Two months in New Orleans — Letters from the Road

New Orleans is familiar territory. I've visited the city multiple times when I was living full time in the USA, and I lived here for one month in my first year of nomad life. This time I rented an apartment in the southeast area of the French Quarter, on the second floor of a typical creole townhouse. It even has a balcony with rocking chairs.

I visited many art galleries, some of them with work by formidable artists. Windsor Fine Art had Rembrandt, Dalí, Picasso, Miró, Chagall, among others. M.S. Rau had Pisarro, Sargent, Degas, and an impressive large painting by a Belgian Pre-Raphaelite artist I had never heard about, Gustave-Max Stevens. Also, of course, I visited the New Orleans Museum of Art (NOMA) again. The NOMA seems to be a small museum, but when you start counting the number of great artists represented in their collection its importance becomes evident: El Greco, Tiepolo, Tintoretto, Claude Lorrain, Sargent, Modigliani, Renoir, Degas, Miró, Picasso, Magritte, O'Keefe, Pollock, Warhol, Kandinsky, Liechtenstein, to mention only a few.

The Twelve Princesses, by Gustave-Max Stevens (3.5m x 2.5m)

New Orleans is famous mostly for the music and for the food, but it is also a literary city. Many famous writers lived and worked here. I explored that side by reading a few books by William Faulkner and by watching movies based on the plays of Tennessee Williams.

Faulkner lived here in the beginning of his career, and his house on Pirate's Alley is now a bookstore. I can't say I liked his books very much. Too convoluted and deliberately obscure. He once mocked Hemingway by saying "he has never been known to use a word that might cause the reader to check with a dictionary". Hemingway, who never left an insult without a reply, said "Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?" I'm on Team Hemingway, of course.

Watching Tennessee Williams was much more entertaining. He is known for his emotionally charged characters and a deep exploration of human vulnerability, but I also find a subtle sense of humor in his plays (dark humor, of course). He lived here in the late 1930s, and kept returning. According to him, "America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland".

I also had drinks at the famous Carousel Bar inside the Hotel Monteleone. This hotel was like a magnet for writers, and hosted Truman Capote, Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, among others. The bar has this name because it's shaped like a carousel and rotates taking you around. You end up not knowing whether you are dizzy because of the carousel or because of the cocktails. Another guy who lived in New Orleans in the beginning of his career was Charles Bukowski, in a house on Governor Nicholls Street, just a couple of blocks from my apartment. He wrote that New Orleans let him alone. "being lost / being crazy maybe / is not so bad / if you can be / that way / undisturbed".

The house where Bukowski lived. It's the door on the left.

I crossed the Mississippi on a ferry boat just to visit the house where William S. Burroughs lived in Algiers. He is, of course, the author of books like Junkie and Naked Lunch. But the house is famous for being in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, where Burroughs is called by the name of Old Bull Lee. "We went to Old Bull Lee's house outside town near the river levee. It was on a road that ran across a swampy field. The house was a dilapidated old heap with sagging porches running around and weeping willows in the yard; the grass was a yard high, old fences leaned, old barns collapsed. There was no one in sight." It's in better shape now, but it's still the same house.

What, only litretchur and no muzik?

Yes, plenty of music. I haunted the usual places on Frenchmen Street, like Snug Harbor, The Spotted Cat, d.b.a., Blue Nile, and Bamboula's, and listened to bands like Tuba Skinny, Palmetto Bug Stompers, and the Secret Six, among others. Highlight to the legendary Little Freddie King at d.b.a. and Grammy winner Irvin Mayfield at Kermit's Treme Mother-in-Law Lounge.

And the food?

Like Bangkok in Thailand and Salvador in Brazil, New Orleans is a city where you need to watch out for spiciness levels on the food. When the waiters say "it's not spicy at all", it means it's spicy. When they say "it's a bit spicy", it means it's very, very spicy. When they say "it's very spicy", you should have an ambulance in front of the restaurant in case of spontaneous combustion.

Boudin (pork, rice, onions, and seasonings, rolled into a ball, battered, and deep-fried). The drink is a Hurricane (white rum, dark rum, lemon juice, passion fruit). At Coterie Restaurant.

Crawfish étouffée (Cajun stew with crawfish tails) at Cafe Pontalba.

Muffuletta (muffuletta loaf with layers of marinated olive salad, salami, ham, Swiss cheese, provolone, and mortadella) at Napoleon House.

Any side trips?

I didn't leave the city. Actually, I rarely left the French Quarter and the adjacent Faubourg Marigny. But you could say, perhaps, that I made a side trip to the lands of the beyond. I visited the St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, the oldest one in New Orleans, opened in 1789. Among the many above-ground vaults (you can't really bury someone here, the city is surrounded by Lake Borgne, Lake Pontchartrain, and the Mississippi River, and anywhere you dig you will find water), I saw the tombs of Paul Morphy (considered the world's greatest chess master in the mid-19th century), Marie Laveau (famous local voodoo priestess), and Nicolas Cage (who isn't dead yet but already built a pyramid to receive his body when the time comes).

What's next?

Now I'm going to Brazil and spend some time with my mother. After that, I'll be in Buenos Aires for a few months.

Hasta la vista!