, just wait ’till next week.

Despite all the stomach-churning and nail-biting though, when we finally get on stage and start freaking out the squares, it’ll be, like, totally worth it.

And for the spam du jour, we have:

Call out Gouranga be happy!!!

Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga ….

That which brings the highest happiness!!

I don’t know what it means, but it certainly is optimistic. It’d be nice if the spammer included a phone number, though, just so I could call and complain should happiness not arrive in 4 – 6 weeks as promised.

And now, a word from Mr. Steve…

Hello, boys and girls! Mr. Steve here again, filling in for that scatterbrained faggotini who just can’t turn down a good project. Honestly, people: either that boy learns to say “no” every once in a while, or he ought to start packing his bags for Whitfield.

But issues of mental stability aside, as he was dashing out the door, Richard said I had free reign to discuss whatever I liked today, so naturally, Mr. Steve has chosen to discourse on his favorite topic, etiquette–specifically, etiquette and the telephone. Lesson number one: the lost art of how and when to answer the phone.

Conversing by phone is simply another way of communicating with friends, family, and complete strangers. You may not be able to shake their hand, and they may not be able to witness your grimace when they begin recounting the oft-recounted tale of their sciatic woes, but nevertheless, phone conversations are a form of social interaction and come with their own list of dos and don’ts.

It is especially important that you, the recipient of the call, greet your caller appropriately. Even if you have caller identification devices attached to your phone and can see that the caller is actually your brother Herbert, who can only be calling to borrow money to support his exotic dancer girlfriend, answering with a curt “What do you want?” is never appropriate. Nor, I think, is the generic and timid, “Hello?” I suggest devising your own unique greeting. Personally, I recommend answering as “the help.” Nothing elicits quite so much respect from callers as a throaty, haughty “Mr. Steve’s residence, who may I say is calling?” Adopting foreign affectations is also acceptable, as in the French “Allo?” and Mr. Steve’s favorite, the Japanese “Moshi moshi?”

Choosing when to answer the telephone is also particularly important–not necessarily for your caller, but for those in your physical presence. If your Aunt Sophie has driven all the way down from Schenectady to inform you that you figure prominently in her estate plans, opting to answer a ringing phone as she regales you with the madcap antics of the recent Casino Night Celebration sponsored by the Lady Banks’ Rose Cultivators Society of Terre Haute might diminish your share of the eventual loot or have you cut from the will altogether. On the other hand, should you find yourself in your bedchamber, entertaining a mortician with whom you were sent on a blind date and with whom you agreed to canoodle because he looked like fun but have lately begun to realize that he’s no more fun than your average mortician, taking a phone call might be the most discreet way of suggesting that he put back on his gabardine and scurry back to the morgue.

A final note on answering: if you are the sort of person to use a cellular telephone device–and from the looks of you, you are–do not under any circumstances answer calls during the burning-of-Atlanta scenes in Gone with the Wind, especially if you happen to be at a very special, one-night-only cinematic screening with surround sound at the Odeon Cineplex on 3rd Street. Such crimes are simply beyond the pale.

He’s back! He’s back! After a long, long hiatus, the Vegetable Man is back!

Just when I thought things were getting a little too gentrifaggotized around here, a sign that there’s still a neighborhood under all the new paint and crepe myrtle bougieness.

Maybe I’m romanticizing him a bit too much. Maybe I’m overlooking the fact that he’s a poor, possibly unbalanced black man living in the South, just managing to scrape by. But screw that–his voice makes me happy.