It's hard for many people to imagine what New Orleans, NOLA as we affectionately call it, is like without ever having been here. I thought that while we are down here for Jazz Fest, playing late-night shows and eating food, I would break it down into not 5, but 6 sense perceptions of what NOLA is like for the uninitiated.
SMELL:
Bottom line, NOLA smells. Good and bad. In fact the contrast is what makes the place so dynamic to walk around. In only a few minutes one might smell alternating heavenly and loathsome wafts of fish, trash, garlic, gardenia flowers, fresh swamp water, salty sea air, sugar, coffee, more garlic and more gardenias. The food and flowers smells utterly delicious, the trash and water stagnant and repulsive.
TASTE:
Choosing from the above, one hopes to end up with only a good smelling item in the mouth at any given time and their is no shortage of morsels and meals around town. In my mind, no other place in America has the range of culinary options, minus the trendy vegan-type non-food we have in certain regions, ahem, Colorado... You can get just about anything put in your pork sausage, alligator was my choice the first day we rolled into town. My favorite is the way New Orleanians work with fruit. An old mid-city fav is blueberry-lemonade and just this morning I had a peach-strawberry muffin. Abita Purple Haze is one of the only reputable fruit-beers in the nation, appeasing even the staunchest Bud-drinkers. After Katrina, an influx of workers from Mexico has led to one fine burrito crafted on Claiborne Ave. and there is no shortage of Italian or Sushi joints either. Still, some chicory in the coffee and a cup of gumbo is just about the most New Orleans you can get in two cups.
TOUCH:
It's humid. Beyond conventional means of odor and moisture control, learning to exist in a bath of one's own perspiration is par for the course. The ground is also highly uneven (read: POTHOLES) due to the location of the city on a constantly shifting subterranean swamp. NOLA is a place of rich materials: aged wood and wrought-iron, stained glass and thick costume velvet.
SEE:
New Orleans is an international city. Europeans, Japanese, West Africans and transplants from the Caribbean all mingle in a place that certainly looks more diverse than most of the rest of the region. The flora and fauna are diverse enough to match the human population, as well. Huge oak tree branches canopy the streets, growing amongst patches of tropical flowers. The clouds move overhead at a quick pace next to the gulf, and sunsets are a fiery purple affair.
HEAR:
Sounds in New Orleans work much the same way the smell does, wafting into your ears, carried on humid swamp currents and inland ocean breeze. The city is alive with cats, dogs, cars, men and women shouting in greeting and conflict, not to mention music. While there certainly are several types of "New Orleans Music", the brass band variety being the least replicated anywhere, you can hear music from regional Louisiana, the South, New York, L.A., the Caribbean, South America and Africa en masse on Frenchman Street and Uptown. New Orleans is the main refuge, as it has always been, for musics of the African Diaspora and the highly percussive result is a musician and listeners dream, alike.
FEEL:
There is something which appeals to a sixth sense in NOLA, an energy which peels off buildings onto the sidewalk, up from cracks in the swamp just inches below the pavement. It is the soul of the Civil War and slavery and untold horror and joy played out over and over again, a production few other American cities have known in their metropolitan theaters. The force is so great, a hurricane couldn't wash it away.
And when I walk down a darkened alley, only candlelight flickering from gas lamps above shuttered French Quarter doors though a thick fog... I can feel it.
