Photoblogging: New Orleans

(Bourbon Street at night. Our hotel is right here, so sleeping during the day with all the wandering street musicians can be a challenge. There are worse problems.)

So I finally got Sprint to cooperate enough to get my pictures of New Orleans off my phone. They decided to change their web and account protocols, which required new usernames and passwords--a couple different sets for various functions, and none of which, after dutifully following their step-by-step trip thru the maze, would then work.

For a couple months.

Well, everything seems back up to speed now, just in time for me to dump Sprint's ass in June when the stork delivers a shiny new iPhone. This new device will surely not make me a better photographer, but at least I won't have to conjugate !kung verbs to get at the files once I shot them.

So with the usual apologies and caveats vis-a-vis my having no clue about how to frame a compelling image: these were taken in the past couple months during three or four visits (many for this post, which, because of Sprint's issues, had to rely instead on web ripoffs), and are all from the French Quarter where we stay on our layovers.

(There are hidden gardens all through the Quarter. This one belongs to a hotel.)

(The calliope being played atop the Natchez)

(Parts of my favorite movie Miller's Crossing were filmed here in N.O. Many scenes like this look familiar to me, though I've never located any known shooting sites.)

(Canal Street with its functioning old trolley car system. Ridership on this seems pretty robust.)

(Some street musicians at the Cafe du Monde. These are regulars on this corner, and they're actually quite good.)

(A little hidden Café entrance.)

I continue to marvel at how strong a cultural vibe comes from this place. In food and music especially, but also in language (and literature, maybe?), New Orleans seems to have forged its own amazingly distinct and vital path. The local weekly covering this weekend's jazz festival has profiles of a bunch of local musicians, people unheard-of in the country at large but renowned in this city. It's interesting that a big cultural event like this expends no energy to get big names to come HERE; they'll supply their own, thankyouverymuch.

(My view during lunch.)


fin.