    "Eating, drinking and carrying on..." -- Adelaide Brennan
Get yo' ticket in yo' haaaand ... I'm gonna see the Zulu queen. At da airport, online courtesy of Continental's President's Club's open wireless network (thanks, exclusive rich people club!) As I will be engaged in copious amounts of revelry over the next five days (and recovering the sixth, remembering that I art dust and unto dust I shall return), posting will be spotty to nonexistent. "Oh well it's Carnival ti-iime, everybody's having' fun ..." [ Link to today's entries ]
Cocktail of the day. We continue our mini-recap of great New Orleans cocktails ... It was Wes' turn to mix last night, and he said, "This is one I've been thinking about all week." It was created by Walter Bergeron, head bartender at New Orleans' Monteleone Hotel in the 1930s and is that hotel's signature cocktail. It's also really, really good ... particularly when you make a top-shelf version like Wes did last night, using Sazerac 18-year-old rye and Carpano Antica vermouth. (It's still really good with Old Overholt and Martini & Rossi.)
If you like Old Fashioneds, give this one a whirl. You'll love it. Just a closer walk with Gate. This just in from the Times-Picayune. I'll most likely be there.
See some of y'all there, maybe. Wake for Barry. Via OffBeat's weekly email:
Spin. Robert Charles Wilson has been one of my very favorite SF writers for about a dozen years now, ever since I read The Harvest, in which one night all of humanity is asked a question: "Do you want to live forever?" It's superb, and I've loved pretty much every Wilson novel since. His most recent is perhaps his best; I picked it up in hardback as soon as it was out (I'm far too impatient to wait for anything to come out in paperback, and I like my books to be made to last) and devoured it in just a few days. It's called Spin, and Patrick posted an excellent article the other day about Spin, Wilson's work and how it fits into the best of classic SF:
Wonderfully put, thank you. If you read SF, and even if you don't, do yourself a favor and read this outstanding novel (now out in paperback, for the patient and thrifty). Then read just about everything else Wilson has written, especially The Harvest, The Chronoliths and Darwinia. Quote of the day. As Wes and I were saying as we were watching Bush, Rumsfeld and McClellan on "The Daily Show" ... "Do these people not hear themselves when they speak?"
(Faire le *boggle*.) As Markos put it, "business concerns take precedence above all." Atrios offers a recap:
Naw, not shady in the least.
I only hope we can get that history (and see the perpetrators held accountable and punished) during our lifetimes ... Heckuva job, though. More Katrina emails have surfaced, showing a White House in chaos.
Wish them into the cornfield, Anthony. Please. ALL of them. [ Link to today's entries ]
Cocktail of the day. New Orleans cocktails are the order of the day all this week, as we approach Mardi Gras day in six days! I was particularly inspired to demonstrate the proper way to make this drink, after that ridiculous version in that Variety article which used "Meyer lemon-infused gin" and no cream! Last night we had Ramos Gin Fizzes, one of the quintessential New Orleans cocktails, invented by Henry Ramos in the 1880s in his bar at Meyer's Restaurant (now long-gone). As the story goes, when Huey P. Long was governor of Louisiana he brought with him to New York's Roosevelt Hotel the bartender from the New Orleans Roosevelt just so he could have New Orleans gin fizzes whenever he was in New York. Every man a king ... The magical secrets of this drink are the egg white (for body, texture and froth), orange flower water for its amazing perfume, and to shake the living crap out of it, with plenty of ice, for no less than thirty seconds and preferably one minute, about six times longer than you'd shake any other drink. You really want to emulsify the egg white and get a good frothy head going. During its heyday it's been said that Mr. Ramos had a dozen young barbacks behind the bar who did nothing but shake gin fizzes all day. (I would have dropped dead after the first dozen; making one batch of two fizzes last night made me want to take a nap, and that was even before a single sip.) Also, make sure you use plain seltzer or carbonated water, not club soda, as the latter contains too much salt. No photo of this one, sorry. After all that shaking it was all I could do to crawl downstairs carrying the two glasses without spilling them, and it would have been far too much of an expenditure of my little remaining energy to get the camera bag. (Okay, that's a lie, I just wanted to start drinking immediately.) It looks something like this, although I didn't garnish with a flower.
Serve these with a brunch and your guests will fall at your feet and declare their everlasting devotion. Dive in the gumbo. The Los Angeles Times' Food Section has an excellent article on gumbo today, and its culinary, cultural and spiritual connection back to Louisiana for the thousands of Louisiana Creoles who've made their lives in Los Angeles since the 1940s. I still miss a few of the great old Creole joints that helped keep me from being too homesick when I first moved here -- the now-gone Edouard's in Inglewood, and the late great Jase's Sid Cafe (a.k.a. "Sid's", and R.I.P. Mr. Jase) which was on Exposition Blvd. near USC. Fortunately places like Harold and Belle's are still around, plus newer places like Uncle Darrow's (close enough to work to drive there for lunch ... thank you, Norwood!), and then there's always my own cooking ... Those gumbo recipes they provide look pretty good. But they ain't as good as mine. :-) Listen to "Down Home" tomorrow night. Just a heads-up ... tomorrow night my radio program will feature all Mardi Gras and Carnival-related music, in addition to a special tribute to Allen Toussaint, who just received a lifetime achievement award from the good folks at OffBeat magazine. 7:00 - 9:00pm Pacific time on 88.5 KCSN in Los Angeles, or streaming in both broadband stereo and dialup mono signals on the web at KCSN.org. Mawk ya calendas! It will not stand. BushCo is really off its nut this time. Even the rabid, frothing right-wing nutjobs like Hannity and M*ch**l S*v*g* are calling him a traitor, after springing upon the American people a deal to have six of our main ports (including New York, New Jersey and New Orleans) run by a company that is owned by the government of Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates, a conglomeration of mini-nations that have ties to terrorism. It is perhaps the largest WTF moment in an administration that's had a long history of WTF moments. Tim Grieve writes in Salon:
Of course not. Quote of the day. From Steve Gilliard:
It's been pointed out that even though the company is owned by the Dubai government, it's primarily run by Brits and Americans, and that it smacks more of cronyism than a national security threat. That's undoubtedly true, but having our ports run by a company owned by a government that seems lackadaisical at best in preventing their country from being a base for terrorists itself seems imprudent ... at best. It's odd, though, that the Republicans who have such a big problem with Dubai-owned companies running our ports have had very little concern with port security in the past ... port security being a major poing in the Kerry campaign. Quote of the day, part deux. Steve Nichols, in a comment in response to the sentence "Bush and Cheney are so used to getting their way that they think questions are impertinent" from the above passage:
Cha-CHING! The money quote of the day. [ Link to today's entries ]
Getting it. Clancy DuBos, writing in this week's Gambit:
Read the rest.. [CORRECTION: It's been brought up that the editorial was not in fact written by Clancy, but was unsigned.] If you think that Mardi Gras is nothing other than a bunch of drunken out-of-town fratboy idiots going "Woo-HOOOO!" and their girlfriends flashing their tits to get beads, then you know nothing about Mardi Gras. It would be nice if the world media would get their heads out of their asses and make an effort to find out what it's really all about. Neologism of the day. Coined yesterday, by Wes.
Now, we need y'all to start using it and spreading it around so that we get it in next year's edition of Webster's. Feed me, Seymour. Oh my, more stuff to do in New York. Via Audrey, here's a scrumptious list from New York Magazine:
Oh my god. We're going to be drunk and bloated the entire time we're there. [ Link to today's entries ]
Carnival bullshit. (They don't get it.) I was reading this morning's front-page article in the Los Angeles Times entitled "A Melancholy Mardi Gras", and began working on a post in my head when Mary and Poppy beat me to it in email and journal, respectively. The gist of the article was that Carnival is "weakened by disasted as the city itself", and while nobody expects Mardi Gras this year to be exactly the same as it is every other year, the Times, being outsiders who don't understand the way things worked in our city then as well as now, cannot assume that low parade attendance on the first night of parade season spells doom for Mardi Gras in general. (To be fair, the article did say that crowds "will surely pick up when Carnival begins its final push next weekend," but I don't like this negative tone right out of the gate. First thought out of my head was that I rarely went to early parades myself when I still lived at home, and with no insult intended toward those krewes, I've never once been to the Shangri-La, Pygmalion or Sparta parades, and I sure as hell would be likely to skip them if it was raining. The early parades are never as well-attended as the later parades and the "big" krewes like Endymion and Bacchus. (That said, it would most certainly behoove you to check out smaller krewes like Tucks, for instance, who always put on a great parade.) Plus, as it was chilly and rainy Saturday night, that will always reduce attendance at early parades. (People tend to be more die-hard about the weather on Mardi Gras Day.) Mary's neighbor Henry also added, with regards to the line about the unopened boxes of throws still left at the end "First of all, most of those guys belong to other krewes, so they will just throw 'em at those parades. Secondly, anyone who has beads leftover--you know what that is? 'Cause they weren't throwing 'em enough! It's their fault!" Heh. Besides, Krewe du Vieux was gangbusters crowded and fantastic, so there. Then Poppy weighed in, firmly and authoritatively, about the national and international media coverage and said it all better than I ever could.
There are more examples from the national media in her complete entry. Read it all. Here's more from the link Poppy references:
Yeah you rite. Oh, speaking of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club, I've heard that the krewe, for the first time ever, is bringing in 20 actual Zulu natives from Africa. They've talked about this for years, but are finally doing it! What the ...?! I swear to God, if anybody had said to me what these Australopithecines apparently said to New Orleanian Dan Frazier on an airplane, I would have ended up getting arrested on arrival for backhanding these idiotic assholes. This is what BushCo, their sycophants' and the aforementioned national media's lies about New Orleans hath wrought. [ Link to today's entries ]
Mary's latest article for Frommer's. Y'know, like a big ditzbrain, I forgot to link Mary's new article on New Orleans for Frommers.com (and she emailed it to me over a week ago ... it's not easy being both God Emperor of Procrastination and Avatar of Absentmindedness). So here it is, read it all but especially the latter half:
I'm taking a red-eye home next Friday at 1am, arriving around 8, and after my shower the first place I'm going is the Lower Ninth, and my school. I need to see. Er, no. John Dvorak, when I've deigned to read him, has been one of my least favorite columnists for a good while now. His latest magnum opus, that Apple might and indeed should drop OS X and "switch" to Windows because Apple hardware now runs on Intel chips, is perhaps his most absurd yet. Dave Schroeder on Slashdot cogently explains why Dvorak is full of shit. (He's full of shit so often, in fact, that I wonder why people continue to pay him for this kind of drivel.) [ Link to today's entries ]
"A pour man's game." Ugh. There are some puns at which even the likes of me must groan ... fortunately, I can't claim credit for this one -- it's the title of a nice article in weekly Variety about the resurgence of cocktails. It's been done before, as we know, but I never complain about seeing another one; the resurgence must surge further! The article mentions some familiar names -- Dr. Cocktail (of course), Tony Abou-Ganim, and has a fair number of quotes from our friend Daniel Reichert, proprietor of Vintage Cocktails, a catering company that provides menus of mostly classic and historic cocktails (along with some new ones) for various events. (Nice gig.) This article, like so many others I've read these days, tends to falter once it gets to the recipes. Their Sazerac is close, but is very, very wimpy when it comes to the Peychaud's Bitters ... one dash? C'mon folks, it's not expensive stuff, and this drink is a showcase for the flavor of Peychaud's. Use at least three, if not four. That drink they call a "Ramos Gin Fizz" ... um, ain't. It's got several ingredients in common, but Henry Ramos' bartenders weren't infusing their Plymouth gin with Meyer lemon peel in 1888 ... and the drink needs cream and lime juice in it, too. What is this, some kind of California "lite" version? Sheesh. It might be a tasty fizz, but it ain't a Ramos. Fortunately, there's a tasty-looking new creation by Daniel himself, and being fans of its namesake we love the name: 
Perhaps the most exciting thing in the whole article was one little passing mention, and since it's there I guess I can finally comment on it ...
Oh, frabjous day! Calooh! Callay! Finally, there'll be a local bar for us. A bar where we never have to make sure the bartender puts bitters in a Manhattan, a bar where we never have to wonder if the $10 cocktail we've ordered is going to be any good, a bar where we'll just know every single drink will be excellent. (Dan, ya gonna have a coupla regula bawflies, bra.) We haven't had a single place where we like to go out for cocktails since Cinnabar closed, and even though we love making drinks at home we love going out, too. Daniel's new place will be at least 14 miles from the house, though, so we'll need to find a restaurant we like within walking distance of the bar. Drinks drinks drinks, then dinner, then drive home. Anybody know a good place to eat in Studio City? NOLA in the news. Plenty of national news stories about the city today.
(Actually, the first Mardi Gras parade of 2006 was Krewe du Vieux, last Saturday.)
Well, it's not good that convention business is down -- we need to get that back up again -- but all y'all potential Jazzfesters should have plenty of places to stay now!
(Hi, Mary!!) Frommer's New Orleans is the definitive guide to the city, and not only because my friend wrote it and my red beans 'n rice recipe is in there. It's the best one, seriously. Here's Mary in another USA Today article from a few weeks ago:
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