Virtual Memories Show 692:
Alison Fensterstock and Michael Tisserand
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“New Orleans has come to be defined by this hyper-awareness of its own identity. It’s all music, food, and culture, and it’s Bunny’s generation that started that deep examination of the identity of New Orleans.”
Let’s celebrate a New Orleans legend with Alison Fensterstock and Michael Tisserand‘s fantastic new book, BUNNY MATTHEWS: HIS LIFE, ART, AND OBSESSIONS (Historic New Orleans Collection)! We talk about the role Bunny Matthews played in shaping New Orleans’ identity with his comics, music reviews, art, and cultural criticism, how Alison & Michael found their collaborative voice for the book, their first encounters with Bunny’s work, his satirical comic about David Duke that thankfully never got published, and how Vic and Nat’ly became a cultural phenomenon (and how Bunny drew the grossest po’boys ever). We get into Bunny’s role in parsing Yat culture and promoting music, the lengths they went to find his earliest writing and drawings, Bunny’s influences (and the shadow of Stan Mack in the alt-weekly world), how he quoted Cab Calloway next to Balzac, his transition to painting, and the masterpiece of his Nint’Wardica canvas, in response to the BP oil disaster. We also discuss the decline of alt-weeklies, the obit pre-write that led to this project, how thrilled they are with the design and production of the book, what it means to be a New Orleanian, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read BUNNY MATTHEWS: HIS LIFE, ART, AND OBSESSIONS!
“No one saw and satirized New Orleans selling itself as lovingly and wonderfully and snarkily as Bunny did.”
“Part of the curse of being a writer is that various people will tell you, ‘You know, my life would make a great book.'”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
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About our Guests
Alison Fensterstock is a former music critic for the Times-Picayune and Gambit in New Orleans and a columnist for the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities’ quarterly 64 Parishes. Outside of New Orleans, her writing has also appeared in Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, MOJO, the Oxford American, and other places. Her books include The Definition of Bounce and How Women Made Music: A Revolutionary History from NPR Music. She’s been a substitute DJ on WWOZ 90.7 FM since 2006.
Michael Tisserand is a former Gambit editor whose books include Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White; The Kingdom of Zydeco; Sugarcane Academy; and My Father When Young. His work has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Eisner Award, and the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award. He’s at work on a history of Charlie Chaplin’s movie The Great Dictator for Oxford University Press.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at an undisclosed location in Brooklyn on a pair of Shure Beta 58A microphones and a blue enCore 200 feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Michael & Alison by me. It’s on my instagram.