Tom Piazza > Quotes

“At one point, early on, some public figures even asked whether it 'made sense' to rebuild New Orleans. Would you let your own mother die because it didn't make financial sense to spend the money to treat her, or because you were too busy to spend the time to heal her sick spirit?”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, once told me that when a brass band plays at a small club back up in one of the neighborhoods, it's as if the audience--dancing, singing to the refrains, laughing--is part of the band. They are two parts of the same thing. The dancers interpret, or it might be better to say literally embody, the sounds of the band, answering the instruments. Since everyone is listening to different parts of the music--she to the trumpet melody, he to the bass drum, she to the trombone--the audience is a working model in three dimensions of the music, a synesthesic transformation of materials. And of course the band is also watching the dancers, and getting ideas from the dancers' gestures. The relationship between band and audience is in that sense like the relationship between two lovers making love, where cause and effect becomes very hard to see, even impossible to call by its right name; one is literally getting down, as in particle physics, to some root stratum where one is freed from the lockstop of time itself, where time might even run backward, or sideways, and something eternal and transcendent is accessed.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“In New Orleans the funerals remind us that Life is bigger than any individual life, and it will roll on, and for the short time that your individual life joins the big stream of Life, cut some decent steps, for God’s sake.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“Functioning in the face of any injustice disfigures you. If it kills you or drives you crazy, you are disfigured, and if you can contain it and channel it and work around it, you are still disfigured.”
― Tom Piazza, City of Refuge

“New Orleans music lovers, black, white, young and old, are much more likely to be found in places where they can dance to the music they love, holler encouragement, sing along and, if at all possible, eat and drink at the same time.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“New Orleans will be the new Las Vegas or, more like it, Atlantic City: a big gaudy façade for all the high-rollers, controlled by mobsters and businessmen who live far, far away and destroy everything they touch,”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“In New Orleans, on the other hand, geography and time, food, music, holidays, modes of dress and ways of speaking, are part of an integrated fabric. People dress in certain ways for certain events, and certain foods are eaten on certain days,”
― Tom Piazza, City of Refuge

“Today I travel a lot, and when I tell people that I live in New Orleans their expression changes slightly; something in their facial muscles relaxes, something brightens in their eyes, and they smile.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“And they went off down the street, into the heart of Mardi Gras Day.”
― Tom Piazza, City of Refuge

“Go with what is. Use what happens.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“Mac Rebennack, better known as Dr. John, once told me that when a brass band plays at a small club back up in one of the neighborhoods, it’s as if the audience—dancing, singing to the refrains, laughing—is part of the band.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“The past in New Orleans cohabits with the present to an extent not even approximated in any other North American city.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“New Orleanians knew how to turn deprivation into an asset; they had the best gallows humor going, they danced at funerals, they insisted on prevailing.”
― Tom Piazza, City of Refuge

“And so they couldn’t have known exactly how despicable a lie it was when the president told the news media later that week that nobody could have predicted the levee breaks.”
― Tom Piazza, City of Refuge

“The traveling world is parallel to the world of those rooted to one spot; it is the other end of the telescope, so to speak. Things that are taken by most people to have solidity and permanence become relative and subject to time. The church spire, the town hall or courthouse that watches over your days and is an ever-fixed mark to the merchant or the laborer, is to the traveling man only one among many such. The cherished touchstones of your daily life are to him a set of fresh opportunities for passing adventure, a source of profit to be extracted quickly, like gold from a small mountain, before moving on to the next El Dorado.”
― Tom Piazza

“After New York City, where I lived and which I also loved, with its sharp right angles and hard surfaces and fast tempo and endless pavement and soaring vertical walls, a giant video game of the mind at the expense of the body,”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“Rarely is the best New Orleans music found in a concert hall where the audience sits separated from the performers by a proscenium,”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“There was a gulf between those who had had their community smashed and their future thrown completely into question, and those for whom life still moved in an intelligible stream. It was not unlike the line that separated those who had come back from the war and those whose lives had been going on continuously while they had been away.”
― Tom Piazza, City of Refuge

“New Orleans has a mythology, a personality, a soul, that is large, and that has touched people around the world. It has its own music (many of its own musics), its own cuisine, its own way of talking, its own architecture, its own smell, its own look and feel.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“The question is not racial solidarity or class solidarity but a distinction between people who have a soul left and people who have mortgaged their souls for a short-sighted self-gratification—whether”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“I didn’t know it consciously at that point, but I had stepped into one of the most important lessons that New Orleans offers: Go with what is. Use what happens.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“the multiplicity of perspectives drove the audience mad. . . . Was it true of the nation as well? Was the madness the reality? Or was the noble ideal the reality? Or was it both? Somewhere, Douglass had called the Constitution a document “at war with itself,” enshrining both the rationales for injustice and the means of dismantling the injustices it contained. Another answer to the question “What is”
― Tom Piazza, The Auburn Conference

“Chief Bo as the center, dressed, in 2005, in bright red feathers, with beadwork that should be in a museum and probably will be someday,”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“she was practicing a skill that both her parents had acquired as children, a way of maintaining a substitute life”
― Tom Piazza, City of Refuge

“Nothing in New Orleans starts on time, and this practice was no exception.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“Everyone who loves New Orleans learns to love it with its flaws.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“New Orleans culture is of a piece. You can't really lose one part of it without losing the whole thing.”
― Tom Piazza

“their Big Chief, Bo Dollis, would marshal them all together and they would start off down Dryades, with Chief Bo chanting one of the Indian songs accompanied by drums and tambourines, and the whole gang shouting back the antiphonal response.”
― Tom Piazza, City of Refuge

“Anger is famous for being, often, a mask for profound grief.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters

“Go into debt.'

It was the best advice anyone had ever given me. As time went on, I learned that this is a very New Orleans attitude, for good and ill.”
― Tom Piazza, Why New Orleans Matters