Louisiana politics at its most jaw-dropping best

Among the many things I miss about living in New Orleans, one that tops the list is election season. That's because politics in the Big Easy is side-show entertainment.

There's no doubt that my nostalgia for the bizarre characters and outrageous mud-slinging battles that surface in races for even the most benign offices in NOLA has some connection to the pedestrian nature of politics in San Diego.

If New Orleans is the Jerry Springer of local elections then surely San Diego is the political reincarnation of Martha Stewart.

Some people thought Hurricane Katrina and its boot-strapping aftermath would infuse more civility into the Crescent City's political culture. But this year's race for coroner is proving the naivete of such predictions.

The race pits 80-year-old incumbent Dr. Frank Minyard against Dwight McKenna, a surgeon who served on the Orleans Parish School Board for five years until a federal court convicted him of tax evasion.

Minyard, who famously flaunts his jazz trumpet playing skills in campaign posters, was first elected to the post in 1974.

He became more widely known in the aftermath of Katrina as his office struggled to identify the hurricane's victims while dealing with its own devastation. The effort was chronicled in this NYT piece.

More recently, Minyard has become the target of what can only be called one of the craziest political commercials ever made. The B-horror-movie-themed spot hits on a mild scandal from years ago when, according to The Times-Picayune, families of several dead people sued Minyard for removing small pieces of bone and cornea during autopsies without their permission.

Those fine points are lost in the ad, which features "Dr. Minyard" and his hunch-back sidekick Igor discussing the night's organ harvest and sale over a corpse.

It won't win an Oscar, and it probably won't win McKenna the election. But it might just get a few voters in New Orleans to think, at least for a minute or two, about something other than the Saints playing in the Super Bowl on Sunday.

This ain't your grandpa's Super Bowl

Watch this video if you haven't already. It elegantly explains why the relationship between the people of New Orleans and the Saints football team is unique and unmatched in the entire world of sports.

Jazz Fest

I headed to New Orleans last weekend with Tim for the final days of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. We stayed Uptown with my friends Pedro and Tommy. Here we are in front of the Gentily Stage on Saturday afternoon.
Sugarland delivered a great set as the closeout band on the Acura stage Friday. Tim and I were able to squeeze our way right up to the front lines. The only downer was the drunk Yat standing next to me who kept pushing me and knocking into me during the show.
Some Mardi Gras Indians in elaborately beaded costumes joined Sugerland for one of the group's closing numbers.
My favorite performance was by Cowboy Mouth, a New Orleans rock band, whose drummer and lead singer, Fred LeBlanc, is famous for his high-caffeinated performances. They did a few numbers from their new album, Fearless, along with some great post-Katrina tunes like "The Avenue" and classics like "Jenny Says."
We caught the end of a set by Doreen (center) and her jazz combo. I've know Doreen since the early 90s when I would listen to her and the group play every Saturday morning on Royal Street in the French Quarter. It was great to see her on stage at Jazz Fest. She plays that clarinet like no one else.

Of course, Jazz Fest is about food as much as it's about music. And we did our best to gobble down everything possible. I started here with one of my favorites, a duck poboy.

We also ate jambalaya, soft-shell crab poboys, crawfish bread, sweet potato chips and a few other things that I can't remember now.

We washed everything down with rose mint iced tea.

This was our final meal of the Fest, a puff pastry topped with oysters, some crawfish beignets smothered with horseradish sauce and a crawfish pouch sitting in étouffée.
After it was all over, we headed to a house six blocks away for a huge crawfish boil (500 pounds of the critters) where Tim tasted his first boiled mudbugs. The crawfish were the best I've ever had.

The cook, a guy from Lake Charles who now lives in Las Vegas, used a couple of special techniques. First, he purged the crawfish for 24 hours in fresh water rather than doing the traditional quick purge in salt water. Then, after the crawfish were cooked, he let them soak for a few minutes in butter seasoned with tons of garlic and a Cajun spice mix.

We kept telling Tim that the rest his crawfish-eating experiences probably never will match this one.

A SoCal Lundi Gras

My buddy Tom (purple hat and feathers) hosted a Carnival party tonight at his house in San Diego's North Park neighborhood.
His neighbor Robbin did most of the cooking.
She fried green tomatoes and frog legs, a special treat for me since my peeps are all from the Frog Capital of the World.

For those of you unfamiliar with Rayne, La., here are the reigning Frog Festival queens and their amphibious consorts. Click on any pic to view it larger.

Each October for the festival, the town's prettiest girls pair off with bull frogs plucked from local canals for the biggest jumping contest this side of Calaveras County.

Imagine my surprise when I arrived at Tom's house and saw frog legs cooking in the Fry Daddy.

We also had seafood gumbo, chicken and sausage jambalaya, Abita Turbo Dog beer, Hurricanes and a live Web feed from WWOZ.
We finished the night off with this perfect king cake made from scratch by Robbin. Tim found the baby, so he'll be hosting the party next year.

Happy Mardi Gras y'all!

Laissez les bon temp roulez!

Quick trip to NOLA

I was in New Orleans last weekend for only a few hours as part of my quick trip to Louisiana, but I managed to drive through my old neighborhood, the Bywater.

I snapped these pics around the folk art compound of Dr. Bob, one of the Bywater's best known characters.
Dr. Bob is most famous for his "Be Nice or Leave" signs, which can be found in countless New Orleans restaurants and bars.
This disco-ball-inspired, dollhouse-sized creole cottage was sitting in a lot across the street from Dr. Bob's studio. I presume it's one of his creations.
The bricks are what remains of an old warehouse that used to stand on the riverfront site.
I found this homage to the new president a few bocks away at the corner of Elysian Field Avenue and Rampart Street. The building served for years as the main grocery store for the Bywater, first as part of the Schwegmann chain then as a Robert Fresh Market. The store closed when Katrina hit and never reopened.


This reminder of the city's horrific murder rate was on a graffiti-covered wall near the foot of Elysian Field.

NOLA parting shots

Is there any doubt that I had a great time returning to New Orleans for the first time in two years, hanging out in my old haunts and communing with long-lost friends and workmates?
The palm trees are back on Canal Street and they're looking better than ever. Katrina shredded the original palms that had been planted along the street's neutral ground (that's median to you non-New Orleanians). Those have been replaced, and they've been joined by more trees lining the sidewalks. The added greenery really dresses up the street.

This was one of those only-in-New-Orleans moments. While strolling down Bourbon Street in the afternoon, I stumbled across this bin filled with a freakishly large number of Mardi Gras king cake babies.
Why were they there? Who did they belong to? What could it mean? These questions will haunt me forever.
Painted miniature street cars like this one seem to randomly pop up around town. They must be a local version of Chicago's much-copied painted cows.
I actually miss this.

No trip to Nola is complete without a Saturday night stop at Cafe Lafitte's, the city's oldest gay bar which bills itself as the "Daddy of 'em all." That's (left to right) Tommy, Pedro and Fred in the center and Lyle and Galt on the right.

I also got to see the gang at my old newspaper, The Times-Picayune, but my only photo with some of my former colleagues in the business section was out of focus. From left to right are Kim, business editor; reporter Kate; reporter Jaquetta; and reporter Jen.

We're gathered in front of my former desk, which for nine years offered me a view of the Broad Street overpass through opaque, bullet-proof glass.

Kim and I rode Katrina out together in this office space with two other business section co-workers. Good times!
I may be gone from the media bunker on Howard Avenue, but these pics prove that I'm not forgotten.

Metro reporter Gwen (left) snatched this "Geaux Tigers" sign from my old desk and mounted it on her cubicle. On the right is a snapshot of me at my San Diego office, taken by Jaquetta during her trip out West last year, that hangs on a message board inside the business section office.
Here are some of the SEVEN iPhones that were part of our weekend gathering. Lyle, who is an Apple employee and helped test the device, was thrilled, and he promised to tell Steve Jobs all about us when he returns to work.

TODAY'S BLOG SPOT:
The dinning room of McDonald's in Jennings. I worked as a cashier at this store in the early 1980s when I was in high school. It's had a complete coffee-shop makeover in recent years.
It seems to be home to the only public wi-fi hotspot in town. The service is through AT&T, and a day pass costs $2.95.

NOLA eats

Our gorge-fest started mid-day Friday at Liuzza's by the track - the "track" being the horse racing track at the New Orleans Fair Grounds.
Liuzza's serves the best barbecued shrimp po-boy in the city. Throw in a Barq's root beer and you've got a classic New Orleans hole-in-the-wall lunch experience.
Next was Commander's Palace for dinner.
It was my first visit to this classic Uptown haunt for dinner.

I started with the restaurant's signature dish - turtle soup - which totally lived up to its legendary reputation. For an entree, I had the pecan-encrusted drum fish soaked in what had to be an entire stick of butter and topped with sweet lump crab meat and hollandaise sauce. I could feel my ass expanding with every bite.

Dessert was an amazing bread pudding soufflé.
We ended the trip with lunch at Galatoire's in the French Quarter, the 103-year-old grand dame of the city's oldest and most revered restaurants. We didn't see any celebrities or Washington politicians, but there were plenty of French Quarter and Uptown bluebloods in the room.
I had a shrimp rémoulade followed by redfish topped with a crabmeat and shrimp meunière.
This was a flaming spicy brandied coffee that was prepared at the table.
I had to borrow a button-up shirt from Andy and a jacket from the restaurant's spare closet to meet Galatoire's strict Sunday dress code.

Some of us also managed to squeeze in a stop at Coop's Place on Decatur Street in the lower French Quarter where I had jambalaya supreme, a rabbit-sausage-shrimp-crawfish-and-tasso version of this Cajun classic that beats all others in the city.

Recovery tour

Matt took us on a whirlwind tour of East New Orleans, Chalmette, the Lower 9th Ward, Gentilly and Lakeview - the areas damaged most by flooding after Katrina and struggling the most to recover from the disaster.
These are some of the houses being built in the Lower 9th by Brad Pitt's Make it Right Foundation. They look nice, environmentally friendly and more storm proof than the buildings that were previously here, but I don't know what this aesthetic has to do with the people, neighborhood and culture that existed in this location before Katrina.Most of the Lower 9th looks just as it did a few months after the storm when all of the debris was carted away.

The first of what likely will be several Katrina memorials sits along one of the Lower 9th's major thoroughfares. The red structure represents the ruins of a house and the blue columns depict the rising water levels during the flood.
On the west side of the Industrial Canal in the Upper 9th Ward, Habitat for Humanity is getting it right at the Musician Village, a cluster of historically and culturally accurate homes built for the city's displaced singers and band members. These pics show both sides of the same street.

I can't imagine what it's like to walk out the front door of your house every day and see empty overgrown lots and gutted abandoned houses across the road. I suppose you just get blind to it after a while, sort of like the way I dealt with the city's horrendous crime problem and decayed neighborhoods when I lived here.
These is the massive new pumping system constructed by the Army Corps of Engineers at the mouth of the London Street Canal, one of the waterways that burst through its levees during Katrina.Back in Chalmette, it was great to see that Rocky & Carlo's was open again, and that the "ladies" are still welcome. The restaurant is still serving up a classic Yat cuisine, including macaroni and cheese smothered in red or brown gravy and wop salad.