Episode Transcript
[00:00:15] Speaker A: Greetings, troubled listeners. Welcome back to the troubled Ben podcast. I am Rene Coman, sitting once again in Snake and Jake's Christmas club lounge in the heart of the Clempire with my co host, the original troubled man for troubled times and former future mayor of New Orleans, Mr. Manny Chevrolet. Welcome, Manny.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Hey, thank you for having me.
[00:00:37] Speaker A: Oh, thank you for being here.
[00:00:38] Speaker B: I know this is your gig and I'm just part of it, but thank you.
[00:00:42] Speaker A: You're the.
[00:00:43] Speaker B: You wouldn't have it without me.
[00:00:44] Speaker A: I, I, I, I wouldn't want to do it without you, man.
It's not, it's not as much fun I occasionally forced to do it, but.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: The hell is this?
[00:00:52] Speaker A: We have a silent partner joining us here. He's got his own set of headphones. He can listen in there. He doesn't have a microphone, but maybe do some panaming.
[00:01:01] Speaker B: But terrific guitar player, sand language, you know, sign language.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: He knows that, that most powerful of sign languages.
[00:01:13] Speaker B: Well, you too.
What's that?
[00:01:18] Speaker A: The failings be. Oh, all right, all right. Well, easy, Max.
Getting and gumming up the works already, man. Join us. Going to the dogs here, Manny. It's not only is it Tiki Tuesday, it's bring your dog to the bar night.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: Yeah, and I don't like dogs.
[00:01:36] Speaker A: I know, I know.
[00:01:38] Speaker B: I hate all animals.
[00:01:39] Speaker A: Right, well, it's just to clarify, it's not that you hate animals, you just don't think people should keep them as pets.
[00:01:46] Speaker B: Right?
[00:01:47] Speaker A: Like animals out in the wild. Yeah, you don't hate animals in general. It's just, you know, like domesticated animals.
[00:01:53] Speaker B: Domestication of animals should be outlawed.
[00:01:56] Speaker A: Huh. Okay.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: You know, I really think that I've stopped that for years.
[00:02:00] Speaker A: Strong stand, you know. But you're not one of those PETA lunatics, are you? PETA activists. That's a better word.
[00:02:07] Speaker B: No, I'm not. I don't even know what PETA stands for.
[00:02:10] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, I think it might.
[00:02:11] Speaker B: But I like PETA bread.
[00:02:13] Speaker A: You might have some PETA bread over there.
[00:02:14] Speaker B: Pockets. Yeah, Peanut pockets are good, right?
There used to be a great Greek place in Westwood Village back in the 70s in LA, and that's where I got introduced to gyros and falafel pockets.
[00:02:28] Speaker A: And stuff like that.
[00:02:29] Speaker B: It was right off the UCLA campus and I fell in love with the PETA pocket.
I really did.
Okay, who doesn't love a PETA pocket? Yeah, tell me someone out there. Prove me wrong.
[00:02:43] Speaker A: Well, you know what?
[00:02:43] Speaker B: The pita pockets are the future, Renee.
[00:02:47] Speaker A: Okay, you know, no, I, I like that. You know, I am particular about the. The falafel that I eat, though. You know, some. Some falafel, it's. It's like, you know, crispy brown on the outside and tender green and moist on the inside. That's the kind I like.
[00:03:03] Speaker B: Yeah. Like a Martian pussy.
[00:03:05] Speaker A: But if you. Sure. But if you.
I suppose.
But if you get. Sometimes the kind. They're. They're brown and dry on the inside, it's no good. It like.
[00:03:16] Speaker B: Different type of. Right.
[00:03:17] Speaker A: Pencil shavings.
[00:03:20] Speaker B: That's an airline hooker.
[00:03:22] Speaker A: Okay. All right.
[00:03:24] Speaker C: Some.
[00:03:25] Speaker A: What do they call them lot? Lizards. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.
[00:03:29] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:03:30] Speaker B: A gizzard.
[00:03:31] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:03:31] Speaker B: I don't know. Anyway, you love a good falafel.
[00:03:35] Speaker A: Yes, Yes, I do.
[00:03:36] Speaker B: The only problem with a bad falafel is after you eat it, you feel awful.
[00:03:40] Speaker A: There you go. There you go. We like. We like the. The word play here.
[00:03:43] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. But anyway, Peter Pockets are the future. All right.
[00:03:47] Speaker A: Well, any. So, yes. Bar is filled up early here.
[00:03:50] Speaker B: It's.
[00:03:51] Speaker A: It's getting the.
The daylight savings, whatever. That's shifted. So now it's dark when we get here.
[00:03:57] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:03:58] Speaker A: Tiki lights lit already.
[00:04:00] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:04:01] Speaker A: We missed. Last week. We had somebody lined up, but I was. I brought back a little bit of COVID the plague from New York City, and it was getting worse, so I didn't want to. Didn't want to infect the whole crew, so took a pass. But did you miss me?
[00:04:18] Speaker B: What's that?
[00:04:19] Speaker A: I said, did you miss me?
[00:04:22] Speaker B: Yeah, like I miss burnt toast.
[00:04:24] Speaker A: Okay, gotcha.
[00:04:25] Speaker B: Or like I missed jock itch.
[00:04:26] Speaker A: Right, right, right.
[00:04:27] Speaker B: That's how much I missed you.
[00:04:28] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:04:29] Speaker B: You know, you're always around.
[00:04:31] Speaker A: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, let's see what's going on. We have Thanksgiving coming up this week.
And do you have your traditional Thanksgiving.
[00:04:41] Speaker B: This is a big thing. Morning. Wife. My wife, who I've been pleading with her for over the last 15 years to not do this thing that we do.
She decided a couple weeks ago that I was right. She didn't want to do it.
[00:04:54] Speaker A: Oh, really?
[00:04:55] Speaker B: So, yeah, we're not doing it this year.
You know, she realized what I realized about 15 years ago.
See, 15 years ago, when we started this whole brunch tradition for the fairgrounds, I realized. I looked at all the people that were showing up, and I go, these are my friends.
[00:05:10] Speaker A: Yeah, right. It's a big disappointment.
[00:05:12] Speaker B: Big disappointment. She realized that, I think, last year.
[00:05:15] Speaker A: Oh, okay.
[00:05:15] Speaker B: And she does all the work and stuff, so she realizes, like, I'm doing all this work for these people.
[00:05:20] Speaker A: Right.
[00:05:21] Speaker B: You know, and there's some of them are from. With a group of yammering bitches and some of them are her family people.
[00:05:26] Speaker A: You see normally all the time.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: Like why bother? So she decided we're not doing it this year. And I'm so happy.
[00:05:32] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:05:33] Speaker B: I'm so happy.
[00:05:34] Speaker A: Now I know sometimes you'd go to the track on Thanksgiving.
[00:05:37] Speaker B: Yeah. But this, you know what we used to do before we started this tradition 15, 16 years ago is that we would go out, we go out to, you know, to have a Thanksgiving meal. Now this year, since we're not doing this turkey gumbo brunch thing that we usually do, we're decided that the, that we're going to do either McDonald's or Burger King.
[00:06:03] Speaker A: Wow. Splurging, huh?
[00:06:05] Speaker B: Yeah, we're going to do that. Cuz they're going to be open.
[00:06:07] Speaker A: You're going to supersize it.
[00:06:08] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I might just dig a happy me though.
[00:06:11] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:06:11] Speaker B: Because I'm gonna get there up probably.
[00:06:13] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:06:14] Speaker B: I'm gonna go through the drive through, you know, so.
[00:06:16] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:06:17] Speaker B: You know, so I will just do that.
[00:06:19] Speaker A: Going all out.
[00:06:20] Speaker B: But I'm very happy that she's decided not to do it.
[00:06:23] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:06:23] Speaker B: You know, so we're not doing anything.
[00:06:25] Speaker A: It's a big load off.
[00:06:26] Speaker B: Anyone shows up, get the off my porch.
[00:06:29] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:06:30] Speaker B: I will answer the door in my wife beater shirt. You know, anyway. Yeah. So I'm very happy.
[00:06:37] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:06:37] Speaker B: We're not doing anything. But I know people are doing stuff because it's a holiday and all that.
[00:06:42] Speaker A: Yeah. I still have all my family coming over to my house to host all of them.
[00:06:47] Speaker B: See, I thought, what's that show Seinfeld? What you get together that you tell all the people how they disappointed you for over the years.
[00:06:54] Speaker A: Yeah. Festivus.
[00:06:55] Speaker B: Festivus. See, that's something I would do. Right.
[00:06:58] Speaker A: Well then at one time you were promoting Others Day.
[00:07:01] Speaker B: Others Day, yes, exactly.
[00:07:03] Speaker A: Because you have Mother's Day, you have Father's Day and this is for all the others.
[00:07:07] Speaker B: For everybody else. Yeah. The other people who don't get mentioned, they don't have a Hallmark card.
[00:07:12] Speaker A: Right.
[00:07:13] Speaker B: You know, but I did the other day and it wasn't a very good.
[00:07:17] Speaker A: You know, it didn't catch on.
[00:07:18] Speaker B: It didn't catch on.
[00:07:19] Speaker A: Yeah, it takes a while sometimes because.
[00:07:20] Speaker B: The guy who invented it was my brother in law and he's some Yoko out in Laplace somewhere. You know, on the street corner going miss.
[00:07:28] Speaker C: Right.
[00:07:28] Speaker A: You know, he wasn't really.
[00:07:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:31] Speaker A: So wasn't really promoting it like he.
[00:07:33] Speaker B: Was indeed to be.
[00:07:34] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:07:35] Speaker B: And you know, he lays in bed all night watching a moth dine a lamp.
[00:07:39] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:07:40] Speaker B: You know.
[00:07:40] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:07:41] Speaker B: Anyway, so, yeah, the holidays is not happening for me. All right. Which I'm happy about.
[00:07:46] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:07:47] Speaker B: I'm just gonna watch football in my underwear and watch my wife look at her diamond ring.
[00:07:52] Speaker A: Oh, okay. You know, and you're gonna have cocktails, though, and.
[00:07:56] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, cocktails. And the kid might come over if she wants to grace us with an appearance.
[00:08:01] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:08:01] Speaker B: She might come over and, you know, give me the check that she does every year.
[00:08:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:08:09] Speaker B: Sign it Poppy.
[00:08:10] Speaker A: Okay. Right, right.
[00:08:11] Speaker B: Anyway, she's a good kid.
[00:08:13] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:08:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:14] Speaker A: It's nice to have him close.
[00:08:15] Speaker B: Yeah. She's getting conjugal visits now.
[00:08:18] Speaker A: Oh, okay. I don't know.
[00:08:20] Speaker B: Anyway, what's going on with you?
[00:08:22] Speaker A: Oh, you know, just playing gigs. I was up in New York, played those. Those gigs last. Last two weekends ago. And then here in New Orleans played with Los Tremolo Kings. Had a gig across the lake with Susan Cowsell out in Wild Things, Family reunion and played a bang up show with the Iguanas. And we're doing it all again this weekend over at the Broadside. So, you know, just. It's nice to be back with some of these bands. I hadn't played gigs with Susan Cassill Band since May. She was gone all summer long, out on all the cruises and tours with the. The Cows Hill. So it's kind of returning to a sense of normalcy here back in the city.
[00:09:06] Speaker B: Oh, she was doing those theme cruises.
[00:09:08] Speaker A: Well, she. They had the happy bands from the Happy Together cruise. Yes.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: And then the Family was there.
[00:09:14] Speaker A: No, not Partridge Family.
[00:09:15] Speaker B: Bunch kids.
[00:09:17] Speaker A: The Turtles.
[00:09:18] Speaker B: My three Sons.
[00:09:20] Speaker A: Now Susan was telling me on. On the Cow. The Cows Hills have a podcast that. That they start after we. We had been doing this one and they have guests like Jody from the. From the Family Affair show or.
Or, you know, some of these.
[00:09:39] Speaker B: I thought Jody died.
[00:09:40] Speaker A: Well, then Buffy, the one that didn't. The one that's still alive.
[00:09:43] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:09:44] Speaker A: Well, which one died? Buffy died.
[00:09:46] Speaker B: Buffy died.
[00:09:46] Speaker A: So they're having Jody.
[00:09:47] Speaker B: The one that still had Jody on the show.
[00:09:49] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:09:50] Speaker B: And he killed Buffy.
[00:09:51] Speaker A: No, I don't think so. But I did bring that up to Susan about. About Buffy. And she said that when she was 16, that Buffy was also 16 and lived right down the street from them in. In Brentwood. And she goes, she goes. And I was the good kid of the two of us.
[00:10:08] Speaker B: Yeah, well, Buffy was smoking crack at the age of 12 or something.
[00:10:12] Speaker A: Yeah, it was a sad story.
[00:10:14] Speaker B: Who names a girl Buffy?
[00:10:17] Speaker A: Jody had Mr. French was running the whole show, you know.
Yeah, I remember.
[00:10:22] Speaker B: What's his name? Brian Keith just looked miserable during every episode. Just like.
[00:10:27] Speaker A: Well, he lost his wife. He had these two or three kids, you know.
[00:10:30] Speaker B: I saw Brian Keith on Pico Boulevard in la. I was going to my doctor when I was like 8, 9 years old with my mom. He was just standing on, waiting for the light to turn green, for the walk sign to happen. And he's just a morbid alcoholic. I mean. Oh, yeah. At the age of 8, I knew this guy.
[00:10:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:10:50] Speaker B: Alcoholic.
[00:10:50] Speaker A: Yeah. The redheads. It really shows up, you know, you can see it again. And.
[00:10:55] Speaker B: Yeah, and I said, look, mom, it's that guy from Family Affair.
[00:10:58] Speaker A: And she goes, quiet, quiet.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: Don't say anything. Because he had a career at one time.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: Oh, man.
[00:11:06] Speaker B: He had a movie career.
[00:11:08] Speaker A: Right, right, right.
[00:11:08] Speaker B: And then television ate him up and spit him out.
[00:11:11] Speaker A: Yeah. I think he continued to work, though, you know.
[00:11:14] Speaker B: Yeah, he did a Love Boat, I think.
[00:11:15] Speaker A: Right, right, right. Yeah, he'd show up.
[00:11:17] Speaker B: Movie of the week. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, he did, actually. He was the father at James at 15. Remember that movie?
[00:11:23] Speaker A: I do.
[00:11:24] Speaker B: He was a bed wetter.
[00:11:25] Speaker A: James, huh?
[00:11:26] Speaker B: Yeah. And he. Brian Keith played the dad.
[00:11:28] Speaker A: Okay. And then it was a successful TV movie, and then it became a series.
[00:11:32] Speaker B: Where he just pissed every episode.
[00:11:35] Speaker A: I don't remember that part.
[00:11:36] Speaker B: But I guess then he learned to masturbate.
[00:11:38] Speaker A: It was so.
[00:11:40] Speaker B: So learn to masturbate. James at 15. So James at 16 just became. Just jacking up every episode with a, you know, explosion of. Come when you're 15, 16, man. You got a lot, man.
[00:11:54] Speaker A: I don't. I don't remember that. That part of the show, but I.
[00:11:56] Speaker B: Feel like it won. It won a couple of Emmys.
[00:11:58] Speaker A: I did watch that show. I remember the. The main actor. Now, you never saw.
[00:12:02] Speaker B: I think Buffy was in it for one episode.
[00:12:04] Speaker A: You never saw that crack. Okay, well, that's typecasting. You never saw that. That main actor, the.
[00:12:11] Speaker D: The.
[00:12:11] Speaker A: The title.
[00:12:12] Speaker B: James. James Kerwin.
[00:12:14] Speaker A: Did you ever see him in anything else?
[00:12:16] Speaker B: Yeah, he did a. A movie of the week that Michael Landon produced and directed where he was an Olympic sprinter, runner, a long distance runner. And that's how they got that show.
It was a movie of the week. J. Michael Landon, who did Little House on the Prairie.
[00:12:34] Speaker A: Right.
[00:12:35] Speaker B: And he. He goes, he won the gold medal. And they say, who do you want to thank? And then they go to a flashback of his whole life where he's a bedwetter, and he runs home every day.
[00:12:48] Speaker A: Because, oh, I saw that show.
[00:12:49] Speaker B: His mean mother would put out the soiled.
[00:12:52] Speaker A: Hang the sheets out the window, and.
[00:12:54] Speaker B: He would run home.
[00:12:56] Speaker A: He would try to beat his classmates from getting there so they wouldn't see.
[00:13:00] Speaker B: Yeah. Because the mom was. And Brian Keith. Finally, James runs away from home, and he ends up at a department store and in the mattress section.
He ends up in the mattress section. And he falls asleep on a bed which is bigger than his bed. He had, like, a little kid's bed.
And he's in this bed. He falls asleep, and the police are looking for him because he ran away. And he wakes up, he didn't wet the bed. And he tells his dad, I didn't wet the.
[00:13:27] Speaker D: The bed.
[00:13:28] Speaker B: It's a bigger bed. I didn't wet the bed. And the mom is screaming at little James. And finally, Brian Keith stands up to his wife and says, shut the up, basically, is what she says.
[00:13:38] Speaker A: He says, it's about time.
[00:13:40] Speaker B: It's about time. And that's how he won a gold medal.
[00:13:43] Speaker A: Oh, okay. Yeah, I do remember that.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: Remember that movie?
[00:13:46] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. He was. Yeah, yeah.
Decathlon runner or something.
[00:13:50] Speaker B: Exactly. Marathon runner.
[00:13:52] Speaker A: Right, right.
[00:13:53] Speaker B: You know, but anyway, just like Bruce Jenner.
[00:13:56] Speaker A: Right.
[00:13:57] Speaker B: Turned out right.
[00:13:57] Speaker A: Right, right. Yeah. It's all worked out.
Well, what's going on with you, Manny?
[00:14:04] Speaker B: I don't know. I've been watching a lot of the news. Our fearless leader seems to be losing grasp of a lot of things he.
[00:14:10] Speaker A: Does seem to have.
[00:14:11] Speaker B: He's like. He's on a losing streak right now, I think, and he's getting upset about it, the whole comey thing that they threw out right throughout.
And so he's not, you know, because when you get. When you get an idiot who hires idiots, this is what's going to happen. So let's hope for the best, you know?
[00:14:32] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:14:33] Speaker A: Yeah. Dysfunction would be a step up at this point. You know, it's like you don't want it to work too well when it. When. When it's.
[00:14:40] Speaker B: Because I think, you know, they talk about, like, the first responders. Those are the. The elite people. I think he's got the worst responders.
[00:14:47] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:14:48] Speaker B: Or the last response.
[00:14:49] Speaker A: Last responders.
[00:14:50] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, the ones that just show up, like, five weeks after the disaster.
What can I do? Nothing. I got to get out of here. You know, I'm out of here. You know, you seem to have it under control.
[00:15:00] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Hoping someone else So I think that's.
[00:15:04] Speaker B: What he's got going for him right now. And what I'm curious about is, like, he tore down the west wing of the White House, right? To build some kind of ballroom room.
[00:15:14] Speaker A: Ballroom, yeah.
[00:15:15] Speaker B: Yeah. So when it gets built and finished and all that, well, whoever, you know, replaces him, bring back the west wing. Are they just gonna.
[00:15:23] Speaker A: I. I don't know.
[00:15:25] Speaker B: You know, you know, because there's a lot of history in that west wing.
[00:15:28] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I can't bring it back. I mean. Yeah, it's rubble.
[00:15:32] Speaker B: Destroyed it.
[00:15:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:15:33] Speaker B: What a jerk.
[00:15:34] Speaker A: No, he's gotta. He's got to put his finger in every. Every pie.
[00:15:38] Speaker B: Yeah. And then I heard that he implies impose a 100 tax on movies where slaves escape.
[00:15:45] Speaker A: Oh, okay.
[00:15:46] Speaker B: He's upset about that. He watched a movie where apparently the slaves escaped. So now any, Any, any, any filmmaker that makes a movie where the slaves get away, he's gonna tax. Wow.
[00:15:58] Speaker A: Crazy man.
[00:15:58] Speaker B: Yeah, he's a crazy.
[00:16:00] Speaker A: It's really, really getting granular there.
[00:16:02] Speaker B: Yeah, he's. He's. He's nuts.
[00:16:04] Speaker A: Taxing the plot lines.
Crazy.
[00:16:07] Speaker B: But I did hear about something local that happened. I.
I don't know, maybe I did talk about it last week or whatever, but this.
There's a guy, I guess out on the west bank or something like that, he called 9 11. He called 91 1, which is an emergency line.
He called 911 several times to ask. He just asked him for a ride, okay? He asked him. He goes, I need a ride to my girlfriend.
Wow. They kept saying, sir, this is an emergency line. You know? He goes, well, this is an emergency. I need to see my girlfriend.
You know, I'm backed up.
[00:16:47] Speaker A: Right, sure, yeah.
[00:16:49] Speaker B: You know, and they wouldn't give him a ride, but he kept calling, called at least six, seven times. So they came to his house and arrested him?
[00:16:57] Speaker A: Well, yeah, you know, they can't do that.
[00:17:00] Speaker B: All right.
[00:17:00] Speaker A: They gave him a ride somewhere.
[00:17:01] Speaker B: They came right somewhere, you know, but.
[00:17:04] Speaker A: Yeah, maybe somebody helped him out in. In the. The county jail, right? Parish jail, yeah.
[00:17:10] Speaker B: He seems like a good guy.
[00:17:12] Speaker A: Oh, okay. Well, good.
[00:17:13] Speaker B: His name was Mitch Landrieu.
[00:17:14] Speaker A: Oh, okay.
[00:17:17] Speaker B: That's what I heard.
[00:17:20] Speaker A: Had Mitch at one of my gigs a couple of weeks ago, from what I heard. I didn't see him, but I heard he was enjoying himself.
[00:17:26] Speaker B: Was he wearing his Chinzano bicycling cap? He's a big bicycle.
[00:17:30] Speaker A: Since I've seen him in that get up. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:17:34] Speaker B: Shorts and.
[00:17:34] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:17:35] Speaker B: Cleats. Kind of bicycle shoes.
[00:17:37] Speaker A: Yeah. The things they strap your feet into the. Yeah, it's too much for me, man. Bicycles are dangerous in New Orleans.
[00:17:44] Speaker B: But he's an enthusiast for it. And you know what the thing is, the best thing about finding a dead hooker.
[00:17:51] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:17:52] Speaker B: Is you get your money back.
[00:17:53] Speaker A: Oh, okay.
[00:17:54] Speaker B: That's the best.
[00:17:55] Speaker A: All right. I could. You gotta look on the bright side. There's always the silver lining.
[00:17:59] Speaker B: It happened a couple weeks ago.
[00:18:00] Speaker A: Oh, really? Okay. Speaking from experience.
[00:18:04] Speaker B: Give me that money back, man.
[00:18:06] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:18:07] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:18:08] Speaker B: Before she spend it on Flocka.
[00:18:10] Speaker A: Right, right, right.
[00:18:11] Speaker B: You know.
Anyway, that's what's going on.
[00:18:14] Speaker A: Okay, well, maybe we should get our guest in here.
[00:18:17] Speaker B: Okay. He seems exciting to me.
[00:18:19] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This might be one of the youngest guests we've ever had on the show.
Right, Right in there. Right in the.
[00:18:26] Speaker B: Besides that 13 year old girl.
[00:18:27] Speaker A: Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.
That episode is.
[00:18:30] Speaker B: Yet you kind of look like her.
[00:18:31] Speaker C: Hey. Hey.
[00:18:33] Speaker A: All right.
[00:18:33] Speaker C: Well, at least I could be 14.
[00:18:36] Speaker A: All right, well.
[00:18:37] Speaker B: Is that a real beard?
[00:18:38] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:18:39] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:18:39] Speaker C: You want to touch it?
[00:18:42] Speaker A: All right. Our guest is a. An acclaimed fine art photographer and photojournalist. His work has appeared in numerous exhibitions across the country including the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Hagen Museum California Chicago center for Photojournalism.
He's published several books of photography including the American west and Shrouded Light.
He has a master's of fine art in photography from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks and is currently pursuing a PhD in anthropology at LSU and Baton Rouge. And he's a avid world traveler.
Many aspects of his. His life we're going to get into, but without further ado, the great Mr. Miles B. Jordan. Welcome, Miles.
[00:19:29] Speaker C: Thank. Thank you for having me. What a. What an introduction.
[00:19:31] Speaker A: You like that?
[00:19:32] Speaker C: Yeah, thanks. That's.
[00:19:33] Speaker A: That's.
[00:19:33] Speaker B: He's a good liar.
[00:19:34] Speaker C: I know. I feel. Acclaimed.
[00:19:37] Speaker B: What does the B stand for?
[00:19:38] Speaker C: Bradford.
[00:19:39] Speaker B: Bradford?
[00:19:40] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:19:40] Speaker B: Miles Bradford Jordan.
[00:19:41] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:19:42] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:19:42] Speaker A: It's got some class to it. It's got some. Some gravitas, as they say.
[00:19:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:46] Speaker C: Family name. Actually, both sides are related to William Bradford somehow. Okay, how that makes sense, but are.
[00:19:52] Speaker A: Your parents double first cousins? Like. Like Jerry Lee?
[00:19:55] Speaker C: I don't think they're that close, thankfully.
It would make sense in the south, though.
[00:19:59] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It's. It's not unheard of.
[00:20:01] Speaker C: No.
[00:20:02] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:20:04] Speaker B: Well.
[00:20:04] Speaker A: So Miles, let's give us a little bit of background. You were born in New Orleans.
[00:20:10] Speaker C: Yeah. So I'm born and raised in New Orleans. I've lived in the Carrollton neighborhood my whole life.
[00:20:14] Speaker A: Okay, so right here where we are Right in this square. It's bounded by St. Charles Avenue, Claiborne Broadway and Carrollton.
[00:20:25] Speaker C: Yep, exactly. Exactly.
[00:20:27] Speaker A: Nice. Right in the heart of the Clempire.
[00:20:29] Speaker C: Exactly.
When you sent me the text about finding the way to parking over here, I almost texted you back. I was like, I'm just going to walk.
[00:20:36] Speaker A: Okay. Oh, you're that close.
[00:20:37] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:20:37] Speaker A: All right, nice.
[00:20:38] Speaker C: I live right by the cemetery.
[00:20:39] Speaker A: Oh, okay.
[00:20:40] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:20:41] Speaker A: And. And I know you went to school here. You went to Lusher School.
[00:20:45] Speaker C: No. So I. So I went to Lusher for a year, actually. I failed out of Lusher after ninth grade, and then I went to Sci High. I graduated from Sci High.
[00:20:53] Speaker A: Oh, okay. But you went to Lusher Elementary School?
[00:20:55] Speaker C: No, I did audubon K through 8, actually.
[00:20:57] Speaker A: Oh, okay. Okay. Well, that's a good school.
[00:20:59] Speaker C: Yeah, that was fun. No, Audubon was amazing. It's definitely, like, a lot of how I've oriented myself in New Orleans, and I think that's why Lusher was so hard for nine, because it was a totally new group. I didn't know a bunch of people.
[00:21:10] Speaker B: Whoops.
[00:21:11] Speaker A: Right, right, right, right.
So SI High. That's. That's right on the same street. It's like the next building over from Lusher, kind of. Huh?
[00:21:19] Speaker C: Yeah. So at the time, we shared a fence.
[00:21:21] Speaker B: Right.
[00:21:21] Speaker C: But our senior year of high school, we got $30 million to build a new building over on Bienville. So there's a building on Bienville that exists nowadays at size. Own building.
[00:21:31] Speaker A: Oh, okay. Nice, nice.
[00:21:32] Speaker C: So Lusher actually bought the other school. So all of that's Willow now.
[00:21:35] Speaker A: Okay, Gotcha. Gotcha.
[00:21:37] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:37] Speaker A: And were you already interested in photography at that time? Were you starting to fool around with that?
[00:21:43] Speaker B: Some.
[00:21:44] Speaker C: So not exactly. My mom is a very good hobbyist photographer. She's taken close to maybe more than 100,000 photos in her life. And so as a kid, we would go down to lower coastal Louisiana, like Grand Isle, Point Auxiens, all down there, and she would let me take photos with her cameras, and so I would kind of mess around with her cameras. And so there's some photos that exist of mine from when I was like, 8 or 9 years old, but by and large, no. I took one camera for our. I took one photo for our high school newspaper. One photo. And then When I was 18, my mom and I went to the United Kingdom, and she asked right around Christmas, her dad had died, and so it was kind of a way of honoring him. And she had asked me if I wanted a camera, and I asked her for a Good autofocus camera. And I went over the uk, photographed a ton. And I was at LSU at the time, actually. And I went back to LSU and I went through all of my social media and I found every person that I thought looked interesting and I just DMed all of them and was like, hey, my name is Miles. Like, would you be interested in just walking around, having a conversation and getting photographed? Like, I don't want you to pay me. Just, I think this would be cool.
[00:22:52] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:22:52] Speaker C: And so that's how I got started.
[00:22:54] Speaker A: Nice. See, I like that about you. Now, now, you and I had never met until I was this past summer. I was in Big Sky, Montana, playing with John Papagaro there. And I was backstage after the gig and I'd seen you earlier and seen you with a bunch of cameras taking a bunch of photographs and stuff. And then you were there and we were chatting, having a big conversation. Someone was several New Orleans people there. They were commenting on how wherever they go, there are people from New Orleans and they always know each other. And somehow you said something. I said, oh, you went to Lusher School. I said, oh, maybe you know my son. And I said his name. You go, oh, that's. You're his father.
[00:23:33] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:23:34] Speaker A: Now the next day I said, oh, I ran into somebody that knows you. And he goes, he goes, oh, wow. You, you, you, you were, you met Miles. He goes, he's a great photographer. I was like, oh, no shit. He goes, yeah, I have his book. So he does.
[00:23:47] Speaker C: I forgot about that.
[00:23:49] Speaker A: So, yeah, apparently when, when Daniel was in maybe middle school or something or some somehow maybe followed you on Instagram, saw you had this book and saw your photographs and he asked that to, to get that as a present one year. So we, we, we did buy that for him. So you see it all, it all comes around. But I had no idea at the time that your father is a guy I've known for a long time. Dave Jordan, singer, songwriter, guitar player, has the band Dave Jordan and Nia. It's a neighborhood improvement association.
[00:24:24] Speaker C: Yep. Used to be in Juice. I wore the white Juice shirt tonight for that reason.
[00:24:27] Speaker A: Right.
So yes, it's all very, very familial here. I could sense that about you, that you were this kind of self starter, that you had a lot of, a lot of energy to you, you know, and really that is so important in life. I think it is the most important thing.
[00:24:44] Speaker C: No, I actually totally agree with you. This is something that I've got an opportunity to teach a couple classes at the collegiate level. During my mfa, I had three semesters where I taught a photography class. And I, and that's kind of what I tell them. It's like, look, no one's going to do it for you. Like you got to send the email, you got to talk to them, just do it.
[00:25:02] Speaker A: And nobody ever comes and drags you off the sofa to give you an opportunity. It's only people who are already in the swim of things and doing something that people go, oh, this kid's got a, you know, some energy, he's got some motivation. Let me ask him.
[00:25:17] Speaker C: Right. No, exactly. I mean my mom said it forever. She always told me like, you have to be a self starter and you just got to do it right. It's like if you find something you love to do, you know, it's kind of the thing that I think is cool with my dad. He's. This is a great story, but he told my grandmother that he was gonna be a musician when he was like 18, 19 years old, had no musical background and he's.
And she basically told him like how, like you don't know what you're doing, you don't know how. And so he just made it happen. And I think it's, it's such a good example, I guess basically being a second generation artist about just knowing like you're gonna get turned down sometimes. People are gonna hate whatever you make. But by and large, just make some friends, continue to chip away at it, you'll be fine.
[00:26:00] Speaker A: Yes. And I always say if you have any amount of talent and then you add to that attention and time, you will get better. You definitely will get better at whatever you're doing.
So you graduated from SCI High, you were not taking photographs. So you go to college. What were you thinking?
What was your idea?
[00:26:25] Speaker C: Yeah, so when I first went to college, I went to lsu. I'd always said I was never going to go to lsu. That was my whole thing. And then one of my best friends from childhood got a house out there and so, or his family got him a house basically. And so I became his roommate and I went up to LSU for two years. Basically hated it. I don't really know how I'm back in Baton Rouge now, but I'm thankful this time. But I ended up transferring to, to the University of Louisiana Monroe after two years. And so in that first two years I worked for the newspaper some, mostly as a sports writer. I wrote lsu.
I was the beat writer for LSU soccer like eight, nine years ago. And then I did some opinion writing and then I went up to Ulm, and I immediately got in with the newspaper. And by that second semester, I was at Ulm, I was our photo editor. The semester after that, I was photo in sports. And then my last year of undergrad was right when Covid started. And so I. The summer after Covid, I had. You know, so I had done all of undergrad. I had been an editor for a couple semesters. And I took like three or four classes over the summer, knocked them all out.
Finished like July 31st or something like that.
Flew out to Colorado the next day. Met my dad on the road. We did 60 days straight on the road.
Basically did all of the west. That's where that American west book came from.
[00:27:43] Speaker A: Right. And then dad every summer goes out. He has. He does a lot of camping. He does a lot of outdoor stuff and then. But he has all these contacts, different places to play, can play solo gigs, can meet up with other musicians he's played with before and do duo or, you know, small band shows, definitely.
[00:28:02] Speaker C: So he and I have been doing that for basically, like a decade. So between that freshman and sophomore year of high school, when I had failed out of Lusher, he brought me. We went out west that year. We went, like, all the way to Telluride. We did some stuff in New Mexico.
It was mostly like, New Mexico, Colorado, and we were on the way home.
[00:28:19] Speaker A: Beautiful country out there, man. The high desert is just shockingly beautiful.
[00:28:23] Speaker C: It blew my mind. It blew my mind. And so we were in basically right. Right outside of San Antonio the last night. We were about to come home, and he pulled me aside and he was like, look, he was like, there are bigger problems in the world than New Orleans. He's like, you gotta keep sight of whatever the issues are. It's bigger than this. And it totally changed my perspective. But he actually had not done a lot of that camping stuff or a lot of that solo stuff until Covid, you know, So I actually had never camped in my life until I was like, 22. I had never pitched a tent. I'd never done anything like that. And so we were on the road and. And we got all into that, so it was really cool to see. I'd never seen him play solo. He had never played solo. It totally changed my understanding of him as a musician.
[00:29:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:29:06] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:29:07] Speaker A: Well, that's. But he. He has done that a bunch since then. I mean, I know this summer y' all were out doing that, you know, doing a lot of that. And I see your. Your photographs. Really amazing, man. You know? Well, let's get back to.
So. So you. You go to the University of Alaska now? How. How does that happen? What. What possesses you to want to go to?
[00:29:33] Speaker C: So I have three friends from the University of Louisiana Monroe that all have a connection to Fairbanks, Alaska. And the main one is my buddy, Dakari Anderson. He's one of my very best friends. He actually works for the National Weather Service. He now lives in Sacramento, but he had. He was moving up to Fairbanks to work for the weather service straight out of undergrad. And I was like, hmm. I was like, I need to do something. I thought I was gonna be a sports photographer, like professional sports photographer full time. Nothing kind of happened there. So I was like, okay, I gotta do something.
And so in the photography world, there's an MA and MFA. The MA is just. Is a regular masters. The MFA is the PhD equivalent for fine art. There isn't, by and large, there's no art PhD.
[00:30:14] Speaker A: It's a terminal degree in art.
[00:30:16] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. So I searched Fairbanks and I was like, I wonder if there's a terminal degree in photography. I was like, how cool would it be to do a comparison between Louisiana and Alaska? And so I searched it and it existed. And the guy, the main professor is this guy named Charles Mason. If you Google him, Charles Manson pops up.
Actually, he's the guy.
There's a New York Times bestseller. I think it's Water for Elephants or something like that. And the COVID is his. And on the first edition it was Charles manson. So there's 70,000 copies or something like that. That's all Charles Manson, which is pretty funny.
But. So he was a photojournalist before he was a fine art photographer. And so I just sent him an email to go back to the self starting. I sent him a cold email, like, hey, my name is Miles Jordan. This is what I'm trying to do. And he called me. We were in Telluride. I was right outside of a grocery store. It was me, Dave Sage, from Johnny Sketch.
[00:31:09] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:31:09] Speaker C: She was. She was out there for a bit of that summer. We were also out there with Jim Kolachek, if you know Jim. Jim played a couple gigs out there too. But. So we were.
We were outside of a. They went into the grocery store. I was like, hey, I need to make this phone call. And Charles. And I got on the phone and Charles was like. He was like, do you have a website? I was like, yeah, at the time I had two for some reason. And so he pulled up both websites and he goes, well, you got good enough Work for me to accept you. And I'm the one who accepts people. I was like, all right, sick. And so that was that.
[00:31:36] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:31:36] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:31:37] Speaker A: And cut right to the chase.
[00:31:38] Speaker C: Right. But I actually ended up having two other friends. There was a girl who played Ulm soccer who I had photographed and become cool with, and she was from Fairbanks originally.
And then there was a guy who went to both Ulm and uaf. He was originally from New Orleans, but was a military brat. They moved to Fairbanks, and then he ended up going to undergrad at Ulm and then grad school at UAF.
I had a Twitter back then, and I had DMed him on Twitter because I had searched in the search bar. Ulm, UAF is this guy named Moose. And he was friends with a bunch of my friends. And I was like, hey, Moose, my name is Miles. I was like, can you just tell me about Fairbanks? And he basically was like, look, if you want to lock in and do something, this is a great place to be. He's like, if you want to party and have a good time, not as good of a place to be.
[00:32:20] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:32:22] Speaker B: There's no women in Alaska.
[00:32:23] Speaker C: No, there's not.
[00:32:24] Speaker B: No, there's no women. They actually pay women.
[00:32:26] Speaker C: It's a sausage party.
[00:32:27] Speaker B: Yeah. To. To move to Alaska.
[00:32:31] Speaker C: If they don't, they should.
[00:32:33] Speaker B: Yeah, because they get lots of tax breaks and some money and stuff like that.
No, because I knew a girl from Pennsylvania who took Alaska up on their offer to move there, and they paid her to move.
[00:32:47] Speaker A: Stipend, huh?
[00:32:48] Speaker C: Yeah. You get a dividend.
[00:32:49] Speaker B: Dividend, yeah.
[00:32:49] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:32:50] Speaker B: Now, when you were in Alaska, was it like, daylight for six months straight or nighttime? For six months straight.
[00:32:55] Speaker C: So I got most of the nighttime. So after the.
[00:32:58] Speaker B: How did that affect you?
[00:32:59] Speaker C: I mean, I definitely got pretty depressed, for sure.
[00:33:02] Speaker B: How are you taking pictures in the dark?
[00:33:04] Speaker C: Pretty easily, actually. There's. The snow never melts. It doesn't get that much snow, but the snow doesn't melt. And so all the street lights reflect the snow.
[00:33:12] Speaker B: Is Fairbanks the capital of Alaska?
[00:33:14] Speaker C: No, that's Juneau.
[00:33:15] Speaker B: Juno.
[00:33:16] Speaker C: Juneau is the only capital in the United States you can't reach by car. You have to get on a boat. Boat or a plane.
Yeah. They may move it, though. They've been having some issues with flooding.
[00:33:25] Speaker B: Baton Rouge. I think I should go up the river to do that because the freeway there in Baton Rouge sucks.
[00:33:31] Speaker C: Yes. I do that drive a couple times a week. It's the worst drive in America.
[00:33:34] Speaker B: Yeah, it's awful. I grew up in la. It's worse than LA Freeway.
[00:33:38] Speaker C: Yeah, I agree.
[00:33:39] Speaker B: It's horrible.
[00:33:40] Speaker C: It's a boring drive.
[00:33:41] Speaker B: Oh, it's a horrible drive.
[00:33:43] Speaker A: Now, now, you were still interested in pursuing sports photography when you were up there?
[00:33:48] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did three years of it.
[00:33:50] Speaker A: What kind of sports do they have there in Fairbanks, Alaska?
[00:33:53] Speaker C: So we have, we have two Division 1 sports, Division 1 hockey and Division 1 rifle. We have. Okay, we have men's and women's basketball. At the Division 2 level, we have women's volleyball, seal clubbing.
[00:34:06] Speaker B: Right. Seal clubbing's a big sport.
[00:34:08] Speaker A: Competitive.
[00:34:08] Speaker C: Yeah, totally.
No, we do have a lot of curling in town though.
[00:34:13] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:34:13] Speaker C: One of my professors. Not this town. Fairbanks. Yeah.
[00:34:17] Speaker A: Now I saw one of your. And I want to ask you about this 504, 907 project. Is this a good time to do that?
[00:34:24] Speaker C: Let's do it.
[00:34:25] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:34:25] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:34:26] Speaker A: Well, tell us about that.
[00:34:27] Speaker C: So when I first went to Alaska, I wanted to compare Louisiana and Alaska by way of climate refugees. So the first climate refugees in America that have been paid for for by federal state governments to physically move are the people of the Ile de Jean Charles in Louisiana and then people in Nuuktoc, Alaska, the Yupik people. And so originally I wanted to do that. And then I realized I don't know anybody, I'm really broke and it's very expensive to fly around Alaska. And so when I was in, when I was growing up, my mom stopped driving in the seventh grade. So from seventh to 12th grade I either streetcarred or walked every day. And so the last two weeks before I left to go on the road with my dad, before I went to Alaska, I started walking around New Orleans because I'd never photographed it. And so I was actually, at the time I was shooting all 35 millimeter color negative film with two Canon F1s and I would just walk around the neighborhood and I would just take photos. And then when I got to Fairbanks and I realized like, I can't do this climate comparison, I gotta do something else. I just started walking around Fairbanks. And so over time I just really tried to interrogate both Alaska and Louisiana, mostly southern Louisiana and mostly interior Alaska. But just by walking around and being there. And so what I did was I took, I mean, close to 100,000 photos and I went back through and found what looks similar. So I didn't. People have asked me this before at conferences and other places. Like, did you go out and intentionally try to photograph trees or houses or whatever? No, I never went out with one of the other images in mind. So I end up comparing them in this thing called a diptych, or as a bunch of people like to make jokes of a dick pic.
But so typically it's religious iconography, which are wood panels, and they're next to each other, But I did one on top of another, and so I never had an idea of one or other. I went back through my archive and tried to see what was similar.
[00:36:17] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:36:18] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:36:18] Speaker B: Why'd your mom lose her license?
[00:36:22] Speaker C: Kind of by personal choice, to be honest.
[00:36:24] Speaker B: Really?
[00:36:25] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:36:25] Speaker B: She was a bad driver?
[00:36:27] Speaker C: No, she just was sort of. She and driving don't get along. I'll just. That's probably the best way to put it.
[00:36:33] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:36:33] Speaker B: Really?
[00:36:34] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:36:34] Speaker B: She had road rage, right?
[00:36:36] Speaker C: No, it's more like. You ever meet somebody who can't necessarily keep on top of, like, keeping up a car and keeping up a license and doing that kind of stuff? My mom. That kind of.
[00:36:49] Speaker A: The details.
[00:36:49] Speaker C: Yeah. That detail she doesn't want to do.
[00:36:51] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:36:51] Speaker C: She's not interested in doing.
[00:36:52] Speaker A: Right.
[00:36:53] Speaker B: All right. So you drove her everywhere?
[00:36:55] Speaker C: No, so I didn't start driving until I was almost 21.
[00:36:59] Speaker B: How'd she get around, your mom?
[00:37:01] Speaker C: She took the streetcar. So we used to live on Sycamore.
[00:37:04] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:37:05] Speaker C: So I used to. So I grew up on Sycamore. And short, like two blocks from you, I believe.
[00:37:09] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Right. In my neighborhood.
[00:37:11] Speaker C: Right. And then after my parents split up, we. My mom moved to Sycamore and Dante. And so my mom would take the streetcar from Sycamore all the way to Canal because she worked at a law firm on Canal, and so she would do that every day.
[00:37:25] Speaker A: Okay. So you're well familiar with what there is of the New Orleans public transit.
[00:37:30] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, yeah. And even actually, when I was a little kid, my dad would take me to school. I went to preschool at Temple sinai. Right. On St. Charles.
And so he would take me sometimes on the streetcar when I was, like, 11. Kid.
[00:37:43] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:37:43] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
[00:37:44] Speaker B: I have.
[00:37:44] Speaker A: One of my. One of my kids went to preschool there as well.
[00:37:47] Speaker C: Oh, nice.
[00:37:48] Speaker A: You know, in fact, I was looking at the. At your.
All of your diptychs there, and this place, Snake and Jake shows up in one of them.
[00:37:57] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:37:57] Speaker A: And it's. It's contrasted with a dive bar in Fairbanks.
And it's. It's really remarkable, the.
You know, the through line, how much all those places in Fairbanks look like New Orleans. They have a similarly broken down kind of quality.
[00:38:17] Speaker C: I mean, the thing I've tried to tell people, like, in the most general way, I think the Comparison between Louisiana and Alaska is pretty simple. Natural resource, outdoors, and we've just kind of been pushed aside because of natural resource. So it ends up being kind of, I don't know, like, one of the big criticisms I got.
[00:38:35] Speaker A: Management.
[00:38:35] Speaker C: Yeah, one of the big criticisms. Oh, well, no, the big one was Republican run. That was the third one. I forgot. What the third one. Right, right, right. But, like, one of the big criticisms I got from my faculty is they kept trying to say that the. What I was photographing in New Orleans was poverty. And I was like, guys, you just need to come look, bro.
[00:38:50] Speaker A: That's just the city, man.
[00:38:51] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:38:52] Speaker A: I'm not going out of my way to find shit that's broken.
[00:38:55] Speaker C: Like, I promise you, I'm photographing my neighborhood, man. I'm not even going in places I'm not from.
[00:38:59] Speaker A: Right, right.
[00:39:00] Speaker C: This house is $400,000. Sorry, man.
[00:39:02] Speaker B: Dang.
[00:39:02] Speaker A: Right, right.
We just have a different style down here for sure.
[00:39:06] Speaker C: But it's actually interesting. My main professor, Charles, who I mentioned earlier, he was in town literally, like, 12 days ago, and his wife had never been down here. He had only been down here once in, like, I want to say it was like 88. He came to Mardi Gras and said he felt sketched out. And I was like, yeah, that kind of sounds about right for the late 80s, early 90s New Orleans, sure. But he was here close to a week. And we were sitting on the rooftop. He was staying basically right off Frenchman. And we were sitting up there, and he was like, you know, he was like, I see.
I see the Fairbanks you saw in New Orleans. He was like, if you. If he told me if he had come to New Orleans earlier, he would have appreciated my work more. Which now, granted, he supported me and appreciated it anyway, but it was really cool to hear. And even Renee, like, hearing it from you, like, it's cool to hear you see it too. And that's been the fun part because people do see it. There's like a. There's a resignation that both people from Alaska and Louisiana have felt that makes me feel like I. I hopefully did a pretty good job. I need to get snakes one of the photos, though. I really do. Oh, yeah, I told him that, but I told Andrew, but right on.
[00:40:08] Speaker A: Well, I'm loving this so far, but it's about that time, Manny.
[00:40:13] Speaker B: Yeah. We need to refresh, and we'll be right back.
[00:40:18] Speaker D: Two days to get to tell you, right?
Two days.
I almost died.
Had to get through Texas and New Mexico, but I was flun out the ash hail was pouring rain when I left New Orleans But Baron returned asleep and Dallas eyes covered over the road And I sure wish I turn back on.
So turn back on so turn back on.
I sure wish I return back home Cause there ain't nothing but broken dreams between which a town falls and everlasting Trust me baby, I know what I mean I've logged in my eyes I've seen that scene Vista F lonel spark over the desert baby out in the dark the moon presents over this canyons road and I never coming back here no more.
[00:41:58] Speaker A: And we're back back with Mr. Manny Chevrolet. I am Renee Coleman, back with our guest, Miles B. Jordan. Now, Miles, I know you're, you're kind of new to the podcast, but, you know, we are a listener supported operation. We have links in the show notes of every show for PayPal and Venmo accounts that we have and our listeners will, will support us, buy rounds of drinks for us. You see, we use a lot of these notebooks. Keep us in notebooks and ink pens.
And this week, shout out to the great Ms. Lisa McGoffern, hellcat from Memphis, who was supplying our cocktails tonight. Thank you so much, Lisa.
And you can be like, Lisa, jump on those, those links. Also we have the links for the Patreon page. We have a handful of patrons that are supporting us week in and week out.
Also, the Trouble Bend podcast T shirt link is there.
And I always say, say follow us on social media, Facebook, Instagram and rate, review and subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen to it. Give us five stars. Cost you. Nothing helps us a lot. Dates, Ongoing dates. Yes. The Iguanas will be at the Carousel bar every Sunday 7 to 10 through the end of the year and possibly beyond that because it's, it's going great guns over there at the, the Hotel Montlean.
[00:43:24] Speaker B: All right, well, Jesus, a lot of dog dogs.
[00:43:28] Speaker A: It's dog night.
[00:43:30] Speaker B: Really? This is, you're not. I'm not even talking about animals.
[00:43:34] Speaker A: One or two is okay, but not, not, you know, not, not all of them.
[00:43:38] Speaker C: When you're having to walk by the bar, it's so tight over there. If I gotta have like a bunch of dog smell too, I don't know. I'm not the happiest camper.
[00:43:45] Speaker A: All right, Okay.
[00:43:46] Speaker C: I mean, it's still snakes, though. I'm happy, but.
[00:43:48] Speaker A: Right, right, right, sure.
[00:43:49] Speaker B: Well, yeah, Juan the bartender, Derwan, is a big dog guy, so I think he invites all his buddies to bring.
[00:43:56] Speaker A: Their dogs in here. They gotta, they got A lively crowd tonight.
[00:44:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:44:00] Speaker A: And. And you know that some of these.
[00:44:02] Speaker B: Women look like dogs.
[00:44:03] Speaker A: Sure. Well, that's. That's always the case. Some of the men, too. Dog face, boys.
You know, now I was. I was imagining that the dogs might be barking at each other, but I haven't had one. One dog bark yet, so that's. That's encouraging.
[00:44:16] Speaker C: Yeah, there's good dogs in here. I will say that.
[00:44:17] Speaker A: Not right. Well behaved.
[00:44:20] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. See, look, this one right here, the tail's not wagging. This one is angry.
[00:44:26] Speaker A: I think he's nervous. I think he's nervous. He's hiding his head under the table there.
[00:44:30] Speaker C: But then we got this other dog on the couch. Just.
[00:44:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:44:32] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, no, that's. That's Juan's dog.
Very comfortable.
[00:44:37] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes more sense.
[00:44:38] Speaker B: And this chick over here, she looks like she has a tail.
[00:44:42] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Prehensile.
[00:44:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:44:45] Speaker A: Well, all right, well, enough of that. Back to our guest, Mr. Miles Jordan. So you're up there, and you're pursuing this Master of Fine Arts degree, and you're getting into, like, a lot of art photographers. They work in black and white because it's a stable medium. But I saw that someone you idolize is someone who I am a huge fan of, and I actually have met a few. Few times the father of art, color photography, William Eccleston. Yeah, the great William Eccleston. So, yeah, you know, he. He famously said, even though it's. It's a perishable medium, the color never quite fixes. It's always changing it. It's close enough for our. You know, and you can. You go into print. It stays.
[00:45:31] Speaker C: Now it's close enough.
[00:45:32] Speaker A: Close enough.
[00:45:33] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:45:33] Speaker A: Yeah. And, well, how did you get turned on the egg?
And I saw also William Christenberry, and those guys are related. So talk a little bit about that.
[00:45:41] Speaker C: Yeah, no, I'm a huge Eggleston and Christenberry fan, so I actually got turned on to Eggleston through my professor Charles. We had a graduate photography class every semester, would run three hours once a week. And he would always try not to talk about photography. That was always his goal. Spend a whole three hours and talk about something else. But this day, I got there early. I usually got there on time, but I was early that day, and he handed me a book, and he was like, hey, look at this. I was like, all right. So I'm flipping through the book, flipping through the book. He's like, who does this remind you of? And I'm sitting there. I'M like me, like me kind of. And we had this other student who my first year was in her last year. Her name is LJ Evans. She's like 76 years old or something like that. It was really cool to have someone that much my senior be there. But also she had a cool experience where she was in Valdez. Well, maybe not cool, but she was in Valdez when the oil spill happened. And actually they took over her dark room and it was one of the locations that they, that they cleaned animals. So that was kind of wild. But so LJ came in next and Charles was like, hey, lj, look at this. Like, who does this remind you of? And LJ did the same thing and she was like, miles. And Charles was like, I finally figured it out. Charles had had some struggles over my first year and a half or so about figuring out where my work could be contextualized. I kind of call him a photographic encyclopedia. He has so much photo knowledge, it's sort of ridiculous. But that day it totally cleared up the issue because part of our thing is you do a show, but you have to write a thesis. And so in your thesis you have to contextualize where you exist within your art medium's history. And I didn't know. Right. And so Eggleston was the first one and then Kristen Barry was the next one one. Because since I like the photograph structures, I mean, even something like Snake and Jake's, I mean, that's so much of what Kristen Barry would do. He would go around the rural South, I think, with medium format, but it may have been 35 millimeter and shot all those old buildings, mostly in Alabama, but.
[00:47:35] Speaker A: Right. Well, Eccleston is so much of his thing. It's, it's, it's, it's like the mundane in the, in the Flannery o' Connor Southern style or approach, where you're dealing with the minutia of Southern life.
The mundane, as you say. But these small moments that we treasure in the south, we see them as, you know, representations of larger themes. People will know Eggleston from like the big star record covers and, you know, many. It's brilliant color photography of, of real down market scenes.
[00:48:17] Speaker C: Often, you know, I think Eggleston's most famous photos. The Red Room.
[00:48:21] Speaker A: Right, right, right.
[00:48:21] Speaker C: Which kind of looks like Snake and Jake.
[00:48:23] Speaker A: Well, that's, that's the COVID of, of one of the big star records.
[00:48:26] Speaker C: Oh, okay. Yeah.
[00:48:27] Speaker A: It says the light bulb with the red ceiling.
[00:48:28] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, okay. I hadn't seen it on the. I hadn't Seen that. I didn't know that.
[00:48:32] Speaker A: That's very cool. I mean, if I was gonna have one color photographer that I would say to.
When I was reading all your stuff, I was like, oh, well, there you go.
[00:48:41] Speaker C: Yeah. My favorite thing with Eggleston, though, is. And you probably know this, but he's prescribed a certain amount of alcohol.
He's such an alcoholic. He has a doctor prescribed amount. But what's interesting is Eggleston claims he's never photographed drunk.
Which to me, if you have, like, a prescribed amount of alcohol, you must drink to continue to live. But you've never photographed drunk is sort of astounding.
[00:49:06] Speaker A: Well, you know, he sees you.
[00:49:08] Speaker B: Believe him.
[00:49:09] Speaker C: I don't know. Honestly, I don't know.
[00:49:11] Speaker B: Yeah, maybe that's.
[00:49:13] Speaker C: Maybe he's probably is. But I like the mystique. It's fun.
[00:49:16] Speaker A: Sure. Yeah.
[00:49:16] Speaker B: Yeah. But don't you think nowadays, you know, anyone can do it with this?
[00:49:23] Speaker C: Oh, you could.
[00:49:24] Speaker B: Yeah, anyone. Because these are holding up a phone. Yeah, Anyone can be a photographer with. With this now.
[00:49:29] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:49:29] Speaker B: So you don't need to go to school for it.
[00:49:31] Speaker A: Well, it's really just the. It's the eye, it's the composition.
[00:49:35] Speaker B: This stuff here on these things. Now, this is an old phone, but I. I see the commercials where you can make all this and all this. So why do you need a 35 millimeter camera now? Because of this.
[00:49:48] Speaker C: I mean, you know.
[00:49:49] Speaker B: Why? Why? I mean, you could shoot sports. You know that.
[00:49:53] Speaker C: You couldn't shoot sports.
[00:49:54] Speaker A: Sports with that.
[00:49:54] Speaker C: That's the one thing I'll push back. No, you couldn't. You couldn't.
[00:49:57] Speaker B: Really.
[00:49:57] Speaker C: Nah. Sports is one of the few things, like you do need the equipment. I do think a lot of photography you can do with your phone. Genuinely.
[00:50:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:50:04] Speaker C: Like, I'm pro phone photography, but sports now. Yeah, yeah.
[00:50:07] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:50:08] Speaker C: Yeah. No, why do you need a 35 millimeter?
[00:50:10] Speaker B: Yeah. So you do a lot of shots with your phone?
[00:50:13] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:50:14] Speaker B: You do.
[00:50:14] Speaker C: Yeah, for a long time I was doing. There's a cool app called the Nomo Cam, and they have these things where it'll basically make your phone camera more like different types of cameras. And so for a while, I was taking Polaroids on my phone, and that was fun.
[00:50:29] Speaker B: So you were cheating? In a way.
[00:50:31] Speaker C: Yeah, I was calling them phonoids.
[00:50:32] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:50:35] Speaker C: Not cheating. I'm just taking the advantage of what I got.
[00:50:37] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so getting back to your dad, Dave Jordan, his itinerant lifestyle, music, musician. Lifestyle must have had a big impact on you. And what you saw was possible for someone to do.
[00:50:54] Speaker C: Definitely. And so when I did my master's defense, the way I spun the narrative was my mom is the person who pushed me to understand South Louisiana. My dad is who pushed me to understand the rest of America. And so, in many ways, I don't think I could have gone to Alaska. If he and I hadn't gone out west as many times as we had, I don't think I would have been comfortable enough as an individual just to take that opportunity. But, like. Like I said earlier, too, I mean, I've gotten to watch his life. You know, when I was a kid, for the first 12, 13 years of my life, he's with Juice. And then him and my mom split up, the band kind of falls apart, and I've got to watch him totally rebuild and become Dave Jordan in the nia. And so I don't want to say it makes, like, being an artist easier, but it kind of does.
[00:51:42] Speaker B: There's a. Who is Juice. Juice Newton. The pop star?
[00:51:45] Speaker C: No, no, it was a band called Juice. New Orleans Juice.
[00:51:47] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:51:48] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:51:49] Speaker A: There's a certain fearlessness that you must possess to do. Or a courage, I should say.
[00:51:54] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:51:55] Speaker A: To. To, you know, stare into the void and walk forward.
[00:51:59] Speaker C: Right. No, you're right. And I think it's also one of those things, like.
So I was at a conference last week at the Major American Anthropological Association Conference. It was actually in New Orleans this year. But one of the things I kept thinking is, I think one of the unfortunate things that happens sometimes with academic people who have never been artistic at all is they've never gotten criticized. So they get up here and they do these presentations, and they're stiff and they're nervous and they're scared, and it's like, man, go make some art. Go get told it fucking sucks. And then come back. Because you know what someone might tell you? Your art sucks, you're gonna see some shit in there that you like, and you're gonna say, I don't want to listen to you. And that's also part of what you need to learn. But I think a lot of, like, the academic people. I know this is kind of an aside, but I think a lot of the academic people, they kind of miss that.
[00:52:43] Speaker A: You gotta build up a tough skin, man.
[00:52:45] Speaker C: Yeah. I forgot which of my.
[00:52:47] Speaker B: I work in the big university here. I deal with all these fucking instructors and professors, and they're all idiots.
[00:52:54] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:52:54] Speaker B: They have no idea what they're doing.
You know, they think they're giving knowledge to these young Minds. And so they think they have a God complex. So they're right and you're wrong, you know, but basically, they're all idiots.
[00:53:09] Speaker A: You know, it's the way I've hot house flowers.
[00:53:12] Speaker C: It's all too deep in the minutia. That's the thing with academia. It's all like a bunch of people circle jerking, different ideas.
[00:53:18] Speaker B: Exactly, exactly.
All patting themselves on the back.
[00:53:22] Speaker C: Definitely.
[00:53:23] Speaker A: You got to get out there and do work.
[00:53:24] Speaker C: Yeah, I think so.
[00:53:25] Speaker B: They never done. Because they've been in the world of academia.
[00:53:28] Speaker C: You got to actually put your neck out there.
[00:53:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:53:30] Speaker C: Like, cool. Who's reading that journal that you wrote 8,000 words for with a bunch of jargon? Nobody.
[00:53:36] Speaker A: Right.
[00:53:37] Speaker C: Put it out there and make the people that you talk to see it. You know what I mean? And that's kind of the thing with the work I want to do is like, the thing I'm thankful for about having an art background is.
Is my dissertation's not gonna be written. Only this thing will be conceptualized as something that can be turned visually, too. Cause it's not just about me.
[00:53:55] Speaker A: Well, now, that takes us to the next thing you're pursuing this degree in. PhD in anthropology.
But I know from your work you're interested in cultural anthropology, and we'll talk a little bit about that.
[00:54:11] Speaker C: Yeah. So I can actually. So all of my work has been recently approved by my. By my advisor and also by our institutional review board. And so basically what I have proposed to do is I want to do an intergenerational look at New Orleans music since Katrina. So what I'm proposing to do is to look at five or six different venues in the city.
The five or six I chose as of right now, could change are dba, Tipitina's, the Maple Leaf, Saturn Bar, Kermit's, Mother in Law. Yeah. Mother in Law Lounge. What's the sixth one?
I'm blanking on somebody.
[00:54:48] Speaker A: Doesn't matter. It's good. We like the open loop.
[00:54:50] Speaker C: Yeah. There's some other one.
And then besides that to do. I. I've proposed to do 80 to 100 or so interviews. So try.
Exactly. Yeah. So sit down with as many musicians as are okay. To do it. And just try to really hear y' all story more than anything.
[00:55:09] Speaker A: Because you were. When we had that conversation in Big sky, you were. That's one of the first things you were talking about, right? Talking about to me.
[00:55:16] Speaker C: No, exactly. I think I talked to all of y' all about it that night.
[00:55:19] Speaker B: Katrina.
[00:55:20] Speaker C: Yeah. Post Katrina. Yeah.
[00:55:21] Speaker B: Don't you think it's a little late for that? That's 20 years ago.
[00:55:23] Speaker C: I think that's why it's the most interesting, is because, number one, no one's done it about music. But number two, 20 years gives you a large sample size about trying to understand what may have changed. People say with destruction, like mass destruction, like us, or like the fire in Lahaina or some of the fires in California, it takes about 10 years for you to get back to a relative normal, anyway. And so that second 10 years, I think, adds another layer to that, you know, and for me, really, part of the reason why it's important to me. I was seven when Katrina hit. I turned eight, like, a month and a half, six weeks later. And so my whole generation is, we're adults, right? We're 27, 28, 29 years old. And so, like, someone like Max, who was sitting here earlier, like, now there's our whole generation of people who are playing music, too. So it's like, understanding Renee, like, how has it changed for you? But then how has it changed for people like Alex who moved here in between that time? What does it look like for Max?
[00:56:16] Speaker B: Right?
[00:56:16] Speaker C: Because if I talk to all y' all about what y' all's different experiences are and say I can talk to, like, a George or Roger Lewis, people like this and start getting, like, larger context, I think the. The picture starts to paint itself. Right. And you start to see what. Just what did change.
[00:56:31] Speaker B: Right, right.
[00:56:32] Speaker C: How did these venues change? How did these areas change? And there's so much other academic work.
[00:56:37] Speaker B: Prices went up. That's.
[00:56:38] Speaker C: Oh, that's for sure true. Well, and some of the stuff got bougier.
[00:56:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:56:42] Speaker C: You know, like, I was having someone remark the other night about DBA having the. The TV screens, not the chalkboard.
[00:56:48] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't get me started.
At that same event in Big Sky, I was talking to your dad, and, you know, we started corresponding about having him come on the podcast, and he was out touring, you know, all summer long. And you guys are in the photographs that you guys were. That you were taking of where y' all were, like, all the. The glaciers, the. The waterfalls. It's just breathtaking, man.
[00:57:19] Speaker C: Yeah.
I. We had never been to Canada at all, and so we went up to Banff and Jasper, man. It's other. Like, the American Rockies are amazing. Don't get me wrong. Right. People were right about the Canadian Rockies. It's just otherworldly.
[00:57:34] Speaker A: Now. Now when you're up in Alaska, getting back there, you saw the Northern lights all the time.
[00:57:39] Speaker C: Yeah, So I would, like. So I had a. We. I had an office on campus, but we also had like a.
Like a house basically for the graduate students.
We couldn't live there, but we could use it as an office shack up pad. Yeah, basically.
[00:57:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:57:53] Speaker C: Right, right. Sure. I smoked a lot of weed out of that place.
[00:57:56] Speaker A: That's really what happened.
[00:57:57] Speaker C: But so I would walk sometimes from my office over there at night because I would park over there because I could park for free.
[00:58:03] Speaker D: And.
[00:58:04] Speaker C: Yeah, you'd see the northern lights just walking around or you see some moose just, you know, just hanging out.
[00:58:09] Speaker A: They're huge.
[00:58:10] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, the moose. Yeah. No, moose are crazy. We were driving. We were actually Aurora hunting one night. Two. And me. Me and two of my best friends, we were going 35, 40, and I mean, a moose is going stride for stride. And we were like, what the.
Like, this is not okay.
[00:58:26] Speaker A: Just don't want him to turn into your lane right now.
[00:58:29] Speaker C: They always tell you if a moose starts to chase after you, hit a. Like, run around the tree. They might be fast in a straight line, but they're not agile. They can't. They can't turn quickly.
[00:58:39] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah, because they'll go for you. They'll. They'll run you.
[00:58:42] Speaker C: If they get mad, they will run you down. Yeah. Because they're. I mean, they're an apex predator.
[00:58:46] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:58:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:58:47] Speaker C: Other than a bear, I don't know what's taking them down. Maybe some wolves.
[00:58:49] Speaker A: They're giant. Now. Now can I. Can a moose kill a bear?
[00:58:55] Speaker C: Oh, that's a good question. I don't know. Okay, maybe a black. If I had to guess. So not.
No, not a grizzly. Definitely not a polar bear.
[00:59:03] Speaker A: Not a polar bear.
[00:59:03] Speaker C: No, no, no. The. The great is if. If it's black, fight back. So if it's a black bear, fight back. If it's a brown bear, lay down. If it's white, good night.
[00:59:12] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:59:15] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:59:16] Speaker A: So. Well, back to your dad. So. So your dad was going to come on the podcast, and he was just getting back into town, and then out of nowhere he winds up having this health issue.
[00:59:27] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:59:28] Speaker A: Which we. Everybody in New Orleans kind of has in the music community is aware of.
But, you know, thankfully, it was not as bad as it could have been. He's. He's on the mend. But. But it had to be shocking for you. Now, my father had a. Had a stroke at about the same age.
[00:59:46] Speaker C: Oh, shit. Okay.
Like same age as my dad.
[00:59:49] Speaker A: Your dad.
[00:59:49] Speaker C: How old were you?
[00:59:51] Speaker A: I was older than you.
[00:59:53] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:59:53] Speaker A: But. But, you know, but he did wind up. Now he had a different kind of stroke. He had a hemorrhagic stroke. You know, I actually had a brain bleed.
[01:00:02] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:00:03] Speaker A: Which is bad, you know, and that's.
[01:00:05] Speaker C: Basically what happened to my grandmother.
[01:00:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:00:07] Speaker C: Yeah. My grandmother in 2000 had, I think seven or eight inches of blood in her brain. They said she was supposed to die, and she's still alive.
[01:00:13] Speaker A: Wow. That's crazy.
[01:00:14] Speaker C: Yeah. No, she's a miracle. It's crazy.
[01:00:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:00:16] Speaker A: My father's still alive too, but. But, you know, he's. And. And he continued to play music till just a couple of years ago that it wasn't the stroke that did him in. It was. It was a review.
But the reviews. Yeah.
All right, man. I like it.
Anyway, so. So, you know, we were all very shocked and. And, you know, concerned now since. Since the. The initial thing, we've seen your dad, he's actually sang a tune on or a couple of songs on the. The.
The Last Waltz show that they do every year at the Civic a few days ago, and I saw him writing about that. You know, he was talking about how music heals and. And. But then saw a social media post where he's talking about his situation. He's in, you know, and really in great shape for what he's gone through. But it's going to be a road to, you know, he's still. Anyway, talk about that a little bit.
[01:01:22] Speaker C: Yeah. So I was. I have late classes with lsu and there's this one professor who. She lives in New Orleans too. And so I was walk with her to her car. And so this was a Thursday and so on. And on the Tuesday, he was out near Lafayette and bro bridge out the cotton gin. He's got a buddy who's got an old cotton gin that he's been going to for years, which is like one of his main places that he goes to write music. And the gin just has a really important place kind of in.
Kind of in our family's life in some ways. But. So I was hanging out with him Wednesday. I was hanging out at his house, and he was saying that he kind of felt like he might have had had a stroke on Tuesday.
His tongue had went numb, he had tasted metal. He was just like, what the fuck? And so I kind of kept that in the back of my mind. And so I was in class and he had sent me a text. I think maybe he said he had gone to the hospital or something like that.
And then I was talking with My professor, we had literally stopped talking like 60 seconds beforehand. He calls me because in the text originally, he was like, I didn't have a shot stroke because they. They hadn't been able to tell or whatever.
[01:02:25] Speaker A: Oh, we went into the. To the doctor and yeah, checked out.
[01:02:28] Speaker C: Yeah. So he was. He was actually. He was playing a gig at Cyther Seafood out in Harahan with James Houseman. It was him and Houseman.
I think that's it. I think it was just them two. And. And I actually have talked to James. Me and James caught up at a Maple at one of Georgia shows on a Monday, maybe like two weeks ago. And James was like, I could tell something was wrong. And obviously my dad could tell something was wrong too. And they both were like, bro, just go to the hospital. Just go now. You're right here.
It's five minutes. Somehow my dad drove, which is kind of wild. But so, yeah, he goes to the hospital. They do end up doing the scans, I guess the MRI or whatever it is, and they see it's a very small stroke. And it was in the part of the body that's basically the stuff that affects motor skills and rhythm and all that. But they told him that the best things he could do was to walk around, to play the guitar and to sing. And so I went over.
I think I went over Thursday, but I for sure went over that Friday. And he was. I was hanging out with him for a little while and he was asleep, and the night nurse came in and he was fully asleep. And so they wake you up, make you do the cognitive test and all that. And he aced the cognitive test straight out of sleep. She was like, I couldn't even tell you how to stroke. And so from there, I mean, he was making stroke jokes in the hospital, right? So at that point, I was like, all right, he's fine.
Dad's good. You know, one of my cousins, a couple days later when he made the post about it, she texted me and she was like. She was like, yo, I saw Dave had a stroke. She was like, is it like grandma? And I was like, no. I was like, it's not even in the same world because my grandmother was in a coma.
One side of her body never worked again, you know, so my dad got very lucky, all things considered, you know, and he's.
[01:04:04] Speaker B: He's.
[01:04:05] Speaker C: He did the Last waltz. I mean, this will come out after the fact, I'm say gonna assuming, but he'll. He's going to sing a song at the Eddie Bow Art Neville tribute at Tipitinas Nice. Which is awesome.
[01:04:14] Speaker A: And speaking of tipitinas, there's a, an event coming up on December 11th. I know. Because that's my wedding anniversary.
[01:04:21] Speaker C: Oh, nice.
[01:04:21] Speaker A: It's easy to, easy to remember, but it's, it's a whole benefit for, for, for Dave. And I'm gonna be playing it with Lynn Drury, I think, and talk about that song.
[01:04:35] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, I, I kind of know. I think basically as much as the public does regarding, you know, it's going to be George, it's going to be Stanton. The way he's described it to me is George is kind of like his New Orleans nucleus, which, if anyone knows my dad, I mean, George Porter. Yeah, George Porter. George Porter. George Porter. Sorry. So when you think about my base.
[01:04:55] Speaker A: Player from the meters.
[01:04:56] Speaker C: Yes. When you think about my dad, I would say that the probably the three most important, important New Orleans musicians to him are George Porter Jr. Art Neville and me. Yeah, there you go.
[01:05:04] Speaker A: Yeah, go on.
[01:05:05] Speaker B: Sorry.
[01:05:06] Speaker A: Not, not me.
[01:05:06] Speaker C: And then probably Dr. John.
[01:05:08] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:05:08] Speaker C: Probably Dr. John. And so, but Porter, like, this is me, this is me saying this, but to me, like, Porter's like his music dad.
[01:05:15] Speaker D: Sure.
[01:05:15] Speaker C: And so Porter's kind of like the New Orleans bit, and then it sort of just extends out from there. So you get old friends with the Iko All Stars. You know, my dad's a big deadhead. Both my parents were. So the IO All Stars will be there.
[01:05:29] Speaker A: You got a Dennis Scanlon.
[01:05:30] Speaker C: Yep. Billy Iuzo.
[01:05:32] Speaker A: Right? Billy. Billy was on the show not too long ago.
[01:05:35] Speaker C: Yep. Yeah, Yeah, I know there will be some members from the nia, like you said. Lynn Drury will be there. Stan.
Yeah. Burke Noonan, another one of our Caroltonians.
[01:05:45] Speaker A: Yes.
[01:05:46] Speaker C: He lives over here.
[01:05:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, he lives right over in Marleyville.
A name that only comes up on this podcast and, and certain rare city maps you'll see that on. But yeah, the fountain blow area.
[01:06:02] Speaker C: Yeah, but no, so I, I, it'll be a fun night. I mean, I know that my dad has said that basically, you know, he wants the people that are going to be there, but anybody that wants to play with everybody, do it, you know. I know. He's basically told Papa John that John Grow is going to basically be the band leader.
[01:06:20] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:06:21] Speaker C: That's what he's asked John to do.
[01:06:23] Speaker A: Coordinate.
[01:06:23] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly.
[01:06:24] Speaker A: John's good at that. Yeah. John is a good lion tamer.
[01:06:27] Speaker C: I think so.
[01:06:29] Speaker A: Whip in a chair, he can wrangle the whole crew.
[01:06:33] Speaker C: Well, yeah, I think so, but I'm excited. I think it'll be a fun night.
[01:06:37] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. That's, that's, that's. And, you know, God, we wish your dad all the best and he's gonna be back, and he'll. We're keeping the speed, the seat warm for him and Troublemen podcast.
[01:06:47] Speaker C: And I gotta, I gotta tell you, it's funny. When I texted him I was gonna be on it, that was kind of the first thing he said. He's like, man, I haven't even been on yet. So. So he's made the joke that this might be the first thing that he'll do after me.
[01:06:59] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:07:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:07:01] Speaker A: All right. Well, you know, I, I, After I saw him speaking with, you know, like a Ro.
Susan Rose, Jen. He was. Saw him on the news. But I know at the same time, you know, that when in the aftermath of that kind of traumatic brain event, you know, like, I know he says he has good days and he has bad days, he feels fatigue, he has headaches. Sometimes it's. It's a SAP on the energy. And he's trying to, you know, while you're healing up from this, you don't want to stress yourself to have another event. And, you know, Troubleman podcast is a little bit stressful.
[01:07:38] Speaker C: Can.
[01:07:38] Speaker A: Can be. Can be a bit of a haul. So. Yeah, yeah, we're. We're not going anywhere. We're keeping a seat warm for you, Dave.
[01:07:46] Speaker C: Yeah, I know he's excited.
[01:07:47] Speaker A: Well, so, you know, we're kind of on the down slope of the podcast, but, you know, I know you guys traveled all over, but besides the US you guys were in Italy and England. Beautiful photographs from there. So you were in Venice.
[01:08:01] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:08:01] Speaker A: This summer must have been incredible, huh?
[01:08:04] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:08:04] Speaker B: So doesn't Venice stink, though?
[01:08:07] Speaker C: No. So.
[01:08:08] Speaker B: No, they cleaned it up.
[01:08:09] Speaker C: They did. Yeah. So it used to be stunk. It used to be they'd leave all the trash out.
[01:08:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:08:14] Speaker C: And so now I actually did research with the trash workers, ironically. And so all the trash workers, they're completely publicly facing now. So they come to every door, they knock on every door, and you gotta give them your trash, you know, and if you don't do it, you're just not getting your trash taken out. But there's no leaving it out anymore.
The rats and the seagulls aren't eating. It doesn't smell like.
[01:08:33] Speaker A: That's nice.
[01:08:34] Speaker C: Smelled normal.
[01:08:35] Speaker B: Really? Yeah.
[01:08:36] Speaker C: Didn't even smell like the sea, Really?
I really liked Venice.
[01:08:39] Speaker A: I'm.
[01:08:39] Speaker C: Venice was awesome.
[01:08:41] Speaker D: It's.
[01:08:41] Speaker A: It's not completely. I mean, when you, when you say the way it smells, it smells kind of like New Orleans.
[01:08:46] Speaker C: Yeah.
[01:08:47] Speaker A: The certain funkiness you're. You're used to. I think you might be. You might be. No.
[01:08:52] Speaker C: Well equipped.
[01:08:53] Speaker A: Yeah, but. Yeah, but. But we like it. You know, it's like. I always describe the smell of New Orleans is like going up to the. The prettiest girl in the room and smelling her armpit.
[01:09:02] Speaker C: That is true. That is really true. That's a good way of putting it. I mean, it's like you said earlier about you run into New Orleans people everywhere. We're just roaches.
You can nuke us. We're not going anywhere.
[01:09:14] Speaker B: That's a problem.
[01:09:15] Speaker A: That's a problem.
Well, well. So where can. Can people find your work on social media? It's at Miles B. Jordan on all the. On all the platforms. Social platforms.
[01:09:29] Speaker C: Yeah. I got super lucky. It's Miles B. Jordan everywhere. Same thing with my website, milesbjordan.com. nice. You know, nice. Super easy. Super easy.
[01:09:37] Speaker A: Cool. Miles, it's really fantastic, man. I love seeing young people who give me a confidence in the future, you.
[01:09:45] Speaker C: Know, I'm glad I can do something.
[01:09:47] Speaker A: So you really are. Between you and my kids.
[01:09:50] Speaker C: Yeah, I. I get that. Daniel's doing some cool stuff.
[01:09:53] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Both. Both my kids are solid citizens.
[01:09:57] Speaker C: That's awesome.
[01:09:58] Speaker A: All right, well, Miles, thank you so much. Give your dad our best. And, you know, tell, as I said, you know, we got a spot for him here, you know, when he's up for it. And as always, hello.
[01:10:10] Speaker B: All right.
[01:10:11] Speaker A: As always, on the Trouble Men podcast.
[01:10:13] Speaker B: We like to say trouble never ends.
[01:10:16] Speaker A: But the struggle continues.
[01:10:17] Speaker B: Good night.
[01:10:18] Speaker A: Good night.
[01:10:19] Speaker D: I'm going to sleep under the stars tonight I'm going break my baby's heart tonight I'm going to drive until I had him lay down and watch the sun come up I saying that I ain't coming out Just need a little time alone A little time alone.
[01:10:52] Speaker B: I'm.
[01:10:52] Speaker D: Going to sleep Because I need to dream without dreams I ain't got anything and it don't matter what you I say is the river gonna roll its way I ain't saying that I ain't coming home Just need a little time alone A little time alone Time alone Just need a little time alone Sad well, last night I didn't stay with you well, I could have but I chose not to and in the end I didn't break your heart and all I did was watch the stars I said that I ain't coming home Just need a little time alone yet I ain't saying that I ain't coming home Just need a little time alone.
[01:12:25] Speaker B: A.
[01:12:25] Speaker D: Little time alone Time alone Just need a little time alone Time alone Just need a little time alone Time alone Just need a little time alone Time alone.