just saw The Void - a truly creepy and pretty bloody Lovecraftian film. It sort of brings Lovecraft into the 21st century. If you like Lovecraftian stuff, I highly recommend it.
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Iāll definitely second that recommendation. Fans of Lovecraftian horror and gross practical effects will enjoy it; it felt like a big love letter to Rob Bottin.
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Treme is frickinā sweet! Canāt recommend it enough!
If you like New Orleans music and The Wire, then Treme will be perfect for you. Otherwise, it will still be damn good.
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Awesome, sounds like I canāt lose. Iām looking forward to it.
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I watched this on Netflix the other day. It was really excellent - great performances and fascinating story; the 70ās was really captured.Watch it when you can handle some darkness.
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Oh fuck. She killed herself on camera, didnāt she?
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I actually didnāt know that before watching the movie so it was a shock to me.
I thought it was a very good portrayal of mental illness and of how people around her missed how troubled she was.
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I was unfortunately exposed to a couple of episodes of something rather awful. I feel it my duty to warn others. Donāt watch Riverdale. I imagine it came to into being a little something like this:
An angsty pre-teen, firmly believing Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey to be the height of literature and film-making, wrote a truly awful story for a fan-fiction forum. Lacking names for the characters, they happened upon an old Archie comic and decided to rip the character names and place names for their story, thinking that no one else would recognize them.
Meanwhile, an out-of-work film crew, having failed even at low-budget porn, now drunk and increasingly desperate, with rent due the next day, was trolling the fan-fiction forum late at night when they came across the story. Knowing an exec in the business that was going through a mental breakdown, they decided to pitch the show the very next morning. The studio exec, who was a bit distracted and just didnāt give a crap anymore, said āI donāt care, do whatever, just donāt bother me!ā
The show does apparently have an audience - people who read the comics and thought āMan, why isnāt Archie having sex with Ms. Grundy?ā
I guess this is what happens when a comic ends its run with issue #666.
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I donāt know what youāre doing right now, but if itās not full-time media reviewer the world is missing out.
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Pre- or post-Katrina? Either way you must have seen some incredible things.
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I watched one episode, then a quarter of another just to confirm what I had seen. Your review is far too generous.
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I was in college when I lived in New Orleans. I have found that itās hard to talk to people about my college days, because whatever other peopleās college experiences were like, mine were like x1000.
To give an idea of what it was like, most experienced students took a lighter schedule in the Spring semester. Hereās why:
January
Jan 1 - New Orleans is a āball dropā city; many students return to the city early to go to the big party
Classes back in session - general on campus parties for the return of school
Mardi Gras - most people do not realize this goes on for 40 days, so depending on when the holiday falls, parades can start rolling in the city as early as mid-January. There are parades that go right by the school, parades that roll near the French Quarter, but also, for the savvy bead whore, parades in all the suburbs and outlying areas with a completely different quality. It is common, for example, in Metairie to see teenagers with large daiquiris in their hands roaming the parade routes in pairs and trios before the big event and their parents sitting in lawn chairs alongside the route.
February
Mardi Gras weekend - The school shuts down. The city swells to twice its population. Drugs wash over the campus and the city like a tidal surge. Thereās so many people and so many parades that you really canāt drive, just walk and take the street cars and buses. Generally for students you end up with a different group of friends during this time - no one knows why. My first Mardi Gras I spent with a group of kids from Beverly Hills. My Sophomore Year I fell in with a group of guys from a stoner fraternity. My Junior Year, I was dating a guy from the āHouse of Good Looking Menā and hanging out there a lot.
Lundi Gras night (the day before Mardi Gras) - Traditionally, you stay up all night long so you can welcome in Mardi Gras day good and drunk. The big thing to do when I was in college was go to see the Radiators at the famous bar Tipitinas. There was an underground fraternity I was in with that had a party called Stella where they would come to this bar with kegs on the back of a truck and set up outside the bar. That was stage one of the party. From the brothers you could find the secret party location for the next stage. At that spot, there was a booze mixture spiked with mushrooms and lots of acid. For the final leg, they would trip a drug one of the brothers had discovered while on travels called āStellamiteā or āStellaā and go to Louis Armstrong park yelling āStella!ā
Mardi Gras Day (we are still just in February people) - Itās parades all day, and if you havenāt been in New Orleans on the actual day of Mardi Gras, there is simply no description for what itās like. It is pure bacchanalia, like walking in the middle of a dream. My Freshman year I remember taking a bus with a friend down to the French Quarter for the first parade (the traditional first parade is Zulu, which is mostly black people in over the top black face and native costumes that surely must be considered the most insulting thing to whatever population they are mimicking, but this is New Orleans so what else can you do but drink and beg a guy on the parade to throw you a prized golden coconut?) As go further down the route, more and more people are on the bus in costume and already itās surreal. Then we arrive and everywhere we look itās people in the most beautiful, most vulgar, and most trippy costumes, all drunk and stoned and high, waiting for the masked men to roll down the street on their parade floats and throw them trinkets.
Ash Wednesday - it all disappears and all the Catholic people are wearing ashes on their foreheads as a new school day starts.
March
Itās St. Patrickās Day!!! - like Mardi Gras, only just for the locals, and they throw cabbages off the floats
Spring Break
April
Easter - like Mardi Gras for the locals, only with strippers on the floats.
Fraternity Formals. This includes the famous Beta Jungle Party, which is in place of an off campus formal. They hire a great musician - in my day it was often the guy who looked and played like Jimi Hendrix. The whole house was converted with sand and plants into a jungle. There was a maze in the basement of the fraternity that was opened up only for this party. There were several levels you had to crawl through, secret rooms where you could get stoned with the brothers if you could find them, and then at the end you landed into a small pool that you had to walk through to exit. Many people tripped acid and smoked as they went through this maze. I could NEVER figure out how the fire department didnāt know about this.
Me with my friends going to a formal at DāEstrahan Plantation. We rode in Mattās hearse to the formal. The girl at far right was just a girl that Matt randomly asked to come to the formal while we were hanging out on the quad, and she was a great sport and decided to take a chance on some random strange guy who had a hearse as his main vehicle. Because New Orleans is like that.
French Quarter Fest - Damn good food and music
Last Weekend of April/First Weekend of May
Finals - eventually you learn these are not nearly as important as
JAZZ FEST!!!
But this is not to mention that on Thursday nights it was Rockinā Dopsie at Howlinā Wolf for $5 cover, Friday night Blues at Muddy Waters for $10 cover, Saturday nights a major act at Jimmyās or Tipitinaās, and Sunday usually a good chill day to hit a local bar for a band playing mid day or just a great juke box.
They also had an event for the school radio station, WTUL, called marathon that one one weekend in April and theyād get major local acts on campus, including Charmaine Neville. We also had every Friday a band that would play on campus for free starting around 6 pm. These were also often major local musicians.
My best friend and I at WTUL marathon
Also, did I mention that one of my good friends was friends with Charmaine Nevilleās tour manager and she had Charmaine Neville PLAY AT HER WEDDING!!!
Yes every song in New Orleans is about New Orleans.
and somewhere in there I studied.
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Mine were spent working, mostly, then going to school. I was putting myself through college, and was in the first generation of my family to attend college, so there was no way I would allow myself to fuck this up. No spring/summer/winter breaks because of work, and because I wasnāt on good terms with my family.
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Oh yeah, I had an on campus job, too. All 4 years.
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Mine was doing what you did, plus trying to avoid preppies ā who just wanted to talk about how much money their parents had. Bor-ing. Not easy on a campus full of them.
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Thatās incredible. Did you know what you were getting when you chose to go to school there? Is the pulse of the music and parties still with you? I donāt see how anything else could measure up after that.
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Ahaha, I did factory work. Because I had to. Campus jobs didnāt pay shit, especially if you were trying to support yourself.
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I went to a real nerdy high school. My college choosing process was ridiculous. I ended up at Tulane because I was a legacy, got a ginormous scholarship, and didnāt get in anywhere else. The school had a big reputation as a party school and the other kids from my class who went there were the party kids.
I knew a bit about New Orleans because my parents met at Tulane, but they were there in the '50s when the music scene was more about jazz and less about funk, and schools were more in control of the students.
The party all the time attitude challenged me a lot. I was a school nerd and was frustrated by the rich kids who came to Tulane just to drink and drug and see music. But then I met people who showed me that it was okay to have fun, and maybe not so important to perform but sometimes to just be.
I got to see that the rich kids werenāt any happier than I was; that they had problems of their own, and that has been really useful to me in my life. I grew up being resentful of the wealthy kids in Birmingham, and then met people who were so much wealthier and saw that there was not really some point of wealth where people found happiness in the money. There were kids who were really off the charts wealthy there.
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Oh please.
Do they ever have to decide between food and epilepsy meds?
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I donāt mean that they didnāt have life easier, but often their outlook was no different. I particular remember sitting down with one guy I didnāt know too well, but more as an acquaintance. He was just a big, sweet, nice guy. He had helped me move because he was that guy who was like, āIāve got a truck and arms, and I sort of know you, so Iāll help you out.ā
I sat down to lunch with him and it turns out he is from a crazy rich family. He has three brothers who are all named things like Wolfgang (I shit you not, that was one of his brotherās names.) They were all like concert pianists, expert skiers, skilled surgeons. Basically, they all had life by the balls.
And then there was this black sheep of the family who was not like that, but just a nice guy who appreciated music.
He felt like a failure compared to his brothers.
You might think, wow, hereās a guy whose family could afford a mega expensive school, who had nothing but the good things in life, he must really appreciate that.
But no.
And that was really it. The kids who had it didnāt see it.
That made me think about my own life differently. I always felt like I didnāt have enough compared to the rich kids I went to school with, but there are a ton of people whoād give their eye teeth to have parents like mine who sacrificed to get their kids into those schools and have the opportunities I have.
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