#162 - three months after...

new orleans seems like a hell of a city. i've never visited there myself, but from what i envision, it's unlike any other city in the nation, a city that thrives on its rich culture. it's got chill people, good music, good food & good times and regardless of whether things are good or bad, there's the city & people & the culture & those help keep folks going. the only person i know in new orleans--my good pal mike--relocated down there a little while back & he seems to be doing well. basically, he lives & works there, enjoys the nightlife & helps run "the NOLA defender," a pretty sweet culture & news site that covers the heart, mouth, mind & soul of new orleans. i guess it's legit, because they recently had an interview with richard dreyfuss. but yeah...i think i could get to like new orleans.

too bad people keep fucking it up. after the levees broke during hurricane katrina & flooded the city back in 2004, SEVENTY DAYS AGO BP came along with a fresh man-made disaster to mess with the city. what's that, new orleans? you need fish & crawdads & shrimp & oysters to support your vibrant food culture? hmm. BP seems to have strewn the waters where you get your seafood from with crude oil. is that going to be a problem? oh. well maybe if BP has a few jobs open, they can give all your out-of-work fishermen jobs cleaning up all the oil. what's that? you still won't have seafood? well, maybe you can be like new orleans chef susan spicer & sue BP over the gulf spill's effect on the region's seafood supply. if that doesn't work, maybe you can click your heels together three times. beyond that, i'm out of suggestions. it's sad to see & while the oil spill hasn't produced the same human death toll & inland devastation that hurricane katrina did, people are definitely starting to feel it.

as for katrina, i recently watched the season finale of the HBO series, treme, which focuses on the music scene in new orleans' treme neighborhood three months after the hurricane hit. it's the lastest show by david simon, who's best known for the wire & i love his stuff, so i was extremely excited going in. now that i've finished the first season, i'm just as psyched. the large cast of characters all have engaging stories & each seems to represent a different way that new orleans' citizens dealt with the effects of the hurricane. at the outset, it's a little slow as you get to know all the characters, but eventually the stories develop so well that by the second-to-last episode of the season, there's a scene that's one of the best on TV in years. with amazing performances by john goodman, steve zahn & a host of others, if you have the means to see this show, you must, especially given what's happening to the region right now.

one aspect of new orleans music that treme didn't really get into during its first season was the hip hop scene, whose biggest name is lil wayne. after a weapons conviction earlier this year, the extremely prolific, self-proclaimed "best rapper alive" is just over three months into a year sentence at rikers. that doesn't mean he's stopped rapping though. a few weeks back, a remix of the track "light up," by canadian rapper drake (who just released an album on wayne's young money records) surfaced & it featured lil wayne at the end of it, rappin' a verse over a prison phone. it's a prison-phone quality recording, but lil wayne tears shizz up with badass lines like "first off, i don't need you second-guessing me. jail is like third base, i'm coming home eventually" & "i'm feeling like elvis. jailhouse rock. i'm not tupac, i'm the new pop." apparently he's so prolific that even jail can't stop him. best. prison-phone rap verse. ever.

snack: zapp's cajun dill gator-tators
drink: drank relaxation beverage

last week, as i finished up the first season of treme, i decided to pay tribute to new awlins with a small bag of zapp's cajun dill gator-tators. zapp's, which is based just west of the city in gramercy, is basically the official potato chip of new orleans. on a sad note, ron zappe, the founder of zapp's, died earlier this month, so i guess you could say that i'm also eating them as a tribute to his memory. i've tried pretty much all of their flavors over the years & on this here blog, i even devoted precious internet space to their spicy creole, voodoo & spicy cajun crawtator flavors...loved all of them. i've already made fun of their website once though, so this time, i've decided to be nice & not mention how crappy it is. given the circumstances, cynical mockery just isn't in good taste.

speaking of good taste, the cajun dill gator-tators are definitely one of my favorite zapp's flavors. true to their name, they taste like louisiana gator, or rather a louisiana gator who's covered himself in peanut oil & rolled around in a barrel of dill. i've yet to taste a bad dill chip, so that works for me. to boot, as is the case with all zapp's chips, they're kettle-style ones that are made "once batch at a time, in (their) custom designed fryers." the result is a chip with copious crunch & a minimal amount of greasiness, a chip that is somehow cholesterol free. while "cholesterol free" doesn't sound very new orleans to me, they do have the word "cajun" in the name, so i got over it & managed to enjoy them.

in the spirit of lil' wayne, i paired my gator-tators with a 16 oz can of drank relaxation beverage. drank's tied to lil wayne because "purple drank," the beverage that inspired this drink, is his beverage of choice. the lil wayne-approved version of drank is a mixture of codeine/cough syrup & stuff like 7up & jolly ranchers, so when you drink it, it "slows your roll." the drank i got is a "relaxation beverage" that also promises to "slow your roll," but it's narcotic-free & made by a company based in houston, another hip-hop & purple drank sort of scene. though it's been out for a couple years now, i've never been able to find it & even wrote drank to ask them where i might find it in NYC, but their response was sub-par, so like with my recently-sampled bag of pretzel m&m's, it took a trip to AZ to finally find a can of it.

so how exactly does drank slow your roll? it's made with rose hips, melatonin & valerian root, which according to the can, "have the ability to relax your body, mind and soul." from what i've read, the effects of those three things are debatable, but the can urges against consuming more than one can in a 24 hour period, so i heeded their warning just in case. it's a good thing, as some ninety minutes after finishing the can, i passed the hell out. since i'm not a scientist & therefore neglected to isolate variables & whatnot, there's no way of knowing for sure whether or not my sleepiness was a result of the drank, but i'm going to assume that's what happened...the drank made me sleepy. it's a good thing that it worked as advertised because flavorwise, it's basically grape soda. grape soda's cool & all, but if i'm paying two-and-change for a can of it, it should at the very least have dubious effects on my inner workings. that's just common sense.