Mud-Vape: Voodoo Festival 10/26/18 -- A Travelogue Ripe with the Odor of Mud...and Vape

Many people don't understand the Biblical passage where Lot's wife turns into a pillar of salt. They think she was just being punished for her disobedience. What they don't understand is that God did not want her to see how he supernaturally transported Sodom & Gomorrah thousands of miles away and years into the future to the very bottom of North America--smack dab in the Mississippi River delta. Native Americans told of its incomprehensible debauchery. The first European explorers entered its sin-soaked gates only to be consumed by their basest instincts. La Salle lost three ships in Lake Pontchartrain. DeSoto lost seven. The crewman dove off the side to swim to port, leaving the ships to rot in the fetid, festering waters.
The descendants of these crewman and the original, time-traveled inhabitants started Voodoo Music Festival 300 years ago, where the first performers were actually street people who played out rhythms on their crack pipes. I've somehow avoided attending it in all my years in South Louisiana, living in the phosphorescent, sewage-eating bacterial glow of the Big Easy, of course named for the way it will open its proverbial, sin-stubbled legs for anyone.
The text came several weeks ago, a brief portent of doom from my best friend, cousin, and soon to be father (of his own child, not me), The Rabbit.
"Hey, want to go to Voodoo Fest?"
I'll never turn down an invitation from The Rabbit, especially considering he's about to have his hands full of baby soon, and wow that maybe didn't get worded the best, so I texted back "sure." This is a tale of that journey, into the very bowels of America, into the dark and septic bowels of the world.

*     *     *

The morning of October 28th was like any other lying between Sunday and Saturday, with the Sun rising in the East, though directions and geography are completely subjective constructs of a humanity that blows off its steam in a city doomed to forever exist below sea level. Yes, that city would soon be my destination, but first I had to go to work, at least until lunch. Then I had to go to Panda Express for a Mountain Dew. Their Mountain Dew machine was broken, though, so then I drove to Taco Bell, whose magical Mountain Dew fountain was still functional. Then I drank my green and glowing liquid courage, and drove South, from my comfortable perch in the state's belly-button, to its sphincter.
My drive to New Orleans has recently gotten 45-minutes shorter. I can almost hit it with a rock now, though that would just piss it off. However, no matter how far my drive, entering New Orleans' city limits, which, like, does it start in Metarie? Does it start when I get to the airport? Does it start when I can smell it? If that's the case, does it start in Sorrento? Sorry, that was a geographical joke that will only be enjoyed by South Louisianians who both enjoy geographical jokes, and geographical jokes that are bad, a considerably small amount of people, though maybe I could get the Russian bots on board. They can get you elected President, and even effect your Rotten Tomatoes score. Anyway, what was I saying? Oh, yeah, I drank a gallon of Mountain Dew, and I had to pee.
Unfortunately, The Rabbit was not home from work yet when I got to his new place on the edge of New Orleans' fabled City Park*
*City Park, now with 50% less syringes, and 2% less syphilis, and a free, malnourished spider monkey from the Audubon zoo for the first 25 visitors. Just forget about last year when that rowdy jaguar got out and senselessly slaughtered six other animals. Toss your cares into the Irish Channel. That's another joke for the locals, who, if they weren't too inebriated to understand English, would not find it very funny.*
My need to urinate was even stronger than my need to hide from New Orleans behind the bushes by The Rabbit's front porch. I scurried to the park hoping for, at worst, a port-a-potty, and at best, a restroom where I wouldn't have to pull an immobily intoxicated person out of the urinal before I used it. However, an even better scenario presented itself, when I realized that The Rabbit lived on the side of the park housing a Morning Call.

Morning Call has beignets and coffee, and after I emptied my glowing, lime-colored urine into its bathroom, I needed more caffeine, and I always need more beignets, so I used the $5 in my wallet to buy three beignets and a coffee, but the old man serving them dug my cool, personable vibe, which surely must be coming through clearly with the amount of rectal and urine-related references I've made so far in this travelogue, and gave me four beignets, though my café au lait had a chunk of semi-dissolved paper towel or some such trash at the bottom of it because after all, this is New Orleans, so I guess I should just feel lucky that the contents of my cup were more coffee than trash, and didn't contain an empty syringe, a severed human digit, or Folgers. Also, now I have the jingle, "The best part of waking up, is severed digits in your cup!" stuck in my head.

I hadn't heard from The Rabbit yet, so I just hung out and took weird pictures of myself, which will most certainly incite intercontinental peace and solve global hunger because self-centered, egotistical narcissism will surely save the world.

After still not hearing from The Rabbit, I decided to wander around City Park, and check out the grounds just outside Voodoo Fest, which is actually officially called "The Voodoo Music + Arts Experience," though I will never ever again refer to it as that in this travelogue outside of this exact sentence.



After a few minutes, two things became clear to me. I was the only person not only wearing a t-shirt to Voodoo Fest, but also not wearing an elaborate, skin-bearing costume. The other is that I could be everyone else attending Voodoo Fest's father. Okay, that's cool, I can deal with that, I hear that I look young for my age...maybe I don't look like a NARC. But why is everyone asking me to take pictures of their group? Is it because I look like a safe, dad type? And why did I just switch tenses? Is it because I'm old?

Whatever the case, with The Rabbit AWOL, and with The Nicsperiment seeming really out of place at the festival, I was beginning to wish I hadn't already purchased my ticket. If I hadn't, I could just run back to The Nicsperimentbile, and high-tail it back to the moral high ground of Baton Rouge...which is literally 50 feet higher above sea level than New Orleans...meaning it is almost 50 feet above sea level. Instead, I walked back to The Rabbit's house, and sat on his porch. His street was starting to feel up...er, fill up with festival parkers to an alarming degree--it was allegedly a two-way street, but the tight mass of cars on each side made it barely a one-way. I re-parked my car so close to the curb, if it and the curb were baptist, they would have been kicked out of the dance.
From the Rabbit's porch I could hear the distant sounds of Third Eye Blind, wheezing through their twenty-year-old, very 90's hits, such as "Jumper," "Semi-Charmed Life," "How's It Going to Be," and "My Fanny Pack Wears a Fanny Pack." Then I noticed this guy staring at me from the bushes.

After reading every "I hate Bama" article I could find in preparation for the next weekend, I decided that even Third Eye Blind would be better than sitting around any longer. I texted The Rabbit to let him know I was going to Voodoo solo, then walked the green mile.
As I passed the entry gates, after a rather thorough, or rather, disturbingly thorough pat down, which is I guess not even thorough enough for a town where people are regularly killed or injured by revelers firing celebratory shots into the air, two things immediately stood out to me because I must currently be obsessed with duos.
This first: butts. So many butts. Twenty dump truck-loads of butts. Hundreds of butts that never should have seen the light of the sun exposed to the rancid New Orleans air. I guess the thong catsuit is in this year? Or maybe just in New Orleans. But hey, it's your butt, do what you want with it. I put mine in a nice layer of boxer-briefs and jeans, but who's to say that those very articles of clothing are not obscene? Let's just all go naked everywhere. Theme parks. Just imagine squeezing into a damp rollercoaster seat 100 naked dirty butts have already sat in all day. How about Chick-fil-A? Who doesn't want to drop a mayonnaise-drenched Spicy Chicken Sandwich onto their junk? I do! How about the zoo? How fair is it that the animals get to be naked, but we don't? And why can't I just defecate anywhere? Damned American puritan sensibilities!!!
The second thing I noticed: mud. Yep. This is what the ground looked like at Voodoo Fest 2018 (bonus: butts).


The muddy grounds of Voodoo were thicker than even the butts at Voodoo, meaning that there was more cushion for the pushin of my feet. That's okay, though, it's not like I wore new sneakers to an event I paid $100 to attend, expecting them to not get entirely ruined. No big deal at all.
I believe Voodoo had four music stages, though only one featured actual bands, as the other three seemed to only contain DJ's who played early 00's hits, asked the crowd to sing along, then dropped the same exact wub-a-dub-dubstep beat one minute into it. As such, I went to the stage featuring bands. Unfortunately, that stage was surrounded by a muddy moat of people.

However, one benefit of being alone in a crowd is that you can weasel through it like a Russian bot on your dad's Facebook feed. I quickly made it from the outskirts to the writhing, butt-filled middle. The band sounded good, so that was certainly something. Turns out it was The Revivalists, a local act whose individual albums don't have pages on Wikipedia, but whose hit song, "Wish I Knew You," has 45 million views on Youtube, the place where dreams come true at .002 cents a view. Still, 45 million views is pretty impressive, even if you have to cram your 15 minute spacey jam into a four-minute happy meal acceptable to the unwashed, butt-bearing masses. Yes, live, The Revivalists combined a distinctly New Orleans roots rock sound with the conventions of trippy prog-rock and improvisational jazz, giving their saxophonist an unending, floaty, reverb-soaked solo over an eternal bass groove, and honestly, it could have lasted longer. I loved it, and it completely flipped my vibe to "maybe New Orleans isn't that bad." Of course, when I Googled the band and song, I found the album version of "Wish I Knew You" to be that easily digestible pop-version on the Youtube video. Bummer.

"Wish I Knew You" ended, the band played an encore comprised solely of a high-energy version of Beastie Boys "Fight For Your Right (To Party)," complete with goofy costumes, and then they left the stage. I then weaseled up all the way to the front because honestly, I was really only interested in seeing the next band, A Perfect Circle. I'd never seen them, and during their ridiculously long hiatus, thought I never would, but now that they're back with their first new album in 14 years, they're also hanging out in New Orleans on a Friday night.
A friendly young couple up in the front asked me for a cigarette. I don't smoke anything but suckers, so I had to let them down gently. The girl complained that everyone around only had vape sticks. Then I realized something. That usual New Orleans smell of marijuana and human waste had frequently been punctuated by fruity tangs. It had been happening since I walked through the gates of City Park. Then I realized it: the giant cloud of haze I had assumed to be the general Crescent City blunt fog was actually more composed of vape smoke. These young generation Z'ers were puffing it out like wily hobbits in Saruman's stash. I suddenly realized that the person behind me wasn't having a luau-for-one and grilling a pineapple. He was vaping a pineapple flavored stick. They were all vaping, the whole lot of them, except for the ones smoking weed, and the girl next to me, who just desperately wanted a good, old-fashioned, addictive, paper-composed cancer-delivery straw. However, the most amusing thing from that interaction came when the girl told me she had always loved the voice of A Perfect Circle vocalist, Maynard James Keenan, because her mother listened to Tool and A Perfect Circle when she was a little kid.
"How old is your mom?" I asked.
"She's 43."
"Nice. She's six years older than me."
A Perfect Circle then played a solid set. Keenan never made use of the Voodoo stage catwalk (which I was standing right next to), and in fact, never really moved in general, standing on a raised platform, enshrouded in stage smoke, for the entirety of their performance. Unfortunately, the band drew heavily from their latest album, Eat the Elephant, which I am not entirely fond of, though they did inject a little more power and atmosphere into those songs in the live setting. Thankfully, they also played a decent selection of deep cuts from their first two albums, and paced their hour-long set pretty well. Overall, I give them four vape sticks out of five.



The Rabbit texted me and let me know he was finally home, and we decided to go see the new Halloween movie later that night. Since the next band playing was Mumford and Sons, I left immediately.
Here's a problem. You cross a seemingly impenetrable mud-pit once. 50,000 people dance around on that mud. You then have to cross that impenetrable mud-pit again. Except, now it's an impenetrable mire full of butts and vape smoke. There's only one way out. And on that way are zombies and angry crowds burning witches at the stake. I'm not kidding.



I talked to a few people wearing shrimp boots, and told them they were geniuses. Most of them said they had come earlier and ruined their good shoes, gone home, and come back more well-prepared. Dagnabbit, I had hip-boots in my trunk. I also ran into a couple dressed as Daenerys Stormborn and Jon Snow from Game of Thrones. Daenerys' pure white dress was brown up to the knees. "No one does that to the mother of dragons!" I told her. "Pfff," she vaped.
I passed by a now lit-up, and benighted Morning Call (they are open 24 hours!), and it looked extra Hopper-y, then crossed the park bridge from earlier, which was now all Rembrandt-y.


I met up with the Rabbit, and then we headed to the AMC Clearview Palace 12, which I have to admit, is my favorite movie theater, mostly due to the fact that the front reminds me of Back to the Future. The whole place is kind of out-of-time, as the interior is part of an 80's-esque shopping mall, replete with a giant food court.

Of course, my favoritism took a pretty major hit when I saw how much the ticket cost! $18.55? I could make a movie for that much money! That's like 9,275 Youtube views!!!

I already reviewed the movie on The Nicsperiment. I won't talk about it anymore here, except to say I enjoyed it. Wow, I can't believe that was so brief. I must be ready to finish this thing. Let's do it!
The Rabbit and I went back to his house and talked for a few hours, since we didn't get to hang out before. He had brought a bunch of cookies and some awesome tasting, extremely buttery German cake from his restaurant. What I did to them was so gruesome, even New Orleans thought I went too far. That's like Ed Gein saying your outfit is a little over the top.
The next morning, we went to this awesome breakfast place called The Station, where I got this awesome cream cheese danish that somehow involved satsuma, and a bacon and cheese biscuit that must have involved more butter in its creation than all of the butts I saw the night before.


"Wow!" I exclaimed. Maybe all those ancient sailors had a good reason to jump off their boats. "Marvelous! You know what, maybe I do like New Orleans!"
Then I looked at my shoes.