Holey Moley

Another Mardi Gras has come and gone, as my boss put it I am no worse for the wear, except for the fact that I put like 30 miles on my legs and 5 years off my liver. Traditionally my response to “How was Mardi Gras” is “No Comment,” but for the sake of those readers unfortunate enough to have missed it (and posterity) I will recount the experience briefly.

Wednesday was a warm up, with two parades, venison sausage, some Jack and waters, and everyone in bed by 11.

Thursday’s parades were cancelled due to a supposed hellacious rainstorm (someone said it rained 3 inches in 20 minutes but I’m skeptical) that was brief but ominous enough to reschedule 2 parades and cancel Thursday’s third. I watched 30 Rock reruns until after the strom had passed, then went to Balcony Bar and met up with some folks I’d met in Chicago after the Saints game right before New Years. I convinced one of them to come with me to the Howlin’ Wolf, to meet up with a gaggle of Tulane sorority girls who suspiciously disappeared right after I started dancing. Having lost all my friends, I did what any rational person does in that situation and went to Ms Mae’s where I serendipitously ran into one of my favorite barflys, someone who’s been called in publications far more prestigious than this one: a “notable New Oreleans Socialite,” or something similar. We partied there until it got late and the staff decided I’d had too much to drink and was singing along too loudly to the jukebox. Obviously they didn’t know me well enough to know that I do that when I’m stone cold sober.

Friday was a glorious sunshiney day, that I'd already taken off, so I sat on my porch and got ready for the big game. Friday there were 4 parades, and they kept breaking down and it was probably 1am or later before the final float had passed. I’m having a little trouble piecing together what happened after the parades were over, but I know that I got ditched by my friends again and I ended the night around 4am when the band playing at Le Bon Temps finally finished up.

Saturday was Endymion, oh Endymion. Saturday was a shitshow that turned into an even bigger shitshow once the clock struck midnight and my buddy turned 24 (he took a lot of shit for being 17 when he got to college.) At some point, we got ditched, and after we had both gotten kicked out of Mae’s went to Le Bon Temps to play some terrible pool. I later found out that I had left my credit card there.

Sunday was quite a day, parades in the afternoon, superbowl, “superkrewe” Bacchus parade at night. After the afternoon parades, we (I’m too Sexy for this Porch) managed to stir up a batch of rock and roll on my buddies’ porch. At some point we were joined by a professional musician who happens to be one of my band mate’s ESL students who we happened to see play with Russel Batiste a few weeks ago, after Krewe de Vieux. With him in the band, the show went from being drunken fun to an awesome Rock! show pretty quickly. We ended up as the superbowl was starting, which finished up in time for the last 10 or so floats in Bacchus, after which it was time to go home. Basically, the wave of adrenaline I was riding crashed after the I’m too Sexy for this Porch show, and then came back a little, and then crashed even lower after Eli and Tyree’s little wunderplay.

Monday I woke up around noon and went scavenger hunting for my credit card which mercifully was at Le Bon Temps. I then sagely went back home and took a nap until about five. Monday --> Tuesday is the big finish, and you need to have as much strength as you can muster to make it all the way through Zulu and Rex. I spent most of the Monday night parades sitting on my buddies’ porch nursing jack and waters, touching my toes and twisting side to side at the waist and rolling my neck around and otherwise preparing for game 7. After everyone had cleared out, a friend and I set out to walk to Tipitina’s, making a pit stop on the way for drinks and to see my bartender friends at the Columns.

Somewhere around this time midnight and I chest bumped, and it officially became Mardi Gras (day.) Galactic played until sunrise, with some guest appearances by Chali 2na of Jurrasic 5, and the New Orleans Klezmer Allstars, and some guest masked mystery guitar player who screwed up the words to Junco Partner. When the show had finished, which luckily was right before I ran out of awesome dance moves, Sav-A-Center, who shares its parking lot with Tips, mercifully opened, and I bought a 12pack of redbull and a bottle of vodka which I carried with me all the way to Zulu. Along the way I met some kindered spirits (lucky pun) who were making mimosas in the Sav-A-Center parking lot and we waddled towards Zulu until I got spotted by these two girls I had met all the way back on Thursday (how they recognized me in passing, I will never know) and whose charity I had promised a foosball table to, and had spent the night in a tent in the middle of St Charles Ave. When I finally got to my buddies’ house I got the bottle of absinthe I had stashed there to motivate myself to make it to Zulu, which is always a challenge, and twisted up a revolting Redbull-Vodka-Absinthe, which promptly got named “Licorice and Gasoline.” There wasn’t too much more debauchery, and I was in bed by 3pm, all the better to make it to work this morning, no worse for the wear (ugh.)

Sing Praises

Over a year ago, after my father’s glowing recommendation, and my new found capability for producing disposable income, I signed up for Netflix. As anyone who is not a first time reader can attest, I love movies. I originally signed up for the modest 2-at-a-time unlimited (no monthly limit) plan for about $14 a month. When my “queue” of movies for which I was waiting reached 200, I upgraded to 3-at-a-time for about $17/ month. Do I watch $18/month worth of movies, you’re god damn right I do. I work those Netflix couriers to the bone, and if I don’t hit my full capacity I make up for it the next month. I have been hanging onto one movie: Isle of Wight Festival 1970: A Message to Love, because I am admittedly addicted to hippie music/culture. In between acts like Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, The Who, Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, Moody Blues, etc, there is actually a plot involving the appearance of about 550,000 people who came to the festival with absolutely no intention of buying a ticket. Tickets were 3 pounds a pop (which a rough calculation works out to about $30 today) and the festival promoters ended up having to let them all in, for a net loss on the festival of somewhere in the order of, let’s say $10M of today’s dollars. Anyways, the point is, if I hold onto a movie for longer than a couple days, its kind of like I’m back to being on the 2-at-a-time plan. Due to the changeover time, i.e. mail it to Baton Rouge, process, mail back to NOLA, 3-at-a-time is necessary if you want to watch a movie every day. Who would want to watch a movie every day? Someone with 320 movies currently waiting to be watched, with new ones coming out every week, that’s who.

Netflix has a rating system that allows you to rive a number of stars to movies, and it uses your rating to suggest movies to add to your queue. At 320, I need help adding to my queue like I need a hole in the head, but if I only watched movies I’d heard of, then I wouldn’t be able to watch a movie every day, not that I actually watch a movie every day, but if I could, you better believe I would. I’ve rated 1,457 movies. I’ve only watched about 50 since signing up, and one that I watched I didn’t finish because it was too bad. Anyways, that’s an overall average of 3.5 movies per month, which is way below my goal, but for much of that time I was on that 2-at-a-time plan. Since I upgraded about two months ago I’ve seen 20 movies, at an average of ten a month. Let’s do the math, 12 months of $14 a month saw 30 movies (there was a transition period of about a month when I moved, and they sent a bunch of movies to the ghosts that were living at my house, so we’ll just chalk up those $14 to being an idiot and excuse them from the calculations so: ) 11months X $14per = $154, $154/30 movies = about $5 per movie, which (I haven’t been to blockbuster in years so I wouldn’t know but) sounds about average. Now, since I upgraded, 2 months X $18 = $36, $36/20 movies = about $2 per movie, which is a pretty sweet deal unless you live near one of those cheap theaters that plays second run movies, which we, unfortunately, do not have her in New Orleans.

Around the same time I upgraded to the 3-at-a-time plan, I also bought an HD-DVD player, all the better to see Clive Owen’s milky complexion. What I meant to say was Rosario Dawson’s yoo-hoo-ey complexion (Children of Men was the first HD-DVD I got, Clerks II should be in my mail box when I get home.) The difference between DVD and HD-DVD isn’t quite as dramatic as the jump from VHS to DVD, but its close. What I’m not sure of though, is whether the films shot in the 7/80’s that are being released on HD-DVD were shot in high enough def for it to be worth it. It doesn’t really matter, because Netflix sends you HD-DVDs or Blu-Rays at the same price as the regular DVD’s.

I kind of want to get a Blu-Ray player, likely in the incarnation known as the Playstation III, because this business of a format war is killing me. The fact that there are tons of movies I can’t see in HD because the studio is buddy-buddy with Sony instead of Toshiba is absolute horseshit. I’ve heard that the last format war, between VHS and Betamax, was pretty much decided when the pornography industry chose, for some reason unanimously, to use VHS to distribute their wares (thus ending the prominence of the XXX theaters you see in movies.)

Age and other Thanksgiving Thoughts

Every time I see my Great Aunt Sally, she says: “Oh, I haven’t seen you since you were this (makes hands like she’s about to catch a basketball) small,” and I see her like every year. As I was leaving, she says: “It was nice meeting you.” Sally lives with my grandmother Kay, who will be 90 in January. My grandmother’s mental faculties remain intact (“If he’s (Al Gore) going to run for president, he’s going to have to lose some weight”) but she’s shrinking and arthritic. Between the two of them they manage to keep things going fairly well. My Aunt’s father (to whom I’m not related, my Dad has 5 brothers, my mom 3, so all my aunts are by marriage) is 97, and his line is: “The only people interested in living until they’re 100 are people in their nineties.”

One of my cousins is 29, on the cusp of no longer being a “twenty-something.” When he asked his father, who’s quite a character, for career advice his response was: “Propecia.” My brother is also 29 and is wearing his hair longer than he has since high school, and may or may not be attempting to cover up male pattern baldness.

My Uncle got Guitar Hero for his birthday. My mom was amazed that my brother and I were able to pick up the game quickly, and it assuaged her fears that a (relatively short) lifetime of (relatively heavy) abuse had screwed up our nervous systems in a permanent fashion. She was very relieved, until she saw my twelve year old cousin play, and saw just what undamaged synapses could do. My Mom, who’s hooked and will be receiving guitar hero and my old playstation for Christmas, says that since she’s known him my uncle’s always had the best toys.

I heard a few stories I’d never heard before this year, including one that started “The only time I ever took LSD two days in a row…” I love stories about 6/70’s. We had a second thanksgiving dinner yesterday at guitar hero uncle’s house, and the only thing better than thanksgiving is doing it two days in a row. I don’t know if the same is true for a “substance made in the kitchen of a Univ. of Maryland drop out, C+ chemistry student.”

One of the traditional thanksgiving activities is the family band. My brother and I are musically competent and my twelve year old cousin (who’s pretty amazing at Guitar Hero, but he’s had a lot of practice) plays the drums and his older brother, who was a music major at UI-U-C, plays the cello. He has an electric cello and a pretty stout bass rig; bands without cellos are missing out big time. We were working on Eleanor Rigby, which it turns out is a fairly boring two chord song, when I noticed that it was the same as a Michael Franti song called “Time to Go Home,” which is an awesome two chord song. We looked it up on the computer and played it for him, and he picked out the bass line instantly and we were off and rocking. Not present for the jam session were the cousins that are piano virtuosos, my father and his banjo or any of my uncles whose musical talents range from surprising to not bad for an old guy.

An old family friend was talking about music with my father when I walked up and my father accused him and myself of liking “baby-boomer music.” I happen to be a big fan of Jorma Kaukonen, and my response was “I was, after all raised by baby-boomers.” Bruce Springsteen was mentioned and I went into my rant about how terrible his Jazz Fest show was, and I attempted to describe how much I hated that show. It turns out, just before I walked up, my dad was pitched the Seeger Sessions album and I was ragging on this guy’s favorite CD. That ended the music talk and the subject moved to space travel.

In order to travel to the nearest star and back in half of a human lifespan, the energy required to accelerate, decelerate, reaccelerate, and then redecelerate (according to spell check, reaccelerate is a word, but redecelerate is not) a human is more than all the power ever generated in the history of mankind. The necessary energy could, however, be reduced by half if people were half as big, or lived twice as long.