An obsession that I've developed in my old age, is great architecture. I bought a house in New Orleans and I became quite enamored of the architecture there. It began there. I travel a lot or my work, so now, wherever I go, I wasn't to find the most beautiful church, the most beautiful museums. Anything ancient.
If I could put my finger on it, I'd bottle it and sell it. I came down here originally in 1972 with some drunken fraternity guys and had never seen anything like it - the climate, the smells. It's the cradle of music; it just flipped me. Someone suggested that there's an incomplete part of our chromosomes that gets repaired or found when we hit New Orleans. Some of us just belong here.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said that New Orleans, when rebuilt, will be a chocolate city. And he will be the delicious nut in the center.
On occassion, slaves in Spanish New Orleans owned slaves, whose labor they could appropriate toward purchasing their own freedom, or whose ownership they could trade as a partial payment on their own freedom.
The city of New Orleans showed America what it takes to rebuild a great place. We're all going together, and we're not leaving anybody behind.
After Hurricane Katrina, I wanted to go back to New Orleans to help musicians return to the city. But Andrew Young advised me, "If you want to help people, go work at an investment bank. " His contrarian advice opened my eyes to the importance of capital. "Learn how to make some money before you give it away. " I learned that you can bring about good in the world especially if you have a paycheck.
How did you fall in love with New Orleans? At once, madly. Looking back, sometimes I think it was predestined.
Yeah, I think A Confederacy of Dunces is probably the perfect New Orleans book.
For a while I was living in New Orleans for like 4, 5 years. I had just come back to town.
Invite the best and brightest to compete for a grand prize to come up with designs, including new zoning, building codes and so forth, for New Orleans that could make it safe from water, and let the state and city pick the plan that works best for Louisiana.
When you set a play in the French Quarter in New Orleans, it's hard not to acknowledge the whole African-American, French, white mixing of races. That's what the French Quarter is: it's a Creole community.
Every time I close my eyes blowing that trumpet of mine, I look right into the heart of good old New Orleans. It has given me something to live for.
New Orleans could wreck your liver and poison your blood. It could destroy you financially. It could shun you or embrace you, teach you tricks of the heart you thought Tennessee Williams was just kidding about. And in August it could break your spirit.
The immediate, highest priority need, in my humble opinion, is that we build quickly the interim structures that can channel water away from population and businesses in the New Orleans area.
The air was so sweet in New Orleans it seemed to come in soft bandannas; and you could smell the river and really smell the people, and mud, and molasses, and every kind of tropical exhalation, with your nose suddenly removed from the dry ices of a Northern winter.
Merrie Destefano storms the world of urban fantasy with AFTERLIFE, breathing new life into the vast genre of the undead. Gritty, poignant, in the tradition of Bladerunner, with the nostalgia of New Orleans. With crisp and beautiful prose, AFTERLIFE blurs the line between the living and the dead to ask life's ultimate questions-even if they take nine lives to solve.
I have been robbed of three million dollars all told. Everyone today is playing my stuff and I don't even get credit. Kansas City style, Chicago style, New Orleans style hell, they're all Jelly Roll style.
New Orleans life is such a night life. The thing that comes up very often is that our day essentially doesn't start until midnight or 2 in the morning.
I'm from New Orleans. There's a lot of vampire mystique and mythology that resonates there, and I was fascinated by it. I always wanted to play one.
I always like to play very contemporary concepts of swing right next to New Orleans music because it highlights continuum.