The Lampshade
A Post-Katrina New Orleans mystery
Dear listeners,
Making the podcast this season, I’ve felt a bit like Chris Farley from the 90s SNL sketch “The Chris Farley Show,” in which he nervously bumbles through interviews with celebrities like Paul McCartney, blanks on what he wants to say, and punctuates half of his exchanges with “That was awesome!”
For me, certain journalists feel like celebrities. I struggle to contain my admiration and wind up blathering about their stories and books as they sit patiently on the other end of the phone or the Riverside recording, waiting for me to wrap it up so they can get back to their lives. I’ve done a handful of such interviews this season, and there are many more to come.
The most recent was my conversation with Marc Jacobson, a longtime contributor to New York magazine and author of the 2011 book The Lampshade: A Holocaust Detective Story from Buchenwald to New Orleans. It’s about Marc’s obsessive years-long quest to figure out if a creepy-looking lampshade he inherited in Post-Katrina New Orleans was in fact made from human skin.
Marc has got to be one of the sharpest and funniest American magazine writers of the last 30 years. The Lampshade, which admittedly gets a bit shaggy toward the end, has dozens of laugh out loud moments. Which is all the more remarkable because the book’s ostensible subject is profoundly dark and terrible (i.e. the commodification of human remains in the Nazi camps).
The episode features several classic New Orleans characters. One is the musician Dr. John, who Marc recruits for help in understanding where this allegedly human-skin lampshade may have come from. (Dr. John puts him in touch with an old acquaintance named Cheeky Felix, who, according to Dr. John, used to hang out at the Saturn Bar and, in his spare time, made masks out of human skin.) Another is Dave Dominici, who became famous for stealing statues and artifacts from New Orleans graveyards back in the late 90s (and who appears in our episode The Cemetery Detective from Season 4).
Hope you enjoy the episode!
P.S. Listeners told me there was a glitch in the recording that went up on Wednesday. That was fixed within hours and it sounds fine now.
In other news, my good buddy Lloyd Lochridge, longtime EP of Gone South, has a new weekly narrative show out this week called Family Lore, about the stories that families tell about themselves. Lloyd takes it upon himself to investigate whether these stories are true. The first episode excavates his own family’s history, and asks whether his larger-than-life relative, Margarita Sames, may have invented the Margarita. It feels like an instant classic.
Check it out here:
That was … awesome. And hearing Dr. John’s voice made it even more so