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05/16/12
Lee Circle is a potentially epic fulcrum for the Crescent City, the pivot where downtown becomes Uptown and the gateway to the museum district. But it’s been under-loved for too long. Gas stations occupy two of its landmark corners, and one of those is closed, while the sprawling embarrassment of the Louisiana ArtWorks, that shuttered boondoggle of an arts complex, lurks just beyond it.
But these days, at least, there is more life and light along the circle, and more reasons to visit.
The Circle Bar is back, and the former Le Cirque hotel has been remodeled as the Hotel Modern, with a new restaurant (Tamarind by Dominique) and a new bar.
That would be Bellocq, which would probably be a destination bar no matter where it turned up. This is a stylish cocktail...
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05/02/12
I’ve grown accustomed over the years to conducting some travel counseling for my out-of-town friends each spring. They want to come for Jazz Fest, but a full 10-day stretch to cover both weekends of the schedule out at the Fair Grounds just doesn’t jive with the cold realities of most vacation policies. So the negotiations would proceed with an opportunity analysis of which weekend to pick and which to forego.
These days, however, I’ve been urging these friends to make sure they’re in town on the Wednesday between Jazz Fest weekends, no matter what they do. That’s because this short weekday span between the festival weekends has enough going now that it’s become travel-worthy in its own right, and the off-the-Fair Grounds action comes to...
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04/18/12
Zydeco music at Rock ‘n’ Bowl on Thursday nights is a long-running tradition for this music hall/bowling alley. But for Chris Ardoin, who plays there this Thursday night, zydeco is more like a legacy, and one that dates back for generations.
Tradition and legacy sound noble, maybe even too noble for someone strictly looking to get the weekend started early on a Thursday night. But this is not folk-style, preservationist music. Chris Ardoin is a champion of the so-called "nouveau zydeco," a style alternately mixing in elements from hip-hop, R&B and reggae. It makes for a fun night, and a full dance floor.
The Lake Charles native grew up as a zydeco accordion prodigy, playing for audiences starting at age 4, touring with his father’s band soon...
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04/04/12
If there’s one thing you can still rely on in this fast-changing age of ours, it’s clockwork. The famous, spinning, carousel-themed bar – and namesake – at the Carousel Bar isn’t powered by clockwork exactly, but sitting at it sipping a drink can bring the gears and mechanisms of an old reliable timepiece to mind.
You and your barstool and your drink and your neighbor, they all turn at the slow, steady, certain pace of clock hands – though in this case they’re all moving counterclockwise. A complete revolution takes 15 minutes. Matching rounds to revolutions has long been a serious pursuit at the Carousel Bar, and 15 minutes is accepted as a reasonable amount of time in which to polish off a drink, provided you don’t have too many...
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03/21/12
Springtime in New Orleans has its own rhythm, and it starts with the emails and phone calls you’re probably getting right about now from out-of-town friends. They’re planning ahead for the big music festivals in April, and they want to know if that spare bedroom/futon/blighted shotgun next door is still available like last time.
Our friends abroad are always welcome, as are any visitors interested in experiencing our city and spreading some travel money around. But it’s still nice to savor that early spring sensation when New Orleans feels like it belongs a little more to the locals. One time when that feeling is especially strong is during the Wednesday at the Square concert series in Lafayette Square, which continues tonight.
Admission is free, and the...
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03/07/12
The indie rock scene in New Orleans must sometimes feel like a lonely place, what with all the attention to jazz in its birthplace. But this weekend that scene is about to get a lot more company. The three-day alt music festival called "foburg" comes around again March 9-11, with a line-up of some 100 bands and not a single Dixieland combo among them.
This is a bit of a free-form festival. It’s not held at a festival grounds, per se, but rather it’s spread across a network of 15 bars, nightclubs and other venues. Most are centered in Faubourg Marigny, the source of the festival’s intentionally misspelled name. In this, it resembles SXSW, the massive alt-music festival that will be held next week in Austin, Texas - and that’s no coincidence....
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02/22/12
You've done Mardi Gras right, so today, on Ash Wednesday, the last thing you want is some report about nightlife. You want snooze alarms, a nice scouring shower and a strong penchant for absolution. You've had enough of drinks and music and socializing.
Great. But how long does such stoic resolve usually last? Can it carry you through Lent? Until St. Patrick’s Day? How about just through one quiet weekend? I didn't think so.
Fortunately for those pulled between borderline exhaustion and the compulsion to participate in the life of their city, there are some calmer, perhaps more contemplative, distractions here and a great one is coming around again this Friday.
That’s when the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) resumes its weekly Where Y’Art...
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02/08/12
Visiting the horse track means partaking in all the pageantry and tradition of the sport of kings – the pre-race paddock parade of magnificent thoroughbreds, the color and flair of race fans dressed up for the day, the bugler’s call at post time, the go-go dancers grooving on elevated platforms wearing hot pants and brandishing jockey whips.
All right, perhaps that last item isn’t so traditional, but it is indeed part of the program when the Fair Grounds Race Course stages its Starlight Racing, a series of evening events that continues this Friday, Feb. 10.
Like other horse tracks around the country, the Fair Grounds is courting a younger clientele these days, and Starlight Racing is part of that bid. The historic track could never really be called a...
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01/25/12
It still feels perfectly normal to walk into the Circle Bar, never mind that it reopened just last weekend after a yearlong hiatus for repairs and renovation. An outpost at the fulcrum of Uptown and downtown, it’s still an alluring, atmospheric watering hole with one of the city’s more eclectic mixes of live music – and, incidentally, it’s still also one of the great spots for that rarefied New Orleans pursuit of streetcar-watching.
But take a seat at the conspicuously larger bar and immediately all the many changes made during that offline time begin to register, and they quickly add up to a big difference. The place still looks like the old Circle Bar, but it feels significantly bigger, a trick pulled off through addition by subtraction.
Walls that...
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01/11/12
I wasn’t around to see the Joy Theatre in its heyday, though I did catch a few movies there during its inglorious slide toward the mothballs of lost New Orleans nostalgia. Watching Spider-Man at the Joy in 2002 was memorable not so much for the film’s superhero thrills, but for the super-sized cups of soda that people in the audience periodically hurled at the battered screen when the villainous Green Goblin appeared, not to mention the gelatinous feel of a floor, its queasy mysteries invisible in the darkened theater but impossible to ignore.
Still, even in such a woebegone state the old place had character, from the marquee stretching around the corner, to the mid-century contours of the interior to, most strikingly, the towering, vertical sign outside that spelled...
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A transplant from his native Rhode Island, Ian McNulty quickly discovered how easy it is to strike up conversations with New Orleans people simply by asking about their favorite clubs and neighborhood joints.
