Drawing Trees

This post was precluded by an introduction.  The theme of this and the next post is how the New Orleans' culture and arts scene provides opportunities for adults to play like kids again and to experience "wonder" and discovery. 

              When I first visited New Orleans I was enchanted with many things, but nothing impressed me more than its trees.  I spent my first morning sitting in a live oak reading Gogol and many hours after that entranced by the flora that uprooted sidewalks and streets and decorated the city in a way that no lights or arts or business ever could.  And then of course, there was the weirdness, the wider range of social norms and creativity that is so prevalent and expressed here.  But rarely is there opportunity for these two affinities to come together.

              It was at a Thursday evening wine tasting that I met Liana.  The wine was free and the store had more than its customary twelve freeloaders lining up at the tables to drink samples and feign cultivated pallets of fine things like wine.  I swirled my glass and sniffed it while I listened to Liana.  She was a sweet older lady with dark-rimmed and foggy glasses and a set of sharp teeth, now purpled with free wine.  She was constantly laughing and smiling.

            “Remember how the Saints won the Superbowl?” she asked me, also twirling her wine to mimic her neighbors.

            “Yes…”

            “Well I fed a whole bunch of them pot cookies the night before.  They ate them before the game.”  She laughed and finished her wine.  “That’s why we won.  My cookies.” 

            She said she was living at an art house on St. Claude  with a tree house and forty-foot aerial slip n’ slide out back, but that there was another art house on Esplanade with its own tree house.  On Saturday, they were hosting a “free market,” where second-hand goods were available for the taking and no money was to exchange hands.

            “Tree house?” I asked.

            Liana had another cup of wine now.  She laughed, “Oh, yes. Fifty feet tall with a big-ass slide.”    

Treehouses have always been gems of my imagination, a magical and natural play place to escape the safe domestic life of a boy indoors.  But treehouses are not just toys.  They began more than a thousand years ago as functional homes.  Some tribes of South Pacific islanders preferred to live in trees and made modest modifications to accommodate them.   Long since they’ve become the stuff of kids: small elevated homes for many generations of boys and girls (and their secret clubs) and the willing projects of their restless fathers eager to build shit in their dusty wood shops.   Ever since I watched Swiss Family Robinson on television, I have had an enduring fantasy of living and playing in a tree house.  Not just a small one-roomer fifteen feet up a magnolia tree, but to be isolated and dangerously elevated in the higher tiers of old wooden giants, hidden in their foliage and swinging from branch to branch, sleeping a hundred feet above my imagined enemies below, which were many.  It is the kind of fantasy that fades with the senescent practicality of young adulthood, but never completely disappears.

When I walked into the backyard of the Art House that Saturday, the fantasy was immediately revived.

            A fifty foot multi-colored tree house was woven in and out of the arms of a golden rain tree.   Ropes hung everywhere and an intricate system of tunnels secret hiding spots and apparatuses ready for reckless climbing was apparent even from a distance.  It was like the play-places at McDonald’s restaurants but bigger, taller, and arboreal.  A friendly young man in green, over-sized sunglasses led me up a set of shaking spiral steel stairs towards the top.  A satellite dish, shaped like a waffle-fry, supported the loading of people onto a slide that had likely been recovered from a fast-food playground after Katrina, when an abundance of these kinds of materials were available to those thrifty enough for the salvaging.  I bent back an open nail that scraped my leg on the way in and slid down to the bottom.  I suppressed the instinct to holler as the slide jumped and dipped several feet.  I climbed out and up and did it again.  The treehouse was constructed in several layers with staircases and tunneled passageways affixed in many places to assist in ascent.   Near the top was a bridge of mesh netting, ropes to swing from, satellite dishes for napping and several holes to climb through on the way up or across.  The creator, local artist Scott Pterodactyl (like the dinosaur), was too impatient to start from the bottom so he began in the middle.   He had even constructed a zipline from the top to the window of his bedroom.  It was no longer there.  His inspiration for the tree house was rooted in the same reasons I now reveled in climbing and swinging through his project: to play and create something that appeals to our child-like wonder, to feel like a kid again in do things that kids do that are still fun but inhibited by the law and adulthood.  It was a project of creation and discovery and hands-on sensory fun.  Here was my opportunity, everyone's opportunity, to climb, jump, shout, swing through a network of colorful tubes and structures without the self-conscious embarrassment of displacing children, the forever rightful patrons of such toys.  

 

I played and napped and played some more before descending back to ground level where I collected some free books and watched the vaudevillian hipster ensemble, Sweet Street Symphony Band, jangle through some old-timey tunes.   The small crowd watched and drank PBRs while collecting free things to stuff in their knapsacks and purses. 

           I later learned more about the house and its reputation: how it had been raided for drug trafficking and shut down for fire codes.  How its parties incite nudity and everyone has to sign a waiver in the case that the treehouse collapses or someone falls off after too many drinks.   It is not a play place that embraces safety, but this only increases my affinity for it.  Because only in New Orleans, relative to the strict enforcement of law and liability in other places in our country, could this toy exist.  
              A couple months later I received a call from a friend who had just moved to New Orleans.  She was living in the Art House.  I went over to visit.  The inside of the house, an old mansion in the Treme, housed fifteen artists of varying commitments to anarchy.  It looked like a cleaner rendition of the house from Fight Club.  Empty shopping carts littered the basement living room.  A glass case of baby pet cockroaches decorated the wall.  The refrigerator was orange and rusted, likely hauled from a supine position next to a dumpster, but its old motor purred and the inside had a few impressive treats created by divers of dumpsters of high-end natural food stores.

            We drank beers at the top of the tree house in the comfort of a yellow connecting-tunnel cube.  Everything seems more peaceful in a tree.  The air is open and the sounds of the nocturnal birds and insects are level while cars and headlights and the general noise of the streets is below you, like there is a layer between, separating the dream from the real life.  It was enough that I wanted to curl up there in the  mesh bridge net and sleep for several nights.  

I left soon after and rode my bike through the city.  I was headed home to sleep, but I was feeling content and childish and a little thirsty for more sensory discoveries, so I turned around again.   I found a 24 hour draw-a-thon in the Bywater where Press Street was encouraging residents to draw all hours of the night.  The scene took place in the Old Ironworks warehouse where several stations were set up to encourage drawing and sketching with various mediums.   The event was advertised to be kid-friendly but when I walked inside a man and woman were laying naked on a bed in the center of the room.   People circled around them, lying on their stomachs and scribbling away at long stretches of butcher paper with charcoal. Every minute someone with a timer called out, “switch” and the naked couple changed positions and then froze.  Another man in army fatigues, heavy boots and a drill sergeant’s brim hat paced around them.  His name was Gary Forbes, and he was also an artist, now impersonating the infamous training officer from Full Metal Jacket.  He folded his hands behind his back and looked downward as he paced, never at the nudes.  He commanded that we draw better.   “If you haven’t caught their essence in the first 10 seconds you failed.”   “Don’t think.  Draw.”  “Sketch the tension, never the bodies.”  I could not meet his demands.  I tried to draw better; I tried to capture their essence; I tried to encapsulate everything adult about the scene, the theater of sexual tension, the intersecting contours, the suggestive crude post-coital laziness, the storied relationship between all men and women and then between this man and woman, but more and more, my drawings looked like trees.  They were elementary and arboreal.  I gave up on the nudes.  I ignored the couple and the sergeant who demanded improvement and commitment.  I drew the images still slipping and sliding in my imagination, old childish fantasies that have endured any adult ones, and had now been given real dimensions in the city of New Orleans by a different set of artists.  I drew houses in trees. 

To read more about the treehouse check out these links
1) Partying at the tree house
2) About its creator

Tree House

The Draw-a-thon bed minus two nudes

Tree house

The backyard "free market"  The tree house is hidden in the foliage to the top right of the stage

Satellite dish naps

Sweet Street Symphony Band

The path to the top

Youth and Wonder in the Big Easy: Introduction

I can think of no better explanation of my affinity for teaching children than the simple introspective truth that I am still very much a child.  I love recess; I love banging on things, climbing, and dancing; I maintain a healthy—although begrudgingly compliant—distrust and disdain of rules that remain under-explained by authorities.  But no, I am no longer a child, despite some lingering habits.
  To me, the most admirable quality of children is their unbound sense of wonder and its intersection with play.   Wonder is a beautiful thing.   I like to think it is how we feel when we look at something utterly and unexpectedly new and surprising, and in that first instant of encounter, we are unable to explain what it is, why it is, and our sudden relationship to it.  It is surprise and admiration and captivation.  It is a child discovering hidden seeds in a woody fruit or a hairy insect it never thought existed.  It the visual confirmation that there are, in fact, black swans and they are mean and nasty when you try to pet them.  For an adult, it might be watching the sun at dusk, unable to rationalize or characterize the range of colors that mix and change and sway together to make that one indefinable color that we can never make into a crayon but simply call a sunset.
      Children exhibit this trait more often because less of the world is known to them, and because their imaginations remain less tarnished with the faculty of logic that senescent adults depend on to explain why things are and how they came to be and how we can relate to it in our environment.  How we can reduce its signifying uncertainty and fit this sort-of-new thing into a mental lump of what we already know.

More than that, as we grow older, we simply don’t get to play the same way.  There are obstructions to fun like laws and fitness  And there are people that enforce or recommend those obstructions like policemen and doctors.  There are places designated for adult fun like bars and strip clubs and golf courses, but even those have rules and their appeal is exclusive and for the most part, they operate without much care for abstract and necessary things like wonder.  Instead they become institutions of habit.  Not discovery.   It seems that the best qualities of children wear away, and adults only get to experience them again through the vicarious joy of their own children if they are serious enough to reproduce.  

But New Orleans is different in this regard.  The first impediment to fun for adults is most often the law, and in New Orleans there is a conspicuous sense of its absence, or at the very least, a diminished presence that lacks formidability.  Its festival culture promotes impulse and imagination and play.  It is the kind of spirit that allows us to dance in aquariums, to march to music in the streets without permits after someone died, to occupy public parks without police brutality and intimidation, to adapt spaces and functions of buildings and structures to suit our own pleasures, whether it is a gutted house exhibiting paranormal local theater or a children’s museum hosting several hundred adults dressed in all-white to drink cocktails and play with educational toys until late at night.

There are fewer limits to fun, and because of the accumulation of innovators and artists, as well as the raw beauty of a place that has forever been an absurd confluence of cultures, geography, and creativity, there are ample opportunities to regress "mature" rationale and replace it with wonder and its favorite complementary partner: play. More simply, it is about hands-on discovery. 

Since the time I learned to walk, my favorite things have always been elementary, even infantile.  I like to run and jump and climb.  I like to bang on things.  I like to drink liquids (I used to drink gallons of milk every week)   I like to dance in crowds.  I like to touch stuff that I'm not sure I should touch.  And in New Orleans, where restrictions are minority to opportunity, there are several places that encourage the inner-child, that augment our sense of wonder and say to us, “go ahead and play.”
My next few blogs attempt to instantiate this feeling and idea (and to abstract less) through stories in a serial format to break up the content and length.  They are simply about how adults get to play in the Big Easy. 

            Since I am finally on break and for the first time in months and I have free time, I will attempt to publish two or three or four entries on this topic.

1) Treehouses  (coming very soon)
2) The Music Box
3) Dancing in the Streets
4) Cool shit and lights

A pictorial preview: 

Open-bar Children's Museum during white-linen night

The backyard treehouse of NOLA Arthouse on Esplanade

The Music Box

Celebration of the Oaks