The City Date Thursday, April 18, 2024 - 03:55 PM PST Topic Beauty This city is history, wrapped in stories and covered in rumour and cowled in legend and has personality oozing from places new suburbs and the towns that crop up in the middle of nowhere will probably ever have-- any time you let your ears wander you hear music and laughing and screaming and crying, and any inhale at any given moment can inhale a thousand spices and foods and even shit you wouldn't normally breathe tinged with the aforementioned spices and food and river water. It's New Orleans. There's the famous places, of course-- famous for tourists, and places within places and things and rituals that people still carry on though very few of them remember the exact reasons why, and only remember the money and the fun. There's Bourbon Street, where people go out of their minds as soon as the sunlight disappears beyond a horizon of steel and concrete and tearing plaster and rusted stairways, possessed by pent up sexual energy and the spirit of the spirits, even Catholic School Girls(who are known to have dubious promiscuity among those who have encountered them at least once) will ignore thoughts of school the next day and stay out late and flash for free booze and beads. Housewives and wives and working women and their husbands all do things that you could never convince them to do in their home town, or where they live, or where they have most of their family. But it's Bourbon Street. And you're supposed to. Two children, each a day if they're eleven get in to a fist fight on Canal Street as a busload of onlookers laugh and point and people on the street in awe try to figure out why they're trying to keep two children from fighting eachother over something stupid enough to cause eleven year olds such rile and fervor. They both hold out their hands in boxer poses, fists up facing outwardclose to their faces-- and it can strike you that these children grow up faster here. It's the same in most cities, but the children here are keenly aware of the tourists and the trade and the sex and things that most other places would keep from them until they are well in to their teens and would become entranced and embarassed by. They tap dance on the streets for money, begging boxes in front of them and crushed beer cans stuck to the bottom of their shoes, and they try and make sounds over the din and the loud Zydeco music pouring from every tourist shop attempting to pull in a few misguided(and hopefully heavily inebriated) victims. At the end of a few days, when the sun goes down and they have to go home, you can see them fondling rolls of green the sixes of their fists licking their lips and dreaming in color of 'Toys "Backasswards R" Us' or whatever thing they might need-- need being a very important thing for some of them, because a great deal of them live in the cheap housing projects just towards canal from Armstrong Park. And there's bars and clubs and music and food for a thousand different tastes, which is shokcing because ten million people will visit, and most of them are small-minded enough to be thrilled by such a small amount. They thrill in the French Market, where things they could easily buy in their home town mall they pay much, much more for, unless you go for the jars and vials of sauces and spice that adorn the racks of the food section of it, where all the delicatessins of the bayou can be found-- Alligator Jerky, for example. On every corner there's music though, singing, dancing, zydeco, blues, gospel, jazz, violin, classical, amazing amounts of it. The best directions anyone can give you is to follow the music when you land in New Orleans, because that's where it's all at. A violin player can be visited upon who plays "Jesu, Jesu, Du Bist Mein" or any number of other peices by Bach in the French market on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday in the French Market, or you can go to Cafe Du Monde where at any given time a man with a clarinet or a violin or a trumpet will be playing anything you ask him to, if you let enough green pass his palm. Or just take a walk. There's life in the park in the French Quarter, psychics and mystics and palm and tarot, crystals and feathers and tea leaves and face painting, where you can watch artists paint or listen to horse-drawn carriage tours fight over fares. There's Clowns, in the typical sense and the robot clowns-- men who paint their bodies silver and make robotic movements with a noisemaker in their mouth which they suck in on to make whirring noises and dance to odd techno/hip-hop on a small plastic crate you would normally associate with being the perfect size for recycling. Life. And it's all here-- something so goddamn potent people just keep coming back. One hit is almost never enough-- estimated upon by the amount of powdered sugar/cocaine ratio you get on your order of beignet or slipped into every hurricane you buy. There's something about the city that can keep you there, whther it be the eye-candy or the stories of the flowing sense of history and memories that are not yours that you'll see. Bakeries and bars and booze and boobs, everything. Just don't shake hands with anyone. This article comes from Shmeng http://www.shmeng.com/ The URL for this story is: http://www.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=314