Quiet Bubble

Reverend Dennis’s little swath of divinity

On a bright, cool Saturday afternoon, La Bella stared at a wall plastered with collages of newspaper clippings, crude paintings of Freemason symbols, hand-lettered (and misspelled and inexact) quotations from the Bible and glued-on Mardi Gras beads. I wrapped my arms around her from behind, leaned in to breathe the flowery shampoo smell on her hair, and whispered, “It takes all kinds to make this world, doesn’t it?” She nodded, giggling.

Really, what else could she say? Margaret’s Grocery and Market is named for the wife of one Reverend H.D. Dennis, who’s either certifiably a genius or just certifiable. As noted in Off the Beaten Path: Mississippi,

The elaborate archways, pillars, and towers of brick are the work of ninety-plus-year-old Reverend H.D. Dennis, Margaret’s husband. The Reverend promised Margaret if she married him, he’d turn her store into a palace, and he was true to his word. The Lego-like construction project hasn’t stopped yet; the Reverend is still adding on to the elaborate structure, which serves as a combination residence, grocery store, and house of worship. “God is the greatest architect,” Dennis says. “I’m only his assistant.”

God’s architectural sense, at least the branch that resides in Vicksburg, Mississippi, favors the camp and the unwieldy. Dennis’s red, pink, yellow, and white (with the occasional hint of blue) structures are sprawled along the side of Highway 61, just outside of the river city. The folk-art site stretches over 100 feet and climbs into the sky. Altogether, Margaret’s looks like a rougher, more slapdash version of a Gaudi design. From the painted school bus to the makeshift outdoor patio to the ramshackle towers, every surface is cluttered with stenciled and woodblock text, costume jewelry, stickers, mirrors, and thickly applied paint. Sometimes the text comes from the Bible; often, it’s blurts from Dennis himself; sometimes, it’s photocopied profiles of Dennis, including a table of contents from the December 2001 issue of Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies. One section is either a shrine devoted either to King Solomon or a protest against a local trustee’s board; the design is chaotic enough that it’s hard to tell the difference. Cinder blocks and wood panels are stacked and painted, seemingly at random, though the color scheme is, if not soothing, at least orderly. The clutter obscures the fact that this is essentially a trailer park; Margaret’s becomes grander and weirder than just a home as a result.

Reverend Dennis—and who knows if he’s actually ordained?—wasn’t in. I knocked on the front door to make sure. In a way, and I’m a little ashamed to say this, I was glad. If the man’s anything like his work, we would have been treated to an hourlong sermon of love that rambled and fizzled and digressed. At least his message would have been of love and peace. I didn’t see much fire-and-brimstone in his collage structure, and he’s made a point (over and over and over again) of noting that all people are welcome to enter his church. So he’s a benign nut—I’d rather have that than the other kind. Still, walking through and around the site, I kept wondering if my response—gaping in astonishment, occasional collapses into laughter—was what Dennis would want. He’s designed the place as a house of worship but its construction comes across as spectacle. I wonder if half of its tourists are smirking on the inside. I wondered if I was, too.

I’ve always had this antipathy toward folk/outsider/naïve art. (All three of those adjectives, by the way, should probably have qualifying quotation marks around them.) On the one hand, Dennis’s work clearly inspires awe. On the other hand, it’s not skilled architecture—a quick storm would destroy the place, and it looked like parts of it indeed had been rebuilt—or particularly competent art. Earlier that day, in the Attic Gallery, Brünhilde commented on a good pencil drawing that it was “good to see someone who understood draftsmanship for a change.”

Now, I quite liked the Attic Gallery, and found several pieces that could hang on my walls happily. La Bella loved a large painting of a jukebox on wood. But I understood what Brünhilde meant. The gallery Looking around the cluttered folk art and local art gallery, full of ambitious brushstrokes that sometimes outstripped actual talent, I got what she meant.

Reverend Dennis’s love letter to God and wife wouldn’t have made sense on sale in the Attic Gallery, despite the fact that his work and that on display at the gallery are closely aligned. In the gallery, Dennis’s stuff would have been just one of many, part of a context of African American “naïve” artists. On its own terrain, though, Margaret’s was an unrivaled source of wonderment. And it was democratic art, free and open to anyone willing to make the drive. By putting it into a gallery, the work would have automatically been institutionalized, automatically become less “outsider.”

But I couldn’t decide if I thought being an outsider was such a good thing. Rudimentary spelling and drawing skills might have helped Dennis better get across his message. Was Margaret’s Grocery and Market actually any good, or was it just crazy, or was there a worthwhile difference in this case? I still can’t decide. Still, it lingers in my head more than the stately and beautiful Cedar Grove Mansion—baroque and orderly and serene—we toured earlier that afternoon, so I suppose Dennis’s gut-check to the brain was worth the visit.

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RELATED: I visited the Ave Maria Grotto in Cullman, Alabama, in June 2007.

Sauna night at Preservation Hall

It’s 9:30pm on a August Sunday in New Orleans, and I’m drenched in sweat. I’m indoors but that doesn’t matter here. At least, not now.

My little brother and I have come down to the Crescent City for a long weekend. I take an annual trip here, but it’s James’s first time here outside of a church trip which, given the nature of the city, doesn’t really count. Still, we’re no Bourbon Street poonhounds looking for a whiskey fix. We avoided Hustler’s Barely Legal Club—James said, “Aren’t they basically asking for a police raid?”—and its like. This afternoon, we’ve taken the Canal Street streetcar to the New Orleans Museum of Art, and shivered through the new exhibits (magnificent Albrecht Dürer engraving, and a lush, gold-strewn set of Russian Orthodox paintings and iconography) and the more-or-less permanent Fabergé collection. Last night, we ended up at Mona’s for some Middle Eastern cuisine, and some fruity, exquisite gelato off of Oak Street.

Still, we’ve stayed for the most part in the Quarter, which means we’ve been walking for most of the weekend. This morning, before the museum trip, we took a $12/person mule tour through the Vieux Carré, and the rambunctious guide pointed out good shops, old history, and interesting places to eat. (During the ride, we ventured into the gayborhood part of Bourbon Street, and one woman said to the guide, “I see all these rainbow-colored balloons around. See, right by that bar. Are the Saints about to start playing?” James and the guide had to suppress laughter.)

Now, the Quarter is not just pedestrian-friendly but probably pedestrian-essential. Parking’s a nightmare; we left our car at our lovely hotel, except for the trip out to Mona’s. Streets are blocked from vehicular traffic for large chunks of the day, and I couldn’t figure out a schedule for when those times might be. The streets are narrow, so even the rare two-way street is clogged enough to make me long for my own two feet.

All that’s terrific; I’m a big fan of older, pedestrian cities. (This is why New Orleans, New York, and especially my love of loves Chicago will always be treasured by me.) But walking in the Quarter, in early August, means two things: 1. You’re always smelling new, and not quite fresh or savory, aromas, in the early morning on your way to Café Du Monde on Decatur, or Café Beignet on Royal Street; and 2. you’re always sweating and looking for an interesting shop in which you can cool off for five minutes.

So, James and I have strolled into toy shops—in one, James found a Curious George tea set; in another, we found a collection of handmade, wooden toys and puzzles—and hat stores with Panama fedoras and bowler hats. We wandered into the St. Louis Cathedral, Faulkner House Books, and Jean Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, which is lit only by candles and serves a great amaretto sour; the latter was the tour guide’s recommendation.

Another Quarter-specific thing: French Quarter architecture surprises outsiders. The exteriors of the buildings—dilapidated, with peeling paint, facades from the mid-1800s, and ancient wrought-iron gates—do not often reflect the tenor of the interiors, which can be luminous and sumptuous. Because the buildings are packed together so tightly on the narrow streets, it’s hard to tell how deep most of them are. A doorway no wider than a phone booth might show a glimpse of green and chairs through a long, dark hallway. You pass through the hall, and discover you’re in an open-air ivy-and-palm-tree-strewn courtyard, with building walls all around you. We wandered into Pat O’Brien’s, and were surprised by how vast the courtyard is, by how much space there is amidst the red brick to stretch out and unwind. James ordered the world-famous Hurricane; I had a mint julep, complete with a huge sprig of mint and a maraschino cherry. True to our nerdy selves, we nursed our drinks over the course of an hour, reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (James) and Daniel Pinkwater’s The Neddiad (me), and occasionally people-watching.

After reading a few chapters apiece, we left Pat O’Brien’s pleasantly buzzed and entered the humidity and stumbling walkers on St. Peter Street. Just down the street, we saw Preservation Hall. James immediately suggested it as a place to visit.

Now, I’m a big jazz fan but the moldy fig stuff leaves me cold. Yes, I own and enjoy a collection of Jelly Roll Morton’s recordings from 1926-27, and I’ve given R. Crumb’s old-timey tastes a try. Mostly, though, my jazz love runs post-1945, and against crackly vinyl and the rattling, slurred trombone and banjo. And what Preservation Hall wishes to preserve, of course, is the ragtime/stomp/moldy fig ramshackle jazz of the pre-1930 era.

But this trip was about searching out new avenues in one of my favorite cities, and about doing what James wanted to do. So I said, “Let’s go.”

And that’s why I’m standing up, on a Sunday night, in a rundown building that doesn’t have air conditioning, and that’s crammed with 50-60 enthusiastic fans, yelling my head off. This incarnation of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band (there have been several incarnations over the years) is blowing hot fire. We’ve reached that crescendo signaling the end of the first set, with the lead singer/trumpeter leading call-and-responses to the audiences and coming sly come-ons to the comely female singer who’s a student at Tulane University. The band engages the audience; the music comes from us as much as it comes from the folks onstage.

In fact, the “stage” is level with the audience floor, and the musicians sit unless they are moved to stand and wow us. Improvisational pyrotechnics threaten to ignite the walls. One thing about early jazz that’s been hard to get used to is that it seems like everyone is soloing all at once. For a good description of what’s going on, it’s useful to turn to Tom Piazza’s Understanding Jazz:

…Contemporary ears may be so used to hearing a sharp distinction between foreground and background, between a solo voice and its accompaniment, that a performance such as [King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band’s] “Weather Bird Rag” may come as something of a shock. In it, almost every instrumental voice, certainly every wind instrument, seems to be in the foreground at the same time.

[…]

Once our ears get used to the limited acoustic range, we can hear something like a musical miracle in progress. All the musicians are playing at once, each is playing something different, and yet the music doesn’t sound chaotic. There is a unified effect consisting of very different elements.

Those things—the limited acoustic range, and the blurred border between foreground and background—is what’s always bugged me about the oldest school of jazz. Tonight, though, this raucous energy and sexy musical slurs is getting me worked up. The crowd, too. We’re singing along, clapping energetically (even if we’re sometimes a little off the beat), and dripping with sweat. Old-time jazz blurs lines, exposes and takes advantage of the porous borders between instruments, between band and audience, between genres (jazz, blues, folk, country), and between solos and group swing. Band members traipse onto and off of the stage. The trap-kit drummer doesn’t show up to join the tuba-and-bass-drum rhythm section until the second song. The Asian clarinetist hops on stage around song four, plays two dynamite and insinuating solos for two respective songs (Is there a more immediately erotic sound than a clarinet blowing smoothly? I think not), and then quietly leaves the stage. He was in the fifth row before he joined the band; I thought he was just part of the audience.

Still, it’s a sauna in here, and not just because of the female singer glistening in the low-cut black dress. The set break comes as relief. James and I buy bottled water—no alcohol here, nor a restroom; the staff welcomes you to cross the street to a bar with both available—and check out the CDs. We rest. We know we’re sticking around for at least one more set.

During the second set, I realize that preservation doesn’t mean cryogenically freezing the sound. In rousing versions of “St. James Infirmary” and “This Little Light of Mine,” the singers adapt the lyrics to make hilarious, in-meter references to Playstation 2 and cellphones. For these kids—because none of the black musicians on stage is over 30—this music is far from “old-timey” or “moldy fig” or “old hat.” It’s contemporary, it’s right now. They feel it freshly, and make it fresh for the audience. We’re all rolling along, singing and clapping to songs twice as old as we are, to melodies that we’ve known in our bones since our first Sundays in church.

Indeed, the concert reminds me of church, but without the sermons or the bombastic moralizing. Just the communion, and a lot more sexual heat. Around 10:15pm, after the second set, James and I leave. This isn’t because the show wasn’t good—it was, in fact, overwhelming. So overwhelming that we needed a slow night walk back to the hotel—well, after a piña colada—to wind down and process it. And I’ve been thinking about the concert ever since.

They only come out at night

Sunset and twilight at the Circle J & B Ranch, Marshall, Texas, 14 July 2007. Photos by QuietBubble.

Another roadside attraction

C. and I were heading north on I-65 to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, when we saw the billboard: “Ave Maria Grotto.” Just in case we weren’t planning to turn off the interstate, there was a line above the headline that read, “A world in miniature!”

What was God’s green earth could that mean? We hemmed and hawed, but not for long, before deciding to get off at the next exit. C. dialed Brünhilde—who rooted around online in Jackson—while I drove towards a huge golden, two-steeple church that loomed over Cullman, Alabama, on our right. To our right was a slightly smaller, but still quite large, cathedral.

If we had had more time, I would have delved more into Cullman’s history. It must have had an interesting development. Alabama—and, really, the South in general—is not known as a hotbed of Roman Catholicism, outside of Louisiana. In part due to an influx of Spanish-speaking Catholics from Cuba and Latin America, I suppose Florida and parts of the southern Gulf Coast have high concentrations of Catholics. Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor are famous Catholic southern writers, so the faith has emerged with distinction in my neck of the woods. Still, it was mildly surprising that a mid-South town (Cullman’s in northern Alabama) of 16,000 was so dominantly Catholic, in the midst of a deeply Protestant—and often specifically anti-Catholic—region.

Then again, Cullman County was founded by a Bavarian immigrant, and the town’s first primary schools were Catholic parochial schools taught in English and German. I wonder how much its residents were harassed during World War II, or the decade just before it. (For a capsule history, go here.) But John Gottfried Cullman was a Lutheran, so go figure.

By the time Joseph Zoettl was born in 1878, in Landshut, Bavaria, Cullman must have built up a strong reputation as a Catholic safe haven and a place where he could find people like those he knew back home. Still, what an adjustment. I can’t imagine he was prepared for the heat, nor the Protestants that surround the county. And who knows what he thought when he first saw a black person? (Admittedly, the aforementioned history notes that the African American presence in the county has always been small, but all the same…)

Anyway, I’m glad Brother Joseph—because he indeed became a Benedictine monk, and a hunchback to boot—moved to Alabama, and built the Ave Maria Grotto. Constructed on the grounds of St. Bernard Abbey, the first (and, to date, only) Benedictine monastery in Alabama, the grotto features over 120 buildings and scenes from the New Testament, as well as noted events from the Old Testament. There are outliers—a fairyland castle, complete with an underground dragon; a hospital memorial to abbey students who died during WWII (29 of them) and subsequent American campaigns in Vietnam and Korea.

But I should back up. We drove to the glittering two steeples that I assumed would lead us to the grotto. Again, this is before I knew how Catholic the town was. This first stop, smack dab in downtown Cullman, turned out to be Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church and Preparatory School—which has its own Benedictine order (of sisters). But there was no Ave Maria Grotto nearby. We walked around Sacred Heart in the afternoon heatglare, and meandered to the local library. A librarian pointed us in the right direction, and said, “Just go a couple of miles. You can’t miss it.”

We drove down the road, into a canopy of trees that seemed to close in on us, as the road was simultaneously narrowing. Houses were sparse. I heard dueling banjos in the back of my head. The greenness opened up into a fork in the road, and a ten-foot-tall brown sign: “AVE MARIA GROTTO.” We went right.

The entrance looked like just another roadside attraction—a small parking lot, two or three picnic tables and benches with peeling paint, a low-to-the-ground gift shop. Only the monastery—it couldn’t be mistaken for anything else, fortified but also splendid—that lurked at us from a distance told us that this was the right place.

C. is a Triple-A member, so we got our tickets for five bucks instead of seven. The kind woman behind the shop counter led us past the cheesy knick-knacks, rosary beads, t-shirts, pamphlets, and saints’ cards to the next room. Ah, yes,, I smirked on the inside, of course there’s a video. I admit that I felt a little smug—Hey, kids! Kitsch!—and the video didn’t help. C. and I kept from giggling only because the woman was in the next room, and the shop was quiet as the catacombs. We only made it through five minutes before we had to head outside, and into the grotto.

It started small. We walked down a paved path—the whole place is a well-designed, gently declining and rising park in a roughly circular trail—and observed small statues of saints and building recreations. Brother Joseph was a master of using found (and donated) items—shards of glass, scrap metal, medallions and coins, polished rocks, beads, fragments of costume jewelry, discarded toys, figurines—with concrete.

My smirk quickly left me. These structures were junky but impassioned and, if they weren’t all beautiful, they at least inspired awe. The sheer patience it must have taken to build a small-scale—but not that small; it still was a foot tall—replica of the Roman Colosseum, with the materials at all, demands respect. Still, the first portion consists of somewhat better versions of what I had expected—Christian-themed dollhouses done by a lonely man.

Brother Joseph, though, couldn’t have been very lonely. As Ave Maria grew, so did the circle of friends willing to donate items, and to help him build. We turned a corner, and the structures got bigger and more elaborate. There was the aforementioned fairyland castle, and a couple of buildings were as tall as we were. There was a landscape of Brother Joseph’s Bavarian hometown, with the humble buildings built (I assume) according to the exact specifications of his memory.

While I was peering at the interiors of miniature Landshut, C. kept opening and closing her mouth, and waving her arms at me. She spoke in splutters that weren’t quite real words. So I came over to her.

It’s been said many times that the line between genius and the looney bin is mighty thin, but I confess that I didn’t fully understand what this meant until I turned that final corner.

When you suddenly find yourself face-to-face with a ten-feet-tall expanse of re-created, historically accurate landscape of Jerusalem, complete with all the critical scenes of the four Gospels, and when you realize that this expanse stretches out for the length of a basketball court, there’s not much you can say. Well, half a basketball court. The other half of that basketball-court length was taken up by a lovingly imagined hodgepodge of the Italian countryside, featuring St. Paul’s Basilica, St. Peter’s Basilica, and—way up high—the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Everything was clearly labeled, from the scene being represented to the year of its completion. The Old Testament landscape—yes, another vast landscape crowded with buildings and statues, all built to scale and meticulously detailed—had running water on its to-scale streets.

The centerpiece was—what else?—Mary in a small cave. By small, I mean that the cave, elaborated by glass-and-concrete stalactites and cherubs, wasn’t very deep. There was enough room for a couple and a priest to stand, and it faced a beautiful lawn with flowers and a rickety bench. The Mother Mary in the back of the cave was eight feet tall, and the cave’s a few feet taller. People could get married right there, with onlookers on the lawn. I’m sure I’m not the first to have thought of this.

The landscapes overwhelmed so completely that Noah’s Ark (toy animals in couples) and the Tower of Babel (with signs in a variety of languages indicating what it was) were slight letdowns. Heading back up to the gift shop, the sculptures became more modern. Some structures were built after Joseph’s death, and the cutesy “Chipmunk Crossing” near the end didn’t match the audacity of what had come before. The sleeping cat next to the gift shop brought us out of our reverie.

Reveries, though, don’t typically come so cheaply. If you’re ever in northern Alabama, you owe it to yourself to see Brother Joseph’s celebration of his faith and crazy-beautiful contribution to the world. God bless him.

The old homestead

Jackson, Mississippi is home for me now, but Dallas, Texas is Home. Like many Homes for many citizens, I had to flee. Mimi Swartz, a Texan who lived in the Big D from 1988 to 1991 (on Mercedes, about eight blocks north of my ancestral home on Richmond Avenue), returns after a long absence. Much has changed and much, alas, has not:

I approached my sentimental favorite, NorthPark Center, with trepidation. I shouldn’t have worried: the Nasher family artwork collection, including Andy Warhol, Jim Dine and Frank Stella, was still showing Neiman’s in its best light, along with newer stores like Barneys New York, Nordstrom, Oscar de la Renta and Intermix. (Khajak Keledjian, a co-owner of Intermix, used to watch Dallas as a kid in Beirut, so when it came time to expand, he had a soft spot for Texas.) I was greeted like a long-lost relation. Way back in the ’60s, Joan Didion described a woman she had met in Dallas who was “charming and attractive” and “accustomed to the hospitality and hypersensitivity of Texas.” That’s still true at NorthPark, and it’s still true of the city at large: Dallas needs to be appreciated by the larger world, a characteristic that will always separate it from bigger, burlier American cities.

She’s a woman after my own heart. NorthPark is my favorite place to take a stroll as well, and it’s the one place I make a point of visiting whenever I’m in town. So, let’s clarify. I’ve got more of a sentimental attachment to a glitzy, artsy, extremely high-end shopping mall than I do to the Dallas Museum of Art or the I.M. Pei-designed Morton Meyerson Symphony Hall. I guess it’s true: You can take the man out of Dallas, but you can’t take the Dallas out of the man.

The article’s worth a read.

(Thanks, Winter.)

The Bean

Cloud Gate by Anish Kapoor (Millennium Park, Chicago). Photo taken by Quiet Bubble on 24 October 2006. Click image for larger version. Thanks to CultureSpace for the inspiration.

Chicago Chop House

Last Wednesday night found me doing something I’ve never done before: paying more than $50 for a single meal. Dates don’t count. Preparation for parties doesn’t count. Paying for a friend’s birthday dinner doesn’t count—and, even then, I’ve never paid than $40.

Even more surprising, I’d chosen to splurge at a steakhouse. I don’t eat beef more than four or five times a month, and often it’s less than that. When I do carve up cow, I cook it myself. A family friend once told my stepdad that steakhouses are wastes of time. Steak, he argued, is one food that anybody can cook faster, better, and more cheaply at home than you ever could in a restaurant. “When I go out to eat,” he said, “I want to eat something that I couldn’t make better myself.” Those words have always stuck with me. Besides, I’ve never been an over-the-moon steak fan, instead preferring my beef as burgers, barbecue, or fajitas.

But Chicago had spent three days working its magic on me. It does things to people. I figured that a city that owes a good deal of its wealth to the stockyards is a city that might just know what a good steak tastes like. So, on a chilly Wednesday evening, as a World Series game was being rained out in St. Louis, I sat with a vodka martini in my hand, observing the woodsy, amber glow of the Chicago Chop House.

That martini was perfectly prepared, with both the small splash of Campari and lemon twist that I requested. A patina of shaved ice reflected light on its surface. I sat in the smoking section because the wait for a single nonsmoking table was going to be over an hour, and was pleasantly surprised to find that no one was smoking. The hostesses were all Indian, well-mannered, and gorgeous. The place was crowded but the noise level was mild and pleasant; conversation bubbled instead of boiled over. Best of all, the house television was off for most of the meal. A customer tried to turn it off to catch the Detroit/St. Louis game, but it was a rainout and the offending device was quickly flicked off.

Joe, my waiter, knew his meat. He knew his customers, too—he had a fan club seated just behind me. He convinced me to try the baked cherrystone clams casino, even though I only know what a cherrystone clam is because of a Joseph Mitchell article, and I had no idea what “casino” implied. For the record, this appetizer involved six juicy clams lightly baked in a creamy, bready sauce that was spicy, and a little tangy. Joe knew that I’d want Tabasco sauce without my requesting it. The house salad that came between the appetizer and the main course was fresh, deeply green, and doused in a rich, homemade blue cheese dressing.

Since I ordered a New York strip, I decided to drink a Manhattan to go with it. I guess I had forgotten what 24 ounces of medium rare, boneless, juicy steak looks like. The presentation was terrific and simple but, in the end, it’s just a big hunk of meat. Buttered, with slightly salty juice running out of every cut, ever so slightly charred and blackened on the surface, rubbed in salt and pepper, tender and dark red on the inside, thoroughly lacking in gristle… okay, it’s a particularly delicious hunk of meat. But, still, people regularly pay 45 bucks for this?

Well, I did. I dipped each cut in its own juice. I savored each morsel. I sipped my Manhattan—again, perfectly made—and tried the baked potato and chives. I took my time. Even so, I surprised myself—not really; I’d spent eight hours walking around Lincoln Park and getting lost on the “Museum Campus,” and hadn’t eaten much breakfast or lunch—by eating it all. Slowly, to be sure (Joe didn’t rush me), but I did it. I even tried the turtle cheesecake and an Armagnac. I inhaled the aroma of the brandy, reveled in its golden brown hue and, sipping slowly, toasted myself.

I deserved a toast, having turned 30 on October 15th. I don’t feel any different than I did on the 14th, or six months previously. Though I’ve been asked regularly how it feels (or, more to the point: “How does it feel to be an old man?”), I get the feeling that most of the people asking are doing so because they think they should, not because they actually think it’s any different. I certainly haven’t reached any conclusions. Except, perhaps, one—it’s okay to indulge yourself, to enjoy corporeal pleasures, to spend $100 on a good meal every once in a while.

Operation Ignatius

It’s official: I've got to get off my duff and meet these PrettyFakes guys. At least one of them lives in my town, and they're stealing my life.

Last week, the site’s Professor Fury took a trip to New Orleans, and wrote prose snapshots of the experience. On 2 July, I drove down to the Crescent City for my first multi-day excursion there since pre-Katrina times, and stayed—for the first time—in a French Quarter hotel.

Not only did Fury stay in the same hotel I stayed in, he also visited the same high-ceilinged, close-quarters bookstore I loitered in to escape the humidity. Our footprints probably crisscrossed on Bourbon Street—the Prince Conti Hotel’s a half-block from the madness—on several occasions.

So, I’m beginning to feel like the protagonist of Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, who is trying to catch up with his impostor.

It’s worth noting that the protagonist’s name is Philip Roth, because I often felt that weekend that I was trying to keep up with an earlier, less world-weary version of myself. Two nights before driving down, I made a detailed itinerary, with careful driving directions to each place from my hotel. Although I drew up plans to dine at Galatoire’s and Jacques-Imo’s for the first time, the list featured more retreads than new experiences—a return to Longue Vue, my favorite garden in North America; a sushi joint on Bienville that I’d last eaten at on December 31, 1999, when Jorge and I surveyed the Y2K craziness with silly, whiskey-smeared smiles; daily beignets and café au lait at Café du Monde on Decatur; the Audubon Zoo, last visited with an old girlfriend; the New Orleans Museum of Art’s sculpture garden, which I visit every time I go to the city.

The one real difference was that I’d be staying at the Prince Conti Hotel, smack dab in the Quarter. Usually, I go to the Quarter for specific things—a concert at Preservation Hall, a mid-afternoon stroll through the French Market, the aforementioned breakfast of pure, luxurious joy—and then get out. I naively thought of it as a site primarily for drunken frat boys and the girls that love them.

So, I planned a nostalgia fest. Nature had other plans.

Garden party

People fall in love with New Orleans for lots of reasons. For gourmands, it’s the plethora of great restaurants. For those who are bad at math, it’s the gigantic and gaudy Harrah’s Casino that looms over Canal Street. For horny frat boys, it’s piss- and vomit-stained Bourbon Street. For architecture buffs, it’s, well, the whole damn city, but particularly the French Quarter. For those who like the nightlife better with a dollop of mystery, it’s the undercurrent of Haitian vodou that courses through the above-ground cemeteries and dimly lit backstreets.

For me, it’s the gardens.

Now, I’ll never be a horticulturist. I have trouble remembering the names of basic, everyday flowers, much less the fragrant and exotic varieties found in the Crescent City. Hell, I managed to kill a cactus. But I love gardens of all kinds. I love breathing in the wild, luscious aromas. I love the ways sunlight radiates off of, and through, petals and stems. The riot of color and buzzing insects thrills me.

More than anything, I love the idea of a garden. A garden is a space designed specifically to cultivate wild, lush, verdant life. It takes the jungle and the forest, and attempts to control it, providing a contained environment in which city dwellers can traipse, and linger.

In The Omni-Americans, Albert Murray writes:

Art is by definition a process of stylization; and what it stylizes is experience. What it objectifies, embodies, abstracts, expresses, and symbolizes is a sense of life. Accordingly, what is represented in the music, dance, painting, sculpture, literature, and architecture of a given group of people in a particular time, place, and circumstance is a conception of the essential nature and purpose of human existence. More specifically, an art style is the assimilation in terms of which a given community, folk, or communion of faith embodies its basic attitudes toward experience.

Gardens, as much as food and jazz, radiate the sense of life in New Orleans. The city has also mixed together ethnicity, race, and ideology in ways that are bewildering to other parts of America. And even to New Orleans citizens—ask ten residents the definition of “Creole,” and you’ll get ten different answers, and yet “Creole” is a defining element of the city. Cultures there have blended together until the lines between them are blurred irrevocably. The city, perhaps more than any other in America, embodies Murray’s concept of the Omni-American, of each and every American as a cultural mulatto, from the landing of Columbus’s ships to the present day. The concept is writ large in New Orleans, and broadcast best through its gardens.

Gardens are where the city’s personality is best expressed. Because if gardens are places where vibrant colors come together, accentuate each other, and cross-blend into unmanageable hybrids, they are also places where smell is paramount. New Orleans is a city of smells, of sewage and muskiness from the Mississippi River, of overpowering perfumes in the French Market, of sweat and piss and horseshit, of spices and succulent meats and fresh fish, of chicory-flecked coffee and buttery croissants, and of—more than anything—flowers and pollen. All these smells commingle. As many years as I’ve lived in Jackson and Dallas, I don’t associate either city with aromas. It’s not that they don’t have smells, but New Orleans has a specific smell. It’s a smelly city, in a way that most others are not.