Why is it on TV that anytime anyone goes to New Orleans,

[raccoon]

there's a band playing in the street, and the main characters always visit a cemetery?

[KamaAina]

1. There actually are bands playing in the street

but not all the time, everywhere.

As for the cemeteries, your guess is as good as mine. Producers could, of course, kill both birds with one stone by depicting a jazz funeral and subsequent Second Line:

[pacalo]

2. Stereotype Syndrome?

New Orleans is known for its Jazz funeral marching bands. After accompanying the funeral procession to the gravesite for the funeral, the band subsequently marches back to the streets for a "celebration" of the dead. Incidentally, the graves in New Orleans are generally above-ground due to the city's being below sea level.

I guess producers consider this tradition to be colorful for filming, but, really, if they want the true flavor of New Orleans, it would require very little production time & costs to just walk through the French Quarter, particularly in the bars & restaurants -- that's where the action is, & little effort would be required to draw out interesting N.O. flavor.

One thing they would learn is that there are NO SOUTHERN DRAWLS down here! "New Awlinians" have accents more like "New Yawkers". :)

:hi:

[KamaAina]

3. Ah yes, bad local accents.

A standard parlor game in NOLA. The gold standard against which all others are measured is Dennis Quaid's in "The Big Easy". Not really Quaid's fault; they couldn't decide if they were going for Cajun or Creole (in language as in food and music, two quite distinct entities).

[old mark]

4. It's funny - they sound like Brooklyn!...Great food, but really HOT and humid

and it rains a lot.

mark

[jobycom]

13. Depends on where. My mother sounds like she's from Boston

Her father grew up in the Irish Channel, and she grew up on Magazine. My dad has a drawl that's not exactly southern, but not really Cajun, either. He grew up off Carrolton. My favorite was my great aunt Maddie. She lived in Broadmoor, I think. She sounded like a cross between Maya Angelou and Oprah Winfrey, only older and a bit weaker and less polished. She was a classic New Orleanean. No one could have classified her. Her entire family was white, but she could have passed for white, black, mulatto, Creole, or Cajun--and according to family legend, did at various times. When I knew her she was in her 80s and 90s and I was just a kid, so I didn't know enough to realize how interesting she was. She was just the old wrinkled woman who prickled when she kissed my cheek, and smelled old-people funny. When she died, my parents found stashes of Kennedy memorablia, ranging from hundreds of dollars of Kennedy silver dollars stuffed in socks, to old newspapers from just after the assassination. I have one of those still. It's a Times Picayune, the Sunday edition, with a long write-up of Oswald's history, especially his time in New Orleans. The final line remarks that they were going to move him from the courthouse later that morning.

I wish with all my heart I had known how much I could have learned from her back then.

You say New Orleans culture is in the French Quarters, but my main memories of the city are playing on the sidewalks in Broadmoor, or of City Park, or Pontchartrain Beach, or the University area to visit our rich relatives (I forget the family connection). I remember broken sidewalks and cracked pavement and corner stores with wooden floors that smelled of constant humidity and dirt, and sold Barqs rootbeer and roast beef po'boys and Golden Flake potato chips. I remember Parkway Bakery when it was a broken down dive instead of a Yuppie bar. I remember riding along Hwy 90 back to Bay St. Louis, and lying on the rear window deck and watching the stars undisturbed by city lights, and being afraid of the swamp monsters of the stories, and the smell of vegetation and black swamp soil along the bayous and bays and lakes and Gulf.

And of course, I remember my parents driving down Bourbon Street and trying to make us hide our eyes when we got close to Canal. :)

[revolution breeze]

5. Don't forget they have to drive through the swamp

to get whereever they are going.

[Bucky]

6. Well, they used to call it Ninth Ward

[jobycom]

14. Yeah, that part's true, too.

My brothers used to scare me when we'd drive in from Mississippi and they'd tell me about the swamp monster. :)

[Orsino]

7. The Eiffel Tower is visible from every window in Paris.

Every police investigation necessitates a visit to a strip club.

[bluedigger]

8. Because without it, they could go to Cleveland instead?

:shrug:

[raccoon]

9. Cleveland should be featured more often--there's the Rock N Roll Museum there! nt

[pitohui]

10. there are always these bands playing in the street and...

to pass from the airport to new orleans by land you pretty much have to pass through a large area of cemetaries on the border of metairie and new orleans

it does not reduce production costs to film in the bars and restaurants of the french quarter, by the way, it inflates them, you don't get to barge into someone's business and film for free, there's a lot of payments that change hands to allow this (my husband's business was the site of a film and they paid dearly for the privilege, tee hee)

the dead have no civil rights or privacy rights, so i'm guessing that a mausoleum is a reasonably cheap place to film a scene altho i can't tell you for sure

but filming in the quarter, in working businesses, etc. THAT'S BIG MONEY

[nolabear]

11. Because ther's always a band playing in the street and the cemeteries are stunning.

If you ain't been, get yo' ass down there and shake it around some!

[jobycom]

12. hahah! I was in NOLA for Thanksgiving, and visited two cemeteries, and saw bands in the street.

At least three bands, including one parading down Bourbon Street. I'm curious why you don't think that's pretty normal.