Beer on Bourbon

We finally got to the French Quarter, the famed and commonly visited tourist centre of New Orleans and the only area we really saw on a previous visit.  First up for drinks in a swish hotel then a meal at a bar at another hotel after not gaining entry to an eatery of dinner suits.  I feel there's an quiet class hierarchy hidden in New Orleans that we saw years back and it comes out in restaurants and grand hotels.  You tend to miss it as a white Australian but you can imagine it.  Our dinner at the bar was open if business-like and we chatted with a pair of women down from Detroit.  They feared Aussie spiders but recognised that American bears can be pretty scary too.  Bourbon Street itself was rocking: busy, varied with locals and ring-ins, music in bars and some on the street, roamers and roarers and speeders.  I enjoyed a marching band crew (various horns, sousaphone, drums) with a crowd and occasional dancers and considerable life and chops.  Then the drummers on buckets who can be quite impressive and plenty of live music from bars although not much jazz.  NOLA jazz does tend to be early and there was some of this, but mostly it was R&B, pop-rock, blues and the like.  Perhaps Stevie Wonder was the most covered: I heard Superstition at least 3 times.  Then a longish walk to Frenchman Street, but this was Christmas Eve on Wednesday night and it was fairly quiet.  Again a few bands but also closed establishments.  I mostly sat for Armani Smith leading a quartet playing R&B styles, an effective singer and guitarist with sparse and defining drums and very effective bass and keys, both quite understated but telling, the bass being variously gentle slap or fingerstyle and the piano just adding lovely harmony colours and the whole being finely balanced by a very involved soundman.  Nice.  And their take on a jazz ballad request didn't quite get the chords but it didn't matter given a very effective groove and delicious dynamics.  So I liked them.  There was a trio of trumpet, guitar and double bass (one of only two doubles on the night, as I remember) doing a lovely soft, folky take on early jazz set and they were worthy.  There was one interesting lineup on Bourbon St: a trio of drums and two keys.  Otherwise, mostly standard rock/blues lineups.  But the Preservation Hall still has gigs, although pricey and short and frequent and presumably very oriented to the tourist trade.  And Jason Marsalis will play a gig (a tribute to Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys!) at Snug Harbor on Frenchmen St on Boxing Day evening (no one's heard of Boxing Day) but we will be gone.  So it was an interesting and lengthy walk around the French Quarter but nothing particularly new for me second time around.

Streetcar little desire

It was our first run on the Streetcar on St Charles which is our route to the French District and Canal Street and the rest.  They give no change if paying by cash and accept no card on board, but they let us on and someone we chatted with at the tram-stop unnecessarily but generously bought us tickets.  We were off to the National WWII Museum which is apparently the most visited collection in New Orleans.  Megan went through the Pacific galleries.  The presentations were pretty realistic and reliable but a close shave with Vietnam and endless WW2 movies in my childhood had me retreating to a canteen and an opportunity to chat again with locals, at least a family of visitors from Colorado, working and retired academics.  It's interesting to talk with this class, informed and lucid as they are.  I feel a more international view in the US these days, having read an article on younger generations who are chasing up nationalities of parents and grandparents when they are available.  It's a change from that famous New Yorker cover of the view over Fifth Ave, Central Park and beyond.  We ended the WW2 museum with a gallery of hanging planes and a temporary exhibit of Hitler's degenerate art which was occasionally trivial but often quite profound and effective, not least when picturing the results of the preceding world war.  Not sure I agree with Hitler on that one!!!  And let's hope for no more cascading wars.

Chalk and cheese

If Houston is business, then New Orleans is pleasure.  It's not quite as extreme as it suggests, but there's some truth in my title.  Another rellie is in NOLA and we will have Christmas here this year.  We drove down through flat country on a busy highway with its numerous off-ramps and considerable water, bayous and the like.  Lunch was at a burger chain and coffee again disappointing in some service station, driving into NOLA on inevitable overpasses but into the delightful Garden district, developed sometime in the mid-1800s from plantations and our Airbnb is on popular Magazine street with eateries and antique and artisan shops and our pad is of the authenticity of the period despite a service station across the road.  Not sure the pics do Magazine St justice.  There's no music around despite the NOLA reputation but you could imagine just hanging here and we did for a day-or-so.  Eating too much, hanging in a bar, meeting the neighbour (lovely) and a costume designer who was just working on a series in New Zealand but otherwise lives in LA and came from NOLA and still owns a house just around the corner.  Another neighbour.  And various visitors and locals, here for a party or a protest.  People are friendly down South.  Interesting to photograph political posters one night and note they are gone next morning.  Fun to find trivial, cheap antiques to buy that Megan just confirms will go in my room, as further inspirations when inventing my Pots ingenuities.  And discovering the difference between Creole and cajun and just what's too ricey and what's not.  Hint: one local upmarket restaurant offers Haute Creole.  And some of the Afro-American hairstyles are to die for.  And there's a touristy streetcar to take to the rest of NOLA when we get over these inviting local pleasantries.

Entering the final frontier

Houston was the first word transmitted from the surface of the Moon: “Houston, the Eagle has landed” and we went to the Space Center Houston and the NASA displays there.  It’s a madly popular tourist site, of course.  The Mission Control Centre tour has you seated in the very chairs that family and dignitaries would have sat in for these early significant space events.  In fact, we were asked to be reasonably quiet as another control centre (presumably much, much more modern) was functioning on the floor below.  It's a strange combination of old and new.  These are not new buildings and the lift wasn’t functioning so we’d climbed stairs to the old MCC.  It’s as I remembered, having watched the Apollo 11 landing one schoolday afternoon (showing my age!).  All old CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) screens and the like.  Otherwise a fairly obvious display area (maybe I know too much of this topic?) but a fabulous unused Saturn 5 lying in state on its side in its massiveness and a Gemini capsule on a stubby test rocket and a Mercury Capsule on Redstone, a diminutive vehicle for those first suborbital flights and, they suggested, essentially a V2.  Thanks Werner von Braun!  Otherwise a visit to a space shuttle mounted on a 747.  I had seen one of these, perhaps this one, on tour of Europe, flying over Rome, before the first Shuttle launch.  So many memories and much that I knew but had not experienced so intimately.  Other than standing under a Saturn 5 engine cone once in a science museum or that Gemini capsule in David Jones Adelaide on tour of the world, sometime back then.

NASA Space Center Houston, Apollo's Mission Control Center and a museum display of Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Saturn 5 and more is in Houston.

Artz

Always a gallery. I’ll include two here.  First up was Gallery of Illusions: a small private space that amuses and somewhat educates, settled in a large shopping centre with its notable international clothing names and the like.  I was not so much surprised by names like Tiffany reappearing or Ralph Lauren and the rest, but some decidedly more plebian chains that must be international did surprise me.  Whatever, this gallery amused with various illusions that we’ve seen in film and more.  Otherwise, it was the big public Houston MFA (Museum of Fine Arts).  We were limited in time so moved quickly and missed some parts, but impressive as expected.  I was mightily impressed that names of the likes of Picasso were not behind glass so you could view details and experience great intimacy.  Amongst the moderns, I only noticed a few very minor Jackson Pollocks behind glass and they were certainly not Blue Poles equivalents.  Strange that.  Reminds me of Mona Lisa when I first saw it, on a wall, with perhaps six viewers from a few feet away.  Those were the days.  Otherwise a lovely overview of various cultures.  One item reminded us of the Louvre sadnesses: a gold helmet weighing ~80oz that we guessed would be worth ~$A500K.  There were several temporary exhibits including French fashions from the Louvre and Roman/Greek antiquities.  I particularly enjoyed the historical photography exhibit.  Maybe I shouldn’t have been too surprised but we ran into a baroque concert in progress by the local Mercury Chamber Orchestra.  It seems a big organisation although this concert was just a baroque quintet with a countertenor singing for Christmas.  Particularly interesting was a program insert called the Houston Music Card composed by DaCamera which listed 32 concerts (“Chamber music and more”) over the period Dec25-Jan26.  Houston does seem well provided with classical gigs.

The Museum of Illusions and the Museum of Fine Arts are in Houston, TX.  The Houston Music Card is compiled by Dacamera Houston and is accessible online. 

DaCamera Houston Music card