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.

Jazzy Day

Okay so picking back up on Sunday. After The Music Box Village...I think we would have eaten something. I'm having trouble remembering right now. Or did we eat after the museum? Ach. Anyway, we went to the New Orleans Jazz Museum which is also the museum for the Mint. It was pretty decent, what you'd expect. There was one little section tucked away in the back corner (right next to the little display for women in jazz) for "modern" jazz, with, among two other more modern people mentioned, there was a little thing for Ed Blackwell (who played with Ornette Coleman) as the single stand-in for free jazz from NOLA. Most of the days on the trip I was dressed up much fancier than usual for some of the fancier places we'd be eating, and since we'd generally be out and about all day, I was dressed up for everything we did. Sunday was the first of those days. I was wearing my suit (usually I kept my suit jacket off until dining) throughout the day. It was much cooler this day. I don't think it was the crazy-cold day (for NOLA) yet but still a lot cooler than when we got in. Oh yeah, and their gift shop was a little satellite of the nearby record store Louisiana Music Factory, focused on their jazz stuff of course. I picked up some cds: John Coltrane: A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle and Eric Dolphy: Musical Prophet: the Expanded 1963 New York Studio Sessions, and also a Sun Ra t-shirt. We had a teensy bit of time to kill so I walked over to Louisiana Music Factory's main store (just around the corner). It was a hurried look, but man, I did pick up a motherlode of an unbelievable trove! I got: Cecil Taylor: Dark to Themselves, Pharoah Sanders: Izipho Zam, Cecil Taylor & Günter Sommer: Riobec, Cecil Taylor: In East-Berlin, Cecil Taylor: Erzule Maketh Scent, Cecil Taylor & Louis Moholo: Remembrance, Cecil Taylor & Tony Oxley: Leaf Palm Hand, Cecil Taylor with Tristan Honsinger & Evan Parker: The Hearth, and Andrew Hill: Point of Departure. That run of Cecil Taylor in the middle there was all part of this series of a whole bunch of shows he put on at a festival in Germany in 1988, and I've BEEN meaning to get more into his later stuff and fuck if this wasn't just the perfect treasure trove (there's still a bunch more in this series I need to track down too)! We had brunch reservations at Commander's Palace so we went over to there. It was jazz brunch with upright bass, guitar (the bluesy steel resonator acoustic kind), and trumpet and they played requests, I think there were some Christmassy numbers. Oh, a weird thing on this trip was people would say "Merry Christmas" and stuff and we're all going to somewhere even warmer and less Christmassy than we came from and we're on vacation so all that isn't in my mind at all and it was kind of a weird juxtaposition and I'm just like, oh yeah, I guess it is almost Christmas? Anyway, the food was really good. Then it was back over to the French Quarter. We did some more book shopping. First we hit up Faulkner House (actually, we tried to go to Arcadian but it wasn't open...or did we try the first night...well, it wasn't open so it didn't happen...yet). At Faulkner House I picked up: A Girl's Story by Annie Ernaux and Shame by Annie Ernaux. Then a dash to Dauphine Street (which is decidedly not on Dauphine St., though of course it used to be at one point). I got some more books: MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood, The Foot of Clive by John Berger, John's Wife by Robert Coover, The Word "Desire" by Rikku Ducornet, I Will Have Vengeance by Maurizio de Giovanni, Aftershocks by Grete Weil, 99: the New Meaning by Walter Abish, and Amédée • The New Tenant • Victims of Duty by Eugène Ionesco. Then it was over to the Preservation Hall for a jazz show. I wasn't sure what to expect with this one. It was definitely a lot tinier than I was expecting. You're in this little tiny dilapidated room with wooden benches. They really keep the old-school feel (even if in a museum-piece kind of way, it works and still "feels" a bit more "authentic" than other kinds of simulacra). So the band plays traditional kind of New Orleans jazz numbers for a pretty strict hour time slot. The trumpet player also does double duty on vocals. This was true of the jazz brunch band too, and you can tell that Louis Armstrong really messed things up for all trumpet players in NOLA and you simply cannot play that instrument without singing in a low, gravelly voice too. But the band was him and clarinet, trombone, drums, piano. They were good musicians and I enjoyed it. I mean, obviously not my first choice for types of jazz but it was a pretty cool experience. Okay, we've reached a point again and I'm going to jump off into another post. (Dang, looks like we're at less than a post a day, this may take a while!!)

Fragments

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.

Voodoo Part One

After that museum, we went to this other bar that was liked from before called Tonique. Then after that we walked across the street to Louis Armstrong Park. Some fun with the parking meter and I had to run back and re-up it. (I was having trouble the whole trip, I'd pay for parking online and whenever I went to extend a session it wouldn't work and I just had to start over anew...but this one, I think I had trouble with online so I did it directly in the meter so had to go back in person.) So I got back and had time to take another picture of the location of the cover art of No Dreams, then I found Mary Beth and it was really then time to split again. We went over to Marigny to hang out a little bit. We happened on another small bookstore we weren't aware of before called Frenchman Art & Books. It was very small and all new but I did pick up one book: James by Percival Everett. Then we dropped into The Spotted Cat to listen to a little music, just some very NOLA jazzy bluesy stuff. We stayed a little bit just to experience the experience. We even got little cat-shaped stamps on our wrists (I'm pretty sure the main reason Mary Beth picked that one to go to was the whole cat theme, which I cannot argue with). If there was something else we did, I can't remember now!

Now we're on to Tuesday. We started off with a delicious breakfast at Elizabeth's. Then I popped into Euclic Records and picked up a few cds: Ultramagnetic MC's: The Four Horsemen; Kool Keith: The Lost Masters; Kool Keith: Lost Masters Volume 2; The Knife in collaboration with Mt. Sims and Planningtorock: Tomorrow, in a Year; Christian Marclay / Otomo Yoshihide: Moving Parts; Sarah Davachi: Selected Works I & II; and v/a: 8-Bit Operators (the latter is a chiptune tribute album to Kraftwerk). Then we took a little walk across the street to this park on the other side of the railroad tracks, over this big arc of a pedestrian bridge, Crescent Park is the name of it. There's an old dilapidated wharf with part of it restored and we walked around on it and looked at the river. Then we went and took a ride on the streetcar on the St. Charles line. We went over and got on at Washington and rode it in one direction, towards the CBD. Rode it to the end and back and just enjoyed the scenery. At night we had ourselves another fancy meal at Galatoire's (if I'm not mixing days up, but I think this is it). Mary Beth was upset that we got put in the back room instead of the famous main room, but the food ended up being very good. We had the first of these souffle potatoes (a novel way to eat potates! it's like you take two thin slices and put them together and fry them so they puff up in the middle...kinda like potatoes au gratin without the sauce mixed with french fries and chips and with its own unique puffy texture). Then lots of other very good food. Afterwards we put in an order at Verti Mart to pick up some sandwiches and sides to take out with us on the next day. Oh damn! I almost forgot to mention how the day started!! Wow! How could I!? It started with this tour at the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum! We get up and get there very early, as we're the first tour right when it opens (and we're there before it opens). Someone shows up and takes us in and at first has us wait around to see if someone shows up to guide the tour. No one else does so it falls on him. Well...this ended up being one of the most INTERESTING parts of the trip (and not at all for the primary reasons something like this should be interesting for). The amount of actual information about voodoo we received was PRETTY CLOSE to zero. And instead we got a lot of ridiculous stories about his personal life (which I imagine are all apocryphal and just little bits of "color" a tour guide might normally insert here and there) and a bit of information that seemed made up on the fly. Oh, here I go once again at a stopping point for a post and needing to move on to the next post. I hate to break this one up but maybe it's more fun getting your hands on it twice.

A Tale of Two Tours

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.