Ramblings unrelated to N'awlins, Nola, or the Big Easy. And some photographs that are.

This is the fourth blog post I've started today. I keep getting about two paragraphs in, then I wander off to switch a load of laundry, or refill my coffee, or eat a tomato, and then by the time I've returned, the moment is lost, the thread is gone, and I can't reclaim it or even remember why it seemed relevant at the time. Or somehow my opinion would change on the topic while I was away and I'd come back and be like, 'I wrote THAT? I don't even BELIEVE that,' at which point it would all have to be tossed, because one should only post absolute truth when possible, or absolute untruth, but certainly not something wishy-washy in between.

I lost my favorite chapstick today and so after lunch I went to Whole Foods to pick out the cheapest one I could find to tide me over until I get to Chicago in two weeks (where I can get it again). Except I didn't bother to read the label on the tube, and now my lips taste like patchouli and I can smell hippie everywhere and it's like the Haight just walked across my face. I'm also feeling a strange desire to burn incense and hang blankets on the wall and replace my couch with floor cushions.

Also, it's a whopping 46 degrees in Memphis today. For those of you from Scotland this is child's play, but for Memphisians (and myself), this is intolerably frigid. As Diana so eloquently put it, 'This is why I'll always live with black people. And mosquitos.'

And now for some New Orleans pictures. Not the bayou ones, they're not ready yet (and by 'ready,' I mean, 'even looked at'), but a couple others.

The French Quarter

The 9th Ward rebuild

The food! Over the course of five days, I had crab cakes benedict with creole hollandaise, biscuits and gravy with boudin (pronounced 'boo-dan') patties (a local spicy sausage with rice in it)--both breakfasts courtesy of Surrey's Juice Bar, which was one of my greatest finds while there--beignets and chicory coffee from Cafe du Monde, and fried eggplant with crawfish au gratin from Cafe Des Amis. Cafe Des Amis was actually located in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, a couple of hours west of Nola, where I passed through on my way into town. It was absolutely worth the detour. And apparently they have a Saturday morning Zydeco brunch complete with live music and dancing! When I heard that, I felt my heart hesitate with a pitter-patter: 'Maybe we should just stay HERE instead of going all the way to New Orleans...'

I passed Grit's Bar (though didn't actually go in) when I was wandering through a residential neighborhood looking for Domilises po'boys, which was a mega-ghetto old school po'boy shop and fabulous. In the same neighborhood I also stumbled upon McKeown's Books and Difficult Music, the greatest used bookstore on the planet where I totally nabbed a Thurber anthology for fifty cents, and last but not least we have Juan's Flying Burrito in uptown, a 'creole taqueria' that I couldn't resist because it combined two of my favorite elements: 'creole' and 'taqueria.' I had the super shrimp burrito and am STILL dreaming about it...

oyster gravel, a st. charles plantation, surrey's breakfast, and a hurricane evacuation route

And lastly we come to the Preservation Hall, one of the jazz meccas of New Orleans. (For tourists, at least.) The two photos on the right were taken with my iphone since my camera batteries died soon after arrival, an action which caused the band leader--Mr. Leroy Jones, bottom right--to announce to the very large crowd in the very small venue in which I was sitting in the very front row of three, 'No taking videos with your iphones! And I know you can do it, because I've GOT an iphone!' (The small matter that my little 3G has no video capability whatsoever was not taken into account.) However, as I was the only one poised with my iphone in the air during this announcement, I felt a * little * self-conscious. The crowd murmured agreement and disgust over such gross and disrespectful bootlegging, and I slunk out after the show with an internal protestation of my dignity. But before I left, I had the loveliest conversations with the members of the band and they were wonderful, charming fellows all. They also mentioned that I should look up a fellow musician friend of theirs who plays in San Francisco now--a funk drummer named Zigaboo Modeliste. Which I totally will.

a crazed out black cat of a city

New Orleans is a city of drunken dreamers. A night out means a host of new friends, new adventures, and hundreds of dreams and promises made to be broken. As you go out on the town with these new companions on an evening--them excitedly pointing the way at every step--you remain discreetly sober, because this is the only way to remember it all. They don't notice--they're getting more and more generous and distracted as the evening goes on--but you're making mental notes and pictures and praying you don't forget a thing. You spend all night loving them as they put on their technicolor dreamcoats and twirl madly through the broken streets, and while you end the evening with plans plans plans to see each other again, you know it was for one night only, a vaporous and fleeting thing.

My five days in New Orleans was a whirlwind. It was melting sun and sagging porches, weeping willows and oyster po'boys, cracked sidewalks and cascading flowers, wrought iron courtyards and mosquitos mosquitos, boudin patties and alligator sausage, turtle soup and biscuits and grits, jazz and funk and rhythm and blues, and hey darlin' hey baby and you havin' a nice day, and chintzy wallpaper and tassled lamps and crawfish etouffee.

I have photos for you. In the hundreds. In the eights and nines and tens of hundreds. I'll be spending my day going through them all, attemping to process and sort and develop. I'm slightly overwhelmed: I've got so many I don't know where to begin. There are photos of the 9th Ward and the French Quarter and the food and the jazz musicians and the food and the Garden District and the food and then a dusty used bookstore in the middle of a lost nowhere that makes one want to read read read again and a roadside market on a tiny riverside highway with oh more food and then there's the bayou--OH THE BAYOU.  It's vast emptiness, it's nothingness as far as the eye can see. It's a barren, alien landscape. It's different from the swamp, which is where people usually go, on airboat tours with guides who drop marshmallows into the water to draw the alligators near for viewing and oooohs and ahhhs and faux shrieks of terror. The bayou is--for the lack of a better word--a community. People live in houses on the water and get around by boat, and back Before Katrina all the kids got picked up every morning by a school bus-boat, and there was a store out there, too, and a cemetery with white white gravestones, glowing in a landscape of browns and greens and rust reds. And for a living they harvest shrimp with giant nets, and sit on their docks with poles and lines catching red fish and speckle trout, and the boys slip in and out of the water like bronzed fish, and this is them. And the bayou stretches and stretches and stretches into nothingness all the way to the horizon.

So as I settle into my new perch in Memphis--where I arrived late last night--to get started on the hours of work before me processing these photos, let me leave you with some pics I took early last week of a lovely girl in Spring, Texas. I'll see you again tomorrow.