It’s day five at New Orleans and the fear I had of running out of things to do has disappeared. This city was Tennessee Williams’ home and muse. Streetcar Named Desire was born here. Vieux Carré, Glass Menagerie - his fragile female characters on the verge of nervous breakdowns are from here. In the quietly manic streets of French Quarters, I too can imagine how one can slowly lose their grip on reality, give into their senses and desires in this all enveloping humidity, adopt a spirit of no tomorrow and only today, and commune with the melancholy ghosts that haunt the city.
Capote, Hemingway, Faulkner all stayed at Hotel Monteleone. You feel inspired - the music can be found at the Spotted Cat on Frenchmen St at 2PM, 6PM, 9PM. You can have a cocktail with lunch and for dinner, and sober up with Café Au Lait in between. Somehow in this up and down madness, inspiration does find you. And you think to yourself this is what being an artist is: a cycle of self-loathing, ambition, and inspiration.
My fingers trembled at the keyboard when Chris Christy, a jazz musician playing at the Spotted Cat, told me to go play something on the piano while the band took a smoke break. The shame and vulnerability I felt while tinkering with the keys trying to remember Fur Elise, the one song I can play from memory; the shattering of an illusion - the piano looked easy and tempting until I got up there to play; the absolute terror… I turned around and almost everyone had left. One drunk dad from Norcal gave me a pity compliment, “Keep it up, ya did great!” and his empty eyes made me feel worse. I put on a brave face walking out of the jazz club and then called my brother who said this experience was good for me.
It’s jarring to be in a European city without Europeans, to suddenly enter a Catholic Church in the middle of the town square and feel inspired to pray. Even scents at a perfumery feels heightened here when mixed with sweat on your sticky and warm skin. Everything is tangible, edible, eclectic, and overwhelming. I mean, just look at the amount of powdered sugar on your beignets. This is a city of excess.
It’s good to know that if I ever feel the urge for inspiration, I can seek out live jazz on the Frenchmen St. There are so many couples here, but it’s not really a city for lovers. It’s a city for artists.
Some thoughts for the visitors: The buildings are lovely but only when the streets are quieter. The beignets are good but not from Café Du Monde, but rather at Café Beignet. Get two perfumes and two colognes at Hové that smell better than all the perfumes in a department store, and only cost $33 instead of $133. Be careful of Sazerac Cocktails - they are strong. Eat at Galatoire’s and Commander’s Palace if you can get a reservation. Wear masks, there’s people coughing from residual COVID. Do return to Spotted Cat to check out great musicians. Bring cash to tip musicians. And wear a sports bra on a hot day - walking makes you sweat. And dab some cologne you just bought behind your ears, neck, and wrists because why not? You will feel feminine and sensual and it goes with the spirit of the French Quarters in all its pastel glory.
A poem by Tennessee Williams at The Historic New Orleans Collection.
“Success happened to me. But once you fully apprehend the vacuity of a life without struggle you are equipped with the basic means of salvation. Once you know this is true, that the heart of man, his body and his brain, are forged in a white-hot furnace for the purpose of conflict (the struggle of creation) and that with the conflict removed, the man is a sword cutting daisies, that not privation but luxury is the wolf at the door and that the fangs of this wolf are all the little vanities and conceits and laxities that Success is heir to - why then with this knowledge you are at least in a position of knowing where danger lies. You know, then, that the public Somebody you are when you “have a name” is a fiction created with mirrors and that the only somebody worth being is the solitary and unseen you that existed from your first breath and which is the sum of your actions and so is constantly in a state of becoming under your own volition — and knowing these things, you can even survive the catastrophe of Success! [...] Security is a kind of death, I think, and it can come to you in a storm of royalty checks beside a kidney-shaped pool in Beverly Hills or anywhere at all that is removed from the conditions that made you an artist, if that’s what you are or were or intended to be. [...] Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that’s dynamic and expressive — that’s what’s good for you if you’re at all serious in your aims. William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. “In the time of your life— live!” That time is short and it doesn’t return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, Loss, Loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.”