I have established myself in a hotel very close to, but not in, the French quarter. I managed to find one for around $100 a night including parking, taxes and so on. My mistake in Nashville, quite aside from it being shitesville which I could not reasonably have predicted, was that it was 2/3 miles away from the 'action' and incurred taxi fees there and back, thus wiping out the advantage of lower charges. So I am well placed here and get a good breakfast. I'm trying to just eat out once a day, so a good breakfast helps no end.
A further insight came to me yesterday as I drove from Jackson down here, about the cop who busted me. Early in our interview I was trying to point out how hard it was to keep the blue monster at a quiet and reasonable speed. Yes, he said, it is a very nice bike. Then towards the end of the incident, as he handed me the documents detailing the offence, he said it again. Note the word 'very'. I'll bet a pound to a penny that he was actually quite jealous. I suspect he would just love to go down that road at that speed on a bike, but he knows he can never do it.
As New Orleans approached, a surprising 35 miles out, we hit water. That is water became all around us as we moved along an elevated roadway. There was land too but mostly what I take to be shallow water. At one point a series of electricity pylons marched, not over the ground, but out to sea, all supported on concrete pontoons. They stretched as far as the eye could see, which as I recall is about 5 miles; the distance to the horizon when looking over a flat sea.
Its really quite hot here, but then look at your atlas, its about on the latitude of the southern Sahara. As I came into the inner city, stopping here and there, as one does for traffic lights and so on, I realised my arms were beginning to burn. The wind at 70 mph cools you down; now I had slowed, they glowed; in an ominous way. I had thought myself to be pretty well tanned, after all I've had two spells in France already this year and this is the third day I have been riding in a T-shirt, but the southern sun is strong.
A two hour stroll around the French Quarter's advertised attractions was not exciting. Like most major tourists venues its full of 101 shops and stalls all selling the same overpriced tat; with the location's particular twist. But I did discover an area with a pile of music bars, more spread out, but not dissimilar to Broadway in Nashville. Chatted to a couple of black, very smartly turned out doormen at one eating place who assured me that come 8 p.m., the joint would be jumping. Which by and large it was. Unfortunately, 15 minutes before I got there, the cafe in question was taken over by a huge party who took every seat going. So I had to look elsewhere for food and it was not the exciting culinary adventure I hoped for; without being awful I hasten to add.
Most of the music bars seemed to have bands playing a standard R n B format; variations on guitar, keyboards, horns and female singers. The latter seemed uniformly mediocre, enthusiastic but ordinary; maybe it was just a bad night. Then I found the Spotted Cat Music Club where a trio led by a black washboard player, Chaz I think, with white steel guitar and harmonica players. Bit more like it. After a wander around when they finished, confirming not much else seemed interesting, I returned to the Spotted Cat to hear the New Orleans Cotton Mouth Kings. With, wonder of wonders, a bass saxophone player. A Cotton Mouth, by the way, is a very poisonous Louisiana snake they told me. Fiddle, trumpet, sax, upright bass and guitar. I left at the end of their second set at around 12.30 as I was ready to fall over. They confidently predicted they'd go on until 2 a.m or so.
As I walked back to my hotel I was surprised by a bout of sneezing. At 5.30 a.m. I awoke with another and felt that tell tale irritation at the back of the throat that pressages a cold//flu/throat infection. I blame the fact I am staying in a hotel with air conditioning, but who knows.
I woke up just in time to get breakfast, bring it back to my room, and watch the Toon's glorious defeat of Blackburn Rovers 3 -1. [As I appear to have a US audience now Toon = Newcastle United, a soccer club about which Geordies are just as passionate as Americans seem to be about their football teams]. My forearms were approaching lobster pink in a couple of places so they've had to remain under wraps today; well lubricated with lotion. Otherwise I generally feel 1 degree under, as the old advertising slogan has it.
Went out to the Louisiana State Museum to see an exhibiton about Race. New Orleans is the the most mixed community after Washington I have experienced. But very different of course; as this is the South. The white people who fought for a Confederation, not a Union, of States; so that nobody could tell them to stop keeping dem niggers as slaves.
Lincoln's address, carved in the wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, makes it quite clear his fight was to maintain a Union of States and that it was not a war for the emancipation of blacks; although in many ways that was, of course, the effect.
I was not mightily impressed with the exhibition; nowhere, for instance, did it tell you where to start which I personally find helpful as it demonstrates some clarity of thinking. There was a quiz about the issues an 'ol bighead scored 10 out of 10. What it did do for me, although it never said it simply and clearly, was to emphasis that our concepts of race are just about entirely social constructs. They have no scientific basis whatsoever. Best moment was a 'fit the face to the voice' game. Where the whitest woman of the 6 on screen turned out to be the one with the broadest Jamaican patois you have ever heard, I did laugh out loud at myself.
Maybe I do the exhibition an injustice; but a glaring ommission was the fact that China, and Islam for that matter, had developed sophisticated cultures and societies 1000 years before the scientific rationalism of the enlightenment had begun to classify humans in appalling ways we have only begun to properly redesss in the past 60 years or so. So good on them for spelling it out, but the cultural relativist bias is still astonishing.
As for the camera it has developed an aversion to daylight. Bizarre. The man in Radio Shack said he had never seen the like:
As I started taking pictures yesterday afternoon this is what happened. No idea how this will look on the blog, but it has a whole load of horizontal white lines on the screen here. But take a photo indoors, as I have just done:
A HOTEL BED IN NEW ORLEANS
Only one photograph seems to have escaped this strange turn of events:
PALM TREES IN NEW ORLEANS
If this persists I can only apologise. I shall take the camera out tonight and try a few shots in the dark. Metaphor for life really.
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