meehawl

all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned

Termite Paradise

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There is allure in the city’s rot, and not a few native authors have bridged the short etymological gap between decay and decadence, as if the city’s louche human history was written in the twisted, rotten, vinewrapped beams of the old Creole cottages of the French Quarter, the Victorian shotguns in Fauborg Marigny, and the rambling Queen Anne piles in the Garden District and Uptown. The city is wet, sunken, overgrown, and tropical, and marks-in our imaginations as well as on our maps-the dead center of our country’s underbelly. Of course the city is the preferred home of termites and wood mold and strippers and drunks and obese hot-dog vendors and moviegoers at odds with the universe. Look in the eyes of the New York television reporter making his report from the Quarter-The bug that ate New Orleans!-and you can see the city as a frontier land of plagues, oddities, and ghosts ruling over chaos.

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