Mister and puppets

New Orleans’s Mr. Quintron and Miss Pussycat
get wood and wallow in vice, respectively

SWAMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE: Quintron and Miss Pussycat

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Its not totally fixed, says organ wizard/renegade instrument engineer Mr. Quintron over the phone from a laundromat in Milwaukee, but its fixed enough that we can deal with it. Hes referring both to the Spellcaster Lodge, the show space in the basement of the home he shares with his puppeteer partner Miss Pussycat, and in a larger sense, to their beloved city, New Orleans.

The Mirror last spoke with Quintron in 05, soon after Katrinas devastation. The next two years were devoted to rehabilitating the Lodge. Since then, among other things, Quintrons built and sold 10 more Drum Buddies, his patented lo-fi, light-activated beat-blasters.

I made them all with sinker cypress, which is wood thats been preserved under the swamp waterold-growth cypress that has a lot of the cypressene oil in it, which makes it impervious to rot and insect eating. Its this beautiful, swampy, green, almost glowing wood, really, really rare.

For more on beats and botany, check the Drum Buddy page at Quintrons Web site. And for an aggravating shitfaced-Brit sing-along, check out Sunday Night, which divides Quintrons 10th LP, 2 Thirsty 4 Love, between his familiar, funky-in-every-sense swamp-tech jams and some more out-there budgetronic weirdness. Its a late-night, drunk-microphone-testing thing, such a perfect, hilarious, retarded thing, and I gave it to all these DJs to clear the room at the end of the night. Thats all it existed for. It had this legendary status.

Miss Pussycat, meanwhile, has gone epic with her handmade puppets, creating a 10-part miniseries called Trixie & the Treetrunks for Vice Broadcasting. Its all about positive thinking, about creative visualization, says Miss Pussycat of the adventures of Trixie, Marsha, Shopping Bear, Jean-Luc and JJ Suede, the worlds greatest jazz drummer whos also an undercover warlock. Thats what its truly about, the power of your mind.

Of course, its also about Hurricane Katrina. I wish I could never hear that word again, but it was all that was on my mind! I changed the flood to a terrible snowstorm, so its about recovering from an apocalyptic event that destroys your world.

WITH PSYCHEDELIC HORSESHIT AND
HAITIAN VOODOO THEORY AT CLUB
LAMBI ON SUNDAY, APRIL 19, 9 P.M., $15