Take them to the ruins.
It’s important. It will always be important.
This many months in, maybe you’re tired of giving your relatives and friends the misery tour or maybe the city’s wreckage is not what you want to dwell upon as you prepare to soak in the rays and revel in the sights, sounds, and smells of JazzFest.
Maybe you’d like to take the opportunity to step out of the darkness and into the light, if only for a weekend. Maybe you’d just like to kick your feet up and cut loose with your out-of-town friends and talk about things that people in other places talk about: baseball, gas prices, and what’s the deal with Tom Hanks’s hair in The Da Vinci Code?
Fine. Talk about those things with them. Talk about those things while you drive them around the city and show them what happened here.
It’s important.
I have more visitors coming to stay with me this JazzFest than I have had in fifteen years—back when I was single, immortal, and had three million friends and a freezer filled with vodka bottles.
They’re coming this year because they love this place and want to support this place and because of the general realization in the Great Elsewhere that any dollars spent here in New Orleans are a contribution to a good cause.
And it’s quite possible that many visitors will want to witness what this city looks like right now—witness what it really feels like; they’ll want to see the breaches, the brown lines, the Lower 9th, and the cloud of emotional dread that hangs over it all.
They’ll want to understand what happened here, the scope of human suffering that occurred before and occurs still.
Then again, many may not want to see that. Quite frankly, they’d prefer to stick to Dylan, the ’dudes, and Fats, thank you very much. And my answer is: If you want to see Fats at the Fair Grounds, you’ve got to see his house on Caffin Avenue first.
You must pay to play.
No one who visits me this year is going to get to the festival without seeing Lakeview and eastern New Orleans first.
Yeah, even just a regular drive to the Fair Grounds from any point in the city is a strong cup of coffee, an unfiltered look at the damage done, and evidence enough of what went down here. And though I don’t intend to bring my guests down, I think it’s a small crime of negligence not to put this festival into context for them.
In that way, really, it actually becomes a bigger celebration than usual. A rebirth. A return. A claim to our heritage and our future. A testimony to the triumph of the human spirit.
The New Orleans spirit.
I think JazzFest visitors can collectively be considered among the most intellectually curious and influential visitors we’ll see in the course of the year.
They will probably drink, yes, but they’re not here for the liquor. I’d wager that the Bourbon Street strip clubs do not experience any great spike in business this time of year. But the record stores, music venues, art galleries, and bookstores do. These folks matter. They want to get it. So give it to them.
Undoubtedly, the spectacle of legions of video-toting gawkers in florid print Hawaiian shirts and straw hats and wearing socks with sandals and shorts will present a disconcerting sight among the colorless wreckage of the Lower 9th.
But it means no disrespect. It is no disrespect, any more than wanting to see where the Twin Towers once stood or the city of Pompeii.
From history, we learn.
Teach them. Teach yourself. Remind yourself, because we forget. We get used to it.
I recently drove a TV news producer around town and was down in the 8th Ward and remembered so painfully what it had looked like in September, so I was provoked to nod my head at the transformations since then and I offered, “Lookin’ good!”
The producer, from New York City, looked at me as if I were out of my mind. “It does not look so good,” he said.
Gut check. Correct. It does not look so good. It looks as though a war was fought here and we lost the war.
So never forget. And never surrender.