Monday, October 31, 2005
    Voodoofest clockwise from upper left: Kermit Ruffins, NIN, more NIN, Cowboy Mouth.
I don't have a costume. it's halloween and I don't even have a costume. me! that should tell you something. i'm still planning on going out tonight to see what's going on, but i haven't even thought about what i'd be, to say nothing of my usual long-term planning and Great Spending of Money on a costume. which i guess kind of explains my lack of posting for over a week. life in new orleans is as strange as could be expected these days - trying to balance normal daily things like work and dinner with aftermathery like visits to flooded family homes to do recon and recovery of whatever items are left or car shopping because your car got flooded... or whatever. it's hard to stop and think. my sister came in town this weekend, a refugee from hurricane wilma in fort lauderdale, so it was nice to get to spend some time with her. on saturday i managed to swing a free ticket to the voodoo musicfest, which was moved to memphis after the hurricane, but they somehow managed to bring a day of it to NOLA, the bands with new orleans ties - Digable Planets, Cowboy Mouth, Kermit Ruffins, QOTSA, and Nine Inch Nails headlining. and it was good. i've been over the cowboy mouth thing since about 1998, let's say - but it did me good to see their first show back in town since the storm, they really are evangelists for the spirit of this city, and of course they had a katrina-specific song, and i teared up in the middle of the crowd. sad. as opposed to tearing up the middle of the crowd, which was the case later that evening during the NIN show. and i thought i was too old for the pit. heh. i figure i've been listening to trent reznor and his pain for 15 years - half my life. and it still resonates, though whatever angst i feel these days is less acute than it was back then, a much duller and more adult emotion. a bit of a weird thing was that he brought out saul williams - socially consious slam poet and hip-hop artist - to do an angry take on the katrina fiasco. oh, and trent reznor has clearly been working out - no longer the scrawny goth type, he looks more like an untattooed henry rollins - heavier, built biceps and a buzz cut. not bad for a forty-something reinvention of image, though some of his more emotional gesticulations just don't look quite right on him now. anyway. rounded the evening out dancing like an idiot all by myself to kermit ruffins trumpet playing - which more than anything i heard that day just sounds like home. Friday, October 21, 2005
it's gratifying to be fucked up in the french quarter again, for what that's worth. --ab3 Monday, October 17, 2005
 --ab3
i moved back into my place uptown on thursday. living in my parent's big house in jefferson parish was nice, but then my parents came back to town, and love them though i do, i ain't living with them. life is suddenly a strange again, though, as the city is a good three weeks behind jefferson on the road to recovery. i've got power and potable water, but i don't have cable, tv or internet... which sucks, but not compared to everyone else who lost everything, so i won't complain on that score. uptown, downtown, and the quarter have certainly made a lot of progress - bars and restaurants and groceries are opening, things are slowly getting cleaned up from about freret street to the river. the damage isn't being *fixed* yet, really, but i's being, well... mitigated. blue roofs are appearing, piles of sheetrock and trash and refrigerators on curbs - all the signs of the first phase of recovery. and it's still very much an occupied city, where national guard troops and construction/demolition workers outnumber us returnees... army humvees and supply convoys rumbling down magazine street, wide-eyed young national guard troops from iowa or new jersey, slinging M-16s on streetcorners where the uptown latte soccer-moms and french quarter arthouse gutterpunks should be; frat bars crowded with blue-collar laborers until last call at 2am. what the hell is LAST CALL and what is it doing in my city?!? all that being said, it's clear that new orleans - at least the parts that i knew well and frequented, the parts that most of the tourists came to see, somehow the 20% that stayed dry - is re-animating. the rest of the city, however, is a wreck that is beyond the ability of my words to express. i've done a lot of driving around, i went through the 9th Ward yesterday, and New Orleans East, and Gentilly. there are areas that aren't bad throughout the city, this subdivision built a little higher, that main thoroughfare is on a ridge - and those might be spared the dreaded bulldozer. but those are the exceptions. there are streets - no, neighborhoods - that look positively dustbowl/grapes of wrath kind of rural. the mud and dirt are caked so thick on the street that they look unpaved; and everything that should be green is brown. boats of all sizes and shapes randomly in the middle of streets and neutral grounds. piles of debris taller than houses, where houses used to be. at the lakefront airport, small planes hanging in trees and off hangar roofs. and the areas closest to where the levees broke, near the london avenue and 17th street canals, - i don't have the words except that it's a testament to the powers of nature and the failures of men. on a positive, tiny miracle kind of note: it's now nearly two months post-katrina. my co-worker dave and his fiance liz lived in lakeview, near the corner of canal & robt.e lee; they got the worst of it, their house was underwater to the tune of 9 feet for the better part of two weeks. they've gone back three times to salvage what they can, and have found relatively little - too young a couple to have accumulated all the brik-a-brac, the china, the silverware - that tended to survive. on saturday, they went back for another look, and found rex, their 7 year old siamese fighting fish, weak and undersized but still alive in his oversized martini glass. it was standing upright on the kitchen floor, two rooms away from the table it had started on, under the refridgerator which is now suspended on a precarious diagonal across the kitchen, counter to counter. apparently, rex and his drink had been lifted by the rising water like some kind of eerie toast, and floated through the house for two weeks, landing on even ground when it receded, without so much as a drop spilled. so rex will live to see his eighth year in a new bowl, katrina be damned. pretty cool, i think. Tuesday, October 11, 2005
mystery photos captioned!: my mercury mountaineer was officially declared a flood total last week by the insurance adjuster... i guess that's a good thing, but now i've got to think about new cars and notes and... gah. also, i'm doing what i can to restore a couple of plaster statuettes salvaged from my grandmother's house.   Saturday, October 08, 2005
 just because i could, for the first time, get chinese takeout for lunch on friday, i did. "singapore angel" pasta - shrimp curry. maybe not too authentically chinese, but asian, anyway, and.. yummmm. they gave me 3 fortune cookies, and i opened them all (greedily, perhaps, but who was i gonna share them with? it was only the one lunch), in growing disbelief - these were all real fortunes or advice (as opposed to the insipid, useless chestnuts of faux-chinese wisdom that fortune cookies seem to more often than not contain these days) and they were all frighteningly applicable to my current tentative situation. --ab3 Friday, October 07, 2005
more photos, a bit on the "photo essay" side: the city of lost refrigerators. 
photos here. self-explanatory.  Wednesday, October 05, 2005
salvaging from my grandmother's home in lakeview today. one of the most horrible, draining experiences of my life. --ab3 Sunday, October 02, 2005
from time to time, for some reason i'm not entirely sure i understand, i hear from certain people who read this weblog that i come off as some sort of angry heathen. while that supposition strikes me mainly as humorous - i mean, i know plenty of good, practicing, strictly observant heathens, and i'm not one - there's certainly good cause to set that record straight.
as for angry, well, that's a simple one: i'm not an "angry person". what i am is passionate about my convictions. that passion leads me to anger, sometimes, and to joyful exuberance others, according to the subject at hand. call it anger, call it "righteous indignance" - as i see it, whatever your ideology, if you're not occasionally angry, you're not thinking enough about the world around you. Fortunately for most of you, this good little lapsed catholic boy is not particularly in the mood to delve the depths of a nice prickly religion discussion at the moment, and well, it (may or) may not fit the current zeitgeist of this blog, so it's a pleasant circumstance that i can punt here, and simply refer to a short correspondence on the subject with a reader regarding a post from earlier this year. it may not address the issue completely, but i think it's at least a good (ahem) apology for my, um... theology. this may not be the palative that certain readers of greater faith than myself may be looking for, but it is what it is. coincidentally, in light of the recent media focus on the president and his support of teaching "intelligent design" to the youth of america, i spent a good bit of last week reading up on some assorted papers by one richard dawkins, snarky evolutionary biologist extraordinare, who while often a bit extreme is nevertheless a an eloquent thinker on that place where religion meets science. conflict avoidance aside, i'm always glad to discuss whatever with whoever, one to one. and if you don't know how to get in touch otherwise, just hit the "contact" button up there. :) |