Skool Daze

Po Boy Views

By

Phil LaMancusa

On Higher Learning

Or

School Daze

            It’s the election cycle, football season, dirty laundry is waist high and it’s ladies night at your local pub; forget it (!)--- you’ve got homework assignments that are due…yesterday! You’re availing yourself to the auspiciousness of advanced education because of circumstances that may or may not be of your own volition and possibly far from your control. Peer pressure, parental pressure (your Daddy’s rich and your Ma’s good looking); you’ve taken out a lifetime of debt in student loans or you’ve decided that there’s more money being a hair dresser message therapist vet tech dental assistant than being a bus boy dishwasher floor sweeping baby sitter (au pair, my butt!). Or, the three to five bum rap for B&E afforded you some state sanctioned free ed--this is your life right now, so pull up your big boy pants and get on with it!

Otherwise, what’s your alternative?  You may decide that structured learning is not for you; you don’t fit into the curriculum; it’s a drag or you just aint gettin’ it.  Well, you could “pack it in, get a pick-up, take it down to L.A.”; consider that you’re not really gonna be comfortable In your skin until you’re at least thirty years old; give yourself a break and take one.  Pursue a dream, then climb a mountain, join a cult, fight a fire, volunteer for foreign service, apprentice, make mistakes; program your own syllabus and educate yourself.  And/or run away with the circus.   Do something that you haven’t done before, start at the bottom somewhere and check it out, see where it takes you. Hit your stride, live under the overpass; hold up a sign at the intersection. “You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack”, failing to live up to expectations, yours and others; perhaps, like a lot of us, ‘happy’ is what you want to be when you’re grown up.

First of all, you’re not going to school because you have talent, if you had talent you’d be out in the world workin’ on your next million. You may have ability, you might be tenacious, you may want better for yourself, you might have nothing better to do or you just don’t want to go out into the world and get a friggin’ job! In any case, you need to get to crackin’… that learnin’ ain’t gonna just rub off on you!

            Oh, so you thought that you had talent; everybody told you so, your parents, your lovers, your friends and your second grade teacher. Do you know what the odds are on you having talent? If you need to ask, then save yourself the heartache. At best, you have aptitude, drive, ambition and if you’re lucky, the capacity for passion. You may have intelligence, charisma, charm and good intentions; it takes that much to get a cup of coffee. For an amount of success; you’ll need more than that.

            Ah, with luck on your side, kismet, serendipity, good karma and love in your heart, you’ll go places. The streets and cities of the world are littered by the likes of those kind hearted souls that believe that the meek will inherit the earth. To make it around here all it takes is looks and a whole lot of money, right? Wrong, that only gives you comfort, not success, so you’ll ask yourself what success is?

            Success is the result of hard work whether you’re a banker, a butcher or a Buddhist monk; add to that, timing, wise (especially financial) decisions, connections and location location location.  And on the subject of luck, a very wise man I know told me “the harder I work, the luckier I get”.

            Focus; paying attention, toil and an amount of personal sacrifice; learning the tricks and tools of your trade, taking care of your health and body, being courteous, well groomed and mannered helps a lot. A barnacle attaches itself to something stable and its sustenance comes to it; a mushroom is kept in the dark and fed manure; a zinfandel vine fights for its nutrients and produces great wine; pick a role model.

            On the lighter side, one day you’ll look back on your educational experiences and exclaim that these were the happiest days of your life; so what if the older generation looks at you like you’re some kind of techno freak. You’ve got your SmartPhone, Ipad, and Wi-Fi; you’re on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and a whole lot more. Whatever you need from life… there’s an app for that, YouTube, Google, Tumblr and your very own blog.  You’ve got voicemail and instant messaging for Christ’s sake, what could go wrong? The world.

            Outside of your student cocoon there’s this thing called a world and what others consider real life; unless you stay in school (which I highly recommend) you will be part of a larger universe where a man named Murphy is in charge and whatever can go wrong… does. Plans change (and should), dreams may become just that (dreams), love comes from unlikely places (it does), then there’s magic as well as danger, mystery, adventure and humor (often simultaneously) everywhere (count on it). You turn a corner, take a chance, miss a step, consider an alternative, play a hunch, avoid a conflict, make a point… things happen. Education, on the other hand, can be insular.

            One of the things that I’ve seen in other countries is that being happy is more of a priority than having fame, fortune or notoriety;  coffee in the morning; off to work as a mechanic or mailperson; pick up the kids; dinner and a good book before bed. “What do you want from life?” Song and lyrics by The Tubes (check it out).

             

            

Real New Orleans Food

Po Boy Views

By

Phil LaMancusa

Real New Orleans Food?

Here’s the questions:  What is real New Orleans food, is there a real New Orleans food and how would any one of us know it --- if it were a snake would we bite it back? 

The answers are afoot when I go to John and Mary’s on Orleans Avenue for a boiled turkey neck, McHardy’s on Broad Street for fried chicken, the Orange House for Ya Ka Mein and/or over in to the Seventh Ward to find an African-American grandma selling Huckabucks (ice cups) from her kitchen doorway for fifty cents. Real New Orleans food is going to Galatoire’s for Crabmeat Ravigote; Pascal Manale’s Barbecued Shrimp, eating Tujague’s Oysters en Brochette and a fabulous Ribeye at Crescent City Steak House.

Real New Orleans food is found at fancy places and filling stations. From the Calas at Elizabeth’s to the Creole Cream Cheese at the Crescent City Farmer’s Market; from Lafcadio Hearn to Sara Roahen. Above all, real New Orleans food is an attitude; Mirliton is New Orleans, Chayote is Mexican… although they’re the same vegetable. Real New Orleans food goes back nearly three centuries and is a gumbo of influences.

The Creoles subsisted on seafood from the Gulf, lake and river; the early Germans at Des Allemandes kept us alive with their farming and dairy products, they handed us our first charcuterie. The indigenous peoples taught us to make hominy, Tasso and the use of powdered sassafras leaves (file); the French brought their cooking methods and terminology; wheat came down the river to make our roux; the Africans came and farmed rice (“YaYa” in their language) and brought okra (quingombo) to our pots; the Spanish gave us the ham (jamon, jambon) for our Jambalaya and from a common ancestor in Peru came red, black, white and pinto beans. The Cajuns? Well, the Cajuns have kept us in touch with our rural and rustic roots.

            This new land of ours gave back to the world: chili peppers, tomatoes, corn, potatoes, chocolate, tobacco, squash and vanilla; we in New Orleans adopted celery, artichokes, thyme, coffee beans, sugar cane, bananas and bay leaves. We made them our own. We took in and we gave back; and, real New Orleans food is a product of Spanish, French and African cultures with influences of the Germans, Italians, indigenous peoples and settlers making do with what they could find, forage and figure out. Slaves bought their freedom by selling foodstuffs in the streets of the French Quarter; businessmen became rich importing ice to keep it fresh, housewives traded collards for courgettes over back fences and Caribbean cooks added a pinch of cayenne to our everyday dinners. Many cooks did not spoil the soup; they just turned it into gumbo.

Put aside for a second what our visitors dive into: red beans, gumbo, jambalaya, etouffee, remoulade, beignets, pralines, bread pudding, poboys--- those are native to us--- baked in, so to speak, second nature to us and only are window dressing to the real meat of what sustains us as a people. Try also to ignore, for now, the ‘newer’ ethnic oriented foods that, happily, has diversified our daily eating habits in the last, say, two decades (something that newly arrived folks may not realize), foodstuffs that were once novelties that are now mainstream: Vietnamese, Hispanic and Middle Eastern. It used to be that you couldn’t find sushi here with a Geiger counter; now, pretty young things are having it for breakfast at Whole Foods (another come lately business). These I consider no less than real New Orleans food, just newer New Orleans food; updated, expanded, and modified from the old to the new--- the eat goes on.

 I do question that ‘modern’ ethno fusion locality ingredient driven over-fussy and unnecessarily complicated works of art that pass for high end food nowadays; terrific to look at, hard to eat and harder to remember except that they contained weird animal parts and far too many garnishes. But that might just be me, I’m sure it has its place; after all, in 1722 after the ‘Petticoat Rebellion’ when Madame Langlois (Governor Bienville’s housekeeper) taught our founding mothers the recipe for pecan stuffed squirrel, I’m sure a few eyebrows raised as well..

New Orleans, known to visitors for our affinity for music, food and booze has become polarized four square by conflicting if not confusing messages that are sending visitors running to our culture pundits for explanations as to our definitions as New Orleanians as to what is really real New Orleans and what is not. Let me say this about that: Music and alcoholic drinks are a subjective experience and give rise to opinions that, like noses, vary from face to face, person to person; I cast no aspersions toward tastes in those areas; although I have my own opinions, I mostly keep them to myself.

When we talk New Orleans food, however, I’m ready to get ‘real’, I’m prepared to get up into some ‘grill’: New Orleans food is like a religion to us here and what we eat on any given day can be classified as such; all the food we eat here is good food (I should hope so) but it’s either New Orleans food or it’s not. It’s found in the components that we swear by: Camellia Beans, Crystal Hot Sauce, Pickled pork, smoked sausage, Mahatma Rice, CDM Coffee and Chicory and greens of every description. It’s found in the onions, celery, bell peppers and garlic that no home is ever without. It’s found in Steen’s Cane Syrup, Zatarain’s Fish Fry and our own special secret spice mixtures. Real New Orleans food has always been based on us being locavores and we were slow cookin’ (and slow dancin’) before ‘Slow Food’ became cool and a convenient catchword.

Our food rituals set us apart as well; red beans on Monday, King Cake at Carnival time, Reveillon dinners around Christmas, Gumbo Z’herbes on Holy Thursday, oysters in months with a ‘R’ in ‘em and that grilled pork chop sandwich from the back of a pickup truck at a second line winding through the Treme.

            Real New Orleans food is eaten all day and all night, washed down by cold beers and conversation. In the street or at the table, with smiles and camaraderie; the scent of smoke like perfume amongst the Jasmine, magnolias and sweet olive comin’ over the fence tells you that a neighbor will be over soon to invite you for an impromptu ‘cook out’ before a Saints game. Our gumbo is “too thick to drink, too thin to plow”; our boiled seafood brings burn to your lips and sweat to your brow; the tropical fruits from Mr. Okra’s truck perfectly ripe; that praline stuffed beignet from Loretta’s having your eyes roll back in your head.  There is nothing superficial or elusive in Real New Orleans food and it cannot be had anywhere but in New Orleans: have a Muffuletta in Des Moines? Not on a bet! Call it the heat; call it the humidity; call it the water. Call it my stubbornness; I’ll have Enchiladas, Pad Thai, Pho, Frankfurters, Falafel, Paella and Pizza in Pittsburg, Pensacola, Flushing and Fargo; I will eat Ban Mi in Boston, Green Eggs and Ham with a goat on a boat BUT… I will save my crawfish cravings for the Crescent City--- and only in season.

                                     

Pigskin perplexity

Po Boy Views

By

Phil LaMancusa

Pigskin Perplexity

Or

Who Dat What Dat?

            I was never an organized spectator sports enthusiast, nor was I ever a team oriented, rock ‘em sock ‘em active player of competitive sports; once when I was pressure/enlisted to join a team, I asked that my position be named ‘left out’. The idea of swatting a vaguely spheroid inanimate object with a bat, club, racquet or my tender hands, is as foreign to me as getting into a roped enclosure with someone bigger (and tougher) than I whose sole purpose in life is to beat me like a red headed stepchild and be rewarded by having their hand raised in victory to the sound of cheers from a bloodthirsty audience who’ve paid money to watch this occur. Ouch!

            As a caveat: I’m aware that it takes great skill, talent and training to run that ball against the likes of that herd of buffalo size men on an open field, or hit a ball coming at you at a hundred miles an hour and run in a circle hoping to eventually cross ‘home plate’. I know that I’d never be able to take a nine iron, or whatever, and slice that egg size ball into a hole three hundred yards away or face Serena across a net as she runs me like a bad comedian dodging tomatoes from a hostile crowd. I can swim, run and bike, but not in competition; for me the emphasis on sports is in the playing… play-ing… get it?

            Also, I don’t have a head for statistics, historic significances, odds in favor (or against), theories, rules of the games, point spreads, names, dates or places. Who did what when how and against what opponent does not adhere to any of my gray cells-- and while this is second nature to some folks-- it seems that my brainpan has sports Teflon surfaces. Even in the Olympics my attention is captured more by figure skating, gymnastics and high diving competitions than on football, golf or hockey. I guess I should turn in my ‘Man Card’.

            That being said; I am a rabid Saints fan; they’re my team, my boys, my dogs, my troops. Although, I’m not sure why they keep getting rid of some of the most beloved players and hiring strangers for us to get to know and love (or not), they’re still a team I’ll get up, dress up, show up and never give up on. Black and Gold symbolize my city and her recovery and ongoing challenges. I just hope that they don’t start drafting any hipsters with man buns.

            In the aftermath of Katrina, I was at a talk given by Alec Baldwin; at the time, the city was a mess of trash, homelessness, chaos, confusion and militant optimism about the balls that it was going to take to get us off our backs and on our feet. The talk was given in one of the dining rooms of Muriel’s Jackson Square and thus spoke Alec: “You know, New Orleans is like your home team; and just because your home team gets their asses kicked, you don’t switch teams! It’s your team, you belong to it and it belongs to you; and New Orleans is going to get through this because her people will not, cannot give up on her.” He said a lot of other things too, but those are the words that stuck with me. At one time, our football team was being called “The Aints” and fans were wearing bags on their heads because they were so terribly bad at the game and that’s when I fell in love with them. I watch them play good and bad and cheer them on (loudly); I learned what ‘fourth down and one hundred and ten to go’ means because that’s what our city came back from; it has been a real ‘Hail Mary’ of a recovery, hasn’t it? And we’re still in O.T.

            Liuzza’s By The Track on N. Lopez is my home team when I consider bacon, beer, barbecued shrimp poboys and game time banter. Liuzza’s stays open for Saints games whenever and wherever they may be; if they’re on Sunday (when the kitchen is closed), patrons bring pot luck and their staff works their day off out of solidarity with the neighborhood and “Our Boys”. That’s the New Orleans that I know.

            As I said, for the upcoming competitive sports season, I know doddley-squat about such things, and previous to my Saints fever and fervor, I would have suggested that we give each team their own ball and have them stop fighting over just the one, but times have changed. I still don’t know the difference between a punt and a bunt, a tight end and a wide receiver (sounds rather earthy to me) or why some grown people get paid gazillions of dollars to run, jump, kick, punch, swat, slam and run in circles wearing themselves out, getting hurt and trying to hurt opponents that are trying to hurt them and others get hurt for little or no money at all; as they say “it’s beyond my ken”. However, put me on a level playing field with you, me and a football pool and I’ll give you odds that I have just as much chance of winning as you do, with no previous experience necessary.

            So, go on with your bad self and root, cheer, whistle, yell, stomp your feet and yell your lungs sore. Of course the Referee is blind and probably biased against your team (he’s probably being paid off). They (the other team) STOLE that victory! Gosh darn it! We still have a chance at the playoffs, semi finals or wild card matches; our team rocks! We have a mascot, a great coach, hot dogs, beer and a pretty lady in a yellow sundress screaming: “Stomp the bastard! Kill him!” I rest my case.

            

Goodtime Charlie's Blues

Po Boy Views

By

Phil LaMancusa

Goodtime Charlie’s Blues

Or

Let’s Eat Grandma

Blow wind blow. As you well know, New Orleans has recently gotten in waves of American immigrants. More expensive places in this country are sending disheartened, disillusioned and disenchanted ex-pats here, effectually making New Orleans now the seventh least affordable place in the country for renters. Bam! People that are poor in other places can live comfortably here, displacing those poor here that, now, can no longer afford to live here and have to move on to places where they, in turn, can afford to live.

The new refugees hail from New York, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago and even places like Portland and Seattle (where they claim to have been Cali-fornicated to suffocation), and other high toned towns. These places are losing good people due to inflated costs of living, and in the process, it’s causing our costs to become inflated as well--like a doll at a bachelor party… with the same prospects. But that’s not the point of this missive; the point of this missive is not that we’re becoming gentrified because we’re not becoming gentrified, we’re being priced out. We got trouble, right here in River City.

Think about it. What we have here is a finite number of domicidal opportunities and logic tells us that when one person moves in, it’s because another has moved (or been moved) out.

Allison and her neighbor had small studio apartments when their landlord evicted them to create short term rentals, they’re in Metairie now. Patricia lost her lease after thirty three years and now has moved to Arkansas. Jen with hubby and baby in tow are off to Ashville (her parents will follow), Kassidy and hubby are also invading North Carolina. Both Laura (around the corner) and Jacob (next door) have gone north for their residencies. Melanie and boyfriend are moving to California of all places! Every day I hear more people I know-- that have made up the fabric of what it means to be New Orleans— bidding me adieu. Businesses that I’ve relied upon are closing, resources and services cut off, buckling under economic disparities between the movers and shakers that move in and those that are simply re-moved; but that’s not the point of this missive.

The question (point) is that: considering the ‘New Orleanian’s Diaspora’—(defined as: “the dispersion of a people, language or culture that was formerly concentrated in one place”)—are Ex-New Orleanians not creating the same dispersal elsewhere? Charlotte? Georgetown? Louisville? Galveston?  “Danger, Danger, Will Robinson!”:  Austin has already fallen; I even hear that our folks are moving to Cincinnati!

I’m fortunate to have a ‘hidden gem’ of a shop in New Orleans, where I get to meet and greet people from all over the country (and the world at large); the stories are the same: it’s happening everywhere. Who are these people, having started this wave, that are leaving my friends left to wash up on other shores? By and large they’re classified as “Techies”, those folks that work from home on their computers and make living enough to pay and play here without adding much to the culture. Spectators. One of my ex-neighbors explained it thus: “they movin’ us poor folks out so much that pretty soon they gonna have to bus us in for second lines!”

E. g. usta be, creative French Quarter chefs had to move into affordable neighborhoods to build their restaurants and reputations, now, they have to move to (affordable) Arabi? The question is--- what happens to Arabi-ans when they are overrun with Orleanians? Gentrification or dispersal?

And once we’ve all left, when we abandon our (no longer) reasonably rented apartments, when we’ve sold our houses for a profit, when our job has been outsourced to Houston, where are we going to go? All the good places have been taken and taken up; Christ on a crutch, we’d have to go somewhere that has winter! Leave the country? That’s an option; however, we’ve already moved natives out of San Miguel, Placencia, Yelapa, Venice, Panama and Chiang Mai; there must be somewhere else! No, nononononono! There is no place like New Orleans; or is that: there’s no place like the New Orleans that was, the one in our memory that we came back to and stayed for?

I have long time New Orleans friends, you know, the ones who like to play the ‘ain’t dere no more’ game and a few of them opine: “wait until after the next hurricane, the next evacuation, then we’ll see!” See what? Oh, I know… all the bad guys will leave with their tails between their legs and all the good people will flock back like birds coming home to roost; giving Newark, Nyack, Norfolk and Newport News back to their displaced; give New Mexico back to the Navahos! New Orleans will return to the glory of yesteryear and we’ll all have kickass jobs, killer digs, meet ‘the one’ and live happy as crawfish in a muddy pond. Not likely. We created this monster as well as the myth that there ever was glory in our yesteryear; the thing that we cherish in our memories is fact: we were happier before. The thing that we fail to wrap our heads around is that it will never be ‘before’ again…ever. The folks that we point fingers at, telling ourselves that they are the cause of our New Orleans Blues came for the same reason we did, and now they, in fact, do live here at the cost of what we selfishly considered our way of life: dysfunctional and licentious but affordable. See?

One theory has it that humans are like a rash upon the planet, another is: “we have met the enemy and he is us”.

The Case Against Plastic

The Case Against Plastic

By

Phil LaMancusa

            The very first item that you need to accept is that you cannot throw plastic away. First of all, there is no ‘away’ for plastic; organic matter can compost and degrade and break down into other organic materials; plastic is not an organic material, it does not decompose. Wait, I’m wrong; plastics will decompose; only it takes a little longer than organics. Plastic takes 450-1,000 years to break down.  Where is plastic? Plastic is like God, plastic is everywhere. Bags, bottles, wrappings, ingredients in makeup, decorations, diapers, automobiles, furniture, clothing, kitchen appliances and tools. There are more than 500 foods-- that we know of-- that contain plastic; and no, plastic is not something that I personally want to ingest.  

            FYI: Around the world, the ocean’s currents form vortexes (called Gyres) as they pass by each other going on their merry ways, like the curves on a global ampersand. Finish that bottle of water, crumple up that burger wrapper, toss that pf30 sunscreen tube anywhere near water and where will it wind up (assuming, correctly, that plastic does not sink in water)? Correctomundo! Sooner or later.

There is a North Pacific gyre that is called “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch”, made up mostly of plastic that has gone from water system to water system until at last it comes to rest in an ocean gyre, needless to say, it is not the only “Garbage Patch”. Others are in the North Atlantic, South Atlantic, South Pacific and Indian Oceans. This one, though, is the size of Texas. It will not healthily support marine life; although, there are seers that predict self sufficient colonization and (human) independent living situations including innovative underwater skyscrapers made from ocean trash in our future on those sites.

Plastic bags are a big issue because they are not recycled and end up in landfills, waterways and the cracks and crevices of your world. California has outlawed plastic bags, New York City and Washington D.C. impose a fee on using them and although plastic bags account for no more than 15% of plastics used, environmentalists believe that this is a great start to cutting down on the world’s plastic addiction.

70% of food packaging can release chemicals that act like estrogen: these include baby bottles, deli packaging, flexible bags and even those products marked ‘BPA Free’. Now, let’s consider New Orleans with our go-cups, Styrofoam (which is made from plastic), and large super-markets that pack people’s shopping carts with more plastic bags than there are items purchased. We use plastic bags, wrappers, containers and products here like they’re dollar bills in a whore house on bargain night.

When plastic is heated, the best that scientists will state is that “it is not good for you”. Thanks guys. And yes, smokers, there’s a carcinogenic plastic in those cigarette tips; if the tobacco doesn’t get you then the filter will.

Citing that more than 160 municipalities and Hawaii have some sort of ban on plastic bags, The New Orleans Advocate reported (November 21, 2015) that City Councilwomen Susan Guidry and Latoya Cantrell introduced an ordinance that would require retailers to charge customers (with some logical exceptions) for paper and plastic bags. On March 10, 2016 the Advocate reported that the bill (#31074), indeed, would be taken up at the next legislature session by the House Committee in Municipal, Parochial and Cultural Affairs which had its first session March17 this year.

The plastics industry spends millions of $$ to keep regulation at a minimum, if at all, they don’t care if plastic is choking our planet, they’re fat cats that make mucho dinero and laughing all the way to the bank. They claim that poor people will suffer if they have to pay a fee for plastic grocery bags and neglect to mention that the price of those bags is already factored in to goods purchased; they’re argument is that it is a tax on shopping. Conscientious folk will point out that it isn’t hard to bring your own reusable bag and many companies are willing to give reusable bags away just to have the advertising space.

            Plastic is made of petroleum and chemicals that are compressed into large molecules that are malleable, hence the name. In 2014 plastic grocery bags were the seventh most common item collected during the Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup, behind smaller debris such as cigarette butts, plastic straws and bottle caps. Plastic bags can choke marine life, snag birds and hang about in tree tops like (as they say in Ireland) “witches’ knickers”.

            Proponents of bag usage will tell us that most bags have a second life as garbage can liners, kitty box liners and pooper scooping bags. Logic tells us that this is still only one step closer to the dump. By some estimates, the world uses and throws away more than a trillion bags a year, that’s 1,000,000,000,000; think about that when that BRF employee at the checkout station loads your cart with more plastic bags than items purchased. One big plastic boogie man is BPA, found in food and liquid packaging and containers, thermal cash register receipts and the lining of canned goods (75% of cans in North America are lined with BPA). BPA gets into your bloodstream, and is an endocrine disrupter with links to cancer, asthma, autism, blood pressure, childhood obesity and diabetes as well as compromises in fetal development. BPA is a plastic product. It can even be absorbed through skin pores.

Can we now ever conceive of a world without plastic? Unfortunately not, the genie is out of the bottle and as I look up from my (plastic) keyboard I count twenty different products made from the material within arm’s reach. The most logical solution to the proliferation would be to stop producing the stuff and rely solely upon recycling that which we can and doing without that which we cannot.

In a call to the Councilwomen’s offices, I was told that

“New Orleans households use approximately 225 million plastic bags annually. Reducing the use of these plastic bags will not only beautify our City and save taxpayer dollars on sanitation collection, but will also prevent toxic environmental harms that occur in the plastics production process. By encouraging consumers to bring their own bags to shop, we save resources and lessen the need to create throw-away consumer goods. I have enjoyed working with the Reusable Bag Alliance to educate the public about this ordinance, and look forward to the hearing in September.”

The other day I got a plastic bottle of water as a last resort on being stranded in public unprepared for the heat and the glare of a New Orleans July. I noticed that in five states there was a nickle deposit on the bottle and considered how many people here could live from the plastic bottles that we throw away (or recycle).

Line Cookin' Dogs

Po Boy Views

By

Phil LaMancusa

Line Cookin’ Dogs

Or

Standing the Heat

            We had fast hands, wet brains and wicked senses of humor; nothing was sacred except for the plate we were working on. We called ourselves ‘line cookin’ dogs’, uniquely ourselves and overly underqualified for any semblance of a normal job or lifestyle. Somewhere, at a point between insanity and uncertainty, we’d gravitated to the only places that would employ us: food service establishments. We had started at the bottom, busting suds, chopping prep and finally being trusted enough by Chef to hold down stations of chaos, heat and rhythmic madness of our own. We preferred working night shifts; we liked staying up late and sleeping through mornings. We came in, dodging sunlight, on the run with hangovers and wisecracks, ready to confront an unsuspecting world, we took and gave out abuse our entire shifts, then went out to claim our lustful places on our favorite barstools.      

This was before busy food; before ‘culinary politicians’ cooked on food networks and ‘celebrity chefs’ (that wouldn’t last a week in our clogs) created meals without breaking a sweat. Barring jail time, rehab or coming to our senses, it was expected that one day we would be in charge of our own kitchens. We looked up to our chefs or despised them, but never disrespected them (not to their faces); our chefs were in charge because they had stared death in the face, fought their demons, and emerged vertically.  Chefs held power over us; more master than manager.

            Wait staff was usually divided between lifers and those just passing through on their way to becoming actors, writers, musicians and/or people who looked forward to a more responsible lifestyle, getting married,  having kids. Their feet were held to the fire each lunch and dinner shift around crunch time--the infamous hour (or hours) of ‘the rush’. The rush was not a time for the faint of heart, slow of wit or weak of bladder, either in the kitchen or on ‘the floor’. The fragile were culled by their inability to handle busy times without becoming ‘weeded’ or ‘in the weeds’--the term used when someone is in over their head and hopelessly lost in their timing, organization and minds; have this situation occur a few times and the person is literally ready to throw in the towel. Rarely did us ‘dogs’ show mercy to the weak, it just wasn’t done. To be frank, kitchen work is hot, sweaty, low paying, thankless work. It’s work times ten and if you can’t cut the mustard, you’re left in the dust and kicked curbwise.

            Miraculously, along the way, a few of us caught the fever and food became our lives; we became defined by our work and that’s when the fires really started getting hotter. We trained with enthusiasm; we took and quit jobs that led nowhere, padded our resumes, found mentors, went to school, read books and emerged with attitude, passion and a thirst for power. We became gang leaders, plain and simple. Keith Richards would have made a great chef.

            Being in charge is a circle of hell all its own. As the person in charge of employees that call you Chef, you have to get the most out of every warm body while fending off the bean counters who judge the bottom line and not the béarnaise, paraphrasing Moses and the commandments:-- ‘thou shall make as much profit as humanly possible this month and then next month make more’-- all the while, you have minions who, albeit a tad shy on experience, have bills to pay and habits to support (laundry, rent). When it’s slow, you’re expected to cut someone’s hours; when it gets busy, you’re expected to work the line, shoulder to shoulder with someone who expects you to be able to do their job better than they can, and you do; and that’s the positive side.

I learned to cook a chicken two hundred different ways, filleted schools of fish, peeled fields of onions, shelled a ton of shrimp and opened a bed of oysters in my time. I have come to believe that there is no component of a meal that can possibly be made better by using a mix, except maybe Bisquick biscuits. I’ve kept and mastered cooking jobs in twenty nationalities and I haven’t scratched the surface of culinary knowledge. I’ve substituted ingredients from skate wings for scallops to pork tenderloin for veal cutlet. It’s hard to be humble once you’ve mastered lemon meringue pie, ciabatta and perfect sunny side up eggs.

            My mentor had a keg of beer in the walk-in refrigerator (PBR) just for the cooks, he made us listen to the Rolling Stones and Beethoven, he worked us twelve hours a day, six/seven days a week and we loved it. He would greet us each morning by promising: “today is the first day of the rest of your miserable f**king lives” and then fulfill that promise. We would do anything to out-cook him, and never could. He is a culinary monster, wherever he is. He taught me that before I could be a success as a leader, I would have to master the art of being a follower.

            Katrina put a hold on my kitchen career when my job as the Culinary Director of a small cooking school here did not resurface. I figured that maybe, after fifty years of blood, sweat and beers, it was time for me to concentrate on the cookbook shop that I co-own and work to make a success of. Still I cook every day—at home. I go into my kitchen, wash up, put on my apron and hone up my knife; I pick up an onion and go into my zone. Line cookin’ dog.

            Comment: “Chef, great stuff, but you made it way too romantic!! It needs the bleeding and oozing finger cuts tied off with butcher twine; the sear and hiss of your flesh as it gets pushed up against gray hot cast iron. It needs more breakdowns and flare-ups, burnouts and speed freaks. But other than that, I loved it” David Mahler, Chef of the Jungle

Satchmo Uncensored

Po Boy Views

By

Phil LaMancusa

Red Beans and Rice-ly Yours

Or

Satchmo Uncensored

“Of course Pops toms, but he toms from the heart!”  Billie Holiday

            I told a tourist the other day that St. Louis Street as well as the cathedral at Jackson Square are named for Louis Armstrong: “After all”, said I, “we have Armstrong Park, Armstrong Airport--- he is our City’s favorite son--- so, naturally we have canonized him!”

 Not really, but it’s not a stretch; we’ve literally put Saint Satchmo on a pedestal, too bad, even though he deserves it, he never wanted it. Let’s start at the beginning:  the grandson of slaves, the illegitimate son of a part time hooker and an absentee laborer, raised mostly by a local Jewish family when he wasn’t being shuffled from pillar to post for a pallet; reared in a dirt poor slum, selling buckets of coal to the Storyville prostitutes (and listening to his musical hero, Joe “King” Oliver), picking up scrap from the back of a drawn wagon and cacophonically blowing a tin horn—“he played it every day, all day”-- to attract business. It was while working and tootling “one of them long tin horns that they celebrate Christmas with” that he spotted a beat up cornet in Jake Fink’s Loan Office (Pawn Shop) on Perdido and South Rampart Street and Morris Karnofsky, the rag, bone, bottle and metal (junk) collector that he worked for, lent him the two Dollar down payment on the five dollar instrument. The rest he paid on time from his hard earned pay.

The Karnofsky family, Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, took little Louis in and even welcomed him at their table, what they called ‘cupboard love’ back then; ‘Mother Tillie’ would make sure that he was fed and even taught him Russian lullabies, because he also had a good voice. The Karnofskys were the first to encourage Louis’ playing and singing; nurturing him in his early life, this kid from a broken family. Louis forever wore a Star of David, relished Jewish food and praised his adopted traditions, giving full expression to this double helix of cultures-- Jewish and African American-- all of his days. The solidarity that he felt was well earned and given freely. It seems that New Orleans has perpetually had an element of haves and have-nots, and like it or not Africans and immigrants have generally had to go through periods of exclusion and prejudice until they come into their own; the Africans, the Irish, Germans, Sicilians and Eastern European Jews all were looked down upon and left to hard scrabble --basically because they were poor-- until they created a prosperity of their own making.

One of the things that united them was music. That music is called Jazz; Jazz is the people’s music, and at the time of Louis Armstrong’s childhood, Jazz was demanding attention.

Singing/scatting in street skiffle bands by age ten, Louis fit into music like a hand into a glove. A performer from an early age, he never tired of wanting, and getting, attention, eating it up like chicken on Sunday and, as we all know, is now called forward for his ‘prodigious virtuosity and extraordinary talent’. It is not enough to say that he got very very good on his horn; he was, simply put, a Musical God.  A god that was treated unfairly enough by his city from day one to the extent that he lived out his life away from here and is buried in Queens, New York not far from where his house that his wife bought in 1943 is and where he called ‘home’ until his death in 1971.

The fact is that Louis Armstrong grew up poor and powerless and he never forgot that. The neighborhood that he grew up in was called ‘the Battlefield’ (AKA Black Storyville) because of the gambling, drunkenness, whoring, fighting and shootings that occurred there. He dropped out of school in the fifth grade and started working; Louis had to hustle because he was the wage earner of his family that included his mother and his sister.  He was sent to the Waif’s Home at age eleven for firing his step father’s pistol on New Year’s Eve and spent three years locked up. It was there that the band director Peter Davis recognized his talent and potential-- as did Louis-- and when he was released, his musical muse called and he followed. He played in New Orleans bands in his early teens, riverboats at eighteen, up to Chicago, over to New York and back, bringing Jazz and Blues to appreciative audiences and making money before he was twenty-one. Between 1925 and 1928 Armstrong cut more than sixty records with his band The Hot Five. It was then that Armstrong, single-handedly transformed Jazz into a soloist’s art.

Louis Armstrong was married four times and was reputed to have taken many lovers, he regularly smoked marijuana and kept in good health (according to him) by taking routine intestinal purges. He publicly boycotted New Orleans since its banning of integrated bands in 1956. He was raised with prostitutes, pimps and prejudice and, with his immense musical ability, he escaped that and became an international celebrity only to find, whenever revisiting the South, not much had changed since his childhood, even into the 1960s. Segregation of restaurants, hotels, theaters and performing venues disgusted him; viciousness, discrimination and violence aimed at blacks by whites scared him. Explaining a resistance to demonstrate publically he explained: “they would beat Jesus if he was black and marched!” He had already been the target of a bombing in Knoxville at an integrated performance in 1957.He cancelled a trip to Russia in the same year protesting the Alabama guardsmen anti-integration military occupation of a Little Rock high school. “They’re going to ask me what’s wrong with my country and what am I supposed to tell them?” He spoke out against it and President Eisenhower’s inaction and was reviled by blacks and whites alike for his actions and words; as if stepping out of the role of an affable, jolly, horn playing minstrel was an affront.

In 1964 he won a Grammy in Beverly Hills, for best song (Hello Dolly!). The next year when he returned to New Orleans it was on the heels of the killing of Malcolm X on February 21^st and Bloody Sunday (March 7^th) when state troopers armed with tear gas, bull whips and billy clubs attacked nearly six hundred marchers in Selma who were protesting the police shooting of a voter registration activist. He was able to see different sides of our country’s prides and prejudices; because of his talent he was loved and revered, because of his color he was disparaged.

If Louis Armstrong was alive today, would he find New Orleans very much different than the New Orleans that he knew? Sure, the streets have been paved (kinda), most everybody has electricity and running water; there’s gentrification and the white washing and green washing of our city infrastructure, but have we really advanced? Why is it that the majority of successful African Americans leave their New Orleans neighborhoods and even the city to find security and peace for themselves and their loved ones elsewhere?

In Louisiana teen pregnancy, infant mortality, child poverty, violent crime, obesity, unemployment, and neglect of the environment are still among (if not) the highest in the country.  Add to this the bleak futures for the 73% of young blacks graduating high school (the lowest in the country), the income disparity and low paying jobs for our workforce minorities--it can be depressing and oppressing. It’s true that we have come a long way, but, things are far from perfect. Any person living here needs to prove their worth, same as everywhere else; it’s just that some segments of our population have to work harder than others to make that point or be beaten down by the powers that be that act, in their own interests, with impunity.

It was talent that let Louis escape and the hatred of Jim Crow that kept him away. There can be no doubt that he knew what it meant to miss New Orleans or the sleepy time down here in the South; and he knew what it was like to be black and blue in America.