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Writing, Reading, Far to Go
For true, for true...
“Follow the formica... that’s my advice. Tablecloths and maitre d’s are fine for the other guy, but give me fried oysters, chipped countertops, and a husky voiced waitress who calls me “baby” and throws in a little lagniappe. Serve me up a po-boy dressed, and then just let me die right there, head down on the formica, and I won’t have any regrets.”
- Anthony Probst, Construction
From Mary Fitzpatrick's New Orleans: Life in an Epic City
Feufollet - the sweetest Acadian band around - has an album out that moves into new territory while keeping to traditional standards. The songs of En Couleurs have an old feel to them, with moments that are lovely and new. After listening over and over to the album, it becomes clear that the arrangements move through old patterns, in turn evoking new ones. The instruments - fiddle, guitar, accordion, bass, drum, glockenspiel, omnichord - and the voices blend in a way that reveals the deep allegiance to Louisiana and all things French Acadian. The foundation and tradition of Cajun songwriting and performing is revealed and then opens up into dimensions that are quirky, beautiful, somehow sad and imperfect. But what seems imperfection is in essence a new kind of truth. The old crosscut with the contemporary results in a new kind of Cajun music, chansons colored with reeling, playful attitudes.
And here, inside of these songs, is the kind of storytelling that you can dance to. Sad narratives set to lively music, surreal and longing tales surrounded by the haunting sounds of fiddle and lead singer Edmiston's layered, ever-changing vocal chords. To understand the stories, you don't necessarily have to know French, though that certainly makes the experience all the sweeter.
Merci, merci! A beautiful album by a group of talented, inspired musicians!
Anna Laura Edmiston - lead singer, guitar
Chris Stafford - vocalist, fiddle
Chris Segura - fiddle
Philippe Billeaudeaux - bass
Michael Stafford - drums
Andrew Toups - keyboard
What am I passionate about, what would I shout about from the rooftops, or in this case, the levees?
The Gulf Coast – its landscape, people, music, its abundance of blue sky and oysters and soul – always, always, always influences me.
Always makes me want to sing and shout and carry on!
When I know it’s time for the Ponchatoula Strawberry Festival or the Cochon du Lait Festival in Mansura or the Andouille Festival in St. John Parish, for Mardi Gras or St. Joseph’s Day or Jazz Fest, for wandering through the Washington Avenue graveyard on our way to brunch, or down Frenchman to Three Muses for feta fries and lamb sliders and the rompin’ tunes of Washboard Chaz and The Palmetto Bug Stompers, then I wish my pockets were deep and I wasn’t so far from home.
But when I do get back to New Orleans, I let the world there seep in, so that once I leave, the spirit of the place will last awhile inside my bones.
And this Christmas I’ll imagine the Festival of the Bonfires along the Mississippi River, looking to the northern constellations as if they were the communal Cajun pyres of Lutcher, Gramercy, and Paulina, their levees aflame with lantern light.
Last night Nikky Finney was awarded the 2011 National Book Award for her collection, Head Off & Split. Inside the crisp white cover is the first of three sections: The Hard-Headed. And this morning my fingers found their way through the first pages, past fish scales and seamstress pins and truth, to the poem, “Left.” I read and felt as though I'd been punched in the stomach. The kind of punch that brings you out of your chair to stand, still and breathless. To pause and then to realize that you're still alive while they're not. The three on that New Orleans rooftop. Another three for the 1,836. The kind of punch that leaves you winded and brought, once more, to your senses.
Pleas Help Pleas
Three words for the three stranded, the e already gone in the high waters.
Nikky Finney’s power rises and slaps. The shore I tumbled on as a child, strolled along as a young woman, the low levee of Lake Pontchartrain, has a different meaning. All changed by the uncompromising cameras, the way the nearly two thousand were left to their own. The poetry calls it up again, and the water lines are clear again.
Awarded the National Book Award for Poetry, for the book that gives voice to the many who have been silenced. Strong stuff. This poet has words in her pockets and her pockets are deep. We are not done hearing from Nikky Finney. It is a sure thing that she has plenty more to say and I for one am waiting for her next exclamation, her next whisper.
Her acceptance speech, a poem unto itself, a slew of incredible gratitude and veritas, is a hint of what is to come. What a woman of words. Again, I am reeling.
Video of 2011 NBA acceptance speeches:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2011/11/national-book-awards-2011-video.html
Thinking about Louisiana, a place rich in cypress swamps and silt and wet, fertile ground. For every flood there are those who lose their homes, farms and fishing grounds, even their livelihoods. The years that mark major floods along the Mississippi River and the coastal waterways leading up from the Gulf—1882, 1927, 1965, 1995, 2005—don’t tell the entire story. One can’t help but notice how natural disasters can be diverted into manmade ones.
But this isn’t a diatribe on the history of floods. It is rather a remark on how those in small towns and in the countryside along the swollen Mississippi have been and continue to be drowned. And now the Morganza Spillway has been opened for the first time in 37 years to divert the river floods away from Baton Rouge and New Orleans to less densely populated areas. The Army Corps of Engineers, who have decided to open the spillway, have a less than favorable reputation after forty years of making money, when they should have been making levees.
The Corps have informed those of the Atchafalya Basin that they need to evacuate as if they are moving for good. Like the folks in the wagon, the dirt road and clouded skies pressing in, photographed years ago by Eudora Welty, the Louisianians south of U.S. Route 190, who know their houses and land will be ruined by the river’s exodus through the spillway, now take to the road in their trucks and through the bayou in their boats, leaving nothing behind. Nothing but a glimmer of hope.
Thunder & Lightning - Flora - Kauai, 2008 - by Karin Cecile Davidson
