opɯdʒɯlɯklɑr

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:]

*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.

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:

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.