I don’t know what you’re doing right now, but if it’s 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 it’s hard to talk to people about my college days, because whatever other people’s 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. Here’s why:
January
Jan 1 - New Orleans is a “ball drop” 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. There’s so many people and so many parades that you really can’t 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 “House of Good Looking Men” 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 “Stellamite” or “Stella” and go to Louis Armstrong park yelling “Stella!”
Mardi Gras Day (we are still just in February people) - It’s parades all day, and if you haven’t been in New Orleans on the actual day of Mardi Gras, there is simply no description for what it’s 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 it’s surreal. Then we arrive and everywhere we look it’s 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
It’s St. Patrick’s 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 didn’t know about this.
Me with my friends going to a formal at D’Estrahan Plantation. We rode in Matt’s 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 Rockin’ Dopsie at Howlin’ Wolf for $5 cover, Friday night Blues at Muddy Waters for $10 cover, Saturday nights a major act at Jimmy’s or Tipitina’s, 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 they’d 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 Neville’s 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 wasn’t 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 – 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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That’s 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 don’t see how anything else could measure up after that.
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Ahaha, I did factory work. Because I had to. Campus jobs didn’t 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 didn’t 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 weren’t 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 don’t mean that they didn’t have life easier, but often their outlook was no different. I particular remember sitting down with one guy I didn’t 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, “I’ve got a truck and arms, and I sort of know you, so I’ll help you out.”
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 brother’s 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, here’s 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 didn’t see it.
That made me think about my own life differently. I always felt like I didn’t have enough compared to the rich kids I went to school with, but there are a ton of people who’d 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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Nope.
I’m reopening the thread as there was agreement to reopen it in another thread. I’m involved in this conversation going awry. I will pm with the other person to sort things out.
I will monitor this and invite @LockeCJ to also keep an eye on this since I’m not impartial.
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I wonder if the ending means there is going to be a sequel?
It also felt a slight bit hellraiserish to me. Definitely a Barker influence…
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It certainly sets one up, and I’m super intrigued as to where they’d go with it (I imagine they’d need a much larger budget!) but it sounds like the filmmakers are very burnt out after the difficulties of doing The Void as an indie movie. I agree that the sequel would likely be even more Hellraiser-ish and more like the Hellraiser sequels, which I am all for.
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Yeah, it was crowdfunded, as I recall. I don’t know if they released it in theaters, any idea if they did? Even a limited run? But the real money is in home sales, I think (I don’t know about streaming vs. DVD sales, though). I guess they could crowdfund again, but like you said, they’d really need a bigger budget for the ending they had, if they intend to carry it forward.
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I saw it months ago as a one-night-only event in a tiny (30 seat) movie theater, and coincidentally, it ran for a few nights just this week at a local art theater, so I think they’re doing a limited run now. It seems like the kind of cult film a company like Mondo would champion and do DVDs and a vinyl soundtrack.
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I AM NOT WATCHING THIS!
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