10 things to do in New Orleans when it isn't underwater
[I wrote this last month for use in a friend's magazine. New Orleans is one of my favorite places in the country, and I never expected thins would get as bad as they are now. When I left Chicago, a band was playing the Blues in a terminal; at the airport in New Orleans they were playing jazz. The people I've met in New Orleans (as well as people I've met in Biloxi, and Picayune, Mississippi, are among the nicest I've ever met. This article will probably not hold true for a while. My heart goes out to all the people I've encountered in that wonderful city. Good luck.]
1. Get a crust punk drunk and have them lead you around town. A possible recipe for disaster? Who cares?!
When my friend Diego visited his family in Cuba, he broke off the first second he could and found some street rats to show him where all the action was. They split a jug of the rum equivalent of moonshine and ended up jamming ska music in a dive bar with a bunch of local strippers. I suggest that whenever you're in an unfamiliar area, before you make any new acquaintances who'll undoubtedly hold you back, you should get a drunk to show you around. I should warn you though, that unlike everything else you'll see in New Orleans, this is not a tourist attraction. N.O. punks are particularly resentful of out of towners coming in, pissing and littering all over their city in a drunken haze.
Despite their occasionally clownish appearance, crusty kids are real people. In other words, a lot of them are assholes. Some are really cool though, and if they have a few hours to kill they could show what the city is really about, or at least point you in the right direction. When I tried this I was nineteen, all wide-eyed and full of awe. That might have helped. I also had a few pocketfuls of Chicago pot, which is oddly cheaper than the New Orleans kind, which I�d share with any and everyone I met. Just don't be a dick and a poor representative of Chicago. You're a Yankee the second you get there, like it or not. Most of the city secretly thinks about you the same way as you do about people from Wrigleyville and Wicker Park, just big dumb cash cows who're completely off about their place in the universe.
Because of the abundance of bars, there isn't as much need for underground venues or house shows, so I never found a good punk spot, but a good contingent of the New Orleans crust community gather in Jackson Square Park around the big church off Decatur. Given the location (the heart of the French Quarter), they're more receptive to the presence of curious out of towners. Find someone who's looking to get fucked up, fuck them up, and hit the streets.
Extra: Get into a pissing contest to prove your worth. Lick something strange off the ground. 5000 punk points.
2. Go to 511 Marigny.
I've visited New Orleans three times and every time there was something cool going on at this address. It's an old, unassuming warehouse with cracked windows and faded graffiti. The first time I visited, it was an unmarked costume shop filled with papier mache monsters. The second time it was this place the A.R.K., kinda like a cross between Hotti Biscotti and the Texas Ballroom, an artist's collective that ostensibly sold coffee and regularly had bands, puppeteers, dada theatre, and circus troupes performing. On my visit to the A.R.K., a cabaret-noise band was playing and a group of puppets and drummers (including one former member of Chicago's Environmental Encroachment) led us on an impromptu parade through and against the Mardi Gras masses.
As of writing this, it is the home of the Iron Rail Book Collective, think a cross between the Azone (r.i.p.) and the New World Resource Center. The warehouse also holds Plan B, a community organization much like Chicago's Working Bikes. Iron Rail is a community library, book- and record store with a wide selection of zines, fiction, children's books, and progressive literature. On my last visit, I bought LPs by the Last Poets, Bauhaus, Michael Jackson, Cat Stevens and Nazis From Mars, a comic book of unicorns having gay sex, and some vegan praline candy for under twenty bucks. They sometimes have zine readings and events benefiting Books to Prisoners and, if you're willing to sit for two hours in a sweltering, unventilated room, they have community movie night every Wednesday. Watch movies like They Live, Spirited Away, Harold and Maude, and A Day Without a Mexican projected on a big dented foam board.
Unfortunately, 511 Marigny�s days may be numbered. Yuppies are encroaching and making condos of the old warehouse district.
http://ironrail.org
http://planb.bikeproject.org/
3. Motherfucking Skeletons, Yo!
One thing that all the tourists' guides will tell you is to hit up one of the city's historic cemeteries. Because New Orleans was pretty much built into the swamp, they don't bury their dead. Settlers in the 1600s found that the rainy season would dredge corpses up from their graves and out of the mud. Because of this, the dead are buried above ground, many of them in stacked shelving units called ovens. The reason they're called ovens is their unique architecture works to break corpses down and literally bake their skeletons clean over the course of a year. Most guidebooks will gloss over this and say that it's because they resemble a wall of oven doors. Many of these rotate bodies in and out. Couple that with the crazy bleached Spanish architecture of the mausoleums (some with their own rod iron gates) and it'd be cool enough but there's more.
There are so many Goths in New Orleans, it's not even funny. Thanks to Anne Rice, Trent Reznor and a thousand jerks claiming to be descendents of Marie Laveau, the place is overrun with spooky kids, each trying to eke out a spot in the darkness. Many of these kids, new to the city or just passing through, have smashed through the seals to grab a souvenir. Imagine how much cooler it'd be to drink your Vampyre Vodka out of the skull of a recently deceased school teacher. Especially when you tell your friends that it's really the skull of a bartender whore who killed and robbed her patrons at the legendary House of the Rising Sun.
It's more than just Goths smashing cement doors. There are also collectors, high school pranksters, and actual practitioners of Voudun. I'm not saying do this. Just go look. Go to just about any cemetery and you're bound to see at least a tibia. C'mon, how often do you get to see human bones and experience the open afternoon?
If you go to the St. Louis cemetery, off Rampart, you're only a couple blocks away from this weird church with it's own dank cave (or "grotto") and tacky-ass gift shop. Look for the 15 foot statue of St. Jude that looks oddly anime.
4. Go to this bar
Unlike Chicago, New Orleans loves its bars. It's almost cheaper to get a 24-hour liquor license there than it is to not serve alcohol. Because of this there are thousands of bars there; ranging from a New York style warehouse club at an old rubber plant to a neighborhood rocknroll dive owned by Sean Yseult (White Zombie/Famous Monsters/Rock City Morgue) to an upscale place run by Harry Anderson (of "Night Court" fame) that specializes in magic shows. You can drink at the strip clubs, you can drink on the street, there's even a couple places where you can order margaritas at the drive-thru window. It's almost impossible to get a weak drink there and, if you do, it's probably because you're being an asshole.
This said, there's only one place I'll recommend: Behind the 8-Ball. It's an actual pool hall and not a thin-veiled drug reference. It's on Tchoupitoulas in the Factory District and while it's not necessarily in the ghetto, it's closer to the ghetto than it is to anything else. It's this really big pool hall, decked out in mirrors and Day-Glo paint. All of the tables are the lower half of be-thonged ceramic mannequins, oh and there are more skeletons there too. None of this sounds particularly special but it's different than nearly all the bars you'll find there. They also have live music, ranging from country to hardcore, hip hop to folk, and sometimes comedy.
The night I was there I talked to these two awesome bartenders. One was this local girl who had a real Midwestern vibe. She called herself a 'real meat and potatoes gal' and talked at length about her recent obsession with chicken Caesar salads. The other was a fresh off the boat Russian girl, living off a student visa, who talked about literature.
If you walk through the weird ghetto areas, you're an idiot. New Orleans is more dangerous than Chicago just in that there's no discernible good block/bad block. However, If you do end up wandering through the crumbling mansion/housing project areas, you will have more of an adventure.
5. Listen to Mad Mike sing about having sex on crack
Mad Mike is this guy in his twenties who's been living on the streets for years, playing a banjo nicer than anything he owns, singing songs that sound a lot like Ween if they stopped trying. Locals either adore him or think he's a scumbag, but he seems to play a lot of shows. Go to one (or drop some money in his case so he can buy a dimebag already).
Hear Mad Mike at http://hippiebum.com
6. Get out of the fucking French Quarter
It's tempting to stay in the Quarter for days at a time with all the historic buildings, shining lights, street performers, fortune tellers, strippers and cheap booze, but there's a lot more cool New Orleans shit out there. Eat your beignet, drink your Hand Grenade, get your table dance and jump a trolley anywhere else.
7. Don't be a vegetarian
It doesn't work here. If you're vegan, pack a lunch. I say go full throttle and rejoin the food chain for a week. They've got meats there you�ve never even thought of not eating. They've got prawn the size of your forearm, rabbit, gator, turtle, crawdad, and more.
I did meet a guy who writes the Asian Cajun Vegan Cookbook zine but I couldn't find the cafe where he sells his veggie gumbo.
8. Juan's Flying Burrito
So you're all like, "Screw you Eric, I'm from Chicago, I'm not going to New Orleans for a burrito. I'm gonna go get some of that rabbit meat you were talking about."
No. You're wrong. This place on Magazine Street in the ironic t-shirt district (think Belmont and Clark with less fourteen year olds) is the greatest. This "Creole taqueria" is the only worthwhile burrito place in the city. First off, all their waitresses look like Suicide Girls and they're playing metal and thrash the whole time, so your sitting there drinking Patron or Negra Modelo or whatever thrashing your head to like S.O.D. or Flux of Pink Indians or Amon Amarth or something, working up an appetite. Then, you find out that they do shit to burritos that towns with actual Mexican populations would never even think of doing. Order up a jerk chicken burrito or a shrimp juaha roll, which is kinda like a sushi taco with three types of cheese, and tell me it wasn't worth holding off on another alligator andouille. This is also one of the few places where vegetarians aren't totally S.O.L.
www.juansflyingburrito.com
9. Zydeco Punk
A month ago, my favorite bullshit concept was zydeco punk. I really like zydeco. It's distinctly American and it kicks fuckin ass. My eyes light up whenever I see a big dude unloading a washboard before a show. I figured that certain aspects and instrumentations could be adapted (bastardized) for punk bands the same way traditional Ukranian music has been for Gogol Bordello and Celtic music has for bands like the Pogues and the Tossers (and to a lesser extent, Flatfoot 56). I thought this would be another unrealized dream until I found the horribly named band Zydepunks on Myspace. They mix Cajun music with a host of other ethnic groups and give it all a thrash breakdown. Hopefully they stick around long enough to draw imitators. I look forward to seeing them next time I head down.
www.zydepunks.com
10. Do DXM.
On that trip when I was 19, I took some bunk chocolate mushrooms during Mardi Gras. Pissed that they didn't work, I went to Walgreens, grabbed some Triple C's and Robo-tripped the night away. As of three years later, I was still meeting people that I was talking to randomly that night.
"Hi, my name's Eric, can you see me? It looks like I'm right here talking to you but I'm really over there, three feet back, watching myself talk to you."
The next day I spent a wonderful hangover piecing the night's events together via notes I'd written myself:
"I am the Lord. The Way to the light is through me."
Of course, this is just another bad idea but, you know what, that's what New Orleans is for. Binging, acting like an idiot. There's no way to go too far. Everyone around may hate you while you're going crazy, but when all's said and done. They've seen worse.
1. Get a crust punk drunk and have them lead you around town. A possible recipe for disaster? Who cares?!
When my friend Diego visited his family in Cuba, he broke off the first second he could and found some street rats to show him where all the action was. They split a jug of the rum equivalent of moonshine and ended up jamming ska music in a dive bar with a bunch of local strippers. I suggest that whenever you're in an unfamiliar area, before you make any new acquaintances who'll undoubtedly hold you back, you should get a drunk to show you around. I should warn you though, that unlike everything else you'll see in New Orleans, this is not a tourist attraction. N.O. punks are particularly resentful of out of towners coming in, pissing and littering all over their city in a drunken haze.
Despite their occasionally clownish appearance, crusty kids are real people. In other words, a lot of them are assholes. Some are really cool though, and if they have a few hours to kill they could show what the city is really about, or at least point you in the right direction. When I tried this I was nineteen, all wide-eyed and full of awe. That might have helped. I also had a few pocketfuls of Chicago pot, which is oddly cheaper than the New Orleans kind, which I�d share with any and everyone I met. Just don't be a dick and a poor representative of Chicago. You're a Yankee the second you get there, like it or not. Most of the city secretly thinks about you the same way as you do about people from Wrigleyville and Wicker Park, just big dumb cash cows who're completely off about their place in the universe.
Because of the abundance of bars, there isn't as much need for underground venues or house shows, so I never found a good punk spot, but a good contingent of the New Orleans crust community gather in Jackson Square Park around the big church off Decatur. Given the location (the heart of the French Quarter), they're more receptive to the presence of curious out of towners. Find someone who's looking to get fucked up, fuck them up, and hit the streets.
Extra: Get into a pissing contest to prove your worth. Lick something strange off the ground. 5000 punk points.
2. Go to 511 Marigny.
I've visited New Orleans three times and every time there was something cool going on at this address. It's an old, unassuming warehouse with cracked windows and faded graffiti. The first time I visited, it was an unmarked costume shop filled with papier mache monsters. The second time it was this place the A.R.K., kinda like a cross between Hotti Biscotti and the Texas Ballroom, an artist's collective that ostensibly sold coffee and regularly had bands, puppeteers, dada theatre, and circus troupes performing. On my visit to the A.R.K., a cabaret-noise band was playing and a group of puppets and drummers (including one former member of Chicago's Environmental Encroachment) led us on an impromptu parade through and against the Mardi Gras masses.
As of writing this, it is the home of the Iron Rail Book Collective, think a cross between the Azone (r.i.p.) and the New World Resource Center. The warehouse also holds Plan B, a community organization much like Chicago's Working Bikes. Iron Rail is a community library, book- and record store with a wide selection of zines, fiction, children's books, and progressive literature. On my last visit, I bought LPs by the Last Poets, Bauhaus, Michael Jackson, Cat Stevens and Nazis From Mars, a comic book of unicorns having gay sex, and some vegan praline candy for under twenty bucks. They sometimes have zine readings and events benefiting Books to Prisoners and, if you're willing to sit for two hours in a sweltering, unventilated room, they have community movie night every Wednesday. Watch movies like They Live, Spirited Away, Harold and Maude, and A Day Without a Mexican projected on a big dented foam board.
Unfortunately, 511 Marigny�s days may be numbered. Yuppies are encroaching and making condos of the old warehouse district.
http://ironrail.org
http://planb.bikeproject.org/
3. Motherfucking Skeletons, Yo!
One thing that all the tourists' guides will tell you is to hit up one of the city's historic cemeteries. Because New Orleans was pretty much built into the swamp, they don't bury their dead. Settlers in the 1600s found that the rainy season would dredge corpses up from their graves and out of the mud. Because of this, the dead are buried above ground, many of them in stacked shelving units called ovens. The reason they're called ovens is their unique architecture works to break corpses down and literally bake their skeletons clean over the course of a year. Most guidebooks will gloss over this and say that it's because they resemble a wall of oven doors. Many of these rotate bodies in and out. Couple that with the crazy bleached Spanish architecture of the mausoleums (some with their own rod iron gates) and it'd be cool enough but there's more.
There are so many Goths in New Orleans, it's not even funny. Thanks to Anne Rice, Trent Reznor and a thousand jerks claiming to be descendents of Marie Laveau, the place is overrun with spooky kids, each trying to eke out a spot in the darkness. Many of these kids, new to the city or just passing through, have smashed through the seals to grab a souvenir. Imagine how much cooler it'd be to drink your Vampyre Vodka out of the skull of a recently deceased school teacher. Especially when you tell your friends that it's really the skull of a bartender whore who killed and robbed her patrons at the legendary House of the Rising Sun.
It's more than just Goths smashing cement doors. There are also collectors, high school pranksters, and actual practitioners of Voudun. I'm not saying do this. Just go look. Go to just about any cemetery and you're bound to see at least a tibia. C'mon, how often do you get to see human bones and experience the open afternoon?
If you go to the St. Louis cemetery, off Rampart, you're only a couple blocks away from this weird church with it's own dank cave (or "grotto") and tacky-ass gift shop. Look for the 15 foot statue of St. Jude that looks oddly anime.
4. Go to this bar
Unlike Chicago, New Orleans loves its bars. It's almost cheaper to get a 24-hour liquor license there than it is to not serve alcohol. Because of this there are thousands of bars there; ranging from a New York style warehouse club at an old rubber plant to a neighborhood rocknroll dive owned by Sean Yseult (White Zombie/Famous Monsters/Rock City Morgue) to an upscale place run by Harry Anderson (of "Night Court" fame) that specializes in magic shows. You can drink at the strip clubs, you can drink on the street, there's even a couple places where you can order margaritas at the drive-thru window. It's almost impossible to get a weak drink there and, if you do, it's probably because you're being an asshole.
This said, there's only one place I'll recommend: Behind the 8-Ball. It's an actual pool hall and not a thin-veiled drug reference. It's on Tchoupitoulas in the Factory District and while it's not necessarily in the ghetto, it's closer to the ghetto than it is to anything else. It's this really big pool hall, decked out in mirrors and Day-Glo paint. All of the tables are the lower half of be-thonged ceramic mannequins, oh and there are more skeletons there too. None of this sounds particularly special but it's different than nearly all the bars you'll find there. They also have live music, ranging from country to hardcore, hip hop to folk, and sometimes comedy.
The night I was there I talked to these two awesome bartenders. One was this local girl who had a real Midwestern vibe. She called herself a 'real meat and potatoes gal' and talked at length about her recent obsession with chicken Caesar salads. The other was a fresh off the boat Russian girl, living off a student visa, who talked about literature.
If you walk through the weird ghetto areas, you're an idiot. New Orleans is more dangerous than Chicago just in that there's no discernible good block/bad block. However, If you do end up wandering through the crumbling mansion/housing project areas, you will have more of an adventure.
5. Listen to Mad Mike sing about having sex on crack
Mad Mike is this guy in his twenties who's been living on the streets for years, playing a banjo nicer than anything he owns, singing songs that sound a lot like Ween if they stopped trying. Locals either adore him or think he's a scumbag, but he seems to play a lot of shows. Go to one (or drop some money in his case so he can buy a dimebag already).
Hear Mad Mike at http://hippiebum.com
6. Get out of the fucking French Quarter
It's tempting to stay in the Quarter for days at a time with all the historic buildings, shining lights, street performers, fortune tellers, strippers and cheap booze, but there's a lot more cool New Orleans shit out there. Eat your beignet, drink your Hand Grenade, get your table dance and jump a trolley anywhere else.
7. Don't be a vegetarian
It doesn't work here. If you're vegan, pack a lunch. I say go full throttle and rejoin the food chain for a week. They've got meats there you�ve never even thought of not eating. They've got prawn the size of your forearm, rabbit, gator, turtle, crawdad, and more.
I did meet a guy who writes the Asian Cajun Vegan Cookbook zine but I couldn't find the cafe where he sells his veggie gumbo.
8. Juan's Flying Burrito
So you're all like, "Screw you Eric, I'm from Chicago, I'm not going to New Orleans for a burrito. I'm gonna go get some of that rabbit meat you were talking about."
No. You're wrong. This place on Magazine Street in the ironic t-shirt district (think Belmont and Clark with less fourteen year olds) is the greatest. This "Creole taqueria" is the only worthwhile burrito place in the city. First off, all their waitresses look like Suicide Girls and they're playing metal and thrash the whole time, so your sitting there drinking Patron or Negra Modelo or whatever thrashing your head to like S.O.D. or Flux of Pink Indians or Amon Amarth or something, working up an appetite. Then, you find out that they do shit to burritos that towns with actual Mexican populations would never even think of doing. Order up a jerk chicken burrito or a shrimp juaha roll, which is kinda like a sushi taco with three types of cheese, and tell me it wasn't worth holding off on another alligator andouille. This is also one of the few places where vegetarians aren't totally S.O.L.
www.juansflyingburrito.com
9. Zydeco Punk
A month ago, my favorite bullshit concept was zydeco punk. I really like zydeco. It's distinctly American and it kicks fuckin ass. My eyes light up whenever I see a big dude unloading a washboard before a show. I figured that certain aspects and instrumentations could be adapted (bastardized) for punk bands the same way traditional Ukranian music has been for Gogol Bordello and Celtic music has for bands like the Pogues and the Tossers (and to a lesser extent, Flatfoot 56). I thought this would be another unrealized dream until I found the horribly named band Zydepunks on Myspace. They mix Cajun music with a host of other ethnic groups and give it all a thrash breakdown. Hopefully they stick around long enough to draw imitators. I look forward to seeing them next time I head down.
www.zydepunks.com
10. Do DXM.
On that trip when I was 19, I took some bunk chocolate mushrooms during Mardi Gras. Pissed that they didn't work, I went to Walgreens, grabbed some Triple C's and Robo-tripped the night away. As of three years later, I was still meeting people that I was talking to randomly that night.
"Hi, my name's Eric, can you see me? It looks like I'm right here talking to you but I'm really over there, three feet back, watching myself talk to you."
The next day I spent a wonderful hangover piecing the night's events together via notes I'd written myself:
"I am the Lord. The Way to the light is through me."
Of course, this is just another bad idea but, you know what, that's what New Orleans is for. Binging, acting like an idiot. There's no way to go too far. Everyone around may hate you while you're going crazy, but when all's said and done. They've seen worse.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home