One of the more wonderful things about publishing OffBeat is that I get to learn something that’s interesting every day. I can’t imagine having a job where I was required to do the same daily drudgery and not be able to learn something. I am cursed with a curious, easily-distracted mind. Luckily, I’m usually able to go off on a tangential thought and bring myself back to the subject at hand!
My mother always tells me that I managed to work in a profession that uses all of the loves of my life: Music, reading, writing, art and photography. It doesn’t hurt that I’m pretty competitive and like business, too.
But while it’s true that one never can possibly have a job that requires some repetition, if you’re like me, you need a different sort of inspiration in your work other than the one related to a paycheck. I really believe that everyone would be better off with a source of uplift that keeps you going and aspiring to whatever you personally want to be: A better, richer (not just monetarily), kinder, loving, fairer, more astute, more perfect—or add your own spiritual quest—human being.
You see, running this business is not just to make money (sometimes I wish it were). It’s a way to expand and improve our community. I’ve learned so much in the past 25 years about New Orleans music, history and culture. Certainly I’m personally no encyclopedia of that, but being able to publish OffBeat gives me the opportunity employ creative people and experts to show the world our musicians, writers, artists, photographers, cultural icons and standard-bearers. In other words, we have the opportunity to be inspired and to inspire in turn.
It’s been said that New Orleans is like an onion: you’ve discovered and are inspired by something interesting and wonderful about the city. But look down just a bit deeper, and you find that it’s got so many layers you can spend your life peeling the onion. That’s the fascination of New Orleans.
It’s true that I tend to intellectualize a lot of what OffBeat stands for. In some ways, the magazine and our website and newsletter are geared towards entertaining people. But it goes deeper than that. OffBeat’s goal was never one to skim the surface of our culture, but to go deep inside it. Hopefully, we’ve been able to provide some education and to elicit real appreciation from our readers about why we think it’s such an endearing city.
A few weeks ago I wrote in my blog about how we all need to embrace change in New Orleans, as it will ultimately be good for the city. One of the better pieces I’ve read recently—and one that said it a lot more eloquently and intelligently than I ever could—was an op-ed piece in the Times-Picayune by Tulane professor and geographer Richard Campanella (I’m a big fan of his books).
My blog described how some of us in the city tend to cling obsessively to old ways, and in fact, never welcome in new blood, new ideas. Personally, I feel this is one of the city’s downfalls: we just like things the way they’ve always been, and we certainly don’t want any “carpetbaggers” coming in to change anything, whether it be an attitude towards food trucks, or changing an existing archaic noise ordinance that prohibits music after 8 p.m. That’s such a short-sighted view.
Campanella’s piece pointed out that historically “changes and conflicts have happened before, in far greater magnitude, and that we should expect flashpoints to occur when a diverse democracy resides in close urban proximity. It’s not a sign of a broken system in a declining culture; it’s the sign of a working system in a vibrant culture… progress does not destroy culture; on the contrary, it breathes new life into it. Culture is ever-experimenting, evolving, discarding, borrowing and inventing.”
As Campanella points out, welcoming change and incorporating new ideas into New Orleans’ culture is the very thing that will keep our city alive and vibrant. I would challenge anyone to dispute that the burgeoning influx of young entrepreneurs—and young people from the “outside world” who discovered they loved New Orleans after coming here to help reconstruct post-Katrina—has done anything but good for us.
In a previous life, I traveled quite a bit to other southern cities, like Atlanta, Dallas, Nashville, Memphis, Houston, Miami, Raleigh, Charlotte. Those cities don’t hold a candle culturally to New Orleans. Not even close. But what I did notice is that all of these places’ populations contain many residents who weren’t necessarily born there. They moved there, usually for a job. In New Orleans’ case—and this is important to note—we have a lot of new residents who’ve moved here because they love the city’s culture.
How inspiring we must be to be so attractive to someone who chooses to move here to spend their lives? New Orleans is a many-layered inspiration to the people who choose it. We should welcome our new residents as they explore our city and help them understand that maintaining and enriching our culture with their help is even better than peeling the cultural onion. It’s more like making a richer, more flavorful onion soup. To hell with gumbo.
