Festival worker perspective

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festivals, Rich Campanella, work

 At the Old U.S. Mint food booths

photo by @nolacampanella

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Love has passed

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Jackson Square

Angie Bradford facebook post:

Really sad to hear about the passing of Dr. Love. He brought so much laughter and adventure into our lives. He was a legend around the city but especially at Jackson Square. I can never think of the Square without thinking of him. We wouldn’t see him for a little bit, but when he’d come back, he always had some tall story to tell about where he’d just come from. One of my favorite memories of him was when John Michael was a little boy…Me, John Michael, Dr. Love and Tuba went walking through the Bywater. Tuba had on a pair of plastic boobs and Dr. Love had his necklace of keys on and was carrying his golf club swinging it every now and then as he explained how he’d just come back from teaching golf at a club for boys. We laughed so much that day that my stomach hurt. You can only imagine the looks we got with Tuba wearing those fake boobs over his clothes. And the words back and forth between John Michael, Tuba, and Dr. Love just made for a comedy. You will be missed Dr. Love…Your name was a fit for you because you really did bring Love and laughter wherever you went.

Subway singer going up

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Music Under New York, New York City

After the marriage ended, Ms. Ridley established herself underground. She became affiliated with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Music Under New York, a program under which selected musicians perform in the transit system. She appeared twice a week at a designated spot. She said that no money was ever stolen from her and she was never assaulted.

And she developed her act, learning to work an audience that wasn’t inclined to stand still. She figures that thousands of commuters over the years have sung duets with her.

Ms. Ridley relishes these connections: “We’re face to face,” she said, describing the appeal of busking.

Subway singer going up

The Ballad of Big Freedia: How the New Orleans Bounce Icon Was Betrayed By Her City’s Housing Crisis

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Big Freedia, Fensterstock

Alison Fensterstock has written an insightful and impressive analysis of one hard-working performer’s legal tangle and how giggers interactions with authority often end up badly for the creative community. How many people were sorry they accepted aid after Katrina or BP later on when they found themselves mired in red tape over it? In this case, as Fensterstock points out, the ebb and flow of funds when a performer begins to hit their moment can be confusing and disorienting and can result in a trip to the courthouse. Why would the authorities feel the need to do any more than fine Freedia for a lack of good accounting? Why require further punishment? One might think that those in authority want to find ways to punish him and others like him who won’t just go put on the white shirt and black pants and bus that table.

 

Cashauna Hill, the executive director of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Center, cautioned that she couldn’t speak directly to the rapper’s case. But “especially for a cash-based economy, the requirement to predict income is incredibly difficult,” she said. “Performers don’t have that kind of set, consistent clear structure.”

 The Ballad of Big Freedia: How the New Orleans Bounce Icon Was Betrayed By Her City’s Housing Crisis | Pitchfork

 

Update: Big Freedia gets probation

Troy Simon’s journey from tap dancing on Bourbon Street to Yale Divinity School

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French Quarter

Yes those hustling around you have dreams and ambition too. Some of them will achieve them.

 

Troy Simon’s journey from tap dancing on Bourbon Street to Yale Divinity School | NOLA.com

Issue One: Invisible Labour | mice cms

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capitalism, labor organizing, outsider culture

Thanks to “sophistiratchet #blackademic beast from/in/of New Orleans” Terri Coleman for highlighting this publication on her Facebookistan page. Cultural appropriation is so constant in colonial economies that artists are forced to enthusiastically participate in maintaining its dominance.  The artists in this issue intelligently and sensitively address how labor as a commodity when it comes to creating and sharing art assists that frame of events.

How can we account for all of the invisible labour that’s required for us to do our so-called radical work? Informed by intersectional and materialist feminisms, Issue 01 foregrounds forms of labour that go unrecognized in the white spaces of contemporary and media art worlds. This issue is concerned with the before, the after, the behind-the-scenes, and the off-camera. How much not-art is required to make the art? What’s the cost and who puts their life on the line? Without reducing all forms of life to labour, the works featured in this issue allow us to think value differently, to acknowledge all that we do to keep ourselves and our communities vivacious and resilient.

Source: Issue One: Invisible Labour | mice cms

 

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Dispatches from the Graveyard Shift: What It’s Like to Work at a 24-Hour New Orleans Bar | Tales of the Cocktail

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drinking culture

Jennifer Kay regales us with her stories from her 7 years working the graveyard bartending shift, a stone’s throw from Bourbon Street.

I think one of the great things about New Orleans is that we don’t care what anyone does for a living. No one is impressed with anyone because of our occupations. In New Orleans, all walks of life party together. You don’t get that in other cities. In New Orleans, we don’t really care if a celebrity walks in because you know what, you have a job just like me, it’s just that your job is different.

Source: Dispatches from the Graveyard Shift: What It’s Like to Work at a 24-Hour New Orleans Bar | Tales of the Cocktail

Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl-Review

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book review, Carrie Brownstein, DIY, informal economy, makerculture

 

A slim memoir from Portlandia’s Carrie Brownstein, but be warned: it is definitely not about that work. Instead, this is about her early family life in the Northwest and her young woman life in one of the best unknown bands of the 1990s/2000s, Sleater-Kinney. Of course, they are still around and releasing good music, but their unknown status is probably past, largely because of Brownstein’s new TV fame and because the teens that found them then are now critics and paid writers and can reciprocate with open love and respect and everyone else can pretend to have followed them for years. For those who do follow them, this book will be familiar in its existentialist language, even as the actual events are presented plainly, dramatically and only rarely as funny.  All of that seems perfect for a book about this painfully present band that was always more about intense performances with alternately obscure or in-your-face lyrics and was much less- if it all- about any rock posturing or god(dess) complex. Brownstein certainly understands and communicates that just being in a band was a lifesaver, but that she used it respectfully to find her adult voice to say something rather than just using it to seem cool is also clear.

Brownstein writes about herself in a rush, seemingly annoyed by her own youth and spends more time and positive energy on the others who make up that time, like her father, her bandmates Corin and Janet and even legendary bands around her such as Bikini Kill or known names like Eddie Vedder (was oddly glad to hear that he is a good guy). That makes sense because the best descriptions in the book are of seeing bands and in describing the scene (maybe the first era that this term was used without irony) in the staplegun marketing of rock and politics back then. Those chapters definitely brought that time back clearly and does so without false nostalgia. Those pieces reminded me of the best writing of Ellen Willis, which to me is saying something.

Brownstein can dazzle with phrases and apt opinions such as “Within the world of the band there was a me and a not me” and “Anything that isn’t traditional for women apparently requires that we remind people what an anomaly it is, even when it becomes less and less of an anomaly” but also can run circles around herself and an opinion so long that it makes you put the book down for a bit. I can relate to that as a writer and I suspect that she is both afraid of revealing too much and unable to resist showing the many sides of any situation that she notices. Both can be disconcerting for autobiographical writing, but lucky for us, she does her best to curb those impulses and her undeniable charisma comes through at almost all times. I hope for many more books by Brownstein, and much more of Sleater-Kinney and yes, many more seasons of Portlandia.

<a href=”https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/635646-blue-collar-mind”>View all my reviews</a>
View all of my Goodreads reviews

Making It in the Quarter: A Conversation with New Orleans Service Workers

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job, New Orleans

• Our city thrives on the French Quarter, yet the people who make it run day to day–the bartenders, hotel staff, tour guides–are often overlooked. Join us for a panel discussion on what it takes to make it in the Quarter. Moderated by Aziza Bayou, the panel will feature mule carriage driver Sandra Holliman; Michelle Mueller of Jazzed Up Tours; Gee Foley, an assistant manager at Banana Courtyard; Thomas Proctor, a lead server from Brennan’s; artist Russell Gore, who sells his jewelry in the French Market; Carol and Jack Siekkinen, owners of the Hemmerling Art Gallery; and Robert Watters, Director of the French Quarter Business Association. Join us for what promises to be a fascinating discussion!

  6-8:30 pm Wednesday September 16,2015

  Chris Owens Club 500 Bourbon Street

FairCoop

The Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC) is a self-managed initiative centered on building a new society from below through self-organization and assembly-based action. Since May 2010, the CIC been weaving a network of self-managed projects and bio-regional and local initiatives by mobilizing collective empowerment through mutual support and other common or collectivized resources, creating alternatives outside the action of the banking system and state. This coordination of productive activity which facilitates cooperative work is the basis for the promotion of an integral cooperative public system without intermediaries, and for building a way of life consistent with the principles that unite us in our collective to search for a good life.