Peter Scholtes said it well - it was like watching someone you loved dying on tv. Imagine a more impersonal horror. New Orleans, a city of supreme sensuality, of endless music, of tangled history, a city blending America with Europe in ways no other American city ever has, a town in which my dad was a teacher, that my aunt lived in for two dozen years, that I lived in for one youthful summer and visited since childhood - I watched it drown from a tv. I was in Germany, trying to dance in sold-out techno parties with a cadre of internationals. I lost my credit card, had no money, and became trapped in my hotel with no money for food, making myself sick watching German-language reporting of this American tragedy, inable to eat anyway at the scenes unfolding in places I knew like a backyard. That could have been...our house. I lost my voice.
It's been a year and a half, and I just got myself down to New Orleans. I went because it was Mardi Gras season, so I could Mardi Gras and work too. Work I did. First, for Habitat for Humanity, on the Musicians Village project, which aims to build something like 150 homes for musicians displaced by the waters:
Putting Jazz Back in New Orleans
By Patrik Jonsson, Christian Science Monitor. Posted February 27, 2007.
We worked for three days on the project. The first day we built window guards to keep people from stealing materials from unfinished homes at night. On the flight home I heard a cabinetmaker from NOLA talking about how contractors have been hiring security after he puts his cabinets in - people spend all night ripping them out. The second day we ripped aluminum to make trim - incredibly time-consuming and probably not the best use of labor, but it had to be done and we were there. The third day we teamed together with our pals Jim and Ben from the earlier days and built a deck on the porch of a bass player named Michael Harris. Now that was a good time. You need a deck? Call me.
Habitat has come under some criticism for their response in New Orleans:
Volunteer Group Lags in Replacing Gulf Houses
By LESLIE EATON and STEPHANIE STROM
Published: February 22, 2007
I also felt a little odd working for a Xtian group, but their one day of prayer (Saturday, biggest crowd) wasn't bad and in fact, if I switched "God" to "Y'all" in the speech "God, let us come together today to help one another out..." I was fine and in agreement with the vibe - yes, we should all be working down there when we can. In fact, it reminds me of what Evelyn McDonnell said of her experience in New Orleans. Being in the 9th Ward makes me want to pray, just in case.
I also went down to do some podcast stories for Associated Press - asap. I was inspired by my friend and Columbia University collegue Matt Sakakeeny, who did this great story on the Hot 8 Brass Band drummer and high school band teacher Dinerral Shavers tragic murder during the Xmas season:
Drummer's Funeral Underlines New Orleans Violence
by
My first piece was on Tipitina's, an uptown nightclub honoring Professor Longhair, a staple for the Tulane crowd. I'd written about Tip's a few years in the past (and also saw my first Fugazi concert there when I was 16) and decided it was the best of all possible venues. In addition to all the obvious - great booking, great staff, great sound - they worked with the city to make a musician's co-op office with computers, printers, fax machines, mail boxes and also around 200 practice rooms. They also teach high school students the basics of audio engineering and the music business in a mentorship program and give instruments to the city's strapped public school music programs. That's especially a big deal since Katrina:
New Orleans nightclub to the rescue
By Daphne Carr
A Struggle For Bands To Regain Footing
By JON PARELES
Published: February 20, 2007
As this NY Times piece reports, Katrina hurt students in the city's junior and high school marching bands, which have long been the training ground for tomorrow's pro musicians. Not to mention, they are the best part of the parades - even the ones that are a little out of tune play with such passion and the young women marching in their dancelines are unstoppable. The sound of their taps scuffing the city streets to the offbeat of the drumline is to me the essential sound of Mardi Gras:
Mardi Gras marching orders
By Daphne Carr
Saturday night we also dropped in to see the famous swamp tech impresario Quintron at his rebuilt Spellcaster Lodge in the upper 9th Ward. The community I always understood him to be part of is this artsy SanFran feeling boho group of folks who live in the Bywater area west of the French Quarter, and Q has been in the 9th ward for quite a long time.
Bohemian Rhapsody
By Daphne Carr
Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to record the songs of the Fi Yi Yi Mardi Gras Indian gang who we saw at The Backstreet Cultural Museum in Treme on Mardi Gras day. Curator/founder Sylvester Francis was giving a most righteous toast to the Spirit of Fi Yi Yi, who addressed the audience of dancers and singers, asking for people to join together for the community.
Injuns Here Dey Come
In Offbeat (author unknown)
We drove through different parts of town on that day, in the 3rd ward past the Magnolia projects where lots of Mardi Gras Indians where in the streets to Treme and down to the lower 9th. Here, after a week of rebuilding, celebrating, allowing myself pleasure at the creature beauty New Orleans can bring, I drove in silence, again in tears, again without a voice. How can these spaces still be empty? How can dozens of blocks be gone, their inhabitants inable to even find the streets without cardboard posts?
Dozens more blocks of homes empty, one trailer with someone building - a homesteader, a hopeful person, but how long until they have neighbors, old friends, history? We stayed uptown, where my family lived, and while I was staying there I felt relieved thinking "at least some part of what I remember is still here," but driving through these neighborhoods was enough to make the rest of the city seem gone - how could people turn their backs on their neighbors like this?
How can our country turn its back like this on people who suffered something so traumatic? The thing that made me most disturbed is that it looked Youngstown, OH, my hometown, or Detroit - 50 years of disinvestment and neglect but rendered instantly and flatly to such obviously cheerful, modest family homes.
My mom lives in a rance slab house on a street of the same - the houses of the 9th ward looked just like hers. This is the hardheaded way of learning empathy, just standing there looking at trees that used to shade folks on porches now shading empty lots, maybe forever, thinking 'this could be anywhere, but would the story end the same way every time?' But for me, I couldn't understand until I stood there.
One of the people whose writing I've liked (also Alex Rawls and the whole OffBeat gang - kudos) on the subject of post-Katrina is Peter Scholtes, who recently wrote:
If You Lived Here, You'd Be Gone, or "Katrina documentaries talk, argue, and ultimately fall silent before disaster." The whole time I was down in New Orleans I kept thinking "what else can I do about this?" and one of the things I kept thinking about was trying to get other music writers to go down to New Orleans to work, write and observe. I even had fantasies about running a music press junket, and may start bugging people about it soon.
In this year's Da Capo, I looked really hard for great writing about this situation and found some, but I see no reason why there shouldn't be reams of it. This is a story that needs to stay in the spotlight until everyone, EVERYONE, is embarassed about it and demands results and since New Orleans has been considered worldwide as the birthplace and sustainer of America's great music - jazz - and dozens of other vernacular musical traditions, I see no reason why music journalists shouldn't lead the brigade of folks keeping the city in the spotlight.
That said, I only went to New Orleans for a week. On the way home, I sat on the plane thinking - you know, I lived in NOLA for four months one summer and I've visited for a week or so for at least eight years. How long before a year of my life was spent in New Orleans? How long before I've 'lived' in New Orleans? People from the city joke that newcomers are people who've put in 15 years or less, and most people have been there through the generations. I'll never bee one of those people, it's too late. But it's never to late to start falling in love with it, start getting to know it, to start helping. A year and a half after the fact, it still needs some work. Find the time and the city will reward you.
UPDATES:
New Orleans Mon Amour, a film by Michael Almereyda for 2008
Bush acknowledges frustrations in New Orleans
March 1, 2007
Get angry again
If there were ever a good reason for blacks to be mad, New Orleans is it.
February 28, 2007
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