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05/04/12
We tried this a few months ago with, admittedly, mixed results. But we at MyNewOrleans.com are nothing if not stubborn, willing to subject you, our dear readers, to attempt after attempt until we get a thing right. (For more evidence, feel free to peruse our perennial advocacy for the unabbreviated spelling of our native sandwich.)
With that in mind, we invite you to submit festival photographs for inclusion in our 2012 Spring Festival Slideshow. The guidelines are as follows:
All images must be from, near or pertaining to a (duh) festival.
Please submit photographs in .jpg format.
Please include the photographer's name, as well as the date, location and (if possible) subject of the photograph.
All submissions are subject to publication.
No submission will be...
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04/27/12
A couple months back I participated in a Herculean carnival of endurance-sport obstinacy. In a fit of temporary insanity, I signed up for Rouge-Orleans, and in a subsequent fit of charismatic persuasiveness I talked five people into doing it with me. For the uninitiated, it's a 126.2-mile race from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. We opted for the relay format, because, come on, it's 126.2 f---ing miles.
Even so, I felt as though I'd earned a break after the race. That, and I pulled my Achilles tendon, so I had an ironclad excuse. (Don't remind me that I could have kept swimming. I don't care.) I limped through Mardi Gras and early spring with way more free time than usual (entire hours almost every week), but before I knew it, the sweet spot of racing season had...
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04/20/12
What to do and where not to drive this weekend
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03/30/12
"All In," and Other Films This Weekend
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03/16/12
Thirty percent of my physical possessions and 70 percent of my living arrangements are Craigslist discoveries. That is not necessarily to say that the roommates I've found on Craigslist are of any higher caliber than, say, the 25-inch Sony Trinitron television I bought two years ago that's only kind of really obviously partial to blue projections. It's just that the online auction house is a wonderful repository for mostly affordable - and sometimes tolerable - merchandise and real estate.
Of course, there are Craigslist horror stories. But if you trust your dating life to a site that prides itself on anonymity and affordability, you're asking for trouble, and police statements, in that order.
And so it happened that, this month, I happened to be more...
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03/09/12
Between this column, Read & Spin and Today's Top Events, I try to force as much book- and literature-related information on you all as you're willing to suffer, but sometimes books come across my desk and I can't find a pretense on which to mention them, or they come around too late for consideration in Read & Spin. Two such binder-board titles came my way this week, so I thought I'd pause to give them a brief shout-out.
Fortunately, they fit pretty snugly into MyNewOrleans.com's niche - they're books about architecture and food. So I think I'm safe.
The first is by a familiar name on the cookbook scene. Kit Wohl has recently come out with New Orleans Classic Brunches: Recipes from Famous Restaurants, in which she poaches (I couldn't...
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03/02/12
March is shaping up to be a solid month for film in New Orleans. The main act, of course, is the nationwide release of the New Orleans-shot 21 Jump Street. The film does not seem to cleave too strictly to the premise of the original series, which featured a pre-funny-hat Johnny Depp; but it does appear to have some merits all its own. For one thing, Channing Tatum has the opportunity to showcase his comedy chops (which, so far, have been rather wasted on films like The Dilemma). It remains to be seen whether or not Jonah Hill will deviate from his wheelhouse of foul-mouthed yet vulnerable incredulity. The film also co-stars a laughably thuggish Ice Cube, whose “mother----ers” aren’t quite as convincing as they were back when the series was on TV (not that he was on...
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02/24/12
So how does one become a writer in New Orleans? Literary clichés of absinthe and sackcloth aside, there are more resources than you might imagine in the Big Easy for folks trying to "make it" or just get their words from their notebooks to the ears and eyes of the masses.
In case you're looking to win a few dollars, or perhaps to publish that (first?) book, or maybe just get some feedback (toughen up if you are), the following may help you break through whatever's blocking you.
1. Workshops
Two of the local authors whom I've interviewed here have run workshops, and a third was a student of one of the first two. This sort of intense cooperation is essential to early projects. The "myth of the lone genius," as James Nolan put it, is...
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02/16/12
Since Eve Kidd Crawford and I can never agree, we’re doing another point-and-counterpoint-style blog series this week. Unfortunately for me, that means I had to come up with five things that suck about Mardi Gras, since she got the cake assignment to write about things that are great about Mardi Gras. But since Yankees apparently like nothing better than pissing on other people’s good time, I figured I’d try to live down to the stereotype.
Think of it as Carnival satire. Krewe de Jersey.
And since even I don’t really believe my own baloney, I’ve offered some workarounds to the “problems” of Carnival.
5. Bathrooms.
Finding them is difficult. Surviving them is nearly impossible. Nearly a million people all have to make due with...
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02/10/12
Tomorrow I’m running from Baton Rouge to New Orleans.
That’s an exaggeration. Actually, it’s a boastful perversion of the truth. I’m part of a six-person relay team running from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. Five-sixths of the time, I’ll be reclining in the relative comfort of a 15-passenger van, thinking about what a horrible mistake we’ve made and wondering why anybody would do anything so foolish.
So far our team, Hot Tag-Team Action, has dealt with shin splints and sprains. Two team members are coming in from Memphis. Only one of us has run a relay before, although we have between us two ultra-runners, another marathoner, two triathletes and two 10K enthusiasts.
And no, you’re not counting wrong—that adds up to seven team...
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Alex Gecan (it's a hard "c") is a Yankee and a carpetbagger. Despite these failings, he wisely moved to New Orleans in 2002. In 2008, he joined Renaissance Publishing as a humble intern. Since then, he has covered state politics and elections for The Trentonian in New Jersey, local news and events for The Brooklyn Ink in New York and penned a bevy of freelance articles. He eventually came full circle to rejoin Renaissance as Web Editor.
