UNCLE LIONEL BATISTE

I'm visiting my brother in New Orleans for Thanksgiving. The next couple of posts will feature people I've met and things I've seen during this week in the Crescent City.



Lionel Batiste, known to most folks down here simply as Uncle Lionel, has been an integral part of the Tremé brass band scene for over 50 years. Bass drummer, band leader, and all around NOLA booster, Uncle has been at every single bar I've visited this week, often outlasting revelers several decades his junior. I watched him sing with Kermit Ruffins one night, dance to the music of his own band the next, and then hop onstage at 2:30 AM to sing and sway along to the music of Walter "Wolfman" Washington. New Orleans is full of characters, but Uncle Lionel is a singular presence.

GLEN DENNY: YOSEMITE

Yosemite in the Sixties is a relatively new book of b+w photography capturing the famous Camp 4 at Yosemite, the epicenter of the climbing world in the 1960s. The book includes a forward by Yvon Chouinard, adventurer extraordinaire and founder of Patagonia.





via Inventory

SWASHBUCKLING, ETC.: WHAT IS FILK?!

EDWARD WOODWARD: 1930-2009

Edward Woodward, who played Sgt. Howie in the infamous 1973 film The Wicker Man, has died.

FEELING ALRIGHT

Incredible early footage of the Jackson 5. Live in their home state of Indiana, 1971.

ANATOMICAL HORROR

Images from a new book called simply The Anatomy of Japanese Folk Monsters by Shigeru Mizuki.

via Pink Tentacle.

VERBOORT SAUSAGE FESTIVAL

Every year, on the first Saturday of November, a small Dutch-Catholic farming community 40 minutes west of Portland holds a fund-raiser for the local parish school. Manifesting itself as an all-you-can-eat dinner, craft fair and bake sale, the real reason to go- the reason my father has been taking me here all my life- is the bulk sausage and sauerkraut.


Visitation Parish in Verboot, Oregon

Made on-site and available for sale exactly once a year, the smokey Verboort sausage and fresh, crisp kraut draw hungry people from all over the northwest. The sale begins at 9:00am, but the line begins to form around 6. Shivering and damp, people wait for hours beneath towering century-old sequoia trees to buy a year's worth of meat: the sausage holds up incredibly well in the freezer. My dad came here as a broke college student, and he and his friends would line their pockets with plastic bags so as to better capitalize on the low price of the all-you-can-eat dinner. There's even a beer garden, accessible only by climbing up onto the flatbed of an old farm truck and wishing for the best.


Those massive sequoias framing a sea of automobiles


Another shot of the line


Glory is the bulk sales counter at Verboort

SAM COOKE & THE SOUL STIRRERS: I NEED YOU NOW