(no subject)
Ok, enough with the oil crisis musings for now.
Yesterday and today I was always sitting at the desk and following the news per internet.
A lot of stuff moved me, but two things moved me most. One was a long list of people who searched for their relatives. Just reading these names, like 'Jessie and Isabelle' (a old couple), I didn't have something like this for a long time, but I almost cried. All those people, ripped out of their life, having to face looters and rapers and perchance even murderers. Bad.
And then New Orleans. A whole city almost drowned. I'm not sure if it will be rebuild, but even if they do it won't look like before. There was something like a funeral for it at my newssite, http://www.spiegel.de (german). I couldn't take it for long. Especially the pictures at http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/0,5538,PB64-SUQ9MTA5NjkmbnI9MQ_3_3,00.html . (Link to a german site, it says above the picture : "<> , clicking on ZURÜCK goes one picture back, clicking on WEITER gets you one picture forward)
I must say I love the architecture, especially the one in the french quarter. These iron balconies, the short houses with their flat tops. All these pictures look like paintings. It reminds me to a song of Sting I once heard, "Moon over bourbon street". Maybe it even refers to NOLA's bourbon street. The lone jazz trumpet player, the street lights on their formed iron masts. Looks all so magical. I remember the time when I was doorman for this rock musician Lord Bishop, when we talked about New Orleans and how much he urged me to visit that city one day, what a great place it would be and so on.
I see the pictures. One of them shows a cafe, and a woman drives by on a bike, in the way old women drive bike in a flat area, slowly, concentratedly. Gone, I guess. Maybe even the woman there on the picture.
New Orleans was something unique. Especially the french quarter, the garden district. When I see the pictures of the bourbon street I am having a smell again in my nose. The smell I know from having been out at discos and bars until the morning, until the grey of morning arrived and I stepped out and walked away. I've had that some years ago. And I also know the time when I walked TO those locations. When I walked past people, young cliques sitting near the shop windows and talking and smoking. Young women, some with expectations on their face, some with a barely hidden resignation for friday nights.
It's one of those 'things' I have no name for. I can describe it, and I guess some might know what I mean, the special feeling, the thought that all of this is something special, this strange mixture of walking into friday nights, the appearance of architecture from older times, the thought of men and women in more oldfashioned suits and dresses. Any person that is new to such nightlife might know it. This expectations, of finding friends, magical appearances of people, their dances, their posings and gestures, the talks one hears, a chuckle, a laughter, being a little drunk, someone running to the toilet. The expectations of finding a lover, someone who looks at you with interest, either openly or well hidden yet still recognizable with some intuition or experience. Or these times when you get sick of nightlife, when the old expectations haven't been fulfilled, or when they got fulfilled and disappointed anyway. What to call all of this? It's either like a rare scent, or like a stench. Or it's something mysteriously plain. For me it's like something I would like to cling to, either in experience or in remembrance, but I know clinging to it is bad. You need a mood for this, a proper willingness, to be lover, stranger, dancer, entertainer, drinker.
Did you expect that? A christian knowing about this? Yeah, I know about this. I know enough about it to treasure it to a degree, enough to be sceptical, and most of all I know enough about it to know when to stop thinking of it, writing of it.