The Barryfest Chronicles

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 »

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 »

Please excuse my tardiness, as I know that I am a day late on posting my personal reaction to the presidential election.  I spent the better part of yesterday in my office with the door shut and my head in my hands, trying my best to hide the most vicious weekday hangover I’ve nursed at work since the days of Wednesday night Tickle Fight rehearsals back in Minneapolis.

Barack Obama won in a landslide on Tuesday, and I can’t think of a better reason than the dawn of a new era to tie one on so early in the work-week.  But Obama wasn’t the only person that won.  Add my name to the list of winners, and while you are at it, throw yourself on there as well. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2008-2009 NBA season is upon us, and for the first time in 10 years I will be intently watching “NBA Premier Week” on TNT.

See, my relationship with the NBA has been very rocky over the last decade or so.  I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago during the absolute apex of the Jordan years, and his departure and the subsequent decline of the Bulls franchise sent me on a downward spiral that was the equivalent of a spoiled teenager going off to college and suffocating under a pile of dirty laundry that develops a mind of it’s own and starts devouring DVD cases and half-opened packets of ranch dressing to feed it’s insatiable desire to expand beyond the corner of the dorm room.

As a 13 year old who spent his formative professional sport watching years following the greatest basketball player to ever put on a uniform win six titles and then leave the game as his team was being dismantled by an egomaniacal owner, I lacked the cognitive and emotional capacity to continue to support a losing, unglamorous franchise.  And my usual trump card – an allegiance to both Chicago and Boston sports teams springing from the fact that my dad spent the first 43 years of his life in Beantown and I was born at none other than Brigham and Women’s – did me no good as the Celtics were at the crest of a wave of misfortune that was eradicating their place as one of the most storied American sports franchises in the history of man. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been a pretty big Girl Talk fan since this girl I knew in Minneapolis pulled a copy of Night Ripper out of her purse at a dinner party and handed it to me.  She claimed that her discovery of Girl Talk about 6 months prior to our encounter had changed her life, and as such she always carried around a few burned copies of his latest CD just in case she sensed an opening during a conversation that she could use as a springboard to spread the Gospel According to Greg Gillis.  She was something of a Girl Talk missionary, you could say.

On Friday night I caught his show at the House of Blues in the French Quarter.  It was great.  Much like at a Rebirth Brass Band show, words (and even pictures, really) do no justice, so here is some footage:

Even though I like to think of myself as a wise music connoisseur with eclectic taste, I have been pretty closed minded about “new music” for the better part of my adult life.  With the exception of Wilco, Lil’ Wayne, and Prince, I only regularly listened to music that was made before I was born.  I wouldn’t call it a rule, it was just an ethos that was pretty effective at keeping my CD collection and iPod full of rocking tuneskis for all these years.

It stands to figure that the music that was created for the 50,000 years before I existed deserves more attention than what has been put on wax since the year of our lord 1984.  I mean, even a great band like Talking Heads hit their creative peak by 1983 with Speaking in Tongues, so I figured the arbitrary, unofficial policy that governed my music consumption was firm but fair.

Sure, I was a big Sublime fan in middle school, went through a solid rap phase in high school and painstakingly assembled playlists filled with one hit wonders from the 80s and 90s during college; but even during these flights of fancy, when I was looking for a new fix, I thought I would be better served by digging into T.Rex’s canon than by picking up the new Snow Patrol album. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Dan,

Across the street from my apartment, there is a decent sized, stand-alone building that formerly served as a Robért Fresh Market but is now completely boarded up and dying for occupation.  Other than the two days the ample parking lot served as base camp for the cast and crew filming Carmen Electra’s new movie, it just sits there, an apparent casualty of the disorganized jack-o-lantern spattering of property revitalization that has been trudging along since the storm of 2005.

Don’t get me wrong, there is amazing work going on all over the city; in every single neighborhood and on every single block.  But there are some shocking plots of land that, for one reason or another, have just been left behind.  This is one of them.

I think it would be a perfect place to open a Trader Joe’s.

I mean, you’ve got stores in Minnesota and those fucking rubes make you jump through hoops just to grab a sixer of microbrew with your groceries.  If you were to open in the greater New Orleans area, there would be no need for that loophole exploiting pay-for-your-groceries-at-one-register-then-walk-through-the-antechamber-to-the-booze-shop bullshit I had to go through at the St. Louis Park location up north. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Scott Van Pelt,

I only became a regular listener to sports radio since I have come down here to New Orleans, as my morning commute changed from the six block walk I had in Minneapolis (a trip just long enough to expose you to the extremes of Minnesota weather but too short to help you fully shake off a hangover from the night before) to my current 15-20 minute drive to the office.

The only other time in my life that I regularly listened to any radio at all was back in high school, which was the last time I regularly drove before the invention of iPods.  And for a variety of reasons, I did not listen to sports radio back then.  In a major sports city like Chicago, the radio waves are full of local sports talk shows hosted by fat, obnoxious, bigoted homers hailing from the South Side.  You even find these fucking mopes for a few hours here and there on the ESPN affiliate, so there is really nowhere on the AM waves to hide from these shitbirds.  And besides, I was perfectly happy rocking out to The Drive, probably the best radio station on the planet (although WWOZ here in New Orleans gives it a serious run for it’s money). Read the rest of this entry »

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 »