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.