Big Sur. Photo by Xelina Flores.
By Brian Chasnoff
February 2010
In the beginning, I sought Big Sur for the same reason so many others are drawn to this 100-mile stretch of isolated coastline in central California: for its reputation of stunning beauty.
By Brian Chasnoff
August 2007
“Yeah, Pops — jazz actually rose from the dead. The real music came from the grave. That was how jazz began. That’s why it brings people to life.” – Louis Armstrong, as quoted by Thomas Brothers in “Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans.”
NEW ORLEANS — It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen someone do to a home.
Takashi Horisaki, an artist from Japan, was peeling the skin off a wrecked house in the Lower Ninth Ward for the purpose of rolling it up like a carpet, loading it into the back of his pickup and driving it more than 1,300 miles across the United States to resurrect the structure in a park in Queens.
Why anyone would attempt this might be a worthwhile inquiry for some. But the artist seemed more absorbed in how to pull it off. I happened upon Horisaki at work one afternoon this spring while touring areas of the city that Hurricane Katrina had caused to flood two years ago.
It was the first of two trips this year to New Orleans, the second one decidedly more uncouth in nature. This was to attend the bachelor party of a friend with whom I’d spent four years at Tulane University nearly a decade ago.
Yes, there are crude and loathsome details to that visit. But please, consider Horisaki.
Pumpville Baptist Church. Photo by John Davenport.
By Brian Chasnoff
May 2005
PUMPVILLE — To drive west on U.S. 90 beyond the Pecos River is to witness the rising up of a dry, desolate land that Spanish explorers once dubbed despoblado, the unpopulated zone.
Limestone bluffs dotted green with cacti and creosote bushes stretch for miles in every direction, broken only by the canyons of Coahuila, Mexico, to the south and Union Pacific railroad tracks to the north.
Amid this emptiness sits a town called Pumpville, population zero.
