New Orleans, Mon Mort

It is strange to think so much of Death while on vacation?

I can’t help it. I first came to stay in New Orleans during a dark time. I usually explain that we chose New Orleans because of the weather and walkability and urbanness. The Brooklyn to New Orleans pipeline makes for a familiar enough story. Creative Types of Certain Sensibility Come to New Orleans, Fall Madly in Love – full story at 11.

The more abstruse storyline was that living in New Orleans during the Dark Time was a way to lean closer into death. Certain places just have a closer relationship with mortality, I think. In New Orleans, it’s not about the ties to the occult, witchcraft, and voodoo. Even the most pragmatic nonbeliever in this city must contend with the nearness of annihilation – the inevitability that the next Big One could take out your home, your neighborhood, the life you’ve built here.

I felt similarly in Berlin, when I visited there. The city had seemingly been reduced to rubble nearly every 20 years in the twentieth century. That infuses a place with an intimate relationship to destruction. The vitality of Berlin has an edge to it, an urgency to get right to it. Do the thing, make the thing, party hard, and do it now; we might all be razed to the ground tomorrow.

New York should be that way, too. People don’t always think about the fact of New York's limited square mileage. Probably hundreds of people have lived, worked, fought, fucked, and died right there where you are logging onto Teams from your couch. New York is a cosmic high-rise of ghosts on ghosts. We often don’t have the time for them, though, so mortality doesn't feel as close as it is.

French Quarter, 2021

New Orleans gave me joy, and friendship, and surprises, and vibrance during a time I needed it acutely. But it also gave me a place for my sorrow. There is always room in New Orleans for more ghosts. It readily absorbed my hauntings, and I was grateful.

During the Dark Time I had occasion to visit the New Orleans Museum of Art. It offers the satisfying option of completism – you can see every corner of the museum in a single, leisurely visit. Andrew found his favorite piece, decisively. “This is the best painting in the whole museum,” he declared, “It has to be painted by a Capricorn, like me.” I rolled my eyes at that.

[Until I googled the artist, Giovanni Boldini – only to find that he and Andrew literally share a birthday.]

I never mentioned I’d found my favorite, too, and that I have thought about it often since then. The internet doesn’t know whether the painter Otto Marseus Van Schrieck was born in 1619 or 1620, much less whether he was a Scorpio, like me, but I have my suspicions. His painting Serpents and Insects cannot be done justice in reproduction. Its textured darkness, its velvet blacks revealing elegant little vignettes from the depths. My Scorpio horoscope once offered this weird little koan that stuck with me: “Surrender into the darker parts of you that want to be explored through love.” That was how I felt looking at this painting. That was how I felt about this city.

I learned that this piece, like many Dutch paintings of its era, uses a trope called Vanitas: the nearness of death highlights the futility of earthly strivings. Vanitas paintings might hit you with a cudgel – a human skull perched amidst the tableau of fruits and books. It might be the slightly sickening vision of too-much food, half-eaten, in still-life arrangement. It might also look like the fecundity of the swamp, of the decay that necessarily follows life. Mushrooms, snakes, and creepy-crawly things that get turned up under the rocks.

“Vanitas”, per art history texts, points to the impermanent nature of life, the certainty of death – and therefore the pointlessness of pursuing the fleeting pleasures of worldly desires. The vanitas of New Orleans, and of Berlin, takes a different tack. Yes: life is ephemeral. Yes: death is inescapable. Therefore: the fleeting pleasures of worldly desires are of vital import.

‘tit Rex, Marigny, 2025

Being back in New Orleans this week, on vacation, has been a gift. We are surrounded by family, old friends, new loved ones, in a place we love. We have savored the bombastic joy of the Mardi Gras season parades, and the pleasures of indulging. For me, life currently feels much larger than death. New life, new relationships, new opportunities are being born, even amidst the terror and uncertainty of a hostile world.

I came down the stairs of our rental home, the morning after we arrived, and was surprised to be confronted with this picture.

Pieter Claesz, Dutch, 1623 - says a reverse-image search

I immediately saw it: the musical instruments, the feast gone fallow, the inexplicable turtle. Hello, Vanitas, old friend. It was a well placed reminder of what brought us to New Orleans in the first place. It was an opportune invitation to hold on to the joy with both hands, without turning away from the darker parts.

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You might enjoy a stroll down memory lane with the 8 podcast episodes we recorded while living in New Orleans in 2021

Episode 31: Crescent City Cha-Cha — Peripatetic, poetic, and chic, your beloved untethered freelancers have landed in New Orleans for the winter - to script, pitch, and seek adventure. We talk all about our first impressions of NOLA culture; plus: murderous rental cars, roller-skate trends, and how on earth do we approach goalsetting for the strange year we're in, after the strange year we survived?

Episode 32: Pandemic Mardi Gras Valentine

Episode 33: Big Bayou Energy

Epidode 34: Finding (Artistic) Roots in Uprootedness

Episode 35: Effort is Overrated?

Episode 36: Hot Witch Summer (the episode description alone on this one…lol)

Episode 37: Hurricane Runaway Edition

Episode 38: Bye Bye Big Easy