Honk If You're An Armchair Activist

I've had my nose in a book that perhaps I should not be reading. Have any of you (besides Blake) read Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins? Maybe I'm totally behind the times - this book was published in 2004. Either way, it's taking me to a very dark place, even though it's certainly worthwhile to learn the truth about the three-way that goes on between the government, mega-corporations and the World Bank. Read it for yourselves...or stay blissfully ignorant. I won't fault you for whatever decision you make.

So, I'm giving you the background for my trip to the mall yesterday. It helps not to think too much when you're shopping. Otherwise, you'd have to come to terms with the fact that all of the crap that's sold in these giant chain stores is made in sweatshops. Also, look at all of the people buying dumb shit that they can't afford. Yeah, it's best to leave me at home when you want to get your shop on.
But please don't mistake me for one of those people with actual principles. You won't find me strapped to a redwood tree or even participating in a single organized protest. Instead, I know how to walk around like I'm having a bad acid trip: sad and paralyzed to do anything except hope that the feeling passes. I've signed a few online petitions in my day, but I had to ditch moveon.org because I couldn't handle the daily e-mails in my in-box. Sadly, the only thing you can count on from me at this stage is a honk of the horn. Recently, at the junction of Hollywood and Sunset, Bisq issued a peace-loving honk, on request, for a sign that read "Honk if you think the U.S should leave Iraq" or something like that. We didn't even have to slow down in order to get the job done. That's the kind of activism for which we can be counted on.

God, we're wimps. I was just watching interviews with the 2 veterans of the Iraq war who are in danger of having their honorable discharges revoked for staging peaceful protests while wearing their uniforms. If you knew that you'd lose your health care benefits for speaking out, would you still go through with it? Therein lies the problem. This is how armchair protesters such as myself came into existence. I remember being afraid to put a bumper sticker on my car a few years ago that said something like "Save the Troops, Impeach Bush." In my neighborhood in Chamblee, GA, it wouldn't have earned me any bless-your-heart's. Why was I worried about offending these people and their yellow ribbons? The answer is simple: what if one of us needed a jump-start one morning? Or needed some help with our lawn-mower? Therefore, the 2 bumper-stickers intended for our cars were tacked onto the bulletin board.

It seems to be our way, I guess. Bisq jokes that he can't believe that his horn-honking didn't get Kerry elected in 2004. It's never too late to get some principles and become a protester, it's just too inconvenient and expensive for me right now. In the meantime, forget you heard me talking like this.
Honk if you like chicks who write blogs who'd like to someday drive a hybrid.

In Search Of Larry James Hamilton

Due to the fact that he has a lot to say about our old buddy L.J. Hamilton, I’m handing this one over to guest blogger Biscuit:

The wife and I have made a few artistic discoveries in our day. I’m not saying we’ve had any sort of impact on the artists’ careers, but we’ve at least hipped a handful of friends to them. That’s gotta count for something. Sometimes it’s hard for even our most twasted of peeps to see the light. I guess we have some very particular perversions. I mean, any old honky can laugh at a televangelist, but when you make it a point to attend Wieuca Road Baptist Church’s musical review twice a year (because your not-out-to-the-congregation gay neighbor is starring as both Mr. Rogers and Elton John), well…that’s commitment.

One of our most prized discoveries is/was an R&B singer named Larry James Hamilton. I can’t decide on the verb tense because I don’t really know if L.J. is still alive. We lost track of him about 4 years ago, and Katrina didn’t help. Now we can't find him. True New Orleanians are virtually immune to Google searches.

I found L.J. back in 1996. Val was still living in Austin and I was spending a lot of my free time hanging out with Zulie. At the time, “hanging out with Zulie” meant getting stoned, going on power-walks around the Lakefront, drinking steadily and going to bars. While investigating a “Free Crawfish during Happy Hour” banner, Zulie and I found ourselves inside what was essentially a big white tent with Astroturf on the ground. The crawfish were decent, the drinks were dirt-cheap and there was L.J., at the piano, playing the funkiest version of “Tie A Yellow Ribbon” you ever heard, accompanied by a drum machine playing through a crappy guitar amplifier. He followed up with lots of Earth, Wind & Fire, solo Lionel, Marvin Gaye and Al Green (this was before Al’s hits had been played to death, at least to me). Since Zulie talks to everybody, we of course cozied right up to L.J. during his first break. I don’t think he understood the conversation (neither did I), which consisted mostly of Zulie’s clouded memories of the songs he’d just done. Either way, now we were friends and fans. Give me a soul singer with a drum machine in an empty bar any day.

Everyone should have his or her own private R&B star, if only for a day. That’s what I was going for when I hired L.J. to play at my 23rd birthday party a couple months after the discovery. Zulie hosted and provided the piano (and probably all of the food and alcohol for my broke ass; maybe I brought the weed?). Zulie made red beans, I rolled lots of joints and L.J. showed up in a blue velvet blazer. It took all my too-cool-for-school rock’n’roll friends a while to warm up to L.J., but this being New Orleans, soon enough everyone was drunk and dancing (and making-out sloppily). I decided to take a little nap around 11:00pm and woke up the next day at noon. Happy birthday.

We kept up with L.J. and went to see him play regularly until we moved away at the end of ’97. He had a little buzz going on for a minute – he recorded an album with Allen Toussaint producing which, for us at least, was an instant classic. Alan released it on his NYNO record label and L.J. did some classy gigs to support it, but I guess the world wasn’t ready for hits like "Back Rub" and "Love Is A Two Way Thing."

He moved on and started playing with a backup band called Blue Horizon (probably the best backing band name you could ever want). We went to see them at a club deep in the Ninth Ward. Being the only whiteys in the room, we were more than a little uncomfortable when L.J. introduced us from the stage as “my good friends from Metairie” (at the time, Metairie was still a racist stronghold [David Duke ring a bell?]; plus, we didn’t actually live there). L.J. played guitar at that gig, which just added a whole new layer to my obsession with him.

Our last time seeing L.J. was when he played at our wedding in 2002. We had a pretty amazing “meeting” with him about 3 months prior, the intention being to go over the set list & specifics of the event. L.J. showed up looking a lot worse for the wear. He looked pretty thin, his hair was in bad need of some activator and he was eating a little box of ‘Nilla Wafers. I suspected some, oh, let’s just call it rock cocaine, was involved, but who knows; we all have bad days. We gave him our detailed, computer-printed list of song requests. We tried not to be too difficult, staying in his style and even requesting lots of his own tunes. He agreed to everything, gave us a copy of his new self-produced album Love Is and gave us a final piece of marital advice: “There’s 2 people you never listen to – ‘I Heard’ and ‘They Say’”

So, it was in the spirit of not letting meddlesome neighbors and street corner ho’s break-up our relationship that we were married under the eyes of God and a cantor named Seth. L.J. did a great job at the reception, though he completely ignored our song requests. He didn’t even do his own songs that we’d asked for. He did do "Mustang Sally" at least 3 times and let my drunk cousin G-Dogg do his own ramshackle instrumental version of "Great Balls Of Fire." It should be noted that L.J. was performing on a Radio Shack keyboard and that his guitar player was a Japanese dude with red hair.

And that was the last we saw of him. Not surprisingly, I’ve since become obsessed with Love Is (the self-produced cd). I’d love to link to somewhere that people could buy the thing, but L.J. wasn’t exactly hooked up with CDBaby when he ‘released’ it back in 2002. I just think it’s the perfect basement R&B-electro record (if you know of another, hip me to it). L.J. plays all of the instruments, meaning all of the instrument sounds on his Radio Shack keyboard. The drums are from the keyboard’s drum machine, but he plays them live instead of programming them, so the rhythm and timing are all over the place. It sounds like it could fall apart at any moment, but somehow it’s funky. There are some keyboard-sax solos and lots of cheesy bass sounds. The overall sound of the album is dark and metallic, much more like Joy Division than, say, Otis Redding. Ya gotta love an R&B record that’s inadvertently Goth. I kind of wonder if anybody but me will ever love this record like I do. I know that I dig it in a way that L.J. surely never intended.

I really hope that L.J. made it out from Katrina in one piece. I hope he made it back to Brazil or somewhere his talent isn’t taken for granted. And I have to keep hoping that, in spite of the fact that I don’t drink, another happy hour freebie will lead me to my next discovery.

Update:
As we go to press here at Just Yoking, L.J. has suddenly turned up, now going by the name Larry Love Hamilton, complete with his very own ghetto website. I guess this news renders a lot of this post moot, but at least you can all go and buy Love Is from CDBaby immediately.

A Name-Dropping Legacy

I come from a family of name-droppers. Maybe we're always looking to catch a glow off of someone, even if it's someone who served on the Tennessee Valley Authority. Yep, that was my great-grandfather, former city councilman of Knoxville, TN. Look, we'll take what we can get.
My late grandfather, Joe, had ties with many politicians. He was the campaign manager for Estes Kefauver back in the 1930s. He married into a political family, and the rest is history.

I remember going over to my grandparents' house one afternoon to find a group of New Orleans' finest huddled around the new big screen TV, watching a boxing match. I was only allowed to walk across the room during a commercial. Rules is rules.
Seated on the couch was Dutch Morial, then mayor of New Orleans. I used to think that Memorial Day was in honor of him (hence, Mayor Morial Day). Somehow, I knew that celeb spottings such as this were meant to be cherished and not squandered. I took this opportunity to get Dutch to brush my hair for me. There I was, in the middle of a bunch of yelling guys in their 60s, getting bounced around from famous paunch to famous paunch.

In 1999 , I went to Albuquerque to see Rick Springfield. Seeing Rick in his 50s was no less titillating. When he came back the next year to play the New Mexico State Fair, I decided that I was going to get backstage. Actually, the story about how I got back there is a much better blog than this one (I must pace myself). Anywho, Rick and I spoke briefly about how he manages to stay so young-looking. Maybe it's smacking his wife after she throws jars of olives at his head, but more likely it's his avoidance of sunlight.
But really what I am most proud of is that I've laid hands on Don Meridith, Ludacris and Andre Benjamin. I hassled Magic Johnson in Florence, Italy, back in 1995. And, I most recently hassled Whitney Houston in front of the door at Houston's in Century City. I was trying to make conversation with her, and she looked a little frazzled. I was lucky that I didn't get slapped. Bobbie Brown was circling, and it seemed they had had an intense dinner. Everything those two do is intense.

I must get my name-dropping bug from my Dad. To sum up his celebrity/politico run-ins...he shot hoops with Lew Alcindor (later known as Kareem Abdul Jabar) and he dated Carol Klein (later known as Carol King) who lived in the same apartment building in Brooklyn. My late Uncle Beast claimed to have dated her in one of his blogs. I tend to believe him over my Dad. What I really cannot believe is that she would go out with both of them.
According to my Dad, he also dated some actresses that none of you have ever heard of - though one of them appeared on an episode of Taxi. I remember when my whole family was gathered around the tube for that one. My Dad's first cousin was on several commercials for Sears and had a cameo appearance on one of my favorite episodes of Threes Company. Remember when Jack had to take a bunch of tranquilizers so he could fly on a tiny plane to attend a party on Catalina Island? He wound up acting a fool for my Dad's cousin who was a hot blonde in a red sequined gown.
Over the years, Dad's met the likes of Alexander Haig and, two Thanksgivings ago, found George McGovern asleep in a car in his next-door neighbor's driveway. It turns out, George was locked out of the neighbor's house which belongs to the widow of WWII historian Steven Ambrose. The most recent reason to brag is that he supposedly had lunch with Brad and Angelina, who were eating breakfast at one of his favorite hang-outs. When he told me the news, I asked him to define "having breakfast with." Others might just say that they happened to have breakfast at the same restaurant where there had been a Brad and Angelina sighting.

My brother, Augie, has had an on-again-off-again thing with Jesse Jackson. Working in and around the Democratic Party, Augie has rubbed elbows with loads of politicos. About five years ago, Jesse singled Augie out, told him he looked different, and pondered aloud that it must be his new beard. "A Hymie looks nice with a black beard!" No, he didn't really say that...but you know it was on the tip of his tongue.

My mom, also a notorious name-dropper, has an impressive resume - well, depending on your standards. She dated an NBA basketball legend, Rick Barry, during her short stint at University of Miami. My brother, being a serious sports fan, used to always say that he wished that things would have worked out between the two of them, so that he would be the son of NBA royalty instead of a wacky sports-hating art-collector. Mom also went out with a former Saints player, Steve Stonebreaker, back in the late 90s. Augie was only mildly impressed. We had grown weary of Zulie's dating escapades. All I can remember about him was that he was really tall with a bad mustache. I hope she never had to kiss him. I say that, but I can't be mean about him. I think he committed suicide not too long ago. When she worked at Circle Gallery, she had the opportunity to meet Charlie Watts, along with a few other big deal peeps.

Oh, top this - while my parents were still married, they partied on a yacht with Jimmy Buffet!

And the list goes on. Anyone else care to post their own run-ins with semi-celebs in my comments section? Feel free.

Carpooling With Chicks

After my past 3 posts, I need to reassure my readers that I don't need a prescription for Lexipro (just yet).
Okay, this is kind of funny in and of itself: I am becoming certified to teach Pilates. The fact that nobody can find my abs is not going to stop me. I suppose it is my love of the circus, contortionism, and authoritarianism which inspired this decision. The training began in April and will be completed in July. Thus far, it reminds me of most of the classes I've taken which are unaffiliated with a university or non-profit organization. Once they have your money, they do nothing more that market their products to their students...as if we haven't already paid $995 for the classes! Foolishly, I am under the impression when registering that I am actually going to learn what I've set out to learn. I should know better. That "beginner's mind" screws me again...
The endless promotion and marketing of $45 spiral bound books, DVDs, equipment, and more advanced classes takes up a good 30% of the class. The other students, riddled with panic and fear of being tested on the scant amount of material, will buy just about anything, making this a multi-million dollar industry. Call it group-mind, call it Pavlovian response - these people go off like traders on Wall Street every time a new product is mentioned. Today's fervor drove a fellow Pilates student to draft by hand a spreadsheet with everyone's order which she hurriedly delivered to our instructor. He was already on his celly dictating the order to one of the employees in the stockroom at their Costa Mesa HQ. One girl who is a personal trainer was reciting her Visa number to the instructor which I took as a cue to go use the rest room for a while.
I can tell you one name that was not on that spreadsheet. I was the one trying to shut down the shopping spree and suggesting that we get back to the program of learning how to teach Pilates. It goes without saying that I'm not too popular with this crowd.

Because I hate to drive in L.A. and still have to read each line of directions from Google maps when I go anywhere, I decided at the first session back in April to find a carpool buddy. Her name is Connie, and she lives about 8 minutes from me. Nice of me to consider our warming globe, right? This chick couldn't be more twasted and more hazardous to the drivers of L.A. I decided after yesterday's commute in her 1970s Volvo that I would no longer put myself in harm's way like that. It was my third time in the passenger's seat with Connie. Although she's lived in L.A. her whole life, she is still completely unfamiliar with the freeway system. Fine - as a chick, I understand that problem. BUT, if that's the case, you need to stay focused: NO MULTI-TASKING! Don't demonstrate Pilates poses while leaving the steering wheel to spin on its own. And how about leaving the windows up while speeding along at 80 MPH and conversing at the top of your lungs about your ex-fiancee. My blood pressure was climbing fast. I kept trying to use my hands to guide her eyes back to those dashed lines on the asphalt. I refused to make eye-contact, in order to dissuade her from this practice.

On Sunday morning I called her and made up a bogus excuse about how I was running late (due to the baby, of course!) and how I didn't want to make her late. She sounded a little put-off and told me that this was not news that she had anticipated or something equally non-compelling. Look, I did what I had to do. As luck would have it, I was not running late. I never am. When I arrived at the studio, the only other car in the lot was Connie's Volvo. Immediately, I left the lot and parked a block away. I wasted about 15 minutes, making an unnecessary call to Augie so that I could walk into the class appearing to have barely made it in on time. Oh, the tangled web we weave. After class, I'm driving away and see Connie making her way to her car. I thought I had a bit of a running start and could avoid any more possible discomfort about my weaseling out of carpooling with her. Somehow, it must have had something to do with the timing of the stoplights, twasted traffic patterns, or just my dumb luck - but we were driving cockpit-to-cockpit almost the entire way! I would slow down, speed up, stay in the right-most exiting lane - it didn't matter. It was like I had a side car, and neither of us wanted to make eye contact. If I'm not mistaken, I think she was even holding her cellphone up to her ear, just to make herself look more legitimately oblivious. My only pathetic retort was to scratch the side of my face a lot. It was such a chick moment. You guy readers probably don't understand these shenanigans
At some point, maybe I'll grow some girly balls and learn how to tell someone that I'm not going to carpool with them without all of the excuses and uncontrollable urge not to look like a bitch. Something to work up to along with the flat abs.

Birthday Doldrums

Try not to have a birthday on a Monday. It just gives off the wrong vibe.
Today was my 34th birthday. Now it's nighttime, and I can talk about this birthday and compare it with others. It was probably in the 15th percentile. As a new parent, you wind up using the word "percentile" a lot. You'd probably feel pretty dissappointed if a doctor so much as uttered the word 15th percentile around your baby.
But this is different. Birthdays are fucked up for adults.

Me? I am lucky. I have friends who make a fuss over me on my birthday. I've been taken out to dinner twice. I've gotten birthday cards, phone calls, e-mails, checks. If I weren't impossible to please, I might say it was a swell day. I am getting to the point where I like having birthdays behind me. I get nervous thinking about who might not call and how I'm going to handle it. Like I said, birthdays are fucked up for adults and even more so for 34 year old children.

Slab From The Past

I just got back from New Orleans on Monday. Good trip and all that, but I mostly wanted to share this image with you. For those of you who knew my childhood home at 5814 Bellaire Drive, you might remember our 1980s decor, especially this rockin' black and white tile. Well, as you can see ole' 5814 done got razed, and here's what's left. Oh, and there's the famous 17th Street canal behind the slab. While I was out snapping this photo, I met the young guy who had just bought the property. He had lost his home which was in St.Bernard Parish and decided to make a new home for himself here on our old property. It was kind of sweet- he had a wheelbarrow full of dirt and a shovel. He's really rebuilding from the ground up, starting with filling in some massive ditches in the backyard. Hard to believe that my old backyard was like an ocean floor after Katrina.
I remember on a few occasions, snakes, possum, raccoons, alligators, and once a gigantic sea turtle made appearances back there. There were 4 mammoth pecan trees bordering the fence .
If you attended our wedding or hung out with me between 1973 and 2004, then you likely spent some time out in the yard as well as on the black and white dance floor.

Remembering the Beast

Today is May 8, and it is the 64th birthday of my Uncle Beast. This is the first birthday since his recent passing, so I'll have to eat cake all by myself. Oh, and he'd probably want me to scare up some homemade ice-cream to go with it. He left this world last October just before Zev was born. The way I see it, they must have passed each other, as one was entering and the other exiting. My palm reader made an allusion to the idea that Beast and Zev share the same soul. I'd like to think that it's so. I sometimes place their pictures alongside each other and see a similarity in their cherubic faces.
His given name was Stuart, but to me and a few others in the family, he was the Beast. Why was he a Beast? Not sure, because the name was around before I was. He had a voracious appetite and loved to eat- maybe like a Beast would. He liked to wrestle and crack toes- again, maybe like a Beast would...but he was ferociously loving and loyal. So, maybe a Beast could be seen in many different ways.
Beast and I have millions of memories together, but we were mostly bonded by a shared burden: we loved two men that are tough to love- my grandfather, Izzy, and my father(his brother). Not that these two men are unlovable, but they just don't make it easy on anyone. Beast and I were continuously trying to impress my Dad and "earn" his love. With my grandfather, Beast was nurturing. And, Izzy is not the type to accept any kind of tenderness into his life. But Beast pushed on and continued to nurture his widowed father up until the last few months of his life. In fact, Beast kept his own diagnosis a secret from Izzy up until his last weeks here in this world. Izzy still insists that he knew all along. Who knows?
I can picture the two of them doing their grocery shopping together at all of the supermarkets in Margate, Florida: Beast holding Izzy's coupons while Izzy scanned all of the prices on the canned goods, in order to make sure that he was buying each item from the correct store. Izzy doesn't show love, but he did tell me once that he thought Beast was handsome like a movie-star.
Beast and I ate together , traveled overseas together, and gossiped a whole lot. Whenever I needed a pep-talk or someone to vent about my dad with- I knew who to go to.
He was a yo-yo dieter, sometimes bearded and always bespectacled. He wore a unicorn medallion necklace which came from a jewelery store in New Orleans. Beast had seen a lot of the world and was quite familiar with China. In fact, he took me there when I was a student in Acupuncture School. We stayed at a famous hotel near Beijing designed by I.M Pei. I introduced him to the joys of Hawthorne berry candies and salty-sour plums. He took me to have desert at the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong, just so I could see how fancy the ladies room was. I didn't have to do anything to make him love me, and that's what set him apart from the other men in our family.
Beast cooked, shopped and read trashy mysteries. He and his wife of 41 years, whom we call the Goose, watched their many t.v shows and baseball games together in their little wood paneled den. They read, solved cross-word puzzles and drank wine in their astro-turfed indoor porch. They were truly best friends, even though Beast would get in trouble for leaving a dirty dish here and there.
He and his pancreas(and also his liver) spent a year trying to figure out if they could live with cancer, or not. He sailed through several months strong and beastly , and we were all in denial of his bleak prognosis. I really can't feel cheated that he was taken away. Magical people like Beast appear few times in one's life, and you do whatever you can to share as much as possible with them. If you're smart, you grab every little morsel.
Anyway, Beast, happy birthday wherever you are.