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Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans

  • Stockings Hanging by the …. Fire!

    Number of comments: 1
    While this is not as visually clever or obscene as some Hostilidays entries, if is so personally satisfying and damn funny I may have to retire from the field on this. I’m too lazy this year to put up links to the competition, but hey that’s what is there Google [...]
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    Posted: December 11, 2009, 5:55am EST
    by mf

  • Its The End of the Blog as We Know It And I Feel Fine

    I posted something up on another blog of mine, Poems Before Breakfast, pondering what happens to my little poetry journal (a journal as in diary or sketch book, not as in literary journal with a masthead and a readership) when I start to publish things in real journals? Yeah, I know, [...]
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    Posted: December 10, 2009, 4:52pm EST
    by mf

  • Odd Words

    § On Dec. 20 the latest edition (fourth or fifth; I’m not sure) of the Maple Leaf Rag Anthology of poets who have read at the Maple Leaf Bar series will be released at 3 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 20 at the Maple Leaf Bar (natch). I better be there [...]
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    Posted: December 10, 2009, 4:00am EST
    by mf

  • St. Stephen’s Day Murders

    Bog, but I love the Hostilidays: the family and friends all huddled together in a too small room under the furiously twinkling light up fir over the mantel drinking too much and glancing jealously at one another’s presents, saying bog only knows what in front of grandmere while the cat [...]
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    Posted: December 09, 2009, 9:57am EST
    by mf

  • Classical Gas

    Number of comments: 2
    Is it because my children are nearly grown or that the NOLA Bloggers are a lot of grown children that we mock one of the most sacred seasons in the Bank Holiday Calendar? Anyone know where I can get a coal-burning fireplace insert cheap? Happy Hostilidays. [...]
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    Posted: December 08, 2009, 5:41am EST
    by mf

  • Songs to Aging Children Come

    Number of comments: 3
    There are no artists today who write songs like this. The traditions that grew out of Lomax’s tape deck, the Celtic and African echos of our ancestors that blossomed in the Fifties and Sixties when a man with a guitar standing on the shoulders of Woody and Leadbelly could speak [...]
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    Posted: December 06, 2009, 8:26pm EST
    by mf

  • Mystic Cookies

    Number of comments: 13
    The novel Mystic Pig by Richard Katrovas is one of the great New Orleans books. You’re have to take my word for it, or you can plop down about $30 US to get a copy of the reprint from Oleander Press in England after conversion, shipping, etc. The story of [...]
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    Posted: December 05, 2009, 8:02am EST
    by mf

  • Odd Words

    Number of comments: 1
    It’s that time of year again, when the book and related event listings turn to cookbooks, cute Cajun kid’s books with Christmas themes and that sort of thing. If you want to catch Angus Lind signing books just keep you eyes peeled. You can’t miss him. As for me, here;s [...]
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    Posted: December 03, 2009, 4:00am EST
    by mf

  • Agoraphonia

    Number of comments: 1
    Trying to read Bernadette Mayer’s surrealist Agoraphobia in a loud & crowded food court is like a holiday in schizophrenia. I don’t recommend surrealism for lunch. Try the Mexican instead. Just when I think I have the sense of it her sentences run like rivulets after a wave back into [...]
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    Posted: December 02, 2009, 1:32pm EST
    by mf

  • Crow’s Fall

    So it’s Wednesday and I’ve nothing much to say so why not another Crow poem on One Eyed Jack’s day. Painting Raven Passion from The Sacred Crow Treasure Box Crow’s Fall By Ted Hughes When Crow was white he decided the sun was too white. He decided it glared much too whitely. He decided to attack [...]
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    Posted: December 02, 2009, 7:08am EST
    by mf

  • Oh Give Me A Noose I Can Hang From The Tree

    Yes, well, this one has been done before but I’m going to try to maintain a modicum of, um, class. Or culture. Or something. Hell, I just like it and it’s Tom Waits. If you’re just wandered in here looking for something else: Happy Hostilidays. [...]
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    Posted: November 30, 2009, 4:42pm EST
    by mf

  • The Gift

    Number of comments: 4
    OK, not exactly a holiday video for the increasingly infamous NOLA Bloggers War On Christmas, (aka The Hostilidays) but also because this is the piece I suggested Lou For A Day should stand up on the bar and declaim at Mimi’s if I can scrape off the right-channel music track. [...]
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    Posted: November 28, 2009, 9:48am EST
    by mf

  • Odd Words

    Number of comments: 1
    So, it’s Thanksgiving Weekend and everyone is probably exhausted from the horrible Mimosa-Sazerac-wine-Belgian Ale-absinthe hangover we try to blame on the triptophan and that fourth helping of oyster dressing. (What, you don’t serve absinthe after dinner?) So of course there’s not much going on for this column. Sure, I could [...]
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    Posted: November 27, 2009, 7:48am EST
    by mf

  • Thankful

    Number of comments: 5
    You have to love a holiday that is primarily about eating and drinking whatever sort of civics class fatherland malarkey They have tried to drape the table with. Thanksgiving is the holiday (I will bet you a bottle of wine) at which you will find yourself trying to remember the [...]
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    Posted: November 25, 2009, 8:38am EST
    by mf

  • Is It Supersonic?

    Number of comments: 1
    I’m a big fan of Rahsaan Roland Kirk, but I wasn’t aware of this odd film featuring Kirk and John Cage, with Cage providing the libretto and some of the mix and overdubs to Kirk’s music. Some people think Kirk is just a freak show, the man who can blow [...]
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    Posted: November 21, 2009, 8:52pm EST
    by mf

  • Prisoners

    Number of comments: 3
    This week I watched cable channel AMC’s television series The Prisoner, a very loose remake of the famous 1960s series staring Patrick McGoohan about a government agent who, on attempting to resign, is kidnapped and taken to a dystopic resort/retirement home called The Village. The 21st century version, based on [...]
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    Posted: November 21, 2009, 7:35am EST
    by mf

  • Odd Words

    Number of comments: 2
    On the road for business so no real time for a column this week. There is no Susan Larson listing (the rumor is she took the T-P buyout) so you might want to check the listings on Nordette Adams’s Examiner list. § Update I missed this while on the road, and [...]
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    Posted: November 18, 2009, 9:50pm EST
    by mf

  • Crunk Before Halftime

    Number of comments: 3
    How improbable is a New Orleans Saints Superbowl? The Yellow Blog tests the limits of Infinite Improbability, probes Life, The Universe and Everything to give us this answer: If the creation of [the] Higgs boson particle is so catastrophically unlikely that it is capable of extra-temporally preventing its own occurrence, [...]
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    Posted: November 13, 2009, 1:04pm EST
    by mf

  • Voodoo Chile

    Number of comments: 1
    Driving down Veterans Highway through Metairie after two beers at lunch, on the uncertain foundation of Vietnamese soup, Electric Ladyland seemed an odd choice to pop into the CD player. Its something we would have listened to cruising after lunch with a joint back at De La Salle. Once it [...]
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    Posted: November 13, 2009, 11:35pm EST
    by mf

  • Odd Words

    Number of comments: 1
    Welcome back to my weekly grab bag of mostly literary events around New Orleans, a short list of what appeals to me, and some links to Internet articles on writing and literature, and some other Odd Bits. § First off is this weekend’s Fringe Festival. There are frankly too many wonderful [...]
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    Posted: November 12, 2009, 6:00am EST
    by mf

  • Odd Words Addendum

    Number of comments: 2
    I don’t know how this slipped by mind last Thursday (or all week, really, and now I’m pretty sure I can’t go) but poet C.D. Wright will be reading at Newcomb College at 730 pm this evening (Monday, Nov. 9) in the Freeman Auditorium, Woldenberg Art Center. Wright is the [...]
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    Posted: November 09, 2009, 8:28am EST
    by mf

  • I’m Not Bukowski

    Number of comments: 2
    “I’m not Bukowski,” Ray said the other day and, no, he’s not. He’s sober, for one thing, and certainly a better writer for it. We are both about as unlike Bukowski as possible: worrying about raising the kids, shuffling the litter of bills on the counter, lumbering into work when [...]
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    Posted: November 06, 2009, 7:43am EST
    by mf

  • Odd Words

    Number of comments: 1
    Two big events this week: first the NOLA Bookfair and the second the new store grand opening and anniversary celebration of Maple Street Books. § The NOLA Bookfair is “an annual celebration of independent publishing and alternative media featuring small presses, zinesters, book artists, anarchists, rabblerousers, and more!”. I will be [...]
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    Posted: November 05, 2009, 4:00am EST
    by mf

  • Dancing Madly Backwards

    Number of comments: 2
    The old bricks of the Lafitte Housing Project are gone, leaving just a scar of tall grass and piles of dirt, a thin stump forest of new pilings naked and brown rising up like the dead cypress trees in Bienvenue and St. Bernard, like the gray leafless forest that lines [...]
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    Posted: November 04, 2009, 11:21am EST
    by mf

  • In the South

    A tale of old men and the sea, of old men and the south, of old men everywhere from Salmon Rushdie courtesy of The New Yorker online. To share the last lines is not really a spoiler, when the opening lines clearly prefigure the end. And it is the getting [...]
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    Posted: October 30, 2009, 1:22pm EDT
    by mf

  • Odd Words

    Number of comments: 2
    It looks like another quiet week for Odd Words but then Halloween is a busy time in New Orleans. Just a few notes on things mostly for the future, some regular events to call out and a couple of blog linkeroos. § First lets start with the New Orleans Bookfair on [...]
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    Posted: October 29, 2009, 12:04am EDT
    by mf

  • The Little Way

    The peculiar virtue of New Orleans, like St. Theresa, may be that of the Little Way, a talent for everyday life rather than the heroic deed.” – Walker Percy This quote from a 1968 Harper’s Magazine article by noted local author Walker Perc7y is one that New Orleans writers keep coming back [...]
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    Posted: October 26, 2009, 9:01pm EDT
    by mf

  • Doin’ That Maple Leaf Rag

    Number of comments: 2
    John Travis of Portals Press kindly encouraged me to submit some work for the next Maple Leaf Rag after I read at the Sunday poetry serires, which I did and he promptly and kindly turned right around and accepted three poems. So three more poems I had posted at poemsbeforebreakfast.wordpress.com go [...]
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    Posted: October 25, 2009, 1:14pm EDT
    by mf

  • Odd Words

    It looks like a quiet week for Odd Words, but there’s a few things to call out and some events down the road I want to mention. § It’s the last week to catch Mondo Bizarro’s production of Moose Jackon’s play Loup Garou in City Park. I’m going Friday (and [...]
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    Posted: October 22, 2009, 12:01am EDT
    by mf

  • Notes from a Dancing Bear

    Number of comments: 1
    As I noted last week, author Stephen Elliott of The Adderall Diaries and Happy Baby will be in New Orleans tomorrow night talking about about work and signing his book. The Adderall diaries is a fascinating work of biography not quite masquerading as crime fiction so much as merging with [...]
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    Posted: October 19, 2009, 10:52pm EDT
    by mf

  • So Lonesome I Could Yodel

    Number of comments: 4
    “I don’t care what he did with his women. I don’t care what he did when he drank. I want to hear just one note From his lonesome old throat. Has anybody here seen Hank?” –The Waterboys New Orleans is swimming in music of every imaginable genre, but old time country-and-western gets short shrift. It’s just [...]
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    Posted: October 16, 2009, 9:05am EDT
    by mf

  • Odd Words

    Number of comments: 1
    Here is my second (now officially weekly) collection of bits of book and culture gossip from around New Orleans, essentially things that might attract me to attend, buy a book, or do something else interesting and specifically or exclusively about the alcohol, music or food. As I explained last week, [...]
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    Posted: October 15, 2009, 12:01am EDT
    by mf

  • Rain Street

    The first rule of driving in the rain, I taught my daughter, is never trust a puddle you don’t know. On the pothole-pocked topography of New Orleans’ streets, crevassed and treacherous as a summer glacier, that sheen of water may hide one of the tire swallowers, one of the axle [...]
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    Posted: October 13, 2009, 8:11pm EDT
    by mf

  • Conditions of Satisfaction

    “Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!” – Howl, by Allen Ginsberg I sit at my beige desk inside my beige cube, hands poised and motionless over the keyboard, co-workers voices murmuring over the low carpeted modular walls, trying to write something called Conditions of Satisfaction, staring at that title on the [...]
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    Posted: October 09, 2009, 10:39am EDT
    by mf

  • Odd Words

    Number of comments: 4
    I’m going to try something new. I plan to post something like this—listing upcoming book events or talking about what I’ve read in hard copy or online—as a weekly feature. It won’t be everything, so don’t quit scanning Susan Larson’s column on Wednesday or Gambit for what’s up. What you [...]
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    Posted: October 07, 2009, 5:00am EDT
    by mf

  • I hope its not over, and good-bye

    Number of comments: 2
    Everette Maddox: He was a mess, by everyone’s assessment including his own and so reads his memorial, a plaque in the patio of the Maple Street Bar where he hosted the long running poetry reading series he founded. He is a bit of an obsession here on Toulouse Street, where [...]
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    Posted: October 06, 2009, 5:40am EDT
    by mf

  • Remembering Carmen

    Number of comments: 1
    The latest shootings were almost a week ago, last Saturday. In the quiet days since the newspaper is full of stories of the person who tossed some kittens out of the window of their car on the Causeway bridge. Today there is mention of a reward for information on who [...]
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    Posted: October 02, 2009, 9:25pm EDT
    by mf

  • Pure Despair for the Savor of It

    No, he’s not about to jump. He’s just some guy whose roommates preferred he smoke outside, catching some rays on the ledge outside the window of his third floor room in North Stadium at LSU sometime late in 1976. The Odd thing is they snapped this picture while he was [...]
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    Posted: September 30, 2009, 10:02pm EDT
    by mf

  • I’m Gonna Move You, Baby

    Eight cylinder adrenaline frustration of no girls on a dull summer night roaming aimless in cars searching for anything (what have you got?) game cock sharp and ready in a rusty Cutlass, blowing smoke inside and out and empties rolling back and forth beneath the seats in time to the [...]
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    Posted: September 26, 2009, 1:12am EDT
    by mf

  • Treme: Life on the Banquette

    Number of comments: 10
    How to tell the story of New Orleans? That is the secret I have tried to unravel for the last several years, primarily through my blogs here and the old Wet Bank Guide. Since I folded Wet Bank Guide into Carry Me Home, I let others bandy about the stories [...]
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    Posted: September 17, 2009, 10:47am EDT
    by mf

  • Of Time and the River

    Number of comments: 2
    Sweet Jesus, has it been two weeks since I’ve had anything to say or time to say it? Back soon, for it’s not that I’ve had nothing to say. It’s merely that the River has been at flood, pulling and sucking as I try to make my way across and [...]
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    Posted: September 12, 2009, 9:17am EDT
    by mf

  • All those ships that never sailed

    K-Date 4.1 I was reading through everyone’s anniversary posting, and mentally comparing those to the page I sort of ripped from my own mental notebook and stuck up, unfinished and a bit confused. I remind myself that down here August is the cruelest month, when we all often wish to be [...]
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    Posted: August 30, 2009, 9:21am EDT
    by Mark

  • Remember

    Number of comments: 1
    [...]
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    Posted: August 29, 2009, 12:01am EDT
    by Mark

  • Wheel to the storm and fly

    Number of comments: 2
    I am reduced to speechlessness, dredging up old words as I cannot find any new for the fourth anniversary of The Event. Perhaps the old words were prophetic beyond any original intent. For some reason, Bob Kaufman’s famous quote “I want to be forgotten” keeps coming to mind, which I [...]
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    Posted: August 28, 2009, 2:41pm EDT
    by Mark

  • Four Years August

    Number of comments: 1
    I think this piece, written last year about this time, bears repeating: Three years August and the storms are being named like epic ships, a doom upon our shore, and I think of the levees still leaking and of the flood walls patched with paper mache, our Potemkin defenses are not [...]
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    Posted: August 28, 2009, 10:01am EDT
    by Mark

  • Requiem

    Number of comments: 1
    I remember where I was when I first heard this song, on an NPR broadcast. The NPR archive reminds me it was Sept. 14, 2005. I was driving through South Fargo to pick my daughter up at junior high school. I had to pull over. I was late. This video contains [...]
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    Posted: August 27, 2009, 8:34pm EDT
    by Mark

  • The Tsunami of St. Claude Avenue

    Number of comments: 2
    It swallowed them whole, then spit them back out like a snake’s breakfast, the unwanted bits left to bloat and bleach and wash up at last on the brown avenues in back of town. Some hung from trees as their grandfathers did, strange fruit that sprung up from a poisoned soil. Separate but equal triumphed at [...]
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    Posted: August 27, 2009, 6:00pm EDT
    by Mark

  • Harry Shearer at Rising Tide

    I’m still collecting my thoughts so for now, here is quick picture of Harry framed by Rising Tide IV. The culture panel was acclaimed a success by everyone I spoke to after (although just about everyone else seems to tired to post much yet) so I came away very happy. [...]
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    Posted: August 23, 2009, 4:31pm EDT
    by Mark

  • Dead Dogs Wag No Tails

    Number of comments: 3
    As I sat in a coffee shop in Carmel-by-the-Sea in California last week, perusing the visitor guide map, I noticed that the Rodrigue and Thomas Kinkade galleries were adjacent to one another and I thought: where else could a single firebomb do so much good? In that vein, I offer [...]
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    Posted: August 14, 2009, 11:23am EDT
    by Mark

  • Rising Tide IV

    Number of comments: 5
    Rising Tide IV, the annual bloggers conference on the recovery and future of New Orleans, will be “Sinking to New Heights” on Aug. 22 at the Zeitgeist Multi Disciplinary Arts Center in New Orleans. Our featured speaker: the multi-talented Harry Shearer, a great champion of New Orleans on Huffington Post [...]
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    Posted: August 14, 2009, 8:35am EDT
    by Mark
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