3:14 PM
Jelly, Jelly.
Frantic piano keys, and hushed rhythms—Jelly Roll Morton squints his eye into a peep hole, and choreographs rhythms to match the unmentionables that are ongoing in the brothel rooms of Storyville in early New Orleans.
Slow, fast, fast, faster.. scales matching breaths, breaths matching scales.
Jelly’s namesake itself is nothing more than a old slang term for an erotic dance.
I guess Lap Dance Morton, didn’t have the same flair.
Jelly had an interesting penchant for the esoteric.
When he was kicked out of his home for playing piano in brothels, he claimed that his God mother took him in—and traded his young soul for supernatural powers.
He retold stories of talking glasses of water—and singing window sills.
He was an arrogant man.
Claimed to have invented jazz and hung onto his creole ancestry to the point of racism.
“There ain’t no black notes in my jazz,” he once muttered.
And when he lost everything—on his death bed friendless—again, he blamed the voodoo.
Never himself.
Always the voodoo.
11:50 AM
This is my home town—there is generally a highway there, and a sea wall.
Luckily my family is fine.
Don’t have to worry too much about storm surges here in good ole’ Baton Rouge. Being from the coast has prepped me well for these circumstances.
9:58 PM
Lovely, lovely.
Power will go out.
I’ll be stuck with candle light and time to work on a manuscript for Oxford American— My freelance writing is a hobby really, as my advertising work keeps me (happily) busy. Haven’t written in ages.
Did creative briefs and general upkeep all morning.
This will be a nice opportunity.
Assuming this bad boy will die down a bit before it reaches the good ole’ Red Stick.
For now just heavy wind hitting the window.
10:23 AM
BRB. Hurricane.
Though—I’m quite inland where I am. I shouldn’t have much to worry about.
Like most families on the coast mine went through a lot with Hurricane Katrina, I hate even talking about it really.
Most people don’t realize that Katrina hit Mississippi, dead on. The levees broke in NOLA, hence the devastation there—but coastal Mississippi towns were just..gone. Wiped out. Nothing.
Anyhow, I’ll be fine where I am now—just nostalgia, that’s all.
2:52 PM
Baton Rouge.
You’re growing on me.
7:58 PM
Louisiana Well-Represented at Hangout Fest (...Or, how I became a Louisianan in Gulf Shores, Ala.)
Article I wrote chronicling Hangout Fest, Randy Newman, Sunburns, Frenchmen, and Geographic identity crises.
1:59 AM
