N.O. Pundit

Cyril Neville

Short and sweet entry. Went to see Cyril Neville (google search) at DBA last night (Cyril is the lead singer to the right).

The camera used for this shot (and the DBA link) is actually the LG 6000 camera phone. Of course I have not read the manual; it comes with no flash, and optics crammed into a 1/8" aperture.

The point of the post (as I've stated before) is that you can be a meter from a Meter in New Orleans.

I'll post some daytime shots with the LG 6000. And I'll read the manual.

Herb Brooks

I went to college in Minnesota. Not much of a winter lover, but I could play and trip in the snow with the best of them. I'm not a native, but I know what broomball is (and have played it, bruises and cracked ribs and all).

I was recounting the story of being in the cafeteria at Carleton when someone walked in and yelled, "We just beat the Russians at hockey". It was a special moment for all of of us eating our salisbury steak and mashed potatoes, and a large whoop went up.

The funny part was that I was recounting this story to Sam, my friend and bartender at the Charleston bar in Chicago around 1996.

Sam was a speed skater, Olympic caliber in 1980, and close friends with Eric Heiden at the time. Sam did not make the team in 1980 (I think only because of an injury), but was sitting with Eric behind the "Miracle on Ice" bench in Lake Placid. Together they watched the 4-3 upset against the Russians. So much for my story.

But this is not about my story. Or Sam's. It is about Herb Brooks.

Even though I am not (definitively not) a hockey expert, I could see a revolutionary new style of hockey playing in our 1980 Olympic squad. There was always motion. Constant concentric rotation from the center out. The Russians, the Finns, the Swedes, did not play this way.

After Mike Eruzione made the score 4-3, I remember American defenders falling to take a puck in the face or the gut to stop a score. It is not that Herb Brooks demanded such behavior; it is that his players rose to such behavior because of his leadership.

Fast forward to the present. I am no more of a hockey expert now than I was then. Herb Brooks and his "Miracle on Ice" team lifted us Americans at a time more crucial than any that I can remember. I was not alive to remember the Berlin Airlift. I am too young to remember the Cuban Missile crisis. I was twelve during the fall of Saigon.

But I was at an adult thinking and feeling age for the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Carter had crashed and burned in the desert. Few college kids (yes, kids) knew what to think of Reagan. It was not yet "Morning in America". Were my political thought processes clear then? Of course not! I couldn't possibly say I have them sorted out now.

Today, one of the great Americans has passed. Herb Brooks only wanted to be a great hockey player and coach. Most great Americans just want to be great at the thing they do best. To be a great baseball player, a great bicyclist, a great comedian.

Every so often though we are humbled and awed when a Jackie Robinson steps to the plate, a Lance Armstrong strides to a fifth Tour de France victory, and a Bob Hope outlasts not only his seven doctors, but George Burns' five doctors as well. They become more than they ever intended to be. This simply cannot be planned.

Herb Brooks, rest in peace.

Go Cups

Just met Mike and Diana at the Circle bar. A couple from Boston, looking to move here, scoping out the neighborhoods.

I moved here because of go cups. If you don't live here (in Louisiana), you probably don't even know what a go cup is, other than guessing what it is in the time it took to read this sentence.

You buy an alcoholic beverage in a bar, and you own it. Don't you? In the 49 other states (as far as I know anyway), you don't. You are permitted to carry it around and consume it, possibly in its entirety, but you cannot take it with you. How stupid. In NOLA, you buy it, you own it, you take it with you. You can even pull up to a bar, leave the car idling, and fetch several drinks to go. In go cups.

I leave the "childing" of our society to another essay. Back to Mike and Diana.

Somedays you meet groovy people. Didn't really talk a lot to Diana, but she seems groovy. Mike is groovy. He's a musician, wanting to work his shit down here. I am a musician in the past, looking to make my shit current.

And it's interesting. Anyone can work their shit anywhere. Why do it here?

Why not? This is a town that loves music. This is a damn fun party town. This is a town where, if you have groovy shit, people will support you with their presence, attention, and dollars.

This is also a town where you can fall into a bottle. Nobody is going to stop you.

The freedom to fail is underrated. When the freedom to fail is in the house, success is so much sweeter.

I'm looking forward to playing music with Mike. That's music project number three on the drawing boards. Like I said, I'll keep you posted.

Ultimate frisbee

Saturday I played ten hours of Ultimate frisbee. In the blazing Louisiana sun. The summer league had our all-day, six team playoff. And our team, Flambeaux, won!

If you don't know what Ultimate frisbee is, it's a bit between soccer, basketball, and football. You play on a field roughly the size of a football field, with endzones. There are seven players per side (with substitutes on the sideline), each trying to score in the far endzone. A score is achieved when the frisbee is caught in the endzone. You advance up the field by passing the frisbee amongst your teammates. You cannot run with the frisbee. You do not tackle or run into any opponents. You cannot strip the frisbee out of your opponents' hands. You can try to block a pass, or intercept a pass. If the offense drops the frisbee, it is a turnover. Not much more to it.

All summer long we would congregate on "the fly", a soccer field expanse right on the Mississippi river in Audubon Park. Playing one game between 6:30 pm and 8:30 pm was always invigorating and tiring. Playing six games between 10 am and 8 pm is mind warping.

I think my estimate is close: I drank around three gallons of fluids on Saturday. That's 24 pounds of water.

Our season record placed us right in the middle of standings. Because there are only six teams, and everyone is friends, everyone was automatically in the playoffs. The first three games Saturday was pool play, and simply determined the bye rounds for the top two teams in the single elimination afternoon. We lost all three, each a heartbreak score. After three games mind you, in ninety degree humid heat, we were all dogmeat. Several limps. We are a fairly veteran team (average age perhaps 37).

We entered the playoffs and we carried a victory away from Monkey Pox. Uplifting, but the reward there was to have won at least one game out of six. No delusions of grandeur. At all.

Game two: we played Disk-Functional for the second time today. We lost to them 9-8 in the morning, and I'm not sure that we expected to win. A tough game to play, especially with the limps, and the heat, and the tremendous fatigue. Even more important was that if we won we would face Weapons of Mass Destruction. WMD had an undefeated season, and was undefeated so far on Saturday.

Well, we won. We focused our attention on the other field and, to all the spectators delight, ours included, Lucky Dog was really challenging WMD.

Lucky Dog had the second best season record behind WMD, and we had lost to them in the morning as well. Lucky Dog came back from 8-4 to tie 8-8; they marched point for point to an 11-10 win for WMD. This made WMD 12-0 for season and post-season play. At this point Flambeaux was 5-7. WMD had a bench of substitutes perhaps 6 deep. Flambeaux had one male sub, and one female sub most of the day (we always play 5/2 or 6/1 male/female squads).

So there's the picture: the undefeated powerhouse that had an early afternoon bye with a deep bench playing against an exhausted, bench-poor, gimpy group of oldies.

Something happened. Really.

It was now around 6:30 pm and the cooler shady evening air was taking over. I looked from the sideline during my few rest breaks, and there was my team, raging on naturally produced opiates, in the zone. Content and confident in a wonderfully unselfconcious way. Fatigued beyond reason, we simply forgot to lay down. Had it been only four hours of play behind us, we surely would have had the good sense to quit.

WMD was down 6-0 at halftime. The crowd of 80 players/spectators was going bananas. Not mean spirited by any means, just having a great time watching the underdog refuse to be whipped. WMD got back into the game in the second half, but were never a major threat.

One final point about Ultimate frisbee. There is no referee. Not just for amateur pickup games. There is no referee at any level. Disputes are handled on the field, by the players.

There is also a four-word saying, perhaps more of a greeting, which captures the essence of the attitude on the field. It is "Spirit of the Game".

The final score was 11-7; Flambeaux defeats Weapons of Mass Destruction. It was a terrific game. It was a terrific day. And it would have been a terrific game, and a terrific day, had we lost the finals.

Spirit of the game, y'all.

Learning the bass, again

The last couple of days I have been noodling on my newly acquired bass. As I mentioned, I played bass around twenty years ago, and it is quite interesting, and gratifying, that my right hand-left hand coordination came back to me within just a day or two of playing.

Playing the bass well with a minimum of musical knowledge is actually quite easy. Far easier than a clarinet, or a piano. This is because you can operate at a reptilian level and still sound like you know what you're doing. This is the level I operated at in college.

The bass has four strings, tuned to the notes E, A, D, G. As a bassist, you do not need to know what "notes" are, or what "notes" the strings are tuned to to play rock and roll. This is because the vast majority of songs you will cover fall into some variation of the I-IV-V chord progression. As a bassist, you need to know what a "chord progression" is only at the brainstem level.

What happens is the guitarist in your band puts your finger on the fretboard that you will start with and pound away at. Then he will show you where in the song to put your finger next. And so on, and so on. As an avid listener of rock and roll, you will get to know when to change that main finger simply by listening.

The I-IV-V chord progression is simply this: first note of a scale, fourth note of a scale, fifth note of a scale. That's it. What's a scale, you ask. Doe, ray, me, fa, sew, la, tea, doe. You don't need to know notes. Hum out doe, then fa, then sew, then doe. A progression of those three notes is the basis of a hell of a lot of rock and roll.

The good news is that you now can cover a lot of songs. The better news is that the bass was born to make the I-IV-V chord progression easy to play. To go from doe to fa you simply move one string up on the same fret. To go from fa to sew you simply move two frets up on the same string. To go from doe to sew, what do you do? Come on, just a little fret math: one string up on same fret plus same string two frets up equals one string up and two frets up. Congratulations! This is easy! To go from doe to doe (one octave higher) you move two strings up and two frets up.

Here is the best news of all: these rules are true for the whole neck of the bass. There are no funny or sneaky exceptions. If your finger is on the I chord note for that song, the IV and V notes are right where they should be as explained above. Anywhere on the neck. No exceptions. Yeah, you can run out of frets. Shut up.

You now know about as much as ninety percent of the garage band bassists out there. And you can start experimenting with where III and VII are in relation to I. This is the beginning of what I call the "interval method" of playing bass. Your fingers can jump to another great sounding note without your brain having the foggiest idea whether it is an A, or an F, or a C sharp.

Now. I said all that to say this. The so-called interval method leaves you high and dry on many levels.

What if you want to blast out a little two note chord way up the fretboard? If your finger is down on the first string third fret, fret math will not get you up to the fifteenth and sixteenth frets in time for that little chord blast. Certainly you can always just practice that chord blast offline and forget the fret math.

What if you want to play a "walking" bass part, especially if it is fast tempo? Your fret math analyzer will be overwhelmed quite quickly and you will start playing notes "out of scale".

What if you want to play a song that does not conform to the I-IV-V chord progression? Or want to play in a minor key? Broken fret math analyzer. Don't get me wrong, the interval method and fret math can get you started, and can sustain you throughout your bass playing career, as long as you either play straightforward songs and/or rote practice the tough progressions.

Personally, I want to take the next step: the music theory method of playing. This is where you know what "notes" are, and where each "note" is on the fretboard. Coupled with that knowledge is knowing what "notes" are "on-scale". Knowing this stuff can free you from that last finger position and allow you to jump anywhere on the neck. All of the greats are (or were) at this level: Jaco Pastorius, Alphonso Johnson, Stanley Clarke, Phil Lesh, just to name a very few. Two favorite albums of mine which showcase what a great bassist can do (both with Jaco Pastorius) are Weather Report's Heavy Weather, and Joni Mitchell's Shadows and Light. The sheer musicality of Jaco's playing is beautiful. A bass in Jaco's hands is a lead instrument, a melody maker, and not simply a beat producer relegated to the rhythm section.

So, that is where I am headed. I already have two tentative band appointments (I'll keep you posted). And the thing that I realize, and the thing to remember is that you can still smash away at I and IV and V in a grunge rock band with a music theory methodology, but you can't play a Jaco-inspired transcendent solo with an interval methodology.

I just bought a Squier P-Bass

I played bass in college (Carleton college in Northfield, MN) with a group called the Talismen (I believe that there is an actual famous group called the Talismen; make no mistake, we were not them). Mainly a cover band, we played "Teacher" and "Locomotive Breath" by Jethro Tull, "LA Woman" and "Roadhouse Blues" by the Doors, "Reelin' in the Years" by Steely Dan, "Empty Pages" by Traffic, "Ride, Captain, Ride" by Blues Image, and a bunch of other similar genre stuff. I owned a Peavey T-40 and a Peavey Combo amp. Nice equipment. I actually have a single photograph somewhere of me playing bass in 1983. If and when I find it, I'll scan and post it. I know of no cassette tapes of our performances (and no burned CDs; they didn't even exist). But I remember us being well liked.

While working in Chicago post-college, I played no music. Moving to New Orleans reawakened my desire to play. It's not just that there are rock bands here (in fact, that there are rock bands in a brass and jazz town still surprises some); you see young people heading home from school having trombone and trumpet competitions at the bus stops. New Orleans is a town that loves to make music. New Orleans is a town where it is not nerdy for a child to have to go home and practice clarinet, or piano, or any other instrument. Indeed, it is not even a question of "have to".

I remember being in Band and Orchestra in high school in the Chicago area (I played trombone), and on the clique-meter, we were definitely a notch down from the athletes. Thinking about a career in music, or even an avocation in music, sure didn't occur to many of my peers. Music was just something that mom and dad thought was a good idea. Maybe there's a flavor of that game here, but it sure doesn't show. Kids want to play music, because to be able to play music well is cool. Isn't it?

Well, I think so. I'm a 42-year old who's about to pick up the electric bass for the first time in 20 years. I shopped for total of 30 minutes (I had an idea that the Mexican-made Fenders were probably the best deal around) and selected a black-body Squier. Great action, great condition, $199! I tell you, I am excited.

As far as giving mom and dad credit for making sure I tasted music, I am reminded of this quote by Mark Twain: When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

James Lileks' Bleats

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I wrote the bulk of this encomium several days ago. I was going to hyperlink several spots with specific Bleats, but James' site has been been skreweled for the last 24 hours. At first visiting the URL just hijacked the visitor and suggested installing an unsigned, untrusted certificate. Right.

Now, James appears to be back in control somewhat (with humor). What you get is:

</prescript>

I like James Lileks’ blog, The Bleat. He is the Jerry Seinfeld of bloggers: he makes nothing entertaining. Do you remember the syllogism:

Nothing is better than divine happiness.
A ham sandwich is better than nothing.
Ergo: A ham sandwich is better than divine happiness.

Makes sense to me.

To many other bloggers, and I’m sure many unseen lurkers, The Bleat is a true delight to read. It’s an indulgent bowl of ice cream before bed. And it’s not what he writes about. It’s the immense talent with which he writes. Off the cuff. With no editor or proofreader. Every day.

He writes about nothing. Oh, of course he writes about Gnat, and mortgages, and matchbooks, and job quibbles, and all the other trappings of a day in the life. But the Bleats are crafted to be beautiful, not to be of use. They are art.

I often think about the question, “What do you do for a living?”, or even more simply, “What do you do?”. They are so taken for granted that people just answer back with their vocation, as if what they do for money defines them as a human being. Does it? I’ve thought about, “Who are you?”, but I actually think that is too hard a question to answer. How about, “What is your art?” What is the thing you do for which you seek no reward, other than the satisfaction of having done it? What are the things you create that are meant to be ends in themselves, and not means to something else. No, I don’t go around asking people that at cocktail parties, but I still like the notion, and it’s a question I do ask myself.

This sleeping archive of Bleats. I just don’t know how to express this. There will be a day when Gnat asks about her childhood. Or, perhaps it is more appropriate to say, there will be day when Gnat needs to know about her childhood. An urge that may not be expressible in words, and an urge that I suspect won’t come until well into adulthood. I don’t know why I think that. But it absolutely, positively sends shivers down my spine to imagine the awe and the love and maybe even the fright she will feel when she starts to read about her childhood in the Bleats. Literally every day documented, days of fatherly love and juice boxes, worldly humor and diapers. Describing 9/11/01:

Some friends have described their day as a series of numb rote gestures, as if drugged by the news; I’ve talked to some people whose voices betray an indescribable sadness that consumes every breath and the space in between. Reasonable responses. Normal. There’s a third: fury. I am furious - clench-jawed white-knuckle wide staring anger. I was putting up a picture tonight, and I heard my daughter laughing in the bathtub, a simple joyful baby giggle - I stopped, spun the hammer around in my hand, felt its heft, and knew without question that if I had before me a man who had blown her to atoms, I would be able to beat him to death without a second thought.

I hold on to the anger; I turn it on the lathe, hold it up to the light, test its point. Because the moment I put it down I will lose all composure, and there will be no end to the tears.

I stand corrected. This is surely not nothing. Please pause with me for a moment.

To pretty much everyone else, picking up the dry cleaning is nothing. Washing the car is nothing. Defrosting hamburger? Nothing! If you don’t record it, it is nothing. But every once in a while, you will snap a photo of your mother basting a turkey on Thanksgiving Day, and right when the shutter is depressed dad gives mom a little goose on the beehind which makes mom shriek and there it is, your favorite picture of all time, reminding you every time you look at that picture that your now-deceased mother lived her life with bliss. No picture, and nothing creeps in and erases that moment of bliss in fifteen seconds.

Wash your hands, and turn off that damn football game!

In one of his Bleats, James once said simply, take pictures. Inspired, I'd like to think that a word may be worth a thousand pictures. Thank you James Lileks. For making nothing special.

Welcome to I'm N.O. Pundit!

Thank you for visiting I'm N.O. Pundit!

What I'd like to provide here in my first blog entry is a mission statement of sorts on what I want NOpundit to be.

But first, what it is not.

The title, "I'm N.O. Pundit!", is a combination of the initials of New Orleans and the suffix popularized by Glenn Reynolds' blog, Instapundit. Glenn's site is inimitable, has amazing reach and impact, and is shaking the Big Media Tree of Knowledge. There will be no attempt to copy or imitate Instapundit, not only because I am not as smart as Glenn, but also because I am far more lazy.

NOpundit is not a blog about the legendary politics of this city and state (perhaps some interesting news items may find comment). I am not a New Orleans native, and really do not have the capacity (or desire) to wax incisively on her happenings. I will comment on the bars, however.

So, is NOpundit a blog for a pundit who simply happens to find himself in New Orleans? No. I am no pundit. Look, I just happened to get to the registrar first with a modestly cool site name.

What NOpundit is. First and foremost, this blog is where I practice efficient and entertaining writing. One of my role models is James Lileks' "The Bleat". Rather than get into his wonderful style here (I will devote an entry to what I admire about his blog at a later date), I say, just visit and browse.

The topics? Anything, really. But that isn't much of an answer, is it? One interest I have is to document and comment on why New Orleans is so much damn fun. I do not know of another city where you can listen to international music legends from so close that you could reach over and tap them on the shoulder while they're playing. Just yesterday at Satchmo Fest, I saw Ellis Marsalis, father of Wynton and Branford, while more or less looking over his shoulder at the keyboard. I am getting one of those nifty camera phones, and I plan some daily guerilla photojournalism.

Another interest is essay writing on the laws and functionings of the United States, especially pertaining to the over-federalization and reach of the government (all levels). Don't go blond on me! I am definitely not a legal pundit, but I find the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights fascinating documents, truly divinely inspired DNA for America. My hope is to write in such a way that the investigations are fun and entertaining, not dissertation-dry and boring. A self-study blog, as it were, with no worries about getting it right. If the essay creation gets any momentum, I'll likely spin off another website. You might call my quest: "If I were in charge of writing the platform for the political party that did things right."

So, thanks for stopping by! Feel free to leave a comment. And remember, I'm N.O. Pundit!