Public Service Announcement: If you're gonna deny, deny, deny, like our fool senator "Diaper Dave" Vitter keeps doing, please drive carefully. Never let 'em see you sweat, or commit traffic violations, in your haste to run from the truth.
Tomorrow morning is a rally for Our Lady of Good Counsel church to stay open. Check back to this post for details.
Nice video on Michael Dingler (aka, ReX from NoLa Rising) that Humid Haney has posted. It even features that "bane of my personal existence" telephone pole, which now has the gray spots beneath the Stop sign stained the color of the pole. Aside from the electrical box pictured in my li'l photo essay, nothing else I saw on my walk has been painted gray. Too bad - don't we all need a new canvas?
Hell of an article in this month's Radar magazine by Ethan Brown about how New Orleans is "keeping the brand out there" - aka, what the murder rate is doing to this city.
In February, a day after Fat Tuesday, I was walking my three dogs when a scruffy man in his twenties passed me on an old squeaky dirt bike, glaring when I offered a wave. In New Orleans, this is unusual—it's still the Deep South, after all—so I stood on the corner and watched him slowly pedal away. Just before he reached the next street, he rode up to a middle-age woman carrying a large purse and suddenly threw a mighty punch, striking her on the side of her face. She fell down screaming; he leaped off his bike and landed on top of her, grabbing for her purse. But the woman wouldn't let go. As I dialed 911, her screams attracted the attention of several nearby residents, who came rushing out of their homes to help. Surrounded, the man took off running, leaving his bike, the battered woman, and her purse on the side of the street. By the time the NOPD arrived on the scene 15 minutes later, he was long gone. This is what it's like to walk your dog in New Orleans.
Brown also answers those who object to his telling it like it is with two important points about the effects of the crime rate here:
1) Even after a massive anti-crime march on City Hall in early January of 2007, the city has done little on crime other than incessantly spin the numbers (the Mayor, the NOPD and the DA all, to borrow David Simon’s oft-used phrase, “shine shit and call it gold”); so, they all need to be constantly confronted with reality in order for change of/reform of law enforcement practices to occur.
2) New Orleans is a very, very small town (population estimates range from about 250,000 to just over 300,000) undergoing a very, very shaky recovery. So a sky high murder rate presents profound risks to the already tenuous recovery. Yes, New Orleans has long been a dangerous place and, yes, New Orleans reigned as the murder capital of the United States in 1994. But the city simply can’t afford its murder rate now–and I’d remind anyone here who is sanguine about the homicide rates of the past that crime was undoubtedly one of several major factors (a lack of economic diversity being another) that led to the steady decline in the city’s population since the early 1960s. Is this the sort of city that New Orleanians want? A city that experiences a long, steady decline in its population–and grows more dangerous every year?
Somebody in a great position to confront city officials on their lack of planning concerning the housing shortage has been on fire lately with his Times-Picayune columns. That's the kind of reporting that confronts our officials with reality when they get out of the vacuum-sealed cocoon that is the Council Chambers - and hopefully take some of that reality back in with them and start working to make this city a better place. For more on Lolis Eric Elie's latest, check E's latest. Yashir koach, Lolis!I was listening to our rabbi's sermon this past Friday concerning his visit to the Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, and when he was taking about looking out at the Ohio River nearby and thinking about all of those for whom crossing that river from the south meant freedom, I was momentarily distracted by Edie, who leaned over and whispered to me, "Yeah, and the Ohio River will be here soon!" I giggled, but it's really no joke. Check the USGS Water Watch map daily to see why. The tide is a-risin'...and the News Ladder's Editilla has been tracking the stories of flooded Midwesterners' homes and lives for quite a while. Go back and read his previous posts from the past few weeks.
V to the Tenth is happening this weekend, with a Superlove event taking over the Superdome on Friday the 11th and Saturday the 12th (admission is free) and, amid all the activities, performances and talks on Saturday, Naomi Klein will be discussing disaster capitalism from 1:50-2:20 PM. I've seen The Vagina Monologues performed before and loved it, so get your tickets for the performance at the Arena on Saturday and see folks such as Eve Ensler herself, Salma Hayek, Jane Fonda, and Oprah doing their thing with it.
AND, if you can't make it to any of the above events, at least read the Katrina Warriors' book selection for their Network Reading Project: Sandrine's Letter To Tomorrow.
Be good, folks. Stay well and take care.
3 comments:
That's quite a piece in Radar, particularly the scary picture of the seemingly abandoned building captioned "SCENE OF THE CRIME: The intersection of Marigny and Burgundy, a notorious drug corner near the location of an execution-style murder this February."
It's interesting to me because that's my corner (one block off Elysian Fields, behind the KOPS copy shop), and 1) it's not a "notorious drug corner"; 2) and I have no idea what "execution-style murder" the writer/captioner could be talking about. In February? Two months ago? Who would that be?
It's just a corner in the Marigny. Sts. Peter & Paul Church is on one corner. Occupied houses on two others. And the big scary house in the photo is undergoing rebuilding, as are a good percentage of the houses in town (it was a wreck before the storm).
I don't dispute the writer's overall theme - things aren't great here, and they're not getting better - but if anyone's headed to Marigny and Burgundy to buy anything but a cup of coffee down the street at Marigny Perks, they're likely to be disappointed. As am I at that article.
Oy vey. It's true. Stick a lurid-looking picture of damn near ANY street corner in this city in a magazine and it'll look notorious, whether is is or not. Yet another argument for accuracy in all aspects of reporting, no matter how innocuous they may seem.
I'm pretty sure Ethan Brown, who wrote the piece, didn't write the caption...and he certainly didn't take the photo, which seems to have been lit with some Extra-Spooky Lurid Nighttime Lens left over from "K-ville." You'd never guess that the Marigny guest-house veldt begins about a block away, or that some of the houses on that block of Marigny would put the San Francisco painted ladies to shame.
Brown lives in New Orleans and knows the city; I'd wager his editor, art director, and whoever wrote that caption were going for maximum zowie on a story that didn't really need it. ("The Killing Fields"? We're bad, but it's not quite 1970s Cambodia here.)
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