New Orleans, 2/14/09

Calm and safety never inspire.

Cities of sin, of sex, of violence, of trouble have been inspiring poets and novelists and musicians and philosophers and artists for centuries. Dark, shadowy, shady, damp, old cities. Cities where you pop your collar in secrecy and clutch your bag tighter in anxiety and walk a little faster at night. Cities that seem dark and forbidding well into the day and despite the sunlight. Cities worn and tired and alive. Dangerous places. Places with long, brutal pasts. Violent places. Passionate places. Venice. Tangier. Havana. New Orleans. Port-au-Prince. Prague. Contradictions and confusion.

There are no famous paintings of Columbus, OH, but Columbus does not have the chilling brutal reputation of New Orleans. Safety does not seem to inspire passion or hate or fear or love or lust. It inspires the “Fair-to-Middling,” the “Just Scratching By,” the “Longing for Something More.” The rich and stable who are dull and dry.

I’ve been struggling to find something to say about New Orleans that hasn’t already been said in an Anne Rice book or a Louis Armstrong ballad. That it drives people mad with the desire to sing or write or paint, to live, is a given. The heat, the sweat, the cobblestones, the voodoo and Creole and worn paint and falling shutters. The smells of boiling crawfish, spices, cigar smoke, beer, and oil and urine. The grinding of boats against docks, saxophones against the screech and shuffle of cars, wailing sirens against overwhelmed voices and clinking beer glasses. The poverty, the tiredness, the aimlessness, the helplessness. Characteristics that have epitomized New Orleans since its birth. To say that New Orleans has ever been a safe place, a happy place, and peaceful place is to forget what it is that makes art so great. New Orleans has never been a “safe” place, so to indicate that the poverty and violence and bigotry is only getting worse is to forget where such a place came from. New Orleans was born from the smoldering cinders of poverty and violence and bigotry, of dark secrets in dark places.

To love and to hate New Orleans are one in the same, and most people intimately familiar with the city often feel an overabundance of both. Residents can swing from loathing to lust in a matter of words, mentioning the unspeakable devastation from Katrina and the poverty following it in the same sentence they use to emulate the beauty and passion of Mardi Gras. The city arouses the extreme, extreme emotions, extreme behavior, extreme artistic expression, extreme deficiency living crushed against extreme wealth.










Birthday fun in New Orleans. We arrived at our hotel and were promptly greeted by a pre-Mardi Gras parade. Apparently they start celebrations earlier and earlier each year, this year beginning back in mid-January. We had raw oysters and micro-brews for lunch, hit up Pat O'Brien's for an original hurricane and a very tasty mint julip, and then wandered around town for the rest of the night, taking in the sights, smells, noises of the city, the artists and street musicians and wayward horses and jugglers and bead throwers.