The beautiful art deco building that has housed Charity Hospital for as long as I’ve been alive is under worse threat with the awarding today of millions of dollars to rebuild. It seems Jindal wants to streamline the razing of an entire neighborhood in lower Midcity to make way for a suburban sprawl of hospital big box buildings rather than do what his constituents want and that is to retrofit the beautiful and historic Charity…
A friend of mine said he has an early memory of a flood in Cincinnati, where he was standing by the front door and watching a boat go by on the street. He was two years old. Most people can’t remember anything from before four or five years of age. At least I can’t. I can barely remember anything these days. My mind has become a sieve. When we were at the zoo, Tin was…
Vanessa and the candle still burning Vanessa Niemann Singer/Songwriter – Gal Holiday and the Honky Tonk Revue Vanessa had just moved out of the French Quarter to Metairie right before the storm and was looking forward to being in the ‘burbs, away from the bars.” Like everyone else, when the mandate came to evacuate, she and her boyfriend at the time left with the clothes on their backs and their cats. “We immediately hit stopped…
Charles and the Garbage Truck route Charles Handler Industrial Organizational Psychologist Charles’ tattoo was not completely Katrina related although he said the event did bind together a lot of themes into one piece of artwork that now spans half of his chest and covers his entire arm like a sleeve. “The decision to cover my whole arm was a big decision and I knew the image should not be arbitrary,” he said. The tattoo is…
I was going to do this book that came up as an idea when I was speaking to my friend Anne at Bacchanal one day after Katrina. It was to do a coffee table book of people who had gotten tattoos to commemorate Katrina. The book did not happen even though it was well intended and I even thought Taschen would be the ideal publisher. Here was the genesis for the book. Start wtih Anne and…
We went to see Willie Nelson at the House of Blues last night and had another friend’s daughter come and sit with Tin. Willie is ancient. I guess I expected him to be older but not ancient. But that wasn’t an issue really, because he still played like a pup, but the problem was that we were with this crowd of people who were talking nonstop and that the House of Blues was not showcasing…
There is a pathway that goes from Carrolton to the French Quarter. It used to be a canal where the boats that came in from the Lake, into the Bayou, went down this Canal and turned on Basin Street in a big turning basin. The effort is underway to turn this strip of land into a recreational path called the Lafitte Corridor. I imagine the future where we take our bikes to the Quarter along…
I took my niece around town today, first over to Mandina’s for a shrimp poboy, then down by the house she was born in on Mulberry Street off Metairie Road. Then we drove down Carrolton Avenue and around the riverbend to see Tulane and Audubon Park. We stopped in at Duffosat to pick up something from T’s tenant and learned that MTV’s Real World was soon to be filming in the house right across the…
On New Year’s Day we took a walkabout with our guests to City Park and I brought them under the big oak tree to listen to the wind chimes. A man was laying on a blanket not too far from us and my friend’s German mother, camera in hand with a lens as big as a telescope, went over and started speaking to him. Turns out he was the one who designed the chimes in…
There is a saying in Croatia that you stepped out of bed on your left foot, it is the equivalent of saying you woke on the wrong side of the bed. Last night we went to two parties – and put Tin to sleep in a pack and play at the second, but by 11:00, we had already all turned into pumpkins so we came home and all went to bed to the sounds of…