Happy New Year from NOLA!

iPhone Diary: 31 December 2009

I first came to New Orleans in the 1970s as an undergraduate at the University of Iowa to attend the national conference of a student organization. I don't remember the organization or the conference, but I have been coming to New Orleans ever since.

That first trip, I did all the responsible conference things a serious student should do. But every evening, as soon as I could make an appropriate getaway, I headed to the French Quarter. Of course, I walked Bourbon Street, gaped at fabulous jewelry, art and antiques on Royal Street, and even engaged what were for a Midwestern farm girl raised Mennonite distinctly guilty pleasures: alcohol (thereby discovering the mango daiquiri); window shopping the sex-toy and lingerie shops; actually going IN the voodoo shops.

But it didn't take much of that kind of thing to satisfy my curiosity. By about 8 p.m. each evening, I had paid my dollar and was soaking up jazz in Preservation Hall. I left at 2 a.m. when the last note died, the lights came on and the audience was shooed out the door. At least a couple of those nights were spent sitting on the floor due to overflow crowds. It didn't matter; I was young and both the music and musicians compelling.

That was not my first exposure to jazz. In fact, the first recorded music I bought as a teenager was not Elvis Presley, although I was a huge fan. Rather, it was David Brubeck's first hit jazz album, Take Five. Jazz was and is part of what draws me to New Orleans.

But New Orleans is more than jazz, more than its various wonderful musics, even more than all of its cultural wonders combined: music, cuisine, art, history, architecture and so forth. New Orleans is, instead, an attitude and a way of thinking and living. It is a city with an irrepressible spirit.

Of course, New Orleans has many problems. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which exposed the city's gravest issues of race and poverty and crime, prominent religious people were quick to define the hurricane and flood as God's punishment for the city's "decadence."

New Orleans is a city easy to romanticize and to villify. Instead, I offer the perspective of Robert C. Linthicum in his book City of God, City of Satan.

In the countryside God has used the forces of nature to carve and shape and mold. In the city God has used the creativity of human beings to carve and shape and mold!

Linthicum acknowledges that cities are and have long been plagued with many problems, but rather than abandon them, as many suggested New Orleans should be after the Katrina flood, he argues:

The city is to be celebrated and admired, not simply for itself, but because the city is the creation and primary abode of God.

New Orleans is the best and worst of humankind writ large, a site of struggle between our most honorable intentions and our most venal tendencies, our most beautiful expressions and our darkest secrets.

Happy new year from a lovely tart of a city!