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ELEVEN on Elysian Fields Avenue
Artist Jason Kimes working in studio

LEJ's Louisiana
Yours Truly in a Swamp

Monthly e-column @
www.LEJ.org

by Leonard Earl Johnson,

of Lafayette and New Orleans

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* * *
July 2018

Anthony Bourdain,
Film, Fire and Trains

By Leonard Earl Johnson

www.LEJ.org
© 2018, Leonard Earl Johnson, All Rights Reserved

Courtesy Chicago Tribune

Maureen Brennan, the Cité des Arts impresario, and I went to Popeyes Oil Centre Buffet, in Lafayette, the day we heard of Anthony Bourdain's suicide.

He had been quoted in the local press, the week before, as taking three meals there recently, and being enamoured with their food.

Mostly he was right. The chicken is always fresh and good. And they have chicken livers! Also fresh and good. And the meager vegetables offered do seem lavish compared to the usual Popeyes ketchup ~ as Ronald Reagan taught us ~ as the only vegetable offered.

But Bourdain had praised particularly their thin, watery macaroni-and-cheese. It was awful. Leading to only one conclusion: he was drunk. Something supported by
Jo Ann Towle in
the Chicago Tribune.

When you are actually in need of a tasty cardiovascular assault, go to

Pamplona Tapas Bar / Lafayette Louisiana

Pamplona Tapas Bar, on Boulevard Jefferson. Their mac-and-cheese is made with smoked Gouda, and is something worth dying over.

I am very sorry Bourdain is gone from this Earthly table, but I see drink as only one part of his disillusionment with Life. Popeyes mac-and-cheese must also be held to account!

He would never have praised that bland mac-and-cheese without the help of ole Elfen Mr. Booze.
~ LEJ.org ✍️

* * *

Amtrak's Sunset Limited

left New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal exactly on time. New Orleans is a "terminal town." Meaning not only an accepting place for drinking yourself to death ~ and giving you a parade when you do ~ but also a third coast rail head. The place where tracks and trains begin
~ or end.

Here our trains arrive as off-schedule as any deteriorated third-world rail system. But here they routinely depart on time for all directions.

"But South!" L. A. Norma said, smiling through a cloud of Camel Cigarette smoke.

We rolled under the Claiborne Street and I-10 overpasses, and snaked through chain-link protected barren lots filled with railroad bric-a-brac, and general population discard. Outside the fenced area are homeless camps. Under one highway overpass, a bright blue tent had a sleek silver Motobecane bicycle chained outside to its open flap. Inside the tent we glimpsed two bearded men passing a joint.

"Some new Jack Kerouac on the road," L. A. Norma said, pointing out the observation car's windows with her coffee cup.

"Or another Eric Hoffer?"

She is telling this to a young lady from England, who is on her way to Beaumont, Texas and from there a bus to Galveston Island. The woman worked for a huge investment firm with offices in London. She travels constantly, she said, often visiting Louisiana.

From Brexit to Trumpit!

"Looking for investment bargains?" Norma asked. "Making America a great colony again?" she added, blowing over her steaming coffee.

Norma subscribes to an idea that Donald Trump, "With his vestigial Habsburg jaw," is the spearhead of a very old world order passing itself off as new.

She thinks Trump is trying to re-throne the most conservative of political ideas, the Holy Roman Empire, and will leave his New World followers bedazzled, dazed and broken amid fields polluted with oil spills and littered with their fallen torches and pitchforks.

The English woman said no, "Merely a tourist who likes New Orleans. I love this place!

"Last April I was here, at the famed Roddie Romero concert in the Historic New Orleans Collection's elegant courtyard, on Royal Street. It was a night of musical history."

Norma agreed ~ we, too, had been there. Romero and The Hub City All-Stars moved musical standards higher that night in one of those concerts where audience and musicians feed each other ~ the firing of that elusive spark you attend live performances in hopes of seeing.

The Historic New Orleans Collection is a rare spark itself. A museum endowed by Kemper and Leila Williams, heirs to Louisiana's oldest lumber fortune, bequeathed and dedicated to the preservation of New Orleans and its historic, social and cultural interactions. Nothing this venerable institution has ever done along those lines can top Roddie Romero's April 2016 concert.

* * *

Along the railroad tracks, at a particularly green spot on the West Bank just past the Huey P. Long Bridge, lays a discarded yacht. You can not make out the name. She was beached thirteen years ago by Hurricane Katrina. Mast snapped and lost. Her keel sprung for sure. But there she sits sailing on a sea of weeds and forgotten dreams. The years pass quickly since Katrina and soon it will be Winter again. The green will die down around her. Then the ghost yacht will heave back to full view.

Further down the line, next to the Mississippi River levee, we pass a small farmhouse surrounded by a large flock of grey and white geese.

"Some French Quarter tourist will eat one of those birds' liver tonight," Norma tells the young woman from England.

* * *

One night earlier, during the New Orleans Film Festival ~ in a Frenchmen Street dancehall ~ a young man handed us a cd-disk of the Cuban film, La Partida. A contemporary Cuban story of a straying sports hero yearning for capitalist dollars ~ with a twist.

Our sports hero sleeps with men and women. No shocker these days. But in this "wed me and save me," saga the young man's girlfriend's mother (to whom he has given a Grandson, and from whom he borrowed a tv for pawn without permission) urges him to pursue a visiting middle aged man with eyes for him, and a passport from a country with legalized gay-marriage. Marry the Spaniard, she pleads, and save us all from the American embargo ~ thought to be more the source of their economic woe than Communism. The film is, "real Cuba," the man assured me.

"Its greater message is the thing that causes us to adore sports heroes," Norma said, after watching. A good film. Recommended, if you can find it.

We live in interesting times, sigh!

Such times call for caution, said wise Chinese ancients.

* * *

Along Elysian Fields Avenue in Faubourg Marigny is a new sculpture as significant as any standing in The City today.

ELEVEN on Elysian Fields,
Faubourg Marigny ~ New Orleans
by Jason Kims

ELEVEN on Elysian Fields, by Jason Kims, is located across from the lakeside-downtown gate to Washington Square
Park.

It is made from a varietal of leftover iron disks gathered from Birmingham, Alabama forgers (hear echos of Civil War cannon). Eleven life sized figures looking out from a circle, standing in the neutral ground of Elysian Fields. They tickle the eye and move the soul.

The title refers not to the eleven years after Hurricane Katrina, when it was erected, but to the eleven men who died in the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion, in 2010. Deepwater spewed an ocean of oil into the Gulf of Mexico for five months.

The young English woman said she had not seen the monument, but she had heard of the oil spill.
~ LEJ.org ✍️