Author Archive
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Tonight’s plum pairing of Nashville singer/songwriter and Secretly Canadian recording artist David Vandervelde with local favorite Giant Cloud (10 p.m. at the Saint, $5) may be my most egregious oversight in coverage this year. As a special apology to Mr. Vandervelde — who is not John Vanderslice, no matter how much I want to conflate the two — I’m attaching every great song of his I could find online. Presenting the world’s first Hail Mary YouTube mixtape:
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Slow-motion scenes of women popping and weed exhalations are to Juvenile what the tracking shot and wide-angle lens were to Orson Welles. That said, consider the video for “Drop That Thang” — from forthcoming LP Beast Mode, due July 6 on Atlantic — Daryn DeLuco’s Citizen Kane. DeLuco, a New Orleans cinematographer, helmed the bleakly beautiful post-K picture Low and Behold and has documented Quintron and Miss Pussycat and Jean-Eric in all their sweat-slicked, lo-fi glory. Here, via crisp, composed black-and-white imagery, he captures Juve in his element: chillaxin’ in a club, clad in Defend New Orleans gear and bathed in thick clouds of smoke and topping glasses of bubbly, begging forgiveness for “thinking with my dipstick” as sundry gravity-defying girls back their azzes up around him. And, action:
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New Orleans Museum of Art curator Miranda Lash flitted around the crowded Frederick Weisman Galleries for Louisiana Contemporary Art like a sapphire pixie. Miss Pussycat kissed cheeks and played the role of hostess with aplomb. As for Quintron, he looked like the nervous, dutiful museum employee he was dressed up to be: moving and fiddling with his recording equipment; dragging out and setting up an elastic barrier when too many drunkies got too close to one of his “studio audience” oil portraits.
Friday’s opening of “Parallel Universe: Quintron and Miss Pussycat Live at City Park” was a smash — and better yet, a hell of a lot of fun. Hundreds of visitors, of all stripes, ages, and walks of New Orleans life, filtered in and out of NOMA to catch a glimpse of what’s sure to be the most unusual art happening of 2010. Here are some of the stories behind the Gambit cover story “Live From NOMA.” First up: Mr. Q.
On the exhibition’s origins:
They approached us. We were walking down the street and got a call from Miranda. She said, “This is the curator for the contemporary wing of the NOMA. Do you want to do something there?” That was the best call. We almost didn’t know if it was real. We’ve never been involved in the gallery scene here. I’ve never been an artist in the sense of the word that I’ve sought out that career.
When we were home, we called her and she explained that she wanted to do something with us, and was open to whatever we wanted to do in the space. She was familiar with us from Dallas. Then we started getting these ideas that began developing. I started thinking about my involvement in it. I’m not a painter, nothing like that — except for the Drum Buddies, very beautiful visual objects that I make the same thing over and over. So I knew that would be part of it.
The most interesting thing to me, if we’re going to do it, would be to make something out of it, go in there every day. She didn’t tell us, “We want you to do this.” She said, “We want to do something with Quintron and Miss Pussycat, whether it’s a retrospective of all the work you’ve done in your life, or whether you want to do new stuff.” It was almost a year ago. It was a secret for a long time. We didn’t tell anyone.
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Thursday was Misunderstanding Day at the WWL-TV newsroom. First Misty Marshall and the Moonpie King performed, leading to this awkwardly revealing on-air exchange with Paulsen:
Eric: “Actually, Sally-Ann and I are former moonpie kings and queens …”
Band: “(Ba-dum-ch!) I never knew.”
Eric: “Settle down.”
Things only got worse when Paulsen and I were discussing the Over the Line Big Lebowski Party:
Me: “They’re having a dialogue contest, outfits, trivia, lots of Caucasians being drunk around the Rock ‘N’ Bowl …”
Eric: (Looking into camera and shaking head)
Only on Misunderstanding Day could “copious White Russians getting consumed” end up sounding like “a ton of boozed white folks acting the fool.” Although I’m sure the latter is also true.
MUSIC
FILM
STAGE
EVENTS
ART
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 Congratulations to New Orleans’ best — OK, only — pure pop band, Generationals, who made The New York Times‘ Nifty 50 list (basically a print version of America’s Got Talent, minus Sharon Osbourne, plus Maureen Dowd).
“Con Law,” their delectable debut, shimmers with the music of the British Invasion, Stax soul, Wall of Sound production, 1950s doo-wop and California-dreaming jangle filtered through a contemporary indie-rock lens. …
[T]hey share twin passions for their hometown’s rich music heritage — Widmer cites the legendary New Orleans producers Allen Toussaint and Wardell Quezergue and the engineer Cosimo Matassa — and late-20th-century fare (the Replacements, Squeeze and Aimee Mann). …
So how does an analog-based band — albeit one with a MySpace page — react to finding its music the subject of so much digital-based blogosphere hype on sites like Pitchfork? “What’s Pitchfork?” Widmer asks. “I’ll run a search for that on AltaVista.”
Widmer: Zing. Gensler: Clever, but no.
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