Sometime during week six I ran into Dave from class last quarter in red square. He and three other guys where hanging out in the sun shine shootin the shit, so I swung by to say hi to Dave. He and the three cats, he told me, are doing an ILC this quarter and he asked me if I wanted to be interviewed what its like being an Evergreen student, also adding at the sight of my guitar if I wanted to record a song as well, I said yes. He texted me later that week informing me that he had reserved four hours in a studio in the media lab under the library for yesterday Friday the 15th 1-5.

So I showed up at one and we got going around 1:30ish and by the end of it had recorded eight songs, with only three first takes of the first track and knocking out the other seven in a single take. I recorded four originals and four covers and intend of making and releasing a demo. It was my third time recording but only second time in a studio and it was my first time doing so on my own.

We miked up the amplifier and ran my vocals through the analogue mixing board before going into the computer. Its pretty cool because the mic I used to sing in to also picked up the amplifier from behind me causing the guitar to sound like two, we put effects on the guitar track and allowed the space where the bleed over happened to act as a “natural” guitar backing under the miked guitars track.

Hes going to spend a few days producing a few different versions of each song and then Ill compile them on to a cd and will begin to distribute them to the class during my presentaion. Yesterday was so much fun and I cant wait to do it again! It honestly was the hardest I’ve worked in a looonnnnggg time. But so worth it.

Something I really noticed in New Orleans was what seemed to be a need for identity, something I don’t really see in Olympia. What I mean by Identity is like there, in N’arlens, in all the stores it seemed there where L.S.U(D) merch, or something about Mardi Gras. I suppose because there isn’t much else down there for them other then Mardi Gras and the French Quarter, and the Universities, they really don’t give a fuck about nothin’. Like I’ve said before the streets are neglected and what construction I did see (outside the Quarter) was just standing dinosaurs in sandbox. I suppose Im being objective as an outsider, I do really love it, I would like to go back, but its just a fucked up place. I guess everywhere you go out side of the “Cascadia” region seems like a fucked up environment but it feels like those who cant get out just wallow in their sorrows by fucking and getting disease, drinking to oblivion on the streets (its not illegal to walk around drinking as long as its in a cup or something that wont break… Im going back when I’m 21., I have to say, a lot of people told me to be careful and watch out for hostility, of all the things I really didn’t feel like I was in a hostel city, it felt more sad and pathetic than anything.

(Click to see full pic)

I realize I haven’t said anything about my readings, so here it goes. I added some while down there, Friday on our way into the quarter we stopped at this book store that he regularly goes to to pick up a copy of Stranger in a Strange Land and One Dead in the Attic, you can read about them in the readings section. I began by reading Truman Capote. Starting with a story called Shut a Final Door; about a man who is desperately escaping New York, trying to find a way out from all the bridges hes burnt on a suicide mission to fortune through the advertisement industry. Inevitably leaving New York for the strange New Orleans, where he thinks he can never be found. After meeting an older woman with a club foot on the train, their paths cross at a hotel bar, which he has been denied a room due to a full house so to speak. The two drink and share their stories, in telling her of a poem he plegerised in a high school magazine the final line of the anonymous poem is “All acts are acts of fear”. This I felt was a profound explanation of the human being, all our acts, whether good or bad, are done because we have fear towards something. The fear I was feeling was to actually go to New Orleans, some place I have never been, under the impression I was going to be more or less doing things on my own. The man in the story’s fear was staying in New York. He found refuge in the madness of New Orleans. There was a passage about arriving in New Orleans by train and having this feeling of reaching the end of the world. Though I came in from the sky, it did feel like meeting the edge with the expectation of falling off again. The story concludes with him receiving an anonymous call from some lady, while he was in the room with the older woman from the bar, and  collapsing into the inner walls of his mind to escape while the older woman comforting him like a mother to an infant.

Another book I read while I was down there was Stranger in a Strange Land. I started reading my cousins copy but got my own on Friday. I havn’t read much since I got back but the story is of a martin from Mars who’s parents where human but he got left there on the first manned mission to Mars, roughly twenty years later he returns back to earth. Ill end my description there, other than adding his name is Valentine Michael Smith. I chose to add a hard sci fi classic to my trip because the story is about a stranger on a new planet and being in New Orleans I gotta say I cant believe were apart of it as a county, and for that matter on the same planet. It is a whole other world down there, I really want to go back and stay for a year or so, really get into that bitch and see what the fuck shes really about, I got a taste and I gotta say as weird and sad and fucked it is, I see why people love it.

I honestly didn’t write much while I was down there because I was kinda in a creative slump. I did get turned on to a lot of groovy music, and I learned Gary Numans Down in the Park and Zeppelins Ten Years Gone and Your Time is Gonna Come (Ill try posting audio but if not its gonna be part of my presentation so don’t worry). I fucked around with some lyrics and a couple chord structures and when ready will post, will also play too.. And a- yeah its been cool, I got a book when I got back that’s like the bible to the music business and how to make money in it, and I’m kinda grazing through that cause its a goddamned boat and more full of info!

My brains kinda saturated from reading the bible so until next time this is Mick Elston signing off….

The most savory  part of New Orleans was the food. This was my feast of friends:

Sunday; Soft Shell Crab Po Boy at Parasols I wasn’t all that hungry, airplane rides fuck my appetite up, it was good though. Then they suggested cafe ole and beignents at Cafe du Mond as a way for me to see the city or at least Jefferson and St. Charles ave at night, and I love coffee so I was all the way in on this plan!

Monday: My first real day in New Orleans the french quarter so for lunch we went to Krystals for Cheese burger sliders which are like White Castles but better. For dinner they explained to me that back in the day Sunday was the day for laundry and usually they would make Red beans and rice cause it was easy and simple, just let the beans boil all day while doing laundry and by the end of the day it was ready so in homage to that they made me homemade red beans and rice that was so dank it almost hurt.

Tuesday: Double cheese burger with chili on rye at Chameleon Cafe, a great joint good food, great environment..

Wednesday: Made Pizza for my cousin’s

Thursday:  I have no recollection of anything going on this day but maybe pinball and some reading..

Friday: Had lunch and dinner at the New Orleans Gumbo shop; Lunch Blacken Chicken salad. Dinner Chicken gumbo… so fucking good!.. Funny story my cousin and I were walking around the quarter and decided  to get lunch, so he takes me here and says “shh Meir (short for Meredeth) loves this place and wants to come here for dinner so if we do act like you’ve never been here”. So I agree and we go about lunch and carry on with the day til we meet up with her and she suggests getting food, at The Gumbo Shop, but doesn’t remember where it is, right next door to the shop is a place called Flirty Girl, we had stopped in before getting food so I could get my girlfriend something, so I mention that its next door there cause my cousin told me how much she loved it, Meir believed this, so we go in to the restaurant and its the same waitress from lunch. My cousin is walking in front of me and his fiance, I was showing her the elephant bangles I got my girlfriend. Any ways he being in front indicates to the waitress that we have not been here before and she plays along, giving me a wink as we take the seats we had for lunch, in the moments of deciding what to order, we all knew the gumbo, my cousin brings up the Blacken Chicken Salad, “I hear its deeeviinne” His fiance just kinda looks at him like hes crazy (the same way she dose all the time) and suggests He order it, but we all order the gumbo and half way through he mentions “Oh I shouldn’t have had so much earlier, I can make room!” then we told her about lunch and we finished our dinner had a second helping of the bread pudding (sooo fucking good) we had also had had that at lunch, then proceeded to go get more cafe ole and beingents at Cafe du Mond.

Saturday: We where spouses to go to a crayfish boil but due to the weather was postponed til next year so we went to Saucy Barbeque somewhere in Jefferson, it too was delicious there Beef ribs where high and far out on flavor!

Sunday: After a long day of sunbathing and watching them garden being it was the nicest day in New Orleans, well technically Jefferson, we went back to Parasols to get some more Po Boys this time I had a spicy sausage.

Monday: For lunch went to Chicken and Watermelon off Claiborn, got a 20 piece of wings, he was kinda reluctant to go at first but then I asked where his will to be weird was and then we went. He and I where the only white people in the place, it was my first time experiencing being in a place where I was the one of two white people, this sounds silly but its true, in Washington Ive never experienced that before.. And for dinner I made pizza for them again.

Tuesday: My last meal in Jefferson Louisiana was a burger from some joint that barbeques their burgers for fast food, it was probably the best fast food burger I’ve ever had.. If I lived down their for even six months I would probably eat meals my body weight every day and develop diabetes. Fucking hell over every thing I enjoyed about Jefferson/New Orleans, the music, the architecture, the history, the corruption, I absolutely love the food.

As we walk up to the bank of the river my cousin explains to me you don’t talk to the people who ask you “I bet I can tell you where you got dem shoes…New Orleans Louisiana”, about two seconds after this picture was taken..” I bet I can tell you where you got dem boots…”

As the plane decended in broad sweeping circles above the muddy Mississippi, the elder couple next to me pointed out the fact that the river cuts an unusual curve north, south, west, then north again around the city which caused something in the city planning to fucked up (this my cousin would verify forty minutes later on the car ride home).

“The streets”  he says “run in a bicycle spoke out from the center (the river) and the side streets run in a curve across the main roads”.. hmmm no foolin. I really couldn’t tell. The south is a very flat place around the coast, and though this is my second trip to the south, first going to Florida. New Orleans is a whole other strange beast.

In two of the books I am reading; the first “Why New Orleans Matters” and the second book which I picked up and added to my list while I was down there, “One Dead in the Attic” both start ( One dead in the Attic is all about, actually) the hurricane Katrina back in 2005. Now when I was down there, about ten years later, at first sight I had totally forgot about the disaster that happened when I was knee high to a grass hopper, so the streets looked like a demilitarized zone, there was construction on almost every street in the Jefferson Parish area, thats where my cousin lives off the Jefferson highway across from the Lowes.

We where driving down the streets of St. Charles Avenue  on the second day and the road was beat to shit, there are all these nice houses, tall live oaks which I was told have a record in city hall where every oak was documented. Oh yeah, all the trees and powerlines and gates and other random tall petruding objects where infastated with a fake spanish lichen that grew in long plactic beads from the holy harvest of Mar di Gras… Where was I?..

Oh yeah, the decrepit roads! Damn, the roads are almost all battered to some extent, except this one night my cousin and I where leaving the Quarter and got lost en route to this psychedelic place called the church of pinball… Ill tell you more of that later, we drove through this nice, kinda not well light neighborhood where there where these newer houses and a nice paved road and my cousin looks over at me and he says “Hey see these houses? This is the ghetto of New Orleans”… No foolin.

Once I got off the plane we went back to his place. Showed me his pinball machines, I’m thinking about getting one now, their pretty bitchen and this one from the mid sixties called Williams Expo is the best, I hold the second and third highest score on there, beating his second highest and his fiances highest. So we shot pinball and the shit on music and art, that was mainly the topics of conversation, until his fiance came home, she’s studying gastro something at Tulane and interning at another hospital down there.. Anyway we went to this place to get Po Boys and let me tell you a soft shell crab (and the hot sausage) Po Boy, its too bad there are no Po Boy shops in Oly, that is what we are missing…

Alen de Bottoms ideas of ego loss and realizations at the end of “Art of Travel” are important elements to understand while both reading the page, safe at home cozied up with a coffee or a beer, or while out in some foreign land watching the lightning dace across the sky. “There was always more in the world than men could see, walked it they ever so slowly, they will not see it no better for going fast. The really precious things are thought and sight, not pace.” (218).

We as a species need association to avoid feeling isolation, and as our worlds grown and new technologies come out the isolation between thought and sight against pace has grown more and more. Little fragments of life just pass us by and even though we can feel connected to something by just taking a quick snap shot of a groovy building or some other shit that we find intersting, and we can post it to social media it has not truly satisfied our being. We become isolated in thinking we are associating but the point that de Bottom makes is that even though we have these great things that could help us, we neglect the time to really see what it is we a looking at, “…and a man, if he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.” (218).

This to me is like Timothy Leary’s ideas of his book “The Psychedelic Experience; A Manual on the Tibetan Book of the Dead”. In the first Bardo called “The period of ego-loss” he describes “the conscience-expantion process is the reverse of the birth process, birth being the beginning of game life and the ego-loss experience being a temporary ending of game life.” (37) If we look at it not as a psychedelic trip but a physical one, the “birth process” would be like the planning of the trip, the beginning of the plane ride (ect ect). The ego-loss experience would in effect be what de Bottom states about man and his being. As well as this the ego-loss process is encourage by de Bottom through the whole book, he constantly reiterates the fact that while abroad do not fall in to “tendencies” you would have at home. Dare to see, dare to live, dare to do something different other wise your time will not be spent properly and while I am on my trip to New Orleans I will every day try to do this for my self.

Ego-loss can truly be achieved if he or she is willing to step out of them selves and just exist and be as they are at that moment, not imposing any ego games upon them sleves. It will be hard and you may or may not e able to achieve it, but through constant thought and awareness to all thats going on and not getting too fixated on bullshit things, it will come as easy as breathing or walking, one just needs a little time and patience.

Like a drop of colored water on to white porous paper, ethnomusicology starts in a place you’d think it’d start. With music, of corse, but as soon as that drop absorbes in to the page, the music you focus on soon too bleeds out and stretches beyond what you thought, like a blind star of fortune with individual reaching rays. And as you dwell deeper and become more submerged you find there’s far more going on then just music.

To the people of Accura in Ghana their music and dance are a sacred force that move and breathe with each other. To them the drums sing and have a language they know and understand. Its more then just communicating to the dancer where they are on the beat but the actual pitches have words and phrases associated with the phrases from the drums.  In the PDF “Soundscapes” from Kay Kaufman Shelemay, its talked about a certain drum, the Atumpan. This drum is in a goblet form (as Shelemay puts it) and it is built in pairs of two, one male and one female to reflect the strength of the relationship between men and women in the Akan culture. In this way the music is heard and felt on multiple levels of emotion and knowledge.

“If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of the quest-in all its ardour and paradoxes-than our travels.” Allan de Bottom “The Art of Travel”. If our lives are dominated by this search and if the means of this happiness we seek is through travel, I wonder how and if the people Accura found their happiness… There land was found in the fifteenth century and since has been visited, colonized, and liberated. But it has been impacted significantly since the Ga people first found it. And it continues to change and become more and more and one day soon it will be like an American city like Boston.

In reading “the Art of Travel” I have been putting my forehead to the grinding stone to try and make connections and find glimpses into what I should (or shouldn’t) be doing on my travels to New Orleans. Page sixty seven in the book starts the chapter of  the Exoitc, and in it de Bottom talks about the Strange vs. the Familiar, his example is of a directions sign in an Amsterdam airport and how the sign was a strange color yellow, and how if the sign had been made in his home land or some other different place it would be yet a different sign, but only so slightly as to keep it similar but slightly dissimilar as well. This made me think of the drum maker in Ghana, and how he uses local materials; local seashells, metals, leathers, and most importantly the woods used and how if this same drum was made here in the pacific north west or back east in Boston, down south in Florida or New Orleans across the pacific in Hawaii, would it be the same drum, granted no two drums are the same but could it behave, talk, look, feel, Sound like the same drum he made in Ghana, or even would a Ghanaian drum maker even recognize it as the same membranophone?

I say through travel you can find happiness, wether it’s a travel on the physical plane or a travel back through time in a traditional folk song battered on the old drums from a time before your grand parents roamed the earth you can find something somewhere what ever it is, and find happiness in it. In ethnomusicology you take a broad look at what makes things happen with in the music and if you keep focused on the big picture and don’t let your self get diluted in the bullshit happiness will run in a circular motion.