"Do Not Open: Cheney Inside"-If These Refrigerators Could Speak (NYT)

[kpete]

If These Refrigerators Could Speak

By ANDREI CODRESCU and NILS JUUL-HANSEN
Published: January 29, 2006

The rows of fridges lining the streets looked by moonlight like primed canvases ready for painting. The city's artists, who have been enthralled since John James Audubon by New Orleans's embrace of decay and death (Audubon purchased all his American birds dead from the French Market), were not long in reacting.

New Orleans music and art had always been inspired by funk: rotting vegetation, blooming night jasmine, the faint smell of the dead wafting from the city's above-ground cemeteries, rotting crustaceans, transpiration and sex. Now here was all this funk, magnified a thousand times. And here were all these metal tombs stretching as far as the eye could see, more numerous than the graves they resembled. The art appeared instantly and it was, appropriately, political.

"Chem Trails Are Real: Weather Control Is Here," was scrawled on a refrigerator below a drawing of a jet leaving behind what looked like a trail of poison. Another fridge warned severely: "Do Not Open: Cheney Inside." Inside others one could find President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, Ray Nagin and Michael Brown doing obscene things with the maggots and with each other. In a short time, there were thousands of art works in the city, an exhibition that stretched for miles, that had no official opening, that was constantly in progress.

Today most of the show is closed. National Guardsmen, volunteers and city workers have incinerated the art after hauling it to vast refrigerator graveyards. New Orleans always renewed its armies of ghosts after every disaster of its 500-year history, but this last addition came with its own unique, absolutely new style. — ANDREI CODRESCU

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/opinion/29codrescu.html

[pitohui]

1. audubon did NOT purchase all of his birds dead at french market

the man traveled extensively and it is well known that he not only collected plenty of his own specimens, he even ATE some of them

i don't think you can really conflate st. francisville and new orleans anyway, that would be quite a commute every morning even today for mr. audubon

sorry, nitpick, but new orleans is a city, louisiana is actually an entire state, imagine that

and codrescu should really know better, i will blame a bad editing job for that flub

[hlthe2b]

2. Isn't Codrescu a humorists/satyrist?

I think this is tongue-in-cheek.