Floating in New Orleans
Although New Orleans may be south of The South, it shares a smell with the other southern parts of the United States that is wholly consistent. Perhaps it's the heavy canopy over these places, thick with their cicadas and humidity, that creates a unified experience.
The more time I spent in New Orleans the more it grew similar to Austin in my mind. I believe this likeness stems not from any physical similarity, of which there is very little, but is derived more from the quality of life. As in Austin, the food is good most places you go and I get the sneaking suspicion that it's not just a side effect of traveling with Pableaux and Ariana. Baristas wait languidly at outside tables, chatting with people and their dogs until fresh customers come along. This is the land of doors that don't quite shut, of mirrors tarnished by the heave of age, of grass growing between the streetcar rails.
All knowledge of the Purchase aside, it had slipped my mind that Louisiana is not natively American in the latent anglo sense of the moniker. Spotting the first road sign denoting a parish instead of a county started to unravel the standard assumptions about American cities. From the start this place has been built atop less stable ground, a fact which has been whole-heartedly accepted. Streets warp casually in all dimensions such that cars parked along them appear deposited in the most haphazard manner. This apparent strewing of vehicles reveals itself to the observant visitor as life out of cartesian bounds rather than life belonging to a wholly different system. The gentle deformations of New Orleans are so epidemic that they've become the true basis of life more than any Cartesian dreams that planners and architects long past tried to impose. Deformation is not an emphatic, imposing standard here, instead it dominates by fiat. At the same time, this is not a Baroque city enamored of the curve. New Orleans is a place of layered, casual complexity.
Highly ornamented houses fall into a state of disrepair that blurs the line between ornament and decay. Where does the florid pattern of decoration end and the ferment of age begin? Patterns of design and patterns of decomposition fold into each other, becoming indistinguishable. This wonderful ambiguity, like the uneven roads, occurs purely as side effect. That is to say, New Orleans does not seem to be a self conscious city but develops a richness despite itself. After all, the designers who originally installed these scrolled eaves and decorative porch details did not intend for them to rot and crumble, but it's this sort of unpreventable act that provides the basis for New Orleans' casual complexity.
Do I dare invoke VSBA in declaring New Orleans America's Mannerist capital? This is not, as I mention above, a city of Baroque curves-- an extravagant, coherent, and integral system-- but one of slight deformations in the Cartesian field: a plan of Houston water logged, fraying and better off because of it. In the jumble of Tintoretto's Last Supper one finds a hint of what may be the true order behind New Orleans: things are almost perfect, lines are almost straight, and it's this slight variance that sets the work afloat. These spaces are where vitality seeps in.
This city may be connected by interstates and infrastructure but it floats on its own: somewhere between France and America, then and now, order and chaos.
--Posted 04/12/04 04:56AM