Tuesday, October 24, 2006

New Orleans is a Scorpio

The French Quarter is truly a puzzle when it comes to parking, especially in the morning. But as it so happens, it must've been my lucky day; I found a spot on Phillips St. right off of Decatur. I parked and fed the ticket machine 80 cents from my right pants pocket. I then placed the freshly printed parking pass on my dashboard, locked the car, and went through a short checklist to make sure I was prepard to document my trip properly. Cash? check. Notebook? check. Camera? sort of check. I had just bought some of those rechargeable batteries, but after opening the package and trying to operate my camera with the energy I thought they would provide, I discovered that one must first charge the batteries before one can actually use them. Thus, on my way to Jackson Square, I stopped in a gift shop to pick up some AAs. My checklist was complete.I made my way down Decatur through a stream of older tourists until I reached Jackson Square, which was sparsely decorated with pedestrians, a napping homeless fellow, and puddles from a morning shower. I walked around the park looking for psychics, viscerally heading toward the north side. Two fortunes tellers had set up tables facing the cathedral: a woman with her dog, whom I had heard reputable things about from various sources, and a disheveled man with decrepit lawn chairs and a drinking problem. I knew the woman would be my psychic of choice, but there was a short wait. To pass the time, I decided to wander through the Square. This provided a great photo opportunity, that, I am sure, many people have taken advantage of before. The Cathedral looked very elegant in front of the overcast sky. So did Andrew Jackson. However, I think they looked the most magnificent when they posed together. I walked back to the north side of the Square to find it was still not my turn for a reading, so I walked into the Cathedral to pass even more time. The interior was beautiful. I walked up the nave to photograph the altar and then back to the doors to photograph Louis IX and Joan of Arc.

I left the church and noticed the fortune teller I desired had finished her private meeting with the earlier client and there were no other potential customers in the area. Perhaps this was my chance to move in closer and ask her to read my fortune. Dare I move in and have all of my hopes, dreams, and fears revealed to me? Yes I dare. I greeted her and she greeted me while closing a plastic container with a large chicken finger in it. I asked her about her profession. "You read fortunes and stuff?" I asked. " I need someone who is an expert in palm reading." She replied that her skills were not only proficient in palm reading, but in tarot card reading as well. I sat in her red cushioned chair and we began the typical small talk with introductions. Her name is Terry, but she goes by Velvet. My name is Graham and I am from Kentucky. She wanted to start with a tarot card reading. I agreed. I picked ten cards with my left hand, since, she explained, the right side of my brain is the intuitive side. This was for a general reading. The reading told me about who I am now, what will happen in my immediate future, my personality, my relationships, and my destiny. While she was giving me my general reading, her dog Sangria, or as Velvet called her, Gri-Gri, was constantly whining. After shushing the dog several times, Velvet gave her the last chicken finger from the plastic container. As the dog ate, Velvet gave me another tarot card reading. This one specifically geared toward my love life, a tangent of the general reading. After completing this tarot, she moved on to a palm reading. I extended my right hand and watched her as she studied the lines and cracks in my skin. She told me I had a long life line, that I was an old soul with many past lives, and potentially psychic. She asked me if I ever felt psychic. I wanted to tell her about the time when I hadn't thought about a certain friend of mine in months and then one day, a week or so ago, I was wondering what he was up to and then he called me within an hour of the thought. Instead, I responded "Sometimes." Then it was my turn to ask her any specific questions I wanted answered about myself. This is when I told her about my big idea. I had been curious about the idea of reading into the future or past from lines on a surface. I then combined this with an interst of the lives and deaths of cities throughout history. People have been getting their fortunes read for years, so why not a city? If the lines produced on our hands produced by a certain higher power or DNA or whatever could be read, was it possible for the lines on a city map, designed by planners, to be read? Could she read the fortune of New Orleans? I wasn't comfortable drawing tarot cards for the city, but a "palm reading" seemed totally objective. I took out a map of the city and unfolded it on her table while explaining my idea. She was intrigued and very excited to give it a try. At first, she had trouble reading the map, but a quick orientation of our location and the cardinal directionsgot the stars to start aligning. She was quick to not that the base of the city actually looked like the base of a palm and identified a long life line, which I recognized as I-10. She also picked up on a long heart line, which means the city is deeply loved. Before, I had only noticed this heartline as Earheart Boulevard. She went on to note that she could not read too much more into the map itself, but she knew the city was a Scorpio since it was founded in Novemeber. Apparently Scorpios are related to the Pheonix, a creature that rises from the ashes of its death. All of these are very positive signs: The city is loved, it has a long life line, and pheonix-esque characteristics. I folded the map and she closed with a final personality-related tarot. As it turns out I am too hard on myself. She gave me a green stone as a parting gift. Its supposed to remind me to find serenity. I paid Velvet and told her she had been very helpful. As I walked back to my car I thought about my fortune. I'm a dreamer with money in my immediate future. I will find true love, I have a "star" personality, and I am destined to become very successful. Of course, this was music to my ears. And as I turned the corner to see the hot orange envelope of an NOPD parking ticket on my windshield, all I could do is put my hands deep in my pocket and rub my green serenity stone.

Thursday, October 19, 2006

A Path Through New Orleans


It wasn’t until very recently that I rediscovered the experience of riding a bike. In the process of moving to New Orleans, I decided that I could save a good deal of money on gas (and tires, thanks to all the nails and potholes) if I didn't bring my car, and instead used a bike to get around. Not having ridden a bike for some time, this became quite a life-style change as I had depended on my car to get around for the entirety of my post-adolescent life. In college, I had always lived close enough to school to walk, and if I couldn’t walk it, I drove it. Now, living in a new city, having to travel farther than ever before to get to school, I was without my Oldsmobile!

My house is located in Uptown, a neighborhood about seven miles from our studio, which is located in Bywater. At first the distance was somewhat intimidating. Previously, I had never had to travel more than half a mile to get to my classes. The thought of embarking on a seven-mile journey through one of the most dangerous cities in America twice daily made me at times, question my choice not to bring a car. But my fears were soon curbed, as I realized that biking it in new Orleans is the only way to go. The roads here are totally flat, and almost all one-way. It is also much easier to avoid annoying traffic laws such as stop-signs. Riding my bike to school allows me to experience the city in a way that could never be achieved in an automobile.

My daily journey begins on Magazine Street. where I live. Now, Magazine is not the ideal bike route to take. It is extremely busy, and extremely narrow, which is a bad combination. Instead, I cut up one block and take Camp Street, which is wide, and predominantly residential. Because it follows the river, Camp Street is continuous and runs the full length of the distance I have to travel. What is so great about this particular route is that in its entirety, it runs through some of the most beautiful, historically famous areas in New Orleans, and probably in all of North America.

The route begins in the college are of Uptown, which is close to Tulane and Loyola. The houses here are modest, but beautiful. Mostly shotgun style, they rarely reach more than two stories, creating a consistently low urban streetscape throughout. The live oaks along the street tower over the avenue and the houses, creating a tunnel like condition, that provides shade for the long ride.

Crossing Louisiana Avenue, the houses begin to grow considerably, as do the spaces between them. This is the garden district. In this area of the city, one starts to sense a real change in scale. Houses are at least two stories, and each is surrounded by plenty of green-space. The vegetation, however, is what is so defining about this area. Every house is surrounded by huge live oaks, banana plants, flowers, and shrubbery, and is unlike any neighborhood I have ever been in.
The beautiful, gigantic, grand houses of the area take a backseat to the gardens that surround each of them. In places it feels like a tropical forest, and I forget that I am am in a city at all. The smell of the flowers becomes overwhelming at times, and you have to remind yourself to watch the road and not the scenery.


Soon, Camp merges with the inbound traffic of Magazine street, and I once again have to start really minding my surroundings. The speed limit goes from twenty-five to forty-five, and the street widens into two-lanes each way. This is I get my first view of downtown New Orleans.
Approaching the Central Business District, the buildings begin to increase massively in scale, and the experience changes totally. I am now an ant in a deep crevasse, desperately trying to keep up with the larger, faster moving traffic.

Finally, after about twenty minutes of riding, I arrive at a large intersection, which dramatically cuts short the overwhelming scale of the surroundings: this is where Canal Street, which is, in fact, an urban canal cutting through the city, separates the CBD from the French Quarter. Crossing this road is like a time-warp, because if it weren't for the cars, you wouldn't be able to tell what century you were in. On one side is the fast-paced, American-urban experience of the 21st century; On the other side, one travels back in time, to an entirely different era or country. Camp Street now becomes Chartres Street, and where the buildings stand at all the same height, and create a long shaded cavern of widened lanes and side-walks. The sights and smells along this part of the route are unbelievable. The minute I enter the French Quarter, my senses become totally overwhelmed, as I pass tourists, bums, strippers, chefs, business men, and cops all on the same path. An aroma of garbage, stale beer, and the most wonderful food one could possibly dream of eating all enter my nose at the same time. As for biking, the traffic is still pretty dense, and I really have to watch out for the opening car doors.

After a few blocks, the road stops abruptly at Jackson Square, and I am forced to leave the street and weave through the tourists, the fortune tellers, the pigeons, and the homeless. Upon leaving Jackson Square, the French quarter becomes quiet. There is no longer any traffic, and I truly begin to feel the age of everything around me. At times I even wonder if the person I'm passing on the street is really there, or just a ghost of New Orlean's past. I pass by streets like Frenchman, that on any given night are full of life, and the best music in all of the city, but in the morning, one might not even notice.

Leaving the French Quarter, I enter the Fauburg Marigny, originally a French residential neighborhood. The houses here are once again all shotgun style, one-story, but they are much closer together than the houses of Uptown or the Garden district, creating a denser urban fabric. At this point I start to notice that the traffic is no longer dominated by automobiles, but instead by bicycles. The Marigny is home to artists, musicians, transvestites, and "freaks and weirdos" from all different walks of life. They travel around on their bicycles, coexisting without the slightest effort in a part of New Orleans which for me, has become one of the most intriguing. This is the point on the city grid that bends or breaks from the rest, disrupting the linear axis of the preceding streets. It does this physically and metaphorically, mirroring the paths of the people who occupy it. New Orleans has always been a home to rougues, outlaws, and people who refused to go along with the confines of the social fabric of American culture. Many still find refuge at this breaking point.

The final stretch of the journey takes me into the Bywater. The dense houses disappear and are replaced by large warehouses. Along my path to the right is a large wall that separates the neighborhood from the mighty Mississippi where one can see the tops of large cargo ships creeping along the edge. The effect of the hurricane starts to reveal itself more than ever as I start to notice the debris on the road, and the coded FEMA spraypaint that marks each building, jolting me back to the reality of why I am here.

While the route I take to studio everyday is beautiful, scenic, uplifting, and amazing in everyway, it is in no way representative of the state of New Orleans. The small stretch of land is not unlike a preserved artifact that tells a story of what used to be, not what is. It is easy to lose yourself in the beauty and grandeur of everything that these places offer, but the red sign spray-painted on the wall of our studio tells the story of the rest of New Orleans: a New Orleans that has yet to recover from the most devastating natural disaster in American history.

Saturday, October 07, 2006

Somethin' Strange About This Place


He says to me like he’s known me for years, “Baby, baby, baby, you ain’t lookin’ too well tonight. Hah!” I’m standing outside of a run down little jazz bar called Vaughan’s and completely puzzled as to why this guy would even care how I was feeling. He says to me, “Now I seen you come around here before an’ you always got a big smile on yo’ face, but I ain’t see it tonight, so I know that something got to be wrong. So why don’t you tell me what’s wrong?” “Seriously? You really want to know?” I laugh. I mean, isn’t he just supposed to take my money and let me in? Feeling encouraged by his sincerity, I tell my new friend exactly what is upsetting me. He looks me straight in the eye and just laughs. “Aw baby! You know it ain’t that bad. Nothin’s ever that bad. And remember, tomorrow’s another day! Unless, of course, another Katrina come blowin’ her way through! Hah!” With that he ushers me in.

Since moving to New Orleans, I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that line – “Don’t worry, tomorrow’s another day” - but for some reason, this time, it actually meant something to me. Some of my closest friends can’t read me that well, so how could he? This was the moment that I realized that people here, in this place, are very different from anywhere else I’ve ever been. There is only one New Orleans, and so I wonder: Is it architecture that makes a place unique? Or is it the people that make the place?

I know this much is true: no one is a stranger in New Orleans. Sometimes it might seem like a big city, but most times it has a small town familiarity. I see the same people everywhere. I imagine the conversations they have or what they are thinking. Like the old woman sitting on the front steps of her St. Charles Avenue house, reading a book while her garden hose runs down the driveway spraying water everywhere: if I don’t see her just one day, I wonder. Where could she possibly be? What terrible or wonderful reason could she have for changing the routine of her life? Or the homeless man I see everyday on my way to work who carries a sketchbook with all of the drawings I imagine it contains; Or the woman I see walking her dog – is she asking herself why she’s up so early? And the guys on the back of the garbage truck every Wednesday and Friday , who wave to me, and I wave back with a huge smile as I ride past on my bike. To me, the best is when I look at someone and they look back at me, and from the expression on their face, I know exactly what it is that they're thinking about. I shake my head in agreement and we have a laugh together. I never find out what their real stories are; I don’t know their names. But I don’t need conversations to feel like I know them because I already do in my own way.

New Orleans is filled with strange occurrences, interactions, exchanges of glances. It’s an unusual city with no such thing as a routine day. It leaves vivid images in your mind. One remembers it street by street, house by house, doors, windows, colors. I remember it by the people I see. It’s those people that make this place. New Orleans is my huge extended family. I just haven’t met everyone yet.