CLINTON ST. QUARTERLY Public Sex Ritual Sacrifice It’s four in the morning. Out on the river, the King of the Zulus is drinking whiskey, waiting for the sun to rise. Mike Smith’s house is freezing. But it’s warm in the bathroom, and Leslie is already at the mirror — 16 and delicious in red transparent nightgown, bare feet, jet-black lipstick, green sequins on her eyelids. I slide next to her in front of the mirror so I can paint my face: half black, half white. The split-personality paint job feels just right; I’m still scared, but I’m excited too. Mysteries will be revealed today. Perhaps I can pass through my fear, my self. I pull a pink fright wig over my hair and Leslie looks me over, breasts moving behind nylon. “ You need some lipstick,’’ she says. “ Here, I’ll do it for you.” The touch of her lipstick is far more intimate than I expect. If her fa the r, my host, photographer Michael Smith, weren’t in the next room I’d take Leslie in my arms and kiss her; this would be the day for it. Sleeping bags strewn across Smith’s living room floor begin to kick fitfully as their occupants squirm into underwear. One of the kickers and squirmers is a slender young man in a rare Funky Kingston/ Toots and the Maytals t-shirt — old pal, ace reporter, big-time New York A bearded man in tutu and gauzy fairy wings glided past on roller skates shouting "Fairy coming through!" A bare-assed priest-in-cassock. Six men as a long, pink penis. Many frogs. music critic John Morthland. Moth and I are out of Austin on the back roads, Nashville-bound via Jackson, the Mississippi Delta and Memphis (where we will try and stop by Mingle- wood). Here, in a Carnival night full of promises, halfway between my SF and his NYC, Morthland stumbles out of his borrowed bag into New Orleans. He’s half asleep, and he’s not alone. None of Smith’s Boor-crashers are looking very lively. In fact, no one in New Orleans who’s at all serious about Mardi Gras has gotten any sleep for 24 hours — but at three in the morning everyone goes to bed and pretends to sleep for an hour. Everyone but Smith, who hasn’t even slowed down — he’s been up all night smoking dope, drinking coffee, trying on his magnificent Photo Mask, a square, African-looking creation of lens filters, strips of film, enlarging paper boxes and various photographic paraphernalia. A biting wind blows off the river at the foot of Canal Street, chilling the chicken handlers loading wings and drumsticks into knapsacks held by shivering chicken grips. Frigid chicken captains are shouting orders into walkie-talkies and foot-frozen chicken runners are carrying big boxes of hot, steaming chicken to the edge of the river. Cameramen cluster around the chicken, warming their hands. The sky is getting light. In the coldest room of Smith’s house a big, bearded, bear-like man of some 40 years is trying to glue a long, rubber nose onto his face with eyelash cement. He wears a fur mask, giving him a cruel, animalistic look. The rubber nose falls off again, and he abandons it. He is surrounded by battery belts, piles of unexposed film, and an Eclair 16 mm movie camera. He is f ilmm aker /fo lk lo r is t Les Blank, whose prize-winning musical documentaries include The Blues, According to Lightnin’ Hopkins, Chulas Fronteras, A lways fo r Pleasure. Blank is an artist as well as an important folklorist, and he makes joyous, angry complicated films that reflect his own priorities. He loves personal, idiosyncratic art — be it cajun fiddling or creole cooking. And he hates the mass-market, six-lane technology that seems to be overwhelming the older regional styles. Recently there’s been some recognition. Blank tours colleges and film archives, famous critics like Jay Cocks hail him in print, the Museum of Modern Art schedules retrospectives, film festivals invite him to appear. But he still has trouble raising money, and his eyes still brim with pain. “ My bucket’s got a hole in it,” he notes one night over the last bottle of wine. He can be difficult — conflicted, withdrawn, bitter. One gets the sense that it’s barely possible for him to work at all. And yet he does work — and his films are love songs to beat back the silence of death. This morning he’s terrified. “Come on,” says Maureen Gosling, the cheerful blonde, blue-eyed woman who has collaborated with Blank on his last four films as sound recorder, assistant editor, camera assistant and general right-hand woman. “We’re late already.” “ I don’t want to do it,” says Blank miserably. “ I’ve lost my enthusiasm. I only agreed for the free trip to New Orleans.” He means free trip to Mardi Gras. No one who has lived through Mardi Gras will miss another without, at least, a moment’s pause to think, “ How can I get down in New Orleans?” Life in Crescent City is measured between Mardi Gras and Mardi Gras. People talk about the last one, plan for the one coming up. It’s the source of New Orleans’ magic — an ancient heart that beats once a year, on Fat Tuesday. Today. Fat Tuesday, the big blow-off last day of Carnival, caps two weeks of building excitement and revelry. It’s good business; tourists buy it every year — local color, charm, harmless fun. In fact, that’s only a piece of it. Mardi Gras is a living ritual, a working time machine at the heart of New Orleans, carrying prehistoric emotions and long-forgotten epiphanies into contact with modern life. Some scholars claim to have traced it back thousands of years to Dionysian celebrations in which public sex and ritual sacrifice played important parts. True or not, Mardi Gras is a lot wilder than advertised — two weeks in which the rules are suspended and the city goes mad. Ecstasy, terror, drunkenness, sexual abandon — souls are healed, death is defied. Mardi Gras is not a spectator sport; either you do Mardi Gras or you lose out. Mike Smith is going to chase Black Indians with his camera. Leslie is heading for the French Quarter where, come nightfall, there will be fist-fucking in the streets, and nothing is forbidden, even to 16-year- olds. But Blank, Gosling, Morthland and I have a commercial to shoot — a Mardi Gras commercial. Dixi-Fried Chicken, a popular New Orleans fast-food franchise known for its spicy chicken (rumor has it they soak it overnight in Louisiana Hot Sauce before frying) is going national. The need TV spots to project a New Orleans image, and that means Mardi Gras. So they’ve bought the King of the Zulus. Zulus and Mardi Gras go back a long way together, the Zulus being one of the oldest, biggest, most prestigious and most middle-class of the Mardi Gras societies — and the only big one that’s black. Traditionally, Fat Tuesday doesn’t start in New Orleans until the Zulu boat lands at dawn, and the King and Queen, resplendently attired, step onto the foot of Canal Street to lead the Zulu Parade to what used to be Congo Square. This year, Dixi-Fried wants the , King to land with a box of chicken under his arm and a big chicken-eating grin on his face. This will be the opening shot for a series of TV spots (produced and directed by local filmmaker Jim Blackburn) featuring happy Mardi Gras celebrants munching Dixi-Fried chicken in giant, halfsecond close-ups. So last week Blackburn went to see the King. Privately. “ What’s in it for the Zulus?” asked the King. “Well, we don’t have a big budget,” said Blackburn. “ I ’m not hungry,’' said the King. “ But for $500 I could work up an appetite.” “ How about $300?” asked Blackburn. * “ For $300 I’ll eat some chicken,” said the King. So, theoretically, when the King steps off the boat at dawn today he’s taking Dixi-Fried with him. Four camera crews will be waiting to capture this historic moment, following which crews and chicken teams will disperse into the Mardi Gras revelers to shoot “ product shots.” All but our crew, the Les Blank crew, presently parked a few blocks from the dock and unloading equipFILM AS ART — 8 p.m . Aug. 7 Selection of films from 1980 Am. Film Festival SHORTS —ALL NEW —MOSTLY ANIMATED Selected works by contemporary film artists Presenting the selections will be Amos Vogel, former director of the N.Y. Film Festival and presently Professor of Film at U. of Penn. LEADED AND STAINED GLASS For those with something else in mind Donovan Harding______ 223-7961 Creole cooking at its finest gumbo — hush puppies — shrimp creole unique southern breakfast treats Breakfast Lunch 8-11 11-4 439 N.W. Broadway 224-6808 ............. ............................. ....... . ....■— L -------------------------------- cobblgiiabench 816 SOUTHWEST 10 222-2577 30
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