Sunday at Jazz Fest.


Yesterday, after a lovely breakfast in the Quarter, we took the bus down Esplanade Ave. to the Fairgrounds and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. It was a hot, sunny day, (91 F), but there was a strong breeze that made the temp quite comfortable. We got tickets and got in with no hassle; they have all this down to a science and even the extra security procedures were painless. First stop was the gospel tent, which happened to be right by the entrance we used.

Love Alive Fellowship Choir and Lady Tamborine.


The Love Alive Fellowship Choir was just amazing! About a hundred kids from age 4 to about 20, tremendously talented with four featured soloists. I had never heard of this group, but they are definitly good enough for prime time. On the right of the stage, dressed in white is "Lady Tamborine", Rosalie Ashton-Washington who plays tamborine and dances with almost every group during the eight hours of performance. The gurl works!

We walked around for a while, stopping here and there when something interesting was going on. Saw a Mardi Gras Indian Parade, (more on that later), checked out the crafts, bought some t-shirts and had some really good spring rolls for lunch. Then it was time to head for the big stage and Melissa Etheridge.

We found a good spot about a third of the way back from the stage.


And not too far away from some eye candy.


Even though we were pretty far from the stage, we were right in front of one of the big screens, so the view was good. The sound systems at the Fest are all flawless so there is never a place where you can't hear. Ms. Etheridge did 90 minutes of full out performance that turned me into a fan. I always liked her alright, but yesterday's performance was incredible; she has now reached the goddess level in my book!

The "I was there." shot.


Karen and Chris totally enjoyed their first day at Jazz Fest.


We had a great time and we're looking forward to going again next Friday, (Bonnie Raitt).

Next entry... the Mardi Gras Indians and more!

Karen and Chris are here!

My sister and her other half got into to New Orleans late Friday night, so we got up later Saturday and made it an easy day. First we had coffee in the back yard with Robert, then a little breakfast and a long chat with Nina. About noon we headed for the Quarter.

On the way to Cafe du Monde, we ran into this jazz marching band.


After coffee and beignets we did some shopping in the French Market.


Karen and Chris shopping.


The Coffee Pot


We had a lil' dinner at home and turned in early so we could get up early this morning to go to breakfast at The Coffee Pot. It's been two years since Karen and Chris have been here, but the waitress that always waits on us came right over to say hello. (This same woman has been waiting on them at the Coffee Pot for over a decade.) We had a huge breakfast; callas for Karen, pancakes and strawberries for Chris and a Sis' Soul Omelette for me with lots of good coffee and chicory. Fabulous!

Then we walked back to the house to take a break and cool off. (It's going to hit 90 today!) In a few minutes we're going to leave to go to the Fairgrounds for Jazz Fest.

Tomorrow will be another new journal entry with lots of pics from the Jazz Fest.

Happy Birthday Alex!

Alex in New Orleans with Ignatius


Best wishes go out today to a special friend who, no matter how many birthdays he has, will always be younger than springtime! Love and hugs on your natal day, Alex!


She's baaaaack!



Yup. Nina's back in town! She arrived yesterday and will be here for Jazz Fest, as will my sister and her lover, who arrive tomorrow evening. Definitely a fun week ahead!

I've got a lot to do before the sib gets here, so I'm going to keep this short, but look for lots of updates and pics in the coming week!

Jazz Fest Special Edition.

I mentioned in the last post that I saw Sun Ra at Jazz Fest... his band was brilliant, and decisively odd looking, lots of long colorful robes, perhaps African, but African from outer space... and then at one point, Sun Ra walked onto the stage and sat down at the grand piano and started banging out this stuff that sounded like Duke Ellington had a child by Spike Jones and..., well, it was amazing! Stunning!

Sun Ra always said that he was from another planet, the planet Venus in fact. It wasn't hard to believe after seeing his "Arkestra" (his name for the 20 piece band) on the stage. After hearing a few of the numbers, and then hearing Sun Ra at the piano with the big band, I realized that the man knew more about the spaces between notes than anyone else, ever.

Sometimes, in music, just like in sculpture, it's the bits that you leave out that count...the spaces.

So here's a treat. A QuickTime sound file. Stars Fell On Alabama

It's fairly special song for me. I heard it that day live, but there's a story behind it...

When Bill and I owned the store on Burgundy Street (and lived across the street from it), there was this fabulously wealthy woman who lived next door, and although you might scarcely believe it, her name was Jera. She and her also wealthy husband, used to have this enormous mansion type house in Birrningham, AL. I mean, it was featured in "Architectual Digest"!. So they did all the big charity events there; they had a room on the first floor, just off of the foyer that accomodated a dozen large sofas, two grand pianos and 300 people! (I saw pictures!)

So, for one of these charity events, Joe Namath was the guest of honor. Of course, everyone wanted to see him and as he was moved through the room, he got more and more drunk. (He was apparently no stranger to drink at the time,,hehe). So by the time he got to the back of the room, his handelers wanted to get him out of the crowd. So Jera said, "Just bring him though the library!", and then they could go down the steps to the lawn. Which they did, but on the way out of the library door, Joe fell down, fell on Jera and broke her arm. Well, Joe was swept away by his handlers, and Jera was swept away to the hospital that her husband ran, and I suppose there was very little pain felt by either of them.

Of course, Jera was mortified (that's a southern lady thing..mortified!) that she wasn't at her big society function at the end to bid everybody goodby!

But that very morning there was this HUGE flower arrangement that arrived at her hospital bed side and it was from Joe Namath!

The card said, "Stars Fell On Alabama", signed Joe.

bwahahahaha! Jera thought there weren't enough roses in the arrangement. And, she would have liked a personal apology. Later, after a few martinis, she said, "well, hell, he was just a damn football player!. What! could I have expected!"

Think Jack and Karen from Will and Grace...

She was an amazing woman!

Jazz Fest!


Jazz Fest starts next Friday with hundreds of performances at the Fairgrounds during the day and several big concerts each night, Friday thru Sunday next week and Thursday thru Sunday the following week. In addition to that, every music club and some of the record and book stores have live music every day. It's an incredible two weeks for music! Some of the big name rock type acts appearing at the festival this year are Bonnie Raitt, Melissa Etheridge and Lenny Kravitz. (My sister and her lover will be here, so we will probably see our lez sister Melissa for sure...) The range of music is amazing; traditional Jazz, Blues and Cajun, wild Zydeco, big band, folk and gospel. Over half of the groups are from Louisiana and many from New Orleans; there's an incredible amount of local talent here. The Gospel Tent is a unique experience; while you would probably be able to see most of the local groups at one club or another during the year, you rarely see any of the gospel groups outside of a church. The tent really rocks! If you are thinking of that mush that gets played popularly every once and a while, well there's some of that, but a lot of the groups are hard driving, full out mesmerizing; there are arms waving, people yelling and shaking, there's some old woman next to you in a Sunday dress just stomping her feet and wailing, you can't help but get caught up in it. It's wonderful and a bit scary... I've found myself in tears there; I'm no fan of religion, but there is certainly a powerful force in play.

I usually pay no attention to the schedule, or maybe just pick one act that I really want to see and then just wander around and let it happen to me. I've never been disappointed with the time spent there and I've often been stunned, like the time I saw Sun Ra, (which was probably the most amazing musical performance I've ever seen.)
The full schedule can be seen at the Official Jazz Fest site, here. This is one of the things you should put on your list if you love music; it's a fabulous time!

The Yard.




O.K. So it ain't beautiful yet... A couple of weeks ago I cut down most of the huge (20 ft +) banana trees because they needed it and did some other trimming. I got exhausted and kind of just left everything. Yesterday, I started cleaning up by the back door and this morning I got this huge surge of energy and got out there with a saw and pruning shears a pitch fork and a rake. I moved a half a ton of debris into a corner spot behind some of the banana trees where most of it will rot away by the end of the summer and cut back a lot of the most active vines. (I say active; some of these vines grow a foot a day!) I had dreaded doing this so much, but once I got started, it went fairly quickly. After a hour of hard labor I could see some results and another hour of work should get the rest of the detritus out of the way. (I have to just stuff it in corners this year, can't afford to have someone haul it away and the city trash pick up will only take a lil bag or two a week. Like I said, most of it will rot in the frist two months.)

By mid summer, it'll be gorgeous! hehe.

AOL version 1.5!



I thought this might amuse some of you. I found this old mailer in my desk from AOL from 1992 when they were still just getting started. Notice the huge old floppy disk! I actually started with AOL the year before when they began beta testing of the initial DOS version of the software. It didn't run under Windows... (Windows existed then, but it really didn't do much, hardly anyone used it.), the AOL software used the GeoWorks environment, a very neat piece of software that at the time had Windows beat hands down for ease of use, cost and it's compact code. It was a graphical interface that actually ran on an XT computer and it was incredibly stable. Microsoft Windows eventually just swamped it; Gates had all the money he needed to promote Windows from his sale of DOS. (Which he bought from someone btw...)

Anyway, 11 years ago AOL was just the kewlist thing out there! I had used text based services like Compuserve and GEnie, but this was something else! When I signed on, there were somewhere between 100 and 200 thousand members and the fastest connection speed was 2400bps...that's 2.4k, hehe. Steve Case actually answered one of my e-mail questions! I left them around the time they hit 6 million members; when they decided it was more profitable to have 6 million frustrated customers rather than 600 thousand satisfied ones. Now they have over 35 million customers, so I guess some of them are happy, but I can't imagine why.

It pretty amazing to look at what's happened to the online community in just a little over a decade!

The last lunch served on the Titanic.



In one of the restaurants I worked in years ago, we used to do some items from this menu at lunch on every April 14. The chef, a lovely older gay man, always had great fun teaching the new waiters the name of the soup he'd selected from the menu; "Cockie Leekie". hehe.

This is a cajun,
Kaleb Trahan, musician.



This from Thursday's TP. Cajun Taliban? Not so fast, cher

By Ron Thibodeaux
Staff writer/The Times-Picayune

It's not unusual to find New Orleanians wrongly portrayed as redneck Southerners by moviemakers and television producers. In the latest twist on Louisiana stereotypes, some national media this week began referring to Baton Rouge-born Taliban suspect Yasser Esam Hamdi as "the Cajun Taliban."

Keepers of the Cajun culture flame across Acadiana were not amused.

First the ABC Radio Network and then Time magazine were peppered with phone calls and e-mail Tuesday and Wednesday from bona fide Cajuns determined to set the record straight.

It all started late Tuesday morning when a Lafayette radio station broadcast an ABC Radio Network national news report on the transfer of Hamdi from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to a Navy brig in Norfolk, Va. In the report, Hamdi was referred to as "the Cajun Taliban." Authorities have said Hamdi, 22, left Louisiana for Saudi Arabia with his family when he was 2 years old.

Within a few hours, the network headquarters in New York had gotten enough complaints from Louisiana listeners that it dropped the label.

"I told them, �You can say that if you want to, although I do find it insulting, but beyond that, it's inaccurate,' " said historian Shane K. Bernard, archivist for McIlhenny Co., maker of Tabasco sauce in Avery Island. "The fact that this fellow was born in Baton Rouge did not make him a Cajun.

"I explained to them that Cajuns are a federally recognized ethnic group; we've been declared an ethnic group by the federal courts. We're counted as a specific group by the U.S. Census Bureau," Bernard said.

Warren Perrin, a Lafayette lawyer and president of the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, also got involved Tuesday, making calls, e-mailing ABC Radio and spreading the word about the cultural faux pas to officials of his organization and many others in the Cajun renaissance movement. When he got home Tuesday night, Perrin found that the latest edition of Time magazine referred to Hamdi as a "ragin' Cajun" in an article titled, "Taliban From the Bayou."

Bright and early Wednesday, Perrin was back on the phone, tracking down the Time writer, who said he used "Cajun" as a generic term.

Can't do that, Perrin told him.

"At that point, he apologized for being so out of the loop on cultural awareness in Louisiana, being from up north and all," Perrin said.

Perrin fired off a letter to the editor of Time in which he admonished the magazine. Then he waited for the evening news.

"I hope it's not picked up by anyone else," Perrin said. "The battle continues."

I can't believe that this story got by an editor at Time! I haven't seen the print version of the magazine, (I stopped reading it years ago when they started looking more like "My Weekly Reader"), but the online version of the article does not now use the word cajun. The ignorance displayed here is dismaying. It's no wonder that we have so many problems with our perception of people in other countries, when we don't even know our own.

Of course, we shamelessly market anything here in Louisiana as "Cajun". Chef Paul Prudhomme made just the right pitch when he sought to introduce his native cuisine to the country. In a relatively short time, Cajun was the thing and clueless chefs everywhere in the country were happily burning meats and fish over seasoned with cayenne pepper and who knows what. It was more than the "culinary fad of the year", it went strong and wild for a decade, and it's still very popular. It caught everyones imagination, and that's the problem; people were excited about it, but they didn't really know anything about it. When the chain restaurants and the fast food places started offering cajun this and blackened that all hope was gone for any real popular understanding of the cuisine and unfortunately for the people who lived this rich style of cooking.

There's a very unique culture here; the Cajuns were originally French colonists from Canada, known then as Acadians. When the British took over Canada, the Acadians were kicked out and they came to Louisiana and settled in the bayous of southern Louisiana where their decendants now live, many of them still speaking a version of the French language. The cuisine that developed was a product of the French heritage, the hot climate and the rich variety of local ingredients, with an emphasis on seafood. Because they settled in a relatively remote area, their culture and the cuisine was not overwhelmed by the French Creole influences of the big city of New Orleans. It stayed fairly pure and largely unknown for years until Chef Paul came along and brought the media attention to it, with the usual media tendency to distill the essence of a culture to a few easy words.

The culture is still alive and there are many groups dedicated to preserving it. What I know about Cajuns comes from what I've read, of course, but also from the Cajuns that I've known... A friend of mine used to bring his mother into the gay bar where he worked on his days off. He told us not to worry what we said in front of her, because she refused to speak or understand American English. They spoke to each other only in Cajun French. (He told me that she understood English fairly well, but since she pretended not to understand it, it was her own problem if she heard something that she didn't like. She was pretty fiesty, (just like her son); she liked all the "dirty jokes" and it became a contest to see who could get her to laugh...) And a Cajun accent in bed is a powerful thing...



Other matters...
The network is still working very well. The laptop is connected and can move around the house some. It has a cam attached to it, which greatly extends the range for cam pics. Not sure what I'll do with it yet...

What's been going on?

I haven't updated the journal for a few days for a number of reasons, some of which will be covered in this entry.

First of all, last Thursday Robert and I decided to network all our computers and share the DSL line. So we hopped into the car and went out to BestBuy and picked up a router and 50 feet of cable, (to reach across the alley to his place). We already each had NIC cards and I had some cable, so that was all we needed. We got back and looked everything over, but then it was time for me to meet Ken and Kurt at The Phoenix for before dinner drinks.

So off I went. It was only 3 PM, but before dinner drinks can take some time in New Orleans... We had a few at The Phoenix and then headed out on foot to Kurt's house where we were having dinner. On the way, we stopped at Bud Rip's, a lovely old NO neighborhood bar that probably looks the way it did in the 40's. The tin ceilings and the bar are original, the atmosphere is great. This place was where all the sports writers went in the 50's and one wall is covered with celebrity pictures. During the day, the bar is sparsely populated, the TV sets are on and the drinks are cheap. At night, it's a different story; the place has been discovered by the local youth. Anyways, we had a few more drinks.

Ken and Kurt at Bud Rip's


As you can see from the picture, Ken has grown a beard. Kurt, who usually has a smile on his face, looks just like he does in every photograph ever taken of him. For some reason, he prefers to look like an angry psychopath whenever a camera is aimed in his direction. While we were there, the bartender served some chips and cheese doodles on a white paper plate. Then, it was time to get to Kurt's house two blocks away.

A new street sign had been recently installed.


Yes, they installed it upside down! Well, it's not like it was spelled wrong... We got to Kurt's house. He has a beautiful shotgun style house with all the fireplaces and architectual details you could want and it's decorated with collections of odd and wonderful old things. But before we ate, Ken had to cut Kurt's hair, so we grabbed a few beers and went out to the yard. Then, it was time to eat. Kurt made a real solid local dish; a crawfish and merliton casserole that was faulous! On the way home, Ken insisted on stopping at The Phoenix for after dinner drinks, of which there were several.

Finally, I got home. Robert was still up, so he brewed a pot of coffee and we started to set up the network. (He had run the cable over while I was drinking, er eating dinner). Now, I may not have mentioned this before, but I didn't really know anything about setting up a network. (I do now...hehe). I finally gave up around 7AM. I slept a lot Friday, for some reason, and only got about two hours of research done on the network question. Saturday, I woke up and immediately knew what to do next. By the evening, I had us all hooked up to the DSL line, (This was a good trick because Bell South offers no tech support for it.), but the computers didn't "see" each other like they should on a network. I finally figured that out on Monday. During this whole time, there was the usual constant rebooting of the three computers, (it gets so boring..) and they had to be disconnected from the DSL line while I was figuring everything out. It took hours and hours, but now I know how to do it. And it works really well. This is the first time Robert has had a broadband connection and he has been busy trying to download the entire web... I sort of didn't want to look at a computer for a while.


This didn't happen Monday.


The picture is from last spring, but we will have some flooding sometime this spring as well. I thought it was going to happen Monday. An enormous front came through in the early afternoon with 60 MPH winds, two inches of rain in an hour and wild thunderstorms that produced a record number of tornadoes and water spouts. The temperature dropped 30 degrees in 5 minutes. But the really bad stuff only lasted an hour, and my neighborhood was spared the worst. It was a little scary, because it looked like we were going to get slammed.

The sun came out this afternoon and everything is back to normal.

Tomorrow, there's an interview in the morning and then we go to make groceries afterwards.

And that's it.

An Amusing Tale From New Orleans' Past

An excerpt taken from "The French Quarter" by Herbert Asbury, (which unokhan recently sent to me. Thanks uno!), that tells about a duel fought by Bernard Marigny who originally owned the land that comprises my neighborhood.

One of the famous duelists of early New Orleans was Bernard Marigny, a member of one of Louisiana's oldest and influential families, who was a master swordsman and a crack shot with a pistol. He was elected to the state legislature in 1817 as a member of the House of Representatives and took an active and a leading part in the many disputes that arose between the Creoles and the Americans. At the same time Catahoula Parish was represented by James Humble, a blacksmith and a former resident of Georgia, who was noted for his great stature--he stood almost seven feet in his stockings. The Georgian replied to one of Marigny's most impassioned speeches, and made various allusions so pointed and personal that the Creole considered himself grievously insulted, and challenged the blacksmith to a duel. Humble sought the advice of a friend.

"I will not fight him," he said. "I know nothing of this dueling business."
"You must," his friend protested. "No gentleman can refuse a challenge."
"I'm not a gentleman," Humble retorted. "I'm only a blacksmith."

Humble was assured that he would be ruined both politically and socially if he declined to meet the Creole. His friend pointed out that as the challenged person the blacksmith had the choice of weapons and could so choose as to put him on equal terms with his adversary. Humble considered the matter for a day or two and then sent this reply to Marigny.

"I accept your challenge, and in exercise of my privilege I stipulate that the duel shall take place in Lake Pontchartrain in six feet of water, sledge-hammers to be used as weapons."

Since Marigny was less than five feet eight inches tall and so slight that he could scarcely lift a sledge-hammer, this was giving Humble an equal chance with a vengence. The Creole's friends urged him to stand on a box and run the risk of having his skull cracked by the huge blacksmith's hammer, but Marigny declared that it was impossible for him to fight a man with such a sense of humor. Instead he apologized to Humble, and the two became firm friends.

Although duels are extremely rare these days, business in New Orleans is carried on today in much the same sort of spirit. Recently two major businessmen (and members of their families) got into a fist fight in a posh local restaurant over a manner of business honor. The two men are still dueling...in the court room.