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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »