Vanitas

I spent the weekend in New Orleans with family. New Orleans is an unusual town, made more so by its reputation. It is an intriguing city that has developed the mystique that its public culture transcends all of its varied peoples, and molds it into a new way of life that has evolved in New Orleans, including the food, the festival, the music. When I think about New Orleans I think about its distinctive form of Jazz music and its repute for uniquely named, heavily spiced foods. But when I am in New Orleans, and particularly in the French Quarter, I feel like I am surrounded by one gigantic never-ending frat party, where the bars never close. The veil of mystique drops away, and I am left standing on a dank cobble street surrounded by thousands of people drinking neon colored concoctions and leering from side to side as if waiting for some Tijuana sex show to begin at any moment.

New Orleans reminds me of a painting by the artist Ivan Albright, "Into the world there came a soul named Ida", The painting of a lady, transformed into a woman of late middle age, sadly inspecting her reflection in a mirror and mourning the loss of her youthful good looks. It is a kind of “vanitas” painting, like the work of the Dutch masters where subjects often focused on the inevitability of decay and death as a part of life; symbolized in people, fruit and flowers. Vanitas comes from the Latin, meaning "emptiness" and loosely translated corresponds to the meaninglessness of earthly life and the transient nature of vanity.

Albrights painting is no different. It presents an image of the inevitability of aging and death particularly in the figure of Ida. Advancing age ravages her face and body. Her clothes are worn and old. Her appearance is almost theatrical, as she powders her nose, oblivious to the ravages of time. Yet the sense of sadness is so pervasive. Ida is surrounded by similar objects that carry the same message. The flowers in the vase on the dressing table, for example, are dying. The burning cigarette and the crumpled dollar bills are other examples of things that are fleeting, as are strands of hair that have been pulled out as a result of combing. The genius in this work is that despite the overall melancholy of this painting, Albright seems to give Ida the strength to continue with life and a refusal to give up.

New Orleans is like that. The city seems in a constant state of disrepair, beautiful gardens and lattice iron-work surround crumbling buildings covered with decades of faded billboard advertisements long rendered obsolete. Signs of decay settled upon the city long before Katrina rolled over her, the hurricane just hastened the process. In many ways what New Orleans has left is that image of Creole cuisine, jazz and other forms of local music, and festivals like Mardi Gras, all the famous attributes of the city that give New Orleans a powerful sense of identity. Undoubtedly it is this identify that the people who live there seek to cultivate, to give new life.

It worked for Japan. In the decades after World War II, Japan famously pulled off an economic miracle, turning itself into the world's second richest country by the 1980s. The interesting thing is that around this time something else happened. While manufacturing electronics and cars, Japan began to export something else: A culture of cool. From sushi to ninja’s, Japan has magically been able to popularize ifs culture to a new generation. Japan, for a combination of reasons, cultural, economic, historical, seems just especially well positioned to create products for today's youth. In the past decade, Japan's exports of games, toys, and pop culture have soared with no slowdown in sight. Gamers go for Japanese video games on their Playstations and GameCubes. Manga publishers, one-third of all books published in Japan, are selling millions overseas. More than half the world's animation comes out of Tokyo. Surprisingly, for the past 15 years, the Japanese economy seems to have slowed down compared to 1980’s levels. However, Japanese pop culture is the hottest brand going. Students will sit in my class doodling anime characters.

I guess the question is, can New Orleans pull off something similar? In many ways it has. The difference being New Orleans identify seems inexorably tied to the place. It is difficult to imagine New Orleans culture without the particularly gritty smell of Bourbon street, the sights of the garden district, the fusion of so many different cultures in one place. Tom Robbins noted this in his book Jitterbug Perfume, (my favorite being his describing the weather in New Orleans as being akin to a obscene phone call)

The problem, that so many people note right away is that New Orleans, drew its strength from its diversity, and now, much of that diversity has been scattered by the winds. New Orleans has lost more talented people that most cities have residence. However, visiting New Orleans, I got the feeling right away that the city has lost so much more than that. New Orleans got its strength from being a melting pot, and cities like that get their power from their openness, not from being a bunch of bars and strip clubs.

When it come to the cultivation of a cultural image, the real difference I see between a city like New Orleans and Japan it that New Orleans has become a nostalgic place of the past, of many pasts, while Japan has recreated its image into a futurist vision where technology and mass media blur into a vision of youthful vitality. Frankly, though, the Futurist movement always seems a little soulless to me, maybe that is why so many Japanese animation movies are about man against the tyranny of the machine or man and the destruction of nature. New Orleans culture has always been about the celebration of life, sometimes a spooky, sexified, slightly drunken bacchanalic vision of life, but a celebration none-the-less. But lately it has been a city in mourning. New Orleans, you have forgotten yourself, and become a mockery of what you once were. Your mourning is no longer a festivity, your zeal has become depravity without purpose. I say, if we are going to mourn New Orleans, it is time to do it New Orleans style, cast of the shackles of yesterday and laissez le bon temps roulet.