Costuming.

Yeah, those are pretty good plastic toy soldier costumes.  Needs more tank, though.

Krewe of Boo

On Saturday, I went down to the Quarter for the Krewe of Boo Halloween parade.  The parade is getting pretty darn good.  The floats were professional, the throws were delicious (pralines and chee-weez), and everyone on board looked like they were having a blast.  Most of the dance groups in town were there too:  the Cherry Bombs, Camel Toe Lady Steppers, Bearded Oysters, Organ Grinders, Muff-a-Lottas, and 610 Stompers were all in top form, and probably some others that I have forgotten.  It was definitely enough to tide me over to Mardi Gras.

My special lady friend and I dressed as Bob Ross and his happy little tree.  The getup was a hit, if I do say so myself.  Plenty of people got it, and I was surprised by how many stopped to tell us stories about what Bob Ross meant to them.  One woman said that Bob Ross was the only thing that would calm her little sister down during tornado warnings.  It felt good to do a positive costume.  Maybe I just haven't gone to those kinds of parties, but I haven't really noticed the sexy costume epidemic down here.  Perhaps because we costume year-round and take it so seriously, very few people settle for the plain old "sexy ____" costume.  Now that's not to say I didn't see any Miley Cyrus ensembles in the Quarter and on Frenchmen on Saturday, but there were more dudes than ladies dressed as Miley.  And I saw more Rob Ryans than Mileys, so that should tell you something.  I am looking forward to going out again on Halloween night.

The Book of Mormon

Getting caught up on last week's non-trespassing-related activities: on Thursday, I saw the touring production of The Book of Mormon at the newly renovated Saenger Theatre.  I liked it.  It was musically diverse and I had several of the songs stuck in my head for days.  The humor is puerile, yes, but not just for the sake of shock value.  There is a recurring gag about scrotum maggots that is a nice little spoonful of sour to keep it from getting too sappy.  But I have a moderately high tolerance for crassness, so the Sometimes-Picayune's hyperbolic review is another valid perspective, although I disagree that it is mean-spirited.

This was my first visit to the reopened Saenger and it looks great.  The theater itself is kind of an italian piazza motif complete with an artificial starry night on the ceiling.  The rest of it looks grand and old-timey.  I look forward to visiting again.

And again.

Just found another guy out back.  He asked if Larry lives here.  I explained that Larry does not live here and it's usually more productive to knock at the front door when looking for someone.  He left.  I don't think he was looking for Larry.

I called the NOPD second district office to try and report that I had found two different strangers wandering around the back of my house in the past two days.  The person on the line was courteous but didn't seem interested in taking any kind of formal report because nothing was taken (I didn't get into details about the first bike incident).  She referred me to Crimestoppers but that doesn't seem to fit because I don't have any real information to pass on; I witnessed one thwarted bike theft and found another guy who probably was looking for something to steal, but that's it.  This is a bit frustrating.

An Incident

Wednesday afternoon I was tidying up around the house and stepped out back to put some recycling in the bin.  A driveway runs along the side of the house to the back carport; when I walked out, I saw a stranger holding a bicycle wheel, walking down the driveway back towards the street.  I said "Hello?" and this first guy, who I will refer to as "the thief" for reasons that will later become apparent, walked back toward me and rambled that someone was chasing him and trying to take his bike.  The thief did not have a bike, only a wheel, and also did not explain why he was in my driveway heading back to the street, so this confused me.

Then a pickup truck stopped in the middle of the street in front of my house.  A second guy ("the owner") got out and confronted the thief.  The owner asked why the thief was riding his bike and where the bike went.  The thief mumbled something along the lines that he didn't know whose bike it was so he rode away because he didn't know if it was the owner's or not.  Now, at this point it became reasonably clear that the thief was riding a bike that was not his own and, more than likely, belonged to the guy who was chasing him, but I still didn't understand how my house comes into the picture.  So the thief then explained that he stashed the bike underneath my house.

The owner, the thief, and I went to the back and sure enough, in the crawl space under the house and behind the garbage cans was a fairly expensive-looking bicycle with a cut-through cable lock still hanging off of it.  The thief said that he is homeless and would like a few dollars; the owner was not receptive to this request, so the thief walked off while I helped the owner pull his bike out from the crawl space.  I probably should have taken the thief's picture, but I was a little discombobulated by the whole situation.  While the owner was looking over his bike, he explained that he had left it locked up near the Milan Lounge the night before and just driven to pick it up when he saw the thief riding away on it, then followed in his truck to my block.  He didn't seem interested in calling the NOPD because he got the bike back.  I didn't report it either, because I wasn't sure what there was to report; I didn't even get the owner's name.

So, that happened.  Thoughts?  Anything I should have done differently?  Any suggestions for deterring future contraband dropoffs?

Nice Weekend: 10/18-20

Friday night we went to The Mortuary, an annual haunted house set up every Halloween season in an actual old mortuary.  This year's theme was a zombie outbreak.  When we got there, a couple of blood donation trucks had set up outside offering free VIP admission for a donation.  It would have been funnier if it was a vampire theme, but I hadn't donated blood in a couple of years (and VIP tickets are thirty-five bucks) so that's what we did.  The Mortuary was a lot of fun, although it was crowded enough that it was mostly watching the people ahead get scared instead of being scared.  Still, I got a good jolt or two out of it.  I probably don't need to go to any more haunted houses for the foreseeable future, at least until I can visit Eastern State Penitentiary at Halloween.

On Saturday, I voted in a local election.  Want to know what politics can get like down here?  I got this in the mail:

Then on Saturday night I attended a lovely wedding at a house on Esplanade Avenue.  It was my kind of wedding: joyous, festive, and not too formal--the programs were printed on a brown paper bag, in which there was a beer).  Very fun.

Among all that I had a breakfast at Artz Bagelz (good bagel, mediocre everything else); a pig-in-a-blanket with some fancy name and a donut at the newly-opened District, subtitled "donuts sliders brew" (promising but they'll need to work on the ordering bottleneck); and a cheeseburger at The Company Burger (first time I've been there in years, and very good).

New Orleans Film Festival: Thursday 10/17

All the sitting and popcorn and Junior Mints finally took its toll on Thursday; I had tickets for two more movies than I could physically take, so all I managed to see on the last day of the festival was:

Le Week-End: Now this is how you do a drama about a disintegrating marriage.  An aging English couple takes a weekend trip to Paris to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary and have adventures.  They bicker, they kiss, they dine-and-dash, they run into Jeff Goldblum at his Goldblummiest, they come to terms.  Very charming.

Birdbath: I'm going to be honest, I fell asleep through most of the middle of this one.  Not out of any fault of the film, I quite liked the acting in the parts I was awake, but the film festival grind finally got to me.  It was preceded by a lovely short film, Samnang, about a taciturn widowed Cambodian donut maker who makes a connection with someone else.  A fine story gracefully told.

Touchy-Feely: A wispy movie about a masseuse who becomes nauseated by touching other people, her bike-shop-employee boyfriend, her niece who has a crush on the boyfriend, and her uptight dentist brother who takes energy-healing lessons from Allison Janney.  And the guy from Office Space is in there too for some reason.  There were some good chuckles but that's about it.

And because I was damn tired I skipped 16 Acres and Bayou Maharajah; I was sad to miss that last one because I contributed to the Kickstarter to fund it.  I'm getting old.

New Orleans Film Festival: Wednesday 10/16 and a concert

The day began with a screening of Chinatown, which I will shamefully confess that I had not seen.  Why don't they make movies like this anymore?  It trusts the audience to piece together what's going on, it builds tension without frenetic editing, the violence is shocking because it's not over the top, everything just works like a finely-tuned machine.  Brilliant.

American Commune: Two women who grew up in a hippie commune go back and learn about it.  Nothing sinister happened, which is good for them but doesn't make for a good documentary.

The Retrieval: This was a solid coming-of-age story.  Set during the Civil War, it's about a young former slave conscripted by his uncle and a crew of bounty hunters to hunt capture other freed slaves.  He is sent to bring back a former slave with a bounty on his head, but starts to develop a very moving father-son relationship with the target.  I liked it very much.

Towheads: I don't know what to call this, but I liked it.  A feminist slapstick movie?  A whimsical motherhood odyssey?  Shannon Plumb, the writer/director/star, is a very funny physical comedian and does a Chaplin riff, a Darth Vader burlesque routine, and everything in between.  But there's an awful lot going on underneath about roles available for women, too; this was the best combination of funny and deep I've seen at the festival.

And then to top off the night, I went to see The Lumineers, the band with that song from all the commercials.  They were pretty good.  Dr. Dog opened and I guess were good but I can't really remember what they sounded like now.

New Orleans Film Festival: Tuesday 10/15

The Republic of Two: I hated this movie.  It was trying to be about a relationship that might be doomed to fail, but it ended up being about a relationship that deserved to fail.  I didn't care about any of the characters (I don't think I even bothered to remember the guy's name until the end) or believe that they had gotten together in the first place.  The man was a one-note horndog bro whose defining characteristic is that he wants to go to medical school for no apparent reason; the woman was a one-note shrill nagger whose defining characteristic is that she has no friends.  The plot was an endless cycle of unconvincing cutesy crap interlaced with the same damn argument over and over.  Just painful to watch.

King of Herrings: This one was good.  Locally shot in black and white, it's a low-stakes drama about a group of New Orleans layabouts.  I overheard somebody in line compare it to Down By Law or Jim Jarmusch's work in general, and I'd buy that to a certain extent, but it was much less formal or composed than Jarmusch's films and felt much more lived-in.  I was surprised by Eddie Jemison (the tech guy from the Ocean's 11 movies), who played a very vivid, sad, violent little rooster of a man.  And it had Persimmon Phil from Deadwood, the greatest show ever made.  Definitely worth catching if you get a chance.

Searching for Bill: This was billed as a documentary about a man trying to track down the con artist who stole his car; it is not.  It is not a documentary at all, even, which explains the notes I took while watching: "artificial mystery? staged? how many camera crews do they have?"  Luckily, three of the guys who appeared in the film attended the screening and explained during a Q&A that they were recruited by the filmmakers to be filmed and to integrate real stories from their lives, but there was no con artist.  If this film had been accurately represented I might not be so pissed off at it, because it tracks a lot of interesting individuals clinging to the fringe of society, but I have no idea how much of that was fictionalized.

Delivery: This one had a killer premise, or at least a killer pitch: Rosemary's Baby but there's a reality television crew filming everything.  I have no idea if the idea paid off because somehow the video and audio got way out of sync, which just made it unwatchable so I left about a third of the way through.  Seemed promising, though.