New to N'awlins: Or a collection of Three Days

Let's face it: first impressions matter. You are familiar with this tired refrain, yes? Well, it's true; there is no doubt that a given first opinion about a given person, place, food, et al. is significant. Lasting even.

Prejudices also matter, for that matter. We'd all like to believe we live unprejudiced, open-minded lives (well, not all of us, but you know what I mean), but we definitely have pre-first impressions about certain things, ideas that form our perceptions, which make up for half of the fateful first impression.

We should not linger on first impressions overlong, of course. First impressions, like prejudices, usually fail to ascertain the essence of a given object, as do in many cases second, third, and nth impressions. Allowing a first impression to define a view about someone or something is lazy and lame. This is one of the more frustrating things, for example, about applying for jobs or schools or anything else, the sense that all the applicant has is a fleeting window to make a positive, though superficial first impression, an impression that is his/her only chance to win the position or at least earn a longer window for making a deeper impression. There's no way around this in situations like open application processes, of course, but in our personal experience we should make sure to consider the pernicious effects of lazily allowing our first thought to stand unedited.

And with that, I dismount from my high horse and present to you the prejudices and first impressions that have guided me in my first three days visiting/living in New Orleans. I'm here for a month (at least), which reminds me of my two month visit to Madrid and allows me to test my new hypothesis that the 1-2 month stay is the best way to visit and get to know a city if you are not prepared to move there or anything crazy like that. Cheap room off craigslist, cheap used bike (also off craigslist), and a heavy dosage of Google Maps and online investigation to set up my activities for the month: this is how we get along in 2011, it seems.

Anyway, I present first the prejudices I have compiled about the Big Easy derived from popular culture and friends' reports, and then my initial impressions, sure to be laughable to me by the end of my month here, from the long weekend. Onwards with shallow thinking, yah!

Prejudices:

Live and Let Die, my favorite James Bond movie, was largely set in a decaying, brass band at a funeral New Orleans, good ol' N'awlins and all that thing. The movie pit, as my high school friend aptly and bluntly put it, Bond against just about every African-American (as well as African-Caribbeans from Haiti and/or Cuba if I recall correctly) in the world, excepting the one or two characters on his side. Hmm. At least this may prepare me for considering the actual racial tensions that I suspect are present in the Crescent City.

There are some cultural touchstones that among well-read people spanning from my age to maybe 15 years older have gained so much currency as to be cliche. Neutral Milk Hotel, great as they are/were, are a good example of this (also not completely irrelevant - Jeff Mangum is from Ruston, Louisiana if I'm not mistaken - sure that's all the way across the state and no doubt a completely different setting, but still). If A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole isn't, it should be. And I think it is a book that stands as something of a badge of pride for New Orleans; I found a statue dedicated to his famous character Ignatius J. Reilly on Canal Street, one of the main boulevards in the city.

For all the significance of the book, I can't remember a ton from it that influenced my view of New Orleans; the Reilly character overshadows much of the rest of the book, and my copy of the novel is currently indisposed, preventing me from brushing up. I remember the crazy feeling of the novel, the crowds and the pushing and what not, I remember (or remembered after hearing my shuttle driver say his accent was either New Orleans or South jersey) the preponderance of Jersey emigres in New Orleans, and I remember, well, again, Ignatius J. Reilly. Humph. I read another book last year, Tom Robbins's Jitterbug Perfume, that took place partly in NO and is quite a good book, but didn't tell much about New Orleans beyond the obvious.

Then there is of course that obvious: New Orleans as a birthplace of jazz, home to Satchmo Louis Armstrong, for example. The Creole and Cajun and French and Spanish roots of the place. Katrina and the flooding and the canals and the gulf spill and everything. Who Dat and Dem Saints winning last year's Super Bowl (I'm sure it would have been a crazy arrival if I entered New Orleans with the Saints still in the playoffs; I'm not sure whether their losing was a good thing or a bad one for my purposes). Mardi Gras, Bourbon Street, and the French Quarter. Those are the pieces of information (represented here in trivial sentence fragment form) that helped me form my initial picture of New Orleans. A crazy, high energy, low prosperity, possibly disharmonious city that knows how to get down, more or less is the picture I formed.

First Impressions
Southern Hospitality - Most people I have come across have been pleasant. In every eating establishment except the most touristy (Cafe Du Monde on Decatur), the service has been kind and timely; at one place, one of the overseeing waitresses (managers?) kept making sure I was taken care of and calling me baby (she couldn't be much over 30); at another, the older staff joked and smiled with perfect kindness; at a third, the cafe owner occupied the energy center of her corner cafe, engaging with her few guests, waving and talking to any and all passers-by - all acquaintances of hers, and providing a good and cheap menu to boot. At one eatery, the hospitality was of the faux-hostile form, i.e. when I asked to get the order for here, the owner good-naturedly scolded me about how I was getting it to go because it was closing time and time for them to go home if not for me.

I also had an exchange with a bus driver that made me smile. The bus driver greeted me by saying something like "What's chirping with you, champ?" (I really didn't hear what he said, but I remember "ch" sounds). A woman stood next to him, so I thought maybe he was talking to her. Then I thought maybe he said it to me because she didn't respond. So I said, "What?"
"Hello, sir, how are you doing tonight?" he responded with exaggerated diction. I found this all charming.

Colors - I haven't wrapped my head around New Orleans's layout, housing design, or overall set up, but the architecture has general themes to them: there are columns and balconies or roof space on many of the buildings, which along with the frequent vacant lots lends an air of decadent decline (an impression definitely emerging from my prejudices, I should say). There are neighborhoods I'm not comfortable walking in after dark that look mildly dilapidated but also joyous and grinning in the daylight. And New Orleans seems like a place full of residents who exude pride in spite of it all.

Mostly, I would attribute that to the colors of the houses. Purple and gold are common colors (possibly official ones) down here, but houses also come in greens, pinks, yellows, blues, and reds. It makes me think that, if color is your thing, why would you ever to paint your house anything less than an exciting, bold color? Why miss the opportunity? Looking at some of these houses, I felt a sudden yen, I of all people who is the last in the world truly concerned about this sort of thing, I felt the desire to own a house, if just so I could paint it cool colors (I'd accept a brick house too, I guess, but cool colors are, well cool).

Why people come to New Orleans - I sense that, should I decide to do some serious exploring in New Orleans, and further to use this blog space as a platform to catalog said exploration, I will have to discuss the societal tensions that to me seem to be obvious in New Orleans. Again, first impressions are shit, so I'm sure I'll revise or deepen that observation if I choose to pursue it, but there are at least three different major populations that I've come across that could cause tension for one another, or that I've heard cause tensions for one another, or so on. 

There are people who live in New Orleans because that's where they're from and they have little choice or consideration for leaving. I will not get ahead of myself any further than to say that I suspect that this is largely a poorer community, and that the ethnic makeup is significantly more African-American than the other groups.

Then there are the people who have arrived in New Orleans in the past five+ years to help revitalize the city in Katrina's aftermath, among other things. This would be a more affluent, white, young community consisting of today's relatively hip and open-minded 20 and 30-somethings, or tomorrow's yuppies. We'd like to think this group is wholly noble and selfless, and will blend effortlessly into the community and buoy all its members. Of course, while most people in this group are good people doing good things, that doesn't mean that the previous statement isn't rubbish. Even if well-meaning, these types can easily create some dissonance when contrasted with the first group. It reminds me of classes last year where we talked about how UN Peacekeeping forces, even when meaning well and following the rules, completely disrupted the economic system in the areas they worked, because the money and needs they brought with them distorted typical market calculations. I wonder if similar things happen here.

Lastly, there are the tourists. Tourists are usually easily ignored, laughed at and brushed aside. Here, where it seems to be a big part of the city's identity, and where the reason tourists visit is so in-your-face - my brother described to me how some people call San Francisco "Neverland" due to the prevalence of 30 and 40-somethings who refuse to settle down and continue to live in the city and party and live the wild life (I'm not sure that's such a bad thing, really, if that's what they want to do, but I digress); New Orleans seems to be, along with Vegas and probably a couple other places, the tourist's Neverland, a place where they can come to forget all morals and values and just have a fun time, because that's what people do here - it is probably harder to deal with that. Add in the large numbers of the young people in group two who do everything they can to show they "fit in" and are true locals, and it makes sense that group two might despise group three.

Before I mock group three too much, however, I should pass on what a native (though someone who doesn't fit into my neat categorization: drat!) told me when apprised of my plan to leave New Orleans in mid-February: that it was strange I was leaving before Mardi Gras, and that whether one parties or not, Mardi Gras is a good time to see the city put on its best face. There's no need, then, to say that partying is inauthentic or as make believe as Peter Pan or something.

Anyway, I'm going to watch out for the tension, among other things. You know, when I'm not face down drunk at the feet of a lady of the night just off of Bourbon Street  So about once a week, in other words. That's the beauty of the 1-month stay, however; it's long enough to get over the first impressions but not so long as to make it feel too much like home or stale to me (not that it feeling like home would be bad, but I might not have the time).

I'll end this with a line from my friend JS, who told me much about New Orleans. Aware of my international leanings, he tried to convince me to move to New Orleans by saying it is like a completely different country. I plan to watch out for this too. As there are no Bank of America ATMs within 40 miles of the city, I am inclined to give this view a thorough consideration, at least.