Tourist Productions 2007

As the tour narrator began rattling off the history of Jackson Square, I stared from my front door into the vacant lot across the street. Disorientation would be the name of the game in this Derive. At the outset my brain began forcing connections between the auricular descriptions of colonial architecture and the 20th century urban environment that met my eyes. The cast iron railings on the balconies of French quarter homes became the iron bars masking the windows of the homes I passed. A green pyramidal cupola on one home stood in for the spire of a cathedral to which the narrator drew my attention. Bushwick Leaders High School became for a moment the New Orleans School of Cooking. And so on. As Debord argues, chance is not meant to be part of a derive, rather, I found myself more consciously creating connections and making decisions than I would on a normal stroll or tour. Indeed, the disconnect between the streets named by the narrator giving directions and the street signs I passed negated the usual passivity inherent in a guided tour: if the corner of DeKalb and Bushwick was to stand in for St. Peters and Chartres streets, I would have to decide which was which in order to keep up with my urban mash-up tour. The experience was interesting in this sense: the tour became distinctly my own, neither a tour of Bushwick nor a tour of the French Quarter (and of course not not either of those things either) -- it became an intensely personal experience.

The tour also allowed me to see my neighborhood anew -- to discover a gorgeous baroque-looking church some few blocks from my apartment, for instance. Most significant for me was the experience of color. While previously my internal image of the area in which I live was composed of earthtones, bright colors suddenly jumped out to greet me -- from hand painted bird sculptures on the fence of one home passed to the intense green of the astroturf laid out in front of another.

In many ways as well, the coincidence of the auditory and visual experiences were quite telling. Two moments in particular stand out. First, as I began to recognize in the narrator's narrative the construction of New Orleans as a colonial 'other' within the continental United States (much of the literature on NO refers to this pervasive trope in the construction of New Orleans as a tourist production, often comparing it to Hawaii in this sense), I began musing on the ways the same could be said of many of New York's ethnic neighborhood. Certainly part of the attraction to me of living in an urban environment, and specifically a 'fringe' neighborhood like Bushwick, was the degree to which it was unlike the bourgeois suburb in which I grew up. Similarly, I can remember countless occasions when I or others have lauded New York City for being so unlike, so outside of, so 'other than' the rest of the US. The second coincidence I encountered was somewhat more insidious -- I passed a police station in Bushwick just as the narrator suggested I should be passing a police station in New Orleans. In that instant the systems of control and observation that constitute much of urban geography (cf. Foucault, the carceral city) seemed laid bare.

One aspect of the experience that the literature we read seems only to hint at was the degree to which memory played a significant role. Though no longer in New Orleans, I found myself recalling many of the places to which the audioguide referred me, superimposing my memory onto my present empirical observations. The most jarring moment of memory insinuating itself into my tour came as I passed a graffiti covered building, 889 Bushwick Avenue. There amongst the various tags I noticed a repeated symbol, a box with an x inside it, that was ubiquitous on the streets of New Orleans. While in New York I could only guess at the symbol's meaning, in New Orleans it identified a particular national guard or infantry unit. The units would mark each house they inspected with this symbol, to mark their passing, and with other symbols, to identify the survivors or remains discovered within each building.