Land of the Delta Blues, or the other LA

Dear trusty Englanders, I am completely overexcited about re-visiting New Orleans two years on. Back in May, 2005 I trooped it the hundreds of miles with my cohort of fellow Brits - 5 to an "SUV" - into the sweltering heat, edgy atmosphere and faded elegance of the Vieux Carré, the old French-Spanish quarter, home of Mardi Gras mania, Hurricane pints and live music to drown for...

This time it's different though. Catching CNN this morning in the "food court" of GW, I watched the strange sight of GoogleEarth floating over the destroyed wards of New Orleans, making the overwhelming point that little has changed. The houses are still flattened, families fled, the city poorer than it was two or ten years ago. So if you really want to bring it all back home to this wonderful European-American foolish-hearted city of delight and plug up the tiniest of holes in the levée, check out Bring New Orleans Back http://www.bringneworleansback.org/, the musicians fund at http://musicmakerstore.stores.yahoo.net/neworre.html and Spike Lee's requiem documentary When the Levées Broke http://www.hbo.com/docs/programs/whentheleveesbroke/







The music will go on!

Foggy Bottom, Sad But True

Dear England, Yes I live in a place called Foggy Bottom. Below is the diamond of the District of Columbia, aka Washington, DC. Foggy Bottom is the site of the old Historic District http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/Wash/dc20.htm

and the George Washington University, now offically the most expensive university in the USA for undergrads to attend, paying a whoppy $200,000 over 4 years. If you think that's worth it, you must be a Texan oil billionaire. True to its name Foggy Bottom is near the river, so if the money don't get you, the famous GW mascot hippo - the fabled river horse of George Washington's days on the Potomac - might! Put it this way, there ain't no river horse and due to GW's expansion there ain't much of the Historic District. But there's a lot of money in them there Board o' Directors hills! Check out www.gwu.edu for the glory of America's finest!

Foggy Bottom is named after an old DC gasworks. German and Irish immigrants were housed in nineteenth century laborers' houses no bigger than your London dorm room and now worth millions...As they say stateside, go figure!

Dutch Mark Flies to North Dakota

England, What happens when a Dutchman flies to North Dakota (no joke)? A whole lot of lovin'! Take the scene from Love Actually where the naive young British lad lands in the Mid-West, only to be seduced by 4 (count them) Coyote Ugly-Pretty small town (nice) strippers, in that classic American Anna Nicole Smith (without the body pump) way.

Well imagine a horny little Scottish-Dutch lad from the lovely flat plateau of the Cheshire plain and my home town of Warrington, North England, making the same plug for American red-blooded joy in...LA?...New York?...no why go there when you can go to North Dakota?

Or why go to North Dakota when you can go anywhere else. Well the Dutch Missile and Muscles from Brussels, my friend Mark "Cuba-Cubaaa-Have a Cigar-Zigga-Zig-arr" Zeegers knows in his bones but (G-d) only knows the real answer. Okay, I just remembered. He's flying 3000 miles to see an American girl. Are they worth it? Well, yes, because us Europeans (scratch that, us British, scratch that, Englishmen, scratch that, Northern English lads - you can take the boy out of Wilderspool Causeway, but not the Wilderspool Causeway out of the boy) can vouch for it, treated as we are like castrato-on-tour for our dulcet tones that sound like glass on sandpaper back home.

American Girls, So Incredible, as the poet says: Holding a candle right up to my hands /Making me feel so incredible...I could have been anyone you see / She's nothing but porcelain underneath her skin...Holding a candle right up to my hand / Making me feel so incredible.

No I don't have copyright from Counting Crows and never will.

Road Trip 2: European Vacation

Dear England, Road Trip is back! This posting is a shameless act of declaring my joy at the holiday/vacation heading my way this summer. I tenuously defend this communcation on the basis that Road Trip 1, a frightening skirmish in a large 5-door 4X4 Toyoka construction containing 5 clueless English lads occasionally driving into oncoming traffic (with momentary horror before realizing a basic rule of driving in another country - other countries drive on the wrong side!) was a grand success. Back then in 2005 we nutted it down to New Orleans from DC via Virginia (encompassing an amusing lost American town called Bristol (isn't that a city?), a dump, half the town bizarrely located in Virginia and half in Tennessee - and I thought American states were big enough), through Nashville (rockbilly happy-do-lucky town of joyful wasters, and big hats) and Memphis (beautifully-wasted Graceland grave) over the stilts of Lake Pontchartrain, into the wonder of the Big Easy, cajun country, hot spices and hotter (drunker) people, and a lot of frickkin' hot-hell weather!

But to get back to the point. This time it's closer to "home", more "personal", potentially "safer" supposing Europe remains the seat of civilization (and that's a lie). But I can't wait anyway! Rotterdam-Amsterdam-Munich-Berlin-Prage: bring it on baby! The English Boys are brinign' it all...back..er...home, American-style. This time it's the motherlands, the homelands, the heartlands, the little countires, and the clock is ticking...I just want a holiday!

Okay, I guess it's not til' May. But it is snowing in DC. Small mercies: be thankful, thou shameless blog-artist and reader. We're all goin' on a...summer holiday!

International News, Britney Does A Sinéad

Yes, Englanders. Britney Spears has shaved her head. It was the moment I've been awaiting after four years in America. Not that I've been petitioning the White House, or her fan club. Only that American Culture was awaiting its first meltdown before rising from the ashes Phoenix-like, or however long it takes Britney to grow her hair up. Clearly there are more important questions, o transatlantic friends. But I'm struck by a random memory that if Sinéad O'Connor - according to nothing more glamorous than a rumor lounging in my own dubious skull - hadn't shaved her head in the mid-80s she "could have been bigger than Madonna." Now let's not be grumpy in our clearly holier than thou envious way, Britain: Madonna is big, and she's American so more free-spirited (well, aristocratic Cockney). God I'm confused. But Sinéad's moment wasn't just a snip, as it were: she's made a career of weird (and wonderful). Britney however, might go Vanity Fair for her third celebrity baby with a thin veneer of brunette (on her head) to match her latest production, no? We'll have to see. And I'm not saying she's pregnant, just a bit bald. Discuss. And this won't be on the test.

Dear England, You Don't Know Cold

Somehow I never get used to the cold in DC, England. I console myself that every day of freezing bright skies, sun shining, and 5 below achieves me the perfect summer's day in May. That's how it works in the Big Country: actual seasons. I've long brushed off the rainy, grey, drizzly, dark winter weather we know and love in the UK. But I regret it now! It's bloody cold in Washington! I don't like John Kettley weather where the snow turns to ice faster than the sugar to alcohol. I don't eat yellow snow, but some of the gales in the past week have been beyond brass monkeys, and beyond a joke. Oh for a pint of winter warmer! (And winter weather that hovers above freezing). I miss you, oh happy certainty of English weather!