“Dude, you’ve got to here this stuff called Kuduro. It’s like Baile Funk, but from Angola. I dj’ed with this kid who played it and he just killed it!” I’m on the phone with Jay P, aka DJ Rusty Lazer. He’s in New York for work and we’re discussing the future of our weekly Saturday dance parties at the St. Roch Tavern. The evening started out late last year wih me playing my old soul forty fives, mostly obscure New Orleans stuff. There’s only so much of that, though, and I started getting bored. That’s when I asked Jay to hop on board. “Yeah,” he said, “That would be awesome. I just bought a mixing board that let me dj off of my ipod.” Read the rest of this entry »

I was asleep at a friend’s house a couple of weeks ago, trying to stave off waking up for just five more minutes, when I overheard a conversation immediately outside the front of the shotgun house. From what I could make out, it sounded like one of the guys engaged in the conversation was a neighborhood installation that we’ll call, uh…Mr. G. Mr. G has been around forever; he’s an elderly gentleman who’s always dressed to the nines in slacks, golf cap, fancy shoes and v-neck sweater. He can normally be found outside the local corner store, where he drinks beer and greets the people on the street with a jovial “Hey Hey! Alright, Alright!”

I was having trouble, in my groggy, crack-of-noon slumber, believing that it was actually him talking, in fact, because in my eight years of seeing him around, I’d never heard him say anything besides “Hey Hey! Alright, Alright!” Also, I hadn’t seen him since the storm and had heard rumors that he’d passed on. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently had the rather odd experience of sitting down with a German grad student named Lasse who is getting the equivalent of his master’s degree in, as best I could understand it, American pop culture. He said that the other students in his class were all writing their theses on things like Buffy the Vampire Slayer as new model for feminism and things like that. Lasse was writing on, of all things, American zine culture and was focussing specifically on New Orleans zine culture. He’d read my zines, and Stories Care Forgot, the anthology of New Orleans zines that I put together just after the storm. It was crazy meeting someone so well versed in, well, my life. As we talked, Read the rest of this entry »

I know my last post was about Vi Landry’s death and I’m not trying to dwell on it to bum out casual blogofneworleans readers, whoever you are, but I’ve been super ill this week and in between running a 102 degree fever while DJ’ing at the St. Roch Tavern on Saturday (as I do ever Saturday, hint hint) and breaking out in hives from head to toe (including one on the tip of my tongue) on Monday morning, the one thing I managed to do was bike down to the Bywater for Vi’s Second Line.And may I say:I’ve been to a lot of parades, street parties, festivals, shows, whatever in New Orleans, all for a lot of different causes, and this was one of the most loving and beautiful events I’ve ever seen. About sixty or so people, mostly local Bywater and Midcity weirdoes: Local artists, punks and bohemian types mixed in with old neighborhood people who new Vi when she bar-tended at Vaughan’s, or through her mom who lives on Alvar Street. Even Bill Moss, my old boss from French Quarter bikes, brought his trumpet down. Read the rest of this entry »

Gambit contributor and New Orleans native Vi Landry passed away in a car accident on Monday. She was driving in Mississippi and got hit in a head on collision. She died instantly. Vi had been living in New York for a couple of years, studying journalism at NYU and interning with Harper’s. She recently returned to New Orleans. Vi is survived by her mom, sister and brother, and a heap of friends who loved her and miss her. There are more photos of her at http://angeliska.livejournal.com/79498.html and her writing can be read in the Gambit archive. The funeral is on Saturday at Jacob Schoen funeral home, 1-4pm. There will be a second line parade for her on Sunday, beginning at Dauphine and Press in the Bywater at 3:00.

Vi Landry died on Monday in a car accident. She was driving to Mississippi and was hit in a head-on collision. Vi was a native New Orleanian and writer who contributed to Gambit Weekly; her writing can be found in the Gambit archive. Also there’s pictures of her available at http://angeliska.livejournal.com. Vi was a dedicated writer who’d been studying in New York for the last couple of years and had recently moved back here. She’s survived by her mom and sister, and lots of friends who miss her and are thinking about her. Vi was 33. Her memorial is at Jacob Shoen funeral home on Saturday, 1-4. There will also be a second line parade for her on Sunday at 3, beginning at Dauphine and Press.

In the past couple years, I’ve developed a pretty serious addiction to old New Orleans records. Growing up in Jackson, Mississippi, I was pretty constantly being washed over by the wake of New Orleans culture, and always had a pretty serious aversion to New Orleans music, the same way that Irish friends of mine cringe whenever they hear traditional Irish tunes like “Danny Boy” (check out my blog on Powells.com for more about this). SInce the storm, though, I have given into my destiny of loving old New Orleans funk, soul and r n’ b. What did it for me was a tape of Soul Jazz records’ anthology Saturday Night Fish Fry, a two disc collection of rare to not-so-rare tracks from the Read the rest of this entry »

 

 There's Something On Your Mind-Bobby Marchan: Play Now | Play in Popup

For me one of the highlights of Mardi Gras time is always the brief, seasonal reunion of the Panorama Brass Band, the carnival-time offshoot of Panorama Jazz Band. Band leader/founder/Clarinetist Ben Schenk started Panorama to focus on Clarinet heavy brass music, and the band plays raucous numbers from all over the world, with Balkan, Caribbean and Klezmer influences, as well as homespun New Orleans selections. Their shows are always totally jumping, with audience members ranging from gutter punks to old school New Orleans brass aficionados. One of my favorite Mardi Gras memories is following Panorama around in the St. Anthony parade and even watching them in a bizarre standoff with a bunch of rabid Christian protestors who, for whatever reason, Read the rest of this entry »

When I was seventeen, a friend once pushed a little stack of papers into my hand and said, “Here, read this.” It was a “zine”,, a little photocopied magazine, the first I’d ever seen, one called “Dishwasher”. The premise was that the zine’s author, “Dishwasher Pete” was attempting to wash dishes-and write about the experience- in all fifty states. It was more than just a “Hey, look how wacky I am” kind of thing, though, the little magazine (which had a subscribership of nearly ten thousand at its peak) was more like a treatise on happiness (and the pursuit of) while trying to live under the radar of an overwhelming capitalist society. The stories of Pete’s own misadventures were accented with vignettes of Dishwasher history and dish-related labor struggle.

Now, ten years or so after he stopped putting out “Dishwasher”, Dishwasher Pete has gone back to his original name, Pete Jordan, and has put out a book that collects and expands upon all the issues of Dishwasher. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a lot of ways to become a musician. You could take out a bunch of student loans and go to some fancy shmancy university for it. You could be born into some travelling family of musicians with a whip-cracking father who beats it into you. You could snort piles of speed and sit in your garage listening to Rush records over and over again until you can play all the parts. Or you could hop trains around the country for a few years with a band of gutter-punk-cum-old-timey-musicians, playing on boxcars and street corners until your capable of knocking out the banjo part to “You are my sunshine” even when you’re full of whiskey and haven’t slept in two days.That’s (more or less) what Alynda Lee from local act Hurray for the Riff Raff did, spending ages 17-20 (or so) traveling around with The Dead Man Street Orchestra (www.myspace.com/streetorchestra), Read the rest of this entry »