Seasonal rituals

I think I'm getting more superstitious in my old age. Or at least I'm making more of an effort to keep to the rituals. Or maybe I'm just set in my ways.  What I'm saying is that, as the year goes along, I'm trying to make sure I do the things. 

For example, we've been in the habit of seeing the skeletons sing at Ghost Manor every year. So it was time to do that again and there we were.  

Halloween is first and foremost a children's holiday even if the grown ups don't always see it that way. It's about processing fear and even the idea of death by allowing it to stimulate our sense of wonder and imagination. Heck we might even call it a social #Resilience exercise.  

But that doesn't mean there aren't also true horrors waiting around the corner. 

The City Council is taking up Entergy New Orleans’ request to raise customer bills because of the $170 million in costs the utility racked up during Hurricane Ida.

Utility committee members voted Wednesday to consider the proposal, originally made in June, which along with another request to replenish a depleted storm reserve fund would raise bills by $4.40 per month for the average customer.

At-large Council member JP Morrell, the committee chair, said it was only the beginning of a process with a deadline of August 2023.

The rate hikes might be months away but, in the meantime Entergy plans to resume shutting service off to residents behind on their bills this week. Although if you call them, maybe they can work something out. 

Entergy New Orleans customers seeking payment assistance may call (800) 368-3749 to sign up for a 4-month deferred payment plan. Customer service agents are also available Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. to discuss additional payment assistance, including levelized billing.

But then maybe you've seen this horror flick before and don't necessarily trust where this plot might take you. Maybe you'd like to try something different than just walking down that dark alley alone where the monster picks off victims one by one.  Maybe there's more safety in numbers. 

That is the idea behind this proposed debt strike. 

A debt strike works to get Entergy’s attention by hitting them where it hurts: their bottom line! By acting together and disrupting Entergy’s cash flow, they risk becoming less profitable. Entergy’s biggest fear is a cascading effect that could erase millions in profits from C-suite executives, hedge fund managers, and others that make a dollar off of our struggles to pay.

Entergy’s stocks are built off of our high bills and their continual disinvestment in our infrastructure. Without collective action, there are no collective gains. It’s time we stand up and fight back together with a debt strike.

Right now the goal is to get 10,000 people to pledge to participate before moving forward.  Remember that's how many signatures the mayoral recall campaign claims to have now.  (I seriously doubt they have even that many but they have enough that they feel like they can say that.) So it's not impossible to at least come close enough to that number to claim it.

In the meantime, we're just trying to ward off the evil spirits the old fashioned way. Ironically, a lot of the time, this is the only way you can light your home around here.  No doubt they'll figure out a way to bill me for it.

 

 

In other news of the occult-adjacent, we caught the beginning of the Anne Rice memorial second line today in the Garden District. 

Rice, the author of the 1976 blockbuster “Interview with the Vampire,” several sequels, and dozens of other novels, died in December at her home in Rancho Mirage, California, where she’d lived for the past few years. Her remains were subsequently flown back to New Orleans, her hometown, where she was buried with a private ceremony at Lake Lawn cemetery.

Leaders of the Vampire Lestat Fan Club, named for Rice’s iconic antihero, decided that the day before Halloween was the perfect time to mark her passing, New Orleans style. They conceived a traditional, group-participation, funeral parade that would begin at the Garden District Bookstore, where Rice once famously arrived for a book signing in a coffin.

Here they are turning on to Washington Avenue.

 

And that's pretty much what that looked like. The parade made a quick cycle to Rice's old house on First Street and then back again.  All told we only missed the third quarter of the Saints game to see it. 

I did feel obligated to check it out, though. After all I'd just re-watched Interview With The Vampire (1994) and re-read Interview With The Vampire © 1976  last week in order to prepare for this discussion on the latest CBC episode.  All in all I'd say we did our part this year. Happy Halloween.

Waiting for the internet to thaw

Apparently Cox's tubes freeze over when the temperature gets below 40 degrees here. We've only had internet in short 5-10 minute bursts here for the past two days. [derp]It's like living in a dang third world country in this city let me tell you... har har har etc. [/derp]

Seriously, though. It kind of is.

City recommends dripping taps tonight with the hard freeze.
Fun fact: SWB says residents should not do this longer than necessary because the overall water pressure drop can “make it difficult to fight fires.” https://t.co/aO1yyqRFR6

— Marta Jewson (@martajewson) January 2, 2018

Anyway I don't know how much time I have right now so, very quickly, we got out in the cold mist and followed the Lady Rollers, Pussyfooters and the Hot 8 Brass Band on New Year's Eve. Here are a few pics from that.







Later, we watched a very tired and injured Saints team limp to a weak regular season finish in Tampa.  This has been one of the most fun and memorable Saints seasons. Don't let the high probability of an early playoff exit make you forget that.

Finally, we braved the freezing temperatures to take our traditional walk out onto the St. Charles Avenue neutral ground where you can see the downtown fireworks pretty well without having to elbow through throngs of Alabama fans to get there.



Hopefully this message makes it through whatever Cox's problem is.  In the meantime, hey it's 2018. Start thinking about who should run against Steve Scalise.

Here is a brief second line video just because

The Perfect Gentlemen Father's Day parade and second line came within porch-sit participation distance for us this weekend. It only rained on them a little bit.

It's time to retire the phrase "culture bearer"

Uptown second line. December 18, 2005.  Grainy flip phone photo. This was the first second line I saw after Katrina.  For all I know it was the first post-storm parade period. 

"Culture Bearer" is meaningless wording that suggests we're thinking of people as tourist attractions first and citizens separately. Pigeonholing people like this creates arbitrary divisions, misapprehends the value of neighborhoods and takes away their power. It's one reason the "Musicians' Village" project always seemed strange to me.

 Would the city even care about displacement if it wasn't related to tourism?

The changing demographics that come with a real estate boom raise questions about the future of the city's cultural identity. What happens when the next Danny Barker passes away? Will the band have to be bussed in from eastern New Orleans or another community miles from the historic neighborhoods and cemeteries that gave birth to the jazz funeral tradition?

Will tourists still flock if the culture begins to feel manufactured rather than authentic? In a region where tourism employs about 40,000 people, the answer to those questions is more than academic.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu's administration says it recognizes that displacement caused by rising housing costs presents a problem and points to a variety of efforts it has undertaken to address the issue, for those it identifies as culture bearers and for residents in general.

Besides that, the term itself betrays the very essence of participatory street culture.  Folk art and music are created by specific individuals. But they have meaning because the are inspired by and tell the story of.. well, the folk.  Everyone in your neighborhood is a "culture bearer" there. Why even make the distinction?

Resilience March

We're just about done with Tuesday. Let's see how far along that puts us in the Shitstorm by now.  Oh yes. Today was Resilience Day.

FEMA director Craig Fugate said he loves the word because it means whatever you want it to mean.

And if you've been paying attention over the last couple of weeks, you'd think he was right. "Resilience" has replaced similar words, or been used in sentences where it didn't necessarily need to appear, to define the City of New Orleans' philosophy as it prepares for the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the federal levee failures. Mayor Mitch Landrieu has planted his "resilience" seed (or some form of it — "resilient," "resiliency") in speeches throughout his terms as mayor. (And if you're keeping score at home, you can add "vibrant," "new Orleans" and "NOLA for Life" to Landrieu's list.) The word has seemingly grown into a jungle of word salads with business lingo and jargon-y nothing phrases that have taken over dozens of panels, events and speeches this week. Its overuse implied it not only didn't mean anything but that there wasn't anything to be "resilient" about. But the word now defines a plan that the city will look to over the next decade and beyond.

FYI: The city's Chief Resilience Officer makes $172,000.

You laugh but, according to this Slate article, the guy might have some work to do.

After Katrina, the second line became a symbol of New Orleans’ resilience. But the survival of the parades—and the neighborhoods the revelers called home—is far from assured.

That can't be good. I mean, if you lose the "symbol of resilience" what else to resilience really is there worth having?

Anyway, this isn't an article about "resilience." It's an article about gentrification even if it doesn't know that it is. Despite the media hyper-focus on the fate of "culture bearers" who do interesting things that tourists might like to see, the escalating costs of living in New Orleans affects an entire class of people.  The fact that the "culture bearers" in question happen to be a segment of that class merely makes this an attractive story for a national outlet.

The reason this caught my attention, though, was the particular piece of resilience theater the article opens with; an "All Star Second Line" organized on MLK weekend in 2006.

Meanwhile, displaced second liners, many of whom had no transportation of their own, were renting cars and even chartering buses to get to the parade. Vallery made a desperate call to City Council President Oliver Thomas, who had strong ties to the clubs. Thomas thought this second line might be the last one the city would ever muster, that the tradition itself was at stake. “That’s why, for me, it had to happen,” he told me later. He convinced the Nagin administration that the parade would be more manageable than a crowd of people who found their way back from exile only to discover it had been canceled. He helped secure a permit for a route contained in NOPD’s First District, a loop around Treme, regarded by some as the oldest black neighborhood in the country, and a bit of the Seventh Ward, birthplace of Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet.

Two days later, around 300 club members and three brass bands filled St. Claude Avenue in front of the Backstreet Cultural Museum. The club members wore black shirts that said “renew orleans” across the chest. Father Jerome LeDoux came out of St. Augustine Catholic Church to bless them. Thousands of people surrounded the clubs, spilling onto side streets. From the front porch of the Backstreet, Jackson announced that the second-line community was coming home. If the club members had affordable housing and basic services, she said, they would bring the city back to life.

Then a bass drum thumped, the horns started to play, and the parade proved the point. Empty streets filled with people, shoulder to shoulder, flowing around piles of moldy sheetrock on the curbs and onto porches of vacant houses with holes in their roofs. Dancers spun, popped, and jumped on the hoods of drowned cars. Thomas danced along with them. “We exorcised Katrina” that day, he recalled. It was considered by many the biggest second line ever. The parade gained momentum turning onto Claiborne Avenue, and it felt to me as if the force of these thousands of people was reshaping the city. Jackson remembers the turn onto Claiborne as “the greatest moment of my life.

Yeah I was there to see that moment.  Here's the parade coming down Claiborne.

 

Here it is later on Rampart.



Oh and hey look. I forgot I shot video.  It's not much.. that camera didn't take the highest quality video... but, well, here.



Here's the parade turning from Claiborne, probably onto Esplanade, I don't remember the route exactly.  This video quality isn't great but you do get a little bit of the sound of the drum echoing under the overpass.



Another thing you might remember about the Claiborne overpass was the parking area beneath it had, by this time, become a repository for flooded vehicles.  I got some pictures of those that day.





There was also this abandoned boat sitting on the curb at Bayou Road.





And that's where I went on Friday to revisit the scene.  The boat and cars have been cleared away. Marie Laveau seems rather indifferent either way.  She was always pretty resilient, though.

What do people do when there is no Saints game?

That's the TBC brass band marching in the Prince of Wales and Lady Wales second line parade yesterday afternoon.  This was a free event that did not involve any statues of Tom Benson.

Yes, well, they still have to live in Charlotte

Around the time the Panthers were taking a 28-13 lead this afternoon, the Goodfellas Social and Pleasure Club second line featuring the Hot 8 and TBC brass bands passed by our door. 



So it's never all that bad.  Angry Who Dat is already cleansing his system.  I suggest you do the same. More later.

Second Line season

My favorites are the ones that come right by the front door. This was Prince of Wales and Lady Wales last Sunday.

These are the pretty days

Springtime in New Orleans is the best time to be outside. Everything is starting to take on the dark green color and sweet smell of Summer but the nasty hot heavy air hasn't quite gotten here yet. For this reason, April-June is prime season for outdoor festivals like this weekend's Greek Fest and Bayou Boogaloo. It's also still second lining season. We spent a portion of our Sunday afternoon following the Divine Ladies S & P Club along with the Hot 8 Brass Band as they made their way down St Charles and then back up through the neighborhood.



I managed to get a few more decent pics in this set but, of course, dsb's are better.

Let Them Ramble

Sic 'em

Seventeen clubs that sponsor New Orleans' signature second-line parades filed suit in federal court Thursday to force the city to abandon what they call excessive, selectively enforced police escort charges imposed after violence broke out at two of the street processions early this year.

The case, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the clubs and several of their members, seeks to dismantle a parade permitting system it claims gives the police superintendent unconstitutional discretion to set the escort fees the clubs must pay as a condition of getting a parade permit.

We mentioned this problem a few weeks ago when linking to this Katy Reckdahl piece in Offbeat. We need to save our cultural institutions from the stormtroopers before New Orleans becomes as soulless as.. Cincinnati. Can't help but wonder if the coming crackdown on "public drunkeness" will be another excuse to go after second-liners.

Update: More on the "crackdown" from Ashley

Chris Rose is a Douchebag

Only in this city would we put up with this kind of hackery. A smarmy middle-aged gossip columnist who happened to live in New Orleans during Katrina and decided to shift his career strategy from following Lindsay Lohan around the bar scene to shamelessly capitalizing on a tragedy by attempting to pass himself off as a culturally aware uber-wit except with no talent. I still can't decide if Rose is just that creepy uncle who always wants to smoke pot with your friends or if he's more like that one frat boy who feels entitled to his smug assholery due to the fact that he may actually have read a book once. Either way it needs to end. Let's just hope that now that his book is doing well he's through milking it. I give it another six months before we get the "It's the best thing for my family" farewell column. I've tried to keep quiet about my white hot hatred of Chris Rose but this morning when I saw his stupid smirking face looking at me from this column I knew I could hold back no longer. For those of you who don't speak Rose's grating brand of yuppie, follow along as I attempt to translate.

Rose says:

Back in the late '80s and mid-'90s, I was all over the map. My Saturday nights would be spread from the rough-and-tumble biker joints of Fourth Street in Marrero to the Vietnamese billiards halls in the East to the Latin dance clubs in Kenner to evangelical tent revivals in Bridge City to the Cajun roadhouse scene down in Crown Point.

I've always had a fascination with hanging out in places with large crowds of people who are nothing like me. A culture vulture? Yeah, I suppose.

Rose means: Behold my coolness! I once played pool with an Asian person! I demand praise for the staggering breadth of my experience!

Rose says:

I remember Dorothy's Medallion on Orleans Avenue, watching Walter "Wolfman" Washington back up Johnny Adams while he warbled love songs that could change the world.

This, I used to think. I like this.

Rose means: I am a terrific douchebag for writing the phrase "love songs that could change the world". I also am not above the using pretentious constructions like that of the last sentence there in order to bring about a dramatic pause. My column is poetry, dammit!

Rose says:

This was about 12 years ago, right after I met the woman who would become my wife. In fact, much of our early courtship took place on the parade grounds of this city. Kelly and I would bounce along the streets to the blockbuster vibes of the city's brass lions on Sunday afternoons and duck into dark corner bars to check out the score of the Saints game and we'd nod and shuffle in the way that white people who are dressed all wrong do when they're hanging out with a bunch of black folks who are truly tripping the light fantastic.

We danced, we got drunk and we were long, long gone into the unbearable lightness of being in New Orleans. We became part of the scene, made friends, shed our self-consciousness and just blended in.

Rose means: Pay attention to the fact that I have a wife. That is important. Also observe how I am unafraid to go native with the darkies as they "trip the light fantastic". This greatly enhances my coolness quotient and in no sense makes me a yuppie poseur despite the fact that I just wrote about shedding my self-consciousness whatever the fuck that means.

Rose says:

But we never felt personally threatened. Ever. We'd introduce friends to the scene, telling them: You gotta check this out. But mostly, we realized that big chunks of our social circle had no particular interest in joining this ritual of ours.

Then one afternoon, about 10 years ago, Kelly and I broke a run of many, many weeks of consecutive second-lining to do something else on a Sunday afternoon; I don't know what, but it must have been important for us to skip out on our favorite pastime.

Rose Means: We felt a little threatened. Not to mention awkwardly pressured by many of our real friends to stop all this pretentious slumming that we once thought made us so interesting. And then one day, the wife finally talked me into going antiquing or doing something else gay and expensive.

Rose says:

At this point, we felt personally threatened. As weeks and months passed -- or am I embellishing this out of frustration? -- it seems the Monday morning paper would too often carry a story about a shooting or a stabbing on or very near a second-line route the day before.

These clippings litter the files of The Times-Picayune, leaving a bad smell.

We had kids now, Kelly and me. A part of this city's culture that I desperately wanted them to know and understand and embrace was out of our reach. It was not an option. I wasn't going to lead my kids into danger simply because daddy thinks they need to be dialed into the fundamental currents of my city.

With the exception of a few high-profile events -- Ernie K-Doe's funeral, the Mardi Gras Indians on Fat Tuesday or Super Sunday -- the second-line scene was dead to me.

Rose means: For some reason we suddenly noticed that New Orleans had an urban crime problem... we had no idea about this before.. why was it suddenly so important? Oh that's right, I decided it was time to fulfill my duty to mankind and pass my genes forward. And of course, to me, being a father means sheltering my precious offspring from all sorts of "danger" like going outside and seeing parades.

Rose says:

Well, you know how that second-line ended. Gunfire. Blood. Sirens. A thousand people there and no witnesses to the crime, police would later report.

It was a day of profound disgrace for this city and one that probably would have had greater impact and provoked very heated and very uncomfortable public discourse had not our mayor given a famous speech the next day that completely distracted the citizenry from the violence at hand.

We focused on the Chocolate City instead of the Killing Fields.

No matter. My wife and I decided not to go back to the second-line parades again. It's not for us, I thought. There is such a disconnect between my value system and the culture of guns that permeates our streets that I don't even have the words to make sense of it.

My kids don't know what happened at the end of that parade and I'm not going to tell them. We do other things on Sunday afternoons because the odds of their getting capped at the zoo are pretty slim.

Rose Means: Certainly none of my columns dwelled on the cheap "chocolate city" laughs while there were "killing fields" on which to report. Nothing like that would ever happen. Also my wife and I decided suddenly that this culture we had in our youth (a whole 10 years ago) surrendered our self-consciousness to was actually too alien and foriegn to us to associate ourselves with. Oh and I continue to believe in keeping my kids in the dark about reality so that maybe someday they can make naive choices too.

Rose says:

And then there was this weekend. Hundreds of folks in from Texas and Mississippi, trying to regain their footing and traction here, trying to get back into the New Orleans life cycle, and here comes a gang-banger bent on revenge and willing to put his entire community at risk to prove he is a man worthy of respect.

Nobody of reason wants this. Black, white, no one. And in the same news cycle a guy walking in the Frenchmen Street music district takes a bullet in the chest -- after surrendering his wallet to a thug.

Rose means: Today's column has been an opportunity for me to exploit two more recent tragic events in order to ramble stupidly about my middle-aged-white-guy hipness and hope that enough of you accept that as a subsitute for insight or talent to keep paying attention to me before the folks who hand out the journalism awards stop paying attention to New Orleans.