It’s been a long time since you all have heard or seen anything from us. New Orleans has lived up to its reputation—rough and kind, dangerous and liberating, equally crushing and uplifting. We’re beginning to understand so many songs about getting chewed up and spit out by this wickedly beautiful town, only to come back for more.
The story we’ve found here is the best one yet, we think, and the depth of it has proven to be too much to finish right now. We’re taking off on bicycles tomorrow. We will return next year to collect the remaining material and to film developments in what we’ve discovered here.
We plan to be on the west coast by February of 2012, almost two years since we started this project. It’s been a long, hard road we’ve embarked on, one we wouldn’t have traded for anything. So many personal developments have happened since we’ve begun America reCycled. Other than being totally rewired by what we’ve seen and lived, our grandfather has died and our father has moved to Panama. Our mom’s getting married next month. We’ve both fallen in love. And as we prepare to leave New Orleans and begin looking west once again, it’s with worn and weathered minds that we anticipate our arrival. As well as the beauty and hardship that awaits us.
It’s been incredibly empowering and inspiring to edit and release short films and writing as we’ve progressed. Every time we put something out there and receive such encouraging emails and generous donations, it fills us back up and gives us energy to keep pushing forward. We’ve released five episodes now, totaling about 75 minutes of video, 50 pages of writing, and hundreds of photos. It gives you all a great sense of what we’ve discovered before New Orleans. Unfortunately, we will not be able to do this with the New Orleans footage we have, and we’ll be approaching publishing differently for the remaining four months of the journey.
We’re going to shoot and write as we go, and edit later. We’re expecting there to be four more episodes (including New Orleans) and to edit them all on the road would add about 4 or 5 more months to the journey. We want to spend the rest of this trip caught up in the inspiration we feel when we’re riding through communities and meeting people, and the arduous process of spending half the time in front of a computer would only be demoralizing and debilitating at this point. When we’re done, we want to be able to step back, take a fresh look at the journey, and tell its story.
So we’ll be making more frequent, less substantive posts. Blogging. When we finally do reach the west coast next year, we’ll be able to sit down and commit ourselves fully to editing everything together into a full-length film and a book, which we will then release alongside the short films. We’re so excited to get back on the road again and share what we discover. Thank you so much for all the help and support. If it weren’t for you all, we never would have made it this far…
We’ve dug up this writing, scribbled on a lineless sheet of paper, now transcribed. It and these photographs will have to do before we can tell our whole New Orleans story. We think it’ll be worth the wait.
There’s a daunting permanence to pen and paper. With each letter committed, the real estate actually diminishes irreparably. Each sheet occupies a very real space in the world. From the forest to the mill to this chipped and painted desk, writing becomes a craft in the literal sense—the gradual manipulation of material to bend matter to the shape of the human spirit.
The city owns you. This time of year more than others, when the heat actually soaks deep down as you sludge through the crumbling streets, alcohol forcing the blood through your veins and your lungs gasping to find air in the swelter. Murder rates are up, people with shallow enough roots are gone, and it’s just the backbone that’s left, pulling the city through the swamp of the season, promising to support the droves of fair-weathered residents once again when they return for the four-month long foreplay to the thrashing orgasm of Mardi Gras.
“Help us make love in the streets?” The words echo down Royal Street from a 19 year old, twisted by a morning of malt liquor. A look of bemused discomfort overtakes her targets, two middle-aged women, neatly dressed and toting bags of souvenirs. Their eyes grow increasingly disturbed as they scan her crew, four shaggy youth, encrusted in years of voluntary, proud street life. As the targets come closer, their apprehension dissolves into laughter as they spot an arrangement of shiny spots in the street. Little silver circles stamped with the faces of dead presidents, neatly forming the letters L, O, V.
“We just need an E and we got it!” shouts the girl. One of the women gleefully reaches into her pocket and provides more fuel for the game. “This barely even feels like spangin’,” muses one of the kids. “Nobody yells at us to get a job, we’re makin’ people smile.” He takes the donation and adds it to the L, O, and V, enlarging the word but keeping it carefully incomplete. “I think we have enough for another round,” announces a third through chapped lips. As he gathers half the change, I notice a deep lesion on his forearm. “Is that staff?” I ask. “You should see the one on my thigh!” He proudly begins pulling up his shorts before I stop him. “How you get rid of that?” I ask. Chuckling, he pockets the change and stands up. “You leave New Orleans.”
