15 Minutes of Fame

One great thing about our hosts in New Orleans was that their 15-year-old son (also Patrick) loves to play music. The second they found out my traveling companion Molly loves to sing, they invited her to sing with him and some other local musicians that very night during a "15 Minutes of Fame" event at a great coffee house called Neutral Ground.


He's been playing guitar since Katrina, and his mom talked about how shocked she was that neighbors and members of the music community just kept giving him their old instruments without them having to buy it. He's a young performer, but I never saw him without a guitar. I hope he makes it big.

They'd never played together so before the performance they sneaked off to practice outside. Molly read the lyrics to Amazing Grace on the internet on someone's cell phone screen. They did it to the tune of "The House of the Rising Sun". They had an incredible sound, very moving. The photos don't capture it nearly as well as the recorded audio from their rehearsal and performance.

Listen to the rehearsal by pushing play:




Everyone sat on comfy chairs and couches and listened to them play. It was like being in a friend's living room. Strangers introduced themselves and shared couches with strangers. That kind of place.

Listen to the performance:

Full disclosure: it's possible that I'm jumping to conclusions. But I love this photo because it appears that our musician friend here is trying to chat up a pretty young lady at the coffee house. The light on her is great and they both look a little nervous, but totally unaware of my camera. One of those timeless moments, and, again, from Patrick's point of view. The only part of their conversation I overheard was them exchanging names, but I do wish him the best of luck with both the music and the ladies.

Some Dogs Whose Names I Forget.

When we first walked up to the house of our New Orleanian hosts (see last post), this little guy was standing in front of the big one, between his legs, and I about melted. Of course I couldn't get my camera out fast enough and they didn't do this cute thing again during our entire stay but I still got some fun shots whenever I could keep them far away enough from me to focus. Such friendly dogs.


Sorry, but I've got to indulge in a tiny bit of projection/anthropomorphism. That little dog reminds me of myself when I'm pretending to be tall-- I stick my nose in the air, extend my neck as far as it will go, and puff out my chest. And that big dog is totally smiling. He knows he won the height contest, and he was barely trying.

I've had a theory in the works since sharing a city with snobby Parisian dogs, that dogs' friendliness is proportional with that of their owners. Thoughts?


At my birthday party in March, Dominick Reuter and I passed his camera back and forth shooting goofy photos of my friends. By the end of the night the only way you could tell who'd shot which photo was that his were all from a much higher perspective (kid is a couple of feet taller than I am.) Point being: I've been trying lately to get my camera off my face so that all my pictures aren't from the same perspective. For this and the last one I held the camera at about knee-height, and got this guy to look up at me.


This is not an example of the effort I just explained, but I was playing with what Bruce Lipsky told me-- this photo has a clear point of view (my face!)



I call this one "Role Model". It'd dedicated to my mentor, former TA, former editor, and close friend, Ms. Phoebe Anne Sexton. I assume she likes friendly dogs.

You're welcome here, kind stranger...

The Be Good Tanyas' version of "The Lakes of Pontchartrain," a civil war-era folk song, kept ing in my head all weekend. Here I slapped a verse on a photo of a pretty doorbell. It wasn't actually the doorbell to the house of the kind folks who hosted us, but the basic idea (welcoming Southern hospitality) is there. Some of the vignetting happened in-camera, but, again, I used photoshop to make it more prominent.

Our hosts were Patrick (who goes by Patrap), his wife Theresa, and their 15-year-old son, also Patrick. They started off as strangers to us-- Molly's aunt knew them from Weather Underground, where you can read Patrap's tips for hurricane preparedness. They spent 26 months living in a FEMA trailer, so they would know. I was struck by the pride they took in having endured that, in having rebuilt and returned, the pride they took in their city was phenomenal. They welcomed us into their house with open arms, sharing stories, inviting Molly to sing with their son at a coffee shop, and even leaving the key to their house with us when we went out that night!


Here they were playing with their sweetie of a dog while watching the weather on TV. It was Saturday, so everyone (and I mean every single New Orleanian I talked to) was worried about Dolly. (Side note: I've got an entire upcoming post dedicated to photos of their adorable dogs.)




I wanted to show both of the last two photos together because they're very similar, and together they tell a lot. In the first one, Theresa is knocking on her neighbor's door to see if they want to come out with us tonight to a coffee shop where her son is performing. Friendly Southern neighbors, sharing a porch, a backyard, an evening's entertainment. Beautiful.

You can't see Patrap in the second because he was around the corner behind me. "This North wind is really freaking me out," Patrap said, "It was like this right before Katrina." He said it with a mixture of fear and pride and confidence in his knowledge of weather, and here Theresa is standing on her front porch, a social center of deep Southern culture, thinking about the wind direction, and about (then Tropical Storm) Dolly.