woobiquity

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.

In search of New Orleans

So, I’m in New Orleans for a couple of weeks. To answer the immediate questions this statement may raise: Is there anything left? Yes, plenty. Is everything back to normal? No, not at all.

In between those possibilities lies a truth that is elusive and changing. Some are calling what’s happening now a Renaissance. That may be as optimistic as it is premature, but anyone can see that in New Orleans today art and community action and city planning and commerce are red-hot and melding in ways that perhaps only an epic tragedy could stoke.

And life goes on. My Bombay-born taxi driver spent much of the journey from the airport complaining about high gas prices. Until, that is, he delivered me to the wrong address. “O sheet, o sheet” he said as he drove on, shoving a worn-out atlas back at me and a highlighter so that I could mark the intended street, which he had never heard of. “It costs 65 cents a minute,” he said, pointing at the fuel gauge,  “65 cents!”

Nearly three years after the hurricane, basic infrastructure is still coming back on service, one piece at a time. So, for example, at the end of the month the St Charles streetcar will run its full length for the first time since the evacuation. Over the weekend, the iconic French Market reopened, and a big food and music festival marked the occasion.

The mood was upbeat and the sun was brutally hot. The vast majority of the attendees were white, although many of the food vendors were black. O sheet, I thought, the city really has lost its soul. Then I realized that most of the city's surviving black population probably have better things to do on a hot Saturday afternoon than go all the way downtown to pay triple the going price for food they can get just as good around the corner, cheap. Besides which, a show of hands at one of the zydeco stages revealed that about half the audience were tourists. (Probably a good sign.)

Incidentally, I found out that alligator sausage tastes almost exactly like the processed weenies in cans of ‘Beanee Weenees’ or ‘Vienna Sausages’, those unnaturally soft, pink lozenges. And all this time we thought we were eating mechanically recovered pork.

I’ve started a photostream on Flickr, where I’ll upload pictures from New Orleans as and when.

Mad cows and Englishmen

go out in the midday fog? Wait, that's not right, is it. After all, we were in Wales, not England. But the village of Hay-on-Wye did feel a lot like London-on-Seed last week, as thousands converged there for the mud-splattered literary event of the season, the Hay Festival. Who knew so many literate, Guardian-reading urbanites owned wellies. (Update: London beer garden retort: of course they do; what else would they wear when tending to their allotments?!)

 

 

Top to bottom: three shots of the front window at Mad Old Cow, a delightfully, madly eccentric shop/tea-garden/one-room-B&B (the room is part Wild West, part Alice in Wonderland, and you'll wake to the disorienting sound of strangers' teacups clinking right outside your window) in the centre of Hay; books books books; the fog on the farm at Vowchurch.

And finally, from this year's festival T-shirts and paraphernalia: "Hay-on-Wye... What's that, some kind of sandwich?" -- Arthur Miller

Thus spake the orchestra

Hear here!

As in, Hear Here!, the Royal Philharmonic Society and Classic FM project exploring what it means to really listen to classical music. Along with three of my fellow Goldsmithians I've contributed a short piece inspired by a recent Sunday afternoon Philharmonia Orchestra performance.

The concept was 'notes into letters' and the brief: 'an imaginative piece of writing in response to what you've heard'. This was my first afternoon concert at the Royal Festival Hall, and I immediately saw that seeing is listening on these occasions. I am referring to the impressive hairdos (such sturdy, streamlined constructions as even the grand dames of Manhattan's Upper East Side could only dream about).

When the orchestra started Thus Spake Zarathustra, the Richard Strauss tone poem popularly known as the fanfare from 2001: A Space Odyssey, I rolled my eyes, only to see how much the venue resembles a Stanley Kubrick movie set. Of course, the fanfare itself is the big bang that gives way to a much more cathartic piece of 19th-century music.

"Closing your eyes to listen properly you soon forget the time and place. Melodies overlap in layers so palpable and full that you could climb up them into the expanse of the room. And you do, metaphorically, propping your head up with your elbows and watching the busy musicians below."

It kind of takes off from there.