NOLA Day 5- Floats, Flights, and Films
Today started with a trip back to the Warehouse District neighborhood. We fueled up for the day by going to Mojo Coffee Roasters, a local chain. Their coffee was very good, and they had a really relaxed vibe making for a great hang out spot.
From there it was just a short walk to Mardi Gras World, the home of Kern Studios the largest and most famous maker of Mardi Gras Floats. You could tell when you were getting close because most places don't have giant turkeys and dozens of carnival floats on their front lawn, even in New Orleans.
Mardi Gras World is open to the public for touring but when you walk in the first thing you notice is that it is still very much an active workspace, with people bustling and machines buzzing all around. The fact that Mardi Gras was this week only meant that it was already time to start preparing for next year's parade. Making other people's fun is hard work, and you can see the products of that hard work as you walk by a collection of famous characters from floats past on the way to the main lobby.
My personal favorite was Scruff McGruff, who looks awfully sneaky for a dog that's supposed to be taking a bite out of crime.
While we waited for our tour, they had different costumes and props that guests could interact with. My sister and I took slightly different approaches with our poses.
The tour started with a short video about Mardi Gras and the history of Kern Studios. The points they made in the video that really struck me were that Mardi Gras is the only citywide parade in the country that is that big, completely devoid of corporate sponsorship, and also entirely audience participatory. People don't just watch Mardi Gras, they participate, they dance, they sing, and they catch the throws from the floats.
To be able to march in the parade, each krewe needs to have 14 floats and 9 marching bands, so that keeps Kerns Studios pretty busy. The tour continued through the studio itself, and it's amazing how much artistry and hard work goes into each float. Each float starts out as a sketch, based on ideas and themes supplied by the krewes. Then the float is usually modeled in miniature out of clay to work the kinks out in three dimensions, and finally the real thing is carved out giant blocks of styrofoam. A long time ago they used to use fiber glass, but they've switched to styrofoam because its lighter and cheaper. Once the float is all painted, it's then given a special chemical coat to help preserve it from the elements because the weather during any given parade can be pretty unpredictable. For shapes that simple and frequently used, they have a special robot which is essentially a little blade on an arm that can be programmed to work on those, freeing the human artists to work on the more complex designs. One of these repeated designs frequently handled by the robot arm should be familiar to anyone who's traveled enough highways: the cows from Chik-fil-a billboards. I can't say I love Chik-fil-a's politics, but the cow billboards have always been pretty amusing to me, so it's oddly vindicating to find out they come from such a fine artistic pedigree.
One of my favorite things we saw on the tour was a series of Dr. Seuss themed floats from last year's Muses parade. The designs were so well done, rendering pop cultural and local figures in Who-ian styles. My personal favorite was a Grinch-like figure with suspiciously Trump-y hair holding up a big dead Twitter bird logo. The mayor of Who-ville and Seuss-y Squirtle, no double referencing last year's Pokemon Go craze, were other big highlights showcasing both the artistry and humor that can go into the parades.
Two other big ticket items were the recently decommissioned Mr. and Mrs. Kong from the super-krewe of Bacchus. These two floats were icons of NoLa's largest krewe, but as of this year they've been replaced by newer shinier models so who knows what will happen to these impressive and stylish apes. They don't exactly lend themselves to things outside of Mardi Gras, though perhaps a haunted house or a dentist trying to look cool for the kids might pick them up. If you look closely you can see the beads from last year's parade still in Mr. Kong's fist and hanging from Mrs. Kong's shades.
Other random highlights included the rock-em sock-em robots, a maybe-Jesus-figure with his insides on display, a giant Salvador Dali head, the main cast of the Wizard of Oz, and what really appears to be a witch with shit on her face. My sister and I really puzzled over what that one could possibly be that isn't that (female Count Chocula is the best we could do), but if it's a reference to something we really couldn't figure it out.
After the tour everyone got a free piece of King Cake which just put that museum even further over the top as being a must-see in my book. Free food is generally a good strategy, but it also happened to be very good king cake which didn't hurt. The museum also offered a free shuttle back into the main downtown area which was very convenient because it is a little bit out of the way relative to the rest of the neighborhood.
The shuttle dropped us off outside Mother's Restaurant, a local mainstay famous for their po' boys. I got their specialty, the Famous Ferdi Special which is their World's Best Ham and roast beef with Au Jus Sauce, and Lauren finally broke into pescaterianism and got a catfish po' boy. I am in all honestly immensely impressed with how long it took her to really have some seafood in New Orleans, because it's some of the best in country. The catfish thankfully lived up to her expectations, and my own sandwich was pretty incredible. I can't say I've had enough ham to truly say if theirs is the best in world but it's certainly the best I've ever had. I think overall I had a bit of a preference for Parkway's po' boys, but I think I'm mostly biased by the surf and turf which I was always going to enjoy over double meat. That being said you really can't go wrong with Mother's and they deserve some extra points for having posters of the pop culture fights you didn't know you wanted to see.
After lunch, we went to the main office of the Prospect 4 committee since we'd been enjoying their exhibits all over town. The office was pretty small and mainly focused on business but the two exhibits that were there were pretty amazing. In the main lobby was the incredibly named piece, the Organic Matter Death Clock by Quintron. In this piece two, plants were alternatingly fed food or poison and depending and the fluctuating CO2 levels caused by the plants living or dying were fed through a special synthesizer creating a bizarre soundtrack to the circle of life. It was very surreal and Frankenstein-y, but I really loved the insane amount of imagination and hard work that went into making it.
The other exhibit on display was a special video installation by Kahlil Joseph featuring three channel videos projected in a triangle so the when you looked dead center at any one side, you'd see half of the other two sides superimposed creating an impressive three dimensional image. The videos were mostly of beautiful southwestern landscapes, with one channel also focusing on the often overlooked tradition of Black and Native American rodeo performers. It was all really lovely, and the soundtrack was all done by Flying Lotus who, besides being John Coltrane's grand-nephew, is one of the most interesting electronic music producers in the game.
We kept the funky art train a-rolling by paying a visit to the New Orleans Contemporary Art Center. They were decked out with a combination of P.4 artists and other featured contemporary artists. These included: abstract geometrical pieces by Marianne Desmarais that examined the lines between sculptures and drawings; seemingly abstract minimalist pieces by Naama Tsabar that were actually musical instruments that guests could interact with, making sounds by plucking strings and waggling the cut felt; massive, whimsical sculptures made from found materials by Lavar Munroe and Rina Banerjee respectively; Creepily realistic statues of of crouching Japenese women by Taiyo Kimura that visitrors could sit on and charge their phones near if they were tired and not given a severe case of the willies; beautiful collage works on Japanese paper capturing incredibly fully realized scenes by Maria Berrio; a stitched leather piano by Margarita Cabrera that makes me uncomfortable for reasons I can't quite articulate; paintings by Wilson Diaz that reimagined Colombian narcos as British invasion musicians; and city maps made with dyed bacteria competing in petri dishes made by Nurhan Gokturk.
This floor also featured a larger installation by Dutch/American collaborators Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher entitled "Highway Gothic" which featured prints made on old 16mm film strips of crawfish and highways with ominous headlines superimposed to question the interaction of man made infrastructure and the natural world. I really liked this installation because I found the medium of old film strips really mesmerizing with the way it interacted with intentional and ambient lighting. There's also just something naturally spooky about giant images of crawfish. If someone told me today that all shellfish were actually alien species, I wouldn't bat an eyelash.
Probably my favorite piece on this floor was entitled Weekly Monster by Pedro Lasch. For every week in from November 2016 to November 2017, the artist used stock images from old horror movies and tongue-in-cheek captions to create posters highlighting what he believed to be the most horrifying thing in the news that week. The piece isn't a particularly subtle critique of the Trump administration but it does deserve a lot of credit for taking an essentially one note premise and breathing new life into it each week for a year. I was particularly struck by the simplicity of one poster that said "Build Levees, Not Walls". I had my own objections to the idea of a literal border wall, but until reading that I never realized how offensive it must be to states really feeling the effects of crumbling infrastructure that so much money would go to such a ridiculously pointless venture instead. I'm not entirely against working towards stronger borders, but I think I, like many, thought a literal giant wall had to have been a bit more of a metaphorical campaign promise than it turned out to be.
Nestled in the center of the spiral staircase leading to the next floor of exhibits was a piece by Evan Ifekoya entitled Disco Breakdown, that featured a large disco ball, music, and videos of delightfully un-self-conscious dancers encouraging visitors to take a break from their daily concerns and dance like happy idiots. It was a beautifully pure little piece of optimism.
The second floor featured quite a bit of impressive video artwork. These included a video surrounded by found objects related to Zulu culture by Penelope Siopis; a video designed to look like skywriting gently spelling out a fading "You're okay" by Jillian Mayer; a video of a mythological ancestral figure emerging from the sea Godzilla style by Cauleen Smith; and a video of different people from around the world eating with their hands to inspire empathy and cross-cultural understanding of a fairly common practice that Westerners consider barbaric by Zina Saro-Wiwa.
My favorite video was entitled Crop Over by Sonia Boyce that explored Afro-Caribbean traditions including Donkey-Man costumes and dancing, and extremely impressive stilt walking. I loved the juxtaposition of the flamboyant stilt walker with a stately European manor, as he went about very mundane tasks like trying to sit on a bench and read a newspaper. It was all very surreal and wonderful.
There were some non-video pieces on the second floor as well including a sculpture of carefully arranged beer cans folded in half to represent Islamic prayer by Kader Attia; a large scale wall paper timeline of New Orleans jazz and Rock and Roll by Dave muller; an incredibly deceptive piece called Bitter Sweet- Hershey's by Minerva Cuevas which appears to be a pop art rendering of a Hershey's Bar until a closer look at the Chocolate in the center reveals horrifying imagery of the colonial exploitations of South Americans that initiated the modern day chocolate trade; a truly massive and intricate silver dreamcatcher by Brad Kahlamer; and some performative photography by Kiluanji Kia Henda of friends and fellow artist replacing and posing instead of old statues of colonizers.
My favorite non-video piece on this floor was entitled Service by Abbas Akhaven which features a nylon cloth that has an image on it, but that image is only unfolded one minute before the museum closes, is left exposed all night when no one is in the museum, and the refolded up before the museum opens the next day to begin the whole process over again. I just got a kick out of how convoluted and intentionally pointless it all was, to show off the inherent absurdity of trying to capture beauty and keep it in museums where you can see it whenever is convenient.
After the museum, we rewarded ourselves for being with a trip to Drip Affogato Bar because we wanted the energy of coffee and the coolness of ice cream and we'd be damned if we were gonna find a compromise when we could just have both. The bar specialized in fancy ice cream and espresso combinations that were designed to complement one another. I got the Vietenamese Coffee combo which was stracciatella (which is what Italians and pretensious Americans call chocolate chip) ice cream with condensed milk, dark chicory coffee, and a stroopwafel. Lauren got the classique which was vanilla bean with pistachios, stroopwafel and espresso. The bar really excelled in both the ice cream and coffee components individually but once you poured the coffee on the ice cream and blended them up a bit the real magic of the place was unlocked. The ice cream thickens and sweetens the coffee, and the coffee unlocks new flavors in the ice cream, and it's all topped off with a delicious sweet waffle which I ate wayyy too quickly. My sister doesn't normally like straight black espresso, so I think she was a bit skeptical at first but once the ice cream had melted into it a bit I think she was sold too. I was definitely a teensy bit jealous of her pistachios, but I guess in the end my chocolate chips more than made up for it.
After our little afternoon snack, we went to our last Air BnB of the trip to put down our luggage and get ready for our flight home tomorrow. We had every intention of going back out and trying to see some more parades that night, but then as soon as we landed we both unintentionally took two hour long naps. I don't think we even fully realized how fast paced and jam-packed these five days were until we actually stopped moving.
By the time we both woke up, we really weren't feeling up to all the excitement of more Mardi Gras so we had a quiet night. We found out that Matilda and Drunk History were both free on our host's On Demand, so we watched both and were pleasantly surprised at how much better they both were than we remembered. Neither of us had seen Matilda since we were kids, but Roald Dahl books were a big shared part of childhoods, and Lauren was actually way ahead of the curve on Drunk History showing me the original YouTube videos long before it ever became a full series. If there is a better way to end a long and exciting New Orleans adventure, than laughing at drunk people and Danny DeVito with your sister, I'm not sure I know what it is.
Favorite Random Sightings: Graffiti that said "F*ck Trump- Sponsored by Humans" (I more enjoyed that they clarified they were human than anything else); Tobasco: A Burlesque Opera (I know what all of those words mean on their own but I have no clue what they mean in this order)
Regional Observations: In case you were worried, every Mardi Gras float legally has to have a bathroom on it so that there is no fear of emergencies in hour+ long parades.
People's Favorite Jokes: Here's one from the internet because I really got out of my rhythm of asking people for jokes
What did the policeman say to his belly button? You're under a vest
New Orleans Superlatives:
Favorite Coffee: Rue de La Course
Favorite Restaurant: Cochon Butcher, though Green Goddess is a close second and a definite first if you have any dietary restrictions
Favorite Beer: Fathom Black Lager by Port Orleans Brewing Co.
Favorite Bar: Dragon's Den
Favorite Po' Boy: Parkway Bakery and Tavern
Favorite Open Mic: 10th Street Live
Favorite Attraction: New Orleans Jazz Museum (but you really couldn't go wrong with any of the things we went to, and undoubtedly some of the things we didn't get to)
General Impression of the NoLa Comedy Scene: Really diverse mix of comedians and styles. Generally self-deprecating personal stories seemed to do the best, but there was a mix of one-liners and more experimental stuff and in general audiences were super supportive and the other comics were all very welcoming.
Song of the Day: