The day didn’t demand much in the way of activity or excitement really. We all packed our bags and generally just lounged about waiting for the adventure to begin. Martina and I did stock up on “emergency chocolate”, our thoughts being that should the situation become dire we could always survive at sea on a block of Green & Black for a couple weeks. WTF were we thinking! Neither of us were really prepared for what we were about to encounter:
Oh Mm Gee. It got real once in the taxi driving to the pier and we could spot the tail-exhaust of the ship from about 3/4 mile away! The whole ‘cruise industry’ has this thing down to a science: the staff at the port greeted us and took our one check-in bag, it disappeared and was in our room by the time we got there! Angie, Martina and I got our ‘fun pass’ identification cards which guaranteed us to have fun… or else. Us 3 were bunking in a room that had a queen-sized bed and a bed that folded out of the wall. I remember walking into the room, quickly dropping our bags and Martina, upon spotting the nightlights that operated behind plexi contour art proclaiming “yeeeeeeaahhhhhh!!!!” and literally jumping up and down.
We exited, took a random path to start learning our home for the next several days and quickly found our way to the top:
Holy crap.
These things are humongous, and wild. And run like clockwork. Within our first hour they announced our life vest and life raft tutorial which sounds cumbersome but really wasn’t and is necessary, you never know. We did a 180 from the port and started heading downstream to the delta and out into the Gulf. Even considering the tutorial we had enough time to catch glimpses of the city on the horizon and even spotted the neighborhood Angie lives in from the boat:
Bywater area.
On the same token this following shot is of the Lower Ninth Ward. It’s hard to tell in this image but consider this is the same Lower Ninth pictured in my ‘on the Eve of Change‘ post:
Now I’ve never been on a cruise before, I had no idea what to expect. In short these things are designed to pamper. It’s incredible, and pretty ridiculous, in an amazing way. Geez that doesn’t actually tell you anything does it! Okay, your bedroom is “turned down” twice a day – cleaned, changed, made anew; food is limitless, seriously you can eat your body weight daily if your intestines wouldn’t revolt; there’s round-the-clock entertainment in the form of musicians, gambling, bars, game rooms, stage performances, etc.; there’s a gym; multiple hot tubs and pools; there’s a sauna and spa for chrissake!; there’s even… an art gallery!
Clearly when I saw that I knew I was going to have some fun. is that Comic Sans? seriously? These ships were obviously designed in the early 90s! No but seriously there’s a real functioning art gallery on the ship, and yes we saw some people buying art, expensive art, like more expensive than all the expenses me and my party paid for the entire shebang. Times ten. People, are here to have fun, spend money, escape themselves, and be taken care of. and party.
The evening of the first full day on the ship, which we spent entirely at sea, there was a formal gathering and dinner which the captain emceed. Some people, “veteran cruisers” as they’re called, live for this. They came prepared. Not me, I packed two pairs of shorts, flip-flops and my boy scout belt! I didn’t even bring a towel, thinking it’d be so hot all the time I’d air dry when necessary (I forget the interior of places like these are always air-conditioned!); meanwhile these people packed jewelry and a pair of shoes for every day. Outclassed. Still, we had our fun:
Thanks – in part – to the performances, wisdom and hospitality of a one Rob the Pianoman.
If you take the Fantasy ship be sure to look this guy up. He plays at the Cleopatra Piano Bar (duh, he’s a Pianoman!). He made our night on several occassions. This Georgia boy will not disappoint, and his single-handed take on some classic songs (a la Dylan, Van Morrison, the Beatles) is not to be missed!
Next entry: Progreso, Dzibilchaltun, Mayan f*%^ing ruins!
I spent less than 48 hours in New Orleans before departing for Mexico but that did include one full day.
The morning offered a trip over to see some houses converted into domicile-scale installations, the houses possibly being unsuitable for living after Katrina. These works were all organized by KK Projects under the auspices of the Prospect 1 New Orleans biennale, so it was my first taste (surprise!) of the art fair. By far my favorite, the one that gripped me immediately, not only because of its visual appeal but especially because of its audience participation and interaction was Mel Chin’s safe house:
One enters through this bank vault door which locks shut at night to view thousands upon thousands upon increasing thousands of hand-drawn $100 bills on templates, by passers-by, participants, and New Orleans area kids and children. Talking with the assistant coordinator to the project Amanda Wiles, she suggested that they were attempting to collecting $300m in these hand-fabricated bills which would be delivered via armored truck to some Congressional body in exchange for the real funds needed to reduce lead levels in the soil and environment of New Orleans which ranks as one of the most lead-polluted cities in the US, and it’s well documented that lead poisoning in children can lead to behaviorial problems and learning disabilities. Still, $300m, that requires drawings by 3million students or participants, or approximately 1 in every 100 Americans! Whoo. That’s a lot of art.
[Visit Fundred.org if you're an artist or educator to see about bringing this project to your peers or students]
What’s difficult to digest is I know you’re thinking ‘wow that sounds like a lot of money to reduce lead content in soil’ right. Didn’t we just pass a bill to spread around $700billion to the financial sector, auto makers, and other industries? Isn’t $300million less than 1/3 of $1billion? Where does that bailout money really go?
Anyhow, adjacent house-installations included some crazy detritus-strewn environments which I was told the previous month contained some elements of water or pools or something which would have better aluded to a post-Katrina environment. Or something like that. Hey, things were crazy:
Quite frankly though I think this city does a better job – as a city, as if the city were an organism – of defining that post-Katrina space, and it doesn’t have to be blunt or overblown, many times in fact it’s subtle, silent, minimal (and beautiful):
that hole up there… is the whole building empty? hollowed? drafty?
The evening began afresh with a jazz band in a jazz bar, total New Orleans style:
Life immitates art, they look like the painting on the wall behind them!
Stumbled upon some car that had many thousand pieces of bric-a-brac and kitsch stuck to it. As well as some text which I was told had to do with saving vampires from themselves; some preachy bit of words about how eternal life is a really bad thing and vampires should repent then somehow commit suicide or give up their souls or something so they can become mortal and die peacefully. But it was the stuff that caught my eye:
(rear-view no longer working!)
Makes me wonder if they worked on the automobile in silent, behind closed doors in a garage, until it was deemed worthy of being seen, or if it was a gradual development, some watches here, a spider-man here, some homeboy figures there, and is it considered done or continually being worked and reworked?
And again, this city photographs beautifully at night:
so Shalin lives in a dollhouse, Angie lives in a dog shack, and Martina doesn’t actually live here and was the catalyst behind convincing me and Angie to take a boat trip to Mexico. All of which has nothing to do with the house pictured above, but at the same time that’s where they all live, but not really. New Orleans is weird. Yup, and these are my friends.
Getting to the house was difficult, which was expected. The driver of a city cab didn’t use the meter and charged me $12 for a journey that would have been difficult considering the weight of my backpack but wouldn’t have been untraverseable any other day on foot (I’ve since realized). He didn’t know how to locate the cross street given the address and suggested that having to drive to find the address might be too far for the fare. Welcome to New Orleans!
Once settled, the first order of business was food, so we set out for a walk in search of po-boys! While walking, it became clear that New Orleans architecture is obfuscated by the abundance of growth and green here. The city neighborhood’s landscapes are dominated by trees, plants, flowers, foliage and probably account for 30% of the density of the town:
As for dinner, I think I just about managed to capture everyone with their faces stuffed:
So service here is so slow and almost awkward, but is a journey in and of itself, you just have to roll with it. Then you’ll have a great time! Our waiter must have made at least four maybe five trips to the kitchen to actually figure out what they had in terms of deserts, but eventually landed us with exactly what we wanted:
Devoured, Gone. We Are Hungry.
As I arrived in the city in the mid-afternoon, by the time we finished with dinner the sun was set. Even having been here a week now I’m divided between seeing the city during the day and seeing it at night. It’s beautiful both ways:
The moon here is flipping bright. Bright, and low. And routinely about as big as I’ve ever seen it. Definitely as bright as I’ve ever seen it. So much light gets reflected here, which was more pronounced once we got out on the boat (will save that for the next post).
As for my first night in New Orleans I experienced something magical that I highly recommend to all if you want a flavor of New Orleans that you simply cannot find anywhere else. I journeyed – under Martina’s guide – to the Venue, a club up river where DJ Jubilee (a high school special educator during the day) and Katey Red (a transvestite rapper and teacher also) spin a distinct brand of music that is unlike anything else I’ve heard. Part hip-hop, part electronica, part bass, Bounce as it’s called has it’s own beat rhythm and vernacular that rivals Grime in the UK in its propensity to energy, but is contained to the shores of this fair city.
Music and club shots begin around minute 4. That mirrored wall… will live with me forever!
I didn’t realize my second-to-last post (or what with the publishing sequence will be two posts prior to this one once it’s actually published) was dated before the end of last year until I published my latest post about our outgoing Decider earlier this afternoon. 20 days between posts is simply unacceptable; this would produce less than 20 posts per year at that rate! I have a lot more to say and show than that damnit! I’ve said it before but generally on my watch when I’m not blogging it’s because there’s simply too much else (real… life…) going on. The gimmick being that you need those experiences to blog about but when they just keep steamrolling on you, sometimes you never find time to talk about it. I make sure to always stay busy in one capacity or another however.
In the past 20 days I’ve taken 1,255 photos. I’ve put approximately 400 of them up on my Flickr for permanent public viewing. Over the next day or two I’m going to attempt to recall as much of that activity as possible and present you with merely a snippet of visuals – 2% or 3% of what I’ve managed to capture – taken already, in an attempt to catch up to the days’ ongoing incredible activities.
(all of the following images are from January 8, 2009, en route to New Orleans from St. Louis)
Shortly after New Years recovery I started planning my trip down souf where I am currently scribing from (while I’m absolutely loving it down here, one of the causes of my lack of productivity definitely is not having my own office and base of operations). This trip took place during the first full week of the new year and since then, whoah. Where to begin?
I took a shuttle bus – which was really just a van – from St. Louis to Carbondale at 1am in 28F degree cold. The driver loved to blast R&B and there was a rider (male, with gold teeth that shimmered even in the dark hours) who knew all of the songs but was trailing the radio like an echo by I’d say .15 seconds. It was lovely, and amusing, but only for so long as the ride was nearly 2 hours long. Thankfully I had my studio headphones and my own mp3 player.
In Carbondale I caught the New Orleans bound train departed from Chicago. It was exactly an hour late but I was told this would be caught up in Memphis where the train normally sits for an hour from 6-7am, this trip it would simply arrive and depart, thus eliminating the twilight delay. By the time you wake up the majority of your trip goes through Mississippi, a state I’ve previously not travelled to or even through:
Life along the tracks looks pretty rough. If there isn’t simply a lot of debris strewn about, then chances are the visual includes standing water. Rust looks really genuine under the sun down here by the way.
That part of the Louisiana start border that touches Mississippi that is a straight line that runs east to west, I don’t know where that comes from or how a straight line was decided to be the best border option, but you do know when you’ve crossed over into Louisiana, because then you’re in swamp country, and things just look a little different:
And arrival into New Orleans parish is obvious too. Of course crossing Lake Ponchartrain gives it away (the bridge is 26 frickin miles long after all!) but more than that, something changes. The light, the look, the pace of vehicles outside my window, even the same whiskey I was just drinking north of New Orleans tastes different – … better! – once you cross into New Orleans! How did they do that!?
infrastructure in New Orleans along the tracks
London in New Orleans. the English did have an influence here.
Big White Elephant. the site of so much turmoil during Katrina. the train rolls reallllllly slow past this one, we’re backing into the terminal now.
Next installment: Bywater; Martina, Angie and Shalin; first food; first art; and Booooooom!
it’s strange, being in New Orleans on the Eve of Change, less than 24 hours to go before Obama’s inauguration and this country will have not only a new President but new hope and spirit (it’s been brewing for months, tomorrow the bottles will explode!)
A couple weeks back when I realized I’d be in New Orleans during the inauguration I became elated. I’d be in a town heavily afflicted during Bush’s presidency – some would say worsened due to Bush’s lack of response as President – but I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant or exactly how his departure would be perceived here (I wasn’t going to be presumptuous about the democratic values of New Orleans). Having been here for about a week now, I can form my own perceptions however. I have to restrain myself from using any expletives, so put simply Bush didn’t do jack for New Orleans. It’s not just New Orleans, clearly, it’s the entire Gulf Coast. But this is where I’m at now, and it’s devastating still, more than 3 years after the event. And with 3 years to think on it, the best Bush could come up with after reflecting on Hurricane Katrina was maybe he could have landed his plane in Baton Rouge or New Orleans?
I’m not going to live a life of hypotheticals and say things like “Well if Kerry had been President during Katrina maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as this and blah blah blah” because that still won’t repair the emotional damage or environmental scarring. But it is clear that Bush simply did not do enough at that time.
His logic is both awkward and interesting. The thought that landing a plane would require detailing massive numbers of local law enforcement away from their posts assisting with the relief effort and to his own personal security. When there were already defections and fewer numbers of available law enforcement personnel. But really, landing a plane? That was the best you could come up with? You, in your stupid fucking (oops, there I said it!) plane? You the Decider cum You the Signifier? The Great Hope in the flesh? NO way man. You know you would have been mobbed. You wouldn’t have made it out alive.
I realize I’ve been loosing valuable blogging time as of late. In the one hand I have all of this valuable content, in the form of my experiences, images, stories and lessons learned while I’m in St. Louis for the holidays and attempting to re-order the World As It Is according to my parents; in the other hand, oh shit the World As It Is consists of a vaccuum, or as my friend John might say a vortex, don’t get sucked in! I’ve found myself getting distracted by the activity of non-activity, by the nothingness of existence here, by the slow pace and hum-drum attitude of interaction here, which I both admire and love, and struggle to cope with and fight against.
As I mulled over this dilemma half-asleep last night, I simply concluded that it would be best for me to start a post, and then to add to it with sub-entries, rather than attempting to compile one single megapost which can’t actually be done as my experiences here are on-going and never cease. Day in and day out there’s something new. And I’m already over a week behind schedule.
So in unordered list and no particular arrangement:
My parents and stuff:
my parents own, or possess rather, nearly if not more than 30 pairs of scissors. Nearly if not more… as in, while I’m sorting through their house and attempting to downsize their lives, I’ve really only penetrated and can account for the contents of two rooms. Add to that the other rooms (namely the computer room and my mom’s office areas) and in passing I’ve counted well over 20 pairs, and nearing 30. And I haven’t even spent time in the toolshop area. Could they own 50 scissors? Is this possible?
In the light of the scissors complex, I went back and counted the number of staplers they own. Currently accounted for: 8.
e.g.:
many, many more to come!
STL corner architecture:
I’ve always had a fondness for corner buildings in St. Louis city. They’re always slightly more visually complex than the buildings surrounding them (which are usually domiciles, with the corner buildings operating commercial ventures); accented with architectural features and decorative elements; usually “wrap” the corner physically, and provide multiple entrances or window displays; and are usually more substantial – at times gargantuan – in comparison to the surrounding area. (I’ll add more examples as I take them) If one was to purchase or develop a property in the city for an arts center or housing co-op, this would be the way to go:
STL alley architecture:
Likewise I’ve always had a fondness for the alleys of St. Louis, and they’re an urban development feature that I’ve missed in larger cities I’ve lived in like London or NYC or which other cities I just don’t think employ the nature and uses of the alley as well as St. Louis city. In my earlier days I played basketball and stickball in them; used them to cut through neighborhoods while avoiding the car-traffic streets; and often used them as entrances to peoples’ homes through their back doors because the front door is so formal and proper, whereas the back door usually leads immediately into the kitchen which is where people congregate to eat and drink.
More recently I’ve found myself attracted to their narrow and sharp vantage points, especially at the moment when one rides past an alley quickly and is given a glimpse down the canyon of garages and sheds, trash cans, and debris. Those moments are quick as the alleys here are only 11 ft. wide or so. Wheres some neighboring streets can appear the same, the alleyways are always different and unique:
Delphi hats:
Word is this kid can’t get enough hats. Things on head in general:
Stumbling around the intertubes looking for STL entertainment, I came upon Bill Streeter’s website and flickr account, which included one of the more honest images shot from within the crowd for President Obama’s (not -elect, he’s my bloody President already damnit!) rally in St. Louis in mid-October. Most press images published from that record-turnout speech were wide shots from above or a press-box area (see scissor lifts) that overwhelmed the eye and whose composition was strategically designed to include the old courthouse in the background (again, for mass media). This shot however shows the back heads of the crowd as they face forward, cheering. That is Illinois in the background; also to the right of the white tent was a jumbotron television. I think Obama can be seen between the bleachers stand and the scissor lifts, in white.
I don’t know Bill but he seems like an all-right guy, his name being penned on some of the websites I’ve been perusing as I re-explore the city, including The Royale, one of the finer pubs in town that I’ve visited before and was trying to remember the name of, and thankfully came across their site. Bill codes with WordPress (the same software I employ), which is good to know open-source is running a fair portion of STL’s cultural production.
I was also introduced to this page at the Kemper Museum’s site which discreetely hides a map to STL non-profit visual art sites. Still, there must be more?
architecture blended:
Did they paint the building to blend in with the tree? Or did the tree chameleonize to blend in with the building?
zombie entertainment:
It’s a shame I just missed this (by a month). Subscribe to their feed for updates ahead of time.
More STL architecture:
I guess architecture, especially domiciles and housing structures, features prominently in this post because St. Louis has so much that is abandoned or not living up to its potential. It’s amazing, coming from New York City where realtors can and do literally sit on pieces of real estate, and end up not leasing them out figuring they can loose money now by not leasing a property in exchange for banking on that same property in a couple months or years even, when a specific neighborhood “blows up” and prices skyrocket. Yet here pieces of property sit abandoned for decades and there’s no assistance from the city to move people into them in exchange for fixing them up or developing a program (non-profit or otherwise) within the structure.
Here are some prime examples of abandoned or derelict or simply vapid structures:
a cutie two-part house thing. I don’t even know how to describe this place. It’s odd. It’s lovely. It has a No Trespassing No Loitering sign. It’s about 50ft. from the Antique Row area (Cherokee Street).
I didn’t walk over the hill but this building appeared partiallly – if not entirely – abandoned. Hard to tell. Still, it’s surrounded by land that at one point surely was loaded with other buildings and structures. Where did they all go? Who took the bricks?
Don’t remember the location. Great double garage door access, with ghost sign on side. All windows boarded up. Red plywood.
This one both confuses and upsets me. Such a beatiful structure, and the colorful rooftop facade is incomplete. Did the owner attempt to fix it up and then simply flee? the spraypaint on the road hoarding says “2900″ for the address.
