020100309 21:36 • 
Everywhere I travel, I look for street art and post-graffiti. Most places truly sound like their street art, and I discover shared character between these not-so-separate attributes in every place I visit or live.
I spent the end of February gathering sounds in New Orleans. This city, even now, is such a collision of light and dark, beauty and crazy. It sounds very much the way these images look. I think I managed to capture some small essence of it in my sonic containment device.
The rail cars in New Orleans are unlike any others I’ve traveled in elsewhere on the world, seemingly out of time and place. I managed amazing captures of their workings. My favorite trolley sounded mere seconds from perpetual explosion, as if it were steam powered and filled with angry water sprites somehow trapped in the boiler: loud bangs and subsonic thumps, liquid gurgles and pressurized wheezings, the entire car shuddering, jolting, bouncing down the track. I rode it twice to catch every nuance catchable.
Continuing my sampling of the audio aether, I hit Café du Monde on Decatur shortly before midnight on a Friday. Hot chocolate, ultra-powdered beignets and an overflowing crowd in heat, dressed to the nines in their weekend release finest. PCM-D50 in hand, I was asked by the man in the kitchen “What’s that?” as he tapped my recorder with the straw he was handing me. When I explained it was an audio recorder, he gave me a long, appraising look, then smiled and told me he would be happy if I used his voice but if I have a big hit he wants a cut. I promised it would be so and he promised me another bag of beignets, on the house, if I “roll back with the millions”. Sharp.
I have a special affinity for Da Vinci and Vitruvius, so it was almost tear-inducing powerful to round a corner and find myself face to face with this rendition of Vitruvian Man embedded beneath the random tags and markered detritus of our current society. From Vitruvius some 2100 years in the past, to Leonardo a scant 523 ago, to someone here in the Now with ink in hand on Frenchmen Street, then to me, and from me to you.
Light and dark, beauty and crazy, sound and vision, all at once.
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