Lying low:

turns out working five days a week is pretty much not as much fun as exploring the deep south and attempting to extract some half-baked cultural conclusions from DIY disaster tourism. But lo, we are back and making the best of it.

Ash and I drove to Glasgow at the weekend: me for a Coba Fynn practice and Ash for some Christmas shopping. I don't think I've ever noticed how grim Glasgow is before. As convenient as the M8 is, there's nothing like a motorway spearing through a city to give it that urban wasteland feel. The city centre manages to be both gaudy and tatty at the same time (especially around Christmas with all the lights, all the shoppers, all the rubbish and the ever-present mish-mash of architecture) and is clogged with traffic despite the hellish one-way system. It'd be almost like downtown Memphis if it wasn't for the throngs of neds giving it a higher population.

But I digress. The practice went remarkably well, given that we haven't played together regularly for a couple of months, and I'm feeling very relaxed about our next gig. We're playing as part of a Free Candy session on Tuesday the 5^th of December at the Liquid Ship on Great Western Road in Glasgow. Notionally this is an acoustic night; in reality we'll deprive Doug of his tom-toms and hope for the best.

This is all in preparation for a balls-out New Year bash at Cabaret Voltaire on the 29^th of December with the Green Day-baiting Proxy. The gig description isn't up yet, but perhaps Charlie's first draft:

Coba Fynn are a most precocious talent. Missing this chance to see them may be an error.

will convince you to go anyway.

In other news: Casino Royale really is very good; The Departed is not, and Davis has pimped a Creme Egg. That is all.

Our final destination

was Memphis for two more days before we left for home. When we arrived the weather had changed from clear and bright in Nashville to grey and overcast, and downtown Memphis was as grim as ever. We checked back into the King's Court (crack whores or not, you can't argue with $40 a night plus tax) and, with the weather clearing up in the evening, walked over to Beale Street to look for some food and drink. Asking the Tap Room's friendly barman where we could find some cheap and cheerful food, he pointed us in the direction of a place called Ernestine & Hazel's. "I've only ever been there once, and I went there just for the burgers. It's over on South Main."

So off we traipsed, taking our time to walk the few deserted blocks along Main Street with the trolley clanking past every now and again for company. A neon sign signalled the bar, and in we went. The three customers swivelled towards us from their allotted bar places and chairs and then went back to drinking. Behind the grimy bar was a hotplate tended by the barman/cook, and I ordered us a couple of beers as Ash took a table and tried to look inconspicuous.

"What kind of burgers do you do?" I asked.
"With cheese or without," he replied. We were dealing with a sort of down-home In-n-Out Burger then.
"Right. With, please."

We sat down and drank our beers, politely fending off the drunk, middle-aged divorcee who was persistently trying to draw us into conversation from the bar and tried to ignore his story of a recent shooting in the lounge upstairs. Our burgers arrived; we ate them (and were pleasantly impressed by how good they were*), downed the rest of our beers and exited stage left. I can heartily recommend Ernestine & Hazel's, with the added caveat that it should be enjoyed only by packs of people.

We had a few more drinks in the Tap Room - this place I can recommend without any reservations - and called it a night.**

The next (last!) day we decided to visit the Civil Rights Museum. On our way to our burger adventure the previous night we'd seen some signs for it and so we made our way back there through the chilly side streets of the city centre. I didn't know what to expect; I knew it was partly built within the old Lorraine Motel but that was all. By the time we finished, I was really glad we'd made the effort to go. There's days worth of material in there and we just skimmed the surface of it because we arrived relatively late in the afternoon, Most affecting is the motel room exhibit, where the room habitually rented by Martin Luther King is preserved more or less as it was in 1968, and the boarding house building across the road, where it's possible to look down through the window from which he was shot. Similarly to Graceland but in an entirely different way, the museum was an incredible time capsule of its era.

For our last night we headed back to Beale Street to hunt down some good old rock & roll. (It sounds repetitive and touristy to visit the same area so often, but we'd singularly failed to find any other areas of interest. As a case in point, a friend of Ash's had recommended an allegedly interesting neighbourhood about fifteen blocks east of the downtown area and through which we passed on the way in to the city. We duly stopped off to look around and found it crumbling, grey and more or less uninhabited. With only a couple of days left, and bereft of the car from the next morning, we took the safe/boring option!) Ending up in B.B. King's, we ordered some food and sat down to watch the show.

I wasn't overly impressed. The food was expensive and mostly fried; the music was run-of-the-mill, even if it was being played by a rising guitar genius, and the atmosphere was more office party than authentic juke joint. Maybe I missed the point, but I couldn't escape the general feeling that we were in a tourist-trap chain bar. Down, dirty and slightly dangerous it might have been, I much preferred the previous night's grungy combo of greasy burger and pool-room bar. There's still a bit of bit of my imagined Memphis to be had, but it ain't in B.B. King's.

We caught a cab for the airport the next morning to begin the three-flight marathon home. I was sad to leave, Ash was moping and despite all of the grimness that comes with inner-city deprivation and hurricane-struck coastal towns, I think I'd seen why most Americans are proud of their country.

* I have finally realised what makes American burgers taste so good. It's the cheese, pure and simple. Your humble Kraft single, both evolved and devolved from its more natural relatives (roquefort, for example) provides the necessary injection of sweetness into an otherwise savoury snack and elevates it from merely an instance of burger to its Platonic ideal. I am depressed that a foodstuff so processed as to be indistinguishable from its plastic wrapper is responsible for such a transformation, but simultaneously elated that I have divined the true nature of burger perfection.
** One thing that only struck me that night, near the end of the trip, was how expensive alcohol is in the States. Accommodation, petrol, food and cars are cheap, but beer is expensive. Factor in a tip of a buck or two per round and it's at least as expensive as the UK.

We dispatched Alabama in a couple of days

in a cross-country dash to Tennessee. Mobile provided antiquated, grand accommodation, helping us by degrees back to earth from the rarefied heights of the Quarterhouse, while Birmingham was so deserted in the Biblical silence of a Sunday afternoon that we decided to press on to the next big city. The swampy land around Mobile gave way to more mountainous and spectacular scenery as we drove north, and I was put in mind of some the more picturesque parts of the Highlands.

We reached Chattanooga as it was getting dark and found a room for the night before heading for Nashville. The next morning we asked the hotel receptionist about any notable things to do before we left, and decided to visit the delightfully unhinged Rock City as a result. It begins with a nice (if trite) walk through some curious natural rock formations accompanied by calming music piped through hidden speakers, takes you over a springy suspension bridge to a look-out point from which seven differnt states are supposedly visible, and finally leads to a fluorescent vision of Lynchian hell. The decision to build an underground grotto filled with fairytale vignettes lit by ultraviolet lamps is not one that I can understand, but it certainly livened up the visit. Take your children only if you feel the need to punish them. We laughed all the way to the car and joined I24 to head all the way to Nashville.

Nashville follows the same the downtown-and-sprawl pattern we saw in most cities, only more so: the city centre is squeezed between the Cumberland River to the south and the railroad to the north, and outside of that it's rare to see a building of more than a few stories. We crossed the river and threaded our way through downtown Nashville, then crossed the railroad marshalling yard and found a motel just on the wrong side of the tracks, so to speak. As Ash napped I took a walk to find some guitar shops I'd looked up before we arrived.

What a farce. "Music City USA" has two worthwhile guitar shops: Gruhn Guitars and the Gibson Bluegrass Showcase (i.e. the Gibson banjo factory). Gruhn had some awesome basses. Unfortunately, being a vintage guitar specialist, they sported equally awe-inspiring prices. The Gibson shop, on the other hand, was prepared to knock the odd dollar or six hundred off the advertised prices but had a terrible selection of their own range. (This theme extended to New Orleans, aka the home of jazz, and Memphis, aka the home of rock and roll. New Orleans had a single shop within walking distance of the quarter, and again most of its stock was unattainable vintage perfection or modern basses I just plain didn't want. Memphis boasted another Gibson factory with an equally limited range, and as far as we could tell, no other guitar shops. Oh well. eBay here I come.)

We tramped along the deserted sidewalks and dashed across the busy roads to Broadway, on the fringes of downtown Nashville. Buskers playing Dobros and wearing ten-gallon hats stood between honky-tonk bars with neon signs in a country and western echo of Beale and Bourbon Streets. After eating some generically glutinous Southern food in a characterless sports bar, we went looking for something a little more authentic. We plumped for Robert's Western World, recommended by a helpful record shop clerk across the street. I didn't know what to expect: we could see a band setting up, but the place was dead as yet, so we bought a couple of drinks and sat down to wait.

After a while, a few more (mostly older) couples had drifted in and eventually the band - John England and the Western Swingers - appeared. They were excellent. John introduced the band and off they went, playing what he called "Western Swing" music. Initially I thought "wow, these guys are great musicians," and as they continued and the audience grew, I found myself completely rapt. I don't think I've ever seen such an amiable band play live: they swapped places at the mic, bantered among themselves and with the audience and generally came over as the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. The attentive waitress kept us furnished with drinks until they finished a couple of hours later, and for perhaps the first time during the holiday I didn't begrudge dropping a fat tip into the box for the band as we left the bar.

We left the Big Easy behind

on a clear, sunny Saturday morning and took the coastal road towards Pass Christian. Josh, Dave and I had stopped there for lunch on our way into N.O, and I had so enjoyed the journey last time that I felt morbidly compelled to see how this part of the Gulf Coast had fared during Hurricane Katrina.

The devastation was evident even before we'd left the city proper. The highway ran along a thin strip of land with houses either side, and in most cases there was very little left of them. Dinghies, yachts and even what looked like some fishing boats were stranded along the road, along with piles of rubbish that on closer inspection appeared to be the entire contents of destroyed houses, up to and including the kitchen sink. Some plots had new buildings on them - most of them stilted like the Queenslanders prevalent in Brisbane - but far more just had trailers parked beside the remains of the previous home. The trees in the swampland that ran intermittently alongside the road were bent ragged by the wind, and piles of broken limbs cleared off the road still lay where they'd first been pushed. (Is this a problem of "small goverment"? Is it the case that someone will come back to tidy up the mess left after the first hasty clear-ups or is this part of the Gulf Coast destined to look like a landfill for years to come? Is it something so minor there are no tax dollars left to spend on it? I wish I knew, because the whole area desperately needs a shot in the arm and living amongst all this debris can't be particularly morale-boosting for the inhabitants...)

We reached Bay St. Louis and then Pass Christian, taking the long way round to avoid the road bridge we'd used last year, now in the process of being rebuilt after the hurricane. Both towns were, to be honest, a mess. I stopped at the beach where we'd gone swimming last year and took a couple of photographs of the damage: the wooden shower and toilet block had gone, leaving only the metal supports standing, as had the boardwalk around it and the bench where we sat in the sun to dry off. The slatted wooden bungalows that had faced the Gulf from behind Highway 90 were more or less all destroyed and had been replaced only by a couple of Waffle Houses. We drove on to Mobile, and I was relieved to see a town that hadn't been trashed beyond recognition.

(Intermission):

we're back! There's another entry to come about the post-Big Easy part of the trip, and then normal service will resume. It's good to be back!

We spent almost a week in New Orleans,

staying in the Quarterhouse on Chartres Street. The place was palatial! We had a comically over-decorated (cf. gilt-framed oil painting of a violin-playing monkey dressed in 19th century costume complete with pince-nez spectacles) two bedroom apartment to ourselves, and it was way beyond anything we could have afforded by ourselves. Mad props must go to Ash's parents for giving us their unused time there.

We spent a good portion of the week just wandering around the French Quarter, soaking up the atmosphere while trying to avoid inhaling any of it. The eye-watering eau de Rue Bourbon was still in full malevolent bloom, lying somewhere evil between putrefying crawfish and stale vomit, although away from the Canal Street end (frat central) it mercifully decreased to background levels.

The quarter was quiet during the week, and if anything was more welcoming than last time I was here. We pottered around museums, gawked at some of the landmarks and emerged blinking (and weaving slightly) into the afternoon light after stopping for the occasional restorative Hurricane. In the evenings we stuffed ourselves silly with gumbo or some other death-by-protein banquet, got elegantly wasted to a greater or lesser degree in a suitable establishment and generally revelled in our genteel Southern surroundings. We talked to a friendly off-duty U.S. soldier who bemoaned the difficulty of getting stoned on base, listened to some jazz (nice!) in Preservation Hall, and propped up the bar in a dingy sports pub near the edge of the quarter while Ash coached me on the rules of baseball.

One afternoon we drove out to the Garden District, independently recommended to us by a few different people. It didn't seem to be much more than an affluent residential area comprised of grand old mansions, but we ambled around for an hour or so, marvelling at the gnarled old trees cracking the pavement slabs with their roots and shadowing the upper stories of the houses. If we'd been there after dark it would have been prime horror film material. A few of the houses were still in the process of having storm damage repaired, but like the French Quarter, there wasn't much evidence left of last year's hurricane.

The tourist map of the city we'd picked up (in one of the handy welcome centres sited where the interstates cross state lines) showed a suggested driving tour route including the quarter, so we decided to follow it home. After a single wrong turn off a broad tree-lined avenue, we were suddenly on the wrong side of the tracks. The houses were wooden bungalows with peeling paint, household debris littered the yards, rusty cars cannibalised for spares lay immobile in the driveways and the streets were full of people with no jobs to go to. It was instantly depressing and oppressive, and it was obvious that most of the people sitting on their faded porches were watching us as we rolled by in our ridiculous lifestyle car - I wouldn't have blamed them if they'd jumped to the conclusion (however wrongly) that we were doing a DIY disaster tour and taken a justifiably dim view of it. We found our way out and headed home.

All this sounds a bit down on the city, but the reality is that I think overall we got a far better idea of what it would be like to actually live there. We saw some of the seamier sides of it; we spent a night out in Faubourg Marigny, an area populated by locals as opposed to the tourists; we saw the bohemian neighbourhoods around Magazine and Tchoupitoulas Streets, and in visiting them all we saw that for the most part, it's just like any other city. An enjoyable one for all that!