Jottings of New York

I'm leaving New York. I haven't been leisurely blogging for the twenty-four hours I've been here; I've been too busy talking with my regular commenter John Cowan (6 hrs, finishing 2:30 AM—good to know I can still do that kind of thing, though jet lag helps), and my friend Genevieve (1 hr, and we had to be efficient about it—bon voyage à Angleterre!)

There have been past Jottings of New York, and I have been to New York several times before; this was a lightning visit, and I'll just quickly note the following:

• My dinner was around the corner from the Polish consulate, which had an improvised shrine to the dead president. That kind of improvised shrine is now common in the West, which doesn't have the institutionalised religious channels to commemorate death that it used to. I'm assuming you won't see that kind of improvised shrine in Greece, for example, because people until recently built actual shrines by the roadside, with icons and oil lamps.
  
• The restaurant was Asia de Cuba, and I'm impressed that it impressed Genevieve. It is fusion Chinese–Cuban. The fusion is organic and not self-consciously experimental as much fusion is (Chinese people did move to Cuba). The food was certainly worth the money: the Shanghai noodles were correct, the pork honeyed and melt-in-mouth, the kind Greeks exclaim "Turkish Delight!" over. Pity I can no longer put away the quantities I could.
  
• New York now, and always, strikes me with its urbanity: the dressed up young things talking over drinks or noodling with their Crackberries, jostling for drinks—this was familiar, this was how the world should be. I don't know that I would last if I actually lived here, but the switch-on, fashion-savvy, over-caffeinated New Yorker is a plane of experience to aspire to.
  
• That, and its no-prisoners, no-nonsense purposefulness, that comes of wedging a gajillion businesspeople in a couple of square km. My anecdote of choice when I used to live in California: after two years of toothy, insincerely grinned "Hey, how ya doin'" from random strangers in the street, I got to New York, where the random strangers would shove me out of the way as they went to where they had to be—and it was heaven. This time around, the contrast was the casual jaywalking, right in front of the cops, who after all have better things to do in NYC than prosecute jaywalkers. Genevieve tells me the cops get a "hey, how ya doin'" from the jaywalkers for their trouble.
  
  • I interrupt this transmission to thank the Qantas staff in Premium Economy for resolving my power supply issues to my laptop, and for the complimentary champers on top of it. The station to which I shall have been accustomed, indeed...
  
  
• There is a beauty to this subjugated, engineered, piled on landscape of towers of brick and concrete. My friend Jana, whose idea of beauty is the Central Australian desert, gets antsy when she comes here. I grin. And it's not all unrelieved gauche glass towers, like Brisbane is (or least would have been, if Joh had demolished everything he saught to). It's Art Deco sky-piecers Midtown, lots of more squat and humane brick uptown (because, as John informed me, the soil outside Midtown can only support so much weight), and plenty of trees still, welcoming and verdant and tamed. Like in DC.
  
• Coincidentally, when I got to my hotel at 2:30 AM, the History Channel was playing a show on reconstructing the pre-urban landscape of NYC. It was overwrought like all History Channel shows are—though at least this show didn't feature Hitler, as is the channel's default. But the reconstruction isn't that amazing a feat: we do have a British map, and pristine woodland still left on the northern tip of the island: unlike Greece, America gets that parks matter, and keeps them inviolable. Still, I wasn't expecting that Times Sq was originally a beaver pond.
  
• And a tree-strewn Manhattan with beavers and porpoises and just the occasional Amerindian wandering down what would become Broadway: that's not "a green paradise". Chill out, History Channel. It was a tree-strewn island with beavers and porpoises. I'm not saying all of North America should be terraformed and levelled and piled with buildings and packed with a gajillion businesspeople per square km; but I'm glad this bit was.
  
• The pile of buildings looks wondrous from New Jersey, and it was an excellent suggestion of Genevieve's to take the ferry across to see it. A giant's playblocks scattered into the sea.
  
• The gajillion people make NYC have microcultures, just like the hills it used to have would have made it have microclimates. This time I confined myself to Midtown–Upper West Side; but Upper West Side isn't Midtown, which isn't Chelsea, which isn't The Village, and you can see it. In Melbourne, none of my friends go any further south than St Kilda; so it's rare they visit Oakleigh. (Or even, by God, South Yarra—which is as New York urbane as Melbourne gets.) I take that as cowardly parochialism. Here at least, I don't begrudge the locals who never bother to venture north—or south—of 14th Street. Their Village is world enough; and so is the next one up.
  
• Thank you btw Genevieve for translating for me "Upper West Side = Malvern". And "they still think Asian fusion is exotic here, when we in Melbourne did that 15 years ago." It's good to have Rosetta Stones.
  
• And thank you John for a seminar I cannot summarise or reproduce, but which was as always rollicking good fun. The comparison between the clout in their homelands of the Greek and Jewish diasporas is not one that would have occurred to me; but it gave me the opportunity to lambast Greek morning TV host & pontificator Giorgos Papadakis once again, which is a good thing.
  • (Israel cares what the Jewish diaspora thinks, because that's where the money comes from. Greece remembers its diaspora when it's expedient to raise it to a nationalist frenzy over a National Issue; otherwise, they ignore them, and I'll never get over Papadakis' patronising tone when Greek-Americans rang in over the Iraq war, indignant about the Greek take on events. I'm not saying I wouldn't patronise them either. I'm saying that's dissing a whole lot of your fellow Grecophones, with unearned arrogance.)
  
  
• Oh, and I know about food servers saying "To have here or to go?": "To go?" is starting to displace "Have here or take away?" in Australia. (Or maybe that's just me.) But have people been saying "To go or to stay?" for a while? It was new to me, but not to Genevieve.

The green highways of Northern Virginia

I'm in a hotel in Northern Virginia this time, and am negotiating its large highways on foot; ten years ago, I was visiting a residence, and not really going anywhere much. So I had not been subjected to its large highways any way other than how God intended them to be encountered—out the car window.

So I'm warming less to the place than I had on previous visits; this is a work visit, and on the perfunctory side.

Still, especially around the grounds I am at, there is an delightsome orgy of green, of trees that are not threatening and peeling, but soothing and sensible. The gaps in the concrete in Irvine make it look like the scrubland is threateningly poised to take back over. The gaps in the concrete here make it look as if the forest has already staked out its niche, and is more at ease with its urban neighbours—more humane.

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At least, that's what it looks like from N. Beauregard; walking down S. King, it was as much a jumble of big buildings out of place as anywhere else.

US, so far

You'll have noticed even more extended radio silence than is usual for me on a trip overseas. I've spent three days in Irvine CA, and am now heading to DC, on a plane four hours delayed.

Which brings thoughts of decaying infrastructure. An unsustainably greened Orange County, with the same gargantuan buildings and brobdignanian freeways (just as I'd bemoaned here about Oracle HQ), a vista which will host tumbleweeds in my lifetime. Airline fleets with bits falling apart as I type. Western Civilisation, throwing out its books for PDFs, to leave behind neither.

Well, no, I'm not happy I'm missing my dinner out in DC, and my Monday has been killed in waiting lounges and overnarrow seats. I'm never happy to be anywhere near an American airport, and even less so an American domestic flight, whose desperate piling on of carry-on luggage is not a million miles away from the chickens and farm implements piled onto a bus in the Third World.

I had a great time of it nonetheless in Irvine, great enough to make a point of staying offline. Not because it is Irvine. I lived in Irvine for three years, and never reconciled to it, never got it or tried to. Irvine's hex on me has by now been broken, I don't have the feeling of dread and emptiness I used to (except when I contemplate its infrastructure); but I still find little in the landscape to detain me. Except the bookstore monopolies, though even those are starting to be shut down by the internets, and nudge towards eBooks.

But what detained me in Irvine was who was in it. I spent three days of chatting with old friends, and that was a glory. (Well, two and a half days chatting, and half a day photocopying references—another of my Luddite hangups.) The chatting wasn't consistently profound—I use chatting advisedly; but it wide-ranging, familiar, and lots of fun.

The kind of chat, I am not ashamed to admit, that led us to giggle for a quarter of an hour over this confluence of YouTube memes:

*Why* this confluence of memes is so knee-debilitatingly funny to my culture is a topic that deserves at least one post. (You can start here for an intelligent take on the Russian song, and some good comments taking it further—not least my own.)

The fate of a society that spends more time on Bread And Memes than infrastructure deserves another post, but I think it would get too depressing to write.

Will be Stateside next week

Things have continued to be odd around here, to the extent that I haven't given my tuthree readers adequate notice of this: on Friday, I'm going to the US for a week. I'm spending the weekend in Irvine; then I'm travelling to DC for the ADL Learning Content Registries and Repositories Summit (see my position paper, if you're that way inclined); then I'm spending 24 hours in New York.

Which may mean a blog post or two here, since I only seem to blog at opɯcɯlɯklɑr when I travel.

Also letting readers know that I've accepted an offer to work at the Australian National Data Service out at Monash in July, when my current contract with Link Affiliates expires. I was melancholy enough when I left the University of Melbourne for Monash the first time, in 2006. Since then, I've changed, Melbourne's changed, and Monash's changed. Or at least, I know more people at Monash, and it's a five minute drive away.

I still won't find buskers playing the Chaconne in Clayton, though.

I'm back...

... from the States, and so is my dead sexy new laptop. MacBook Pro 15″, 2.66 MHz, aluminium resplendence.

Because my new laptop was in carry-on luggage (and a slightly awkward size), my old laptop along with my eeePC were in checked-in luggage.

By the time I got to Australia, they were not.

Someone has spoken of the TSA as Stasi Dinner Theatre. Myself, I'm even less inclined to use American airports now than before.

New Orleans #5: Mulate's

In my last evening spent in New Orleans, I have a choice. I can seek out Cajun music and culture, which brought me here to begin with. Within walking distance of my hotel, that rather constrains me. Cajun Cabin no longer has live music. Michaul's, post-Katrina, is only open Thursdays through Sundays. The only option left is Mulate's, a tourist trap next to the Convention Centre, with a cockroach sighting only last week, and with no good words from anyone online about their rendition of Cajun cuisine—least of all by Cajuns themselves. But with a decent rotation of Cajun bands, and the offer of Cajun dance lessons. (Or was that Michaul's that offered that?)

Or, I could follow the advice of my concierge, bypass the horrors of Bourbon St, and go to the genteel surrounds of Faubourg Marigny, for some delightful Cajun/Soul Food at Praline Connection, followed by a performance of contemporary R & B stylings by Charmaine Neville at Snug Harbor.

I am typing this from across the road from the Convention Centre.

Now, I'm white. Not as white as some, but still plenty white. And to me, jazz stopped ca. 1930. (Things White People Like had a good post once on how white people get into black music a generation after black music has moved on to the next thing; make that three generations for me.) So I don't know if I would really get the contemporary R & B stylings. I got a good dose of jazz last night anyway, at Maison Bourbon; and I couldn't leave Louisiana without *some* Acadienité.

And the poor food and hour-long delays and unwelcome crawling guests? I guess I'll just keep repeating to myself: I'm doing this in atonement for the Grand Dérangement.

When the sullen invitation was extended at the door to dine at a table or the bar, I picked the bar. I figured, easier access to alcohol, to dull the pain of the Grand Dérangement Culinaire; and more foot traffic, so possibly less likelihood of creepy crawly gatecrashers. I disappoint my New Orleanian hosts, who have good reason to poke their nose up at the mention of the Convention Centre (never mind Bourbon St); but I'm a reporter dammit, I need to find if it's really as bad as all that (and whether the music redeems it).

Alors, laissez les bon temps rouler!

...

Well, ils ont roulé. Didn't notice any roaches. I stayed clear of the mains (les entrées), and limited myself to a couple of appetisers, which were inoffensive but hardly amazing. The bread pudding *was* amazing—and was the only thing any online reviews had a kind word for: a quivering cube of porous toffee. My seatmate compared it to a blueberry muffin.

There are a couple of downsides to eating at the bar. One is, you have seatmates. And for reasons gone through in a previous thread, American seatmates are inclined to talk, and I was too polite (and too alcohol-fuelled) to say "no, I don't think you're going to have a revolution here to take back your rights, the Feds are always going to have more guns than you."

Oh, hang on. I *was* alcohol-fuelled enough to say that. But I said it in passing and quietly, and this was the kind of bar discussion where everything gets assented to and affirmed, so there was not much point staking my social-democratic ground.

That'll learn me to lug my eeePC along to the bar. I was actually halfway minded to liveblog my food, but mercifully I was out of battery since (a) I had mistaken the plugged in cable for the not plugged in cable at the hotel; and (b) the eeePC was drawing comment. Not adverse comment, or "mug you later in the alley" comment. It did draw "huh, that's a tiny computer", but not of the knuckle dragging "wot iz computer so small" variety; it was either "I've got the next model up" or "that makes more sense than a Blackberry". The randoms across from the Convention Centre may have looked random, but were savvy about their hardware, and the aesthetics of the iPhone user interface. Of course they were: they were from the Convention Centre.

The iPhone has conquered this country, btw. Anything that keeps Cupertino afloat is fine by me, but I will still try to resist the blandishments to buy one. Which will be difficult, now my boss is a convert.

The other downside to eating at the bar is, it was the opposite side from the music, and what with the din of diners (and the stream "right-on, I hear ya brother" from my seatmate), I didn't hear the band well enough. In the second half, once my seatmate took off to see if Bourboun St had changed any in the last five years, I managed to get a seat up close.

The band was not on fire. I don't really blame them, they were playing three nights a week for bored conventioneers. In truth, I'd say they were playing more for the two elderly white couples that were two-stepping to pretty much everything they played. I'm assuming they were Cajuns, keeping on doing their Cajun thing, and that's great. (My seatmate certainly thought so; then again, my seatmate thought everything about the venue was authentic.)

But with the crude dichotomies that underinform my understanding of the States, I felt they should have been playing more for the black waiter in dreads, who did a little cakewalk to the music at the start, and (I couldn't really see, but I think) two-stepped a round with a colleague soon after.

Because black people have rhythm or something. OK, that's indefensible of me, and given the latest brouhaha about Australian insensitivities to race involving a New Orleanian, I should not be making that kind of surmise in public. But, I plead, they should also have played for this guy because this guy had humour and liveliness about his approach to the music; he wasn't being reverent and slow-mo, he was going to let his toes tingle no matter how sedate the pace of the music. And of course his dancing was likeliest all part of the show and not spontaneous; but he still had an energy about him that the others didn't. Not least because the others were in their 70s.

My seatmate asked what this music was, and was answered it was Zydeco. Now, I didn't know the difference between Cajun music and Zydeco music until I read some CD liner notes yesterday. All I knew about Zydeco was from the TISM song (Leo's Toltoy), about a Melburnian musician anxiously trying to keep up with the latest musical fad, which this month was Zydeco—only to find out that the fad had already moved on.

Now everyone's playing Cajun - Zydeco - whatever you call that thing.
I go off and buy the records, learn how to cook Jambalaya -
Then everyone's dropping Ecstasy; the dance clubs are on fire -
I start talking about Louisiana, everyone tells me to stop:
Just like the coming of click-clacks comes something called Hip-Hop.

Still, I could tell: this was no Zydeco.

Cajun music is what the white Acadiens brought with them, violins and guitars and triangle—and accordions thanks to German immigrants, who passed it on to Louisiana music like they passed it on to Mexican music. Zydeco started as the same music, only played by black people instead of white people. (There are plenty of black French-speaking Creoles; I wonder if they too go to the Congrès Mondial Acadien.) When they turned up to the recording studio, they found themselves typecast with R&B backing bands. The liner notes say the first such recording was a mess, the Cajun and the R&B not communicating with each other. But Zydeco ended up cohering, with more rock, funk, less violin, and I'm pretty sure no triangle: it became more black, you could say. Cajun by contrast became more white: more influence from Country music, to the extent of steel guitars.

The band didn't have steel guitars, and the triangle was probably a deliberate statement of oldschoolness. But it was still more sedate than what little accordion-based popular music from Louisiana I have heard; and I'll have to work out whether that ability to set the dancefloor alight is common to Cajun, or only a Zydeco thing. I made a point of buying both a Zydeco compilation and some '60s Cajun recordings, and will render judgement at an appropriate time, along with my review of the Royal St Doo-Wop. (Unless I've lost the CD already.)

I don't know whether the band was also playing for the middle-aged balding gay couple, who waltzed half-way through the set. I'm glad they did though, and I'm glad that noone stormed out or picketed them. The world is changing, and it doesn't always change for the worst.

And that was an early night for me. I had to keep drinking at the bar to justify my presence there (and to distract me from my seatmate). And the other thing I've learned on this trip is, any more than my usual one drink an hour, and I fall asleep. Why I then wake up at 6 am, I haven't worked out yet.

Scottsdale

A curious thing; to yield
one's purse, and then one's nerve
endings, both now still chilled
next day; adrift, unsafe,

tentative. Curious, no?
that I can still get tipsy
on brine and Veuve Clicquot,
though little passed my lips.

A sea, of salt and swells,
of stark and fearsome shores,
whose waves have deigned to stall,
whose deeps I will not hear.

A sea, its code unknown,
as mine to hers. I traced
its surface, and left home.
Godspeed its winsome face,

through change of seasons: fall,
winter, spring, summer, Autumn.
The sea restores it whole.
Its beauty arches, awesome.

New Orleans #4: Dinner at Antoine's

Antoine's is a culinary institution of New Orleans, founded in 1840, introducing the Creoles to the ways of haute cuisine. Diana urged me to go there and have Oysters Rockefeller for her, since she wasn't able to appreciate Oysters Rockefeller the last time she was there. What seven-year old would appreciate oysters, after all.

What grown Nick Nicholas would appreciate oysters, I mused. I've been a late adopter of seafood; mussels, I think I've only stopped minding in the past few years. And I'd never gotten the point of oysters, which I've pretty much always encountered in their natural briny state. Small, smily, briny, and pointless: that has been my verdict, which no amount of lemon or bacon topping has dislodged me from. And I didn't notice any particular aphrodisiac benefit from consuming them.

I don't know where that aphrodisiac notion would have come from anyway. Not from sympathetic magic, that's for sure. "Sexy" is not the image I conjure up, swallowing one of these small slimy briny pointlessnesses.

But, I am here to be educated; so after wandering around the Upper French Quarter, and the obligatory steamboat cruise, I put on my best shirt and slacks, and headed to Louis St, to see what the fuss was about.

Antoine's may have changed a lot in the last 170 years, but it tries not to let on. The exterior is dark, because it was 7 PM. The interior is opulent and padded, silverware and bowtied waiters. One concession to the twentieth century has been, the bowtied waiters include women. Another concession is that the waiters are integrated; I don't rightly know which concession was made first. A third concession, less welcome: the menus were printed in Apple Chancery. I'm only intermittently a typography snob, but the place felt too venerable to be using a default system font.

I rejoice, in the abstract at least, that such places still exist, where jeans look out of place (though they still turned up). Where dining is stately and serious, if not austere. And though I ordered four courses with some trepidation, I rejoiced that the portions did not make the further concession to the twentieth century of being Supersized. I'm happy to pay more to have the portion be civilised-sized.

So how was it? Well, my experience of haute cuisine, such as it is, is Australian and 21st century. That means you're not paying extra just for civilised-sized portions. You're paying extra for the chefs to experiment: to come up with hybrid concoctions and innovative amalgams, to put together two things that don't belong on the same page, and if you're lucky, have them work together. And although all Creole cooking is novel to me, I wasn't wowed with innovation here: it was 19th century food, and I've come to expect 22nd century food from such surrounds. Not that the place *should* have been Yet Another Fusion place, let alone one of those freeze-dry freakshows that flourish in the US latterly (bacon ice cream and whatnot.) But the food was somehow stolid. Not unpleasant, but not exciting.

The Oysters Rockefeller were so named because they had the richest sauce on oysters in existence, so they were named after the richest American of the time. (Would you have a Gates burger these days? A Buffet casserole?) There's a lot of song and dance about the recipe being kept secret, and every chef outside Antoine's merely guessing what the original ingredients are. The more malicious say even the chefs inside Antoine's are guessing at this point.

I was worried to hear about the richness, and needn't have been—although in deference to my recent diet, I did stop at four out of six oysters. The Rockefeller topping is a heated, delicately browned paste of green vegetable puree, rather agreeable. The colour says it should be spinach-based, and the chefs are adamant it isn't; some literal-minded soul has snuck a sample to a lab, Wikipedia tells me, and I'm surprised to read no leeks were detected. The heated paste works with the oyster, and subdues it. Heating the oyster underneath the puree may have that effect too.

Crawfish étouffée is crawfish stew, reduced down to a little bowl of concentrated carameliness. The tiny bowls of gumbo and étouffée have been another New Orleanian delight. Given the density of the stews, you really don't want your serving to be American-sized. I didn't find the étouffée flavour noteworthy to begin with—the crawfish is *really* reduced, I could barely tell it had ever been near the bayou. But I ended up almost emptying the bowl. I stopped short, because my main was next, and I figured it would be American-sized.

The main was not American-sized, which was a pleasant surprise. Poulet sauce Rochambeau: Chicken with a mayonnaise/eggy sauce (in French, Béarnaise), over a strip of baked ham. Very tender, quite petit, and flavoursome: I bet the chickens are from the 19th century too. The white and red meat worked off each other unexpectedly well. The disappointment was the sauce: too generously slathered on, no real savour. Without knowing anything about it, I suspect that lack of subtlety to sauces is the downside of old haute cuisine.

Because I was a party of one, I could not have a Baked Alaska with "Antoine's" embroidered on it in cream, or flambé cherries. Probably just as well. Desert was a tiny, delicate Peach Melba. First time I've had that too. Which is remiss of me, given that the dessert is named for Melbourne, via Dame Nellie Melba. The peaches may have been from a can, but somehow I doubt it: there was something candied about them, which doesn't sit well with Safeway shelving. The almonds were a nice touch to the dessert too: the crunchiness gave it a subtle texture, not all eager to please and sugary.

And all dishes delivered officiously and solemnly—which I delighted in, being an emotionally constipated Australian, who does not want waiters darting across to ask how I'm doing every two minutes, or complimenting me on how wicked awesome my choice of entrée is. Australia is not a Libertarian Wonderland, and we're socialist enough to pay our waiters, rather than have them fend for tips. That's how I was brought up, that's what I think right and proper.

Of course the clientele was not emotionally constipated; and once the waiters worked out the clientele weren't, neither were they. One waiter was doing the recitation of dishes with the panache more familiar in American restaurants; another was telling the customers about how he couldn't understand a word his Cajun grandfather spoke; a third broke into a wide smile chatting with the customers at the far end. But I would have none of that, and the waiters were perceptive enough to discern that too.

Which made my bathroom break all the more disconcerting, because the bathroom was next to the kitchen, and I discovered that the chefs in the kitchen were having a merry old time, yelling and banging and laughing. The occasional nouveau restaurant exposes the kitchen to the customers, like translucent clockwork on a wristwatch, so you can voyeur into your dinner preparation. (After watching one episode of Gordon Ramsay, I'm all voyeured out from that kind of thing.) Antoine's will not expose the wristwatch through its padded walls; and that is proper. The mystique is part of the point of the place.

The highlight of the evening so far, though, was the final exchange I had with my elderly, slow-moving, taciturn, main waiter. (That I got the fittingly reserved treatment was probably as much about him as about me.) I'd signed my bill and left my credit card in the bill. The waiter handed me back my credit card, and said "there's your cawd".

Given my limited interactions with the locals, and the demographic changes in New Orleans, and the overall decrease in US English linguistic diversity—this was my one interaction with Yat dialect. "Yat" dialect is the local dialect of New Orleans, so called after "Where Y'at", the local equivalent of "All hail, my good fellow". I had not done any homework of course; so until John alerted me in comments—and linked to the wrong Yat—I had no idea that a non-rhotic dialect is spoken here. (Or that all the South was originally non-rhotic.)

Of course, I would hardly have noticed that the local dialect drops its r's like Commonwealth English does, because the vowels are still American: it was "cawd" [kʰɒːd] here, not Australian "kaaahd" [kʰɐːd] (or [kʰaːd], if we're trying how Australian we are). So while Americans think it sounds like Brooklynese, I think it sounds like Southern-via-JFK.

But then, my ear was always too tin to have made it as a phoneticist.

New Orleans #3

It's a couple of hours later. I continue not to know how to have fun, and given how I've already exceeded my nightly budget, I think I'll turn in early and get the full day tomorrow.

[EDIT: Because of having to deal with the ending of this post, I did not end up turning in early. And I may well already have a hangover...]

So having spent my last $2 for the evening on gravy and mash at Popeye's (hm... well, it's spicier than the Other Establishment's anyway), and having downed in total three cocktails in the evening—which makes me decidedly drowsy, I've nothing left to do but lodge my report, and try and work out how to download video from my camera. There is a reason I don't drink much...

[EDIT: Yeah. Hangover alright. At 2 am.]

Royal St has not got a lot going on of a Saturday night; then again, confronted with the contrast of Bourbon St, few places will. It does however have a lot of galleries and antique shops. The antique shops overflow with chandeliers and fine carvings and all the money made off the back of the plantation slave; it's easy enough to tune that out, I'm afraid, and when you do, it's lively and garish itself, but a bit too brittle-looking to match the noise of the next block up.

The galleries have a lot of imitation-impressionism depictions of Gay Paree; that's New Orleans trading off its francicité, a good century after it's become too artificial to. I liked the imititation-impressionism: colour and texture that's still figurative, and not abstract or *shudder* conceptual, but not too caught up in the details of depicting stuff, and impersonating a camera. Regrettably, my suitcases are burdened enough as is, and there would be some logistical challenges in getting a 1×2 m painting into the overhead compartment of the plane. I'll just have to find who in Melbourne Town does that kind of painting.

I didn't quite get what Decatur St's story is, and I got bored too quickly to find out; so I headed back up to Bourbon St for one last lap.

Music here grabs you in the street and won't let go. Which is why you come to New Orleans in the first place. Opposite a hotel in Royal St, the Royal Street Doo-Wop of Jay, Ray and Gee (special guest star: a white dude doing bass) was enchanting its surrounds: they managed to get me to by their CD when they launched into a much improved "What a Wonderful World". The CDs of buskers tend to be a disappointment: they don't catch the spontaneity, the hucksterism, the passers by joining in. A blessing on them anyway, especially for taking the time (as they were singing the next number) to sign their CD for me. Review when I get around to it, likely in Irvine.

The Royal St Doo-Wop was enchanting and sparkling. At Canal & Bourbon—where I kept confidently predicting I would be taking residence in the gutter—I noted no conspicuous gutter to take residence in. But I did note a jazz band that was not merely grabbing you in the street, it was blockading the street, jumping out with baseball bats, and battering your eardrums until you too had to grin and bop along. The trombones were the baseball bats: they'd keep cracking against the sidewalk and ricocheting after each trumpet solo.

The narrative I'd got in my head after five seconds (as I started grinning and bopping along) was that the black folk were on the street bopping, and the white folk were on the sidewalk filming. After a couple of minutes, I worked out that was too convenient a dichotomy: several white folk were bopping along too (though very much on the sidelines), and at least one black guy was filming from the sidewalk.

The band was brash and loud and disruptive, and the couple of upmarket restaurants on Bourbon had their maitre d's staring anxiously out the window. (Bourbon St is a silly place to put upmarket restaurants, and I'm sure they've worked that out by now.) The band was insanely infectious; when they started hatcheting at the Beatles' Come Together, turning it into a cacophonous cosmogony, I hesitated for a few seconds, then decided to join my fellow whiteys (and the one brother), and film as well. Thereby making me upload to YouTube for the first time.

Well, maybe you had to be there...
[EDIT: I was not the only person to have YouTubed them:]

New Orleans #2

*hic*

OK, I've ducked into a coffeehouse in Royal St, open for another hour after my first iteration of Bourbon St. I am full of red beans & rice, jambalaya, and gumbo, not necessarily in that order. (Come to think of it...  it was in that order.) Sampler size, so I was still able to face the rest of the street. Then I went and had some bread pudding, so there goes me ingesting anything for the remaining two days here. That's going to be a problem, inasmuch as I've already booked dinner at Antoine's tomorrow night, as a pledge to Diana who was last there when she was seven. I don't even *like* oysters [Rockefeller], but I'm here to try things at least once.

Today is not looking as effective a day of tourism as it should have been: I got into the hotel too close to 1 pm, but didn't emerge until after 6 pm, as I had at least some sleep to catch up on. Had the Airport Shuttle not squandered 40 mins of my life, I might have emerged to daylight, and documented some of what I saw around me. I'd better get up at the crack of dawn tomorrow to make up for it.

Me getting up at the crack of dawn is inconsistent with me coming over here to lodge myself in a gutter on Bourbon St. But then, I wasn't fooling anyone when I kept saying I would lodge myself in a gutter. I don't know how to get drunk, after six years of Thursday or Friday pub nights; and I don't propose to find out in a foreign city, with only my wallet and a tourist map connecting me to my accommodation. I'm slightly buzzed after two cocktails accompanying the New Orleans Sampler, and I've noticed I'm slightly buzzed; that guarantees no booze for at least an hour. I don't relinquish control that easily.

I walked grinning up Bourbon St, until Bourbon St petered out first into a very sedate couple of gay bars, then by Ursulines St into an empty residential street, that was imprudent to hang out in on a Saturday night. I was grinning not because I was having fun per se, but because I was enjoying other people having fun. Bourbon St is tacky and dodgy and garish, and blues singers commingled with Boy George on jukebox, and Authentic New Orleans Po' Boy commingled with empty Pizza By The Slice parlors, and rocking out stately bars mixed in with hole-in-the-wall boozeries out of a hose, and bored strippers standing in their bras to draw in customers from among the moseying men with beers at hand; and Bourbon St pulses with life. It's wonderful, in all its partytownness.

There's even a couple of people on the balcony who haven't gotten the memo about Mardi Gras, and are throwing beads off the balconies in late October. (In fact, a bunch of people who've caught beads have just walked into the coffeehouse.)

There is of course nothing Cajun or French or Spanish or Jacksonian or Antebellum about any of Bourbon St, just a little jazz and a lot of tourists out to have a Good Time. Something like an expurgated Red Light District of Amsterdam, with a familiar smell of aromatic smoking material. Yet the ghosts of the architecture still tell you, if you notice, that there are stories in the walls here. You have to not be drunk to notice of course, and to look at it was an accepting eye. It helps if it's not dark, too, which is why I do need to come by again in the daytime.

Diana has such an eye—certainly in Greece, and she's long ago enough gone from the South that she'd notice things here too. (Then again, she said to me of New Orleans what I've said of New York: it's not really The South/The US, it's something else, something new again.) I forgot to note that she made Iraklion made sense to me last night, bceause she'd noticed what I couldn't. Iraklion is higgledy-piggledy and cramped and oppressive, not because it's no longer a Venetian town, the way Rethymnon is. It's not obtuse Modern Town Un-planners that are to blame. On the contrary: it's higgledy-piggledy and cramped and oppressive precisely because it is a Venetian town. And Venetians did not do town squares (with the exception of the central square, with the lions fountain and the Logggia). They built Iraklion up as town islands, like they did Venice; and the side walls dividing up housing survive, even as the front and back walls are now ghastly Modern Greek cement.

Anyway, I'm becoming gradually more lucid. Not that you'd notice from what I'm typing. Pit stop before the coffeehouse closes, then Royal St and Decatur St, to see what Non-Bourbon St New Orleans is like of a Saturday night. I'll miss a lot, but I've already noticed that the coffeehouse I'm in exudes a genteel hippiness, that I wasn't figuring to find here.

Makes up for the coffeehouses I didn't get to go to in Seattle yesterday.

New Orleans #1

My first impression of New Orleans: the airport signage is in English, Spanish, and French. A beautiful gesture; not sure whether its audience is the tuthree Quebecois who come over per year, or the Cajuns (pour raisons emblematiques).

Second impression of New Orleans: I had the choice of a cab for $33, or the New Orleans Airport Shuttle for $20. What you gotta ask yourself is, was the $13 savings worth waiting an extra 40 mins. It wasn't the most scenic airport garage I have seen, so I surmise the answer to have been no.

Third impression: the downtown skyscrapers certainly don't seem to have been flood-damaged.

Fourth impression: having heard the shuttle driver announce hotels, and the shuttle coordinator announce routes beforehand—I'm going to have serious issues with understanding the local accent:

SHUTTLE COORDINATOR: Sir? Y'awlre dahn't termnuhnl too.

ME: ....

SHUTTLE COORDINATOR: Sir?

ME: ... Yes?

SHUTTLE COORDINATOR: Sir? Follow me.

ME: ... Oh.

Good. It makes for Opɯcɯlɯklɑr Comedy Gold, that kind of thing.

Fifth impression: the hotel. I'm in love with the hotel. In fact, I felt like I was bringing down property values just by walking in there. The interior is elegant enough,

—but what really catches the eyes is the loftiness of the lobby:


This explain why the interior is full of exposed beams:

Houston

A month back, commenter matternal (Michalis Nikolaou, who noticed that we have the same surname) suggested that if I ever found myself in Houston, I should pay a visit to Niko Niko's Greek Restaurant, 2520 Montrose, Houston Tx. For that its name was like mine.

On the Super Shuttle equivalent out of Seattle heading to San Francisco, the convivially cheery driver informed me that I clearly had interests in Hawai`i, since Nick's Fish Restaurant in Honolulu was also run by a Nick Nicholas. (If he meant Nick's Fishmarket, it's closed down. So I'm obviously now looking to diversify.)

En route from San Francisco to New Orleans, I found myself in Houston Tx, at 6 am Saturday morning, with three hours between flights.

Those who have a life define fulfilment through family, or work, or study, or companionship. Those who have less of a life define it through outré romantic gestures, or their next high. And then there are those who define fulfilment through the occasional ability to indulge in grand follies.

I don't feel fulfilled for it as I take the cab back to George Bush International Airport at 7 am Saturday morning; but I have gone off and committed my grand folly for the week.



The grand folly did not cost me a grand; it did cost me close enough to a tenth of a grand for me to be taken aback. Especially because the restaurant only opens at 10 am, so what greeted me was fairly dark, with several restaurant workers just arriving on the site, and looking startled enough that I did not seek to inveigle them into the shots.


So I can't really tell you anything about the restaurant, other than what the website shows you. (And the website did not cost me a tenth of a grand to visit.) They serve souvlakis. They have a Greek flag in the window. They're situated on Montrose, which my cab driver informs me is "Half cosmopolitan, half gay". (I know what he means—half ethnic, half gay; but I'm sure there's several members of Houston's gay community who regard themselves as plenty cosmopolitan, and maybe even plenty ethnic.) Their phone number has GYRO in it. The owner has a beard, and looks like me inasmuch as anyone Greek with a beard looks like me.

Houston's downtown looked just as brobdignanian as San Francisco's, and nothing like Seattle; but I could barely see anything at all at 6:30 am (outside of the donut shops).

And I'm disappointing matternal, who I suspect was rather expecting me to visit Houston at a time when Niko Niko's was open for business (and may even have had him in it). But I doubt I could deal with a souvlaki that time of day anyway. Or most times of day, really.

Right, back at George Bush International Airport. May even catch some sleep now...

Seattle

I don't have much to say about Seattle, because my allotted time there was spent in profuse geek-out mode with Diana and Pierre, whom I thank profusely for their hospitality and good humour. When I grow up, I'd love to be them: in a house groaning with books, with papers on the boil and an anecdote always ready, with an affectionate and non-allergenic cat, in a cosy sprawling house perched by a park in an orgy of greenery and damp timber cheer. And fresh-baked apple pie. I have a sneaking suspicion that's not where I'll end up if I ever grow up, but at least I have a reference point to aspire to now.

Orgy of greenery and damp timber cheer. That's Seattle. A pity I didn't get to wander around it now, but it's wasn't the day for it anyway: I wandered for ten minutes in the autumn wind, and got a maple leaf in the face for my trouble. That, and a reminder of my acrophobia as a forest layered itself in glorious 3-D from the park bridge next door, its depths and deciduous dappling impossible to capture on pixels. So I didn't even bother.

But the damp timber makes sense here, even as I look down on the dry timber of my home suburb. There's something about the varied colours of the houses, and their gabling right out of Brothers Grimm, and the luxurious green of their temperate rainforest backdrop, that makes it all coherent.

I was in good cheer enough, I even engaged the convivial van driver in conversation. (He made it clear I didn't have any other option.) We are a reserved people, we Australians; we don't think so, because we compare ourselves to the British, but from the vantage point of Americans we're indistinguishable. My tram-bound colleagues of the inner city assert to me it is not so in their tram routes, and they have wonderful conversations on the tram. Some of them don't even involve junkies. This data point does not fit my thesis, so I'll make like a Chomskian linguist and ignore it.

So when an Australian is in an American vehicle of group transport, and the friendly and open-hearted locals seek to engage them in conversation, the reserved and laconic Australian tries to Back Away From The Crazy, because no, we don't want to share. But like I say, Seattle had softened me up enough that I humoured the friendly and open-hearted locals.

I see how you could pick up that way.

The trip to and fro was the standard series of misadventures: the Super Shuttle in Redwood City forgot I existed (there's $20 prepaid I'm not going to see again), the shuttle services get you to the airport an hour before you have any business there ('cause they don't want the liability), the airports look and feel like something out of Central Asia, only with vending machines selling e-Book readers.

There's several things that make American airports tortuous. The ongoing farce of Security Theatre is up there, but it's only one. In truth, it's not the pointlessness and officiousness of Security Theatre that are the annoyance; they're old hat now, and I got my Semtex joke at an airport out of my system before September 11 anyway. It's the understaffing of the Security Theatre staff: the procedures are no more invasive or drawn out than in Australia, but the queues are three times as long, because anything involving the public sector in Seppoland is inefficient.

(Anything involving mass service, in fact: Greyhound buses are not state-owned, they just don't have a market driver to do a good job. And unlike the socialist rest of the world, here it's No Market Driver, No Service.)

But it's several things beyond that. The dim lighting of airports, which was just as much a bad-mood–setter in 1999 as it is in 2009. The obligation to pay $20 extra for putting a suitcase on a plan, and the invitations at the counter to pay extra for legroom, food, water, video. It's intended as user-pays exercise of choice; it comes across as extortion. I got a bag checker asking how it was in Australia, where we do not (yet) do any of that on Qantas, we just pay more upfront; and he wistfully sighed "those days are long gone here."

And never again BLT. You'd think I'd have learned my lesson from the Sofitel "mini"-burger, but that's the classic definition of insanity: keep trying, hoping next time it'll be better.

No matter. Seattle, orgy of greenery and damp timber cheer. Thank you for existing.

Even if the Melbourne W-class trams are currently off the waterway tracks. Bring 'em back, good burghers of Seattle. The tourists love that kind of thing. Next best thing to actually having a functioning tram system.

Redwood City #3

Urrrgl. Mlurt. Fnorghr.

Zhlumpfkh.

And this isn't even me posting immediately after downing a glass of Grand Marnier.

Not much to report from the vista: it's still brobdignanian and empty. What I do have to report is that I finally succumbed and had a burger, a week after I promised myself one. An elite Sofitel burger. An elite Sofitel mini-burger ($13 instead of $16: Sofitel is not an instance where the food is surprisingly cheap.) Surely, a refined and delicate reentry to burgerdom, after six months without.

The Grand Marnier was timely; yes, I needed un apéritif. It worked as un sédatif as well, and I was dead to the world by midnight. I was up at 4 am with a tummy ache (which has not gone away by 10 am, when Yr Obt Svt is writing these lines). I'm giving serious consideration to not ingesting any more solids while in NorCal. Especially as I have been promised pie in Seattle.

I didn't mention Seattle last post, where I'm heading this evening; and that's remiss of me. Truth be told, I'm not visiting Seattle, I'm visiting Diana Wright (of Surprised By Time and nauplion.net); that she is now in Seattle is a bonus. Not that I had any objection to visiting her when she was in DC.

I don't know how much of Seattle I'll see this time, it being a lightning visit. But when I last went there ten years ago, I was so exultant at getting the hell out of Orange County (I'd only been there four months!), I got a riff in my head, and started composing again: MIDI, PDF. I'm not saying I ever became a good composer (you can survey my oeuvre yourselves), and the Seattle piece is sloppy minimalist doodling. But getting on a plane was like switching on a light.

Airports in the '90s to me were misery: it's where farewells happened, where I saw people for the last time. They were freedom and light while I was living in the States. Now that I travel mostly for work, they're a mild nuisance—although they'll be a lot milder if I ever get enough Frequent Flyer points for free membership in the Qantas Club. Not that the Qantas Club is *that* salubrious; but at least it's comfy chairs, free internets, and nibblies.

With no burgers. Mini or otherwise.

Krnarlblumpk. Shtrulphr.

Mlurt.

Frenchville, PA: a distinct dialect of North American French

This is not about Quebec or Acadia, but this is where my North American French stuff goes, so: in reading a book on Prince Edward Island French,

King, Ruth. 2000. The Lexical Basis of Grammatical Borrowing: A Prince Edward Island French Case Study . Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

—I've come across a mention of Frenchville, PA, settled in the 1840s, which appears to have retained a distinct dialect of French into the 1960s.

As Ruth King says, there have been no studies on it apart from a glancing mention in a 1973 dialect survey; and Wikipedia does not even know Frenchville exists (it's now part of Covington Township, Clearfield County).

At any rate, I've now added a paragraph on Frenchville to Wikipedia's French language in the United States article. Frank Merat, an Electrical Engineering professor from Frenchville, has the most material online on the village. And I haven't sighted Haden's 1973 survey, although I don't think it'd say all that much.

I assume it's safe to go to Frenchville without a shotgun nowadays...

Redwood City #2

Just to give confirmation I'm still alive:

• I CANNOT WAIT to get to New Orleans. (Or more to the point, get out of NorCal suburbia.) The three-hour stop over in Houston at 6 AM, not so much.
  
• It never rains in Southern California (with some recent exceptions); it sure does in Northern California (though not today).
  
• Restaurant food's extraordinarily cheap here. Chinese restaurant dishes for $6. Hot and sour soup (which I've dearly missed—it redeems tofu): $3.50. Not for a small bowlful: they give you the entire serving bowl! Similar story with the Japanese and Persian–Italian-minus-the-Persian I've had. I don't remember food being that cheap 10 years ago; is it the recession, or NorCal?
  
• The catch with being in a luxury hotel, it's still a bare room, and you have to now pay for everything—so you can't even improvise instant coffee in your room. That's not really a good deal after all. (And I've never had the heart to call room service for anything.)
  
• Walked over to Belmont for said Chinese meal last night; good to know there is some quaint-looking urban stuff in walking distance. (If you walk long enough.) Clambering over freeways to get there is horrid: it's that unwelcome reminder, which I'd repressed, that Californian suburbia was not intended for pedestrians.
  
• Walked down El Camino Real in the process. Uninspiring as a bunch of strip malls and brobdignanian lanes. In my youth I'd formed a different mental picture of the fabled El Camino Bignum; but then again, I'm not in Stanford.

Redwood City #1

So, what have I learned in my first day in Redwood City, CA?

• Oracle HQ is full of buildings that look like hard drives. Or artists' impressions thereof.
  
• Oracle HQ is full of lakes. No wonder lions drowned here, when it used to be a safari theme park.
  
• Duck shit is green.
  
• I have visual evidence of Larry's Yacht:
  [INSERT PHOTO]
  Parking your yacht outside your corporate HQ tells you something, I'm just not quite sure what yet.
  
• Sofitel here trades agressively on its francicité. Not something I'd noticed with any Accor Group hotel in Australia. The francicité is un petit peu overdone. From the pamphlet for SoBoutique (You've Slept In Our Bed, Now Buy The Bedspread):
  

  Make your home look Magnifique!
  THE ART DE VIVRE: Pure moments of Plaisir
  THE ART DE RECEVOIR: The Taste of Bon Goût

  From what I can gather, the translations to English in the brochure are deliberately poor, for that extra soupçon of Gallic je ne sais quoi. Alors, moi, je sais quoi est-ce que c'est. C'est de blague des emmerdeurs pretentieux, câlisse!
  
• The roads are brobdignanian and verdant and void of pedestrians, the way that always alienated me from SoCal.
  
• I got lost on the brobdignanian and verdant roads, trying to get from hotel A lobby to hotel B lobby, which makes me even less well disposed to them. They disorient me: they're not meant for people on foot.
  
• Rumi's Restaurant, where I ate last night, was advertised to me as Persian-Italian fusion. Given who and where Rumi was, I'd have thought Greek–Persian (or at least Turkish–Persian) would be more apposite; as it turned out, I was hard put to find any Persian in there at all.
  
• I'd been led to believe the History Channel was All Hitler All The Time. That would have been hugely preferable to the National Enquirer mess of parapsychology and conspiracy theories that was actually broadcast into my hotel that night. A show on the Freemasons' influence on the Great Seal of the US actually kept gravely saying "Conspiracy theorists believe..."—and not as a disparagement. One more reason not to bother getting cable...

OK, time to get some work done: start of my morning workshop session.

Arrived in USA

I am in the US. I have celebrated my arrival as is my custom, by having a tub of Cherry Garcia ice cream. It was mehlicious. I hope that means I'm over ice cream.

I forgot to pack my camera into my camera case. That severely sucks. Several-wise.

I'm to dinner, and then I'll upload a book review. Because my stay at Oracle HQ will also be mehlicious...

Itinerary Stateside

So, I'm taking off for the States on Sunday, and this is my itinerary:

• 18-22 Oct: Oracle HQ, attending IMS Workshop, and doing overtime with boss on the side
  
• 23 Oct: Because I announced I'd be in the States, and had a friend say "So, coming to Seattle?" -- Seattle
  
• 24-27 Oct: Gutter in New Orleans. I have no idea what I'll find, because New Orleans is a place I know very little about. I'm tempted to keep it that way, I like surprises.
  
• 27-31 Oct: Irvine, CA, attending TLG conference.

As always, travel broadens the mind, or at least the superficial prejudices, so expect lots of posts on my misconstruals of the US.

I don't expect to be touring odd roadside attractions in the Midwest, btw, or sampling odd candies; but if you want to see blogging by someone who does, check out The Bewildered Brit, by my erstwhile TLG colleague Richard Peevers.

I actually saw some Razzles in a lolly shop last night, as it turns out. Richard's review help me in my decision to resist temptation...

October in North America

I've booked my accommodation, so I might as well un-embargo the news. Work takes me in three weeks' time to San Francisco (actually, the erstwhile theme park outside San Francisco that is Oracle HQ, for the IMS Quarterly Meeting), and then to Irvine CA and the TLG. In between, I will visit a place on the other side of the continent, that will capitalise on some of what I've been posting about here for the past couple of months.

No, I am not going to Moncton. Maybe I should, maybe I will yet, but instead, I'm going to the third Francophone dominion of North America. I'm spending the weekend in the Big Easy.

I'm not going to New Orleans primarily out of attachment to Francophonie. You might not know it from this blog, but out of the two languages I learned at high school, I always preferred German—the music had a lot to do with that, and I found annoying the aesthetic I stereotype as French: the unresolved, the ambiguous, the elusive, the balloon floating away. Pah, give me ardour and fists on the table and crunchy consonant clusters. And French may be easier to read for an English-speaker, but I will always struggle with spoken French, and appreciate the crispness of spoken Hochdeutsch.

That doesn't relate much at all to my fun and games trying to speak French in Montreal: I didn't have that much more success in Berlin or Salzburg. But it means I'm not romanticising Francophonie because it's French specifically; there's other reasons I found Quebec intriguing. (And I doubt I'd find Amish Country intriguing just because they speak German.)

Nor will I go to New Orleans out of a great love for gumbo or jazz. The one time I've had gumbo (in Memphis), I loved it, and the two or three times I've heard Dixieland, I've grinned profusely; but I don't own any Dixieland recordings, and I haven't sought out gumbo since. I don't know if you can even get gumbo in Melbourne, though we are pretty good on diverse cuisines as a rule... "Recommended is the organic cajun seafood gumbo with john dory, mussels, vegetables and rice ", you say? OK, I'll have to look that up when I get back.

I'm under no illusion that I'm going to hear any French spoken in the Tourist Theme Park of the French Quarter; nor am I not going to hire a car and head out for two days through the wilderness to whatever out-of-the-way parish along the coast Cajun is still spoken in. I'm not so naive as to believe that the French Quarter will be much more than a Tourist Theme Park; and I gather than post-Katrina, New Orleans still has deep-set problems (which I won't notice from the Tourist Theme Park vantage point), and will likely never be the same.

So why am I going to New Orleans? Because ten years ago, I went to Disneyland.

Disneyland is lame, surprisingly lame even by theme park standards. I went because my mother was visiting, and it's the only tourist attraction in Orange County I could come up with. (Have I mentioned my ill feeling towards the OC lately?) I was wandering around the surprisingly lame and surprisingly small attractions of Disneyland, to see what I could sneer at next.

And as I turned a corner in Backwoods USA Simulacrum, I came across a fake New Orleans.

A bad fake, of course. A solitary ramshackle French colonial shopfront, with two Disneyland employees throwing beads out a first floor window window, and the three or four girls on the the ground catching the beads were fifteen years away from the customary Spring Break response to the activity (as filmed on Girls Gone Wild). The mint julep on sale had the unmistakeable savour of Kool-Aid about it, and no alcohol that I could sniff out.

And yet, otherness can seep through even a bad fake, even a parody. Brush Up Your Pidgin parodies Tok Pisin—and colonialism, and missionaries, and anyone in Papua New Guinea in the '30s; and its Tok Pisin version of "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears" is played for laughs—hence its exaggeratedly English orthography:

Frend, all man belong Rom, wan-tok, hearim me now

Yet when I read it in my teens, I was startled: parody it may have been, but this was unmistakably its own language, with its own spirit (to use the non-linguistic impressionism): it was not a bad English, but something new. (That book could have made me a Creolist. But I don't know if Creolists are that much more employable than Hellenists.)

(E, disla buk, em i ken inap long mekim mi kamap olsem saveman bilong Kriol. Tasol, ol lain saveman bilong Kriol, em i save kisim bisnis i pas ol lain saveman bilong Grik? Mi no save. I don't know if that was correct, but it sure was fun...)

In the same way, this bad fake of America was not like the bad fakes of America I'd already seen on TV: this was not Seinfeld or Family Ties or Cheers or The Dukes of Hazzard (Fake New York Upper West Side, Fake Columbus, Fake Boston, Fake Georgia). This was something new to me, something intriguing and European-worldly and louche, which I had not expected to find in the US. When I went there, I discovered the same of Manhattan. (Well, substitute "louche" with "wired" there.) And I'd like to see that fake more close-up.

So when I'm at the corner of Canal and Bourbon in four weeks, I may not find something substantially more "authentic" to Louisiana than the Disneyland rendition; but I'll see *something* unfamiliar there, anyway. From the underside of a gutter in a drunken stupor, possibly (though knowing me, rather unlikely...)

I don't really know what I'm expecting to see. I know little enough about New Orleans to reduce it to a series of keywords. A rather embarrassing series of keywords, but that's why I'd like to go in person:

Jazz, Big Easy, local pronunciation: Nawlins, gumbo, Cajun, Cajuns, Acadians post-Great Upheaval, Creoles, Dixieland, Louis Armstrong, levees, Katrina, flooding, refugees, demographic collapse, Mississippi, Emeril, Mardi Gras, big-ass floats, beads, boobies, drunken college kids, Spring Break, Bourbon St, French Quarter, Quaint architecture that Plateau Mont-Royal in Montreal is meant to be reminiscent of, House of the Rising Sun, Tulane University, Different Status during Reconstruction but I don't remember what exactly, French, James Carville, Heckuva Job Brownie, Cities of the USA I know too little about, jambalaya, bayou

Not necessarily in that order.

Thank God I didn't post a similar keyword portrait of Montreal before I went...