Letters To Patti Ann (Chapter 2) "Into The Wind"

hello patti ann,                                                                                                   September 11, 2001  Brooklyn, NY

can you believe how life is.  it just goes where it wants.  what nerve.  sorry it has taken so long to write again.  i've been in shock since this morning when i woke up and heard the tv on in my living room.  the first plane had pierced american soil and i was all snug in my bed sleeping heavily about three miles away.  it didn't seem real until i stuck my head out the window and saw the smoke and the people running across the bridge.  i ran into one woman who had just gotten across the bridge, she was in shock.  she didn't know where she was.  then it was real.  realer than i ever wanted it to be.  this wasn't what it felt like when i studied American history.  this was frightening.  i'm strong though.  i've been in my own sort of boot camp during the making of my record.  we all knew that life was about to change.  i knew we couldn't go on cruise control forever.  I hope you're well over there.  i'll probably be moving back to new orleans soon.  it's just not good here. there are guys with backpacks on the subways.  it doesn't feel right anymore.  it would be nice to see you more.  i am of no use to ya'll over here.  no use to the kids.  no use to louisiana.  i'm excited about the challenges that lay ahead.  glad that i have them.  thankful to be free to go head to head with em.  i'll be fighting til somebody takes me.  hope you'll be right there with me.  i'll talk soon.

love,

dut

  It's one thing to make a vow and another thing to live up to it.  When Joey died in the factory explosion, life became something completely different.  I had finally gotten around the fact that grandparents die but tragedy was something completely new, well maybe not completely.  For whatever reason God, the creator or whatever you need to call him/her wanted to expose me to death.  He wanted my face up in it.  Like the time me and my cousin Mudgun were sitting with Papere and we heard a loud screech and when we got out there time stood still and there was a kid suspended in mid air who had flown off the back of a motorcycle and was plunging to his death right before our eyes.  I wondered if I would have run fast fast and dove if I could have made a play to save him.  It was a recurring nightmare for years. Rest in peace little Brandon.

  It was easy living up to vows when playing sports.  It was a little more difficult being a little smaller than most but if you wear bigger shoulder pads and work harder and have that god damn mountain on your back because of these vows, then you play big.  It's easy because we grew up with balls in our hands and that's all we had to do in Grand Point and I was much younger than Joey who taught me to throw floating passes over the defender.  What a clown he was. So funny.  I don't think I can remember him ever being mad or angry or mean to anyone.  He taught me to wear my hat high on my head and throw pitches down the pipe.  Little leaguers had no chance, I was learning from the best. The Poirrier's were well known athletes along the river and taught me  and my brothers how to dress for games and wear our baseball stockings correctly.  We invented so many games. My favorite was garage ball.  The batter stood in the garage and the pitcher just 10 feet out of it and pitched against the wall where a big square strike zone was marked by tape.  In order to get hits, we had to hit line drives and home runs had to soar really low and just carry.  I loved making all of the older ones proud.  

It's easy in sports, because your coach gets up on a table and gives you the speech of a lifetime to get you to rise up way more than you ever could on your own and then your teammates are there to boost each other up.  When my playing days were coming to an end,  I left McNeese State after a year and realized I wasn't 6'4" and that my real work was just beginning.  

  In south Louisiana, football is king, it's what we do and how we express ourselves.  I was a bit lost without sports for awhile. I loved to practice and to feel improvement and see the results. I could be quiet and just let my play speak for itself.  Louque men are traditionally pretty quiet and I wasn't much different.  I began to have all these thoughts of trying to piece the dots together....all these things I saw but I started to let it go.  The task was too daunting. I had no idea what to do with all those things I had learned in sports and life or what to apply it to now.  I think many in the River Parishes can relate to this.

The "911 Letter" was one of the last letters I wrote to Patti Ann before I moved back to Louisiana from New York but many came before.  Years before, when I first moved to New York, Patti fell ill with meningitis and lost her arms and legs just like that.  Those beautiful legs were gone.  I was pissed.  I mean it was enough to take one kid from his mother but to almost take another and leave her so helpless!  It was hard when I went home to visit and I saw her for the first time.  

  When I went back to New York I began writing letters to her.  What do you tell someone who just lost so much?  I knew I needed to be there for her somehow but in the end she was there for me too.  Looking back, in a way, I became the coach standing on the table in tears trying to will his team with their backs to the wall to get on the field and play.  I was on the table for both of us.  I wanted to express all these things I was seeing but didn't know how and it would take so much strength to get through the insecurities of being a guy from Grand Point, Louisiana in New York making a record for the first time.  When I was getting weak and the years were passing since my vows, Patti became the person who wouldn't let me turn from them.  She held my hand as I told my Grand Point story and helped me to believe in it, to believe that we were artist too. Americans.

  Everyday moments became the moment right before the big game when your coach's speech is almost biblical and the walls are coming up around you and you must persevere.  I became like my old coach, "Coach Tim" for Patti.  I stood on the table and told her she could throw farther into the wind and that if she stood in the pocket just a little longer everything would open up.  

"Sisters, human life is the unforeseen, everything is transient and egoless.  Only the world of Enlightenment is tranquil and peaceful.  You must keep on with your training." -Buddha

Letters to Patti Ann (Chapter 1) "Down Grand Point Lane"

hi patti ann,

today is a great day.  i saw you practically running with no legs, somebody else's legs.  wow.  what a sight.  thanks for making me a stronger boy and a wiser man.  thanks so much patti for fighting.  it's your unique gift to the world.  when it is received it is the most precious gift.  hope you kick your feet up tonight.  your grande pointe feet.  

love,

dut

When the "So Long" years came to a close.  I couldn't really look back.  So much had happened.  Some of the scenes were horrific.  It's easy to judge myself when I look back at my work or writings and to think of myself as overdramatic but when I read my last letters to Patti Ann, it seemed apropos. 

    I avoided it for years.  I knew in my old Yahoo account I had saved every letter I had written to her.  And here it is, I'm here crying trying to "effing" put it all down on paper. Put it to rest.  It's so beautiful to me when someone comes to me professing their love for "So Long" because I was able find something beautiful and find some joy amidst all the horror.

  Patti Ann was a smart girl from the country who had that simple joie de vivre.  She loved her dad and kids and was an aerobics instructor in the 80's with those leggings that covered her beautiful natural legs.  I used to be proud to be her cousin when guys from the city would look at her in awe.  I always felt country because Grand Point was truly country back in the day.  The Pointe de Cannes they called it and the strange cars would pass by real slow on Sunday's to observe our simple little lives.  Mamere on the swing with chicken stew on the stove and all the bets were in.  All bets were on Montana and phoned in to Buck's bar.  That was "nip and tucked" like a local's lawn at dusk on a Saturday before LSU kickoff.  Everything in its right place.  Everything was still there.  Joey was throwing spirals in the front yard.  

  Joey was Patti's brother who would be taken from us in the coming years but that's a whole other story, that's a chapter....a lifetime. That life experience is the root of my record, "So Long" and Patti the fire beneath the pot of resilience.  I've never been one to turn from a challenge.  One morning in 1988, we were woken by Aunt Marie's screams and she came running into the bedroom hugging us...he's gone...he's gone.  Now I'm a person that can't talk before coffee and here it is all the screaming.  It was tragic.  It was a howling wolf at your door that wouldn't go away.  Your head was in its throat and that's how it was going to be.  It was loud those screams! When the dust settled, I was standing outside all dressed for school and my dad asked if I was alright and I just shook my head.  I stood in silence and vowed to live a great life and pay whatever the cost to follow my instincts and find myself.  

  Well it's Sunday and the Saints are playing their first game and that's enough looking back for now.  I guess the pot is boiling now and the word is out.  I'm flowing like Marie!  I hope soon I'll have the courage to read another letter.  I peeked at the next one and it was dated September 11, 2001 from Brooklyn.  The world was about to change.  

Thieves of Joy......

You want to see me mad....try to make me follow in someone's footsteps and do what they're doing.  Every cell of my being has to be into the next step for me to take it.  I don't care if massive success awaits, if it's not my step, it's not my steps.

When I was first signed as an artist, I had just spent 3 years running around New York City mostly alone reading, researching and buying records and listening....a whole lot of listening.  I think I spent more time thinking about what it is we were trying to do, than actually doing.  For me, it wasn't music we were making exactly but more of a collage, a painting with sound scapes and mood.  I listened to a lot of Miles Davis and John Coltrane "Blue Trane" in my little East Village apartment while in acting school.  My appetite remained soaking whet and I was never bored and I was very careful not to become one of those downtown guys chasing models.  It can be done, whole days trauling in the cafes looking the part and getting no work done.  After an early evening stroll for a coffee at Cafe Gitane, it was time to get to work.  In the early days it was really hard to feel like I was getting things done.  An artist has a canvas and he finishes his painting and moves onto another.  We were entering the digital realm and the possibilities were immense.  All of sudden we had too many options and had to start narrowing down the focus.  Looking back, three years is not that long for someone who had never made a record or been in a studio before, not to mention playing instruments and writing lyrics and singing.  

When you make a good record, there is a well worn path to this jackass at the mic and I wanted no part of it.  I hated seeing pics of me, positioned to be the next big thing with images resembling past artist.  All this new technology and we're expected to have careers like the old heroes.  Fast forward to now, I'm on a strange new path.  I don't recognize it and it seems like it could be uniquely mine.  All the different streams are starting to add up to what looks like a sustainable career.  Defining ones own success is very important.  And uh....oh yeah...comparison is the thief of joy!

Make Me Love Again.....

The Bywater, my old neighborhood in New Orleans, feels like a ghost town.  Too many wealthy people bought into the idea of its grand bohemia and chased all the artist away.  I'm a professional surfer of gentrifying neighborhoods and this is not a new occurrence.  I've seen it happen at the speed of light in New York.  When I first moved there, people wore their 212 area code on their sleeves.  It was a thing, til Brooklyn became a brand.  The aesthetic kings were taking over Williamsburg back in the early 00's and the wealthy were buying it hook line and sinker.  The old light bulbs and subway tile and clean lines nodded at the past while embracing modernity but soon became soulless.

It's easy when you study history to see the gentrification of America as a whole.  I've just finished watching Ken Burns' "Vietnam.  Wow.  I had known about it but didn't know anything really.  I can't believe the state of things in the year I reared my head on this earth.  I was feeling like we were living in the darkest of times before I watched this documentary.  It's proof that our government is not always right and how easily it is to fool the people and keep them pacified.  

We are so pacified now with information, man caves and our constant conflict from the left and the right.  We love war.  It is our definition of greatness.  It's hard to look on the past and not be ashamed to be a human.  I have the utmost respect for all the men and women who went off to war for us, especially the most noble of wars WWII.  But lets face it, most wars can be avoided and most conflict is saturated in greed and the need to dominate another.  I went to the African American museum a few weeks ago in Washington D.C.  As the elevator was descending the dates on the wall were going back.  2018, 1918, 1818, 1718, 1618 and then the doors opened to a small room crowded room.  It felt like the bottom of a ship.  I cried before I had even seen an image.  To think that we looked at other humans as a commodity and that our world leaders traded humans and the practice thrived for centuries is mind blowing.  But the most disturbing thing is that the civil rights era didn't begin until the 50's and it was a struggle for desegregation for years.  It's numbing to realize that my parents were kids when that was happening.  Not that far away.  

In order to be great again.  Today's kids will need to realize how technology is affecting them and learn the expanse of their resources and grow exponentially.  It is my hope that they use this great resource to learn from our mistakes, not just our country but the world.  When we learn to love and to accept others that are different than us, when we learn to share and love the land, when there is no war, there will be greatness.  

Bonfire of the Ivories 2017.....

Another year has come to pass.  We burned another piano on Christmas Eve after a lovely show at The Grand Point Music Hall.   It seems this will be a yearly tradition as people are starting to offer me pianos.  Someone offered me a player piano for next year.  

I loved this years show in Grand Point.  Not only was every table reserved, it felt special and I felt that people saw me and I saw them.  It is important more now than ever to be fighting for our culture. I'm all for progress, as I've said before, but there's some great qualities we can't afford to leave behind.  

After three years back on the road, I am reminded of some of those qualities from the past.  Patience being the most revered.  Newlafaya, our record label,  was based on the concept of patience and refinement.  Our label logo was a pyramid of sorts, refining itself to a point.  It's hard to live simply and not rush things in this age.  You need reminders and the National Parks across the country have been a medicine of sorts for me and slowed me down.  

I love our bonfire every year.  No fireworks or extravagance.  Just some music and a torch and real sharing and connecting.   I feel I'm articulating our culture more and more with each passing year.   Light the fire, I'll be coming home.  

This is an ode to the river of song.

An ode to joy.

To the joie de vivre along the German coast to old St. Jacques

All the way to the heart of Acadiana.

   An ode to this piano and the long lost lives who once felt her vibrations.

Sure there were other times, but this ones ours.

An ode to fire

Be cleansed and made new again

Renewed again in life and purpose

An ode to the son of a carpenter

Who broke from the customs of his time to find a new path

           To the season that grips the whole world in a conspiracy of love.

Picture The Beauty Queen

Dub Down Babylon at The Music Box....

Last Saturday, I had the privilege of directing a show at the Music Box in New Orleans.  When I first moved back home from New York, New Orleans Airlift caught my attention.  They were putting on small shows in their newly constructed Music Box and Quintron was at the helm.  In those days I was quietly working on music and concepts and most in my circle had no clue I was a musician.  I had just been let go from a big label and was confused on what path to take to sustain myself as a musician.  I knew I wasn't cut out for Frenchmen St. and began mustering up the confidence to get back on stage.  Dave at the Marigny Opera House was so gracious in those days.  He had me, a little known musician, play three shows in there over the course of a year.  

I haven't played many venues in New Orleans.  I don't feel like an entertainer.  I am envious of those who can muster up the funky crowd in a late night bliss.  I'm always drawn to the black box of the theatre.  My days at The Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting in NY really stuck with me.  Playwrights like Chekov, Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams were looking life right square in the face and talking about it.  

When I spoke to Jay (Rusty Lazer) about me directing a show there with Nels Cline I began to imagine a post apocalyptic set right away.  I wanted to look modern America in the face and put it out there real ugly and imperfect as it is. 

We recruited a stellar cast of musicians from different genres.  Nels Cline (Wilco) was on guitar along with Rob Cambre on guitar and some of the houses.  They acted as the score between songs and created a nice layer of noise and ambience.  I used the telephone booth along with a pre recorded narration to set the scene.  Margaret Hebert joined us on keys, Eric Heigle on drums, Josh Werner on bass, Simon Berz on drums and sounds, Leyla McCalla on cello and Blato Zlato on harmonies.  We had Blato Zlato open the show with a 30 minute ambient set.  

The cast was mostly improvisors so rehearsals with this crew was real minimal.  On Wednesday it rained so that whole day of rehearsal was lost.  I made detailed notes for everyone and sent them the songs and setlist.  We had a short rehearsal on Friday and sound check on Saturday before the doors were open. 

I had a rough sketch of my conversations in the phone booth and how I wanted it to keep escalating into anger.  The sound was going in and out and I starting using it as something to play off of and began my improv shouting through the telephone.  It was especially nice to reconnect with improv acting and bringing that into the music world.  

Margaret made margaritas in the van pre show and there was a crowd back there.  Most of the time it's just me and the van pre show.  This was so refreshing to share what it's like in my green room.  I'm so grateful for The Music Box and their ability to get huge crowds out to these shows and fund these projects.  I look forward to more in the future.  Thanks for creating such a fine theatre in the round.  

Dub Down Babylon Intro

Man Grinds Earth into Dust that Cakes the Lungs of Humanity.  

We shaved the mountains, raised the seas, and salted the Garden.  We deflowered native blooms wherever they dared to thrive.  We scraped at and gnawed on the Celestial Body who carried us and delivered us.  Honeysuckle, jasmine and pine drown in fetid air.

Over five to six generations we raged this planetary warfare. We marched on as needy narcissistic zombies groping for cash, fame, man-eating pick ups, jumbo TVs, Botox, nose jobs, jobs, Styrofoam food, plastic mansions, and bug spray. Now, mosquitos have colonized the evening skies and we've devoured our own flesh.

Man Grinds Earth into Dust that Cakes the Lungs of Humanity.  

The only way out was a non-stop first class ticket to the Planet Nod— a planet several galaxies from Earth.  Nod had all the luxuries of pre-twentieth century Earth—abundant and clean air and water, and Virgin Airlines charged the Nod pioneers one million dollars a seat to get there.  Everyone else perished—everyone except for you and us. 

We have survived because we're close to the pulse—we understand that freedom is never superficial—our planet sings freedom—swaying trees, storms, cicadas, streams —our bodies respond in kind: heartbeats, laughter, melodies, dance, breathing (takes deep breath) breathing.