If There's A Hell, We're All Gonna Go - Thoughts On Oak Creek, WI, One Year Later

Since 2009, I have been a friend and ally of the Sikh Coalition, a civil rights group based in Manhattan. Last year, I trained with a group of eleven other individuals as part of the Coalition's Advocate Academy in our nation's capital. I am proud to call the Sikh community my friends. The Advocates were asked to possibly write a follow-up from last year's shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. After several days of deep thought, and with Alexa's endorsement of my message, we jointly decided to publish this here first.

With the anniversary of any tragic event, it gives us an opportunity to ruminate. In the case of last year’s shooting at a Sikh gurdwara (temple) in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, my immediate thoughts go to the deceased. There were six of them, five men and one woman, all of whom had done nothing more than wake up on a Sunday morning and attend worship services.

My second thoughts are my own experience in learning the news. Alexa and I had spent the weekend painting our new apartment, away from television and without Internet. That Monday – the day after the shooting – I went to grab my morning coffee down the street from my office in Tribeca. It was there that I saw the newspapers, all featuring Sikh men and women in tears, with headlines reading “TRAGEDY IN OAK CREEK” and “SHOOTING AT SIKH TEMPLE LEAVES SIX DEAD.” I could not believe my eyes.

As a volunteer advocate for the New York-based Sikh Coalition, I knew I would have to get in touch with my contacts right away. As a human being, though, my head began to spin. I fought back tears, both of sadness and of rage, and my whole body felt cold. When I arrived at my office, I was barely able to work that day. My supervisor knew of my involvement with the Coalition and was gracious in letting me spend my morning taking phone calls and getting in touch with my friends at the Coalition.

For many Americans, with this story pushed into the national spotlight – right on the heels of the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado – this was their introduction to Sikhs and Sikhism. The news outlets dumbed it down: Sikhism is its own religion, but because of their beards and turbans, they are occasionally mistaken for Muslims. Depending on the source of this news, they may or may not have gone on to explicitly state that violence against any religious group is wrong. Most did not.

The shooter was found to have connections to white supremacy organizations (he even played in one of those crappy Neo-Nazi punk bands), with a military history and the usual stream of people – after the fact, of course – who came out of the woodwork to say he had always been “just a little odd,” a “loner,” who never even made eye contact with his neighbors. What the media ultimately chalked the Oak Creek shooting up to was a case of mistaken identity. He had set out that morning hoping to kill some Muslims.

He took his own life at the scene, a final act of cowardice that absolved him from having a (very) public trial, from having to explain his motivations, or from even learning that his victims were not Muslims.

Let’s stop for just a second so I can state something – with emphasis – that I do not feel enough news anchors, reporters, bloggers, and Tweeters made known: unless somebody presents you with a direct and immediate threat, you have NO RIGHT as a human being to harm, maim, or kill them. Furthermore, killing anyone, anywhere, because they are different from you in some way, is morally reprehensible.

If this asshole had perpetrated violence at a mosque, instead killing six Muslims – five men, one woman – I hope that there would still have been the same level of outrage. We do not know, and it is my sincere hope that we will never know. The fact that he wrongly identified Sikhs as Muslims speaks loudly to his own ignorance.

So, one year later, what have we learned? My initial thought, looking at the present state of the world, was that we have learned nothing. Coming from a background in media and journalism, it pained me to see Oak Creek fade away from mainstream news coverage, following the so-called “ten day rule” of a news story, with focus returning on the orange-haired nightmare from Aurora. As I drove around this week, wondering what we have learned, I found myself contemplating this a lot: nothing. We have learned nothing.

It was only after a day or two that I came to an even bleaker conclusion: as bad as it was to think we as a society had learned nothing, we have actually gotten worse. The gun debate, which had been resurrected following Aurora, only got more heated, with both sides of the argument becoming more polarized. The rhetoric bordered on extremism – again, from both sides. After a perfunctory statement of condolences from President Obama, calling Sikhs “a part of our broader American family,” (emphasis mine) his wife visited Oak Creek while he was out electioneering.

Not even two weeks after the Oak Creek shooting, a member of that same sangat (congregation) was shot and killed during a late-night robbery. In his case, he just happened to be the man on the other side of a cash register, but the news sickened me just the same. There was something so inherently disgusting about this – a man who survived a shooting at his temple, only to be gunned down two weeks later – that I began thinking our society was terminally ill. With the Sandy Hook massacre four months later, the initial blame on the Boston Bombing getting foisted upon any brown-skinned fellow within a mile of the blast, and the lack of action from our elected leaders to do anything – literally ANYTHING – about regulating (not banning, not outlawing, mere regulation we are talking here) the sale of firearms, my suspicions were confirmed again and again.

What did we learn from Oak Creek? We learned that not even houses of worship are safe anymore. We had learned just weeks earlier that movie theaters weren’t safe. In mid-December, a man in Portland opened fire in a shopping mall. Days later, the unthinkable – the product that, before it became reality, would only have been in the thoughts of a truly sick individual – happened in Newtown, Connecticut. The shooter ended lives of teachers, the principal, teacher’s aides, and twenty first graders. Just typing that still puts a grapefruit-sized lump in my throat.

A year later, our society has grown more fearful, and as a consequence, more quick to violence. The entire case surrounding George Zimmerman’s shooting of Trayvon Martin was shrouded by the fact that Zimmerman acted out of fear, fear motivated at least in some part by race. There will be a lot left to speculation, as one of the parties involved never got a chance to tell his story, but the fact that Zimmerman walked – no charges for murder, no manslaughter, not even a note in his permanent record – sets a scary precedent. The day judgment came down, I declared that murder was now legal in Florida. Sarcasm aside, the “stand your ground” law being a viable defense in court for shooting someone armed with only a pack of Skittles makes this ruling one of the most shameful decisions since Dred Scott.

We have learned that nowhere is safe, so we should go ahead and stockpile our own private arsenal until Congress says we can’t, and continue to shoot first and ask questions later. Besides, if you live in Florida, you might not even have to answer for it.

In lieu of a conclusion, I will end with an extended quote from Curtis Mayfield’s 1970 song, “(Don’t Worry) If There’s A Hell Below, We’re All Gonna Go.” It is a timeless message, one warning and urging people to change their course (he even gets a line in about pollution) or suffer the consequences:

“Sisters, brothers and the whities,

Blacks and the crackers,

Stone-stoned junkie,

Police and their backers,

They're all political actors.

Smoke, the pill and the dope,

Educated fools from uneducated schools,

Pimping people is the rule,

Polluted water in the pool.

And everybody's saying don't worry,

They say don't worry,

They say don't worry,

They say don't worry,

But they don't know,

There can be no show

If there's a hell below,

We're all gonna go!

Lord, what we gonna do

If everything I say is true?

This ain't no way it ought to be.

If only all the mass could see,

But everybody keeps saying don't worry.”

It Came in the Night: Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, NY

As a kid, I liked to scare the crap out of myself. I stayed up late watching Are You Afraid of the Dark  between slotted fingers, clutching a pack of Gushers for protection. I devoured every eerie Goosebumps novel and bought every volume of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Even as an adult, the chapter about the girl who gets a mysterious bite on her face which births hundreds of baby spiders still makes me want to take a shower. It all gave me nightmares, but the feeling of utter terror is the biggest rush one could get at eight years old, so I kept up the habit.

As we plotted our journey into upstate New York, I wanted to go to Tarrytown and Sleepy Hollow, birthplace of America’s most famous ghost story. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was a favorite of mine as a young fan of horror-fiction. I owned a more “kid friendly” illustrated version, which depicted a pink-cheeked Katrina Van Tassel and her polarized suitors, the meat-necked Brom Bones and the lithe and unfortunately superstitious schoolteacher Ichabod Crane. A copy of the Disney adaptation, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, made its way into my rotation of frequently watched films, to the delight of my mother, who was sick of watching The Little Mermaid for the thousandth time.

It is a story that everyone knows - Ichabod Crane competes with local neanderthal Brom Bones for the hand of Katrina Van Tassel. At a party, while gathered in the parlor for a night of storytelling, Ichabod hears the legend of the Headless Horseman, a gentleman who had the misfortune of losing his head to a rogue cannonball during the War of 1812. In the spirit of wooing miss Van Tassel, Crane searches for the night rider, only to meet the “ghost” and have the fertilizer scared out of him. While the Disney version has a frightened Crane fleeing Sleepy Hollow, other versions end with Ichabod Crane being found dead the following morning. The reader is left to speculate whether Crane met his end at the hands of Brom, or possibly at the hands of the real Headless Horseman. 

The story is one of the earliest pieces of American folklore that is still read and appreciated today, and Tarrytown couldn’t be prouder. Its scribe, Washington Irving, was a life-long resident of the area. There are restaurants, statues, and street signs dedicated to the story, letting visitors known which concrete monument marks the “site” of the meeting between Mister Crane and the Headless Horseman.

Despite being only 15 miles from the Bronx, and all of 27 miles away from Times Square in Manhattan, Tarrytown is devoid of the bustle and endless motion that emanates from the City. The town, like nearly all of the rest of Westchester County in New York, retains its 18th-Century old-world charm.

We walked down the highway to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, where Washington Irving is buried in a small plot with his entire family. Nearby, his postmortem neighbors include Louisa May Alcott and Brooke Astor. I thanked him for Sleepy Hollow, a keystone in my early descent into the literary world, and endless nights of checking inside my closet and under my bed.

Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay - Smitty's Clam Bar, Somers Point, NJ

A ten-minute drive from the tourist traps along the Jersey shore boardwalks, Somers Point, a sleepy and oft-overlooked marina village on the bay, is home to one of the greatest seafood dives on the East Coast - Smitty’s Clam Bar. While it might seem obvious that you can get great seafood near the coast, palatable dining on the Jersey shore is surprisingly hard to come by. Restaurants seem to come and go with each summer season, aside from a few classics that withstand the yearly ebb and flow of visitors. Throughout most of my childhood, my family spent many steamy summer nights at Smitty’s, filling up on fresh fish and fried clams on our way from Atlantic City to ride the rides at Wonderland Pier in Ocean City.

Smitty’s is universally beloved by a loyal following of diners. Come Memorial Day, chowderheads line up snarling to fight for first-come bar seating or brave the hour-long wait for a table inside, pacifying their children with cartons of french fries. The food is just that good. Arriving just before Memorial Day, we luckily missed the sideshow.

We each ordered a cup of the red clam chowder, served spilling over the side with a packet of saltines. The tomato stock is rich, and well-seasoned, thick with potatoes, carrots and giant, meaty pieces of clam. For addicts, Smitty’s sells quarts of the stuff that you can take home, freeze, and eat in the dead of winter when you’re aching for summer.

The tuna.

The fish is gratuitously sauced in simple elements like garlic, lemon, and olive oil. It’s broiled in a ceramic dish which gives the fish the ultimate balance of a crispy exterior and delicate inside. We picked the mako shark and the tuna, both sizzling in a soy, ginger, and wasabi blend. It’s a powerful feeling to consume something with the capability of eating you. The food is not about revisionism, it’s about freshness and flavor, the way great seafood should be.

The mako shark.

The elderly couple that sat down next to us were clearly regulars, greeted with everything short of a kiss from the entire staff. Their adorable waitress knew their order by heart, including the gentleman’s birch beer. It’s Cheers in real life, for the Jersey shore set.

The place is not by any means fancy, with plastic chairs, specials scribbled on a white board, and their menus designed in crayon by the youngest patrons. But sitting dockside, twenty feet from where your dinner was plucked, makes for one of the most authentic dining experiences on Earth.

God Save The Village Green - New Castle, DE

I hope our friend Caitlin – an alum of the University of Delaware – is not too righteously offended by this, but neither of us had lofty hopes for the state of Delaware. We went into it knowing three things about it:

1.)   It was the first colony to become a state.

2.)   It is very tiny.

3.)   Joe Biden is from there.

The only big thing about Delaware known in most of popular culture is this scene from Wayne’s World:

Somebody tell their board of tourism this, but our moderately low expectations were exceeded ten times over. Aside from a quick jaunt through Wilmington, which was just another Mid-Atlantic shithole, we were delighted to find several towns that time forgot. The first we visited was New Castle, just six miles south of Wilmington. New Castle looks like it hasn’t changed since the late 18th Century, complete with an English-style village green. At the north end of the village green is an Episcopalian church from the 1700’s. In describing it to a friend, I said it was like the town is a giant Kinks song, a quaint village with a deep reverence toward its past.

One of the main drags in New Castle.

In the present day, cities have their own ethnic enclaves, where the spirit of “back home” manifests itself in the architecture, the signage, and the types of stores in the neighborhood. Currently, there are a large number of immigrants from Africa, South Asia, and South America coming into the United States, all of them bringing their cultural heritage and artifacts as the latest ingredients in our cultural stew. Before that, it was my great-grandfather coming by way of Sicily and Alexa’s great-grandparents coming from Warsaw, Poland. At the same time, there was a massive wave of Chinese immigrants. Before that, it was the Irish (including the ancestors of my maternal grandfather). In a weird way, New Castle is the British take on the ethnic neighborhood, like Wee Britain from Arrested Development, only real.

The Episcopalian church on the green.

There have been some criticisms about Williamsburg, Virginia, for replicating (rather than restoring) all of the old homes from colonial times; New Castle, by contrast, is the real deal. The gorgeous homes here have been treated with the utmost care, with friendly locals out tending to their gardens and saying hello to passersby. There were also more people on bicycles than there were automobiles. As a low-key and comparatively small town, it seems to attract dedicated followers rather than gaggles of waddling visor-wearers fresh off of a tour bus.

New Castle marked a great start for our trip through Delaware, which included stops in Dover (the only state capital that looks like a college campus), Rehoboth Beach (the only East Coast beach town we visited that had not been overtaken by neon-lit consumerism), and Lewes, which itself was another town that time forgot, albeit with a pronounced maritime flavor.

We also saw this.

What's New In Baltimore? - Baltimore, MD

Baltimore is a rough city to navigate, with its downtown overrun by impoverished and dangerous neighborhoods and drivers who possess about as much value for human life as a drone strike. It seems to be one of those cities where every few years someone starts a rumor that it’s on the rise and cool things are happening, but that generally just means they finally got a Crate & Barrel and there weren’t any homicides in the gentrified (read: white) neighborhoods.

We began the afternoon in what we now believe might be Baltimore’s only livable neighborhood, made popular by Baltimore’s flashiest son John Waters and his attraction to several of its book and record stores. Even the hip area seemed to attract a strange crowd of derelict meth-heads, the types one would be inclined to see manning the water-gun game at the county fair, instead roaming the streets in the middle of the day. The neighborhood, while an oasis, was still nothing out of the ordinary. An overpriced vintage shop here, a record store there, a tattoo parlor around the corner, and plenty of yoga studios.

When we attempted to visit Billie Holiday’s former residence, we were averted after realizing it was now a housing project in a neighborhood where we didn’t even feel safe inside our car. From the street, there was no indication that the building was of any historical or cultural significance - no sign, no plaque - so we just kept driving.

We paid our respects to Edgar Allan Poe, whose grave still garners flowers and love notes 164 years after his death. Buried just inside the entrance to the cemetery, next to his bride Virginia Clemm, what was once a quiet graveyard is now surrounded by the stench of diesel exhaust, the wailing of sirens at the nearby medical center, and all sunlight blocked by the towering office buildings. It seems something of a dishonor for the American master of horror, suspense, and all things gothic, but at the time of his death, the church was the centerpiece of the city, which itself was built around it. We circled through the surrounding graves, some dating back to the early 1700s, worn and weathered from the years. The cemetery ended up being our small moment of calm that day, edging out the noise of downtown, interrupted only when we spotted a bum napping on top of a headstone and decided it was time to leave.

We followed signs for Poe’s Baltimore home only to discover that the building is now surrounded by housing projects and across the street from a vacant lot, the kind of place to dump off a body...or at least a duffel bag of spare parts. We chalked it up to another instance of incredibly poor city planning, but it still left us feeling like The Wire might actually be a more accurate representation of this sad city than any local government official would like to admit. Baltimore’s piss-poor job preserving and marketing what could be an immense source of tourism makes one wonder if the people running the city even care about drawing visitors, a nearly insane notion after visiting places like New Orleans and Williamsburg that thrive on it. The home of America’s first truly great writer, whose works defined an entire genre of literature, is smack in the center of the kind of neighborhood one can hear described in a Bobby Womack song.

Poe's Baltimore home.

Across the street from Poe's Baltimore home.

The Inner Harbor, Baltimore’s most well-known tourist destination, seemed more like a giant waterfront mall than something actually worthy of an entire afternoon. It is something we are noticing with an increased frequency that exists in cities such as this, where the token “place to go” is little more than a glorified shopping mall, the place where you can buy some artifact proving that yes, indeed, you did go to Baltimore and spent too much money on a stupid little lime green shirt illustrating that fact. We opted to avoid the hordes of Vacation Families™ and shot down to Annapolis to stuff our faces with crab, which seemed like a much better way to spend the evening.

Maybe everyone just has a different idea of what vacation is than we do. This is starting to become a problem.

American Royalty: Solomon's Castle, Ona, FL

For the average Florida tourist, the only castle on the peninsula belongs to Cinderella. Roughly a hundred miles from the calculated splendor of Disney World, off unpaved country roads, past a group of vultures snacking on a deer carcass, where cell reception goes black, is another palace, made entirely from repurposed junk.

To twist the old adage, one man’s trash is definitely still another man’s treasure - bringing us to Solomon’s Castle, one of the places that helped inspire the American Weirdness project back in the autumn of 2012.

Howard Solomon is the king of this castle, though he opts for a skipper’s hat rather than a crown. He moved to the central Florida property in 1972, having bought it on the cheap. With the first late-summer rains, Solomon realized he had scored a massive deal on acres of mosquito-infested swampland. He began construction on his regal residence that year, transforming the waterlogged acres into a recycled wonderland. It withstood hurricanes Charley, Jeanne, and Frances, which all tore through Ona, ripping out groves of old oak trees but leaving the castle unharmed. Now in his late 70’s, Solomon presides over a massive kingdom, one both unique and ever-expanding.

The castle features over 90 hand-made, stained-glass windows, depicting images of nursery rhymes, zodiac symbols, and the planets. The exterior panels are made of a holographic metal that changes colors in the sunlight. A black and white knight stand watch at either side of the entrance - Knight and Day.

While serving as a residence for Solomon and his wife, the castle is also a museum of his artwork, crafted entirely from found objects. He has used oil drums, beer cans, and failed appliances, even re-appropriating the cylinder of a Volkswagen Beetle into one of his sculptures. He made a menagerie of animals out of coat hangers, weighing nearly 50 pounds, and has crafted over 300 cars out of beer cans, the only project he says he doesn’t remember making. It took him over a year to gather the parts to create a steam engine that runs on a working Hoover vacuum motor. He made a carousel from old record players, complete with singing figurines in the style of “It’s a Small World After All.”

Our tour guide, a Vietnam War veteran, blessed with the quick rap of a vaudeville performer, took every opportunity to crack jokes about the sculptures and their pun-filled monikers. He stopped beside a six-foot-long metal Lion named Lionel, quipping “Lionel has two glass eyes and two steal balls.” The “Lorena Bobbitt” shotgun has a knife attached, to keep fidelity in check, and the “Mother-in-Law” clock, which runs backwards with the three on the left and the nine on the right.

Between 1990 and 1994, Solomon built the Boat in the Moat, called the Santa Maria, a restaurant run by Princess Solomon and her husband that serves country-style lunch fare. Two years ago, Solomon created the Alashmo, his version of the Alamo, right next door to his daughters home, which he also built himself, a deep brown stucco structure called The Chocolate House.

Remember the Alashmo. 

Lunch like a pirate.

King Solomon is never far from his castle, greeting visitors with a lissome grin and taking their tickets. It took a few minutes for us to even realize that he was the Solomon of Solomon’s Castle, taking a Saturday off from his workshop on the premises to man the register.

Solomon’s Castle is one of the most interesting pieces of living art in the cultural wasteland of Florida, made by a true, original Dadaist. If you’re not in love with paying $100 for the screaming, vomiting experience of Disney World to stand inside a castle, drive the 90 minutes to Ona to visit one created by a real artist for a mere $10.

Despite his age, Solomon assured that he plans to keep expanding and creating so long as he’s able.

“Some day,” he said. “The castle will be my kids problem.”

Art is Hard: The Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, FL

The Dali Museum, a grandiose hull of glass nodules and steel adjacent to a marina in St. Petersburg Florida. Only a few years old, the powers found it necessary to destroy the former Dali Museum in order to erect a new one, not for efficacy reasons but for aesthetics alone. Our friend Danielle with whom we were staying told us this trend is increasing along the waterfront to the point where locals have begun protesting the destruction and recreation of a shoreline site called The Pier, simply because some find it outdated, at the behest of taxpayer dollars and the possible malnourishment of the pelican population. Why fix what isn’t broken? Because we can afford it, goddamn it!

In the lobby of the museum sits a remake of Dali’s Rainy Taxi, which by the insertion of a dollar bill into a slot causes simulated rainwater to pour through the interior of the automobile, soaking both the molding mannequin in the backseat and the shark-headed chauffeur. The original exhibition included chicory plants and live snails which crawled across the plastic woman. Its pay-per-play remake did not.

Snails not included.

As a tribute to the artist who was quoted once admitting a love for everything gilded and excessive, the institution exists solely to serve to the upwardly mobile their monthly helping of culture, celebrating the depraved opulence of the allotted few and not the collection of one of the greatest creative minds of the 20th century. It is, as with the yacht club or the golf club, a place to be seen and to socialize, a spot to nibble on cheese plates and sip $7 glasses of low-rung wine at the commissary and not to engage in a sensory experience with the present art. They are shopping, plugged in to their headsets, their faces saying “This one would look lovely in the pool house. Do you think they take checks?”

The appeal exists because Dali’s work is different enough to earn culture points but not outwardly shocking enough to spark real, introspective thought among these people, fighting their twanging discomfort in front of a wall-length portrait mocking the crucifixion of Christ or a topless portrait of his wife and muse Gala at the kitchen table. Anything more intense and they would barf into their Hermes handbags.

Their mentality is disturbingly appropriate as the collection itself began as one of the largest, private collections of the artists’ work in the United States, owned by a big-money couple from St. Petersburg who began collecting in 1943. The now amassed 1,500 works consist of still lifes of fruit bowls and landscapes of the artists’ hometown from his early art school days and the extravagant, absurd masterpieces he labored over in the final years of his life.

The art is exquisite and it is striking to see his works in person, many of them taking on varying shapes and meanings when viewed from different distances and angles. The motifs running throughout - the silhouette of the Venus de Milo, Gala,  melting clocks and globes - are traceable when viewed as a massive, live portfolio, witnessing his transition from student to artist, discovering his sense of Surrealism around the time he met idol Pablo Picasso.

Migrating through the mingling browsers - if you have the stomach for snobbery - there’s something hysterical about people fantasizing about art they’ll never own or even really understand. They’re more interested in what’s in the gift shop and who’s at the snack bar, anyway. We cannot help but wonder what Dali would have thought of such a clash - the very people he sought to satirize and shake out of complacency, quietly gazing at his works as though they were at the Sistine Chapel. Would he love it? Would he hate it? The answer is not one or the other, nor does it lie somewhere in between. It is in fact a trick question: he would probably pull the fire alarm and wait outside to spray patrons with a hose.

I Love The Dead: The New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum

I might as well come out and say it, as if we didn’t make it obvious enough to anyone and everyone we have talked to since our jaunt through the South, but Alexa and I both loved New Orleans. LOVED it. One of the things we admired the most about it was the amount of acceptance and assimilation that has taken place there. It still has its problems, and we saw a few sketchy characters – like the kid rolling a blunt in Armstrong Park who also huffed some blow off of the back of his hand, or the man with the bloodied face filling out a police report on the “other” side of Elysian Fields – but ultimately, it is one of the most welcoming places in the world.

What makes it so welcoming? It is just as easy to point to the colorful buildings – the marriage of diverse architectural styles and shockingly bright colors make New Orleans a psychedelic experience* – as it is to the broad culinary palate that existed in NOLA (word for the wise: no one down there calls it the Big Easy. Nobody.) long before the foodie explosion of the early Aughts. Let’s not forget the ever-present sounds of music, usually performed live on a street-corner, that also pulls you in. What I think makes New Orleans so enticing is not the architecture, the food, or the music – although those are all added values.

It’s the people.

As a town driven in no small part by year-round tourism, its biggest draw is no doubt the party atmosphere. Second only to Vegas, NOLA serves as a venue for typically demure businessmen attending a sales convention, virginal bachelorettes, and good timer frat boys to get completely and utterly shit-faced. We are talking just totally ruined, as in puking into the nearest catch basin at four in the afternoon, after debasing and embarrassing themselves along every inch of their downward spiral to this point.

This is where the locals come in.

Conscious as to why so many people flock to New Orleans – and after all, where else can you publicly double-fist tumblers filled with daiquiris? – the locals are understandably wary of out-of-towners. Some, as we witnessed, are downright mean to the stumbling drunks on Bourbon Street, and to our delight, especially since New York City’s tourism industry is regarded as a sacred institution. For the out-of-towner seeking more than the gratification of their id, expect – after some initial curtness – to meet the nicest people in the world.

Such was our experience with John T., the resident psychic and clerk at the New Orleans Voodoo Museum. Sitting behind the counter in a cloud of incense smoke and with the piercing eyes of a mystic, John presented an intimidating presence. With its location in the heart of the French Quarter, on Dumaine Street between Bourbon and Royal, John no doubt sees his share of tourists who treat the Voodoo Museum (or at least its front room, since there is no admission fee for that) as though they were on safari. When we came in and asked questions about the cost of tickets, the test began.

“Tell me,” he asked, in a Southern accent that was both charming and slightly discomforting, “what are your signs?”

“Capricorn and Cancer.”

John’s eyes widened.

“Capricorn and Cancer?” He sat back and folded his arms, shaking his head slightly. “Oh, that is a match made in Hell.”**

He went on to ask us about our interest in Voodoo, picking our brains to make sure we weren’t just there to treat something he takes so seriously like a joke. I told him we were interested in studying religions and belief systems, and that we were particularly fond of rituals, images, and objects held sacred by them. With a glint in his eye that was somewhere between an avuncular twinkle and a spark of Hellfire, he told us that what the museum featured was good and well, but that what he had in his third-floor apartment upstairs was something different altogether.

Raising his eye-spark with one of my own and a half-smirk, I asked what we would find upstairs?

“Oh, I have things up there that would send you running into the street.” He returned the smile, no longer trying to scare us but instead playfully teasing. “You wouldn’t last five minutes!”

With that, we passed the test. It is only left for us to speculate how other people would carry on during this psychic game of poker, but I would imagine the visitors being much more stand-offish. John smiled and told us about the museum: it was founded in 1972, that he himself is the resident psychic as well as a practitioner. He also added a fair warning for us before we entered the museum.

“Anything you see involving body parts or animals is not there for the fear factor. It is there because these are things used in Voodoo ceremonies and rituals. They are used because Voodoo believes God is present in all living things.”

And it is on that note that we present our own photos of the Voodoo Museum:

Baron Samedi, left, and the Rougarou, a Cajun variant of the werewolf, on the right.
The New Orleans Rougaroux has a much better ring to it than the Pelicans, don't you think?
It would certainly make for more interesting merchandise.

Voodoo has its origins in the folk religions of West Africa.

Historically, to allow Voodoo practitioners to hide in plain sight, Catholic saints were used in place of Voodoo spirits.

There is a unique reverence for the dead based more in celebration and ancestor worship, rather than fear.

Part of a display case depicting Voodoo symbols (the rainbow snake on the back tapestry represents God) and offerings.

Voodoo offerings made in Saint Louis Cemetery No. 1.
Different offerings mean different things: makeup signifies romance, jewelry signifies the desire to seduce, lottery tickets signify wealth and prosperity.

After the museum, we had a nice conversation with John, during which a group of tourists came in, doing exactly what we thought they would do: they took pictures, asked how much the museum cost, lied that they “might be back,” and then promptly left. There is a lot more for us to share: our conversation with John, where he told us just what he had upstairs, the walking tour itself (led by Jerry Gandolfo, historian and brother of the Voodoo Museum’s founder), and an encounter with a Voodoo priestess in her temple (where she quoted Bobby “Blue” Bland and told me I was a seeker with an old soul – so yes, we got along swimmingly), but you’ll have to wait for the book for all of that.

* It is worth noting that neither of us have been to San Francisco – but we’ll get there.

** We look forward to one day telling our kids about the best compliment we ever received, and it will be the time a psychic in New Orleans said we were "a match made in Hell." (It sure beats the time a drunk in the East Village asked me if Alexa was my sister.)

Trompe le Monde: Two New Orleans Icons: Napoleon House & Café du Monde

In keeping with the sometimes-we-do, sometimes-we-don’t tradition of dedicating a post to somebody, I would like to dedicate this entry to my dad, Eric DiBlasi Sr., with whom I first explored New Orleans in 2009.

This marked Alexa’s first time to New Orleans and my second, which allowed me to both revisit many of the same restaurants, shops, and other sites of interest from my first visit, while also doubling as a guide through my favorite place in the world. The afternoon we arrived, we dropped our bags off at the hotel and drove into New Orleans proper. I took us right to Napoleon House, at the gorgeous intersection of St. Charles and Chartres Streets, and one of many places where my father and I ate during my first trip to New Orleans four years earlier.

Napoleon House is a building with history literally etched into its walls, with the bricks visible beneath the cracked plaster. For a town that is already distinctly different from the rest of the United States (Voodoo historian Jerry Gandolfo called it “the north coast of the Caribbean,”) walking into Napoleon House is like stepping into a European bistro, albeit with a tropical climate.

Both times I ate there, I kept it simple and classic: red beans, rice, and sausage. No frills, no bullshit, nothing fancy. A staple of New Orleans cuisine, it is the perfect blend of flavors and textures. Words are barely enough to describe it. When done right, red beans and rice is a food experience that borders on the divine.

On my recommendation, Alexa ordered the muffuletta sandwich. An often-overlooked fact about New Orleans is that it boasts the largest Italian-American population in the United States. The muffuletta is an invention of Sicilian immigrants, featuring layers of meat (mortadella, salami, and ham) and cheese (provolone and mozzarella) on muffuletta bread, topped with a slightly spicy olive tapenade. The bread is somewhat like focaccia, thin and soft, and topped with sesame seeds. To soften the cheese – and also to make it into a melty bite of Heaven – the sandwich is usually served warm. Most restaurants will offer the sandwich in quarter, half, and full-sized portions. Measuring ten inches across, the full-sized portion is a lot of sandwich.

If the food is among the best things I ever ate (apologies to Alton Brown), then the atmosphere is even better. Featuring both indoor and outdoor seating, it is an ideal spot to enjoy a good meal, coffee and dessert, or to just sit back with a local favorite (Pimm’s Royal is highly recommended) and people-watch while listening to the classical music played over the house speakers.

We didn’t order it this time around, but when I visited New Orleans with my dad, I enjoyed the cassata (spumoni ice cream served with jelly and cake – a true delicacy) while my old man indulged in one of his favorite things on the planet, after Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, 1950’s sci-fi B-movies, and his Fender Mustang: the cannoli. Regardless of what you do there, no trip to New Orleans is complete without stopping by Napoleon House and just soaking in the atmosphere – but be sure to order something among all the soaking.

Just a short walk away from the Napoleon House is Café du Monde, one of the better known dining spots in the French Quarter, famous for their beignets and traditional New Orleans style coffee. The beignets, deep fried pastry fritters topped with powdered sugar, arrive steaming hot to the table under a large green and white striped canopy in pure French flair. The café au lait is another local must. The coffee beans are roasted with chicory, giving a peppery flair to your morning coffee. While Café du Monde is one of the more touristy spots, it is worth the visit. The beignets and café au lait make the perfect mid-afternoon snack or ending to a day in one of America's coolest cities.