This is Western Coffee—notes on building the creative body. Last time: The tidewater goby. The whole series is here. Please share this email; you can sign up free below.
You only need one thing to connect you to a place, but I finished my first trip to New Orleans yesterday with two. The first was a run from our hotel in the Garden District down to Audubon Park, near the Tulane campus, on the path made by metal tracks in a big grassy median obstructed only by utility poles and the occasional streetcar. You’d run for a while in the opposing lane, see the car’s slim old stately green face and lone round light peek out from behind the broad curve of the avenue, and switch over to the other lane for a while, let the car pass, slide back over. The ground was soft under Niked foot, the traffic mostly deferent, and despite a withering noonday heat I found myself snapped right into the zone.
The other thing was when Beyoncé, whom we’d come to New Orleans to see, asked the audience at the last show on her tour list to sing “Love on Top” without accompaniment, even from her, and they did so on pitch and on rhythm, through several modulations up the scale—tens of thousands of people stacked up the sides of the Superdome just belting it out quite capably.
The Superdome first entered my awareness during Hurricane Katrina, back when I was a brand-new editor at the brand-new Huffington Post. As Beyoncé strode the core of the megalith, no trace of that old nightmare evident, I thought about how much inferring you’d have to do, were you to stumble on this future ruin, to picture tens of thousands of people with electric wireless wristbands pulsing color in tandem with the music generated by the monarch and her industrial-scale traveling court. Eighty-nine trucks and 18 crew buses, James told me as he read about it the next day. It’s normal to talk about art as a legacy, a record of what it was like from one perspective once to be human. I reckon this concert was at least as documented as any live performance anywhere ever. But the truth of it—the ear-scraping football shrill of the upper-decks cheering, the fans gulping up $20 Little Caesars slices under glittering hats in the merch line, the hundred-minute delay before the first song—it’s already gone. We said goodbye the moment it came, like on St. Charles Avenue with the streetcars.
I’m less than $500 away from qualifying for the New York City Marathon on Nov. 5 as a charity fundraiser. Please make a donation to the nonprofit Achilles International.