Trombone Shorty performs at the 2012 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.(Douglas Mason)
Eric Clapton, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Christina Aguilera, Phish, Santana, Arcade Fire, John Fogerty, Robert Plant, Alabama Shakes… New Orleans hosts thousands of events each year, but one of their most popular attractions is the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival presented by Shell (Jazz Fest), founded in 1970 when the non-profit New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation was formed to promote and preserve music, arts, and culture in Louisiana.
It’s said that, during the very first Jazz Fest, there were more people on stage than in the audience. But today, the festival generates some $300 million a year for the local economy. It’s no wonder, considering this year’s featured acts. There so many highlights that deciding which to experience in April won’t be easy.
Which leads us to a question: how did New Orleans get dubbed “The Big Easy?” The city’s official name comes from the city of Orleans, in France, itself named after Phillippe Duc D’Orleans. But as for the nickname—well, it’s not an “easy” question to answer.
There are a number of theories in circulation. One references how easy it was, and continues to be, for musicians to land gigs in New Orleans. By the way, you may be surprised to learn that the word “jazz” did not originate in NOLA, according to You Don’t Know Jazz and jazz pianist, musicologist, educator, and author Dr. Lewis Porter. They claim that to date, the earliest documented use of the word was in an article published on April 2, 1912 in the LA Times. It had nothing to do with music, but everything to do with baseball. The brief, entitled Ben’s Jazz Curve, includes this quote from the pitcher: “I call it the Jazz ball because it wobbles and you simply can’t do anything with it.”
So while the word “jazz” was later associated with music, it didn’t stem from New Orleans, which was once said to be one of the least expensive places to live. Actually, that’s another theory on why it’s called The Big Easy.
But locals attribute the widespread use of the nickname The Big Easy to the late Betty Guillaud, a gossip columnist from the Times-Picayune. They say that Guillaud used the term first in the early 1970s to compare life in New York City—the Big Apple—to life in New Orleans—The Big Easy.
Lea Sinclair, her friend and marketing director for The New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation, insists that Guillaud popularized the term, even pointing to her Times-Picayune obituary: “Betty Guillaud, a Times-Picayune columnist who swanned her way through a succession of soirees and swankiendas as she chronicled the fun and foibles of the denizens of the Big Easy, a nickname for New Orleans that she helped popularize, died Saturday at the Sanctuary of complications of Alzheimer’s disease. She was 79.”
Author James Conaway, who penned the crime novel The Big Easy, has a different story. According to Conaway, the phrase was never in print until his book was published in 1970. And here’s how he came up with the book title from which the nickname was popularized: Before he became a novelist, in the mid-1960s, Conaway was working as a police reporter for the Times-Picayune. One night, he says, while walking on Claiborne Avenue to the criminal courthouse, he overheard two African-American men chatting, and the words “the big easy” stuck out. Conaway isn’t exactly sure what it pertained to; he can only speculate. But, “it was a wonderful phrase. I’d never heard it before,” he says. “It’s an indigenous phrase I overheard as a police reporter and, struck by it, named the novel title two years later.”
So what of Betty Guillaud? Conaway suggests she must have read his book (or perhaps a review of it in the Times-Picayune) and picked up the phrase. Lea Sinclair begs to differ. “My opinion is that I think Betty did use it before 1970, and while I don’t know whether the author’s memory is correct or not, my guess is that he heard it at the Times-Picayune. His recollection, however, makes for good copy,” she told us via email.
“It’s my phrase,” counters the author. “Nobody heard that phrase before I used it.”
Well, nobody except at least two men in deep conversation one night in New Orleans…
Wherein New Orleans's most promising, patrician politician meets the least palatable constituents, mortality-wise. From the just-released novel, World's End:
I did some crazy things…
Strather Ward left the study, with its walls of law books bound in gilt-edged calfskin, and walked up the hall to Erin's bedroom. Although it was late, the door was closed. He knocked softly and let himself in. His wife lay sprawled among the sheets, hair over her face, sleeping. He sat on the edge of her bed but didn't wake her, gazing about the room at the appurtenances of Erin's ordered, stylish life: a maple breakfront filled with books and correspondence, a splendid original sun face by Klee, the elegant disarray of yesterday's clothes. He was pleased by the sense of her well-being. If he could not give her more of himself at present, he could at least provide the material aspects of stability and love. After the election, he told himself, things would be different. "Oh, it's you," she said, sitting up. "Whom did you expect?" "The governor." She laughed. "It's late, you should be on your way to Shreveport." "Not yet. I have to make an appearance downtown.” The sound of footsteps carried along the hall. He went to the door and saw the butler, Clarence, standing at the head of the stairs. "Man downstairs to see you.”
“Who?" Strather asked.
“Name Scali. He say he in the vegetable business.”
“Well, send him around to the service entrance."
"Say he here for his boss. Name Chink Way." He meant Cinque.
"Here? In this house?”
“He only jes inside the door."
"Tell him to call the campaign headquarters. "
Clarence started slowly down the stairs.
"Wait,'' said Strather. "Show him into the sitting room, I'll be right down."
He could hear the sound of the shower in Erin's bathroom: he would not have to answer her questions, at least not now. He had dealt once before with an envoy of Salvator Cinque's, when he was a congressman and a round man with an Italian surname came by the office to discuss the grocery business. Strather recalled endless details about creole tomatoes but nothing about prostitution, gambling, drugs, or vending machines. He had been afraid the man would offer him money, but he didn't: a courtesy call.
Strather went downstairs. The shutters in the sitting room were still closed against the morning sun, his visitor sitting in a wing chair beside the fireplace, the face partially in shadow. He stood when Strather entered the room, at ease as if they were both strangers in the house. Strather recorded a mournful expression, dark, inanimate eyes, a depression in his glossy black hair left by a hat Clarence would have deposited on the hall table.
"Morning, Governor," the man said.
"Good morning, Mr. Scali. Don’t get up. And I’m not governor yet.”
Strather sat across from him. Scali gazed around the room. “These old houses," he said, "they're all right.”
“Thank you.”
“But I'd hate to fix the plumbing."
The man's casualness was infuriating. "You wanted to see me?"
"That's right. We been watching you and we think you're a real interesting candidate.”
“‘We'?"
"Me and my associates in St. Theresa. Like Sal Cinque, who you maybe know about." Scali paused. "He's in produce, too."
"I know who Mr. Cinque is."
"Now Sal's a loner, he don't talk much. But a great guy. He's been interested in good government going way back. Down in Theresa he's helped out the sheriff, I mean, unbelievable. He built the wing on that hospital. They put up his name on the wall. That cost plenty, all for children and orphans," pronouncing it erfans.
''Very commendable."
"So naturally he’s interested in your campaign. We just want to make sure where you stand on some issues."
"Where I've always stood, Mr. Scali. I believe in local autonomy, civil liberties, help for the less fortunate, free enterprise…”
“Yeah, free enterprise. We're interested in that, too. What about extradition?”
“I don’t really have a position on extradition."
"Maybe it ain't an issue to you but it is to us. Naturally we wouldn't back nobody that was for automatic extradition of law-abiding citizens that give a lot of bread to charity and like that."
"I'm not for automatic anything, Mr. Scali."
"Well, that's good to know." Scali sank deeper into his chair, eyes fixed on the ceiling, right hand beneath his lapel. Strather was fascinated. No doubt that the man carried a gun and could employ it with lethal effect.
"We wouldn't want to back nobody," Scali went on, the hand searching now, "that was even leaning toward extradition. So I just wanted to try it out on you. See, when we back somebody — and we didn't back you for Congress because we didn't know you real good — we back 'em." Strather knew that much. A judge had just been elected to the State Supreme Court with the assistance of these people, who had spent upward of one hundred thousand dollars in each of four parishes.
"I don't know anything about Mr. Cinque's problems," Strather said, "other than what has appeared in the newspapers. I couldn't possibly make a commitment, one way or the other."
"We're not asking you for nothing dishonest. What do you think we are?" At last Scali withdraw his hand, a toothpick clamped between thumb and forefinger. "We just want you to have an open mind, not to be too tight with some of the people that would like to see Sal get his."
"Get his what?"
"You know, canned."
"Who’re you referring to?"
Scali opened his mouth and to Strather's horror inserted the toothpick between two molars. He probed thoughtfully. A gunshot would be less humiliating than having to bear witness to Scali's dental hygiene.
"That was some party Rory O'Neill threw for you down to the parish."
"A political pulse-taking," Strather said. "He's done the same for many candidates. I might add that he's never done it for me before."
"They all say you're their man."
Strather felt anger rising. "They're all wrong, Mr. Scali. And I don't like that insinuation. My independence will become more of an issue in this campaign, believe me."
Scali laughed, an unpleasant sound. "We wouldn't want you to be too independent."
"I'm afraid I'll have to disappoint you. I have no intention of serving any special interests, not you and not Commissioner O'Neill. In fact, if there is anything I would want to be rid of ..."
He saw his mistake too late. Scali withdrew the toothpick and leaned forward in the chair. "Yeah? Go on."
"... I would want to be free of charges of influence. And now, if you'll excuse me I have to address the mayors downtown in ..." He consulted his watch, to cover the blunder. "... in seven minutes."
But Scali hadn't heard. ''You got some problem with O'Neill?"
"I don't know what you mean."
"If you got a problem there, Governor …"
"Please don't call me that. I'm a private citizen, as you are.”
“My mistake. Well, whatever problems you got, Straight, maybe we can help."
Strather had never before realized just how much he hated that nickname. "Why, thank you," pretending to misunderstand, "we can always use volunteers. I suggest that you contact one of my people at the campaign office, on Carondelet. And now, Mr. Scali ..."
"Please call me Jock."
"Jock, I really do have to get downtown." He rang for Clarence. "It's been a pleasure."
"Likewise." Scali stood with an elaborate slowness, and they shook hands. The visitor held on. "I always like to meet a man personal. You never know what will come out of a personal meeting. Take today. I see you're a real person with real problems. I say to myself, 'Here's a real person that maybe we can help.' Everybody's got a product to sell, that's what makes the system work."
Clarence appeared in the doorway holding a black hat with a tiny feather in the brim. Scali drifted toward him and took the hat without acknowledgment, running his palm around the brim. Strather waited for him to speak again but Scali simply nodded and followed Clarence into the hall, leaving Strather uncertain of what had just transpired.
When my novel, World's End, first came out the reviews were good (http://www.fearlessbooks.com/WorldsEnd.htm) but more than one critic preferred the hoods to the good guys. So here's a short except featuring two enforcers working for the deep-delta, Irish reincarnation of the Kingfish, Rory O'Neill. They're Neco and Blue, ideally suited for the business at hand:
Hail Mary, full of grace…
Neco’s pistol rested comfortably in his jacket pocket, a familiar .357 magnum with the bluing worn away from the muzzle and the cylinder's sharp edges. He carried it as casually as another man might carry a pipe. In the twenty years he had worked for the Commissioner, he had worn out the linings of a dozen coats as he packed a gun about the parish or traveled armed to New Orleans and Baton Rouge and beyond. Neco refused to wear a holster because holsters made him sweat more than usual in the hot, heavy air, and holsters were showy.
Luis Necochea Bovnik was the son of a Dalmatian oysterman and an illegal Argentine immigrant taken into the household of the Commissioner's father years before. Neco had grown up close to the Commissioner's family, taking part in the last ferocious days of partisan politics, and becoming the organization's chief enforcer because of his loyalty and physical strength. Neco was short and thick, and no longer young, but he was still capable of awful swiftness: no man had twice made the mistake of considering Neco fat. Steel gray hair swept back from a prominent widow's peak, giving his face the look of a wedge. He chain-smoked cigarettes of harsh, dark tobacco and he seldom spoke.
Ostentation was one of many things Neco did not approve of, Italians were another. World's End contained as much racial diversity as any place on earth, yet retained a curious cohesiveness as Endsmen had been traditionally drawn together by their isolation. There was not just the remains of European invaders: the French, the Spanish, and the presumptuous English. There were also Irish, German, Chinese, and native Choctaws in World's End, as well as powerful Tockos from the Dalmatian coast who had endured every hardship, Cajuns who fled Nova Scotia to settle on the western edge of the parish and were known familiarly as coonass, and freejacks — fair-skinned Negroes whose forebears may or may not have lifted themselves out of slavery.
Neco had already driven up to the city once that day to fetch a pound of cayenne at dawn. Without cayenne, there could have been no good food, and without good food, no real celebration. He had purchased the pepper in the French Market, and then walked over to Bourbon to buy pralines and a brassiere for his girl friend — the kind with colored ribbons and holes for the nipples. He returned to the corner of Royal and Dumaine to find that the two rear tires belonging to the World's End Parish Sheriff's Office had been stabbed with an ice pick. “Wop bastids," Neco had muttered to himself, crushing the pralines in a huge hand.
Neco was still angry about that as he and Blue rode across the top of the parish toward Barter Street, the frontier between World's End and St. Theresa parishes. It was lined with cut-rate stores, liquor outlets, walk-up whore houses filled with girls who couldn't make it hustling in the Quarter. Neco took out the magnum, and placed it on the seat between them.
Blue said, "Straight Ward's wife's a looker."
"Foreign," Neco said, meaning she was a stranger to Louisiana, and that closed the matter.
“Where to?"
"Turn here."
Neco was eager for the night's work. He liked to use Blue to hit the criminals of St. Theresa Parish who dared cross over the line into World's End. To be beaten by a black man added to his enemies' disgrace. Blue was the only Negro in the organization authorized to carry a weapon, and was affectionately known for his freckles, his adeptness with a blade, and for a ferocity indiscriminate of race.
"Here we goes," Blue said, wheeling into a service station, past the pumps, and up onto the grease rack.
He and Neco got out with the rolling motion of large, purposeful men.
The owner came running. "Where ya at, my boys?" His name was Juriscvik, and that would save him: Neco took care of his fellow Tockos.
"Shut the door," Neco ordered.
He and Blue walked into the office. A slot machine stood in the corner, secured to the concrete floor with one-inch bolts. Three clusters of cherries behind glass proved it a winner.
"Now ain't that sumpthn'?" said Blue.
"Don't tell me you boys are interested in that ole slot." Juriscvik nervously wiped his hands on his greasy jacket.
Neco didn't answer. He walked back to the Mercury, hidden now from the street, and opened the trunk. Inside lay a sawed-off, side-by-side Remington .10 gauge, a two-foot billy with a leaded tip, and a submachine gun wrapped in a blanket. Neco moved these about until he located what he wanted — a scarred, double-bitted ax.
"Aw, Neco," lamented Juriscvik.
"Shut your mouth."
Blue went back into the office with the ax. They heard glass shatter, followed by the solid sound of metal pounding metal.
Neco fingered the crumpled pack of Picayunes in his shirt pocket. He extracted a cigarette, applied his own lighter, and inhaled in one continuous motion. He said, "How come you let 'em in?"
"They said they'd bust me if I didn't."
“We'll bust you if you do. You should'a called."
Juriscvik shrugged. "They're close, Neco."
They heard coins shower onto the floor of the office. Blue shouted, "Li'l momma! Jackpot!"
"Now you go and put them quarters in a sack. We'll make the contribution over at Our Lady of Sorrows."
Blue returned, sweat beading his forehead. "They makin' em tougher," he said. "We got to git ourselves a sledge." He tossed the ax into the trunk.
'“What're you carrying?" Neco asked. Blue produced his switchblade.
Neco shook his head. "No marks."
"Don't need nuth'n anyway."
"You like to hit, don't you, boy?"
"When it ain't work," said Blue.
Neither man was smiling.
Juriscvik brought the sack of quarters. "Now you go on into the shitter," Neco told him, "and you stay there."
Blue stationed himself behind the Dr Pepper machine. Neco went into the office, picked up a chair, and carried it into the storeroom. He sat against the wall, and smoked, studying the stacked cases of motor oil, the new tires, a ball peen hammer at his feet. He had wanted to wish the Commissioner a happy birthday, but the words wouldn't come. He had not even given the Commissioner a gift, because he couldn't think of one that was adequate. Neco decided he would make him a very special present in the days to come, one that only he had the nerve and the ability to make.
The bell rang again and again as cars pulled up to the pumps for service that never came, and then pulled back into the street again. A candy-apple-red Impala waited longer than the others, announcing itself with a sustained blare of the horn. Neco did not know the driver, but he recognized the other man as The Walk, named for his tight trousers and his strut. What the Italians called bella figura.
Neco moved his chair to one side, out of sight. He lit another Picayune, and smoked until he heard the car door slam. Then he mashed the cigarette out against one calloused palm and picked up the hammer.
The office door opened and shut. The pause that followed was full of outrage. He heard The Walk mutter, "Holy shit!"
Neco called out to him, keeping his back to the door.
The Walk stepped into the storeroom as if he owned it. "Why you dumb Tocko," he said, mistaking Neco for Juriscvik. "You let them fuckin' swamp rats..."
Still sitting, Neco whipped the hammer to one side, catching him across the shins. The Walk gasped, and clawed at the door jamb. Blue came up behind and grabbed him in a tight half nelson, driving his fist into one kidney. Neco held his free arm, and hit him in the solar plexus with the ball peen hammer. While The Walk fought to get air into his lungs, Neco traced his waistband. He extracted the pistol.
Blue dragged him unprotesting to the grease rack, and began to work on him with steady, measured blows.
Neco had never gotten up from the chair. He inspected the pistol briefly, a .25 automatic — a woman's gun. Then he unloaded it, placed it on the floor, and broke it into several pieces with the hammer. He gathered these together with the brass cartridges, and went out into the garage.
The Walk lay almost casually across the rack, his trousers and jacket smudged, staring glassy-eyed at Blue's two-tone loafers. There were no marks on him, but his mouth was full of blood. So much for bella figura. Neco went on out the door, and across the asphalt toward the Impala, gripping the magnum in his pocket. The blond driver wisely kept his hands on the wheel, but he stared at Neco with undisguised contempt.
Neco tossed the bullets and the bits of the pistol through the window, and then opened the door for The Walk. Blue brought him forward, holding him up by his belt, and shoved him into the car.
“Wop trash," Neco said.
The motor whined as Neco swung the door shut. The car squealed off toward St. Theresa.
Next, the governor-elect receives a button-man in his elegant Garden District home.
The phrase, "The Big Easy," having been laid to rest at last (http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2014/01/more-on-big-easy.html ), we turn now to "World's End," the title of my second novel that's also just released as an e-book. Like The Big Easy it's set in New Orleans and environs and, as with the earlier book, the name picked up during my perambulations that included the coastal parishes of Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes when I was a reporter for the Times-Picayune. Plaquemines was the political fiefdom of the notorious segregationist, Leander Perez, and St. Bernard the haunt of mafiosi, most notably Carlos Marcello. But what about the name? Well, I saw it on a dilapidated sign pointing south along a dirt rut which I did not follow. I did photograph it and hope to eventually turn it up. Meanwhile, it was attached to my novel, and later also used by Paul Theroux and T.C. Boyle for their novels. Titles are not copyrightable, though it bothered me at the time to have World's End applied to other places and other books, but that's all pre-Katrina, when in fact the end of the world did more or less arrive for that watery stretch between New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. A civilization of sorts did go under for good, and at least you can read about it: http://www.amazon.com/Worlds-End-James-Conaway-ebook/dp/B00HLKFGDS/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1389134011&sr=8-4&keywords=james+conaway Here are some images that belong to the real place. More about it another time:
Years ago I met Edward Abbey, author of Desert Solitaire and The Monkeywrench Gang, in Tucson. Abbey was a legend by then - an ailing one - and he provided me not just with contacts but also with a vision of the West and what he thought was at stake there, all of which was immeasurably helpful. I had read his book and later he read mine - The Kingdom in the Country - and sent me the note above, unsolicited, that hangs on the wall of my study today.
Here's the section of the book devoted to that meeting with Abbey:
There was another side to the environmental movement, one unconcerned with "the system." Its members would have scoffed at the orderly meeting on the banks of the Escalante, and such civilized objectives. They favored something called ecotage — ecological sabotage, a leafy version of bomb-throwing.
I heard about ecotage first from the Western writer Edward Abbey, a former Forest Service employee. In 1968 Abbey had written a book called Desert Solitaire, which found a wide audience. The book was an evocative narrative of canyonland life in the service of the federal government, and it aroused my interest in the arid West. The author seemed fractious but informed, moved by an old sixties countercultural impulse. He had greatly augmented his following with the subsequent environmental thriller, The Monkey Wrench Gang, which was an inspiration for ecotage — uncivil disobedience that included shooting holes in the radiators of FS bulldozers, all in the interest of the untrammeled land.
I telephoned Abbey when I was in Tucson, where he lives. We made arrangements to have lunch the next day at the Holiday Inn. It seemed odd to meet one of the foremost advocates of the undeveloped West in the symbol of instant American ease, but Abbey liked the stir-fry there, and the Holiday Inn was convenient.
The restaurant was deserted when we arrived together. I had expected a brawny embodiment of the voice of Desert Solitaire, not a rangy fifty-eight-year-old in a Cat hat and wrinkled cords. The waitress appraised Abbey's beard and rubber sandals but showed us to a table anyway. I had heard stories about Abbey: he was a hard-drinking, four-square extrovert with four wives and five children, or five wives and four children; he hated cities and Eastern reporters and refused to be interviewed; a bleeding pancreas had almost killed him a few months before.
That last story was true, he said. "Too much booze, too much aspirin."
He lived with his fifth wife and two of his four children,
one of them a baby girl. He was writing a novel and teaching part-time at the University of Arizona. "It keeps me from becoming a hermit," he said. "I'd prefer to live out in the country, but my family likes it here."
From his back yard ten miles outside Tucson he could see plenty of public land; its development had been the focus of most of his writing. "The public lands have been exploited and continue to be. It's important to resist, to slow it down, hoping against hope that people will change their views, or that we'll have an economic collapse. I'm counting on biology to bail us out — famine, plague, anything short of nuclear war."
Desert Solitaire had made him slightly famous; renewed movie options on The Monkey Wrench Gang kept him slightly rich, at least by the standards of retired seasonal rangers.
In The Monkey Wrench Gang, a group of ecotagists attempt to destroy a dam on the Colorado River. "I wrote it to vent my spleen and indulge my fantasies. It's a funny book, but I'm serious about ecological sabotage. At readings I advocate illegal action, and catch hell from editorial writers.
"Politics isn't enough anymore. Our representative democracy has broken down, the politicians represent only those interests that finance their elections. You must have some recourse — free-lance sabotage is the only thing left."
I asked about what seemed to be a violent aesthetic.
"I see it as a force against violence," Abbey said. "I've attacked machines in the national forests threatened with logging. I've spiked a few trees offered by the Forest Service to the highest bidder — a commercial buzz saw can be ruined with a single heavy nail. After you spike trees, you call up the logging company about to bid on the timber and tell them about it. That way we save both the buzz saws and the trees."
The Forest Service then had to go around with a metal detector, trying to find the spikes. "We have a little war going on out here between the preservers and the developers. Sugar and sand in crankcases, handgun blasts to radiators. I wouldn't urge anyone to do what I wouldn't do myself."
He asked the waitress to warm up his stir-fry.
"I think of the public lands as a whole, administered from Washington," he went on. "I wish a century ago we had had enough sense to set aside the entire West as a wilderness preserve. I'd move back east right now if everyone else would. I'd go back to Europe if the Indians would go back to Siberia."
He came west from a hardscrabble farm in western Pennsylvania forty years before, hitchhiking, and fell in love with the country. With money from the GI Bill he studied philosophy at the University of New Mexico, Yale, and Edinburgh University, and he worked summers for the Park and Forest services. "I had academic ambitions, but I gave them up when I realized I could make a marginal living as a seasonal ranger. I used to be able to pick my park out of half a dozen choices every spring. It was a good life, and a good life for a writer."
The journal he kept, which became Desert Solitaire, carries the immediacy and detail of something written quickly, in the heat of discovery; in fact it took ten years. "I've been a welfare case worker in Brooklyn. I lived with a painter once in Hoboken, and New York. I've seen the bottom side of the urban world. We should limit our numbers and demands, and let half the planet remain undisturbed — a fifty-fifty split. We should reduce the population of the United States to, say, fifty million through incentives and tax bonuses for fewer children. But we'll keep drifting from disaster to disaster, as humans always do."
"You haven't set much of an example of population control."
"Four children by five wives is a modest rate," he said. "Every woman is entitled to one child. If she's able and willing to be a full-time mother. Women who prefer other careers should not have babies."
The waitress was pouring more coffee; Abbey's comment sent her eyes rolling back in her head. "We're trying to close," she said.
"I don't want to leave you with the impression that life is all gloom and doom," Abbey told me. "Personally, I'm very happy. I have a good life, I make my living as a writer, and I don't work too hard. I'll be a father to a teenager while in my seventies — a fantastic prospect. Abbey died in 1989 and was buried by friends in an unrecorded grave somewhere in the desert near Tucson. He was 62 years old.
Two recent releases by this quality producer, Gary Farrell. One (the 2011 Hallberg Vineyard) costs $55 but is worth it in today's pinot sweepstakes. Full bodied - can a wine have an aggressively strawberry nose and still be balanced? Guess so - it should be
(Photo by Shion Conaway) kept a couple of years before drinking. I found the slightly less expensive and less alcoholic (only 14.5 %) Russian River selection more open and appealing, with bright red fruit and good body. More proof of just how appealing is Russian River pinot and how lucky Sonoma to have that lovely riverine inlet for ocean breezes.
Another appealing wine is Jean-Charles Boisset's excellent, fanciful experiment with inter-continental blending (go to http://cjonwine.blogspot.com/2012/08/hands-across-sea-jcb-no3.html). It's called JCB No. 3 and, as you may remember, a blend of Burgundian and Russian River pinots. Boisset's family owns Raymond in Napa, DeLoach and Lyeth in Sonoma and many other properties. Total disclosure: he sent me a bottle for Christmas and so I tried it a year and a half after the first time. It has opened up: great fruit, well structured, bright, long finish. The price? Only $123.
Below are the annotated endpapers for my book of reportage about the American West, looking like a map left somewhere by Lewis and Clark. My route is traced in black - from Roswell, N.M. to the deserts of California. It's The Kingdom in the Country and just out in ebook. The site also has reviews and comments, including those of Wallace Stegner, my teacher when I was at Stanford, and others. Go to: http://www.fearlessbooks.com/Conaway.htm To research and write Kingdom I ditched my job as a feature writer at the Washington Post (the retirement of Ben Bradlee as editor was already changing that newspaper). I bought a van, put a bed in it, collected maps, camping equipment, a small research library before the days of ebooks and a typewriter, and took off for the territories.
Below, taped inside the first copy, was a letter from the publisher:
One of many characters in the book is Edward Abbey, author of Desert Solitaire that first got me interested in the West. Next I'll run the chapter in Kingdom about Abbey, and the note he sent me after the book was published.
and my other books: Sometimes a nickname is so apt, so perfect, that it fits like a glove: the way the “The Big Easy” has become synonymous with New Orleans. Tracking the term “The Big Easy” provides a happy, if rambling, stroll through New Orleans memory – the way following a walking club on Mardi Gras Day can give you a skewed city tour. Is it an old term? “‘The Big Easy’? That’s a modernism,” local historian Sally Reeves says – and certainly she’s about as familiar with historic New Orleans as anyone alive is likely to get. The city’s founder, Bienville, can be credited with “Crescent City,” but he never called it “Le Grand Façile.” There is no listing under that name in New Orleans Jazz: A Family Album written by Al Rose and Dr. Edmond Souchon in 1967. Neither Bruce Raeburn of the Hogan Archive of New Orleans Jazz at Tulane University nor jazz historian Jack Stewart could immediately recall any early dance hall or club named “The Big Easy” (“But if I do think of something, I’ll let you know,” Stewart promises.) Then there was columnist Jill Jackson – a regular contributor to the Rider’s Digest on the old New Orleans Public Service streetcars in the 1940s and 1950s. Did she invent the term? Jill Jackson is alive and well (except for a case of shingles) in Hollywood, Calif., and still turning out gossip columns. Did she coin the phrase “The Big Easy?” Absolutely not. Jackson insists: “That’s after my time.” Columnist Betty Guillaud popularized the phrase. “That’s all there is about me on Google!” Guillaud says. She wrote for The States-Item and later The Times-Picayune beginning in the late 1960s. When did she begin using the local term? “It was about the same time they started calling New York ‘The Big Apple.’” In fact, there doesn’t seem to be any reference to “The Big Easy” prior to 1970. That’s the year author James Conaway published his novel The Big Easy. The book follows the adventures of a police reporter (which Conaway had been at The Times-Picayune) through the underside of New Orleans, with crime, drugs and racial disturbances scattered through the pages. Did the name exist before Conaway’s book? There is an Internet site maintained by word researcher (and Manhattan traffic court judge) Barry Popik (www.barrypopik.com) that carefully records all possibilities of occurrences of “Big Easy” and finds three, all for New Orleans dance halls and none as a nickname for the city. Was the phrase used elsewhere in connection with the city of New Orleans? A digital search of The New York Times for 156 years finds Conaway’s “The Big Easy” mentioned in a review of top crime novels in that paper on Dec. 6, 1970. From 1851 until then, there had been 29 uses of “the big easy,” but none connected with the words “New Orleans.” From 1971 to 2004 there were five mentions of “the big easy,” all with “New Orleans” and all made after the movie with the same name was released. So where did Jim Conaway get the phrase “The Big Easy?” Well, like any good reporter, Conaway just made note of something he heard on the street. Conaway, originally from Memphis, had gone to Southwestern University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and had been a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford University when he was hired as a reporter for The Times-Picayune, arriving in town two days before Hurricane Betsy in September 1965. “I was an English major – I thought I’d have to teach English or sell insurance. Journalism saved me,” he explains. His first day at work began the morning after the hurricane hit. Conaway soon became a police reporter. “It was a noir experience – real life noir – although I didn’t realize it when I was having it,” he says. The world of Criminal Court at Tulane and Broad was fascinating. “Bigger than life characters, a lot of corruption but a lot of freedom,” he says. “People could do exactly what they wanted.” He often rode the bus and walked from Claiborne Avenue to the courthouse, an adventurous route. “Once [The Times-Picayune editor] George Healy saw me walking. He screeched to a stop and made me get in the car! He just didn’t get it,” Conaway notes. It was while walking that he overheard two black men use the phrase “the big easy,” perhaps describing the city as a place where any musician should be able to succeed with ease. “I was really struck by the phrase, ‘the big easy.’ It was one of those things. You hear something sometimes, and then it sort of goes away. It was only later that it came back to me,” he says. In the book, the phrase is used as an explanation for the city’s lack of riots in the 1960s. “The Big Easy’s just 10 years behind the rest of the world, that’s all. You might say it’s just too goddamn hot to riot,” one character says. There is a racial disturbance in the book but it’s not similar to the New Orleans Black Panther incidents, which occurred just after its publication. Conaway would complete Judge: The Life and Times of Leander Perez, in 1973 and a novel, World’s End with a local setting – and a explosion at the Boston Club as a plot device – in 1978. Here his New Orleans writing ended. On one of his last days at The Times-Picayune, Conaway recalls that, “[veteran police reporter] Jack Dempsey had a little piece of paper and he put it on my desk. He said ‘You might want to look into this.’ I opened the piece of paper and it had David Ferry’s name written on it.” Ferry would be one of the characters in former District Attorney Jim Garrison’s odyssey into the Kennedy assassination. By that time Conaway was gone. He and his wife Penny left New Orleans after two years, went to Europe and eventually settled their family in Washington, D.C., where he later become editor of Preservation magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In 1987, the film The Big Easy appeared, with a completely different story from Conaway’s novel. “I talked to my attorney but he said it’s difficult to sue about a title, especially if the plot is different,” Conaway says. Ironically, his World’s End title was also used by others. Among Conaway’s best known works are The Texans, chronicling better known citizens of that state; Napa: The Story of an American Eden, on Californians; The Smithsonian: 150 Years of Adventure, a biography of that institution; The Kingdom in the Country, an exploration of today’s American West; and his own autobiography, Memphis Afternoons. His most recent book, Vanishing America: In Pursuit of Our Elusive Landscapes, includes magazine pieces and some new writing. In it he has a New Orleans essay, “The Big Uneasy,” reflecting on his years in the city and comparing his hurricane experience of 40 years ago with the tragedy of Katrina. He writes: “Insight may be the ultimate service provided to us all by a city older, more interesting and more enduring than most.” Insight, yes; but inspiration, too! For a look at reviews of this novel and of World's End, or to buy either, go to: http://www.fearlessbooks.com/Conaway.htm
