Frolic: jazz, books, food

Jazz, Books, Food, and the Writing Life

Blogging from New Orleans, La

30 March 2006

I went to a wedding Saturday. Before the couple’s first dance, the entire wedding party second-lined through the room. They were waving hankerchiefs and dancing to “Iko Iko.” In what other city would a wedding reception start with a song about spy boys? In what other city would they realized that the lyrics aren’t entirely nonsense?

Tulane gave me a nice office with a third floor window. I can see the Superdome and the CBD skyline. A few weeks ago, there was a zydeco band playing on campus and I could faintly hear the music in my office. This Tuesday from my window I could hear a jazz band playing.

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24 March 2006

I got out of Texas just in time. The state has begun arresting people who are drunk in bars.

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Yesterday, the crew working next door was blasting tejano tunes. Today, it’s Phil Collins at high volume. I guess that the contractor, and not the crew doing the work, asserted control over the radio today.

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There are small signs of progress in New Orleans. The signals at the corner of Calhoun and St. Charles have finally been replaced. Traffic no longer backs up for blocks in front of Loyola and Tulane.

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20 March 2006

Bart found out that his revised homeowner’s policy covers neither his hovercraft nor his trampoline. Hasn’t the man suffered enough.

He also posted episode 93 of Rox, his online television series. I haven’t had a chance to watch this one, but other folks say that it’s good. I have no doubt. Bart has been a mulit-media star since the early days of the internet.

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19 March 2006

Other people’s prose:

New Orleans is a town that resists being fitted with an adjectival straitjacket. But if it were a Chinese-food condiment, it would be sweet ‘n’ sour. The easily pacified citizens of this country’s other cookie-cutter cities seem to require only that they have a Starbucks Mocha Macchiato in one hand, and an Olive Garden breadstick in the other. But New Orleans offers something more. Faulkner called it “that city foreign and paradoxical, with an atmosphere at once fatal and languorous.” Walker Percy wrote, less grandiosely, that if you fell ill in its streets, it’s a place where there’s still a chance “that somebody will drag you into the neighborhood bar and pay the innkeeper for a shot of Early Times.”

Matt Labash of the Weekly Standard writes about Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

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18 March 2006

To Do List:

Hear Lucinda Williams perform an acoustic set at House of Blues.
Catch Mark Feldman at the CAC.
Visit a few St. Joseph’s Day altars.

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People have not heard enough positive stories about New Orleans after Katrina. “New Orleans: My Home, My Life, My Love” is an 11 minute movie about two young men’s heroic efforts to save the residents of the American Can apartment building.

Every day, I see people rebuilding their lives with grit and stoicism. The people of New Orleans are tough.

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14 March 2006

Last Saturday, the incredibly half-assed St. Patrick’s parade rolled through Uptown. The beads are cheap, the floats looked recycled, and the riders don’t wear masks. The krewes get extra credit for throwing vegetables. I caught an onion and two heads of cabbage.

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13 March 2006

Other People’s Prose:

Annabel and Midge came out of the tea room with the arrogant slow gait of the leisured, for their Saturday afternoon stretched ahead of them. They had lunched, as was their wont, on sugar, starches, oils, and butter-fats. Usually they ate sandwiches of spongy new white bread greased with butter and mayonnaise; they ate thick wedges of cake lying wet beneath ice cream and whipped cream and melted chocolate gritty with nuts. As alternates, they ate patties, sweating beads of inferior oil, containing bits of bland meat bogged in pale, stiffening sauce; they ate pastries, limber under rigid icing, filled with an indeterminate yellow sweet stuff, not still solid, not yet liquid, like salve that has been left in the sun. They chose no other sort of food, nor did they consider it. And their skin was like the petals of wood anemones, and their bellies were as flat and their flanks as lean as those of young Indian braves.

The first paragraph of Dorothy Parker’s “The Standard of Living.” (Thanks Poppy)

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12 March 2006

Thomas Kincade, the Painter of Schlock, has been accused of fondling strangers, peeing on Winnie the Pooh and heckling Siegfried and Roy. The L.A. Times has the story.

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9 March 2006

I never thought that I would say this, but God bless Newt Gingrich. Along with John M. Barry, Newt has written for Time magazine the best piece I’ve seen on why New Orleans must be saved and why the entire country must take responsibility for its rebuilding:

Shortly after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert wondered aloud whether the Federal Government should help rebuild a city much of which lies below sea level. The most tough-minded answer to that question demonstrates that rebuilding and protecting New Orleans is in the national interest. Reason: The very same geological forces that created that port are what make it vulnerable to Category 5 hurricanes and also what make it indispensable.

These days, I’m more interested in honesty than politics.

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If you’re worried about the state of beer in New Orleans, Beer Travelers has the scoop. Short answer: they’re still selling it, and we’re still drinking it.

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7 March 2006

I go to bed after the SNL news and miss out on Natalie Portman’s rap. Luckily NBC has posted the clip, the latest from the Lonely Island boys, on its website.

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