Oh Dog, you Sleuth!

First of all, I would LOVE to create the website for the New Orleans Tourist Department cause after watching a very-special-episode of Cops (Mardi Gras Cops!) when I was home, I felt like the wrong people were visiting New Orleans and it needs to stop. Plus, their current website sucks! What does ‘happenin every day’ refer to? Murder? Flooding? Termite swarms? My site would have an interactive map that would help you avoid the danger zones and would completely eliminate any desire to visit the French Quarter. When I was waiting for Kim to get out of work, I thought I’d walk down Decateur Street to try to buy some of those old postcards I used to love (the ones that showed a bikini-clad girl about to get bitten in the butt by an alligator) but the shops I went to didn’t sell them anymore and the sidewalks were all clogged with drunken tourists staggering along with their mardi gras beads and go cups saying, ‘You’re SO WASTED!’, ‘No, YOU’RE so wasted!’ Sigh. The mardi gras-izationing of America is our most shamefull export and you can witness it every time a bimbo anywhere gets beads for flashing her breasts.
Still, it’s very cool to go home and I’m always grateful I didn’t grow up someplace boring like… most of the United States. In the 1980s, the tourism catchphrase was ‘Louisiana, a dream state,’ which it really is. I guess if I lived there it would all become ho-hum after a few weeks, but when you just go back for a visit, it’s really easy to get knocked over by what a surreal place it is. I dunno, maybe I lived there in the wrong era, when I listen to the compilation CDs that Soul Jazz puts out about our musical heyday, I’m floored. It knocks me over to hear old songs by The Dixie Cups, Eddie Bo and Lee Dorsey, Irma and, of course, Little Richard and the world-shattering repercussions of his earliest singles recorded on Rampart Street.
And all the praise about the food doesn’t begin to describe it.

“Air condition your tummy” with a Hansen’s snoball!!! These are the most cryptically delicious snowballs in the world. You always have to wait in a long line, but it’s a cool old shop. The elderly couple who’ve run the place since the 1940s (?) were there supervising the shaving of the ice. Their grandson (?), a New Orleans judge, was operating the big machine.

In other departments… This Wayne White keeps getting more interesting by the second. It mentions in the copy that he was an art director on Pee Wee’s Playhouse and thus worthy of my unending admiration.

And speaking of which, McSweeney’s Issue 13 showed up in the mail yesterday and it is DEVASTATING. Chris Ware edited and he really kicked out the jams, though a first glance shows a complete lack of Rusty Brown comics. Still, it’s pretty dreamy.

There’s some new Dan Clowes included in the new issue, but I’m more interested in this brochure from the 1940s about phone etiquette that is so exactly like Clowes’ drawing style that it’s a little unnerving.

Haunted Tulane Avenue, which is nowhere near the famous college of the same name. This street’s been a bad neighborhood my whole life, but there are some cool buildings and an almost ZERO effort at gentrification whatsoever, which is kind of laudable. Because of that, most of these pictures were taken with a complete lack of guerilla photography integrity, i.e. I was too scared to get out of the car, which really complicates the process.

Actually, I’ve spent weeks at a time in Thrift City. But technically it’s on Carolton Ave, which intersects Tulane and I’ve always seen it as my little piece of neutral Switzerland in this neighborhood.

Then, later on that night Kim suggested we go to this club, owned by one of my favorite singers (said Irma Thomas) because supposedly Irma does two shows a night. And I was like, gulp, okay. I’ve always wanted to go there and have only seen her a couple of times. It looked seriously closed when I took this picture and nobody answered the phone when we called.

Here’s another place I’m totally afraid of. I actually got out of the car and stuck my head inside a bit when I took the picture because it’s just been killing me to know what goes on in a ‘middle-age’ Latin Dance Club and it’s across the street from Thrift City. It just looked like an old man’s bar to me. Later on, this came up as another suggestion as a place to go. All this planning was happening at the restaurant where Kim works and one of the waitresses said Las Islas was really, really disturbing (!), but that they had an old man who DJ-ed in a bright orange matador outfit. We ended up wisely hanging out at Kim’s house, which turned out to be a good idea since it flooded pretty bad that night.

New Orleans, like most places, I guess, has a lot of re-purposed fast food restaurants. I like this one especially because the new owners made such a minimal effort at turning a Popeyes into a Chinese restaurant. Which reminds me, my mom told me when I was home that Popeyes puts mayo in their red beans and rice. I keep threatening to try it because seems like such a genius idea.

I went into the criminal courthouse here once about 10 years ago just to check it out and got really freaked by all the people in shackles. It’s across the street from Irma Thomas’ club. Does she have a big ex-con clientele?

Another reason why Steve Espo Powers is so cool! (thanks Rob)

I saw this when my parents picked me up at the airport. The next day I made Mary drive me around to find it (sorry) and we were both like, ‘How did we never notice this before?’

Two great websites have come to an end. Monotonous is gone and the Chernobyl woman’s site was a fake!

More signs! Mostly from Veterans highway in New Orleans.

It’s easy to spot Mardi Gras beads caught in signs and tree branches and electric wires on streets that serve as parade routes.

Probably the last freestanding muffler man in town.

I couldn’t remember if our dog had died and my mom was like, ‘oh yeah.’ The night I got home I ate this massive seafood dinner with my parents at one of my favorite restaurants. As we drove away, the sky was purple. I believe that New Orleans leads the world for dramatic thunderstorms. For the next hour a monsoon came down with constant lightning. Kim had the night off of work, so I thought I’d drive over to her house. It seemed like a good idea to wait out the weather for another half hour or so.

But still the short drive was pretty dramatic since the sky was like a big strobe light. By the time I got uptown, the water was starting to get pretty high. Most of my driving-while-photographing pictures didn’t come out. But it wasn’t long before the water was about a foot high in the street. I called Kim and she said her street was under a couple of feet of water already. It seemed so stupid, since we hadn’t seen each other in a year and now we were only separated by about fifteen blocks. But it’s really dangerous to drive through water that high, so I went back home.

The next day I went to my sister’s place. She lives in this old haunted Victorian house. It’s pretty cool.

This is her hallway, with the big fish.

There was a big custody fight over this oil painting of me and Mary years ago. My grandma sent a photograph of us to the painter in the early 80s and we came back looking very severely retarded. I felt pretty good about giving it to her when I saw the little museum light screwed into the frame.

Notice anything different?
It makes me think of that art market truism about the value of a painting going up after the artist dies, but is it true about the subject as well? I was pretty devastated when I saw the sign had been changed, which is the kind of thing that sets off a chain reaction of feelings about New Orleans in general… like I feel like I’m the only person in the world who can possibly fully appreciate it and never want to see anything change from the way I remember it, even though I don’t particularly want to live there anymore and the place really scares me more than anywhere I’ve ever been. In other words: hypocrisy.

Anyway, I thought Megan (at least) might appreciate seeing the rest of the restaurant.

As you can see, it’s a very prestigious company.

Seriously, though, if the market forces could kill one of my favorite signs then really nothing was safe. So I tried to make a little time in my short visit to quickly record some of my other favorites, which is what I’ll be showing for the rest of the week.

Check out this abandoned Japanese island.

It may not look like much now, but the defunct Onyx Club had a very illustrious history. Certainly humbles Farrells. Did anyone ever go here when they were a kid? For a more detailed account of the rise and fall, check out this interesting site, which features a lot of facts about Portland and the proposed sequel to Goonies.

Probably the best souvenir I brought home from New Orleans last week was this year’s new Harry Lee magnet. I’ve been collecting one a year for the last four years. He’s the sheriff of Jefferson Parish and this fridge magnet PR master stroke is what he’s been giving out at Mardi Gras (I think from the horse he rides in parades). The synergy of Harry Lee branding is that, like Sprite ReMix, the flavor’s always changing. I was told that this year’s magnet reflects his new trim figure due to a stomach stapling surgery. I tried to find out more about the history of these items, but all I could find out was that he uses campaign contributions to pay for these likenesses. I wish I had magnets instead of pictures of my friends.

This brings me to the Dallas airport. On Sunday morning, I had a layover there on my way back to Portland. I couldn’t find any place to buy coffee between terminals, so I started walking around, somewhat nervously looking for a strong cup of coffee before I got back on the plane for four hours. I was willing to settle for a Starbucks. But I walked around enough that I was seeing the same crappy fast food stores and pretzel stands repeating themselves. What’s up with the Dallas airport?!? No coffee anywhere! Not even a Brookstone or a Hudson News. You are certainly a stain on Texas. But I did find a nightmarish and baffling store called ‘Magneticism’. The whole place was like this (above): walls encrusted with hundreds of little furry doggy heads.

I kinda half-heartedly looked for one that resembled Jenny’s dog, Oliver, but the whole endeavor was creeping me out too much. Plus they were like $9 a pop.

One last time: no coffee at all, but you can buy this.

What does this mean?

And is it just me or does the new Blogger interface suck?

In celebration of Ginni’s recent visit, the city organized a large fair at the park on the river. It was mostly attended by Mexicans. Ginni and I thought we’d drop by while we waited for Katherine and Jeremy to get out of work.

We had partied the night before and then had a massive pancake breakfast. So maybe it wasn’t the best idea to get on a big spinning ride.

I love Wayne White!

Grocery store, Waldport, OR. I wanted to buy this t-shirt but nobody else thought it was funny.

Be patient Ginni!

Vice cards!