Mike Frolich’s artistic legacy in the Saturn Bar

One of my many justifications for keeping the devil was Frolich’s claim that his paintings were created in part for the children of the Ninth Ward, more of whom run through our house than the Saturn Bar. Kids need a relationship with their devils as much as adults do. Instead of renouncing or banishing them, children should know their features and particular hues, their habitats and gestures. Keeping them in steady sight, they’re easier to manage.

An installment in our weekly series, The By and By. 

When Cash Money was started several years before by the brothers Baby and Slim Williams, Kilo G had been its flagship artist. He was only fourteen when he met Baby and Slim, too young to sign a contract; they’d had to take a ferry across the river to find his grandmother, so she could sign in his place. Before Mannie Fresh, before Lil Wayne—before the fleet of Bentleys and yellow Hummers that roamed the streets of New Orleans like an occupying army—there had been Kilo G.

This Pagan world is a discreet part of American religious history that hadn’t been told of yet, outside of very small snippets in books that are really for the community itself. There’s power in having a narrator whom you feel like you can relate to. This helps make the reader willing to go along with you as you end up in late-night circles drinking from chalices and all the other good witchy stuff.

New Orleans has a mercurial sensibility that allows it to simultaneously resemble only itself and any number of other places. The flow of the streets and speech, the cuisine and the history—it’s all distinctly of New Orleans, yet testament to the fact that this city was built on trade and traders (and the traded). What better place for EN MAS’,  an exhibition stretched between here and there.

In the ten years that have passed since Hurricane Katrina, David G. Spielman has documented New Orleans’s ever-changing landscape in haunting black-and-white haunting images that chronicle endurance, neglect, and recovery.

The text from my little brother came around six in the morning: we would meet for lunch at the Rib Room and then spend the rest of the day “filling our lungs with memories.” It was Tuesday, April 21, 2015, and a citywide smoking ban in bars was going into effect at midnight.

Everything is Going to Be All Right, by Jared Ragland, is a photographic meditation on Walker Percy’s classic novel of New Orleans, The Moviegoer. In search of meaning amid feelings of loss, isolation, alienation, and malaise, Ragland is Binx Bolling with a camera.

Elysium is an examination of the diminishing urban forest of New Orleans, forever altered by a 70% canopy loss due to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and further destroyed by rescue and restoration crews in the wake of the storm and in the years since.

Foreword to a collection of personal narratives by the junior class at New Orleans’s George Washington Carver High School.

I’ve read the essays in this book at least ten times each, not because I have to, but because I don’t think there is another book like it in the world. The really terrifying thing is that I need this book even more now than I needed it as an eleventh grader. If every American book published in 2018 were written to the eleventh grade at Carver High School in New Orleans, the world would be less violent. If every American book published in 2018 were written by eleventh graders at Carver, the world would be more loving. Though these young folks are rarely written to in American literature, they know who they are. And they know who the folks are who refuse to see all of their complexity. “We are rare and powerful,” the younger writers tell us in the introduction.

Richard Sexton’s forthcoming book, Enigmatic Stream: Industrial Landscapes of the Lower Mississippi River documents, in close to one hundred images spanning nearly twenty years of work, the role of industry along the riverbank.