A Frolic of My Own

Jazz, Books, Food, and the Writing Life

Blogging from New Orleans, La

2 June 2007

For the past four months, Dan Baum of the New Yorker has been filing a daily journal from New Orleans. Friday he posted his final dispatch:

As I drive past endless repetitions of Wendy’s, Golden Corral, Ethan Allen furniture, Jiffy Lube, Red Lobster, and the like on my way back to Colorado, I realize that I haven’t spent a dollar anyplace but locally owned business in four months. A long time ago, David Freedman, the general manager of the listener-supported radio station WWOZ, described New Orleans to me as a kind of resistance-army headquarters. “Everyplace else in America, Clear Channel has commodified our music, McDonald’s has commodified our food, and Disney has commodified our fantasies,” he said. “None of that has taken hold in New Orleans.” In the speedy, future-oriented, hyper-productive, and globalized twenty-first century, New Orleans’s refusal to sacrifice the pleasures of the moment amounts to a life style of civil disobedience.

This is my last dispatch for New Orleans Journal. (Margaret and I can be found at www.knoxandbaum.com.) We are on our way back to a city full of high-achieving software engineers and real-estate brokers who have built a fabulously well-organized community, with excellent schools, thriving businesses, and immaculate parks, but who can’t find the time to sit a spell on the porch, let alone enjoy a second beer. Everybody in New Orleans tells Margaret and me that we’ll be back, that we now have the city in our blood and won’t be able to live anywhere else. We don’t yet know if that’s true. I can tell you that, wherever we live, I’m comforted knowing that New Orleans is there. It’s no exaggeration to say that, without New Orleans, the United States would be lost.

Thanks for telling our story so well. We hope to see you back here again.

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