“You know like I know, ain’t no city like N.O.” - Free Agents Brass Band

As I mentioned last time, I spent most of last week in New Orleans with my man Josh. It was a great experience and as a kind of recap I want to string together a few images and observations from the trip. I did something like this during my visits to Dubai and Inner Mongolia and it worked pretty well, but I’m a little hesitant this time, just because New Orleans is complex and, as George W likes to say, misunderestimated. Still, this blog is about bigging up things that I love, so better to just dive in…

This is the New Orleans most of us know, the New Orleans of postcards and shot glasses and novelty T-shirts that say things like “I got Bourbon Faced on Shit Street”. It’s the New Orleans I visited with my family as part of a two-day detour on the way to our much more hotly anticipated final destination, Sunny Orlando. This New Orleans is alive and well. Most of the French Quarter survived Katrina with relatively little damage, and even in late July, when most of the rest of city is abandoned due to the heat, Bourbon Street was packed every night with students, parents, soldiers, middle managers, and fun-loving people of all kinds trying to live their Mardi Gras fantasy on the cheap.

We didn’t spend much time around there so I don’t really want to dwell on it, but I do think it’s worth saying that without a doubt the best thing we saw in the French Quarter was Big Al Carson & The Blue Masters performing at a spot called The Funky Pirate. Big Al is a giant (mO_Om) in the NO music scene. He started out playing tuba in brass bands and eventually migrated to the mic. He is a great singer, a great performer, and for my money the sexiest morbidly obese man around. Here’s a short clip that captures a some of the vibe…

But, as I said, we didn’t go to New Orleans to see this side of it. To me the French Quarter is interesting mostly because of how successfully it collects, structures, and Disneyfies the messy cultural production of New Orleans’s other neighorhoods. The problem is that, now more than ever, NO is two cities - one for tourists and another one for its people - and most visitors don’t ever get to see culture behind the caricature. In normal circumstances this wouldn’t be so bad, just another case of American comparmentalization and binary thinking, but Katrina showed us the perils of this sort of disconnect and what happens when government allows it determine policy or division of resources. So I think it’s more important than ever to emphasize some other parts of New Orleans, starting with its most vulnerable, the Lower Ninth Ward.

We arrived in the Lower Ninth Ward on our second day in New Orleans. I’d heard of the neighborhood mostly because of the horrors that took place there after Katrina. The Lower Nine was the site of the city’s worst flooding and the backdrop for some of its darkest images - swollen bodies bobbing for days in oily brown water, people waving “HELP US” signs at news crews, toddlers in cages swaying in the wind as they were raised into helicopters… I’d heard that clean-up and reconstruction had taken longer in this neighborhood than any other, so when we showed up I half expected to see the same wreckage I’d seen in magazines.

But when we finally got there and started walking around, the atmosphere was completely different. The images I had in my head were now nearly three years old. The clean-up was done, but the place still remained empty. Empty and spooky.

And I guess this is the second, less obvious tragedy wrought by Katrina - after the failures of planning and response, now the failure to rebuild. In the years since it flooded, nature has reclaimed a large part of the the Lower Nine. A neighborhood that a few years before was emblematic of American inner city life now feels more like a village in the backwoods.

The few houses that did survive are still abandoned for the most part.

Their insides have been gutted, but I saw very little restoration happening anywhere. It’s hard to imagine their owners don’t want to return, but between the elongated clean-up period, the trauma of starting over, lingering suspicions about the levees, epic injustices at the hands of insurance companies, ongoing FEMA fuckery, and the enormous difficulty of living life in a community that didn’t have a supermarket or bank before Katrina and now has almost no social support system or basic infrastructure at all, there are too many reasons for them to stay away.

Pre-Katrina, the Lower Ninth Ward was a sort of melting pot for all that is admirable and horrific in New Orleans. Its crime was legendary, but so was its sense of community. 60 percent of Lower Nine residents owned their homes, including Fats Domino, who never evacuated and had to be air lifted from his roof by the coast guard.

After the flood, the Lower Ninth Ward became a battleground for the many conflicting visions of New Orleans’s future. This is a very complicated and emotionally fraught topic, one that extends way beyond the scope of this little slideshow here, but if you want to know more check this New Yorker article by Dan Baum. A lot of good info on the Lower Nine in there.

Stories of people having their houses bulldozed without permission, predatory real estate companies buying up plots for below value, government schemes to turn the area into condos or golf courses or vague (program to be determined later) “green spaces” can still be heard, but it seems like most of the immediate threats evaporated with the billions the Bush administration promised but never delivered.

Long-term is something else though, because even if the New Orleans government’s enormous capacity for dysfunction and dereliction of duty makes any large scale development in the Lower Nine impossible, these same qualities may very well lead to the area simply atrophying and falling off the map.

But I don’t mean to be 100% gloom and doom. There are signs of revitalization in the Lower Nine. Construction is taking place, people are returning home. Brad Pitt’s Make It Right project is already bearing fruit in the form of some very, very easily identifiable eco-friendly homes on stilts. Former residents have returned and built their own homes in the native shotgun style.

One of the people leading the trickle back to the Lower Nine is Ronald Lewis.

Ronald is an activist and Founder, Curator, and Director of The House of Dance and Feathers, a museum dedicated to Mardi Gras Indian culture that he maintains in his back yard. We met with him on the visit and had a good conversation. I’ll post that up a little later. For now, the main thing that I want to emphasize about Robert (and this holds for almost everyone we met down there) is that he is a person who demands and accepts no pity. He is doing everything he can to get his community back together with the full knowledge there will probably never been any real help from the local or federal government. I think that his is representative of a heroic mentality that, for good or bad, New Orleans has instilled in its citizens through years of corruption and neglect.

To me this house says it all. It’s broken down, unlivable, whatever. But the message is: AMERICA NEEDS HELP. We’re going to be ok. We are survivors. America, you need to check yourself out.

Most of the rest of the trip we spent in and around the Bywater section of New Orleans. Most of it was spared from the worst of the flooding, but parts were still pretty badly damaged and today the area is a weird mixture of paralysis and rehabilitation.

Since so many of the structures survived, the marks left on them give a view to the frantic nature of the recovery efforts.

Not to mention the terror that preceded them.

But you also get a chance to appreciate some of New Orleans natural flavor, particularly its emphasis on color.

And color coordination.

Most of these pictures are from the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood where we were staying. The more we walked around, the more these candyland color schemes entranced me.

When we’d occasionally stumble into one of the industrial corners of the neighborhood, I felt sick. The exact same scene wouldn’t bother me a bit in New York, but down here it felt dull and more than that completely joyless, almost inhumane.

So when I could I kept my head to the sky. Eventually my brain sort of clouded over and I started to see things only in terms of color combination. And I ended up with dozens of pictures like this:

New Orleans is a city that resists simplification, especially the kind of either/or dialectic so popular in other parts of America. So it wouldn’t be right to give the impression that the city is either dilapidated and sad or viable and lively. Many times these conditions occur simultaneously. This is a house we stumbled on in Tremé, the oldest African-American neighborhood in America and a center for brass band culture. It was abandoned, but dressed in a kind of Jackson Pollack meets Jean-Michel Basquiat meets Pee Wee’s Playhouse type of style.

I had it in mind later that day when we went to Claiborne Avenue, the runway for black Mardi Gras, to check out a jazz funeral being held for a woman named Barbara Sparks, the pre-eminent Mardi Gras Indian Big Queen.

The jazz funeral is an essential part of New Orleans culture. Like New Orleans food and music, it is a mixture of African, European, and American approaches. I’ll lean on wikipedia for the breakdown:

A typical jazz funeral begins with a march by the family, friends, and a brass band from the home, funeral home or church to the cemetery. Throughout the march, the band plays somber dirges and hymns. A change in the tenor of the ceremony takes place, after either the deceased is buried, or the hearse leaves the procession and members of the procession say their final good bye and they “cut the body loose”. After this the music becomes more upbeat, often starting with a hymn or spiritual number played in a swinging fashion, then going into popular hot tunes. There is raucous music and cathartic dancing where onlookers join in to celebrate the life of the deceased. Those who follow the band just to enjoy the music are called the second line, and their style of dancing, in which they walk and sometimes twirl a parasol or handkerchief in the air, is called second lining.

My mother having passed away a few weeks earlier, the whole experience was very intense for me. The thing that impressed me most and the thing that I think connects this experience to so many others that I had while in New Orleans is the capacity of New Orleanians, especially black New Orleanians, to funnel their darkest feelings into expressions of warmth and joy. Coming from the wallowing culture of Irish Catholicism, I found prolonged exposure to this point of view deeply therapeutic.

The other thing that impressed me, and freaked me out slightly, was the furious documentation taking place around the funeral. There were people with cameras everywhere. (Me being one of them obviously.) The entire procession was surrounded by a curtain of mostly white people recording every gesture and expression.

Josh told me that this phenomenon is sometimes referred to as the “third line” - the first being the band, the second the people who follow and dance and show love, and the third being tourists and voyeurs who manically document the whole thing. That’s a little harsh but of course it isn’t so surprising. Perhaps more than anything else, American pop culture has been shaped by white fascination with the products of black pain. I recognize that and am a product of it, but I must say that the blatancy of the gawking at the funeral and the forced, claustrophobic atmosphere it created turned me off taking photos for the rest of the trip. Although I think this photo is awesome.

So all that said, the main thing I want to emphasize about New Orleans is that, hobbled as it is, it retains its passion and if anything its citizens are more dedicated to their city than ever. There’s something to fight for now and unsurprisingly music provides one of the primary weapons (of offense and defense) in this struggle. So I want to wrap this long ass post up with some of the good music that we were exposed to during our visit. I guess in the spirit of this post, it makes sense to go with a few Katrina-inspired songs…

This first one is by a group called Free Agents Brass Band. We saw them on our last night in New Orleans. This was their grand finale track. It was crazy.

Free Agents Brass Band - Made it through that water

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This one is by Lower Nine native Kermit Ruffins and his band the Barbecue Swingers. We saw them on our first night, part a magical evening that culminated in Josh being taught some sort of Electric Slide-type line dance by NO’s own Wendell Pierce AKA Bunk from the Wire. No shit.

Kermit Ruffins and the Barbecue Swingers - O-o-h child

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New Orleans’s rap scene is getting back on its feet, thanks in part to Nuthin But Fire Records, one of the city’s strongest indy record labels. They’ve got a shop on North Claiborne Avenue that advertises itself as “the place to rebuild your record collection.” This song is by Sess 4-5, Nuthin But Fire’s founder. He sold us a whole bunch of bounce mixes then threw in his Dats Wassup mixtape for free. More on them here.

Sess 4-5 - Death of me

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Last, here’s the latest smash by deceased soul singer Ernie K-Doe. Josh and I hit up his bar/shrine The Mother-In-Law Lounge on Friday night and it was totally crazy. Not talk about it on a blog crazy, like real crazy. Anyway, apparently this jam was the #1 song in the UK a couple of weeks ago. It was recorded in 1970. It’s not dealing with Katrina…

Ernie K-Doe - Here come the girls

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