The Barryfest Chronicles

This afternoon, I was trying to fish out a tip for the barista at Rue De La Course when I found a relic from the previous evening crumpled in the back pocket on my jeans.  A quarter page, bi-fold pamphlet titled The Only Doorway was mixed in with the loose dollar bills and bar tab receipts one would normally expect to come across after a night out on the town.

When you think of a typical French Quarter souvenir, I’m not sure if literature extolling the virtues of receiving Jesus Christ as your personal God and savior makes the short list, but this type of shit is actually more common than you may think.

New Orleans is full of sin, and wherever you find sin you’ve bound to find a few people trying to offer salvation.  And when religious zealots descend on Bourbon Street, they are usually armed with megaphones and offensive placards reminding all the Democrats, drunks, rock ‘n’ rollers, adulteresses, potheads, homosexuals, lesbians, Masons, Shriners, Mormons, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Evolutionists, Catholics, Satanists, Abortionists, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, liberals, fornicators, prosperity preachers, atheists and “worldly lukewarm once saved-always saved Christians” that they are in imminent danger of eternal damnation.  Desperate times call for desperate measures, I guess.

These obnoxious bigots start making a scene around the time Mardi Gras rolls in by harassing every poor soul that drifts into earshot and relish the opportunity to take the fight to any inebriated onlooker that dares to inquire what, exactly, they are trying to accomplish with their message of hate.  If you test any one of the shitbirds impeding your safe passage through Jackson Square, you learn pretty quickly that they’re not just throwing this nonsense around for effect and don’t take their intolerance with cream and sugar.  They devour and expel that poison neat with the rocks on the side.

So when I noticed a huge PVC cross off in the distance as my friends and I were leaving Pat O’s after putting in some heavy work at the Piano Bar, I braced myself for an explosive encounter.  I realize that an “Eat shit and die, you anti-Semite fuckstick” – no matter how artfully delivered – only fuels these sad, sad individuals’ fires and adds little to the philosophical discourse, but what can I say?  After a few Hurricanes, I usually don’t have the wherewithal (or desire) to stop myself from shouting the first bit of reactive gobbledygook that pops into my head.

I had an expletive-laden opening argument primed and ready but instead of crude signs and small-minded rednecks, I was greeted by thoughtful individuals speaking with 12 inch voices and respecting everyone’s right of way.  And even thought I was part of a pretty tough crowd – one which was both shitfaced and 70% Jewish – their message stuck it’s landing a lot more than expected considering it was coming from the New Testament.

See, instead of using a fucked up notion of spiritual superiority as a cloak for violent prejudice in the manner of most Bourbon Street evangelicals, these people just seemed like they might be on to something hip and wanted to spread the word.  Even though we were less than polite at times, their pleasant demeanor and cooler heads prevailed and the entire encounter made a lasting impression on me.

To be honest, though, I still don’t understand why The Bible, out of all the hundreds of thousands of works of literature produced in the annuls of human history, has developed such an incredibly fervent following.  Sure it’s a pretty cool story, but so are The Odyssey, Don Quijote, and The Lorax.  Even a nearly unreadable mess like Naked Lunch sheds some light on the human condition if you catch it right, so where are the barkers on the street spreading the gospel of doing bag after bag of heroin and staring at your toes for days on end?

I am guessing that this is where “faith” comes in, an idea that I have spent many years disparaging in the bitter, condescending manner favored by modern-day secular intellectuals such as myself.  But even though I wasn’t buying much of what those good folks were selling and still think religion is pretty asinine; their patient way of carrying water for the topic lead me to believe it shouldn’t be looked at with any more disdain then most of the bullshit I do in my free time.

After giving it plenty of thought, I can’t really think of any material difference between those kind missionaries dispersing fliers outside Big Daddy’s Female Impersonator Show and yours truly spending $12 to play Gaucho all the way through on the jukebox at Monkey Hill, except for the fact that the Jesus freaks were surely a lot more genial and probably had much purer intentions.

I guess it is in everyone’s best interest to find a few things that they love and are not afraid to share with the world.  For me, these things include an ironic jazz-rock band known by most people my age either as a punchline in a Judd Apatow flick or “that dude who did ‘Rikki Don’t Lose That Number.’”  For others, it may be a belief that your personal relationship with an unseen almighty being determines what happens after you shuffle off your mortal coil.

These are two very diseparate things for sure, but trying to objectively judge one as more valid than the other is really just a waste of time, time that would be much better spent partying with whatever it is that happens to get your rocks off.

Good luck finding The Rusty Nail on your first attempt.  Seriously.  This place is less than a five minutes from my apartment and it took me at least ten tries over my first six months down here before I successfully made it there when I actually looking for it, as opposed to the few times I did actually stumble upon it during daylight hours when I was still learning how to navigate the narrow, pothole-littered streets of the Warehouse District and subsequently forgot it’s location by the next evening when I was looking to check out it’s capacity for partying.

It is literally located on the wrong side of a dead end street that is hidden under an overpass.  Its signage faces the opposite direction traffic would travel if the one way block on which it sits was not closed for road construction (which it has been at least as long as I’ve lived in New Orleans). 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 »

Over the past few weeks, I have reached the conclusion that jukeboxes were practically custom designed for complete assholes such as myself.  I am not content merely lording over the music in my living room and any car I happen to be in.  No, no, no.  I am the type of gaping asshole that needs everyone around me to be listening to music that I enjoy at all times.  I’m such a sick fuck, sometimes I can’t even tell what I like more: the actual song that I requested or the fact that everyone at the bar is listening to it whether they like it or not.

That is not to say that I punch in “Thursday Afternoon” every time I see a jukebox just to annoy people, but I definitely aim to please only myself.  Mostly of the time, my picks are at worst unusual, but they are not going to clear the room.  Of course there are some nights when I play The Band’s “Chest Fever” three times in a row before settling into a nice string of Steely Dan deep cuts.  Last night at Old Bruno’s was one of the those nights.  I’m sorry, I just can’t help myself sometimes. 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 »