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" NEW ORLEANS -- If there&amp;#039;s one distinctive image to sum up HBO&amp;#039;s True Detective, it&amp;#039;s Matthew Mcconaughey staring out the passenger-side car window, with Woody Harrelson at the wheel. He ponders an existential crisis. The sun glints off of lazy bayous, oil refineries off in the distance, decrepit shotgun shacks in the foreground. The occult seems to breathe out of the landscape itself. Anything is possible, we think. This is Louisiana. There has been a lot of media trading on the strangeness of the 18th state lately. Last year, Beasts of the Southern Wild garnered a jerry-built raft of Oscar nominations by reminding us how honest and pure it can be to live in desperate poverty, so long as it&amp;#039;s in Louisiana. Before that, HBO ran Treme, which tried to mitigate the absence of plot by setting itself in a pretty city, and before that True Blood, because of course there are vampires down here. Witches too, according to American Horror Story. It extends into nonfiction TV as well -- from Swamp People to Cajun Pawn Stars and even Duck Dynasty, it&amp;#039;s become clear that the rest of the country wants as much Louisiana as it can get. Watching these shows while living here can get uncomfortable. Louisiana, we learn from these shows, is something else. It&amp;#039;s not like whatever state you&amp;#039;re watching it from. Dangerous, primal, magical and otherworldly. It&amp;#039;s quaint, honest and unapologetic. Darkness lurks in every hazy corner, uncommon beauty just behind it. Some people down here are sort of French, which is the most magical of all nationalities, except maybe Tibetan. Let&amp;#039;s use the word &amp;quot;magical&amp;quot; one more time, for good measure.  I&amp;#039;ve been in New Orleans for three years, putting me right at that crucial transplant moment where you either leave in search of authenticity elsewhere, go to grad school, or just start living like a normal person might in some godforsaken other city, maybe Cleveland, which, come to think of it, actually seems pretty good right about now. Here is my life in the most magical city in the world: I watch a tremendous lot of Netflix. I play a tremendous lot of video games. I eat red beans and rice occasionally, but Pad Thai much more frequently. I go to music sometimes. Mostly, I do the things that American middle-class white guys in their late 20s are doing all over the country, because, as it turns out, New Orleans has been a part of the United States of America for more than 200 years.  I make it out to Cajun country for stories sometimes, where yes, I have met strange people. And yes, decrepit Creole homes flanked by unruly live oaks draped in Spanish moss tend to stick in your head. But I&amp;#039;m not convinced that I&amp;#039;ve met stranger people than I ever have in my native Massachusetts. And I&amp;#039;m not sure that the cypress is inherently more magical than the sugar maple. I do think that people go a little crazy in the heat, but the rest of the South can claim that just as much as we can here. Alligator hunting, I hear, is really boring. It is not hard to understand why the Southern Gothic facade entrances so many new arrivals, Hollywood producers, and me. It looks amazingly different from LA or Brooklyn (if not as different from other places in the South). It&amp;#039;s hot, people talk different, and the food can knock you flat. The myth grows like one of them crazy oaks from there. The New York Times recently ran an article called &amp;quot;Experiencing New Orleans Through Fresh Eyes,&amp;quot; which formed a perfect microcosm of the way people can confuse &amp;quot;fun vacation&amp;quot; with &amp;quot;profound cultural discovery.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s full of gems like this: &amp;quot;In New Orleans success is measured by how unhinged you can get,&amp;quot; Alex Ebert of the band Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros told me a few days later. &amp;quot;That lends itself to a wildness that&amp;#039;s beneficial to the soul.&amp;quot; Obviously, we abused almost every word of it, even to the point of getting really riled up about one interviewee&amp;#039;s claim that there was &amp;quot;no kale&amp;quot; in New Orleans. That&amp;#039;s right: The city of Hollywood&amp;#039;s languid, Southern dreams feels strongly about the healthiest kind of salad, and wants you to know we have it in abundance. This is not to say that this city and this state are not great and unusual places, in a great many ways. There are a lot of great bands, something made no less enjoyable by the fact that it&amp;#039;s true of a lot of other cities as well. The buildings are very nice to look at. Crawfish are delicious, and 1-10 over the Atchafalaya basin at sunset is a haunting, strange sight. Long, lazy years are punctuated by a regular rhythm of festival and respite that seems to melt decades. See how easy it is to start talking this way? But Hollywood wants Louisiana to be something more than a state. It wants an oasis from America, a netherworld right in our backyard with two nonstop flights from LAX every day. We might make a documentary about the plight of poor people in the slums elsewhere, but in Louisiana we can make Beasts of the Southern Wild. You don&amp;#039;t have to feel bad because it&amp;#039;s all magic, and magic just is what it is. We quickly leave the realm of celebration and move wholeheartedly into fetishization -- Southern Orientalism, an obsession with an imaginary other. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a27742/louisiana-is-not-magic/>