My guests often Ask Arthur about coffee and beignets. It’s a matter of personal opinion, of course, and I won’t mention its better known rival — the one with the French name on Jackson Square where all the tourists go and sometimes wait, and wait, and wait for a table because of the crowds — but hands down the Morning Call coffee stand does the best coffee and beignets in New Orleans, which means they’re the best in the entire world. Morning Call has been in business since 1870, owned by the same family for all those years. They have a special and secret way of crafting their beignets, which I’m happy to share on request. And they leave it up to you to control how much powdered sugar to sprinkle or dump on top. For these and many more reasons, Morning Call is the locals’ favorite. So let’s go!
Holt Cemetery with Paul Newman and Neil Diamond
Met so many others
Wanted to know which way to go
Louisiana, New York City
They wanted the answer
They'd ask of me.
Friend, have you seen glory road?
Happy New Year! Let's go walking!
Big River
French Quarter Sunrise guest Angie Rubin of Los Angeles caught this dramatic view of the Mississippi in early morning light.
Don't you love the smell of hot grease in the morning?
Sharing this amusing contribution to our blog from recent French Quarter Sunrise tour guest, Angie Rubin of Los Angeles: "We took a sunrise walking tour with Arthur that was a blast. If you ever go to NOLA, you must take one of his tours. Here's a SLO MO video at Cafe Du Monde and the beignets being thrown into the boiling oil. Arthur dug this."
Poet's Corner: Charles Bukowski in New Orleans
Charles Bukowski's imprint outside the R Bar on Kerelec Street, the midpoint oasis in our Marigny Happy Hour walking tour. Note the soggy joint above.
Of all the Bohemians and barflies to leave their mark on New Orleans literary landscape surely the most indelible belongs to the poet who scratched “Hank was here — 1955” in wet concrete outside a corner bar in Marigny.
Some of Bukowski's earliest poetry collections were published here by the avant-garde Loujon Press.
“Hank” is short for “Henry,” as in Charles Henry Bukowski (1920-1994), America’s laureate of lowlife. It was a name he went by in person and one he also used in print, as in “Hank” Chinaski, the alcoholic anti-hero of Bukowski’s novels and prose works like Notes of a Dirty Old Man.
So what was Hank doing in New Orleans in the mid-1950s? Oh, the usual if you believe everything Bukowski wrote about himself— getting drunk, getting into fights, getting laid. The rundown port city of that era was ideal for all three pursuits. But it was here too that Bukowski found a publisher for some of the earliest collections of his poetry, such as It catches my heart in its hands (1963) lavishly printed in an edition of 777 copies by Loujon Press.
Bukowski’s first visit to New Orleans was in 1942. Possibly on the lam from the World War II draft (he would later be classed 4-F, “psychologically unfit”), the young drifter lived in squalid rooming houses, worked for 40 cents an hour as an errand boy for the old New Orleans Item newspaper, and subsisted on “five cent candy bars.”
Fifty years later, and two years before his death from leukemia at age 74, Bukowski remembered that time in one of his most celebrated poems, “Young in New Orleans.”
starving there, sitting around the bars,
and at night walking the streets for
hours,
the moonlight always seemed fake
to me, maybe it was,
and in the French Quarter I watched
the horses and buggies going by,
everybody sitting high in the open
carriages, the black driver, and in
back the man and the woman,
usually young and always white.
and I was always white.
and hardly charmed by the
world.
New Orleans was a place to
hide.
I could piss away my life,
unmolested.
except for the rats.
the rats in my dark small room
very much resented sharing it
with me.
they were large and fearless
and stared at me with eyes
that spoke
an unblinking
death.
women were beyond me.
they saw something
depraved.
there was one waitress
a little older than
I, she rather smiled,
lingered when she
brought my
coffee.
that was plenty for
me, that was
enough.
there was something about
that city, though
it didn't let me feel guilty
that I had no feeling for the
things so many others
needed.
it let me alone.
sitting up in my bed
the llights out,
hearing the outside
sounds,
lifting my cheap
bottle of wine,
letting the warmth of
the grape
enter
me
as I heard the rats
moving about the
room,
I preferred them
to
humans.
being lost,
being crazy maybe
is not so bad
if you can be
that way
undisturbed.
New Orleans gave me
that.
nobody ever called
my name.
no telephone,
no car,
no job,
no
anything.
me and the
rats
and my youth,
one time,
that time
I knew
even through the
nothingness,
it was a
celebration
of something not to
do
but only
know
But why quote, when you can listen to the poet in his own whiskey-roughened voice? Or, next time you’re in town, seek out Bukowski’s French Quarter haunts on Ask Arthur’s “Bards and Barflies of Bohemia” literary history tour.