The Crescent City

Sometimes a place just touches your heart. Not in a "gee this is nice" kind of way, but in a down in your SOUL kind of way. For me, New Orleans is complicated and mysterious and unknowable...but it calls to me, in a way that is hard to explain, but that feels a lot like love.

I love this concept of street art. And I love that he's reading a book.

First of all, the idea that you can hear amazing live music at any time of day or night,  just by walking down the street, is almost unbelievable to me. And the quality of the music you hear from the buskers on the street is unlike any other place I've ever been. And of course, they are actually not just ON the street, but IN the street. In the middle of the street.  And, for a more formal experience, you can see
tremendously good performers by showing up at a club a half an hour before the show starts, paying a paltry sum like fifteen bucks, and just walking in. No real advance planning required! We saw great shows by amazing performers and got a great, if too brief, view of what living in that city could be for a music lover like me. To get a brief overview of a week on Frenchmen Street, where some of the best clubs are, we went to clubs there three different nights. We saw Kermit Ruffins, who is practically the mayor of local music there, and it was terrific.

Kermit Ruffins

We saw Charmaine Neville, who put on a great show, and we saw Delfeayo Marsalis and his Uptown Jazz Orchestra. He, and his band, were astonishingly good, and one of the best parts was that in his 13 piece band he had some kids who didn't look older than 20. It made me feel hopeful and happy and all full of optimism about the future of jazz.

Eating fabulous food is a part of being there, and their cuisine is so specific to that place, in a way that feels less true of other cities. The people  are so warm and friendly, and what the people are like is part of why it feels like a weird and wonderful and unique culture, like nowhere else in this country. Actually like nowhere else on earth. There is really nothing to compare it to.

Actually IN the street

Some parts of the city are quite beautiful. Some parts just look desperate. The level of poverty there
is shocking. It's hard to tell exactly, because some places that look really rundown are quite beautiful inside. A lot of effort--or a quite purposeful lack of effort--goes into making sure you can't tell from the outside that it's really nice inside. But of course, a lot of what looks incredibly rundown and edgy is just incredibly rundown and edgy. The city's neighborhoods feel fine during the daytime, but even in some of the nicer neighborhoods we were told not to walk around when it gets dark. There is still a stubbornly high crime rate in much of the city. I don't think people feel safe there even in the best of circumstances, and in a lot of the city, these are not the best of circumstances. The city seems somewhat improved from when we were there last, a couple of years after the storm, but it is still a rough life for an awful lot of the people there. I think it is not particularly an easy place to live.

But.... besides the music, and the food,  and the interesting Cajun/Creole history, the thing that seems to make it feel so different is just the fierceness of the people's love of the city. You just feel it everywhere you go. A lot of the songs you hear in the streets and in the clubs are about the city. The songs often tell of staying in the city until the day I die. When you talk to people they say "welcome to New Orleans" repeatedly, and it's clear that they are proud to call their city home. And what do they call their city? We heard it a handful of ways. I wish I could put a little audio link here! We heard "New Oh leens," and New Ah lins," and "Naw lins," and No lins," and "New Orlins," and all together, like "NewOrlins." I wish I knew what each pronunciation said about where each person was from, but I will never know.

We had lovely bike rides in two huge public parks, City Park and Audubon Park, both of which had been plantations. Both parks were spectacular, and City Park in particular was so well used by so many people--and different kinds and ages of people--that it was clearly a tremendous resource in the city. There are clearly places where everyone feels safe, at least in the daytime, and that was tremendously reassuring, because this city has some seriously sad and rough edges.

We heard that the slaves in the city had had a somewhat better situation than those out in rural areas, and being given a day off every week, used to gather in what is now known as Congo Square,

inside Louis Armstrong Park, and that the music made there was the beginning of  jazz, as well as of rhythm and blues and rock and roll. We took a very interesting guided tour of St Louis Cemetery Number 1, which is the oldest Catholic cemetery there, going back to the early 1700's, and we learned a lot of interesting stuff about burial and funeral practices in the city, which is a place where burials must happen above ground. We also learned a bit about the practice of voodoo, because the high priestess Marie Laveau is buried there. What a magnificent hodgepodge this place is!

There is a magnificent museum about World War II in the city. In fact it is the national WWII museum, and it was amazing. We drank great local beer, including a tremendous trip across the (stunning) Lake Ponchartrain on a 26 mile bridge, which is surely one of the engineering wonders of the world, to visit Abita Brewing Company, in the charming little town of Abita Springs. We sat on the big broad porch of a hotel in the Garden District and watched the sun go down. We walked the campuses of Loyola and Tulane with a kid we've known since he was born, who isn't a kid any more. We spent time with some people we know who moved there from Boston, and had some lovely conversations about why it is such an amazing place to live. Among those conversations were discussions of the weirdness of living in a city which has never gone along with many attempts to "civilize" it, going all the way back to the British, and the early Americans, and where even now, the politics are liberal and the lifestyle is free and easy, and we-don't-mind, including being able to walk down the street with a drink in your hand. There are even DRIVE-THROUGH daiquiri stands. REALLY. You drive through, and they give you an alcoholic drink to take with you. IN YOUR CAR. And all of this, inside what is surely one of the very most conservative, and in a lot of ways, backwards, states in the union. It's like New Orleans is a country all on its own. Our friends told us it's kind of like living in a third world country. And in terms of public services, public health, the environment, bureaucracy, education, and efficiency, it certainly is. And yet..there is a joie de vivre that seems unmatched to me anywhere else.

Bob wasn't as taken with it as I have been. That has been true the other times we have been there, as well. I think he sees Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard and the sadness of decay and corruption. I see that too, but mostly it feels like a kind of musical heaven, wrapped up an an enigma of a place with fabulous architecture and great food.

If I have anything to say about it, we'll be back. The last time we were there I tried to make a vow to go every year. I think that was about eight years ago. So I guess it might be awhile. But if we had the money, I'd go for a couple of weeks every year and just soak up all that music and food, and live off that fuel until I could go again.