"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....