A Sinking Feeling: Southern Decadence ‘22
In 1972, a group of New Orleanians, both gay and straight, held a party where guests were to come dressed as their favorite decadent Southerner. Today the house party has exploded into a six day bacchanalia attended by hundreds of thousands who rove the streets of the Quarter late into the night under the eerie glow of LED street lamps. The dazzling display of queer love and sexual liberation is set against a backdrop of police surveillance, piles of waste, and bodily exploitation. It is the domain of queer culture, and by extension Southern Decadence, to own these contradictions in the midst of what might be the age of our own demise.
Vulgar Vignettes
Today, there are only a few remaining movie theaters in New Orleans. But just a few decades ago, downtown movie palaces like the Joy and Saenger competed for audiences with neighborhood cinemas from the Marigny to Carrollton. What's less remembered is a brief period mostly in the 1970s when mainstream and art house theaters began switching to a new type of entertainment: pornography.
Why is the Great American Poem So Hard to Write?
Living as we do in trying times, Dean has been pondering poetry’s purposes, as Far Flung, his new poetry collection from Portal’s Press can attest. Throughout the volume he asks and answers the question, what can poetry do for a world that appears to be bleeding out anywhere you look? “This country is collapsing from within, it seems,” he says. “Poetry may be the lie that tells the truth, but what difference does it make?” When I ask him what difference it’s made for him, he dreamily returns to his lifetime of adventures. “A friend of mine in Brazil—he has something like a Brazilian Rick’s Cafe—set up a table where people would come up and I’d write them poetry on the spot,” he says.
My Hotel Room
As the right hand man of celebrity photographer Greg Gorman, Josh Smith has often traveled to far-flung destinations to coordinate and teach high-end photography workshops. Spending countless nights in the unfamiliar ambiances of hotel rooms, Josh had the idea to document the traces of his humanity in these transient spaces.
Economy Hall: Interview with Fatima Shaik
The twists and turns in how Fatima Shaik’s incandescent new book, Economy Hall, came into being are as remarkable as those within its pages. Economy Hall was a free Black brotherhood in 19th century New Orleans. Its members were genteel, extremely educated, and tireless in their fight to make a more just society. When the old Treme building that served as its most recent headquarters was torn down, it contained 24 books of handwritten minutes from a century of their meetings. spanning from 1836 to 1935. Shaik’s father was best friends with one of the last remaining Economy Hall members, and after receiving a call from him that these precious archives were on their way to the city dump, her father rescued the books.
Review: Called to Spirit, Women & Healing Arts in New Orleans
If you follow the sound of steady drumbeats and lilting accordion into the Ogden’s third floor gallery, prepare to be dazzled by the Neighborhood Story Project’s exhibit Called to Spirit: Women & Healing Arts in New Orleans. Presented as part of Prospect.5, and on display through January 23rd, curators Rachel Breunlin and Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes have retraced the legacies of our city’s most notable female spiritual leaders—past and present—through their sacred objects, audio recordings, visual art, and archival material. By presenting the unique material culture of New Orleans’ particular form of African-diasporic spiritualism, the exhibit broadens definitions of art into the metaphysical.
Com(Monu)ments
Queer poet and legendary Lusher English teacher Brad Richard is a Gulf Coast native, born in Port Arthur and full-fledged New Orleanian since the sixth grade. "I knew I was a writer from a young age," says Richard, "but I went through some other possibilities—like little children who don't that they're queer do. I was going to either be a priest or a jeweler." In junior high, Richard began writing poetry, making a small chapbook with the precocious title Living and Dying, Trying and Failing. "I knew I was a poet pretty exclusively by the end of high school," he says.
Save Our Souls
In the 1920s the City of New Orleans designed the monumental Municipal Auditorium to serve its elite as a convention center, Carnival ballroom, opera house, and concert hall, among other things, with glass-walled lounges where patrons could smoke without missing the show. The mayor gave no thought to locating the segregated facility at the edge of Congo Square, a historic gathering place of enslaved people revered by Black New Orleanians.
Positive Power: Interview with Gwendolyn Midlo Hall
When Gwendolyn Midlo Hall published Africans in Colonial Louisiana, her meticulous archival work performed the miracle of retrieving the lost voices of the enslaved Africans who built Louisiana from the ground up, paving the way for slavery historians elsewhere to do the same.
Truth and Time: The Paintings of Ulrick Jean-Pierre
The scale and vitality of his paintings put us directly into the fray, and with a single glance Haiti can no longer be dismissed.
Commerce & Capitalism
The story of commerce in New Orleans is the story of New Orleans, an epic poem told in polyrhythmic and multilingual verses. At its center is the marketplace, where New Orleanians have always gone to negotiate fiercely for power and prosperity.
La Decadencia: Interview with Piki Mendizabal
The movement of the water and its mysterious sound is the natural force most represented in my work.
Defending the Collective: An Interview with Malik Rahim
From his days organizing with the Black Panther Party in the Desire Projects, to co-founding the Common Ground Collective, Malik’s brilliance as a community organizer lies in the simplicity of his model: gather any and all available resources, do the necessary work no matter how unglamorous it may be, and honor and protect one another like your life depends on it.