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New Orleans
 Photo: Joe Brandt
New Orleans
 Photo: Brian Nolan

Ode or Eulogy: New Orleans After Katrina
By Jan Stürmann

I drive my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was gone.
           T-shirt with a twist on Don Mclean’s American Pie lyric

“The Lower Ninth Ward was the neighborhood of neighborhoods,” Frank Relle, a New Orleans native, says, as we walk along the Industrial Canal Levee. Here 20,000 poor blacks built homes on a below-sea level cypress swamp no one else wanted. Here, in this fertile Petri dish, grew the cultural soul food this city thrived on. Here, when the levee broke, the surge of water and the howling wind scoured the land clean of homes and community. All that remains behind the levee are concrete foundations, a child’s pink bicycle, and cars tossed like discarded toys.

By a makeshift shrine to some of the nearly 1850 people Katrina killed, we watch the sun set over cranes and construction workers racing to repair the levee before the June 1st start of the next hurricane season. The estimated cost to repair some150 miles of levees around New Orleans is $800 million. “But there is nothing left in the Ninth Ward to protect,” Frank says. “We Americans are such a reactive people; we are good at fixing the symptom but never the cause.”

Go back a few blocks, and you see houses pushed against houses, boats in living rooms, a teddy bear hanging in a tree, and the telltale flood line high along the walls like the Devil’s own bath ring. I lift camera to eye, and as I press the shutter.  A screen door swings open. I gasp, imagine ghosts. But it is only the moist wind eddying with memories and loss. 

Katrina Gave Me A Blowjob I’ll Never Forget.
            T-shirt.

At the downtown W Hotel where I’m staying you step from humid smog into the scented lobby of tilted mirrors, orchids in crystal vases and staff like fashion models. Decorated like an understated German Gentlemen’s Club, its cold air crackles with permissiveness. Even the mini-bar is stocked with an Intimacy Kit of three condoms and lube for just seven bucks.

After showering with exotically scented soaps, you hit downtown past the Harrah’s Casino and up Canal Street, where everything at first glance looks just fine and impersonal. The rent-a-cops beam big smiles and bigger guns, and the tourists walk dazed and glazed, uncomfortable in their pudgy bodies.

But after a few blocks you again see some of the $115 billion worth of damage caused by Katrina’s wind and flood that swamped 80% of the city: deserted buildings, blown-out windows, the looted Footlocker store boarded up. Traffic lights flash to their own dissonant rhythm. Even McDonalds is still not serving billions and billions. Is this a premonition of a civilization unraveling?

A street preacher waves a battered bible, calls out to repent and pray before it’s too late. Young bucks strut past, flash gold teeth and bling jewelry. The atmosphere twangs just this side of lawlessness. Bitterness coats the back of the throat with some sick chemical taste you try not to think about.

New Orleans has always been a twilight zone where the freed and escaped slaves came to live in the swamps with the French and the pirates. The dead are buried above ground, and, God knows, voodoo thrives here—a connection back to Africa before we prayed to a skinny white guy on a cross. In this city resides the dark, eccentric soul of America. Let it die, and those that want to turn America into a puritanical mega-church have won.

On Royal Street, past the antique stores and the art galleries, you step impulsively into Fleur de Paris hat shop, where a tall, thin woman with perfect ankles sells eccentricity for the head.

Katherine Madere is her name, a tenth generation New Orleans native. “Katrina was worse than losing a loved one,” she says. “She blew away our history.” She lights a cigarette like Bette Davis, inhales, exhales. “But we’re made from tough stock—we’ll survive.” “Meanwhile,” and she mimes tossing back a stiff drink, “we all self-medicate.”

Known for its perversion, drunkenness, and debauchery, Bourbon Street is home to an endless array of barrooms, strip-clubs, and sleazy gift shops.
                     From a street preacher’s flier

On the corner of Bourbon Street and St. Peter, a legless man sells $5 roses to lovers. Live music blows in from the four directions—a cacophony of dissonance and delight, through which streams of tourists strut and stagger, all high on the night and the possibility other things.
      
Here, on these French Quarter streets, more ancient than their age, Pan and the saints dance intertwined. The timeworn brick buildings stand adorned with wrought-iron balconies like a widow’s lace veil. A place to sit above it all and catch the cool breeze, thick with the mingled odor of debauchery and decay, and a rank base note drifting in from the bayou.

Outside a gay bar where Emmy Lou Harris sings from a flat screen TV, fortunetellers peddle promise and hope. Two strippers in black corsets and pink pumps sashay on the balcony of the Hustler Club and with cool distain, toss love beads to leering tourists. Street vendors sell post-Katrina, anti-FEMA T-shirts. And of course the God-Squad is out, preaching hell and damnation. They carry sandwich boards lettered with: “Jesus Said: Go And Sin No More,” and a list of the Ten Commandments—every one of which will be broken countless times tonight.
 
What is jazz? “Man, if you have to ask, you’ll never know.” Louie Armstrong.

        T-Shirt.

New Orleans needs tourist dollars, and the annual Jazz Fest is one occasion where the city feasts on out-of-town blood. When nearly a half-million fans gather for six days of music, the hotels are booked, the restaurants bustling, and the locals are filled, briefly, with hope.

Clustered around the Fair Grounds, street venders flog over-priced water, hotdogs and Pay-to-Piss port-o-johns. Heat-flushed tourists crush past security gates and push through ticket checks like feedlot cattle.

 

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