Three Kings Night... An Epiphanic Interlude

I truly love the Christmas season... but by that, I mean exactly what I said. I am NOT a fan of the shopping season between the Macy's Parade (though I love the parade itself, and Thanksgiving is definitely my favorite holiday) and December 23rd.

I love and believe in Advent. Many of those who know me at least a little bit think this means that I am some sort of a religious freak who can't get passed my past as a Baptist preacher (though... of course... Baptists in general have no quarter for a season like Advent). For me, the thing about Advent is the antici... PATION. The four weeks spent waiting for the creation to be fulfilled, the time spent thinking on who and what we might be, we could be, we... CAN be. There is an exquisite aesthetic to taking the darkest time of the year and going inward rather than jumping around in a shopping frenzy in malls and stores with jingle bells blathering out of every little tin speaker.

But when Christmas comes... I want to take the time to let it seep into my bones, trickle down to my toes and then blast up through my head in a celebration of how absolutely wonderful it is to be alive. I like it to take a long time.

THERE ARE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS.

And then comes Epiphany... The day The Wise Guys arrive with the presents... and then turn around and skip out on the government surveillance program. The radical nature of extending Christmas for nearly two weeks beyond what the capitalist structure wants us to engage in, and thereby breaking it out of the standard model of greed, and craziness, and tension and into a new world of sharing and talking, and eating and drinking and laughing... THIS is the subversive nature of Christmas. This is why it's more than Santa... more than Rudolph... and even more than the Baby Jesus.

This is why it's so deeply important... and so damn much fun.

So last night, for Epiphany, I decided to celebrate with friends in the true chaos of the season, for Epiphany is not only the day The Magi arrive... in New Orleans, it's also the start of Carnival. It's the time for craziness, for openness, for life breaking through the dismal mundanity of the day to day. It's the time to have a hell of a party - with your family (that's my daughter as Jailhouse Elvis by the way), friends, neighbors, loved ones and acquaintances - on a TUESDAY night!

It's the perfect time for The King... or more accurately, THREE Kings!

It's the time to go home by another way,

Five Years & Six Beginnings... Part Three

To understand where I was on January 1, 2006 one has to start five months earlier during the last few days before I packed up, threw away, or left behind all of my worldly possessions and headed off into the sunrise for New Orleans on August 5, 2005.

[Ex]Partner showed up in the house a day early, seemingly for the purpose of messing with my mind (or perhaps hers) and she did a good job of it, but despite the amorous state of confusion we acted out that afternoon, I was still on the plane the next morning.

Friday Night August 5, 2005 I was on Frenchmen Street with friends old and new, listening to music, sweltering in the heat, and generally feeling like I was HOME. The feeling continued throughout that first weekend, when, despite the overwhelming August heat I enthusiastically joined the summertime trumpet summit known as Satchmo Fest. This feeling continued the next night, and the next, and into my first full, real week...

In fact, it lasted for three weeks, and I was on track. In that short span, I had contacted a whole collection of new work contacts, had begun work on two large projects and was well on my way to reconnecting to people I wanted to work with on my film project. I had even launched a project that I had been struggling to get off the ground for nearly ten years. August 2005 was the very best month (personally, financially, and creatively) I had experienced in years. This move was starting to look like the very best thing I could possibly have done with my life.

And then Katrina crossed into The Gulf.

The next five months were spent on the road. Two days in Hattiesburg Mississippi with ex-partner and family, two weeks with my parents in Murphy, NC and a month back in California before finally being able to return to New Orleans (though not to my apartment).

As most people already know... I was one of the lucky ones.

For the rest of 2005 I slid back and forth between the semi-vacant apartment of a friend in New Orleans, the couches and floors of friends around San Francisco and Petaluma, and the floor of my newly acquired "office" space (a vacant warehouse room South of Market in San Francisco).

And that brings us to January 31, 2005 and the night I spent in San Francisco's North Beach with a bunch of displaced New Orleans musicians. They played... I ate... we sang... and drank... and drank, and I wound up dancing through Union Square like Gene Kelly at 1:30 in the morning.

It was a truly joyful and exhilarating way to begin 2006. It was also more than a little bit manic and a whole lot depressing. Lying alone (who would have joined me!?) on the floor of my warehouse "office," I regularly barred the passageway downstairs so that the rats I could hear scurrying below would not come up the stairs and nibble on my toes (I still don't know if rats can climb like that, but I was not about to see if I could find out). In New Orleans, their cousins would frequently scurry across the courtyard of the apartment complex where I was staying and jump into the toxic pool water for a swim. While I had a Whole Foods Market nearby the office in San Francisco (where I regularly picked up a pretty serviceable version of Gumbo), most stores in New Orleans were still shuttered at the end of 2005 and predicting where I was going to track down my next meal sometimes meant guessing the corner where The Salvation Army truck was going to deliver hamburgers.

I was VERY glad to be rid of 2005... but I did not have a clue about what I was going to do next. Actually, that's not really true. I had some very good ideas about what I was going to do next.

They were all wrong.

Five Years & Six Beginnings... Part Two

New Year's Day 2005, found me once again alone in the house on Dana Street, but this time I was most truly alone.

My aforementioned partner had moved to Mississippi late in the summer of 2004 with the plan of taking care of her father and getting a PhD in education at the same time. There was a lot of talk about our still being together, but as I look at the situation from this side of the great divide, I can see that we were both either lying, or trading on false hopes, or pretending for various reasons, or all of the above. The clear reality of our life together is that it ended back in the summer of 2004. It took another year to finally break down completely, but it was really over when she stepped on that plane headed east.

2004 had also seen my daughter graduate from college and subsequently move to London. My partners and friends in the house were three cats. Two (Hobbes and Angelica) had been in residence with me/us for a long time. George, who I was taking care of for Jen while she was in London - and who definitely did not get along with the other carts - was my only real company and friend. I was turning into a "crazy cat person."

A week earlier, coincidentally (or perhaps not) on the same day as the earthquake and tsunami in Asia, I had a small seizure while working in my office at the back of the house. I awakened from the seizure confused and disoriented with no sense of the day or date, where I was, or what had just happened. The disorientation didn't last that long, but the depth of the feeling remained. I was by myself and on my own. If something happened to me, no one would find out for days, or even weeks.

I was also finding it very difficult to get work and to keep up the mortgage for the house and the car payment for partner. My months had turned into a mad financial scramble that I couldn't sustain and that I would never have made it through without considerable help from my family. I had plans to meet partner in New Orleans over Mardi Gras, a month away, and that less than stellar reunion (ugly interactions in our lovely hotel room and arguments over brunch at The Court of Two Sisters) would clearly signal the true beginning of the end of our relationship. It was after that trip that I would decide that my place was in New Orleans. I had been working on a film about Mardi Gras Indians for quite some time and the work I put into it during Mardi Gras of 2005 convinced me that I needed a greater comittment to the task and a new way of viewing things in my life. I spent several months trying to get things in order and make plans to move. With each passing day, I found it more and more difficult to remain in California in general, and Petaluma in particular.

I missed JazzFest in April for the first time since I had begun attending, and I spent long hours listening to the music on WWOZ and watching my friends on Liuzza's web cam. When that was followed by the death of Tootie Montana in June I sat in a closet on Dana Street and sobbed for most of the day.

I was totally in the wrong place at the wrong time. My nearly 30 years in California had been reduced to an 800 square foot house, a bar stool at Dempsey's, and a few friends scattered about the world. I was as alone as I had ever been in my life.

It was time to get the hell outta Dodge.

Five Years & Six Beginnings...

Earlier today, as I was journaling thoughts and plans for the new year, it struck me - not for the first time, but certainly more deeply than before - how much my life has been transformed in the last year. Walking backwards from a year ago, I was instantly flabbergasted at the way my life has been re-set in a relatively short period of time. This despite the fact that within the process, things seemed like they were never going to end.

The last five years of my life have included some of the highest and most of the lowest experiences of my nearly 55 years on the planet.

Five years ago, I was living in Petaluma, about four blocks from where I live now, but the life I was living then and the life I am living now are as different as night and day. The joy I feel now, compared to the misery I was feeling then, is as astonishing as it is delightful.

The journey in between these two points is even more incredible, while also being rather mundane. I don't want to pretend that I have had some amazing adventure (though there are many aspects of the last five years that would certainly qualify as exactly that).

The details of the last five years add a whole new level of meaning to the concept that you cannot step into the same river twice.

The experiences I have had, the friends I have come to know and to value (along with new and deeper relationships to old friends), the ways my life has been confronted and transformed, and the love that I presently feel from the tips of my toes to the center of my soul is nothing short of miraculous to me. In my comparatively short life, I have been in a lot of places (both physically and emotionally) around the world, but the last five years in which I have moved from a little house on Dana Street to a tiny apartment on Fair Street, all within the 94952 zip code have been the most profoundly life-altering experiences (with one singularly significant exception that I will talk about later) of my life.

I began 2004 in a little living room on Dana Street, my partner of 16 years visiting her family in Mississippi as she always did at that time of the year. There was nothing terribly odd about this at the time, but what I didn't realize on that lonely night was that everything I had built my life on for the last 20 years was going to be systematically obliterated over the coming twenty months. We had come through the struggles of raising children, battling cancer, fighting back the difficulties of financial distress and the basic frustrations of our difficult personalities. We had shopped for, bought, and decorated a house together, only to find ourselves trapped inside it like doomed sailors on a becalmed sea. The times when we couldn't keep our hands off of each other had transformed into several years in the same bed when we never made love once.

The stage had been set (we had been working on our respective parts for over ten years) and most of the coming actions had already been determined.

Things were about to get crazy.

Richard Does It Again!

What might just be the best concert I saw in th last year rolled into the little Mystic Theater in Petaluma Thursday night when Richard Thompson played solo to a packed house.

One of the most amazing moments of the show was when he covered Britney Spears' "Oops I did it again." This clip is from the rendition he did during his "Thousand Years of Popular Music" tour. In one single song he revealed what an incredible story teller and musical interpreter he is. His take on the song flat out made it his own. If you had not previously heard it by Britney it would be impossible to think of it as the goofy pop song she created it to be. In Thompson's gifted hands it transforms into a dark amusement etched with playful evil.

It SOUNDS and FEELS like a Richard Thompson song!

This was just one single small element of a tasty show created by a consummate artist who is completely in command of his instrument, his song writing, and his voice.

Thompson reveals insight, darkness, playfulness, sadness and joy at each moment of the concert. He plays tennis with human light and shadow and in doing so brings to musical fruition a complete sense of what it means to be human.

This is why we live.