Music, Food and the Neal Auction House / May 2013

Yours Truly in a Swamp

May 2013

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Leonard Earl Johnson

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Music, Food and the Neal Auction House

by 
Leonard Earl Johnson

May 2013
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L. A. Norma held up 
Neal Auction House's Spring Estates Auction Catalog to show me two photographs by George Dureau. "These ran with your story in the Houston paper?" she told, more than asked. "Before gay NBA, Jason Collins coming-out?" she asked/said, dropping her cigarette to the boarding platform and crushing it with a red high-heeled foot.  

"They did," I said, "twenty-some years before. When news flowed on ink, and photographs sailed on paper; and news editors would have known without looking it up that Jason Collins was not America's first big-time gay athlete."

Norma smiled, "Today's press got Collins chronology wrong without looking it up." We laughed and our train's whistle blew in the distance. 

"For the crossing in Scott," I said. We stood and gathered our things. 

* * *

Neal Auction  House Spring  Estates Auction,   May 4 & 5,  2013

395. George Valentine Dureau (American/New Orleans, b. 1930),  "David Kopay" and "Edward Lucie-Smith",  1987, two silver gelatin prints, both signed and titled,  the former signed, titled and dated en verso, 8 in. x 10 in.,  unframed. $400/600 Note: As a running back, David Kopay played for the  San Francisco 49ers and the Washington Redskins  and was the first NFL player to publicly come out as gay.  In 1971  Kopay played one season for the New Orleans Saints and  during that time met the artist George Dureau, who took a series  of provocative photographs of the football player. The  internationally renowned art historian Edward Lucie-Smith  wrote the introduction to the 1985 book George Dureau,  New Orleans, 50 Photographs, published in London,  in which photographs of Kopay are featured.  Two years  later, Dureau  took this engaging photograph of Lucie-Smith.

What the Jason Collins news story told us was not only inadvertently how wrong they were -- press and public -- but, also, that there has been a sea-change, from Kopa to Collins, in how American's see being gay and manly.

"And long overdo," Norma opined inside a plume of Camel Cigarette smoke. "Was David Kopay as charming as Jason Collins?" This clearly was a question. 

"Yes," I said. "Manly charming. Exciting. Think bull-force football. Tank-armor clad football. The guy who would take you dancing, pay all the bills, and get your uncle a green card, too!"

Collins is basketball charming
Think clever. Physical agility. Think brilliant youth you want to see advance the human race. (If you want a thrill, think two. There are two of them! The other is Jason's straight twin who is charming as his Brother.)  

Kopay played one year for the New Orleans Saints, and comes back most every Mardi Gras. He was a favorite subject of his friend, photographer George Dureau. I met them both one year when I was newly home from The Sea. When we met, Kopay was living in Los Angeles, more-or-less retired from the public's eye. And Dureau was being seen increasingly in the pantheon of new art-gods. English art historian, Edward Lucie-Smith published a book about Dureau's photography and his association/influence on shock-photographer, Robert Mapplethorpe.  Many attribute this nod from Lucie-Smith as Dureau's entree bon fide to world art stardom.  

* * * 

L. A. Norma and I boarded the train to New Orleans after spending the weeks following French Quarter Festival in Lafayette, Louisiana, the "Hub City," according to boosters, and a great place that is home to the annual, widely acclaimed Festival International de Louisiane, Lafayette. This year's was the 27th. What a time it was!  

Think of those first Jazz Fests in Armstrong Park, where the gate was free, and you walked and talked; visited and boozed. When nearby restaurants abounded with great food, tables and chairs, and Gott-blessed shade was around every sound stage. That is how it was then and now, in Laughingyette. 

At Pamplona Tapas Bar, 
on Boulevard Jefferson, filmmaker, Connie Castille (T-Gallop, A Louisiana Horse Story) bought us Jack Daniels and spoke in full lack of detail about her next film. She introduced a Florida money man and a Bayou Teche Experience man.  The watery route to film in French Louisiana, oui? 

A Lafayette couple introduced us to four pretty young women from Paris, whom they had invited to Lafayette off their just returned-the-day-before Caribbean cruise aboard the M/V Carnival Conquest, out of New Orleans. Alas, they did not come over on the train, but they were loving Festival. 

L. A. Norma told them we had sailed on the Conquest twice, and gave them a web link to Country Roads Magazine's story about our adventure. (Note: Country Roads editor says their link is in process of moving to a new server, and may temporarily not work. Sorry, try again later.   =   "Remarque: Le Country Roads rédacteur en chef a dit que leur lien est en train de se déplacer vers un nouveau serveur, et peut ne pas fonctionner temporairement. Désolé, essayez plus tard.")

* * *

During the French Quarter Festival, we spent an afternoon dining at Dickie Brennan's yet-to-open restaurant, Tableau, on The River end of  Le Petit Theatre overlooking Jackson Square. 

We sat outside on the second floor, in the gallery's curve, nearly close enough to touch the Cabildo. Wow! Such views! Such food! Such Life! 

Down in the Square we saw an Evangelical with an amplifier. Mostly he was ignored but several musicians and vendors approached him. Then a policeman. Another amplified preacher joined them. Then I got distracted by a man in a pork-pie hat with a spotted pig on a leash. When I looked back the two preachers were gone. A Lucky Dog hot-dog wagon lumbered over the curb. Leif Pedersen's 1944 Big Band music wafted its smooth sound from the  tree-shrouded WWL-TV Stage.

We ate Turtle Soup, drank whisky, and watched two elderly ladies leading a little white dog wearing pink booties. Next, an Uptown matron-type tried liberating a sad brown puppy on a huge brown rope being dragged about by a disoriented young man in rags. The matron doubtless thought the puppy was getting improper care. The word on the street is that homeless folks can avoid police arrest if in the company of a dog, because police won't take them in and leave their dogs on the street. In the end, the sad young man kept his sad little puppy. 

Rip and Marsha Naquin-Delain, publishers of New Orleans only gay newspaper, AMBUSH, and the only source of Big Swamp City's gay news for the main stream press -- what be left of it -- walked along with a bag from Rouses on Royal. Where New Orleans' First Couple shops. The Naquin-Delains are the First Couple registered in Orleans Parish as a legal Domestic Couple. 

Jan Ramsey, publisher of Off Beat magazine joined me with news that her March issue, the one with "B*tch, get off me! Cheeky Blakk bounces back (always)" on the cover, had been disallowed distribution at two sites. She declined to name them. Cheeky Blakk is The City's leading practitioner of  Bounce Dancing, and ghetto tongue slinging.  She played herself in HBO's Tremé.

In the studio scene, with Steve Zahn's character, D. J. Davis McAlary, Blakk asks, "You want full ghetto!?" She then lets loose sounds that would singe any stiff collar. The Bounce? It is a dance where the supple bend and turn their rumps to the crowed and bounce them for the joy of all to see.
---------------

Copyright, 2013, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved

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Easter on the River of Bourbon St / April 2013

Yours Truly in a Swamp

April 2013
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Easter on the River of Bourbon Street

by 

Leonard Earl Johnson

2013 April
www.LEJ.org

2013  ~  Spring  New Orleans,                       Photo-credit:   Jessica ReeTull

After Mass, L. A. Norma and I left the witch-hat-towers of Saint Louis Cathedral, and headed for the soaring balconies of Bourbon Street, where we were lifted on the chaliced Wings of Whiskey, served from temporal cathedrals named, Oz, and Bourbon Pub. There are many Ozs and Pubs on this street, but these two are dance-halls flanking the intersection of Bourbon and Saint Ann.

Once they were populated exclusively by gay men. Then gay men and gay women. And now -- especially when balcony seating is open -- anyone who might read National Geographic and take Sea cruises.

The dance-halls stand as a demarcation between Reader's Digest tourists, on one side ebbing back towards Canal Street; and those tourists who well might read National Geographic, and definitely yearn to venture towards the gentrified mysteries of Faubourgs Marigny, Bywater and Treme'.

We took seats on the balcony above   
the Pub's swinging street shingle,  

Courtesy of French Quarter Festivals 

and watched the masses with their  
arms upraised in jubilation of 
Christ's resurrection, or beads.

Touched by Easter Spirits and the elfin Mr. Booze, we saw Jesus walking down this street of sin. He 

wore a crown of thorns over His 
long black hair. 

He wore sandals, too, and was naked save for a loincloth cut like the one in the paintings. He was thin and looked like He might be Filipino, but mostly He looked like Jesus. Everyone on the balcony thought so.

True to The Book 

He was slumming with local rabble, and reveling in their Easter experience. As they did His.

"Well, theirs is a damn sight better'n His," L. A. Norma said, tapping her fingers along the tiny silver figure on her crucifix necklace. "I say skip the crucifixion.  Fuck the fasting, and go straight for the Resurrection."

Every one glowed in the clear and righteous wonder of that thought.

A few blocks up, and a few years back, Chris Owens, an elderly Bourbon Street dancer, conducted her annual Easter Parade, with Grand-master David Duke, a brass band made up of midgets, elder ladies of the snatched-bodies cult, and a half dozen or so young bunnies in pastel furs. The bunnies threw underpants to the crowd. Among this human eddy, none would have given any notice whatsoever to our walking Jesus.

A tourist family did. They stood against the downstream wall of Pete Fountain's former club (now Club Oz), directly across the street from us. The father was wide-eyed. The girl, about seventeen, waved up to us. The pubescent son giggled and hugged his mother. Then along came Jesus straight towards them. 

The tourist mother looked offended. She gathered her brood and paddled them off down the street. Jesus did not seem bothered by their departure. After all, He wrote the book on forgiveness.

The sinners, noting nothing of this, went on about their sinning as Jesus walked among them.

Then the Pope appeared on the Oz balcony. He stood directly above where the tourist family had been, dressed head-to-toe in yellow and white satin. He blessed all who passed beneath him. He looked across the river of Bourbon Street and blessed us, too. We waved, and he motioned us over.We crossed the street and took our seats at the Pope's table.

We looked back at the Bourbon Pub balcony. The Pope, ever wise, said, "You cannot see yourself on the balcony you have just left." We had all had a lot to drink. The Pope handed out Wild Turkey and water. "Holy Water, from The Holy River," he said.

Three real nuns, in old-fashioned black-and-white habits, came trotting down rue Saint Ann, returning from a later mass. They passed our intersection headed towards Cathedral School. The sea of sinners parted. We cheered.

"What would they think of seeing Jesus?" L. A. Norma asked of no one in particular. She leaned over the balcony rail and yelled to the crowd below for Carnival beads. A photographer looked up and took her picture. I yelled down asking if he had seen Jesus. "No," he shouted back. Would he like to? "Yes, of course, yes!"

The Pope lay his hands on my shoulders, and said, "Watch that woman, do not let her fall over the communion rail." Green Carnival beads landed on the Pope's pointy hat. They looked interesting, but he took them off and tossed them to two college boys on the street below. Norma told him the two boys should have opened their pants. He frowned and said sternly, "This is not Carnival!"

I said, "It is not Laughingyette either," but the Pope did not hear me -- he was gone to find Jesus.

Norma looked past my forehead, and talked of far-ranging things.

The Pope returned without Jesus. He was balancing fresh drinks and passed them round the table."He can not be found in this wicked den," said The Pope, handing us a Wild Turkey and water.

When we looked up from our drinks we saw Him. He was at our old table across the street waving from the Bourbon Pub's balcony. We waved back. His naked arms were lifted heavenward. His loincloth flapped in the whiskey-flavored air. The man with the camera jumped and shouted, "Your cross, your cross, show us your cross!"

Jesus looked down and bellowed: "Don't you know what holiday this is? It is Easter, I have no cross!" 

Camellia                            Photo-credit:  Frank Parsley

The Pope, assorted communion-rail leaners, and other followers passing on the street below shouted, "Is it Carnival?" 

It wasn't, it was Easter on the River of Bourbon Street.
---------------

Copyright, 2013, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved

(A version of this story first appeared in the mid 1990s)

* * *

French Quarter Festival 30th Anniversary, 
April 11-14, 2013 
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

Festival International de Louisiane, 
April 24-28, 2013
Lafayette, Louisiana, USA
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Sequestering Forty Days of Lent / 2013 March

LEJ being glittered by maidens, Mardi Gras New Orleans

Photocredit: Anson Trahan

* * *

Yours Truly in a Swamp

Monthly column 
by

Leonard Earl Johnson


2013 March

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Meanwhile Back In America
* * *
"Hi ho, hi ho. 

It's off The Cliff we go.

No brains, no thoughts,

 just the guns we wrought. 

Hi ho, hi ho, hi ho..." 

~ L. A. Norma

* * *

Sequestering Forty Days of Lent

by Leonard Earl Johnson

2013 March 

www.LEJ.org

On Ash Wednesday all over Louisiana, Carnival lifted its colorful cloak and revealed Lent's ashen smudge. 

LEJ before the ashes                    Photocredit: Anson Trahan

At Saint Louis Cathedral, business suits stood cheek-by-jowl with crimson capes and smeared-lipstick ladies awaiting priests dressed in the Vestments of Sorrow smearing the Sign of The Cross on their foreheads, with thumbs dipped in the ashes of last year's Palm Sunday palms. Outside, rain washed Jackson Square and up and down the whole Sliver on the River we call New Orleans. 

I have doubts about many theological things, but none whatsoever about Ash Wednesday. It celebrates our journey from ashes to ashes. In a return directed by Canon Law over forty-days of stony passage we call Lent, a time, like Sequestration, of man-made deprivation. The handy work of theologians and politicians. 

Lent is a joyless anticipation of Spring, the most joyful, loving Godlike thing there is.  Yet, by Canon Law Lent -- not Easter -- is the longest holiday in Christendom!? If you need reason to be suspicious of religious powers -- all religions -- consider that fact. 

Spring, under the name of Easter, comes at the end of these forty days of Lenten fasting. So saith Pope Gregory's Calendar. By which we measure all this. And not too accurately, we might note. What with the Moon and all those Stars moving around faster than the dogmatic eye can see.

* * *

Easter brings the end of Lent's suffering, and the budding of trees, children's hands filled with fluffy little chicks, bunnies, rolling around with Easter eggs on the White House lawn!

Lenten fasting repairs Winter's damage and Carnival's excess, and prepares us for Spring's rebirth. Like the jazzed-man and the bean-sprout say,"Blow the roof off the sucker ..."

The live oaks outside our dormer windows are a soft young green. Live oaks don't dump their leaves till Spring's new buds arrive (as students of JFK's murder know). Then, they change from old dark green to young soft green almost overnight. 

Today, soft-green rules Big Swamp City, and all the feeder rivers, bayous and swamps beyond.  We old horned alligators lie on the banks in whatever sun we can find dreaming of Carnivals past, Easter baskets and Spring. 

Begone Lent and Sequestration, man made hair-shirts! 

"Get thee behind me, Satan," Matthew 16:23, "You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men."

L. A. Norma lifted the window a bit higher to give her cigarette smoke greater egress, and asked, "Did you see that man on Mardi Gras day, in the headdress and mantle of an Egyptian Pharaoh and a sign around his neck reading, 'WILL RULE FOR FOOD'?  

"I saw him again, on Ash Wednesday. He was with a Cleopatra who took off her snake armband and held it to her breast. Delicately exposed, of course. We were at the Communion Rail, and I was close enough to see them mouth, 'Asp Wednesday,' to each other. I would not swear to this, but I think the Priest smiled." 
---------------------------------

Copyright, 2013, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved

(A version of this story first appeared in 2004)

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Alan Robinson Didn't He Ramble / February 2013

Yours Truly in a Swamp

by 

Leonard Earl Johnson

  

February 2013

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Alan Robinson Didn't He Ramble?

2013 February

by Leonard Earl Johnson

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"That is leadership," L. A. Norma said, placing a smoking Camel Cigarette along the tip of a treasured pink conch shell she lugged back from the Bahamas.

"And more power to you, Mr. President," she added turning off the TV.

Norma was cheering President Obama's effort at doing something to stop the shootings of masses of Americans -- even unto the little children -- by disarming big-gun nuts exercising some woefully misjudged Constitutional right.

"Perhaps the little children could pool their milk money and buy a congressman?" our cabdriver said as he dropped us in front of an Uptown bar.

* * * 

We returned from the Bahamas aboard the M/V Carnival Conquest, our second cruise on this good ship. While at Sea, Obama grew a hard spine. And Louisiana suffered foot-high rainfalls and flooding. We learned all this from our shipboard-tv. The TV did not name the town flooded. We figured it was not New Orleans or they would have talked about Hurricane Katrina.

We later learned Eunice, a town in the ancestral Cajun parish of chef Paul Prudhomme, had been completely cut off from access by anything but boat.  Yet at our first dinner back home, the cook, bartender and waitress who fed us great sandwiches at a bar near Tulane's campus, shook their heads, and said, "No flooding here, we've heard about."  

Outside it was pouring, and while getting back in our car, rain water came rushing down Freret Street swamping our shoes and thoughts.

"Should I go back in and tell them?" Norma asked, splashing along, "Thank Gott there is no ...," she stumbled into a pothole, talking.

* * *

"Gliding along we go,

loving it so, and so. 
We are by, 
by the beautiful Sea ..."

Hard to believe, in post whole-lot'a-years, but I sang that ditty to bemused sailors aboard the first of many ships I sailed from New Orleans to Odessa, U.S.S.R. And down near the Straits of Magellan, and up to the Saint Lawrence Seaway. And from Baltimore to the Bahamas and beyond. I was young. The world was my outbound vessel. New Orleans was my home port.

Home is the sailor, home from the Sea. Sailors come to live in neither worlds. Not fish at Sea, and not quite like other people on the beach.

I dropped anchor in New Orleans in the 1970s, when I rented an handsome apartment in Faubourg Marigny, restored by Gene Cizek -- a pioneer of Marigny's current gentrification. 

Cizek taught at Tulane and introduced me to the late Alan Robinson, then a rising Faubourg Marigny and Citywide star. This was long before Katrina -- that perfect metaphor for Life's journey of change. 

Pat Brady, author and former president of the Gulf South Booksellers Association, remembered Alan: "One year, we all took the train to Chicago for BookExpo, along with Alan's dear friend, Eleanor Meade of the New Orleans Museum of Art book store.

"We opened the walls between the cabins 
and had a party."

* * *

"Alan was in the New Orleans Museum of 
Art's  Comptroller's Office," E. John 
Bullard, NOMA's Director Emeritus said.

"working as an Accountant with 
responsibility for the Museum Shop.  

"He left to pursue his literary interests full 
time, including his pioneering gay book 
store. Alan had a keen intelligence, great 
sense of humor and warm personality. He is 
greatly missed."

Last week we learned Alan Robinson's voyage ended in May, at a post-Katrina relative's home in Texas, accoding to Otis Fennel, current operator of FMB Art and Books. We did not talk with the relatives, who wish to forget New Orleans and Alan's time here. 

Life can be like that. 

It also can remember us for decades, years or not-at-all. We are briefly what we are in the hearts of those who knew us. And then? Today even the Pharoahs of Egypt are forgotten but for a few known by era alone, and for little else.

Susan Larson, The Times-Picayune's book editor, radio personality and New Orleans bonne vivante, reminisced, "Alan always saw the bigger picture -- he wanted our Booksellers Association to work, he knew we were stronger as a group, and he always stood up for what he believed in.

"Alan and I, Mark Zumpe, Pat Brady, --  all went to the Human Rights Campaign dinner when Alan was honored for his work with the bookstore, and, I believe, the Gertrude Stein Society. He was so proud and it was such a lovely evening."  

Alan Robinson bought a house in Bywater and the FMB Art and Books Store. This was Faubourg Marigny's premier book shop, on Frenchmen Street, at Chartres. He took over the struggling operation from a defrocked priest, who left for reasons no longer remembered. 

He grew it to a City premier retailer of books, curios, art and what-not on what was then Siberia (1970-80's Frenchmen Street) but is today one of the hottest hot-time streets in the country. 

Frenchmen Street was recently celebrated in song, on HBO's, Treme', a film-story which understands New Orleans filmnoir. With a storyline that understands Frenchmen Street -- where Alan Robinson once ran a book store.   

* * *

"Alan died?" e-mailed Tony Fennelly, the Edgar-nominated mystery author of such titles as The Glory Hole Murders, and The Hippie in the Wall. "But he was only our age! What happened?"

I wrote back, "Time done dropped on top'a us like a Katrina metaphor."

Along with Uptown bookseller, Mark Zumpe, Robinson founded the New Orleans/Gulf South Booksellers Association.  Zumpe died before Katrina, and is memorialized in Washington Square Park, on Frenchmen Street, and with a scholarship in his name. 

Robinson is presumably interred in Texas. Rest in Peace, old friend. Didn't you ramble!
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All Rights Reserved   

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