It’s true what they say.
Alabama hot slaw goes with just about every damn thing.
Esoteric middlebrow.
“Wild Dance,” Ruslana Lyzhichko; “Illartia (PDX edit),” SpineFolder; “An instrumental work, called ‘pleasant,’ 4th mode,” Hristodoulos Halaris; “Smack Your Lips (Clap Your Teeth),” the Residents; “Summer Vacation,” 林原めぐみ; “Within a Room Somewhere,” Sixpence None the Richer; “ALWAYS,” 田村直美; “Enchanted,” Delirium; “Hebeena Hebeena,” Farid el Atrache; “On droit fin[e] Amor; La biauté,” Anonymous 4.
After the late, great unpleasantness.
I am a Southerner, for all that I’m expatriate—born in Alabama, raised in Virginia and the Carolinas and Kentucky, I graduated high school in John Hughes land and attended a famously liberal arts college on the North Coast of Ohio. Since then, I’ve lived my life in New York and Boston and the Pioneer Valley and Portland, Oregon, and I haven’t spent more than two weeks at a stretch south of the Mason Dixon. (And those stretches are sometimes awfully few and far between.) —But I cook up hoppin’ john for New Year’s, every year (though, apostasic, I make it without the fatback). I taught my Jersey girl how to eat grits and I make my biscuits from scratch. (Food? Don’t laugh. Look to the roots of your own tongue.) —I’m haunted by the smell of magnolia blossoms, plucked and left in a drinking glass on the mantelpiece. (They smell lemony, the same way apples do.) Long pine needles crushed underfoot, dry, not wet and silvery grey; evergreens burnt brown by the sun. I always forget until I see it from the window of the plane, how red the dirt is, scraped up, laid shockingly bare in circles of development scars that will always ring Charlotte: how wrong it looks, how raw. It’s not the color the earth is supposed to be. It’s alien; I’m home.
For a couple of weeks, at most. And then.
(“You will find no other place, no other shores,” says C.P. Cavafy. “This city will possess you, and you’ll wander the same streets. In these same neighborhoods you’ll grow old; in these same houses you’ll turn grey.”)
—If you aren’t Southern, I don’t know that I can explain the little thrill I felt when I saw the motto for the Levine Museum of the New South: “Telling the story—1865 to tomorrow.” Shock is hardly the word. Frisson even seems too strong. It’s a stifled giggle; a flash of a grin, at something you’d’ve done yourself, but never would have thought to do. It hardly seems worth mentioning, but—well, maybe the About Us page will bring it into focus for the Yankees among us?
What is the New South?
The New South means people, places and a period of time — from 1865 to today. Levine Museum of the New South is an interactive history museum that provides the nation with the most comprehensive interpretation of post-Civil War southern society featuring men, women and children, black and white, rich and poor, long-time residents and newcomers who have shaped the South since the Civil War.
New South Quick Facts
- A Time—The New South is the period of time from 1865, following the Civil War, to the present.
- A Place—The New South includes areas of the Southeast U.S. that began to grow and flourish after 1865.
- An Idea—The New South represents new ways of thinking about economic, political and cultural life in the South.
- Reinvention—The New South encompasses the spirit of re-invention. The end of slavery forced the South to reinvent its economy and society.
- People—The New South continuously reinvents itself as newcomers, natives, immigrants, visitors and residents change the composition and direction of the region.
To say that you are about the South, but dismiss the antebellum—not to forget, because who can forget, not even to repudiate it, but to wave it off as no longer important to the South you want to look at, here and now— Don’t throw out the cotton and the rice, the pastel dresses and grey uniforms, the stars and bars and whips and chains. Those things are all still very much alive and kicking. But cut out the thing that props them up, the hollow rites, the archly wounded pride; blithely (if a little self-consciously) announce you’re leaving the Civil War well enough alone, to all the many other hands that want it; you will turn your attention to everything else, and watch it all fall into some saner perspective—1865 to tomorrow—
(“How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?” says C.P. Cavafy. “Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look, I see the black ruins of my life, here, where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”)
The Levine Museum of the New South is currently hosting an exhibit called “Families of Abraham.” Eight photographers spent over a year with 11 families in the Charlotte area—Christian families, Jewish families, Muslim families—recording their holidays and everydays, putting the photos together to demonstrate that when you set aside the different words we’ve each plucked from the same shambolic Book and just look at the people, going about their lives, well, under the chadors and yarmulkes and double-knit blazers we’re all, y’know, the same. Basically.
Which is why, given the way things currently are, what with the Pragers and the Goodes and the Qutbs, this show is important. —But it’s not why it’s important to me.
That’s a photo (by my mother, which is why the show is important to me, yes, but), a photo of Basheer Khatoon with her great-grandson, Raahil, taken in the home she shares with her son, a Charlotte cardiologist.
My South—the South in my head, the South I came from—doesn’t have a Basheer Khatoon. But there she indisputably is. Alien—and yet, from all the years I’ve spent since and elsewhere, heimlich. The world has come to the South; the South—my South—is becoming part of the world.
No matter where we go, there we are; we find no other place, no other shore. We wander the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods. —But those streets change.
Why you all so kip?
I mean, really: how many people can ego-surf on Urban Dictionary?
Hoppin’ John.
Honestly, the dish being as Southern as it is, I find it much easier to believe it’s an elision of pois pigeons rather than a Northumbrian “hopping” held in honor of St. John the Evangelist. Charming though the latter undoubtedly would be.
I did finish something in 2006, and we did not look about last night and say, anything’s got to be better than that. (Which only means we now have somewhere from which to fall.) —This year? This year, I’m going to start to crack. This year, I will sell something.
Hop in, John.
Five things.
Jesus, John. Some of us have writing to procrastinate. Which, well. Um.
So okay. —Though I have to agree with fellow taggee Yglesias that this particular meme lacks a certain gimmicky je ne sais quois. One is tempted to cheat with overly specific items such as I have 14,774 songs in my iTunes library, or maddeningly vague items such as almost all the money I’ve made from writing is due to pornography, but I am at heart a decent creature, raised up right to color inside the lines.
- My mother comes from South Carolina aristocracy; my father from folks that seceded from the Confederacy. I was born in Alabama, and most of my formative years were spent in Virginia, Kentucky, and both Carolinas. Yet I can’t speak with a Southern accent to save my life.
- Though I score as an introvert on most Meyers-Briggs evaluations, I tend to be loud and effusive at parties. —Also, I acted a bit back in high school and college. Roles I have played include Dr. Jim Bayliss; Jeff Douglas; Sidney Lipton; Bridegroom; Harlan McKenna; Dr. Bazelon.
- I was once in possession of what might well have been the world’s longest appendix. Or so a surgeon assured me in 1986, after a longer-than-expected appendectomy. For all I know, the intervening years have swept that record under the rug. If you see me at a party, ask for the extended dance mix; this particular anecdote doesn’t survive translation to the written word.
- Though I can’t draw a lick, I’ve completed three 24-hour comics: “Getting to 24,” “The Star,” and “The Story I was Going to Tell on Halloween Night but Couldn’t.” Not that many people have done more than one, but I don’t know that any of us are necessarily proud of this achievement.
- Did you attend Oberlin College in 1987, along with Liz Phair and Michelle Malkin? Did you eat in Dascombe? Do you remember what was invariably the loudest table in the joint, loaded with SF-computer-gaming geeks cracking wise and bluing the air with awful puns? I was the salad bar guy, constantly neglecting his tubs of croutons and dressings to hover about that table for a taste of the action. Those jokes shaped the entire rest of my life.
Now for the tagging: Kevin Moore! Anne Moloney! Jeff Parker! Sara Ryan! Barry Deutsch! Pentamemes are go!
No one, not even the rain.
“The Bride Stripped Bare by ‘Bachelors’,” the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band; “The Nerd,” DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid; “Viva! Sea-Tac (live),” Robyn Hitchock; “Better Luck Next Time,” Scissor Sisters; “Coyotes,” Richard Thompson, Don Edwards; “Quito (live),” the Mountain Goats; “Purple Avenue,” the Holly Cole Trio; “Welcome to the Middle Ages,” the Playwrights; “Finnish Farmers,” Laurie Anderson; “One Long Pair of Eyes,” Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians.
Don’t let those Sunday afternoons.
The things that happen when you’re altogether elsewhere: back in June, “somewhere in northwestern Europe,” Jane Siberry changed her name to Issa. (Metafilter reacted, including the Jar-Jar joke you’d expect, and a wry lick at Siberry’s second album, which, thinking about it, you probably also would have expected.) As I’m typing this, she’s workshopping new material in Vancouver; there’ll be a tour of the Antipodes early next year. (I did hear about how she was selling everything but her guitar, thanks; apparently, I fell into a very narrow window the last time I checked up on her.)
I’m not so much mentioning this to comment on name-changes in general, or this one in specific; I know from design that surface is important, and I know from magic that names matter, but in the end a rose is still a song is still a rose, right? You either know her already and love her, or you’ve never heard of her, or she just isn’t right for you, not now, not at the current juncture, and what do you care what I think about what name I have to look for on the lists of upcoming concerts? —But if at this current juncture you think she just isn’t right to you because of maybe the whimsy, or the quirk, can I just point out that seeing her live is as close as I ever want to get to church, these days? “I didn’t know we could do that,” says Dana Whitaker, in the sort of deeply embedded pop-culture reference I specialize in, when I bother to specialize in anything; when I forget we can do that, something usually reminds me. —She reminds me, as often as not. Whatever her name might be.
Mostly I’m mentioning it because it’s what I learned on my way to pointing out that Child, the third disc of her New York concerts from back about the turn of the century, is pretty much a must for the playlists of the sort of people who make playlists of holiday music but not until after Thanksgiving. It’s available from her online store, for whatever price you’d want to pay, and for a while there, you’ll be as close to church as you’d want to be. And if I have to explain what I mean by that, well. Go listen to “Hockey,” instead. Smile as she calls the band home, one by one. “Rosie…”
Get away get away get away get away
Get away get away get away get away
Break away, break away
Um.
So, it’s been a crazy month, September. Stupid busy. Did I miss anything?
Catechism.
“I’m not making a joke. You know me; I take everything so seriously. If we wait for the time till our souls get it right, then at least I know there’ll be no nuclear annihilation in my lifetime.” —Me, I’m still not right neither. Further bulletins soon enough. (I’d thought my anger at the traffic hot enough, but then I saw the Yes on 43: Protect Teen Girls bumper sticker. Such filthy eloquence! Her ears would have been flensed from her skull, had our windows been rolled down, were we not been traveling at such wind-whipping speeds. —I’m sleepy, and punch-drunk; hurry home, Jenn. The cats won’t leave me alone, and the words aren’t doing what I want them to.)
We wish to register a complaint.
Since when did y’all let new car keys get so dam’ bulky?
“Self-correcting blogosphere,” my ass.
Three days I’ve had “onamatopoetic” down there. Three days. And not one of you said a goddamn thing. (And anyway, the actual “onomatopoeic” is even better rhythmically than my oh-so-cleverly factured “onomatopoetic,” to spell it properly.) —Is this thing on?
An industrial seashell.
They’re hollowing out the upper floors of the Meier & Frank across the street from our office, “they” being NUPRECON, which probably stood for something at one point before it got all “Nu” on us. (I notice they also did for the Danmoore Hotel, on which more later.) —They’ve bolted a giant sheet-metal chute to the front of the building, braced by a webwork of scaffolding, with openings at every floor through which they lustily toss two-by-fours and chunks of drywall and metal brackets and pieces of concrete flooring and ripped-out electrical ducting and pipes and I don’t know what-all else to tumble booming down the chute and crash into the concrete bunkers at street level where backhoes scoop it up into battered containers and there’s the guy whose job it is to hose the whole thing down to keep the gypsum dust and other particulates from choking passers-by. Before today, it was an occasional event, whenever somebody on the sixth or the eighth floor got a load large enough to dump; we’d hear the intial boom and crash of a drop on its way down and apologize to whomever on the phone, hold up our meeting, look away from the computer screen, suspend all conversation for the half-minute or so it took the reverberations to die away. But today? Today they’re really into it. Load after load after load going down. Our only defense is to pretend we’re at the beach, and it’s the crashing surf we’re hearing—the crashing, clanging, thumping, banging surf.
A thoroughly self-indulgent post
pointing out that episode one of City of Roses finished today; episode two begins Monday, and runs Monday-Wednesday-Friday for the next two weeks. So there’s that. —Also, if you haven’t been checking out the news over there, you probably missed some lovely photos from the Portland Zine Symposium, which mostly taken by Matt Nolan and Erika Moen. So there’s that, too.
Personal appearance.
Today and tomorrow and Sunday I’ll be in the Smith Ballroom at Portland State University, sitting behind a table with the irrepressible Erika Moen. We’re there for the 6th Annual Portland Zine Symposium; I’ll be hawking City of Roses chapbooks, and she’ll have a variety of minicomics available, some of which are naughty. —Also, if Dylan Meconis found a decent copy shop in time, she’ll be there with some poetry.
We’re operating under the name Bikini Girl and Tiny Top Hat Man. I should probably state for the record that I do not have a tiny top hat (just a leopard-skin fez), and while Erika may well have a bikini, she won’t be wearing it. No one’s entirely sure who’s responsible for the name, or why we thought it was a good idea at the time. So let’s just move on, shall we? —There’s going to be lots of DIY publications to browse and workshops galore and I for one am eager to learn more about the Multnomah County Library’s new zine collection.
So do stop by, if you’re in the area and so inclined. Admission’s free. Tables are open Friday from 3 – 7 and Saturday and Sunday from 10 – 5; workshops run Saturday and Sunday; parking’s not bad; there’s a farmer’s market for lunches. Liquids are allowed.
Resolute.
Oh, hey. I did it.
(Final print job tonight. First of the promised packages out tomorrow. Further bulletins as events warrant, and do note I’ll be here a week from this weekend, if you’re so inclined.)
Ah, youth, where is thy sting?
—Neil Gaimain; Scott McCloud; San Diego, 1991.
Via 
ivy_rat.
