Katrina Update #56

December 31, 2005; 5:30 PM

Happy New Year's — New Orleans Style!

Maker's Mark is the bourbon of choice for most of us, and that being the case, we have diligently saved all the bottles emptied at our house during all the various gatherings we have had since returning home on October 3rd. Lest you think we are all lushes, I would remind you that we have had upwards of 30 people at some of these cookouts!

It occurred to us that properly adorned bottles, with their red wax and all, would make lovely luminaria. And so they do. The above display, complete with Mardi Gras beads and christmas lights, welcomes visitors to our house this holiday season.

The New Years holiday, of course, presents a time for both reflection and resolution. I've done more than my share of reflecting on this site, and, thanks to the encouragement from so many of you who read this each week, will continue to do so. But looking forward, what resolve do we have or hope for in the new year?

My New Year's Resolutions

1). To do what I can to make sure New Orleans is not forgotten in 2006. Rebuilding New Orleans would be a daunting proposition without all the political infighting that seems to be happening. You can help. Tell people to go to the "Go Anywhere" map at PBS.org and see for themselves the size of the devastation. Here are the instructions I posted in Update #52:

Point your browser to http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/orleans/map.html
Click the tiny "Go Anywhere" link just above the map.
Now move the map to your home town. You can use the arrows and zoom tools on the left side of the map.
Zoom in so you can clearly see the area of town you live in and center it on the screen. (You can do this by just grabbing the map while holding down your mouse button and moving it around).

2). This year I will be prepared, and follow my own (post-Katrina) Hurricane Readiness advice.

3). I will try to mend fences instead of build them.

4). Friends and family trump jobs and stuff – and I am going to try to make sure people know that.

And of course, lose weight, end world hunger, bring our troops home from Iraq, and instigate world peace. (Since I haven't been so successful at those last four in the past, you'll forgive me if I concentrate on the first four.)

Your 2006 Reading Assignments

I have been reading books about New Orleans ever since I first came to this city and fell in love with it. It's time I shared some of them with you. If you purchase by following the links below, I'll get something for it and that amount will go directly into the MacChuck Katrina Fund, which (at this point) will help displaced people such as Cary and Fay purchase stuff for their homes once they find new places to live, sometime in 2006.

	Why New Orleans Matters, by Tom Piazza. Like me, Tom is another person who is passionate about New Orleans. Unlike me, he actually has some books published and is far more capable than I of explaining why this incredibly unique place needs to be preserved. This book was written post-Katrina. Here are a couple of excerpts: Discussing the New Orleans tradition of Jazz Funerals: So which is real, the grief or the celebration? Both, simultaneously, and that is why it is profound. You might sometimes see a mother dancing behind a casket containing the body of her own dead son, with tears of grief running down her face. Most funeral traditions in our society are there to remind us that we are dust and to dust we shall return. In New Orleans the funerals remind us that Life is bigger than any individual life, and it will roll on, and for the short time that your individual life joins the big stream of Life, cut some decfent steps, for God's sake. No individual life lasts forever, and it is the responsibiliy of those left outside the walls of the boneyard to keep life going. This isn't escapism, or denial of grief; it is acceptance of the facts of life, the map of a profound relationship to the grief that is a part of life, and it will tell you something about why the real New Orleans spirit is never silly, or never just silly, in celebration, and never maudlin in grief. Under ordinary circumstances the word "irony" might come to mind, but the detachment implied by that word doesn't seem to quite fit the situation. It is a way of containing the opposites that are a part of life in a way that allows the individual, and the community, to function with style and grace, even wit, under the most adverse circumstances. Later in the book he faces the tragedy of Katrina first hand as he tries to help readers grasp the enormity of the loss on a personal level. After visiting his partner's house – which was not too far from my son Cary's – he had this to say: If you do not live in New Orleans you can try this simple experiment: Put a chalk mark on your wall at a point three feet from the floor, then imagine everything below that line coated with toxic scum, swollen with foul moisture. If this ifficult to imagine, take this book, place it in a sink filled with water and leave it there for a week and a half. Then place the soaked book on the floor and try to imagine the entire floor filled with several layers of such books. If it is still hard to envision this, take all of your books, place them in your bathtub and immerse them in a mixture of water, urine, spoiled food, feces, weed killer from the garage, and perhaps your beloved cat, preferably drowned and bloated. Make sure to turn the lights off and to leave the house as nearly as possible sealed to the fresh air, which, come to think of it, isn't really fresh air anymore in New Orleans. If this suggestion seems odd, out of the spirit of this book, as if the author has suddenly turned into an unpleasant stranger, that is because the author went crazy at some point that day, not for very long; maybe it was after we saw the members of the Oregon National Guard, three houses away under the hot midday sun in the deserted street, breathing hard, wiping their faces, one of them getting his boots hosed down with water as he sat trying not to vomit, and we learned that they had just pulled the bodies of a pair of elderly sisters from the basement apartment where they lived and had been trapped in the rising flood waters. By the time the sisters had tried to get out the water was so deep that they couldn't open the door against it, and their windows had locked burglar bars on them. And so it goes. This book is number one on my list. If you read no other book about New Orleans – why it should be saved and what happened to it just after Katrina and what its future might look like – this is the one to read. I can't emphasize this enough: BUY THIS BOOK!
	New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape, by Peirce Lewis. This book, originally written in 1976, was updated in 2003 with what the author calls the "Second Book." It is a fascinating look at what has been typically referred to as the "white exodus" of the sixties, in the context of an observer in that period, followed up my observations on the effects of that exodus all the way to the present. The author is a geographer and writes from that perspective. Along the way, you will learn about many of the city's charms, as well as its shortcomings.
	Rising Tide by John M. Barry. This is an amazing book that goes way back to when New Orleans was first founded and gives you incredible insight as to how and why it came to be. Using that as a backdrop it then moves forward to the Great Flood of 1927, presenting both maps and text describing the incredible climactic conditions that caused the flood, and then the bad decision to blow the levees, destroying the Beaver population in Southeast Louisiana. The blowing of the levees was intended to save New Orleans from flooding, but was found later to have been unnecessary. (Just so you know that political ineptness is not a phenomenon relegated exclusively to the 21st century). It also presents a fascinating look at how Herbert Hoover managed to become president of the United States, btw.
	An Unnatural Metropolis: Wrestling New Orleans From Nature, by Craig E. Colten. This is a more technical read, but no less fascinating, account of how New Orleans manages to keep nature at bay. Although copyright 2005, it was written before Katrina. The author is a professor of geology at Louisiana State University.
	Holding Back The Sea, by Christopher Hallowell. More story teller than historian, Hallowell presents the dire straits of the entire Louisiana coast by sharing the plight of its people. He gets into the heart of how the erosion of the wetlands are causing all sorts of problems. It is a very easy read and along the way you start to feel like you know the people who is is writing about in such a way you could just go up to them and start a conversation. The subtitle is "The Struggle for America's Legacy on the Gulf Coast." I highly recommend this book.
	I have not read Mr. Hallowell's previous book, People of the Bayou, but based on how much I enjoyed this book, I intend to.
	My New Orleans, edited by Rosemary James. Subtitled "Ballads to the Big Easy by Her Sons, Daughters, and Lovers," this is a collection of essays and poems by some of New Orleans' most beloved citizens, native and adopted. It contains writings from people like Andrei Codrescu, Paul Prudhomme, Harry Shearer, Roy Blount, Jr., Wynton Marsalis, and many others who you would probably not recognize unless you were from here. It is yet another testament to what is cool about New Orleans, and how her soul will survive.
	This one is for all you geeks out there: Building New Orleans: The Engineer's Role, by James S. Janssen. I have to admit, this is one of my favorites. Mr. Janssen was an engineer in the New Orleans area for 43 years, before retiring in 1973. During that time he probably learned more about how the pumping system in New Orleans worked than any other person alive. Here are just some of the facts you will learn from this book (and if you read these elsewhere, the author probably learned them from this book): New Orleans is settling slowly at a rate of a few feet per century. New Orleans has 83 miles of covered canals and 87 miles of open canals (compared to 44 mile total for Venice!). The port of New Orleans has 25 miles of wharves on the Mississippi River. The Mississippi River has approximately 250 tributaries. The Custom House in the French Quarter has settled approximately 3 feet below its original elevation. Adrien de Pauger, who laid out the French Quarter, built a windmill near the site of the present Custom House. When the wind failed, horse power was used.

At some point I will add a recommended reading section to the Links page with these and other books that will allow me to share New Orleans with you from a distance, but this should give you a good start.

PEOPLE

- Kathleen "Mama" Barrow is recovering nicely and has been moved from the hospital to Health West Rehabilitation Hospital. She has feeling on her left side, but very little control. The doctor said there is no brain damage, so she should be able to retrain her brain to control her left side. It is as though the part of the brain that controlled the left side of her body had its disk erased.

- Nichole Deshotel and Mike Moses are back in town for the New Year's holiday. They will be moving back to New Orleans after they visit some friends in North Carolina.

NEWS

- Behind the scenes, Tom Benson, the much maligned (and deservedly so) owner of the New Orleans Saints NFL franchise, has been spanked by NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue. It has been announced the Saints would play most - if not all - of their home games in the Superdome, which now is on the fast track for repairs so it can be used in time for the first regular season home game in 2006. It was originally estimated that the dome wouldn't be ready until sometime in November, at a cost of $125 million. The cost will be the same (or higher) but now they plan to have it ready for a football game by opening day in September. So that is settled, but we won't know until well into next year's football season whether or not the Saints will stay in New Orleans.

- Steven Palfi, a great New Orleans' filmmaker who made one of my favorite New Orleans' Documentaries, Piano Players Rarely Ever Play Together, killed himself over the past week. Years of his work was lost when his mid-city New Orleans home flooded, and he simply couldn't take it any more. He is the latest in an increased amount of suicides in New Orleans, as reported by the New York Times. I feel suicide may replace murder as a statistic New Orleans becomes all too well known for in the month's ahead.

- There was a story published in Newsweek, which you can read here, that got my attention. Here's an excerpt:

"New Orleans is our home, our culture," says Lisa. "It's everything." Larry and Lisa, who have been together since she was 18, have 10 children, ages 2 to 18. Before Katrina, they "had a good life with beaucoup stuff," says Lisa. There was the widescreen TV, their favorite spicy foods (red beans and rice) and federally subsidized rent (only $280 a month) for their large, yellow four-bedroom house.

It goes on to talk about how husband Larry could make $2500 as a roofer but makes hundreds more marching behind coffins (see reference above about Jazz Funerals). Lisa and Larry are probably fine folk, and they obviously like to be together – a lot. But ten kids or not, I have a problem with the federal government subsidizing housing for someone who is making about $30,000 per year. That isn't even close to the poverty level! It underscores part of what was wrong with New Orleans pre-Katrina. A post-Katrina New Orleans needs people who pull their own weight and put money back into the system, instead of take it out. I'm all for people like Lisa and Larry taking advantage of whatever the system allows, don't get me wrong. It is the system that has to be changed.

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