mills
My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.
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Homes in flooded, post-Katrina New Orleans.
A case in point of Will’s exceptional memory: more than a year ago, on March 6th, 2008, I posted a photograph and wondered at the photographer; at the time, I wasn’t able to determine the source, which frustrated me as I considered it one of the finest examples of beauty in disaster to emerge from Katrina.
Last night, Will emailed me -from across the room- to let me know that he’d stumbled across the photographer’s site. It is by Benjamin Krain, whose work is just wonderful.
Sidney Bechet - When the Saints Go Marching In
Last week I made explicit my wish that Saints games not be so heart-stopping as the victory over Miami was; once again, the universe has demonstrated that at best it is indifferent to my desires. Last night, Abs even got into the game, experiencing roughly the same palpitations during the final quarter that I did.
As happy as I am for the Saints to be 7-0, I’m happier to share some Bechet.
Fig. 1. Astute viewers will note that ordinarily, Hobbes carried Calvin.
One thing I particularly like about Abby is her incredible emotional resiliency. On Saturday night in New Orleans, on an evening in which I was peripherally involved in a startling assault and we were digested and spewed out by the monstrous crowd on Frenchman street in the Faubourg Marigny, a very drunk girl fell through a sign and they both crashed onto Abby’s little foot, breaking it.
Despite being crippled by pain -see here for the amazing bruise- she was in good spirits as the evening wore on, maintaining that her foot would be fine. The next day, at the most amazing clinic in the world, we learned that it will not. Abby is uninsured, has no car, and works as a waitress while attending school in San Francisco, so the coming months will be trying.
On the other hand, it means she is staying with me for a few more nights, boot and all. Here are our Halloween photos. Note in particular that my best friend went as Jack White, who tried to steal my girlfriend: tangled webs and so on.
One of the most famous of E.J. Bellocq’s photographs of prostitutes in New Orleans’ Storyville district, where sex work was legal from 1897-1917. See below for more.
Ernest Belloch Photographing a Prostitute, George Schmidt.
When Abby was last in town, she, Will, and I visited the gallery of George Schmidt, a New Orleans artist, to deliver a canvas stretcher. He treated us to a polymathic and monological tour de force as we wandered around his building, discussing the very high and the very low with equal enthusiasm. He laughed at his own constant and usually ribald jokes while showing us a work in progress I’d give my car for.
The painting above is of a man more commonly known as E. J. Bellocq, well-known for his photographs of prostitutes in Storyville, a district in which New Orleans legalized prostitution from 1897 through 1917 (as is always the case, the goddamn Feds eventually interfered for their own selfish reasons).
His photographs are amazing; this is from 1912:
Bellocq and Schmidt are both part of and concerned with the idiosyncratic and unusual side of New Orleans that is inimitable; Schmidt’s current painting treats in a manner both comic and reverential -the archetypal New Orleans Catholic stance- of the city’s four holy figures in a scene I can scarcely describe. Hopefully I’ll be able to share more on both of them in the future.
Will and I had the pleasure of meeting the wonderful Locomotive Hootenanny, who goes by Elizabeth when not posting amazing paintings and photographs and stories; she traveled to New Orleans with her friend Betsy, who was also a delight, and her friend G.J. Echternkamp, about whom I have a complex and possibly unbelievable story to tell at some other point.
In any event: we went first to the Gumbo Shop, where we ate with Kevin so long ago, and then on to the Marigny and eventually to DBA, where two surprisingly good bands, both organized around the same washboard player, were performing. After passing a few hours there and running into an old friend on Frenchman, we headed to Pat O’Brien’s, which was deserted but whose flaming fountain made a positive impression; noted GJ, “It’s the first time I’ve ever touched a paradox.”
Unfortunately, it was a short and very late night, but it was awesome. Someday in the distant future, when we’re all long dead, I’ll have my executor post the audio recording I made of the most revolting conversation ever conducted in the French Quarter, which -it should go without saying- was quite an achievement.
Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans
Linked above is my aforementioned review of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a poorly-titled but richly enjoyable Werner Herzog film I saw in Telluride. I hope you enjoy it. Incidentally, Cage and New Orleans combined to form some of my favorite scenes in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart.
I was just rows from Herzog and from Cage, and later tried -and failed- to approach and thank Herzog for working in New Orleans. I think I must have been star-struck, as they say.
Despite not understanding movies very well, I’ve previously reviewed District 9 for Filmosophy.
Dad’s living room, slightly more than one month after Katrina. Will and S. and I went to New Orleans to take photographs for insurance purposes.
New Orleans Photographs (No Record of Who We Were)
Photos from this recent trip to New Orleans are here; included is a dinner with Mandalay at the Green Goddess, a classically bizarre New Orleans backyard collection of oddities, some toy soldiers, and mud.
Notes:
1. While I loved Tess Lynch’s essay on the ostensible Internet archive, I think no such archive exists: the ever-increasing availability of documentary material has done little to make us intelligible to one another. Against the mysterious context of past decades and captured only in reality-obscuring photographs, the best of which remain performative and partial, all selves remain hidden. Film helps little; even diaries do little: this is an enigma, but it is the case that reality resists comprehension in particular while in general its repeatable laws seem to encourage it. We can understand and simulate the structure of things, but not their specific occurrence.
I read her essay while working on these photos, and was reminded of the Kafka story I posted here: nothing escapes from the self, not with all the technological effort imaginable. Even if we penetrate our various outer layers to capture and display some interiority, it then cease to be interiority: it becomes the outer-self, and our ever-retreating essence is buried even deeper. This is the point of the parable: there is something asymptotic about confession, about language.
Only enacted imagination -art-, which is made wholly within us by the effort of others, can communicate from these interior spaces, and art remains as rare now as it ever was.
2. Does everyone cry when they look at childhood photographs? Why?
GPOYW. My mother showed me an album with this photo of my father and me; in it, he looks more like me than in any other photo I’ve ever seen, and we thought it amazing. Examining it closely later while showing Abby the presence on the mantle of some preserved butterflies -which are now, 27 years later, at our ranch, where she saw them and where, since she was reading Ada, I noted Nabokov’s fondness for them- I noticed that the photo is reversed.
“Chicago” is written backwards on the Jurgen Peters print on the wall; that print, incidentally, now hangs on the wall to the left of where I sit writing this. My father’s watch is also on the wrong wrist. When the image is corrected, he looks more like himself. I suppose this means my face is the mirror-image of his, reversed in its symmetry.
Here I am on a bed at our old house: 901 Jefferson Avenue, New Orleans, LA. There was a stained-glass window in that house, a shotgun camelback in the classic Uptown style. In the background you can see a dresser, then used by my parents. It’s been mine for ten years or so. Once, in a rage, I threw one of its drawers into a window and slept with cold air pouring in that guilty night. My clothes are in it now.
My father and I are here walking in Daneel Park, on St. Charles Avenue, blocks from where my parents live now. On Saturday, I went on a run with a friend down the wide neutral ground to Audubon Park and back; while crossing the street here at Daneel Park with Bayou in tow, the car that approached after the gap in traffic was my mother’s; she drove past, to Langenstein’s grocery, without seeing us.
My mother picks me up in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. I recently proposed to Sydney that I purchase some overalls and reintroduce them as a functional, comfortable form of attire for the American office laborer. This proposal has met with little enthusiasm, even after I altered it to specify that the overalls need not be blue, as above, but could perhaps be brown, as at the top.
Here is an ambiguous contribution to the theme of the day: me, in New Orleans this very weekend, with the skull of a cat. I don’t know with which side I am hereby allied, which is generally how I prefer it.
Dr. John - Qualified
I’m old: I’ve been on Tumblr for 28 years. A long time ago, I posted maybe the best song ever, but that was before they’d implemented “Following,” “Reblogging,” “Liking,” comments, or tumblelogs: you just sent an email to Marco with whatever you wanted to say and sometimes he’d send an animated emoticon back. We called that “Being on the Radar Screen.”
I sometimes think: I should repost that song, but instead I’ll passive-aggressively link to it a few times in this post, which is of a Dr. John variation on it that I also like a hell of a lot. I’ll also manipulatively mention, but with a meta-declamation that will make it at once amusing and touching, that you are ethically-obliged to like New Orleans music because of Katrina and what happened to my dad’s house.
In one year, I’ll passive-aggressively link to this other Dr. John song, too, so get ready for that.
Dr. John - Right Place, Wrong Time
I don’t see how anything involving the Meters and “The Night Tripper” could miss, but I still find this, despite hearing it thousands of times each year, especially great.
GPOYW: M&Ms are what you drink at swanky parties when you don’t drink anymore.
