An interviewer once stated to Walker Percy: “You’ve lived a fairly privileged life. Why such despair?”

He answered: “I would reverse Kierkegaard’s aphorism that the worst despair is that despair which is unconscious of itself as despair, and instead say that the best despair and the beginning of hope is to be conscious of despair in the very air we breathe, and to look around for something better. I like to eat crawfish and drink beer. That’s despair?”

From DOUBLETAKE

The hardest part of creating a body of work is letting go of premonitions, expectations and the idea of what has gone on before.  On top of that, New Orleans is an incredibly complex place, and incredibly difficult to see in an unique, fresh way.

Walker Percy, in his essay “The Loss of the Creature,” writes “Impossible to see: the thing as it is, has been appropriated by the symbolic complex which has already been formed in the sightseer’s eye.”

And so, the plight of the post-post-modern artist – to attack the impossibility, appropriate the appropriated or deconstruct the symbolic.  Either way the approach, my approach, as rambling street photographer can lead to little or nowhere in this sort of philosophical environment, and I am feeling the brick wall.  Question is: Do I shoot it?  Or find another means?

You live in a good place when you can comfortably wear the same shirt every day for a week and no one notices.  That, or youre one lonely fucker.  This weeks flavor: a red plaid double-pocketed cotton Van Heusen picked up for $2 at the Salvation Army.

three Percy essays from “Pilgrim in the Ruins”

four Dixie beers

a thunderstorm over the Garden District

an orange moonrise

The Third Man with Orson Welles

Most reckless things are beautiful in some way and recklessness is what makes experimental art so beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibility that they are founded on nothing…I feel this in the work of great modern painters such as Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko. Everyone acknowledges them now as being major artists, and yet, does their work amount to anything? There’s a possibility that it doesn’t, although I believe in it and want it to exist. But I think that part of the strength of their art, in fact, is this doubt as to whether it may be there at all.

- John Ashbery