Category Archives: Musings

New Orleans New Year’s

Can’t leave New Orleans without mentioning a little more about our trip. It’s just plain hard to leave New Orleans at all, and I’ve thought that every time I’ve visited. This was a great one week family vacation and I’d recommend a trip there to anybody who asks. We were supposed to fly out just after Christmas, but the Snowstorm that Stopped New York stopped us too. Our flights were delayed for days. We were at home, snowbound, with no jobs to do, and all I could think about was how much I wanted to be in New Orleans. I used to visit friends there frequently but hadn’t been back since Jazz Fest 1995, cue “Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?”

I spent these null days re-watching Treme and taking a virtual visit to NO. The extra time allowed a level of research I’d never done for a vacation before. At http://www.offbeat.com/ —one of the local music magazines — I found lists of all the bands in the many clubs the week we’d be there. I had some favorite places to eat that I wanted to return to — like Franky & Johnny’s, for crawfish as good as I remembered — but knew that I needed some up to date insight, and looked through a bunch of too touristy sites until I stumbled upon http://chowhound.chow.com/boards

I loved the food, but the music is what has stayed with me the most. We landed the morning of New Year’s Eve and headed out to Jackson Square for the free concert that night. I have never been tempted to be in Times Square for New Year’s Eve, but this was something else. We stood in front of the stage and danced in the street. Terrence Simeon and his zydeco band was the highlight for me, including catching some of the beads he kept flinging out to the crowd. N.O. Mayor Moon Landry showed up and played washboard on stage with one of the acts.

New Year’s Day we headed to the Rock ‘n Bowl to see Kermit Ruffins and his Barbecue Swingers. Being in New Orleans on a family vacation, Rock ‘n Bowl is the perfect place, ’cause there’s no age limit and you can really bowl if you want, and Kermit (and his smile) was the perfect way to start a new year. Later I bought a copy of his latest cd Happy Talk from a vendor in the French Market and I have been wearing the grooves out of it since. If you come see my storytelling show the title track kicks off the pre-show music, as a talisman for me as much as for the audience. Kermit, doing the jazz standard I like to request (whenever anybody asks):

I just finished reading Patti Smith’s poetic and uplifting memoir, “Just Kids”, and twice in the book she recalls her mother’s traditional wisdom regarding New Year’s, that the way in which you start the new year is the way you will spend it. If so, I’ll take it.

Bronx Zoo Facepainting – Opening Day – Rebirth

What a beautiful day it was to be at the zoo. Finally it feels like Spring is here, with warm enough weather to open our Transformation Facepainting concession, starting our 18th season of turning people into animals at the Bronx Zoo. After this tough winter it was great to be back at the zoo. Lorraine and I got there before it was open to the public in order to load in the equipment, and I’ve always enjoyed watching the zoo wake up and get ready for the crowds.

The artist we had scheduled for the opening day was Jennifer, and as soon as she was ready she had our first customer of the season, a cute little girl who she painted up as a penguin, an animal the zoo is featuring this year in it’s annual Run For the Wild fundraiser. As we were leaving, I was happy to see that her next customer was a man in his twenties, who was there  with just his girlfriend, it seemed, and no kids at all — it’s great when the adults get painted. Jennifer was turning him into a tribal-style grizzly bear.

http://www.bronxzoo.com/

Working at the zoo is really just an excuse to head over to Arthur Avenue and load up on Italian food supplies. Adding to the pleasure of the morning was discovering that De Lillo, my by-far favorite Pastry Shop, had just opened in a beautiful new, bigger location, with real room for tables. Now it’s possible to get in and out with out having to worry that you’re going to knock somebody off their chair with the packages in your hands as you squeeze by their table. So we sat before going shopping. Lorraine had the berry pie and I had the perfect pastry, a sfogliatella. Heaven.

http://delillopastryshop.com/

We got home in time for me to spend the rest of today gardening, which is the most essential way in which I experience this season of renewal. The stars lined up for me yesterday as well, for as I was out there in the backyard, turning over the earth as I expanded my vegetable garden, feeling the life coming back into the land,  the Rebirth Brass Band was playing live on the radio, on WNYC’s Soundcheck.

We were down in New Orleans around New Year’s Day, and I went to see the Rebirth Brass Band on their home turf for the first time, the Maple Leaf Bar — a transformational experience. I’d seen them before but never there, and I can still feel the energy of that loud, loud music going through my body in that packed bar as they went from song into song without pause, just driving the crowd on.

David Brooks’ advice for facepainters: Blending

In a recent Ted Talk, David Brooks tossed off Picasso as the exemplar for a quality of the mind he called “blending”—being able to take two disparate concepts and combine them into something new—referring to how Picasso revolutionized art by blending European painting with African masks. It was a reference Brooks was able to use easily, without much explanation, because it is well understood as a pivotal moment in art history, primitivism in Modern Art. The other example David Brooks used for blending was a child pretending to be tiger. Cue the facepainter.

Have I been “blending” all this time as I turn people into something other?As a facepainter am I a “blending facilitator”?

As David Brooks ticked off the five or six qualities of mind we should be cultivating in ourselves, and by implication (I think) looking for in our politicians, I did feel that being able to blend was within my range. Over the 30 odd years of transforming people I have become a pack-rat of visual inspirations for what I can paint on the next face. And I will look at peoples’ faces on the subway and imagine them painted as I work out a new idea based on current inspirations.

Taking a painting of a face by Picasso and painting it onto someone’s face is another sort of transformation than turning someone into a tiger. It feels more ironic. Their face is still a face, a human face, so I haven’t changed their identity from human being to a wild animal or such. And I feel some irony in taking the images of an artist who so famously transformed the human face into something unhuman and startling and in some measure re-humanizing these images by applying them back onto a face. Though the final effect does remain startling, judging by the typical reaction of people when you paint something like this on someone at a party.

Speaking of startling, what about hearing David Brooks pushing a humanist approach to politics, and saying that the most important element in education is that people learn from people they love?

To find David Brooks’ Ted Talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/david_brooks_the_social_animal.html

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