Archive for the ‘The New Orleanian Abroad’ Category
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Psychedelic New Orleans hip hop MC (and former Lil’ Wayne underling turned Roc-A-Fella recording artist) Curren$y gets the thumbs up from the tastemakers at Pitchfork. Pilot Talk earned the coveted Best New Music tag and an arbitrary 8.6 rating — so, if I remember college correctly, that’s like a B+, right? (Curren$y now shares the Best New Music title with the anticipated Arcade Fire release The Suburbs.)
Lawyers in Boise, Idaho meet to argue the hundreds of lawsuits filed in the wake of the BP oil disaster — an event that’ll no doubt send a shockwave of cultural enlightenment within the community, it prompted one lawyer to say, “This must be the biggest thing to hit Idaho since Napoleon Dynamite.” Brace yourselves, Boise!
Playboy names the Lower Garden District late-night haunt The Saint the best dive bar in America. Playboy’s description of the dive: “… a church for down-and-outers and those who romanticize them, a rare place where high and low rub elbows—bums and poets, thieves and slumming celebrities. It’s a place that wears its history proudly. Why are dive bars shabby? Because outcasts generally have little to celebrate except celebration itself, and yesterday’s grime embodies those memories.”
The Downtown Development District has asked the Circle Bar to remove one of its only identifying features — the 10-year-old chalkboard sandwich board outside its door, typically filled with the night’s lineup underneath Will Smith’s (the artist not formerly known as the Fresh Prince) representation of the Circle Bar logo. Jason Songe has an online petition asking the DDD to withdraw its plan to keep the chalkboards off its lawn.
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I stopped in yesterday at the Southern Sting tattoo parlor in Larose, Louisiana, and spent some time talking with the owner, Bobby Pitre. As well as tattoos he does paintings and sculpture, and has decorated the outside of his shop with political statements about the BP oil disaster.
The Southern Sting tattoo shop in Larose, Louisiana.
Much of Pitre’s business since the disaster has been from Coast Guard workers. “One of them got a Spongebob [Squarepants] standing knee deep in oil, screaming, with an oil well blowing up in the background, on his calf,” he said. Read more and see pictures after the jump.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Anne Rice, the New Orleans novelist who famously feuded with Al Copeland, famously rededicated her life to the Church to write only about the life of Christ, famously moved out of the Garden District and to La Jolla, Calif. a few years back, famously stopped writing books about sexy vampires and started writing books about sober Saviors (then left the door open for maybe one more sexy vampire book), has announced a new chapter in her life. Via her Facebook page:
For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being “Christian” or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to “belong” to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten …years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider.
Why? Rice elaborates:
In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of …Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.
For English majors and Southern lit fans, this all may sound a bit familiar; it was 1952 when the Southern author Flannery O’Connor wrote Wise Blood, in which one of the characters forms the “Holy Church of Christ Without Christ.” The difference here seems to be that O’Connor didn’t have Facebook, and God only knows what she would’ve thought of the late lamented Straya (now Copeland’s Cheesecake Bistro).
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Louis Prima, the New Orleans-born trumpeter and lounge entertainer who was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2008, received a national accolade on July 25 when he was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles. It was the centerpiece of a day celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Prima’s children, Louis Jr. and Lena, were on hand to honor their father, and the younger Prima performed his father’s music with his band The Witnesses.
If you’re going to L.A. and you want to check out Louis, his star is at 1617 Vine Street (in front of the Ricardo Montalban Theater). And his act never, ever gets old:
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 We all have our own memories of K-ville, the locally shot drama that kept New Orleanians alternately amused and befuddled in the fall of 2007. I know most people were tickled at the thought of “gumbo parties” and the cop who put Tabasco in his oatmeal, but my heart always belonged to the airport shootout action sequence that seemed to have been filmed on the roof of the Riverwalk.
K-ville may have disappeared stateside, but it’s just making it across the pond to the UK, and — what do you know? The critics like it!
Metro U.K. praises the show’s “brilliant action sequences and intelligent storylines to boot”:
It only lasts 11 episodes, which is a real shame because it offers a sharp insight into a city struggling hard to keep from going under.
K-Ville’s combo of social conscience and kick-ass action is top notch.
But its cold, hard look at how America failed one of its own, proved too tough for US audiences to take.
The Glasgow Daily Record gave it a thumbs-up:
It’s a great start to the series, and should leave you begging for more. In fact, the only drawback to the whole project is that, for some bizarre reason, American audiences didn’t take to it.
The Mirror mostly liked it too, so the only naysayer in the bunch was the stuffy old Guardian:
Wobbly cameras, shots through high fences, a slight tendency to overacting … irrespective of subject, there’s a very early 1990s feel to this.
1990s??? These guys?
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