ateolf | New Orleans Trip

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.