“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.