This interview originally appeared in the March 2007 issue of ANTIGRAVITY.
To celebrate After The Deluge getting picked up by Pantheon, I thought I’d post our original talk with artist Josh Neufeld, which coincided with A.D.’s debut over at SMITH. Interested parties may want to know that the current issue of DC/Vertigo’s American Splendor mini-series features some of Josh’s work.
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Josh Neufeld has become adept at telling graphic stories of a personal nature — his comic series The Vagabonds chronicles his and wife Sari’s travels around the world, his artwork frequently tells Harvey Pekar’s unique slice-of-life stories in American Splendor, and his 2004 graphic novel A Few Perfect Hours (and Other Stories From Southeast Asia & Central Europe) won him a prestigious grant from the Xeric Foundation. Neufeld’s latest projects feature both personal and, for the first time, communal stories. In early ’06 Neufeld released Katrina Came Calling, a chapbook-style collection of prose journal entries written in late ’05 during a three-week tour of duty with the Red Cross in Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi. In January ’07 the prologue of Neufeld’s new sequential art project, New Orleans: After The Deluge, premiered on SMITH, an upstart website that celebrates personal storytelling and, in 2006, published Shooting War, a highly acclaimed webcomic about the war in Iraq. After The Deluge features several real-life people affected by Katrina (including AG editor Leo McGovern), and Neufeld intends to weave those people’s stories together in an attempt to show readers that New Orleans isn’t a city full of statistics; that the populace of the Gulf Coast isn’t simply full of people either with or without the means and/or desire to leave, return and rebuild; that our region, even a year and a half after Katrina, is brimming with grey area.
ANTIGRAVITY spoke with Neufeld about the reasons he created A.D., what he hopes readers take away from these stories, and how this project is different from anything he’s done before. (more…)
After a year and a few months at it, nine-piece local band Antenna Inn’s sleek, smart and superbly constructed suites of jazzy prog rock are starting to draw a large crowd. They’ve been headlining shows more frequently and are about to release their solid new album, Do/Work, with a party at Tipitina’s. Their’s is the sound of a band working through ideas together for the first time, as they realize their talent and range. As good as Do/Work is, you get the feeling that their next album is going be the one—it’s going to be crazy. For now, though, Do/Work and its highlights: the angelic and Beach Boys-ish back-up vocals and the jazz dirge breakdown at the end of “Ernest Borgnine,” the high frequency bass and bright keyboard on “Ink,” the disorienting horns on “Stockholm Syndrome,” and the swingin’ verses in “Nobody Expects The Spanish Inquisition.” Though the choruses are pretty catchy, there’s something sublime about each song’s instrumental stretches. The lyrics are dark, anxious, and purging, sometimes malevolent and sometimes self-help-like: “If you’re looking for love, stop, because you will never be happy, even when you are. You will always be lonely…c’mon, people, fall back out of love. Call your mother. Mothers, call your sons.” There’s also a rolling confidence throughout the band—one that could easily be perceived as arrogant, except that confidence is tempered with a clear love of not only New Orleans and its rock scene but the city’s traditional music, as well as a want, almost a need, to create a unifying force that makes it all more successful.
To all the people who think that New Orleans metal is Eyehategod and Soilent Green and Goatwhore and Crowbar and Down, to all the people who think that New Orleans hardcore is nonexistent, that it manifests every six months or never—here’s a big ol’ swinging set of balls dangling in your face. Frankenstein balls, to be precise. Resurrected from pieces broken off of Katrina-killed bands like Rat in a Bucket, Cancer Patient and Scrotesque come five of the nicest, hardest working, unrelenting brahs this side of The Parish. Drummer Keith Sierra and vocalist Shaun Emmons (of Rat in a Bucket) joined bassist Ryan Pomes and the dual axemen Grant Tom (Cancer Patient) and Jason Cook (Scrotesque) to form 
“You do you, I’m a do me—and don’t come between this here.” With this simple yet profound declaration, Lil’ Doogie introduced himself to the world a little over a year ago on his website, lildoogie.com. He has since become an internet sensation, posting videos of the adventures that take him from the deepest recesses of West Bank garage hang-outs to the heart of New Orleans, even showing up during Mardi Gras on local TV network WGNO’s report from the Endymion parade. If you’ve been following him then you’re familiar with his spicy-tongued rants on all things related to the thug life. You may even be sporting his face on a Dirty Coast t-shirt that asks quite simply, “Brah, I’m real?” Well, long-time fans, you might be in for a surprise. ANTIGRAVITY was recently contacted by Lil’ Doogie because he had something “to tell them people.” We met up at the park on a nice Sunday afternoon to find out what he had to say and, as you’ll shortly find out, it was quite the eye-opener. 
Crossing over from acclaimed poet and spoken word artist to the increasingly close-minded music industry seems an impossible task. It helps when you’re incredibly talented and have the brass to put together one of the year’s best and most challenging records. Saul Williams’ 
What is it about playing a record that feels so natural, so sensual? Is it the warm sizzle that shivers up through the needle, the soft punch of the bass, the steady, hypnotic spin of the turntable or album covers the size of a children’s book? It’s a lost art, really, the manipulation of grooved vinyl, pouring songs back and forth into one another so they wash over the dance floor as one never-ending wave—or cutting sound into a thousand patterned pieces, amplifying the ecstatic flicker of fingertips for all to hear. Music nowadays seems like it happens in a digital fog; the gears of our listening devices are atomized and hidden behind an opaque plastic shell, the “search” for music no more engaging than email, entire collections measured in weeks and months existing only as fragments on a magnet. That a select few still burden themselves with crate after crate of LPs and 45s, boxes of cables, mixers and, of course, the heavy motors of two direct-drive turntables, all for the sake of bringing a good time to anyone who shows up, a chance to connect spiritually to something that drives the entire universe—is nothing short of a miracle. 
Tired of the same old outrageously boring tee shirts breeding like rabbits in the city, in the summer of 2005 Patrick Brower and Blake Haney decided to be the change they wished to see in New Orleans. And then Katrina changed everything. What was at first just a few tee shirt designs that native New Orleanians could sport with pride and laughs became a symbol of New Orleans’ struggle to rebuild without losing our unique soul. Since Dirty Coast’s launch shortly after Katrina, the company has grown from selling their shirts in just a few local shops to operating their own retail website and bustling Magazine Street store, stocking upwards of 8,000 shirts in over forty-five designs, as well as stickers, posters, bags, undies and more. ANTIGRAVITY spoke with Haney and Brower about what it takes to make it as a new company, how to keep customers coming back and the importance of Acadiana Self Reliance. 
In 1997, Boise, ID, guitar-stretchers 
