The Most Unusual Story
Mon Feb 12, 2007 at 03:51:12 PM PDT
Of his film entitled, "Experience Like No Other", by filmmaker Stephen Ives, yesterday's New Orleans Times-Picayune reports:
The combination of history and culture, edification and empathy, puts this project at the top of the pile of documentaries that have been done about this town since the big soak. It's the one to show first to someone who's never been here, or, for that matter, a lot of lifers. Not to mention every member of Congress.
Many of you have taken an interest in the continuing saga, the major battle of New Orleans, taking place right here and in real time. This film, however, covers what is truly important for you to know about this place that is, for any who truly know her, their muse.
Taken from the article:
Filmaker Stephen Ives didn't experience Hurricane Katrina and its floody aftermath as breaking news...he was on vacation on an island without TV in late August and early September 2005, so his ensuing "American Exerience" assignment to do a post-K historical overview of New Orleans wasn't as visceral as it might've been had he spent a week glued to CNN's helicopter-shot horrow show, as much of America apprently did.
Because of this, he reports that,
"....it galvanized us to do the job in an in-depth way. We were just so convinced there was a much more complicated and more interesting story beneath it."
I first came to New Orleans as a seeker. That, in and of itself, is not an unusual story as it's a common one. In fact, the story of my life here holds much in common with anyone who has left their home to co-habitate with their muse. So, the story might sound mundane. At least the overview might. However, what is so unusual is that my experience is not what most people have when they move to a new place, but rather it is the universal experience of those who come to love New Orleans.
To begin, my first impression of the French Quarter was that it was full of little cottages that could be huffed and puffed and blown away. This absolutely delighted me for some reason as I had no idea what to expect except what I had seen in pictures. I knew New Orleans was a big deal to alot of people I knew, but what I hadn't known was that it would be so raw, so unpretentious, so totally lacking in self-consciousness. The very idea, that a city like this could be found in America, made me absolutely giddy! The line from Marcia Ball's song, "La Ti Da" kept coming back to me, "...don' know enough to be ashamed. La Ti Da...."
It's just the most complicated subject I've ever encountered, and I've done the American West, which is fiendishly complex.
Several visits later, I was on the St. Charles streetcar, in a summer dress and no panties when I felt every molecule in my body shift from "tightly fit" to "loosely floating". It was at that very moment that it dawned on me: I could live here. A childhood friend of my husband's moved here about 8 years ago. He astutely observed, "People in New Orleans have fuzzy outlines. They're all soft. Like a Monet. Not like people up north where they have more definate outlines."
There are shades of gray and brown and black and white and everything in between. As soon as you think you've got it figured out, it moves
Tendrils of humidity slowly crept around my ankles and calves, and then embraced my thighs as a mockingbird distracted me with its imitation of a car alarm; this was my first morning as a fresh, new resident of New Orleans. A gardenia was planted somewhere. I suppose I should have been more aware of the mockingbird. But what's a car alarm when you're in love? And besides, I had French doors in my bedroom.
Ives compares Las Vegas to New Orleans:
No surprise, New Orleans provided Ives vivid contrast to his most recent prior subject, Las Vegas.
"They both cultivated and to a certain degree thrived, for at least part of the their history, on the image of the demimonde, the outsider fringe culture in America, as places you go to satisfy all those forbidden desires that you can't experience in the rest of the country," he said. "The difference between Las Vegas and New Orleans is really the difference between a calculated in-authentic culture, in some ways built entirely around artifice and fantasy and illusion and the suspension of disbelief, and (a culture) deeply rooted in authenticity.
Both are very American and utterly un-American at the same time. They both live on the paradoxical edge, and you never quite know if they're emblematic of the essential nature of the culture, or (if) they are informing that experience by their differences.
They both really captured my imagination. They tell you a lot about the state of American culture and what our society is all about."
In Anne Rice's book, "Interview with the Vampire", she tells of a time when the pragmatic Lestat, after losing a great battle that drains him of all his strength, is discovered many years later by the soul-tortured Louis, holed up, shriveled and gray, in a decrepid mansion in the Garden District. (I've been by it many times and the location scout chose well.) Louis leaves him behind only to see him re-emerge several years later as the next generation's rock star.
One of the hardest things about telling the New Orleans story is that, on an economic level, you can say it's a story of perpetual decline since the Civil War. And yet, on a cultural level, it's been this extraordinary and steady fluorescence.
Have I told you that New Orleans embraces the very worst and the most exhalted in human behavior? I have seen interactions between human beings, that are so lovely, so delicate, so ripe with "aliveness", so vital that they have, literally, brought me to my knees.
If you really want to get why New Orleans matters, why it has to be saved, your opportunity is tonight.
PBS, 'American Experience'.
Tonight at 8pm CST
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