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A three-alarm fire damaged popular nightspot Miss Mae’s at Napoleon Avenue and Magazine Street on Monday night….

Fire officials say they had some resistance from bar patrons who were reluctant to evacuate because they were watching the Saints game.

— NOLA.com

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I have a new favorite novel. Or rather, novella: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

I’d picked up a collection of Muriel Spark’s work because of “The Driver’s Seat”, a short story that was eventually turned into one of my all-time favorite movies (which, for reasons still unclear to me, was also released as Identikit and Psychotic). Turns out the short story isn’t as good as the movie: Spark’s writing style is dynamic, but she compresses time, flattens it out, so that we can see everything that has happened and will happen in one fell swoop. That’s fine for some things, but the film turned Spark’s work into a sort of psychological study/thriller, unraveling the plot in a linear fashion and leaving the surprise ’till the end. Much better, IMHO.

When I finished “The Driver’s Seat”, I thumbed idly through The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I was hooked in about three pages. I mean, c’mon–what’s not to love? It’s about a prim girls school in Edinburgh and one rebellious teacher who encourages her small cadre of students to think differently about the world around them. It’s like Picnic at Hanging Rock meets the Dead Poets Society meets Children of the Damned. (Oddly, Peter Weir directed the first two of those, and Picnic was released in 1975, the same year as The Driver’s Seat. Weird.)

Here’s one of my favorite passages, where Spark’s flattening-of-time thing really works. It’s about Mary Macgregor, a girl constantly chided by her classmates and Miss Brodie for being slow, stupid, and lazy:

Mary Macgregor, although she lived into her twenty-fourth year, never quite realized that Jean Brodie’s confidences were not shared with the rest of the staff and that her love story was given out only to her pupils. She had not thought much about Jean Brodie, certainly never disliked her, when, a year after the outbreak of the Second World War, she joined the Wrens, and was clumsy and incompetent, and was much blamed. On one occasion of real misery–when her first and last boy-friend, a corporal whom she had known for two weeks, deserted her by failing to turn up at an appointed place and failing to come near her again–she thought back to see if she had ever really been happy in her life; it occurred to her then that the first years with Miss Brodie, sitting listening to all those stories and opinions which had nothing to do with the ordinary world, had been the happiest time of her life. She thought this briefly, and never again referred her mind to Miss Brodie, but had got over her misery, and had relapsed into her habitual slow bewilderment, before she died while on leave in Cumberland in a fire in the hotel. Back and forth along the corridors ran Mary Macgregor, through the thickening smoke. She ran one way; then, turning, the other way; and at either end the blast furnace of the fire met her. She heard no screams, for the roar of the fire drowned the screams; she gave no scream, for the smoke was choking her. She ran into somebody on her third turn, stumbled, and died. But at the beginning of the nineteen-thirties, when Mary Macgregor was ten, there she was sitting blankly among Miss Brodie’s pupils. “Who has spilled ink on the floor–was it you, Mary?”

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Given my pristine public image, I’m sure none of you would ever expect to see one of my relatives onstage at a rock festival, guzzling beer, shaking his/her buttocks in the air, and singing about casual sex, but I suppose these things just happen:

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MISCELLANY

  • I can’t say enough good things about Brian and Anthony’s debut at Le Chat. I spoke with Brian many times as he was planning the show, but even after all that, I wasn’t sure what I was going to see. I guess that between Varla and Kiki and every other drag queen who’s put together a show, I assumed Brian would create a character and a backstory for her and that Just Sing would be an exploration of her trials and travails…. But the show is much less theatrical than that–and much, much more radical: it’s Brian, in a dress, half-heartedly assuming the name “Sadie Shepherd”, but never letting you forget that he’s really Brian under all that gear. There’s not much story or backstory–just music. Like the title says, he just sings, in that breathy, magnetic, enthralling voice of his. I guess it’s like seeing Elaine Stritch or Karen Akers or any other cabaret lady, but completely, utterly different. If you’re in town, do yourself a favor and catch one of the last three shows.
  • In case you missed it, Ken Foster has written another article for Salon. This one does a pretty good job of summing up how many New Orleanians–or at least Ken and I–feel about the media and the stories they want us to feed them.
  • Just for the record: despite the wee frisson of schadenfreude I get from seeing Larry Craig‘s name dragged through the headlines (invariably with the sub-head “I’m not gay!”), I think the man’s getting a raw deal. If this had happened to John Edwards or John Kerry or some other queer-friendly politician, activists and the media would be handling this much differently. Hell, if it were Edwards, we might even be wrangling for a look-see at the secret footage…. I mean, I’m all for calling out hypocrisy when necessary, but c’mon: human beings are hypocritical by nature. Seriously, do you act the same way around your parents as you do around your friends or as you do when you’re alone? None of us are consistent in the things we do…. Furthermore, why does Craig get nailed for merely attempting to get it on, while his fellow family-values Republican David Vitter gets a pass on repeatedly hiring prostitutes for adulterous shenanigans? Talk about hypocrisy….
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Obviously, there’s a lot going on here today–a lot of visits, a lot of tours, a lot of speeches, protests, news reports. I thought I’d become immune to most of the grandstanding, the spinning, the misinformation, but then I came across this article in today’s New York Times, and well…. Well, there’s so much going on here, I just couldn’t help myself. So maybe it’s sophomoric, and maybe it’s just my general state of bitterness, but here’s my version of the story, edited for New Orleans’ readers.

President Bush toured New Orleans today, delivering a message of hope to a city devastated by wind and flood two years ago and still divided over the speed and effectiveness of federal help. If by “divided” you mean “in agreement” and by “speed and effectiveness” you mean “lack of”. Not that state officials have been any better–and local officials may have been worse. Much worse.

Mr. Bush led a moment of silence (a welcome relief for his beleaguered speech writers) at a school, asking for “the Almighty’s blessings on those who suffered,”(which, when paired with $1.25, would ordinarily get him on New Orleans’ minimally functioning streetcar, if only his entourage hadn’t shut it down for today) then envisioned “a more blessed day” just ahead, thereby offering definitive proof that our president is really a Jehovah’s Witness. “And there’s no better place to do so than in a place of hope, and that’s a school,” he said. “So long as that school isn’t one that I’ve saddled with the No Child Left Behind Act and its ass-backwards measurements of accountability,” he added. “That’s what Cheney calls ironical. I just think it’s damn funny.”

“Hurricane Katrina broke through the levees,” the president said. “It broke a lot of hearts. It destroyed buildings. But it didn’t affect the spirit of a lot 50% of citizens in this community.” (This portion of today’s speech has been brought to you by Miss Lilian Gerstein of Shrewsbury, Ohio, who was selected at random from a pool of octogenarians and given the honor of writing four sentences for the presidential speech of her choice. Miss Gerstein selected the Katrina anniversary because she once had a nephew in Bastrop.)

But while Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco accompanied Mr. Bush on his visit to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School for Science and Technology, patiently teaching him to pronounce Dr. King’s name without sneering, and was praised by the president for being a problem-solver and “an educational reformer,”–a reference to her institution of the “double time-out” during her tenure as a kindergarten teacher in Lafayette–there were plenty of reminders of the rifts between the Bush administration and state and local officials on whether enough was being done for New Orleans.

Across town, for instance, Mayor C. Ray Nagin ordered a bell-ringing to mark the anniversary of the moment when the levees broke, The Associated Press reported. (C-Ray had initially considered having a moment of silence, but in the end, he decided bells were flashier. Plus they remind him of the ringing in his ears that happened around the same time he snapped for good, just before announcing his plans for a “casino corridor” on Canal Street three weeks after the storm.) Two years ago, both the governor and the mayor bitterly criticized the slowness of the federal response, whose shortcomings were symbolized, especially for the administration’s critics, by Michael Brown, then the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, who sometimes seemed generally bewildered by the catastrophe.

The Times-Picayune of New Orleans ran a front-page editorial accusing the Bush administration of steering more money to Mississippi than to Louisiana, where the damage was greater, and questioned whether Louisiana was being short-changed because Democrats are more powerful there than in Mississippi. (Mr. Bush did carry Louisiana in 2004, as he had done in 2000, but what that has to do with recovery funding, I don’t know. Sure sounds interesting, though, don’t it?)

The Ninth Ward charter school visited by Mr. Bush is itself a symbol of recovery. A fourth-grade teacher, Joseph Recasner, recalled that the school was inundated by up to 18 feet of water two years ago, and that people who had taken refuge there were rescued from the second-story windows. Today, the school seems mint-new, with bright hallways with names like Dream Avenue. (Named, by sheer coincidence, by the aforementioned Miss Gerstein.)

But to get to the school, the president’s motorcade crossed a canal with new white cement walls that had “Hindsight” painted in large red letters. (Again, Ms. Blanco’s vocabulary guidance proved invaluable to the president.) Along the route, considerable damage widespread devastation was still visible, with boarded-up houses and lots strewn with debris.

Ahead of Mr. Bush’s trip to the Gulf Coast, the White House issued a “fact sheet” detailing $114 billion in relief to the region, not counting $13 billion in tax relief. (Also not included: untold millions of dollars the government will spend on lawyers’ fees while defending the Army Corps of Engineers from 5.5 bejillion civil lawsuits.) The president’s Gulf Coast rebuilding chief, Don Powell, told reporters that $96 billion of that aid has already been made available to local governments, The A.P. reported.

Alluding to complaints that not enough money has reached the people who need it quickly enough, Mr. Powell implied that local officials were at least partly to blame, The A.P. said. Other parties making Mr. Powell’s top-ten on the “blame list” included state officials, Catholics, and homosexualists. Mr. Powell’s name did not appear on the list.

On Tuesday night, President Bush and his wife, Laura, dined with community leaders at Doo
ky Chase, a famed restaurant that has been closed since the hurricane struck but is scheduled to reopen soon.

The reopening of Dooky Chase will doubtless be heralded as another sign of the Crescent City’s rebirth. But long before the flood, New Orleans was at least two cities — the jazz-filled, pleasure-celebrating, European-style community cherished by tourists, and the everyday New Orleans, marked by deep pockets of poverty, a rundown public school system and a police force with a checkered history. There was absolutely nothing in the middle. Tourists and poor people: that’s it. Those problems were not washed away by the floods. (Gerstein, ibid)

New York Times

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Two years ago to the day, to the hour, I sat where I’m sitting now: on the sofa, laptop in front of me, TV tuned to the nonstop, non-erotic news cabaret of Max Mayfield warning us that the time for hubris had passed. It was time to get the hell out of Dodge.

Jonno and I–stubborn by nature–weren’t convinced. Or maybe we were, but neither of us wanted to admit it. We’d milled around the house all day, trying to pretend that everything was going to be okay. Finally, at 10pm on August 27, something snapped. We snapped. We caved to the hype and the fear and the incessant stream of text messages from Don and Drew. Two hours and ten minutes later, we were on the road heading west as fast as the contraflow could carry us.

I hate this cliché–really I do–but it all seems like a dream now. I’m really good at throwing myself into projects, and for the past two years, I’ve done so nonstop. My job, theatre, design projects, this old damn house–anything to keep my mind occupied. It’s a trick I learned to refine working in restaurant kitchens: when things get overwhelming, put your head down and do your work, and when you’re done, you’ll look up and see the clock and wonder where the time has gone. Yeah, maybe it’s denial, but who ever said that self-preservation had to be healthy?

But while the last two years have been an ambivalent blur for me, many of my friends and family haven’t led such pleasantly purgatorial lives. My dad, for example: I was talking with him on the phone earlier this evening, and he confided that he’d had a serious bout of depression for months after the storm–which is surprising because (a) he’s even more stoic than I am, and (b) he live 90 miles inland and several hundred feet above sea level. He’s fine now, but it’s still weird to think of him that way.

Anyway, I’ve said all this before, but given the date, I thought it bore repeating. Bottom line: we’re still here, and it feels like things are looking up.

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Sadie and The Ant in...JUST SING

I have three extra tickets to tonight’s opening performance of Just Sing, Brian Peterson and Anthony Sears’ new show at Le Chat. I know it’s short notice, but anyone wanna join me? The tickets are already paid for, but I’d rather not drink alone. Or maybe I would….

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Of Limited Interest

  • After two and a half months and nearly 6000 miles, the boyfriend is finally home.

  • After two and a half months of driving privileges, the boyfriend is already pushing me to get a new car.

  • Worldfamousauthor Ken Foster rules the school! And by “the school” I mean Salon.com, and by “rules” I mean Salon ran one of his great pieces on pit bulls–a breed that, as many of you know, is near and dear to my heart.

  • If you’ve ever wanted to own a little piece of uber-hipster artist Mark Ryden, now’s your chance. (Wow. That sounded dirty. And/or cannibalistic. Sadly, it’s neither.)

  • In case you were wondering, it’s a little warm in New Orleans right now.