Frolic: jazz, books, food

Jazz, Books, Food, and the Writing Life

Blogging from New Orleans, La

15 May 2008

In New Orleans, we have the meanest queens. Those cross dressing crooks are again on the loose. Now they’re terroizing Burger King:

As employees were preparing to open Sunday at about 4 a.m., a tall, slender redhead, dressed in a colorful floral dress and pink necklace, entered the store. But the figure wasn’t a mother popping in for a warm Mother’s Day breakfast. “She” wasn’t even a woman, but a cross-dressing robber. And cold, hard cash was the order. The suspect got into the store by crawling through the drive-through window, New Orleans police said.
Once inside, he demanded money before slinking out the same window to make his escape. Police said he fled in a white pickup truck.

The TP has the full story along with an aesthetic critique of the robber from a cashier at BK.

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30 April 2008

Slate posted a slide show on Antonio López, who they call Spain’s greatest living painter. I would agree. The few images in the slide show, though, might not convince a skeptic of realism. Better to book a ticket to Boston for the exhibit at Museum of Fine Art and see for yourself.

The great Spanish painters, Velázquez, Goya, Picasso, fearlessly take on the whole world as their theme. The breadth of their vision is breath taking.

I first encountered López’s at the Museo Reina Sofia’s retrospective in 1993. He made me realize that abstraction wasn’t the only approach to contemporary life. Spend time with his work, and abstraction will look self-indulgent. The ruthless realism of Lopéz’s painting seems like a more engaged, and even more responsible, reaction to our world.

Although a print of smogy López cityscape hangs in our kitchen, I hadn’t thought much about his work (or really any visual art) recently. I’ll have to pull that catalog of the retrospective off the shelf

Posted by Todd at 8:37 pm | Comments (1)

28 April 2008

Jazz Fest tightly controls the price of food at the festival. Vendors must petition Festival Productions, the private company that runs Jazz Fest, if they want to raise prices.

When I interview Michelle Nugent, food director of the festival, for this month’s OffBeat, I asked if this encourages vendors to use imported crawfish. Louisiana crawfish rise in price at the start of the season and get cheaper after Lent. But you can never predict what the price will be by the time the festival starts in late April. If vendors have little control over what they charge, then it makes sense to use a product like Chinese crawfish with a stable price. Nugent, needless to say, didn’t think the way Jazz Fest sets food prices encourages vendors to use imported seafood.

In City Business today, Emilie Bahr reports on a Di Martino’s Famous New Orleans Muffalettas getting squeezed between rising food costs and Jazz Fest’s refusal to let them raise prices:

In his first year, Di Martino, who was notified about a month before opening weekend of his selection as a Jazz Fest vendor, said he spent $15,000 on the kitchen supplies, shelving, safe and other equipment required for his booth at the festival. He also spends between $7,000 and $10,000 each year in booth rental fees, to say nothing of the money spent on the 2,000 pounds of meat, 3,000 loaves of bread and 200 gallons of olive salad he estimated goes into the operation each year. The cost for those provisions is up significantly this year, Di Martino said, thanks to a spike in food prices exacerbated by a declining dollar that makes his European-imported salami and olive products particularly pricey.
In what he described as one example of the highly-regulated environment confronted by prospective festival vendors, Di Martino said he wanted to raise the price for his Jazz Fest muffulettas from $5 to $6 this year to account for those inflated wholesale costs. Festival organizers, he said, wouldn’t let him.

Can he keep using top quality ingredients if Jazz Fest won’t let him cover the price increases?

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27 April 2008

Just how much Louisiana is there in the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival? According to Quint Davis, 87% of the bands are from our state. As I found out in this month’s OffBeat, the percentage of Louisiana crawfish used by the food vendors is probably a lot lower:

Sixty years ago, crawfish was cheap food for poor people. “My father would say, we’re so poor we’re going to have to eat crawfish,” says Marcelle Bienvenu, food columnist and cookbook author. “I remember my mother saying, don’t eat crawfish in front of strangers because they’ll think you’re barbaric.” Today crawfish is an icon of Louisiana cuisine. “I think of it as a very indigenous thing,” says Michelle Nugent, food director for Jazz Fest. “Nobody cultivates it, fishes it and eats it like we do.” The boiled crawfish sold at Jazz Fest is definitely local, but the cooked crawfish are just as likely to have been cultivated in the south of Spain or the Jiangsu Province of China.
Louisiana crawfish, at least the peeled tail meat, is now expensive. At their peak, the tails can sell for almost as much as lump crabmeat. Even though local crawfish are widely acknowledged as better tasting, many festival vendors use imports because of the cost and, they claim, a lack of local supply.

You can find the whole story—along with my review of the Marigny’s excellent Cake Café and Bakery—in the magazine’s current online edition.

My friend and fellow blogger Kevin Allman quized the Time Picayune’s food staff about the issue during an online chat. It looks like Picayune didn’t keep an archive of the chat, but you read the reactions of Brett Anderson and Judy Walker to the issues raised by my piece on Kevin’s blog. In case you don’t want to click through, Anderson is categorically opposed to imported crawfish at Jazz Fest while Walker is sympathetic to the vendor’s need to compromise on this issue. Walker also says, though, that she’ll be asking vendors the source of their crawfish. I wonder how many other Fest goers will do the same?

Posted by Todd at 9:51 pm | Comments (1)

18 April 2008

I live in a city of scavengers. Last week, we replaced four windows in the house. After the workmen left, I realized they had dumped the old windows on the corner. Now I had to haul them off. There were six wooden sashes and an aluminum window.

When I got back from lunch, someone had taken all the wooden sashes except for the one with a cracked pane. Who drives around on a Friday afternoon poised to grab any salvagable junk off the street?

By the time I woke up the next morning, somebody else had taken the wooden sash with the broken glass. That left me only one aluminum window to get rid of. If I’d waited a day, someone else might have made off with that one too.

Posted by Todd at 4:35 pm | Comments (1)

13 April 2008

I haven’t been calling my grandmother enough. She never talks more than two minutes. Not for as long as I can remember. She asks how you are and when you’re coming to see her. Nothing more.

Last Saturday, I called her. She talked for two minutes. Asked when I was coming to see her. I said in a few months. Then I set up a weekly reminder on my to-do list. Every seven days, I would get a reminder to call grandmother.

The to-do list item popped up Saturday morning. I gave her a call around 10 a.m. No answer. She’s probably wandering the halls of her assisted living complex, I thought. She seems to make friends easily for such a cantankerous woman. Although she is always having to make new friends, because one by one they move out to nursing homes or pass away.

Later that morning, around noon, my mom called. Grandma died early Saturday morning. She died in her sleep sometime between 2 am and 5 am. The nurse at the home found her.

I should have called my grandmother more.

Posted by Todd at 8:27 pm | Comments (3)

7 April 2008

Errol Morris’ New Yorker piece on Abu Ghraib is one of the most depressing things I’ve ever read. Most of the article is an interview with Sabrina Harman, a soldier at the prison:

It was easier to be nice to the women and children on Tier 1B, but, Harman said, “It was kind of sad that they even had to be there.” The youngest prisoner on the tier was just ten years old—“a little kid,” she said. “He could have fit through the bars, he was so little.” Like a number of the other kids and of the women there, he was being held as a pawn in the military’s effort to capture or break his father.
Harman enjoyed spending time with the kids. She let them out to run around the tier in a pack, kicking a soccer ball, and she enlisted them to help sweep the tier and distribute meals—special privileges, reserved only for the most favored prisoners on the M.I. block. “They were fun,” she said. “They made the time go by faster.” She didn’t like seeing children in prison “for no reason, just because of who your father was,” but she didn’t dwell on that. What was the point? “You can’t feel because you’ll just go crazy, so you just kind of blow it off,” Harman said. “You can only make their stay a little bit acceptable, I guess. You give them all the candy from the M.R.E.s to make their time go by better. But there’s only so much you can do or so much you can feel.”

I knew that we were torturing men. I didn’t realize that we were kidnapping children.

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2 April 2008

Test Post: This is only a test.

Posted by Todd at 4:46 pm | Comments (1)

5 February 2008

The Lyons are coming! It’s 6:36 in the morning, and in about an hour the Lyons will be marching past our house. I’ll be out there to greet them and catch a few plastic roses.

Happy Mardi Gras everyone!

Posted by Todd at 6:34 am | Comments (1)

4 February 2008

You can’t escape Carnival. Not that we would try, but with James barely two months old our Carnival season has been unusually calm.

Last weekend, the foul weather kept us inside and away from the parades. On Sunday, though, I wheeled James down to Creole Creamery and we ran into the Jefferson City Buzzards milling around outside their Annunciation Street den. Some men were wearing dressed and a brass band played on the back on a flatbed truck. James was unimpressed. He didn’t even wake up.

On Wednesday, we crossed the river for Vietnamese at Tan Dinh. At the entrance to the Crescent City Connection, we had to wait while a line of 25 tractors puttered up the onramp on their way back to Mardi Gras World.

We finally saw our first parade Saturday when Tucks rolled, although we could only stay for a few floats. Yesterday, though, we had first ever annual Thoth brunch. A good and rowdy crowd, and the kids were certainly the rowdiest, jammed into our house for bagels and jambalaya. Thoth rolls down Magazine Street just a few blocks away, so we’ve got a nearly ideal spot.

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3 February 2008

The Wall Street Journal interviews Sara Roahen on her excellent new book Gumbo Tales. If you can’t be in New Orleans for Carnival, reading Sara’s book is the next best thing.

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29 January 2008

If you’ve seen an interior installation of a Richard Serra sculpture, you surely wondered, “How the hell did they get that thing in here.” After watching this video, you realize that removing a 26,000 pound sculpture might be the real trick.
[Thanks MAN]

Posted by Todd at 3:24 pm | Comments (2)

22 January 2008

The trash trucks were decorated this morning with beads. It’s Mardi Gras. The most wonderful gras of the year.

Posted by Todd at 12:56 pm | Comments (1)

Reason #947 why Apple designs good products: Unplug the headphones from an iPod, and it automatically pauses the song.

Most users will never notice this feature. It’s hardly worth touting on the iPod’s box. But it’s another detail that makes an iPod feel intuitive instead of like a dumb machine that plays music.

Posted by Todd at 12:55 pm | No Comments

18 January 2008

The AP began writing Britney Spears’ obituary last month. Just in case.

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16 January 2008

I had my first king cake Monday. It was awful. Not bad in the way most king cakes are bad–too dry or too sweet. This was revolting. I picked it up at PJ while getting coffee. It seemed like a nice gesture for the office. I hope they don’t hate me now.

The box claimed it was cream cheese filled, and I’ve got no problem with that. Filled king cakes can be marvelous no matter what some natives think. But this wasn’t cream cheese. The bottom seemed to have been soaked in almond extract. There was a half-inch pool of icing in the center.

I should have sensed trouble when I saw the cake was baked in Slidell. I should have know better than to buy from an Atlanta-based franchise. Next time I’m buying local.

Posted by Todd at 12:11 am | Comments (1)