The voodoo that you do

February 22, 2016 Comments Off read Attractions, Louisiana, South, Travel, USA

The Voodoo Museum was my consolation prize on my last day in New Orleans. I’d first and foremost planned to visit the Musee Conti Wax Museum before it permanently closed at the end of December, but the timing simply did not work out–we were either doing something else or there wasn’t enough time left in the day for a proper visit. So here it was, the last day of my trip, my very last opportunity, the museum was supposed to be open, and I waited outside. And waited. And waited. And tried to call. And waited. Eventually, someone came to the door and said that the museum probably wouldn’t be opening that day as they were having problems with their electricity. So I suppose it just wasn’t meant to be, although I can’t help but be a bit disappointed about it.

Instead, I set my sights on the Voodoo Museum, a three room museum packed to the gills with altars, gris gris, and just enough information about each thing to pique your curiosity. For $5, we had the run of the place, learning about the difference between Voodoo and Hoodoo (in essence quite similar with some differences–the former led by a voodoo queen and associated with the catholic church, the latter led by a spiritualist bishop in a separate church). That’s right–you read Catholic church. Voodoo as a spiritual practice is often associated with paganism and witchcraft especially as contrasted with white christianity, but Marie Laveau herself was a devout Catholic, ministering to the sick and dying of yellow fever, which plagued the city over the course of her lifetime.

As with all of these niche museums, it’s hard to know what’s fact and what’s bunk. For instance, in one section, they claimed that voodoo was a dancing religion, the purpose of which is to become possessed by the spirits via the transforming ecstasy of dancing, and that the musical rhythms call the spirits down which cause the dancers to eat, drink, sing, dance, smoke, and engage in sexual relations, and that a West African word for sex, jass, is the etymology behind “jazz”, which doesn’t actually seem to be true. So does that make the whole thing about voodoo being the “do it if it feels good, the spirits made me do it” religion suspect, or just the last bit? And that thing about Voodoo being Catholic and Hoodoo not…is that applicable to voodoo in general or just Louisiana voodoo or just Louisiana voodoo post Marie Laveau? Based on my limited internet research, it would seem that it was Marie Laveau who intermingled Catholicism and Voodoo and that people have carried on in her stead since, keeping and discarding the aspects that they personally believe properly align with the faith, which would make my previous statement about the difference between Hoodoo and Voodoo also suspect. I would have to do a lot more in-depth reading to make any definitive claims one way or another about the veracity of any information in the museum. The important thing is that now I know where to buy a zombie whip and how to make a proper voodoo doll.

Ahh, New Orleans. The Big Cheezy. Sweet Lady Gumbo. Old….Swampy.

February 19, 2016 Comments Off read Louisiana, Masticating With Mellzah, South, Travel, USA

I love a good pun. And bad ones, too. So when I spotted The Big Cheezy on Google Maps as I was plotting out places that I wanted to visit on my trip, it immediately got added to the list. What’s not to love about grilled cheese sandwiches?

It was actually a bit of a struggle to get to the shop–I intended to take the streetcar the majority of the way there and walk the remaining few blocks, but literally two blocks into my ride, a truck tried to make a left turn in front of it, the streetcar couldn’t stop in time, and t-boned the truck pretty badly, really crunching the rear quarter. The driver of the truck just drove away, she didn’t even look back. Even though everyone seemed fine and the streetcar itself had very little damage, we had to wait for the transportation authorities to arrive, and then fill out paperwork, and everyone was deboarded as that car had to be put out of commission for the investigation. The distance between me and lunch never felt longer. I eventually called for an uber driver to pick us up and take us the rest of the way as the next car was jam packed and I was starting to get hangry.

The grilled cheeses were completely worth every second of hassle, however. We went splitsies on two sandwiches–The Juice (cheddar & pepper jack on sourdough, roast beef w/ debris gravy and grilled green peppers) and Crawgator (cheddar, pepper jack on sourdough w/alligator and crawfish sausages, caramelized onions and grilled green peppers)–so basically, the difference between them was some onions and the type of meat. My standout favorite was the Crawgator. The Juice was good, but a bit wet, and the beef gravy tended to overpower the cheese. The crawgator sausage added heat and complexity without overwhelming the cheese–because after all, a grilled cheese is first and foremost a cheese sandwich.

The streetcars were still borked from earlier. I should’ve grabbed a third sandwich for the long walk back.

City of the Dead: St Louis Cemetery No 1

February 17, 2016 4 Comments read Louisiana, South, Travel, USA

The above-ground cemeteries of New Orleans have long-fascinated visitors to the area. Mark Twain famously said that the city of New Orleans has no architecture, save for its cemeteries. Nicolas Cage even bought space for and constructed an enormous whitewashed pyramid for his eventual interment. Thanks to vandals, disrespectful tourists, and ne’er do wells, you actually can no longer visit St Louis Cemetery No. 1 if you don’t have relatives interred there unless you are accompanied by a licensed tour group. I selected Haunted History Tours at random (all the tour groups advertise that they’re the number one tour group, and they all pretty much depart from one voodoo shop or another so it’s impossible to differentiate between them from afar), and fairly shortly into the tour I was sure I had made the correct choice. I’d seen a number of tour groups wandering through the french quarter, and some of them were so large that I’m not certain the people in the back knew what was going on or could even see the thing they were there to hear about before the group made it to the next thing on the list. Our tour group was seven people plus the tour guide, which made it easy to hear and ask questions and get a more personal tour experience.

We departed from Rev. Zombie’s House of Voodoo (meh, I’ve seriously seen some of the candles for sale in there at Urban Outfitters), and walked up the street toward the cemetery, learning the original sites of the graves so none of us invest in potentially haunted property, and taking a couple of quick detours at Louis Armstrong Park and Basin St. Station to talk about the history of the area, learn about why people and GPS devices get so confused when talking about directions in New Orleans (you’re not going north, south, east, and west in the crescent city–you’re going lakeside, riverside, uptown and downtown), and take one last opportunity to use a restroom since (surprise!) there aren’t any in the cemetery. While we were in Basin St. Station, our tour guide recommended a book, Frenchmen Desire Good Children, about the history of New Orleans and its interesting street naming conventions. Somehow, I got the title mixed up in my head and went back to Basin St. Station later and requested to buy a copy of City of Saints and Bastards, to which the people working there looked quite perplexed and asked me which tour guide recommended that book, again? It turns out once they figured out which book I was actually after, that they were sold out, but they also enthusiastically praised it, and said it’s the book that all New Orleans tour guides study before they take their examinations. I bought it later on Amazon and just very recently started to read it, which I wholeheartedly recommend you not do, because it is the single most racist piece of shit I’ve ever read. I said “What the fuck?!?” more times in the first ten pages than I did throughout the entirety of the series of Twin Peaks, and it wasn’t a perplexed kind of Twin Peaks-y “What the fuck?” but a truly horrified, can’t believe this book came highly recommended, really can’t believe that the author just compared native americans to dogs sort of “WHAT. THE. FUCK.”. I think I would have preferred City of Saints and Bastards to this hot garbage.

But back to the tour. It was interesting to see how differently the city of New Orleans handles burials. We learned that because of the heat inside the tombs, in about a year’s time, there are only bones left in the tomb, which means that they can be reused over and over again, adding more names to the plaque on the front, while the bones intermingle in an area at the bottom. This is why you see double-decker tombs in the cemetery, because if you had multiple family members die less than a year apart, you wouldn’t want to open the tomb until the decomposition process had ended. With two, unless your family was having a really bad year, it’s unlikely you’d have to worry about opening up a tomb that wasn’t…uh…fully baked. We also learned that tomb maintenance is handled by the family or by a trust left by a family for said purpose, which is why some tombs look pristine and others are crumbling.

Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen of New Orleans, is interred at St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, and even though maintenance people keep whitewashing away the Xes people scratch on the sides of the tomb, hoping for her favors even in death, more keep appearing. Evidently, if your wish is granted, you’re supposed to return and circle your Xes and leave her a gift in accordance with the size of the favor–although her tomb has been cleaned, it’s plain to see that not many favors are granted. Some people also believe that Marie Laveau’s bones are not interred within that tomb but are instead elsewhere in the cemetery out of fear of them being stolen, which is why triple Xes are found all over various tombs in the cemetery from people hedging their bets.

Visiting this cemetery made me think a bit more about what I’d want for my own body when I die. I’ve joked about being packed into a lipstick tube and launched into space, I’ve suggested that it would be totally fine if I was just tossed into a dumpster, but it is important to really consider the impact not only our lives have on the planet, but also our deaths. The single coffin below ground has to be a thing of the past, as our world population has exploded and there just simply isn’t room. Family crypts are an interesting solution. Maybe I can get in on Nic Cage’s badass pyramid. Either way, right now, I’m seriously in the mood for some brick oven pizza.