New Orleans - last full day

It completely poured with rain overnight, and the temperature dropped 30 degrees, so this was rather chilly weather for visiting the Honey Island Swamp - 70,000 acres of pristine wetland, full of alligators, and birds, and (though we didn't see any) raccoons and javelinas.  And bees - here are some flying in and out of holes in a tupelo tree: hence (for Van Morrison aficionados), Tupelo Honey.

It was ... swampy.  Here's a heron,

and a very young gator;

and a Common Egret admiring its reflection.

The egret then took off: this was my favorite shot of the day, and definitely an album cover of some kind.

This monstrous thing is an invasive Apple Snail - huge, and it eats crawfish, which makes them a local enemy - so big brown birds (we saw one, rootling around) called Limpkin have been introduced to eat them.  They are especially insidious since semi-amphibious - they have gills and lungs.  They also lay their toxic eggs - like lumps of gooey coral - up trees, so they're not going to get readily eaten.  Despite my snail fondness, these are like something out of sci fi.

At every turn the tree reflections are stunning ...

Ooh, look who's swimming up to the boat!

- to be thrown a lump of - of what? gator kibble - by our guide.

By the time I was back in the city, the sun was vaguely coming out: a bit more house admiration round the French Quarter;

including a very large crown on a porch: left over from Carnival, or from a No Kings demo?

Waling round the Louis Armstrong park (yes, there was another procession, with tubas, etc), I cam upon this boarded up, desperately in need of restoration, complex.  The building on the left is one of the oldest Masonic Halls in the US, built in 1820 as a Masonic Lodge for Creoles of Color, and home to some very early jazz performances.  The others have mostly been moved there - and the whole site has the most vexed and complicated history, belonging for a while to the National Parks Service, who then handed it over to the Preservation Resource Center a few years back; damaged by Hurricane Ida - the more one digs in online, the more one finds so many people want to save and renovate them, but who has the money? whose responsibility ultimately is it? The whole area, indeed, has a troubled history: about ten blocks were demolished in the 1960s, largely displacing lower income Black people, for the building of a big (also didn't look at all functioning) concert hall that would supposedly encourage more white people to come to the area ... but leaving 18 or so acres of empty land, which in the 70s was turned into a memorial park (lakes, bridges, trees and shrubs, turtles) for Louis Armstrong.  

Heading back into festival land, here's a timely sign (if you look closely, it says YALL MORE BOOZE LESS ICE)

and here's a performance by Jade Perdue, who is, among many other excellent things, an educator and a National Parks Service interpreter for jazz history.  She can really sing.

 

New Orleans, cont

It was good to get out of town today, on a small tour to the Whitney Plantation (this is the one plantation tour that concentrates on the experience of the enslaved, and also that really puts on display, and explains, the importance of slow, detailed, archival history).  It made a fascinating compare-and-contrast with similarly oriented former plantations that I've visited in North Carolina (tobacco), and northern Louisiana (cotton): so much that's similar, but I did learn a lot both about sugar (and molasses) production, and also about the history of resistance and rebellions in southern Louisiana.

They did a great job in not romanticizing, or even venerating, the Big House, except as a place where enslaved people could hear and pass on news and gossip, and, above all, as a place of sexual vulnerability and danger for women.

There was a rather fine stencil over the fireplace - but overall, it was a house that brought home how much power was wielded from a center that by the standards of many plantations was relatively modest - a good-sized farmhouse.

This is from the kitchen - removed from the house, of course, because of the danger of fire - and as in so many little corners of the place, there was a dried yellow rose.  There was a great deal of quiet, respectful memorializing.

A reminder of the plots that were cultivated by the enslaved - and then, post Reconstruction, by sharecroppers, since few ever had the money to move on - on Sundays.

And here are some of the many, many, many huge sugar boiling vats - boiling down the syrup from crushed canes until it started to crystalize and turn into granulated sugar.

I'm not sure who this guy is - maybe a young blue heron?  Not easy to locate his identity on line ...

As well as quiet memorializing, there were more pointed treatments of the past throughout - especially this monument to those who had been executed after the 1811 German Coast uprising.  We'd been shown the levee where their heads were left to rot on our drive up; told that the enslaved nearby were marched to see these heads every day, as a reminder of what would happen to them if they rebelled.  It's by Woodrow Nash (who's actually from Akron, Ohio);

and he also made the statues of the children that occasionally appear in the grounds, on a porch,

and then in the church, at the end of the tour: not exactly accusatory, but, in their realism, decidedly haunting.  I didn't see any children visiting today - odd, actually, now I think about it (and I checked: there are some sober cautions about the exhibit being most suitable for older children, and to talk with them beforehand).  If I'd visited as a ten year old, I think it would stay with me for ever.

Then back to New Orleans, and I walked as smartly away from the French Quarter and its Fest as I could - down Magazine, past many lovely houses; painted fences; plants; more plants, and had a weirdly Southern lunch of a collard greens and mustard grilled cheese sandwich and a (very weak) glass of Pimms made with ... dill pickle brine and ginger beer at Turkey and Wolf (not a drink, you'll be glad to hear, that I'll rush to recreate at home.  But of course I had to try a Pimm's Pickle Princess.  

I'm glad to see that New Orleans tells it as it is.

Back in my room, eventually (another nearly 15,000 step day, and the temperature was 86 and humid), I thought I'd have a quiet few minutes or so.  But no!  A full scale krewe wedding, complete with brass band, and costumes, and everyone wielding umbrellas and white handkerchiefs, processed slowly under my window ...

 

New Orleans miscellany

This morning began at 1.10 a.m., with the fire alarm going off, and the whole building having to evacuate.  No fire was ever in evidence.  11 floors is a lot of concrete staircase.

New Orleans has a better class of electrical junction box.

I hope this couple enjoyed their praline-filled fresh beignets as much as I did.

A hut painted with houses.

Some people do strange things with windows.

Some people try very hard with their balconies (that's a bubble machine on the right hand side).

Some houses are very small.

A centre figure, Europe (even if she does look like Queen Victoria), an 1860s figurine which is part of a Four Continents set - any connection with the Albert Memorial?).

A nineteenth century snail.

Perhaps my favorite thing in the museum: Mary Proctor's Freedom of Expression (1998): Proctor's art is intentionally celebratory of women, and painted on salvaged doors.

From the sculpture park next door: only three of these people are live.

 

flowers in New Orleans

A very academic day in New Orleans, giving a lecture in the Tulane art department, and when not doing that, or eating some very good food, I was polishing and burnishing the talk and making the slide show as impressively slick and apposite as it could be.  So that was all fun, if tiring.  Top - a mysterious bit of fly posting on a doorway very close to my hotel.   Bottom - a pottery lamp post outside the art department, which is faintly creepy.

 

the delights of today's travel

Greetings from DFW, where I am waiting for a very, very delayed plane to New Orleans.  I do know how crazy it is to fly late in the day into Dallas (I gather they no longer call it "turbulence" in in-flight announcements, but "air disturbance"), and that this can happen, but I had a department meeting this morning (unanticipated by me when I arranged to give this lecture - I didn't realize meeting dates would be different this month because of Passover.  You'd have thought I'd have learnt that, too).  At least I'm in a lounge where I've found the screen that will have the Dodgers on ...  Let us hope that the flight actually happens, or it'll be a night somewhere less than ideal and then an 8 hour drive.  But that would be doable, I guess ...

 

the domestic and the feral

We trust that Mothy knows how lucky she is (and Gramsci too).  Here she is, at breakfast time - and here's one of her figurative brothers or sisters in a cat colony in Mount Washington, where we went out to dinner,  This guy is, of course, fortunate to have shelter and kibble, but nothing like his spoilt domestic counterpart ...

 

turning purple

It's jacaranda time!  Only ... as I noted a week or so back, when they first started to create their purple haze, it's really very early in the year.  I usually associate them with graduation time - sometimes not even then.  Plenty of rain, periodically; a couple of mini heatwaves (not right now: it's surprisingly chilly) - I guess that's a recipe for encouraging premature flowering?  They look good, at any rate, against various bits of USC architecture (a residential hall, and the University Club).