The song I can’t stop going back to is Randy Newman’s Stephen Foster-esque “Louisiana, 1927,” from his Good Old Boys record. It’s amazing to thiink that the dirt poor south he describes in the song, and all over the record, was once a white man’s south (hence the word “cracker”), and to see how Bush’s contemptible, contemptuous photo-op leadership is presaged by Calvin Coolidge’s appearance in the third verse. Lyrics below.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who downloaded the song “City of New Orleans” this weekend, but for those who may still do so, I recommend the Arlo Guthrie version, with its spare backing and pure emotion, over Willie Nelson’s more glitzy rendition.
My dad used to play this song when I was a kid. I loved it then because I loved trains, and this is a song about a train, the City of New Orleans, making a run from Illinois to Louisiana. Later I realized it is also a song about the end of an American institution, the railroad. In a tone that is at once bitter and plaintive, the black locomotive calls out: “Good morning America, how are you? Don’t you know me, I’m your native son?”
The train calls this out as it passes “freight yards full of old black men and the graveyards of the rusted automobiles,” and listening to it now, one can’t help but hear the tone as being pitifully similar to the tone of the pleas for help that came from New Orleans over the last week. It is the song of the proud but forgotten.
Yesterday marked the first day of Sunday liquor sales in Washington state, and the end of a pre-Prohibition “blue law” that banned all liquor sales on the Sabbath, when upstanding citizens were supposed to be in church. Three dozen stores, including three in Seattle, opened their doors yesterday across the state. Sunday sales, which are now legal in 33 states, are expected to generate more than $7 million in tax revenues over the next two years.
With sympathy to Dave Segal, who slogged about being shut out of every comedy event he tried to attend at Bumbershoot, I must report that I managed to catch some great, angst-dispelling comedy this weekend.
First came Lauren Weedman’s solo show Wreckage, which I caught at Bumbershoot on Saturday. The show’s subject matter could hardly be darkerin college, Weedman told a little white lie about being raped that soon took over her lifebut the show itself, thanks to Weedman’s self-excoriating wit and dazzling mimicry skills, is a rich, itchy triumph.
Then came last night’s Bumbershoot after-party at the Mirabeau Room, where a handful of local and national comedians took to the stage for nouveau spins on stand-up. Best in show: the widely adored Eugene Mirman, who I’d never encountered before and who charmed me silly; the Edinburgh-conquering Reggie Watts Tangent (it’s not everyone who can spin yuks from a sweet-natured tale of stalking a woman to death); and up-n-coming local Fahim Anwar, a baby-faced 21-year-old of Afghan descent who’ll be a featured performer in this week’s premiere installment of Unhinged, the weekly showcase devoted to alterna-comedy starting this Wednesday and continuing every Wednesday after at the Mirabeau Room. (Check it outit’s about time this town got a punk comedy night to call its own, and props to Dave Meinert for making it happen.)
Who’ll get fired for Katrina? No one.
Bush won’t fire the head of FEMA, that useless, lying assholethe man who couldn’t run a horseshow!or the head of Homeland Security, or anyone else. If no one has been fired for the mess in Iraq, no one is going to get fired for letting all those poor blacks drown, starve, and die of dehydration in New Orleans.
And here’s the reason why Bush can’t fire anyone: The charge against the Bush administration’s response to the disaster in New Orleans is incompetence. But asking Bush to fire people for incompetence is like asking the Queen of England to do away with hereditary titlesit puts the monarch in an awkward position, you know?
I don’t know if it’s always this way at Bumbershoot (didn’t seem so last year anyway), but this time I’ve been shut out of every comedy show I’ve tried to catch. Crowds are overflowing the Charlotte Martin Theatre this year. In light of recent events, laughter seemingly is more necessary than ever. Natural disaster + incompetent government + mismanaged illegal war = comedic boom times.
I hope Bush’s nomination of a very white Roberts for chief justice, coupled with the images of mass black suffering in New Orleans, will wake up that sole (and soulless) negro on the Supreme Court. (Thomas does not deserve to be called an African American, he is a negro in the truest old-world sense of that word.)
The best line in this report is by a Tanzanian civil servant, who favorably likens the federal government’s slow response to the disaster in New Orleans to an “an elephant [trying to do] gymnastics.” Another Tanzanian in the report says, “What I see on TV, people carrying their most important belongings and fleeing, it’s the same as anywhere in Africa.” I think the situation in New Orleans will create the first real link between Africans and Africans Americans. Finally, Africans can see the African in African Americans, see them as the same, as black people, and not as a whole different and super-rich race—Michael Jackson, Jay-Z, Oprah Winfrey, P-Diddy, and other celebrities who fill the pages of Ebony.
