Riding on the City of New Orleans

I must just not be paying attention. It's been a few weeks since I looked at the upcoming concert schedule, so I knew it was possible that I could've missed a couple of things, but I would've liked to have thought that this Chicago date would've gotten more attention rather than me having to find out about it in The Washington Post ten days after the fact. Arlo Guthrie is riding on The City of New Orleans, his first time, from Chicago to New Orleans and holding fund-raising concerts along the way for that stricken city. He performed a kick-off show on December 5 at the Vic in Chicago (here's the Chicago Trib story I could've read if I'd been paying attention) and started the train trip the next day. He finishes at Tipitina's tonight in New Orleans. Various guests and visitors have joined him along the way--Cyril Neville's been accompanying him, and Willie Nelson is scheduled to join him tonight. I'm sure they won't be the only ones.

New Orleans and the fallout of Hurricane Katrina is something I've been avoiding writing about because our failure all around this catastrophe is so massive that I feel like a gnat buzzing around the issue without any light to shine on it (OK, the metaphor is strained--gnats don't often carry lights). But that's part of the problem, too. Because all the issues involved in the subject are just so big and hard to grapple with, waiting to get a better handhold actually adds to the indecision and avoidance of the whole thing in the first place.

In blogging about anything, I want to be sure I have some substance to add to a topic, but many of the major issues of the day are so huge and have so many facets that I feel I can never address them in the breadth they require. I keep a list of subjects I want to address, which continues to get longer and longer. Within five minutes of finishing a post, I inevitably remember three or four other points I'd intended to make but overlooked, but I just move on to the next subject. A number of my topics get dropped entirely, as a combination of too much time having passed (because, God knows, blogs have to be fresh) and other topics arising push them off the list. All of them deserve to be addressed, but I can't do them the justice I believe they require on my current schedule.

Oh well, I guess this is just typical blogger frustration, and it'll pass, I'm sure. In the meantime, back at the subject at hand, whatever you're doing to help the city of New Orleans and the Gulf area in general, do more. Whatever you're giving, give more. And speaking of subjects I'd intended to blog about but hadn't, the Tribune piece reports that Guthrie's kickoff show at the Vic was underwritten by Richard Pryor.