Weird

Austin, Texas

Thursday 24 May 2007

‘Keep Austin weird’ the bumper stickers and technicolour t-shirts proudly proclaim, but such sloganeering is unnecessary; Austin couldn’t be anything but weird. Four days about town is a tumble through the Texan looking-glass.

Despite being the warm, gooey, liberal heart of a vocally Red-publican state, Austin is proudly proudly Texan. More than one Austinite had me pause while they pointed proudly up one of the many flag poles. Texas, I was told a number of times, is the only state allowed to fly its flag at the same height as the USofA national flag.

A condition of Texas joining the USofA was that it retain the right to secede from the union at any time.

The Texas state capital building is in Austin, and a colossal thing it is, enormous white dome sitting atop a great pink granite building. Inside an enormous crest commemorates the six flags that have flown of Texas: the French flag, the Spanish, the Mexican, the Republic of Texas, the Confederate States, and the United States. The flags, the secession clause, the enormous portrait of Davey Crockett on the lobby wall – it is clear that Texas is a state that values its independence highly.

So when the revolution comes, will independence be bought with the pistols of Texan mythology or the bags of cash of Texan reality?

Austin, like Houston, is awash with money. The university of Texas is a massive institution. Its prestigious research centre boasts (i think) the first ever photograph anywhere, as well as an original Gutenberg bible. These are items with no cultural heritage in Austin. But they are a part of the great American buy-up of global culture.

To feel the full weirdness of Austin, though, I stepped out of the institutions and walked about town. Like all of Texas, Austin is a diverse place. The myth of the white macho frontiersman has long faded from the earth. Today Texas attracts a smorgasbord of international cultures. And while people of all shapes, colours and sizes are pulling on fancy leather cowboy boots, it is Texas that is being shaped and moulded by this international richness. My friend Nazanin, who I was in town to visit, is a proud member of the Persian-Texan community. It is a rich and poignant paradox, that Iran and America can meld so effortlessly on the streets of Austin, while remain at such stubborn loggerheads in the strange world of diplomacy.

In the evenings a crowd gathers, tourists and locals rubbing shoulders on the bridge at the edge of downtown. It is a polyglot group, English and Spanish in equal portions, and a smattering of Asian and other European tongues sliding between these. The people have turned out to see Austin’s bat population take to the air. Beneath the bridge hundreds of thousands of tiny bats are crammed into humid little crannies, waiting for the sky to darken.  Bat colonnies have been fostered in town for over a century, their original purpose to protect the citizens from insect-borne Malaria. But again, the wild frontier days are long gone. Now the bats are a part of the rich and proud local mythology.  When the sun is down they pour forth, a river of shapes in motion, flitting over the sluggish green river below. They move too fast to be individually distinguished, but appear first as a flow over the river and then as a haze over the trees. then they are gone into the darkness.

Bats, pride, multiculturalism. These are a part of the Austin backdrop. What fills up the hours of the day?

The particulars of Austin life are hard to define. In the evenings 6th street explodes to life and music thumps through the air. Rickshaws zip from club to club. And yet despite the energy most people are sitting languidly, enjoy Austin’s signature live music, eating, drinking and being merry.

It takes up a surprising amount of time, eating. The food is excellent, but again expectation-defying. No sign of Texan BBQ or obscene slabs of meat. But a plethora of vegan options, enormous organic markets, and Tex-Mex fare thats puts to death my fear that all American culinary institutions are marked by blandness and greasiness. It has taken almost two months for me to quell that fear.

I arrived in Austin on a Thursday evening, and Nazanin casually mentioned that there was a vegan hot dog eating contest on the Saturday. The stars and dates could not have aligned better. This was to be the centrepiece of my time in the capital, and the highlight of my foray through Texas.

What better crystallisation of the weirdness of Austin, then a vegan hot dog eating contest? A quintessential American idea – stuffing ones face with dogs – inverted and gone green, healthy, socially-responsible, maybe even ironic?!

The Austinites turned out in force, and they brought their tattoos with them. The hobo-punks were well represented, and one of them entered the doubles contest with his dog, who wolfed down six franks. The rocker kids were there and their star massacred 13 dogs, guzzled cloudy hot dog water and then threw up on stage. A plethora of photographers and film-makers stalked the crowd and filmed the guy in the super-hero get-up, who was disqualified for smuggling dogs. The vegan fire-fighters were invited as special guests. The hippies waited around and requested leftovers.

Having sniffed out a free meal, I entered into the singles contest, intending to polish off three dogs or so and then retire. But the roar of the crowd and the mound of lukewarm dogs on the plate before me aroused something deeper. Can I say the spirit of Texas was upon me?

One two three dogs slid down easily, and i knew I wasn’t going to win, but couldn’t very well walk away now. I had had my meal but there were another ten minutes on the clock. four and five and i was enjoying myself and hadn’t forgotten to use my napkin or chew with my mouth closed. Six and i had to adjust my posture somewhat and chew more thoroughly. seven and there was little point in stopping now with the time more than half gone, but the rock guy next to me swigging hot dog water made me a little queasy. Eight and my stomach was hurting but the mouth and hands were unrelenting. Nine and i wondered for the first time how such an act of gluttony fit with my vegetarian principles. Nine and a half and i had forgotten principles and had my sights set on double digits. Ten and i felt triumphant and very very bloated, but there were still some dogs on my plate, and the crowd was counting down. Ten and a half and numbers became irrelevant and my stomach became the distressed centre of the universe. The countdown concluded. I was too tired to stand but too sore to sit. The winners were awarded and I smiled and wanted to sleep. The winners, both in the double and singles categories, were not the big-talkers or face-stuffers. they didn’t throw up or look troubled. They received their prizes and disappeared into the colourful crowd.

The fullness passed and I would eat again. i had surprised and vindicated myself. I had crossed over and entered into the looking glass of Austin, found it to be weird but deeply pleasing. I had contradicted and surprised myself, and done so vibrantly and theatrically. And that I think was my most profoundly Texan moment, a mouth stuffed with ketchup and veggie-dog, not sure why I was doing what I was doing but determined to see it through to the end, to enjoy it and be proud of it.

How does any of that typify Texas? or Austin? It doesn’t necessarily, but after all my time in Houston and in Austin I still feel confounded by the richness and weirdness of Texas, a land that conforms to its own myths at the same time that it flips them round or shatters them. I had hoped to glean some special insight in America by coming here. And while there were fleeting moments of apprehension, usually with a full mouth or belly, I think I only really began to skim the surface of an impossibly rich and diverse state, with enough  ingredients to constitute its own nation many times over.

The revolution is coming..

 

 

 

The Grey Miles

Houston, Texas

Tuesday 22 May 2007

I had originally deviated south from my classic east to west trajectory so I could experience Texas. New Orleans, Alabama – these had all been arranged around the grail of the south, which was Texas.

Greyhounding out of New Orleans and the verdure of Louisiana, I was tantalised by ideas of cowboys, Cadillacs, oil wells and rednecks. All that stuff that makes up the mythology of Texas. But the fecund green of the deep south didn’t stop at the state line. And there were no broncos or stage coaches or tumbleweed to greet me. There was just more green, and bloated clouds roiling and boiling overhead.

Great grey strips of road had been raised up on tall legs over the fickle bayou waters. These strips merged with other strips, becoming wider and wider, carving greater chunks out of the green until eventually there was no green. Just endless lines of grey, intertwining and converging on Houston.

First came the greasey auto shops and shiny machinery dealerships. Then came the franchises, squatting over huge parking lots; Burger King, McDonalds, Dairy Queen, Jack in the Box, KFC, Walmart, Walgreens, Home Depot. Then came the planned, leafy nieghbourhoods, hidden from our greyhound behind high fences. Then came the first business district with its attendant hotels. Then came more franchises. It was all Houston, but downtown, central Houston was still a long way away. Long grey miles intervened between it and me.

Alex, the gal kind enough to host me, lived in one of these well-planned, reclusive little neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Houston. The bus into town took well over an hour, and passed four separate Hooters franchises.

Downtown, when it finally emerged from the nest of highways over, under and bypassing each other and stacked three, four or five high, was an impressive skyline. Narrow skyscrapers gleamed in the leaden light, all glass and steel like mirrors. Smooth, shiny edifices that reflected endless repetitions of the other skyscrapers. A skyline communicating the brashness of new money and the high-gloss veneer of success and prosperity.

The downtown streets were quiet. An underground mall that connected many of the main buildings meant the majority of workers didn’t need to take to the streets at all. From carpark to desk to food court to desk to carpark. Outside it started to rain. Grey clouds reflected in grey steel.

This was not the mythical Texas I had been desiring. This was the reality of oil and industry in the south, creating billions of dollars, but not yet the sophistication to know what to do with this money. Houston is a city that seems to be casting glances north to the impossibly big brothers of Chicago, New York and DC. It has the money to rival these cities, to put itself on the global map. It just hasn’t quite figured out what that involves yet. The trappings of wealth, the glamour labels and names and brands have arrived, but they are everywhere and their prevalence here makes the city seem soulless and generic.

Caught between the greyness of the city and the greyness of the sky, I lapsed into apathy and discontent. The money of Houston has brought big name and big price tag art to the city. It, like the rest of America, is full of art plundered from the rest of the world. I saw none of it. I spent long hours wandering nondescript neighbourhoods looking for signs of life, but found few. I ended up walking the same streets over and over, and wondering, what am I doing here why did I come to Houston to Texas to the USofA? I reached my limit of bad American food and spent hungry hours unable to find fresh food or cheap food or even tasty food. Mind and stomach grumbled to one another.

In amidst the endlessly repeating blocks and unvisited galleries, though, I did find a few special places. Some of that idle money had found creative outlets. In close proximity: the Rothko Chapel, the Byzantine Fresco Chapel, St. Basil’s Chapel. Three quirky little havens against the grey, even if, in the case of the Rothko chapel, the walls of the space were lined with fourteen immense canvases painted entirely black. A different kind of grey, then; this was a meditative greyness. A carefully curated and designed greyness, built to house abstract expressionist canvases, or restored thirteenth century Cypriot art, or very contemporary Catholic icons. And in the stillness and the contemplative greyness, I pondered Houston and my trip.

I just wanted to see a few cowboys.

Alex had some consolation for me. She took me to see the Wild West. Which is a bar, in greater-Houston, its car park full of pick-ups, its neon sign sitting atop a barn of a building. Inside the waitresses called us darlin’ and couples two-stepped around a dance floor. There were moustaches and there were patterned boots and there were big hats. It looked like the real Texas, that is, the imaginary Texas I had been craving. Couples of all ages were a-twirling and a-stomping. And they were laughing. And I was laughing.

I had wanted to see the ridiculous in Texas, and it was here. But it wasn’t in the people enjoying themselves, it was in the fact that there have to be special bars, like museums, dedicated to this sort of thing. Places to preserve and perpetuate the old, time-honoured, empty myths about the exotic folk of Texas. I don’t know whether Texas was ever like this, but it definitely isn’t any more. There is a huge gap between the image of Texas and the reality of Houston.

I’ve been asked many times by the people I’ve met about the outside, international image of America and Americans. My snappy reply is that when people think of Americans, they picture Texans. Its partly the result of the jocular president, and partly the result of a deeper, ingrained racism that envisages yankees as cultural barbarians, as an upstart nation wielding too much power (this attitude is usually most fervently clung to by citizens of nations no longer at the height of their power. It looks a lot like jealousy), as a bunch of brash cowboys, dropping bombs, driving big cars and chasing dollars.

Houston was by no means the highlight of my trip, but it did shatter for me some of the illusions that should have shattered long ago. Texas isn’t the romantic, western frontier i had hoped it would be. And its not a den of warmongers and oil barons. In amidst the bland concrete blocks of Houston are, for instance, some of the most advanced medical facilities in the world. Houston feels like a city undergoing a crisis of identity, seeking to reinvent itself outside of most of the stereotypes nurtured at home and abroad. It is the same ardent spirit seen all over the states, and especially throughout the middle cities. Cleveland, St Louis, Memphis – all have their demons and stereotypes to throw off. In Houston the money and the desire are there, the rest will come.

The grey miles knot themselves together and snake out in all directions. The Greyhound follows an impossibly convoluted route out of the city and away. The sky clears and the immensity of Texas remains before me.

The Tourist

New Orleans, Louisiana

Friday 18 May 2007

My southward flow ended where many paths seem to end; in New Orleans and the muddy Mississippi delta, the great river reaching its terminus and dissipating into the gulf.

Dissipation is an important idea in this city. It is a city that, one way or the other, has the ability to destroy a person. As well as to revivify. Old and well-worn tales tell that in the early days of the settlement here the high water table meant that interred corpses would from time to time be washed out of their holdings and slither into the streets. Now all tombs are built above ground. The corruption and mortality and absurdity of this city…

I was shocked by the number of tourists soaking up the flavours of the restored French Quarter. I hadn’t seen so many tourists, nor such a tourist industry anywhere else in the USofA. But here they were, seeking their own forms of dissipation. I was left with little choice but to also dissipate into the crowd.

So Phil the tourist, adrift in New Orleans. He walks the French Quarter, up and down. And despite the souvenir shops and tacky, hokey displays of decadence, the beauty of the area is clear to see. The city feels old in a way that no other city in the USofA feels old. Here is an escape from the single, thin layer of history that seems to bother the Americans so much. Here is the natural evolution of architectural style, through the influence of the French and then the Spanish, then America, both confederate and union. Here is escape from the pretense of neo-everything style. New Orleans doesn’t need to pretend to be of another style. It is its own style, mimicked and evoked all over the country and world.

The tourist takes coffee and beignets at Cafe du Monde, a crumbling old place, the terrace littered with spills of icing sugar from the over-sweet snacks served. Fine old Louis Armstrong covers are bawled and ad libbed to the delighted audience.

He stands on the banks of the muddy Mississippi and shudders at the idea of death by water. The French Quarter is just beyond its banks.

He sits down with a Tarot reader with hopes of another insight into a curious old belief. The first card, the centre card, is the world, and that seems fitting, but after that comes a jumble of cups and pentacles, the tower, the devil, the joker, the sun. The reader is poetic, but has drawn no great conclusion when she talks of journeying and change. Nor when she explains that the cards can be read infinite numbers of ways, that she hates the tower but that it can be associated with new beginnings. The tourist gives up trying to have a real conversation about tarot, forgets completely the configuration of his cards, and walks away with the world at his centre.

He walks from his lodging, a little out of the French Quarter and downtown, past gorgeous homes. Some have arcane symbols sprayed on them, the work of rescue teams. Most are beautiful, with porches supported by elegant pillars, small balconies of intricate wood or metal, and yards  full of fountains or statues or flags or cats. There are houses painted in all colours. Fluorescent, eye-hurting yellow. But always the cracks in the paint are fast to emerge, and vines creep up walls and into these cracks. There is decay, even amidst the bright colours, tropical gardens and sunshine.

And eventually he comes to Bourbon St, one of the most infamous streets in the world. Though the original French name has somewhat more grand connotations, the present-day meaning is a perfect fit. Bars sell straight onto the street, and at all hours there are revellers seeking dissipation in the depths of those long plastic cocktail glasses.

Most won’t realise this, but you don’t even need to be drunk to feel the effects of Bourbon St. The street itself is drunk, soaked with thousands of spilled liquors. The crowds wheel and spin and the odd motorcycle plows through. The street itself seems to lilt and lean against the fine old wooden walls around it. From terraces people cheers and gibber. On the streets there are tap dancers and musicians and people falling over and people shouting drink offers. Music blasts from every bar at every hour. It is madness and dissipation. The bars seem to twist and turn forever, humble old fronts concealing vast dungeons full of partygoers. There is garbage everywhere.

And when the tourist is done with these sights, he rents a scooter and buzzes out of the downtown area. Flying along narrow streets and over bridges above treacherous canals. There is another face to New Orleans, and it reveals itself most confrontingly in the old Ninth Ward.

The city is doomed, really. It must have seemed that way from the start, when the strategic importance of having a city at the mouth of the Mississippi was sufficiently worthwhile for its forlorn occupants to weather hurricanes and floods, yellow fever epidemics and the odd half-hearted invasion. It still seems so today, with huge resources being poured into the construction of levees and canals to keep the capricious waters at bay.

The Ninth Ward is or was a working class neighbourhood built behind such a levy, in a plain that sat several feet below sea level. When hurricane Katrina hit it wasn’t the fury of the winds that levelled the entire precinct, but the inexorable, encroaching tide of waters, that spilled their confines and rushed the houses waiting below.

Now the tourist can zip through the abandoned streets, nodding to the few other tourists tiptoeing through the neighbourhood. There isn’t much left here anymore. Many of the destroyed buildings have been bulldozed, so that the few that remains suddenly have entire blocks to themselves. But some houses remain, leaning at sickening angles, or collapsed beneath the weight of their own roof. Others have been swept up and deposited on top of cars or other houses. A couple have been rebuilt, but more remain as the waters left them, their insides dragged out and displayed indecently. A caravan lies twisted and crumpled on its side. Rusted, windowless cars are buried under mounds of debris and wreckage. Stricken boats now sit on the sides of dry and eroded streets, where they were tossed by the receding tide.

The tourist is staying with volunteers, a few of the huge army of outsiders that have descended on the town intent not on dissipation but on reconstruction. Most of those he is staying with are moving on now though. There is a feeling of disappointment in the air. While these people labour and sweat over the forgotten neighbourhoods, the city itself, particularly those in power, are watching the French Quarter and counting the tourist dollars. There are no monuments or memorials or museums to Katrina or her victims in that Quarter.

So it is left to the outsider, but not the tourists, to reconstruct lives, to disentangle the long threads of corruption and bureaucracy that encumber every process. And they must face the people of New Orleans, too, who are consumed by another kind of disconsolation. Living in a doomed city, a city of dissipation, what incentive can there be to rebuild when all eyes are on the French Quarter and when the hurricanes and the waters will inevitably come again?

The tourist zips back down town and returns his bike. He passes some streets of freshly painted and newly rebuilt houses, splendid in blues and reds and greens and purples. They are success stories, surrounded by ghettoes, surrounded by empty, obliterated space.

Back on foot he wanders the picturesque streets, that have apotheosed completely since the hurricane. His camera is always out. The city is doomed to die a hundred ways, its culture is rich with fatalism, in its witchcraft and voodoo and baroque Catholicism and hedonism. But it is fated also to be reborn and to rise again from the mud and rubble, thrusting through the grime and filth and corruption and apathy to become again and again the seductive, exotic queen that it is.

The tourist wishes to come back, to see how this city has changed, how it rises and falls and rises and falls. But he is glad to be away from it now. He has his own fate, the world is at the centre, and he would not dissipate completely, yet.

Big Fish and Turtlegators

Montgomery, Alabama

Sunday 13 May 2007

‘Stars fell on Alabama’; it is etched on the license plates. And it turns out to be more than just an overly-abstract advertising slogan. It refers to an old black myth, in which one destiny of the land was erased by a shower of falling stars, and a new one inscribed in its place.

This is Alabama, the deepest of the deep south, a fated and fairy-tale land, where there is violence and there is enchantment and there is mystery. Fiction and fact are a little harder to distinguish here. They coexist comfortably in the same spaces and the same voices.

The stars shone brightly on me, night-busing south and sleeping fitfully. I arrived in Montgomery, and Iwas collected by Laura. Laura who lives with her father on the green banks above the old marina they operate, comfortable on a gentle bend of the Alabama River. Laura who doesn’t have a lot of couchsurfing visitors through her neighbourhood, but who happened to have two at once. There was me and there was Kwinci. And Kwinci puts all my travels to shame.

You walk about the river, and are stunned by the lack of fences. The dogs range ahead and snout in the brambles. A hare breaks cover and bolts away. Birds rush the hot sky and are gone. Turtles plop into the green water and peak up to watch you pass.

By the old sewage pipes, in the still and milky pond waters, Laura tells me there are turtlegators. They have shells like a turtle but snouts like an alligator. Long necks and spiny tails. And they can be big and grouchy. Her father, the river captain, emphatically backs this up. It sounds far-fetched to me, too perfectly and absurdly southern. Like his many other tall tales.

When Tim Burton filmed Big Fish, he chose Montgomery as the place to capture his whimsy on film. The captain talks with the same whistled accent as the film’s protagonist. And both of them are fantastic storytellers.

He sits, at the dining table or out on the porch with the sun over his shoulder, or on the deck of the boat with a beer in his hands, or splay-legged in the grass picking burrs from the dogs’ tails. I sit with him and immediately there is a tale to hand, and he is transporting us throughout Alabama and the world. But all the world feels like Alabama, is permeated by the same veils of mystique. And when he does turn his memory and his voice to Alabama, the colours seem to heighten and the shadows to lengthen. And he recounts how his practical jokes ended his time as an altar boy, or how the kitchen hand quit his work with the family and started a successful restaurant in Chicago, or how his yardsman was taken by Klansmen and thrust off of a bridge.

He is an old boy of Alabama, and he takes us to breakfast with the other old boys. They mash butter into their grits and skewer eggs with shakey hands, and introduce themselves formally. The supreme court judge, the cattle farmer, the author. There is among them the racist, the jew, the communist (their choice of title, not mine). They are a diverse bunch but they share the same penchant for tale-telling, the same sharp humour and welcoming handshake. The banker whispers to the jew ‘did you ever see a skinnier boy?’.

The author is Wayne Greenhaw and we meet him for a few afternoon drinks. He brings books and signs them, but there is nothing proud in the deft scrawl of his name. He is earnest and compelling, and the first American I think i’ve met who speaks too quietly. His entourage of far younger folk from the publishing and writing milieu come across as raucous and a distraction. Kwinci and I have many questions. Most go unanswered in the din, and that seems in keeping with this place. A thousand stories but few straight answers. That blurred line that is not a lie but is also not the plain and unadorned truth.

They are a friendly and hospitable people, these of the south, but it is also a secretive land, and they like their quiet houses surrounded by trees, and their sleepy streets with no traffic or bustle. Amidst the privacy and secrets there is shame buried not far down. The birthplace of the Confederate states, the birthplace of the civil rights movement, where the Klan have ridden with impunity and a Governor has stood on schoolhouse steps and pumped his fist and proclaimed segregation to the sky. The confederate battle flag still flies proudly and brazenly, and there are black people still living in tiny two-room homes down by the railyards where the trains whistle and carriages collide.

The southern rhythms flow here too, carried by the rivers. They are organic and ancient, and they slow as they flow further south. The greenery reclaims everything and the new fades quickly into the dishevelled. Around the houses by the marina we have our own stories to tell. Laura has travelled and returned home to take an active role in the ongoing civil rights work. Kwinci has travelled and still hasn’t reached home, the road confronting her and her bike with long hard miles. I have travelled and am travelling still, but in Alabama i feel lazy and doze off often, and wake up wondering exactly where I am going.

I wander the banks of the river, stare hard into the pond and doubt the existence of turtlegators. The turtles scramble off of warm logs and plop into the river. I peer into Alabama, the sleep river and rusted riverboat, the hard bridges and dusty downtown. I shake my head as the sun makes me sleepy. I try to understand this fated country, and the hatred that it has nursed, and the jubilant freedom it has tasted and the frustration of the fading aftertaste. There are a few straight answers but a multitude of possibilities.

In the cool of Laura’s house we have google to bring us clarity. I discover information about Martin Luther King and the Klan and the past as well as ongoing struggles, and about the Alligator Snapping Turtle. But it doesn’t help. There is no perfect, sharply-focused and crystallised image of Alabama; no adequate portrait, as the many murals in the state capital attest. They offer snapshots of moments that seem fantastic and distant. Instead there is a rich and mysterious country, where enchantment lies thick along the river and the railroad and the hills and the sleeping town.

And i felt the enchantment, and didn’t want to leave. This place of rest and tranquility, of poetry and story-telling, of vibrant sunsets and murky waters.

One last stroll along the riverbanks before I leave, and I have learned to tread more softly but the birds still take wing and the hares thump away. The turtles are plopping into the green water. And moving under the surface of the pond is a long-necked silhouette, which never surfaces and soon dissolves. And i don’t know what I’ve seen and finally it doesn’t matter, because the magic of Alabama is that it is suspended between belief and disbelief, fact and fiction, story and story, destiny and destiny, the stars aligning and realigning and falling a thousand times over.

Memphis Rhythm

Memphis, Tennessee

Thursday 10 May 2007

Many would undoubtedly scoff and wonder why the hell I had come to Memphis at all.

I didn’t go to Graceland. And i didn’t bar-hop on Beale St. I didn’t even see live music. I barely went down town. And I didn’t eat BBQ. Or not the meaty core of BBQ. Just beans and ’slaw.

Memphis, the continuation of the plummet south, into warmer climes and vivid greens. Memphis, Tennessee, a city in a state of what was briefly and bloodily the Confederated States of America. I was in Memphis to get a taste of the South. Doing so took all my time, and left nothing for Elvis or the Blues.

On the Greyhound south we passed a sign advertising ‘all you can eat catfish buffet’. This I took to be quintessential South. Much of what I experienced felt the same way.

Memphis was hot and sticky. My body surrendered to the rhythms of the day; siestaing was accidental but inevitable. Big meals and hot middays meant a lot of time spent sitting in the shade or indoors. It is a rhythm I remember pretty well from Latin America and Spain. The mornings and evenings are all a-bustle. When midday comes I could be found seated in the shade at one of the two houses I was welcomed into. There was beer and there was malt liquor and there were a few of the artsy folk of the city.

In the south, you eat. Even if you don’t go for meat or really like the rather gruesome BBQ adverts, you still eat. When you go to the drive-in to watch gorey zombie flicks, you still throw a couch and a grill and some beers in the back of the pickup. Maybe here at last is the logic behind the huge truck phenomenon; how else can you be sure of being well-fed and well-rested wherever you go? Again, you surrender to the rhythms of the South.

The food, as mentioned, is big. It is also spiced and spicy. Memphis was the first I saw of any sort of popular alternative to the fast food joints that so proliferate. The typical BBQ place is dingy in old vinyl and lino, with a rusted, faded or missing sign. But it is local run and local patronised. And each one isunique and has its own recipes. The food, to be fair, is still greasy and enormous and salt, sugar and vinegar heavy. But at least it has taste. Even a vego eats big and eats well here.

An afternoon excursion took us and the pickup out of Midtown, and way out into the greenery and fecundity of the Mississippi woodlands. On a thin road hemmed in by tall trees and wire fences is hidden Voodoo Village. Local legends tell of this community variously kidnapping and sacrificing animals, chasing off outsiders with machetes, or blocking off their retreat with an old bus. They also speak of strange rites, rituals and healings.

The place when we arrive is deserted, save for some very loud, very angry, very ragged looking dogs who bark from behind the barbed wire fences. Further back beyond the fences is a mess of rusted old cars and dishevelled houses or shacks. And in amidst dog, car and house are hundred of strange works of art, painted in garish, bright colours. Some are completely abstract, some are shaped like people, or suns or stars or houses. Some are covered in nails, the spikes sticking outwards. Despite the intense reds blues and yellows, they are an unsettling assortment. The sheer number speaks of a manic, inscrutable frenzy of production. The gateway bears the name GOD carved over and over again, forwards and backwards in red blue and white. i don’t think the allusion is to American patriotism. It too is unsettling.

The mangy dogs slipped through the fence somehow, and we decided to leave quickly. I still have no idea what that place is all about. Again though, one of these perfect crystallisations of the South. Or rather what the South has been mythologised as. In Memphis I began to see that a lot of these images have to come from somewhere. The South is very much what it is imagined as. But it loses nothing for all of this; its reputation is already so sordid and surreal and full of contradictions and mysteries.

One final Memphis experience. A night out at the speedway, its rickety grandstands jutting out over a sea of trucks in the muddy carpark. Not many sedans parked here. Stepping through the mud and up to the ticket booth felt like slipping back through time. I don’t know how far exactly, certainly before all the 9/11 hysteria and mania. There was no weapons check and no X-ray machines. There was no request for ID when buying beer. Before the national anthem everyone stood silently while the announcer prayed through the loudspeakers, for protection and blessing for the drivers, for blessings for us all. And then the anthem, hands on hearts and backs straight, eyes proud.

The racing itself was all noise and speed and mud. Cars hit walls and spewed smoke and spun in the mud. The noise was intense, clods of dirt showered the audience. There were cheers and there were engine roars. There was brightly coloured steel and battered old cars that were all engine and nothing else. And there was the checkered flag and winners, but i have no idea whether the winners won anything, or whether they just like driving in circles around the muddy track.

And some of the drivers came out, wiped the grime from their face, and sat with their wives and litters of kids in the audience. And they drank beer with their buddies and the speedway old timers. and the kids slurped ice cream and clamoured when free caps were thrown into the stands. And beyond the track the sun was setting in its most magnificent shades of red and orange.

And it was all rhythm, the older calmer rhythm of life in the South. And of life itself, the dogs barking, the trees growing and weeds insinuating themselves everywhere, the people eating, drinking and laughing and growing old. The sun setting and the heat dissipating, and it all cycling endlessly.