Happy Abandoned Orphanage Day!

Ok, so, as a Memorial Day treat, I've decided to post TWO blogs today. I've been doing so much and blogging so little. I've got to catch up.

Charlsie and I explored an abandoned orphanage (which had most recently been used as a boys reformatory type of school prior to its complete abandonment after Katrina) today. She photographs abandoned buildings (and is documenting entropy therein), so I decided to tag along. Here are some pics of the place we broke into..I mean visited...today.

It looks like they just picked up and walked out. Nothing had changed, really, in the four years since the hurricane.

or maybe it has, a bit...

olllld typewriter in the hall....

Mold eaten classrooms....

Mold-engulfed orphan beds in the attic!

Abandoned library.....

Teeheehee.....

haunting attic window.....

mysterious cabinet full of keys....

rad-tastic old sewing machine (jealous).....

creepy nativity scene...

TERRIFYING dentist chair....wtf?

possible hobo sign?

We stayed for about an hour, leaving hastily for fear of arrest/mold poisoning/zombie attack.

"Roughing It" in Shreveport

This weekend my roommate, Charlsie, drove me five hours up to Shreveport, LA, (her hometown) to see her people and her culture. And what a fascinating anthropological adventure it was!

This was an Exxon station. This is what they sell in gas stations in Louisiana. I wanted to try 'em all! Unfortunately, they had just run out of everything listed above. Very popular eatin' spot.

Charlsie had a gig assisting a photographer friend (Charlsie's a photographer!) at the film/music/art house, Minicine. The totally rad guy who runs the place has a collection of hundreds of old film projectors that he wanted documented in pictures. That was cool and all, but take a look at the description of one of their past shows...if you can't decipher it, it reads:

"What if the Velvet Underground were blues cowboys from hell? What if Stereolab drove motorcycles and pick-ups and played shady bars on the Texas border?...Propulsive urban dirges for modern ghost towns."

I can't say it better myself. This is exactly the direction/mood/lifeblood that I want to evoke with Autonomous Clothing Co. I wish I had been here to catch that undoubtedly remarkable show!

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We "camped" that night at Charlsie's MeMe's (Cajun French grandma) lake house. In the morning, Charlsie showed me the lake...that had trees growing out of it. Magic water-dwelling trees.

I know that swamps have trees growing out of them, but really...out of a lake? This place is so alive that shit will grow anywhere!

We went fishing with worms. And it was gross.

But I caught a fish! A catfish to be exact. And I was more terrified than it was.

We had a bit of time to kill before the show we were going to, so Charlsie took me down her favorite country road.

How perfect is this place?!

Here's a (rare) photo of Charlsie, taking a much better photo of the above than I could ever dream of taking. That Charlsie, she's always gotta one-up me. Doesn't she just look like the perfect little Dorothy, innocently admiring the cornfields? Hope a (very possible) tornado doesn't pick her up and carry her away!

Also, unbeknownst to me, there's oil in these here fields! That's one of thousands of oil rigs in Louisiana. This is seriously one of the lushest, resource-rich states that I've ever visited. It's like Eden or something...am I gushing a bit? Is my Louisiana lust showing? I like it here, ok?

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The show that we saw that night was pretty rad. The band was a local bootstomping Shreveport band, called Dirtfoot, and the venue was the town's Mudbug Madness festival. I felt like I was mainlining Louisiana. And then this guy showed up:

And now I could end this trip satiated. I could chase this dragon no higher, tonight. But tomorrow is another day....

I forgot to mention

I picked up this little monster from a local painter who had a box full of em. He was going to eat them, so I decided to take one off his hands. His name's Napoleon. And I hope he grows into those ears.

Doing THINGS

Here's a pic of a skirt in progress, just so you know that I'm actually working on stuff and not just hanging out with these lunatics:

or marvelling at graffiti made with menstrual blood:

Or stalking wildlife in City Park:

Or stalking little green men in the KK projects:

I'm actually working. Seriously. I even have three other things finished which will be soon divulged to the public eyeballs.

The Road Trip: Part 2

I've been putting off writing this part of the blog, because, as you will see, it is very revealing and possibly damaging to The Greater New Orleans Artist Mansion. And although they suck, they did treat me relatively fairly. Let me explain...


Jacqui and I arrived at GNOAM at about midnight, having warned the resident with whom I was in contact (lets call him Ron) that I would be arriving at this exact time. We let ourselves into the house, whose main entrance was wide open despite the shady neighborhood, and introduced myself to the two fellows sitting on the couch in the large living room and asked if they knew where Ron was. Blank stares. "Dunno."


Awkward.

After calling him on my cellphone from inside the house (the two on the couch didn't seem that it might be appropriate to tell me where his room might be let alone say howdy-do back to me), Ron appeared in the hallway. He babbled incoherently about some paperwork he needed to fill out -and how this was a scary neighborhood-and how he didn't have keys for me yet -and how I might be able to have the back door fingerprint-reading lock programmed for me tonight -oh and here's your room:

Cooool.....

So, I kinda thought that my room was supposed to be on the first floor, not in the basement...I didn't even know that basements were structurally possible in New Orleans (or smart for that matter). That window doesn't look too secure...didn't you just tell me this was a "really scary" neighborhood? And I know that you said the furnishings weren't going to be "glamourous" but two dirt encrusted half deflated air mattresses as "bed", and a 2'x2' tv stand as "work table" might be considered a little bit less than unglamourous. And this closet, well:

That's a creative solution, but I'm not so sure that this piece of string is going to hold up to the weight of even one clotheshanger, and those fabric "shelves"might not exactly provide the storage space I was looking for. Thanks for the effort though.

Jacqui was even more skeeved than I was (I was quietly panicking, thinking that this was to be how I would spend my next 4 months). We elected to spend the night sleeping in the car and assess the situation in the morning.

The light of day, however, didn't exactly do wonders for the place:

cool bathroom.........

cool hallway.......

cool bathtub......

cool "gallery space"........

cool kitchen......

cool pile of shit in the corner.......

cool...absolutely appalling-

completely squalid-

totally offensive junkyard-

I mean cool backyard.....

I'd like to go on, but I think this is enough to show you how absolutely incredible this place was. This wasn't exactly the professional residency that I had been sold via all of GNOAM's online media....this wasn't a place that I could work, let alone live. So, I confronted Ron and his resident cronie (who proceeded to immediately unprofessionally gang up on me whilst trying to defend their professionalism) and I left. To GNOAMS credit, with alot of supremely honed cajoling, I was able to get my security deposit back from the relatively sympathetic mysterious off-site landlord guy.

AND I found a truly amazing place to live that same day. This scary, squalid place did not colour my view of New Orleans or it's fantastic artists, either, as the days that came afterwards were filled with the vibrantly talented and friendly people and extroardinarily exciting experiences I was expecting from this town. Pics and stories will soon come.

The Road Trip: Part 1

After a week of travelling through the beautiful south, I finally made it to New Orleans! Much drama ensued when I got here, but lets start at the very beginning...

Jacqui, my friend of 13 years, volunteered to road trip with me and all of my many belongings to NOLA. This was our first day of travel, stopped at a gas station/dairy queen somewhere in Maryland. We needed lots of windshield wiper fluid to wash all the many large bugs that were to soon splatter nastily across the windshield for five days. Mississippi definitely won for the state with the most kamikaze bugs.

Our first stop was supposed to be Wilmington, North Carolina (the pretty, seaside town where Dawson's Creek was filmed), but thanks to our GPS unit leading us an hour astray, we settled for Raleigh, NC...a very happy accident. Despite our reservations, Raleigh was amazingly friendly and full of great places to go. Immediately upon our arrival at the hotel, we came upon this kind fellow (Joe), the hotel bartender, who proceeded to be our hilarious tour guide of Raleigh and its local bars. Soon after this picture was shot, Jacqui bought a sub from the only place open at 3 am in Raleigh, upon Joe's recommendation. She ended up having to tip the angry delivery guy ALOT, because apparently he was Joe's oot dealer and he was all kinds of cranky. The sandwich cost her $20, WAS incredibly delicious, and Joe was immediately expelled for his stupidity. Poor boy.

Next morning/afternoon we took to the town. Raleigh is GORGEOUS! Its a small college and young professional type of town with lots of art, cool stores (and bars as mentioned), delicious food (that jacqui is eating oompa loompa style, here) and tons of southern hospitality. Out of all the places that we visited along our trip, Raleigh was by far our favorite.

Whilst in Raliegh, on our local pub crawl, we ran into two wonderful fellows, Jonathan and Adam. They were visiting from Myrtle Beach, and invited us to come stay with them for a few days. We made our way down the Carolina coast, stopping at beautiful, kitschy Carolina Beach. Jacqui, as you can tell, hates the beach, but humoured my ocean lust for a couple of hours.

Jonathan and Adam had the largest, most luxurious trailer I've ever witnessed. Three bedrooms? Waterfront? Amazing. And cool party tricks (this is flavored tobaccy in the hookah, of course). Adam was enthralling us with smoke bubbles, as you can see.

Lunch, the next day, was had at Captain Poo's lovely seaside restaurant. Ironic because soon thereafter Jacqui had an episode of three day long non-pooing which left her in this state:

Pregnant with Cap'n Poo's large, angry baby.

Later, we indulged in the traditional Myrtle Beach pasttime of put-put. I won, of course.

We celebrated with an awkward drink at a very Italian martini bar where we were looked upon in horror for our lack of fake tans and bleached hair. One drink and forty glares was more than enough to get us out of there.

As much fun as we were having, we needed to keep moving. We bid farewell to our new friends and headed to Atlanta.

It was boring and didn't embrace our uniqueness. Memphis, however, was delicious:

And full of history!

Beale Street!

Graceland!

And beer!

The next day, after a disgusting shake at Shake'n'Steak, we drove through the wilds of Mississippi to our final destination. We arrived at the Greater New Orleans Artist Mansion at midnight, where the drama began....to be continued.