Amzie: Oh yes, what's up man. When I first came to French Quarter, I went "Oh my God. This is the best place I ever seen in my whole life." You and I want to be here right now, as long as I can be. It's like all the people who live around me are like musicians, and artists, and poets, painter, writers, and stuff. So you walk around within this environment. I think of it as kind of like a kid. And you know like when you have a kid in a playpen, and they're in an enriched environment. They're always growing, always learning, always alive, and their IQ goes up, everything, their motor skills grow up. Here I think is just a big playpen.
The Quarter was built by the people, by the French and Spanish, who understood architecture, and understood aesthetics, and understood beauty, and created a living environment for the people to be enriched in. And you can walk through the quarter at three in the morning on a January night and there's a full moon. And in New Orleans you've got freaks that have been here for 300 years. So its like, it's okay to be here. I always wonder, especially when I'm making a poster or a painting or something, I'm wondering what does someone who comes from somewhere else see when they first walk in here.
Tourists ... they come and they want to see what the real New Orleans is about. The sad part is that they come to Bourbon Street, they stay in hotel. They get drunk. They see some titty dancers, and then they go home and say "I don't what's the big deal about New Orleans is."
You think of New Orleans as, you know, like a place longitude and latitude on a map, on the earth. But in a sense, like, New Orleans to me is an address in the whole of the whole of the universe of existence. And if you match up with that address, if you're supposed to be here, then you'll feel it. You'll walk in here and you'll go "Whoa!"