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.
These fantastical, one could say phantasmagorical, images of New Orleans as taken by Frank Relle are post-Katrina documents of what’s been left behind, abandoned, and in some cases simply overgrown in Relle’s hometown.
I’ll be visiting New Orleans sometime in early January and I’m psyched to see this city, as unfortunate as the situation is – although I don’t think I’ll quite have the lenses embedded into my eyes that Relle sees the world through. (I think there are things you can ingest to achieve these effects however)
