December 2007 Archives

Ashley describes our pre-Christmas lunch from the other day, sitting on the steps of the Lafitte Projects eating take-out from Dooky Chase's.

While we were there, the mist turned to a light drizzle, and I turns to him, and I says, "Ya know, we're sitting on the steps of a hurricane damaged, boarded up, abandoned and condemned public housing project, in the cold wind, in the rain, eating take-out food, and all I can think is 'This is the fucking life, man. This is it.'" And he agrees.

And I tasted the candied yams and said, "This is a vegetable? Jeezus, it tastes like bread pudding" and when I was done with my half I handed the cup to Ashley and he tasted it and he literally squealed with delight. I doubt any of y'all have ever heard Ashley squeal over his veggies before.

Later that day I called Tom Fitzmorris on The Food Show and told that story on the air and he agreed that New Orleans is pretty much the only place where a story like that makes perfect sense.

Broadcasting from a gated property inside a gated community in a development near a suburb of a suburb of Fort Worth, Texas (i.e., the in-laws place): Merry Christmas again, y'all.

...all anybody wants for Christmas, is Home.

Santa, bring everybody home.

I appreciate all the kind words, folks. I'm OK. That post was done right after I got home from taking the pictures so I was feeling pretty crappy. I didn't mean for it to be a big pity party for myself.

Lisa, your Oskar Schindler comment cracked me up.

I talked to Karen on the phone, and Karen has done more to save houses in this city than probably anybody else, and we both agreed that when you get emotionally involved in a house, then the first time you drive by and see an empty lot where it used to be, it feels like a punch in the stomach. And she's taken way more punches than I have, and she still feels it.

I think what goes on in my head when these things bother me, and one of the reasons I try to volunteer so much when I wasn't that big of a volunteer-type before the storm is a weird sort of survivor's guilt.

Mark, you're probably the only one that knows exactly what I mean when I explain this. New Orleans is where I grew up, it's where I'm from and it's the city that made me the person that I am. It's a city that I love more than any other place, but for various reasons, like Mark, I moved away a long time ago, and so on 8/29, I was a mere spectator. Other than making sure family members were safe, I had very little at risk personally other than memories.

It reminds me of a person portrayed in HBO's Band of Brothers, Private David Webster. Webster was part of Easy Company, landed during the D-Day operation behind Utah Beach and was wounded there, fought in Operation Market Garden in Holland and was wounded again, received the Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts, and stayed with the company throughout the entire war. But he was in the hospital recovering from wounds received in Holland when the unit was besieged that winter at Bastogne. Which was probably the defining moment of any American military unit during the war. And when he returned to Easy Company after Bastogne to finish out the war with them, he was never really fully accepted back by the other men. Because he wasn't at Bastogne. What he did before didn't count, and what he did afterward didn't count. Simply because he didn't go through hell at Bastogne. So he wasn't really one of them any more.

I feel like him a lot some times. Not that I wish I was flooded out, that would be nuts. But like a 101st veteran who got to avoid Bastogne, I am a New Orleanian who did not have to survive Katrina. I will always be lacking probably the most important experience that defines a New Orleanian of this generation.

I have another high school friend who is Nth generation Y'at, born on Mardi Gras Day in the back seat of a taxi stuck in parade crowds, and she has told me that amongst her writer friends, that division was not implicit, it was explicit. Writers who had lived here only a few years treated her as a tourist because during the storm she was teaching at a university in another state. "Sorry, honey, but you weren't here for it, so you don't really know." I know it hurts her quite a bit.

So I gut other people's houses not just because I want my city back, but because I did not have to gut out my own house. I wasn't here when the power was out and the only food was MREs. I was never displaced from my home, I never lost my job. I've never had to deal with Road Home, or Allstate, or FEMA.

And I cannot help but feel that that makes me somehow less of a New Orleanian than the people who did, even the people who moved here from other places only a few years ago, or the people who came home to unflooded houses and business as usual. And like my writer friend who now lives elsewhere, it stings a little. Even though I know none of you think of me that way, and really, I'm not posting this to generate a lot of "you're doing great, Ray" stuff in the comments, it's my own personal issue that does bother me and I have to work through it.

I've blogged about gutting Mrs. Cora's house. I've blogged about driving by it a year later seeing it slowly decay. And I've blogged about thinking about trying one more time to get into her house and see if we can salvage some important and historic family heirlooms.

And now it's all gone.

And of course I didn't do any of the things I planned to do. I got the phone numbers for the Foster daughters, but I didn't get around to calling. Every day I planned to call and every day it fell through the cracks and I just didn't do it. Just like I came up with the idea and registered a domain name for the Care Forgot project and then never did anything with it.

Today I feel like I'm all talk.

I feel like those guys in Do The Right Thing who sit on the corner all day long and talk and bitch about the Koreans who run the convenience store across the street and talk about how they should open their own store, til one of them stands up and says "'I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna do that.' You ain't gonna do a goddamn thing! I tell you what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna go across the street and give them damn Koreans some more o' my money."

I possibly had it in my power to do something for somebody, and I didn't do anything.

Merry Christmas.

Thanks to Ashley for this anti-rant from Craig Ferguson. I try, I don't always succeed, but I try not to make fun of fucked up addicted celebrities myself, because the only thing that kept me from being one of them was, well, celebrity.

It's long, it's heartfelt, and it's feckin' brilliant.

I've been doing lots of late-night writing these days, cranking out my third short story and up to three chapters in a potential novel, but my muse refuses to come out at home. Not sure if she hates kids or pets or unfolded laundry; regardless, I must coax her out with beverages, usually triple espressos.

I like to walk from the house up to Oak Street with my laptop. Did the usual midnight shuffle tonight when Rue shut down, down to Zotz which keeps later hours...alas, Zotz is keeping pussy advent hours, so I decided to take a chance on Carrollton Station. It was loud, so I doubled back down Dublin thinking to see what the Maple Leaf was like.

Halfway between Willow and Plum, I see a young man peek at me around the fence on the corner. A few seconds later he peeks around the corner again. As I get closer he disappears. As I arrive at Plum and think about crossing, I see him standing a half a block down. He sees me and starts toward me at double time. Me a big fucking target, obviously carrying a computer, likely a wallet, and it's that time of night when the hunting is good looking for all the drunk college students at the edge of the herd. I already knew that the closest populated area was back on Willow, so I turned around and double-timed it back. A look over my shoulder and the guy is now slowly hovering around the opposite corner.

Sometimes I hate this fucking city. I hate always looking over my shoulder like that. I hate having to mistrust people by default at certain times of night or certain situations. I hate that a Lusher middle school kid was robbed at gunpoint at Freret & Lowerline at 7:30 in the fucking morning and the school downplayed the incident, and now I worry when my kids are on their way home from school, and I don't like them out after dark. And we live in a safe neighborhood.

So Carrollton Station it is, because the crocs are out on Plum tonight. And I gotta tell you, if there's no live band playing and you don't mind loud classic rock, this is a great place to isolate. Endless supply of O'Doul's, and even wifi. And even though you have to put up with the odd Boston or Stevie Nicks swill, right now I am wallowing joyfully in the full eleven minute version of the motherfucking Chambers Brothers.

Now the time has come
There's no place to run
I might get burned up by the sun
But I had my fun
I've been loved and put aside
I've been crushed by the tumbling tide
And my soul has been psychedelicized

P.S. That was the abridged Sullivan Show version. Here's the acid-drenched original LP version:

Hulk Hogan to reign as Bacchus 2008.

Whatever happened to the days of Jackie Gleason?

Better choices:

Brad Pitt
Bill Murray
Dan Akroyd
John Goodman ('cept he's on the wagon)
Philip Seymour Hoffman
Paul Prudhomme

Speaking of, I mean, if we're all integrated and shit, and we've already had one cryogenic replicant (1996), one Belgian sociopath (1994), two white local jazz musicians (1980, 1993), and now next year one roided-up space alien, isn't it about fucking time we had a black Bacchus?

Bill Cosby
Denzel Washington
Chris Rock
Bernie Mac
Anybody named Marsalis, Jordan, or Batiste (or Baquet for that matter)
Kermit motherfuckin' Ruffins
Uncle Lionel
Al "Carnival Time" Johnson

Come on, y'all. Hulk Hogan is the best that the greatest minds of Uptown can come up with?

The Edwards campaign is hosting a conference call for the Louisiana campaign organization, and grassroots supporters are invited to attend.

Wednesday, December 19 at 7:00 p.m. ET (6:00 CST).

Signup is here.

Unfortunately I won't be able to make the call, I have a regular engagement on Wednesdays that I can't get out of. But at this point in the campaign, I'm pretty firmly in the Edwards camp, with Obama a close second and Hilllary in the "oh, crap, if I we have to, I guess so" pile. I'm hoping the rest of the halfwits will drop out soon after the first primaries.

[P.S.: Just to clear up any confusion, we're talking about John, not Edwin.]

An open letter, emailed to the whole motley crew. And I didn't say fuckmook even once!

Dear Councilmembers,

I am writing to you today as a citizen of New Orleans to urge you to oppose the impending destruction of public housing buildings in the city.

At a time when we are suffering a critical shortage of affordable housing;

at a time when a shortage of workers for working class and service industry jobs is hampering our reconstruction;

at a time when I and many of my friends are giving up weekend after weekend, neglecting our own families and our own lives and careers in order to volunteer to repair a pitifully small number of homes using volunteer labor and donated materials;

at THIS time in our history, you want to intentionally demolish a huge stock of low income housing that could easily and cheaply be put back into service to house the working class, the backbone of our city?

It is an outrage. I know, I know, I've heard the theories that "these projects were concentrations of crime and poverty and drugs." Ladies and gentlemen, have you lifted your heads up from your laptops and looked around at your home town lately? Even without public housing, this city is thick with neighborhoods that are concentrations of crime and poverty and drugs. What kind of fantastic logic would lead a right-thinking person to believe that the solution to crime and poverty and drugs is to bulldoze buildings? You aren't solving the problem, you're moving it. Tearing down the projects will not lift one person from poverty; will not pull one addict into sobriety; will not save one teenager from being gunned down or one shopkeeper from being robbed. What it will do is take thousands of hardworking, struggling, temporarily homeless New Orleanians and make them permanently homeless.

We will go from being a poorly educated, crime-ridden city with a housing shortage to a poorly educated, crime-ridden city with a catastrophic housing shortage.

For the record, if it counts for anything, if it helps you see past assumptions of demographics and rhetoric, I am a white, college-educated, financially well-off homeowner living in an affluent Uptown neighborhood. And I say we need to re-open public housing in this city and get our people back home.

And then let's get off our asses, as our mayor once said, and start working on REAL solutions for crime and poverty and drugs. And throw in education while you're at it.

And then maybe we can really start talking about building a better New Orleans in recovery.

Mrs. Cora Foster's house, slow-mo demolition in progress.

August 2006, right after salvaging some family heirlooms and giving up on gutting halfway through due to the structural unsoundness:

October 2007, I drove by to see what it looked like. Of all the houses I've done, this was one of the special ones because of the history involved:

Karen said she saw Mrs. Cora's daughters approving the demolition a couple of months ago, so I wasn't sure it would still be there, but this is what it looks like today:

The foliage is coming back, somebody has ripped the porch roof half off, and somebody pushed the front window right out of the frame. I thought about climbing in and looking around, but I didn't have a mold mask with me (the mold is still really bad), and something about that open window said "crackhead" to me.

Apparently the city's demolition plan is to let vandals and crackheads and the elements take these houses apart over a series of decades, so that we can all grow old watching it while we pass around Klonopin and Zoloft in candy dishes.

I harbor this fantasy that one day I will happen to drive by and they'll be knocking it down, and that back closet will be ripped open by a backhoe, that closet that we could never search well because it was on the other side of a collapsing floor and a head-high ramshackle pile of moldy rotting bedroom furniture. And the demo contractors will listen to me explain what might be in that rubble, and instead of having me arrested, they'll let me dig through the pile and I'll find all that documentation on Buddy Bolden and Honore Dutrey from the Smithsonian that we never found.

And I harbor this other fantasy that one day Karen says "Ray, whatcha doin' today?" and we just fucking go over there with some masks and trespass and go Katrina-spelunking and take one last crack at finding it now that the house is a little bit drier.

If I'd had a mask, I might have been tempted today, but it's not a safe house to be alone in. At this point, I imagine it's haunted. Buddy Bolden was a crazy motherfucker at the end, and they're making a movie about him now so his ghost is probably on the prowl.

I've ignored the so-called Netroots for a long while now in favor of the NOLA-Roots, so I didn't realize til today that YearlyKos actually beat the Commission on Presidential Debates to the punch in declaring New Orleans "not ready to hold conventions". Reminds me of the manager of Spinal Tap writing off their canceled gigs in Boston by saying "It's OK, it's not much of a college town".

The real reason they're going to Austin and not here in 2008 is that the Austin liberalocracy worships Markos and everything having to do with him and will be lining up to suck his dick when he gets off the plane, whereas half the New Orleans blogosphere wants to kick his ass for kicking us when we were down (calling for a boycott of the state mere months into the recovery because of one stupid Meemaw decision). One of them (him or Atrios) said he couldn't put his pregnant wife's health on the line in a state that would compromise health care by restricting abortion rights, back when we didn't even have doctors or hospitals. As if Louisiana is the only state with an anti-choice statehouse. They're at the top of my liberal clueless Fuckmook list.

Plus they got their asses handed to them when they tried to meddle in our "New Orleans politics is localer" election by putting it all on the line (with MyDD) for Karen Carter, without ever trying to grasp the nuances of New Orleans Democratic machine politics. Democrats have had a few congressional victories in the Austin suburbs lately so they'd rather go where they can rock out with their cock out than come here and look befuddled again.

Fuck DailyKos and their "50 state minus 1" strategy. Markos wouldn't even be able to show up, he hasn't retracted his boycott yet.

Besides, I'm sick of people showing up here with laptops and microphones wanting to help us. Bring lumber and sheetrock and checkbooks and investment. Bring teachers. Bring carpenters and electricians. Bring psychiatrists. Armchair activists, stay the fuck up in Dirt Farmer Land and tend to your own fucking country.

Sinn Fein. Orleans for the Orleanians. Carpetbloggers raus!

Assholes.

Good days are not a guarantee. They are a blessing.

Single-parenting it for a few days. Brother-in-law in town, thinking of staying. He and I and the boy and the girl dined at Vincents. Talked about movies old and new, skateboarding, pranks, music famous and obscure, sazeracs properly and improperly made, homework done and homework still to-do, and ex-girlfriends, recent and long-ago.

On the drive home the boy said "If you re-arrange the letters in Food Mart, you get Doom Fart." Ten minutes later we were still laughing and he said "I feel smart!" and we laughed some more.

By the time we got home we all agreed that "The Official Ironmen Rally Song" rules the fucking universe.

Everybody should have more good days.

bitter fish in crude oil sea
you don't have to bother me
you just have to join in on this song

to dine alone
to build a private zone
or trigger a synapse
and free us from our traps

I've been having trouble with William Gibson's latest one for weeks, only managing a couple of pages a night before falling asleep and not being able to keep track of all the intertwined plots and the dozen or so key characters. I finally gave up and grabbed the next thing on my pile, one I'd been looking forward to: Dedra Johnson's Sandrine's Letter To Tomorrow.

I could have read this in one sitting. I had to force myself to put it down at 2am the first night because I had work the next morning, but I read it some more at lunch and finished it the next night. It was like a punch in the stomach to me, the first night my heart was racing, and I'm still not completely over it days later. Others might react differently but if you or a loved one have lived through similar circumstances as Sandrine, reading this will be an emotional experience that you won't soon forget. I know for me it picked at some scabs that should have healed long ago.

Sandrine is a bookish light-skinned black girl growing up in New Orleans in the 1970's, being handed off between parents and stepparents with varying degrees of parental involvement. It's moving and it's shocking and it's sweet and it's brave, sometimes all at the same time.

This is brilliant and I want more like it.