Lingerie Shop Biography
Source:- Google.com.pk
The shop names say it all. Trashy Diva, Voluptuous Vixen, Constant Envy ... Walk down Chartres St in New Orleans' wilfully bohemian French Quarter, with its richly coloured houses and frilly cast-iron balconies gushing with flowers, and it is clear that this is a city where the sensual life matters.
Boutiques selling perfume, corsets and lingerie give way to handsome Jackson Square, lined with purveyors of hope. Fortune tellers and tarot readers vie for attention with the pencil-point spires of St Louis Cathedral. A uniformed jazz band tunes up as a splendid white carriage with matching horse clip-clops off for a romantic ride through a bewitching ensemble of Spanish, French and Creole buildings.
Set beside a venerable bend of the Mississippi, New Orleans has always been that dreamy, steamy place where Uncle Sam finally throws off his top-hat and goes lindy-hopping. Tennessee Williams, Mardi Gras, Dixieland, voodoo, gumbo - the call is exotic and hard to resist.
Strangeness is everywhere. New Orleans has stalls selling alligator burgers, and tribes of men who dress up as Indians in outrageous feathered costumes that take a year to make. There are bars that resound to the foot-tapping beat of zydeco, and there are fish named pompano and sheepshead. The locals confer using words such as "lagniappe" (a little bit extra) and "po-boy" - a sandwich, not an impoverished youth.
"Some say we are the northernmost city in the Caribbean," a resident suggests - which is plausible given the warmth, colour and laissez-faire lifestyle enveloping me. New Orleans is one of only two cities (Las Vegas is the other) in the United States where it is legal to drink alcohol in the street, with 24-hour bars and signs saying "Cocktails To Go". Every weekend the pedestrian-only party-strip of Bourbon St becomes a raucous, boozy mayhem filled with out-of-town drunkards festooned with coloured beads.
It seems to have been like this for ever. In 1920, when Prohibition arrived and agents were despatched nationwide to assess the severity of the problem, New Orleans was found to have 5000 bars. While it took an inspector 14 minutes to be offered an illegal drink in New York, here it was just 37 seconds - generously proposed by his taxi-driver.
Comparisons with Venice are appropriate. Both cities have ravishing looks, bags of atmosphere and a precarious relationship with water. As we all know, in August 2005 Hurricane Katrina triggered floods that devastated the city. The verdict is that this was a man-made disaster - levees meant to provide protection failed.
This view is banged home emphatically in David Simon's hit television drama Treme, named after the city's historic and culturally rich African-American neighbourhood. Beginning three months after the disaster, the series shows its citizens struggling to transcend the tragedy, with a superb backing track of home-grown tunes. Many locals consider it "hyper-accurate", and a third season is now in production.
Seven years on, you still see the odd building bearing a spray-painted cross left by the emergency workers, and there are tours to see how the severely hit Lower Ninth Ward is recovering. The city's abiding mood, though, is one of "moved on".
The year 2010 will go down as the breakthrough one, when the local football team, the Saints, won the Super Bowl and the city pulled in more than nine million visitors who spent a record US$6 billion.
New hotels have opened, and the Louisiana Superdome, once a vision of flood-refugee hell, has had a multimillion-dollar renovation. The Mardi Gras parades in February head a diary packed with parties, from the April Jazz Fest to the voodoo gigs and vampire balls of Halloween.
For all its reputation, the big surprise is how small New Orleans is. Its population is only 350,000. Exploring it is a Big Easy, thanks to a historic stand-off that left its core neatly split by two-mile-long Canal St. To its east lies the astonishingly picturesque French Quarter, a neat grid of blocks that is a legacy of 1721 colonial town-planning. To the west is a classic corner of urban America with skyscraper office blocks, big-name hotels, flagship museums and a gentrifying warehouse district.
Much of this can be enjoyed on foot. Stroll a few blocks south-east and suddenly there it is - the great Mississippi, with massive cargo ships taking the bend at a surprising lick and the red-and-white Steamboat Natchez spruced up for your sunset jazz cruise. Walk north across North Rampart St and you reach Treme, the neighbourhood that is the soul of New Orleans and home to the Backstreet Cultural Museum, packed full of costumes and memorabilia from Mardi Gras and the city's famous jazz parades.
To cover more ground, join a bike tour.
"Why is it so quiet?" I ask my guide, Jeff Shyman, as he leads me through the leafy streets of Faubourg Marigny.
He explains how all the traffic keeps to the main roads, leaving peaceful neighbourhoods lined with colourful wooden "shotgun" houses, so called because a bullet fired through the front door would pass right through to the back down a passage alongside the rooms.
It is also essential to ride a streetcar. Sadly there isn't one named Desire, although you can catch a bus to Elysian Fields.
The most popular ride is on the rattling wooden Perley Thomas streetcars from 1923 that trundle along St Charles Avenue. First stop should be the Garden District, filled with staggeringly overblown antebellum mansions and magnificent live oak trees with huge roots chomping up the pavements. The scale is operatic, with every house capable of inspiring a monumental novel. Even the street names - Harmony, Pleasant, not to mention Camp - fuel the fantasy lifestyle.
This is also a good place to savour another key part of the New Orleans atmosphere - flamboyant cemeteries. With 80 per cent of the city lying below sea level, elaborate tombs and vaults had to be built above ground like rows of fancy kennels and pompous sentry-boxes.
Opened in 1833, Lafayette Cemetery is perfect for a wistful walk into the past, meeting dynasties of German emigres, yellow fever victims and Victoria Smith Fluke, once "a beautiful uptown lady".
New Orleans is renowned for its unique reply to death, with its celebratory jazz funerals featuring brass bands and the companion Second Line parades. Yes, you can get sick of hearing When The Saints Go Marching In, but superb live music is never far away, with more than 50 venues to choose from.
For many, if it's Thursday that means Vaughan's in Bywater where the jazz trumpeter (and Treme star) Kermit Ruffins performs regularly with his BBQ Swingers. The night I go he's away, which makes it easy to get inside this small wooden shack to hear Corey Henry, a trombonist who plays so vigorously that he almost beheads several fans as his slide shoots back and forth.
It's a deliciously hot night, the five-buck margaritas hit the spot, and the dress code is anything from camouflage shorts to cocktail dress. The locals are inclusive, too - I meet a painter, a seamstress and a harmonica-player who assures me this is "the very last 'hood in America". As Corey sings an eyebrow-raising song that goes "I want to blow your brains out", New Orleans certainly does feel like nowhere else in the United States, a truly maverick city where life is not so much about making money as being able to cut some decent steps.
Down on Frenchmen St - "pure New Orleans", as everyone tells you - there are a dozen music venues all within a few blocks. In some, such as the three-room club Snug Harbor, you'll have to pay US$25 to see a smart-suited guy such as Wendell Brunious play some very smooth j-a-z-z. Most others, though, rely on tips - which is how many great stars started, including the city's best-known son, whose name now graces the international airport.
Born here in 1901, Louis Armstrong spent his formative years hollering tunes with the rag-and-bone men, playing in brass bands at funerals and working summers on the paddleboats.
"We were poor and everything," he reflected, "but music was all around you. Music kept you rolling."
Visit New Orleans, and you'll find it still does.
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