cry, the beloved country
i've been to new orleans four times in my life. each time i go, i come away with a sense of alternate reality, as if there's a version of me that's been there for years. back when i was making decisions about what college to attend, i narrowly missed landing at tulane university, courtesy of a last-minute deal with my parents and a slightly heftier scholarship from nyu's gallatin school, where i ended up. i have a feeling that a vanessa in new orleans at seventeen might have ended up staying there, and things would have gone very differently for me.

all speculation aside, i've always been in love with the place... with the attendant music, past and present ("house of the rising sun," the be good tanyas' "lakes of ponchartrain," and even "bloodletting" by concrete blonde") and the historical mystique and the marvelous food and the horrifying, carnal primality of the flesh-hot air and the swamp and the bayous and the roachy, lizard-spotted, banana-leafed immediacy of it all.

if you shuffle back in the archives here till you reach june, you'll see copious notes on where i went, and what i ate, and about a million photos of everything i saw, save for the goddamn roaches because i just don't have the presence of mind to take snaps of insects which are skittering about at excesses of the speed of sound. i could go on, here, but i guess what i am leading up to is the big storm, Katrina (a category 5 hurricane, to be precise) which is even now plowing mightily over jefferson parish on its way to points north. i didn't take any pictures of it, but if you've driven over the Lake Ponchartrain causeway, you'll have an idea of what i'm talking about when i recall the seemingly endless shallow-water flats of glassy silver reflecting the sunset in shades of dove-gray and blush-pink. it's something. the city and it's environs, under the folkloric-sounding name jefferson parish, which is a nifty euphemism for 'county' i guess... are all clothed in a palpable sense of deep, purple, tropical gothic mysticism. it's not so hard to imagine half-mad voudons gleaming with sweat under fragarantly smoking bonfire shadows, or nattily attired vampires abroad in the garden district, for god's sake, when you find yourself in a place as determinedly backwards, (and beautifully so) as this...

with the palpable sense of mortality that hangs over the whole shebang, it ought to come to no surprise that the teasers of it's own doom sound like this:

"NEW ORLEANS — When Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans, it could turn one of America's most charming cities into a vast cesspool tainted with toxic chemicals, human waste and even coffins released by floodwaters from the city's legendary cemeteries. -AP Monday, August 29, 2005"

What a way to go...

So here's a list of things I'd miss, if the Atchafalaya Basin becomes the Atchafalaya Memorial Landfill today:

Trey Yuen Cuisine Of China in Mandeville, LA

http://www.treyyuen.com/

especially the monster crab rangoons and the crayfish in spicy lobster and black bean sauce, which i never would've ordered if it weren't for Andy nagging my ass. also, the gorgeous gardens with the biggest man-made fishpond i've ever seen, just crawling with frogs and crayfish and god knows what else.

Audubon Park, Garden District

http://www.auduboninstitute.org/park/index.php

A very pleasant, if horrifically steamy, place to run, with the most gorgeous lake populated by what seems like hundreds of snowy egrets and mossy-backed turtles.

Oysters

Rockefeller, Bienville, Arnaud, on the half shell, and best of all, Drago's Charbroiled...

Drago's Restaurant in Metarie http://www.dragosrestaurant.com/

was the first meal I had off the plane the last time I was in the city, and I'm never not going again.

from the site:

"About ten years ago, Tommy Cvitanovich, manager of Drago's, was thinking about the dish that bears his name. (Drumfish Tommy is broiled drumfish napped with a superb butter garlic sauce.) He wondered: How would that sauce taste drizzled over one of the fat, tasty oysters for which Drago's is known? And what if that oyster was then cooked over an open fire? There were other oyster dishes cooked in a shell, but those were baked with a stuffing. Tommy's idea was simple. Almost too simple. We tested it. It was extraordinary! We tried to improve on the sauce by adding wine. We tried bordelaise sauce. But the unofficial tasters at the restaurant, who had the enviable chore of sampling countless oysters, all came to the same conclusion. You can't improve on perfection!"