Wet Bank Guide

In the Zone (Slight Return)

2011-09-28T12:37:00.002-05:00

I often come back to this post on this blog, converted to the book at right and otherwise abandoned to the spammers and the memory wells of the Internet. I thought that the post Carry Me Home was a fitting coda to the tale told here and at the time of its writing it was. It closed the book on a journey of years chronicled here. Still, if I leave nothing else behind from this time and place, it would be this.

August 5, 2007

In the Zone

Today I walked past the Fairmont Hotel on University Place and the back door was ajar. I stopped and leaned over the police barricades that still block the entrance and peered over the once red carpet on the steps--now a burnt umber--down the long lobby hallway into the dark. There was enough light to admire the first ornate arch in the long procession that divides the lobby, and I was fascinated at the lizardish dragon rampant on the gold colored span. The hallway was strung with a chain of work lamps that together with the receding arches gave the impression of looking into a mine works. It was difficult to see much past that first arch in the dim tunnel. A distant chandelier that still hangs between the arches winked faintly with refracted light.

I can't tell you the last time or reason I had to walk down the hallway of the hotel we all know as the Roosevelt, but I do have an almost visceral memory, like the recollection we have of dreams, of walking down through that lobby, stopping in at Bailey's on the Baronne Street side for a cocktail after whatever event it was that drew me there. Still, I can't remember the occasion. That glimpse into the past of Sazerac and the Blue Room (a venue I peered into once but never visited for a concert) sent me rummaging in long forgotten corridors of my own mind, dimly lit and little visited themselves, trying to recall the reason for my last visit without success.

In New Orleans we tend to live in our cherished past a lot of the time. For us history is not a marker on the side of the road, one notable building or a small district full of quaint shops to which we take visitors. Our past stands all around us, bears down on us like the towers of Manhattan on a first time visitor. It reaches up like a hand from the grave and tries to trip our ever step forward, the smoky ghosts of slavery blinding us and the afterbirth of the civil rights movement twisting every turn of public policy in ways we can not seem to stop. It is not just the the momentous events of the past we must contend with, but a thousand small things from the past that inform the way we live in the present moment the way water cups a swimming fish or the breezes lift a coasting bird. Our past may be monumental in spots and burdensome at some moments, but it is also as ever present as the humidity, a very part of who we are and how we live.

In spite of that awful moniker Big Easy, New Orleans has never been an easy place to live. Just ask my wife, who traded the Nordic efficiency of the upper Midwest for a turn in the south, a place where mañana and baksheesh are not just scores in Scrabble but instead the way we govern the machinery of our life. I won't rehearse the entire litany of woe involved in rebuilding a city from scratch. Suffice it to say that every few steps forward, as we watch the ground carefully for roofing nails or bits of nail-studded plaster lath, we walk forehead first into something hard.

In spite of the weight of history and the difficulty of the moment, I am not living in the past. Increasingly, I am living in a Richard Alpert Right Now, a locus in time informed by the landscape around me and my sense of its age, its rightness for the place, the uneven and green-occluded site lines of a city settling into the earth as perfectly as a Mayan ruin rising out of the jungle. The monumentality of the city informs the moment as you perceive it, but to truly live here is to walk through a series of present moments like cells in a film, the action is in front of you or inside of you and the great pillared oaks and moss-draped homes are just backdrop.

I think it is in part that very difficulty, as well as something in the climate, that leads me to find myself increasingly living in a present moment. More worrying is the feeling that here where it's After the End of the World, I am becoming like Thomas Pynchon's anti-hero Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity's Rainbow: inexplicably entangled with the ugly juggernaut of history as it unfolded in World War II until he disconnected from it altogether, withdrawing into himself, his "temporal bandwidth" approaching zero.

There is also the story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the Zone to be present at his own assembly perhaps, heavily paranoid voices have whispered, his time's assembly and there ought to be a punch line to it, but there isn't. The plan went wrong. He is being broken down instead, and scattered. His cards have been laid down... laid out and read, but they are the cards of a tanker and feeb: they point only to a long and scuffling future, to mediocrity not only in his life but also, heh, heh, in his chroniclers too..." (737-38)

In New Orleans our way of life is as old as the oaks that brush the ground in the park near my house but for me it as timelessly in the present as a squirrel frozen on a branch of one of those oaks. It's neither as Zen as it sounds or as dark as Slothrop's fate, but after 20 years abroad in America Norte I find I am slipping into the easy, my horizon constrained by the familiar dinner litany what am I eating today, what last meal does it remind me of, and where do we want to eat next week.

Part of it is the need to focus on the task at hand. To me, it is the renovation of my bathroom to repair a leak and re-tile. It's not a small project. We had the room gutted to the studs, pulling out the archaeological layers of sheet rock and plaster from 50 years of construction and repair. The project is the recent history of the city in microcosm, and because of all of the demands of work and family, it is all of the reconstruction I am able to handle for the moment. The city will largely have to get on without me.

At work I am a project manager for large software efforts, and the tracks of several of them are converging at critical points this month. In my last job, where I had been long enough to have a core of good friends I worked with, I used to approach these moments by sending out an email with the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "Don't Panic" logo, and an MP3 I had of "It's The End Of The World As We Know It". I'm not sure the guys at the new bank are quite ready for that.

Its important in these large endeavors not to lose cool in the moments of high drama, or to let the endless procession of problems grind you into the ground. Some days I feel like the number two on a ship attacked by Zeros in some World War Two movie. It's important I keep everyone focused on the task in front of them, in spite of the explosions and the strafing fire, if we're all going to get through this. Don't think about the sky full of planes trying to kill you. Focus on the one that actually has you in its sites, point the machine gun, and shoot back.

The reconstruction of the city around me will last at least as long as WWII. There will be long periods of boredom and routine punctuated by times of great excitement, much of that of the unpleasant kind. Yes, we will have shore leave for Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest but most of our time will be spent scrapping rust and paint knowing all the while that just over the ocean's horizon there is something threatening.

In this peculiar armada the officers are as useless as the French nobility. They look fine high up there in their crosswise hats and give marvelous speeches, but we know from hard experience that they are worthless. People mutter all around the city about mutiny of one form or another, but mutiny is a lot of damn work and it is awfully hot. I like to think we could yet rise up and have our storming of the Bastille moment but every passing day it seems more unlikely. No Fletcher Christian or Maximilien Robespierre has stepped forward to lead us, and every angry mob needs a leader.

Perhaps I ask for too much. If history and the city consumes us all one-by-one but the city lives on, that perhaps what was always intended, why were were all lured home. In the end, perhaps Pynchon has given us the model for surviving It's After the End of the World. If history has gone too wrong for any one of us to stop what is happening around us, maybe it is better to amble down a shady street in New Orleans without a particular thought in my head except the distant sound of what might be Slothrop's harmonica, to disappear into the random noise in the signal.

Katrina NOLA New Orleans Hurricane Katrina Think New Orleans Louisiana FEMA levees flooding Corps of Engineers We Are Not OK wetlands news rebirth Debrisville Federal Flood 8-29 Rising Tide Remember Tyrone Slothrop Thomas Pynchon Gravity's Rainbow temporal bandwidth Roosevelt Hotel

Carry Me Home published

2009-03-03T20:43:00.010-06:00

Ex-pat Orleanian Mark Folse’s decision to move back to New Orleans post-Katrina was featured on National and Minnesota Public Radio and in the Los Angeles Times. Now he tells his own story and that of the post-Katrina city in Carry Me Home A Journey Back to New Orleans, a collection of essays based on his popular Katrina blog Wet Bank Guide.

The Wet Bank Guide was featured by French National Radio as one of the unique voices of the post-Katrina disaster in New Orleans, and drew praise from readers across the nation. The Times-Picayune plucked two pieces from its columns, and Carry Me Home collects the best of that work, refreshed and expanded for publication.

Suspect Device cartoonist Greg Peters has called Folse "one of the best writers in Louisiana," and author Michael Tisserand, another regular reader of Wet Bank Guide, said of Carry Me Home: "Mark's writing is about skill and heart. A blend of reporting, memoir and analysis, [the book] is as immediate as it is reflective. It's more than a love letter to New Orleans--it’s a survival guide for post-Katrina America. Mark shows how to go through a disaster with your soul intact." The Chin Music Press Voices of New Orleans blog said, "it belongs on the bookshelf alongside the other worthy post-Katrina works. [His] heart is absolutely in the right place, and it is that heart — that passion — that the reader will ultimately remember from this book.”

The book is available at fine local bookstores in New Orleans and online at Lulu.com and other online book sites

Mark Folse majored in English literature as the University of New Orleans where he was editor of the student newspaper. He worked as a journalist for a decade, winning a New Orleans Press Club and a Jefferson Parish Medical Society award. He served as deputy press secretary and speechwriter to Sen. John Breaux in Washington, D.C., and has worked in the computer and banking industries since leaving the political life in the early 1990s.

In the fall of 2005 he convinced his family--then residing in Fargo, North Dakota--to try to move to New Orleans even as water still stood in the streets. Now he and his wife Rebecca Noack and their children Killian and Matthew Folse are settled in the Mid-City section of New Orleans. The Wet Bank Guide blog is now closed, but he continues to share his observations on Crescent City life online at Toulouse Street--Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans (http://www.toulousstreet.net).

Katrina NOLA New Orleans Hurricane Katrina Think New Orleans Louisiana FEMA levees flooding Corps of Engineers We Are Not OK wetlands news rebirth Debrisville Federal Flood 8-29 Rising Tide Remember Carry Me Home

Goodnight and Good Luck

2008-01-20T19:35:00.000-06:00

The time has come to turn a page and start something new. The Wet Bank Guide has been a defining part of my life, of what I do and who I am, for two-and-a-half years. From the first days after 8-29 when I started gathering tidbits of news because the mainstream media we so lost and confused in the days of the flood, until I wrote the last post just below this, it has both captured and defined how my life was changed by those signature events.

The last piece, Carry Me Home, seems a perfect book end to the story of my journey home, the story line that predominated on WBG at the end. That journey is complete, and what is before me is not a journey but something like a continuous arrival. Having reached this cultural Galapagos, it is no longer about the voyage: the rats and the hardtack and the bad weather. It is instead about the beauty of a life unimagined elsewhere.

I think I need a change of tempo and time to begin the next movement, and so we will leave this story here and continue elsewhere. Look for me at my other sites that have sprouted up over time, primarily at Toulouse Street -- Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans, and at Poems Before Breakfast. I plan to collect what I think is the best of Wet Bank Guide and publish it to paper sometime in the near future, and I will post that here when I do.

Beyond the book idea, I have other writing projects banging around in my head or in progress. There simply aren't enough hours in the day or days in the week to do all I want and need to do and I think Wet Bank Guide is what has to give. If you've been one of my loyal readers or one of those who have left kind comments or track-back links, thank you. You have pushed me indirectly to keep writing, and by doing so first to keep my head above water and then to grow as a person. I am forever indebted to you for that.

For Victoria and Annette, my some-time editors, thank you for your help. To all of the NOLA Bloggers who were my eyes on the ground when I was still in Fargo, and who have become friends since coming home, thank you as well. This blog is just one, tiny part of a huge collective and collaborative space that is telling the story of the rebirth of New Orleans better than any other media. It is a privilege to be in your company. And to my wife Rebecca, who blazed the trail home, and my children Killian and Matthew left the place they knew growing up and who made this city their home, thank you beyond the ability of words to express.

One last thing for everyone who comes here: Remember.

Katrina NOLA New Orleans Hurricane Katrina Think New Orleans Louisiana FEMA levees flooding Corps of Engineers We Are Not OK wetlands news rebirth Debrisville Federal Flood 8-29 Rising Tide Remember

Carry Me Home

2007-12-29T23:40:00.001-06:00

"Our precious hearts are all shattered, scattered across the land.
And I know that I'm going back to a place where I know who I am"
-- Susan Cowsill in "Crescent City Snow"

Last night I met the man who brought me home.

No, he didn't carry me on his back like St. Christopher or ferry me home in a boat or even loan me twenty bills. Still, it is because of him that I find myself here on the shores of my own personal Ithaca. The meeting that resulted was not as profound as it sounds. A sideman in the band I was listening to, he was introduced to the crowd and in the moment I knew who he was. Later, I spoke to him briefly like two men who discover they have a common friend or interest, as any two men in New Orleans, given time enough to talk, may likely find. And in that brief encounter, I closed the circle on a journey of 21 years.

My wife and a very old friend and I went to hear Ingrid Lucia sing at the d.b.a bar on Frenchman Street in the Farbourg Marigny just behind the French Quarter. For out-of-towners, this is where the locals hang, where the French Quarter of Tennessee Williams and William Burroughs still lives on just across Esplanade Avenue from the Vieux Carre. For the first set, we sat in a small window seat carrel and listened, having an animated conversation about this and that, a big trip to Europe we were planning. Every now and then, we'd fall silent and listen to Ingrid sing, or the quartet backing her wail. During the second set, we decided to move out into the main room and just listen to the music. My friend Eric and my wife grabbed some seats along the wall, and I settled in on the floor at their feet.

As we watched the group, I kept looking at the horn player. There was something so damned familiar about him, but I couldn't place it. This happens to me all the time since I returned to New Orleans. The city is full of people I knew in passing over twenty years ago, and I keep seeing faces I feel I might have known in the long ago but since forgotten. There was something about the trumpet players that told me: you know him from somewhere. Then the singer introduced him. And now, she said, we're going to feature Marc Braud on vocals.

It was then I knew. The name triggered a flood of memory that washed over me like the warm air from a brightly lit doorway opened onto a cold, damp alley. I was transported briefly from the floor of a small, dark nightclub in the Marigny to an auditorium at the University of North Dakota in Fargo, to late September of 2005 and the first days after the Federal Flood. My wife and I were alone in front. Most of the crowd sat to the back of the room, tentative and polite as any crowd of North Dakotans will mostly be. Like characters from a monologue by Garrison Keillor, they huddled like a herd against the back and side walls: none was going to push up to close to the bright lights in front and call attention to themselves.

My wife is from North Dakota, and we raised our children there. I had lived in that area for over a decade and away from New Orleans for almost 20 years, but remained deep down a Crescent City boy. Clad in a Mardi Gras-colored rugby shirt and clutching a large purple, green and gold golf umbrella, I had brashly marched down to the front and plopped myself center, just one row back from the empty front. In the cold and dark of the north that dreadful September of 2005, I went to this concert like a lost soul stumbling into a church, desperate for some redemption. If there were to be any splash of holy water or waft of incense from the altar, I was going to be close enough to catch it.

I had spent the prior weeks like a man adrift, had been struggling not to drown in tears or burst into flame with anger ever since 8-29-05. I was desperate to escape the television and Internet news, was anxious to hear the sound of a voice with a certain, familiar timber and turn of phrase; to be in the company of people who had moved from rice gruel to gumbo before they could properly say the word; to feel the insistent rhythms of the second line, to witness fingers doing that peculiar boogie-woogie dance that is New Orleans piano, to hear a horn by turns plaintive and brash trumpet the familiar songs. At a time when it was not clear that home would ever be there to go to again, I wanted to be carried home.

The affair was a Red Cross benefit for the victims of Katrina. Someone in the Red Cross had managed to put the Troy Davis Quartet on the road doing benefits, raising money for the cause and giving these displaced musicians a role to play doing what they knew best, playing the music of New Orleans. Somewhere I have a clipping from the Fargo Forum newspaper reviewing the show. Sometime I will pull it out and read it again, but not today. There was only one moment in the show that will remain with me until the day I die and they carry me less than a mile from Toulouse Street to Schoen funeral home, then a few blocks down Canal Street to Greenwood Cemetery.

At a point late in the show Marc Braud spoke briefly, looking not at the crowd but at the horn in his hand, of how the Red Cross had arranged for him to get in and out of the city and recover his instrument. Tonight was the first time he would play it since the flood. He said some more words about the city and its predicament, spoke of the losses of so many, but I was lost after he spoke of recovering his trumpet, transported into sorrow, all of the pathetic scenes from TV and the Internet rushed back at me like sudden flood waters. When I focused again, he had called the song and the band began to play "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans".

They played it just a bit slower than the usual tempo, the drummer on brushes playing the soft and respectful cadence of a jazz funeral marching out. Between singing the verses and playing his horn Braud looked not at his audience but down at the stage, rubbing away what I knew were tears in his eyes, the same that clouded my own view of the stage. When he lifted his horn to his lips he played that song with the same sad joy musicians of his father's and perhaps his grandfather's generation had played it. Unlike most of the polite audience, I heard not one but the voice of a hundred trumpeters from New Orleans who were, that night in September 2005, somewhere other than home; I heard them like a chorus of the sanctified in heavenly white robes blowing drapped horns to call all the children home; I heard in it the wobbly wail of a late night busker somewhere in the quarter playing the Lincoln Center in his head.

I quietly wept. I don't know about the audience. I couldn't turn my head to look, as I might have with the training of a journalist to sweep the situation and look for the bit of color to add to the story, the picture in words of the crowd that might make the scene. That night I was that bit of color, one of the five men in that room for whom that song on that night in the Fall of 2005 was not just a song but was like the wailing of the apostles after the Crucifixion and the later descent of tongues of fire onto their heads. And I was not the only one who was moved.

Next to me my wife listened and watched as Braud wiped at his eyes between singing and blowing. This Pentecost of the lost reached down and touched her as well. She told me later that in that moment she understood my earlier announcement that I wanted to, no needed to go home to New Orleans, to a city at that time more than still half underwater and in near complete ruin. She understood that my past light-hearted remarks about emigrating to America from New Orleans were not a joke but a way of saying how much I needed to be home, that home was more than just where she and I and the kids lived but a very specific and irreplaceable point on the map. She had watched me the preceding weeks glued to the television and computer, sleeping maybe five hours a night and slowly unraveling in grief, and that night in Fargo saw that grief paraded on stage.

She told me it was then she knew that she had to let me come home.

And that was how I came to find myself sitting on the floor of d.b.a watching Marc Braud playing his horn, just as I had sat in that Fargo auditorium two-and-a-half years earlier; how recognized him as the man who had brought me home. It wasn't as powerful a moment as the one in 2005, but I knew as I sat there and listened that I had closed a circle, completed the journey that began when I left the city New Year's Eve morning 1986. Seeing Braud there on stage closed the chapter that began with a weather forecast one Friday late in August two years ago and which I thought had ended when I crossed the Causeway Memorial Day 2006 with the city skyline rising up from the horizon, but which did not really resolve itself until until I shook Braud's hand, told him the story and thanked him for helping to bring me home.

It was a quietly anti-climatic moment. What does one say when a complete stranger comes up to you and says something like, "I justed wanted to tell you you're the reason I'm home." He just looked at me with no particular expression on his face, then began to smile a bit as I told him the story in brief--living in Fargo, the concert and his story of recovering his horn and his tears as he sang the song, and how that had moved my wife to decide that yes, somehow, we would move to New Orleans. He was silent for a bit, trying to place my odd story in among the expected things people will say to a performer just off stage. He just kept nodding his head slightly as if I were still taking, until his face lit up with a broad smile and he said, "well, welcome home man!" My own story all told, I couldn't think of another word myself. "You, too" I offered.

With that, I took my drink out into the street for a cigarette, and watched the crowd passing along Frenchman Street. I thought about the long journey to this evening, twenty one years almost to the day, to this night in a club listening to fantastic New Orleans music with an old, old friend and my wife the newest Orleanian. As Braud returned to the stage and I heard his horn from inside dueling with the coronet player up the block in the street band, and the music pouring out of the Spotted Cat where later I would catch the Jazz Vipers; while I watched the parade of tourists and quarter rats and people dressed up for a just-once-in-a-while night on the town passing up and down the street and in and out of clubs; as I contemplated a plate of red beans and some fried okra at the Praline Connection to soak up the beer; as I stood there and the music and the scene and the thought of good food contended for my attention, the words from Cowsill's alt-country/folk anthem some how came to mind. "And I know that I'm going back to a place where I know who I am." I crushed out my cigarette and stepped back into the crowded club and the music to find my wife and friend, the last pieces I needed to put together the puzzle that is home; stepped into the heart of Frenchman Street Friday night, into the heart of New Orleans: home for certain and home to stay.

Katrina NOLA New Orleans Hurricane Katrina Think New Orleans Louisiana FEMA levees flooding Corps of Engineers We Are Not OK wetlands news rebirth Debrisville Federal Flood 8-29 Rising Tide Remember Marc Braud Ingrid Lucia Frenchman Street home Fargo

Farewell to all that

2007-12-27T08:35:00.000-06:00

Somewhere north of 60 degrees vast sheets of ice break apart into tiny islands, floating baby polar bears and seal pups away to their doom. A vast expanse of rain forest is bulldozed into pulp while displaced aborigines watch stoically, endangered butterflies flittering around them like ancestral spirits. The world is being taken apart like an old baseball as humanity carefully picks and pulls at the seams in our quest to make sure there is not some missed bit of ore, some sparkly jewel we have left undisturbed beneath the surface.

Baby boomers indoctrinated by Marlin Perkins and Euell Gibbons to value the exotic and distant in the natural world are so disturbed by these catastrophes they nearly choke on their organic, free-trade coffee. These Samaritans threaten to overwhelm coastal cities all around the globe with endless crocodile tears of anguish long before the glaciers melt.

Screw the polar bears. If the only habitats you care about saving must involve animals suitable for reproduction in faux fur and stuffing and found in a wire bin at the local zoo’s gift shop, it's over. Your own world is crumbling beneath your feat and you don't even know it. If you will only be bothered about saving endangered Americans if we put bones through our noses and take to living by spearing fish in Bayou St. John, we are not the only ones standing in the shadow of our man-made doom.

Every drop of ethanol you pump into your hybrid car and every gallon of gasoline it dilutes; every ounce of the imported steel that wraps you in the perceived cocoon of safety in your SUV that swallows that fuel; every forkful of food made with mass produced soybeans or corn and every springy blade of lovingly fertilized green grass in your lawn: almost everything you do and touch today in America is systematically destroying a vast and valuable eco-system in your own backyard.

In the process, cultures as unique and valuable as any aboriginal group on the globe -- the Acadians of south central Louisiana, the Islenos in the east, the native Houma -- are left to stare out over the open water that once was the marsh that fed and sheltered their families, to look at an empty net or oyster rake and see there the void they feel inside as their world falls apart. In the distance, vast stands of dead coastal forest stand as gray and skeletal as concentration camp survivors. If you think I am exaggerating, I recommend you take the time to read Mike Tidwell's Bayou Farewell or Christopher Hallowell's Holding Back the Sea. Within this generation it will all be gone, not through an inexorable process of natural erosion--that would take another thousand years or two--but by a combination of choice and willful ignorance of the costs of what man has wrought.

The coast will not be gone by 2080, or 2050, or even 2030. It could be gone tomorrow, with the next storm that comes ashore. It will certainly be gone within this generation if nothing changes to reverse the policies of cheap energy and food exports which, by robbing the coast of replenishment then slashing what remains with oil-and-gas canals that poison the marsh with saltwater, have indirectly expropriated an area the size of Delaware in Louisiana without paying a penny.

What does America care? The citizens of the US prefer their goods shoddy and imported, made with the cheapest labor possible under any conditions that guarantee that the shelves of Wal-Mart and Target remain stocked to the ceiling at a guaranteed low price. The far east will cheerfully supply all the shrimp and crawfish needed, if you're not to scrupulous about being slowly poisoned by it. We're already as enslaved to the Saudi's as any pipehead or junkie, so what's a little more imported oil going to hurt? Or, better yet, grow more row crops for ethanol and poison the Mississippi with more fertilizer, until the dead zone created obliterates all marine life in the Gulf of Mexico.

Sadly, when we are gone most of you won't be able to afford those goods. When the marshes have vanished and the big one comes, it may sweep away the infrastructure from which a quarter of the nation's oil and gas originates, is imported or processed. Or else it may find the entire lower stretch of the Mississippi an unprotected earthen jetty, and sweep the banks away and send the river down a new course to the sea closing all navigation. Crop exports and steel imports will cease and oil prices will spike to the astronomical. How long could your state's economy prosper at 10-cents-a-bushel crops and $10-a-gallon for gas?

For those of you who live in the new, service oriented America (where row crops and steel are just a box down at the bottom of the page next to where you track your mutual fonds), don't worry. The Acadians may be gone, but we will save the French Quarter and the street car for you. We can contract with Disney to schedule daily parades down Bourbon Street with festive, Cajun themes. The most important parts of our culture--the cheap beads and t-shirts, the high-proof daiquiris and karaoke bars--all of that is high and dry and waiting for you. So come on down. We have arranged for the best garbage service money can buy, standing by to hose your vomit from the street before you wake for afternoon brunch.

Just try not to look out the window of your plane as it approaches the city, lest you be reminded that the cost of that low-fare to the City That Care Forgot is the displacement of a million of your fellow citizens and the destruction of their unique culture, the intentional eradication of an entire, genuine way of life. Forget that someday the consequences of that loss will come home to you.

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Christmas wishes and dreams

2007-12-24T07:46:00.000-06:00

Ed.'s Note: Dusting off the old chestnut to toss on the fire. Laziness or tradition: we recycle, you decide. Whatever this time of year means to you, I wish you peace and the joy of it.

There is a young tradition in my family of watching the Muppet film The Christmas Toy at this holiday. It was never a popular holiday staple. If you blinked during is television airing sometime in the the early 1990s, you would have missed it. My children, however, still love to watch it. For myself, it is my reminder that Christmas miracles do come true.

I won't need much of a reminder this evening or tomorrow, sitting in my house on Toulouse Street in New Orleans. The first part of the wish I expressed in the piece below came true not a month after I wrote this: we were on our way home to New Orleans. Like most wishes for great things, it did not come without a cost, but on balance we were so lucky: finding a dry house we could afford, children ensconced in Lusher and Franklin charter schools, my daughter Killian at NOCCA. So many pieces fell into place, that the miraculousness of it all is striking.

Much of the rest of what I wished for seems distant, almost beyond hope. My hopes for the rest of the city seem mired in a willingness of us all to slide easily into old ways that could drag us down back even deeper into the old problems, the old divisions. And so I'm going to repost this, as a reminder that wishes can come true if one sets out to make them so. The city need not slide into racial turmoil, does not have to tolerate failing schools or rampant crime, and should not accept that corruption or incompetence are just some part of the natural order.

You have to have faith. Still, that is not enough. The lesson in my homecoming is that faith is never enough without works. If you find the thoughts for the city something devoutly to be wished, then it will only happen if we are determined to make is so. And there is sacrifice. This Christmas post is dedicated to my wife, Rebecca, who took a difficult new job in a strange city, coming here alone six months before the children and I, and found and made the home were we will celebrate our first real Christmas in New Orleans. Her love for me, her faith in my dreams, and her work and sacrifice were the essential components of this wish come true.

Faith, works, sacrifice. If you make it into church today you probably won't here those words. Even if tomorrow is the only day, or one of the few you make it into a church, you will still recall these concepts from other gospels of Sundays long past. You can even be a believer but not a Christian: these are the timeless principles off all faiths. All of them are required of us--believers or not--if our dreams and aspirations are to come true. But on this winter's day we can start with faith, with a willingness to believe in miracles.

Saturday, December 24, 2005
All I want for Xmas is New Orleans

There is an old convention in journalism that we bloggers, as the New Journalists of the 21st Century, will feel bound to observe: the Christmas piece. As a former reporter, I can't seem to resist the temptation. But it's more than dragging out the fir and lights; it's a deeply ingrained desire to say or do something good at this time of year.

All I want for Christmas is New Orleans.

How easily this conventional, almost trite sentiment comes to mind. But it is true. Even for a 20-year ex-pat, there is nothing I want more. Outside of my wife and kids, there is nothing dearer to my heart than the home I left behind New Year's Eve 1986. Like most first-generation emigrants (and I have always considered myself an immigrant to the United States from the Republic of New Orleans), I have never, could never break the ties of place to my only real home.

And since I said to my wife back in late September "I want to move back to New Orleans" and she, instead of spitting wine all over herself in convulsive laughter, said yes, its become even more important to me personally, and not just because I was what Dr. John called traumaticalized in a recent Chris Rose column in the T-P.

At an age when my kids are more than halfway grown, and I sit and contemplate what to do with the rest of my life, I can't think of anything I want to do more than be a part of the future of New Orleans. Anything else will, for me, be an excuse for a life, the poet's quiet desperation of hanging on until it's over.

That's not a life.

I have no illusions about what was lost. Hell, the city I left in my rear view mirror nineteen years ago was not the city I grew up in. So much had been lost already to the relentless floods of time and American commerce; so much more was swept away between that New Year's Eve when I left and the flood. But the failure of local stores, as dear as they were to us all, was not a New Orleans problem. It was an American problem, happening everywhere. Losing D.H. Holmes or K&B were a disappointment. But that was not the same as losing the neighborhood bars and restaurants and stores, all threatened in the aftermath of Katrina and the flood.

Much that remains the same would not be missed if it could somehow be carried away with the ruined appliances and the moldy drywall: the crime that blossomed in New Orleans just like in every other heavily poor and black urban area, the political division and bickering that separated New Orleanians into warring camps, the corruption of the School and Levee Boards.

And there are the embarrassing headlines about the N.O.P.D. or Bourbon Street bartenders, the remarks sitting in my inbox today from various lists about the people Gretna Mayor Ronnie Harris called "the criminal element" in his 60 Minutes interview. You know who I mean. Many of the people I hear complaining the loudest about Mama D must have lost all their mirrors to Katrina, because they could mostly use a long, hard look in one.

I won't accept just resettling, merely rebuilding New Orleans. Somehow, it must be better, fairer, less poor and less divided, and still every bit as much the city of memory and dreams. Not many cities are presented with the opportunity of starting over from scratch on such a vast scale, being given a second chance to do things right.

The New Orleans of my Christmas wish is not just the town I grew up in, or the town I constantly pine for on some level--the city of food and friends, of music and Mardi Gras--it is for a city where people make a decent living and can afford to own and fix up their homes, where the schools and police and the levees work at least as well as most other places, where the unifying spirit of resettlement and recovery breaks down the fear that divides Audubon Place from Almonaster, separates Lakeview from Lafitte.

It should be a place that is rebuilt for the benefit of it's people, and not at the whims of the market-place that's already left so many of them behind, the invisible hand that turned the last jazz club on Bourbon Street into a karaoke bar, the idol Mammon that would demolish everything to rule over a thousand suburban boulevards lined with box stores, that would be perfectly appeased to make New Orleans into an historic shell for upscale boutiques.

Only if a critical mass of people come home can what is good be saved, and what is not be averted. I understand why some people who lived in crime-ridden neighborhoods would stay in their newly adopted homes, why others who sacrificed the high salaries of elsewhere to live in New Orleans might find it hard to return home to sub-market wages and inflated rents.Good luck to you all. But you may find, five or ten or twenty years from now, that you have never really been happy living in your new home. The city’s pull will begin to work at you. You will want to go home.

That’s my Christmas Wish, not just to come home, but to be part of one of the great stories, the one about miraculous births and resurrections. There are so many pieces that must fall into place, so many immense hurdles to overcome--multiplied by the hundreds of thousands, once for each of us--it seems only a miracle will do.

But I believe in Christmas miracles. A decade ago, my three-year old daughter fell in love with a character called Rugby Tiger, from an obscure Muppet’s movie call the Christmas Toy. Having Rugby Tiger was her only Christmas wish, the only secret she had for Santa.

Finding Rugby Tiger proved to be impossible. The Christmas Toy is a wonderful show, but not a spectacular of the sort that generates tie-in marketing. The stores at Christmas are full of great piles of stuffed animals, but none came close to looking like Rugby. We scoured the smallish town we lived in at the time, and all the stores of Fargo, N.D. as well. I dredged through catalogs online stores back in the early days of e-commerce, and called every major toy store I could think of. It became increasingly clear there would be no miracle, that the first Christmas my first child really understood would be a failure, a disappointment that would haunt her the rest of her life.

There’s a happy holiday thought.

Then one day, perhaps a week before Christmas, I went into a little mom-and-pop drug store in little Detroit Lakes, MN, and walked past the big pile of stuffed animals I had twice before torn apart. As I came back from the pharmacist with my little bag, I decided to have one last desperate dig. And that’s when I found him. His tag didn’t say Rugby Tiger, but he was a perfect replica, the very image of the television tiger.

Christmas was saved.

I’ve told this story to my children, when they finally asked me about Santa Claus. Yes, I can tell them with a straight face, I do believe in Santa Claus, because once when I truly needed a miraculous Christmas present for someone I loved, it happened. Perhaps I’ve used up my quotient of miracles. But I know that belief is more than just a bit of sustaining psychology. I am a poor excuse for a Christian, probably not one at all at this point in my life. But I know there is a power within us and without us that, sustained by belief, can work miracles in this world.

Most miracles are small and personal things: two people meeting and falling in love, a child’s face on Christmas morning when they find a dream come true, the birth on a winter’s night of a child entirely ordinary and no less miraculous. My Christmas wishes for myself and for my city may seem as improbable as the sentiments of a beauty contestant, but they’re not. My wish is for the thousand tiny and entirely human miracles I know are possible.

My wish is that at this holiday, somewhere in America, the separated parts of a family come together in exile--a little more complete—and begin their plans to go home; that somewhere in a line at a government office, two people discover that the other is not a greedy white boss or a scary black criminal, but someone with whom they share memories and hopes; that someone will come home today and, when the tears have finally stopped, they will begin again their life in New Orleans.

I'll see you there.

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House Burning Down

2007-12-15T12:48:00.000-06:00

Well someone stepped from the crowd he was nineteen miles high
He shouts we're tired and disgusted so we paint red through the sky
I said the truth is straight ahead so don't burn yourself instead
Try to learn instead of burn, hear what I say, yeah, yeah.
-- Jimi Hendix, House Burning Down

How could any educated person not approve of tearing down the city's four largest public housing complexes, a fellow blogger on the New Orleans blogger mailing list asks? In that question lives every ugly and sharp edge that glitters about this question like a field of broken glass.

My education was tutoring fourth graders at St. Alphonsos, a Catholic school at the edge of the now demolished St. Thomas, to escape high school catechism class. It was continued in college one semester mentoring the middle school newspaper at the Carver Complex in Desire. Complex was an apt name: it was a place that looked more like the prisons my father once built, surrounded by a tall, razor-wire topped fence and patrolled by armed guards.

These were not bad kids. Given the circumstances I knew they all lived in, I think they were in fact superb. Based on the kids I met, I knew their parents were not bad people. Perhaps I was just lucky to encounter children whose parents gave enough of a damn to insist they go to St. Alphonsos, children who grew up in homes in or around Desire where reading was not an alien concept, who could conceive of being on a school newspaper.

Perhaps they were the exception. I have a good friend who spent the last year coaching the most hopeless kids in the St. Tammany Parish Schools for the state's LEAP exam. These little golums were the future headlines and the future shooters and victims, and they scared the shit out of him. The kids I know were not those zombies, the walking dead. They were just like ourselves at that age, full of life and curiosity. These kids were an eduction for someone who who grew up on the privileged lake front, my exposure to people of color limited to Sylvia the maid or my father's handyman. They taught me that the people in these neighborhoods were not some Dark Other, but people just like everyone else.

Why tear down the projects? Why not tear down the projects? The arguments fly back and forth, but I have to ask this: We don't have projects now, not really. There's just Iberville and a few score units off Earhart. Has that reduced the crime and murder rate? Has that turned around the schools? Has it brought an economic miracle? How will tearing down these buildings do what the flood could not to clear out generations worth of mistakes?

Perhaps I am foolish to think, to hope that the largely working population (I include among the working the retirees and disabled who provided the free child care that freed up mom to work making beds downtown); to believe that these people might have some opportunity to return. Without them, the city will not grow back into something recognizably New Orleans. If we let the working class be replaced by hordes of undocumented Latin Americans, people who's fear of La Migra makes them more like the docile black working class of two or more generations some people seem to yearn for, it will profoundly transform the city. I welcome the new comers, without whom we would not be as far along as we are. But I want to add them to the mix, not replace the people who were here before.

Let me be clear, as I have been in the past. I have no use for stoop sitters and corner idlers. If you're not coming home to work and be a part of the massive task that still lies ahead, then don't come. I don't want you to come. We don't want you to come. You don't deserve to be here. To generalize and tell everyone who ever lived in public housing that they are all stoop-sitting, soap-watching losers is wrong. It's a lie, and that fact so many don't know that is perhaps the biggest problems of all: we really don't know each other.

Perhaps the people I care about, the ones who really helped make New Orleans with city we love, the ones who lived in what were arguably hell holes at times and yet got up and somehow got the kids to school and themselves to work, perhaps they have already begun have come home. I work at 1111 Tulane on the back end of the CBD, where people who ride the bus to-and-from work wait, the people who work the downtown hotels and clean the streets. I eat at the McDonalds on Canal every now and then and the Real Pie Man stops at my corner. The people of color who made up the core of the New Orleans working class are home in ever increasing numbers. Perhaps all the truly hard working folks, whether they lived in HANO housing or in the rundown rows of doubles that fill stretches of the city, perhaps they have already made it back. At the very at least as many of them are back as a percentage as anyone else in the city. The downtown where I work looks a lot like the downtown of the past, just with fewer people.

But that's not what this is about. The battle over the projects is just another skirmish in the centuries long struggle of race in the South, and in New Orleans. To the white community the projects represent every stereotype and social dysfunction and fear--fears real and ignorant--that result from every mistake we have made since Reconstruction, perhaps since the first slave ship landed on the river.

The projects became a hellhole because we all chose to let that happen. Building Bantustan on the Bayou did not solve the problems of slavery, or reconstruction or desegregation. It just attempted to push "the problem" into manageable blocks that were easy to avoid. Now we hope to push the problem even further away, onto another city, by tearing down the largest block of affordable housing with no plan for its replacement. That's not a solution. That's another attempt to escape the responsibility for the last several hundred years.

We're not going to escape that much karma that easily. People have told me that the association of the projects with all of the ills that might be found there is called a "spatial fetish" in social science. The brick buildings under discussion are truly a fetish, something meant to represent the unseen and powerful. Burning the fetish will not kill the spirit it represents, or the responsibilities that spirit places on us. That spirit has been fed on tears and blood for too long, has become too powerful. The projects are just a thing, not The Thing.

By insisting that the projects be demolished without confronting all of the real problems that animate the boogieman the folks I grew up with call "The Projects", we almost guarantee another generation of the same old racial shit. We will simply have found another way to dodge the real problems and leave in place all of the anger, dependency and despair, the suspicion and dishonesty and fear. It will breed more bulgy-eyed "civil rights" activists who will necklace anyone white or black who doesn't follow their line. It will push to the front people in the white community to answer them, people who are the other side of the same cheap brass coin, people whose white robes are plush like those of the best hotels, people who share Jimmy Reiss' vision of an ethnically cleansed city.

Is that where we want to live, in Rhodesia-turned-Zimbabwe? In the Balkans?

I don't want to save the projects. I want to save New Orleans. Tear down the projects in the current atmosphere, without confronting what those buildings truly represent to both sides and we might as well tear down the levees because I'm not sure what there will be left to save.

Edited at 12:45 to fix the "bad" words the child protection software stripped out. If it happens again, find the missing instances of shit, death, dead, murder and fetish and win a prize TBD.

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The Projects
St. Alphonsos
Carver Complex
Desire
St. Thomas
race
racial
demolition

A light in the east

2007-12-09T21:45:00.000-06:00

Ah, the holidays: that festive time when Orleanians celebrate by driving our cars willy-nilly up onto the curb and demolishing more than our usual number of stoplights. One of my busiest neighborhood corners, where City Park Avenue crosses under Interstate 10, was without any stop lights for over a day where I routinely exit southbound then turn east toward City Park and home.

Thankfully, the cheerful red and green have returned to this corner and it is safe once again to come in from Metry to tour City Park and enjoy the light show of Celebration in the Oaks, to sip lukewarm buttered rum in the steamy 70-degree December while wandering over to visit Mr. Bingle. To those of us who live by the park, the trees are full of the ruined reminders of the drive-through Xmas lights that once adored the south end of the park. Bits of wire and metal still hang from the trees like apocalyptic moss. The remains of a display in the lagoon where City Park meets Carrollton and Wisner Avenues look like the skeletal outline of some vague sea monster revealed by low tide. If you don't visit the park often but come for the Celebration, as you travel between the lights and your car look up to the trees for those remains of the celebration that was. It makes the celebration of lights that is that much more precious and important.

Lights are important to us this time of year. It is not just the ancient act of turning the solstice, the universal myths of darkness and light in every culture north of the Tropic of Cancer, the stories and re-enactments and sacrifices to turn back the wheel of the year and return the sun. The primordial fears and hopes that fuel Hanukkah and the bonfires of my own Cote des Allemandes people and even my personal, petty desire to buy just one more string or twinkly thing for the house, all are inescapably imprinted on us not just by the collective unconscious but also by the events of the Federal Flood.

I searched and searched in vain for an online copy of the the photo taken from near where the 17th Street Canal intersects Veterans Boulevard, the one that shows the spared suburban streets of Metairie brightly lit and contrasted with the abject darkness of the West Lakeview neighborhood just across the canal. It is startling to one who knows the area. Many know the skyline of the city from football coverage and other event. And that is what makes the picture below so disturbing: a major American city in the dark not for hours but for days, then weeks. If you find yourself watching the Sugar Bowl or the BCS championship this year, you will see this vantage at some point, I am certain . When you see the city festively lit for New Years, remember this picture. Remember how it was.

I was not here to see my city entirely in the dark. I could only watch in near paralysis from more than a thousand miles away as days turned into weeks and weeks into months and still much of the city was a dark wasteland. This was not some transient outage, an inconvenience to fill a few minutes of the evening cable news. It was the loss of a key piece of what makes us modern. It was the breakdown of all of the infrastructure of post-industrial revolution life and the social contract it supports: a vision of what the end of America might be like, a dystopia that before was safely trapped in the covers of pulp novels and the reels of Hollywood movies. It was a darkness that was more than just the absence of light. It was the absence of civilization, its collapse in miniature.

I remember when the President spoke in Jackson Square and they fired up generators to light up Jackson Square, even as the local utility Entergy was saying it was too soon to restore power anywhere. As the square lit up I swore a solemn oath that violates several laws of the United States even to utter aloud, regarding what I would do to George Bush if he burned down the French Quarter for a photo op. In the end, he did not. For all of his efforts, he has been as powerless to destroy us as he was to save us.

For us the diminution of the light is not simply metaphorical. The fear that some power has stolen the light and that the world has turned for the last time, that there will be no return to the life of years past, such a fear has an immediate meaning to those who have seen their entire world upended, who have confronted the reality that they may be witnesses to the end time. And yet in December of 2005, just up the river from the darkness and disaster, the bonfires were built to light the night at the turning of the year as my people have done for almost 300 years. The persistence of life is its more important characteristic. A forest the size of Delaware can burn to the ground only to erupt again in wildflowers and saplings.

I lost my faith in the conventional divine long ago. Still, the universal festivities of this season are inescapable, and they call to all of us--even the unfaithful--in deep ways tied to childhood and our collective human soul. After my decade in the far north, when I might enter and leave my basement office in bitter cold without a glimpse of the risen sun, I was reminded why this season is sacred to all cultures. To survive the darkness that threatens to swallow us we must light a candle rather than curse the darkness. We must huddle together with the rest of our kind, remind ourselves as best we can that this season will pass. We must band together and be merry. This last part I understand deeply. It is the core of the only religion I have left, the civic religion of being an Orleanian, a part of a people that parades in the face of death.

Even as we decorate the tree in our house and I string the lights across the front, I cannot ignore the fact that there are still endless city blocks to my east, stretching for miles, where the darkness still reigns after two-and-a-half years, anymore than I can ignore the shortening of the days. That is my reminder even as the temperatures hover in the seventies by day that this is still the time of darkness. Even as the city comes slowly back to life, so many remain unredeemed, as displaced as the people of Israel marching from town to town at the command of a foreign government for purposes they barely understand. Here in the birthplace of their fathers and mothers, the city they would call home, they cannot be truly at home for there is no room in the inn.

For their redemption, for the redemption of us all, I can offer only this: somewhere tonight in the East there is a light to light the world. In a neighborhood where the only other illumination is an irregular constellation of streetlights, in a place where the blocks are still largely dark and the vacant and the empty homes stand like rows of tombs: even there, a home is lit for the season and shines as brightly as the mythical winter star of two millennia ago. This light will lead the faithful and perhaps the odd wise man to a place where there is a miraculous rebirth, if they will only choose to follow. It is the light that can save them, that can save us all.

Hosanna, hey!

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Thanksliving

2007-11-22T19:50:00.000-06:00

As someone who toiled as a journalist in the long-ago, I am drawn to observe the holiday requirements of writing something appropriate to the day. I started at the screen long-and-hard, but found myself struggling through the post-dinner haze with nothing on my mind.I wandered over to the blog roll at right and looked for what my fellow Orleanians and others might have to say on this holiday.

I found Schroeder's own clever crib from reviews of Waiting for Godot in New Orleans:

So why do we stay and wait?

Maybe it’s like Blanchard said half-joking at his concert: He tells people elsewhere: Don’t worry, New Orleans will survive "because we hate your music and we hate your food."

In other words, we stay because this place births talents such as Pierce and Blanchard and they in turn wrap us in a warm embrace with their art, because they know it’s what we need to stay strong.

And, although we cry and fume, we stay and we wait, leaning on one another, propping one another up and hoping for something brighter as we wonder what the future will bring.

I hardly know how to add or improve upon that. To live in a place where every breath is a prayer of hope or thanksgiving for life itself even at its most difficult moments, where every step holds the promise of becoming a parade, a hip-shaking celebration driven by the music,and every meal as simple as dripping roast beef po-boy is a marvelous feast: it's hard to imagine the need for a day set aside for Thanksgiving.

For this, I am thankful.

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Hail Atlantis

2007-11-20T16:17:00.000-06:00

"I love the friends I have gathered together here on this thin raft."
--Jim Morrison

This week Anima Mundi reminds America why we are home. It it not just the grand events like Jazz Fest or Carnival that define us, it is a hundred small scenes in the commonplace--somewhere today in an enraptured gospel church or around a lively table in a restaurant, in a small gathering of friends or a street-filing festival--even with the ruins around us, the venality of our politicians, and every trouble imaginable, the people of New Orleans find the joy in the day or in the moment. We live what the French call joie de vivre in a way that is uncommon among the Anglo-Saxon settlers of the north, but which is as automatic as breath among the post-colonial people of points south.

My own experience this week was my first chance to hear slide-guitar player Sonny Landreth at the Rock-N-Bowl. He is a fantastic musician and everything my friends had promised, and the audience swayed and danced and shouted with joy. As I find myself doing more since coming home, I spent much of my time looking not at the stage but at the crowd. What struck me Saturday night was not Landreth's obvious talent or the crowd's enjoyment of it. What stuck out was the mean age of the audience. At fifty, I was comfortably in the middle. For a rockin' blues player, it seemed odd that there were few if any younger people in the audience. We looked collectively like some tragically hip successor to the audience at a Lawrence Welk show.

I wondered where the young people were, why there were no twenty somethings in the audience. I've seen them out at clubs I might visit before, but that night people under 30 (hell, under 40) were conspicuous by their absence. Perhaps there was something fantastic going on across town that I missed, some show at another club that was drawing in the crowd that overran City Park a few weeks ago for Voodoo Fest. Or perhaps our own youth are succumbing to the overwhelming force of industrialized American pop culture that spawns rap artists in Africa and dresses the world in American sports t-shirts and Reeboks, a culture that has little room for the classics of 20th century music.

Today's Times-Picayune article about Fats Domino in New Yor k melded perfectly with my Sunday morning reverie, and set me off down a road of worry:

Domino takes a seat at the piano and counts off "Blueberry Hill." His playing and singing are tentative, as they were during rehearsal. After maybe 90 seconds, he tapers off and stands up; the band is left to puzzle through the rest of the song, and Fats appears to be done for the night... Domino returns to the piano. No longer the center of attention, he comes alive. He pumps the keys, mouths the words, hunches his shoulders, turns to his left and grins at the audience. Lloyd beams, and the band is into it. Harrison blows an alto sax solo and Fats tacks on a final flourish. It is THE MOMENT everyone hoped for.

Fats Domino is pushing 70, and barely survived the flood of the Ninth Ward. Alvin Batiste, Earl King, Willie Tee, Earl Turbinton: so many of the musicians who defined the critical musical culture of New Orleans have passed since the Federal Flood. It seems at times that the antediluvian ambiance of city is vanishing even as the it tries to right itself. Perhaps it is just my own intimations of mortality as I turn 50 and see so many of the signature figures pass on, but I can't help but feel that even as we struggle to rebuild that something essential is slipping away from us. If all of the older musicians are passing, and a show like Landreth's draws an audience what will need comfortable seats in a few more years, how much longer will it go on?

I return again and again to the theme of memory and remembrance> I wonder if I do so because I feel I am writing the last entries in the log of a lost ship, the chronicle of a lost or forgotten city. I recall the artist who went around the Ninth Ward in the months after the storm paints Coatan onto tree trunks. As the musicians fade and I think the aging crowd of Saturday night, I begin to wonder if we are perhaps among the last of our kind, the final generation or something close to it.

I find myself thinking again of the lost cities of the Maya, the magnificence of what they built and why it was all ultimately and mysteriously lost. Was it war without end, a fundamental economic imbalance between the feathered-and-masked aristocracy and the corn-grinding slaves at the bottom, or some environmentally unsustainable aspect of their culture that left those cryptic pyramids drowned in the jungle? All of those specters hang over us today in America, and in New Orleans more than any place else. What will be lost, and what will we leave behind, how will we be remembered, if ours is the first (but not likely the last) American city to sink beneath the waves or simply be abandoned as unsustainable.

The same forces that may have undone the mesoamerican cultures and threaten us today seem too monumental to turn aside. Perhaps it is all we can do to live the life we cherish in the place that makes it possible (or by equal turn to live the life made possible by the place we cherish). If we are the last of our kind, so be it. All we can do is record what we can of what and who we were, and this place where we live, even as we live out our own version of the last days of Pompeii.

As I sat on my porch in the cool of the early morning last Sunday following the train of thought that became this post, it was not Sonny Landreth's licks that played in my head. With a perfectly incongruous synchronicity the music that ran through my mind was a song every one of the middle-aged fans at Rock N Bowl would remember: Donovan's Atlantis. Even as these thoughts of loss and finality first passed through my mind, it was not with sadness but with the upbeat Sixties folk-rock sound of that song and its anthemic chorus. That is how it came to me. Let us rejoice and sing and dance. This is Where I Want to Be.

Hail, Atlantis.

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Profiles in Pusillanimousity

2007-11-14T12:16:00.000-06:00

The American Society of Civil Engineers has threated Levees.org and the 17-year-old producer of a video criticizing the ASCE's investigation into the failure of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers-built levees in New Orleans. By the time you click that link, the video may be gone.

The ASCE not only demanded that Levees.org remove the video from its website and the YouTube online video site, but also copied the letter to the school where the producer is a senior. Levees.org leader Sandy Rosenthal said the video would come down, but only because her non-profit could not sustain a prolonged legal battle to defend it. As of midday on Wednesday, the video was still on YouTube.

Apparently, the ASCE takes umbrage at the video for pointing out that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers paid ASCE close to $1 million for the study. They don't deny it. They just take umbrage. And they sort of fess up to opening an internal investigation into improprieties associated with this study.

The video supports Levee.org's call for an independent, Congressional commission to look into the massive engineering failure that drowned New Orleans. It's about time. And it's about time to start a criminal investigation into the Corp's failures, and that of any accessories, as was done for the Big Dig in Boston.

In my book, ASCE Executive Director Patrick Natale [quoted in the Times-Picayune story] joins any number of the members of the corps as accessories to mass manslaughter.

Update: Suspect Device captures the video in flash on his blog. It will never go away. We will never let the world forget. Memo to the ACSE: by joining forces with the Corps to whitewash their culpability for a few hundred thousand dollars, you have fucked with the wrong people. Don't get me wrong. I don't blame the working civilian corps of the Corps. I blame its command.

I blame Congress (yes, you John Breaux and Mary Landrieu, who diverted flood protection money into the new lock for the industrial canal). And I particularly blame anyone or group that would rush in to cash in on the opportunity to help cover up what happened. Most of a million and the inside track on future contracts. Sweet.

I think its time we empaneled a grand jury and began dragging the command structure of the Corps and idiots like these in to explain while they should not spend the rest of their lives breaking rocks in the Louisiana sun

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Waiting on Godot

2007-11-11T20:38:00.001-06:00

"Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be?"
-- Vladimir in Act II of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot

By the time we arrived almost two hours before the show was to start, all of the tickets for the Classical Theater of Harlem's outdoor production of Waiting for Godot were long gone. We decided not to wait around under the tree at Pratt and Robert E. Lee, but instead withdrew for more drinks, starting back on the porch at Chez Folse and ending at the Circle Bar for Gal Holiday.

I heard (from someone else who asked last night) that there would be no Sunday show added as there was the first weekend. So tonight instead of seeing Becket's play, I am--after a prolonged episode of absurdist, existential angst in my friend's club level seats at the Dome--reduced to watching bits of video.

I read the script through this week during a business trip. There is something essential in it to the current experience of so many in New Orleans, the discovery that we are not suffering from post traumatic stress disorder because we are not past the thing but instead in the very midst of it, in a landscape and a plot as bleak and confusing as Beckett's, on a road of dubious prospects in a landscape swept clear of familiar geography and of hope, no prospect that over a hill or beyond a wood there is something different, something better.

Nothing to be done.

And yet we came in the hundreds last Saturday night, over a thousand; turning our back on the well-lit streets of the sliver by the river, forgoing the restaurants of Magazine and the lively nightclubs of Frenchman to go to the edge of the empty zone to try, at least, to sit through this difficult work, a comedy as black as the streets were for months in this part of town, as dark as the windows remain in so many of the empty brick boxes that line the streets. We came because all of us are so like these characters, lost in a landscape from which familiar references have been erased, clinging to the one thing that keeps us all from dropping over the brink: each other. We know Godot will not save us, that the Pollos of the world care not a whit for how we fare or fail.

The carefully crafted fictions Americans erected like the pyramids were all swept away from this place by the flood, were taken from us as the Great Wars of the 20th Century destroyed the illusions of Beckett's generation. We have peered into the abyss, an abyss where many waded or swam in desperation and too many drowned, while the newsreaders stood puzzled on dry streets and the relief trucks stopped at the edge of town, waiting for word that it was safe to come, waiting for instructions from Godot. We were not ignored or abandoned by America. Instead we were force fed the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, and were driven out of the garden of mass marketing, ashamed of not of our own but of America's nakedness. We have peered into that abyss and come away filled with uncertainly and angst, equally incapable of trust in god or government. What is left? What reason is there to live here, to live at all?

And still we come home, even as we came to see Godot. The ticket rules of the prior week were changed without announcement, more were turned away than admitted, a sullen confusion hung over the disappointed. I left the site of the play not confused but reminded of the life we have found here, of the fitness of this text for our stage. We left the performance, but we can no more leave this place, this city than these characters can hang themselves: not because we are incapable, but instead because it is beyond our human nature to surrender this life we call New Orleans. Perhaps Godot will come. Just as likely he will not. All we can be certain of is ourselves: Sinn Fein. In the end, however bleak the scene, we will not give up hope.

VLADIMIR: Well? Shall we go?

ESTRAGON: Yes, let's go.

They do not move.

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Help Tabasco

2007-11-07T20:56:00.000-06:00

It's the eighth day of the disaster in Tabasco and 60,000 people
of 19 communities near the state capital of Villahermosa still need to be
rescued as they are trapped on roofs and the second stories of their
homes.
-- root coffee reporting on flooding in Tabasco
Nos recuerdos. A disaster of almost unimaginable dimension. Tens of thousands of people stranded on their roofs in the sun waiting for rescue for days on end. Even as the people of New Orleans struggle to rebuild some semblance of normality over two years after the disasterous Federal Flood of 8-29, I hope that we can step up and help. Look at the table on the Wikipedia page of donations. Way to go, America. I think New Orleans should try to raise $301,000 just to embarress the nation to our north.

From the options on Root Coffee's page, I selected Operation USA. Poking around on their web site, they seem like a solid organization and were among the first responders to Katrina and the Federal Flood. Their continuing involvement in mental health support for the hurricane coast is something all of us should be grateful for.

If you don't choose them, choose someone (but, please, don't choose the Red Cross. Take it from the hurricane coast. You might as well burn your money as an offering to your favorite diety for the well being of Tabasco as piss it away on them.)

New Orleans remembers. Je me souviens. Yo recuerdo.

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There was a crooked man

2007-11-04T16:27:00.000-06:00

When the former governor of Minnesota famously insulted his capitol city by suggesting its streets were laid out by drunken Irishmen, he missed an important feature of that or any river city: if streets start out as perpendicular to a sinuous river your city will be a Mandelbrot maze only the natives understand.

Of course New Orleans is just such a city in its oldest quarters, away from the attempts of the former town of Carrollton or or Broad or Canal Street to provide some Jeffersonion, rectangular order. Just as the river itself bends away out of sight from any point upon its banks, so streets vanish Uptown as their neighbors crowd them out, Upperline consuming a half dozen in its run to the north. Downstream as the river's bank bends right Kerlerec and St. Roch, A.P. Tureaud Avenue and New Orleans Street emerge in mid-neighborhood when the adjoining roads spread too far apart. All through town wind places like Bayou Road, Gentilly Boulevard and Metairie Road, all following the inexorable logic of moving water, winding along the banks thrown up by flooding of ancient bayous.

We like this sense of oblique impenetrability our odd streets lends us. It is a part and parcel of our ingrained exceptionalism, our sense of superiority through uniqueness. Of course our streets should be mysterious, appearing and disappearing as so much of the landscape seems to do behind its lush screen of vegetation. Such a geography is fitting for a city when all decisions of consequence once took place behind the discrete and exclusive doors of private clubs, or perhaps the executive suite of an old-money bank should the presence of a citizen not admitted into the Boston club,--say, a Jew--might be required, a city where every tourist has peered through the bars of a carriageway gate to glimpse a hidden Vieux Carre' patio.

As part of our obsession with the oblique, we have built much of our government upon a odd collection of boards and offices that make the Lord Mayoralty of London look positive modern, outfits such as the Board of Liquidation, City Debt (through which the old money families once controlled the fiscal whims of the merely elected). We have two Sheriff's, one civil and one criminal, while the other 3040 county-level jurisdictions of the U.S. make do with one. We had at one time over a half-dozen different police forces with jurisdiction over some part of the city. We had until recently a system of seven property tax assessors, an office virtually inheritable from one's family which conspired to ensure that no one paid very much in property taxes.

While the rest of the English-speaking continent ed itself upon the Roman Republic, we seem to have taken our cues from the notoriously bureaucratic eastern empire of Byzantium, with a measure of the culture of baksheesh of our Latin neighbors to the south. It is no wonder that simple, industrious Yankees and the descendants of cow pokes--who grease the wheels of the central government in more subtle ways such as Political Action Committees--look down on us as somehow un-American. We're not. If anything we are more American (in the sense anyone south of the Rio Grande river would understand) but we're certainly un-United States-ian.

Much of this we bring on ourselves, not just through our general attitude of exceptionalism and our particular if not peculiar forms of the social contract, but through overt acts of profound stupidity. This week's case in point: garbage.

Why has garbage always been associated with corruption of the human sort (as opposed to the little critters which will appear in my trash can in warm weather should I miss a pickup)? Notably in cities where the Mafia was big the waste management business was inextricably linked with the Mob. Down here the Gulf Coast Mafia seems to have faded from its glory days, but our elected officials continue to find clever ways to smear themselves and our city with garbage.

In the case of the City Council's problem with interpreting with English Language, it is hard to separate the merely stupid from the corrupt. First the city grants a garbage collection contract to two bidders who routinely give money to the Mayor's campaign fund, at more than double what adjacent jurisdictions pay. The contract is hidden from public view by the leader of the promised transparent mayoralty until a time when the council has two choices: approve the contract, or stop garbage pickup.

Part of the mayor's largess is explained away by a requirement that the companies haul away "unlimited" bulk items including demolition and construction debris. Then, our City Council-new reformers and old hacks alike--voted unanimously last April to limit bulk waste pickup to 25 pounds or less.

Not satisfied with this bit of stupidity v. corruption theater, the world was treated to a Sanitation hearing at the city council chambers at which the meaning of the world unlimited was much in discussion. Stacey Head, who was elected in the "reform" election right after the storm, pointed out that citizens should always have expected to pay for their own demolition removal. She didn't specify if she thought that people's who demolition waste had been removed by FEMA should have to reimburse the government, but that's the logic of her defense of her April vote.

It is easy to pin the failure of our recovery on the central government's defective levees and even more defective response to the greatest American catastrophe in a century, to hold up the Road Home program and the ineptitude of the outgoing governor to manage the recovery. In the end, however, we have to look to ourselves. Many of us have figured this out a long time ago: Sinn Fien, as Ashley Morris aptly put it.

We are on our own, and by the hand of those we have elected to lead us, we are failing ourselves. It is clear that our businessman-turned-mayor is as corrupt as the rest. There is no other explanation of a garbage contract that gouges us for inferior service awarded to those who fund his campaigns. The difference between stuffing envelopes full of cash into one's pockets and upgrading your airline seat to Dallas to First Class on the campaign account credit card is a fine distinction, one I argued when I worked as a press flack in Washington but never believed.

The current garbage situation is so bizarre, that one has to ask every single member of the council who approved first the garbage contracts and then the 25 pound limit: Are you corrupt like the mayor, or merely stupid? There is no other obvious explanation, so it's time to tell us which you are.

Sometimes it is good that we can hide ourselves away, in a courtyard patio or even a craftsman porch like my own, behind our screens of vegetation on our impenetrably confusing streets, and contemplate our cultural superiority. Otherwise, we might have to face up to the reality this particular opera buffa illustrates: we seem incapable of governing ourselves. Local politics is run on the same model as the national: race and class block voting resulting in buffoons who invade Iraq or sign ridiculous garbage contracts. Anyone who questions the outcome is a racist or pro-terrorist.

Perhaps politics is pointless, that it is no longer possible to make a difference. As Beckett may have once answered Lenin: "Nothing to be done."" Perhaps it is time to take down the street signs and just vanish into the the impenetrable landscape.

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Looking for ghosts

2007-10-31T06:09:00.000-05:00

"Memories there are, enough and to spare, of the famous days of old, and of the not less famous men of our own time; but the ghosts have fled."
-- Real Ghost Stories by William T. Stead

The ghosts have all fled, and taken my words with them. This time a year ago, two years ago, the ghosts of the flood crowded around me and compelled me to write, to tell the story of New Orleans and the Federal Flood. At first the fear that my city was lost, then the atmosphere of living among survivors in a ruined city was a constant, palpable presence, leading me through entry after entry of the story of the post-deluvian city like an ectoplasmic visitor leading me around the house in search of the source of bumps in the night.

Lately the haunting presence is missing. The city seems brighter, busier, more the antedeluvian city of memory. Unless I steer myself into the empty quarters, it is possible to slip into a life where I can forget what these streets were like a year ago, two years ago, what some of them are still like today. And I am just too absorbed in life to seek out what I know is just down the Bayou: empty Gentilly. Perhaps it is not the ghosts have have abandoned me. Perhaps I have abandoned them.

The end results is the same. I am not driven as I was for much of the last two-and-a-half years to tell the city's story in honor of those ghosts, of the palpably suffering spirit of this place. This is not a relief. It has instead left a void I'm not sure how to fill. I have had other motivations to write here--anger, pain, sadness. These are difficult to sustain as a habit, and as likely to ultimately consume the person who invokes them as dark magic consumes the practicioner. Few do anger well, and I'll never be able to sustain it with the talent and humor of an Ashley Morris or a Greg Peters.

Some how, at this particular time of the year when the spirits are believed closest to our daylit world, I need to seek those lost spirits out, to reconnect with what best sustained what I do here. I have to do this because, in the end, writing this blog is probably all I am suited to do for my city. I have worked for politicians, but I make a poor one myself. I am a much better lieutenant than captain, and I am uncertain whom I might serve. I am not particularly suited in any way to help New Orleans beyond my commitment to live here. Perhaps that is enough, but part of the void at the center is the nagging sense that it is not. If I have any shred of talent it is what I do here in Wet Bank Guide, and I need to find a way to continue to be a voice in the chorus of and for New Orleans. I need to continue to be a witness, to remember.

Remember. Je me souviens. I need to continue because the story has really just begun. As I wrote only a few months ago, "[t]he scope and time line of our story is novelistic, not episodic in the fashion most suited to the corporatized media of the twenty first century. The big media could no more cover the story we collectively write [as bloggers] than they could serve up the serialized works of Dickens without being filleted and served to their stockholders." And of all of the motivations that kept me pounding away here the sense of a haunting presence, even if only as an internatlized metaphor for some sense of a spatial and temporal dislocation, a dark cousin to deja vu and much more persistant, that is the experience of life in a disaster zone. The ghosts of the flood and memory have been my most consistent themes.

I wrote this in July, 2006, and it sums up well why I have never changed the sub-head of this blog from Remembering Katrina even if I have not mentioned the storm in a year:

Many of us have seen the videos of the 2004 tsunami shot by tourists , have witnessed on a small screen the incredible power of a tidal wave of debris pushing through a crowded neighborhood. There is no such video of the Ninth Ward, nothing like the film shot by a fire department crew in Lakeview shortly after the levee there began to fail. . . I imagine the last images captured by the eyes of the people who lived on those streets, synthesizing my own memory of these neighborhoods with the videos of the tsunami, running a monstrous newsreel of my own imagining. It is as if the victims of the Federal Flood were reaching across and directing the camera, telling me: this is what it was like, what we saw, what they did to us. I can almost feel them crowd around me, the cliche of a haunting image made palpable, whispering as I type: Remember.

Je me souviens. Remember. No one who cares about New Orleans will ever forget, certainly none of those who lost everything, or those who stayed and struggled to survive, trapped in a televised nightmare plainly apparent to everyone except the people who commanded the relief trucks to stop because it might be too dangerous, those who left their dead behind in lawn chairs covered by newspaper or dirty blankets. They might rather not remember, but it will almost certainly haunt them to the end of their days.

I suffered none of that myself. I watched it unfold from a safe distance of decades and a thousand miles. Whatever vicarious pain I experienced was trivial, even if it was enough to upend my family's life and bring us home. I would take some of that burden on myself from the people of the city around me, would gladly be their Judas goat, their ghost eater If I can swallow some of that pain and turn it into words here that tell their story so the world will not forget, can use that dark energy to paint a picture of a city that was, and of a city trying to be again, then perhaps this is not all just some horrible exercise in self-pity. Oh, poor, sorry New Orleans. Look at us. How pitiful.

There are things that deserve to be remembered. Perhaps my ghosts are like the victims of Hiroshima, hiding their scars in shame. Or perhaps, as I suggested above, I have abandoned them, swept away by the currents of life from the places they inhabit. I want the suffering to be remembered, but also the beauty of a city rising out of its ruin like wildflowers from a fire swept landscape; the spirits not just remembered but transformed into something else, something like that oldest of stories, the wanderer's trial by monster and descent into hell on the long road home.

There are heroes here among the shades, and their stories are as inseparable as Odysseus' is from the shades of the heroes of the Iliad he encounters in the underworld. The heroism of the people of New Orleans (not my sorry self, but those who lost everything and came back again) is measured in part by the depths, the darkness from which they are rising up, by the ghosts they struggle to leave behind so that they can live something like the lives they had before. Only by remembering all of the horror and suffering and loss the ghosts of the flood represents can the true measure of their heroism be taken. This is what I must remember, why I must remember, why I must keep writing.

This is why the ghosts are important. That is why, after the candy is inspected and my teenage daughter recovered safely home, I will take a walk through my neighborhood and look for those reminders of the last two-plus years, for the signs of what happened. I will look for the ghosts I once felt hoovering while as far away as Fargo, N.D. or Portland, Ore., and renew the promise in what I wrote a year ago, to honor the ghosts of the flood so that they are not forgotten, but are transformed into an integral part of who and what and most importantly where we are.

We will do this to tell whoever is listening--Our Father, Oshun, Mother of God, ghosts of the Flood--we remember. We have suffered, and we will never forget the Flood and those who did not come through. We are the people who came through and came back. We remember the lost. We remember you.

When we accept and embrace this spirit, perhaps the haunting will end once and for all, will not be a permanent pall over the city, a fearful sound in the night like a howling in the wires, or an unpleasant knotting in the stomach as we pass an abandoned house. It will cease when it becomes instead like the glinting of the sun on white-washed stone above the neat green grass of the cemeteries, just another comfortable part of who we are.

Gotham and the Ghost Town

2007-10-28T19:27:00.000-05:00

After five days navigating the electric anthill of New York City, a lunchtime errand through New Orleans' Central Business District seemed like a walk through a ghost town. I vaguely remember a more vigorous CBD, the midday sidewalks full of people moving perhaps more slowly as the climate demands but as purposefully as the people of midtown Manhattan. Those crowds are gone now, like the outdoor clock at the D.H. Homes department store on Canal where people once met on a vibrant Canal Street. I can't be certain how much of the loss was the gradual erosion of downtown as the oil business drifted off to Houston, and how much is due to the diaspora that followed the Federal Flood.

New Orleans is many things, but neither vigorous nor invigorating come to mind. As much as we might enjoy the languor of our warm syrup bath and the inclination to the easy, these are not the hallmarks of centers of industry and commerce. We can't really blame our ghostly downtown on the flood. As corporations feast like cannibals one upon the other in a race to the bottom line, places like New Orleans--where Mammon hides itself discretely behind the doors of private clubs--are left to suck thin soup from the castoff bones the centers of power toss us.

Which is not to say I didn't enjoy New York, or that I blame the pin-stripped masters of the universe for our fate. If anything, my journey through the teeming streets was precisely the tonic I needed. As Orleanians wound their way through the days from 8-29 through to the tail end of hurricane season, the same dim miasma that engulfed the city the same time last year began to overwhelm us all once again. We didn't even have the Saints to cheer us. New York was just the ticket: at once relaxing as a Sunday stroll through Central Park to the museum, and as invigorating as only a plunge into the rush hour subway or Monday morning, breakfast time bagel shop could be.

New York is, along with San Francisco, one of the places Orleanians say they can live outside of the Crescent City without regret. While Manhattan and New Orleans couldn't be more different, I think from my brief visits to NYC and the place that prefers to call itself The City, there is a sense in all of these of a uniqueness, of a pride in their city above all, a loyalty to the polis ahead of any vague concepts such as nationality. The citizens of these cities consider themselves self-sufficient in everything that matters and merely tolerant of whatever is required of the outside world. These cities are also stages where people choose to go to act out lives not possible elsewhere, a place where eccentricities are common place if not celebrated, and there remains a strong sense of belonging not just to the polis, but to one's own tribe within it as well.

All of these cities are places where you might encounter someone as odd as Ruthie the Duck Lady, or the fellow in the pink body suit and unicycle I saw peddling around San Francisco, or the self-proclaimed Mayor of Strawberry fields. Even more fun than the self-consciously odd was the thoroughly modern monk--head shaved and clad in a full saffron-and-purple robe--I saw ducking into the Olive Garden restaurant at Times Square heavily burdened with shopping bags, an Old Navy bag outermost.

In each of these places one can turn a corner and be confronted with a city-defining vista. In San Francisco, I remember walking down the steps from Coit Tower onto Montgomery Street and turning down the hill toward the Transamerica pyramid, or the view my daughter stopped to capture with our camera of a piece of a piece of the east side skyline over the Lake in Central Park, postcard perfect moments that stop you in mid-step and make you remember: I am somewhere special and other.

As a person who lives in a profoundly stereotyped place, I have to say that one of the accepted truisms of New York is patently false. Our experience of New Yorkers was almost universally pleasant. The one man who yelled at my wife when she couldn't quite figure out how to swipe her subway fare card in just the right way was quickly replaced by another who not only helped her, he ultimately just swiped his own card and sent her through the turnstile. While there was no chance the cashier at the neighborhood deli was going to ask after my mom'n'em, there was nothing overbearing or dude, just a brisk and cheerful efficiency that to an Orleanians is as remarkable as any of the landmarks of New York.

My daughter remarked that no one made eye contact, but I am an incorrigible gawker who looks at everyone coming down the street, who can sit endlessly at a table and observe the people around me. Men in New York tended to avoid returning eye contact, but women seemed more likely to glance back, perhaps to smile. I probably flatter myself to think it was something essential to the propagation of the species that made women more likely to return a glance, and occasionally smile; more likely they were thinking to themselves "who's that middle-aged rube in the beret?"

Coming back to the low, green vistas of New Orleans after those few days in the iron gray canyons of Manhattan was like slumping down on a bench in the sauna after a vigorous afternoon at the gym, experiencing a pleasant and refreshed exhaustion. Our provincial downtown seemed as quiet to me as my midweek ramble across Central Park from Natural History to the Met. I have to console myself with noticing that, as we pass 300,00 in the city itself and close to 90% of the metro population returned, Carrollton Avenue on Friday night is as busy as I ever remember it, that as languorous as New Orleans fancies itself, there will be the excitement of dressing for Carnival and the invigorating experience of marching in Krewe du Vieux.

I had once thought I would like to live in New York, when I was young and fancied I might become a writer. Lacking the discipline of either the artist or the scholar, I drifted into journalism instead. At fifty, I don't know that I could now adjust to the hustle and flow of New York on a 365 day a year basis any more than I could cheerfully climb the hills of S.F. day-in and day-out. New Orleans has its own hidden excitements, and in just enough measure to suit my nature and my age.

Still, I find I am secretly rooting for my daughter, who has had the New York bug since junior high where among here best friends were a who wanted to study film at NYU, and an aspiring fashion designer. She dragged me to NYU and Columbia to check the lay of the land, even as her mother reminded here of all of the advantages of universities in less challenging (and expensive) places. If she were to make it into either place, I think I would just have to hock the rest of my living days just so I would have an excuse to return more often to New York.

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The River (Redux)

2007-10-27T07:18:00.000-05:00

Well, here I am back from New York and still suffering from writers block. Work and life in general have been just too damned hard lately to find the extra hours to keep this up. I find myself sitting on the porch at late at night night thinking about blog posts and end up staring up at the moon humming Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again. So, rather than just let WBG fade away (and in hopes I will find the energy and focus to return to the posts I have half-written), I am going to crib (yes, Peter, again) something I originally posted on a project called Flood Street back in the late fall of 2005 before we came home.

The River

The river is our defining place, the soul of our geography. People ask, why build a city here? The answer is now what it was almost three hundred years ago, when my ancestor debarked a ship and left for the Cote des Allemandes: the River.

I grew up as far from the river as one can get and still be in the city, in a lakefront reclaimed from the lake’s shore in living memory. For me the Lake and Bayou St. John and the great drainage canals were the defining waterways of my youth. These were accessible, and mysterious in small ways.

The old Spanish Fort on the bayou, the antique pedestrian bridge that crossed the Bayou just there, the ribs of a long sunken boat visible just beneath the surface beneath the crumbling brick walls: behind the levees one entered another world. Even the Orleans Canal seemed a bucolic waterway in it’s last stretch before the lake, reached on the east side by crossing a vast park filled with trees and climbing a tall levee, which seemed mountainous to a boy used to an apparent flatness in the world.

In those days before the Moonwalk or the Riverwalk, the river was a distant and mystical presence, often spoken of but rarely glimpsed up close. It hid behind floodwalls and levees; behind the warehouses that lined Tchoupitoulas Street, themselves fortified by ramparts of railroad tracks. The riverside neighborhoods were alien and dangerous, like the Loup Garou, waiting to swallow little boys. The River had at once as much and as little reality as the godhead I was told resided in a tiny wafer of glutinous bread.

The immensity of the River was inflated when revealed from the heights of the bridges that spanned it, the Huey P. Long and the Greater New Orleans Bridge. It was, to a small boy, like a snapshot of a pre-Cambrian world; from something so huge and remote, one expected great monsters to suddenly break the surface, and swallow the toy ships.

When I was much older, and had seen the river up close from the decks of the ferries or from high atop the Trade Mart building, I remember riding the Canal Street Ferry to Algiers with my father, to walk the streets he knew as a child new to New Orleans. His family came up from Thibodaux in the early 1930s, leaving a house where French was the first language, on another Canal Street facing a different bayou than the one I knew growing up.

We strolled through the streets and looked for the house of his early boy hood, and he told us of days when they would swim in the river. Swim in it! I had only heard tales of sucking quick sands along the shore, and of whirlpools that would swallow anyone unlucky enough to fall in, taking their bodes down to great depths peopled by mythically giant catfish, never to be see again. And my father swam in those waters.

On that day, the River entered my life as a force, as something to which I had a connection. It lost none of its mythic proportion. Instead, my father was raised up into a figure out of Bullfinch’s or a character from Twain.

Before that day, my father made the river an indelible part of his history. He had joined the Second Battle of New Orleans, and help lead the fight to save the River from plans to further sever it from the city by building an expressway between the Quarter and the River. He was president of the American Institute of Architects in New Orleans, and had challenged the head of the downtown business establishment pushing for the expressway to debate him on citywide television. The publisher of the newspaper had threatened to without my older sister’s wedding announcement in retaliation, in words that a hundred years earlier would have ended not on WWL-TV, but beneath the Dueling Oak.

My father became the man I think of when I look at the self portrait he painted that hangs in my office, a figure who strode across and not just through the landscape of history, when I learned those tales.

***

When I came to work for the small newspapers in Gretna and St. Bernard, I became a frequent passenger of the ferries. For a time, my only vehicle was a small motorbike, and I came to rely on the ferries almost exclusively. My working days often began and ended standing at the railing of the lower deck, watching men hand lines as big as my arm, as the pilot let out a blast on his whistle to announce our crossing.

That was when the river really entered my life, when I began to feel myself a citizen of a river city, at the mercy of the currents and the skills of a pilot, planning my day in part by the schedule of the boats, mindful of its floods and the debris that swept past the ferry rail, bound for the sea.

Now, when I take my children back to New Orleans, we inevitably travel to the zoo, and return from Uptown on the riverboat Audubon that travels from the foot of Canal to the Park and back. I point out the bright new container ships and the rusting banana boats, explain the mysteries of the Plimsoll mark, and name the wharves as we pass them like a list of the boats on the shores of Troy.

Now that I hope to come home to stay, I think often of the river. A famous author once wrote of memory and home and a river, and told us that we can’t go home again. The ancient aphorism tells us that we cannot step twice into the same river. I know that they are right. I believe that they are wrong.

The city I return to will not be the city I left. Too much was lost in the flood, swept away by the waters of my childhood, the waters of the lake and the canals I once thought idyllic. But before I had crossed the Parish line twenty years ago, the city in my rear view mirror was not the city I grew up in. Time and commerce had done more to erode the city of my childhood than even the greatest river on the continent could.

What will I find then, when I return to the river and it’s city? I know that when I return, I will go back to the Moonwalk. I will climb the steps that my father helped to build, that are in my mind his great monument, and the river will be there. It will not be the same river he knew and swam in as a boy or fought for as a man; it will not be the river I first saw from high atop the Huey P. Long Bridge or the one I watched from the levee at Riverbend as a youth; it will not even be the river I took my children down just last year.

It will be as much a river of memory, and a river of dreams, as a physical river,. But that, in the end, is the river it has always been, from the time of LaSalle and Bienville until today. I will find that river there, just where I left it, up and across those steps. I will take my children and climb them, and there I will tell them the story of their grandfather and the river.

And I will be home.

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On The Road

2007-10-12T22:00:00.000-05:00

The Wet Bank Guide will be on vacation to the Isle of Manhattan for the next few days. I had a couple of posts knocking around in my head, but none quite got done. I've been re-reading some of my old stuff here, and decided to bring back one of the first things I posted, from long before most of the people kind enough to come back here had found this blog. This was written on Sept. 1, 2005 after watching MSNBC's endless loop of the helicopter flyover of St. Bernard Parish drowned to the eaves from the levee to the lake.

Thursday, September 01, 2005

The tragedy of St. Bernard

I worked for a number of years for a weekly newspaper in St. Bernard Parish. The main community of Chalmette flourished after desegregation, a haven for white flight. This bothered me when I first came out there. The more time I spent there, the less I noticed. This was not Mississippi, some place people raged against their neighbors.

After desegregation, some of us in both communities chose to try to live among each other. Some in both community retreated, and chose to live among themselves. St. Bernard was one of the latter, and its residents unapologetic about it. For all their antipathy toward the city I loved, I came to love St. Bernard and its people.

Today, the Parish is completely immersed in water, its boats and it buildings ravaged by wind and waves, its people scattered or traumatized or drowned. US Senator Mary Landrieu, flying over the parish, is reported to have made one remark: "It's gone", while crossing herself.

The real tragedy of St. Bernard is this: no one should have waited out this storm there.

Everyone knew the next big storm could be a tremendous catastrophe. Members of the Police Jury (the equivalent of a County Commission) knew it. The people who didn't rebuild after Betsy--continuing to live in their government-supplied trailers knowing the next storm would just take their house again--they knew it. The Corps of Engineers and all the experts knew it. Long-time Police Juror Junior Rodriguez had railed for years for some way to close off the MRGO during a storm, knowing the surge that charged up that channel during Hurricane Betsy--causing much of the flooding in the 1965 storm--would one day return even stronger.

They were all right.

Here's is a bit of their story, from the WWL-TV web site new blog:

3:40 P.M. - WWL photographer Willie Wilson: People being rescued from Chalmette were begging for water, wanted to talk to family members. People rescued in Chalmette were ferried across to Algiers. People hot and parched from
days on roof tops.
3:42 P.M. - Wilson: You can't fathom it. I've covered tragedies around the world, never thought it would be here.
3:43 P.M. - Photographer Willie Wilson: Those rescued from Chalmette homes are dazed, don't know where they are going and just asking for water and to find family members.
3:44 P.M. - Tugboat captain who rescued those in Chalmette. "Without more help, many people will die."
3:46 P.M. - Tugboat captain: We have so little help. Send us some food and water immediately!
3:47 P.M. - Man rescued after spending night on Chalmette High School roof for two days: "It's all gone."
3:49 P.M. - Survivor from Chalmette: We spent two days on a roof, swam to a storefront, food was pouring out, we ate it, we drank the water. We had to do something. There's no help.
3:52 P.M. - Chalmette man. I spent 40 hours on a roof then God sent a boat from a neighbor's house floating by and we took it to safety.
3:54 P.M. - Wilson: People were passing out in the heat in front of me.
3:55 P.M. - 40-year veteran photographer Willie Wilson: Maybe one other time in my career did I shoot pictures crying.

Once I knew these people. I know this place. They will come back.

I know that, however great the devastation, I will someday take my children to Rocky and Carlos, and we will eat macaroni and cheese. We will go the battle field, and I will tell them of the Pirates' Lafitte and the Creoles and flat-boatmen who beat the British.

And I will drive them down Highway 300 to Shell Beach, and show them on each side of that narrow road the swamp these people wrested their homes from. We will watch the shrimpers unload, and buy some fresh from the lake. I will take them down the road to The End of the World Marina in Delacroix, and show them the beauty of these waters, so they will not think them cruel.

I want to show my children the beauty in a place they don't understand, growing up in the Midwest. I want them to see people who live with the water the way people in Fargo live with air; people who shrimp and crew towboats and work on rigs in the Gulf and, when the refinery lets out for the day, go fishing; people who chose to live on an island in the middle of a swamp, and not in Kenner or Fargo, ND; people who worked hard and set aside a little and built a place for themselves out of a swamp, a place they would not willingly let go.

I want them to know why I am crying at my keyboard for people who's views on issues of race I could never understand, and teach my children to abhor; people who took me into their homes and fed me sweet tea and told me stories until the stars and the mosquitoes came out; people who chose to live apart, surrounded by capricious waters, an island; people who would not willingly surrender their island back to the waters.

I want them to understand why some people stayed, and why they would come back and start over again.

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In the Wilderness

2007-10-05T22:54:00.000-05:00

While the strip of New Orleans' City Park that runs along City Park Avenue is looking something close to its old manicured self--the lawns trimmed and the great oaks leafing out-- if you wander far enough to the north (less than a mile in this 1,300 acre urban greenscape, say north of I-610, you leave behind an urban park and enter a feral urban wilderness where wild boars recently roamed.

I remember a time when much of the north end of City Park was such a place, before the north course or the new driving range on Filmore, a time when Filmore did not bisect the park at all. The land north of the West Course and behind the riding stables was a wilderness of tall grass and weedy trees, camphors and Chinese tallow, a place where packs of wild dogs roamed on well-worn paths. I lived just across Robert E. Lee and would sometimes venture just a short way in. Not too far, for I was young enough to bring Tonka trucks to the great piles of earth that rose up as the lagoons and golf terrain of the North Course were excavated. But I heard the stories from older boys, ones who would venture far into that wild place armed with trusty BB guns.

That tangled wilderness is long gone, just like the ski jump that once sat in the lagoon along Marconi before the Filmore causeway was built, back when water skiers were a frequent fixture on that long and narrow stretch of water. Gone as well is the man who used to launch his amphibious sports car at the same ramp used by the skiers. That was another park, another era, a time like that described by Walker Percy in The Moviegoer, when the girl who rode in passenger seat of that water-born car no doubt wore the same sort of tight, one piece swimsuit as the water skiers, the sort of little skirted number you could trace all the way back to the noses of bombers in the 1940s.

Am I really that old? At fifty, enough people who seemed not so old are suddenly dying off like flies. Its the sort of age when you start to look at the obituary page not because you expect to find friends from high school there, but just to start to place yourself in the mathematical distribution of age and cause of death, to look at those pictures that might have been next to yours in the high school yearbook, to see them depicted in the grey and grainy tones of the photos of ghosts.

I've been in such a rut lately--kids to school, into the swirling vortex at work, back to get kids and run them around in the early evening; chores on Saturday then collapse on Sunday--that I rarely get off my well beaten paths. I noticed those lost golf tracks through the encroaching wilderness just as the subject of the article on the lost world of City Park North did, as I crested the Wisner overpass one recent day as I drove my daughter out to Ben Franklin High School at the lakefront. Crowds of track runners passed bicyclists following a path through the tall grass of the newly wild north side. I need to get out there, I told myself, even before I found the Times-Picayune article I missed courtesy of Bayou St. John David.

Driving my daughter to Franklin on Saturday (my wife's weekday chore), I found myself taking a wander through another bit of urban wilderness: Gentilly. As I wandered down Mirabeau on my way over to St. Roch, I was struck as always unrelieved prospect of desolation. So little has changed since I came home last year. Sure, there are new debris piles as I travel around Mid-City and Broadmoor, and yard signs pop up touting this or that contractor along the way. It is not as if I don't know that I live in a disaster zone. Still, I might as well be living on Audubon Place for all I get out into the real Debrisville lately. It would be so easy to stay in settled Mid-City or the sliver by the river and forget just how desolate some neighborhoods remain.

City Park may be hauntingly beautiful in its slow decay back into a natural state, but Gentilly is not beautiful, even in a haunting way: haunted is more like it. I almost forgot how disconcerting those empty blocks can be, ones where sagging houses stare through glassless windows onto unkempt lawns in a scene that seems to repeat infinitely to the horizon like a trick with two mirrors. Has it really been more than two years, and so little done? Did Berlin look like this in 1947? Hiroshima? Is this how far we've fallen in one or two generations, that we leave half an American city to rot, its people scattered? We are not as our mothers and fathers were, not by a long shot. The World War II museum here should close as a matter of general principle, lest the few remaining survivors of that conflict come by and confront what a failure the nation they once served has become.

Some of the city, I fear, will ultimately revert just as the park has. I worry about the hardiest pioneers on the frontiers north and east along the lake. Here from my little atoll of City Park, at the edge of the archipelago of dry spots sometimes called the Isle of Orleans, I wonder as I did a year and a half ago how those who return to the emptiest neighborhoods will cope. The idyllic neighborhood of flowerbeds and children on bicycles they remember are gone, replaced by a wilderness that lacks the beauty of City Park's rampant greenery, but instead offers a parade of peeling sideboards that reminds one of the abandoned farmsteads along rural roads, signposts along a way of life that no longer exists; the greying brick facades which smack of the stone piles by the side of the road one finds in Europe, the leavings of cultures past.

These dark thoughts swarm around me like termites around the glaring lights of Metairie, engulf me sometimes like that first measure of syrupy weather as you step out of the cold airplane just arrived from the chilly north and step into home, into New Orleans. Yes, much of this place is trying to revert to the wilderness settled by our families hundreds of years before.

Still, it is the landscape we know, the one we have glimpsed driving down Highway 300 to the End of the Earth Marina, the barrenness vaguely familiar to those of us old enough to remember when there was were raw new subdivisions west of Causeway but this side of the airport, when the East was the empty land between Chef Menteur and Morrison Road.

It is not the wilderness I wandered in for nineteen years, the place we call America. I've lived in places where culture was an ad in the newspaper listing a half-dozen events in a year at the local college, where the restaurants were all careful clones of someone's imagined Italy or Mexico replicated a thousand times over. Life was safe there, predictable. I could plot my future out with the certainly of someone who knows how many more trips to the store it would take to collect enough Yellow or Green Stamps to claim that RV at the back of the redemption catalog.

It was not terrible there. To suggest otherwise would not be fair to the people who lived there, the ones who marched on St. Patrick's Day in D.C. or danced on Syttende Mai in the Nordic Midwest. To them, it was home. Over time it became to me a flat landscape without relief, the desert of the Isrealites without the comfort of a fanatically certain Moses, or even the wan light of a volcano bellowing a column of fire in the distance.

There is a certain safety in the cities of the diaspora. I know that, having found it a dozen years ago not far from the other end of the Mississippi. But at some point the wilderness will find you, even as it creeps over the greens of City Park or claims abandoned bungalows in Gentilly. Even among the high rises of Atlanta or Houston the same chill feeling the endless steppes of North Dakota sometimes stirred in me will grab a hold of you, will make you wonder why you stay there. Over time the void that can't be filled anywhere else will overpower all the reasons to stay away, and the growing wild places of New Orleans will be reclaimed by those who left, or by their children.

I may not live to see that day, but I am as certain as Moses that it will come to pass--if not for me then for my children. And that is enough.

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Sitting Here In Limbo (remix)

2007-09-28T23:06:00.000-05:00

Wet Bank Guide is on a bit of a hiatus, but nothing that won't pass. Anway, here is something from December 2005 that's worth revisting :

Thursday, December 29, 2005

Sitting here in limbo

Sitting here in limbo, but I know it won't be long
Sitting here in limbo, like a bird without a song
Well they're putting up resistance
But I know my faith will lead me on
-- Jimmy Cliff

I wore out my vinyl copy of the soundtrack to the movie Harder They Come a long time ago. I just loved that movie, and think of it every time I accidentally punch up the opening to the TV show Cops, and flash back to a time when the opening theme song had an entirely different meaning.

My theme for today, however, isn't the anti-heroes of the 1970s. We are long past the days when their was anything romantic about the anti-heroes of this movie. The drug gangsters are gone from New Orleans (for now), and good riddance.

This reggae spiritual is the sound track in my head as I sit here 1,200 miles and twenty years removed from my city and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, replacing the unrelenting loop of Adagio for Strings that haunted me through September and into October, and was then replaced by the piece Requiem , a haunting piece of music originally composed by Eliza Gilkyson for for the victims of the Christmas tsunami.

Mother Mary full of grace, awaken.
All our homes and all our loved ones taken.
Taken by the sea.

Hear our mournful plea...

Mother Mary find us where we've fallen
Out of grace. Lead us to a higher place.

If you can listen to this carefully without crying, check your pulse or the mark on the front of your house, cap, cause you're .

But now I read day after day about the seeming normality of life for those lucky few on what a WWOZ DJ referred to as "the sliver by the river", a town smaller than Fargo, N.D. where I sit writing this. And then I get an email from someone who's taken a series of photos of the rest of the city after dark, in the dark. I read about the latest post-K suicides here and here and ...

Congress passed a Katrina relief bill, but most of the $29 Billion went to FEMA or other branches of the federal government, which means that real people mostly will never see it. No one will step up to help pay $350 million to rebuild Entergy's infrastructure in the city, including the stockholders of the parent company who have been perfectly happy to harvest the profits in the past.

Congress adjourned without action on the Baker Bill, which would provide direct assistance to those who lost their homes. Without this bill, hundreds of thousands of Americans will have to pay out the mortgages on their ruined, worthless properties. Baker has promised to bring it back, but the people's House is adjourned until Jan. 31, meaning no action can begin before February.

The city's leaders can't seem to make a decision on how reconstruction should proceed, while the usual political factions bicker over where FEMA trailers should be placed. The rest of the country seems to think we're too corrupt to take care of ourselves, so they're perfectly OK that we've suspended elections for the time being.

So, we're all left (well, I am at least) with Jimmy Cliff's voice echoing around in my head, in a mournful sort of way. Ah, but then, we have to remember, Sitting in Limbo was just one of the fabulous songs in that movie. And it was not the title song. This was.

Persecution you must bear
Win or lose you've got to get your share
Got your mind set on a dream
You can get it, though harder them seem now
You can get it if you really want
But you must try, try and try
Try and try, you'll succeed at last
You can get it if you really want - I know it
You can get it if you really want - though I show it
You can get it if you really want - so don't give up now

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Drums and trumpets

2007-09-16T10:09:00.000-05:00

In the first true cool of an evening in more months that I care to recall, I can hear them drumming. The sound comes and goes on the wind like a shortwave signal, sometimes blaring and other times distant and irregular. In spite of the slightest hint of coolness, I know it is fall not by any outward sign of nature but by sounds of football at Tad Gormley Stadium in City Park.

It is such a reassuring sound. So much was lost in the flood: instruments, uniforms, the gladiatorial gear necessary to field a football team. When I first heard them last year there were still debris piles on the street and the last bits of tarp still fluttered on my neighbor's roof. The sounds of a marching band in the distance was positive vibration in a desperate place.

This year new neighbors are moving into the newly roofed house next door. My immediate vicinity is almost vacant of signs of the catastrophe. And as a lake-chilled zephyr wanders down from the north, along empty streets and through the feral parts of the park, the clear sounds of pop and hip-hop rendered by ranks of brass, woodwind and drum, punctuated by eruptions of crowd noise, is a touchstone of normality.

I never played football and only rarely bothered to attend games in high school. My college--the University of New Orleans--had no football team (lest they steal away valuable players from the flagship school of the system, LSU). My experience of marching bands is tied up with Mardi Gras Parades: the thrill when far down Napoleon when the lead band finally forms up and starts a song, announcing the beginning of the parade. The odd way the instruments sound as they pass in ranks, each dominating the sound as the respective rows pass.

My first thought when I heard the bands last year was: where's the parade? Then I remembered where I was, that I was only blocks--less than a mile--from the stadium. Then I knew what I was hearing. I was hearing the sounds of of thousands of teenagers and their parents. Long before I came home, people remarked on living in a childless city. Few schools were open in late 2005 and early 2006, and so many people were living in tiny trailers or only communting into the city from Baton Rouge or the North Shore to work on their houses. New Orleans looked like Hamlin after the pied piper had taken his due.

In my first Mardi Gras after the Federal Flood, when my wife was already here and we drove down her car, there were not as many bands as in years past. The St. Augustine Purple Knights joined a pickup band of kids from Xavier Prep, St. Mary' s Academy and Redeemer-Seton, all predominately Black catholic schools, to form the MAX Band. Uniforms were lost and the marchers wore gold stickers--one color all the schools had in common. Instruments were what could be found or salvaged, rarely the instrument the student had owned. But they were home and determined to march. Like all of us they were ready to make do as long as they could make it.

At Mardi Gras 2007 the band that stirred the most emotion was that of the Chalmette High School Owls. Chalmette is the central part of St. Bernard Parish, where less than a dozen buildings escaped weeks of water up to the eaves. It was ground zero for the collapse of the levees, and a helicopter flyover from Violet at the east end of the settled part of the parish up to Arabi, looping over and over again on MSNBC, is one of my clearest memories of the blur that was the week of the flood. To see them march was to see the tenaciousness I foresaw in one of my first blog posts after 8-29 proven true.

Now at the start of the fall of 2007, more than two years after the event, life is New Orleans is far from normal. Vast stretches of the city are still largely vacant, the issuance of building permits down at City Hall the strongest sign of life in parts of Lakeview and much of Gentilly and New Orleans east. The pennies-on-the-dollar relief the central government has offered for the failure of its levees continues to barely trickle out of a state bureaucracy that makes one long for something as efficient as, say, the Soviet shoe industry. The city's so-called leaders have bungled the opportunity to stanch the cities violent crime rate and spend most of their time in hiding, behind locked doors plotting bog-knows what: certainly not the city's recovery.

Sitting in Mid-City this Saturday evening all of that seems as faraway as the marching band when the wind shifts and the music is like something heard underwater. The wind clocks and again I can hear the melody clear if distant, followed by an explosion of crowd noise. I have spent enough time in the stadium--high school games, my first concert (the Allman Brother's Eat a Peach tour), Major League exposition games we sold programs to gain free admission to, grade school track-and-field days--that the scene in the stadium is clear to me, if perhaps the dress of the spectators is out of date. The physical details of the place are so clear I can almost touch them as I imagine my walk beneath the bleachers, then up a ramp and into the lights.

Tonight I am not there. I'm not even sure who's playing, but is doesn't matter. Tonight Orleanians in the thousands sit at Tad Gormely and look over the new turf of what is now called Reggie Bush Field and cheer. I sit on my porch on Toulouse Street and wander back in memory to 1963 when I stood as a six year old on the corner of Egret Street and Robert E. Lee Boulevard and strained to hear the distant sound of the Beatles drowned out by screaming girls at that same stadium. Just down the block tonight another six year old is sitting in those stands, hearing a sibling play in the bad or cheer while another gets down in stance behind the ball.

That image gives me some reassurance that forty-four years hence another middle-aged man may sit on this porch and hear the band and the crowd in the distance and be transported into his ownb past, perhaps into this very night; that another generation will be raised here and indelibly marked by the experience and will do whatever is required of them to make it home.

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Crescent City Snow

2007-09-09T19:48:00.000-05:00

This morning Invest 90L in GOMEX is showing some signs of high level circulation. For those who have not succumbed to the urge to read every single line published by the National Hurricane Center, an invest is an area of weather interest which might or might not become a tropical storm. GOMEX is of course the Gulf of Mexico.

While many New Orleanians pay no mind to such things until one of the television forecasters calls it to their attention, some of us watch the postings to the National Weather Service NHC in the same way our ancestors checked at the Western Union office daily or more often to learn the price of cotton. Our lives, like theirs, are greatly influenced by the telegraphic postings, the numbers marking out coordinates which spell rising or declining arcs of risk. In our, later case these abstract constructs might be given a name, might coalesce into walls of wind and rain towering miles into the sky.

The peak of the hurricane season straddles what the calendar tells us is late summer and early fall. Looking instead at my thermometer, it is not easy to tell September from August, not in the way I could when I lived far to the north. In Fargo, N.D. this morning the temperature was 42 degrees Fahrenheit, a coolness we will not see in New Orleans until well into winter. It is cold enough up there that soon all of the deciduous trees will begin to turn color and drop their leaves.

My wife misses Fall more than any other season, here in the subtropics where the Four Seasons are a group featured on Time-Life retrospectives on late night TV. Neither of us would easily return to the hard winters at the Canadian border, but for all the city has to offer we feel cheated of the sudden coolness, the promise of a hard freeze that will finally kill the mosquitoes, the color show of the trees turning red and golden before they cover the lawn in a crunchy brown carpet.

Down here we have more than our share of pines, and the palm trees of course do not shed their branches come fall. Many trees seem to suddenly shed their canopy without any sort of color-coded warning. The disconcerting trees are the ubiquitous lives oaks, which shed leaves all year and are never bare. These evergreen monsters lend a certain never-never-land-of-the-lotus-eaters quality to those visiting or returning from the north. If you've lived somewhere that large deciduous trees should go bare at some time and stay that way until Spring it is subtly disorienting. When I moved to Washington, D.C. I was bothered all spring in the growing heat by something I couldn't quite put my finger on, until I realized it hadn't rained--not a good soaking thunderstorm of a rain--in months.

The trees I look forward to seeing change (and the ones I pointed out to my wife when the fist bits of cool Canadian air finally reached us like a relief column late last year) are the cypress. These trees combine knobby and stately in a way the aging British monarchy might wish to emulate. The leaves are delicately lacy branchlets with serrated edges. When I took an interest in Japanese gardens and built a small karensansui space of rock leading to our door, I thought to carry the theme all through the yard. I was smitten with the idea of getting one of the Japanese maples with their own delicately divided leaves which turn multiple colors through three leafy seasons.

The only impediment is that a decent sized specimen of those Japanese maples, anything larger than Charlie Brown's Christmas Tree, cost several thousand dollars. Needless to say the closest I got to that tree was visiting the unsold one at my local garden center to admire it. What I realized when I came home is the similarity of the leaves and the bright changes of colors to the cypress tree of Louisiana. Perhaps that expensive Asian maple wasn't so much an expression of my new found affinity for the Japanese garden as it was an unconscious echo of my distant home.

The Japanese take a particular interest in the natural seasons and their cycle. Here in New Orleans we tend to measure our year by the great festivals and holidays. Perhaps that is because one needs an almanac to note the precise arrival of Fall or Spring, would need to take a theodolite to the sun and moon to actually note when the astronomical seasons pass. When I lived at the northern end of the central flyway at this time of year the sky was literally filled by flocks of geese and ducks heading south. You could turn in any direction and see them by the hundreds, and the urgent honking was audible indoors. Fall arrived like the invasion of Normandy.

To the Japanese sensibility aspects of nature and the seasons are reflections of our own inner moods and cycles, almost an opposite of the pathetic fallacy, a projection not outward but inward of falling leaves or drifting snow onto our own interior landscape. In western culture, we tend instead to project ourselves out with all of the force of manifest destiny. Yet even in a pop music setting an image of weather or the seasons can still be a metaphor as delicate as those traced with brush and ink on rice paper.

In the song "Crescent City Snow" by Orleanian Susan Cowsill her juxtaposition of the Christmas Day snow of 2004 with the Federal Flood and the terrors that followed is a mingling of nature and emotion any Samuri poet would recognize. When she sings of her Katrina and flood experience "And in the other hand we pray/That the wind and the panic and the rain/Will all turn to a/Soft and quiet, gentle peaceful snow..." the healing and peace that is invoked is that anyone who has lived in a snowy climate recognizes immediately, the white world/white noise hiss of falling snow as it hits the snowy ground, the intensely bright stillness of an early morning of glaringly fresh snow.

I encountered the song when I purchased by download the entire New Orleans Musicians Relief benefit CD ReDefine 8/29. Its a fabulous record and probably the best of all of the Katrina/Flood-related compilations I've found. Cowsill's song is arguably the best of the lot, alternating a quiet guitar and fiddle supported first verse and chorus (quoted above) with following verses cataloging what it means to be New Orleans. The songs seques into the lilt of a Jacobin marching song and transforms ends on a second line parade that together brings to mind the vision of thousands of Orleanians marching, and ultimately dancing home.

Numerous songs have been offered up as anthems for the 200,000 (the name I still keep for the returned even as we push closer to 300,000). While Randy Newman's Louisiana 1927 (and reworkings changing the lyrics to reflect a flooded city) still resonate, and the replays of the Green Day/Bono "The Saints Are Coming" still rung true at this year's opening Saints game, I don't think a single song has combined the pain of loss, the longing for home and the triumphal insistence on return as well as Cowsill's. It is the anthem we have all been waiting for. To hear it is to want to buy it.

N.B. Published an early draft full of typos. Reposting. Sorry. God I need an editor!

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We Are Not OK

2007-08-29T16:45:00.000-05:00

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Ghosts of the Flood (repost)

2007-08-29T16:34:00.001-05:00

Yes, Peter, I'm recyling. I just think this is a fine thing to (re)post today (originally posted 10/5/2006):

'' . . . so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many . . . "
The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot

Sometimes I feel them, my wife told me, their spirits, as I'm driving down the street. All that suffering, she explains, all those people. As if 300 years of yellow fever and the lash, the lynchings and gansta gun battles weren't enough to populate a parallel city of spirits in this place where tombs are mansions and burials a celebration, the Flood came. Now there is a brooding presence even in the bright of day, looming over us all like a storm-bent house on the verge of collapse.

These empty shells of former lives that line so many streets are a daily reminder of the vast catastrophe; the windows staring lifelessly at broken sidewalks, the facades washed pale and colorless. Each still bears the esoteric marks of the searchers that mimic the scratching on tombs in the old cemeteries, some the dreaded mark at the bottom that totals up the lost. The tally marked beneath the cross now rises to 1577, a crowd like that described by Eliot.

I imagine not a host but solitary figures, the ghosts we know from childhood stories. In their newness to death, I picture them wandering as curious as children in the house of an aged aunt, getting underfoot and touching what they should not, interrupting and making unwelcome mischief. The brush of their passing is still strong enough to reach out and touch a good Catholic girl from North Dakota, one as innocent of the spiritualist shadows cast by every flickering candle flame before a New Orleans saint's statue as a Midwestern Yankee could possibly be.

Even the most rationale and disinclined among us imagine ghosts in a city this old, where the steamy air is a tangible presence on the skin and lights flash erratically in the night through the stirrings of the thick, tangled foliage, where the old houses creak and groan as they settle into the soft earth like old men lowering themselves into a chair. Once I wished to experience that touch of the other, a product of reading too much fantastic fiction. One of the signature scenes in film for me is John Cassavettes as a modern Prospero in The Tempest, standing in his urban tower and saying, "Show me the magic.” For him, the sky erupts in lightening. I would sometime catch myself whispering those words, but they were simply blown away by the night wind.

Then one bright August afternoon I was sitting in my idling car in my driveway in Fargo, North Dakota. At just before five o'clock that 29th of August a string of Carnival beads which hung from my rearview mirror--black and gold beads interspersed with black voodoo figures--suddenly burst. It seemed strange at the time that they would break as the car sat still, would break at the bottom and not at the top where they routinely rubbed against the mirror post, where the string was tied off, the knot weakening the line.

It was not the way that I, as a sailor with some idea of how a line will wear, would expect them to break. Perhaps the beads slid about at the end of the string as I drove around, causing the string to wear through at the bottom, so that it was inevitable that is where it would break first, given enough corners turned, sufficient applications of the accelerator and brake. The timing of just before five o'clock on that Monday in August of 2005 was just a coincidence, the inevitable laws of physics unfolding without regard for the observer and his sense of time.

Be careful what you wish for is the lesson we learned in a dozen fairy tales. The longed for touch of the other, and the tide that washed me up on the shores of my personal Ithaca, into this house on Toulouse Street in the only place I have ever thought of as home, came with a terrible price: both are tainted with graveyard dust. I would undo it all in instant, if I only knew how.

I've written this post before--or ones very like it, that tell this story of the broken beads--and then deleted them. It seems just too strange and personal a tale to share with just any aimless visitor wandering the Internet. What will people think? I ask myself in a voice that sounds vaguely like my mother’s. What if some future employer Googles up this article? worries the husband with a mortgage and two children to raise.

I don't expect them to understand. Unless you learned from the maid that cleaned your family home that crossing two matchsticks in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary and sprinkling them with salt would bring rain, unless you believed that a piece of candy found on the ground could be made safe to eat by making the sign of the cross over it, if people did not come in the night and scratch odd marks on certain tombs on the grounds where your family is buried; if these were not part of your earliest experience, then my tale of the broken beads sounds like the product of an overworked imagination, or something like Scrooge's undigested bit of beef, a spot of mustard.

There is a spectre over New Orleans. As the August anniversary slipped away, I thought the grim, invisible cloud that hung over the city would begin to drift away. Instead, as the weeks passed, I was increasingly convinced: everyone in New Orleans was haunted. You could see it in people's eyes, in the way they walked, hear it in the words they spoke, or the ones they wrote online as they spoke about their lingering pain. It was a spirit as much inside as out, the ghost in the machine that haunted our every step.

Then came the Monday Night Football game. I thought about the curse of the Superdome, the one that suggests the tearing down of the Girod Street Cemetery has cursed the ground and all who play there. Was the spirit of the people in the Dome that night just the charm needed to lay that particular haunting to rest, to break that curse? The morning after the strut in people's step, the lilt of their voices told me that perhaps, just perhaps a healing had begun. We were not a city in need of an exorcism: we were the exorcism.

The ghosts of the Flood are now a part of who we are. Ultimately it doesn’t matter if it is ectoplasm or the synchronized firing of a million neurons in ways science does not yet understand. In the end we have to come to term with it. This is something that we as Orleanians, the people who live next to our dead in their exclusive farbourgs of marble and white-washed stone, should be able to do. We need to honor these dead and respect them, not with the weight of Confucian ancestor worship but in the simple spirit of the pre-Confucian Japanese who venerated odd stones, in the ways inherent in our own Latin roots mingled with the traditions of Africa, where the community of saints and the loa of Africa intersect.

We don’t need an exorcism. We need a conjuration, a ritual that calls up the ghosts and honors them, that welcomes them in the way the way the devotees of Vodoun welcome the possession of the loa. Perhaps next August 29, we should all tie a brown cord on some pillar or post of the house at just the point where we have carefully painted over the water stain. Just above that, we should mark in dust of ground gypsum the rescue symbol that is now as much a part of our selves and our city as the sign of the cross. We will do this to tell whoever is listening--Our Father, Oshun, Mother of God, ghosts of the Floo--we remember. We have suffered, and we will never forget the Flood and those who did not come through. We are the people who came through and came back. We remember the lost. We remember you.

When we accept and embrace this spirit, perhaps the haunting will end once and for all, will not be a permanent pall over the city, a fearful sound in the night like a howling in the wires, or an unpleasant knotting in the stomach as we pass an abandoned house. It will cease when it becomes instead like the glinting of the sun on white-washed stone above the neat green grass of the cemeteries, just another comfortable part of who we are.

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Remember

2007-08-29T00:01:00.000-05:00

All 'Aints Day.

2007-08-28T19:41:00.000-05:00

So, I'm running my errands and listening to to the 99.5 drive-time knuckle heads Gary Foster and Anthony Patton, a show I usually enjoy. Tonight's topic for callers was complaining about what they perceived as "parties" tomorrow celebrating 8-29. Um, I think we covered that one last year, guys. Now, maybe I've missed something, but most of what I see going on tomorrow falls into the solemn remembrance category. I'm sure that at some point next evening (or perhaps even afternoon) drink may be taken, but I don't know anybody who's going out to party.

I hope at least one of these guys lives in Lakeview or Metarie, so they will think about that as they drive past the 1,400 small white flags of the Lakelawn-Metarie Cemetary commemorating those who died here when the Federal Levees failed. That's where my head will be today (when it's not steering project Titanic through the corporate and vendor icebergs blindfolded at full throttle--"you gotta let it out, Captain!"). I'll be thinking of them, of all the dead , the counted and the uncounted, of all the ghosts of the flood. So before I hang out the black Remember logo on the blog tomorrow, I'll leave you with something I borrowed when they first thought 10,000 were dead , and words failed me. Read this somewhere tomorrow, aloud. Don't be afraid you'll scare people. Or just hand somebody a copy, and say, "Remember".

And death shall have no dominion
By Dylan Thomas
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't ;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And sdeath hall have no dominion.

Shanti. Shanti. Shanti.

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Born Again in the Grace of the City

2007-08-27T08:15:00.000-05:00

Lakeview was the neighborhood most of us think we grew up in, even if only vicariously via television. It is the sort of place the cast of Happy Days spun out their lives, bright concrete streets shaded by leafy trees and lined with an endless procession of smallish brick and clapboard homes as regular as the pieces in a board , where women sunned sheets in the back while children road bikes safely down the middle of level streets.

The neighborhood had it's oddball homes, like the one on West End Boulevard with the bright cobalt blue roofing tiles. This is, after all, New Orleans. Many of the homes on the south end were swathed in stucco or raised on piers, the typical sort of house one would see in the older neighborhoods. To me stucco was as routine as red brick, and the place I was brought home to from the hospital was a perfect stereopticon match for the world inside the glassy eyed television.

After the flood, Lakeview was transformed. All of the carefully tended lawns and trees were brown, and the homes water-marked ruins. It became a Mister-Serling-asks-us-to-imagine-the-unimaginable scene, like a street in some B-movie disaster in which the anxious crowds have abandoned cars and belongings in their flight. The panicked exodus is complete, the thing to fear has passed, and everything is left upended and empty, still except for odd things moving in the wind, all color washed out into sepia tones.

Two years after the Federal Flood, Lakeview is on the mend. Driving down West End Boulevard on Saturday I was stuck at the sense of normality. The broad neutral ground, a good city block wide, was green and empty again. The tower from which men had last year directed the collection of the debris of half a city into piles that towered over the grandest of the neighboring houses is gone. The irredeemable tear downs are now empty lots, and I passed only a few trailers. Most of the houses look habitable.

What struck me about the scene was not the absence of the marks of disaster, but a subtle change in the demeanor of the street. There was a certain gentile shabbiness to the homes that lined the boulevard, a feeling that I was not driving past the late twentieth century Lakeview of memory but was instead down some unfamiliar street a few blocks over perhaps from Napoleon somewhere in Broadmoor. Everything had aged, it seemed, half a century in the two years since.

It was as if Lakeview had woken up one morning and found itself suddenly elderly, like a person just past midlife who has battled some sudden and severe illness or a terrible grief and emerges clearly and prematurely aged by the event. Everyone remarks at how wonderful the survivor looks, hardy a mark and such energy! Mrs. Lakeview is grateful for their attention, and dearly wants to believe them, but every glance in the mirror and every difficult step up the stairs to bed tells the truth. One may have survived, but is no longer young.

And yet Lakeview does not look out of place. It has become just another aging neighborhood in a city as steeped in its past as it was in the waters of the flood, a city destroyed and rebuilt by great fires (so that the architecture of the French Quarter is uniformly colonial Spanish), a place tried and proved by past floods and epidemics. Time's imprint, so clear in the rest of the city, has reached across the railroad tracks and interstate highway that separate Lakeview from my neighborhood and the core of the city, just as the water found a way under and around those barriers, and has left its unmistakable mark.

Having come through the water, Lakeview was born again in the grace of New Orleans. It is draped not in the crisp, white cloth of the baptismal font but in the faded and a-bit-wrinkled cloth that speaks not of a blank newness but of wisdom won through time, like the cloak of a wise old woman. Each wrinkle and stain of her cloak renders a map of the safe paths through this boggy land, each mark is like hermetic writing in which are hidden the secrets of life in a place at the mercy of the waters that surround it.

Some in Lakeview, particularly the builders of McMansions, will lament and try to erase this change. I suggest they should embrace it as the vigorous embrace old age as just another step on the journey. They should raise their houses up as that old woman might lift her skirts to navigate a puddle, and settle gracefully into their recovering homes in the newest of the old New Orleans neighborhoods as that elder might settle into a wicker porch chair.

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Mr. Bush, you are not welcome here

2007-08-26T18:37:00.000-05:00

George W. Bush has announced that he is going to soil the anniversary of 8-29 by coming to New Orleans, returning like a cancer we all hoped was in remission.

Mr. Bush, you are not welcome here.

I think I about summed it up for all posterity in this post--You Lying Sack of Shit--when you did the same damn thing last year.

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Come On Rise Up

2007-08-22T20:21:00.000-05:00

Join the New Orleans blogging community this Saturday, August 25 at the New Orleans Yacht Club at 8:30 am for a day long conference examining the state of the New Orleans recovery two years on. You can meet some of the people mentioned in my last post (or profiled in the list at right), along with author's David Zirin and Joshua Clark.

Don't forget that the incredibly cheap $20 registration fee includes chicken and red beans from Dunbars.

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Bowling on the bayou

2007-08-19T10:26:00.000-05:00

Today I was a guest on the radio show Community Gumbo, hosted on Tulane' radio station WTUL-FM by Brian Denzer, aka Schroeder of the blog People Get Ready. My purpose was to tout the Rising Tide 2 blogger-organized conference on the recovery of New Orleans. I think I did a tolerable job, with Brian making sure the correct plugs for the event were made up front and repeated

His show is one of the gems of the New Orleans media scene, a heart-felt and intelligent examination of the issues that shames the rest of the local broadcast scene and much that is produced nationally. Often political and opinionated without being didactic,his guests tell the story themselves in a personal way exemplified by his recent rebroadcast of A Gentilly Fourth of July, or the broadcast that stick smost firmly in my mind: a visit to post-Flood Lakeview on the event of a Sunday game by the playoff-bound Saints.

We spoke for a while of the place of blogging, and specifically of blogging as done by the people most involved in the Rising Tide 2 conference as it differs from much of what the public perceives as blogging: the often ridiculous comments beneath online newspaper stories and the facile wasteland of Facebook. Yes that is blogging in its most catholic sense, but it is not the work of the organizers listed in the sidebar of the Rising Tide 2 blog. Some of the core of the NOLA bloggers community offer a deeply personal journal of life in this city. Novelist Poppy Z. Brite's Dispatches from Tanginyika and local artist, almost attorney and grandmother Kim's Danger come to mind.

At the same time citizen journalists such as American Zombie, Matt McBride's late and lamented Fix The Pumps, and Bayou St. John David's Moldy City offer critical stories of the recovery missed or hidden by the major media. The commentary and analysis of the situation published by Oyster's Your Right Hand Thief, Ashley Morris: the blog and Matri's Valtul Blog routinely match and exceed that offered in the editorial sections of our newspaper. I know I've left out someone, so apologies in advance.

Blogging of the sort we perform (and radio as Brian presents it) is better suited to the story of New Orleans after the Federal Flood than any outlet in the major national or established local media. The scope and timeline of our story is novelistic, not episodic in the fashion most suited to the corporatized media of the twenty first century. The big media could no more cover the story we collectively write than they could serve up the serialized works of Dickens without being fileted and serve to their stockholders.

I said we write collectivly. That has evolved from the earliest days of what I consider the NOLA blogger's community, the group of on-line writers who emerged right after Katrina and the Federal Flood to write about those events. Most of us started blogging or redirected our prior efforts into communication about The Event. As we searched for information on-line to republish to our own small communities of readers, we found each other. We began to link to each other and leave comments. Sometime in late 2005 I started a Yahoo mailing list, and began to invite the bloggers I had found. At that point, we began to become a community.

From a first meet-up Ash Wednesday, 2006 at Fahey's through a series of potluck "Geek Dinners" we continued to connect as a community, a path that lead to someone (I can't remember who, so I won't give credit wrongly) suggesting that we put together a conference on recovery in August, 2006. I did not have high hopes for the idea, as organizing began little more than a month before that event. Somehow, we succeeded beyond our highest expectations. We discovered that some of us had readers in the mainstream media, and were able to lure two high-profile Wall Street Journal reports anxious to promote their new book as keynote speakers and panelists.

The first conference succeeded, and the second is on track to do the same, because we had moved beyond the solitary, saloniste approach to blogging into something loosely but clearly organized, like the first ragged assemblage of clouds in the Atlantic that becomes a storm. And we were not alone in organizing ourselves around the salvation of New Orleans.

Our experience is that of much of the rest of the city. The neighborhoods that were both most damaged and furthest along the long and winding road of recovery are those that self-organized themselves, places like Broadmoor and Mid-City. Out of the disruption of the city's social networks resulting from the largest displacement of Americans since the Civil War, new social networks emerged around neighborhoods and causes tied to the issues we struggled with.

In his now famous book Bowling Alone, author Robert D. Putnam posits that the social fabric of America is disintegrating. I can't find anything to disagree with in his premise. I am unchurched, and struggled as a minor political party functionary to find candidates and volunteers. I do not belong to a social or service club. Before I returned to New Orleans, were I to go bowling, I likely would have gone "alone" with just my immediate family.

Because the larger social contracts--especially those that underpin our system of government-- were torn apart like the floodwalls by the forces of Katrina and the Federal Flood, New Orleans has been forced to examine this issue by necessity, to build new networks that enable us all to survive in a leaderless city and nation, to organize ourselves as we finance ourselves in the credit-card recovery.

There was a quote I clipped and lost in a story quoting one of the actors in K-Ville, the new Fox Entertainment crime series set in After the End of the World New Orleans. He compared New Orleans' position to that portrayed in the fictional post-apocopytic television world of Jerico. Left on our own, we did what the human species has done through all history and memory: we organized ourselves and got on with the business of survival.

New Orleans did not lose all of its integral social networks. We all feared a year or more ago that the social clubs and Indians would be disbursed to the four winds, that the famlies that built the St. Joseph altars and people the truck parades on Mardi Gras Day might never return. We were concerned that the unique aspects of our culture they represent would be lost forever. Every passing day that seems less true. Indians and second liner's march. Churches our inept hierarchies had written off and tried to close meet. While the New Orleans Recreation Department sits in disarrary, the Carrollton Boosters are organizing sports for kids. St. Joseph Altars are built, and the truck parades rolled until my children could take no more. We are building the New Jeruselum right under Ceaser's nose and the mayor is forced, for lack of any accomplishment of his own, to adopt the neighborhood plans and claim them as his. Let him. We know who will really have built the community center in Mid-City.

Americans may not be joining the Elks or Rotarians as they did a half-century ago, but in organizations like the NOLA bloggers we are building the new Rotarians: self-organized groups that are born and grow both for the fellowship and the necessity of organized public service. Here is New Orleans we are increasingly proving out the second part of the "bowling alone" thesis: that this dissolution of the social contract is not an inrreversible trend. Here in Debriseville, we are joining together to do what ever it takes to make sure that in the future we will all be bowling together to a Cajun dance band at the Rock-and-Bowl.

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A clean slate

2007-08-12T21:09:00.000-05:00

"How you like dem ersters?"
-- Famously corrupt New Orleans
Mayor Robert Maestri to visiting
President Franklin D. Roosevelt

So, City Councilmember-at-large Oliver Thomas, a favorite to succeed "Chutzpa" Ray Nagin, has fallen like so many before him. Commentators all across this nation will cluck their tongues tomorrow and wonder what is wrong with us, staring out the windows of their high-rise, media-conglomerate studios vaguely in our direction, and thereby missing all of the corruption around them.

Try Googling (should that be capitalized? Should it even be a verb? Have you ever Chevroleted or Jesused or Kleenexed someone before? sorry...) Try searching the Internet for city government corruption. Funny, New Orleans comes up fourth when I try that, and on the blog that one of those link to, New Orleans is listed behind San Diego, Atlanta and Philadelphia in the post. What is up with those people in San Diego? Perhaps it has something to do with so many people with such short haircuts spending all that time in the sun on the golf course.

That would not, how ever, explain Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens. I find the headline "`Uncle Ted' Stevens's Corruption Probe Imperils Aid for Alaska" odd. What sort of aid, precisely, does a state that receives so much in oil royalty payments from the federal government that they cut checks to their citizens rather than collect taxes. Must be nice to actually get paid to have your oil taken. Maybe we should look into that for Louisiana.

New Orleans and Louisiana in general isn't particularly more corrupt than the rest of the nation. How many prominent men and women have done their "perp walks" in the last few decades, and how many more have looted companies and governments with impunity. Our local reputation arises in part because we tolerate the little bits of corruption, the expectation that someone who performs a service should be given a little something extra. My wife used to be amazed at my insistence that I tip people like city garbage collectors. I was raised to make sure no tradesman or laborer should leave my property thirsty or without some money is his pocket. I'm not sure what the root of that is, but I suspect it is the pervasive poverty of those who do the most menial jobs, perhaps even a throw back to the master-slave relationship. Whatever the cause, that large economy of small tips and favors is the way things are done down here.

From that, it's not a large leap to expect government to run on the same principles.

In Washington and the nicer states of the nation, these things are done with a bit more discretion. Contributions are given, dinners are held, and tax breaks and government contracts rain like manna on the Israelites. No one should suggest this is corrupt. At least I know the arguments well, having rehearsed them during my years defending the system while I worked on Capital Hill. Why, those PACs are just good people like yourselves--teachers and real estate agents and plumbers. Its downright unAmerican to suggest that they not be able to band together in free associations to stuff a little something in the pockets of the people who do all that heavy lifting for them in Congress.

What's sad about Oliver Thomas is that he is someone who tried to bridge the racial divide in this city. Many people looked to him as a reasonable successor to Nagin. Now he is out of the picture. What does that mean for a city in our situation? I think it offers, if not hope, at least an opportunity. It gives us one more chance to move beyond the alphabet soup of political organizations that have one after the other ruled this city, back to the days of Maestri's Regular Democratic Organization in the first half of the last century.

Machine politics with all of the baggage of patronage and the potential for corruption is something that should be carted away with all the sodden sheet rock and moldy sofas. We need to find people who are neither the wards of political machines nor the step-'n-fetch-its of the old-line Uptown circle of clubs and krewes. The machines that that arose out of the civil rights movement foolishly followed in the steps of the Italians and Irish before them in other large cities, becoming a conduit for transferring patronage and corruption to a new group because it was their turn. The old money power structure has failed for over fifty years to effectively govern the city or, when they lost control of City Hall, to use their money and influence for any general good.

As the old leadership fall or are taken out one by one in the aftermath of the Flood, there is still the promise we saw in the aimmediate ftermath of disaster: the possibility that we would be given a clean slate, given the chance to make our city over into something that preserved the best of what it was while eradicating the worst of what it was. Every day that takes us further from that path is more disheartening than the last. I have to view these continuing collisions between the old way and a determined federal prosecutor as second chances to do it right.

As I've written here repeatedly of late, the issue that is most likely to drag us down is the profound racial divide boarding on the paranoiac that governs every one's reaction to events. We cannot let ourselves be ruled by people who see in the Landrieu Administration and its integration of Blacks into the city's leadership and government as the root of every ill of today, or those who view any criticism of an elected Black official however venal or incompetent as if it were a harangue at a torchlight procession to the noose. Those who are the heirs of the integrationist and the segregationist have nothing to contribute. They are too bound to a past that the Flood very nearly washed away.

But not quite.

Here in our solitary salons of the blogosphere some names of our own have been bandied about as candidates for the vacancy Oliver Thomas' almost certain resignation on Monday will create. While those nominated in the underworld of Internet comments are just the sort of people I would have running city hall, they suffer from what Hunter S. Thompson once called "a profound racial handicap". They are white. I think that to avoid touching off another firestorm of paranoid ranting by civil rights has-beens and their friends among the ministry, Thomas' replacement will have to be Black.

That we even have to have this conversation as if were were settling the civil wars of Lebanon or Iraq is a sad commentary, but I'll stipulate to it as the lawyers would say. It is my own belief that it will be easier for the right Black candidate to reach out to the white community than the opposite, at least in the current atmosphere. I think that given the level of paranoia in some circles, Thomas' replacement will not be Bart Everson or Karen Gadbois as some of my fellow bloggers have suggested, although I'd pretty much follow either of them to the gates of hell and back.

I have no idea who it should or will be. I only know that we need someone to fulfill the promise Nagin offered but proved incapable of delivering, the promise of someone outside the old machines who could bridge the two communities, could appease the fears of both communities while promising the ability to run something as complex and cranky as a city and make it work. It should be someone like Bart or Karen, people who are giving immensely of their lives to rebuild this city without any thought of reward, people of high character, noble purpose and immense energy. We need in our next election to run a clean slate.

Somewhere in this city of now 300,000 people like Bart and Karen are reading the news about Thomas and wondering as I am what will happen next. If they are going to step forward, now is the time to do so. We have missed so many chances to make a real change of direction in the last few years, I don't know how many more we are going to get. Right now we are all an angry rabble, black and white, uptown and downtown, river and lakefront. We are ready to believe the worst when we hear it. Without some real leadership, we can no more save this city than the children in Lord of the Flies could recreate the polis of ancient Greece. Without people of good will ready to step forward, we are instead liable to end up hunting each other through the rubble with sharpened sticks.

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Branded

2007-08-10T17:24:00.000-05:00

"Do I worry about [the murders in New Orleans]? Somewhat. It's not good for us, but it also keeps the New Orleans brand out there, and it keeps people thinking about our needs and what we need to bring this community back. So it is kind of a two-edged sword. Sure it hurts, but we have to keep working everyday to make the city better."
Mayor C. Ray Nagin to Fox 8 News, from a Times-Picayune story

How long, Lord? How long?

I asked this, what: seven, eight month's ago?

How long, Lord, how long? ". . . Thou feedest them with the bread of tears; and givest them tears to drink in great measure. Thou makest us a strife unto our
neighbours: and our enemies laugh among themselves . . .", the Psalmist laments
in number 80. Unlike the children of Israel, release for the [people of New Orleans] is as close as the nearest tank of gas and entrance to the interstate. A conversation with a friend [back in December], a couple that came home early and rebuilt and who threw themselves into the endless parade of rebuilding meetings, turned to talking whistfully of what life would be like in Memphis, and I wonder, how
long?

We are branded, Mr. Mayor. We wear the indelible mark of a people foolish enough to live in a city below sea level, behind levees built by a government we know incompetent, governed by fools and scoundrels of our own choosing, in a city where the streets run with blood while houses are torn down at random and it's called recovery. The branding burns our foreheads like the mark of the people of the biblical beast; cries out like numbers tatooed on the wrists of the survivors of the Nazis: we suffered and we will never forget; is hidden in shame sometimes like the scars of the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Like the tatooed people of the last century, we will rise up and go on and build the New Jeruselum, will rebuild our city as Hiroshma and Nagasaki were rebuilt, will not accept the mark as a sign of the end of time. I listened to a radio talk show host ranting the other day about all of the people who say they are leaving because of the crime, because of it all. I hear those stories, too. I heard them back at the turn of the year.

The couple I spoke with are still here. Everyday more people come home. We are determined. We have been tested and have passed through the water and been made stronger. You, Mr. Mayor, have been tested and found wanting. Every day someone who voted for you in Houston or Atlanta comes home, and sees the result while your family settles into Dallas. How much longer do you think we will tolerate this before we march again to city hall, sit down, and wait for your to announce your resignation. How many more must die and how many salvagable houses demolished before we are not content to sit peacefully on the steps and wait for you to leave, but come in to get you.

The brand you need to concern yourself with, Mr. Mayor, is the first flaming brand that lights those in the rest of the crowd, the flickering firelight playing off of the sharp times of the pitchforks and the glassy, angry eyes of the crowd calling for you to be given to them for the crucifiction. How much more do you think the city can really take before we begin to organize ourselve in our own defense against crime, before we confront your random bulldozers with something sturdier than flimsy Do Not Demolish signs?

If you think we are not capable of whatever is required of us, look about your ruined city and consider that we have come home in the hundreds of thousands, to this. We are ready for anything, and we are of one kin with the people who stormed Bunker Hill, who followed Pickett up that hill, who today patrol the streets of Bagdhad. We did not look around at the desolation and turn around and go back to Texas. We came determined and driven. We will do whatever is asked of us to defend and save this place we love. And our patience has run thin.

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Rising Tide 2

2007-08-08T07:40:00.000-05:00

NEW ORLEANS—A community of over 100 New Orleans, La.-based bloggers will sponsor Rising Tide 2, the second annual conference to examine the state of post-Katrina/Federal Flood recovery in their native city. The conference will be held Aug. 24-27, 2007. The main conference will take place at the New Orleans Yacht Club, 403 N Roadway St, on Saturday, August 25 with registration starting at 8:30 am.

Featured Speaker will be author and columnist David Zirin, author of Welcome to the Terror Dome. His book of essays on sports and society opens and closes with chapters on the New Orleans Superdome, first as shelter of last resort in August 2005 (the Terrordome of the tile) and again when the New Orleans Saints returned to play their first home game against the backdrop of a city still in ruins a full year later.

The conference will feature day long panel discussions on issues of the recovery of New Orleans, including panel discussions on Politics & Corruption, a discussion of community-led recovery titled Civic is Sexy, and a panel of New Orleans writers discussing the flood’s impact on their work. Featured speakers include Matt McBride, whose blog Fix The Pumps has exposed the continuing failures of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans and author Joshua Clark, who has just published the well-received memoir of life in post-flood New Orleans Heart Like Water.

Cost of the day-long conference is $20, and includes lunch from Dunbar’s. Featured speakers will be offering their books for sale. This year the conference will kick-off with a Friday, Aug. 24 party and screening of Katrina-related short films and videos at Buffa’s Restaurant and Lounge, 1001 Esplanade Ave from 7:30-10:30 pm. Cash bar available.

For more information on the conference or to register, visit http://www.risingtidenola.com/ or call toll-free 866-910-2055.

Last year’s successful conference featured keynoters Chris Cooper and Robert Block, reporters for the Wall Street Journal and co-authors of Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security.

Click the link above or the graphic at right to learn more and register.

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In the Zone

2007-08-05T22:28:00.001-05:00

Today I walked past the Fairmont Hotel on University Place and the back door was ajar. I stopped and leaned over the police barricades that still block the entrance and peered over the once red carpet on the steps--now a burnt umber--down the long lobby hallway into the dark. There was enough light to admire the first ornate arch in the long procession that divides the lobby, and I was fascinated at the lizardish dragon rampant on the gold colored span. The hallway was strung with a chain of work lamps that together with the receding arches gave the impression of looking into a mine works. It was difficult to see much past that first arch in the dim tunnel. A distant chandelier that still hangs between the arches winked faintly with refracted light.

I can't tell you the last time or reason I had to walk down the hallway of the hotel we all know as the Roosevelt, but I do have an almost visceral memory, like the recollection we have of dreams, of walking down through that lobby, stopping in at Bailey's on the Baronne Street side for a cocktail after whatever event it was that drew me there. Still, I can't remember the occasion. That glimpse into the past of Sazerac and the Blue Room (a venue I peered into once but never visited for a concert) sent me rummaging in long forgotten corridors of my own mind, dimly lit and little visited themselves, trying to recall the reason for my last visit without success.

In New Orleans we tend to live in our cherished past a lot of the time. For us history is not a marker on the side of the road, one notable building or a small district full of quaint shops to which we take visitors. Our past stands all around us, bears down on us like the towers of Manhattan on a first time visitor. It reaches up like a hand from the grave and tries to trip our ever step forward, the smoky ghosts of slavery blinding us and the afterbirth of the civil rights movement twisting every turn of public policy in ways we can not seem to stop. It is not just the the momentous events of the past we must contend with, but a thousand small things from the past that inform the way we live in the present moment the way water cups a swimming fish or the breezes lift a coasting bird. Our past may be monumental in spots and burdensome at some moments, but it is also as ever present as the humidity, a very part of who we are and how we live.

In spite of that awful moniker Big Easy, New Orleans has never been an easy place to live. Just ask my wife, who traded the Nordic efficiency of the upper Midwest for a turn in the south, a place where mañana and baksheesh are not just scores in Scrabble but instead the way we govern the machinery of our life. I won't rehearse the entire litany of woe involved in rebuilding a city from scratch. Suffice it to say that every few steps forward, as we watch the ground carefully for roofing nails or bits of nail-studded plaster lath, we walk forehead first into something hard.

In spite of the weight of history and the difficulty of the moment, I am not living in the past. Increasingly, I am living in a Richard Alpert Right Now, a locus in time informed by the landscape around me and my sense of its age, its rightness for the place, the uneven and green-occluded site lines of a city settling into the earth as perfectly as a Mayan ruin rising out of the jungle. The monumentality of the city informs the moment as you perceive it, but to truly live here is to walk through a series of present moments like cells in a film, the action is in front of you or inside of you and the great pillared oaks and moss-draped homes are just backdrop.

I think it is in part that very difficulty, as well as something in the climate, that leads me to find myself increasingly living in a present moment. More worrying is the feeling that here where it's After the End of the World, I am becoming like Thomas Pynchon's anti-hero Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity's Rainbow: inexplicably entangled with the ugly juggernaut of history as it unfolded in World War II until he disconnected from it altogether, withdrawing into himself, his "temporal bandwidth" approaching zero.

There is also the story about Tyrone Slothrop, who was sent into the Zone to be present at his own assembly perhaps, heavily paranoid voices have whispered, his time's assembly and there ought to be a punch line to it, but there isn't. The plan went wrong. He is being broken down instead, and scattered. His cards have been laid down... laid out and read, but they are the cards of a tanker and feeb: they point only to a long and scuffling future, to mediocrity not only in his life but also, heh, heh, in his chroniclers too..." (737-38)

In New Orleans our way of life is as old as the oaks that brush the ground in the park near my house but for me it as timelessly in the present as a squirrel frozen on a branch of one of those oaks. It's neither as Zen as it sounds or as dark as Slothrop's fate, but after 20 years abroad in America Norte I find I am slipping into the easy, my horizon constrained by the familiar dinner litany what am I eating today, what last meal does it remind me of, and where do we want to eat next week.

Part of it is the need to focus on the task at hand. To me, it is the renovation of my bathroom to repair a leak and re-tile. It's not a small project. We had the room gutted to the studs, pulling out the archaeological layers of sheet rock and plaster from 50 years of construction and repair. The project is the recent history of the city in microcosm, and because of all of the demands of work and family, it is all of the reconstruction I am able to handle for the moment. The city will largely have to get on without me.

At work I am a project manager for large software efforts, and the tracks of several of them are converging at critical points this month. In my last job, where I had been long enough to have a core of good friends I worked with, I used to approach these moments by sending out an email with the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "Don't Panic" logo, and an MP3 I had of "It's The End Of The World As We Know It". I'm not sure the guys at the new bank are quite ready for that.

Its important in these large endeavors not to lose cool in the moments of high drama, or to let the endless procession of problems grind you into the ground. Some days I feel like the number two on a ship attacked by Zeros in some World War Two movie. It's important I keep everyone focused on the task in front of them, in spite of the explosions and the strafing fire, if we're all going to get through this. Don't think about the sky full of planes trying to kill you. Focus on the one that actually has you in its sites, point the machine gun, and shoot back.

The reconstruction of the city around me will last at least as long as WWII. There will be long periods of boredom and routine punctuated by times of great excitement, much of that of the unpleasant kind. Yes, we will have shore leave for Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest but most of our time will be spent scrapping rust and paint knowing all the while that just over the ocean's horizon there is something threatening.

In this peculiar armada the officers are as useless as the French nobility. They look fine high up there in their crosswise hats and give marvelous speeches, but we know from hard experience that they are worthless. People mutter all around the city about mutiny of one form or another, but mutiny is a lot of damn work and it is awfully hot. I like to think we could yet rise up and have our storming of the Bastille moment but every passing day it seems more unlikely. No Fletcher Christian or Maximilien Robespierre has stepped forward to lead us, and every angry mob needs a leader.

Perhaps I ask for too much. If history and the city consumes us all one-by-one but the city lives on, that perhaps what was always intended, why were were all lured home. In the end, perhaps Pynchon has given us the model to surviving It's After the End of the World. If history has gone too wrong for any one of us to stop what is happening around us, maybe it is better to amble down a shady street in New Orleans without a particular thought in my head except the distant sound of what might be Slothrop's harmonica, to disappear into the random noise in the signal.

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White House to MN: It's your own fault

2007-08-02T17:42:00.000-05:00

I've tried to move beyond the anger of the first year or more of this blog, but I simply can't help it tonight.

The first response from the Bush White House to the tragedy in Minnesota:

White House press secretary Tony Snow said the Interstate 35W span rated 50 on a scale of 120 for structural stability. "This doesn't mean there was a risk of failure, but if if an inspection report identifies deficiencies, the state is responsible for taking corrective actions," [White House spokesman Tony Snow] said.

Not our problem, dude. Is this a great country. Or what.

My other issue (already raised by other bloggers including Dangerblonde and People Get Ready) was the comparison to other major failures of public engineering. Among those mentioned were the Big Dig failure in Massachusetts and the explosion of an aging gas line in Manhattan.

One other small example of a public engineering failure, one which took over 1,700 lives and did over $100 billion in damage, wasn't mentioned.

Thanks for remembering, America.

Friday Morning Update: Thank you Rod Diridon of Marketplace, the NPR business show.
[Host Kai] Ryssdal: It's worth mentioning that it's not just bridges, as tragic as yesterday's incident was. It's water supplies and tunnels. It's the steam pipe that exploded in New York City a couple of weeks ago.
Diridon: It's the levees that we've recognized as being deficient in New Orleans. ...

Soft Asylum

2007-07-29T22:10:00.000-05:00

The Subdudes' "One Word (Peace)" struggles to overcome the waspish whir of a gas-powered weed whacker and random hammering in the distance. If I close my eyes and relish the scent of cut grass I can transport myself into a universal summer morning almost anywhere in America: whining, tiny gas engines duel with rumbling clothes dryers for first chair in the orchestra of Saturday morning the way cicadas and frogs do at the end of twilight. Even here on the last thin line at the edge of America, where its already after the end of the world, the grass must fall and the laundry tumble until done.

My backyard is a narrow patio of a dozen by twenty paces, and from my chair with my back against the shed I can easily see through the reed privacy screen the backs of the neighbors shotgun houses. In a place where dry land is dear and few are rich, the houses sit cheek-by-jowl in the fashion established by the first straggly settlements along the batture. Even as the sounds of this morning mingle today's sounds and memories of summer Saturdays in other places, swapping places like the stereo channels on a Sixties' psychedelic song, the view tells me I am in New Orleans.

The highlight of this morning was watching the dumpster removal man navigate our narrow and heavily parked street to haul away a dumpster of debris, the remains of the neighbor's backyard shed. Mid-City is a neighborhood of low-dangling black cables strung in the random profusion of vines in a jungle. The street is narrow and full of cars; the homes dating from before all America had a car mostly lack driveways. But after two years of the constant gutting of homes the operator is an expert. My neighbor watches anxiously as the giant metal bin, as big as a railroad hopper car, slides just feet from his own small truck and onto the hauler's.

This ends a project not prompted by the storm, like so many I have watched progress from the first debris to the last scrapings of the gutter. It was a decision to tear down the old, termite-infested shed and redo the yard and sheds. As I stand on the porch watching, the downtown-side bathroom of my own converted double is gutted to the studs, plaster lath piled outside the window. This is not the gutting that continues today over scores upon scores of square miles all around me. This is basic, three-trips-a-week-to-Lowes home improvement. Here in the town some called Debrisville in the year after the Federal Flood, my neighbor and I are burrowing into normalcy by fixing up our houses not out of the necessity of flood water but from desire.

I quoted from an old Sun Ra piece lyric that's on the side of this page--Its after the end of the world/Don't you know that yet?--because it best describes the city I live in, one that is just starting down the road of recovery from the largest man-made disaster in history. Just across town to the south police stand around yellow tape where another young man has died. Walking distance to my north the levees along the draining canals begin, the levees that failed. To the east for miles and miles houses stand in rows, boarded with plywood or open to the weather, drying out now not from a flood almost two years past but from the summer rains and neglect.

Standing on a street where homes did not flood, where all of the rescue marks are painted over, its easy to forget and to slip into a reverie of normalcy as I listed to the sounds of chores all around me, to think that all across North America people are in their yards listening to or making these same sounds. At some point today, I will have to venture out. As likely as not, I will pass through neighborhoods were it still clearly after the end of the world. There are few places in this city where the reminders are just a stroll away.

And still we come home. The postal service tells us the population has reached 300,00 again, and when I visit Lowes to shop for fixtures it is as busy as it was a year ago when a few tens of thousands of people consumed ten percent of the constructions materials in North America. All across town, people are working on their homes with the same routine intensity as fishermen mending nets in the evening, as paleolithic hunters chipping new stones around a fire. We are making our way through life in the place fate put us.

Have you thought of what you will do if al-Qaida detonates a dirty bomb up the block, or if that big inevitable earthquake comes? Do you know where you would go, what you would bring? Have you thought of where you might live if tomorrow were after the end of your world, if your home and all its contents and the town it where in were irretrievably lost, if everyone you know were scattered to the winds? We all have. Its after the end of the world. Don't you know that yet?

And still we come back, and every day brings more. The levees stand, mute piles of dirt in the oppressive heat of July. The clouds that role in from the Gulf are not those of a hurricane, just another storm in the endless cycle of storms that fill corners of the city with water, water we pump out again. Someday the levees will be tested again, and they will or will not stand. Tomorrow you may board an airplane, and it may or may not fall screaming out of the sky. And still you file into your seats and open a book or fiddle with your I-Pod, just another day gambling with catastrophe at long odds.

You may think this is a crazy place to live, but we think it is the only place to live. We treasure our food and music and culture, but on any given Saturday we only want what you want: to sit in our backyards on a Saturday morning and listen to the dryer's basso while the neighbor cuts the grass, to be comfortably at home.

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Oh, it's just my medication

2007-07-21T23:39:00.000-05:00

"Is it hot in here, or is it just my imagination?" I asked my daughter, launching into the chorus of Temptation's "Just My Imagination". "You medication?" my daughter asked in a puzzled voice. I told here what I said, then launched into "oh, it's just my medication, running away with me" and broke into laughter.

Why does this remind me of Mayor C. Ray Nagin? In a speech to a group of school children he refereed to New Orleans as "the miracle city," apparently having worn out his supply of confectionery metaphors. According to the Times-Picayune, Nagin told told the campers that they are "somebody very, very special because you're in the miracle city. This city, most people thought, would not get to this point."

What point exactly is that, Ray, this "miracle" point?

Is it the point at which public anger over the failure of the criminal justice system devolves into racial game playing, while you and the rest of the so-called black leadership sit on your hands and let it happen? Black leadership? There is no black leadership in this town. There is no white leadership in this town. There is no CO.

Is it the point at which a dedicated and selfless (which is to say, entirely volunteer and unpaid) civic servant like Brian Denzer of CitizenCrimeWatch.org, who has labored thanklessly to build a citizen-controlled crime tracking system sends an email in which he sends his hands up in despair? The new score: Mau-Maus 1, White Devils 1. It sure is a miracle, Ray, that we haven't all killed each other already.

Is it the point at which the city's recovery czar takes the labors of thousands of citizens who really had better things to do, like say gutting their houses, but chose to attend endless meetings to write a recovery plan, which recovery czar takes there plans and makes them his own like the boy who stuck him thumb in a pie and pulled out a plumb?

Is it the point at which we have to read once again about those who have decided it's just no longer worth it, that it time to give up? Is this the miracle, people so disheartened that they are ready to give up not just on New Orleans, but on the US altogether? Frankly, I agree with Jack Ware on one point: if New Orleans it not my last stop in life, my next stop will not be in the failed state of the United States of America. We are like the Lincoln Brigade fighting fascism in 1930s Spain. If the so-called good guys leave us here to fail, how them will I tell the good guys from the bad? A country that can't save one of its major cities is no longer worth any effort on my part, is not worth saving elsewhere.

I'll tell you the point we've reached, Ray. It's a tipping point; just the latest in the crazed, zigzag path toward recovery we've blazed without any real help from Perdido Street. When the chatter about people giving up and leaving becomes a featured topic on talk radio, the editorial page, and on the Internet, it's not a miracle. It's a disaster, and this one is entirely of your making, yours and all of our so-called leaders like you. How many have already set up their families in Texas and are just hanging on to skim the promised recovery money that never seems to come?
The miracle, Ray, is that so many of us stay and so many more continue to come home, in spite of you and the rest of the so-called leaders who have failed us. We're going to do it in spite of you, and we're going to try and make damned sure that you and yours don't profit from it like The Jeffersons.

Perhaps I am too harsh. I know this is a miracle city. But I also know the portentous events do not unfold on the endless news loop of WWL on Channel 15. I won't hear it on talk radio or read it in the local press. It does not come in an announcement from some shell-shocked pol. The miracle is that in spite of it all, I'm sitting here in my house in New Orleans watching a storm role in from the north, silencing the cicadas and frogs, and I do not fear the storm. Instead I relish its electric magic. It is the same storm that has passed this way for three hundred years, been watched from porches and windows by a dozen generations of Orleanians, of my family.

The true miracle is that I am here to witness this, even if I am the last of my line who will do so. Politicians like you pretend to understand why we are home, just as politicians in Washington pretend to understand while the young go willingly to their deaths in Iraq, but you cannot understand. Only those who have not moved their families to Texas but have instead put all of their chips back on this bit of green, those who have the faith to stare in the face of the storm, are admitted to the precinct of the miraculous.

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Posted to wrong time stamp: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Signs and portents

2007-07-19T06:41:00.000-05:00

Note: I don't know how many people saw this over the weekend. In light of yesterday's meeting on Eddie Jourdan at the City Council, and the way the crowd broke along racial lines, I feel compelled to re-push it in hopes a few more people see it.

It is possible to live in a New Orleans unmarked by disaster, to limit yourself to the circumscribed island of high ground along the river and avoid the streets that stretch block after block into mile after mile of persistent ruin. Confine yourself to downtown, to the French Quarter and CBD, or stay Uptown below Prytania Street and it is pretty much the city a half-million fled in August 2005.

Even the so-called Isle of Denial along the river is hardly a perfect place. It's littered by neglect: neglected streets littered by garbage, neglected houses and buildings, neglected people. People live so close together in the older parts of the city that even a sophisticated Orleanian will find themselves in one of these blocks. Except in the richest blocks around Audubon Park, the pattern of settlement was never so segregated as the New South. Drive down a street of large bourgeois homes, not mansions but clearly the residences of the prosperous, then turn a block and you will find the closely spaced shotguns and cottages of the servants just around the corner.

In spite of our tremendous architectural heritage, perhaps because of the richness of old homes amidst so much poverty, many of these buildings--manse and cottage alike--have fallen into decay. Most neighborhoods in the narrow slice of city that was unflooded have their share of empty-eyed buildings sagging behind a patch of weeds like tired old men. One thing these wrecks lack, that the unflooded part of town in general is missing are the spray-painted rescue marks that tag most of the buildings to the south toward the lake.

During New Orleans' transformation in 2005 into Venice-On-Hell, a search of the city was conducted by boat and aircraft. There was no other way to travel except to swim or wade. As each house was visited to check for survivors needing assistance, the searchers blazed in paint what has come to be called a rescue mark. In the most deeply flooded areas full of one-story ranch homes, the marks were made on roofs.

The typical mark is a large X with a circle at the center, although sometimes there is just a long stroke and a circle. In the four quadrants inside the strokes of the X are a date, some indication of who searched a flooded homes in the weeks after, and on more than a few homes a number at the bottom indicating the number of dead. These marks are as much a part of New Orleans after the flood as the ubiquitous fluer-de-lis.

Everyday as I walk to work I pass a reminder of the chaos that was the downtown hospital complex in 2005, a marking on the wall at Loyola Avenue and Gravier Street reading "EMS Out" with an arrow pointing up Gravier toward the river. It is paired with a similar spray-painted mark further up Loyola at Julia Street reading "EMS In" with an arrow pointing up Loyola. These hermetic traffic guides only make sense when you visualize the scene just north of Tulane and Loyola, the hectic evacuation of two large downtown hospital just over a block away in the frantic days after the Federal levees failed

Given the scale of what happened and the poverty of areas of the city, markings like these will likely persist for years, for decades, for generations. These painted postcards from a time just passed remind me of the handful of painted Jim Crow signs that still linger in corners of the city, fainter and more distant reminders of a more distant past. Colored Only. Colored Entrance. If you know where to look, you can find the faint remains of these marks that were once as common as shop signs

Like the rescue marks of Katrina, they are an emblem of a point in history that defines much of who we are today. The Jim Crow signs evoke not just the segregated past. They quietly speak of the tremendous bravery of the civil rights movement, of desegregation and white flight, of the self-imposed divides that separate us to this very day. I was born in 1957 and don't clearly remember the ugly television scenes of desegregation, the angry mobs in the Ninth Ward. Still, like everyone else here I am imprinted with the history of that time, my mind's inner voice forever marked by the telltale shibboleths of who I am: white, from the lakefront, a catholic school graduate. I can still, if I concentrate, call up the sound of an elder female relative saying"nigrah".

Our legacy remains that represented by those faded Colored signs, no matter how hard we try. The socialization of our childhoods is burned into us like the scars of some terrible accident. To this day I can recall snippets of racist rhymes I learned as a small child. We are all here the children of masters and slaves, and the sins of our forefathers haunt us even unto the seventh generation. The man that childhood training sought to create lives somewhere inside me, even if it is not the person I chose to be today. I think of it as akin to alcoholism, something inherited that can't ever be eradicated, simply overcome day-by-day.

I still think my great gift to this city is not this blog or any little thing I've done here or there in town to help others or my neighborhood. My real gift is my family. My wife and children were raised in the Mid-West, in an environment without the dark shadow of southern history hanging over them. My son and daughter attended an elementary school with the children of a dozen nations, courtesy of Lutheran Social Services efforts to bring refugees from central Europe and Africa to a new life in Fargo, North Dakota.

The place they group up was not idyllic. When I first arrived to a town near a Native American reservation, I heard people say "the Rez" and immediately recognized the tone used to say "the Projects". I watched other parents yank their children away from the young Roma who sometimes came to our playground, listened to the ranting on local talk radio about the influx of foreigners. We shielded our children from that, and as a result they carry none of the baggage my generation of southerners were saddled with.

When I came home to New Orleans I hoped that the Federal Flood would overturn some of what we were before, that an event that massive and shared by all would give everyone a sense of commonality stronger even than the Saints. The city's first election proved me wrong, as the voters quickly divided along racial, class and ward lines as they have for generations. We are like breeds of dogs trained over generations to some task, ltrained over generations to the task iable to neurosis if deprived of sheep to herd.

An acquaintance who is not a native recently had an ugly encounter with a woman from Lakeview over race. She was angry at the increasing return of black people. Black people was not, however, the term she used. She suggested to Bart that he wasn't from here and just didn't understand, in particular he didn't under "them". I drive my daughter to the west bank and see the men on the General De Gaulle approaches to the bridge in bow ties and Malcom X glasses selling the Nation of Islam's Final Call newspaper who will not make eye contact with me, a white devil. These are the extreme examples. Not everyone in the city thinks this way. But there is a divide as profound as the distance that separates De Gaulle from Lakeview.

I haven't given up hope, in part because of the children. As my own spawn's circle of friends and acquaintances grows, I find that those too young to vote in that last election do not carry the same baggage as the survivors of desegregation. The parents of my children's black friends do not treat me like the drones of the Nation of Islam, and I do not treat them as the woman in Lakeview would. In the middle is a body of people who treat each other with respect, and in the case of the children a color-blindness that is startling to me after 20 years outside the south.

I ask those who are not in that happy middle, or not lost to the extremes, to contemplate those rescue marks they see as they drive through town, to note that as they traverse the checkerboard proximity of neighborhoods that the water did not respect race or income. The rescue marks of the City Park end of Mid-City are the same as those of the Seventh or Ninth ward. As I wrote almost a year-and-a-half ago now:

The Bitch didn't care. Her waters came up the MRGO and took the paint-bare, black-eyed-pea shotguns of the Lower Nine the same as it took the Bunny Bread, virgin-in-a-tub brick ranch houses of Chalmette. Claiborne Avenue or Judge Perez Drive, they cried and struggled and drowned just the same. The waters that swept up Canal Boulevard and Paris Avenue didn't stop in at the Hibernia to check antibody's balance. They took everyone in their path, no checks accepted.

As the monumental task of reconstructing a city bit-by-bit unfolds, those rescue marks will slowly disappear from the city's streets as they have in the block I live on. I think some should be saved in every neighborhood, walls torn if necessary from homes to be demolished and and the paint stroked bit of wood staked to the ground. We need a constant reminder of what we all now share that those who came before us did not: a common experience, a common enemy, a common task to accomplish. I want these marks to linger just as those colored entrance signs do, but instead to remind us we are all Orleanians and all the survivors of the Federal Flood. We are all in this together.

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Get Down With The Funk

2007-07-15T16:43:00.000-05:00

I am doing nothing for New Orleans except the most basic things such as paying taxes and owning property and not leaving. I don't want to write, but I feel as if there is absolutely nothing I do want to dedicate my life to.
-- New Orleans novelist Poppy Z. Brite on her blog Dispatches from Tanganyika

It's been ten days between posts, and I'm not the only laggard. I think that once again everyone here in America's Most Medicated City shares her feelings. I know that the track of my own life here follows her's in part. I am doing nothing for New Orleans except living here.

I fear that with the fests of winter and spring behind us, hurricane season arrives like an ugly midsummer heat wave: a palpable change in the weather that oppresses everyone and stifiles all activity. If the reality of the humidity-laden and still air of a 105-heat index day were not enough, all of us have shouldered an 80 pound bag of worry to tote around. Unless relieved by the terror of evacuation, we will lift and carry those sacks of sullen every day for the next several months like the stevedores of old loading a ship on the river.

I have to remind myself that, faced with such a task in this climate, we should do what those dock workers would have done.

We should sing.

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Same as it never was, same as it never was

2007-07-03T23:37:00.000-05:00

"And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful Wife
And you may ask yourself-well...how did I get here?"
-- "Once In A Lifetime" by the Talking Heads

Somewhere tonight in the vast sameness of North America people are driving perfectly flat and smooth roads past neat and sturdy homes that show no signs of disaster. The landscape they traverse shares the irregular uniformity of the vast expanses of the prairie where I once lived. On those streets the variations of architecture and landscaping repeat like something crystallized, the occasional irregularity of taste only highlighting the sameness, the emptiness all around around the way isolated stands of cottonwoods or the odd farmstead punctuate the emptiness of the Dakotas.

On those smooth sheets of concrete they have no real need for that large SUV or pickup. They are not hauling away the debris that was once their worldly goods or hauling in sheet rock to rebuild these homes with their own hands. Still, these vehicle give them feelings of power and safety those of us who live this far south envy. We have not shared either of those feelings in a long time. It doesn't matter to them that the large V-8 engine is fueled with gasoline that flowed as oil through a pipeline just south of where I sit, a pipeline that once bisected a vast marshland that is now open water.

It might never occur to them that the very icon of their safety is the cause of my own proximate danger, has contributed to the destruction of the marshlands that once protected me from hurricanes in much the same way the enormous expanse of sheet metal they have wrapped around themselves protects them. They are clueless that the totem of their power requires that I feel powerless, unable to see a path to undo the damage caused by the vast infrastructure of wells and pipes and refineries that marks the landscape here, that caused the stealthy industrial murder of a vast ecosystem.

Maybe their SUV is travelling to a convenient grocery or drug store located not in the next county or far across town but in their very own neighborhood. It must be pleasant to select the makings of a cookout without worry. There wives will not survey the leftovers and remind them Wednesday night that it is unwise to buy so much food this time of year, in case they have to suddenly flee their city and leave it all behind to spoil. No ghostly carbons of four figure checks to their insurance companies haunt them in the checkout line.

I lived among these people once, driving a Detroit-built station wagon down those practically perfect streets through rows of boxy homes to my own four-square castle. Their life was my life. I grilled brats on the lawn in summer's clouds of mosquitoes; shoveled snow and scrapped ice off the driveway in winter. I made an effort at keeping the lawn mowed and free of noxious weeds. If a neighbor was away, I mushed the snow blower down their sidewalk and plowed a path up to their door.

It's not such a terrible life but there was something disappointing to it, like picking up Sunday's paper looking for diversion only to find that we're still fighting in Iraq and Paris Hilton is still famous, checking the date on the newspaper just to confirm that it's this week's and not an accidental reprint of last week's, or perhaps next week's. In the Dakotan heart of starkness I felt a secret kinship with the African and Central European refugees which church social services brought to Fargo. It was a false analogy. My own dislocation from Carnival, street bands and familiar restaurants was trivial compared to what they experienced. There was nothing in my world that approached the vast catastrophes of war and famine they had experienced. Nothing, at least, until 8-29 of the year of the flood.

Today I live in an area of New Orleans called Mid-City that is now the edge of the settled part, a neighborhood a century ago considered the back of town that has reverted to its old geography. To the north and south for several miles are large areas largely unpopulated, filled with homes that don't look much different than they did almost two years ago. If I turn my mind's eye east, that devastation reaches out much further, more than ten miles of streets that once looked a lot like those of Fargo or the stretches of Northern Virginia where I lived before that, but which are now vacant and dilapidated.

This destruction was not the product of the massive cyclone immortalized by satellite photography. That storm passed us by and instead leveled much of the Mississippi Gulf Coast for the second time in a generation. The tragedy in New Orleans was more akin to Chernobyl or the loss of the space shuttles, an entirely predictable failure of government engineering. As an isolated incident, that might be bearable. After almost two years that stretch from the botched attempts at rescue through an endless series of maneuvers by Washington to present a false front of concern while failing to own up to the vast destruction they created, I find myself in the days leading up to the Fourth of July writing posts about "the central government."

A disaster this large shatters a lot of illusions. A curtain was torn away briefly on national television in the weeks after the flood, those pictures of people begging U.S. troops in the street for a bottle of water. That glimpse into a darker America quickly disappeared into the noise of political blame-mongering and attacks on the survivors, was digested and excreted from the news cycle to be replaced by something more palatable, like the adventures of Hollywood couples. To live here, as I have chosen, is to be reminded daily how much of what passes for America these days is a marketing illusion, as transparently false as those conversations in television ads in which bubbly actresses recount the side effects of their birth control over pink drinks.

It's hard to get excited about the Fourth of July when you think in terms of the "central government", an increasingly alien other that seems indifferent on the best days and overtly hostile on the worst to one's very survival. A few days ago I found myself plopped in front of the cable television channel TV Land, drifting through Mayberry and Lucille Ball and Dezi Arnez' New York and Bonanza's Virginia City, thinking when a change of shows interrupted my electronic reverie of how I came to believe in and live the myth of America, that place millions will celebrate on the Fourth. I thought perhaps I would spend Wednesday, Day 310 of Year 2 of the Event, watching TV Land: immersing myself in endless re-runs of shows portraying an America that never was, but is still the one I was raised to believe in.

Instead, I will go out and celebrate my life here in New Orleans, among the hundreds of thousands who have come home in spite of the indifference or hostility of the government, in the face of the dangers of flimsy levees and drug crime run amock, the hundreds of thousands who have faced those challenges and tried to rebuild with their life savings and their own sweat what the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers let wash away.

The America of TV Land perhaps never was. The America of our childhood history books may have passed on and live only in those books. The spirit that built that increasingly mythical America is alive and well in New Orleans, in the people who have mostly on their own, with a bit of charitable help from volunteers around the country, undertaken to rebuild an entire city. They do it in the face of dangers as vast as those that faced the pioneers of the winter-blasted prairies and the settlers of the real Wild West.

Here in New Orleans it is not just the unique soul of a Creole and Carribean city clinging to the edge of America, the birthplace of much of American culture, that is being saved. It is one of the last stands to save the soul of America. That it has even a slight chance in hell of succeeding is something worth celebrating.

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The Only Flag That Matters

2007-07-01T18:15:00.000-05:00

Until the central government not only admits its culpability for the destruction of New Orleans, but steps forward to make everyone here whole again, builds the levees we were always promised and restores the coastal zone brutally raped by the American oil industry over the last half century, this is the only flag that will fly from my house: this Fouth and every and any other day. I have and owe no other loyalty: New Orleans above all.

Long Live New Orleans. Je me souviens. Sinn Fein.

We've got something to believe in...

2007-06-28T20:10:00.000-05:00

Back when moving to New Orleans was a work in progress, at a point where I'd pushed all of my chips onto the table and packed an uncertain Mrs. Wet onto an airplane to New Orleans, I wrote an angry screed chastising the President for his miserly relief, accusing him of not being a true Texan:

If you were a real Texan and not a pretender, you might understand. You might know the words to Gary P. Nunn's "London Homesick Blues”, the part that goes“'Cause when a Texan fancies,/he'll take his chances, / chances will be taken.” Or perhaps you’d know Guy Clark’s song "L.A. Freeway", especially the chorus: “If I can just get off of this LA freeway Without getting killed or caught I'd be down that road in a cloud of smoke For some land that I ain't bought bought bought.”

I've never been a fan of what programmers at CMT would call country music, but I consider myself a fan of what I call American music. A fine distinction, perhaps, but the music I ignore is the Tin Pan Alley sort of country music, Nashville pop. As someone drawn to words and writing, I've always been a sucker for songs that tell a compelling story regardless of the musical setting and you can find those artists in just about any genre.

As we executed our move to New Orleans, Clark's LA Freeway resonated in my head for months. The tale of a couple uprooted by a man's dream so closely mirrored my own: the escape from the "LA Freeway" sameness of Fargo, the singer's words to the song's Susanna "don't you cry, babe/Love's a gift that's surely handmade/We've got something to believe in/Don't you think it's time where leaving."

That song is at once hopeful and plaintive, mixing a look back, thoughts of what will and will not be missed, with a glance to the uncertainly of tomorrow, "down the road in a cloud of smoke/to some land I ain't bought bought bought." It was a perfect mirror of all of the emotions swirling through me at the time: hope, sadness, uncertainty, nostalgia (both for New Orleans and for the place my children had grown as small children) and, ultimately, resolve.

Somehow that post referencing Texas songwriters led to an email from a gentleman named Clay Eals, who was writing a biography of singer/songwriter Steve Goodman. Goodman, who was a fellow traveller of that country/folk scene (but was in fact a Chicagoan and good friend of fellow Midwesterner John Prine), penned a number of popular songs. One everyone in this city knows, although they likely associated it with Arlo Gutherie: "City of New Orleans".

Eals' biography promises more than just the musician, looking at Goodman's long battle with leukemia. The musician's life is an instructive one for people struggling to live in New Orleans. He fought his illness for fifteen years and went on to write dozens of wonderful songs (including "You Never Even Called Me By My Name", an unofficial anthem of The Abbey bar on Decatur when Texan Betz Brown was the owner).

Living in New Orleans feels so many days like the life of someone who's been in a horrible accident, or diagnosed with a wasting disease: a burden you can't let overwhelm you lest it kill you faster. Every time you step out into the heat you can't help but think of what lays around the corner--ruined and abandoned homes fronting streets collapsing into ground churned to pudding by the floodwaters. The city is run in part by people who've flocked here to profit from the promised billions of relief that never seem to arrive.

Then you see a debris pile. A lot of Orleanians think flat tire or mold spores when they see those piles of debris, but I see another person coming home. Or perhaps its someone with a sense of adventure, striking out into our own bit of the 21 Century Wild West, either to make their fortune or just to help. Maybe that house is being gutted by college kids who have decided to spend their vacation roasting in a respirator gutting a stranger house instead of baking in the sun of Yucatan.

Life gives you lemons, I say make whiskey sours; any other outlook down here would be as fatal as a terminal disease mixed with a terminal attitude. Better to be home than a sad expatriates like the ones in the Goodman song Banana Republics made popular by Jimmy Buffet. I think Steve Goodman should have a statue somewhere in town. If writing "City of New Orleans" were not enough, his life should remind us how to face a life-and-death struggle with the best possible medicine: beautiful music and lyrics, some "words we can dance to and a melody that rhymes."

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Living with Chaos

2007-06-22T17:32:00.000-05:00

"In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order."
--Carl Jung

This week British weather forecasters announced the 2007 hurricane season may be less blustery than predicted by U.S. forecasters. The Associated Press story notes that while this is the first time the Brits have published a season forecast, the British Navy-affiliated office has routinely made hurricane forecasts. Apparently, our cousins-in-English did a better job of forecasting last year's less active season than the National Weather Service or noted State University researcher William Gray.

"Who really knows?" I want to ask, almost imperceptibly shrugging my shoulders with the least possible expenditure of calories in the June swelter. I think we can no more predict a particular hurricane season than I can be certain of the next turn the little green anole lizard on the garden wall will make. These anole scurry about my backyard in seemingly random patterns, like tiny green soldiers mounting an assault on the backyard shed. A time lapse photograph of this little fellow's ramble along the wall would produce something resembling the work of M.C. Escher.

I'm certain that the lizard's trail is anything but random. All around my backyard are patterns, some recognizable and some hidden to me. The symmetry of the spider web I understand, recognizing a net to catch supper. The spread of the Bougainvillea or the lazy patterns the bamboo trace in the wind are more difficult to decipher. Someone less challenged by math involving Greek letters could, I am sure, explain it to me. Or at least try. As for the weather, it's the ultimate challenge for the pocket-protector set, a massive array of forces that on one hand follows simple rules like "red sky at night, sailor's delight" and is at the same time is wildly unpredictable.

It is unpredictable, we are told, because it is a chaotic system. This doesn't mean that the weather is without rules, the formless void of the ancients. If it were, then "red sky at morning, sailor take warning" would never have caught on. The weather appears chaotic to us in part because any particular bit of weather is incredibly dependent on initial conditions, what the meteorologist Frank Lofrenz described in the early 1970s as the Butterfly Effect: the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Brazil can cause a tornado in Texas.

That is perhaps a metaphoric exaggeration, but the import is clear. I don't know what spawns tropical waves, those masses of air coming off the coast of Africa and colliding with the warm south Atlantic along the Horse Latitudes: some contours perhaps of the African landscape that send the winds swirling like the dust devils I used to observe in the tiny smoker's corner behind my office building. Many weather systems spin out into the ocean but only one in a hundred, with the chance cough of a camel somewhere in the Sahara, gives birth to Katrina.

The big pattern is clear. I know it. The anole, in some sense, knows it. The bamboo dancing in the wind knows as well. That is why we are all back living here again., sharing this space. Something terrible happened here two years ago, but it was that once in a generation storm that every one who lives on the hurricane coast is raised to expect. We have internalized that risk because we live in that pattern the way seabirds live in the wind and the waves, a world that to an outsider seems untenable but is to us the only landscape that matters, the one that inhabits us as much as we inhabit it.

Somewhere in Connecticut insurance accounts are fretting over forecasts and their columns of numbers, worrying that the pattern is broken. What will we tell the stockholders, they worry. How can we possibly afford the Hamptons this summer if these storms continue? The only Connecticut insurance man who matters to me once wrote: "We live in an old chaos of the sun/ Or an old dependency of day and night,/ Or island solitude, unsponsored, free/Of that wide water, inescapable." Wallace Stevens in Sunday Morning outlines a chaos as predictable as the heat death of the universe and as beautiful as June, then yanks god off the table as a source of blame or comfort like a trickster pulling the table cloth from beneath the dishes.

All that Stevens leaves me, in the end, is myself sitting at a table observing all the order and chaos in the universe in the particular of an anole wandering along a garden wall. It is enough. A flood may come and sweep away this wall and this anole. No matter. I've placed my bet, knowing as the anole knows which way to turn that one hundred years ago and one hundred years hence, someone sits in a patio in New Orleans and looks at a wall, wondering which way the anole will turn. I know this because in spite of all that happened I'm sitting here now, watching the lizard's progress in the place I call home.

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Little Miracles

2007-06-13T21:31:00.000-05:00

The neighbor's crepe myrtle trees are blooming, and it seems to me as miraculous a gift as the olive branch delivered to Noah.

Last year this time I counted my time home in days, not months or years. It was a time marked not by the flowering of trees like magnolias and crepe myrtles and sweet olive but a period filled with visions of trees dead and dying, the grey and broken limbs which haunted each street like the frightening claws of a dark Disney forest. What clearly stands out in memory from summer of 2006 is seeing every single magnolia on Broadway taken down in July, even those few that were clearly leafed out in part and trying to recover. In that time, if the crepe myrtle bloomed, I was too busy looking at the ground for roofing nails and debris piles to notice.

Roofing nails still spontaneously appear in the grass alongside my house like toadstools after a soaking rain, and the neighbors’ house is about to sell and will be gutted, so it will be another summer of sitting on my porch and looking at debris. There is no escaping the reminders that we still live in a city as much a ruin as not even 22 months after the Federal Flood. I have to remind myself that the debris and nails are just a byproduct of rebirth, no different than the leaves or brown petals that the crepe myrtle will scatter on the sidewalk, the price of the persistence of life.

I was reminded of the way life insistently returns to the scene of disaster as I drove down Marconi between drowned Lakeview and the feral north end of City Park, all of the street lights extinguished so that the middle of a large America city seemed as dark as a country lane. I passed the routinely flooded expanse between the road and the Orleans Avenue Canal levee just south of Robert E. Lee Boulevard, and slowed to a crawl with the windows down in the steamy dark to listen to a raucous chorus of frogs bellowing lustily in the dark. Last summer seemed eerily quiet, as a single cicada struggled to make a decent noise on my street. That night on Marconi it seemed all of Frogdom has assembled for their own Mardi Gras in this pocket swamp, and the street (deserted at just after 10 at night) was filled with ducks waddling over from the park to see what all the commotion was about.

Tomorrow I must call someone. There was routine and ignored seepage under the levee along the 17th Street Canal in the years before the floodwalls failed, and this persistent wet spot concerns me. That's tomorrow's worry. On this night I come to a dead stop in a once busy four-lane suburban artery, turn off the headlights and listen to the singing of the frogs. Just as my neighbor's house is coming back, and just as sure as I know there is new framing on the many demolished lots just over the levee, these frogs insist on coming back here at the toe of this questionable levee. The frogs, it seems, have not gotten the memo that its just too dangerous here, that we have no right or sense to be here.

All of us here cling to life --people, trees, frogs--as tenaciously as sea worms in a cauldron of boiling sulfurated water at a sea bottom vent: life where reasonable minds might not expect it. In the deep of the ocean it is considered miraculous and treated with glossy photos in National Geographic. The people of the hurricane coast are treated by the same publication to a gloomy article predicting our imminent doom behind failed levees facing carbon-exhaust boiled seas. And yet, like those sea worms, we live in a colorful and improbable world of our own making.

The frogs and ducks crowing this little sinkhole of a wetland, what I learned to call a slough when I lived in north-west Minnesota, reminds me what a fecund place these marshy bottom lands are. There is good reason that people have settled the most easily flooded places, thick with wildlife for the taking and built from fertile alluvial soil. Where there is food or the promise of it, people since pre-historic times have gone and lived. Given a modicum of civilization, rivers and other watercourses are a bonus, allowing for trade in the easily acquired surplus of such a fertile place. Of course there's a city here. We've been building cities on the alluvial banks of rivers since man first piled mud-brick on mud-brick along the Tigris and Euphrates.

Orleanians may seem as odd as something dredged up from the sea bottom, but it is a good life in spite of the heat and the threat of the odd hurricane. I spent a decade in the upper Great Plains and have to wonder at why people persist in living up where the weather can kill you not once in a decade or a generation, but once a week or so through the seemingly endless months of winter.

Ours is a different sort life, conditioned by the sultry climate and 300 years of a relatively easily life off the fertile land and convenient waters. You may think us as indolent as the fabled grasshopper but like the people who settled into sod houses to wait out howling blizzards, we've just adapted. Like life everywhere, we've found a niche where we can live and learned how to do it. Just because we don't march down Poydras Street in a "tropical" wool suit like it’s an Olympic event doesn't make us lazy. It makes us sensible, unlike the mad dogs and Englishmen on a forced march from hotel to meeting.

At first I wrote easier instead of different to open the last paragraph, but life here is not easy, not anymore. The fact that we find cause to celebrate and relax in the way we have for 300 years, in spite of being a continuing disaster zone, is as miraculous as the blossoming of the crepe myrtle or the festival of frogs reveling in their permanently flooded bit of New Orleans. The way we chose to live is part of the equation that makes life on the sultry hurricane coast irresistibly attractive to those of us raised to it, or the odd visitor who becomes hooked.

The imperatives of commerce, like the imperatives of life, would repopulate some sort of city here if only to serve the port. Commerce is just an expression of our species, no different than the hunting of a predator or the mating dance of a bird. The return of life to the city is less miraculous than the sort of life we all returned to make here, a life where the blooming of a crepe myrtle or the reopening of a restaurant is as important -- no, more important than mere commerce or the earning of our daily bread. We prefer our daily bread to be fresh and French and eaten under the flowering trees, and as restaurants and crepe myrtles alike bloom in Mid-City hope is reborn that for all our challenges, the newest incarnation of New Orleans will be very much the city we feared we had lost forever.

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Stuck On Stupid

2007-06-07T13:01:00.000-05:00

What is wrong with this picture? In an area which took two-to-four feet of water HANO, HUD and the developer have built slab-on-grade homes.

Worse, an earlier Picayune story pointed out that units constructed before 8-29 were razed and started over together with additional post-Federal Flood units. Slab-on-grade in a flooded neighborhood almost in sight of the Industrial Canal and a stones throw from the neck of "the funnel" connected to the MRGO and the Intracoastal Watwerway.

Dumb.

I won't even address the question of who will want to buy or rent the mixed-income units in a neighborhood isolated by the Industrial Canal railroad tracks and the interstate. Perhaps it will become an idyllic little corner of the city away from the hustle and bustle. Perhaps.

I think Tim of Tim's Nameless Blog sums it up well in today's post on the demolition of Cabrini Church in the Vista Park neighborhood of Gentilly.

"...throughout the neighborhood are slab-on-grade, ranch-style, suburban American homes...pretty much all of them below the 100- year Base Flood Elevation...the owners...think it appropriate to fix 'em up [with] no effort to elevate or flood proof their homes.

Cabrini Church, on the other hand, was a landmark, a genuine statement of architecture as it was practiced in the 1960's. Its owners decided it was not worthy of renovation, and they labored tirelessly with government agencies to clear the way for demolition.

It seems to me the church should be spared and the houses demolished and replaced--not the other way around.

Some days I wonder if we aren't as stupid as our neighbors to the north think we are.

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Bring out your dead

2007-06-03T07:47:00.000-05:00

In an effort to debunk this study showing 4,081 victims of Katrina including excess mortality (deaths beyond typical averages) among those who died following the evacuation, State epidemiologist Raoult Ratard appears to suggest that people put false death notices in the New Orleans Times-Picayune obituary section.

"Obituaries are a voluntary notice that is put in the newspaper by the families," Ratard [told the Times Picayune]. "You can see that there are all kind of things that can influence that."

The nut of the mattter is this: Dr. Kevin Stephens, Sr., Director pf the New Orleans Health Department, used the Theory of Excess Mortality to ascribe a large spike in obituary notices to the impact of Hurricane Katrina and the Federal Flood. Ratard prefers to rely only on death certificates issued in New Orleans, disregarding the dispersal of half the city's population elsewhere and clear evidence in the obituaries of a significant spike--2,358--in deaths reported in the newspaper over just a six month period in 2006.

Of course it's not clear evidence if, as Ratard suggests, people were for example just making up obituaries for fun. I've stared at the story from earlier this week for half and hour and can't for the life of me think of anything else Ratard could be suggesting by the quote above.

It does not help matters that Mayor C. Ray Nagin misstates Stephen's case in his state of the city address to suggest the excess mortality was caused by the city's slow to recover health system. That's a leap that would suggest he didn't read Stephen's testimoney before Congress very closely, but that's par for C. Ray who is well known to just make stuff up that sounds good everytime you stuff a microphone in his face.

As to Ratard, his bizarre attempt to discredit results that contradict his own by suggesting people fabricated obituaries is not much better than something Nagin might come up with. I don't know about you, but I'd rather not be relying on a state epidemioligist who might be susceptible to poltical pressure to hide deaths when the asian bird flu virus comes around.

I still believe it comes down to this: no one in government wants you to understand that more people died because of the incompetence of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers than were killed on 9-11.

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Adios, America

2007-06-02T20:34:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow I return from America to New Orleans. Blogger American Zombie can explain that for you eloquently if you're not a regular reader who knows my views. Even my wife remarked on it after her year-and-a-half in New Orleans: Destin is just like everywhere else, she said was we drove down the main drag to dinner one night. The implication coming from one of the newest Orleanians was clear to me: New Orleans is not.

Long gone from the Florida panhandle are the aqua motels and family beach cottages I remember from long ago, replaced by the march of monolithic condos down the beachfront. All of the usual chains stores and restaurants are conveniently located just blocks off the beach along the highway. It is in one sense a warning of what New Orleans could become if we are not vigilent, a mostly soulless tourist destination.

It is in many ways Miramar Beach is precisely the sort of place built on a spit of sand senators from the interior have in mind when they complain of coastal communities built in harms way. Still, you would have to have some terrible aversion to the ocean not to be thankful someone built here after even a short visit.

Frankly, its been damned relaxing. Everyone in New Orleans needs to go someplace pleasant for a while, somewhere the drugstore is up the block and not half-a-city away, where there are not constant reminders of disaster and challenge. Forget the expanses of hurricane-hardened concrete behind you and turn to the sea and the sun and just tune out.

While my week at the beach has not been without reminders of what I left behind (it amazes me to see incredibly valuable beach-front property still boarded up from Hurricane Ivan in 2004), I plan to turn off of I-10 somewhere in Mississippi and drive past Wal-Mart and the Olive Garden until I get to Highway 90 and drive through the heart of Katrina.

I want to see for myself the rapid recovery I hear all those extra recovery millions sent to the faithful GOP voters should have bought. I already know what I will find: a barren landscape not unlike the bulldozed Ninth Ward. I have a clear mental picture of Waveland before. I had an aunt and uncle and cousins on the coast.

I know all that is gone. I need to remind myself (just as the boarded beach houses of Destin remind me) that we in New Orleans are not alone on the Hurricane Coast. I need to see or hear something that might rekindle my dwindling connection to the rest of America.

I need that because I increasingly share the view Ashley leaves in the comments under the post I linked to before. Perhaps it is time for our own Conch Republic moment, something dramatic so the nation to the north understands how little of the money they think was sent has reached us, will understand our feeling of abandonment by the central government, will hear why with every passing day I am less an American and more an Orleanian.

A final thought to add: I tried to grab the video of church volunteer Connie Uddo, but only got this audio. You can view the entire hearing here. Uddo's remarks occur between 1:13 and 1:17.

Ed.'S Note: apologies for typos but posting by Blackberry is a pain.

Updated Ed. Note: I cleaned up the typos, and added a bit here and there. I want to note that along Highway 90, there are signs of life along the road on the Bay Saint Louis end that I would compare to the commercial progress in Mid-City. After cruising the Pass Christian coast road, I decided to take my tired family home and didn't drive along the coast in Bay St. Louis and Waveland. I though Pass Christian offered enough in the way of barren slabs, tumbled walls and newly streched Tyvek for one Saturday afternoon.

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State of the City

2007-05-30T08:50:00.000-05:00

Bart at B Rox let's us all know that Ray No-C-Em Nagin will give his State of the City address today at 6:30 pm at the National D-Day Museum.

Read about it here:
http://www.silenceisviolence.org/article/25

Since I'm in Destin (wo is me, eh?) I guess I'll be stuck with the account of the Times-Picayune, a newspaper that has about the same relationship with Perdido Street that Pravda had with Soviet part bosses.

What can Nagoin tell us: that crime is down? That his fabulously expensive garbage contract with its ridiculous giant cans is a stunning success? That there is no real aid for local business in the pipeline but he has high hopes to bring Elmwood to Mid-City?

Those of us who choose to live here know the state of the city and there is nothing Nagin can say that would rise above fodder for laughter and derision. The recovery of the city to date is in spite of city government (and statew and federal government, for that matter).

The best we can hope for is that he not embarress us again. We could greet him with a shower of new Creole tomatoes but that would be a waste of perefectly good food.

It's ironic he would choose the D-Day museum. As I've said beforeN the 200,000 who resettled the city are the equal of the Greatest Generation, the best living example of the traits of self-reliance and oingenuity and perseverance we are told built the U.S.

Like the generation the museum honors they know the meaning of SNAFU and yet they trudge on and get the job done in the face of tremendous adversity and even danger. What ever idiocy comes out of C Ray's mouth tonight he cannot sully what they have accomplished.

Update: I think I like Michael Holman's gloss on the Mayor's speech best so far.

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Save the Coast

2007-05-25T06:07:00.000-05:00

Yes, I'm dredging up old posts again, but work has been insanely busy and trying to get ready (at work and home) to leave on vacation for a week has not helped. Posting will resume when I return from Margaritaville.

For 5,000 years, there were hurricanes. For 5,000 years, there were floods, there was sea level rise and there was subsidence. So, you know, there are forces of nature that wetlands have been able to survive. The one different ingredient in our landscape in the last 300 years is humans.
Robert Twilley, Louisiana State University on PBS' NewHour.

Forty square miles a year. That is the annual rate of coastal lost sustained in the last half century. By the year 2050, Louisiana will have lost an area the size of Rhode Island to the Gulf of Mexico. The graphic here gives an impression of the tremendous rate of loss.

This is in small part a natural process of subsidence. River deltas are built by periodic river floods that deposit silt, and the same land subsides when the river abandons a particular delta and changes course, when the flooding that replenishes the land comes to an end. But the river has not abandoned its current delta, the seventh it has built in this region. Man will not let it.

Instead, the channelization of the river, topsoil erosion control and the construction of river flood protection levees have deprived the southeast Louisiana coast of its natural replenishment. These losses have been immensely aggravated by the development of oil-and-gas long the coast, involving the dredging of tens of thousands of miles of pipeline and access canals and the construction of unnatural spoil banks. This has allowed the intrusion of salt-water into brackish water marsh, and brackish water into fresh water marsh. Killing the vegetation that holds this tenouos land together has sped up the process immenslvely. Without vegetation, the tenuous land is easily washed away.

Like the levee failure in New Orleans, the collapse of the coastal environment in Louisiana is largely a man-made catastrophe, the outcome of a series of choices made for the benefit of the entire nation at our expense.Subsidence plays a part, but only a small one in the vast lossees of the last half century. What has occured has been the theft of land from Louisiana, without compensation, in order to provide additional agricultural land elsewhere, and to produce oil-and-gas.

Imagine this if you will: Los Angeles is the city most closely associated with America's lust affair with the personal automobile, and production of the oil necessary to make that lifestyle possible is in large part responsible for coastal erosion.

If we applied Louisiana's coastal erosion rate to the L.A. coastline (which Google tells me stretches 76 miles from Malibu to Long Beach), the city would have to move back from the sea a little under one mile a year. Would the Hummer continue to be so popular in SoCal if it were their land they were giving up at such an alarming rate in the name of cheap gas?

People tend to think of the coast of Louisiana as an abysmal swamp, perhaps imagining the place where the National Guardsmen got lost in the awful film Southern Comfort. In fact, it is one of the most productive places on earth, nurturing an immense bounty of seafood (and less importantly, as fashion trends change, fur). It is an essential stopping point on the Mississippi flayway. Without these marshes, the future of a lot of popularly hunted birdlife from here to Hudson Bay would also be threatened.

According to the coastal advocacy group America's Wetlands, Louisiana produces one-third of the nation's seafood by dollar value, and is ranked second behind Alaska in by weight of seafood landed. In 1981, the value of those commerical fisheries was about $680 million. Sport fishing and constitute over $10 billion a year in economic activity. All of this is being taken away from us without compenstaion.

From the vantage point of New Orleans, the biggest impact is the loss of protection from storm surge, the water pushed up by low barometic pressue and storm winds into a tsunami-like tide. These maps (courtesy of Third Battle of New Orleans) show the impact on one small area in suburban New Orleans: Chalmette, La. In St. Bernard Parish, the levees were overwhelmed by the storm surge and wave action made possible by the loss of these wetlands, which can reduce storm surge by as much as one foot for every mile of wetland between open water and the levee.

These rapidly disappearing coastal environments protect not only the city of New Orleans, but the massive oil-and-gas infrastructure along the coast. Outages along the coast from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita help keep the price of gasoline at between $2 and $3 a gallon since September of last year. Production is still 15% below normal nine month later.

Neither of these storm were The Big One. If we don't act to protect the coast, when the Big One comes the United States could lose 25% of its domestic imported oil-and-gas (if you include the imports from the off-shore Superport). Will we be able to help anyone to rebuild when gas goes to $5 or $7 or $10 a gallon and stays there?

To survive, we must have coastal restoration, or everything that makes Louisiana a place unique in the world will be gone in our lifetime: New Orleans and Acadiana, the seafood and the oil, and all of the species of fish and fowl that depend on the coast. If the levees along the lower river start to go (as they did in stretches of Plaquemines Parish in Katrina), the river could cut itself a new, non-navigable channel. If that happens, the economy of the entire American heartland will be in peril, if agricultural exports have to be freighted to other ports by truck and rail.

We have known the solutions for years, as everyone at this recent gathering of experts says.The most recent statement was the Coast 2050 plan. A gathering of All we need are the funds to implement it. There is a model. Inland oil-and-gas production on federal lands rebates 50% of the lease revenue back to the state the federal lands are in. This money is why Alaskans get a check each year from their state instead of paying taxes. All we're asking for is the same 50% share of off-shore oil-and-gas lease revenue, because of the tremendous impact this has on our coastline.

And if we can't have that, then we want all of our damn money back, money we paid to the IRS and at the pump, from those shiftless, no-count Alaskans who should have to pay state and local taxes like the rest of us instead of leaching off of the rest of America.

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The Ethics of Allstate

2007-05-20T18:42:00.000-05:00

After reading today's latest revalations of rampant fraud by Allstate, I found myself reading from the Allstate Corporation Code of Ethics:

Making Ethical Decision

Allstate is committed to operating its business with honesty and
integrity.
Integrity and Compliance
Allstate is deeply committed to integrity and compliance [with the law] ... As one of Allstate's core values, integrity must be a part of all business goals and activities....
We act honestly and deal fairly and ethically with customers, suppliers, competitors...
We will avoid any unethical activity even if it is not expressly illegal.

Questions to Consider
Is it legal?
Does it comply with this code and the policies that apply to the
situaion?
How will it affect others -- consumers, competitors, shareholders, other
employees, agencies, or the community, and you?
How will it look to others...?
How would you feel if this decision were made public? ...

How does anyone in the Northbrook, Illinios headquarters square this with the continuing revelations that the company has committed systematic fraud in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the Federal Flood?

I can hardly find words to describe the anger I get when I read about the insurance companies. The best I can do is this. New Orleans is a city beset by a horrendous violent crime problem tied to the drug trade. If I could push a Big Red Button and choose to send either all of the gun-tottin' ganstas or all of the fiduciary officials of Allstate to prison tomorrow, I would choose the suits at Allstate and take my chances with the gang bangers.

But in a story which I did not see online yesterday, I find that I may not have to make that choice. There may yet be one uncorrupted official left in the entire United States with authority to take these scum down.

Actually, scum is not a fair and accurate description. The Allstate executives and employees engaged in this massive, interstate fraud are not scum. They are below scum. They are the nasty little things that live in the dark of the pond and feed off the uderside of the scum.

When I'm done venting here, I going to call a telephone number I discovered in Allstate's Code of Ethics and ask what precisely they plan to do about the company's continuing criminal activity.

The Allstate Alert Us Line is a 24 x 7 toll-free number that all non-employees can use to alert the company about issues with company employees ... The Alert Us Line can be accessed by calling 1-800-427-9389.

Or perhaps we should all go to the web site of the Coalition Against Insurance Fraud and follow the link to report Allstate to the National Insurance Crime Bureau. (They also have a toll free number: 1-800-835-6422.

I think that's a much better idea than picking Allstate agents at random out of the phonebook and asking why we shouldn't armor the levees with their skulls. Hell, it's not the agent's fault. They just sell the stuff. Still, I can't figure out why anyone would want their name and photo plaster on the side of a bus advertising their affiliation with Allstate. You might as well slap your business glamour shot up on a billboard with Pedophile in three foot letters.

Better yet, consider this: Allstate proudly lists $157 Billion in assets. They've already lost one $2.8 million judgement based on one of their fradulent "engineering" reports. We could build a lot of levees and houses with $157 Billion. All we need is an attorney general with some balls instead of the worthless one we've got.

Update 6-3: While I was on vacation, this further evidence of systematic fraud by Allstate, State Farm and other insurers came to light.

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What Is Remembered Lives

2007-05-18T06:15:00.000-05:00

Or are you a stranger without even a name
Enclosed and forgotten behind the glass frame
In a old photograph, torn and battered and stained
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame.
-- "No Man's Land" by Eric Bogle

"What is remembered lives" my friend Victoria reminds me in a poignant post unrelated to New Orleans. Remember. That has been a large part of why I write since the time when the water still stood in the street outside the house I sit, in the days when an old friend's husband chronicled the floating dead and many thought there might be 10,000.

There were not 10,000, and Mayor Ray Nagin was castigated for a wild exaggeration. This was not a number which our slippery tongued mayor chose to just make up. Republican Senator David Vitter offered the same grim estimate in the first week of September. Consider the context: an unknown number of people unevacuated and the city largely submerged by a sudden, tsunami-like incursion of the lake through the failed levees. Keep in mind that the worst case scenario in the Hurricane Pam exercise projected 61,900 dead in an inundated New Orleans.

Thankfully, the real total of the dead was smaller. How much smaller, however, depends on what is meant to say someone was killed by Katrina. There is an official number of people killed directly by Hurricane Katrina and the flood that followed--1723--but it gives an incomplete picture of the impact of the storm and subsequent Federal Flood.

Four thousand and eighty one: that's the number independent journalist Robert Lindsay reports in this post, based on research by Dr. Kevin Stephens, Sr., Director ff the New Orleans Health Department, presented to the House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations on March 13, 2007.

...anecdotal reports caused Stephens and a team to undertake a study to count the number of death notices in the New Orleans Times-Picayune and compare it to a reference year which would serve as a baseline. 2003 was chosen as a reference year. The data can be seen on page nine of the testimony linked above. In the first six months of 2003, 5,544 deaths were counted.

In the first six months of 2006, 7,902 were counted, an increase of 2,358 deaths over baseline in the post-Katrina period. Based on this, we will assign 2,358 deaths as caused by the accelerated death rates that occurred in New Orleans even long after the storm.

Four thousand and eighty one. Some will scoff at the methodology but it seems sound. Over 2,300 more New Orleanians died in the first sixth months of 2006 than in the same period of 2002 or 2003, a forty-two percent increase. What other proximate cause can anyone suggest? "They just didn't up and decide that 2006 was a nice year for dying," suggests Lindsay.

It was not the waters themselves that killed those lucky enough to get away. They were killed in part because getting away did not mean to escape. Those lucky enough not to be trapped on a roof, or worse under it, sat in shelters and motels and friends or families houses, compelled to watch the disaster unfold under the unblinking eye of 24 hour news, could Google up their houses from space and see the water all around. There was safety in distance, but no escape.

Once the water subsided, things became worse and not better. Not since the Great Depression have so many people lost so much. Denied insurance payouts after a faithful lifetime of monthly payments, many without flood insurance because it was not required--we were, after all, protected by our government's levees--hundreds of thousands lost everything but the clothes on their backs. Worse, they were forced to continue mortgage payments on uninhabitable ruins while it became increasingly clear that there was nothing, including criminal conspiracy, their insurance companies would not do to deny them payment.

They were robbed of everything America had told them made their lives valuable: their houses, their possessions, the jobs that might help them to rebuild. The promises they have believed, that hard work and timely payment would make them safe, that their government would protect them in extremity, proved to have all been lies. They lost everything; not just things, but faith. Is it any wonder that many of the elderly or infirm could not cope, that even the younger and stronger might despair so that suicide rates spiked in the months after the storm?

What is remembered lives. It's been a long time since I've written about the dead, or seen any thing else published or posted besides Lindsay's piece. Google up Katrina deaths and 4081 and you find nothing. Here in New Orleans, we hear the anecdotal stories. They hover at the edge of consciousness like ghosts, but life here is just too damned hard to let the forgotten dead intrude too far.

In my early days home, the ghosts seemed to crowd around. It was an inescapable feeling in a city so clearly in ruin. With passing time there is a growing numbness, a scarring over that might be healthy, but I wonder. As the dead pass deeper into memory, does our sense of obligation to them wain as well? As Memorial Day creeps up on us, we will hear the routine speeches about the sacrifices of our glorious dead, and our own obligations to the constitutional republic they died to create or defend.

There was so much hope for our city even at the height of despair, that given a slate wiped clean we could rebuild it better: better levees, betters schools, better government: levee and assessor reform, the blossoming of new schools, the election of new officials (recall: in the districts where the population was returned in significant numbers, we tossed out the old ones. Nagin is the exception, not the rule). As we slide toward old ways, I believe we need to remember those who died in the flood--all of them, including those who died of despair under an unending burden of bad news--and the obligation we have to them.

Our obligation is this: to rebuild the city they despaired of seeing saved, a city recognizably New Orleans; a city protected by levees that work, with good schools for everyone and safe streets and a transparent government that works for us. We have not had those things for generations now, and it may be the work of generations to achieve but I think we are capable of it. The half or so of the population returned to the city have proven themselves capable of working through tremendous adversity.

As we move past the Spring festivals and see the restaurants popping open around us like flowers, we can't just assume that the city those forgotten dead passed pining for is returning, that we can just move on. It could happen again if we are not vigilant and persistent. We owe it to the the victims of the Flood to see that it should not.

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Hope floats.

2007-05-10T18:58:00.000-05:00

This T-P article on the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation survey of the attitudes of Orleanians is just the tonic to the hangover week of news we've had. First, the National Geographic releases a web teaser of their next issue, promoting a story on persistent defects in the levee system. Then we have a named storm in April, even if it is something called a sub-tropical and not a true tropical storm.

"There's a tremendous sense of optimism and resilience," said Mollyann Brodie, vice president for media research for the foundation. "There's still a sense that things are moving in the right direction and that this place is going to recover."

I know I'll get smacked for "recycling", but I want to pull out these words I wrote in February of 2006. I thought these as good as anything I might sit down and right today:

I believe the people of New Orleans haven't given up hope because we had so little of it to begin with. The venality of politicians, the inefficiency of government, the vicissitudes of weather and termites, of social and economic decay, all of these breed a certain sense of fatalism, an "if Allah wills it" quality that is alien to most Americans.

We have a sense that New Orleans, without those burdens, would no longer be the place we love. We cherish a notion of ourselves as the equivalent of a nineteenth century sailor's Shanghai, a colonial outpost of sensuality and corruption and decay. We don't want to be 21st century Singapore, a model of totalitarian efficiency and cleanliness. It just ain't who we are.

And yet, the insha'Allah and the ennui are a mask, one we wear not just on a certain winter Tuesday but most days of the year. Behind that mask are the people who get up five days a week and haul their kids to school, then go to work. They get up on a sweltering Saturday and overcome their tropical torpor to mow the grass. Later that night, they go out to try that new restaurant.

They get up on Sunday and hope that--this time--the Saints might win. Somewhere today in New Orleans (or Houston or Baton Rouge or Atlanta), someone will put down their beer, and talk about how wild it will be in the Quarter the year the Saints win the Super Bowl.

At some level, and as much as we might not want to admit it, we are a hopeful people. Hedged in by levees that may or may not hold, beset Formosan termites and feckless politicians at every level, it would be impossible to live here without it.

Its a funny kind of hope, as old as Abraham. When you expect the worst around every corner, as often as not you will turn that corner and find some small thing that gives you a tremendous lift. That's where we find hope, like a glinting half dollar on the broken sidewalk as you walk from a bad day at the track to Liuzza's, the little mystical sign that maybe today or at least tomorrow is going to turn out all right.

Its the kind of hope we like, because it lets us wear that cynical mask of the weary nabob struggling through another rainy season, slightly superior to our surroundings yet completely captivated by it, certain the natives are stealing from us even as we steal from them and hoping we all at least come out even.

I would add only this: ours is not the kind of hope America is used to thinking about, the kind found in television commercials and achieved through the purchase of some new miracle drug or the complete prayer kit of some religious huckster. Ours is hope none the less, and it is how we get past Jazz Fest and into a pile of warnings that hurricane season is just around the corner, and yet get up and get on with our lives.

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Don't We All Deserve Levees That Work?

2007-05-10T06:14:00.000-05:00

Please visit, join and support Levees.org.

Walking in their father's shoes

2007-05-06T08:05:00.000-05:00

If you watch this bad camera video of a parade I encountered at Jazz Fest in New Orleans this Saturday, you should watch carefully for the two children. Both are equipped with just their size walking sticks just like the adult men of the New Generation Social Aid and Pleasure Club, and the eldest is doing his best to learn the steps.

In the dark days of late 2005 and into early 2006, I was not the only one worrying about the potential death of the unique, indigenous culture of New Orleans. I joined a parade of national commentators in wondering of this largest displacement of people the nation's had seen since the Civil War would lead to the death of New Orleans native culture. As early as September 9, 2005, I wrote:

Imagine if you will a New Orleans without Mardi Gras Indians; without neighborhoods where young boys actually want to learn to play the trombone, so they can march proudly at the head of the parade; without the little neighborhood restaurants where Creole cooking was perfected before we gave it to the world; without the little bars where every generation of musicians have played for a circle of friends and neighbors before they took our music into the world...
It would be an act of cultural genocide , a word I choose carefully and mindful of its terrible implications. It would be the ethnic cleansing of an alien other perched on the edge of America. It would be a crime not much different from that of the Taliban when they chose to demolish the ancient cliff Buddhas.

Seeing these children was a tremendous moment for me, an indication that the culture can survive if it is nurtured as it has been for generation. It worries me not to see any teenagers or young men. Have they all been lost to the ghetto culture, the self-titled "convict music" that blares from their radios, touting criminality, violence and misogyny?

I was heartened on my first Jazz Fest Saturday watching Chief Iron Horse and the Black Seminoles on the Heritage stage. Only two were in full costume, but there was a large compliment of young men who looked to be in their twenties drumming and singing on stage. They were not lost to dark side of hip-hop culture. Still, I wonder where are the teenagers.

Those young men on stage and the children in the parade area small but important sign of hope. This culture need not die, unless America chooses to let the city go, chooses in effect to kill it by failing to rebuild the levees and the coast, to pay the debt they have run up over the last one hundred years for a navigable river and oil-and-gas.

If America chooses to do this, it will not be remembered in this time as the enemy of the Taliban in the East or the ethnic cleansers of central Europe. It will be remembered as a fellow traveler with the demolishers of the Buddhas of Bamyan.

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The Father, Son and Holy Ghost

2007-04-26T00:01:00.000-05:00

As crowds flock to see Rod Stewart and Ludacris as closing shows for the first Saturday of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, there will be no gnashing of teeth or rending of garments at the faithlessness of the people over at the Jazz Tent.

The chastisement will I hope be entirely aural, an unleashing of primordial chaos delivered with an Old Testament intensity that only Pharoah Sanders can muster. In the end it will be a holy deliverance as this saxophone Bodhisattva anoints those who chose to come in the river sourced in the heart of Africa which roles through city, the holy waters of jazz.

Jazz Fest has become a big music festival that could at the kindest be called eclectic. There is something for everyone, even the people who will come to hear Z.Z. Top or an Allman Brothers Band without Dickey Betts or Duane. The Allman Brothers and Z.Z. Top both figure prominently in the sound track of my youth, from the time before I started to take an interest in more complex forms of music, before I started to pick up jazz records I heard on WTUL and stumbled across a copy of a cutout record titled Love is Everywhere after hearing something by Sanders on that station.

It was a record that transformed my life, a bright sound on the road to Damascus that changed me from another kid in the 1970s listening to the same music as everyone else into a person who could find room in their head for just about everything, a person who was ready to sample everything that New Orleans and the wider world offered. It was not only a musical awakening, but also one to a spirituality not nailed to a cross, a universal spirit that moved through the entire world and could enter at the ear and pierce the heart.

There will be enough jazz at Jazz Fest, if you chose to seek it out. There will be no on else on the schedule that approaches Pharaoh Sanders. He is of the generation that produced John Coltrane and Miles Davis and Thelonius Monk. He is a disciple of Coltrane's who played in his last ensemble, an influence from which he inherited the profoundly lyrical spirituality of much of his own music and a setting in which he tempered his own ecstatic free jazz freneticism at the source fire.

While seeing him at Jazz Fest will be a tremendous personal experience, his appearance is more than that. He is one of the giants of jazz, and in a world not ruled by corporate sponsorships he would command the largest stage, and no one else would dare to play while he did. For me it is enough that he will be there in the Jazz Tent, and for one hour the Copernican universe will be set aside and all will whirl about that spot, where the leylines of American invention and African rhythms cross.

At his wildest, there is something in Sander's music of what I imagine Sunday afternoons at Congo Square were like hundreds of years ago, and he will carry us back to the place where the first Jazz Fest was held decades ago, on the grounds where African slaves first played music of their own on this continent. At his most lyrical you can imagine a world where tongues of fire descend onto the heads of men and grace them with new voices, with the ability to make sounds previously beyond their ken. You can not only imagine this world. You can enter into it. Saturday. Five forty-five. Be there.

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Law & Disorder

2007-04-23T19:41:00.000-05:00

Can someone explain to me why a felon found in possession of the handgun used to commit a murder is now walking the streets?

In a story in today's Times-Picayune (which I can't find on the NOLA.Com interface but only on the T-P homepage), we learn this:

In February, Jordan's team gave up trying to charge Eugene Treg, 20, with the first-degree murder in 2006 of Darryl Tyrone "Dizzy" Davis, 20. Prosecutors blamed witness problems and a dearth of physical evidence.

Treg, whose criminal record is lengthy, walked out of jail once the murder rap disappeared, not without a parting shot from Jordan's office, which said the courts wrongly released their suspect on a bond he had forfeited. An arrest warrant was issued for a weapons violation, but Treg remains on the lam.

In Treg's case, the ballistics from the gun police found when he was arrested on May 31, 2006, matched the ballistics from the Davis murder.

As a reasonable citizen I want to know why in the hell they wouldn't take this to a jury. If they could not, I want to know why the hell being a felon in possession of a gun that was used in a murder isn't grounds for to be held for something.

When someone like Eugene Treg walks, something is terribly wrong. I know things are not as simple as a television show like Law-and-Order, but how could anyone not indict someone for murder or some serious crime under these circumstances?

A year ago, my mother-in-law (who was not terribly fond of our idea to move to New Orleans) cheerfully placed a copy of the Time Magazine article Gangs of New Orleans into my hands. I think she hoped I would read it and stop and say, well, I guess we can't move there.

Instead, I saw the positives in a displaced criminal population, and a new found willingness of the locals to work together under the direction of the Feds to take the window of opportunity to turn around a deteriorating criminal justice system, and the deteriorating streets that went with it.

I was not naive about the challenges they faced, any more than I was naive about all of the challenges involved in moving here. Now, even as we move forward with levee and property tax reform, with newly elected leaders in the districts with returning populations, with a general sense that progress is possible, there remain many areas we have disappointingly fallen short.

I have to say that I am more than just disappointed that the DA and Police Chief have blown this golden opportunity to turn the situation around, to create a new environment in which criminal's don't talk about a "misdemeanor murder" but about hard time and greener pastures elsewhere. Riley and Jordan have failed us so profoundly that we cannot wait for the next election

We are a failed state, living among terrorists. I want to know when we get our surge.

I don't expect one. I think the powers that be in Washington are perfectly happy to "fight them here" rather than have our own gang-bangers back in Houston or Atlanta. They can decide this because they have written off New Orleans. They have the port open and the oil and gas are flowing. What do they care if the city itself lives or dies?

With an election in front of us, keep this in mind: if you vote for the incompetent and racially-charged local government status quo or for the party of George Bush, you are one of them and not one of us. The blood will be on your hands. You might as well go out and buy up a bunch of hand-guns at your next convenient gun show, and go do to Central City and pass them out for free.

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