xxx
I watch Travolta, then Scarlett Johansson, walk past places I knew, places I've seen, and realize that they're no longer there, not in any meaningful way. The musical culture depicted in the movie... it's not there anymore. Destroyed. All gone. Nothing left but a Disneyfied New Orleans, purged of what made it one of the great cultural cities of the United States, and one that is still surrounded by rotten levees patched with sand that will break when the next moderate-sized hurricane hits.
Anyhow, the song above is by Grayson Capps, a New Orleans musician. It's not one of his best songs, go to Youtube and search for his name for better songs, his music is what New Orleans was, a mixture of blues and jazz and rock and roll all mixed up into one spicy gumbo. But this particular song is a lament that still is not being heard. A great American city was destroyed by neglect and incompetence, and what little rebuilding has been done by locals with whatever scrap they could scrape together. There is a trillion dollars to bring "democracy" to Iraqis, but not a dime to bring safe levees to New Orleans. And nobody seems to care, or give a damn, or see a thing.
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
yeah, i thought it was a decidedly two star (maybe 1 and a half). with a predictable script and performances. still, new orleans, the lost city.
ReplyDeletei'm afraid she's gone for good my penguin friend. i haven't been able to bring myself to visit or even drop in for a look.
a friend of mine for many years is from there. he has asthma and has been warned that the molds and other noxious stuff that has been left to fester and rot in the lower ninth could quite easily kill him with his first breath of home. so, he hasn't gone.
until i can strut on a tuesday morning, with the tchapatulas singing out taunts and creative insults to the other "tribes" fuck it. i ain't going.
i have no desire to see a republican epcot center bullshit version of "neworleansland" nor do i wish to sample their "bourbonstreetexperience"
fuck that.
fuck them.
i'd rather mourn.
One of the things the movie did get right (insofar as it's possible to get something like this right in a movie, a movie has to simplify things pretty much by its nature) was the general musical culture, the way people would get together and bullshit and jam and knew everybody in the business and the way the city would just suck people in and they'd stick there even though the place was a dump, really. And the too-early deaths from too much booze and cigarettes and the general toxic nature of living in a moldy swamp drinking water out of the nation's biggest sewer, that was too real too, sigh. But then, that's one of the things you'd expect to be gotten right given that it was based on a story by Grayson Capps' brother and most of the extras and minor characters you see in the film are actual New Orleans musicians (indeed, Grayson Capps is one of the extras if you look closely). The sound track to the movie is pretty good too.
ReplyDeleteSo anyhow, it's hard for me to objectively assign any star rating to the movie, because really, how do you assign a star rating to a funeral? That's what sitting through this movie was like for me, like sitting through the funeral of a recently dead friend. In the end you just sit there remembering what is gone and will never be back again. Funny how that works.
-- Badtux the Louisiana Penguin
I don't think it would do any good to build new levies, they were told not to build that town there when they built it. And ever since then they have wanted the rest of the country to help them when there was trouble over the years.
ReplyDeleteMove the damn town a few miles, nature needs that area anyway. Rick gave me LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD to watch, sounds like lots of action.
As I've explained to you in the past, BBC, New Orleans is located in the only possible place for a port on the lower Mississippi. You can't build further downriver because it's even worse off than where New Orleans is built, you can't build further upriver because it's even swampier and lower upriver (that's why they built the Bonnet Carre Spillway there to connect the Mississippi and Lake Ponchartrain, duh!). And if you go above the Bonnet Carre Spillway, the river gets narrow and fast-flowing and you can't get ocean-going vessels up there.
ReplyDeleteIn short, learn some geography. The City of New Orleans and its surrounding port and industrial area is where it is for a reason, and there will always be a city there, because any nation has to have a major port city at the mouth of its largest river to handle trans-shipping river traffic to ocean-going vessels and vice-versa. That's just how economics works. New Orleans benefits the entire nation, not just its immediate vicinity, and it makes sense to require everybody that New Orleans benefits to have some responsibility for protecting the place.
- Badtux the Louisiana Penguin