NEW ORLEANS | It was my first time in New Orleans. Maybe I should start with that. I had arrived on a Wednesday, a full five days of work awaiting.
I had the most superficial understanding of New Orleans. Café Du Monde. Drew Brees. The Superdome. Katrina… and the scenes from the aftermath. Bourbon Street. That Simpson episode where Marge plays Blanche DuBois in a musical adaptation of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” And so on.
This was my New Orleans.
And then came Tuesday afternoon. My last day. For five days, I had covered basketball, tracking a Kansas team that wouldn’t wilt, and a Kentucky team that couldn’t. For five days, I had walked the streets of the French Quarter, all of its tackiness and beauty and charm blending together in some strange concoction of Bourbon-infused wonder.
They call this place Le Vieux Carré … the Old Square. Or at least they did.
I attended a creative writing class a couple of weeks ago. It was fairly basic: the stuff you’d learn in the first few sessions of an introductory college Fiction or Creative Writing class, all scrunched into one employer-funded weekday away from the grind of the office. Aside from its value as a reprieve from the stress of everyday, the class granted me a newfound obsession, triggered by a prompt to write about a memory of a pivotal life moment.
What and how and how much do we remember?
The best tacos in Texas and possibly the best in the United States because Texas probably has the best Mexican food in the country (just guessing) are served at a Dallas gas station underneath a highway and nestled in a region that contains four liquor stores within two square blocks, along with a drive-thru daiquiri store. The place is called Fuel City and its tacos are authentic Mexican. And they are the best.
This is not some assertion I have blindly tossed into the blogosphere as though my words were medieval flaming arrows peppered with significance. They lack all of those ingredients. But people with authority have made similar comments. In 2006, Texas Monthly’s food editor called the picadillo taco the best in the state. This matters quite a bit. Many Texans believe in only three printed publications: the bible, Texas Monthly and any jumble of written words that bashes the Koran. So, yes, Texas Monthy writing to the state’s residents about tacos is akin to Paul penning a letter to the Philippians – IT’S NOT TO BE TAKEN LIGHTLY. Continue reading
Because sometimes you just want friends to tell you about cool things… the Brew House team offers up its weekly mix of author-supported goodness.
Endorsement: Joe Posnanski’s commenters
A few months ago, Joe Posnanski disallowed comments on his blog, one of the few blogs I consistently frequent. Normally, I don’t read too many comments, aside from perhaps the first five or six after a story on most website, and I rarely comment on any piece of work. Posnanski’s website is different. I always read the comments, and I’ve commented a few times as well.
But, yes, a few months ago, Posnanski removed the comments section from his blog. He was justified for doing so. In a post, he wrote about a particularly malicious comment he had to delete, which the commenter then just rewrote no more than a few minutes later. He decided to suspend the comments section because he wouldn’t have time to moderate. A blog without comments is like an SNL episode without “Weekend Update.” It just doesn’t happen.
His readers realized this. A few apparently VOLUNTEERED to monitor the comments for him so the section could return.
I used to study the NCAA Tournament bracket like it was the back of a cereal box and I was extremely bored while eating Fruity Pebbles. My dad would print several out at his office the Monday after the selections and then I could spend the next two and a half days, erasing and erasing and erasing, changing my mind again and again because I never could quite decide whether I should pick St. Bonaventure to beat Kentucky in the 2000 first round.
Now I’m in the real world, which means I have to provide, have to make a living so I can afford to buy vital necessities such as chocolate milk. Ipso facto,* I don’t have very much time on my hands, and I can no longer properly produce an NCAA Tournament bracket. I can, though, stay awake past midnight the day the tournament starts and make my picks and live blog about them to an audience that is only slightly larger than one that would pay to see a St. Bonaventure-Kentucky matchup. Continue reading
President Obama filled out his NCAA Tournament bracket this week. It’s become something of an annual tradition these past three years. Andy Katz shows up in a suit, hauls along one of those oversized, cardboard brackets, and Obama grabs a sharpie, delivering his picks with that trademark cadence.
This really isn’t about Obama filling out a bracket. It is, to me at least, one of the cooler things he does. Less cool that he does it on ESPN. But Obama seems to know ball, and his brother-in-law coaches Division I basketball, and basketball just seems to be a family sort of thing; one of those things he shares with people he loves.
I bit my lip a little bit and blinked hard, exhaled and read the final few sentences again, smiling as I hit the bottom of the page. I was finishing my first read-through of Parish, Parish, a 30-some-page lyric essay by Brian Lewis-Jones, a friend and former colleague of mine. The tale of a week in post-Katrina New Orleans explores the intersection of past and future, indecision and decision, loss and gain.
I love pep-band music.
No, really, I love pep-band music. It’s one of my favorites things about basketball, one of my favorites things about college, one of my favorite things about life.
And of all the months of the year, March is THE month for pep-band music. Parents and students and fans are packing gyms across the country for high school state tournaments*. And the NCAA Tournament field was unveiled on Sunday. And this means that pep bands will be blasting out their renditions for the better part of the next month.
*Spent two days in Columbia at the Missouri state basketball tournament last weekend. The coolest song I heard a pep band play: Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep.”
In honor of March Madness, here’s a collection of the best pep-band songs I could find on YouTube — with a hat tip to Pablo S. Torre.
1. So first, for obviously reasons, we’ll start with a band from VCU playing “Rolling in the Deep.”
Every Monday morning. Music so good… it must be shared.
This week: “Soma Kijana” — Sauti Sol, off the album, Sol Filosofia
[h/t “All Songs…“]
The Brew House 