woobiquity

If the whole world were made of clouds

Fluffy cloud-clouds and their shadows atop low-rolling landscape-clouds, somewhere over the Midwestern United States, last Thursday morning.

Pictures of the gone world

With some hesitation, I have posted to Flickr 30 or so photographs that I took in the flood ravaged parts of New Orleans. I say hesitation because in some ways this is a reprehensibly voyeuristic act, an invasion of the privacy of people who have already suffered too much. But it is also an act of deep sympathy, as well as an expression of my own incomprehension at what I've seen.

Tourists be consoled: historic New Orleans has mostly survived Katrina and the floods. The French Quarter, the Central Business District, the Garden District are as lovely or quirky as ever. But Twentieth Century New Orleans -- the nondescript sub-divisions and shopping malls of ever larger proportion, the American Dream sprawling outward across four generations -- is mostly gone. So are many of the obvious calling cards of the disaster that claimed them. The mud has been cleaned up, the levees repaired (if not exactly strengthened), the debris carted off and burned. 

What remains is a ghost town in the most haunting sense imaginable -- one seemingly without end, one that looks, disturbingly, exactly like the rest of America -- if only the rest of America had been drained of everything living within it and left to warp and crack under an unrelenting sun. Even in bold, eccentric New Orleans, suburbia looks, or looked, like something close to nothing. Now these suburbs are almost Vesuvian in their lack of living detail, but they are still recognizable for what they were and weren't. The shape of the Circuit City superstore is there, but the signage, stock and customers are missing. Ditto the fast food joints, the grocery stores, the hulking shopping malls, even a theme park, its rusting roller coasters rising skeletal above the overpasses and underpasses, a network of roads designed to whisk cars along without stopping here.

And of course, out beyond the noise-blocking walls and shrubbery, there are the shapes of uninhabited houses, many of which were until the catastrophe home to people who might proudly have called themselves 'average Americans'. Houses after houses after houses.

 

Could be developer-abandoned blight in suburban Atlanta, Charlotte or Austin, except that it's not.

What I can't get out of my mind: how invisble all of this is to those of us who aren't there, despite widespread curiosity about New Orleans' fate. How impossible, I suppose, the dimensions of it are to comprehend from a photograph. Then again, these are parts of the city that have always been invisible to visitors, in part because they so closely resembled the places people came to New Orleans to forget. 

And how big is big? As vast and unfathomable as the New Orleans devastation is, empirically it's a speck compared to the similarly unimaginable swathes of Asia leveled by typhoon, earthquake or tsunami. 

There are, I should add, signs of hope. Not the whimsical hope of greeting cards, but the hope of wild defiance, hard-won hope. Houses coming up almost lawlessly, here and there -- modular or expanded, half-finished or walking on stilts, dotting a landscape of weeds and ravaged sameness with signs of eccentric life, showing us that hope is not, after all, something that can be legislated, that it is unpredictable, radioactive, comes from somewhere intimate and hidden.

Poetry book in a Bywater shop window. 

The full set of post-Katrina photos begins here. 

The new shotgun house

The shotgun house is as New Orleans as Mardis Gras and jambalaya, but is building many new homes in this traditional mold the best way to deal with the city's post-hurricane housing shortage?

Photos: brand new shotgun houses in Habitat for Humanity's Musician's Village, in the Ninth Ward; an old shotgun house side-by-side with a much more modern interpretation, in the Uptown district.

For other modern takes on traditional NOLA architecture, check out the Urban Build project.

Photographing 'Desire'

The lens of my Panasonic Lumix has been getting a lot of action since I arrived in New Orleans.

Mainly I've snapped areas of the city that were not so much physically as emotionally scarred by the storm. These are the areas that are walkable and have the paint-left-to-dry-and-crack qualities and forgotten typefaces that I'm most interested in. Before Katrina they were the most interesting areas of the city by far. Maybe a marker of the city's revival will be when they are the most remarkable areas yet again. Though that day may yet be a long way off.

Anyway, photostream here.

Poetry post-Katrina

A week or so ago in New Orleans I ventured on foot into Bywater, a riverside community with a high density of both artists and dilapidated homes, to catch a reading of the excellent post-Katrina poem Green Zone New Orleans, read by the poet and a merry band of other voices. You can read about the experience here if you're interested. Or, here's the digested version:

In performance, the poem spoke loudest, literally, at the surprise climax, when all nine readers re-read their sections in unison. The whirlwind of noise they created was not unlike a hurricane or a heave beyond grief or a city of stunned citizens finding their voices all at once.

Hearing poetry performed almost always gets my meager poetic impulses buzzing. Add to that the sense of living dangerously (however internally contrived it may have been) that came with walking an unfamiliar street into and back out of the infamous Ninth Ward (however tangentially) and they were off the charts.

So I stopped at a coffeehouse and took some notes that became, or are becoming, this:

Two By Two By Burgundy Street

Two white ladies, one cupping a hand
To her lips to wonder, Is this a long poem?

Two black women fanning themselves
On a concrete stoop, their conversation

A poetry as natural as breathing: Girl,
Shut the fuck up. I know you ain’t lying.

Two frying pans face down in grass,
One rust-brown, one blacker than ever.

Two bicycle handlebars spread like
Featherless wings atop a chain-link fence.

Two dogs. A tidy Chihuahua on a leash and
An unruly woof loose behind locks and bars.

Two, four families peering out from within
Barbed wire and glowing, guilty and bemused.

Two sets of tracks in the asphalt, ghost
Rails connecting platforms of bristly grass.

Two of you: yourself and the man
In the red helmet, with eyes as wide

As the spaces between the spaces between
The skinny overlapping beams in a structure

Deconstructed, less a house than the sketch
Of a house, an old roof asleep on spidery legs,

A new door in the attic opening onto a drop
Almost as deep as the longing in the retinas,

That screen within a screen within a screen.
Was there a long history  — walking on,

You wish you’d cupped your hand and
Asked this — here?  And so you turn to see

Two denim legs turned toward you, under
A body of fluted blossoms heavy with rain.

Summer solstice

Marigny style. At Sound Cafe on Chartres Street, Saturday evening. A band, trays of party food, plastic cups of red and white wine and people of all ages dropping whatever they were doing to come together and have a good time. This kind of tight-knit community isn't supposed to exist anymore, is it? Not in an America divided anyway.

A tale of two crimes in one city

One of my greatest pleasures at the moment is reading the New Orleans section of the Times-Picayune newspaper every day. I don't know whether it's tragedy plus time or just something in the water down here, but these reporters really have an eye for absurdist detail.

In yesterday's installment: two crimes depicting the slippery slope that is the life of the incompetent petty criminal.

The paper reported that two young women aged 16 and 19 were booked and bailed in Slidell after they tried to steal two kittens from an animal shelter. They'd gone to the shelter hoping to find their missing cat. It wasn't there, but they liked the looks of two of the kittens that were. When staff weren't looking, they sprung the kittens from their cages and ran for it.

Animal control officials tried to chase down the girls, but lost them about a block away... Anti and police went to Foundation Drive and found fliers the girls had posted ["Missing Cat"], which included a home address. The girls arrived home a few minutes later to find police and Animal Control officials waiting for them.

But the bigger crime of the day involved a high speed car chase through central New Orleans that didn't end well (although no one was seriously hurt). I happened to cross the scene as police were standing around at the intersection, kicking bumpers and other car parts absentmindedly in the evening heat. There were several burned-out vehicles, including a charred Hummer.

Apparently the perpetrator was 16 and had a 14-year-old sidekick. There were drugs involved. And underwear:

As the two young men bolted from the Trailblazer to make a run for it, one was delayed because "his pants fell down to his ankles and he had to pull them up before he ran," Salzer said.

Royal Launderette

It's a launderette, it's royal, it has cafe tables and beautiful patina. What more could you want, really. (Apart from maybe a new roof; note the blue FEMA tarp still in place up top.) On Royal Street, New Orleans, yesterday.

Cocktails or Christ?

Why choose? From last Saturday's Times-Picayune, the main New Orleans newspaper:

Speaker to address racial harmony
Walter Bonham of the Archdiocese of New Orleans’ office of religious education and a contributor to Archbishop Alfred Hughes’ 2006 pastoral letter on race will speak on racial harmony in the young adult community Thursday at 6:30 p.m. at The Balcony Bar and Grill, 1104 Harmony St., with cocktails at 6 p.m., as part of a Catholic ministry to young adults.

The location on Harmony Street is a nice, poetic touch.