In a city that’s staring down the barrel of its 300th birthday, I feel comfortable in my sweeping generalization that there’s a story just about everywhere you look in New Orleans. You don’t have to walk too long before the bizarre crosses your path, and if you have spent enough time here, sometimes it doesn’t even register on the radar. Sometimes.
Most days I’m privileged, and only during inclement, monsooning weather am I cursed, to be able to walk to my place of work. I started thinking I may have become desensitised to the madness when on the morning commute I happened upon a giant jester’s head atop a float and wasn’t going to stop to wonder or ask why. I did, however, stop at the gentle behest of a lady wearing an NCIS baseball cap. Because that’s a symbol of authority and power?! While I did think it was odd there was a parade at 8:00 on a Tuesday morning it was completely within the realms of possibility that the floats were being moved from one location to another. But no, the excited group of onlookers, donning feather boas and over-sized novelty sunglasses were being compensated for their valuable time all in the name of an episode. Madam Baseball Cap requested I cease my barrelling through the set and stand and pretend like she and I were conversing. I give you my television debut people, all thanks to entertainment professionals attempting to make it look like being a cop in New Orleans is sexy. That concept being so far from accurate it be London if the truth be Hobart!
I know I’m not as observant as I could be about what’s around me at street level a lot of the time and this is even more true of what might be up above. But it turns out I’m not becoming as oblivious to my surroundings as I may have originally thought and I like to credit “The Goddess Revisited” with this discovery. This collaborative creation is a two-storey high, 3-D mural, installed above a Thai restaurant in New Orleans’ CBD. An ode to the ladies it pays homage to some truly great trail blazers; Harriet Tubman, Amelia Earhart, Oprah Winfrey…..Wonder Woman. Impressed doesn’t quite capture the sentiment when wandering back from dinner you see a plastic lady deity with a video screen in her stomach shining from the exterior of a 19th-century townhouse. Anyone who lives in a city that may not be the most aesthetically pleasing, can appreciate how welcome these breaks in the ordinary are. Creativity as adventurous as this, almost hidden in a side street, can make you feel warm and fuzzy about the place you live again despite the dirt and noise. The Goddess is just one piece in the mosaic that is P3; the third edition of Prospect New Orleans; a large scale art extravaganza that takes place across the entire city every two years. Aptly, The Goddess is subtitled “From the Venus of Willendorf to Trucker Mud Flaps”. Indeed!
More stories to come as just over a month after the fat man in the red suit shimmied his big carcass down chimneys the world over, New Orleans dusted itself off and dove head first into Mardi Gras…..more on that a little bit later 🙂 For now, like the great son of New Orleans Mr Fats Domino, who recently celebrated his 87th birthday and loves his ninth ward before and after Katrina says; I’m walkin’.
The Last Bohemian City 