The terrorists have won

It may be time to send a cleaning crew down to Bywater/Marigny.  The invasive species of cool kids down there have descended into self-parody.

In a way, he says, Booty’s will be a physical manifestation of their Web site’s brand. Social media and online marketing will be a key part of the concept, he says, explaining that they’ve taken to calling it a “blogstaurant.”
 
“People see food as a type of content now. They talk about it online, they take pictures of it. It becomes pixels before they’ve even enjoyed it,” he says. “We want chefs to be Tweeting and sharing the food from the kitchen and we want people to convene at our restaurant like they do online now.”

Also. Pirate unicorns. I'd say pirate unicorns presented without irony but that isn't quite right since every stupid fashion statement like this is presented with the irony implied.  Is irony even the right word?  It's whatever accent they're putting on their brand that let's us know they're selling cool in addition to whatever it is they're actually selling. Have we come up with a word for that yet?

Anyway if you're scoring at home, New Orleans is soon to be minus one classic Bourbon Street dive bar and plus one social media-themed designer cocktail and tapas outlet.  I'm sure it will go over well with the Creative Ones staying at the Rice Mill lofts.

You see, it's not just a building where you pay the kind of rent that makes people in bigger cities hate their lives (rent starts at $1,100 for a 930-square-foot studio), it seems the building aims to cultivate a culture with members of the self-branded "creative class" that's proliferated post-Katrina.

The comments section to that post is diverting.  Comment number one is, I'm pretty sure, genuine.. and also representative of everything that's wrong with America.  The successive comments are probably more.. um.. ironic... in the spirit of this now classic Craigslist bicycle ad. 

Of course as fun as it is to make fun of the cool kids and their eccentricities, let's remember we probably wouldn't have the Rice Mill to kick around were it not for developer Sean Cummings.  It was Cummings who had the fortitude of vision to get himself appointed by Ray Nagin to the New Orleans Building Corporation where he could direct major civic development projects that greatly inflated the value of his real estate investments.  And now that's paying off in the form of $1100 per month studio apartments where people can live Creatively so long as they can afford to.  It's all part of "building the city we want to be" as the mayor likes to put it.