Cats

Weekend in New Orleans Part 2: City views and Scultpure Garden

My second excursion focused on walking, art and photography. I began by heading downtown from the hotel along St. Charles Avenue, following the inactive streetcar route. The hotel clerk later advised me that this may not have been the wisest action because of some rather sketchy blocks along the way. Personally, I don't think there was much of issue during the day – a lot of times such concerns are exaggerated. In addition to the “stately mansions” of the Garden district and the occasional boarded-up business, the walk along St Charles affording an opportunity to sample some of the local politics. Something called “Amendment 7”, which I gather has something to do with assessors, seems to be a big deal in this neighborhood. And of course, there are reminders that depite some of New Orlean's reputation, we are still deep in the south and “red America”:

Apparently “fundamental values” don't include keeping the streets free of litter. These flyers were scattered all over the sidewalk, and probably made a nice paste in the rains on Monday.

St. Charles passes under Highway 90 and empties out onto Robert E. Lee square. I'm guessing this was a significant central point in the past, but it seems to be a rather seedy area on the edge of downtown. I kinda like the irony of that. One notable landmark is the Circle Bar, which I hope to visit before the end of the trip. Moving west, one enters the “arts-warehouse” district that attempts to be the downtown of art galleries and clubs one finds in other cities. Not a lot seemed to open early on Sunday, it is good to see alternatives to tourist center of French Quarter getting built up. Here we see a Cat Noir, a cabaret-style club compete with one of my favorite of the old Toulouse Lautrec posters.

I did finally locate not only a source for the transit day-passes, but also a working streetcar on Canal Street. Here zip and I catch a ride:

Actually, these are the historic cars from the non-functional St. Charles line, but moved over to the new Canal Street line because its cars were flooded.

Heading up Canal street, more of the damaged and closed businesses can be seen. On one block will be luxury hotels or appartments, on the next a boarded up department store or theatre:

As the streetcar continues north past the I-10 overpass, more severe physical and social damange becomes apparent, with shuttered businesses and entire blocks empty or in ruins:


Click on the lower photos to view them in more detail. Notable on the lower right are the ubiquitous spray-paint symbols indicating that the house was checked after the storm, and the first roaming kitty cat of the trip.

Our ultimate destination was the city park, home to the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) and the city sculpture garden. The city park is close to Lake Pontchartrain and the Lakeview neighborhood, and suffered extensive damage, from which it is still recovering. However, the museum weathered the storm with little damage, and reopened in February.

One scultpure in the garden was topped during the hurricane, is is currently being repaired by the artist. Otherwise, it faired well and reopened last December. They have an impressive collection of modernist and contemporary figurative works. I have included a few of my photos here. (A few of the best photos from the garden and the trip in general will be included in my photography section when I get a chance to update it). Again, you can click on any of the photos below for a more detailed view:



I think the wedding photo session on the bridge adds a nice contrast to the tower of violins in the lower right.

In addition to finding good art within the city, I also sought and found good music outside the main tourist destinates. My brief experiences with music and nightlife will be explored in part 3…











Weekend in New Orleans Part 1: Zip visits the French Quarter

Before the start of the ICMC Conference today, I spent the weekend exploring a bit of New Orleans. Zip of course came along for the ride and photo ops.

In this first article of several, we make the obligatory trip to the French Quarter. This area largely survived the devastation last year and was quick to reopen as the “adult Disneyland” that people associate with New Orleans. Just outside the quarter on Canal Street, damaged downtown buildings being repaired and closed businesses are a common sight – a little eerie in spots. but inside things have the appearance of being back to normal. The bars and restaurants are mostly open, music and neon lights are everywhere. Tourists are in abundance (perhaps not as many as before, I have no way to gauge this), and there were plenty of people and vendors around the major sites, such as Jackson square and the cathedral(?) of St. Louis:

Churches are fine, but there are also monuments a plenty to one of the town’s real religions: jazz. Here Zip poses with famed jazz clarinetist Pete Fountain:

We also took in some live jazz at the New Orleans Jazz national park in the French Market along the rivier:

The famed architecture of the quarter is exactly as one would expect:

Again, most places seem to have weathered the storm or been repaired quickly, and many that are not hotels or business are up for sale as condos. There are still plenty of signs of the last year’s events, such as ubiquitous blue dog, here decked out for Mardi Gras (or pretty much any day here, it seems):

A few pleasant breaks from the stereotypical tourist fare could be found in some of the small specialty shops sprinkled throughout the neighborhood, including a rather intruiging shop dealing in occult products, including “black cat fur.” No cats were harmed in the collection of this fur, one hopes… Also some craft stores, a modern art gallery that didn’t give in to insipid tourist tastes, and a cool little shop that used the mason’s “Pyramonster” as it’s logo.

Another welcome addition to the day was a performance art troupe Wild Animus, who performed part of their piece on the riverfront near Jackson Square:

Apparently, the artists responsible are part of a San Francisco art collective, go figure. Several performers were handing out free DVDs, which I have yet to review, but I am curious about this work.

There was a particularly surreal moment as a wedding processing, complete with Dixieland-style band crossed paths with Wild Animus. I have a little bit of that on a video, which I will post as soon as I get a chance.

Having had enough of the French Quarter, I went in search of what is apparently one of post-hurricane New Orlean’s best kept secrets: where to get tour passes for the bus system. After several attempts, I finally found a tourist info agent who pointed me in the direction of a kiosk in one of the shopping centers, but when I got there I was met only with a sign that said “Back 30 minutes after the hour.” I believe it was about 2:45 at this time. A little annoyed, I headed back to Canal Street anyway to catch a streetcar (and pay full fare) towards the city park, where the city’s main art museum and sculpture garden is located. Of course, the streetcar would be out of order when I got there, and the busses running in its place were nowhere to be seen. The changes of making it out to the park before the garden closed to visitors at 4pm seemed pretty slim. But instead of stewing in my frustration, I headed with Zip back into the quarter for a more local kind of stew and a local brew:

This is definitely following the traveler’s rule “When in Rome…” In addition to gumbo, we sampled some of the ever popular oysters, cooked in this case:

And with this, the first of many tasty meals and refreshing beverages to come (too many?), we conclude this part of the story.

Be nice or leave.

Weekend Cat Blogging #74: Preparing for New Orleans radio performance

Lali at Lali et Cie is hosting Weekend Cat Blogging soixante-dix quatre (I never could get the hang of French numbers). And how appropriate to be blogging this weekend from one of America's great cities with French heritage, New Orleans. I am here attending the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC), and will be performing a piece live on local public radio WTUL FM. For anyone interested in listening in, it will be streaming live online, next Friday at 1PM CST US (check out my main site for more info.

Needless to say, I've been scrambling a bit to get ready for the trip in general, and the performance in particular. I'll post more about the music and technology later this weekend, but for now it's enough to appreciate that Luna has been keeping me company in the studio as I work out some nasty bugs in the software for the piece:

She seems to enjoy sitting on my lap while I work. And it's great to have her sharing in some small part of the creative process.

I think this closeup qualifies as a “catsynth pic.” Luna poses with laptop, E-MU Xboard, E-MU Vintage Pro and circuit-bent VTech toy phone.

In my absence, Luna is being well cared for courtesy of Ronni West's Happy At Home Cat Sitting.

Halloween Weekend Cat Blogging: Black Cat Appreciation

This special Halloween edition of Weekend Cat Blogging is being hosted by Linda and Aggie over at kayaksoup. It is a lovely warm sunny October afternoon here on the left coast, and Luna has some lovely harvest-themed pictures to share:

Here Luna obliges us with the traditional Halloween pose:

Sadly, Halloween can be a difficult time for cats in the United States, especially black kitties. The image of the black cat as “bad luck” or witches' familiars permeate folklore as well as the pop culture and commerce surrounding Halloween. Ritual sacrifice and harm to black cats is largely documented to be an urban legend, but the fiction can influence kids. Indeed, animal killing and abuse does rise around halloween mostly because of “poorly-behaved kids” influenced by the folk and popular images:

Far too often, the animals are tortured and sacrificed during pseudo satanic-based rituals.

“But not by the real religious satanic groups,” [Lillian Dubois-Tercero, president and executive director of Arizona Pet Line] stressed. “They don't sacrifice cats and dogs. It's the idiot juveniles (who are) responsible who don't know what they're doing.”

This is one reason why many shelters control (or ban) adoptions of black cats in the weeks leading up to and immediately after Halloween. However, shelters are trying to minimize another problem faced by black cats around Halloween – people “adopting” them as living decorations, trying to go one better than the ubiquitous paper cutouts. Even if not specifically “hurt,” many of these cats are apparently returned to the shelters after Halloween. Such “shelter whiplash” can be traumatic, and if I were a cat I would lose some of my trust in humans.

About.com has an excellent article on The Perils of Halloween for Black Cats. We join the author in dubbing October as Black Cat Appreciation Month. Of course, here at CatSynth every day is Black Cat Appreciation Day.

So be kind to kitties you meet these week, and keep your own feline companions indoors. Might want to keep an eye on some of those kids, too…

UPDATE (Oct 29): AP has an article today entitled “Black cat adoptions banned on Halloween”, which discusses both the practice as well as potential downsides for already stigmatized black cats:

Janet, a black cat up for adoption, pauses on a wall ledge at the Kootenai Humane Society, Thursday, Oct. 26, 2006, in Hayden, Idaho. The Kootenai Humane Society is prohibiting all black cat adoptions from mid-October to Nov. 2, fearing the ebony animals could be mistreated as a Halloween prank, or worse, be used in a satanic sacrifice. (AP Photo/ Kirk Mastin)

Doesn't Janet look a lot like Luna? Such a sweet face…








Worthless Kitty Backfill: "Not a catsynth pic" and other diversions

There are real catsynth photos, and then there is this submission we received this week:

It came from a rather odd site with copies of the same picture over and over again, with long biblical quotes. The trackbacks were rather suspicious, indeed the whole thing seems kinda sketchy. Thus I am not providing a link to the original source to order to protect you, my loyal readers (hey if you're reading this post you must be pretty loyal).

Speaking of biblical spam, this seems like as good a time as any to note (as so many have already) the resemblance between the new Pope Benedict XVI and the Emperor from Star Wars:

You can google “pope star wars emperor” for plenty of earlier and more authentic references. While the metaphor for the imperial past of the Church is obvious, I wonder what it says about the future? Perhaps the ultimate fate of the Church is to be overrun by dancing ewoks…

We'll have to wait about the ewoks, but in the meantime, the cats are invading the Holy See. It turns out that the new pope is quite the ailurophile. If he loves cats, he can't be all bad, though I still don't like this “the dictatorial relativist Left is apoplectic” thing.

Yub dub, erub yub








Weekend Cat Blogging #72: The furry encounter

Jelly and Kamikazee over at I got Two Shoes host this weekend's roundup. Uncle Kamikazee is up to his old antics again.

We had our own little drama here earlier. Luna was looking out one of her favorite windows here in the studio when one of our neighbors showed up:

This tuxedo kitty has been in the neighborhood a lot longer than I have, and, well, he thinks he owns the place. That being said, Luna has her own claims to the view out the window, and attempts to let him know who's the queen of this domain. She has a unique sound she uses for encounters with other felines, as can be heard in this Catster video:



This is as good a time as any to let folks know that Luna has her own profile and blog at Catster, where you can read about this episode from her perspective and watch Furry Encounter Part 2.








Catsynth pics: Silicon Breakdown

Silicon Breakdown features the cat April programming a micromoog:

Small world; Silicon Breakdown performed at Woodstockhausen 2002, same year as my first appearance at the “tiny festival of esoteric music.” Check out the track Mutate from WSH 2002, which is part of their 2003 CD Green, available as freely downloadable mp3s.








Weekend Cat Blogging #67

Luna blends in perfectly with her dad's decor while getting warm on a table above our main heater. The temperature this morning was 49F (10C)! That is a travesty in September, usually the hottest month of the year along the California coast. It's not helping my recovery from whatever ailment has befallen me this week, either.

Anyhow, being stuck home gives me plenty of time to host Weekend Cat Blogging #67, taking over from last week's host, chefsarahjane. Assuming I'm feeling better over the weekend and things warm up a bit, I'll be spending as much time as I can outside – but that shouldn't stop me from posting updates.

So send us your feline articles and photos; either leave a comment on this post, or send me a message. Bonus points if you can fit into the cats-with-music-and-art theme of this forum.







Weekend Kitty Blogging #71: Silliness and The Mighty Hunter

This weekend's round-up is being hosted at Rosa's Yummy Yums, featuring Fridolin and Maruschka taking turns with a knit bonnet and looking quite embarrassed. Check out this week's round-up of silly and crazy, but nonetheless extremely cute felines.

Luna is quite the sophisticated cat, but that doesn't mean she doesn't have her silly moments, such as her fun with boxes last week. She also loves to play with her toy mousies, and goes at them with reckless abandon:

One of her favorite games is to push them under the couch farther than she can reach, which often leads to amusing scenes like this:

Indeed, Luna can be quite silly and obsessive when she plays the mighty hunter. I snapped this pic while she was engrossed for 15 to 20 minutes with a bug that fell behind the dresser after she succeeding in swatting it:

Sweetie, just let it go…








CatSynth pic: kittennettik fyrall

It's been a little while since I've posted an actual cat-and-synth photo. Here we have a kitty posing with a “kittennettik” instrument called the fyrall. From the website:

fyrall is a multo-jungo-world dialer, it is a freak. Within, it has three electronic wheels, one made out of wigglers, one made out of digital counting temples, and the third reconnects the others. at every move it may be in a state of internal paradox. it is always looking for a state of rest and it can never find it. Experimenting on the fyrall is fun because new rewirings will cause it to spasm in the weirdest ways.

The fyrall and the other kittennetiks use chaotic cicruits for sound synthesis and control. The creator of these instruments has some specs and papers, which are, well, quite interesting. See for yourself.

My interest is definitely piqued. However, I might try looking at one of the “paper circuits” they provide before considering any of the full-blown kits.