05 Jun Springtime in New Bjork & New Orleans / Infinite Fazz Jest

Ahhh, printemps in New Orleans, printemps in New Bjork! Such joy, such bounteous pulchritude, such not-awfulness of meteorological conditions! Not to deny the appeal of printemps in my beloved Santa Fe, but the wind, Gentle Reader(s), the wind! The near constant gale force gusts blasting eastwards out of Arizona can begin to mess with yo haid after a while, so in recent years I have resolved to put thee behind me, Satanic zephyrs, and decamp to Ink South. This year I decided to append my southern sojourn with a trip to the Big City, the lure of inexpensive non-stop flights from Louis Armstrong International to LaGuardia being too attractive to resist. So, after the numbing two-day excursion across half of New Mexico, all of Texas, and three quarters of Louisiana, I hitched up on Laurel Street and settled in for about ten days before heading north.

In anticipation of my NYC sojourn I had procured a reservation for myself at my usual haunt on E. 51st Street, betwixt and between 2nd and 3rd Avenues. Now, don’t get me wrong—the POD Hotel is perfectly serviceable and I ain’t necessarily sayin the rooms are small, but all the mice are hunchbacked! As fate should have it, a few days in advance of my departure I was invited to a second-Thursday luncheon gathering at Commander’s Palace by family friend of many many years standing—French Quarter fixture, noted gourmand, and all-purpose Man About Town, the Good Doctor B. I mentioned my forthcoming trip to Gotham and the Good Doc said ‘Well whaddya doin staying on 51st Street when my condo is sitting there empty?’ The Good Doc’s condo is in the CitySpire building on West 56th Street directly across from Carnegie Hall and boasts exceptional access to all that upper Midtown has to offer with exceptionally easy access to subway stations that connect to each and every part of the five boroughs. Well, four out of five anyways (sorry, Staten Island).

I hurriedly checked POD 51’s cancellation policy and found that I was still within the penalty-free realm of grace. I put the ixnay on my reservation and began to recalibrate the calculations and triangulations of my forthcoming journey: Museum of Modern Art, now only two and one half blocks to the southeast; Central Park, two and one half blocks to the north; La Bonne Soupe, one of my most favoritest and most dependable NYC eateries, only one and one half blocks away; the Met, an easily doable half-hour stroll through the Park or up Fifth Avenue. I was giddy with anticipation of this unprecedented windfall, fate having proven once again that it ain’t what you know, it’s WHO you know that really counts. But don’t quote me on that.

On the very evening of my auspicious luncheon with the Good Doctor B I had a ticket to attend a St. Vincent concert at the Orpheum Theater on Canal Street—a venerable vaudeville-era venue of the Beaux Arts manner that has been extensively renovated over the past decade. I have been a fan of Ms. Annie Clark for quite a while, though in recent years some of her Bowie-esque conceptual transformations have been a bit lost on me. Nonetheless, she has always been an artiste of particular interest and the opportunity to see her in my hometown was not to be missed. The kicker was that the following week I was going to see Annie again, this time as the opening act for (brace yourselves!) none other than Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn! This pairing was of particular significance seeing as how Annie lifted her nom de guerre from the line about the death of Dylan Thomas in Nick’s song ‘There She Goes, My Beautiful World.’

I presented myself at the appointed time and place and found a relatively small crowd clustered in front of the stage. The opening act was a group, or perhaps an individual, or perhaps both, by the name of Wallace. I give them high marks for effort, but the only member of the band who made a real impression on me was the drummer—she/they was/were a real spark plug who managed to reduce a few drumsticks to kindling and inflict enough damage upon one of the cymbal stands such that it had to be replaced mid-set.

St. Vincent took the stage right on time and I quickly realized that having a floor ticket at the Orpheum came with one distinct disadvantage: The venue skews strongly to the vertical axis as opposed to the horizontal, which in the days of un-amplified performance was advantageous for the audience as it kept them closer to the stage. As a result the house PA system was suspended a good 25 feet above my head: Great for the people upstairs in the various balcony levels, but not so much for those of us on the floor. In addition, St. Vincent, like many artists nowadays, eschews an old school stage monitor system in favor of in-ear wireless monitors. Back in the day, I used to enjoy being close to the stage at concerts because you got to hear the monitor mix—the mix the band was hearing—as opposed to what was blasting through the mains. Not only did St. Vincent not have a stage monitor system but there was nary an amplifier to be seen. For a gear-head like myself, this is always somewhat of a letdown. I want to see the GEAR, maaaan—amps, pedals, picks, all of it. From the floor Annie’s vocals were pretty much of an unintelligible jumble, but since I knew a lot of the songs anyway it wasn’t really a deal-killer for me. I resolved to put it down as a learning experience. Counter to the ‘Old dog, new tricks’ concept, I have quite a lot of those these days.

Annie Clark is well known for her fearless crowd surfing and occasional human-fly tendencies and on that front she did not disappoint. During the song ‘New York’ (highly appropriate, considering my forthcoming itinerary) she positioned herself at the edge of the barricade in front of the stage and, after petitioning the frontmost audience members for reassurances, toppled backwards onto a welcoming sea of upraised hands. She began to move out into the crowd and surfed directly over to me. I reached out to support her left arm and, for a moment, we gazed deeply into one another’s eyes: I can confirm that hers are exceptionally large and green. I gave her my best ‘I gotcha, kid’-type smile and she reached down with her free hand (the other was holding her lipstick smeared cordless mic) and plucked my Oliver Peoples ‘Gregory Peck’ model glasses off my face. She put them on for a second, grimaced slightly when she got a taste of what is required to correct my deeply astigmatic eyeballs, handed them back to me, and surfed away. After returning to the stage she utilized some of the Orpheum’s elaborate wall ornamentation to clamber up to the front loge seats, much to the delight of those concertgoers fortunate enough to both see and hear the show. For better or worse, the entire episode has been preserved for posterity via the good graces of YouTube, with Your Humble Narrator grinning like an idiot right in the midst of it. All in all, it was a highly enjoyable event and I figured it would be interesting to suss out how headliner Annie compared with her alter ego, opening act Annie.

Settling back into my usual routine of bike riding, walks in Audubon Park and lunches with the Commodore, the days before my departure for New York passed quickly. With no one stepping forward with selfless offers of airport transportation and not wanting to leave my car unattended on the street in front of Ink South for an entire week, I resolved to utilize the long term parking facilities at Armstrong International—an ill-informed decision that I would come to rue and shall not repeat in future.

My travel went perfectly smoothly and by mid-afternoon of April 15th I had presented myself at CitySpire for inspection by the first of a seemingly endless succession of doormen and front desk attendants. I have been through this before: Regardless of how connected you may consider yourself to be, you cannot breeze through the lobbies of such establishments as this with the presumption that your respectable attire, purposeful stride and air of confidence will be sufficient to forestall inquiries regarding the nature of your business. It is the job of these fine gentlemen to safeguard the property, safety and privacy of the residents, and I respect that fully. The only issue was that there were a lot of them but only one of me.

By the time my week on 56th Street was over I figured I had introduced myself to a minimum of seven different desk attendants and about as many doormen. There were the day guys, the night guys, the weekend guys, and then the holiday weekend guys (my visit being inclusive of Easter Sunday). Every time I entered the lobby, whether leaving or arriving, I would acknowledge the person behind the desk with the hope that I would see someone at least somewhat familiar who would respond to my greeting with a smile and a wave. It took several days for me to get through the full rotation and until that was achieved I would dutifully march over to identify myself and invoke the blessed name of the Good Doctor B and the number of his condo. Had I stayed any longer I would have begun to wonder whether I should tip the lobby staff upon my departure.

My time in New Bjork is typically centered around the museums—MoMA, the Met, the Neue Gallerie, the Guggenheim, the Whitney, and their associated entities, all institutions of which I am a card-carrying member. It is rare that I pay any attention to the galleries. Having worked in art galleries for most of my adult life I have no patience for the elitist snottiness that is de rigueur amongst upper echelon Manhattan retail art emporia. The staff of such institutions make it painfully obvious that unless one is a) a known collector, b) a celebrity, or c) someone who exudes obvious wealth, you are of zero consequence and may be completely ignored. Fuck that shit. Courtesy costs nothing.

MoMA being but a leisurely five-minute stroll down Sixth Avenue, I was in there pretty much every day. I love MoMA—it is unquestionably one of the greatest art museums in the world, and I love the luxury afforded by membership of coming and going to my heart’s content when I am in town. Over the course of my repeated visits on this sojourn it struck me that the crowds were inordinately large. MoMA is always very busy, but this time around it seemed to me to be on a whole other level of congestion. In some galleries it was hard to turn around without bumping into another art lover (or at least art observer), some of whom who were toting backpacks that looked as though they were kitted out for a week-long slog through the Amazon rainforest. It took me a while to fully comprehend that my decision to come to the city on this particular week—the week of a major holiday—was perhaps somewhat ill-advised. Don’t get me wrong—I LOVES me New York in the spring, but the crush of humanity, especially in and around MidTown was a bit overwhelming. So that’s on me.

A couple of fanciful wish list ruminations as regards museums:

Backpacks — To be BANNED, altogether, completely and without exception. They are a hazard and an impediment to patron and artwork alike. I personally never employ this article of utilitarian luggage lest I am on a camping trip. Backpacks are inappropriate for general usage by adults. If you’re going out in New York, especially to an art museum, and you’re packing more crap than you can fit in your pockets and/or a SMALL shoulder bag, you’re packing TOO MUCH CRAP. Fran Leibovitz—I know you feel me on this.

Cute children with Hello Kitty-type backpacks with a stuffed bear sticking out of the top may be excepted from this ban, but that is the sole exception.

Cell phone photography — SHOULD be BANNED completely and without exception. I realize that this is pure fantasy, but can you even begin to imagine how vastly improved the experience would be in MoMA or the Met or just about anywhere on the planet if the Instagramicians and Facebookworms and TikToktarians were brought to heel? I mean, I get it—the impulse to take cheek-scuking selfies with Jackson Pollock’s One: Number 31, 1950 or Meret Oppenheim’s celebrated furry teacup, saucer and spoon of 1936: ‘I was here, this is what I saw’—it’s a natural human response. But when hundreds, thousands of people are clogging up the sight lines and snapping away like maniacs to produce fodder for the gaping maws of their social media accounts it just… gets… to… be… too… MUCH. I think I have made it pretty clear by now, Gentle Reader(s), that I consider social media to be pure evil. This is usually an armchair observation but when I’m getting walloped upside the haid with it every minute of every day like I do when I’m in New York my social media phobia really kicks into high gear.

So, this rant is based upon my repeated hangs at MoMA, but then I moved along to the Met. I love the Met so fucking much, I can’t even barely find the words. One of the many many great things about the Met is it’s so goddam HUGE (approximately 2,000,000 square feet, in case you were wondering) that no matter how crowded it may be in the Great Hall or in the various featured exhibitions or in the galleries with the Van Goghs or the Picassos or whatever there’s always loads more places where you can commune in peaceful (almost) solitude with the artwork. Check out gallery 229 in the Asian wing or gallery 904 in the far southwestern corner of the Lila Acheson Wallace wing—chances are you’ll be one of no more than two or three people at a time checking out the extraordinary gems stashed away in there. Pure bliss.

The big draw for me at the Met on this trip was the Caspar David Friedrich exhibition. I’ve admired Friedrich since I was an art history student at the University of NM back in the ‘80s and this exhibition brought together pretty much every painting by CDF that I had ever hoped to see in person. I always appreciated CDF’s strategy of orienting the figures in his paintings facing away from the viewer and towards the landscape so that our perspective is the same as theirs—a technique that the Deutschlanders call Rückenfigur. The wall text for the CDF show provided me with one other useful Germanische word: Fernweh, being defined as ‘the yearning for distant places and for experiences of the unknown.’ Sign me up, bitte.

My guess is that for a lot of NYC visitors if they’re only going to one art museum that museum is probably going to be MoMA. Of course the Met is a major draw as well, but, as previously noted, it is more than big enough to handle whatever comes its way. The Whitney, while not tiny, is much more modest of scale than MoMA and the Met and its location way the hell down southwestwards on the Hudson is quite possibly a limiting factor as regards the tourist trade. I spent the afternoon of Holy Saturday at the Whitney and was very pleased to experience no jostling or backpack jackassery and minimal displays of selfieism. The exhibition of Amy Sherald’s sublime portraiture alone was well worth the effort to get down to the Meatpacking District and while I have never packed any meat down there, hope springs eternal.

My additional culture vulturing included visits to the jewel box Neue Gallerie (lovely, as always) and the Guggenheim (a total bust, I’m sorry to report). The Frickin’ Frick Collection, about a 15-minute walk away from CitySpire at 70th and Fifth Avenue, was set to reopen on April 17 following a five-year closure and extensive renovation. A significant amount of buzz was accompanying the event and I didn’t even bother trying to get a ticket. My friend Junko—an actual Frickin’ Frick member—had to show up at 8:00 in the bloody AM for her timed visit, so that weren’t gonna happen. A feller needs his beauty sleep.

The museums are always at the fore for me in NYC, but, as mentioned up top, this trip was especiale extra because Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds were coming to town on the evening of the 17th. Dearest Hailey had acquired the tickets months previous but, due to a variety of uncertainties, she had reluctantly decided to pass on the event and hand both tickets off to me. I made a pitch to Junko to see if she was up for it, but not being familiar with St. Nick and his extraordinary oeuvre, she politely declined the invitation.

As mentioned above, one advantage (of many) of the situation of the Good Doctor B’s W. 56th Street digs is its access to the subway system. In the past I have tended to stay on the eastern side of Manhattan, making the Lexington Line (aka, the 6 Train) the default railway. With its upper Midtown location the N, Q, R, W, F, E, B, D and 1 trains are all within a one-half to three block walk of Cityspire’s front door. On the evening of the concert I walked the half block to the 7th Avenue station, hopped on a Downtown/Brooklyn-bound Q train, and was delivered to the doors of the Barclays Center in less than a half hour. Now that is civilization, folks.

With a seating capacity of 19,000 the Barclays Center isn’t massive but it’s still far and away the biggest venue I’d attended in quite a long time. I swore off of arena concerts back in the ‘70s so I was a bit uncertain when I entered the hall and got the measure of the joint. My seat was about 3/4 of the way back on the right and while binoculars weren’t necessarily required I wouldn’t have minded having them. St. Vincent made the best of her opening slot, and despite being about 1/8 of a mile away from the stage instead of 20 feet, I could hear her vocals loud and clear. No crowd surfing or eyeglass-snatching this time around, but Annie paid homage to the headliner by crediting Nick for her stage moniker.

The home of the Brooklyn Nets looked to be full to capacity so far as I could tell and by the time Nick & Warren and the gang hit the stage the anticipation in the hall was palpable. I won’t go into any extensive detail as regards the show—there’s simply no way to convey its exceptional greatness accurately and adequately. The new elpee, Wild God, was the primary focus of the first half of the set while the second half dug deep into the NC + BS back catalog. The sound was exceptionally strong and clear for such a big venue, the visuals were excellent, and the band was an well-oiled machine in absolute top form. Nick’s ability to extend his connection with his audience out beyond the hands-on standing crowd in the immediate fore of the hall was nothing short of extraordinary. By the time Nick finished out the encore with his solo rendition of ‘Into My Arms’ you could hear a pin drop in the Barclays Center and the crowd’s heartfelt singalong was beautiful and truly moving. The man has a rare gift and an even rarer gift for communicating it to the world without a trace of artifice or rockstar bullshit. Le Buzz and Crab Mommy caught the tour in Portland, OR, on May 10 and Buzz characterized Nick’s expression as one of ‘extreme authenticity.’ I would concur and can only add that it was one of the best concerts I have ever seen. Thank you, Nick.

On Easter Sunday I walked down Fifth Avenue to the corner of 51st Street. The morning was sunny and cool and the crowds in front of St. Patrick’s were decked out in their full glory with every imaginable variant on the themes of Spring, and Easter and renewal and rebirth. I took loads of photos and in almost every one of them the people are smiling—beaming almost. Ninety days into Goblinreich 2.0 and the joy and hope amongst the people of New York was a beautiful thing to behold. It did my heart good.

I bade farewell to New Bjork and Cityspire and its bounteous legion of front desk attendants and returned to New Orleans on April 22nd. April is the beginning of ‘festival season’ in New Orleans, and they come hot and heavy throughout spring and summer, starting with French Quarter Fest in the middle of the month. The OG big daddy-o of ‘em all is, of course, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival—an event that I have been patronizing off and on since I were but a wee lad back in the late ‘70s. Attending JazzFest is always a bit of a production—careful planning and preparation are essential, but the intangibles and unknowables will always factor in. Late April and early May are about as close to a sure bet as one can hope for in terms of New Orleans weather, but you gon get what you gon get. If the heavens should open up ‘pon ya and you find yourself soaked to the skin and up to your shin bones in mud and you ain got you no shrimp boots, you jus gotta deal with it: There are no re-dos in JazzFest. You pick your days and hope for the best.

First order of business in any successful JazzFest campaign: A visit to the FazzJest website and a careful consideration of the Cubes. The Cubes is/are the grid detailing the day-by-day, hour-by-hour breakdown of all the scheduled performers and performances across all eight days and all fourteen stages. There’s an almost absurd wealth of musical greatness on offer pretty much any given day at JazzFest, but, depending on one’s aesthetic preferences, some days will fall short while others are over-stuffed like a fried shrimp po boy at Frankie & Johnny’s. Since the current laws of time and space tend to limit most of us to being in one place at one time, some tough choices may be required. If a perusal of the Cubes reveals that some essential genius of the improv realm is holding forth in the Jazz Tent at 3:15 while a rock & roll legend you feel compelled to see once before they croak is cranking up their set at 3:40 at the Gentilly Stage, you’ve got some decisionating and, potentially, some hoofin to do.

My survey of the Cubes revealed three days that I could not in good conscience pass up and a few ‘interesting but not critical’ days. My short list of ‘must see’ artistes included Bill Frisell, Kamasi Washington, the Deslondes, Branford Marsalis, Cyril Neville, Cheap Trick, Stanley Clarke, Haim, Marty Stuart, Yossou N’Dour, Astral Project, Lila Downs, Boyfriend, George Porter, Zigaboo Modeliste, the Radiators and Terrence Blanchard. There were time/space conflicts aplenty, but when armed with a good knowledge of the JazzFest grounds and a brisk walking pace it is rather remarkable how much one can pack in.

A few random observations:

1 – Some of the mellower offerings in the Jazz Tent were occasionally challenged by the ambient noise level from outside, not to mention the aural competition from the nearby Blues Tent and the Festival Stage. During Bill Frisell’s set I found myself straining to fully appreciate the infinite subtleties of his sublime six-string artistry above C.J. Chenier and Dave Matthews. Arriving early and aiming for a seat close to the stage is advisable but not always possible.

2 – The misting systems installed in the Jazz, Blues and Gospel tents are a mystification to me. The first time I saw these evaporative cooling systems in use was in Phoenix. Phoenix, Arizona, that is, where the temperatures are frequently over 100 degrees and it’s dry like a sumbeyotch. New Orleans gets plenty hot, but it ain’t the dry like a sumbeyotch kind of hot. Phoenix is in the desert. New Orleans is in the swamp. This is not news. Misting systems in the swamp produce one reliable result: More humidity. Which only makes it feel hotter. Get RID of the misting systems, Mr. Quint (Davis—JazzFest impresario)! They DON’T WORK! Sweet Baby Jesus—why do I even have to point this out?

3 – Something unsavory appears to be afoot at Mr. William’s pies. Mr. William’s has been a fixture at JazzFest for years now, dispensing toothsome miniature pies from a small booth situated betwixt and between the Gentilly and Fais Do Do stages. I am a regular customer, typically laying in a supply of bean custard, pecan, cherry and coconut pies to help sustain me through those long FazzJest weekends. The Commodore is a Mr. William’s patron as well, and we both visited the pie booth on the final Sunday of the event. We made our purchases at different times during the day and, weeks later, we both discovered that we had been taken for a ride—in my case for an additional pie purchase that did not take place (approximately $25 worth) and in the Commodore’s case a $90-something purchase that got rung up to the tune of $150-plus. Now, so far as Mr. William’s pie booth is concerned, the Commodore and myself are a couple of rando customers—two of many hundreds who step up for the delectable pastries over the course of six days of JazzFest (Mr. William’s crew are of the 7th Day Adventist persuasion and therefore refrain from conveying their wares on Saturdays). How likely could it possibly be that BOTH of us should end up getting jammed for pie that we did not knowingly purchase? Coinkydink? A body gots to wonder… So, if you’re reading this and you have suffered the trauma of paying for pie that you did not receive, please get in touch—we may have a class action suit in the works. Watch for our billboard on an interstate near you.

That’s about it folks, but it would be remiss of me not to mention the gators. The Mississippi was on the rise when I took off for my week in the Big City and by the time I returned the water had completely overtaken the batture and was lapping at the base of the levee all along my bike route from Audubon Park up to River Ridge. With high water come the gators, and there was a bumper crop this spring. It’s not unusual to see one or two lurking about when the river is high, but this time around I was seeing four or five of the intimidating reptiles on every ride. I am informed that the average American adult alligator measures about 13 feet in length and weighs in around 800 lbs. For better or worse, the ones that typically present themselves in the batture are not in this range—more like six to ten feet in length in my estimation, but still not to be trifled with. I keep my eye out for them when I’m on the InkCycle and I’ve noticed that they are most often to be found in a stretch that extends about a mile downriver from the HPL Bridge. There’s no batture industry along this particular section and the gators seem to favor it. I haven’t heard tell of any over-lubricated revelers from the River Shack stumbling down into the batture of an evening and getting munched, but it’s not outside of the realm of possibility.

One day I rode upriver past a clueless chucklehead decked out in a Grateful Dead-style tie-dyed tank top who was standing about a yard away from a toothy eight-footer, grinning like an idiot as he snapped away with his cell phone for the pleasure of his Insta acolytes. I rode on by without comment but with full expectation that snapping away of another order might soon be in effect. When I passed back by the spot on my return trip there were no dismembered limbs or blood-stained personal effects laying about and no ambulances or East Jefferson Levee Police in attendance. That could be indicative of a variety of scenarios but the Insta hippie dude didn’t look as though he’d come up short on his FazzJest pie purchases—probably a bit too big for a gator that size to take down in one go… but ya never know.

And Goose and Swan are both fine—thanks for asking!