Put up your nickels and dimes

House floats are popping up all over town I've seen a few of these. But in the COVID times one only travels a short distance along the same route every day with fewer stops in between so I can't say I've seen a lot of them yet. I'm sure I'll get out and take some pictures sooner or later.  I have noticed a number of different takes on the phenomenon over the past few weeks. The class politics of it are a little bit fraught. One could complain that it's a high barrier to entry kind of event. In order to have your own display, you gotta own a house and afford to pay for the art. The inherent tie to home ownership can signify gentrification, especially given what we've been told about high enthusiasm among wealthy young transplants for participating. 

But, when you think about it, regular Mardi Gras basically works the same way. The floats and riders represent a certain wealth holding class. Although, we should note, there is wide variation there that has become elaborated over time. Once there were only krewes comprised of white elites. Now there is basically a krewe for every sub-strata, race, or gender of the upper middle class. So, you know, progress.  But, as always, the real event is in the party that chaotically evolves from public participation all around it.  The parade of blue bloods (or moderately well off so and sos) is just a reason to be there. It's the people dancing and shouting and drinking and just standing around talking to their neighbors that we're all there to see.  Obviously we can't have that this year. Not the way we are used to, anyway. Look what happened last time. 

We did walk out to see the Phorty Phunny Phellows on Twelfth Night thinking it would be the closest anyone would come to seeing a real live Carnival thing happen this year.  A larger (but still sparse and well distanced) crowd than usual showed out probably thinking the same thing.  It was a weird vibe. Uneasy, uncomfortable and concerned that maybe this anti-climactic non-event we usually take in as an ironic amusement would be the most celebrating we would do all season.

We have to have something, though. Our spiritual health demands that. And house floats are as good a place as any to start. Maybe there are other kinds of public art and just ways of hanging out that can embellish that central event.  Back in the normal universe from which we are currently estranged, Krewe Du Vieux would have been parading this weekend.   Instead they are offering a "virutal parade" on their website as well as a series of house float style art installations in various locations across the city.  See their website for a map.  Hopefully we'll see more events like this. Sooner or later we're going to learn that lots of things besides houses can probably be floats.

The good news, in the meantime, is that it's proving to be a way to keep artists working this year who otherwise wouldn't be.  

Devin DeWolf then took the concept a step further and focused specifically on job creation with his website HireAMardiGrasArtist.com. “Caroline Thomas knew that I had organized Feed the Frontline NOLA, which brought 90,000 restaurant meals and 10,000 coffees to local health workers as a moral boost. We hired unemployed local musicians as delivery people,” said DeWolf, who is also the organizer and founder of the Krewe of Red Beans, and the charity project Feed the Second Line.  

“Red Beans has a lot of members who care about the community and are very grass roots, so when Caroline Thomas had the idea to crowdfund Mardi Gras worker jobs back, she turned to us,” said DeWolf. HireAMardiGrasArtist.com collects donations of all sizes. “And every time we raise $15,000, we raffle off a house float to someone who donated. We also take commissions from people and businesses who want to hire artists to create $15,000 projects. We’ve raised a quarter of a million dollars in just a month, and are currently employing 45 full-time artists at a minimum of $30-per-hour. We’ve completed 22 float houses since December 5^th when we announced the idea.”

What this proof of concept suggests, though, is that we could go bigger. Imagine a COVID stimulus bill that includes a WPA style program for hiring artists and other participants in the so-called cultural economy to keep this sort of work going.  Not year-round house floats, per se.  Carnival does come to an end, after all. But surely there are other creative ways to employ creative people who haven't been able to do their ordinary work during the pandemic.  There are unique talents and resources in New Orleans. We should learn from this unusual Carnival season that they are talents worth investing in.

"Political opinion aside..."

Public art can be appreciated best if we separate it from its message.

Political opinion aside, the wooden sculpture charmingly blends the suggestion of digital-age government surveillance with old-fashioned birdhouse carpentry. Passing drivers may very well smile as they slow down for fear of receiving a robotic speeding ticket.

After all, that is why we kept all those Confederate monuments up for so long, right?

Archaeology

Uncovering the lost civilization that was New Orleans in the latter half of the 20th Century.

Amid the debris, Greg Lambousy, Director of the New Orleans Jazz Museum, spotted a long iron rod with a curve like a shepherd’s crook and used it to pull down a gutter.

We were trying to get a better look at what we’ve come to call the “Panther mural.” Painted on cinder block, covered over with stucco years ago and relegated to oblivion, it appeared to embody themes of African-American empowerment and militancy from the era of black nationalism.

Also relegated to oblivion, except in the minds of a few, is the memory of how powerful the New Orleans Panthers were in 1970 when they took up residence in a Desire Public Housing Development unit and vowed to stay there to protect residents from police.

Champions of the poor, unifiers, revolutionary educators, the Panthers were dreaded by some — including FBI director J. Edgar Hoover who vowed to eradicate them — and a source of inspiration to others. As I explain in my book, “Showdown in Desire: The Black Panthers Take a Stand in New Orleans,” believers saw them as a divinely protected force for good.

After our strenuous, resourceful, and somewhat dangerous clearing efforts, photographer Mark Sindler got a pretty clear angle on the mural where the stucco had fallen away. Propitiously, just then the sun came out.

If you follow the wildly improbable twists and turns of this story, you could conclude that we, all of us, are being led to pay attention, to notice something that has revolutionary and artistic relevance to New Orleans history.

Now we know who is to blame

Ran across this blame game wall stencil a few months ago just off of Tchoupitoulas Street uptown. It's kind of like watching a City Council meeting.



Anyway I wasn't sure we'd ever find out who the artist was but check it out.

In fact, the artist is not even trying to pass his work off as Banksy’s — he signs each piece with his adopted name, “Az,” and has a website showcasing it, Azwashere.com. He also has been featured at local galleries, including Treo and Gasa Gasa, and, in light of the ongoing confusion about his art, agreed to discuss it with Uptown Messenger.

Az is 32, has lived in seven or eight cities, and moved to New Orleans about two years ago. He started tagging about two years before that.

“I was living up in Fargo, and I was so bored that I wanted to make the place look not so much like a stereotypical suburban city,” Az said.

One night, when he was spraypainting the word ‘freedom’ on the back side of an apartment building, a passer-by took note of his license plate. With that, Az got his first attention from the police, and left Fargo soon afterward.

New Orleans, he said, has become a place of “refuge” for him, and he no longer wants to move around. Instead, he and artist Rex Dingler are collaborating on a project called “Not Jericho,” a sort of Craigslist to connect artists with property owners who have walls they want painted.

“New Orleans has been so against murals and graffiti in general, now that they are starting to want more public art, they’re having a hard time finding the artists,” Az said.

The website includes photos of some of his other work around town.  I was hoping to find this Magazine Street meter maid among them, but no.  Don't know whose this is.

Staring out from otherworldy windows

This is a mural by an artist named Bruce "Shakur" White near the corner of Oretha Castle Haley and Martin Luther King Boulevards. It is meant to complement and comment on a sculpture by Frank Hayden that sits in the neutral ground there on MLK.  I took this picture in April of 2006.



I also have some close ups of the accompanying text. I included them in this post back in January which also addresses the fact that the mural was removed when the building it hung on was renovated in accordance with the ongoing "revitalization" of the OCH corridor.  Here is a look at the same wall just last week.



Like a lot of new New Orleans, it looks nice. But it's clearly missing something. 

Nuisance statues

Mitch is doing a talk about statues for the city council today.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu has formally asked the city council to begin the legal process required to have four public monuments, including the statue of Robert E. Lee in Lee Circle, declared public "nuisances" and taken down.

In a letter addressed to City Council President Jason Williams, Landrieu asks the council to hold a hearing to determine whether the following monuments should be removed: Lee's statue, the statue of Jefferson Davis on Jefferson Davis Parkway, the PGT Beauregard equestrian statue at the entrance to City Park and the Battle of Liberty Place monument on Iberville Street near the riverfront.

Landrieu is scheduled to address the council on the subject at noon Thursday (July 9) during its business meeting.

I was all set to head out to Lee Circle with my decibel meter but I stopped and read the rest of this article where it actually defines what makes something a "nuisance statue."

The law sets up a three-point test to determine if a statue may be removed. Briefly stated, the council must find that the monument:

* Praises a subject at odds with the message of equal rights under the law.
* Has been or may become the site of violent demonstrations.
* Constitutes an expense to maintain that outweighs its historic importance and/or the reason for its display on public property.

The language of the first provision in particular seems tailored to the removal of Confederate statuary, as it makes a clear reference to the 14th Amendment, which was added to the U.S. Constitution after the Civil War and made black Americans full citizens with equal protection under the law.

According to that provision, any monument that, in the council's view, "honors praises or fosters ideologies ... in conflict with the requirements of equal protection," would be subject to removal. Also eligible: anything that honors those who "participated in the killing of public employees of the city or the state" or anything that lauds any "violent actions" to promote "ethnic, religious or racial supremacy."

This is obviously an ordinance written in response to a controversy over the Liberty Place Monument brought on by David Duke.

The monument left public view in 1989, reportedly for safe keeping, amidst construction on Canal Street. Mayor Sidney Barthelemy pledged to return the marker, though his administration missed the originally stated date for its replacement. The structure stayed in storage until February 1993, when a movement led by David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, sued for its return. To the chagrin of many residents, the city obliged but moved the obelisk off of Canal Street to its present site in the curve of Iberville Street, between railroad tracks and the entrance to a parking garage.

Mitch is finally asking for the new ordinance to be applied to the cases it was intended to address. But why stop there? There are plenty of statues around town we might consider nuisances. Mr. Peanut is pretty annoying, for instance.  Also those Evac-U-Spot giant metal stick men. Nobody likes those.

But neither of those cases seem like they fit the criteria set forth by the ordinance. Mr. Peanut is an advertisement. Maybe we can dig around and find some way Planter's is "at odds with equal rights under the law" but let's not get too deep into the problematics today.  (A Twitterer tells me he's already gone anyway) The Evacu-Spots aren't likely to draw demonstrations.  Hell, they aren't even likely to draw crowds of evacuees even though that is their ostensible purpose.  Some nuisances you have to live with, I guess.

This, on the other hand...



Everybody hates Bronze Tom.  Tom Benson's personal fortune is derived from public subsidies and the use of public facilities. This constitutes a considerable expense to maintain. A lot of people might not agree the expense outweighs its historic importance.. at least in terms of the football team which we seem to enjoy.  But if we're just talking about the statue.. well.. everybody hates Bronze Tom.  This has already caused it to become the site of demonstrations which, on occasion, have bordered on violence.



No reason to stop at just the Confederate monuments. Mr. Landrieu, tear down this paw paw.

Telling the easy story

In the last post, I pointed to Oyster's complaint that the political press is inaccurately reporting Bobby Jindal's record with regard to the Americans for Tax Reform no new taxes pledge.  Jindal hasn't always adhered to the (totally non-binding, anyway) pledge. But it's easier to write the story as though he has because it sets up an easy-to-digest narrative for the reader.  Through repetition, the simple but incomplete version of the story becomes convention. 

Similarly, there's this Strawberry Festival poster.Varg wonders why this particular story gets traction while others are left alone. 

Receiving far less publicity even though I think it addresses a more pressing and immediate social and racial concern is the artwork that was displayed in Oakwood Mall this week. This student’s artwork and the (much smaller) controversy surrounding it seems far less abstract and debatable than the Ponchatoula piece. Fear of police is a daily issue for us all. That there are police who do their best to serve and protect but are thought of as murderers is an issue. The huge rift of trust between this student and the police that have vowed to protect him perhaps represents the top social ill of our time. This student made a piece of political art and spoke his voice. This is important and it is critical to our freedom of expression.

But the story has seemed to have sputtered out while the festival poster has gone worldwide. Why? There are protests in Ferguson right now about police killings. Doesn’t this student’s art reflect how concerned he or she is about their future? Somewhere in the local area a student watched protests in Ferguson and was inspired to do something with his or her emotions on the matter and the story of it being pulled from an exhibit was just a blip on the media radar. Why was the Festival poster so sexy and this very relevant one not?

I guess because it’s an easier story to report: Small town white folks are ignorant and racist. Gets reported all the time in all sorts of ways.

Yet somehow RT EXPO in New York, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, FI-ART in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Northshore Regional Endowment for the Arts and the African-American Heritage Museum in Aurora, Illinois are not ignorant and racist despite doing the same shit.

Again we're skipping the more relevant stories in favor of the easy ones. 

Hell even the pineheads are worth 50 Blue Dogs a piece

Somebody stole a bunch of Varg's stuff out of his truck last weekend.   That sucks.  Maybe Sidney Torres will make a TV commercial about it.

Embracing the Dream

This is a sculpture at the corner of Oretha Castle Haley and Martin Luther King Boulevards by the late artist, Frank Hayden. It was installed in 1976 as a monument to Martin Luther King Jr.

Frank Hayden (1934-1988) shared these words during the unveiling of his ten-foot tall sculpture honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in August 1976. Hayden’s abstract egg shape with arms and hands revealed was met with mixed reactions. It was reported that many in attendance expected a life-size statue of Dr. King. Hayden explained “the shape represents life and growth, and the arms and hands are reaching out for brotherhood.” Inside the egg form are passages from Dr. King's speeches, and there is a bullet hole to commemorate Dr. King's assassination.

I took these photos back in 2006.  Since that time, this corner.. along with the rest of the OCH corridor, has seen some changes thanks to a variety of revitalization efforts.. as well as the beginnings of the gentrification process in Central City.

One very high profile project involves the Gators department store on the left in the above photograph which is being redeveloped into the New Orleans Jazz Market opening this spring.

The extensive renovation/construction project to convert a long-dormant former department store into a sleek center for modern jazz is scheduled to be completed in early 2015. Plans call for the New Orleans Jazz Market to house a 360-seat performance venue, a rehearsal room and an archive of New Orleans jazz. The market will host educational programs and performances by the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra and others.

Founded in 2002, the nonprofit NOJO was modeled in part after the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra in New York, intended to be a permanent performing arts institution devoted to building an industry for jazz in the city where the music originated.

When I took these photos I also took some of a mural facing the monument from the side of a building on MLK Boulevard.



The mural, titled "Embracing the Dream" by artist Bruce "Shakor" White,  offered a commentary on the sculpture.





Last year, the building began undergoing renovations leading to the mural's removal from the wall. Gambit's "Blake Pontchartrain" explains.

Display windows have been installed where the murals used to be and passersby now can see local artists' works on display inside. The Labats say the two Shakur murals are in a secure place. Possible plans for the murals have been discussed, including one to display them on the third floor of the building. Connie Labat says the renovated building will feature live music, films and theater — and will always have art displayed.

That's nice, I guess.  Still it's a shame that the mural, which was such a great companion piece to the sculpture, had to be removed from the adjoining outdoor space. 

"Shoot 'em"

The Downtown Development District's conversion of Gallier Hall into...a Pink Floyd show... but with less drugs... and at Epcot Center, probably... really does draw out the most lovely sorts of "art patrons."

New Orleans police separated the protesters from the LUNA Fete spectators, some of whom were upset by the disruption and yelled back. "Shoot 'em!" one woman shouted.

The tourism arts

Kind of a strange association here but OK.

Meanwhile, a measure to raise the occupancy tax rate on hotel rooms by 1.75 percent was pulled from the House floor before it was considered. Its doom had been all but been ensured by the vehement opposition of a coalition of tourism industry leaders, including Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne and New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau President Stephen Perry.

“I think the industry as a whole is very pleased that there was no change in the hotel tax,” Perry said. “It means that we have a competitive price structure, and it means that we have marketing funds sufficient to drive some real economic growth.”

The industry’s leaders are typically allies of the mayor, but in opposing the hotel tax increase they argued that it would make New Orleans among the priciest travel destinations for tourists.

“I think that was a surprise, when you consider the fact that Mayor Landrieu was formerly the lieutenant governor and is definitely involved in the arts,” political analyst Silas Lee said. “You just don’t have permanent friends and permanent enemies in politics.”

It's true the Lt. Governor's office has been in charge of something we call the "Department of Culture, Recreation, and Tourism"  but it doesn't follow that being "involved in the arts" is the same thing as supporting every whim of the hospitality industry.  Maybe Silas is confused by the "Vibrancy" movement.  Who wouldn't be, really?

Also the Advocate article notes that Mitch's sanitation rangers idea "to allow public workers other than NOPD quality-of-life officers to issue summonses for sanitation and nuisance violations" passed so expect a city employee to show up and write you a ticket if your lawn isn't just so next year.

This will be a different sort of ticket from the ones we already empower various busybodies to write.

New Orleans historical society is fining us $500 a day for our fence sign  #WTF this city isn't small biz friendly at all!
— ChefॐRob (@NOLAsmokehouse) June 3, 2014

Which is a weird thing for them to be mad about since, you know, the Mayor is definitely involved in the arts."

@skooks the condemned sign that is in question Food behind :) Come see us http://t.co/eTrenqjJmI pic.twitter.com/1xi27LDRAm
— ChefॐRob (@NOLAsmokehouse) June 4, 2014

Must demolish all houses on this block in order to put up a hotel

This whimsical street art in Chicago would have been far more clever in one of New Orleans' gentrifying neighborhoods like Treme or Bywater... or maybe just the whole city.

Paint the Luxury Tax space underneath all the traffic cameras.  The stack of Community Chest cards all reference Bill Jefferson charities.  Fred Heebe has a permanent Get Out of Jail Free Card. Spend three consecutive turns in jail and Gusman makes a bigger per diem. That sort of thing.

Nobody told me Kirsha Kaechele was back in town

Kickstarter proposal to turn house into free, but gross, amusement.

All that lovely money makes us bad and rare

I would have preferred we just ignored anything coming out of the Pelican Institute since we'd pretty much pegged them as a dishonest right-wing propaganda house some time ago when we read about their ties to the krewe of clowns James "Lil' Liddy" O'Keefe assembled to execute his botched break in to Senator Landrieu's office last year.

But as the New York Times Magazine reminds us, no degree of dishonest punkery goes unrewarded these days... well at least none that emanates from the right anyway. So I guess it shouldn't surprise us very much to see Tulane graduate and Pelican Institute founder Kevin Kane published in The Lens espousing some bone-headed tripe about getting gubmint out of arts funding.

Luckily we have Lamar White around to slap that shit right back down.

Kane’s misunderstanding of the interplay between public and private investments is never more obvious than when he posits the Frenchmen Street club scene as a pure case of cultural capitalism.

In fact, the Backbeat Foundation and the Let’s Be Totally Clear campaign for smoke-free bars and nightspots have utilized funding from the New Orleans Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to foster innovative arts and music programming and community based events and projects in and around Frenchmen, Kane’s showcase of purely “private-sector innovation.”

Is this complex weave of public and private funding streams having the desired impact? As Sarah Palin might put it: You betcha. In New Orleans, according to a report issued by Mayor Landrieu’s office, the cultural economy accounts for 28,000 jobs, over $1.1 billion in wages, and hundreds of millions of dollars in additional economic impact. Festivals, which are heavily subsidized by the city, attract over 3.2 million tourists annually.

Of course, most Louisianans don’t talk about our “cultural economy;” we talk about our culture. Culture imbues and defines Louisiana identity. “There are many reasons why Louisiana has ‘generations-old traditions like jazz, second lines, Mardi Gras Indians, zydeco and parade floats,” Kane writes. “Our state’s unique history, geography and demographic diversity have all had a hand.” And government support for arts and culture? Kane wants to rule that out — no matter that it is a long and well-established part of our “history.”

Note also that, in 2011, the City of New Orleans spent about $3 million on Mardi Gras related expenses including police, sanitation, EMS and various other serivces that make this "generations-old tradition" possible. The Times-Picayune seemed to think that was quite a bargain, in fact.

Carpetbaggers are real

Quickly becoming the story of the day.

The houses that form the unusual art space were already in states of decay when Kirsha Kaechele, the glamorous globe-trotting creator of the project, first adopted them and dedicated them to artistic experimentation. At the time, KKProjects seemed to represent the sort of outside-the-box thinking that could breathe vitality into imperiled historic neighborhoods in the bleak post-Katrina recovery period.

Now, ironically, the site, between Music and Arts streets, is worse off than it might have been. The spectacular vault door is gone, leaving a gaping cavity in the former art gallery, which a neighbor complains has become a trash-strewn haven for squatters. One of the other art houses has been demolished, though the lot where it stood is still heaped with debris. Two more of the houses are boarded up and tangled with vines.

Frankly, I don't see the "irony" here. Capitalizing on the misfortune of others is what these people do. Haven't we figured this out yet? I mean her next move was to Australia fer chissakes. How obvious does this pattern need to be?

And also this.

Kaechele said that her boyfriend, David Walsh, a professional gambler, art collector and businessman she met at an art fair in Switzerland, has recently established the Museum of New and Old Art in Tasmania.

She described the remote museum as a trove of everything from ancient Egyptian artifacts to a work by Damien Hirst, the English artist known for his series of dead animals preserved in tanks. The works are all displayed in a sunken four-story bunker. Kaechele says she’ll be living in an apartment accessible through the museum’s mummy room.

Upon which Superdeformed wins the day

How do you even get into that lifestyle? She must be a Super Villain!

This week in Gambit

Some time ago this site would periodically produce a "Gambit Preview" post consisting of whatever articles of interest the site author wanted to highlight from that week's Gambit which he had happened to read on either Sunday or Monday before the issue was made available online. For reasons that remain unclear, the tabloid's online and print publishing schedules remain oddly out of sync. But we no longer feel obligated to provide a "preview" post since the editor has made a habit of putting one of his own up on the Gambit's blog each week.

Except, again for reasons that remain unclear, no preview of this week's Gambit appeared on the blog site. After flirting briefly with the idea of canceling our subscription (the paper is free) and then organizing a boycott of Gambit's advertisers (alas, Green Parrot Nursery and Funky Monkey Vintage Clothing, I don't know how to quit you) we've decided instead to once again preview the paper ourselves... on Wednesday which, of course, only makes sense.

• Noah Bonaparte Pais writes about the long-awaited publication of Josh Neufeld's webcomic A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge

  Now a hardcover graphic novel — courtesy of Pantheon Books, which also published Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical 2000 account of the Iranian Revolution — the 13-chapter volume is being held up as one of the definitive accounts of the catastrophe, both by the media and the story's subjects. Novelist Dave Eggers, who spent much of the same period researching and writing his own Katrina report, Zeitoun, called A.D. "one of the best-ever examples of comics reportage, and one of the clearest portraits of post-Katrina New Orleans yet published."

  
  
  Earlier this week, A.D. received an uneven review from Newsweek and gets a far more favorable treatment from the T-P's Susan Larson today. Neufeld will be signing copies of A.D. on Saturday at The Maple Street Book Shop from 1-3PM and at Octavia Books beginning at 3:30. On Sunday there is another signing scheduled at Beth's Books/Sound Cafe for 1 PM. Also this Saturday, Octavia Books will have copies of A.D. available for sale all day at the Rising Tide conference (more on this in a minute).



• The appropriately named Alex Woodward profiles local artist Lance "Varg" Vargas and his folk art creations made from recycled wood and found objects.

  Vargas moved to New Orleans in 2004 to find affordable housing following a graphic design gig at a newspaper in California.
  
  "I just said, 'I want to do it all myself,'" he says. "I'd rather make $8 an hour than $12 or $16 an hour working for someone else when you're just going to get let go." But he never takes himself too seriously.
  
  "It's asinine to me now to think, 'I'm going to take these chopped up pieces of wood, nail some stuff to it, spray-paint it and call it art, and go out projecting myself as an artist.'"
  
  His work — found at local art markets, galleries and amid street art vendors at Jackson Square — draws from folklore, music, anatomy textbooks, bottlecaps (Abita and Miller High Life), and voodoo. ("I'm not versed in voodoo or anything. It's voodoo-'inspired'. The voodoo people will get on your ass when you get something wrong.") Vargas, who writes his blog The Chicory (www.thechicory.com/blog), also promotes his art through his Web site (www.leveeland.com).

  
  Menckles and I are the proud possessors of a pair of Vargas originals we received earlier this year as wedding gifts. Here. I'll photograph one for you right now.
  
  
  
  Varg sells his work in Jackson Square on most Saturdays... weather permitting. It's the closest thing he's come to figuring out a decent "racket".



• On page 22 of your Gambit there is a full-page psychedelic-looking advertisement for Irvin Mayfield's "The Love Sessions" These are a series of shows Mr. Mayfield is playing next week at his club in the Royal Sonesta Hotel. Proceeds from these shows will go to benefit Unity for the Homeless, The New Orleans Police and Justice Foundation, Boys Town Louisiana, The New Orleans Public Library, The New Orleans Jazz Orchestra, and the LSU Health Sciences Center Department of Psychiatry. We applaud Mr. Mayfield's effort to put on these performances... so long as we don't have to listen to them. If you would like to support any of these worthy charitable concerns and can find some poor soul to palm your ticket off on you may purchase it here.



• David Winkler-Schmit previews this weekend's fourth annual Rising Tide Conference.
  

  Under normal circumstances, and even catastrophic events like Hurricane Katrina, the blogging community is a virtual one: It's not face-to-face, but screen-to-screen. That won't be the case this Saturday, Aug. 22, however, when New Orleans bloggers get together for their fourth annual conference, Rising Tide, with comedian and writer Harry Shearer as the featured speaker. The event takes place at the Zeitgeist Multi-Disciplinary Arts Center in Central City, and the main thrust is to provide and share information. It's not just for bloggers, but for anyone interested in New Orleans.
  
  "We're trying to morph from a conference that was heavily about blogging to one that is more about the city, its culture and its past, future and present," says Rising Tide organizer Peter Athas, who writes his own blog, Adrastos.

  
  
  For the record, Rising Tide has always been more about New Orleans than about blogging in my mind. The previous conferences have hosted discussions on flood control, education, the local literary scene, and of course, politics. All of this should be of interest to anyone who cares about the status and future of New Orleans. Winkler-Schmit explains a bit of the history in his article.
  
  

  By late 2005, local bloggers were finding each other. An Internet discussion group began, giving bloggers a chance to share tips and news. Someone suggested a conference, and Mark Moseley, aka Oyster, who writes Your Right Hand Thief spearheaded the effort with others, including Athas and Maitri Venkat-Ramani (Maitri's Vatul Blog). The inaugural Rising Tide conference was held Aug. 25-27, 2006, the weekend before the storm's first anniversary.
  
  "The Rising Tide Conference will be a gathering for all who wish to learn more and do more to assist New Orleans' recovery in the aftermath of the natural disasters of both Hurricane Katrina and Rita, the manmade disaster of the levee and floodwall collapses, and the incompetence of government on all levels," (Mark) Folse wrote on the first day of the conference.
  
  Though local bloggers organize these conferences and the central theme is New Orleans' recovery and future, Rising Tide isn't for bloggers only, nor just for locals. Since the first conference, there has been an effort to get the information to a wider audience through live blogging, YouTube and other new media. (George "Loki") Williams says he is promoting this year's event via Facebook and Twitter, two popular social media networks. Even if these efforts don't attract more attendees to the actual conference, it will create a permanent online record for anyone to access. Williams does, however, think this year's attendance could be the highest ever.

  
  
  This year's conference has adopted the theme "Sinking to New Heights" It examines the state of the city as the recovery era begins to transition toward the "new normal" whatever that might be.
  
  The agenda (schedule here) features a keynote by the aforementioned Harry Shearer, as well as presentations by NetSquared Nola and The New Orleans Institute. There will be a panel on New Orleans cultural folkways moderated by Mark Folse. Mark writes,

  I am working with NOLA Slate on a panel on the state of New Orleans culture, with panelists who will speak on the state of parading, food and music culture in the city in Year Four after the Federal Flood. Speaking on parading culture will be Edward Buckner of The Porch Seventh Ward Culture Organization and the Original Big 7 Social Aid and Pleasure Club Our food panelist will be Susan Tucker, editor of New Orleans Cuisine: Fourteen Signature Dishes and Their Histories. Our music panelist will be Bruce Raeburn of the Hogan Jazz Archive and author of New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History.

  
  
  Holly Scheib will moderate a health care discussion. Leigh describes the panel here.

  The health care panel at this year's Rising Tide conference will explore this sad fact of post 8-29 living, as well as many other related subjects. Moderated by public health Ph.D. candidate and local blogger Holly Scheib, the participants will be: Cecile Tebo, crisis unit coordinator for the NOPD and one of New Orleans magazine's Top Ten Female Achievers; Dr Elmore Rigamer, medical director of Catholic Charities; and Sean Fitzmorris, local EMT and administrator of New Orleans EMTs Sound Off!(CORRECTION: Fitzmorris will, in fact, be unable to participate)

  
  
  Peter Athas will once again moderate the always entertaining politics panel this year featuring, Gambit publisher Clancy Dubos, cartoonist and radio commentator John Slade, Louisiana politics blogger Lamar White Jr, and writer Ethan Brown.
  
  Additionally, the organizers of this year's event have been prevailed upon to allow a panel on the local sports scene.
  
  Panelists include:
  
  Alejandro de los Rios reporter/blogger for the Gambit
  
  Leo McGovern Editor/publisher of ANTIGRAVITY Magazine which is the only local alternative music zine I know of that features a regular sports column. Leo is also a character in Josh Neufeld's After the Deluge (see above)
  
  Chris Wiseman (AKA Mr. Clio, AKA Dilly, AKA Lee De Fleur) Long-time local blogger, ever-enthusiastic member of the Black and Gold Patrol and locally famous Crescent City Classic participant.
  
  The big-picture discussion will be about the role of sports in the local cultural fabric and how that has helped sustain civic identity in the years after the flood. The rest, I'm sure, will be a knuckle-headed argument about the upcoming football season. It should be a fun way to finish the day. Unfortunately they've got the same guy running it who moderated last year's journalism panel which everybody hated.... so keep your fingers crossed.
  
  If you're interested in attending Rising Tide this year, you can still register at risingtidenola.net/

Thanks to the Gambit for covering these stories this week. Let's see if we can get them online faster next time.

Random observations

• Jumping the gun?
  
  
  I took this picture last night (Sunday August 2) at Walgreens. I get tired of Summer too but looking forward to Halloween this early will just make the days seem to drag even more.



• Buy local
  
  
  
  The Rouses on Tchoupitoulas is selling these teddy bears dressed in paraphernalia from Uptown high schools. (This one obviously supports McMain.) There were also Cohen bears available. Does the Mid-City Rouses sell Warren Easton bears?



• I'll just come out and say that I don't like White Linen Night. I'm interested in art well enough and I certainly don't have anything against public street festivals. But this event always seems to be more about scenesterism than anything else.
  
  On the other hand, the participants who end up in the Quarter afterwards can do some entertaining shit. As we were on our way to Fahy's Saturday night, we encountered a young man dressed in his White Linen finest having an animated discussion with a woman we presumed to be his date. We wouldn't have stopped but the guy was kind of screaming, "YOU'RE WRONG! NO, YOU ARE WRONG! LISTEN TO ME I KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT!" Each "WRONG!" was punctuated by a turn and punch to the wall they were standing beside. "LOOK IN MY EYES I AM TELLING YOU YOU ARE WRONG!" (quick turn and uppercut delivered to wooden latticework) We decided to hover on the corner for a few moments, if only to determine what the poor girl could be so WRONG about.
  
  Turns out it was about directions. "NO, LISTEN! CANAL STREET IS THAT WAY!" (lifts presumably bruised hand to indicate Canal St.) "SATCHMO PARK IS THIS WAY!" (points bloody stump down Toulouse toward Rampart street supposedly in the direction of Armstrong Park.) And so my question here is this. "Satchmo Park"? What? I'll admit to a degree of unhipness but is that really a thing? Are the cool kids who have "flash-mob pillow fights" at douchey art parties taking it upon themselves to rename shit? Or is the seersucker panted angry fellow acting on his own accord?

Update (because it seems to fit with this post somehow): Meanwhile, dismembered bodies continue to behave strangely.

Joe Longo's "warning to us all"

In a guest column for today's T-P, Nolafugees.com editor Joe Longo asks us all to "Think that you might be wrong" ... or something since "the digital age" has suddenly laid bare our "electronically cataloged" "narcissistic malevolence" if I'm using those quotations in the correct spirit. (He also made certain to mention the buzzwords "Facebook" and "Twitter" within the space of his column which I thought was a nice touch.) Longo is expressing a seemingly noble sentiment. But what he's really doing is dampening the discourse with a mushy kind of thinking which ignores obvious distinctions of context in the interest of everybody getting along.

Longo's main trick is to compare Stacy Head's widely-discussed "Wal-Mart" email with a Salon.com blog entry by local art gallery employee Leeandra Nolting elegantly entitled, A Guide to the Douchebags Who Come Into My Gallery That's right. We're reading someone start with the ridiculous assumption that the statements of a public official are weighted equally with those of some art-chick's blog entries and then run with that. It is Longo's assertion that the two literary works in question are guilty of the same sort of "venomous thoughts about other people" which overrides and nullifies all other context of the authors' differing stations, class, or subject matter. Longo, in fact, goes out of his way to make this exact point.

What is interesting to observe about Head and Nolting is the way the class conflict element informs their prose. Head, an earnest gentrifier, can't get her mind around why poor people make lousy nutritional choices. Her sarcastic (one assumes) declaration that she will vote for "that freak" John McCain in the upcoming election reveals a liberal sensibility under strain, a mindset even the most empathetic New Orleanians have had to confront within themselves.

As for Nolting, art gallery prole, presumably just getting by on her meager hourly while she dreams of becoming Sarah Vowell once the larger world comes around and appreciates her cutting wit, the resentment comes from below.

Regardless of whether the anger that fueled the writing was righteous or mean-spirited, the fact is that these two locally grown electronic me-centered missives should serve as a warning to all of us.

What seems like an elevated appeal to our better angels of decorum is really a lazy attempt to gloss over facts in the interest of preserving niceties to the ultimate detriment of meaningful debate. Here is what Longo is telling us. He's saying that it doesn't matter that Head is an "earnest gentrifier" who has selected to place herself in a position of civic leadership the same way it doesn't matter that Nolting is a private citizen who appears to hold a customer service position which demands that she accept a tacitly subservient role to all manner of brutish personage on a daily basis. But it does matter. It makes all the difference in the world.

Head's public leadership position subjects her words to an entirely different sort of scrutiny than what we expect to fall upon Nolting's opinions. To those of us who read these pieces in their proper context, they tell us very different things. Head's tells us that an elected councilperson harbors irrational hatred toward citizens who receive public assistance. Nolting's tells us that an underemployed young woman feels a bit angsty when subjected to the endless parade of douchebags (and yes that term is quite apt) which makes a progress through the city's tourist-infested neighborhoods. However, according to Joe Longo, none of this matters so much as the fact that the tone of each work is a bit too dark. (This, incidentally, is a surprising criticism coming from the editor of Nolafugees.com but there it is.)

What, by the way, is this "warning to all of us" contained within this tale? In concluding his little fantasy, Longo needs to pull our heartstrings once again and goes immediately for the most sensitive one

Summer is approaching, and those of us who stick around will eventually get on one another's nerves. Then, odds are, in a few months we'll all be stuck in traffic together dodging a hurricane.

Then when we come back, we'll have mayoral and City Council elections to contend with, where the candidates will fan the flames of our rage toward whatever "them" we blame the sad state of the city on.

The last thing we need is a digital catalogue of our resentful selves.

So to sum up, Longo is warning us against the dangers of open discussion about petty things now so that when the time comes to sort out something important like another hurricane snafu, we'll know not to question each other then either. But at least no one will say anything mean.

Update: Since her post was mentioned in this morning's paper... and likely in response to the discussion in her comment thread (although the overwhelming majority of the comments are positive), Ms. Nolting has been intimidated into appending a "disclaimer" to the beginning of her post in which she sort of apologizes to the "99% of people who walk in the door to the gallery" who are "certainly NOT" douchebags. This is unfortunate and, frankly, ruins the artistry of the entire post for me.

Upperdate: On the other hand, I thoroughly enjoyed Ms Nolting's response in the NOLA.com comments to Longo's op-ed.

E is my new favorite art critic

I hate those stupid streetcars too.

Isn't this whole meme of variously decorated theme-ornaments kind of 10 years-ago anyway? I still remember hating the fish when they went up all over town back in 2000... and even those were kind of catching the end of the trend.

Flashback

This morning, when I was informed of this disturbing Alphonso Jackson Soviet style photo project, it struck a familiar chord which I couldn't quite place until... ah yes here it is.

What the hell is going on here?