The Strawberry Blog

On a recent Saturday evening, in need of fresh Los Angeles air, I found myself on a friend’s Hollywood rooftop, enjoying the view, the fruit, the vine, and surveying the vast Scientology real estate holdings along the not grand boulevard. A thick man sashayed back to his chair, at which point I noticed his t-shirt (a ubiquitous article of clothing on the west coast, the t-shirt is rarely blank out here…[and I’ll leave that door wide open for you to enter] ).

“Hey, what’s up with the Dachau t-shirt?” I asked him, lightheartedly, because on his green background was in fact a white barbed wire pattern, repeating itself past his ample navel.

“Oh, no…Look!” he countered with enthusiasm. “It has barbed wire on it. See?”

As I said, I’ll leave the blank door open for you. It’s what I get for asking.

The spirits may have called me to New Orleans but it was this nation’s capital that birthed me (quasi-poetic apologies to my mother) and I can’t help myself…when spring time comes, all a native Washingtonian longs for during the crucial week between frost and humidity is a peek at the cherry blossom orgy. So I caught a plane to the District and rolled into Union Station where My Brother The Harried Nursing Student met me. My birthday plans? Spy the international blooms, hang out with my brother, eat first rate Ethiopian food. My research was important but played second fiddle to the redheaded sibling I adore.

For six days I desperately sought the sunny side of the street because, while this was mid-April, climatically it was more like early March. I found myself asking everyone from subway electricians to library archivists, “Hey, when you find April would you kindly let me know?”
Despite the weather it was a bumper birthday week filled with low-key, contiguous fêting and the marvelous sight of stalwart tulips. Despite the wind, the dogwoods barked, bit and otherwise stood their ground. Despite the rain, the city shone; despite the chill, the streets were active. Despite the Wizards’ defeat, the Redskins were in training. Despite wearing mittens to and fro, I gloried in the city of my birth, greeting monuments—Reeve’s Restaurant, 12th & F Street, U Street—with a nod to the parents who made it so and an audible exhalation for the city that is both Capitol and capital, Kennedy Center and Creme Lounge, Lincoln monument and neighborhood testimony.

And as for the cherry blossom orgy? Well, let’s just say that their weaker constitution initiated grounds for an earlier close this season. The [ahem] doors of colorful, Asiatic ill repute slammed shut for Occidental Mother Nature.
And with that jumble of metaphoric, unintentional punning, I bid you a farewell from overcast Los Angeles. Stephen Colbert: I challenge you to a Metaphor Face-Off!

In one week I have been socially thwarted by a Puerto Rican banker, inadverdently dissed by Quincy Jones, and chatted to, by, and with former United States Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky.

Pinsky and collaborator pal Michael Mazur were speaking as part of the University of Southern California’s “Visions and Voices” series (Quincy Jones will be there next month). As my professor friend and I tardily approached the lecture hall Thursday evening, we were stopped by a woman outside.
“The lecture has already started,” she said in a stage whisper and horrible skirt, “so please be quiet when entering the hall.”
Please be quiet? We took our seats and, as Pinsky and Mazur discussed collaboration on Dante’s Inferno, I stewed. Quiet? As in refrain from alerting the press, cueing the trumpets, and striking up the fanfare? Did she mean that kind of quiet? As the discussion carried on colorfully on stage I continued to ruminate on the meaning of this poorly outfitted, presumptuous nitwit, wondering why I didn’t fire back with something like “Perhaps you’ve mistaken me for an ill bred undergrad?” or “Gee thanks, I know I look like Lindsay Lohan but I promise I’ll behave myself in the auditorium.”
After these fantasized fair to middling retorts, I promptly got down to the business of listening. Listening and scribbling, which is what I do when I’m in lecture halls with brilliant minds and the palpable energy of enlightened people.
People who are in The Dante Club, as Mazur calls it, the unspoken guild to which one is automatically assigned when working on a translation or illustration of Inferno—a collaboration with every other artist in history who has ever worked on Dante.
It’s been a long time since I sat down with Dante’s Inferno and curiously, I had forgotten how, in Canto V, “Carnal Desire,” those fixated on sexual thought walk in a perpetual hurricane. And it gave me pause: what, then, might be the punishment for Gross Negligence in Engineering?

What would Dante do?

Might the punishment entail a perpetual state of coitus interruptus? Or prostatic congestion? Or would it involve drinking enough toxic concoction to make one sick—but not mortally injure? He might condemn the Army Corps of Engineers to be ignored in perpetuity. Or, confine them to a state of hopeless struggle, forever building a levee that is never strong enough—one never good enough for the people who commission it. That seems fair enough in hell, don’t it?
Dante ends the Inferno with this:
“Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,
Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.”
The other Pinsky, Dr. Drew, the M.D. better known for his radio show Love Line, in his recently published study cited that stars—or, more precisely, celebrities—are more narcissistic than the rest of us. No shit, Dante! The star of our evening, Robert Pinsky, very un-egotistically inscribed my book thus: “Best Wishes.”

So, maybe—just maybe—there are stars at the end of hell. If they’re Dr. Drew types and not the celestial ones, you’ll find me sipping a cocktail in Dante’s Fifth Ward—waiting for the lust filled to come in out of the hurricane

September 2006

Last week I attended a Jewish Sabbath dinner on Friday (a seder) and went to my first Los Angeles church service on Sunday. At The Forum. That’s right—the arena where the Lakers used to play; where Madonna rehearses for world tours.

I was a little skeptical about The Forum: how would the music fare at this non-denominational church-arena? How could it compare to New Orleans? Would there be brass? How could there not be brass? If Glenn David isn’t singing, then do I really want to be there? I had a litany of questions for my poor friend. I was such a pain in the ass about it, anyone else would have said, “You’re so concerned about the music? Stay home with Johnny Coltrane then.” But Nicole is a patient friend—a virtue with which I am unfamiliar. Spiritual and fairly regular about her bible study, she’s far too kind to let a little music snobbery get in the way of soothing my soul.

In the same way that my Jewish friends would never serve sweet traditional wine at their sabbath dinner because (A) They’d be celebrating alone, which means that B) in effect, it would get in the way of the communal spirit. My lovely friend, who actually hates chicken but felt compelled by tradition to make her maiden cooking foray into that pedestrian bird, blessed the garlic-spiked fowl in Hebrew—a language almost as unmusical as Kevin Federline. An unfortunate mix of spitting, choking, and complaining, it is jarring to the senses seeing a beautiful woman speaking such gutteral words. Like using expletives in the nave. At least German is…funny. I always laugh at the thought of myself barking German orders to my late (incredibly German) Shepherd. But Hebrew isn’t funny. It’s depressing. The seder—which was only religious in the sense that the chicken was baptized, kosherized and otherwise sanitized—was beautifully scored with iPod shuffled spirituals including The Harmonizing Four’s “Motherless Child,” a rendition that remains unparallelled. It’s like a world record in dulcet harmony, The Guinness Book for bass. How low does he go? How can he go that low and still sound like God?

Doesn’t matter; at least it offset the Hebrew. There was all kinds of good music that night while we downed Spanish and California bottles and tore the flesh of figs. As I marveled at their rice, I wondered too—perhaps to the point of blaspheme—how Christ got his word across if he was speaking Aramaic? It’s not exactly Italian. The rest of dinner was Hebrew-free, free-range fowl and free-flowing bottles and conversation, while my beloved wowed them with a limited but impressive Yiddish vocabulary. Impressive because his people hail from Acadiana, South Louisiana–essentially, they’re all from Spain.

How could the Forum on Sunday beat the seder score?

Forty minutes of song and praise lifted my eyes to the rafters where sodium lights threatened to make me squint, so I blocked them with my hands—which made it look as if I were prematurely raising the roof instead of protecting my vision. And high in the stands were flag draped liturgical dancers, little boys and girls, grandmothers with bellowed fabric. Sure, the music was amplified, I didn’t recognize a soul, and I couldn’t make out the faces except when I looked at the giant screens, but the gospel was good, the people were lively, the spirit manifest. After a chorus or two, in good spirituals style, you picked it up and carried it along… with the 5,000 other churchgoers. L’Chaim!

August 28, 2006

I have a small suitcase with three changes of clothes, all uncarefully packed around a scrapbook. I have my computer; my bag. That’s when I see him cycling aimlessly—really, it’s too aimless, unliterarily so—in a teeshirt. Around and around across the street from my house, at the edge of the park. I hate when he cycles in the dark. When he spots me he wheels over and we embrace until it feels like the stickiness of August won’t ever separate us.
There was never a time we had trouble saying anything. Words came easily, affection naturally. “Baby,” “sugar,” “sweetpea,” roll off the tongue like Italian. There are some people who, out of proximity and instinct, know they’ve got another soul to count on.
Flowers underscore our parting. The sweet olive is all but dormant so, like a dutiful understudy, the slightly overdone, nightblooming jasmine steps in. The stray brother cats loll in the front yard—the brave one slipping under the wrought iron fence watching us under the sodium lights at the curb where I wait for my ride.
I think about taking him with me. Every time I look back at the stray cats I think of taking him and them, with one front seat and no carriers for wild domestic animals. In thirty seconds I make up my mind: I run through all of the scenarios—unwarranted jailtime, unwarranted death.
There is everything to say and no time to say it, so we speak every word silently, and the embrace substitutes for what every other bone, muscle, and organ is helpless to communicate. I ask him to please go home. Safely. Without incident. Now. But to go home to his home safely and without incident is to ask a drug addict to go home via the dealer on the corner who’s open for business. His home is not without incident; I fear that, in his mother’s Section Eight state of mind, he might not make it. I take mental snapshots of my house and neighborhood, stray cats, trees, the stillness. His face. Everyone left hours before. I feel like I’ve overslept.
“Go home, baby. Please. I miss you.”
“I miss you, too.” We look at each other a long time. I want to say it but I don’t want to worry him.
Then, as if a director cued the red truck, my ride appears. And August pries us apart.
***
One year ago tonight, he was eight and a half years old. We’ve spoken once since then and I wonder how he’s navigating Texas when all he told me in February was how much he missed home.
The other three boys who went to private school I can’t reach at all, no matter how many times I drive by their house. The girl across the park is gone—mom sold the house before Mardi Gras—and I don’t remember her name so I doubt that I’ll ever find her again. She had a hell of an arm; we liked playing football. The last time I saw her we got good and sweaty playing ball, then had the nerve to eat at the Night Out Against Crime picnic with caked on dirt and flushed faces.
One year anniversaries are hard whether it’s a tough first year at marriage or 365 days after death. What is it about a year, about marking time? On the one year anniversary of leaving, and closing in on the one year anniversary of the flood disaster, it doesn’t appear that places fare too much better than we do.

August 24, 2006

Because of my mother’s obsession with mine, friends know how much I love the derrière (various kinds, both genders), that I love a good set of sturdy shoulders (ibid.) and rippling leg muscles, and though I am not jaded when it comes to the human physique…I am embarrassed to admit that what I spied (wrong verb; you’ll see why) at THE Hotel at Mandalay Bay last night almost sent me for my camera. It wasn’t the rumpshaker at Rumjungle. While hers was nothing short of stunning, mere beauty does not send me packing. I reside most of the year in a town bursting with hotties and Beautiful People (though all I really want is to meet Gore Vidal). I appreciate it; I do not necessarily want to capture it for future consumption.

When it comes to excess, Vegas has a reputation to maintain. But imagine if you will, the size of an average to large watermelon. Now imagine a petite blond woman—say, about 5’2”— in a black tank top, shorts and heels. Now take two of those watermelons (I kid you not—why would I?), but in the recesses of your mind fashion them into breasts. Yes. And if you thought watermelons were an awkwardly sized fruit…people, you have never seen anything like this. Did it get her noticed? Yes. My male companion even suggested that, because I’m a woman, she probably would have allowed me a picture. But I resisted touristy temptation; resisted, in fact, anything that would have given her another reason (one wonders what the first was) to say, “Hey, these watermelons [for there is no actual corresponding bra size] were a great idea!” As you can imagine—and my male companion is unabashedly a Breast Man—they were so abnormally tremendous, such an offense to natural anatomy, geometry, physiology, harmony, and geography that even he said they were “ridiculous.”
We’d had this argument before. I say breasts should fit the form; he says the bigger the breast, the better the form. Frenchmen have told me that the perfect breast fits in a champagne flute (which explains why I have only been with one Frenchman). In a fit of sisterly and human concern, my first inclination was to have pity on her and not stare because I thought Watermelon Woman’s breasts, which defied all laws, gravity or aesthetic, were a congenital abnormality—and no one should be ridiculed or made fun of for that (yes, I was the girl in second grade who punched a boy for making fun of the handicapped student in class—that was tomboy-underdog-workin’-for-the-people me). This watermelon syndrome was a similar concern. But my male companion assured me that it was just fine to drop my jaw and gawk with the rest of ‘em. So I did. With subtlety, sympathy, and grace I widened my eyes and uttered something completely original like, “Do…you…see…the…those?”

I’m wondering, apart from specialized porn catering to the formerly formula-fed man with a fruit obsession, just what kind of work she gets. And what do people say to her when they meet her? It wouldn’t be easy. In my history of having breasts, I have a laundry list of incidences of men on Breast Watch while I’m giving them the time (an unclever ploy of the stranger on the street), or engaging in slightly more clever cocktail conversation. Fact is, this social problem was the entire raison d’etre for my baggy sweater/trenchcoat look I sported in high school—and variations thereof later. Ask any brainy, buxom woman if she has ever been thought of as “lesser” intellectually because of her breast fullness and, sadly, she will answer in the affirmative. Why anyone would want the kind of attention that comes from surgically attaching bizarre appendages which lure the eyes of even sensitive gals like me…I am at a loss. It baffles those of us who’ve considered breast reductions who’ve merely had full breasts, not mutant gourds residing in our chest cavity.

So, Vegas. Vegas and fruit. I guess it only makes sense that, with the unholy amount of anti-indigenous tropical foliage flown in here, there would have to be an equally false mammary residing here in the desert mirage, too. I don’t know. Maybe that’s just MY World, not THE World.

August 14, 2006

Considering my recent return to Hollywood from New Orleans, you were probably expecting the requisite entry on what it was like being back home in Louisiana after four months away.
Not so fast, buddy. We’re not that predictable.
Instead, waxing about visiting home is usurped by a Hollywood institution: a film. Ahem—a movie. Perhaps one of the most irredeemably awful movies I have ever seen. So bad it was…worse. Nothing to save it except as an excellent means for compare and contrast sessions in college film courses.
The steaming turd? Miami Vice. It’s a puzzler, this one. Though I wasn’t particularly looking forward to seeing it—it was another DGA screening so, though it took two hours of my life it didn’t take my money—I was up for a silly, flashy piece of light entertainment. It had all the elements of Collateral (incl. Jamie Foxx and and director Michael Mann), yet absolutely none of its success. It had name recognition, yet chose to muddle the Miami palette. No displays of sleek, Art Deco chrome and sculpted derrières beachside. Where were the pastels and sundrenched mojito bars? Instead, we got white supremacists in dark, dingy trailer parks that looked like Ohio. The only time I knew I was somewhere was when we were obviously in Cuba and South America. Otherwise, it may as well have been called Cleveland Vice.
And as for the jittery handheld camera/ Michael Mann trademark? How about using it for a reason, an artistic call, as character psychology—as they did in Collateral. Here it was just annoying. Dark, muddy, and reverberatingly hand held now just equals I Grow Weary of This Filmmaker.
Despite the production design misfire, I was hoping for some witty repartée, or at least some good looking male leads being good looking and snappy. Instead, what we got were a couple of la-con-ic actors saying some of the worst lines heard on screen since I sat at Graumann’s Chinese Theatre for Titanic, audibly groaning. This audience (mostly SAG actors) laughed aloud at unintentionally funny lines. I’d like to say that the women were strong but they weren’t; they were just one-note angry in that cartoonish fuming-from-the-orifices sort of way. And you couldn’t understand half of what the Japanese woman said. Therefore, I hated her.
Midway through this torture, I finally realized why Colin Ferrell’s character seemed so ill at ease. Wouldn’t you feel out of place in the 21st century…in a mullet? Jamie Foxx, well after delivering the funniest line in a sex scene (replete with let-me-lick-you-up-and-down contemporary R & B) also delivered the most unintentionally funny line of the whole, painful evening:
“Let’s take it to the limit…one more time.” The audience half expected Glen Frey to cut in for a solo. Patently ridiculous. But it gave us the first reason to be freely uproarious.
Colin Ferrel got the other line. With zero irony, he cocked his gun and said, “Let’s do this thing.”
Nobody says that. Not even in a movie.

August 2006

I don’t know. Sub-zero or 4-star hotel…Vegas is just inherently depressing to me, I think. Not all of it, but certainly the interiors where poorly to exceptionally poorly dressed American families and single men tend to congregate—lobbies, halls, dens of monetary inequity—especially those. Casinos. It’s the A/C on overdrive and the buzz and ring of would-be bling—of Bling! far removed, yet…”just over there, Penny. Let’s go!” And The House of Blues ensconced in a gold palace. Aawww, The House of Blues tries so hard to just be a down home ramshackle jook joint. But each time it pops up with voodoo masks on faux wood, it’s just another reminder of corporate takeover (that said, the one in New Orleans has good greens and a killer turkey burger and sweet potato fries).
Why can’t I escape the pleated khaki? They are terribly out of place here at THE Hotel at Mandalay Bay, this homage to everything serenely paletted and divinely understated (except for the THE). The Khaki Mafia hound me. What next? Sleep with the fishes at Shark Reef?
However, that low, sinking, Vegas Interior feeling lifts as soon as I hit THE beach, out of doors, in search of THE wave pool.
And quickly lowers once more when one of the janitorial staff informs me that someone has just thrown up in it. And that last week someone left a little…“Miami Vice,” shall we say? We both grimaced, then she directed me to the clean pool where I surveyed it, deeming it safe. Clean. Serene. Mine. No floating turds, no last night’s meal on full display. Apart from foul play at aqua central, I feel very much at home here (from now on we’ll just refer to it as MY Hotel).
But where a little knowledge is a dangerous thing and ignorance is bliss…where does that leave too much knowledge? Too much knowledge of wave pools might just keep this swimmer in her suite tonight watching Spike’s “Levees”—reminded once more that last year’s fallen water is sadder and bluer than any resort pool debris could ever be.

July 25, 2006

Southern California weather is the climactic equivalent of Henry Mancini. Ninety-five percent of the year it is mere background. To some, it serves as impetus to get up and meet the surf; for others, it is the entire reason for living in a congested maze with many a movie rat. Some view it as a most pleasant foundation upon which to pursue their dreams (approximately 3.4 million of them—mostly from Indiana); some exult its near perpetual state of arid bliss. I have noted that talking about the weather is not something that southern Californians do, other than to say, “Man, it’s beautiful. This is why I love it here!” But most of the time it is wallpaper.
Not so this week. Southern California is talking weather, baby! Straight up. Bordering on obsessive. Manic. Depressive. Impressive in its volume.
At a recent screening of “Pirates of the Caribbean” we sat behind a woman who was slumped on the shoulder of her companion. Asleep or dead, we couldn’t tell—not until a friendly face arrived next to us, at which point Little Miss-Asleep-Not-Dead rubbed the crusties from her greens and started singing the weather blues. I have never heard such whiners:
“Can you believe how hot it is? Our air conditioner didn’t even cool the bedroom—in the bedroom! We’ve been too hot to do anything. And our cat is pissed.”
“I know, I know…does anything get accomplished in this kind of weather?”
And on and on…and on it went. Fifteen minutes to wax weather before Johnny Depp swaggered, at once fay and Keith Richards. Fifteen minutes to read the same sentence in my book fifteen times because Miss Former Texan, Formerly Dead or Asleep just couldn’t over “the humidity! Ugh!” She was still slumped on her equally tired companion’s shoulder, wondering how she was going to “make it through the movie”—in which pirates fight the ocean turbulence, outrun cannibals, outwit slimey sea creatures, and do battle with imperialists.
We have become a very sad nation, indeed. I am not immune to this Urban Refusal. But I’m from places with real, regular weather patterns. Sort of.
Just as I was going to recommend “Pirates of the Carribbean” to several friends (all back, in, or from New Orleans), just when I thought, ‘What a great way to beat the heat, go see this!’ I thought better of it: So much water. So much looting.
All that water.
So I kept the thumbs up to myself. Because it’s been eleven months since the Flood and people are dying from depression. Not because their once hardy constitutions can’t take the heat, but because there aren’t enough beds in the psych wards and because there is only one public mental health facility left—located in the old Lord & Taylor department store. Because they can’t get home.
I’m concerned; selfishly so. When people are obsessed with their own nasty weather, they can’t be bothered about the havoc it wreaked somewhere last summer. War and reality tv are one diversion, but humidity where it never rains? I’m worried everyone will forget, for once and for all. I’ve been asked too many times, “So, everything’s alright there now…right?”
I return home to New Orleans this Friday, after four months away, for business and for pleasure. To revel in what is found only there—and to lament the passings and losses.
I can almost hear a second line….

July 13, 2006

Maybe it’s the flâneur in me, maybe it’s the American Studies major, but I get a kick out of living history—as in live, direct, up close history: Roman ruins, Druid stones, old theatres. I feel the same way about personal history—worn, common, and un-trumpeted. Which is why my native Washington, D.C. thrills me. I walk it for miles, finding spirits in sticks and stones, greeting new ones in concrete and tarmac. Gordon Parks also felt this way. He walked the same U Street corridor in the 1940s documenting ordinary life, as I walk today. I get a kick out of the interconnectness of people, places, and things. I guess I’m just a simple girl in love with nouns.
But I’m obsessed with verbs. I’ve been reading Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, And What We Can Do About It (2005, Mindy Thompson Fullilove, M.D.), about the palpable disquiet that develops once neighborhoods are destroyed, once the city power structure has its way with the territory. A meditation on the interconnectedness of global urban pillaging, it is also an oral history of those on whom these terrible wrongs are wrought. Terrible wrongs like much of Urban Renewal. Terrible wrongs like destroying community. Dr. Fullilove weaves seamless historical analogy between Paris and Pittsburgh; between poor French people and working class Americans (It is poetic retail justice that I bought the book at the National Building Museum after seeing the “Newer New Orleans,” and “Washington: City and Capitol” exhibits).
In the heat and humidity of Monday afternoon I walked around Columbia Heights in Northwest D.C., checking on the progress of the old Powell Junior High School where my father used to shoot hoops. Last year I’d wanted to shoot it for my mini documentary but it was razed the year before, so I’m resigned to 1948 black and whites that an unnamed photographer thought fit to make. I feel a connection to that photographer for capturing time and place for one moment so that I can use it in the many moments on screen. I was curious what went up in Powell’s place, what might serve the community better today. It is now a curvaceous, salmon bricked multicultural institute with new basketball courts. Better than I had expected.
Between the construction all around 14th Street and the bustle of people at Columbia Heights Metro Station, it feels like a lot of life has returned. But underneath, below the surface of a short row of façades preserved, is the sensation that not all of this demolition and re-construction is meant for them. How many upscale live/work shopping temples can Columbia Heights support?
I walked toward my father’s old house. I’d shot it last year for documentary B-roll, and walking along the even numbered side of the street, I noted nothing much had changed. Apartment buildings, sturdy row houses and trees line Harvard Street, privy to the boom of Gordon Parks’ day and the devastation of crack cocaine. My grandfather sold it for a song to the Davis family who’d stayed through the crack era, at least until 1998 when I took the last photograph of my father on the porch. It’s the house I hoped to one day buy, to restore, to glory in its ghosts.
But I couldn’t find it.
I paced back and forth in the brightness of mid-day, like a caged animal, searching for the numbers “1461.” I found “1458,” and “1463.” What lay in between sent me reeling, cursing, shaking my head in the heat.
“Root shock is the traumatic stress reaction to the destruction of all or part of one’s emotional ecosystem…Just as the body has a system to maintain its internal balance, so, too, the individual has a way to maintain external balance between himself and the world.”
In the midst of Harvard Street’s unified dark red brick, in between 1458 and 1463, lay nothing short of a monument to Beige—a love affair with a non-color, jutting out of the street like a broken bone. There was nothing left of the old house; not one brick, not one stick, not even a stone.
Extracting my head from my hands I found Miss Pat, a longtime resident. As we walked toward her bus stop, she said, “It’s sad, it is. I could have bought that house from the Davis’s. Kick my behind. Go on! But…after you fall you got to pick yourself up again. Can’t stay down there forever.”
Her bus came. I took mine to U Street and ducked into a mom and pop for some homegrown, bootlegged, old school Go-Go.
Gonna drop a bomb on the Northwest crew/ Drop the bomb! Drop the bomb!/ Yeah, Northwest crew, now what ya gonna do?/ Drop the bomb! Drop the bomb!
A lot of percussion and a little brass…goes a long way to verb a broken noun.