HumidCity

If anybody out there has missed my vitriolic ranting I have come to apologize. I have been absolutely buried over the past two weeks or so and have contributed but little here on the HC. One reason is that I have been getting things off the ground over on Katrina An UnNatural Disaster where I have just done some posting, including a piece I just put up today about local bloggers here in New Orleans.

Anyway, there are a few posts coming in the near future. In the meantime it seems that you are all in capable hands with the rest of the team. Kami just got back to town so we should be hearing from her soon. (hint)

While I need to keep it brief I would like you all to think for a moment. Think about what the flood victims North of us are going through. Think of what they are about to go through. Just because a few dipshits got on the Internet or in front of a camera and ranted about how we deserved it when the waters hit us does not mean that everyone up there shares that perspective. We have skills unique to the situation, we know what the long haul looks like. We can help.

I don’t care who you are, almost three years ago someone helped you. There was someone out there that helped each and every one of us. Remember that.

-Loki, HumidCity Founder (Like The Governator, “I’ll be back!”)

(Originally posted someplace else on May 1st, 2008)

This is the kind of scene you occasionally find yourself stumbling into when you live in the greatest beat-up beat-down city on earth:

(photos on this page copyright 2008 Louis Maistros)

Me and the wife are minding our own business, performing our evening ritual of snagging some joe and peace along with Chalmette the misfit pooch down at the Sound Café a few blocks down, and what do we happen upon through pure serendipitous dumb luck? Maybe the best brass band on earth slamming down right there on the coffee shop floor. As if this weren’t heaven enough, jazz legend Dr. Michael White is there, too, sitting in on clarinet. Moments like this cannot be bought with mere cash-money – and that’s alright, because in New Orleans the best moments always come free of charge.

The Hot 8 Brass Band matters. Everything that is good about New Orleans is embodied in this little band of regular neighborhood guys. They’ve been to hell and back, have even lived through the senseless murder of their friend, teacher, leader and drummer Dick Shavers, and yet they keep on with this music, this amazing, uplifting, truth-giving music. This is cool jazz, funked to the core and set ablaze, but it’s something much more than that. It’s the rawness of the street shot out through the business end of a tuba. It’s Tabasco spiked with tears and gasoline. It’s love. It’s war. It’s life and God and the devil and everything else in the world that matters and some things that don’t and a few that fall in between and ask me if I give a damn about whatever it is because the reasons, the causes, the rationales, if there are any, can’t possibly matter in this singular moment that puts this whole fucking mess in one simple context, on one single page, down and clear and all right there. These guys are not always in tune. They’re not always sober. They’re not always tight. But they are always, always just right. In the moment. In the pocket. In the heart. My heart. Yours if you’re lucky.

So the night is cool and rare, the sun’s creeping down the sky, and it’s one of those gray, gray pissy southern skies with a dirty tint of orange twilight like a slow-rotting peach that I’ve only ever seen in New Orleans, and I’m having an epiphany moment.

I’ve had days where I’ve pondered the wisdom of staying here, days where it seems best to pack up the kids and take them somewhere/anywhere up north and just be done with it already. I’ve had days like that, and I guess I’ll have a few more.

But today is not one of those days.

Thinking about leaving is something I sometimes do. Staying is what I do every day without thinking.

Today my heart is clamped to my sleeve and bulletproof. I’m seeing and hearing this neighborhood band, these normal guys, blowing out through those horns, wailing away, kicking through songs of the 1920s like “Girl of My Dreams,” ripping them to pieces for this modern-fucked-sideways world, I’m hearing the hopped-up rage of their own songs, like “Ray Nagin,” a song that can make you cry and scream and dance all at the same time, and I’m hearing the pure funky hotgoddamn of “Let Me Do My Thing.” I’m going all the way back then fast-forward to here, ten minutes past now, with outrageous brassed-out covers of everything from “High Healed Sneakers” to Marvin Gaye’s disco sin, “Sexual Healing,” and I’m hearing my wife say over and over, “I never liked this song before, but I love it now.” I’m knowing that they’ve been through so damn much, these guys, these normal fucking guys, much worse than the troubles suffered by me and mine, but they just won’t stop, they can’t or won’t, they just keep going, taking all those hits – from behind and above and below – and they still come back up again, over and over, these guys, these normal everyday fucking guys, still raging, still preaching, still high, still defiant, still towering in spirit like it’s just another day on the job. And now I’m thinking: How dare I bitch about a single bad day? My problems are reduced to shadow tonight and these guys have lighted the way. I’ve done nothing for them, but they give me this. They give me this without even knowing who the fuck I am or that they are giving anything to anyone at all. They’re just playing. They’re just doing what they do.

And that’s New Orleans tonight.

Go visit the Hot 8 at their MySpace page where you can listen for free in streaming audio. If you get what I’m talking about, buy their CD or download a few tracks off iTunes.

Here’s the thing:

Some types of truth cannot be told in the usual way.

Louis Maistros

http://louismaistros.com

These things may not be right, but they are true.

The Sound of Building Coffins by Louis Maistros is due for publication from The Toby Press in Spring 2009.

HumidCity is once more proud to bring you Missives From Matt McBride. This episode is in response to a rather obnoxious column that includes a revelation concerning what a certain former Mayoral candidate (and then Nagin supporter) truly thinks of our efforts to bring our city back. -Loki

Source Article Here

“Will America’s breadbasket be fixed faster than America’s party town, brought to its knees by water-overwhelmed levees in August 2005?

Rob Couhig, 59, thinks it will, partly because of Midwestern self-reliance. He thinks they’re not about to sit around, wringing their hands, waiting for the government to bail them out, which, he says, sadly, was what his beloved home town did - and still does.

A no-nonsense corporate lawyer in an open-collar white shirt, Couhig is a commissioner on the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, and is thought by some to be one of the smartest men in town.”

“Talk-show host Robinette, a Cajun who devoted countless on-air hours to the danger of flooding before and after it happened, says that the city’s high ground, which was spared the flooding, exactly matched the boundaries of the original city. “If the engineers of 200 years ago knew those areas, you shouldn’t build there.”

This came in response to me asking if it is wise to rebuild the entire city.

To the same question, lawyer Couhig gave me an answer as long as a Ryan Howard home run, but didn’t directly answer.

“You’re saying ‘no,’ aren’t you?” I asked.

Couhig didn’t reply, but he smiled. I guess there are some things that you don’t want to be quoted as passing through your lips.”

The columnist gets things wrong too, assumedly from his chat with Garland Robinette:

“One who believes this to be true is 65-year-old Garland Robinette, a former TV anchor and now popular talk-show host on WWL-AM, which earned its bones by remaining on the air with emergency information after the TV stations drowned and the local paper couldn’t get delivered.”

In fact, the T-P stayed on line the whole time and was publishing within a couple of days. WWL-TV stayed on air continuously. Both won the most prestigious prizes in their respective fields for those feats; the T-P got a Pulitzer in 2006 and WWL-TV got a Columbia-DuPont prize in 2007.

Rob Couhig can be emailed at: couhigre@couhigpartners.com

Garland Robinette can be emailed at: grobinette@entercom.com

You can email the column’s author, Stu Bykofsky at stubyko@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5977, which is his direct line.

This column came out of a columnists conference held last week in New Orleans. Lt. Gov. Landrieu and Mayor Nagin spoke to the assembled ink-stained wretches. The organization that put it on, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, has high hopes for lots of columns to come out of the conference:

http://www.columnists.com/index.php?ID=2

“Since New Orleans’ attempt to recover from being virtually destroyed by Hurricane Katrina is one of the most dramatic stories of our generation, we’re expecting some great columns to come out of the conference.

“We plan on collecting these columns (with permission, of course) and assembling them in an attractive book. Current plans call for proceeds from the sale of the book to go to help the recovery effort, which still needs help almost three years after the storm and flood.“

If the rest of the columns are like this one, it’ll be a pretty thin book.

Matt McBride

(Originally posted someplace else on June 1, 2008)

I’m trying to keep things up-tempo here at Casa de Maistros, but this time of year, my God it is tough. I confess that summers in New Orleans are not my favorite thing.

Here’s the deal. Today is the first day of hurricane season and it’s like some invisible demon has shot a starter pistol off into dogbreath blue sky signaling the Olympic Games of Organized Neurosis to hereby officially begin. It’s a stressful time of year, for sure.

Back before the big storm, hurricane season could be nerve-racking at times – but there was a kind of camaraderie about it, an almost jovial good sportsmanship associated with that universal fear of the so-called big one, a certain comfort in the comfortable uncertainty of how it might play out. We were only guessing then, and the guessing felt like a game.

Now it’s different. We’ve all seen how this shit plays out for ourselves, up close and personal. Now we know how very fucked up things can get around here. There’s not a whole lot left to guess about.

I’ve noticed that the biggest difference between now and then is not the weather, but our collective state of mind. Remember back in the day, when Ivan or Georges or Isabelle or whatever one-eyed shitfuck had to crawl so far up the radar that it was breathing down our necks before we even got the tiniest bit antsy about it? That was really not a bad way to go. Nowadays, everyone shifts way down low into mental meltdown mode as soon as the tiniest swirling bit of goo forms off the coast of Africa. It’s really ridiculous, but we all watch this shit like hawks now, as if such obsession can possibly do anyone any good at all.

The truth is simple enough. All we really need to do is decide whether we’ll be staying or going if the unthinkable happens again, and how we’ll act out that decision if and when it’s go-time. I know it’s very difficult to be methodical and rational about these things considering all that’s happened. But if we’re going to keep living here, we’ve got to start integrating these possibilities into our psyche in smoother fashion and stop taking out our frustrations on each other. And we have to do this even when we’re feeling the heat and the fear and the anger of bad memories far too recent to dismiss gracefully or easily or, really, at all.

I’m not preaching here, I’m pleading. Try. Just try. Let’s reject the temptation of the group nervous breakdown. We can’t go on acting as if we’re all just back from Vietnam, expecting Charlie might jump out of the bushes at any point between June and November 1^st. We New Orleanians are world renowned for our nutty behavior, and it’s an endearing quality on most days, but when the collective dementia translates into 7 parts crime wave and 3 parts general heartlessness towards one another, the nutty factor loses its classic charm.

And, I know; the mosquitoes, the termite swarms and this devilfucked black gnat epidemic are not helping morale much. I know. I’ve gotten to the point where the bugs have me so twisted that I’m collecting the little fuckers like trophies on tape strips and trap jars. It’s just how I deal. Makes me feel like I’m making a dent. A dent on what, I’m not exactly sure.

Let’s make a summertime resolution to get a grip. Really, we all have to learn to just kick it like we used to.

Do like this: Put together your little riding-it-out-like-a-crazed-motherfucker survival kit, or your getting-the-hell-out-of-dodge-like-a-sane-motherfucker escape kit, then tuck it away for that rainiest of days and forget about it till you need it. Fire up the barbecue or berl up the crawfish, reacquaint yourself with your fellow humans in a good way and try to remember that we’re all in the same leaky boat – and also remember that the day may come when that cranky-ass neighbor who’s name you can’t quite recall might turn out to be your best friend on this earth. Brush up on your hurricane humor. Remember how we used to crack each other up before a big storm, making light of a bad situation? That was healthy. As long as we’re prepared to deal with it realistically, it is very healthy to laugh. So yuck it up, bond with your fellow inmates, and strike up the motherfucking band. This is New Orleans, goddamnit, and we all have a lot to be proud of here. We’ve come a long way down this rough road of making things right again, and the government promise-breakers – be they city, state or federal – have had very little to do with that. This city has been regenerated one roof at a time. It’s you who have accomplished this. And your neighbor. So treat each other right. Every one of us who came back and swung a hammer in trembling fists is a fucking national hero. Know that. And don’t forget it. We might have been forgotten by most of America, but we absolutely embody the American can-do spirit. So be proud – because you’re a fool if you aren’t.

You know, if we’ve learned anything from the past it’s that, at the end of the day, we can only truly depend on each other. And that’s just fine because it’s enough, and it works. So let’s all take a deep breath of something good, wash it down with a stiff drink of something better, put on our goofy-ass devil-may-care Southern grins, and love thy neighbor like it’s an idea that really means something. Because goddamn if it doesn’t.

Experience is a tricky thing. I once knew a guy who had played guitar for twenty years but just never got any good at it. I asked a friend, “Has this guy really been playing twenty years?” And the answer was, “Well, it’s more like he’s been playing for one year, but twenty times.”

Let’s not let the benefit of our experience be erased every year, only to start from scratch with tempers flaring and guns blazing in a blind war against whoever or whatever is handy. Let’s build on what we’ve learned, every year and every day, let’s toughen our skins and sharpen our wits – but also let’s soften our hearts towards each other. Because if we don’t reach out to our neighbors, if we don’t prepare to help and be helped by each other, then we’ll just wind up in that damn Superdome again, waiting for another Godot who will not fucking come till it’s all too late, another demoralizing spectacle of pity and ridicule for the world to gawk at – and that, my friends, is not us. And it never has been.

So here we are again, about to run through one of those mind numbing psychological gauntlets, another Orleans Parish pressure cooker, and make no mistake; stand or fall, it’s all on us, baby. And just like always, we’ll either rise to the challenge or be diminished with the tide. We really can’t do both.

Regular readers are well aware that I, like each of the other writers on HumidCity, am the sole person responsible for my own words. In no way do they reflect the opinions of any of my employers or clients.

That said I am happy to announce that I will now be blogging for the Open Society Institute’s Katrina: An Unnatural Disaster. While my more *ahem* strident opinions will remain on this forum where they belong I will now be able to continue to document and fight for the rebuild with a Webby Award winning platform. Come on out and play.

-Loki, HumidCity Founder

That is what John McCain called Senator Obama’s campaign staffers pointing out that he has not once, but twice voted against and 8/29 Commission. Now both Senators are politicians, which means I don’t trust either one of them. This is why I love the Annenberg Political Fact Check. A non partisan group that documents the realities behind the political posturing.

Today they addressed this one. Here is the summary, once you’re done click the link at the bottom for full documentation with sources.:

McCain was asked by a New Orleans reporter why he voted twice against an independent commission to investigate the government’s failings before and after Hurricane Katrina, and he incorrectly stated that he had “voted for every investigation.”

McCain actually voted twice, in 2005 and 2006, to defeat a Democratic amendment that would have set up an independent commission along the lines of the 9/11 Commission. At the time of the second vote, members of both parties were complaining that the White House was refusing requests by Senate investigators for information.

The McCain campaign accused the Obama campaign of “tired negative attacks” for pointing out and documenting McCain’s gaffe.

Read all the details at Katrina Kerffufle.

The video shows why we all need the 8/29 Investigation - a truly independent and complete analysis of the Katrina levee failures on August 29, 2005. Best if done by NOON THURSDAY JUNE 5.

Help launch Levees.Org to the top of the YouTube charts!

Want to do more? You can also:

1. Register at YouTube and rate the video.

2. View and rate our other videos on YouTube.

Help spread the word. Help show why New Orleans and people nationwide deserve the 8/29 Investigation. We have shown that the levee study done by the government is flawed and controversial. We also know that the review done by the ASCE was shoddy and biased.

-Loki, HumidCity Founder

A bill to find the truth about the levee failures is stalled in Homeland Security and YOU can kick this bill into action!

If you haven’t yet, please make two (2) important phone calls today:

1. Call Senator Landrieu at 202-224-5824 and tell her we need hearings on the 8/29 Investigation Act.

2. Call Senator Vitter at 202-224-4623 and ask for him to co-sponsor Senate Bill 2826 so we have a bipartisan bill.

It’s quick and simple - just start your phone call with this:

“I would like to leave a message for the Senator…. ” And leave your message.

Your Senators represent YOU; make sure your voice is heard!

Best if done by 6pm CST today Tue June 3.

Syndicated from the Levees.org email.

This post is dedicated to all of the soulless cretins who denigrated my neighbors and I for moving back to New Orleans. This ones for you!

Most of America has “Katrina Fatigue.” They’re sick of hearing about the minor issues that have displaced half our city. It almost makes me wish I was sadistic enough to revel in this news article, but I’m not and I can’t.

You see the Army Corps of Engineers is not just the source of an overflowing cornucopia of woes for the Crescent City, oh no! Their pernicious incompetence ranges far further than that, at least if you believe….MSNBC:

ST. LOUIS - Across America, earthen flood levees protect big cities and small towns, wealthy suburbs and rich farmland. But the Army Corps of Engineers, the federal agency that oversees levees, lacks an inventory of thousands of them and has no idea of their condition, the corps’ chief levee expert told The Associated Press.

The uncertainty, amid an unusually wet spring that has already caused significant flooding across many states, is creating worry even within the corps.

“We have to get our arms around this issue and understand how many levees there are in the country, who’s watching over them, what populations and properties are behind them,” Eric Halpin, the corps’ special assistant for dam and levee safety, said in an interview last month. “What is the risk posed to the public?”

Critics are troubled that the government doesn’t know the answer.

Its disturbing on a level that New Orleanians are all too familiar with. And it makes me come back to an old mantra of mine I have not voiced in awhile: “We must not let this happen to anyone else.”

If there is a lesson to be learned from the Levee Failure that followed Katrina it is one that has been lost to the members of modern American sound-bite culture. Not everyone, but enough of a percentage that I run across them frequently whenever I travel north and visit anyplace else in the country.
Go read. Especially if you are from somewhere else. Trust me, you do not want to experience what we did in August of 2005.

Really, you don’t.

Yessireebob! That is exactly what Bill O’ Reilly is! The man who has such respect for the “homies,” down in New Orleans is a true, blue pro. This little piece from Media Matters should bring back fond memories. (Emphasis mine)

CALLER: George Bush doesn’t care about American people. After Katrina, he passed a law making it so his contracting buddies could bring in a bunch of illegal immigrants, instead of putting Americans to work, plus it took them five days to get down there.

In response, O’Reilly said: “On the rebuilding of New Orleans, you’ve got to use contractors that can do the job. So, you can’t — you know, if you’ve got contractors who specialize in infrastructure rebuilding, you’ve got to bring them in.” He then added, “And the homies, you know, who you don’t know — I mean, they’re just not going to get the job.”

If WordPress played well with flash media I could just embed this video, but instead I will steer you over to visit Bec and take a look at what passes for grace under (minute) pressure on O’Reilly’s part. I would do so quickly though, YouTube has already pulled it and I don’t know how long it will last on break.com.

This is one of the big voices of modern day conservatives, a group who is no longer conservative by any measure I can discern. The group whose reckless approach to their duty as public servants has caused such hardship for my fellow New Orleanians in the aftermath of the Levee Failure. No matter what your political leanings you should be appalled at this behaviour worthy only of a spoiled child (with a foul mouth).

Fine example, eh?

-Loki, HumidCity Founder

In the midst of the Jazz Fest Daily Deluge the following article snuck through between the raindrops:

A federal court judge cleared the way Friday for the Army Corps of Engineers to face trial on claims that defects in its Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet destroyed wetlands and turned the navigation channel into a funnel for storm surge..

U.S. District Judge Stanwood Duval’s 40-page ruling “paves the way for the first and only trial that will likely be held on how the Army Corps of Engineers drowned New Orleans” during Hurricane Katrina, said California attorney Pierce O’Donnell, who leads the legal team that filed the case two years ago on behalf of a group of plaintiffs that includes WDSU-TV anchorman Norman Robinson, who lived in eastern New Orleans.

The suit alleges the controversial shipping channel flooded thousands of homes in eastern New Orleans, the Lower 9th Ward and St. Bernard Parish.

After the way previous suits against the Corps have gone this is a lovely breath of fresh air. In order to engender respect from the community there needs to be responsibility, accountability and some from of pennance besides. Accountability has been evaded because of decades outdated immunities still on the books. Need I remind the world yet again that the winds that hit New Orleans were Cat 2, we were on the weaker backside of the storm. The levees were certified for Cat 3.

Now the Corps is using newspapers to seal the gaps in the levees? Drag them through the court system and enforce accountability.

Without proper flood protection the world will lose a lot, not just the residents of New Orleans. Newsweek said it very well recently:

This subtropical port, which looks to the Mediterranean, Africa and the Caribbean for inspiration, has always marched to the beat of a multitude of different and very funky drummers. Which city has more beguiling street names - Abundance, Beaujolais, Cupid, Desire? Other places have the Rotary and the Elks. New Orleans has Social and Pleasure clubs and the Mardi Gras Indians - African-Americans masquerading as Native Americans in a tradition dating from when Indians and slaves were natural allies. A Mardi Gras Indian designs and sews a new costume every year: one chief put the cost, in time and materials, at $100,000 each. There are secret rituals, songs and chants; even parade routes are classified. Masking is crucial - disguise, misdirection, all in the service of nutty, impractical, unclassifiable mystery - and it’s one key to understanding the city and its culture. New Orleans elevates the chores of daily life to a high level of culture. Porch railings are wrought into sculpture. In the kitchen, the humblest food becomes piquant. Even the funeral procession is an art form.

In the wake of Katrina, New Orleans is doing what it does best: making something extraordinary out of next to nothing. There’s no Marshall Plan here - just small miracles in individual neighborhoods. “The culture of New Orleans emanates from the bottom up, not from the top down,” says Ellis Marsalis, pianist, composer and patriarch of the musical clan. The resurrection of the neighborhoods is doubly important because thousands of residents are still trying to come back, and because the city’s culture - particularly its music - is anchored in the neighborhoods. Unless they are revived, “the music won’t have a home anymore,” says saxophonist Donald Harrison Jr., who is also the Big Chief of the Congo Nation, a Mardi Gras Indian tribe. “New Orleans needs the neighborhoods, because it’s the only city in America that retains its traditional styles.”

In the increasingly mobile and digital age the world needs places like New Orleans. This is the last true American bohemia in so many ways, a place with a rich and vibrant (and yes, in many case unfortunate) history.

This is one of those rare moments of sanity over the past three years, I hope it goes the distance!

Now back to my foul weather Jazz Fest Blogging…

Loki, Founder and Cat Herder, HumidCity

Why do all you lefty radical types hate President Bush so much? Follow the links for documentation.

Well, first of all because he spent the day talking immigration with Chertohoff (White House) and eating birthday cake with McCain (White House again)after the National Hurricane Center’s Director told him of the magnitude of the disaster in New Orleans (AP).

Who needs to even bring up the obscenity that is the Iraq situation when we have the devastated remnants of our homes as illustration. Governor Blanco requested aid, Bush didn’t bother (Newsweek). He was too busy talking Medicaire (White House).

It goes on and on. I guess to many people it does not matter becase it did not happen to anyone but those “deadbeats from New Orleans.” To others it has just faded from memory along with all the other soundbites. Well let me tell you, it does not fade out for us. We live with it every day, trying to put lives together in the face of the three worst impediments known to modern man: the local, state, and federal governments. The unholy trinity of Bush, Blanco and Nagin have done their best to finish us off with their dual pronged plan of incompetence and corruption, but we are still here.

Why do I say that he should never be allowed within our city limits again? Go read a nice, well documented timeline of the times around the Federal Flood, some excellent work by ThinkProgress. This isn’t imagination, its Politicians Gone Wild. How dare anyone tell me not be angry at the total abandonment of the social contract by those in power.

Lets just put it simply: the man is a criminal and I do NOT welcome him in my city. I am far from alone in this. Take your stink of corruption (Enron anyone?) and dereliction of duty (Gitmo, perhaps?) and leave us alone. You have done enough. FYYFF!

This content is syndicated from the email by Matt McBride, formerly at the helm of Fix The Pumps. -Loki

Dear New Orleanians,

The Corps has released the preliminary version of their category 5 study:

http://lacpr.usace.army.mil/default.aspx

or the direct link:

http://lacpr.usace.army.mil/default.aspx?p=LACPR_Draft_Technical_Report

They had promised this to the public (after missing their 12/31/07 deadline) on February 8th, as seen here:

http://www.mvn.usace.army.mil/pao/Video/WLAE_Col_Lee_080115.wmv

I went and checked on March 7th, and it hadn’t yet appeared on the LaCPR site. But it’s there now.

By the way, the study doesn’t actually make any recommendations. In fact, here’s an excerpt from the end of the report:

“Efforts to date do not point to a single effective risk reduction strategy. No single strategy for comprehensive hurricane damage risk reduction, other than entirely abandoning communities in South Louisiana, will guarantee safety for the population along the coast.”

Basically, what this study has done is just collect all the alternatives, so that more meetings can be held. The Corps has placed a paragraph in the report meant to blunt criticism that the public was expecting recommendations from this report, and there are none (and, yes, I am aware that was reported earlier, but that doesn’t mean that every member of the public in South Louisiana will remember or care about it):

“Congress also directed a technical report rather than a reconnaissance or feasibility report as described by normal USACE policy. The technical report will contain many of the same components as a reconnaissance or feasibility report, such as presenting the results of the formulation and evaluation of alternatives. As outlined by the Congressional direction, the technical report will contain a ‘comprehensive hurricane protection analysis and design…to develop and present a full range of flood control, coastal restoration, and hurricane protection measures…for comprehensive Category 5 protection.’”

Expect to see that argument when people start asking, “why are there no recommendations other than, ‘have more meetings?’”

Matt

Update March 17th
So, I’m waiting for Entergy (with Smokey Johnson) to come turn my gas back on after a leak down the street - and who shows up to document us villagers? None other than Jonathan Demme and his crew. To be fair, they were running on a wing and a prayer, using fairly low tech gear.

I had a talk with Mr. Demme. He was pleasant and seemed mighty interested in New Orleans, so I will cast off my initial barbs (while leaving them for posterity, of course). I did explain to his crew that most of us in New Orleans are kind of fed up with the flurry of people coming here to capture a story on Post-K life. They got it.

————————————————barbs below.

Hello, fellow Humid citizens, this will be a quick post as if off to one of many jobs. My name is George Ingmire. I live in the 9th ward, the Musicians Village, in between sleep and overworked - like most of us.

I am here to pitch a female dog (not like the Marine, of course) about a call I got this week from Jonathan Demme’s office -

“Hi my name is Harper (?), I’m calling from Jonathan Demme’s office. We are checking on your possible availability as a sound recordist for this Sunday, March 16th. It’s pro bono, but it’s going to be really great and we’ll cover travel expenses…. the story is about recovery after Katrina, blah blah blah”

Well. Let’s see. You are coming from NY to do a film about us. Poor us, for the world to see. How thoughtful, all the while utilizing local workers for free. Recovery on the backs of one of her inhabitants. Now I understand the need for low/no budget indie filmmakers to do things on the cheap. I’ve been very happy to work on my friend Aaron Walker’s film for ages for free, he returns the favor as a cameraman. But what’s up with Demme’s people? I don’t even want to lay the blame at his feet. But whoever it is, up there in the “well to do” climes of NY, should rethink finding cheap southern labor.  We aren’t going to rollover whenever a filmmaker who has work on IFC shows up with some gas money and a couple of bologna sandwiches.

Has anyone else in this community been handled in a similar fashion? Just curious.

Until then.

George
www.neworleansnarratives.com

The following is a small post from The Unfathomable Dr. Mongoose on the New Orleans LiveJournal Comunity dated Jan 8, 08. I only just got permission to syndicate it so it is a few days late. Take it away Doc:

Katrina general retiring from the Army.

As Lt. Gen. Russel Honore gets ready to retire from the Army and hand over his command on Friday, he says he wants to spend the rest of his life creating a “culture of preparedness” to prevent another post-disaster disaster.

“There’s an attitude everywhere else that people are smarter than they are in New Orleans and in Mississippi. They’re not,” the 60-year-old general said at his office at Fort Gillem, just outside Atlanta. “What happened in New Orleans could have happened anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard…A vast part of America still thinks, `That couldn’t happen where I live.’ And they are dead damn wrong.”