Interesting perspectives on New Orleans

Like any natural disaster brought to the peak of media attention for a period, you don't hear about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina very much. But this is a comic-style serialisation of the events of august, 2005 and what happened afterwards. The story of New Orleans exists now for most of the world in the realm of history and tv memory. Here's a little insight into some of the reconstruction that people are trying to do down there, on their own. Click on the neighbourhoods to see the videos.

Getting mixed up with the boogie

I remember a moment from the short time I lived in New Orleans. It was early August in the French Quarter, a day or so after the hurricane winds brought all the hot torrents of rain to drench us. Those rains sent me into the Marriott Hotel on Canal street to get dry before getting soaked through again. I squelched across the lobby to the ladies, sat under a hand drier for half an hour, then met the rain again, walking almost the full length of Canal street to the St. Charles streetcar which carried me home to Prytania street, more soaking than I have ever been before or since, in clothes or out of them. An evening beer has rarely tasted so good.

By then, I had decided that I was pretty much living in New Orleans. I just couldn't imagine leaving. It was a common and pernicious kind of experience that happened to people when they spent more than a wild weekend in Nola. She sort of seeped into you. It was the magic and the sensuality and the earthy natural energy of the place, mixed with the boogie and the pollution and the swamp magnetism, that made it a very easy place to get stuck in, especially when the humidity was high. It was also incredibly easy to find your way through, once you actually slipped under the skin of Nola.

And right after the heavy rains, it was quiet in the quarter. Summertime was low season, anyway. Even at that, I never really spent much time in the French Quarter, I usually hung out over in the Marigny, or uptown altogether. But this evening I was strolling past Jackson square, along St. Ann street, and there was a man standing on the sidewalk, in under an awning to shelter from the rain, a dark figure on a dark and by then lightly rainy street, and he was singing a tune to the hot mist and the rain and the empty street as I walked through it. And I saw him and listened to his song, and he didn't have a go-cup sitting by his feet, or a cap upturned to catch passing falling change, and he was just standing there, eyes closed, enraptured, singing to the street, the sound of his heart calling out to the air in Nola to meet him there, the sound of the life of Nola meeting him there, the life of Nola inside him, where she dwelled, rightly. And I watched this man, and I felt it, I got it. This was really the only appropriate response to the question of New Orleans. To sing to her, to woo her, to love her in the way she likes, with softness on a hard day, with boogiesounds, with rhythm. And so she comes rushing in.

Cities live inside us, in ways we don't always recognise. Places do that, whether city or wild nature. And cities have character, have spirit, that magnetise us in different ways, bring out different aspects of us, depending on the particular vibe of the particular city. They bring out different activities, too.

I spent January of this year in Barcelona and Berlin. Barcelona was warm and sunny, and I swam in the sea and strolled around in my high heeled boots, wandering through the labyrinths, hanging out in the Plaças, kind of entranced, for the most part, and spending my days with a new friend I made on my first evening there. It's always fantastic when you meet a fun chica friend, and in Barcelona, that would be Tina.

And then I went to Berlin, and there was a hurricane on the second day, and it was dark and cold and I wandered the very wide streets and felt the blood of northern europe circulating in me again, and I found it hard to get talking to people and I felt kind of lonely so I bought a notebook and three crayons and made my fun inside that notebook wherever I wandered, in my Barcelona high heeled boots.

I snaked around Europe this year, ended up in New York city on what seemed like a whim that landed me home. That's what this place feels to me. Home. Home is, of course, a moveable feast, when you live the way I have these past few years. But home also feels like staying. Here.

Snake n Jake's Christmas Lounge

I just found a little smelly tealight on the shelf of this apartment I've been living in for nine days. It's the first I've seen of a candle in ages. I had forgotten all about candles. Denmark was all about candles. The whole country, all day, all night, everywhere, in the street, at least a hundred in every home, restaurants, my favourite dive bar and nightspot in Copenhagen: Kulkafeen (get there while you can, it's changing hands soon!) was lit ENTIRELY with candles.

Reminds me of Snake n Jake's Christmas Lounge up on Oak Street in Nola. Just down the road from the Maple Leaf, though you'd only know if you had been told about it. It was a little shed of a place lit only with Christmas tree lights, and was by a long way, the most fundamentally hip bar I have ever been in. I shudder to think of Snake n Jake's fate since the waters came. The last time I was in Snake n Jake's was an afternoon one August. Outside it was sweltering, hot, humid. Inside, a/c kept its clients cool, it was utterly dark but for the fairy lights, and two enormous greyhounds wrestled each other silently on the floor.

Snake n Jake's was a kind of a typical Nola place, in that it was open all the time. It wasn't 24 hours like a lot of the other St. Charles bars, but they basically stayed open until the last drinker stumbled out the door into hot sweltering daylight, grabbing a couple of hours shuteye, before opening again for the first thirsty customer of the day banging on the door again.

I was brought there one night by a wild drunken chef I met while having a quiet beer in the Avenue bar, across the street from the flophouse on Prytania street where I was staying. A quiet beer, I thought, I'll write for a couple of hours and go home. Yeah. But this is New Orleans. Instead I met a wild drunken chef who whisked me off to the St. Charles Tavern, where he challenged me to a game of darts (at that time I was as passionate about darts as I currently am about iPod).

There was to be a challenge. If the wild chef won our game of 301, then he got to lick my armpit. If I won, it was something inane like a beer. Nothing I could think of could beat his bounty. I hit a couple of twenties, he hit the wall, what can I say. I got the beer, he hit the street.

But he was fun, and as much a gentleman as a wild drunken armpit licking chef could be, which was surprisingly considerable. And I never saw him after that 9am-finishing game of darts. I have a photograph somewhere, he's trying to lick my cheek. Or actually licking my neck, and I'm wincing and laughing at the same time, and trying to hold the camera up and press click.

Anyway, that was how I got to hear about Snake n Jake's Christmas Lounge. He told me about it like it was the Shangri-La, like he was Cassandra about to usher me into the flame of immortal life. On wednesday nights, he says, if you take your top off and dance on the counter, you drink free for the night.

So one tuesday night after the Rebirth Brass Band's regular gig at the Maple Leaf, I met some ex-hippy couple out in the courtyard at the back, and I said

Hey! Lets go to Snake n Jakes! D'ya know it?

Sure!

(said the wife)

I haven't been there in years! Lets go!

And we all piled into her car, she put her go-cup of wine into the cupholder in her driver's seat, and off we roared.

Within about ten minutes of getting to Snake n Jake's, the couple offered to have me come and live at their home. I think I accepted their kind offer in principle, and told them I would call on their sofa, if ever the need arose. Later that night, a friend of the couple's was about to drive me home, when I crossed the street and saw that there was a Luau happening in a garden. So in we went, and joined the party.

Grass skirts, hula garlands, cookout, hawaiian music. White college boy types. One older dude. Ginger, small, crosseyed. I got talking to him. Turns out he was NOPD. He was also very taken with the fact that I was Irish. His guard went down a little.

You from Ireland? he asked me. You got bad people in Irelan', like we got here? BAD people you know? BLACK people? Like we got here?

He had the ring of someone who knows he can fuck someone up and get away with it, no questions asked.

And out it all came. His stories. I stood there, in a hula garland, getting the gist of this cop's vibe, and said whatever I was there to say, and then I said goodbye, and we left. Something dark was brewing with a group of men further down the street and we got out of there.

Ah, Snake n Jake's.

Or the night I gave my credit card to the bartender and left it there when I left. I think there were two drinks on the tab at the time - big spender, me - and discovered the absence of the card when I got back to Prytania street at 9.30 am. Bollocks, I thought. Classic tourist moment.

I went back there, later that day.
They gave me back the card, had torn up the tab.
Snake n Jake's had honour.

I really have no sense whatsoever of what shape nola is in, these days.
Just can't fathom it.

You shake my nerves and you rattle my brain

too much love drives a woman insane
i lost my will
oh what a thrill
goodness gracious great balls of fire

So I haven't been blogging much since I kicked it off... but I've been busy! All sorts of New York and computer-based concerns are whizzin' round my brain, sugar.

Speaking of sugar pies and fruit flies and all things nice and sowprisin' baby doll, it looks like I'm heading for New Orleans Louisiana within the next couple of weeks. I've got to say I'm really feeling quite apprehensive about this trip.

I mean, when I met Nola for the first time, it took four days but I fell in love. I slipped inside Nola's sheets and danced. She moved me. We grooved to each other's beat. I loved inside her, played inside her, cried inside her, was amazed inside her, I learned streetsmarts inside her, I met a black man called Elvis who played guitar inside her, I rode her streetcars dripping wet from the aftermath of some hurricane winds inside her, I listened inside her, I met Miss Rose inside her.

I do not expect to find this Nola when I return.