Just a word to everyone we saw at our booth at the Fair Grounds during Jazz Fest: thank you for your concern, kind words of appreciation, praise and encouragement. Many of you are our subscribers, but even more of you are local people who can pick up OffBeat free but haven’t usually subscribed. One of the reasons we manned a booth during Jazz Fest is to encourage subscribers.
Since Katrina, our advertisers and particularly, our subscribers, have literally floated the magazine and the other efforts OffBeat enters into to support Louisiana music. So if you’re a local New Orleans-area reader, please consider subscribing for only $29 a year. It’s a great bargain, and you’ll receive a free CD to boot. You can also get OffBeat’s Weekly Beat online by signing up at offbeat.com.
The Louisiana Music Directory is also online, free, at www.louisianamusicdirectory.com. Be forewarned: this is last year’s version, and may contain incorrect information as we have not had the staff to fully update it post-Katrina. We’ll begin working on that this summer as we usually do.
A few more words to the people who stopped by our booth: No, we cannot give you a free OffBeat from our booth. No, we cannot give you anything from our booth, not even a schedule. Please buy an official Jazz Fest program if you forgot to bring your daily cube sheet. If you can’t afford to buy a program, please go to the information booth to see a schedule and a map of the Fair Grounds. Jazz Fest producers say that copies of OffBeat and the schedule will be dropped as litter and it will cost them even more to clean up.
The OffBeat booth gives us a place to say hello to you and to take a subscription order from you. We love seeing you and hearing how much you love the Jazz Fest and OffBeat for keeping the music alive. Talk to Festival Productions next year about letting us pass out magazines free on the Fair Grounds. There. I’m done…
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Considering the devastation, the lack of population, volunteers and workers, the dearth of musicians who used to live here and now don’t, not enough hotel rooms, tourists or cabs, I think both the French Quarter Fest and the Jazz Fest certainly deserve a lot of credit for creating great, well-attended events this year. The French Quarter Fest announced that an estimated 350,000 people attended in the one weekend of its festival. Festival Productions’ official statement regarding Jazz Fest’s estimated crowds was somewhere between 300,000 and 350,000. Last year was about 400,000, including the Thursday, so Jazz Fest was amazingly close to that on average, even with one fewer day and half the city gone. So in Quint Davis’s words on opening day “We don’t know who you are or where y’all came from, but we’re sure glad to see you!” We have a lot to be thankful for, this spring. But what comes this summer is going to test us severely.
Businesses, including ours, are battening down the hatches for what could be a very bad summer, business-wise. This issue of OffBeat will be distributed at the very first large convention that’ll take place in New Orleans: the American Library Association, in late June. We need more conventions to get us through. And we’re praying every day that the hurricanes miss us this year, and that our friends can move home once again.
By the time you read this, New Orleanians will have selected a new mayor and sundry other elected officials. As a native, sometimes I take the attitude of “plus de choses changent plus qu’ils restent la même chose” — the more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s always been that way in New Orleans, and sometimes you get sucked in by complacency and apathy towards the situation. We can’t afford to feel that way now. We have to change. I’m afraid that we’re going to lose even more good people if we don’t. If you didn’t vote, shame on you; you deserve stupid corrupt politics. If you voted for someone based on the fact that you recognized their name and don’t know anything about the person’s work ethic, integrity and record, then, shucks, you’re an idiot and you shouldn’t be allowed to vote. If you’re sitting on your ass waiting for someone else to clean up your city, shame on you again. Get active; pick up the garbage; take care of our kids; demand a decent education process; report criminal activity in your neighborhoods. If the Orleans Parish school system is failing, work to change the system so that it does succeed. Forget about making race an issue in governing the city. Aren’t we really trying to get beyond that for the good of everyone?
If we’re going to turn New Orleans around — and those of us who are the “pioneers” post-Katrina desperately want to do just that — then we have to be practical, we have to make hard decisions, we have to work for a common good.
Finally — I’ll climb off my soapbox soon—I plead with our city’s leadership to recognize and capitalize on one of New Orleans’ most important cultural and economic assets: her music and musicians. There’s a lot we can do to bring New Orleans back, and our music and culture is tops on my list. Get the music and musicians back to the city and let the world know that New Orleans is the music capital of the universe. Say it, believe it.
