You know a phenomenon has gone mainstream when it’s written up in Vanity Fair, the coffee-table bible of trends and tastes from high to low. And so it goes with “sissy rap,” which was the subject of an award-winning Gambit cover story by Alison Fensterstock in 2008 — and is now immortalized in VF under the headline “New Orleans Sissy Bounce: Rap Goes Drag.” The article, by Brett Berk, begins:

You do not need to spend much time in New Orleans to realize that it occupies a unique position within the pantheon of American cities. As different from similar-sized towns like Pittsburgh as a coyote is from a mound of cottage cheese, the Big Easy is wholly it’s own scrappy, disheveled self (and I mean that as a compliment).

Berk goes on to profile the biggest New Orleans sissy rappers, including Katey Red (who tells him “It’s not sissy bounce. It’s Bounce music. It’s just sissies doing it”), Sissy Nobby, Big Freedia and Vockah Redu.

Whatever you (or Katey) want to call it, this seems to be the season of the sissy. Vockah is also on the cover of this month’s Antigravity magazine, and a clutch of New Orleans rappers (sissy and otherwise) will be appearing at the New Orleans Bounce Showcase at South by Southwest Mar. 20. Then, on April 22, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art will present Where They At: New Orleans Bounce and Hip-Hop in Words and Pictures, an exhibit curated by Fensterstock and Aubrey Edwards, which will go on for most of the summer and have a satellite exhibition at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.

In the meantime, don’t miss the Vanity Fair story, which reveals something truly interesting: Katey Red is starting her own marching band, which we hope is rehearsed and ready for next Mardi Gras.

The opening of Fantastic Mr. Fox, featured in this week’s Gambit, has been postponed until March 26.

“I hope this is the end of it,” said New Orleans Coroner Dr. Frank Minyard today when he declared Jannie Burgess’s death unclassified and its cause undetermined. Burgess died at Memorial Medical Center in the days following Hurricane Katrina when the hospital was flooded and without power. Before dying, Burgess was injected with morphine seven times, but the coroner said the 79-year-old patient was extremely ill — suffering from kidney and liver failure.

“We don’t feel that has contributed to her death,” Minyard said regarding the injections. “We feel it may have some minor contribution.” Minyard added that death from a morphine overdose usually occurs immediately, but Burgess died three hours later.

This death and others lead to an investigation and eventual second-degree murder charges against Memorial Medical Center’s Dr. Anna Pou and two nurses. Then Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti accused Pou and the nurses of killing as many as nine patients, but in July 2007, a grand jury decided not to pursue the charges.

The controversy surrounding the Memorial deaths resurfaced late last year after an article by ProPublica reporter and medical doctor Sheri Fink. In Fink’s story, Dr. Ewing Cook, a senior physician at the hospital, admitted to hastening Burgess’s death: “I gave her medicine so I could get rid of her faster, get the nurses off the floor.”

As part of his investigation, Minyard said he tried to interview Cook, but his attorney, Ralph Capitelli, advised against it.

Speaking of Google, New Orleans might have an opportunity to participate in a trial of the search provider’s/Internet overlord’s anticipated high-speed fiber-optic broadband Internet connection. Google has ambitions of speeds of 1Gb per second in open-access networks, and if city officials and community members tell ‘em to bring it here, they just might. Check out the video (and Googleman’s awesome voice):

From Google:

We’ll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We’ll offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000, and potentially up to 500,000 people.

As a first step, we’re putting out a Request for Information (RFI) to help identify interested communities. We welcome responses from local government, as well as members of the public.

Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make Internet access better, and faster for everyone. Here are some specific things that we have in mind:

Next generation apps: We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it’s creating new bandwidth-intensive “killer apps” and services, or other uses we can’t yet imagine.

New deployment techniques: We’ll test new ways to build fiber networks; to help inform, and support deployments elsewhere, we’ll share key lessons learned with the world.

Openness and choice: We’ll operate an “open access” network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers. And consistent with our past advocacy, we’ll manage our network in an open, non-discriminatory, and transparent way.

Local governments and ordinary folks can submit nominations for their communities for the trial. There’s also a Facebook group. The deadline for nominations is 4 p.m. (central) March 26, and Google will announce the Chosen Ones later this year.

Those of us who have become used to the local comings and goings of the crews for Tremé might be surprised to know that even New Orleans can’t play New Orleans on film all the time. Courtesy of the blog NewYorkShitty comes this image of a flyer posted in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, advising residents that their neighborhood will be doubling as the Crescent City for some night shooting this Saturday evening.

This from the flyer, however, is cause for pause:

It is the heartwarming story of the residents of New Orleans Ninth Ward attempting to rebuild their lives after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

Heartwarming? That’s Touched by an Angel stuff. We can hope that’s shorthand for “gritty drama, leavened with the weary, knowing sophistication and bawdy humor that so characterizes the Jewel of the South.”

But what of Greenpoint? Looking it up on a map, it’s scarily adjacent to Williamsburg, that district of Brooklyn where Hasidim and hipsters have been on a collision course lately. The Web site Not for Tourists characterizes Greenpoint as a Polish enclave being inevitably hipsterized, and adds:

One exciting aspect of Greenpoint (though not for locals with cars) is the frequent number of movie and television productions being filmed here at any given time. Again, because of its proximity to Manhattan and Long Island City (where a number of studios are based), Greenpoint serves as an ideal location for a production that is looking for a green, industrial, or cozy neighborhood setting.

Green? Industrial? Cozy? Our L9W???

We’ll see — obviously we have a lot of trust in David Simon, but some of us remember the disastrous results the last time a foreign location was used to represent the Big Easy.

Among the performers headed to Austin’s South By Southwest conference is a contingent of New Orleans bounce rappers. Former Gambit columnist Alison Fensterstock organized a benefit show at the Saint (961 St. Mary St.) tonight (10 p.m. Wednesday) to support the group of artists. The show features DJ Rusty Lazer and raffle prizes, including a limited-edition Defend New Orleans T-shirt signed by Katey Red, DJ Jubilee, 10th Ward Buck, Wild Wayne and others. There are rare cassettes for sale and a DVD with rare bounce songs, mostly ripped from Fensterstock’s collection of vinyl.

The Austin bounce showcase will feature Partners-N-Crime, DJ Jubilee, Katey Red, Big Freedia, Vockah Redu, Magnolia Shorty and Ms Tee. Anyone unable to attend the show tonight may be interested in the Kickstarter page for the entourage, which features further information and prizes for different levels of support. Fensterstock and photographer Aubrey Edwards also are working on a documentary project about New Orleans bouncers called “Where They At” which will be on display at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

With the help of the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, Google Maps now offers biking directions on its maps. The mapping and directions functions follow the same process one would enter for walking or driving — but now users can choose biking from the drop-down menu and get the best or suggested routes.

The directions feature provides step-by-step, bike-specific routing suggestions — similar to the directions provided by our driving, walking, or public transit modes. Simply enter a start point and destination and select “Bicycling” from the drop-down menu. You will receive a route that is optimized for cycling, taking advantage of bike trails, bike lanes, and bike-friendly streets and avoiding hilly terrain whenever possible. Just like Google pioneered with driving directions, you can click-and-drag your route to customize it as you’d like. You can also access the other features in Google Maps, such as Street View, so you can tell exactly where you might need to turn on your route or preview how wide a bike lane is, and Local Search, so you know where you can take a water break or where the bike shops are along your route. Biking directions provides time estimates for routes based on an algorithm that takes into account the length of the route, the number of hills, fatigue over time, and other variables.

The new bicycling layer for Google Maps, accessible via the “More…” drop down menu at the top of the map, will display an overlay of the various bike-friendly roads and trails around town. The layer is color-coded to show three different types of paths:
- Dark green indicates a trail;
- Light green indicates a dedicated bike lane along a road;
- Dotted green indicates roads without bike lanes but are more appropriate for biking, based on factors such as terrain, traffic, and intersections.

The RTC, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit working to transform abandoned rail lines into community-accessible biking and walking trails, has offered Google use of its 1,600 rail-trails, with information for more than 12,000 miles of trails. The group visited New Orleans last month to workshop the Lafitte Greenway, a three-mile linear greenspace linking Treme to Lakeview.

The only color-coded layers available to the New Orleans maps are the established trails in Audubon Park and along the River Road levee. You can, however, still get a pretty decent suggested route. For example, here’s the suggested route from Gambit to the French Quarter.

Questionland question of the day

What’s the correct way to preserve a Zulu (BIG SHOT, at that!) coconut, that still has the “milk” in it?

Help out Thothnola before his coconut rots away!

Americans loathe Congress, but they still like President Barack Obama according to a recent Associated Press poll.  A mere 22 percent support Congress while public approval for Obama’s job performance checks in at 53 percent even though Karl Rove casts the president as “undisciplined.”

The poll also reveals that party affiliation doesn’t inspire confidence — 50 percent of those surveyed would give a pink slip to their congressperson. As the midterm elections approach, public perception obviously matters and pols, but not polls (there’ll be plenty more), will struggle to prove their worth.

And it raises the question, what do you think of your own representative? Will you vote for them, choose someone else, or does it matter what you think, change is going to come?

*photo by Cheryl Gerber

A recent poll from the Pew Research Center found 33% of smartphone owners now read news on their cellphones — a number that’s bound to rise as more people adopt smartphones and more news orgs develop specialized apps to meet the need.

Leading the media market in New Orleans, smartphone app-wise, are WWL-TV and Fox 8 News, which are now offering free, ad-supported iPhone applications featuring current news content.

Which one is better? It depends. WWL’s is easier to navigate and seems more intuitive; Fox 8’s is a bit more stylish and customizable, and the font size and layout of the stories are definitely easier on the eyes. What may break the tie is WWL’s video offerings — you can watch selected stories or a weather forecast on the go over a basic Internet connection; Fox 8’s app doesn’t have that function.

The good news is: both apps are pretty good for keeping up with New Orleans news, and they’re both free from the iTunes Music Store. Why not try them both? Here’s a couple of screenshots for comparison, with more below the jump:

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