Best Of New Orleans Blog

Ryan Perrilloux, a reserve quarterback for the defending national champion LSU Tigers, today was kicked off the team for a breach of contract, sources revealed, after the university’s math department deduced that the sophomore’s remaining eligibility will not allow for the four Heisman trophies Perrilloux promised the school as an incoming freshman. 

“A deal’s a deal,” head coach Les Miles said at Friday morning’s spring practice. “He can go win those other three Heismans for somebody else.”

Perrilloux, for once, had no comment.

Another Jazz Fest, another round of easy target practice with Quint “Redfish in a Barrel” Davis. In today’s Times-Picayune “Lagniappe” insert, Davis, the festival’s chief producer, is quoted as saying, “We have a great national lineup. … We’re different than the other kid festivals … because we’re a festival for grownups.”

Ugh. Most people who still harbor misgivings about the fest’s puzzling inertia regarding national headliners — a sideways shuffle that’s led us from Al Green, Jimmy Buffett and Widespread Panic in the early 2000s to, um, Al Green, Jimmy Buffett and Widespread Panic in 2008 — stopped voicing them years ago, once it became clear that if Davis and Co. were indeed aware that new pop and rock music had been produced outside Louisiana since the year 1990, they probably didn’t care. Now we have Davis shooting blanks at, presumably, the Bonnaroo, Coachella, Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits festivals, all of which have national lineups that make Billy Joel look like the stale, ‘80s radio relic that of course he is. (more…)

This blog post necessitates an embarrassing confession which I’ll just get out of the way now; I, dear reader, am a stringer for a celebrity magazine. That’s right - when you’re in the checkout line at Rouse’s, skimming a headline about Brad and Angelina’s latest baby or Britney’s latest self-inflicted debasement and wondering who comes up with this stuff, wonder no more. It’s shameless**, underpaid (hint, hint, Gambit Weekly) freelancers like me.

On a recent Saturday night, my cell phone buzzed multiple times, displaying an unfamiliar Los Angeles number. Like all good paranoiacs, I ignored it. But after five calls, curiosity got the better of me and I answered. It was the celebrity magazine.

A voice chirped: “Hi, this is Heather?** And we just got a tip that Brad and Angelina are getting married right now, in the French Market? Can you go check it out?” (more…)

Let us all take a moment, shall we, to reflect on the utter badassery, the sheer Rambo-in-Crocs machismo, of one Paul “Bulletproof” Prudhomme. Revered by Louisiana’s foodies and feared by its redfish, the iconic cook seems to have further fattened his legend with Tuesday morning’s near-death (or, at the very least, near-Meuniere-breaking) experience at the Zurich Golf Classic.

To recap: Chef Prudhomme was setting up his station near the links sometime after 9 a.m. when he felt a sudden stinging sensation above his right elbow. According to multiple news reports — each of which has taken on a new, superhero-like characteristic with every retelling — he shook his sleeve and out fell a .22-caliber shell casing. The ammunition, believed by authorities to have been fired in the air within a mile or so radius of the golf course, apparently had found Prudhomme’s appendage on its parabolic return to Earth. (more…)

by Sam Winston

For those worried about the time lost from putting the clocks forward, think again. It’s all in your head.

“But the quest to spend time the way we do money is doomed to failure, because the time we experience bears little relation to time as read on a clock.

The brain creates its own time, and it is this inner time, not clock time, that guides our actions. In the space of an hour, we can accomplish a great deal - or very little.” -IHT.com

Details are still surfacing from two seemingly isolated incidents last week in New Orleans that authorities now believe might be related.

At 8:17 a.m. Monday, Feb. 11, two streetcars collided near the corner of Canal and North Gayoso streets, leaving 22 passengers with non-life-threatening injuries. Around that same time, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation were surrounding the house of Daniel Fox, a local musician and magazine editor whose roommate, Yu Xin Kang, has since been charged as an accomplice to international espionage.

“Yeah, I’m surprised our roommate was a Chinese spy,” Fox told the Times-Picayune.

Even more surprising is the newly revealed purpose for Kang’s residence in New Orleans. According to unnamed sources, the 33-year-old spent the past four months researching streetcar schedules and passing her findings on to high-ranking Chinese intelligence officials. Exactly what the operatives had planned to do with the hijacked streetcar is still unknown, but according to the same sources, certain designs are believed to have included  “a catastrophic event” at the downtown Riverwalk’s critically maligned (but popular among tourists) pan-Asian eatery, the Bambu Asian Grille and Sushi Bar.

Check back for more on this developing story as information arrives.

I wasn’t getting along with Keith Moore in the months before he was shot Uptown, so it’s strange that I would be dubbed his official biographer in the afterlife. But I had helped him put on his Noizefest the year before, had written many articles about his strange but important endeavors, and in the process Keith made sure that I knew enough (more than enough) to talk about him when he was gone — he did this to me on purpose. So when this dude Charles Anderson, who founded United for Peace in New Orleans came to me wanting to know who Keith was and why he was important, I told him everything Keith would have wanted me to (along with some opinions Keith would have fought me on, but I made sure to let Charles know Keith wouldn’t have agreed, and why). (more…)

Local blogger Kevin Allman has more on Nagingate, the developing, mysterious disappearance from the Times-Picayune’s pages of first editorial criticisms directed at our (de)famed mayor’s new pictorialized gun policy and, now, letters to the editor about said incident.

“After scrubbing its editorial page criticism of New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin — first in the print edition(s), and then in its online edition — the Times-Picayune seems to have removed two letters to the editor about the incident from its website, replacing them with two different letters that did not appear on the main editorial page of today’s edition.”

Read the vanished letters on Allman’s blog.

These past four years, I’ve taught a class where elementary-aged public school kids learn to program beats on drum machines and pen original lyrics, plus write hilariously mean reviews of albums by New Orleans artists, which Gambit Weekly has been kind enough to publish. This teaching job’s part time nature has allowed me to, in my abundant spare time, chase my dream of becoming a professional author and freelance journalist. But this week I dumped both vocations; after seven years as a New Orleans bohemian, I finally caved and took a full-time job as assistant editor of a Metairie-based trade magazine that details the coin-operated game industry: pinball machines, video poker, crane games, etc. (more…)

This year, Ash Wednesday happened to fall on my 34^th birthday, which was the only reason I agreed to play at Balcony Music Club (ex-El Matador) on what is traditionally and officially the most un-fun day of the year. The other three Bywater/Marigny bands and the scruffy 60-person crowd they conjured (miraculous for Ash Wednesday) are often called “Circus People,” though I’ve yet to see most of them do any tricks, outside of playing open chords on acoustic guitars. Others call this genre of person, “hobohemians”. If they begged for money (which they don’t; they play music for free drinks and beer money) they’d be called “gutterpunks”. A hilarious friend of mine refers to this clique (more…)

Like a lot of people last night, I had my plans ruined by a parade that never took place. Or at least that’s what Republic would have me believe.

Sometime Wednesday afternoon, word leaked out that the Warehouse District music venue/dancehall had canceled its Thursday evening rock show, a highly anticipated triple bill featuring the Fiery Furnaces, Super Furry Animals and Holy F**k. Despite being the club’s only notable booking for January — not to mention arguably New Orleans’ top indie-rock concert of the month — the show was canceled because, in their words, a “parade route surrounds Republic and there was concern that people wouldn’t be able to get [here].” (more…)

They say that freedom isn’t free. They also say that it’s priceless. But Sotheby’s came up with a workable figure this week. $21.3 million.A copy of the Magna Carta sold at auction for that price (complete with seal of King Edward I who stamped it in 1297 - though King John originally agreed to the basic declaration of human rights in 1215). Apparently the auction house expected to fetch $30 million, but either freedom isn’t in demand these days, or collectors decided to wait on one of the 16 other copies. Perhaps the oddest note is that this copy belonged not to a museum or even a Brit, but to Texas billionaire Ross Perot. He had parked it at the National Archives in Washington, where it was on display next to the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.There’s no telling what those signed originals would go for on eBay or if the Bush Administration might want to find out while they still have value.The Magna Carta copy was purchased by the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm that counted former President George H.W. Bush as a shareholder and advisor until at least 2003 and 2004 respectively. There’s no word on how much they expect the item to appreciate in value, or where it will be kept.

Has anyone noticed lately that the long and multifarious (or should I say nefarious?) arm of the Reese’s empire has been slowly and silently reaching its chocolate, peanut-buttery fingers into all corners of the candy market and tightening its grip on sweet-toothed minds in every demographic through a complex ideological apparatus with aspirations of global domination and hegemonic bliss?

Did anyone anticipate that the inchoate dreams of the tiny little candy-coated peanut butter gems of the Pieces would spawn such visions of supremacy in supermarkets and drugstores nationwide? Who knew that cashiers, shelve-stockers and vending machine maintenancers would be so mindlessly and effortlessly recruited as deputies in exercising the subaltern functions of this expansive chocolate-covered, peanut butter hegemony? (more…)

Until recently I taught in the Treme, beside Armstrong Park, at Craig Elementary. I’m not certified, just an artist who, after-school, teaches a writing course that’s disguised as a rap music class, to trick New Orleans kid into writing, an act they generally hate. I don’t know much about Craig, beyond what I observed between 2:30 and 5p.m., Monday through Thursday for a year. I do know it was an historic school, and had recently been part of the Recovery School District, and that people I briefly encountered there – most of them leaving for the day just as I arrived – blamed every misstep on RSD. Though the Craig kids I worked with possessed remarkably positive attitudes (their high-pitched joi de vive got them in trouble more than any negativity), the majority read and wrote at a kindergarten or pre-kindergarten level. This, though most were smart as hell. Of the many illiterate kids I’ve met in New Orleans, very few seemed to suffer any learning disability. Usually it’s just obvious that the adults in their lives let them down. (more…)

In my seven years here, I must have somehow never waited tables in the French Quarter during the Bayou Classic.

Every single road into the Quarter is blocked off despite that, on this Saturday night at 9:45 p.m., New Orleans’ cleanest and least pocked streets stand empty. Regardless, Mizzy and I must turn the car around and get our bicycles to ride around the barriers and go meet Mizzy’s friend for a drink. It’s just a football game — not even the Saints, or even LSU. They don’t barricade the Quarter like this even for Mardi Gras, I don’t think. Essence? Maybe. I don’t exactly remember ever seeing the Quarter quarantined this way. (more…)

Forget the firetruck Louisiana gave New York, look what we gave New Jersey. 

Apparently the first nutria have been spotted in the Garden State. This news report says that the hardy little Cajun beaver arrived in Maryland and Delaware in the 1980s. Perhaps the lack of marshlands slowed their progress into Jersey, but the nutria is nothing if not persistent. 

New Jersey pest control association official Leonard Douglen isn’t worried though. He told the New York Post, “We’d probably trap them wherever there are sightings.” He added, “Just because a new species comes around doesn’t mean you reinvent the wheel.” 

Ok then. They seem to have that situation under control. 

By the time global warming does away with polar bears, Canada should be ready to welcome nutria — unless the Canadians have some sort of trapping techniques to handle the new arrivals.