blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

Okay, we're back to our backtracking to the voodoo tour guide who was an absolutely terrible tour guide but now makes for one of my favorite experiences of the trip. So yeah, as I was saying, tour guides can often sprinkle in a good bit of personal anecdotal color to keep the tourists entertained, you know, sprinkled in along with the information that the tour is covering, but his color to information ratio was completely flipped (probably more than flipped...almost all "color" and almost no information). We start off in the museum, which is pretty small, just a couple of small rooms. Most of what he says is "now, the sign says this, but this is why it's wrong..." which were mostly due to him having a Christian interpretation and not really believing in any of the voodoo stuff. So we start off kind of getting anti-information, maybe little bits of things here and there in this part, but not a whole lot. Just lots of jokey or faux-wise kind of stock phrases stacked together (playing with words in the way that tries to seem profound but is just kind of playing with words to lead to cliche maxims). There's one other couple in the group with us. Before we go out, he lets us know about some guy (who's probably completely made up) who's his enemy and he just talks about how fat he is and he went to explain about why the guy doesn't like him but didn't clear up that mystery really and just talked about one time when the guy choked him and so if he runs away all of a sudden he doesn't want to get choked. And a story about how this guy has both constipation and diarrhea because of the smell that comes out of his mouth when he talks. Like yeah, this is the main information of this tour. The other couple I could tell had the eyes of "well, what have we signed up for here?" and I'm sure it would have been funny to bond about this shared experience but the chance never could have arose. Anyway, the large portion of the tour was walking the streets to supposed spots of voodoo in the Quarter. So we walk a bit and he takes us to a deli that I guess pays him to recommend them to tourists and in this outdoors part about no mention of anything related to voodoo at all even comes up. We do see the most historical part of the tour (at least the one he gave) which is the site where the house of Marie Laveau used to be (so a little about her having used to live in a house that used to be there, but more about "shotgun houses" and well, I'm not really sure of the point of that...except that, no, shotgun pellets don't shoot straight so no, it's not a good name for those houses). We ended in Armstrong Park at the site of Congo Square, which could have some good information about voodoo in there, but mostly he dissed the artist of the mural and complained about the mayor, which hey, could have some interesting information of another kind, but we didn't really get any context or reasons for the complaints so they kind of didn't really go anywhere. Okay! That was the tour. It was objectively bad but amazing for other reasons. Okay, then we did the stuff I already mentioned before.

So now on to Wednesday. This was the day taken up by a big group tour. It was a combined swamp tour and plantation tour. Now, the plantation tour could have gone in some terrible directions, but it was actually pretty good. Really, here we have a compare and contrast 'cuz our tour guide on this one was absolutely fantastic. Really informative and entertaining...kind of the complete opposite of the previous day's tour, but yeah, he was really good and actually an even bigger highlight of the trip. So we meet down by the river in front of the Quarter and get on a big tour bus and this is a big group tour kind of thing. It's a good drive out to the plantations and he just talked a whole good while about the history of the city itself and moved on into the history of the surrounding region and the plantations and stuff as we moved out that way. I think he said he's a historian and his knowledge of local history was really awesome and I felt like I learned a good bit. I could have just listened to him all day. There were two plantations that were chosen from, most of the people went to the same one as us but a handful got dropped off at Whitney Plantation. We didn't know the difference when signing up, but Whitney is completely dedicated to the slaves and slavery. When it got reopened and redone and had its focus on slavery (really not that long ago, about a decade ago) it kind of pushed the other plantations to also start actually including slavery in their tours and stuff. If we ever make it back, it'd be good to do that one. But we went to Oak Alley. In this one you do get the tour of the house but there's also a part dedicated to the slaves and the slave quarters now too. Our main tour guide focused a good bit on slavery while he talked to us on the bus. At the plantation, they had their own tour and tour guide and stuff. The house itself wasn't super interesting, I mean, there's a little bit of interesting stuff but not so much my thing. They have multiple tours going at once so they kind of churn you through it all, but that's fine. After that tour, Mary Beth and I ate one of our Verti Mart sandwiches. Then we went and looked at the slavery part, which is self-guided. That was definitely the most interesting part, getting information about the lives of the slaves and where they lived. I mean, it's hard to say one "enjoyed" it, but I hope you know what I mean. In another part there was also a video about sugar cane farming today but it was just an industry promo kind of thing. Then we went to do the swamp tour and on the way there we got information transitioning from slavery and the plantations to the history of the Cajuns and how the Acadians made it down there from Canada, etc. We get to the swamp tour place and go out on a boat and once again this is its own tour with its own tour guide. Being in the swamp was interesting, but the focus of the tour was taking us to spots where animals gathered and they just throw feed to them so the animals are trained to come out, which was kind of weird. It was mostly raccoons and wild boar. And I did enjoy seeing them, but the whole semi-domesticated feel felt a little weird. I've probably never seen wild boar so there's that. And the raccoons were cute. The first animal we saw was a possum who he's trying to train but it's still wary and ran off when we came near. We also saw some baby alligators (not trained, just hanging out under the shrubbery in the water). The adult alligators are hibernating now, but we were told the babies take advantage of the adults being away to vie for a better chance of getting food (funny, we got that bit of information from our regular tour guide later and not from the swamp tour guide). There was also a baby alligator they keep on the boat to bring out at the end of the tour and pass around for everyone to hold. So yes, Mary Beth and I both held the baby alligator and got our pictures taken with it. There was also a bit about some stories of a woman and a curse and a town and a storm and we were taken to these goofy props so it was almost like a little made-up haunted house kind of thing, but there wasn't so much of that after the first bit and the rest was more of the nature and "nature". Oh! And at the main building for the swamp tour (before you go on the tour itself), we saw a chonky tuxedo cat for a minute. Also they had alligator snapping turtles in a tank. Overall, it was a very enjoyable tour and I really liked our tour guide (as I say yet again!). Okay, back to a breaking point.

After our little jazz show we went over to a place called Jewel of the South for a nice fancy dinner. (Did we do something else in between? I can't recall.) We had real caviar and Mary Beth was over the moon about it. I got this duck sausage and it had the duck's head and everything (I guess it's weird looking at what you're eating but the food was tasty). Did we do anything after that? Probably I don't recall.

Oh, forgot to mention that on Saturday night, after everything I did remember, we walked over to this bar in the CBD Mary Beth had loved before called Loa. First actually we made a mistake. She was mixing it up with The Sazerac Room which is the bar in a different hotel (The Roosevelt) and that hotel was having some Christmas lights display and the whole downstairs was just packed to the gills and we had to slowly make our way through all the people. Then we realized this wasn't the right place which was a relief that we didn't have to keep putting up with that crowd. So we got out of there and made it to the International Hotel where Loa actually is and had a few drinks. I requested some mocktails and the flaming stick of cinnamon in Mary Beth's first drink made me crave something cinnamony so I asked the bartender for maybe something with cinnamon and he was like "I'll see what I can do." But then the drink I got had both grapefruit and cinnamon and it was not at all a combination I would have ever thought of but the result was one of the most magical things I've ever tasted (magical in a huge part because of the unexpectedness, of course, but really, it was delicious). So yeah, grapefruit and cinnamon, yeah! (There was other stuff going on too, it was very complex but also smooth and rich, I'll stop going on about this darn drink now).

Okay, so now I can pick up with Monday. I know I'm forgetting some stuff with food. I can fill in the blanks I later I guess. Oh, I think this morning we went to Slim Goodies and had some amazing potato stuff (she had latkes and I had hash browns) topped with delicious etouffee. We had a little time to kill so we walked around the corner and found a little coffee shop and sat on a little stage with nice comfy chairs and read while drinking our drinks. Then we went over to Mardi Gras World. It's the place where they make the statue things that go on the floats at Mardi Gras. They also make those for other events like sports and restaurants and stuff (some are permanent fiberglass and most are temporary with styrofoam and papier-mache though those can get recycled and repurposed). So it's a big warehouse on the wharf where those are made (they also have a bunch of other warehouses where they're stored). So in this we got a lot of info on how the whole krewe and float business works (we didn't even know how many days before Mardi Gras the parades go for). That whole aesthetic with the Mardi Gras floats is decidedly not my thing, but it was a fun tour and pretty interesting. Then we went back to the CBD where we did a tour at The Sazerac House. It's all about the history of bars and drinking and stuff in NOLA. There's some good and fun history in there, but mostly it's a big advertisement for the company that sponsors it. Also because it's very corporate, it's more hi-tech so there are lots of interactive digital exhibits and that whole thing isn't my favorite either, but I did enjoy learning about what I did learn there. Okay, that was a short one so, sorry. But now off to another post.

Back from a nice week-long trip to New Orleans. Going to try to see what I can get from memory and will probably do badly, but let's see how it goes. Last Saturday we left off in the morning and the drive went all fine and well and good except while passing through Jackson, a rock cracked the windshield. It's not a big crack, but still pretty annoying. And what is it with the drive to New Orleans specifically!? This seriously happened twice before (with a different car, of course...and also those times it was on the way back and not down, and at least one of the other times I'm pretty sure it was in Jackson too, and the other if not specifically Jackson then probably somewhere else in Mississippi). Well, fuck it. Mary Beth had decided she wanted to get into the city taking the causeway across Lake Pontchartrain (the real long bridge straight across the lake, as opposed to the real long bridge the interstate is on that mostly goes over the swamp and a little bit over the edge of the lake). You feel more like you're out in the middle of water (because you are). It was also convenient for what we were doing when we got into town as we went to a place up there on the lake. Our first stop was...I'm trying to get its name but I can't find it. I may refer to Mary Beth's plans later and fill in blanks. But it was a restaurant on the dock on the lake, right by a marina. We had some oysters and fried gator bites (I think) and there was a sign about not approaching gators and then we saw a gator out in the water (we were on a little harbor channel). Oh, I think I found it was Felix's! We didn't eat a ton 'cuz we were going to eat later. Then we were off to the French Quarter (unless I'm missing something) and we hit a few used bookstores. First it was Beckham's and it's got the classic old used bookstore vibe (it even had a cat that just slept the whole time). I picked up some books: The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood, The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante, The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas by Gustave Flaubert, The Machine Stops, The Celestial Omnibus, and Other Stories by E. M. Forster, The Ages of Lulu by Almudena Grandes, The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa, The Art of Flight by Sergio Pitol, The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald, and Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig. Then to the nearby Crescent City Books, which was smaller but decent-sized and pretty well curated, I thought, where I got: Fado Alexandrino by António Lobo Antunes, Rushing to Paradise by JG Ballard, The Man Outside by Wolfgang Borchert, The Burroughs File by William S. Burroughs, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age by Bohumil Hrabal, The Apes of God by Wyndham Lewis, Seven against Georgia by Eduardo Mendicutti, Aurélia Followed by Sylvie by Gérard de Nerval, The Magician of Vienna by Sergio Pitol, and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. And that was our bookstore jaunt. Then we walked down to the other end of the Quarter to eat at Coop's Place. And yeah, the craziest thing happened! So I'm wearing my Charmaine Lee shirt and then our server (actually, I don't think he was originally going to be our server, he was at the bar but I think maybe he switched with the regular server because of the following) is all like, I have that shirt too. He asked if we saw her in New Orleans and so we talked about the show we saw her at and he was nice and cool, really into her (of course, who wouldn't be!?). He' also in a band and I asked about that and they're called The Bomb Pulse and they're good, kinda angular/scratchy punk/postpunk. I need to listen to them more when I get a chance, was in a whirlwind of traveling. Anyway, cool encounter. Also the food was good as always! (It's one of our favorites from before, we hit a lot of new stuff this time though.) Then we went to a bar that's practically next door called Cane & Table. We're at the bar doing the drink thing (me with mocktails) and after a little bit our server from Coop's Place came in and I saw him further down the bar and kinda waved or whatever. He wasn't there long, just talking to the bartenders and stuff and didn't talk directly to him, but then later when we tabbed out (long after he'd come and gone) we found he'd paid for one of our drinks which was hella nice! Oh yeah, one more random bit of information. We left Memphis and it was still cold (not as cold as a few days before, but you're at least wearing a jacket if not a coat) and we get out in New Orleans and it's frickin' short sleeve weather (the weather was all over the place, but it hasn't been short sleeve weather at all here in Memphis in a while). Okay, so after that bar we go across to Cafe du Monde for our biegnet and cafe au lait fix. It wasn't even windy for once so only a minimal amount of powdered sugar got all over me! Okay, I think that was it for the night. Then to our hotel to check in. I was thinking we might have been staying a bit of a ways out but it was still in the city and it wasn't very far from everything (usually about a ten minute drive). I guess that makes sense for New Orleans as there's not really much of an outskirts as you're just in the city and then it's the fucking swamp.

Okay, so day two! On Sunday we get up and first thing is we go to this really awesome place called The Music Box Village. It's kind of like if the Cathedral of Junk in Austin mixed with a treehouse mixed with a diy music kind of thing. It's this little fortress built up around these trees and it has the junky ramshackle vibe and there are all these musical instruments built into everything. It's all outdoors pretty much so a lot of it has faced the effects of time and weather. There's this one thing that's like a plexiglass organ maybe mixed with a synth (and run through a couple pedals) that I'm sure sounded amazing when it worked. Some lights came on and the internal wheels spun but it wasn't making any sound. It had cool switches though. There were a few drum things and some buttons that played rusty foghorns. We couldn't really get too into the music stuff as that morning there was an artists market kind of thing. So we couldn't be too much in the way. Okay, I'm stop here and pick up in another post! Let's see how many this trip gets.

Needing a screen protector for my new phone, I went out to Best Buy after work to pick one up. So I did that and some other minor errands. Well, I take it back home and put it on and the motherfucker's instructions are misleading (or at least they misled me) so I which side was adhesive and which non-adhesive mixed up and tried to put it on backwards, so of course the adhesive side being pointed down got completely covered in all kinds of dust and shit and totally fucked up. So...all that was a complete bust!

I finished reading Lord Malquist and Mr Moon by Tom Stoppard (his sole novel...and RIP). It was quite good, very Stoppardian. It starts off pretty zany (I mean, I guess it stays that way) and absurd and as it progresses it starts to come together (I mean, it doesn't stop being absurd, but it uh, comes together in a way that's still humorous but also sad and all that). After work I went out and met my dad and we went to get a new phone. He first just set off for the store he knew about and went to before, but it was closed (as in empty building) so then we actually had to look up where a store was, of course there was one that would have been much closer, so back towards it. We were also on Poplar at the height of rush hour and of course there happened to be some sort of incident a bit away with emergency vehicles backing up traffic even worse, but we managed to maneuver off Poplar and take a different route. Anyway, I got a new phone and now it's just setting it up and getting the stuff I want on it (and all the garbage and garbage settings off).

In the afternoon we went out to Tennessee Shakespeare Company to see their holiday production. It was two short plays (both adaptations). The first was of Dylan Thomas's "A Child's Christmas in Wales". The second of was Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle". The latter was entertaining and I enjoyed the way the characters passed on the narration of the story between each other, though it makes me glad I don't read more Sherlock Holmes stuff as I'd probably find it pretty insufferable after not too much more!

Yesterday was a Friday and I didn't do a whole lot. Worked a little later than usual and then just kinda vegged out most of the rest of the night. But that's what goes at times, just sorry you have to sit there reading such a boring (albeit short) post!

Mary Beth and I did our Fresh Market grocery run during my lunch break. We picked up a little treat of madeleines and we had them with our afternoon tea and, being Proustian aside (or is it actually Proustian if I don't have any associated childhood memories to evoke?), they were very delicious together. Then after dinner I went over to my parents' house to pick up Mary Beth's aaa card (there's always a convoluted thing of them coming, getting lost, found, lost again, etc.; after being initially lost my card was found and I picked it up at Thanksgiving but hers turned up a few days later). My sister had also found these cross-stitches in frames from when I was born. One has my name and a rabbit hanging out in a bed or something and the other has my name and dob and weight and a little baby. So, fun to see these old things. Then back at home I watched a little bit of Two Fat Ladies with Mary Beth on her laptop while she did her nails.

I finally got around to putting those "I saw Robert Traxler perform..." shirts up on bandcamp. So maybe one will sell there one day. In a related note (probably what reminded me of the former, really), I went and mailed out a Memphis Concrète shirt someone had ordered on bandcamp, so went up to the post office after work and did that. Then at night Mary Beth and I did our Superlo grocery run. That's about it.

Mary Beth and I went up to the Brooks in the afternoon. The main exhibit was of quilts by African Americans. That was cool. At the end there was a little interactive thing where you could make your own little pattern on a square of paper with fabrics but the scissors I had were way too dull and I was just hacking away at it (when I was almost done I tried another pair of scissors and they were much better! oh well, my thing would have looked dumb no matter what!). Then we went through the rest of the museum. Not a whole lot else, though late at night we watched Golden Girls while eating cheese dip.