The first jazz history book, Jazzmen, edited by Smith and Ramsey, characterized Storyville as the “birthplace of jazz.” The 1947 film “New Orleans,” starring no less than Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, confirmed it. Poke any tourist, and if they’ve even heard of jazz, they’re sure it was born in the honkytonks and bordellos of Storyville. Hell, after a couple Hurricanes, they were there last week. Shoot, they met Tom Anderson and Lulu White. They watched Little Louis Armstrong deliver hard coal to the prostitutes in their cribs.

If Storyville isn’t the birthplace of jazz, its proximity to the Tremé neighborhood perhaps begins to tell a piece of the story. Fatima Shaik’s incredible book, Economy Hall: The Hidden History of a Free Black Brotherhood, from which I have only lately learned so much, makes the case that just behind Congo Square in Tremé, Economy Hall and its “benevolent society provided the location, the organizational structure, and the community in which jazz could flourish in the 20^th century.”

Trying to make sense of Trump’s hold on America and the havoc he and Elon Musk wreak, I struggle to find “an adequate metaphor” the great jazz commentator Albert Murray thought we should seek for “contemporary actuality.” How can I delineate Trump and Musk’s power and suggest perhaps how to contain them?

Dark Trickster Dionysus? How can we help his base emerge from the hallucinations his heady wine and demand for loyalty instill John Mulaney’s horse in a hospital? A Clown Car of Cabinet Candidates? The lawlessness of vigilantes?

My latest adequate metaphor is the Looney Tunes’ Tasmanian Devil. Remember him?

Who can resist New Orleans? Gumbo and oyster po’ boys, jazz and funky blues, the French Quarter and the Garden District. Eyes light up, mouths water, toes tap. I’m obsessed with New Orleans — explaining its uniqueness to myself and to visitors. My need to understand the city is perhaps inescapable. When I was 15, my mother bought Chris Steak House with its small but loyal clientele. I bussed its 17 tables and learned how to butcher heavy short loins. Before long, Mom added her name, and the famous Ruth’s Chris Steak House chain of restaurants was born. Meanwhile, my father was making a name for himself too, running for mayor on a platform of bringing a gorilla to the New Orleans zoo. He got only 310 votes but kept his campaign promise by going to Singapore and buying two baby gorillas he named Red Beans and Rice. As the son of the Empress of Steak and the Gorilla Man, how could I not become a New Orleans obsessive?

I lost my Mac guru. I mean, he died. A sudden heart attack while doing one of the things Pableaux Johnson loved best: taking photographs at a Second Line parade in New Orleans. To begin to gauge my sense of loss, consider that the day after his memorial service, my 1password app, which he had installed, stopped working. Kind of like losing your bitcoin password, without all the zeros.

But a better gauge, perhaps, is that his memorial service was attended by 500 people, standing room only, who arrived from all over the country. Or that obits appeared in The Economist and The New York Times. “Pableaux Johnson, the Heart of New Orleans Hospitality, Dies at 59” was the Times headline. The outpouring of grief first found vent on an Ever Loved email thread that included dozens of voices who contributed photos and stories and Pableaux-isms. Many red bean dinners in his memory by those who couldn’t fly in were reported across the land.

Stephen Colbert’s commitment to improv sprung from tragedy. At ten years old Colbert lost his father and two brothers in an airplane crash. Colbert grieved by embracing nihilism. If these lives that meant so much to him didn’t matter to the universe, then surely nothing mattered. Colbert’s darkness was so extreme that a theater professor at Northwestern urged him to seek counseling because he feared “you were going to punch me today in class” (Sam Wasson, Improv Nation: How We Made a Great American Art, 345).

But, one night a friend took Colbert, now a theater and philosophy major, to see his first improv at Second City. Colbert was struck by how improv players did not fear “free fall”—perhaps an echo of that tragic plane crash.

In improv, there are no mistakes. Whatever your stage partner offers, the more off kilter the better, is a new way forward: Yes, and… You provide the “and,” taking it in any direction you want.

Here the Wheel of Fortune (Rota Fortuna) spins its merry way. Lady Fortune, who rules all, spins the wheel from behind the world’s axis.

As you can tell, that poor slob at the bottom, let’s call him the Fool as he is often pictured, is destined to find his way to the top where the king now reigns. When that happens, the king will find himself groveling at the bottom.

This is the essential imagery behind the medieval carnival we call Mardi Gras. The Fool becomes king for the day, and the king takes the place of the Fool.

I point this out because it seems fitting that it is on Mardi Gras day, 2025 that Trump will deliver his State of American Carnage Address and impose his tariffs on Mexico and Canada, an imposition that might start Trump’s swing down into the mud. Hold on folks, the wheel is turning…

The Trickster archetype is full of delicious paradoxes and contradictions—delicious to those like me who revel in life’s complexity. Lord of the marketplace, Trickster has an ear for both merchants and for thieves. Lord of Liars, he also makes communication possible—between gods and humankind by creating the rituals of sacrifice, and among us, inspiring hermeneutics, the science of interpretation. The god of mischief, Trickster often makes things better, ends up enriching culture. The disruptive voice of improvisation, Trickster challenges decorum, the right way to do things. Amoral, not immoral, neither good nor evil, from Trickster’s mischief the values we live by emerge. From Trickster’s pot stirring, more delicious gumbos flow. Trickster embodies the paradoxes of human existence, including the ultimate paradox: the idea that duality, symbolized by the two snakes on his caduceus, can be unified. (The more familiar medical staff only has one).

Davia Nelson’s oral history work and Alice Waters’s restaurant career dovetails with my interest in improv. We are all winging it. In this interview, Alice, Davia, and I wing it for the famed North Beach bookstore, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights, where Allen Ginsberg read a draft of his great improvisation, Howl, in 1955.