New Orleans

I was trying to think of a creative introduction, or impressive alliteration, or metaphoric portrayal of life in New Orleans.

I couldn't.

There's just too much to encapsulate when you're trying to introduce the uninformed into a world of overwhelmingly transcendental sensory experience.

Cuisine. Music. Architecture. Diversity. The River.

Everything about New Orleans is unique. When you grow up in a literal and figurative black-and-white, rural Deep South small town, a place such as New Orleans is fresh and lively, yet relaxing and comforting at the same time.

New Orleans is different from other cities. Come to think of it, New Orleans is different from everywhere.

While a small-town upbringing makes you think just about any large city is overwhelming and diverse, no place makes as significant an impact on your senses as New Orleans. It's not your typical major U.S. city, i.e. Dallas, Houston, St. Louis, etc.

None of those cities are more than 300 years old. None of those cities have been directly ruled for significant portions of time by the British, French, and Spanish. Throw in the Haitian-voodoo culture, years of Catholicism-based practices, and pinches of Italian, German, and Greek cultures, and the city's heritage reveals a broader spectrum of customs and deeper layers of influence.

The amalgam of cultures results in one label - Creole.

Creole is not Cajun. Creole is more urban, Spanish, and West African. Cajun is more rural, poor, and white. Both have a strong French base, but many people believe the terms are interchangeable, and often label New Orleans as a Cajun city.

Cajuns do exist in New Orleans. However, New Orleans is Creole. Lafayette is Cajun. Baton Rouge is Cajun. New Orleans is not. In fact, it's hard to label New Orleans as anything but a city made up of countless ethnic groups that have all somehow retained their individual characteristics while avoiding homogenization. Yet at the same time, there has been somewhat of a homogenization, otherwise there would be no Creole.

But perhaps the most striking difference in New Orleans to me is its deeply rooted cultural base in one frame of thought/being/academia that consists of so many branches: Arts.

When most people hear arts, they think artists: Monet, Renoir, Picasso, Remington, Da Vinci, Van Gogh.

However, that's just a limb on The Great Tree of Arts. The first definition for "art" on dictionary.com is ...

"the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance."

Doesn't that sound awesome? And doesn't that sound like New Orleans?

I admit. I'm not a well-traveled person. But of the places I've been, no place comes close to representing the epitome of arts or the complexity in the capability of the human mind than New Orleans. Everything is an art form in New Orleans.

Masterpieces are seen throughout the realm of the human experience in New Orleans, from the grand scope of the local cuisine, to the European architecture, to the assortment of musical genres, to the people who make their livings on the street: Children tap-dancing, adolescents and adults playing trombones, trumpets, tubas, guitars, and harmonicas, the artists who hang their hand-crafted pieces along the wrought-iron fence of Jackson Square.

It's all art. It takes a mind capable of understanding the abstract, how a mind can start with nothing and create it into something others enjoy.

When I was in college, I would have never said that what I do - sports writing - is an art.

It is.

Any kind of writing is an art, as long as the writer puts his or her time into it. That doesn't mean all writing is art, just like you can't throw water colors at a piece of paper, make something up explaining it, and call it art.
Photography is art. Sport is art. Public speaking is art. Poetry is art. Art is why the Greeks were so intellectually far beyond the Romans despite predating them by so long.

But if an individual is genuine and sincere about throwing paint onto paper, explaining what it means, and being proud of making nothing into something, it is indeed art.

And that's what's different about New Orleans. The people you encounter in the city - mind you, a city still recovering less than three years after the worst natural disaster in American history - are genuine and sincere. From the folks working in the restaurants, to the men hauling luggage up and down hotel elevators, to the musicians honing their crafts in French Quarter clubs and bars, they're genuinely and sincerely glad you're there with them experiencing the experience that is New Orleans. Sure, they may be extra nice because they want a tip or want you to spend more money during your visit, but that's the cost for arts. Not everybody is capable of comprehending the abstract, of making nothing into something, of taking a few raw materials and making them into a grand creation, or simply appreciating the aptitude it takes to do so. Therefore, yes, it should cost something to attain the arts, or try to even if you're not truly able to understand them from an internally intellectual standpoint.

I love statistics. I'm a sports freak, and I love number-crunching. If I see something on TV telling me Tim Duncan has more playoff double-doubles than any other player in the past decade, I'm happy because I know those figures are concrete and they're supposed to please me since I'm a Duncan fan.

But when I hear the blues, something hits me inside; the notes, the sound, the words, something about the abstract creation of an aesthetically-pleasing art makes me happy in a way concrete values don't. What would seem like a five-minute soliloquy of self-pity to an individual incapable of comprehending that art is a five-minute romp of happiness for me. The feeling of understanding another person through the genuine expression of arts creates an intangible connection, almost a relaxation, that figures and facts can't elicit.

I'm a logical, reason-based person. But I'm the first to admit, our current world is dominated too greatly by the concrete: zeros, decimals, digits, figures, facts, ratings. Those incapable of thinking in abstract terms dismiss the arts as meaningless, baseless, illogical, pointless, soft, when in fact, numbers lie. Facts aren't always facts because you can't get the same thing out of a string of numbers you can a string of letters.

Numbers make values; letters make words. Values make more values; words make stories, stories make books, books make novels, novels make epics, epics make volumes, volumes shape history.

Therefore, while the concrete may appear solid on the surface, it often lies more than the abstract. Sciences can't explain everything; arts don't try to. That's why they're more genuine.

New Orleans doesn't care if you don't like it. It's just going to keep on doing what it's been doing for 300-plus years ... making memories, shaping lives, and existing in a genuinely abstract and good-hearted collective soul.