"Growing up in New Orleans, I experienced music and dance as forms of expression that allow us to be most in our bodies, to have and own our bodies. I defined this as real freedom. I am New Orleans... I embody its culture and spirit. I look in the mirror, I dance, or I make food. It comes out when I hear my voice, I hear home. I carry this with me always and it comes through everything I do. I come from a street art place—in New Orleans, everyone is an artist. We know how to take shit and make gold. That's something I hold very close to me."

Lorna Williams, “Tree of Life: Q+A With Lorna Williams” Art in America, 9/7/2011

Link URL:   Link to full article in Art in America

Andrei Codrescu opens New Orleans, Mon Amour, Twenty Years of Writings from the City by popping the question:

“How did we fall in love? At first sight, violently.”

“Later, when I started living there, I caught the Mythifying-of-New Orleans virus, too. The city that Mark Twain called “the upholstered sewer” generated stories like water from a faucet left on everywhere you looked."

Andrei Codrescu, New Orleans, Mon Amour, Twenty Years of Writings from the City, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill 2006.

"It is a place that seems often unable to make up its mind whether it will be earth or water, and so it compromises," wrote Louisiana historian Harnett T. Kane in The Bayous of Louisiana. “The result is that much of Louisiana belongs to neither element. The line of demarcation is vague and changing. The distinction between degrees of well-soaked ground is academic except to one who steps upon what looks like soil, but finds that it is something else.”

The culture of New Orleans is a rich mingling of many diverse ethnicities, spiritualities, communities, attitudes, rituals and traditions. Not only have New Orleanians developed their own food and music, the people also speak a different language from the rest of the United States. The following is a list of terms explained in a manner to provide insight into the universe that is New Orleans...

“Burn K-Doe Burn” Shots is kind of a long story. Native New Orleanian Ernie K-Doe, Ernest Kador, Jr., February 22, 1936 - July 5, 2001, “the one, the only, the baddest motorscooter and the Greatest Boy-Child ever conceived at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, Louisiana” (according to the official website www.k-doe.com), shot to fame in 1961, when his song “Mother-in-Law,” written by New Orleanian Allen Toussaint, climbed to No. 1 in the nation and sold millions. K-Doe, also an accomplished drummer, recorded other rhythm and blues hits like "A Certain Girl", "T'ain't It the Truth", "Come On Home", "Te-Ta-Te-Ta-Ta" and "Later for Tomorrow" and years later “White Boy, Black Boy." "Mister Naugahyde,” as he billed himself in the 1980s on local radio shows, used catch phrases like "Burn, K-Doe, Burn!", "I'm a Charity Hospital Baby!" and “I’m cocky, but I’m good!” In the ‘90s, the energetic showman began wearing a crown and cape and calling himself “Emperor of the Universe.” He opened his Ernie K-Doe Mother-in-Law Lounge in 1994, 1500 N. Claiborne Avenue, New Orleans and, in 1996, married Antoinette Fox who became a legend in her own right. Often, K-Doe himself would meet you at the door of his bar and music club where he and other living legends of New Orleans performed. The signature drink there was called Burn K-Doe Burn, containing cherries and a highly potent distilled grain-alcohol.

So,
when the strong unholy high winds
whiplashed over the sold-off marshlands
eaten back to a sigh of saltwater,
the Crescent City was already shook down to her pilings,
her floating ribs, her spleen & backbone...

Excerpt from Requiem by Yusef Komunyakaa, Oxford American, Issue 51, Fall 2005

Link URL:   Link to full text of poem "Requiem".

"New Orleans always understood far better than more so-called sophisticated cities that culture is experience, not product."

Annette Carlozzi, “In Katrina’s Wake, An Exhibition/Report/Call to Leadership,” Art Lies, Issue 58, Workspace 08

Link URL:   Link to Article

"The conflicting spirits of eccentricity, despair and carnival permeate the psychogeography making streets storytellers and wrecked homes witness to a full range of human experience."

Dr. Lori A. Kent, “Emerging Resistance: New Orleans Psychogeography as Constructed through Memory-based Visual Arts, Cultures in Resistance,” The 7th Conference of the Discourse, Power, Resistance Series, 18-20 March 2008, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK

Link URL:   Link to Abstract