Playing the villains

I saw The Dark Knight on Saturday at the Prytania Theater, which opened in 1915 and is the last remaining single-screen cinema in Louisiana. Am very glad that we took Alissa’s lead and didn’t go the Canal Street one – a student ticket at the Prytania costs $6.25 and shows before 6pm cost a dollar less! It is also located smack in the middle of a residential area, with complete disregard for generic city planning.

SPOILERS WITHIN.

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“Port Lazo”
Philip Charles Jacquet

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Here are a few more New Orleans favourites while I’m at it. Magazine Street is the best place to live if you remember you’re an unpaid intern and properly stick to window shopping.
That’s why art galleries are lovely (though you need to carefully avert your eyes if you want to enjoy art and not talk about it). Philip Charles Jacquet is an un-googlable artist with vision I can only gape at. “Le vent du large” – which I am not putting up here because the online replicas are lousy beyond belief – is very simple, an unmanned boat in the middle of a windy field. Though it seemed at first glance to depict a foolish and abandoned hope of voyage, he liberally uses fantastical blues and greys and the sky fills up two thirds of the painting. It swells comfortingly and seemed to say: I am going somewhere beyond this.

In twos

a)i) I spent my first day at work going over manuscript submissions! One of them was a children’s book proposal from the ex-VP and treasurer of the World Bank. Yes, it came on one of those papers with a letterhead from his office in DC. (It wasn’t very good.)

a)ii) These things happened almost simultaneously yesterday evening when I was standing outside the B&B waiting for my ride: one, an immensely beautiful boy cycled by and he looked over his shoulder and smiled; two, the side of the roof of the building connected to the coffee shop across the street collapsed with a boom and a shower of broken brick. (There was a man sitting directly underneath the awning when this happened but all he did was calmly shift to another seat and continue reading his paper.) Ominous, much?

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b)i) Dirty Coast – T-shirts New Orleans style, like Threadless, only cooler. I am particularly interested in their alternative gifts, such as the Constance anthology. You can choose to donate to Katrina relief efforts when you make a purchase.

b)ii) National Public Library Book/$ Donations – The New Orleans Public Library was hit hard by Katrina and the flooding that followed. Eight of twelve branches were destroyed. Revenue loss forced layoffs of 80% of the staff and total damage may be as much as $30 million. The community’s access to books, discs, computers, and the Internet continues to be very limited – when searching their online database do not be surprised if you find a book that used to be in the system but is currently listed as “lost/damaged in Katrina”.
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c)i) Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind. And the signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them there. That is why it is so important to know them by heart.

- C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

c)ii) What a promise! So large, so Divine, that our little hearts cannot take it in, and in every possible way seek to limit it to what we think safe or probable; instead of allowing it… to enlarge our hearts to the measure of what His love and power are really ready to do for us.

- Andrew Murray

The Big Easy

Rooftop of St. Michael Special School for Exceptional Children (no joke, look it up) on a blazing hot day, Chippewa Street, New Orleans. (You are with me everywhere.)