Two of the grief-filled but somehow repairing moments that we experienced at JazzFest 2006: Springsteen’s Acura set and John’s chilling jazz tent performance.
bless you Bruce.
John Boutte singing Randy Newman’s Louisiana 1927 at JazzFest 2006:
John is the voice of the shared soul of New Orleans.
And fuck you bush, blanco, brownie and nagin.
*Update 08.25: they have to be out by 9/30. if you know of a likely retail space or can offer support to Philipe and Deb in any way, I hope you stop by Toulouse between Royal and Chartres to offer it.
Just as we were about to celebrate Kitchen Witch’s 10th anniversary we received the letter no business wants to open. Our rent will more than double and our excellent lease has expired. So, it appears that our beautiful, quirky and happy space will no longer be home to our books and wonderful customers.
This is how small business dies–The lease increase of 115% is more than they can afford, so on your next visit you find them gone. But what if the landlord — SuLuEtteDee c/o Latter&Blum 712 Orleans Ave. NOLA 70116–received a card, letter, post card from you–would it help? Yes Indeed!!!
Kitchen Witch Cookbooks
631 Toulouse St, New Orleans, Louisiana 70130
Hours
Wed-Sun: 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
“Kitchen Witch is a small, but purrfect book shop in the heart of the French Quarter in New Orleans. We specialize in rare, hard to find, out of print and pre-owned books on food and cooking.”
(504) 528-8382
http://www.kwcookbooks.com
http://phillamancusa.blogspot.com/
dammit I am tired of the passive and the aggressive war on bicyclists in this city. way too many “No bike parking” signs, drivers driving in bike lanes without regard to anyone’s safety, (or almost as bad) driving JUST behind us out of eye sight as if we impede your driving lane. Scary to see how many drivers who cannot calculate safe distance on either side. Trucks using dedicated bike lanes for parking even when there is ample parking to pull into, thieves running amok with tools to cut even the best locks in less than a few minutes and entirely too many people immediately blaming the DEAD cyclist when an accident happens.The fact that the cyclist is often no longer among the living should tell you that an accident involving a car and anything human-powered is not a fair fight. What is really going in in many cases is the driver either “doesn’t see” the cyclist at all (which tells you about the level of distraction and road awareness among many drivers) or the driver felt the cyclist had no right to the road and encroached on their space, resulting in a tragedy for one side. And yes, I am also tired of the few cyclists I see who have a disdain for bicycle traditions, including communicating with savvy drivers when possible with hand signals, using eye contact and acknowledgement and ceding the road to pedestrians when necessary. I see those cyclists, but I do not believe they actually number as a significant number of us. In order to ride a bike for a long period, one has to believe in those rules and to honor them. And those few who disregard the rules are just that, few. They are just more visible to those looking for examples of bad cyclists.
There seems to be a belief that the “grown up world” is about owning an auto and bicycles are for the immature, the Peter Pans of the world. That the rights of car drivers extend to the ownership of the road and that their decisions should override every other conveyance, even while they using their car as a weapon or wreaking havoc on the streets because of the distractions they have added to their driving time. For those who believe in auto-only roads, I would be happy to cede the highways to you and to take back the city streets for pedestrians, for cyclists and for low-powered motor vehicles. I am sure we’d all be a lot safer.
Much of the story of Hurricane Katrina lived on the internet as the city reconnected during its diaspora. When Cynthia Joyce went looking for one vital account for a course she was teaching, she found the site down and the piece forgotten. This inspired her search for the works that became Please Forward: How Blogging Reconnected New Orleans After Katrina. Some of the writing included is famous and easily obtainable; a good percentage of the work is currently unavailable due to aging servers and broken links. Taken together, these pieces are powerful testament to the New Orleans blogging community who proved the internet could function as a crucial platform in a time of crisis.
Official Launch Party
WHAT: “Please Forward” launch party, featuring contributor readings and book signing
WHEN: Tuesday, August 18 at 7PM
WHERE: Press Street HQ (3718 St. Claude Ave.)
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Please-Forward/572978082845369
Other events in New Orleans:
It’s amazing to be alive at the moment of the tipping point for a social movement: For my lifetime, they already include the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of apartheid in South Africa, Arab Spring, the extension of legal rights for women and for same-sex unions among many others.
What all of these have in common is that they happened well before the formal governing entity signaled that it was ready for the change or even in some cases, before the solid majority had decided to back the change.
All were hard-fought and seemed destined to fail at many points in their campaign. All had active opposition.
The removal of statues of Confederate leaders from public space is another tipping point in a country that is heading toward a time when whites will be a minority (by 2043).
The affronted use mockery (“Why don’t we remove all traces of Washington? HE owned slaves! Where will this end?”) or condescending treatises on what they view as “the real history”, as understood through a lifetime of racist schoolbooks and likeminded family members (“The war was about states rights and not about slavery, duh.”)
To me, the arguments stated above mask the bigger truth: The public lionization of the Confederate past of the South is a barrier to working together for the future and signals to people of color that whiteness is a privilege earned, when it is not. I don’t care what version or scope of history you subscribe to, although I may pity you; have a statue of Lee in your backyard, but holding on the “Lost Cause” narrative in public places is a recipe for the continuing disintegration of our region. It also masks the true vibrancy of the South: that it is based on a multi-cultural, multi-generational belief in place, extreme socialization and culture handed down from person to person.
I wish we had the ability and forethought as a people to have created realistic evidence of the world of slavery and the brutality of the Civil War as Eisenhower ordered to be done with the concentration camps after WW2, but we did not. Instead we have inherited this soft and “heroic” narrative that does not truly represent the history of that ugly time.
Statues of those who brought a civil war to defend a system that allowed people to be sold as chattel should not be kept in public spaces.
Keep all of the statues and throw some Mardi Gras beads on em if you’d like, but put them in the Custom House or another place to properly frame their history as those who ignored the opportunity to expand human rights for their neighbors, along with information on when the statues were commissioned and by whom.
And thank you to Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of “The Warmth Of Other Suns:The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration” for writing this piece in the NYT about how symbols do help to define their time:
With the lowering of the Confederate flag in the state that was the first to secede and where the first shots were fired, could we now be at the start of a true and more meaningful reconstruction? It would require courage to relinquish the false comfort of embedded racial mythologies and to open our minds to a more complete history of how we got here. It would require a generosity of spirit to see ourselves in the continued suffering of a people stigmatized since their arrival on these shores and to recognize how the unspoken hierarchies we have inherited play out in the current day and hold us back as a country.
“Any time, any time while I was a slave, if one minute’s freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it—just to stand one minute on God’s airth [sic] a free woman— I would.” — Elizabeth Mumbet Freeman secured her freedom in a precedent setting court case on 8/22/1781.
When people overreact about airbnb, I think I’ll bring this story up. Affordable housing has been in a crisis for some time, long before that site was created.
The lack of affordable housing issue comes from the same old greed that has allowed this crisis to happen in every place in the US (not all of which are airbnb-heavy counties): owners cashing in on the highest rates they can get for their property, whether the culprit are developers or homeowners. If you want to charge at the high end of market rates (whether through airbnb or Craigslist/classifieds or using brokers or any other system), then you are going to get a revolving door of tenants and those tenants are not going to care about the area or the neighbors. If you want to have responsible tenants, then map out something that works for both parties whether using airbnb, a handshake or Craiglist/classifieds or using brokers or any other system. As for those who use airbnb to decimate their neighborhoods: those folks have been around since the first days of the Industrial Age, using any means necessary to populate their slums. The way to counteract those slumlords is for a city government to take affordable housing seriously, and begin to address that issue without penalizing those homeowners (and yes renters) that use their property properly to offer good places to long-term neighbors and to the type of visitors interested in participating in community when they travel, and for short-term and newly arriving residents.
I find it ironic that those who are crying the loudest against airbnb are not now (and have never been noted for) demanding rent controls or incentives to increase long term affordable housing. (Interestingly, after Katrina, the vitriol against public housing was shocking and directed almost entirely at those trapped in the cycle of poverty for generations as their neighbors and neighborhood associations applauded the shuttering of well-built, brick townhouse and had no issue with the crap now being slowly built in its place with much of it reserved for market rate apartments.) I have been lucky for almost my entire renting life to have caring and responsible homeowners that I have rented from (including presently, stand up and wave to the people, E and D) and they always repay my loyalty with their own, but too many of my friends are being priced out of the city because of this type of rampant market-rate greed that started IMMEDIATELY after Katrina (long before airbnb) and so lets call it what it is. I have long advocated for the city to offer tax credits for rent-controlled listings or at least for those who offer rates on the low end or middle. I think the DDD should offer incentives to the owners of Canal Street businesses to develop their upper floors for the service industry to be able to be in walking distance of their workplaces, and the same with the Quarter (as a resident, I can show you how many floors over storefronts are completely vacant; it would boggle your mind).
Airbnb done badly is just a symptom of that greed and outlawing it will not stop slumlords but will reduce the number of caring residents who use it responsibly to make the mortgage or to keep their apartment if they need to be away for a month or two. Airbnb offered the data in 2013 that 89% of their listing were single listings of primary residences. (If you suspect that data is 100% accurate, I will say that i have some skepticism just as I do about hotel data, but I can tell you that in my 20+ airbnb trips, all but 2 of them have been primary residences and those 2 were well-managed European hostel-style with strict rules about behavior.) As a constant traveler, I appreciate the ability to stay in a neighborhood and get to know residents, and to be able to walk to the store and to the metro or bus. I cannot tell you how many times before airbnb that I was in a hotel “zone” with no place to walk to get food and little access to public transportation, no one to talk to about what or where it was safe for a woman alone, adding up to what was often a stressful experience.
Check out these sensible recommendations for short-term housing (including different rates for primary residence airbnbs and a cap on the number of short-term rentals in any one area):
http://www.theselc.org/draft_short_term_rental_recommendati…, but let’s recognize that the boogeyman has been among us for some time and cannot be solved by outlawing a sharing site.
Opening soon at the old Stella space at Hotel Provincial is Angeline, opened by well-regarded chef Alex Harrell, last found at Sylvain, which earned 3 Beans in the T-P review (and here is my “review” too). We certainly needed another mid-priced restaurant with a creative menu and an ambitious chef for locals and for savvy visitors. I’ll look forward to making a reservation and will report back here of course.
The Angeline menu will include butter bean tortellini with redeye gravy; sherry-glazed shrimp with fried Meyer lemons and shaved radishes; and fried quail over hoecakes with local honey and hot sauce. The average price of the entrees will be $20
“I don’t want to price out the neighborhood and local business,” he said. “I want it to be a place where people feel comfortable coming in multiple times a week, maybe grab a starter and a glass of wine after work.”
Angeline is the middle name of Harrell’s mother. He wants his restaurant to reflect her personality.
“When I thought what I want the restaurant to be,” he said, “I want it to have that Southern charm. I want it to be friendly and inviting. Those are things that I associate with my mother.”
UPDATE
Went last week with writer pals Nancy and Bill and we had a grand time, excellent service and lovely food. We were originally seated in the lovely main dining room, but one of us wanted to sit in the front room (not me!) and we were immediately seated there. Unfortunately, that front room is low on personality and is a little like sitting in an waiting room, although having access to viewing the street is a plus. (Maybe they can knock down the wall that separates it from the bar and make that all one area, which I think would work very well. If they can’t knock it down completely, then even cutting a “window” between it and the bar would help.)
The main room looked great and two of us eyed it wistfully when we left! I guarantee we’ll sit there next time.
as for food:
I had two of the “starters” of southern fried quail made with local honey, their own hot sauce on a hoe cake and the crispy cauliflower (olivade aioli, sheep’s milk cheese); both were very good. One of us enjoyed the fish entree which had a goodly amount of fish (at first glance, it seemed small but was not). The last had two other starters and loved them as well-one was the chicken livers and arugula (with pickled blue berries, shaved red onion, Angeline buttermilk) and I think the other was the squash blossoms, but I was too busy with my quail. We all shared a nice brothy black eyed pea and collard green soup which was made with bourbon, bacon, smoky pork broth.
Drinks were good-one had asked for sherry and had the good luck of catching the general manager (I think?) on his way out who then stayed for a lively 20 minutes at our table discussing sherry, sent out a flight of choices for tasting and their own copy of the sherry bible to peruse as well as invitations to meet their sherry contacts in Spain for the two of us often there (not me!)
I had a gin drink which was tasty, well presented and a healthy size; the good size is so unusual for a restaurant these days (I’m getting tired of 10.00 cocktails that don’t match their description or are hastily or lightly poured- that is not the case at Angeline, I can assure you.)
Long story short- good menu with robust flavors using many locally sourced ingredients. Staff lovely and pleasant. Ambience good, but stick to main dining room.
yes will be back- after all, it is one of my neighborhood restaurants.
French Quarter block by block 
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