For most of the year in New Orleans, the only weather issues we have to deal with are occasional afternoon monsoons and scorching humidity. The generally short-lived winter weather came a bit early this year, though, and since we in New Orleans have no idea what layering means, that’s usually our cue to huddle up in bars and living rooms.
Despite that, we were pleased to join a sizeable crowd of people turning up for New Orleans GOODFest at the outdoor Music Box Village venue. As photographers, we couldn’t be more excited about the space.
The space itself was reason enough to travel outdoors: a network of treehouse-type structures that themselves are musical instruments. Saws, chimes, and whirring turbines cohabitate in an almost ghostly neighborhood of small music huts that together function as a self-referential sculptures of the community inherent in music, a collaborative creation they’re themselves capable of.
The event was put on by GOOD and presented by Pixel, so we were even more excited about the opportunity to attend the event as Pixel photographers and put Google's new phone to the test. Tasked with capturing the night through the phone’s new camera, we immediately started exploring the unique architecture of the Music Box Village until the show started.
Familiar with the work of the evening’s featured artists--Gogol Bordello, TANK of Tank and The Bangas, and Nick Zinner of Yeah Yeah Yeahs--I was excited to hear what new and unfamiliar sounds they would draw out of these bizarre stationary instrument-structures. TANK started the evening off with a spoken-word version of Tank and the Banga’s piece “Human” that was so powerful that the crowd was immediately hushed. I was pleased to see that even in the romantically dim light of the performance space, the Pixel I was trying out let me capture high quality shots of this charged moment as well as the rest of the performance throughout the dynamic performance space.
After TANK’s spoken-word, the main event was signaled by Gogol Bordello lead vocalist Eugene Hütz’s iconically guttural voice as he emerged from a hut of wind chimes in an outfit reminiscent of the Old West--true to the piece’s billing as a “Dada Western,” a centennial homage to the art movement. What followed was a pretty magical and mobile combination of movement and music that saw Hütz and the rest of the performers travel from structure to structure telling a quite recognizably Western drama. The Pixel came in handy again here: it was really exciting to see all the details of the structures and costumes translate so well into photograph format.
With Gogol Bordello’s signature gypsy rock musical style (that, save for a couple guitars, came to life solely through the Music Box Village’s structural instruments clanging, banging, shaking, and whirring) the complete piece told an optimistic story of collaboration, community, beauty, and humanity. And if only for that hour, the surprise cold front I’d shied away from just hours before didn’t seem such a big deal. That performance and that venue generated its own intangible type of warmth that I was ecstatic to have been a part of.
Gif of Bryan CRanston being angry via 
Hungry and ready.Photo credit 
The mac and cheese staple presentation.Photo credit 
Pizza ready from the oven.Photo credit 
Friends hover around the barbeque.Photo credit 
Seafood platter on the beach.Photo credit 
Scarecrow watches over a vegetable garden.Photo credit 
Happiness next exit.Photo credit: 
Butterflies in a flower patch.Photo credit: 
Happy running doggie.Photo credit: 
Positive confirmation.Photo credit:
Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.