New Orleans Can Thrive

Spillway

2019-06-24T13:05:00.000-05:00

As you can see from this one link I think a lot about the river.
Not only because it is the single most important drainage systems in the U.S. in terms of the the number of states it includes in its watershed (32 states and a few Canadian provinces) but also because it remains the shipping channel for much of the commerce that the country depends upon.

• The Mississippi has been above 11 feet – considered bank full – at the Carrollton Gage in New Orleans since last November. The river hit 15 feet in New Orleans on Feb. 23, which triggers daily inspections.
• For the first time in its history, the Bonnet Carre Spillway at Montz (located about 12 miles west of New Orleans) was opened two years in a row and also for the fist time, opened twice in the same year (February and May of this year).
• "On May 21, 2019, this flood event will become the longest in duration since the 135-day-long flood event in 1927 at Baton Rouge," AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Kristina Pydynowski said. "The river went above flood stage during the morning of Jan. 6 and is forecast to remain out of its banks through at least mid-June.""

With disastrous effects of the Anthropocene era here sooner than we imagined, New Orleans has to constantly check the mirror on the left (Upriver) as often as it does the right (Gulf) to make sure its okay during each event.

Here’s a LIDAR image of the Mississippi River along the border of Arkansas and Mississippi. This shows the past and present meanderings of the river:

How Mayors Can Expand Their Powers in the Age of New Localism - CityLab

2017-11-21T14:04:00.001-06:00

How Mayors Can Expand Their Powers in the Age of New Localism - CityLab

It is (Not) done but it is a good start

2017-05-24T07:16:00.001-05:00

(Mayor Landrieu's speech from May 22 as the Lee statue came down.)

Thank you for coming.

The soul of our beloved City is deeply rooted in a history that has evolved over thousands of years; rooted in a diverse people who have been here together every step of the way — for both good and for ill. It is a history that holds in its heart the stories of Native Americans — the Choctaw, Houma Nation, the Chitimacha. Of Hernando de Soto, Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the Acadians, the Islenos, the enslaved people from Senegambia, Free People of Colorix, the Haitians, the Germans, both the empires of France and Spain. The Italians, the Irish, the Cubans, the south and central Americans, the Vietnamese and so many more.

You see - New Orleans is truly a city of many nations, a melting pot, a bubbling cauldron of many cultures. There is no other place quite like it in the world that so eloquently exemplifies the uniquely American motto: e Pluribus Unum — out of many we are one. But there are also other truths about our city that we must confront. New Orleans was America's largest slave market: a port where hundreds of thousands of souls were bought, sold and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor of misery of rape, of torture. America was the place where nearly 4000 of our fellow citizens were lynched, 540 alone in Louisiana; where the courts enshrined 'separate but equal'; where Freedom riders coming to New Orleans were beaten to a bloody pulp. So when people say to me that the monuments in question are history, well what I just described is real history as well, and it is the searing truth.

And it immediately begs the questions; why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame... all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans. So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission. There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.

For America and New Orleans, it has been a long, winding road, marked by great tragedy and great triumph. But we cannot be afraid of our truth. As President George W. Bush said at the dedication ceremony for the National Museum of African American History & Culture, "A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them." So today I want to speak about why we chose to remove these four monuments to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, but also how and why this process can move us towards healing and understanding of each other. So, let's start with the facts.

The historic record is clear, the Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P.G.T. Beauregard statues were not erected just to honor these men, but as part of the movement which became known as The Cult of the Lost Cause. This 'cult' had one goal — through monuments and through other means — to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity. First erected over 166 years after the founding of our city and 19 years after the end of the Civil War, the monuments that we took down were meant to rebrand the history of our city and the ideals of a defeated Confederacy. It is self-evident that these men did not fight for the United States of America, They fought against it. They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots. These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.

After the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone's lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city. Should you have further doubt about the true goals of the Confederacy, in the very weeks before the war broke out, the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, made it clear that the Confederate cause was about maintaining slavery and white supremacy. He said in his now famous 'cornerstone speech' that the Confederacy's "cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."

Now, with these shocking words still ringing in your ears ... I want to try to gently peel from your hands the grip on a false narrative of our history that I think weakens us. And make straight a wrong turn we made many years ago — we can more closely connect with integrity to the founding principles of our nation and forge a clearer and straighter path toward a better city and a more perfect union.

Last year, President Barack Obama echoed these sentiments about the need to contextualize and remember all our history. He recalled a piece of stone, a slave auction block engraved with a marker commemorating a single moment in 1830 when Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay stood and spoke from it. President Obama said, "Consider what this artifact tells us about history ... on a stone where day after day for years, men, and women ... bound and bought and sold and bid like cattle on a stone worn down by the tragedy of over a thousand bare feet. For a long time the only thing we considered important, the singular thing we once chose to commemorate as history with a plaque were the unmemorable speeches of two powerful men."

A piece of stone — one stone. Both stories were history. One story told. One story forgotten or maybe even purposefully ignored. As clear as it is for me today ... for a long time, even though I grew up in one of New Orleans' most diverse neighborhoods, even with my family's long proud history of fighting for civil rights ... I must have passed by those monuments a million times without giving them a second thought. So I am not judging anybody, I am not judging people. We all take our own journey on race.

I just hope people listen like I did when my dear friend Wynton Marsalis helped me see the truth. He asked me to think about all the people who have left New Orleans because of our exclusionary attitudes. Another friend asked me to consider these four monuments from the perspective of an African American mother or father trying to explain to their fifth-grade daughter who Robert E. Lee is and why he stands atop of our beautiful city. Can you do it? Can you look into that young girl's eyes and convince her that Robert E. Lee is there to encourage her? Do you think she will feel inspired and hopeful by that story? Do these monuments help her see a future with limitless potential? Have you ever thought that if her potential is limited, yours and mine are too? We all know the answer to these very simple questions. When you look into this child's eyes is the moment when the searing truth comes into focus for us. This is the moment when we know what is right and what we must do. We can't walk away from this truth.

And I knew that taking down the monuments was going to be tough, but you elected me to do the right thing, not the easy thing and this is what that looks like. So relocating these Confederate monuments is not about taking something away from someone else. This is not about politics, this is not about blame or retaliation. This is not a naive quest to solve all our problems at once.

This is however about showing the whole world that we as a city and as a people are able to acknowledge, understand, reconcile and most importantly, choose a better future for ourselves making straight what has been crooked and making right what was wrong. Otherwise, we will continue to pay a price with discord, with division and yes with violence.

To literally put the Confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places of honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past. It is an affront to our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future. History cannot be changed. It cannot be moved like a statue. What is done is done. The Civil War is over, and the Confederacy lost and we are better for it. Surely we are far enough removed from this dark time to acknowledge that the cause of the Confederacy was wrong.

And in the second decade of the 21st century, asking African Americans — or anyone else — to drive by property that they own; occupied by reverential statues of men who fought to destroy the country and deny that person's humanity seems perverse and absurd. Centuries old wounds are still raw because they never healed right in the first place. Here is the essential truth. We are better together than we are apart.

Indivisibility is our essence. Isn't this the gift that the people of New Orleans have given to the world? We radiate beauty and grace in our food, in our music, in our architecture, in our joy of life, in our celebration of death; in everything that we do. We gave the world this funky thing called jazz, the most uniquely American art form that is developed across the ages from different cultures. Think about second lines, think about Mardi Gras, think about muffaletta, think about the Saints, gumbo, red beans and rice. By God, just think.

All we hold dear is created by throwing everything in the pot; creating, producing something better; everything a product of our historic diversity. We are proof that out of many we are one — and better for it! Out of many we are one — and we really do love it! And yet, we still seem to find so many excuses for not doing the right thing. Again, remember President Bush's words, "A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them."

We forget, we deny how much we really depend on each other, how much we need each other. We justify our silence and inaction by manufacturing noble causes that marinate in historical denial. We still find a way to say 'wait'/not so fast, but like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "wait has almost always meant never." We can't wait any longer. We need to change. And we need to change now.

No more waiting. This is not just about statues, this is about our attitudes and behavior as well. If we take these statues down and don't change to become a more open and inclusive society this would have all been in vain. While some have driven by these monuments every day and either revered their beauty or failed to see them at all, many of our neighbors and fellow Americans see them very clearly. Many are painfully aware of the long shadows their presence casts; not only literally but figuratively. And they clearly receive the message that the Confederacy and the cult of the lost cause intended to deliver.

Earlier this week, as the cult of the lost cause statue of P.G.T Beauregard came down, world renowned musician Terence Blanchard stood watch, his wife Robin and their two beautiful daughters at their side. Terence went to a high school on the edge of City Park named after one of America's greatest heroes and patriots, John F. Kennedy. But to get there he had to pass by this monument to a man who fought to deny him his humanity.

He said, "I've never looked at them as a source of pride ... it's always made me feel as if they were put there by people who don't respect us. This is something I never thought I'd see in my lifetime. It's a sign that the world is changing." Yes, Terence, it is and it is long overdue. Now is the time to send a new message to the next generation of New Orleanians who can follow in Terence and Robin's remarkable footsteps.

A message about the future, about the next 300 years and beyond; let us not miss this opportunity New Orleans and let us help the rest of the country do the same. Because now is the time for choosing. Now is the time to actually make this the City we always should have been, had we gotten it right in the first place.

We should stop for a moment and ask ourselves — at this point in our history — after Katrina, after Rita, after Ike, after Gustav, after the national recession, after the BP oil catastrophe and after the tornado — if presented with the opportunity to build monuments that told our story or to curate these particular spaces ... would these monuments be what we want the world to see? Is this really our story?

We have not erased history; we are becoming part of the city's history by righting the wrong image these monuments represent and crafting a better, more complete future for all our children and for future generations. And unlike when these Confederate monuments were first erected as symbols of white supremacy, we now have a chance to create not only new symbols but to do it together, as one people. In our blessed land, we all come to the table of democracy as equals. We have to reaffirm our commitment to a future where each citizen is guaranteed the uniquely American gifts of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

That is what really makes America great and today it is more important than ever to hold fast to these values and together say a self-evident truth that out of many we are one. That is why today we reclaim these spaces for the United States of America. Because we are one nation, not two; indivisible with liberty and justice for all ... not some. We all are part of one nation, all pledging allegiance to one flag, the flag of the United States of America. And New Orleanians are in ... all of the way. It is in this union and in this truth that real patriotism is rooted and flourishes. Instead of revering a 4-year brief historical aberration that was called the Confederacy we can celebrate all 300 years of our rich, diverse history as a place named New Orleans and set the tone for the next 300 years.

After decades of public debate, of anger, of anxiety, of anticipation, of humiliation and of frustration. After public hearings and approvals from three separate community led commissions. After two robust public hearings and a 6-1 vote by the duly elected New Orleans City Council. After review by 13 different federal and state judges. The full weight of the legislative, executive and judicial branches of government has been brought to bear and the monuments in accordance with the law have been removed. So now is the time to come together and heal and focus on our larger task. Not only building new symbols but making this city a beautiful manifestation of what is possible and what we as a people can become.

Let us remember what the once exiled, imprisoned and now universally loved Nelson Mandela and what he said after the fall of apartheid. "If the pain has often been unbearable and the revelations shocking to all of us, it is because they indeed bring us the beginnings of a common understanding of what happened and a steady restoration of the nation's humanity." So before we part let us again state the truth clearly.

The Confederacy was on the wrong side of history and humanity. It sought to tear apart our nation and subjugate our fellow Americans to slavery. This is the history we should never forget and one that we should never again put on a pedestal to be revered. As a community, we must recognize the significance of removing New Orleans' Confederate monuments. It is our acknowledgment that now is the time to take stock of, and then move passed, a painful part of our history.

Anything less would render generations of courageous struggle and soul-searching a truly lost cause. Anything less would fall short of the immortal words of our greatest President Abraham Lincoln, who with an open heart and clarity of purpose calls on us today to unite as one people when he said: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds ... to do all which may achieve and cherish — a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

Thank you.

"I worked for the governor of Louisiana during Katrina. Here are 5 things I learned."

2015-08-21T06:00:00.001-05:00

"To my surprise, those television reporters were often reluctant to issue a correction. They simply changed their stories slightly the next time. I learned, especially with TV news, that the truth is mostly a work in progress."

"While the US Coast Guard did a heroic job of plucking many people from rooftops, there are people today who think that federal agency made all the rescues. In truth, there were more people saved by state employees on Wildlife and Fisheries boats and National Guard helicopters."

"...One afternoon, I arrived in New Orleans with Gov. Blanco, and we went directly to City Hall. But Nagin was gone, and nobody knew where he was. On another occasion, reaching Mayor Nagin meant me calling one of his staff members who had evacuated to Houston. She relayed the message to someone in New Orleans who, in turn, got our message to the mayor."
I worked for the governor of Louisiana during Katrina. Here are 5 things I learned. - Vox

New Orleans, the Reluctant 'City Laboratory'

2015-08-20T12:32:00.001-05:00

This article is well done, although it could have also quoted Tracie Washington's famous quote (made into a poster by Fitzgerald Letterpress) found about town a few years ago:

10 Years After Katrina, New Orleans Comes to Terms With Being an Urban Laboratory - CityLab

For New Orleans to thrive, we must reduce unemployment for black men: Ron McClain | NOLA.com

2015-08-14T13:07:00.001-05:00

amen to this.

For New Orleans to thrive, we must reduce unemployment for black men: Ron McClain | NOLA.com

America’s transportation system discriminates against minorities and poor: Federal funding for roads, buses, and mass transit still segregates Americans.

2015-03-01T13:30:00.001-06:00

America’s transportation system discriminates against minorities and poor: Federal funding for roads, buses, and mass transit still segregates Americans.

Lump of coal for DNR

2014-12-30T15:50:00.004-06:00

The Louisiana Department of Natural Resources' Office of Conservation issued a drilling permit to Helis Oil late on Friday afternoon, December 19. That was not too late to catch the attention of Santa and his elves, who attempted to deliver a bag of coal to the department on Christmas Eve morning.

Facebook page

Savio's Free Speech Movement speech anniversary

2014-12-03T07:30:00.000-06:00

For me, activism is made great through those all too few moments of courage and clarity at crucial and tense times.That is how I think of Mario Savio's speech during the Free Speech Movement in 1964. Today marks the anniversary of his speech. I think of his voice rising during this part quite often actually:
"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"
His short life showed his commitment to the struggle against tyranny of all kinds among free and self-organized people and to direct action, even as far as to step down from leadership when he felt it necessary, since in his own words: “I should do a great disservice to our community if I were to make myself indispensable.”

Down the Dirt Road Blues at the Dew Drop Social and Benevolent Hall

2014-11-30T10:40:00.002-06:00

First show at 4:00 especially for students
Second show at 6:30 open to everyone

No Admission Charge - Learn more about the Development of American Blues

More about Dew Drop

Spencer Bohren's music education program, Down the Dirt Road Blues, follows the journey of a single song as it travels through America's history and culture. From its pre-slavery African beginning, the song slowly transforms into Mississippi blues, Memphis dance music, a banjo tune from Appalachia, Hank Williams' early country music, Muddy Waters' electric Chicago blues, and finally into folk music and rock 'n' roll, with Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. Spencer's concurrent narrative gives students a historical context for the changes that drive the music forward.

Bread at the circus: 300 years of New Orleans baking event

2014-11-29T18:24:00.002-06:00

Come learn how and why bread like this has been baking every morning in New Orleans for nearly 300 years.

As historian Roger Baudier wrote, “The baking industry is regarded as the oldest business in the world. In New Orleans, founded in 1718, and for nearly 85 years the capital of a vast colonial empire, baking is also the oldest business.” We will understand the history of bakeries in New Orleans through photographs, discussions, tastings, samples, and interviews with current and former New Orleans bakers. We will look beyond and through the snow white slice of French Bread and Poor Boy bread; the event will dive into the rich history of the city and region, which was and is home to a vast quilt of bakeries, grains, flours, and styles of breads. This story, most importantly, will be told through the voices of the men and women who make our daily bread. It is important for their voices to be heard in the increasing cacophony of hyperboles and superlatives that distort the true creation of real food, by real working people.
This Tuesday, at 7pm, at Purveyor of Fine Wines with St. James Cheese Company, Gracious Bakery, James Smith of La Louisiana/Peristyle, and Sal LoGiudice of United Bakery. Mr. Sal whose shop closed under the water of Katrina: he will be graciously traveling from Pearl River to participate in this event.

Major Rethink

2014-11-02T11:29:00.000-06:00

Thanks to my friend Nicole for posting the article linked below on how to rethink progressive progress at the political level. It is an engrossing read on the eve of elections across the U.S. where excellent people are exhorting their friends and neighbors to vote using language like "if you don't vote, don't complain", or "your only chance to speak up is this Tuesday" which always strike me as the same type of empty warnings as moms and dads threatening to cancel Christmas or turn the car around three miles from Disneyland. Let's be clear: Voting is a privilege we have in this country that should be exercised by all, but people retain the right to agitate no matter what they do or don't do on election day. And why should they only speak up on Tuesday and only to choose someone else to work on these issues? Can some not care and work on these things the rest of the week, month, year too if they so choose?

Here's my own deal: I vote but only in local elections and initiatives and only when there is a measurable difference between the candidates. I stopped voting in statewide and national elections after 2005 actually, when my city went underwater and the politics played with it on both sides sickened me. I decided that my time and interest to work on real change had been long sapped by my extensive work on electoral politics, which had included working on races at the local, state and national level, even paying my own way to work on GOTV in Florida during the 2004 election. That even while I saw the amount of money and influence wielded by corporations on all manner of political candidates, I worked and voted for them because (I thought cleverly) I saw ahead to the chessboard moves that might lead us to a stacked Supreme Court, a president with jingoistic fears and adept administrators behind him or to congresspeople with unyielding corporate connections without any desire for lifting all boats. I feared the "opposition" gaining control of one of the apparatus of government, even as I saw both sides becoming closer in ideology and more importantly, almost identical in those that they allowed access as influencers and advisors.

Well to no surprise to me those things happened anyway and continue to happen because of some of the very ideas that Don Hazen points out in his article, especially because of the money controlling elections and the revolving door of politicians turned lobbyists. Culturally, is it a huge win that a African-American president was elected? Absolutely, and I was moved by the connections that I had after that historic day, especially with people of color who exhibited a type of hope rarely seen in our country, but let's be honest-what we elected was a centrist Democrat with starter policies and no plan for a lasting peace or any how to handle the ecological apocalypse ahead. The next election promises to offer an even more hawkish Democrat with more status quo friends than Obama, but since it's likely a female candidate and former first lady at the helm of one of the two parties for the first time in U.S. history, we're supposed to hold our noses and vote.

Maybe we should only vote for people we believe in? (I remember Nader suggesting 20 or more years ago that we add a "none of the above" on ballots. Under Nader's proposal, if "none of the above" as a choice on the ballot obtains a majority or plurality of the votes cast in an election, the election's results would be invalidated. The losing candidates would be dismissed. A new election would then be called, possibly within 30 to 45 days of the first election. New candidates would have to be nominated, and those defeated in the first round of balloting could not stand for election again.)

And maybe we should take some of the regular decision-making back on our own shoulders? Bring organizing back?

Maybe we should recognize that most politicians - even "good ones"- do not forward ideas out of their own good hearts and brave minds, especially at any level past local, but instead savvy politicians of all stripes sense which way the stream is flowing and jump in with a boat to be carried along when it can assist their next election. (See the Grace Lee Boggs quote over to the right of this page.)

We need to remember that culturally, this country has shifted in profound ways: first with the sexual revolution in the 1970s (people often talk about the 1960s but that was the "counterculture" part of it, the 1970s was when our moms and dads adopted these freedoms and truly made it a shift), and then a frightening shift to a "greed is good" glee which allowed trickle down global capitalism to gain a cultural hipness or demonization (depending on where you sat) that it had never had before, and then with the recent explosion of social media and computer technology a shift to a no holds-barred, no gatekeepers discourse that is never-ending and often childish, sometimes hateful but also oddly democratic in cultural terms. The deal is that all of those shifts and more continue to weigh on us and to influence us; the new does not wipe out what came before. Those shifts, once noticed and accepted as real were then adopted by politicians, often resulting in weak political gains that could have been much more robust if they had not been handed off at too early to the bureaucratic behometh of Congress to solve for us.

The younger generation in this country are entirely connected to the world and to each other 24 hours a day while comfortably living amid a jumble of family types and dizzying numbers of popular trends. Yet, the hardening of the economic strata is apparent to them, seen in the increasing number of them that believe that owning a house or even a car is not necessary to their well-being. It is also important to note that for the first time in human history, the majority of people will live in a city and that means that more of us will have to come to terms with having diversity of neighbors within sight and sound as well as the necessity of weighing in on decisions on aging infrastructure and new regional opportunities.

The sharing and conditional ownership (call it an Uber/airbnb/popup world) shift seems to be next, even as politicians and their sidelines scramble to understand who is who and what is actually going on. Trust me, officials will "allow" these new economies to grow, which I believe is a good thing even as I understand that the few that control the bulk of the ideas will just be replaced by others just like them-people chiefly interested in commodifying this sharing impulse or in gaining an unfair advantage by manipulating a weakness in entrepreneurial activity regulation. Since this is as true in this economy as it was in the Gilded Age or in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, social critics and trade unionists remain necessary to agitate to get a balance so that whatever new technology is at hand, it is not only the few that gain.
The reality is neither banning nor allowing unchecked activity is the appropriate answer to getting to the best version. The decision on which of these ideas plays out to be the most useful will be made by users and means therefore they will exist as long as they are useful and without deep penalties that are evident to those users. Most people do not operate in a nihilistic framework, but instead will accept information about the positive and negative impact of their decisions. When we do see a selfish agenda among our neighbors, we should recognize that they are operating from fear where they feel they will be ostensibly left behind. I recently heard the author Marilynne Robinson term the reactionary strain in the country as people using fear to make themselves the hero in their own narrative while pitting everyone as against them to strengthen that narrative. That struck me as accurate and if so, could be breached by showing our neighbors that their narrative will be more resilient with others involved and if no one is left back.
So the hope is that it these technologies and ideas are also used by those with empathy and innovative ideas for reducing inequities, as they have been already by thousands of organizers on climate change, violence against women and authoritative regime overthrow among many other issues.

So, I really appreciate his article and feel that this along with George Packer's "The Broken Contract" and Rebecca Solnit's essays especially The Case For Hope are some of the necessary readings for anyone determined to be an clear-headed active citizen in the US in these days.

Here are two excerpts from Don Hazen's piece that I especially agreed with:
..."I wrote an article, " The 4 Plagues: Getting a Handle on the Coming Apocalypse," about the four especially powerful and pernicious overarching economic and political mechanisms operating in our country that are fundamentally responsible for the situation we are in. They are privatization, financialization, militarization and criminalization, which together are producing a steadily creeping authoritarianism—a new authoritarianism—to fit our times....
.. We need to get more radical, and more self-supporting, both financially and emotionally. I am not advocating for despair or for dropping out. But we absolutely need to work more locally. The old adage that "all politics is local" is still very true. It is clear that very little can be accomplished on the national level of law-making."

Alternet essay

Don't defer post

oil spill data

2014-11-02T00:08:00.001-05:00

Thursday: Mental and Spiritual Health Panel Discussion, Friday: The Cultural Ecology of New Orleans Speech and Music

2014-10-11T12:30:00.000-05:00

Thursday, October 16 6:00pm

Ashe' Cultural Arts Center
1712 Oretha C Haley Blvd, New Orleans, Louisiana 70113

New Orleans has always been full of things to make you well, including traditional and alternative healing practices, and at least equally full of things to make you sick. Where and how do we find relief? What do we each find healing? Join a pharmacist, photographer, two spiritual healers, and a mental health technician for a conversation about mental, physical, and spiritual health in New Orleans. This interdisciplinary program springs from the map “Juju and Cuckoo: Taking Care of Crazy” in Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas and will be moderated by Rebecca Snedeker. In addition to the discussion, we will also have an interactive mapmaking activity.

Panelists include:

Janet “Sula Spirit” Evans – Akan priestess; author, Spirit of the Orisha Book and CD project; co-owner of King & Queen Emporium, Intl

Adam Graff – Mental health technician; member of the NOPD Mobile Crisis Unit

Randall Schexnayder, RPh, MSPH - Assistant Dean for Student Affairs, Xavier University College of Pharmacy

Lewis Watts – Photographer, archivist/curator, and professor of Art at UC Santa Cruz; coauthor of New Orleans Suite: Music and Culture in Transition

Reza "Cinnamon Black" Bazile - Voidooiene; founder of the Treme Million-Dollar Baby Dolls

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SPECIAL CHAUTAUQUA/LYCEUM FREE LECTURE

Friday, October 17, 7:00-9:00 pm
Location: Loyola University, 6363 St. Charles Avenue, Miller Hall 114
Presenter: Shane Lief

This presentation focuses on the ways that people communicate through everyday speech and musical performances in New Orleans. These patterns of interaction are considered together under the rubric of “vocalization practices,” which reveal the complex history of cultural exchanges in the city as well as throughout Louisiana during the past several centuries. Speech communities including people of indigenous, African, and European origins have all played a role in generating the current patterns of vocalization. With a better understanding of the complex roots of social interaction, we can have greater insights into human communication and how all people negotiate meaning in everyday life.

FRAN LEBOWITZ On the Tourist Economy

2014-09-18T06:22:00.004-05:00

From Paper Magazine in an interview with writer/curmudgeon Fran Lebowitz:

Tourists
Tourism as a number-one industry is a terrible, terrible idea for any city, especially New York. If you were going to turn a city, which is a place where people live, into a tourist attraction, you're going to have to make it a place that people who don't live here, like. So I object to living in a place for people who don't live here. As it became more and more intense, it became more and more a place where the actual citizens are pushed out to the edges. A friend of mine always says this: "I don't care what kind of aesthetic people have; the second they have a kid, their house becomes hor- rible." The second you have a kid, whether you think it's going to or not, your house becomes full of plastic junk. So this is the same with tourists. The city will sink to that level of having a house of three- year-old children, so they like certain things, they don't like certain things. And they like things that you don't like, or that I don't like. I do object to it. And I would like to see fewer and fewer tourists and I'm tired of hearing about how much money they bring to the city because the kind of jobs the tourists bring to the city are the worst jobs. They're hotel maid jobs, they're jobs that have no future to them.

Scientists Find 'Direct Link' Between Earthquakes And Process Used For Oil And Gas Drilling

2014-09-16T16:09:00.001-05:00

In a study to be published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America on Tuesday, the scientists presented “several lines of evidence [that] suggest the earthquakes in the area are directly related to the disposal of wastewater” deep underground, according to a BSSA press release. Fracking and conventional natural gas companies routinely dispose of large amounts of wastewater underground after drilling. During fracking, the water is mixed with chemicals and sand, to “fracture” underground shale rock formations and make gas easier to extract.
The USGS research is just the latest in a string of studies that have suggested the disposed water is migrating along dormant fault lines, changing their state of stress, and causing them to fail.

Scientists Find 'Direct Link' Between Earthquakes And Process Used For Oil And Gas Drilling | ThinkProgress

Charity Hospital building could be used for treatment of mentally ill: Janet Hays

2014-09-07T16:02:00.001-05:00

If only our elected leaders would listen to activists like this:

We are at a critical juncture in New Orleans. The fate of people afflicted with mental illness rests largely on whether or not we as a society choose to continue to incarcerate sick people under the Department of Corrections, or rather, create alternative facilities where patients can be cared for in a local hospital environment close to their families and community.

entire piece on nola.com

Any organizations or parties that are interested in being part of this initiative should send an email to SaveCharityHospital@gmail.com with the subject line: "Charity Vision.

Chris Rose remembers again.

2014-08-31T12:12:00.002-05:00

Very little of what was written right after the 2005 levee breaks was better than Chris Rose's emotional and wry work, written when daily life here was seesawing from dark and bitter to bright and hopeful to despairing, based on what you were viewing or who you were listening to or if City Hall was involved. Maybe it's because he had viewed and written about the city pre-2005 with ironic counterpoint to the other "homespun" columnists at the Times Picayune (unfortunately, sometimes his also had eye-rolling levels of condescension), but post 2006+ he said things in his writing that no one else was able to say without sounding pitiful or manipulative. His thoughts were similar to mine and to many others here then-doubtful that the place could be livable again, grateful again and again for the talented artists and musicians and chefs who sustained our souls, sad about the distance we now had from those who could not understand why we felt that we needed to stay. The rumor around town was that he ended up being a bit lost after this early period and whenever I would see him in the street in those mid Reconstruction years, he did seem very alone and angry. I hope he is better.

This was posted on the 9th anniversary on Chris' Facebook page:

=====================================================================================
Chris Rose

Last one, I promise.
On this weekend of memory and forgetting, a lot of stories from my book have been traveling the information superhighway with great speed and frequency. At the risk of overindulgence, I'm posting one last Katrina memento, something a friend emailed me yesterday and which was not in my book.
Thing is, I don't remember writing this story, though I remember the events described as if it were yesterday. And yesterday was, in fact, the first time I ever read this story since I wrote it. And what struck me then is similar to many comments folks have posted about my Katrina stories this weekend: Although I wrote it more than 7 years ago, it sounds like it could have been written, well......yesterday.
Another similarity is this: Folks tell me my stories make them cry sometimes. And I get that. It was not an easy time. But I've read most of them so dang many times that I guess I'm kind of inured to it all. And then my friend sent me this story yesterday. And now, well....
Now I really get it.

FINDING MY WAY HOME
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
By Chris Rose
I have been off work for a long time. For a month, I was out of town and blissfully unplugged from the New Orleans news cycle, and while I was gone, I had the same recurring notion, every day, over and over, unwavering and intractable.
It was this: I need to get out of New Orleans. I need to leave. For my health, my sanity, my family, my sobriety, my chakra, my feng shui and everything else, real and imagined, nostalgic and unpronounceable.
You don't need me to list the reasons. They're the same ones everyone has in a town where people steal from public schools, no one uses trash cans and federal flood protection is a Big Lie.
I had an appointment at my eye doctor shortly after I returned to New Orleans and while he was shining that little blue torch into my retinas he told me he lives in St. Charles Parish and his homeowners insurance before the Thing was $2,700 a year and now it's $9,000 and he said: "I swear it's like they want to make it impossible to live here, like they want us all to leave. It's like they want to clear all the people out of south Louisiana and minimize the risk."
In a less civil society, the masses would rise up and parade the scalawags from Allstate and their fellow profiteers through the town square in shackles and let their aggrieved victims -- er, clients -- have their way with them, but this is America, the wellspring of democracy and due process, so instead we gripe about it at work to no end and somebody somewhere sets up a committee to look into it and in five years they'll tell us mistakes were made.
But here's the thing: We're not leaving. Not my eye doctor. Not me. Not because of a corrupt insurance industry or incompetent federal engineers or murderous children. And if you read that sentence, it makes absolutely no sense to stay here, especially as experts forewarn of a particularly turbulent storm season in the offing.
But I had a conversation the other night with a woman who likened living in New Orleans to an abusive relationship where you bear the obvious scars of a love all wrong and everyone knows it but you.
You leave once and you leave again -- if not physically, then emotionally -- but for reasons not entirely clear to you (nor your friends, family or psychiatrist), you keep coming back even though your mental condition could best be described as marathon episodes of "Cops," "Cheaters" and "Punk'd" playing on an endless loop on the giant cognitive plasma screen in your head.
And you tell them -- those who do not understand: You don't know her other side. You've never experienced her soft bedroom manner or seen her when she's not all wound up in a blue rage and throwing dishes around the trailer. She's so creative and empathetic; all artists are temperamental. She's so romantic. And she doesn't smell like anyone else.
New Orleans, she smells like rain, sweet olive, coffee and sex.
For the past two weeks, I have been back here in town living the life. I went on two field trips with my kids, one to Café du Monde and one to Gelato, a new Italian deli and glacerie on Oak Street, and I was thinking: In most towns, they take the kids to museums on field trips. Here, they take them to eat.
The final day of classes began just like every other day at Lusher Elementary, my kids' school: The music teachers plugged in their guitar and violin and led the entire student body in a song at the morning assembly.
Every morning at my kids' school begins with a history lesson in rock 'n' roll. They make movies out of ideas like this.
And as often as not, the composition is drawn from the New Orleans musical pantheon -- Fats or the Nevilles or all that Iko Iko, Hey Pocky Way stuff -- and on the last day this year they sang "Don't You Just Know It" by Huey Piano Smith and all the kids went crazy on the chorus and its "ooba dooba dooba dooba" refrain and I realized that our kids speak a different musical language than children in other places and we have cultural icons named after keyboards, obesity, amphibians and witch doctors.
I was in the Quarter last Tuesday night, trying to get to a movie at Canal Place, but it never happened. I was 40 minutes early, so I crawled around the neighborhood looking for a cup of coffee, and I came upon a guy who was singing while he cleaned the streets.
He works for the new garbage contractor downtown and his name is Melvin Holmes. "As in Sherlock?" I asked him and he responded: "Holmes -- just like Inspector Clouseau," and I don't think he was trying to be ironic, postmodern or even funny. He was just being so classically New Orleans, getting it all wrong in just the right way.
He was singing a Luther Vandross torch song, the kind that makes women love you for a lifetime. And he was nailing the song, just killing it, just calling out the doves and stars and blooming jasmine of the night.
And he was cleaning the street. Because that's his job. And as he did, a local talent agent drove by once, then twice, then made the block again and pulled over and gave Melvin Holmes his business card and told him to give him a call some time and he would make him a star.
Is the next American Idol sweeping cigarette butts and go-cups off our streets tonight? Stranger things have happened.
Holmes said to me: "People see me sweeping up trash in the street and they hear me sing and I know what they're thinking: Another man with talent who doesn't want to put it to use. But that's just what I'm doing. I'm putting it to use out here on the street. I just love to make people smile. The people holding hands, they walk by and then turn and look at me and they understand what it is I am saying."
What Mr. Holmes is saying, of course, springs from the vocabulary of music and of love. The language of the streets of New Orleans -- even if it is Luther Vandross and not Frogman Henry he's singing.
I was trying to get to Canal Place, but when I left Melvin Holmes to his singing and sweeping, I was caught by the sound of an acoustic guitar springing out of a fairly new supper and music club called 300 Decatur.
Inside, on a big and beautiful stage, a guy named Chip Wilson was picking at his guitar and this guy, he plays crazy good. He's got the look of the Woodstock Generation, long gray hair and a slight paunch of a life well-lived and his music matches the look; he introduced a song by Steve Winwood as his personal anthem during the year he was in exile from New Orleans, the song he held onto to keep him alive back in that winter of our discontent.
The song is called "Can't Find My Way Home" and it just kills me, reduces me to jelly even when you don't put it in the context of Katrina, but when you do I'm on the bus to Teardrop City.
Like I said, I never made it to the movie last Tuesday night. I spent the evening listening to Melvin Holmes and Chip Wilson, two undiscovered planets here in this remarkable musical constellation.
So I tried to get to the movie again Thursday night -- I really want to see this Julie Christie film -- but I got to walking around again before going to Canal Place and one thing led to another and pretty soon I was sitting in the back courtyard at Napoleon House, eating a muffeletta and Zapp's potato chips and listening to the laughter of all the strangers around me, and I sat there and wondered how it was I had come to the conclusion just a few weeks ago that I needed to leave New Orleans.
Something simple like a pile of heated Italian meats and cheeses and classical music playing in a tiled, ancient and decadent courtyard can reduce me to tears and that's something that a good barbecue in Memphis or peach cobbler in Atlanta will never do to me.
Never. Not unless I'm eating them there and wishing I were here, back in New Orleans, where I can't find my way anywhere but home.
But it's not for everyone, this living in New Orleans thing. Just this week, three more friends of mine are leaving town for greener pastures, brighter lights or whatever it is out there in the Great Elsewhere.
It's been another rash of goodbyes -- always goodbye, every day goodbye. I don't blame them and I wish them well and their reasons are all legit; they leave for jobs, safety, security and love, though I wonder what love is like in another place and it cannot be as good as it is here. Can it?
Hurricane season starts Friday and maybe you've heard: The experts tell us it's going to be a banner year, maybe like the time we ran through all the names in the alphabet and had to start naming storms after Greek letters, and if Allstate and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers aren't making it clear that they don't want us living here, maybe God will.
But here's the thing: We're not leaving. Not my eye doctor. Not Melvin Holmes (unless he goes Hollywood). Not me. And not so many others.
I was looking at all the other parents around me at that final morning assembly last week at Lusher and they're staying -- most of them, at least -- and investing their time, energy and children in a New Orleans public school, and if that isn't insanity, I don't know what is.
But we love our school -- it is a reason we still live here -- and it runs all the way through 12th grade now, so I'll be standing next to these people for a long, long time.
I look at them as my involuntary friends now, my brothers and sisters of circumstance, we Parents of the Children of the Storm. Whether we're fighting hurricanes, crime or head lice, we are soldiers in the same army now, bearing the physical and emotional scars of this abusive relationship with a lover named New Orleans.
But we remain true to her. It is in the words to every love song ever written. We have found our way home.
. . . . . . .

Louisiana 1927, Louisiana 2005

2014-08-29T08:36:00.001-05:00

The great John Boutte:

Live at Joe's Pub

Louisiana 1927 from John Boutte on Myspace.

August 29, 2005 (and dark days after) remembered

2014-08-29T06:00:00.000-05:00

Swipe the photos and see Hurricane Katrina disaster dissolve into present-day recovery | NOLA.com

posts on life in New Orleans post Katrina

my post on August 29, 2006

The Most Persuasive Evidence Yet that Bike-Share Serves as Public Transit - CityLab

2014-08-25T17:34:00.001-05:00

The denser the urban environment (particularly for rail), the more bikesharing provides new connections that substitute for existing ones. The less dense the environment, the more bikesharing establishes new connections to the existing public transit system.

The Most Persuasive Evidence Yet that Bike-Share Serves as Public Transit - CityLab

Punk Funk slash Communist Revolution Band

2014-08-25T16:41:00.002-05:00

thanks to my musician nephew up in Lakewood OH for posting this Fox news chuckle:

"We will get the coast that we are willing to pay for"

2014-08-20T21:27:00.003-05:00

The Lens, with sponsorship from the Mississippi River Delta Coalition, hosted a panel discussion on the financing of the $50 billion coastal master plan at Loyola University, Wednesday, Aug. 20 from 6 to 8 p.m.

While much of the discussion about the master plan lately has revolved around implementation — in particular the pros and cons of river diversions — without funding, it’s all academic. The panel discussion expanded the conversation.

Panelists:
1) Mark Davis, Tulane Institute on Water Resources Law and Policy
2) John Driscoll, Corporate Planning Resources
3) Kyle Graham, Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority
4) Douglas J. Meffert, Audubon Louisiana/National Audubon Society
5) Steve Murchie, Gulf Restoration Network: United for a healthy Gulf of Mexico
6) John Snell, WVUE/Fox 8 Moderator

I went, was impressed by the spread of good food (someone asked who made that crawfish cheesecakey thing?) and the full room but chagrined by the number of white guys in suits taking much of the air and space up front. I comforted myself with the thought that valiant men do live and work among and sometimes even resemble the scoundrels (so must remember to not be overly judgy by appearance or the number of law degrees...)

The upshot of tonight's talk was about what funding is here, what is possible and what is still needed to deal with the restoration and protection of our coast. The evening focused on the 50 year, 50 billion Master Plan Louisiana created in 2012, this number reduced from the larger 2007 200-300 million "wishlist" that had no plan attached to it.
The funding for this is meant to (mostly) come from energy companies through GOMESA and from the penalties and damages from the BP spill through RESTORE; however, the payouts for these are not decided yet and any estimates as to the final levels are wildly speculative (a phrase used by multiple panelists this evening); in other words, just to fix what has been done already by these folks, we need the money that is not in hand and may not be ever or at least not for years. These energy companies have successfully used the "tobacco companies approach" and fought every bit of science that they could in order to delay their payout to these states. Inflation is not figured into these estimates by the way and will drive the costs up significantly.

Here are some interesting points (in no particular order) brought up tonight:

• 85% of the coast is in private hands. However, alliances have been formed with landowners and NGOs to address the issues of coastal restoration, which allows for more comprehensive plans and landowners matching federal funds on some projects.
• In post-Katrina meetings held throughout the state on the question of elevation requirements for homes rebuilt, citizens chose coastal wetland restoration as a significant need for the state to address with any funds they had. This was clearly a tipping point in the level of awareness among citizens.
• The master plan does not include hurricane protection construction or any maintenance of hurricane protection so more money is necessary to be able to remain in place.
• If we acknowledge that the large payment we are hoping to receive from oil and gas through RESTORE will not be enough (Mark Davis estimates 100 million is really necessary), then we must also acknowledge that we cannot wait for another inexcusable event like the BP spill to raise whatever else is needed. So the question is how can federal, state and local concerns all be involved in funding search for the coast?
• "we are embarking on a civics adventure like no other" to figure out how to engage oil/gas, navigation and citizens to understand everyone must pay their share of the system we need. Levees and drainage were originally paid for by tax-paying citizens, not by Army Corps- we need to remember that and follow it in some cases.
•Let's not always be our own worst enemy: Steve Murchie pointed out the mid-Barataria sediment diversion project now has a coal export terminal right next to it. Hard to show Congress that we take these projects seriously, when we allow an 80 foot tall pile of coal as a neighbor to a diversion project.
•RESTORE will most likely be funded, but 5 states will share the money- politics will play a part in what is funded and where.
• BP and its 2010 spill are emblematic of the industry and NOT an outlier. That means that more spills and more delaying tactics will continue unless we change the cozy relationship that oil/gas has with its regulators. Requiring those operators to re-vegetate and clean their abandoned oil rigs is certainly a small step in the right direction.
• Oil/Gas owe the people of Louisiana something around 400 square miles of land as of now.
• Louisiana actually does fairly well in federal investment levels, both on the appropriations side and on the crisis recovery side: the Congressional delegation are strong advocates and yet, we must acknowledge that there is "Katrina fatigue" in DC. We have a reputation for "always having our hand out, but not spending wisely" which is largely inaccurate but we need to be better at documenting and demonstrating our success in DC.
• Terrebonne Parish is taxing itself to pay their share; we must ask all Louisiana citizens: are you willing to pay for this? Mark Davis again: "if candidates for office promise to not tax you, then they are also promising to not serve you."
• How can private entrepreneurial activity help? Investing in local engineering firms, selling carbon offsets, mitigation banking, building better homes and communities, encouraging social entrepreneurial competitions like Idea Village/GNOF/Propeller's annual water Challenge. We need to change the architecture of public projects which are in the hands of a few agencies and don't leave room for entrepreneurial activity: John Driscoll offered an idea around the design of diversion projects: Instead of asking bidders to bid on an already designed Army Corps project, to instead set forth the goals of each project and allow bidders to come up with their own designs.

Mark Davis: "The crisis we face in the future will be met by the quality of ideas we have laying around then; we already have better ideas than we did in 2005."

The last note to remember: Moderator Snell rightly pointed out "Why didn't we build better after Katrina?" Mark Davis using gallows humor answered: "well, we'll have another chance next time."

Site Provides Census of NOLA Cheaters

2014-08-19T11:53:00.001-05:00

Thank you to NOLA Defender for once again giving us the detail we need to truly understand our city:

Discreet Affair: Site Provides Census of NOLA Cheaters | NOLA DEFENDER

First-Time Home Buyers - WSJ.com

2014-08-18T11:55:00.001-05:00

So over half of the home buyers in LA are first time home buyers, or maybe not:

"The data only look at the share of homes being financed with conventional loans or FHA-backed mortgages. Because most of the all-cash purchases probably aren’t first-time buyers, the total share of homes being purchased by first-time buyers is lower...(therefore), the reported share of first-time buyers also could be higher in more expensive states due to the conforming loan limits. Fannie and Freddie, for example, can’t buy loans that exceed $417,000, though the limit was increased for certain high-cost areas in 2008. It currently runs as high as $625,500 in the more expensive markets. This means a significant share of more expensive home sales—which are less likely to include first time buyers—aren’t captured in the data.

The fact that a larger portion of loans would be excluded from the analysis in more expensive states could make state-by-state comparisons less revealing. But the data still provide an interesting view of how the first-time borrower component has changed over time within a particular state. They show that first-time buyers continue to make up a higher-than-average share of borrowers, even if they are off of their 2009 highs."

The linked heatmap shows the share of mortgages guaranteed by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration that went to first-time buyers.

First-Time Home Buyers - WSJ.com