(Jeez, this whole thing desperately needs rewriting. Until then...)

The condensed version:   I'm a native New Orleanian, living as an expatriate in Los Angeles, California. I worked in local public radio as a roots & traditional music programmer and DJ for 20 years ("Down Home" on KCSN from 1998 to 2008, and various similarly-themed shows -- "Gumbo Ya-Ya," "Global Gumbo" and just plain "Gumbo" on KCRW from 1988 to 1998).. I'm a graduate of Holy Cross High School in da Lowuh Nint' Ward (1879-2006, reborn in Gentilly in 2010 ... go Tigers!), Loyola University, New Orleans (B.A.), Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles (M.A.) and an almost-graduate of the culinary arts program at UCLA Extension (I needed four more accounting / management-type classes to finish my certificate before they scuttled the program ... of course, if I were to have gotten a job in that industry nobody would have given a crap about a certificate, but "How fast can you peel dem potatoes?").

Is that enough? Well ... in the highly unlikely event that anyone wants to know more about who's behind all the stuff on this Web site, and you're wondering why this guy's pontificating about Louisiana and cocktails and food and music all the time, here are some answers to some questions you may have, and probably lots of questions you may not have. ("This guy thinks we want to know this much about him? Sheesh.") No, not really, but people have asked. I can either answer or call you a nosy bastard, and I'm not that rude. (Well, usually not.) This page used to be very very sketchy, then people started writing and asking appalling personal questions. The less appalling of them got answered, and I decided to toss a few of the answers up here because I'm far too lazy and procrastinatory to keep up with email properly. I got on a roll and it expanded far beyond what I ever thought it would. I may or may not expand upon it further later on, given time and desire. It'll most likely remain perpetually unfinished. Oh, and though I never really thought I'd have to say this ... try not to take any of this too seriously, okay?

By the way, the lil' picture you see above was taken in 2006 at Bayona Restaurant on Dauphine Street in New Orleans' French Quarter. I am quaffing a Sazerac cocktail, and waiting for my crabmeat salad and my duck breast, cashew butter and pepper jelly sandwich to arrive. And no, I'm most certainly not drunk. Well, not yet, anyway.

The design to the left is from The Gamble House, the 1906 masterpiece of Craftsman design and architecture in Pasadena, California, designed by Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene, and one of my favorite buildings anywhere. (The design is featured on the fireplace andirons in the living room.)
 

We can start with a little ancient history, the early, funny stuff, like who I am, and where I'm from (which is a big part of who I am). If you haven't fallen asleep yet, move on to a bit about me now, and the work I do. I don't mean my day job, I mean the things I'm passionate about -- the things that spark my soul, feed my life, and occupy my non-9-to-5 time. Cuisine, music, my work in public radio, and my other web projects, to name but a few.

Although you've already probably stumbed across this, the bulk of my food writing (which my friend Mary once described as "food porn") is on my Creole and Cajun Recipe Page. Go there, make my gumbo and you will not be sorry. Speaking of food ... if you own a restaurant, listen up. I just want regular iced tea, please, and none of that fruity flowery crap. This is my tireless iced tea crusade, and read about why I bitch about it every time I go to a restaurant that thinks that just tea isn't good enough. (It's a southern thing, you might not understand.) Keep in mind, of course, that I am never rude to servers! You'd better not be either. And tip your server 20%! Especially tip your bartender 20%!

"Where ya stay at, bra?" Although I was, am and forever shall be a New Orleanian, these days I live in L.A., and I like it a lot. Recommended reading for people who email me asking, "Why don't you live in New Orleans if you love it so much?"

I am an extremely avid cocktail enthusiast. Spirits, mixology and bartending are my passion, and have been so for over 10 years. Although I am not a working bartender, I am a member of the Los Angeles chapter of the United States Bartenders Guild. Currently I write the monthly newsletter for "The Sporting Life," a group of bartenders and enthusiasts dedicated to elevating the level of the craft of bartending and mixology and in educating ourselves and the general public. I'm also a member of the Los Angeles Cocktail Community Board, who organize and put on The Sporting Life events each month.

I'm a voracious reader. I read books. Lots of 'em. I read magazines: Bon Appetit and Gourmet, Fine Cooking, Cook's Illustrated, Food and Wine, Harper's, Folk Roots, Dirty Linen, No Depression, Hot Press, The Oxford American (The Southern Magazine of Good Writing), American Bungalow, Style: 1900, The Advocate, and a bunch more. I read newspapers: The Los Angeles Times, the L. A. Weekly, the New Times of Los Angeles.

I love movies. I actually went to film school and thought about doing it for a living. The realities of the god-awful Hollywood film biz put an end to that, but I never lost my love for movies. I once read some wag who pontificated on his "how to write a good web page" page that he'd scream if he ever saw someone else's Top 10 Films list on a web page. Well, screw you, pal. This film-school graduate happens to think that's important. Here are the films that do it for me.

I watch way too much television these days. We bought a TiVo, and while it freed us from the television networks' scheduling, it enslaved us to ... itself. We are rabid fans of "Battlestar Galactica", for my money the best show on TV. There are too many other and constantly changing shows to list here. Sheesh. I still try to watch as many cooking shows as I can (even though the Food Network almost completely blows now), and I get stuck on those documentary cable channels too ... see? Way, way too much TV. Then there's the 2,000+ title DVD collection we're hopelessly behind on ... oygh. I think Wes and I maybe need to quit our jobs and start watching movies full-time. We might actually catch up by retirement age.

I love to travel, and will eventually put up a page on my travels to Ireland, Scotland, Russia, Luxembourg, Amsterdam (with which I fell in love within 24 hours ... my second day there, I was already picking the neighborhood where I wanted to live, and where I wanted to open my Creole restaurant), Slovenia, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

I'm a Shy Person. Quite shy, in fact, although most people who know me would roll their eyeballs at this claim. They're used to me being gregarious and never shutting up. It's at its worst when I'm around people I don't know. If I'm at a party where I don't know anybody, I often say nary a word and tend to try to blend into the wallpaper. This isn't good, I know. I'm working on it. If you ever see me being a wallflower at a party, please come over and say hi. God knows I'll be too shy to do it.

I'm very devoted to my friends, I travel often back home to New Orleans and to Houston to see my family, and we own a 70+ year old house with all its commensurate maintenance needs. This all keeps me rather busy.

 
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I drive a Barcelona Red 2006 Toyota Prius, and I love it. It gets an average of 47 miles per gallon, drives like a dream and often makes no more sound than a large golf cart. I've got those little yellow stickers that let me drive in the carpool lane by myself, and some of my friends call it "The Smugmobile." Ah, jealousy.

I used to drive a Bright Blue 1999 Volkswagen New Beetle, and I had quite the love/hate relationship with it. It was a fun car, but broke down a lot and cost way too much to fix. I sold it to Wesly, and when it started giving him problems ("Oh, it's the radiator and water pump, but because of the way the car's designed we'll have to pull the entire front end off to get to it, and that's 3-4 days of labor ... about $2500.") Sigh. We donated it to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation right before Christmas '09. (That would be a really great thing for you to do with your old car, too.)

A while back I bought a blue seersucker suit, which I had wanted for years; I like to wear it with my straw hat and white shoes (of course, but only after Memorial Day and never after Labor Day, or Wesly would surely kill me dead right were I stand). I'm one of those rare people under sixty who can make that suit look good.

I use a Apple iMac, 24" 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 4 GB of RAM, running Mac OS X 10.6.1 Snow Leopard, and a wheezing old G4 Powerbook for portable use, which cannot be upgraded to Snow Leopard because it's not an Intel Mac, and which I still use to get by because once again I am a cheap bastard and won't buy a MacBook Pro. I broke down and got XP and Boot Camp installed to play a couple of games, but I hardly ever touch it.

Yes, I have drunk the iPhone Kool-Aid. I love it. I feel naked without it.

My surname is an Anglicization of the Irish Gaelic surname "Mac an tSagairt" (no, it's not a typo, it's an eclipsis), which means "son of the priest". According to my Irish language teacher Séamus Ó Díreáin, it dates back several centuries to a time and a region in Ireland when the laws of priestly celibacy were "not strictly enforced". Heh.

Tá beagán Gaeilge agam, agus is an-mhaith liom ceol tradisiúnta na hÉireann.
(I speak a little Irish, and I love traditional Irish music.)

I am a citizen of the United States of America. I am also a citizen of the emerging virtual nation of Cyber Yugoslavia, where I am the Minister for Traditional Music (Ministar za Tradicionalnu Muziku).

I run SETI@home, because I secretly wanna be Jodie Foster in "Contact"

I share a birthday with a number of famous and infamous people: One of my favorite writers, Kurt Vonnegut (1922), comedian Jonathan Winters (1925), XTC singer and songwriter Andy Partridge (1953), bad-boy actor Leonardo DiCaprio (1974), Swedish actress Bibi Andersson (1935), Gen. George S. Patton (1885), alleged Communist spy Alger Hiss (1904), really skinny actress Calista Flockhart (1964), cinematographer Fred J. Koenekamp (1922), "I Love Lucy" head writer Jess Oppenheimer (1913), darkly humorous monologuist Brother Theodore (1906), Russian novelist Fëdor Dostoevski (1821), U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. (1940), mafioso Charles "Lucky" Luciano (1896), French film director René Clair (1898) and Jigme Singye Wangchuk, King of Bhutan (1955).

Over the first several years of my doing this site I collected some interesting articles, bits of humor, and other various and sundry things that have stuck to my shoe after slogging through the Net, and I stuck them all on my virtual refrigerator door. I haven't updated it since 2003 (and it was a bit hoary even then), but still, have a look - this section was once actually quite popular among readers of my site.

My additional capacity to spew useless personal trivia knows no end. For instance, I took that Keirsey Temperament Sorter personality test thing ... it was actually kind of neat. Turns out I'm an ENFP.
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Finally, a bit about time management, for those who may ask, "When does Chuck find time to sleep with all this stuff going on? And why does he take so long to answer my e-mail, the bastard?" Read this if you plan to email me and you're not someone I already know.

So that's it for now, thank Gawd. I this, and I that ... I I I, blah! All this talking about myself ... I've had enough. If you found any of this remotely interesting and care to have a chat, drop me a note sometime, keeping in mind the above caveat about email. As the Grateful Dead Hot Line used to say, "stay in touch."

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