We Have A Gold-embossed Oxford University Latin Dictionary

How in the world do they expect historians to work when they keep putting crack right next to our desks, in the room on the way to the washer-dryer, the upstairs hallway ... EVERYWHERE!


The J.E. Leo Lemay Library of early America has been moved in, and, oh, honeys. We didn't get to bed last night until after 2 AM because we had to explore.

Bloody Bloody Andy Jackson

History Suddenly Got All Sexypants!  (That's a direct quote from the subway poster's banner that's stamped on the six-gun totin' image's ass, ripped right off from the back of  Bruce Springstein Born in the USA album, for the musical, Bloody Bloody Andy Jackson, mashed up with contempo so-called rock 'n roll.  We're contemporary as heck, ain't we.)

Originally musical only, it played at the Public. It's opening on Broadway at the Barnard B. Jacobs Theater.  I cannot express how twitterpated this show has the New York theatrical cognescenti.

History is sexy is very old news over here.

The review in the Times back in April is kind of interesting:

Don’t assume, though, that “Bloody Bloody” is a satire of a single contemporary political phenomenon. When I saw the show last May, it was the grass-roots campaign of Barack Obama that first came to mind. What Mr. Timbers and Mr. Friedman are examining is a fierce emotionalism in American politics that transcends party lines and has existed for centuries. Though the United States may have been founded on the rational principles of the Enlightenment, this show suggests that what really makes it run — then and now — is the crazy, mixed-up energy of enduring adolescence.

Idealism, resentment, a short attention span, a fear of being perpetually misunderstood and a ravenous sense of entitlement are mixed together here in one big, gawky, sexually charged package: America, the eternal teenager. And who better to lead this restless, appetite-driven creature than a red-blooded rock star?

A good description of Jackson, though it leaves out his awful hair-trigger temper coupled with great piety.

That this is opening right now while I'm so busy charting the Clay - Adams - Jackson imbroglios on the national stage in the 1820's seems almost a sign of ... well, surely, not the zeitgeist?

In any case Obama read the wrong book.  Instead of Team of Rivals he should have read a biography of Henry Clay.  The Jackson crew punked Adams - Clay just like the rethugz have been punking the dems for decades now.  It's time the dems start studying history as carefully as the rethugz.

Henry Clay

Is eating my life.

He was born at the start of the War for Independence, 1777, in Virginia, into one of the very old, well connected, influential families. Though his own immediate family was no longer wealthy, he didn't grow up in either poverty or humble circumstances -- unlike the later slant political campaigning put on his background.
He got very rich, very young, partly through his family connections, his personal relationship with Thomas Jefferson, marrying a very well doweried young woman of the wealthiest family in Kentucky, and very much through his native intelligence and astounding capacity for hard work.

He entered politics very early (notice how 'very' charmed his early life is? born into the right family is the most useful element in a person's life, even more so than being very intelligent and working very hard!), serving his first term in the Kentucky legislature in 1803, the year of the Louisiana Purchase.  The Purchase in so many ways advanced the fortunes of Clay personally, his family and that of Virginia families everywhere, as their good friend, the President from Virginia, appointed them to lucrative federal and regional offices. With secure, well-paid positions, more family members had a base by which they moved into the Territories, to Louisiana in particular. There they married into creole families and their businesses and plantations, bought and sold plantations and slaves themselves, and handled all kinds of enormously lucrative legal work, and made other fortunes through land deals.

 
Despite not being legally old enough, not yet thirty, he was sent to fill in a vacated Senate seat in 1806. He returned to fill out another expired Senate seat in 1810. From 1811 on he spent all of his adult life in D.C., in one capacity or another, mostly in the House, including as the youngest ever Speaker of the House, and as Secretary of State in John Quincy Adam's disasterous administration. He was largely responsible for the War of 1812 -- for which he is reviled to this day on the Upper Chesapeake by descendants of the families the Brits burned out back then.
 
Admitting he was gravely ill, at the end of 1851 he put in his resignation to the Senate, to be effective for the first week of September, 1852. He continued working, including arguing two cases before the Supreme Court. The Western Star died at the end of June, 1852, in D.C., the scene of his many triumphs, his mis-steps and mis-calculations, and many disappointments and humiliations, particularly at the hands of King Andrew Jackson and his slick political organization and network of newspapers.

His was the first state funeral in Washington D.C. The honors and rites there were emulated across the nation as his coffin made its way by rail and steamboat -- these routes part of Clay's grand plan of "The American System," back to his beloved Lexington, which was now, unlike in his youth, an economic backwater, thanks to steam. A long grueling journey for his son and other friends, nearly a thousand miles, in what was a brutally hot summer.

When the coffin stopped in Springfield the funeral oration for the Great Compromiser who labored to preserve the Union through compromise after compromise was delivered by Abraham Lincoln. Let us not forget that, though perhaps you cannot say as you can about Jefferson, that Clay lived on slave labor all his life long, Clay certainly lived in many ways via slave labor from the moment he arrived in Kentucky and his brother gave him the young man their father had bequeathed to Henry and taken to Kentucky.

Lincoln modeled himself in many ways on Clay -- as did just about every young politician up-and-coming, particularly if they had a Kentucky connection. But Lincoln's success as a circuit lawyer as well as a story teller in these situations were what Clay was early famous for. (Lincoln also learned about telling stories from his father, just about the only talent that ne-er do well man possessed.)

Slavery was an issue when Clay first entered politics in Kentucky and was a greater issue every decade of his political life. Every decade of his life touches on the Great Subjects that are my area of research, thus I've allowed him to eat my life.

What a picture of the U.S. over these decades I'm getting filled in.

Piety Street Studios

V did four presentations this week, three of them in two days, two in one day.  He is pretty darned beat, except the feedback is so gratifying.

The last one was a history of R&B, with the New Orleans focus, for a class of undergrad Tulane music students.  They. Went. Wild.

Now he's been in the studio all day doing the mixes for the last few songs he didn't get finished mixing in August.  He's in a pretty good mood, despite HIS computer's screen detatching from the laptop body.  Good thing a portion of the royalties have arrived at ye agent's, which they deposit tomorrow so he can draw on these for a new thing this weekend. Then we go back to MD.

I've gotten sick.  Nothing has happened that I was expecting to accomplish while here excep the haircut and seeing a couple of friends.  I'm feeing truly rotten.  And my laptop, equipped with Windows 7, which MS didn't bother to make compatible with older router protocols lost its wireless connectivity.  So I can't get online with it.  I guess I could if I jacked directly into the router or replaced the router, neither of which I feel up to doing or feel like doing at all.  Besides, then I'd have to disconnect the desktop here in NYC from the router, and maybe the new router wouldn't be compatible with this old XP Pro system.  Since I plan to be living mostly in MD for the next few months I don't want to disturb the home system right now.

Gads computer eat our lives because the goddamned manufacturers and developers do shitty jobs at their jobs.

Testing

Nothing would post all day yesterday.  Is today different?

*OFFBEAT* Does Postmamboism -- and His Nness Too, Of Course

Canal Street Gets the Postmamboist Treatment by Zachary Young.

“Postmamboism” is a word you’re probably not familiar with. For writer and historian Ned Sublette, it’s a way of looking at the world.

“It’s a term that I made up to describe what I had done in my three books (Cuba and Its Music, The World That Made New Orleans, The Year Before the Flood),” Sublette says. “I used music to read history.” He describes postmamboism as a “portable theory that places music at the center of understanding and uses music to interrogate other fields of study.” The practice treats music as a lens through which to view other aspects of human society.

This Monday, Sublette will give a talk at UNO in which he will apply his analytical methods to the cultural history of New Orleans – or more accurately, to one specific part of it. The title of the talk is “Uptown and Downtown New Orleans as Musical Plate Tectonics,” and in this metaphor, Canal Street is the fault line.

Tonight, New Orleans

So we'er back in NYC, but Himself leaves for the airport again at 6 PM for New Orleans.

Then to U of SM on Monday night.  Back to NO Wednesday, returning to NYC Friday night.  We'll head back to C'town on Monday.

Whew.

Yesterday was a grueling as expected and feared.  I was asleep by nine AM.  That happens when the day begins at 5 AM, and very much goes on and happens in-between.

So now what?  Is it NYC that's the dream or is it C'town?