April 2007 Archives

Doodling around with Google Maps (wanted to see if it looked like it was easy to park near McHardy's Chicken on N. Broad), and I ran across this:

NOFD HELP

If you zoom out, you will see that it's painted on the Fairgrounds parking lot.

NOLAFugees gets it on many levels:

“We’ve been trying for almost two years to put a price tag on the collective shame of the New Orleans power structure,” Sharpton said. “But apparently, you could pile a mound of dead brothers ten feet above sea level and not a single moneyed motherfucker blushes when we hit the streets.”

Update: More:

"Here's where the shit gets wild," Nagin warned listeners. The "money folk," according to Nagin, would still get behind the "business-oriented" Mayor, even against a well-known white candidate, because doing so would allow the conspiracy to remain veiled behind, as Nagin said, "a handsome black face."

Last September, the Arabi Wrecking Krewe spent a hot Saturday afternoon gutting the house of local free jazz legend and musical patriarch Kidd Jordan. (Some gutting pictures are here.)

Schroeder came along to pitch in and also to collect audio samples for his WTUL show, Community Gumbo, and on Saturday morning's show he'll be running a feature about Kidd and the day we wrecked his house. Tune in to 91.5FM at 9:00am, or catch the online audio archive later.

Kidd also plays at the Jazz Fest on Sunday at the WWOZ Jazz Tent at 12:35. If you're a fan of really out jazz along the lines of later Coltrane, Peter Brotzmann, John Zorn, Evan Parker, or Joe McPhee, you won't want to miss this. Jordan's biggest fans are all in Europe so catching a hometown show from him is a rare treat.

You had to wait until 72 minutes into the debate before anybody commented on New Orleans, or Katrina, or the Gulf Coast.

At that point, Obama mentioned it in passing. Spent about 5 words on the topic, or about a second and a half.

It was never mentioned again.

And this is the party that cares the most about us.

From a recent email conversation:

"and i got like 3/4 of the way through it and thought, "i'm full, i should put the rest away", but then i thought that what was left wasn't enough for a full helping next time, and i didn't want my future self to be disappointed in how little ice cream was left, so i ate it."

You tell that story to an alkie/addict, and they will know exactly what you're talking about.

Wonkette has a typically snarky piece about ABC News comparing and contrasting "mud huts" to mansions in a story about the housing market collapse.

But eagle-eyed Scout notices what Wonkette doesn't notice (since Wonkette ain't never been here): the house they picture as a "mud hut" with a For Sale sign is in fact in New Orleans, bearing a search-and-rescue X and a bathtub ring about chest high.

I mean, honestly. The mud can be shoveled out, ya know. That and the smell of fresh-baked cookies and this could be a cozy little fixer-upper! Uninsurable, but still...

Liam is currently icing down his first encounter with a buck moth caterpillar. It's amazing how big your hand can get when it's pissed off.

So I've been googling these things, and I have to admit I'm a little puzzled. Growing up here in the 70's and 80's, I vaguely remember caterpillars existing, and thinking that they probably stung, but I don't remember these kind and I don't remember them being this fearsome pestilence like they are now.

For people who have been here for a long time (like, born and raised)...have the caterpillars gotten really bad in the last 20 years or so? Or was I just lucky to grow up in a neighborhood without many of them? Most of my childhood we didn't have a whole ton of oak trees around, but we had bunches of oaks my teen years and I don't remember ever being afraid to go barefoot.

In fact lots of times it's pretty damn good.

I know I tend to bitch and moan a lot, and even though my lunch at Mandina's did fall through at the last minute, I had a damn fine weekend.

Friday French Quarter Festival and riding the Triumph around the city all afternoon with Cassidy.

Saturday brunch at Elizabeth's (Eggs Florentine...creamed spinach, potatoes, poached eggs and hollandaise with the best fried oysters I've had all season), then Gina's birthday dinner at Manale's (way more oysters at the oyster bar than we paid for, then I had the ribeye which was splendiferous).

Sunday, I took Liam over to the weekly music workshop at Tipitina's, where he got to jam onstage with the New Orleans Saxophone Quartet, and where I got confirmation that he knows enough about the sax to play along with the big folks, with a little coaching:

and then found out much to my surprise that he fucking jams on the drums when somebody asks him to "just lay down a groove":

We celebrated his jazz debut by hitting opening day at Hansen's (strawberry with condensed milk for me...it's a tradition) and right after I took this picture:

the crowds who'd been in line behind me came out looking all sadfaced, and we find out that the ancient motor on the custom sno-bliz machine had burnt out, and they were closing. I got the last sno-ball. Judge Hansen says he'll hopefully have it fixed by next Thursday so cross your fingers. Sorry. It was a really good sno-ball, too. Heh heh.

So by now everybody is talking about the "massacre" that took place yesterday in the birthplace of Henry Lee Lucas.

I don't know why, but I feel nothing about this. Not shock, not anger, not sadness. I don't even feel discomfort at not feeling anything. It doesn't really register. It's not even numbness. It's just nothing. Gina feels the same way. She thinks it's because we've become too comfortable with the daily carnage from Iraq. I almost feel like it's because I have post-Katrina tunnelvision...if it doesn't happen here, if it doesn't have to do with us and our recovery, I can't muster up the energy to care about it.

The local body count certainly affects me more, in both a physical and an emotional sense. And despite the best efforts of the Asian overachiever at Virginia Tech, our city is still on track to be the murder capital of 2007 on a per capita basis.

It's a selfish, provincial attitude, I know, and I'm not saying it as a retort or a challenge or a provocative statement. I'm not particularly proud that my mind is working this way. It just is what it is.

"They're trying to kill me," Yossarian told him calmly.

"What difference does that make?"

So, we're trying to buy a house. Mortgage: check. Inspections: check. Title company: check. Insurance: has caused a blood vessel to burst in my brain.

AIGDirect: The guy who answered the phone sounded like he'd just been moved up from the drive-through window at Burger King. Rude rude rude. He insists that my new house is worth $705,000 replacement value at an annual insurance premium of over $11,000, and that I cannot insure it for anything less. Needless to say I am not buying a house anywhere near that value, but even if I was, I wouldn't insure it with this douchebag. If that's the way they treat you when they're trying to sell to you, imagine how they act when you want to file a claim.

Republic: Will write me a policy. However, if my house was built before 1950 (it was), it can't be worth more than $300,000 (but it is). So let me understand the logic here: an old house in great condition in a historic neighborhood that didn't flood is not insurable by Republic, but if I have a post-war McMansion on a slab in Lakeview that got 15 feet of water, they'll write me a policy.

I want to scream.

Fireman's Fund: Will write me a policy. However, if my house was built before 1950 (it was), it can't be worth less than $750,000 (but it is).

I want to kill. Apparently these guys haven't talked to the folks at Republic.

So far, all I'm coming up with is FAIR Plan. The so-called insurance of last resort for people with bad credit. It's insane. I have money. My credit is spotless. I have a great house in a great neighborhood, but I'm falling into this weird crack where if I had either a shittier house or a mansion I could get insurance, but for a merely great house, I can't.

I'm not even complaining about the expense of the thing. They simply will not write me a policy.

We've been driving past Hansen's Sno-bliz almost every day for the past month, ever since they painted over the 7 on the wall so that it now reads "68 Years". But it's been closed, closed, closed.

Today Cass and I rode by again, and it was...closed.

BUT, Miss Ashley was outside doing some cleaning and planting, and she says it will re-open for the season this Sunday.

Don't get in my way. I plan on being first in line.

Breaux says he won't run for governor.

I pretty much shot my wad about the whole Blakely foot-in-mouth thing on various email lists, and now I've got nothing left for the blog.

For some thoughtful analysis that's free of the "mommy, he called me a bad word" rhetoric, see this brilliance from Celcus over at Some Came Running (via Adrastos).

It's been a shit week for me and lots of people I know, but today I have the day off, I'm having lunch at Mandina's, then biking to the French Quarter Fest, so shit week begone.

Nothing to do til then but listen to The Weddoes. Probably deeply relevant to at least one or two of you. Enjoy.

When I first learned from Adrastos that the guy who was shot and killed Uptown yesterday was Deacon John's son Keith Moore, my mind made a few quick leaps and I noticed in my mind, for the first time, the similarity between Deacon John and this short, funny kid I went to Franklin with named Keith Moore.

Sure enough, same guy.

I haven't seen him since high school, and in fact I don't think he actually finished at Franklin. I probably wouldn't have recognized him if his 43-year-old self passed me on the street. But I remember the kid version of Keith Moore and his evil, conspiratorial grin. I remember how smart he was and how twistedly funny he could be. How he could lean over at the most inappropriate time and whisper the most innapropriately funny thing about this kid or that teacher and you'd be the one who got in trouble for laughing out loud.

Some times I wonder if I went through my junior high and high school yearbooks, how many bodies I would be looking at. I know a kid I went to Alice Harte with who was found shot dead up by the levee many years ago, the victim of a drug deal gone bad. Now there's Keith. Probably several from Edna Karr.

Is there even a list of the names of these folks? Do they really just disappear after their brief time in the news? For a while this year I was trying to keep track of them all...their names, where they were from, how they died. I gave up after around 25 murders. It got so there wasn't even enough time in the day to keep track of them all.

It doesn't seem like this should be normal, to wonder these kinds of thoughts.

Housegutting today with retirees from New York. Mostly it was charming, including brunch afterwards at Elizabeth's in the Bywater (grillades and grits and OMFG the biscuits), and nothing at all like this video. I'm just saying.

(My kids find better stuff on YouTube than I do now.)

This is news to me: The Florida Avenue Bridge project is building a 4-lane elevated freeway that will zoom cars from the west bank of the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal all the way to Paris Avenue in Chalmette without anybody getting their feet wet.

Construction is slated to start in early 2008.

Shades of I-10 through the Treme?

[More details at the New Yorker's New Orleans Journal, which is a fantastic local blog.]

So an offhand email remark about the yipyipyipyipyip aliens from Sesame Street has gotten out of hand and migrated to Hiromi's blog, where she has gone on to harder stuff like the Ladybug Picnic.

Well, little girl, I see your Ladybug Picnic and raise you one Counting Pie Guy.

While canvassing with Common Ground last month, I wandered briefly through Joseph A. Hardin Elementary in the Lower 9th Ward. It was a sad and lonely place, untouched since the storm.

Then last week, while watching Children of Men for the second time, I was reminded of it when the protagonist and his cohorts are sheltering in an abandoned school. It was a similar scene...art work on the walls from kids who are who knows where, writing on the blackboards from classes long forgotten.

What's weird is that it never occurred to me why there would be an abandoned school in the film. Everything in Children of Men has a purpose, every backdrop makes a statement. State-sponsored suicide kits, immigrant concentration camps, "foogees" and "fishes" and End-times cults...everything is exactly in its place. But it only just now occurred to me that in a future without children, all schools would be abandoned and desolate. I missed the point of it completely. It's like my mind just glossed over it, because abandoned schools are such a fact of life where I live now and so it seemed unremarkable in the movie.

Anyway, when Athenae of First Draft took a picture of the front of the Hardin school, and I mentioned to Scout that I'd been inside, she asked if I wanted to go back to take pictures and I jumped at the chance.

Scout's pictures are here.

Mine are in a flickr set here.

But here are a few samples.

These photos were all taken more 19 months after the storm. The blackboards inside still say "August 26, 2005". The school has not been touched.

And it's a school in a neighborhood which no longer has children, so maybe it's not so far off from the movie anyway.

Idling away the day looking through my sitemeter, I notice that somebody recently arrived here by googling "jealous of broadmoor neighborhood".

Which says volumes about life in the city right now.

And which reminds me of a story my friend Jeff told me, from back when his partner used to work in the psych ward at San Francisco General. For a long time they had a patient on the ward, a very large black woman who was also very very crazy, who was pregnant with bats. And you couldn't tell the woman anything without her waving her hands and saying, "Y'all just jealous of my BATS!"

A few months later, I asked Jeff how the bat lady was doing, and he said, "Oh, she gave birth to the bats, and now they fly around her head all day and torment her." We weren't sure whether that meant she was getting better or getting worse.

Which, again, says volumes about life in the city right now.

I've been trying to muster up the energy to write a post-Geek Dinner post worthy of the fabulous party at Dangerblond's last Saturday, but as usually I waited long enough that the job has been done for me, and dB herself has collected all the links to all the words and pictures you could want.

Thanks, dB, it was the best ever.

Writers and readers from First Draft were in town last weekend to see K-ville up close and to put in a day of work. We hooked up with ACORN to finish gutting a house right next to the west levee of the London Avenue canal. Details and a few pictures in Athenae's post here. (I remember lots of pictures being taken, does anybody know who has the photo mother lode?)

Athenae talks about the neighbor, Mr. Victor, who wanted everybody on the crew to know every detail of what is wrong with the world post-Katrina. One thing he told us was that the Israeli army was guarding Dillard right after the storm (right across the canal from where we were working). Everybody I've asked has said that's crazy talk, and that just because the guy was super sweet and bought us all chicken doesn't mean you should believe everything he says. Israeli army? Indeed, it sounds farfetched.

So I turned to Google. And it turns out that Mr. Victor knows what he knows:

A few miles away from the French Quarter, another wealthy New Orleans businessman, James Reiss, who serves in Mayor Ray Nagin's administration as chairman of the city's Regional Transit Authority, brought in some heavy guns to guard the elite gated community of Audubon Place: Israeli mercenaries dressed in black and armed with M-16s. Two Israelis patrolling the gates outside Audubon told me they had served as professional soldiers in the Israeli military, and one boasted of having participated in the invasion of Lebanon. "We have been fighting the Palestinians all day, every day, our whole lives," one of them tells me. "Here in New Orleans, we are not guarding from terrorists." Then, tapping on his machine gun, he says, "Most Americans, when they see these things, that's enough to scare them."

The men work for ISI, which describes its employees as "veterans of the Israeli special task forces from the following Israeli government bodies: Israel Defense Force (IDF), Israel National Police Counter Terrorism units, Instructors of Israel National Police Counter Terrorism units, General Security Service (GSS or 'Shin Beit'), Other restricted intelligence agencies." The company was formed in 1993. Its website profile says: "Our up-to-date services meet the challenging needs for Homeland Security preparedness and overseas combat procedures and readiness. ISI is currently an approved vendor by the US Government to supply Homeland Security services."

ISI is Instinctive Shooting International. More information here if you feel like pursuing it.

As for the housegutting itself, I have to admit I'm somewhat conflicted about it lately. It does seem like the gutting era is coming to an end. Common Ground has finished all the houses on their list. Arabi Wrecking Krewe has shifted from a volunteer labor model to more of a grant coordination role. ACORN's web site says that they will be gutting through next August, but in talking with the coordinators there, they are already starting to wind down and may be done by the beginning of summer.

To be honest, as much as I want people to get back into their homes, I'll miss this. It's been as much therapy for me as anything else. It helps me a little with my (admittedly nonsensical) survivor's guilt over being in Austin when all this happened, and with stress relief from my job which seems to consume so much of my time that I'd rather be putting to use doing something for my city.

So what's next? Rebuilding. And that is so much harder to get off the ground. Rebuilding requires skills, insurance, and licensing. Even simply hanging sheetrock requires a level of thought and care and precision that ripping out sheetrock does not. Face it, if you make a mistake gutting a house, nobody is going to make you put it back up and gut it over again, so gutting is uniquely suited to throwing armies of unskilled spring breakers at in a way that reconstruction is not.

Habitat for Humanity has the construction thing down to a science, and massive resources to bring to bear, but their model is putting new homeowners (who qualify financially) into new homes. If you're one of the tens of thousands of New Orleanians who own a gutted home but can't scrape together enough money from insurance and Road Home to rebuild it, then Habitat can't help you. What we need is an organization like Habitat, with a different goal. We need Rehabitat for Humanity.

Mardi Gras Service Corps has put a couple of people back into their homes. ACORN and Arabi Wrecking Krewe are wrestling with how to do the same. Common Ground is focusing on other worthy causes.

There is a gap here, and I don't really know how to fix it.

In the high tech world, when a company develops a technology or a market that is outside of the business they're in, sometimes they spin off a new company. I wonder (and maybe I'm talking out my ass here) if there is some way that Habitat could spin off a small portion of their infrastructure and their expertise into a new Rehabitat organization, that would focus on the unique issues in the storm zone where people need to rebuild existing homes, not just build new homes. Give people like MGSC and ACORN a leg up rather than letting them struggle trying to build whole organizations from scratch while Habitat continues to follow its traditional model which doesn't exactly match the problem down here.

The recent dust-up over Google's changing out of satellite data for pre-Katrina images in their Google Maps application has had me scratching my head. I mean, I know this happened last fall and I know that we bitched about it in the blogosphere back then. And I know the maps have been out of date all winter because I've been househunting, and so every time I look at the satellite map of a potential new neighborhood, I'd have a conversation with the wife that went something like this:

R: Hey, check it out! There's a park with a baseball field right around the corner from that house on Constance!

G: Excellent!

R: How come I haven't seen it, though? I rode my bike all over that neighborhood.

G: Are you sure it's not a FEMA trailer park now?

R: Doh!

What I don't get is, for everybody who has been so pissed off about this the past week...where the fuck have you been? Did you really just notice? Do you just not use Google Maps much, or are you just kinda sorta generally oblivious to your surroundings until you find something on a blog to get outraged about? Did people really think that Ray Nagin would be doing something like this in order to increase tourism? Ferchrissakes, the same Ray Nagin who thinks Greg fucking Mefferts is some kind of technology guru is supposed to be able to have any kind of pull at Google?

Jeffrey now links to the official Google explanation (they made the change back in September, and last night they changed them back):

Given that the changes that affected New Orleans happened many months ago, we were a bit surprised by some of these recent comments. Nevertheless, we recognize the increasingly important role that imagery is coming to play in the public discourse, and so we're happy to say that we have been able to expedite the processing of recent (2006) aerial photography for the Gulf Coast area (already in process for an upcoming release) that is equal in resolution to the data it is replacing. That new data was published in Google Earth and Google Maps on Sunday evening.

[P.S.: the snarky tone above is not directed at my friends. Just those other people.]

[P.P.S.: This FEMA trailer park still had a baseball diamond on it last week, at least as far as Google Maps is concerned. There's a darling little camelback double for sale on Constance just a couple of blocks away, if you're interested. No word on when baseball might return to the neighborhood, though.]