New Orleans - A Picture Tour

Here's the official picture tour of our side trip down to New Orleans (with a bit of Baton Rouge mixed in)

This is probably the most New Orleans picture we took! Black guy with cane, cap and suit! You don't get anymore iconoclastic then that! (Okay, so we cheated, this was actually in Baton Rouge)

I was expecting Bourbon street to be more scummy...it's nothing next to the red light district in Paris and Amsterdam.

The old state capital of Louisiana (in Baton Rouge); I felt like I had been transported to England.

Rain and churches make the best pictures!

If you're in New Orleans this is the bookstore to check out. It's on Pirate's Alley, right of to the side of that cathedral in the picture above, and it's where Faulkner stayed when he lived in the city. Rumor has it, he would sit drunk on the balcony and throw things at the nuns at the church next door.

French donuts are amazing! Please open a Cafe Du Monde in Orange County....

Outside the National World War II museum...I honestly didn't know we had a WWII museum, but we do and it's in New Orleans.


They had awesome propaganda posters inside the museum...can you imagine having this kind of stuff around the city as part of America's effort to fight the war on terror?!

The highlight of the New Orleans trip...a swamp tour about 30 miles North of the city.

Apparently all that mossy green stuff was not always there; after Katrina the swamp had no way to drain into the lake; they're hoping to have engineers open it back up once they're done making repairs on the city.

The question most people have asked is can you still see the effects of Katrina...this is one example of yes. The population of New Orleans is still not anywhere close to what it was before, and it was pretty common to see homes boarded up and completely abandoned. Anyone you talked to had a story of loss. With any luck more organizations will sponsor conferences in the city, because that's what they need.

Farewell...

This blog is being posted on auto-feed. By this time, I should be on my way to Baton Rouge with my wife where I will be presenting at the Louisiana Book Festival over the weekend.
Those who will be in the area on Saturday, October 4th, I hope you stop by. I'll be giving a solo performance at 10, and a co-presentation with Alex V. Cook called "Blogging is Writing, Too...Or Is It?" Alex is the author of Darkness, Racket and Twang: Essential Listening from the Fringes of Popular and keeps a blog here...check it out, and while your at it, buy his book; I haven't had a chance to read it (planning on reading it on the plane), but it looks good.

I'll bring back a picture or two (and perhaps a video) to share when I return in a week.
For the next week, all of the post here are on auto-feed (I promise they won't be boring!), as I am taking a brief vacation to New Orleans following the festival, and then flying back to L.A. on Thursday to see the New Kids on the Block at the Staple center (don't laugh...it's just one of those things I have to do to keep my wife happy! I am, however, ashamed to admit I was a fan of a few of their songs in junior high, so they better not be playing new material on Thursday night.)

There are a lot of things lining up for October. The most important being, fingers crossed, a new book in the works; I spent much of September (and random parts of the summer) hashing out a proposal with the help of my agent, and it's now time to sell.

There's not a lot I'll say about the new book at this point...except that it's not a sequel to "Quiet, Please." The handful of people I've told about the book all seem to think the idea is a good one, and I hope you do to.

I also hope to have a new dispatch up on McSweeney's in late October, early November, and am working on selling a couple of humor articles.

So enjoy a week of impersonal, auto-feed, blogs. I'll see you in cyberland next week...