Katrina Update #82Katrina Update #82It's not hot like Thomas Nuendel reported in Update #79. It's much worse. It's hotter and more humid. More like what our friend Max Wage would call "Africa Hot." Of course, in New Orleans, it's not just the heat - it's the humidity. It was 101 in the French Quarter this past Tuesday, and 104 out in Metairie. This isn't like Phoenix or Las Vegas, where you routinely feel temperatures of 110 or more with 20% (or less) humidity. There, you feel like you are baking. Here, you feel basted; or like a piece of bacon, broiling; your sweat just contributes to the humid air around you.
Our hot water tank sits outside in a shed behind our house, mostly unneeded, since the ground and the water pipes in it are heated during the day to temperatures acceptable for a shower. The irony is that once you turn on the faucets you have to wait for the water inside the pipes in the house to expel because it has been cooled by air conditioning. A cool drink of water is unheard of unless you have stored it in the fridge or cool it with ice. Wednesday night it was still 88 degrees on our front porch at 1 AM. And did I say humid? So humid it feels like you are taking a drink of air when you walk outside. I have heard the reason they keep track of the humidity here in New Orleans is so we don't drown when we breath. Maybe that is why I saw a jogger wearing a snorkel the other day. When you come inside, the less humid 82 degree air in your house feels positively cold as the sweat begins to finally evaporate from your skin.
And Katrina took away the one thing I could always say about the heat here: "no matter how hot it gets, I don't have to shovel it," -- a reference to all those winters spent in Wisconsin, shoveling snow just to get to the wood pile so we could bring in more wood for the Franklin stove. Practically the first thing I did upon arriving back in New Orleans was to start shoveling debris - which was filled with all sorts of tire-hating objects - from in front of my house and that of my neighbors.
This is the time of the year when New Orleanians usually pray for a tropical storm to come through and cool things down for a bit. The day after a tropical storm or hurricane - even one that passes away from you, such as Ivan did a couple of years ago - are amongst the best weather days you will ever experience on the planet. The storm sucks all the moisture out of the air and it is unseasonably cool - usually 10 to 15 degrees below normal.
But not this year. This year we welcome the frequent afternoon thunderstorm, but that's enough, thank you.
The media event of the year - perhaps the decade - is coming soon to a screen very near you: your TV - and it's not the 5th year anniversary of 9/11. The one year anniversary of Katrina is barrelling down the track, gathering steam with each passing day. Let's hope the bridge up ahead wasn't flooded out in the storm, and all this attention doesn't careen into the muck and mire of obscurity.
I'm working on some special surprises for the site, as I look towards moving the Katrina site down a level and taking my own small step towards getting along with things. Enough already!
Well, almost.
Spike Lee premiered his documentary "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts" in New Orleans this past Wednesday night. Although he defended it as something that is non-racial, early reviews suggest otherwise. I have long admired Spike Lee's skill as a filmmaker, while loathing his neo-racist approach to portraying the world as though African Americans are universally disadvantaged. While I have no intent to open a politically incorrect can of worms regarding racism, I nonetheless hasten to point out that Katrina was an equal opportunity destroyer, and a great equalizer between the classes. I'll reserve further comment until I see the film for myself next week.
But there is someone who has already seen it. New Orleans Times-Picayune television critic Dave Walker got a sneak preview of the movie, and here is what he had to say:
The word other critics likely will use most to describe Spike Lee's Hurricane Katrina documentary for HBO is "wrenching."
My word is "unfinished," even at four hours.
"When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts" locks in on the black Katrina experience, which should not come as a surprise to anybody who knows Lee's filmmaking career.
As such, "Levees" tells only half the story. Or, rather, 67.3 percent of it.
Frequently brilliantly, but still.
The tragic story of black New Orleans trapped in Katrina's path has found a supreme chronicler, but the flooded-out residents of Lakeview or Old Metairie who attend tonight's sold-out premiere at New Orleans Arena will spend all night sitting on a hard plastic chair and then wonder: Where am I in this?
Perhaps they'll be coming attractions. Lee has said he'd like to make "Levees" the first installment of a series of films about the ongoing battle to save New Orleans.
"Depending how this ends up, I would like to go back (and see) how the city ends up and not let this be the final statement on the Crescent City," Lee told TV critics last month in Los Angeles.
Those who were here know that, in virtually every way, Katrina was an indiscriminate storm that killed and destroyed without regard to ethnicity or economic condition. That is not the impression that the nation received watching coverage of the immediate aftermath of the storm, nor the one viewers will take away from Lee's documentary.
In one of his future installments, perhaps, will be the stories of Lakeview families whose losses were every bit as tragic as the stories told so movingly in this film.
Or the similar stories of the Asian families in eastern New Orleans, the Central American workers literally putting roofs over our heads again, the doctors and nurses who risked their lives to stay with patients in drowned hospitals, the tourists who suffered alongside locals in the Superdome and Ernest N. Morial Convention Center.
Four hours seems like a down payment.
As it is, Lee's epic-length film has a few significant flaws but packs an overall impact that will move anyone who invests the time to see it through.
It's not an easy task. Sadness and anger are the film's relentless themes, a sign of the project's emotional veracity.
For the next few weeks, we're counting on TV retrospectives just like this to tell and retell our story to the world.
Political ramifications
On that count, Lee picks his villains well. The Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency are, in order, the bad guys in this catastrophe. To a lesser extent, the local, regional and national politicians who made this mess and then failed to save their fellow Americans from it also take ire.
I'll let others parse the political impact of "When the Levees Broke," but not without sharing this nugget from one habitually quotable politician: New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin good-naturedly describes Air Force One as a "pimpmobile."
For those who can't make tonight's screening, HBO will premiere the film in two parts Monday and Tuesday at 8 p.m. All four hours will air in sequence on Aug. 29 at 7 p.m.
Act One watches the storm's approach and landfall, then the levee failures. Act Two is immediate aftermath. Act Three begins with the rescue diaspora, then circles back to catch up on some of the cultural history that makes the dispersal such an ongoing tragedy. Act Four examines recovery problems (FEMA, insurance companies) and solutions (wetlands restoration, improved levee protection).
The film is framed by Louis Armstrong's "Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans?" at the beginning and a concluding second-line rendition of "I'll Fly Away."
The overall structure is chronological, but Lee takes jogs in time to make editorial points.
The filmmaker is occasionally heard asking off-camera questions, but there is no narrator, just the voices of various witnesses both well-known and not.
Of them, standouts include Herbert Freeman Jr., whose mother died in a wheelchair outside the convention center; author Michael Eric Dyson, who is ruthless in recounting Condoleezza Rice's New York City shoe-shopping-and-evening-at-the-theater getaway while Ethel Freeman sat dying in the heat; and WWL talk radio host Garland Robinette, whose emotions still roil a full year after he narrated Katrina's deadly fly-by live on the air.
Adding a light touch
Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, once of eastern New Orleans and now a FEMA trailer resident, is the personification of her city's eternal secret weapon in the face of despair: humor.
Recounting her survival year, she's profane and prosecutorial, as much of a thread throughout the movie as Terence Blanchard's deep-blue score.
A New Orleans native and frequent Lee collaborator, Blanchard himself takes an on-camera role in the third act, acting as his mother's guide on her first trip back to her ruined Gentilly home.
A similar sequence in the last act shows actor Wendell Pierce, star of HBO's "The Wire" and another favorite son succeeding so triumphantly in the wider world of the arts, retelling the devastation to his father's Pontchartrain Park home, but also the subsequent and related damage done to his father's soul by a heartless insurance company.
The heart of Act One is a sequence in which schoolboy Glenn Hall III plays "St. James Infirmary" on his horn to accompany footage of people wading out of their neighborhoods, then Wynton Marsalis sings it.
Act Two ends with a haunting montage of floating bodies, which you hope could be the film's lowest mood trough.
Then comes the drowned child's funeral that concludes Act Three.
"Wrenching" is right, in other words.
Letting rumors fly
But the film's most troubling passage has been anticipated since HBO announced that Lee would make it.
Early in the opening act, several witnesses swear they heard explosions before the Florida Avenue breach.
Refutations are made in follow-up sound bites, but the overall takeaway is that intentional levee destruction might've, could've, probably happened.
For both Katrina and Betsy.
There is value in exploring how such impressions are made and last, but absent any real evidence beyond inexpert testimony -- and there is no evidence introduced in the film -- such notions must be presented as folklore and nothing more.
Here, they're presented as likely fact, in a confusing sequence of quotes and clips that mix references to Katrina and Betsy with the one time there actually was an intentional levee destruction, during the Mississippi River flood of 1927. That breach inundated St. Bernard Parish.
"During Hurricane Betsy, there were rumors, and it became almost an article of faith with people in the community that the 9th Ward flooded because there was an intentional breach of the levees," former New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial says to Lee's camera. "It was never investigated. It was neither proven nor disproven. In this case, for the government and others to sort of dismiss it without looking into all of it is not doing the people or the public a service."
In this context, the same could be said for statements just like that.
Morial is a frequently recurring character in early parts of this film, and his righteous indignation at how seared he was by watching his fellow New Orleanians suffer in the toxic water is leavened by the fact that he had eight years to plan and practice an evacuation that might've better served his city.
Later, a pastor from New York states as fact that "a master plan" has been put in place by "Trump land-grabbers" to "bulldoze down the 9th Ward."
A quote from Nagin denying that possibility comes just a few seconds after, but again, someone is allowed to make an explosive charge for which no evidence is evident.
In a flash-forward at the very opening of the story, while Katrina still spins in the Gulf, Lee jumps to a December congressional hearing at which Nagin says, "We come to you with facts."
It's intended as a setup device for the four hours to come, and it's largely backed up thereafter.
But the allies of New Orleans' enemies will obsess over the few sequences that forgo known facts, allowing them to too easily overlook the sweetness and sadness in Wendell Pierce's eyes when he talks about how his father paid insurance on that little house for 50 years and got nothing.
Awful anniversary
Among just a few other lapses, the levee section of "Levees" diminishes what could've been a profoundly compelling history of the most scarring unnatural disaster in recent American history.
Still, millions will watch and be hurt and angered, again, by what happened here and at points elsewhere on Katrina's track.
And that's a good thing, because here at K+1, New Orleans needs all of the sympathetic and accurately informed allies it can get.
The documentary premiered at the New Orleans Arena on this past Wednesday night. 7,000 free tickets were given away to the screening. One person came posted this review on the Uptown/Garden District forum on nola.com:
Things I have learned from watching spike lees slanted movie about Hurricane Katrina - New Orleans:
- The hurricane only hit black family's property.
- New Orleans was devastated and no other city or parish was affected by the hurricane.
- The government had a hurricane machine in the gulf and it destroyed only black people
- The resulting hurricane was a conspiracy by rich white politicians to steal land in New Orleans
- It was everyone else's fault that you stayed and drowned--don't say you couldn't get out--you could-even if you had no car-or money--I can understand if they didn't tell you to leave--but they did
- The levees were blown up by the white devils, and navy seals were in Strategic positions in the industrial canal and on orders from George bush they cut the barges loose to crash through the levees in the 9th ward
- Mississippi is reported to have a tree blown down.
- New Orleans has no white people.
- The hurricane blew a limb off a tree in the yard of an Alabama resident.
- When being rescued shoot at the people rescuing you and then say you were only signaling them as to where you were
- When you are hungry after a hurricane, steal a big screen TV.
- The hurricane did 23 billion dollars in improvements to New Orleans and the city is now welfare, looter and gang free; they are in your city.
- White folks don't make good news stories,or movies
- Don't give thanks to the thousands that came to help rescue you, instead complain because the government hasn't given you a debit card yet.
- Only black family members got separated in the hurricane rescue efforts.
- Ignore warnings to evacuate and the white folks will come get you and give you money for being stupid.
- It wasn't a flood--it was a man made event
- I feel so sorry for all those black folks.
- Oh, and it is all George Bush's fault.
I admit, I come to the table with an expectation of how Spike Lee will portray New Orleans, and it is not far off from those reviews above. But then again, what do I know. I'm white. I can no more share in the black experience than I can walk on the moon. To be fair, take a look at what CNN.com had to say about the film here. After reading the piece at CNN.com, I have no doubt Lee's film faithfully portrays black New Orleans. But who speaks for the other third (now half) of New Orleans (maybe The Discovery Channel, see below)?
<rant>
It's the "race thing" again, and I hate the "race thing." Lee always seems to place the emphasis on the plight of black people - as though other people have no plight. I don't think his films serve to promote the equality of "black" society with "white" society. If anything, they further polarize.
</rant>
Our friend Johnny Adriani - who you may remember also lost his home because of Katrina - sent the following letter to the editor of the Times-Picayune last week:
Dear Times-Picayune Editor:
Once again an outsider is coming in to New Orleans adding gasoline on to a smoldering fire. First we had the opportunist Jessie Jackson parading around and recreating a “March on Selma.” Now we have Spike Lee who is intent on stirring up more trouble by releasing a production based on eyewitness accounts of what people perceived to have occurred on the Industrial Canal.
In New Orleans we have entirely too many outsiders attempting to capitalize upon our losses. There are other, more honest, documentaries which should be aired by HBO. One in particular, was made by a University of Chicago student entitled “Renew Orleans: six months later.”
Chad Owen, the student, filmed this documentary for his senior thesis, not for fame or fortune. The vantagepoint comes from an unseasoned documentary maker who walks around the entire City in observance of the disconnected reconstruction effort.
It has been pointed out, numerous times now, that other sections of New Orleans deserve the same attention as the focus placed upon the Ninth Ward. We should attempt to bring Chad Owen back to New Orleans so that we can view the work which he compiled from three months of tireless effort on the streets of New Orleans searching for the true story – not one which is sensationalized.
If you have HBO, you can see part one of "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts" on Monday, August 21, 2006 at 8PM. Part two will air on Tuesday, August 22, 2006 at 8PM. If you don't have HBO, grab a box of Kleenex and go down to your local HBO-enabled pub to watch it, where you can drown your sorrows and toast our lost souls.
I'll let you know what I think after seeing the film next week - and you let me know what you think as well, will you?
You can read more about Spike Lee and the documentary on this Times-Picayune web page.
Something that looks just as promising - maybe a show for the rest of us, in fact - is Surviving Katrina on the Discovery Channel, which will air at 9PM ET/PT on Sunday, August 27, 2006.
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