Approaching Mardi Gras

         

            I had been inside Studio 3 less than a minute when a naked woman came bounding across the warehouse floor doing cartwheels.  Her boobs were glittered purple and gold.  They sparkled as she rushed the stage.  Behind her was a young man dressed as an octogenarian.   He wore a Santa Claus beard and shuffled across the floor with his walker.  He also was naked, but without the glitter. 

            Mardi Gras morning was only ten days away but I could feel the anticipation of its arrival ascending steeply.  I have yet to experience it but I can feel it coming, and I can feel the microcosms of New Orleanian culture expounding with each approaching day.  In a city that prefers parties over politics, absurdity over etiquette, and is never shy to express its color and sound by parading itself in the streets, Mardi Gras is definitive.  It is hyperbole of this spirit actualized, the very real manifestation of everyone’s desire to deshackle social expectations and norms and walk freely in the streets as whatever the hell they feel like.  The streets are no longer the stuff of cars, but our venue of a good time, where everyone agrees to meet to dance and drink together and disregard all the normalcies of daily life.  After four weeks of eating King Cakes, its approach seems real and tangible, the magnetic field of the famous day pulling us all faster and faster toward it.   The approach is communal and exciting, as if everyone is together on a large ship accelerating toward some funky island filled with music, beer and costumes, but the ship is also fillled with these things and so the ride there is almost just as good.  

            Ten days before Fat Tuesday I walked out the door wearing sequin shorts, a tank top, swimming goggles, a purple inner-tube and a Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers backpack filled with beer, whiskey and a foam kickboard.  The apocalypse ball was that night.  Costume was mandatory and people were encouraged to dress as if the world might end and the party would have to move skyward or hellward.  I thought if the world ended tomorrow I would want to take a swim first.  I put on sunscreen and my lifeguard whistle and headed out the door.

            Two hours later I was dancing underneath several colossal floats, including thirty-foot tall Greek gods and goddesses.  I was surrounded by people of various costumes and degrees of nudity.  The stage was filled with young revelers that proclaimed the world might end soon and everyone must be quiet or die to hear what they had to say about it.  They were lead by a half-naked drummer who called forth the High Priest, an old man wearing a red sparkling bikini.  They marched around the stage and several women convulsed on the floor in some improvised ritual dance.  The entertainers’ only objective was to stay weird, to stay in character.   The drum beat picked up and the women continued to gyrate as the high priestess pointed to a disco ball, now ascending toward the ceiling, and up the nose of a twenty-foot wide Mardi Gras mask that overlooked us all.   The revelry had already begun, but the high priestess now made it official.

            Everyone danced and drank for several hours.  Outside people strapped themselves to a large wheel designed to castigate party-goers with excessive tickling.  Four stuffed animals lay on the wet ground as part of the petting zoo.  Inside the warehouse space filled with smoke and the smell of marijuana.  The ground accumulated the moisture of sweat and beer and the only place warm was in front of the dance floor where everyone danced wildly, an extreme inter-meshing of sparkles, costumes, and colors, all moving freely under the direction of the Stooges Brass Band.

            When I danced I felt like a bumper car, my inner-tube bouncing against the hips of my neighbors until they spilled their beers. I ran away each time.  Revelers were getting sloppy, and I knew it was my duty as a pre-apocalyptic lifeguard to try to save them.  I wore the orange "guard" tanktop that legally obligated me to do so.   I attached a rope to the tube and threw it into the crowd hoping to save at least person from the sweaty turpitude of a doomsday dance party.  The innertube came back empty.  Nobody wanted to be saved.  

             “If the Rapture happened, I wouldn’t want to go.   Not before Mardi Gras,” a friend said.  Everyone agreed.  I ditched the innertube and pulled out my kickboard and swam back into the sweaty, glittering crowd.  Nowhere else did this scene seem possible. Nowhere else seemed as desirable.

              

            It took most of the next day to recover.  The world hadn’t ended. The Rapture had not selected anyone, at least no locals.  And Mardi Gras was now only nine days away.  The Krewe of ‘Tit Rex was scheduled to roll at 5:30 in the Bywater.  I rested until I felt good enough to travel again and then biked with friends across the train tracks and staked a claim on a corner of Burgundy.  ‘Tit Rex was possibly the most adorable parade in New Orleans.  Because everything is more precious when it is tinier.  While most Mardi Gras parades feature colossal floats, the kinds that overlooked the debauchery in Studio 3 the night before, ‘Tit Rex featured miniature floats, tediously crafted and detailed, each no bigger than a microwave.   Men and women in costume lead their floats by fishing line or remote control and distribued tiny coconuts, parasols and clothespins as throws.  A group of older residents dangled tiny spectator puppets who waved at the floats as they went by, all of it lead by a trio of jazz bands spaced evenly throughout.  Once again I found myself dancing in the street, and the same feeling came over me as always, “Here I am and Here we are….nowhere else…nowhere else…”  

            After, I walked with friends and found a bakery in the 9th Ward that opened at night,   We ate maple bacon scones on our way to a swanky art gallery party at a house that had been vacant and rotting only six months before.  Now it was a community art space in the middle of a poor neighborhood.  The beer was free and a smooth jazz band serenaded a room full of hipsters looking at photographs of naked men and peppers on the walls and floors.   Anywhere else the transitions between these activities and environments might seem impossible, if not jarring, but it all felt normal in the Bywater of New Orleans. 

           The next day the canine parade, Barkus, was scheduled to roll at 2:30.  The French Quarter filled with dogs wearing funny sweaters or being toted in decorated wagons.  The dog-walkers were not in costume, but they seemed crazy enough, all of them talking to each other through their animals.        

          "Is he potty-trained?" A woman asked  a friend in the French Quarter.  The dog was an English bulldog and it wore a blue, yellow, and purple sash around its neck while drooling heavily onto Chartres.  She leaned down toward it.

         "Are you potty-trained?"  she asked.  The dog looked blankly back. 

         "She's going through a program," the man said.  "Aren't you?" 

         "Yes, you are," the woman said, "You are a good dog, aren't you?"

         The parade was disappointing.  I spent an hour watching several hundred residents take their dogs for an elaborate walk on a designated route, wearing sweaters and sashes.  The dogs hadn't practiced and the spacing was terrible.  Dogs aren't good at parading.    It seemed too normal.  "Cats would be better," a friend suggested.  "That would be absurd enough." After the thousandth dog, I could not not stand it anymore, and I left to go home, hardly even stopping to dance to the lindy-hop jazz band on the corner.   

         I biked down Bourbon toward Esplanade ready to rest in my bed, knowing there would be a hard week of work before the partying began non-stop and I would need all my reserves to make it there and through.  I passed an older man wearing a golden robe and a Persian nobility’s hat.  He carried a golden pole with the flag of St. Ann.  He was drunk and the bells on his ankles jingled as he walked.  His stumble was rhythmic as he marched across the quiet end of Bourbon Street  He fell over in the middle of the intersection.  I heard the collapse of the pole and the smack of his bells ring against the pavement.  I turned around.  He was lifeless and prostrate in the street.  No cars were coming.  I approached him to help him up when he lifted his face and chest and then kissed the ground three times.  He bent his knees and bowed his head, and even though I could not hear him, I understood his reverence, the veneration of excess--he was praying to the streets.  Mardi Gras was finally here. 

THE APOCALYPSE BALL

Apocalypse Ball 2012

 

Naked (censored) octogenarian costume

'TIT REX

Horseman of the Apocalypse

'Tit Rex float

'Tit Rex

'Tit Rex

'Tit Rex

     

BARKUS

Barkus

Barkus

To view videos, click on hyperlinks in text ('Tit Rex and Barkus)

Football in New Orleans: The Saints, The Tigers, and a collective sigh of disappointment

            The New Superdome (great picture I can't legally post here)

            “If we win it’s a second-line; if we lose it’s a jazz funeral.”  This is always the spirit of any high-stakes Saints game in New Orleans.  I have lived in a couple football cities (Boston, Pittsburgh) and while the passion Steelers fans have for their football team is maximally equivalent, it is not expressed with as much heart and loving fervor anywhere else as it is in New Orleans.

            It is hard to understate how big football is in the United States.  It is no longer a Sunday activity, a way to pass the time with nachos and beers in a recliner.  In some ways it has even escalated beyond the Roman Coliseum’s spirit of bloody battles between titans, a mob group of men watching the physical collision of warriors and beasts in wild anticipation of a desired finish, a well-fought victory, despite the sure cost of injury and bodily loss.   It has that, too.  But no, it more than that now.  It is tribal.  

            Football gives a community colors.  It gives a community a united purpose that transcends socio-economic divisions.  It gives a community an excusable passion in cheering for the regulated violence exacted against rivals, against the other tribe.  It is dist

             When the college football season wound down to its close, New Orleans became a hubbub of collegiate traffic.  The Superdome was to host three important games in seven days:  The Sugar Bowl, the Saints vs. Lions, and the NCAA College National Championship featuring two local southern giants, Alabama and the home-state LSU Tigers. The population of New Orleans is around 350,000, but on that weekend it felt like it had doubled downtown.  The streets were flooded with young men donning their respective colors.   They were young and drunk and from out of town, many of them having rolled straight out of bed from sorority and fraternity houses.  They didn’t always play by the local rules of “Be Nice or Leave.”  Even on my block, purple tribesmen settled in and began to drink and cry and scream at one another. Everywhere, a steady traffic of angry human flotsam in crimson or purple paraded the streets with exotic drinks, yelling and shouting, each side delusional that the other side will have be the ones to go home stung and wounded. 

            The night of the championship game was quiet.  I biked to the Superdome just after kickoff.  Nearby in the Central Business District, LSU fans had set up tribal encampments.  Entire parking lots had been turned into outdoor theatres.  Large tents were set up with thirty foot projector screens hid underneath.  Smaller camps of families huddled around smaller televisions set up next to their RVs.   I could not see the game from my bike but I could hear the commentators narrating each play as I moved from camp to camp, large television to small television to large.   The Alabama tribe was nowhere to be seen.  Everyone had been convivial enough in the days before, but it was dangerous to intermingle during these critical hours.  The Crimson Tide camps had hid themselves away in secluded corners of downtown, or bought out entire floors of large bars so they could watch together in safety and numbers.

            The French Quarter appeared empty.  Nobody was on the street, but I could tell the temperature of the game by the simple outbursts that would surge through bar windows as I passed. 

            I arrived at a bar with friends in the second quarter of the game.  The tribe was purple and local.  Only a few women wearing Crimson were in the corner, closest to the television, were there.   They were lesbians and they were very loud.  Each time they cheered the rest of the bar was silent.  I have no allegiance to either tribe.  I am a pacifist.  But even then I wanted to throttle them.  They were audacious and out of place, but likely protected from danger because of their minority status, and because they were buff enough to beat the shit out of any man or woman who might tell them to tone it down.   We left at halftime, and I wondered if even that would be enough to protect them if LSU lost in the end.

            LSU did lose, badly.  There were no explosions.  No turning of cars.  No riot police.  The purple tribe had been stung, their pride wounded.   There would be a few fights on Bourbon Street.   I went home to my quiet neighborhood, now overtaken by fraternity boys.  Across the street a young man cursed expletives, calling his own tribe’s quarterback a “faggot” because he lost the game for “us.”  A friend told him it would be ok, to come back inside and have a drink and left him there.   He sat on the curb and began to cry softly.

            Saints fans aren’t prone to crying or fighting over a loss.  When the Vancouver Canucks lost in 2011 in Game 7 of hockey’s Stanley Cup, the city was upset enough to try to burn it down.  When the Steelers won Superbowls in 2006 and 2009, the city was happy enough to upturn cars and trashcans, to burn defenseless couches and break the windows of liquor stores.     New Orleans has already suffered enough damage.  Crime and murder and hurricanes have hurt the community enough that it is unfathomable to willingly accumulate its abuse because of a football game.  It is a party city, and so the party just gets bigger, the people happier.  

Alex Smith piñata beatdown

            When I woke up that morning my throat was closed up and my nose was stuffed.   I had a head-ache and my eyes were red.   I rested and drank enough chicken soup to feel decent enough to bike to the Marigny for the game.  I arrived at the R Bar, where you can get a shot of Jameson, a high life, and a haircut for $10 on Mondays.   This time the bar was packed, the pool table covered with a tarp and crockpots of chili.  A saints fan stood on the barber’s chair and rang a plastic cowbell.  A voodoo doll hung against the wall above the house liquors.   It looked like a drooping black turd wearing a 49ers jersey.  The Saints were down 17-0 and already the Voodoo doll had been stuck with several 9 inch needles.   At halftime, with the deficit marginalized, a piñata of the 49ers quarterback was hung on the corner outside.   Two birthday girls were given shots and the second exploded his torso, releasing a confetti of candy, whistles, and plastic mythical creature toys.   The act was not done with vitriol or resentment, instead it was a fun jab against our enemy, a simple way New Orleanians celebrate; nothing is sacred and nothing is serious.   We collected the plastic dinosaurs and whistles until the second half began.   The fans were not serious football people.  They did not comprehend or care about the nuances of the game; but they were serious Saints fans.  They cheered at incredible decibels when the Saints kicked an extra point, or completed a 4 yard pass short of a first down.   Everything was reason to celebrate.  When they felt a flag should have been thrown, they hurled lightly weighted yellow napkins at the screen.  They hurled them often.  Nobody cursed.  Nobody called the other quarterback a faggot, and nobody ever said a bad word about their own men, their black and gold tribe.    

            Toward the end of the game, the bartenders stood on the back counter and beat the voodoo doll furiously as the 49ers and Saints exchanged scores in the fourth quarter.  They beat the doll with a crutch.   Then a frying pan.  Then a skateboard.  They stabbed it with large kitchen knives, always with a smile and a laugh.  Each time they taped the weapon against the doll, a visual history of its abuse, and a promise that another weapon of torment was coming.  With two minutes left both bartenders completely abandoned their posts at the bar.  They stood on either side of the doll, and like pistons, beat the belly of the voodoo doll with crowbars.  When they were done, it was nearly severed.  They taped it back together to prepare for the possibility of overtime. 

49'ers voodoo doll beatdown with bat and crowbar

            When the Saints scored with 1:37 left, a mosh pit ensued in the bar.  My friend was accidentally punched in the face.  A young man stood on the bar and free fell forward into his friends’ arms.  People picked each other up and shook one another in the air.  The black and gold balloons above us seemed big and airy, and we were ready for the confetti and balloons above us to fall and for the real party of the night to begin.  Two minutes later the 49ers scored.   The entire bar was quiet.  The city itself was quiet.  It was the first time I could hear the audio of the game. It remained that way for a full minute until the Saints got the ball back.  There were four seconds left and 85 yards to go.  The cheers of “Who Dat, Who Dat” started up again.  If anyone was to be blessed with a miracle—it would be the Saints—it would be our tribe.  When the game ended and no miracle had occurred, everyone stood around stunned for a minute.  There was a collective sigh, knowing that any party that night would lack meaning and purpose.  Then the music began.  The bar played the iconic “When the Saints go Marching In,” almost in defiance of reality, and they released the balloons and confetti.  Those still in the bar began to dance, stomping on the balloons, not in anger, but with the irony of defeat and the bittersweet mixture of a spirit that not even strong disappointment can keep away for long.   I stomped on them too and swing-danced with a friend atop the confetti and spilt beer and whistles.  Outside a couple ran in the streets until the girl was hit by a bicycle.  She got up and started to run and dance again.  My throat began to close up once more and I knew there would be no great party that night.  That most people would eat their dinners and go to bed a little hurt, but also, there would be no violence or fires, no abuse of our own town and community.  That nothing would burn out of bitter insobriety, and in the end, we danced because we all knew it was just a game.  Because the passion runs deeper than football.  But it’s football that helps us express it best sometimes, together.   Until next season, when the tribe puts their colors back on and the voodoo dolls and balloons and piñatas restake their places on the walls of bars and homes, and everyone stands ready to break that small threshold our proud city has for another big  party, another reason among many to celebrate our tribe.  

The voodoo doll at the end.

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

Occupy Autum in NOLA

        

            A few days after New Yorkers began to march and occupy Wall Street fall arrived in New Orleans. The first day of fall here feels much like the first day of spring in a colder, more northern city.  Hibernation from seasonal oppression ends, and the local population emerges into the urban wilderness, ready to stretch their limbs and shake the dormancy from their desires, evoking a sort of Dionysian spirit of impulse and action, quick passions and senselessness.  On that first day of autumn in New Orleans, crime went down but the colors extended their range, and strange characters of the city started to appear in greater frequency, all image and without message.  I rode my bike through the Quarter after work and celebrated by drinking a bloody mary and watching Mem Shannon play blues in the French Market.   Somewhere an impromptu parade began and ended.  On Bourbon Street wildness began, the early onset of an absurdism that is everlasting but glimmers best in the dusk: silver men lying prostate in the street with balloon dildos, a police officer showboating by walking his horse backward, strippers and perverts watching the pedestrians for bait, bachelorettes drinking their first hand grenades and taking pictures under the bright lights, letting it all go one last time before tying the knot that forever forbids this kind of behavior without approval.

            It felt like more people were on the streets.  And so there was more energy in the air.   The parking lot at City Park was full and the usual unsavory characters that lingered below the overpass on Claiborne had multiplied.   Beer bottles and empty tin pans of chicken wings littered the mural'ed columns that support the Route 10 overpass.  Homeless men and half-dressed hookers walked in the shade between them.  I filled my car with gas and then filled my nose with heavy nasal swallows of fried chicken and po-boys from Manchu.  I stopped and waited while the car in front picked up a middle-aged white hooker in a black bikini top.  She crushed her cigarette on the sidewalk and got in with a smile.

            That night I sat in a residential dining room with thirty other young men, women, and children.  I had gone to services for a Jewish Holiday for the first time in five years.  The service was Orthodox and a wall separated the men from the women.  After, the rabbi invited us all to dinner.  It was Rosh Hashanah and the first day of the Jewish New Year, number 5772 on the calendar   We ate apples and honey and pomegranates and the rabbi wished we all have as many good deeds inside us as the pomegranate has seeds.  He requested that we go around the room and declare our optimism for the new year in the form of a wish.  The guests wished for better economic prosperity for our country, for world peace, global sensitivity, compassion, opportunity.  I wished that everyone might have one good meal, but kept my true wish private, a more selfish wish that I drag with me everywhere—to experience novelty every day.   When everyone was done, a seven year old named Shalom stood on his chair and made the final wish, “All of the above.” 

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            I arrived on my bicycle at Tulane and Broad a few minutes past noon.   The protestors were already gathered on the strip of lawn that led to the courthouse stairs.  Behind the courthouse was the Orleans Parish Prison.  The cops and correctional officers stood together and talked next to the news vans, whose radio towers spired to the top of the entrance of the jail.  There, the following words were inscribed permanently in capital letters, “THIS IS A GOVERNMENT OF LAW, NOT OF MEN.” 

            On the opposite corner the Gypsy Mermaid had parked her “art car,” a large colorful van decorated in blue murals, pink artifacts, and glitter.  She had painted the price of her services on the front of the van by the door.  Twenty dollars for a complete prognostication of your future.  Ten for a tarot card reading.  Below the prices: “Take donations in gas and repairs.”  Her hood was open and a stout young black man was leaning in,  hooking jumper cables to her battery.

            I locked my bicycle to a street sign on the corner and made my way into the crowd     At the center a core of activists attempted to inspire the crowd to chant, “The people united/will never be defeated.”  They accused the protestors  in the back of not participating.  I stood there quietly.   There was no central message to OccupyNOLA.   In some ways, that was part of its draw; political messages are exclusive, inaccessible to those who are angry but can't specify why.  Instead we shared a common dissatisfaction, a spirited disagreement with the direction of our ship.  Our numbers were the message.  But as an absurdist, I am serious about very few things. And I  cannot say anything seriously if it’s in the form of a chant.  I was glad to just be there, angry and happy and quiet. 

            I took notes in an old pocket notebook I found in a drawer of my bedroom.  I began writing in the first open space next to notes about things from years ago, a description of Mount Cardigan from its peak, an anonymous Boston phone number, and the name of a church where a friend was buried two years ago. 

            A man in a green hat handed me a slip of paper, a behavioral guide of what to do if apprehended by the New Orleans Police Department. 

            “If you are arrested—REMAIN CALM!”

            I briefed through the bullet points and slid the paper into my pocket.  Someone took the megaphone and yelled “Let’s GO!”   We stepped off the grass and into the street.

     
                  Tulane Avenue was sordid in its appearance north of Claiborne Avenue.  The Dixie Brewery loomed over all of it like a vapid lighthouse of its surrounding vacancies—its dome a lingering relic of that old, undying thirst.  The brewery had long been a national success, an icon of New Orleans post-prohibition alcoholism.  But Katrina despoiled the factory and they took their business to Wisconsin, still brewing the Dixie brand, still touting the New Orleans label.  Around it, isolated instances of Title IX houses sprinkled Tulane Avenue, surrounded by empty dirt lots that were once filled with houses.  The city enacted eminent domain and those houses were removed as whole to make way for the new VA hospital, an allegedly auspicious promise for the land, now marked by a few wandering construction workers, dusty weeds, and a set of lonely metal cranes. 

            The chants continued.  A group of gutterpunks carried signs promoting anarchy (Flor de Lis + Anarchy = Love). “1…2…3….4…We declare class war!”  A homeless man stood next to a cop car on Claiborne and yelled at us, “Go home, just go home!” 

            Someone brought horns and drums and began to play Bob Marley songs in the center of the march.   I could no longer hear the chants, only the brass notes ringing out semi-relevant songs of protest.  The people around the band danced and the politics became less important than our sense of place.  This was New Orleans and it seemed at any moment we all might put down the cardboard signs, pick up beers, and say “Fuck It!”  We would second-line instead.   The boundary seemed thin.   

            There were no arrests.  Instead the police stopped traffic and assisted the march on route.  All the officers wore sunglasses and rode motorcycles.  They looked disinterested, if not dispassionate, as if nothing short of heavy crime could ever garner an immediate emotion.  They escorted us to Lafayette Square where protestors climbed the statue of the old American warhawk, Henry Clay, and surrounded him with flags, angry signs, and a megaphone.  Henry Clay himself stands on top of a pillar like it was a platform.  His hand is open and his mouth is closed as if he had just finished speaking, like he’s just offered an idea, a possible solution, a compromise.  He seems to be saying, “So what do you think?  What next?”

              The megaphone rotated between speakers.  Their messages were scattered

            “Fire the police chief!”    “Fire the mayor!”  “End police brutality!”  “1…2..3..4..Let’s declare class war!”  “Eliminate classwarfare!”   “Forgive student loans!  Crush Fannie Mae!”  “Dissolve the Federal Reserve!  Print more money!”    People began to leave.

            The only common thread left was anger and disappointment.  It had seemed so easy to walk together in a predetermined direction, but when we arrived, the effort to agree on a definition, to centralize the elasticity of our collective discontent, our desire for something better, seemed confused and implausible.  Those standing under the shadow of Clay would stay and sleep in tents outside City Hall at Duncan Plaza for the next few weeks while the rest of us would sleep in beds.  Were we not angry enough to abandon our routines?  Too comfortable?  Not dedicated to real changes?  What changes were we going to make in our own lives? Or were we overheated?   I walked away unsure, leaving behind the civilly disobedient warhawks and their one megaphone, still yelling different things at a high volume into a dissipating crowd. 

            It took forty minutes to walk back to the jail to get my bike.  The intersection and the lawn were empty except for the usual traffic.  A truck drove by with its back open.  Inmates in orange jumpsuits sat precariously at its edge, their legs dangling over the black pavement of Broad Street as the truck pulled into a quiet jail. The courthouse steps were busy with suits, but the television crews were gone.  So was the Gypsy Mermaid.   A half-blind woman tried to cross Broad but her cane got caught in a cardboard sign left in the street.  She picked it up and slammed it onto the curb.  She turned back to the street and scowled and a young black man helped her cross over to the other side.  I picked up the sign and read it.  “We are the 99%.”

 

Sources include Louisiana Weekly, http://theneworleansblightblog.wordpress.com/, and the Times-Picayne