7/7/2002 (next day)
Walking the French Quarter yesterday felt something akin to a foreign country. The old-looking buildings with their pretty 2nd floor balconies and fold out blinds bespoke a beauty not American in origin. Yet New Orleans is a very American Bazaar, maybe the culture of tourism makes it that way. Walking into an internet café in one of those smart looking buildings, however, felt just right somehow. In his autobiography, Miles Davis names Kansas City, St. Louis and New Orleans musically special cities. Even walking tourist areas in the French Quarter you can hear the accuracy of Miles’ observation. The street bands have soul and swing unlike street performers I’ve heard in any other city. A man sitting in a park and playing his guitar through a bright sun-yellow amplifier played a song so sweet I wish I would have recorded it. Later three musicians sit huddled around a bass drum turned on its side counting stacks of cash. A situation, I knew, where if I asked, they would not let me photograph them. Like an idiot I asked anyway. “No way man,” one responds as he holds up his palm to further discourage my photographic effort. Karma tells me that I shouldn’t later snap a picture of this scene, and when I hear them play, maybe their song ringing in my memory is sweeter, if less tangible.
Walking Bourbon Street the night before was quite a different experience, musically speaking. Due to the weekend’s Essence Fest, the street was filled to capacity with brown skin beauties and the gawking, groping, and gaga-eyed men giving it their best shot. The swell of the crowd matches the round overgrown bass tones that spill from every opening of every establishment on the strip. I wouldn’t quite call this jambalaya of bass flavors a competition unless I licked my plate clean. The real dish on Bourbon is the street itself, individual places a la carte items along the buffet table.
Driving the ‘hood after walking the French Quarter takes the foreign country metaphor one step further—a third world country. One of the roughest-looking ghettoes I’ve seen sits just a couple blocks from the place that I’ve added to my list of possible time-share destinations. The dirty south indeed.
Hightailing it from the ‘hood to the countryside in Louisiana is like solving the Pythagorean theorum in geometry—Asquared + Bsquared = Csquared. The countryside a mere extension of the same problems and desolation that are a consequence of the production of wealth. Still, the sunset that I witnessed outside of Baton Rouge through a labrynth of pipes at one of the city’s many factories is one of the more beautiful I’ve seen recently. The soft magic-hour lighting lends the green terrain a special lushness, the fire atop a chimney giving an extra “what the?” to the whole scene. I would return to Louisiana for that sunset, ghetto, and French Quarter. I would return to Mississippi for the cotton fields and the storm just north of Gulfport. I wouldn’t, however, return to northeast Arkansas for the soulless tourist outpost in Hardy.
