Blog2L2
- Baldessari May 18, 2012 Derek Bridges
- Rewind May 11, 2012 Derek Bridges
- Going in the Opposite Direction May 8, 2012 Derek Bridges
- Rope Man with Cigarette April 25, 2012 Derek Bridges
Fest for Life
New Orleans clarinetist John Casimir founded the Young Tuxedo Brass Band in 1938. In the liner notes of the band's first (1958) album, Jazz Begins, alto sax player Herman Sherman is described as the "baby of the band." (For black and white photos of the band parading during this period, see Lee Friedlander's Jazz People of New Orleans).
Sousaphonist Wilbert Tilman took over as band leader for a brief period in 1963 after Casimir died. In poor health Tilman handed over leadership to Andrew Morgan and when he died in 1972, the baby of the band, Sherman, ascended to the leader position. In 1983 the band released its second album, Jazz Continues, and Sherman continued to serve as leader until his death on September 10, 1984. Cornet player Gregg Stafford took over as leader and remains so today. The roster of the Young Tuxedos over the years has included the likes of Paul Barbarin, John Brunious, Walter Payton, Charles Barbarin, Ernest "Doc" Watson, Joseph Torregano, Fred Lonzo, Lawrence Trotter, Mark Braud and Dr. Michael White. I think even Shamarr Allen played with them at least once.
***
My wife Dedra is from New Orleans and when I fell in love with her, in 1992, we were living in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The next year we moved in together and I also fell in love her jazz records. They once belonged to her jazz musician grandfather, Herman Sherman.
The two albums that most captivated me were A Night at Birdland with the Art Blakey Quintet (it never fails to amuse me when Blakey recounts how Dizzy Gillespie composed "A Night in Tunisia" "on the bottom of a garbage can") and Dexter Gordon's One Flight Up. I played that Gordon album relentlessly, especially savoring the first track, "Tanya," all 18 minutes and 21 seconds of it. The Gordon album was held together by a couple generations of tape, yellowed Scotch and gray duct, applied by her grandfather. That his hands had worn the album to such a degree seemed a kind of validation of my love for the music.
Not right
There was always something wrong with my twin brother, some little kernel of not-right. Chess knew it. And he knew that whatever was wrong with him didn’t apply to me.
Being a twin is supposed to mean never being alone. We dressed alike, were crammed into the same room, shared the same dirty little strings of DNA, but were always, both of us, alone. I took it better than Chess. Chess was twitchy and filled with violent fury. I was merely twitchy.
Stop being afraid of me! Chess shouted one time, when we were little. We were in a vast, dandelion-covered field near our house in Nebraska. Chess had come outside to play Red Rover with the neighborhood children. I was part of the group. They all stopped, the children, stunned voiceless in the presence of Chess’ rage.
I gotta go, an undersized kid said. He had the look of a boy with a career in accounting in his future. He wanted to become that accountant. He ran off.
I’ll show you, Chess said to… Continue reading
3 poems with drawings
1.
a hookah bar is opening in our neighborhood
and we young toughs flick our butts
at the Coming Soon! front window shout
while we smoke in the American way
and burn and burn and burn
2.
even now I cannot see her smile
without the stern of my heart
bashing into that same fucking rock
3.
I do not believe in walking up escalators
great men and minds have labored and sweat
in the construction of these wondrous things
that take me from the parking lot to my office
let them do the job they have been so well designed and oiled for
say I
as less patient men rush past me headlong upwards
in their dream-like speeding walks
all to the same slow fate
Happiness Comes to Me on a Wisconsin Highway. 2003.
I may have found my home here in Wisconsin. As I travel I-90 and I-94, cheese and meat shops appear on the horizon every now and again. Everything is called a Haus. Cheese Haus. Sausage Haus. When I see two on the same exit, I pull over faster than you can say “who has a big belly?”
The Cheese Haus looks full, but there’s a place called Humbird right next to it, and it has a giant painted sign that seals the deal for me: “Fudge.”
Three ladies are working the place. It looks like they’ve just opened fairly recently. There are giant display freezers, but they’re new, and not especially tight to the walls. Some things have prices, but not all of them. The cash register is brand new, and one of the ladies is working it over like she was Mike Tyson.
Continue reading
The Fascinating Case of Jose Emilio, part I
Once upon a time there was an academic department at a Midwestern University that recruited international graduate students into is master’s degree program. The program was successful and, at the end of the summer of 2011, brought in a promising student to teach and study in their program. At least he was promising on paper, but he had one little problem that would curse all of those around him: chronic gastritis. The student’s name was Miguel, but for the purposes of this post we will can him Jose Emilio.
When the sub-director of the program picked him up at the airport, Jose Emilio confessed the dark secret of his recent struggles with a daunting condition that ran in his family: gastro-intestinal dysfunction. It was true. He had to endure painful intestinal cramping and his application to the graduate program indicated that he had lower levels of gastric function than what the university required. Nonetheless, faculty concurred that the candidate demonstrated the requisite digestive skills and believed that his skills would surely improve over time.
Back… Continue reading
Woody’s Dairy Bar.
I’m steering the red SUV through endless Ohio towns. Roads are closed in a flurry here right now. The last months of construction have got me detouring through towns I’ve never seen before, and I’m turning around in many nice driveways when I miss those “No Outlet” signs.
After my third detour in three towns, I get a hankering for some ice cream. Not a big sundae or anything by Baskin Robbins, but soft-serve. I’m dreaming about soft-serve as I drive, someone dropping big dollops of the stuff from the sky on top of me. Me sliding down a big mountain of it, etc. These are the dreams that foodies always have.
Milford Center is a tiny town that is less than a wide spot on highway 4, and just as I’m blinking and passing it by, I spot a small wood one-story building on my right. The hand painted sign says, “Woody’s Dairy Bar and Pizza.”
Continue reading
Avoiding Trouble. Battle Creek, Michigan, 2003.
It’s 7 pm or so after I check into the Hampton Inn in Battle Creek, Michigan. When I drove in earlier, I was knocked out to see about 30 vintage cars in the parking lot, Fords, Chryslers, all primo condition, detailed, etc. A big sign in the lobby advertises this weekend as the National Street Rod convention.
After getting settled, I decide to run out and make some very bad food choices at the closest place with a drive-thru. As I emerge from the front door, a 50ish guy with a baseball cap comes right over at me. “Hey, are you the guy who bought the Packard?” He’s closing in, got his hand stretched out, so I have to shake it before I say, “Uh, no.”
He hooks one arm around my back and keeps shaking as he says: “Oh, shit, sorry. But you gotta see this, my pal just sold his ’44 Packard for 18 grand…I thought you were the guy…you look just like him.”
Now, this is all happening at light speed, so he’s got me away from my car and headed toward the back corner of the hotel parking lot. It’s daylight, he’s not especially threatening, and I am street tough like Allen Iverson, so after I unloose myself from his grip I keep walking along with him.
Two guys are waiting by a purple roadster of some kind. My baseball cap friend points at a fat guy with a beard and says, “My buddy here sold his ’44 Packard to some guy for 18 grand…show him the money.”
Continue reading
Capital ‘A’
As a child, I was a typical, overfed, pasty and underexercised american with a lower-case a, with little interest in anything beyond the tip of my nose. The Army, with a capital A, remade me using its not-so-subtle methods.
Standing in my new attic home, a week after leaving Uncle Sugar’s employ, peering into an oval, full-length mirror, I saw a scarred beanpole with eyes that could bore a hole through a plate of depleted uranium. Get right, soldier, I told the reflection. He glared back at me with scorn – Civilian.
Some of those little scars in my face came from my old battalion XO, a major who’d snapped at us troopers out of the side of his mouth like an old-timey movie gangster. He’d told us not to pick up anything that looked out of the ordinary maybe an hour or two before he died. We’d swept into Iraq earlier that day and were ready for adventure. Anything could be booby-trapped, the major had told us. Anything at all. With a capital ‘A.’… Continue reading
WARNING: THE FOLLOWING POST CONTAINS EXPLICIT LANGUAGE
Is It Just Me, Or …
… Is harpsichord music first thing in the morning super-fucking annoying?
… When fundamentalist megachurch preachers start running their mouths about “freedom” and “confiscatory tax rates,” does it make you want to curb stomp their pointy heads to a pulp?
… Is anyone else pissed off that these snake-oil salesmen, these atavistic con artists, make tax-free millions and have the balls to blandly announce that Jesus was actually a laissez-faire capitalist?
… When you see yet another maniacally dumb beer commercial, does it make you want to throttle the life out of the people who push this lethal swill as if it were organic produce?
Continue readingSmoking. (Cont.)
Cigarette – Blue Hotel (1994) from Bob Hate on Vimeo.
The only person on B2L2 I actually know is John Hicks. He and I met in Hattiesburg in 1985, but we’ve been pals and malcontents ever since, even though there were years in the middle when we didn’t see each other much. It was through Mr. Hicks that I was introduced to this happy online location, and I’ve had a real blast posting some minutiae and menace.
John and I now make a point to get together once a year for fellowship and ministry of the highest order. As I ease through my 50s, it’s more and more apparent to me that old pals are the best pals. (Oh, and I haven’t called him John in 25 years. I call him Chet, after the name of an ill-fated and too-loud band that he and I formed in grad school…the band was Chet. We were all Chet for a while. But it only stuck on him.)
Anyway, I thought I’d share a music video… Continue reading
Lindsey Lohan and soft-core necrophilia, part II
Despite the intent to recast the “Last Sitting,” there are some noticeable differences between the two shoots. The original sitting was shot with a soft white background, which created the illusion of sorrowful innocence, an image that also appeared in Monroe’s films. But what did we really see? Monroe was obviously stoned on a mix of downers and booze, stretched out on white sheets, hidden behind semi-transparent veils, and reclined on carpets and draped in white pearls. The photos evoke more pathos than eros because they bespeak of a “save me” fantasy. “Save me from Hollywood,” “save me from myself,” “save me through your love.” Even the new biopic entitled “My Week with Marilyn” alludes to the same tragic scenario: a woman tortured by the fantasies she has to create, and all it takes is a man who loves her to save her.
The photos in Playboy draw a parallel between Monroe and Lohan as actresses who have had troublesome working relationships, their ups and down with the tabloids, and numerous bouts with drugs and… Continue reading
Smoking.
Does anyone remember when smoking was still okay?
I hate to be such a nut about this, but I have such a nostalgic streak about SOME of the way things used to be. Not the casual racism and misogyny – don’t get sidetracked by what you think nostalgia is – but some of the items from the past that made the world seem cool.
I liked when there were no cough guards on salad bars. When that ended I just felt that everything was over, the goodness had run out. We must be slobbering, coughing imbeciles, because Sizzler now has to protect us from each other. It was like the end of the world to me.
And smoking. Everybody used to smoke. We smoked in college classrooms. We smoked at the grocery store. We smoked in bars and restaurants and on planes. Oh, yes, I know it’s a giant KILLER. I’m not an idiot. But nothing ever tasted better to me than a cigarette. And the fire, the control of fire. Fire right here in my hand. Jesus I felt like a god.
Continue reading
Winnebago.
There are only a handful of things that I’m looking forward to from this trip. I’d like to see the Grand Canyon from a helicopter. I’d like to throw a silver dollar into the Pacific Ocean. I’m hoping that I’ll find a cool diner somewhere on the side of a highway where they make giant milkshakes with cookie crumbs in the bottom.
I’d like to see some sunrises and sunsets, and I want to take a breath of ice cold air that is clean and free of whatever it is that troubles city air.
And I’m hoping that the distance from this house will make the dreams I’ve been having stop.
It’s a Winnebago. It’s 27’ long and it’s set up like a studio apartment inside. It has enough space for my books, some clothes. I have a camera and a bunch of lenses and a briefcase. And there’s room enough in this thing for a lot more. But it’s enough for now. I can pull over whenever I need to to refill the fridge.… Continue reading
“Jimi Hendrix: Bread Maker.” A Short Story by W.T. Pfefferle.
It all starts and ends with Jimi. When he began doing those hard crust rolls in 1967, nobody was doing shit like that.
- Fletcher Morgan
One time he came into my boulangerie in Marseille and you just knew that this cat had a different vibe. I did up a nice plate of gingerbread cookies for him, you know, the ones with the little raisin eyes and the big bellies. He ate two and then put the rest in his pocket for later. He was stoned, like always, but I saw him on the street later on breaking the cookies up, tasting the edges with his tongue, like you do, you know, when you’re copping some guy’s spices and so on. Sure enough next time I saw him was in America and he had the recipe down, except he was putting little oatmeal crisp hats on the men. I mean, it was just so far out that I wasn’t even mad at him.
- Reg “Skinny” Samuelson
People used to think I was Jimi’s girl, but it wasn’t true. I liked him from the start, of course, who wouldn’t? I was a sous chef in LA and I met him like anyone else, at one of those exhibitions he’d do for Fletcher’s restaurant. And we sort of hit it off. One night after we closed, he asked me to help him make some wet fondant icing. That’s something he could do in his sleep, but for whatever reason he wanted me to stay, so I did. He was sweet, very gentle. We kissed sometime later, after we were done. He just held me in his arms outside in a little rain and I could smell the icing on him. I brushed little shavings of it off his shirt and leaned up against his chest. His heart beat so slowly that it just about put me to sleep. Then he drove me back to this place I was staying at up in the canyon and we made love outside. When I woke up the next morning he was gone. And that’s how I became Jimi’s girl. That’s all it took.
- Sarah McAllister
Life’ll Kill Ya
It’s Friday the 13th and we’re all gonna die.
In the time-honored, slasher-movie tradition, those of us smoking pot or having sex will die first.
Okay, okay. These two things aren’t really connected, not in this piece, anyway. I just noticed my regular Friday post would be going up on the 13th and I thought I might sucker a few more people into reading it. (By the way, I’m a total wuss when it comes to filmic gore. I actually cover my eyes when the ominous music starts pumping and the knives, guns and chainsaws come out. Also, in terms of superstitious beliefs, the Friday the 13th thing is about as dumb as they come. Boatloads of bad things happen on Friday the 12th and Friday the 14th. You can look it up, Mookie.)
I hate to be the one to break the news that we’re all gonna die, because I’ve worked hard to establish my rep as B2L2’s Pollyanna-in-residence.
Human beings are born in much the same way all warm-blooded mammals are born. If you’re not clear on the concept, ask mom or dad for details.
Continue readingLindsey Lohan and soft-core necrophilia
Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film, entitled Brazil, comes to its conclusion soon as the protagonist Sam Lowry informs his girlfriend, Jill Layton, that he has reported her dead to the authorities. As a result, she no longer has to fear detention. Relieved, she kisses her would-be hero and responds, “Care for a little necrophilia?” After the two spend an evening together, a black-bag, goon squad kicks in the doors and hauls off both of them to a secret detention center where they are tortured until they lose touch with reality. Since Sam has already reported Jill as dead, Brazil’s totalitarian government will have no difficulty in doing away with her because she is already legally dead.
The whole notion of necrophilia came back to me back in December when Playboy released it much awaited photo spread of Lindsay Lohan, the bumbling alcoholic actress who has spent more time in jail, drug rehab and community service than Paris Hilton. Despite her inability to hold down a job other than that of court-imposed morgue attendant, she was… Continue reading
like animals
- we ate out of cans
we let the grass grow
we lived at the end of the street
we wrote earnest and pretentious poetry
we played records late
we painted on the backs of cardboard boxes
we drank on weeknights
we worked low-paying dead end jobs
we shared weed like it was significant
we romanticized the sixties
we were certain Reagan would blow up the world
we did not plan for retirement
Courage: A Short Story by W.T. Pfefferle
The channels flashed by brightly, shadowing Richard’s watching figure up against the wall behind him. A small boned man selling knives and a cheery middle-aged man with a way to multiply huge columns of numbers. Richard went back and forth between 45 and 47 for a while with the remote. He liked it that way. He never got tired.
The spiel from one channel blended nicely with the other. “Indestructible is an understatement…now give me a four digit denominator…and look at what it does with tomatoes…isn’t that something, Mike? Don’t you want your children to have that kind of a head start…never dull, never needs sharpening, ever again.”
Richard kept going, up into the fifties, sixties, and to the end at 74, the program guide. He liked 74 pretty well because a scroll told him what was coming up on all the channels. It also marked the end of what was available to him. He always stopped here before going around to 2 again. It was ritual.
He usually had the mute on or the volume very low at night. It didn’t make any difference any more, because Phoebe had been gone for nearly six months. While she had been there though, she had slept soundly. The light of the TV would shine across the living room, past Richard, and right up the white banistered stairs that led to their room. If Richard had any sense he would have been there with her, nestled in behind her, his head sharing her pillow, an arm slung low over her hips, his knee pressed up to the small of her back, breathing with her, soft, silent, sleeping through the night.
But these were different times. These were the days of malaise. He had a penchant for the dramatic, a flair, Phoebe had actually said. The malaise had captured him after she left, and for a long season, he had almost relished it. It gave him purpose, a reason to keep moving. He watched the malaise grow, and he nurtured it.
He moved on to 2 and watched thirty seconds of a movie about a guy who once was a big country music star. He pumps gas now at some black and white and beautiful roadside service station somewhere pinned into an Oklahoma plain, and one day these four young guys pull up and ask if he used to be someone.
The leader of the young guys says to this old star, “Me and the boys got a band. Big Teddy there plays the bass, and Mike plays guitar. Joe Bob on the drums, and me, well I sing a little.” They all stand sheepishly around while this old guy half squints up at them, holding on to the pumps like he’s going to fall over.
“We was wondering if you had any advice for us?” the young guy says.
“Play it like you feel it,” the old guy says and then Richard gets back on the remote.
Grace Notes
For the last eight years, I’ve lived on a farm in rural Alabama.
In the movies, when city people arrive in the country, all kinds of funny, wacky things happen.
The other Hollywood default, of course, is best typified by John Boorman’s film of James Dickey’s tremendous 1970 novel, Deliverance. (Dickey’s cameo as a redneck lawman is superb. Watch for it near the end of the movie.)
Before I became a resident of Coburn Mountain, it was college towns and big cities. Culture and nightlife were always around the corner, or a short drive away. As a writer and musician, I never had to look far for work or inspiration.
More importantly, wherever I went I made new friends. I enjoyed the estimable pleasures of belonging to a community of people who also appreciated the thrill of walking the thin line between soul-crushing poverty and bohemian splendor.
It took me a while to figure out how to be happy here on the farm. I might as well have parachuted into the Amazon basin.
When you’re used to living life at a certain tempo and volume, peace and quiet can be disorienting, daunting. Complete solitude requires a kind of mental toughness I’d never had to cultivate.
After a year on the mountain, I was ready to leave. I’d always wanted to live in New Orleans, and my NOLA friends made sure I knew the welcome mat was out.
So one sunny weekend in August of 2005, I loaded up about half of my worldly possessions and delivered them to the Uptown apartment of an ex-girlfriend, who had graciously offered me a place to stay during the transition.
I returned to the farm to finish packing. I wasn’t in a hurry. I felt like I’d already pulled the trigger. I was doing something I’d done a dozen times before, picking up, moving on. C’est la vie. Despite New Orleans’ semi-deserved rep as a cruel banana republic, I knew I’d find a way to make it there.
Continue readingPrisoner
My crimes were mostly clerical, and I readily admitted to them with a shrug. No broke weeping widows showed up at my sentencing hearing. No mothers with suckling babies, either, screaming, “You stole my life’s savings!” No press. No one showed up but my court-appointed attorney, a nervous young man who’d already developed a facial tic. And there was the judge, whose boredom was only matched by his inability to maintain eye contact with anyone in the courtroom.
Counting me, three people were present. The two cops behind me made five.
When the deputy assistant U.S. district attorney who’d been assigned my case finally arrived, ten minutes late, that made six people. He announced himself by tripping, dropping his briefcase and accidentally kicking it across the courtroom. “Whoopsie-doodle!” he trilled, and chased it down.
No one was there to weep for me. My parents had retired to deepest Boca in deepest Florida, surrounded by festering pools of wealth, chipped mahjong tiles and sun-faded bocce balls. They’d lost interest in me a decade or so before… Continue reading
Letter to My Dog, Vol. II, part II
But my remote control victory was short lived. The Electro-Doggy-Shock crushed your Alpha-male ego and it produced so much anxiety that you developed a rash, a skin condition that manifested itself with little suppurating boils and lesions on your back. My wife freaked and called the vet, who in turn consulted veterinarians from California, Nebraska and throughout the Eastern Seaboard. The goddamn vet gave us some antibiotics and a bill for over six-hundred dollars. But the worst was yet to come. The medicine irritated your bladder so you overdosed on water, draining all of the downstairs toilets, and if that wasn’t bad enough, you then pissed all over the floors. It was like having a faction of Al Qaeda based in our house, a mobile shit factory. We never knew where you’d strike next: on the wall next to the door, under the kitchen table, in my shoes, or in the hallway next to the bathroom.
And, then it all stopped.
My wife and I were wondering where we could dump your lifeless body, and… Continue reading
Hot Like Fire
Check out this video my friend Trey Deark shot of the Hot 8 Brass Band circa 2002-03. If I remember correctly, the Hot 8 were playing at a party for someone in Mystical's family. If you know the Hot 8, you know you're going to dig these 6 minutes, 17 seconds. The rest of you, you're invited to join the party.
Once Upon a Time in America
I was up early, filling water bottles and charging batteries. I checked out a few maps. It’s always a good thing to know where you’re going in my corner of Alabama, especially if you live in the middle of nowhere and your destination is even more remote.
Chance of rain, according to the forecast. I was ignoring the gray skies. Given the vicissitudes of 21st century weather, I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had started raining locomotives and Gummi Bears.
Does anyone really know what the weather is going to do these days? I keep waiting for a TV weatherperson to tell it like it is:
“Right now it’s pretty nice out there. Last time I looked out the window, anyway. The forecast for tomorrow is … (shrugs). Hey, your guess is good as mine, Einstein! It might be a beautiful spring day, or we might experience a meteorological event straight out of the Old Testament. My advice, folks, is have a few drinks and don’t worry about it. I’ve been into the Absolut since lunch, and, frankly, I feel great. [Expletive] the [expletive] weather. Back to you, Todd.”
Continue readingLetter to my dog, vol. II
Dear Dog,
It finally happened. Three weeks ago, the men in the white coats came in and took you away. They separated you from us, and they separated you from yourself. You lost your manhood, or at least your dog-hood. Never again will the world be cursed with your horrific brood. The vet and his team chopped your nuts off. It went down like a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Nurse Ratched took you away and we figured you’d come back docile as a lamb. But you went willingly, strutting with your tail in the air. After the deed was done, the lack of doggy testosterone appeared to take the edge off of you, but you fooled us all. It was just the calm before the storm.
You were chilling on the sofa when my daughter left the front door open while she went to get the mail. You must have had it planned. You saw the fat old lady walking her Pomeranian, the same old witch that you bit last… Continue reading