The Barryfest Chronicles

A couple of weeks ago, I saw Into The Wild for the first time.  It was a pretty fascinating movie, and my fascination with the incredible cinematography and flawless acting was no doubt heightened by the fact that I hit the trees pretty hard before I popped in the DVD.  If the movie hadn’t been based on a true story, I would have called bullshit on the whole premise, and the extreme details of Chris McCandless’ ill-fated journey would have came off as completely overwrought sentimental cheese if the action in the movie (or at least a non-dramatized approximation of it) didn’t actually happen at some point in time.

Because not only were his travels unconventional to start with, but by the end of the movie I was convinced that they were also completely emblematic of a particular moment in history.  While the early 1990s are nearly two decades old,  Into The Wild isn’t exactly a period piece.  The setting is very familiar (it has cars, credit cards, fast food restaurants, television, etc) and yet the differences that exist are striking.

Alexander Supertramp was very likely riding the crest of the final, awesome wave of casual hitch hiking in the United States of America.  I’ve done my fair share of driving around this great country, and I have never – not once, not a single time in my entire life – seen someone on the side of the road trying to thumb a ride.  I am not even going to waste time to try to figure out how or why the practice is all but eradicated, because the mere fact that is does not seem to exist anymore proves my point.  What was unusual but plausible just a few years ago seems like science fiction in this day and age.  Especially when you are really, really high.

And it goes beyond Into The Wild.  I got to thinking and realized that the majority of the action in the movie takes place between 1990 and 1992, with also just so happened to be the  heyday of a novel concept know as MTV’s Rock ‘N Jock.  For those of you who do not remember Rock ‘N Jock, let me give you the rundown:  Professional athletes would team up with celebrities to play in pickup softball, baseball, basketball and football games.

These games were loosely officiated and featured people making millions of dollars a year at their day jobs muscling up to try to hit a 350 foot home run off a tee or launch a ball four stories into the air to score a 100 point basket.  If there ever was a high water mark of unnecessary risk, Rock ‘N Jock was surely it.

This type of shit would go over like a lead balloon nowadays.  The caliber of talent that would ostensibly be standing shoulder to shoulder with Dean Cain and Roger McDowell don’t even participate in the Home Run Derby or Slam Dunk contests of their actual professional leagues anymore for risk of injury or other negative effects the exhibitions may have on their form or function.  With the exception of Dhani Jones and his inexplicable quest to tackle the globe, the riskiest thing a modern day professional athlete does in the off-season is have sex with Madonna.

Another staple of the 1990s:  Seinfeld.  Now, Seinfeld isn’t exactly dated in the way that, say, a show like Deadwood is, but there are anachronisms in almost every episode that serve as constant reminders that the show originally aired in a different era.  The main characters aren’t rocking afros in apartments decked out with shag carpet, but there are no cell phones, people bring four carry-on bags to the airport and Jerry needs a blank VHS tape to record the evening’s Mets game.

Even later episodes like “The Nap” which aired in 1997,  Jerry called in a bomb threat to Yankee Stadium so George could escape from under his desk, where he had recently discovered he could catch a snooze during his work day.  It is a funny premise, but is there any doubt that a scene like that, if it happened on How I Met Your Mother, My Boys or any other show set in the present, would come off as completely improbable?  That type of shit (along with countless other instances of hijinx featured on the show) is just no longer a joke.

But because of the huge amount of  things I find completely bizarre about days not so far removed from the ones we are living in, I wonder if this is just the natural order of things when it comes to hindsight.  I mean, I am just reaching the age in which I can summon lucid memories of events in my life that took place over a decade ago, so maybe I am still getting the hang of this whole “retrospective” thing.

I can imagine that it won’t be long before we are all reminiscing about the strange days when Lil’ Wayne had a blog on ESPN.com and would show up on 1st and 10 and have debates with that contrarian prick Skip Bayless.  And history is already turning on the XFL, P. Diddy’s Making The Band and Sarah Palin, so I guess that sooner or later everything looks pretty weird when you see it in your rear view mirror.  I just didn’t realize it happens so quickly.

I think that you can tell a lot about a city by the way it rings in the New Year.  Minneapolis, for example, is a fun enough time but not really anything to write home about.  Chicago, on the other hand, offers plenty to do but your options can be limited by the bitter cold winters and spotty public transportation system.  And then there is New York, which is more or less a crowded, expensive theme park.

While especially apparent on the last day of the year, I think the statements above hold true for their respective cities at all times.  So, after getting intimately familiar with New Orleans over the past 12 months, I cut my holiday family time short to make sure I could test my “New Year’s Eve as a microcosm” theory down in the Big Easy.

Now, New Year’s Eve is nothing if it is not another excuse for revelry.  And when it comes to revelry, if you give New Orleans an inch, in one magnificent swoop she will take a mile, your favorite watch and every clean pair of tube socks you’ve got in your top drawer.  Luckily, she will return them before you know they are even gone.  New Orleans is sneaky like that. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve always believed that if you make a habit of putting yourself in unusual situations, you can’t really get that upset when shit starts to get weird. And if you’re also prone to tipping the karmic scales with such flights of fancy as gratuitous alcohol consumption, light prescription drug abuse and unconventional party itineraries, you’re likely to find yourself on the business end of weird more often than not. With this in mind, I guess you could say I got exactly what I deserved when I decided to head into the French Quarter on a Monday evening last week.

Given the fact it was so early in the week, it didn’t surprise me when I encountered far fewer barkers in the middle of the street holding up signs advertising the drink specials or lack of cover featured at the trashy saloons that line the front of Bourbon Street than I was used to.  But even in this relatively serene setting, hip hop was still pulsing out of a fair share of dance clubs that were most certainly open for business.

I’ve heard “Lollipop” at least 350 times in the last year, but the song takes on a bizarrely fascinating and frightening sheen when it is accompanied by a tubby waitress sporting coke-bottle glasses and visible c-section scars gyrating on top of a bar in a haunting manner that is at once repulsive and mesmerizing.  That was the scene just beyond the threshold of a sparsely populated bar known as The Old Opera House, and even though I should be immune to the allure of Tha Carter III by now, the morbidly intriguing nature of what I was looking at gave me pause. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Kanye,

I spent Saturday night at my first holiday party of the season, so I unfortunately was not able to watch the original airing of the most recent Saturday Night Live, in which you were featured as the evening’s musical guest.  No worry, though, as I have been DVRing that shit since I first equipped my audio/visual set up with DVR technology almost two and a half years ago in my apartment back in Minneapolis.

I’ve always been a huge SNL apologist, keeping faith in the show even through the doldrums of the turn of the century with all it’s Jimmy Fallon-tainted misery.  Even then, when the majority of each broadcast featured Horatio Sanz in a variety of ill-fitting get-ups trying in vain not to break character and laugh while delivering terribly written lines, I found it amusing enough to keep watching whenever the mood struck and my schedule cooperated. Read the rest of this entry »

There we were, taking the gritty-as-shit alternate route to Louis Armstrong Airport – forgoing the interstate, with its road construction and rush hour induced bottleneck circa the Causeway Blvd. exit, in favor of the scenic drive through the blocks of shotgun houses and tire shops in Hollygrove and then past the endless row of seedy motels on Airline Highway – when I had my second favorable encounter with the nefarious group of “musicians” know as Coldplay.

The first time I listened to this band with a smile on my face was over three years ago in East Troy, Wisconsin.  A variety of factors, not one of which even remotely having to do with the band itself, led me to purchase a ticket to see England’s softest rockers at Alpine Valley Music Theater during the waning days of the summer before my senior year of college.  And through another set of circumstances, again completely unrelated to the group of hacks crooning sweet nothings into the cool August air, I was breaking out into fits of hysterical ecstasy towards the end of the first set. Read the rest of this entry »

When you’re drunkenly balls deep in a plate of cheese fries at F&M’s on a Thursday night, it is easy to forget that there is a lot more to Louisiana than New Orleans.  This is the “Sportsman’s Paradise” for chrissakes, and I’ve been down here for almost a year and have not actually done anything even remotely “sporting.”

To remedy this, I spent the weekend at Fountainebleau State Park with a crew of brave souls willing to endure some good old fashioned outdoor living in what could easily be the coldest weather any of us will see all year.  Yeah, the winters are pretty mild in southeast Louisiana; but the fact that the mercury doesn’t dip too far below 40 degrees over a 12 month span doesn’t make those 40 degree gusts any toastier when they are whipping across your campsite.

But the trip was a blast, and when I wasn’t gathering firewood, complaining about non-Kosher hot dogs, smoking Natural American Spirits, slugging persey bottles of Charles Shaw, pounding packets of BC, dancing on top of a picnic table to Rilo Kiley, tossing hard-boiled eggs into Lake Pontchartrain, or freezing my dick off after passing out in a tent with no pillow or sleeping bag, I engaged in my new favorite pastime: hypothesizing about whether or not Chinese Democracy is going to be any good. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Craig,

College was a wonderful time in my life.  I met some incredible people, had some great adventures and even managed to learn a thing or two about a thing or two.  It is also where I discovered your wonderful classified service know as craigslist.

It quickly became my first stop when I needed to acquire or get rid of literally anything in my life.  When I needed a cheap fridge to gut and turn into a kegerator, I checked craigslist.  When I wanted to get rid of my futon from freshmen year that was still in pretty good shape, I put it on craigslist.  And when I decided 12 hours before the doors opened that I would be willing to see Phil Lesh and Friends at the Chicago Theater if I could find a decent deal on some tickets, I searched craigslist.

I was constantly in awe of it’s simplicity, elegance and convenience.  But more than just providing a fee-free way to directly connect sellers and buyers, your creation breathed life into such commonly heard yet seldom understood and even more rarely practiced tropes as “trust your neighbor,” “think locally,” and “conserve.”  The revolution would not by televised, man.  It would instead be politely emailed between two strangers negotiating the price of an entertainment center and arranging for it’s pickup. Read the rest of this entry »

It is no secret that I have a pretty expansive taste when it comes to television shows.  It’s not like I exclusively watch unusual documentary programming or mediocre sitcoms, it’s just that with the advent of DVR and Cox cable’s surprisingly large selection of specialty HD channels, I consume huge amounts of TV on a weekly basis.  I say the line-up here in New Orleans is “surprisingly” large because it is a surprise when any utility, public good or service down here functions as it should.  This is the type of place where three consecutive days of mail service is cause for celebration, so while we may not actually get more HD channels than any typical metro area, it sure feels that way considering we have to pay to recycle and landline phone service has been know to go out for a few hours at a time on a sunny day.

Anyways. The point I am trying to make it is that I watch almost all of the typical TV shows that most people watch, but even after making time for those and surfing around MLB Extra Innings each evening, I somehow still have plenty of room on my schedule to watch a bunch of weird shit.

One of the shows that has caught my attention over the past few years is the docu-fuckscene that is Intervention on A&E (and now A&E HD!).  For a long time, I was pretty sure that:

1. I was the only one who watched it
2. At least half of that shit was completely scripted. Read the rest of this entry »

A few blocks from my apartment, nestled on a slightly overgrown corner on the one-way stretch of Magazine, you will find The Bridge Lounge. It is one of many hidden treasures I have found here in New Orleans since I arrived six months ago.

What makes this bar so great? Let’s see. They do not serve any food at any time of the day. And they do not have a single television screen anywhere in the bar. These are normally two big strikes AGAINST a drinking establishment in my book.

And the joint also lacks a jukebox. Instead, one of the bartenders just hooks up his iPod to the bar’s sound system and lets it rip. Strike three, right? Wrong. This actually where is all starts to come together and make sense. You see, last Saturday the dudes manning the taps and the tunes played Chocolate and Cheese in it’s entirety. No joke. They played a full Ween album for a diverse crowd on a Saturday night.

The place is just off the beaten path and looks pretty shitty from the outside. And considering the fact it lacks may of things meant to attract casual passers-by – drink specials, late night food, 10 screens of NFL Sunday Ticket, for example – it should come as no surprise that the proprietors see nothing wrong with blasting Ween on a Saturday night. And that is why it is so fucking sweet. Outside of a GLBT biker bar, this place is as take-it-or-leave-it as you can get. And if you do choose to “leave it”, no need to get riled up. Even though Bridge Lounge may feel like it is nestled into it’s own universe of awesomeness, it is actually closer to Balcony and The Bulldog than you may think. Read the rest of this entry »

Hmmm.  How do I explain the Rebirth Brass Band to someone who has never been to one of their performances?

Or, better still:  How do I explain the Rebirth Brass Band to someone who has never even been to New Orleans?

At the heart of it, to understand Rebirth is to understand the effect one of their live shows has on your face.  It’s pretty straight forward and extremely predictable:  That shit gets melted right off your fucking head.  You’ll probably shit your pants, too.  And orgasm harder than Rob Schneider at the mention of Denver’s no-huddle offense.

I have never been able to come up with a description of their music that I find satisfactory, and I have had a lot of chances to try.  Rebirth Brass Band are one the first things I mention when anyone asks me “How are you liking it down in New Orleans?”

Their mix of traditional brass band sounds, jazz elements like call and response and virtuoso solos, hip hop beats, and serious cow funk grooves is unlike anything I have ever heard in my life.  Everyone in the crowd – black, white, old, young – cuts a goddamn rug the entire time.  And whether it is an afternoon set at Satchmo Summerfest, a late night blowout at Tipitina’s, or a second line march down Frenchman Street during the Krewe De Vieux parade, they are always on their game.

Enough with failing to describe something like Rebirth with words.  Here is a little clip from last night’s show at Howlin’ Wolf:

I never really liked my job when I was living in Minneapolis.  And, considering I was putting in consecutive 65+ hour weeks at some points, my memory of life in the Twin Cities is unduly influenced by the days I spent doing little more than programming spreadsheets and running HOST reports.  Or the time I was answering to the VP of Merchandising because there had been a run on wiper fluid after a huge fucking snowstorm ripped across the Midwest.  Or the time the guy in the cube next to me wouldn’t stop listening to “Throw Some Ds On It” over and over again for the better part of a month.  Or the time I got gang-raped by a group of supply-chain experts in the cafeteria.

That last part might be a bit inaccurate, but I’ve been out of there for almost a year now, and the mental images and vignettes warehoused during my term are getting hazy and disjointed.  Add to that all the work I have done to actively misremember the unfortunately large part my former employer played in my former life, and my ability to recall many of the great times had while not slaving over a hot keyboard in seizure-inducing florescent lights has been severely compromised.

Luckily, a few things from the Mpls Era have stayed with me, such as:

1. How, when driving over the Hennepin Ave bridge to St. Anthony Main in the early evening, the orangish glow from the setting sun and the Steely Dan blasting from the car stereo made me look 15% more attractive than I actually am
2. That time I caught a Police concert and a Prince concert in the same week
3. Memorial Day of 2007, which was spent cruising around Like Minnetonka at the the helm of a pontoon boat, blasting “Play Deep” by The Outfield. Read the rest of this entry »