Some New Orleans music on NPR

Both Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz, and JazzSet with Dee Dee Bridgewater featured New Orleans artists this week.

Piano Jazz was guest-hosted by Elvis Costello, and guest-guested by Allen Toussaint. It’s a nice listen — here’s the link — even if to my great disappointment he doesn’t play “SJI.” Toussaint is such a fascinating guy, I always love his interviews, and the more I hear him and learn about him the more I think he’s one of my heroes. There’s a moment when he declines to play a James Booker tune, and do so with such casual elegance and certainty, you somehow trust that he’s right even if you’re disappointed.

And who else could be so smooth and convincing in observing that Katrina brought “blessings”? Anybody else who referred to “the booking agent Katrina” getting gigs for New Orleans players all over the world in the past four years would sound snide or crass. Toussaint just sounds thoughtful and matter-of fact. “More musicians got to work after Katrina than ever before in history,” he observes.

“SJI” is mentioned once in passing by Costello as a quintessential New Orleans song (I always like hearing that), and at the end there’s an interesting mini-medley of “Tipitina” and “Ascension Day.” The latter is the tune these two did together on The River In Reverse; I wrote about that here.

JazzSet, meanwehile, has a Marlon Jordan set — the link is here. (Apropos of Toussaint’s point, the intro indicates that the jazz festival in Colorado, where the performance was recorded has gone out of its way to add New Orleans musicians to its lineup since Katrina.) Jordan (who is Kidd Jordan’s son) is not someone I’m all that familiar with, but it’s a nice set, and the interview with him toward the middle of the show, about his harrowing Katrina experience (stuck on  his roof for five days) is interesting.

“SJI” reimagined to address current health-care crisis

I went down to St. James Infirmary
60 people were waiting there
It was 8 AM in the morning
And we barely had the cab fare

First they handed me a pile of papers
The first page was easy to do
It said who is your health insurer
I wrote ‘none’ and turned to page two

All the same old questions
I answered 20 times before
Did they ever hear of computers?
This is what they were invented for ...

Full lyrics and the actual song — which has a good sound, too — are here, at the site of Polarity/1, the musicians responsible.

I think this is a fantastic development. Truly inspired. Via Danny Schechter News Dissector.

“The Doctor”

Surely you’ve been hearing about the book version of Josh Neufeld’s online comic for SmithMag.net, A.D.: New Orleans After The Deluge. It’s been getting lots of press, and Josh is off on a big book tour to support it right now. The book tells the during-and-after Katrina stories of several very different New Orleanians. Check it out.

One passing note of interest to those of you who read Letters From New Orleans. You may recall from the essay “Luncheon,” a cameo by a fellow named Brobson Lutz, who both wrote one of the anguished letters about the firing of a Galatoire’s waiter — and then participated as a performer in a sort of satirical play based on those anguished letters. Well, Lutz is one of the characters in A.D — he’s mostly referred to as “The Doctor.” I don’t think it counts as a spoiler to reveal that Lutz’ first appearance in the book, as well as his final one, both find him at … Galatoire’s.

Away from New Orleans

[NOTE: We're coming up now on the fourth anniversary of Katrina, meaning soon there will be a new round of books and essays and TV segments and so on.  Before all that kicks in I have decided to re-publish this essay, was originally written when the city was still reeling from the flood. I revised it a bit to include as the afterword for the second edition of Letters from New Orleans. That's the version below.  Maybe I should wait and put this up on the day of the anniversary itself, but what I had to say when I wrote this wasn't meant for anniversaries. It was -- and is -- meant for every day. For any day. Today, for instance.]

AWAY FROM NEW ORLEANS

(Or, Regarding Katrina)

A month or so after the first edition of Letters From New Orleans was published, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. Because of the book, I was asked by various news outlets to write about or comment on this event and, for lack of a better word, its “meaning.” The specific nature of the request varied. Somebody wanted me to talk about “the arts and culture of New Orleans.” Somebody else wanted me to write something on the “psyche” of the place, in a way that would “draw a picture of the world that lives, fatalistically but also optimistically, with the proximity of natural disaster.” Mostly they wanted an explanation of what it is that makes New Orleans different. Again: they wanted meaning.

As Katrina’s eye passed just east of the city early on a Monday morning, August 28, I was on an airplane from Newark to Las Vegas. I was headed, for professional reasons, to an apparel-industry trade show. We had long since moved from New Orleans to New Jersey, but because of friends in Louisiana and a very acute awareness of all the things that make New Orleans different, I was worried and distracted. When I landed, the early word on the hurricane was that, for New Orleans at least, things looked better than expected. I spent the next several hours hustling around Vegas’s enormous convention center, in a strange bubble where the only news that circulated was about the authenticity of some hipster street-wear line or gossip about the hottest “urban” brands.

Meanwhile, the news in the real world was changing. In a hotel room, I watched events unfold on television. People were stranded. There was looting. By Tuesday morning there was word that at least one levee had failed and water was now rising through the city.  It was clear to me, at this point, that a nightmare was unfolding. It was at about this time that the requests for an explanation of New Orleans, its special-ness, and its meaning, began to arrive in greater numbers. It looked to me as if there were quite likely hundreds or maybe thousands of people who were going to die in their attics in poor, mostly black neighborhoods; the rule of law was collapsing; a majority of the city was now said to be flooded; there was no word on when power might be restored; even the hundreds of thousands who did get out of the city were now in an open-ended homeless and jobless limbo. I did not feel like explaining New Orleans. I felt like crying.

Many times it has been pointed out that New Orleans is different from most places partly because it is surrounded by water and has lived for hundreds of years with the possibility of just this kind of disaster. Perhaps, it has often been speculated, there is a connection between this and the city’s almost un-American joie de vivre; at the very least, there is something of the fatalistic in the juxtaposition of the good-time life and the constant threat of destruction. That may all be correct. It may also be correct that the perfect metaphor for this carnivalesque place is the mask, a constructed façade that hides another and quite possibly much less attractive identity. Obviously, these are notions I have explored myself, in this book..

Many people think of New Orleans as a picturesque vacation town, a zone in which to act wild and crazy for a time in an atmosphere appropriately soaked in the carefree, the possibly dangerous, and the authentic. The aftermath of Katrina, I suspected in the days after the storm, would have the effect on many people of feeling that they had seen a mask fall away.

Certainly anyone who has lived in or really knows New Orleans already would have known that behind the beauty of the French Quarter and the Garden District lay a sprawling and sometimes desperate underclass. Generally this fact is mentioned only in the “arts and culture” context, as a backdrop to, say, the creation of jazz, or more recently the rise of several major rap stars. But clearly it is just as true in a socio-economic context: the city has long been full of people living in brutal poverty; the city has long been full of cheap violence.

I was back at home in Jersey City by late Tuesday night, watching with anyone else who cared just how badly things can fall apart. It was hard to believe the city that care forgot could disintegrate into chaos and misery. It made me angry and it broke my heart. I had written many words about what it is that I think makes New Orleans special, different, unique. I had written them in tones of love, and I have meant them all. Now I wondered, however, if thinking about what sets New Orleans apart was, while understandable, somehow the wrong thing to do.

If a mask was falling away, it seemed to me that the attempt to localize what we saw was also an attempt to be distant from it. That is a comfortable approach to take, but it is also a misleading approach. It is comfortable to acknowledge brutal poverty and cheap violence in New Orleans, rather than to acknowledge brutal poverty and cheap violence in the United States. And it is comfortable to think that there must be something different about the people of New Orleans because they were so willing to live right on the edge of mortality; they must have some strange penchant for denial.

But we all live on the edge of mortality. A penchant for denial is the most un-strange thing in the world. Masks are a routine function of daily life – and they were of course precisely the thing being sold at that Las Vegas apparel convention that I was so anxious to escape. A penchant for denial is what allows most of us to gossip about fashion or search for meaning or otherwise go about our business in one city, while the social contract dissolves and trapped people die of thirst in another.

Disasters, large and small, natural or otherwise, are always proximate. Learning to live with that is not what sets the people of New Orleans apart; it is what binds them to us all. More than any of the many things about the city that are special, unique, irreplaceable, this is the reason you should care about New Orleans, and its people, and their future.

This essay is adapted from one that first appeared on openDemocracy, and subsequently became the afterword to the second edition of Letters From New Orleans. All author proceeds from Letters From New Orleans (still) go to relief-oriented nonprofits in that city.

The story of a New Orleans sign-painter: Artist Lester Carey

artist lester carey, originally uploaded by anthonyturducken.

Probably two months ago or so, by way of one of my other projects (mlkblvd.wordpress.com), I became familiar with the work that Anthony DelRosario has been doing in documenting, preserving, and building some appreciation for the creations of a New Orleans artist named Lester Carey.

Carey’s work appears on buildings, but he is not a “street artist” in the sense that that term has become popular: He paints commercial signage, sometimes on actual signs, sometimes on walls, but basically always at the behest (and in the service) of business owners, in New Orleans.

Two Sisters Restaurant, originally uploaded by anthonyturducken.

As I clicked through DelRosario’s massive Flickr set of Carey work, I was struck by how much of it I remembered, and in fact had photographed myself, in an incidental way, without ever really giving thought to who painted it. After a brief Flickr/email exchange, DelRosario shared with me a paper he wrote, “Corner Businesses in New Orleans and the Naïve Commercial Art of Lester Carey.” He also gave me permission to summarize here some of what’s in that paper.

Post-Katrina, DelRosario was spending a lot of time biking around New Orleans, and was introduced to Flickr by a friend named Christopher Kirsch. He started varying his bike route: “My new muse of capturing the unfortunate sights of the flooded neighborhoods led me to places that I never would have ridden my bicycle before the storm.” Among other things, he started to notice commercial signage, often on abandoned businesses. Many seemed to be the work of one person: “Fortunately, the artist signed his name on a few works,” including a mural in the Magnolia projects: Lester Carey.

As the title of his paper indicates, DelRosario explores the role of the corner store in New Orleans neighborhood culture, as well as its endangered status thanks to a variety of economic and social forces. However, I’m not going to deal with that here. The point that relates to this post is that corner stores often have hand-painted signs. Who paints them? Guys like Lester Carey, often. And you have to be paying a lot of attention to pick up on the fact that there’s a single artist involved in making a mark of sorts all over a city. “The signs of Lester almost hide in plain sight,” DelRosario writes. “Unless one is consciously on the lookout for his works or interesting signage in general, one would naturally be unaware of these signs.”

long po boy, originally uploaded by anthonyturducken.

In February 2008, DelRosario began looking for Carey himself. He asked the owners of businesses that sported Carey’s work — an auto repair shop on South Miro, a corner store in Central City, and so on. Eventually he asked a guy sitting outside a tire shop on Felicity and Clara. “To my astonishment,” DelRosario writes, “he told me that Lester was probably just down the block at the Keller Market.” And indeed, there he found a man sitting by “a milk crate of what looked like art supplies,” who turned out to be Carey himself. The painter took DelRosario (and Kirsch) on a two-hour walking tour of Central City, pointing out his works here and there.

milton’s auto repair & detailing, originally uploaded by anthonyturducken.

Carey, a native New Orleanian, apparently got a degree in commercial art from Delgado, and then spent the better part of 15 years in the military or the reserves. He started the sign-painting work in 1982, and one of the first stores he painted, it seems, was the Project Food Store on MLK. (When I lived in New Orleans, I was somewhat obsessed with the Project Food Store.) In addition to painting signage all over town, he worked for a while for an “environmental non-profit,” called the Green Project, DelRosario writes.

Carey spent a few months in San Antonio after Katrina, and although he got back to New Orleans, he had nowhere to live. “Since his return he has been mainly living on the streets making money by recycling aluminum cans cans and other metal.” He still finds commercial painting gigs as well — “occasionally.”

artist Lester Carey, originally uploaded by anthonyturducken.

Having documented quite a bit of Carey’s work, DelRosario is in a position to analyze it stylisticallly. He notes the “triangle meat po-boy” as a recurring visual motif, possibly Carey’s “defining icon.” He also examines Cary’s block-lettering style, and its unique quirks. It’s pretty clear that DelRosario has take a very personal interest in Carey, helping out with art supplies and a few bucks when he can — and starting another Flickr pool, Society to Preserve The Art of Lester Carey. (As New Orleans is reconfired in the post-Katrina era, a lot of the buildings Carey painted on are being painted over or demolished.) Carey  himself is living a “rough life,” DelRosario notes, and commercial sign painting is “a dying trade.” It certainly seems a worthy cause to bring attention to the man and his work — he’s left a mark on New Orleans, literally, and deserves some recognition. If you’ve lived in New Orleans in the past 10 or 15 years, I think you’ll recognize at least some of his creations.

kim’s supermarket, originally uploaded by anthonyturducken.

undertaker, grave digger, and mike’s auto repair, originally uploaded by anthonyturducken.

As noted above, Carey isn’t a “street artist” in the sense of being a tagger (“bomber”), or a even a graf-style piecer, of the sort that is celebrated on trend blogs or courted by corporate marketers. But he’s certainly as “authentic” — a word those folks tend to be obsessed with — as it gets. And I was amused by his answer to one of DelRosario’s questions that made me think of the street-art context: Graf guys are always going on about being “all city” and so on, meaning their work is everywhere in town, or (in the old days) on every subway line. The question DelRosario asked was which neighborhoods featured Carey’s work.

Carey’s proud reply: “I’m citywide.”

louis armstrong and ham seasoning, originally uploaded by anthonyturducken.

Inside the pie factory

I have fond memories of Hubig’s Pies — even though I very seldom ate one. I just liked seeing them around, and driving past the pie factory.

The Gambit’s site offers a short video from inside said factory. Very fun.

This in connection to a recent Gambit cover story on the company: Really interesting, and recommended.

Stories and more stories

Wow! It’s been a really long time since I updated no notes! Where have I been?

Mostly trying to pay bills, but there is one thing that might interest some of you: Josh Glenn and I have a little side project going called Significant Objects that we are really proud of and excited about. We have rounded up a bunch of great creative writers, and paired each with an object that one of us bought from a thrift store or yard sale for a buck or two. We get each writer to invent a story about that object — then we sell it on eBay; winning bid gets a copy of the story, too.

Participating writers we’ve already published include Luc Sante, Lucinda Rosenfeld, Lydia Millet, Matthew Sharpe, Ben Greenman, and Kurt Andersen. Coming up are Curtis Sittenfeld, Bruce Sterling, Ed Park, and … well, just too many to name. It’s been going really well and getting some cool attention. I hope you’ll check it out. In fact I hope you’ll consider bidding. We definitely need reader participation to keep the thing going. Tell a friend!

Anyway that project is sorting of getting its legs under it so I’m hoping that once I get some day-job stuff under control I can get back to the list of things that I am anxious to post/address here. There’s a lot, I just need to find the time.

Meanwhile, in New Orleans-related story news: With the Katrinaversary coming up again soon, there’s some more new New Orleans-centered books on the flood and its aftermath. I hadn’t heard about the Dave Eggers book Zeitoun until I read this WSJ writeup, but it actually sounds pretty interesting. Also sounds like Eggers has gotten involved with some local aid efforts in N.O., and that’s cool.

And on a related note, longtime friend of no notes Josh Neufeld’s book A.D.: New Orleans After The Deluge is also arriving. The WSJ wrote that up, too, right here. Check it out!

I got all sentimental reading about these books and other N.O.-related stuff today and pulled Letters From New Orleans off the shelf. You know, I still think it holds up okay. And if you’re among those who believe there is more to the city than the Katrina story, well, all I can say is I feel lucky have to have completed that particular project and had my say before the whole idea of New Orleans got so tied in with the flood and its aftermath. (Which is obviously an important subject — don’t get me wrong!)

And if you’re curious, yes, it’s still the case: Even to this day, all these years later, I still repurpose my royalty checks over to relief effort organizations. It’s not like I ever could have retired on the money I would have earned from the book, and over time the checks have obviously gotten smaller — but hey, if you ever feel like sharing a version of N.O. before that hurricane, buy LfNO for a friend, and rest assured the money spent won’t be wasted on me!

I’ll be back to regularly scheduled no notes programming soon … I hope.

“SJI” on the uke

Up The Lazy River, a blog about “Learning to play the ukulele,” brings up “SJI” in a post about minor chords. Excerpt:

These chord groups are fun to play and practice on a regular basis. They’re grouped in the way you will likely find them in songs, and they almost sound like songs in themselves. As a matter of fact, the first group Dm, Gm, A7 and back to Dm are used in St. James Infirmary, a well known traditional American sad song.

Of course, as it’s played in New Orleans, it starts sad, but pretty much turns into a raucous affirmation of life. In a way that’s a little jarring if you think about it. Which as you know, I have, way too much.

Stream-able Touissaint live set on NPR

In a May 20th set at the Village Vanguard, Touissaint plays a bunch of material from Bright Mississippi. The band for the gig includes Don Byron, Christian Scott, Marc Ribot, David Piltch, and Jay Bellerose. “SJI” comes up pretty early — about 12 minues into the nearly hour-and-a-half set. Joe Henry (who produced Bright Mississippi) takes the vocals and does a nice job. Full set list and other details + plus audio link here.

“An easy song to remember … You just try not to ruin it”

Friend of no notes Alex Rawls has a great piece about Allen Toussaint in the current Offbeat, check out the whole thing here.

I will of course just share you with the “SJI” moment:

He hadn’t performed any of the songs before including “St. James Infirmary,” despite the song’s status as a standard in New Orleans. “I hadn’t paid much attention to it, but it’s an easy song to remember,” Toussaint says. “I didn’t give it much thought, but for some reason the intro came to me like that. It was something I had done before on the piano, but never used.”

In that intro, he teases the melody with a little trilled, morse code-like figure before playing the melody as a series of single notes played only with the right hand. With each pass through the verse, he adds levels of complexity. “As far as my part is concerned, that’s the most unique thing about the song by this pianist—the intro and the interlude. That song is a good song on its own and is easy to remember. You just try not to ruin it.”

First: Rather charming modesty.

Second: I’ve always thought I could hear what sounds an awful lot to me like an “SJI” cameo within Toussaint’s “Tipitina And Me.” I thought I’d written about that once on this site, but I can’t find it in the archives, so maybe I just thought about it.