This we have learned: Extraordinary tragedy begets extraordinary generosity. Listen to the story of one couple's dream, wiped out by The Flood, then resurrected with a random act of kindness.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Chris Rose
Luis Bernhard and Sandra Bahhur, husband and wife, were chasing a dream. He is a retinal angiographer in the ophthalmology department of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, which, translated into English, means he's a highly specialized photographer of the eyes. She is an operating room nurse at Tulane Medical Center.
That's what they do for a living, and a good living it is. But it's not their dream or their passion, really. What they really wanted out of life was to be New Orleans restaurateurs.
They're foodies, Luis and Sandra. They eat out a lot and they talk about what's good and what's bad and what they would do if they could have a real New Orleans restaurant of their own.
“Any time we go out to dinner, we critique everything," Sandra says. "We talk about things we could do better. It's been a dream of ours for 15 years. It was something I really wanted to try before I turned 40."
They took small steps toward their dream many years ago, when they opened a lunch and breakfast joint called Arabesque in the medical district of downtown New Orleans, next door to their day jobs.
But that was just eggs, sandwiches and Middle Eastern appetizers. It wasn't the dream -- a bustling, eclectic destination bistro with daily specials and cool furniture, fancy lighting, art on the walls and all that intangible stuff that makes a restaurant great, gives it that magic, sensual allure of the fine dining world.
They got real close to the dream in the fall of 2005. A year and a half earlier, they had bought a funky, dilapidated shotgun house on Carrollton, right by Canal, the site of a former sign shop.
"Truth is, it was ugly," Sandra said. "It didn't say 'restaurant' at all." Nevertheless, they bought the place and poured all their sweat, energy and savings -- and loans -- into it. Luis, a very capable carpenter and artist, did all the physical renovation himself.
They were set to open in November of that year. But then.
But then, in one afternoon, the new restaurant, the old restaurant, their home in Lakeview and their jobs were wiped out. You know the deal. "It's the same miserable story everyone else has around here," Sandra says.
Luis was transferred to the VA in Miami. The dream -- just one of a million dreams around here, really -- was over. They bought a place in Miami. Started over. Moved on. But then.
But then that uncanny and imperceptible New Orleans virus bloomed in their blood, their brains, their souls.
"How do we leave?" Sandra asks. "We had unfinished business here. I mean, Miami is gorgeous; really gorgeous. But when we'd go out to dinner, we'd realize how much we missed New Orleans, how much we missed the friendly environment of the city's restaurants, and the variety of life here. In Miami, every restaurant is high-end Italian. And, truthfully, Miami is pretty high strung."
So they came back. They got their old jobs back. Took out more loans. Gutted the house and the new restaurant; lost the lease on the old one. Started over, moved on -- sure. But started over and moved on here.
"We wanted to be part of the rebuilding," Sandra says. "We wanted to be pioneers."
Luis rolled up his sleeves and renovated the building at 127 N. Carrollton Ave. for the second time in two years. They developed an eclectic menu that merges Middle Eastern, Cuban and Louisiana cuisine. They got cool furniture and fancy lighting and nice art on the walls. They poured what was left of their physical and emotional selves into the dream, a one-of-a-kind bistro called, again, Arabesque.
But then.
But then they ran out of money. And this time for good. They had maxed out their loans and tapped their in-laws for everything. This fall, just weeks from opening their restaurant, still refurbishing their Lakeview home and still sitting on a fat bank note in Miami, they hit bottom. Flat broke and busted.
They were desperate. "We got laughed out of four banks," Sandra says. "We began to feel pretty stupid for thinking we could do this."
But then. A quick back story:
In September 2005, Dr. Toney Russell and his wife Gina, residents of Houston, had heard about everyone in trouble over here in New Orleans and decided to do what they could to help. Toney tracked down Dr. Kyle Dickson of New Orleans, a colleague in arms, who along with his wife Susan had been wiped out by the storm. The Russells wrote a check to the Dicksons for $10,000. No strings attached. Rise up and fix yourself, with a little help from a stranger.
About six weeks ago, just when Sandra and Luis had reached the end of their road, the Dicksons tried to repay the Russells. But Tony explained that it wasn't a loan, it was a gift. He advised the Dicksons, now back on their feet, to pass it along to the next guy who might need it.
Kyle and Susan had once lived next door to Luis and Sandra. And I think you know what happens next.
At the very moment Sandra and Luis pondered closing down the whole New Orleans operation and going back to Miami with their tails between their legs -- what were they thinking when they tried this, really? -- Sandra showed up with a check. For $10,000. No strings attached. Rise up and fix yourself.
In truth, $10,000 doesn't get you far in the restaurant business. But it bought Sandra and Luis a month and that's all they needed. With the help of a local printer who refused to take their money, they ran off their menus and dusted off the tabletops with enough capital to open 10 days ago, enough capital to get butts in the seats and start serving meals, start being real New Orleans restaurateurs.
"He decided to give it to us because he heard that we were helping rebuild the city," Luis says. "And it came at such a desperate time. We didn't know how -- or if -- we were ever going to open our doors. We were despondent."
And folks have been pouring in the door ever since, and with the cash register ringing and capital coming in, they have survived, so far, thanks to the kindness of strangers, a strange pipeline begun by a man in Houston who simply gave a damn and then a couple in New Orleans who clearly understand the concept of karma.
And the story doesn't end there. Or, at least, hopefully not. You don't break a chain like this.
Sitting in his hip new bistro a week ago, Luis acknowledged that, ultimately, the survival of his restaurant is up to market forces -- and whether the food is actually any good. But he smiled and said: "We're going to make this happen. And we realize what a helping hand we had. And when we get an extra $10,000 -- whenever that may be -- we're going to pass it along. We're going to pay it forward to the next person who might need it."
And somewhere down the road, a dream awaits salvation, Katrina-style.
. . . . . . .
Columnist Chris Rose can be reached at chris.rose@timespicayune.com, or (504) 826-3309, or (504) 352-2535.
Friday, November 30, 2007
Saturday, November 17, 2007
New Orleans Flood Control System NOT as Advertised or Can We PLEASE Get This Right?
NEW ORLEANS FLOOD CONTROL SYSTEM NOT AS ADVERTISED
Floodgates, pumps provide less protection than predicted
Flooding reduction of 5.5 feet actually just 6 inches, maps show
Engineer calls it "correction"; professor calls it sloppiness
Homeowners worry change could affect building permits, insurance
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) -- A system of floodgates and pumps built since Hurricane Katrina to help alleviate flooding in several New Orleans neighborhoods may not be as much help as authorities first said.
The Army Corps of Engineers released flood risk maps on a block-by-block basis on June 20, but didn't include some technical data, preventing independent assessments of the accuracy of the maps.
The maps showed that the improvements made to the city canals' drainage systems would reduce flooding during a major storm by about 5.5 feet in Lakeview and nearby neighborhoods. The maps were based on a storm that has the likelihood of occurring at least once in 100 years.
But in a report released November 7, Corps scientists estimated that the actual benefit the system would provide would be just 6 inches.
The discrepancy was tucked into the voluminous report's appendices, and neither the Corps nor the scientists hired to conduct the study brought the changes to the public's attention when the report was released. It wasn't until New Orleans television station WWL-TV asked an engineer involved in the assessment about the discrepancy that it became known.
"We've made some corrections," the engineer, Ed Link, told The Associated Press on Friday night.
Link said the mistakes were apparently made in the calculations for two sub-basins that include Lakeview and nearby neighborhoods. In one, a minus sign was used instead of a plus sign.
Ivor van Heerden, a hurricane and levee expert with Louisiana State University, said the mistakes are the latest example of sloppiness and a lack of scientific peer review in Corps work.
"It's people's lives we're playing with and all we're getting is fuzzy science," van Heerden said.
Walter Baumy, a chief Corps engineer in New Orleans, said he was unfamiliar with the mistakes, but said, "I wouldn't contest what Dr. Link says."
But he added that the floodgates installed on the canals have given New Orleans "far superior" protection.
Donald Powell, federal coordinator for Gulf Coast rebuilding, said in a statement he was only informed of the errors in the maps on Friday night.
"Our team immediately contacted Dr. Link to express my strong concerns and my expectations on how the public will be better informed in the future. While the news is disappointing, it is an indication that the ongoing review process of the draft materials is working as intended."
Other Corps officials would not comment on the mistakes or did not return telephone calls.
Tami Do, 46, said she and her family rebuilt in Lakeview because they felt the Corps was doing a good job. Now, she said, her faith is shaken.
"I have confidence in what they're doing all along the levee, with the pumps. That's one of the reasons we're back here," she said. "But these kinds of things put doubt back in your mind. If they got this wrong, what else have they gotten wrong?"
Her husband, Tommy Do, wondered if the mistake would mean an increase in insurance rates, or perhaps a change in building requirements.
"Now all these people who have built these $300,000, $400,000 homes should be higher?" Tommy Do said. "That's not good. We're going to have to sue the Corps again!" E-mail to a friend
Floodgates, pumps provide less protection than predicted
Flooding reduction of 5.5 feet actually just 6 inches, maps show
Engineer calls it "correction"; professor calls it sloppiness
Homeowners worry change could affect building permits, insurance
NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AP) -- A system of floodgates and pumps built since Hurricane Katrina to help alleviate flooding in several New Orleans neighborhoods may not be as much help as authorities first said.
The Army Corps of Engineers released flood risk maps on a block-by-block basis on June 20, but didn't include some technical data, preventing independent assessments of the accuracy of the maps.
The maps showed that the improvements made to the city canals' drainage systems would reduce flooding during a major storm by about 5.5 feet in Lakeview and nearby neighborhoods. The maps were based on a storm that has the likelihood of occurring at least once in 100 years.
But in a report released November 7, Corps scientists estimated that the actual benefit the system would provide would be just 6 inches.
The discrepancy was tucked into the voluminous report's appendices, and neither the Corps nor the scientists hired to conduct the study brought the changes to the public's attention when the report was released. It wasn't until New Orleans television station WWL-TV asked an engineer involved in the assessment about the discrepancy that it became known.
"We've made some corrections," the engineer, Ed Link, told The Associated Press on Friday night.
Link said the mistakes were apparently made in the calculations for two sub-basins that include Lakeview and nearby neighborhoods. In one, a minus sign was used instead of a plus sign.
Ivor van Heerden, a hurricane and levee expert with Louisiana State University, said the mistakes are the latest example of sloppiness and a lack of scientific peer review in Corps work.
"It's people's lives we're playing with and all we're getting is fuzzy science," van Heerden said.
Walter Baumy, a chief Corps engineer in New Orleans, said he was unfamiliar with the mistakes, but said, "I wouldn't contest what Dr. Link says."
But he added that the floodgates installed on the canals have given New Orleans "far superior" protection.
Donald Powell, federal coordinator for Gulf Coast rebuilding, said in a statement he was only informed of the errors in the maps on Friday night.
"Our team immediately contacted Dr. Link to express my strong concerns and my expectations on how the public will be better informed in the future. While the news is disappointing, it is an indication that the ongoing review process of the draft materials is working as intended."
Other Corps officials would not comment on the mistakes or did not return telephone calls.
Tami Do, 46, said she and her family rebuilt in Lakeview because they felt the Corps was doing a good job. Now, she said, her faith is shaken.
"I have confidence in what they're doing all along the levee, with the pumps. That's one of the reasons we're back here," she said. "But these kinds of things put doubt back in your mind. If they got this wrong, what else have they gotten wrong?"
Her husband, Tommy Do, wondered if the mistake would mean an increase in insurance rates, or perhaps a change in building requirements.
"Now all these people who have built these $300,000, $400,000 homes should be higher?" Tommy Do said. "That's not good. We're going to have to sue the Corps again!" E-mail to a friend
Sunday, November 11, 2007
The Advocate: Why Harry Shearer Has Become a Tireless Spokesman for New Orleans
"The Advocate" by Chris Rose for the Times Picayune, Sunday, November 11, 2007
Harry Shearer is one of those multifaceted personalities whose career has always been characterized with lots of dashes and slashes; he is an actor/writer/comedian/political satirist/ broadcaster/commentator/blogger -- among other job titles.
Perhaps his greatest fame -- and best pay -- has come from his role as the animated voices of Mr. Burns and Ned Flanders on "The Simpsons." But for residents of his adopted home of New Orleans, his preeminent job for the past two years might best be described as: cheerleader/truth teller/banner waver.
Since the fall of 2005, perhaps no celebrity has matched Shearer's steady, visible and insistent support for and defense of the city. At risk of alienating fans who'd rather not think too hard or too much about it, Shearer continues to use all forms of media to challenge Americans to remain dialed in to the battered physical and emotional landscapes of the Gulf Coast.
How Shearer ended up as one of the city's chief spokesmen, sometimes assigned the exalted position of "The Voice of New Orleans," is as multifaceted as the man himself. One motivation, he admits, was guilt.
"I was off making a movie during the first two months of the disaster," he says. "I was suffering, but at long distance. And when I finally came back for the first time, in November, everyone was telling me how lucky I was to have missed the worst part; that I had gotten in after the smell had dissipated a little bit."
Shearer and his wife, chanteuse Judith Owen, have had a French Quarter condo for 12 years. It started as a vacation getaway but in recent years has served as their home for up to half the year. It was undamaged by Katrina.
"So, yes, I felt lucky," he says. "But yet, I still felt: When it was all so much worse, I was off making a movie. And I realized that I wasn't going to be spending my next six months or a year doing what everybody else was going to be doing -- plunging into their insurance companies and Road Home and all the rest -- so I figured that energy should be used for keeping -- no, getting -- the story of the city out and keeping it alive."
Another motivating factor, he says, was the abdication of support from other celebrities with New Orleans connections, folks who had the power and influence to get their voices heard and make things happen -- but who didn't.
"Seeing certain people of certain fame trash the city publicly just made me more determined to try and balance the scale in the other direction," he says. "I don't hold anything against anybody who got whacked and split, but people who had nothing bad happen to them and then just walked away saying 'screw you' ticked me off."
On this subject, Shearer doesn't call out any names in particular, save one -- that of another New Orleans celebrity transplant named Harry.
"I'm the un-Harry Anderson," Shearer says of the notoriously prickly TV star whose post-storm departure from New Orleans was accompanied by a slew of withering comments that did neither him nor the city any justice. "I'm trying to be the nice Harry," Shearer says. "I'm trying to rescue the name."
And so Shearer blogs incessantly on the popular Huffington Post Web site, spreading the straight dope on the city and referring readers to newspaper and magazine stories. He regularly invites New Orleans musicians, chefs and artists on his weekly syndicated radio show. He went on "Celebrity Jeopardy," representing -- and winning $50,000 for -- the Tipitina's Foundation.
He recently wrote a guest editorial for The San Francisco Chronicle, which heralded the city's spirit and can-do-ness.
"Despite it all, the city's joie de vivre, its celebration of the quotidian as well as the occasion, and its bawdy, take-no-prisoners sense of humor survive," he wrote. "(And) slowly, perhaps more slowly than they imagined, New Orleanians are sending a message that the rest of the nation seems to have difficulty receiving: Today, two years after their world got turned upside down, New Orleans is Bootstrap City."
Yeah, you right, Harry! And on and on he goes, on Bill Maher's HBO program, on National Public Radio, on every radio station in Scotland during a publicity blitz there -- anywhere and everywhere he can get people to listen. So, naturally, two years into this thing, some fans are telling him it's time to give it a rest.
"All the time," he confirms. "The same thing happens to Brian Williams (from the 'NBC Nightly News'). And my point with Brian, which I made to him personally, was maybe if he told people why they should care as opposed to just doing victim stories all the time, maybe they wouldn't be bitching so much."
Why people should care, he says, is simple, an argument well-worn in New Orleans: "People outside of here should care because their tax dollars paid to flood the city. Their tax dollars paid to do it wrong. That's a pretty big story, I think. And my prediction is that five years from now, somebody in Washington will win a Pulitzer Prize for finally discovering that."
Another reason for Katrina fatigue, he says, is racism. "It comes through every pore of what some people say. And for that, I have to blame the national media, which framed this very early on as a 'poor suffering black' story. They couldn't get their cameras out to St. Bernard Parish. They got them to the Convention Center and figured, well: That's all we need. And so, they misframed the story, and being New York liberals, it appealed to them that way anyway."
But despite -- or maybe because of -- a growing chorus of fans who think Shearer needs new subject matter, he keeps coming up with new ways to spread the gospel. His most recent offering is the lovingly crafted "Crescent City Stories," a sweet, poignant and melodic series of interviews and musical cameos currently airing on the new entertainment Web site www.MyDamnChannel.com.
"I was thinking: OK, what am I going to do next?" he says. "So much of what has come out of here in video documentation has been done by New Yorkers and I thought, as a quasi-local, it would be a good thing to let other locals give their view of things. And I thought -- again -- I could try to counteract the barrage of victim stories we get from the national media. The idea was to put some people I know for their loquacity and their cogency on the air, without an agenda, and just let them tell me something about their last two years."
"Crescent City Stories" debuted its first episode several weeks ago and Shearer has added a new one each week. In addition to his own commentary, he has profiled LSU hurricane specialist Ivor van Heerden, singer/composer Phillip Manuel and torch singer Leah Chase.
Ambiance for most of the episodes is set by local keyboard master David Torkanowsky, who is also profiled. An emotional apex of the series is certainly when Torkanowsky mournfully accompanies Chase as she sings: "Was this storm sent to make me realize what living is/It's the beauty of love/The joy of Life/Is this what 'rebirth' means?"
Printed words do not do the segment justice. Go see it for yourself. All the stories are archived on the site, along with a wealth of Shearer's more familiar brand of non-Katrina related political satire.
For a one-man phenomenon, Shearer smartly underplays his own role in "Crescent City Stories," simply serving as on-air interviewer and occasional narrator. It's great stuff, and uncharacteristically unfunny for Shearer.
"Most of the subjects were musicians, so there was a way to have music carry through it all," Shearer says. "But it was all mainly about counteracting that steady diet of 'poor pitiful me' that we get from the national media."
And they're great pieces to remind locals why we love it here, part of the continuing and sometimes arduous process of loving this place -- and a phenomenon Shearer recently experienced.
"I was just showing a friend of mine from Great Britain, a travel writer, around town," he says. "And, watching it all through her eyes enriched my appreciation of the city. What I saw in the people -- what came through -- was the ability, no matter how much angst you may be going through, to experience joy. And that's part of what makes this place different from, say, New York or L.A., where, no matter how much advantage you may have, you're always open to experiencing unhappiness; where, no matter how good things are, you find a reason to be unhappy."
All this cheerleading and boosterism is a far cry from the Harry Shearer who carved a career as a funnyman with no particular agenda. And he is well aware of that.
"When I was a kid, I was relentless about making fun of celebrities with causes. You know, pick a disease, any disease. So to change gears like that and suddenly have a cause and now be asked: 'You're the voice of a cartoon character; why should we believe what you have to say about this?' I guess you could say there's a credibility problem there.
"But this is not what I would choose to be doing -- if I had a choice," he says. "There's a part of me -- a part in all of us, I guess -- that would like to just go back to the way it all was before, just doing what I used to do.
"I wish circumstances were different. I wish there were more well-known people from here or living here who had reason to do this, but there aren't, so we all just play the cards we are dealt."
. . . . . . .
Columnist Chris Rose can be reached at chris.rose@timespicayune.com, or (504) 826-3309, or (504) 352-2535.
Harry Shearer is one of those multifaceted personalities whose career has always been characterized with lots of dashes and slashes; he is an actor/writer/comedian/political satirist/ broadcaster/commentator/blogger -- among other job titles.
Perhaps his greatest fame -- and best pay -- has come from his role as the animated voices of Mr. Burns and Ned Flanders on "The Simpsons." But for residents of his adopted home of New Orleans, his preeminent job for the past two years might best be described as: cheerleader/truth teller/banner waver.
Since the fall of 2005, perhaps no celebrity has matched Shearer's steady, visible and insistent support for and defense of the city. At risk of alienating fans who'd rather not think too hard or too much about it, Shearer continues to use all forms of media to challenge Americans to remain dialed in to the battered physical and emotional landscapes of the Gulf Coast.
How Shearer ended up as one of the city's chief spokesmen, sometimes assigned the exalted position of "The Voice of New Orleans," is as multifaceted as the man himself. One motivation, he admits, was guilt.
"I was off making a movie during the first two months of the disaster," he says. "I was suffering, but at long distance. And when I finally came back for the first time, in November, everyone was telling me how lucky I was to have missed the worst part; that I had gotten in after the smell had dissipated a little bit."
Shearer and his wife, chanteuse Judith Owen, have had a French Quarter condo for 12 years. It started as a vacation getaway but in recent years has served as their home for up to half the year. It was undamaged by Katrina.
"So, yes, I felt lucky," he says. "But yet, I still felt: When it was all so much worse, I was off making a movie. And I realized that I wasn't going to be spending my next six months or a year doing what everybody else was going to be doing -- plunging into their insurance companies and Road Home and all the rest -- so I figured that energy should be used for keeping -- no, getting -- the story of the city out and keeping it alive."
Another motivating factor, he says, was the abdication of support from other celebrities with New Orleans connections, folks who had the power and influence to get their voices heard and make things happen -- but who didn't.
"Seeing certain people of certain fame trash the city publicly just made me more determined to try and balance the scale in the other direction," he says. "I don't hold anything against anybody who got whacked and split, but people who had nothing bad happen to them and then just walked away saying 'screw you' ticked me off."
On this subject, Shearer doesn't call out any names in particular, save one -- that of another New Orleans celebrity transplant named Harry.
"I'm the un-Harry Anderson," Shearer says of the notoriously prickly TV star whose post-storm departure from New Orleans was accompanied by a slew of withering comments that did neither him nor the city any justice. "I'm trying to be the nice Harry," Shearer says. "I'm trying to rescue the name."
And so Shearer blogs incessantly on the popular Huffington Post Web site, spreading the straight dope on the city and referring readers to newspaper and magazine stories. He regularly invites New Orleans musicians, chefs and artists on his weekly syndicated radio show. He went on "Celebrity Jeopardy," representing -- and winning $50,000 for -- the Tipitina's Foundation.
He recently wrote a guest editorial for The San Francisco Chronicle, which heralded the city's spirit and can-do-ness.
"Despite it all, the city's joie de vivre, its celebration of the quotidian as well as the occasion, and its bawdy, take-no-prisoners sense of humor survive," he wrote. "(And) slowly, perhaps more slowly than they imagined, New Orleanians are sending a message that the rest of the nation seems to have difficulty receiving: Today, two years after their world got turned upside down, New Orleans is Bootstrap City."
Yeah, you right, Harry! And on and on he goes, on Bill Maher's HBO program, on National Public Radio, on every radio station in Scotland during a publicity blitz there -- anywhere and everywhere he can get people to listen. So, naturally, two years into this thing, some fans are telling him it's time to give it a rest.
"All the time," he confirms. "The same thing happens to Brian Williams (from the 'NBC Nightly News'). And my point with Brian, which I made to him personally, was maybe if he told people why they should care as opposed to just doing victim stories all the time, maybe they wouldn't be bitching so much."
Why people should care, he says, is simple, an argument well-worn in New Orleans: "People outside of here should care because their tax dollars paid to flood the city. Their tax dollars paid to do it wrong. That's a pretty big story, I think. And my prediction is that five years from now, somebody in Washington will win a Pulitzer Prize for finally discovering that."
Another reason for Katrina fatigue, he says, is racism. "It comes through every pore of what some people say. And for that, I have to blame the national media, which framed this very early on as a 'poor suffering black' story. They couldn't get their cameras out to St. Bernard Parish. They got them to the Convention Center and figured, well: That's all we need. And so, they misframed the story, and being New York liberals, it appealed to them that way anyway."
But despite -- or maybe because of -- a growing chorus of fans who think Shearer needs new subject matter, he keeps coming up with new ways to spread the gospel. His most recent offering is the lovingly crafted "Crescent City Stories," a sweet, poignant and melodic series of interviews and musical cameos currently airing on the new entertainment Web site www.MyDamnChannel.com.
"I was thinking: OK, what am I going to do next?" he says. "So much of what has come out of here in video documentation has been done by New Yorkers and I thought, as a quasi-local, it would be a good thing to let other locals give their view of things. And I thought -- again -- I could try to counteract the barrage of victim stories we get from the national media. The idea was to put some people I know for their loquacity and their cogency on the air, without an agenda, and just let them tell me something about their last two years."
"Crescent City Stories" debuted its first episode several weeks ago and Shearer has added a new one each week. In addition to his own commentary, he has profiled LSU hurricane specialist Ivor van Heerden, singer/composer Phillip Manuel and torch singer Leah Chase.
Ambiance for most of the episodes is set by local keyboard master David Torkanowsky, who is also profiled. An emotional apex of the series is certainly when Torkanowsky mournfully accompanies Chase as she sings: "Was this storm sent to make me realize what living is/It's the beauty of love/The joy of Life/Is this what 'rebirth' means?"
Printed words do not do the segment justice. Go see it for yourself. All the stories are archived on the site, along with a wealth of Shearer's more familiar brand of non-Katrina related political satire.
For a one-man phenomenon, Shearer smartly underplays his own role in "Crescent City Stories," simply serving as on-air interviewer and occasional narrator. It's great stuff, and uncharacteristically unfunny for Shearer.
"Most of the subjects were musicians, so there was a way to have music carry through it all," Shearer says. "But it was all mainly about counteracting that steady diet of 'poor pitiful me' that we get from the national media."
And they're great pieces to remind locals why we love it here, part of the continuing and sometimes arduous process of loving this place -- and a phenomenon Shearer recently experienced.
"I was just showing a friend of mine from Great Britain, a travel writer, around town," he says. "And, watching it all through her eyes enriched my appreciation of the city. What I saw in the people -- what came through -- was the ability, no matter how much angst you may be going through, to experience joy. And that's part of what makes this place different from, say, New York or L.A., where, no matter how much advantage you may have, you're always open to experiencing unhappiness; where, no matter how good things are, you find a reason to be unhappy."
All this cheerleading and boosterism is a far cry from the Harry Shearer who carved a career as a funnyman with no particular agenda. And he is well aware of that.
"When I was a kid, I was relentless about making fun of celebrities with causes. You know, pick a disease, any disease. So to change gears like that and suddenly have a cause and now be asked: 'You're the voice of a cartoon character; why should we believe what you have to say about this?' I guess you could say there's a credibility problem there.
"But this is not what I would choose to be doing -- if I had a choice," he says. "There's a part of me -- a part in all of us, I guess -- that would like to just go back to the way it all was before, just doing what I used to do.
"I wish circumstances were different. I wish there were more well-known people from here or living here who had reason to do this, but there aren't, so we all just play the cards we are dealt."
. . . . . . .
Columnist Chris Rose can be reached at chris.rose@timespicayune.com, or (504) 826-3309, or (504) 352-2535.
Monday, October 1, 2007
Background to the Jena 6: What a Hanging Noose REALLY Means
There was little local coverage of the Jena 6 happenings in our local paper. We're awash with stories about bungled Road Home money, chasms between our City Council and Mayor, non-stop thievery against those trying to renovate homes, and other less than uplifting topics. Perhaps I missed the few articles that there were, after one of our most trusted city leader's sudden resignation per bribery charges splashed the headlines for days.
I was unaware that people from across the country were planning to march in Jena, LA to protest the inequity of legal prosecution, until a friend and neighbor from Baltimore called to tell me about it. She wanted to go, but as a mother to 3 disabled children, she rightly thought that, perhaps, the environment might be too hard on the kids.
Following is a wonderful column, which appeared in today's Times Picayune, reprinted from The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio. This unequivically puts to rest the idea that hanging nooses is a 'harmless prank'. I watched in amazement as local Jena residents were interviewed prior to and during the march last week.
Several people said that they never saw any signs of racism and that the noose thing was just overblown. Until we learn to see through others eyes and become sensitive to ugly truths, we will continue to have a difficult time with reality.
We Must Remember The Ugly Truth That a Hanging Noose Symbolizes
by Connie Schultz
Friday, September 28, 2007
Plain Dealer Columnist, Cleveland, Ohio
There's a glaring omission in most of the Jena Six stories, and the silence shrouds an ugly part of American history that most of us would like to forget.
Reporters frequently note that as many as three nooses were found dangling on a schoolyard tree in Jena, La., but there is virtually no mention of what those crude circles of rope symbolize. Nobody, it seems, wants to summon the horrific images of the past, which may help to explain why copycat nooses are now popping up at other schools around the country.
Between 1882 and 1944, at least 3,400 black men were lynched in the United States. That's an average of one human being a week.
Historians say lynching began in the 1770s as a vigilante response to local criminals and political opponents. It was institutionalized in the South in the late 1860s to fight emancipation and Reconstruction. Author Philip Dray, in his book "At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America," wrote that "lynching became the means of killing any African-American whose status, actions or attitudes challenged white supremacy."
The victims were usually tortured and castrated and often set on fire in front of cheering crowds before they were hoisted up by a rope and left swinging from tree branches, lampposts and utility poles.
A newspaper reporter in Anadarko, Okla., described the 1913 lynching of Bennie Simmons. He was dragged from his jail cell, soaked in coal oil and set on fire before the goons hanged him from a cottonwood tree.
"The Negro prayed and shrieked in agony as the flames reached his flesh," wrote the reporter, "but his cries were drowned out by yells and jeers of the mob."
The men who killed him made no attempt to hide their identities, but not one of them was ever prosecuted.
Frequently, the dead bodies were photographed for gruesome souvenir postcards that were mailed and exchanged like baseball cards. James Allen collected more than a hundred of these for the book "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America."
One of the cards, titled "The Lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith," from 1930 in Marion, Ind., was double-matted and framed for the walls of someone's home. Locks of the victims' hair were flattened under glass.
The 1911 image of John Lee in Durant, Okla., was marketed as a "Coon Cooking." Five years later, a dutiful son named Joe mailed a card displaying the charred corpse of Jesse Washington with this inscription on the back: "This is the barbecue we had last night . . . "
Our reluctance to talk about this gruesome past has fueled the notion that a noose hung in 2007 is just a misguided practical joke. Authorities now insist that the nooses in Jena were unrelated to the subsequent beating of a white boy by six black students. But the boys who hung the nooses weren't severely punished, and nooses are now cropping up at other schools.
Several nooses have appeared at schools in North Carolina. A cadet and an instructor were targeted at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn. At the University of Maryland in College Park, a noose was hung from a tree just outside the Nyumburu Cultural Center. Nyumburu is Swahili for "freedom house."
Meanwhile, a neo-Nazi in Roanoke, Va., posted a threatening blog littered with racial slurs. If the Jena Six are released, he wrote, "we will find out where they live and make sure that white activists and white citizens in Louisiana know it. We'll mail directions to their homes to every white man in Louisiana if we have to in order to find someone willing to deliver justice."
His brand of justice is a lynching.
A circle of rope hanging from a tree is never a prank, but it is a call to action for every history teacher in the country. From middle school to college, these gatekeepers to our past should interrupt their lesson plans for a day and force their students -- and our children -- to think about a time not so long ago.
A time when murder was entertainment, when racism was a creed, and when the America we want to love was a country we all just want to forget.
To reach Connie Schultz:
cschultz@plaind.com, 216-999-5087
cleveland.com/columns
I was unaware that people from across the country were planning to march in Jena, LA to protest the inequity of legal prosecution, until a friend and neighbor from Baltimore called to tell me about it. She wanted to go, but as a mother to 3 disabled children, she rightly thought that, perhaps, the environment might be too hard on the kids.
Following is a wonderful column, which appeared in today's Times Picayune, reprinted from The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Ohio. This unequivically puts to rest the idea that hanging nooses is a 'harmless prank'. I watched in amazement as local Jena residents were interviewed prior to and during the march last week.
Several people said that they never saw any signs of racism and that the noose thing was just overblown. Until we learn to see through others eyes and become sensitive to ugly truths, we will continue to have a difficult time with reality.
We Must Remember The Ugly Truth That a Hanging Noose Symbolizes
by Connie Schultz
Friday, September 28, 2007
Plain Dealer Columnist, Cleveland, Ohio
There's a glaring omission in most of the Jena Six stories, and the silence shrouds an ugly part of American history that most of us would like to forget.
Reporters frequently note that as many as three nooses were found dangling on a schoolyard tree in Jena, La., but there is virtually no mention of what those crude circles of rope symbolize. Nobody, it seems, wants to summon the horrific images of the past, which may help to explain why copycat nooses are now popping up at other schools around the country.
Between 1882 and 1944, at least 3,400 black men were lynched in the United States. That's an average of one human being a week.
Historians say lynching began in the 1770s as a vigilante response to local criminals and political opponents. It was institutionalized in the South in the late 1860s to fight emancipation and Reconstruction. Author Philip Dray, in his book "At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America," wrote that "lynching became the means of killing any African-American whose status, actions or attitudes challenged white supremacy."
The victims were usually tortured and castrated and often set on fire in front of cheering crowds before they were hoisted up by a rope and left swinging from tree branches, lampposts and utility poles.
A newspaper reporter in Anadarko, Okla., described the 1913 lynching of Bennie Simmons. He was dragged from his jail cell, soaked in coal oil and set on fire before the goons hanged him from a cottonwood tree.
"The Negro prayed and shrieked in agony as the flames reached his flesh," wrote the reporter, "but his cries were drowned out by yells and jeers of the mob."
The men who killed him made no attempt to hide their identities, but not one of them was ever prosecuted.
Frequently, the dead bodies were photographed for gruesome souvenir postcards that were mailed and exchanged like baseball cards. James Allen collected more than a hundred of these for the book "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America."
One of the cards, titled "The Lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith," from 1930 in Marion, Ind., was double-matted and framed for the walls of someone's home. Locks of the victims' hair were flattened under glass.
The 1911 image of John Lee in Durant, Okla., was marketed as a "Coon Cooking." Five years later, a dutiful son named Joe mailed a card displaying the charred corpse of Jesse Washington with this inscription on the back: "This is the barbecue we had last night . . . "
Our reluctance to talk about this gruesome past has fueled the notion that a noose hung in 2007 is just a misguided practical joke. Authorities now insist that the nooses in Jena were unrelated to the subsequent beating of a white boy by six black students. But the boys who hung the nooses weren't severely punished, and nooses are now cropping up at other schools.
Several nooses have appeared at schools in North Carolina. A cadet and an instructor were targeted at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn. At the University of Maryland in College Park, a noose was hung from a tree just outside the Nyumburu Cultural Center. Nyumburu is Swahili for "freedom house."
Meanwhile, a neo-Nazi in Roanoke, Va., posted a threatening blog littered with racial slurs. If the Jena Six are released, he wrote, "we will find out where they live and make sure that white activists and white citizens in Louisiana know it. We'll mail directions to their homes to every white man in Louisiana if we have to in order to find someone willing to deliver justice."
His brand of justice is a lynching.
A circle of rope hanging from a tree is never a prank, but it is a call to action for every history teacher in the country. From middle school to college, these gatekeepers to our past should interrupt their lesson plans for a day and force their students -- and our children -- to think about a time not so long ago.
A time when murder was entertainment, when racism was a creed, and when the America we want to love was a country we all just want to forget.
To reach Connie Schultz:
cschultz@plaind.com, 216-999-5087
cleveland.com/columns
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Save NOLA: Houses Built from Donors' Generosity and T-Shirt Sales
THE ROAD TO WELL
Good intentions have been paying off in a big way, as the millions of dollars raised by sales of Katrina-related merchandise are building houses, buying instruments for musicians and helping City Park meet expenses
Sunday, September 30, 2007
By Susan Langenhennig
Michael Harris lives in a house built by T-shirts.
The singer/bassist and his 17-year-old son, Michael Jr., moved into their new gray and white cottage on Aug. 21, two of the newest residents of the Musicians' Village in the Upper 9th Ward.
It cost the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity $75,000 to build Harris' 1,100-square-foot, three-bedroom home.
The money didn't come from some big corporate donation. It was raised, at $20 a pop, through the sale of Save NOLA T-shirts.
"We started out by putting up a table on Magazine Street, and we thought we'd make a thousand dollars," said Clare Durrett, one of the volunteers behind the fleur-de-lis-emblazoned cotton tops. "We sold out in two hours, 200 T-shirts and caps. And we thought, well, we might be on to something here."
All told, the Save NOLA folks -- a loose volunteer group ranging from eight to 12 people, many of whom lost their own homes to Katrina -- have raised a bit more than the $75,000 needed for Harris' house.
"It's phenomenal, really," Durrett said, still shocked by the receipts rung up in less than 24 months on the group's Web site, www.savenolanow.com, and in local boutiques. Purchases have been sent to Argentina, Canada and Germany.
The group gives all net proceeds from its products -- shirts to hats to coffee mugs -- to local charities linked to home-building.
The Save NOLA shirts are just one of dozens -- maybe hundreds -- of products that bobbed up in the storm's wake to raise money for hurricane relief and rebuilding.
First came the lemonade stand-style sales on street corners of hometown-proud caps and car magnets.
Then came products targeted to more sophisticated shoppers -- $75 silver fleur-de-lis pendants to benefit a foundation helping artists; $500 George Rodrigue Blue Dog posters to help the New Orleans Museum of Art; and dozens of $20 music compilations, whose riffs and refrains generated dollars for local musicians' aid agencies.
Even Style.com, the online fashion bible of Vogue and W magazines, touted $320 Hermès silk scarves benefiting New Orleans City Park. A Google search at the time found everything from plastic arm bands to Christmas ornaments to six packs of Abita Brewing Co.'s Restoration Ale with Katrina donation tie-ins.
Taking stock some two years later, a skeptic may wonder where all the money went.
While there's no data tracking total dollars generated through such independent charitable merchandise sales, a quick survey of nine of the more high-profile pieces showed an impressive sum. Sales of products ranging from T-shirts to bottles of beer to DVDs raised more than $3 million combined for local nonprofits.
The yearning to shop for items linked to hurricane relief efforts was as intense as the desire to produce the merchandise.
"I gave my nieces and nephews all New Orleans T-shirts for the Christmas after the storm to not only support some of the local charities, but to instill pride in New Orleans," said Mary Beth Romig, director of communications for the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Romig, whose Lakeview home was swallowed by the flood, also scooped up fleur-de-lis jewelry to replace lost pieces and bought her daughter a necklace with a music note pendant because "it fit her passion and it was also for a good cause (raising money to help struggling musicians). I saw it and bought it immediately."
Indulging in such charitable retail therapy proved a panacea for many residents mired in a painfully slow rebuilding process. It also had the side effect of shoring up local cultural institutions and companies drowning in Katrina's economic backwash.
Such was the case for jewelry designer Mignon Faget, whose company has donated $155,000 to the Louisiana Cultural Economy Foundation. The money primarily has come through the sale of her fleur-de-lis pendants, necklaces and earrings.
Those proceeds have turned into grants to replace lost paints and brushes, horns and drums for local artists and musicians, said Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, who set up the foundation to "get money directly into the hands of artists who needed it after Katrina and Rita."
"To think we've raised that much money when we thought we might go bankrupt ourselves back in September 2005," said Virginia Saussy, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Mignon Faget.
"When the storm hit, we had just purchased all of the metals for holiday '05. We came back and opened the doors on Magazine Street to an empty city. We didn't know if we were going to make it. Mignon says the fleur-de-lis saved our business."
The historic French symbol, reinterpreted by many local designers, quickly became New Orleans' unofficial badge of courage. Anything adorned with the image flew off store shelves.
Even while Faget's staff was still scattered around the country, her company's Web site was logging orders from customers.
"We had a woman e-mail us with about a thousand-dollar Web order," Saussy said. "She said, 'I'm trying to find a way to help the city, and if I can keep you all in business, maybe that will help.' "
From Sept. 1, 2005, through the end of that year, Faget dedicated 10 percent of all fleur-de-lis sales to the Louisiana Cultural Economy Foundation. Then in 2006, she gave 5 percent of sales of specific Katrina-related pieces, including a Rebirth Ribbon and an Anniversary Amulet, to the foundation. Faget, whose company now has 100 employees, up from 80 before the hurricane, picked the foundation because she recognized the economic and cultural importance of the arts to the city, Saussy said. "Mignon is an artist who employs artisans," Saussy said, so "she was very interested in helping to bring back artists to the city."
Across Lake Pontchartrain, just two months after the storm, Abita Brewing Co. was mixing up a batch of malted barley into a new recipe: Fleur-de-lis Restoration Ale.
Since it launched the brew in October 2005, the company has donated $1 from the sale of every six pack of the ale to the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation, generating $400,000 so far for the nonprofit fund set up after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita by Gov. Kathleen Blanco. The company anticipates it will raise an additional $100,000 before the donation ends at the end of this month.
"We felt like we had to do something to help out, and when we thought about it, we thought the thing we do best is make beer," said David Blossman, president of the company.
"Normally a launch of a new product is about an eight- or nine-month process, but with the help of our artists, suppliers and the federal government -- which pushed through our label approval -- we got it done much quicker."
Abita also printed up T-shirts, caps and lapel pins with the Restoration Ale logo, and all net proceeds from that merchandise also went to the foundation, Blossman said.
When Pat Baldwin read in the newspaper that French fashion house Hermès had reissued its New Orleans-themed scarf, she had to have one. "I sent an e-mail to the Hermès store in Paris, and they referred me to the Hermès store on Park Avenue in New York, and I got the black one," she said. The colorful, jazz-themed square of silk replaced one of three cherished Hermès scarves Baldwin had owned before the storm. "They all drowned in the flood . . . I live in Eden Isles, and our house had six feet of water," she said.
It was easy for Baldwin to rationalize the purchase: Hermès contributed 10 percent from the scarf sales to New Orleans City Park. "If I'm going to buy it anyway, then I might buy something that helps," she said. "I thought it was for a good cause. I believe in supporting the city, and I want to see the city come back."
Apparently she isn't alone. Those Hermès scarves raised $27,000 for City Park, said John Hopper, the park's director of development.
"It's real money, and it helps," he said.
But it wasn't only replacements of cherished possessions that many residents were seeking in their post-storm shopping.
There were a lot of businesses who saw an unexpected climb in (sales of) luxury items after the storm," said Janet Speyrer, professor of economics and associate dean for research at the University of New Orleans College of Business.
"To an economist, at first it just didn't make sense that jewelers would be having such a big year when there was so much of our lives destroyed," Speyrer said. "But people were buying things to make themselves feel better, luxury cars, jewelry, expensive things. Spouses felt so bad for their wife or husband, they went out and bought them something special."
Such purchases sent local sales tax collections soaring. For the first six months of 2006, Jefferson Parish sales tax revenues went up 41 percent and St. Tammany recorded a 48.6 percent jump as compared with the same period a year prior.
Products with tie-ins to Katrina relief only made purchases that much easier.
"People who lived through this were looking to buy and wear something that said 'I'm here, I'm supporting the effort, I survived the storm,' " Speyrer said.
Then there were the out-of-town buyers, those who fell in love with New Orleans' cobblestone streets and jazz-filled haunts long before Katrina and were broken-hearted about what happened. Other purchases were taken home by the many caring volunteers who came here to help the recovery effort by gutting flooded houses.
"I gave out some (New Orleans music) CDs that benefited Katrina victims at a conference after the storm, and people just hugged them," Speyrer said. "It was as if I gave away so much more than music. If you were a visitor and could buy something like that, it simply made you feel good."
Among organizations on the receiving end of Katrina-related product sales is the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity.
To make sure its name is not used in vain, the nonprofit group has anyone who wants to fundraise on its behalf sign a contract, said Gina Stilp, the local Habitat affiliate's development coordinator.
"We have every company or individual sign a letter of intent with the terms of the fundraiser, how long they'll run the benefit," Stilp said. "That ensures it's a legitimate fundraiser not only to Habitat, but also to the customer.
"We are protective of the Habitat name, that it's being used with good motive and for a good product," she added.
To date, Stilp said, she hasn't heard of any cases in which a product used the Habitat fundraising hook without actually anteing up the money generated.
"We have had very positive experience thus far," she said. "Occasionally we will have people send out press releases without talking to us first, but I've never had an instance where we couldn't reach them and say, 'OK, let's back up a step and get that letter of intent."
Stilp points to Save NOLA as one of its "standouts." Habitat worked with the group's volunteers, tracked their fund-raising progress, and when they'd reached $75,000 "we assigned a (building) lot and a partner family."
Another high-dollar contributor was the Home Shopping Network. It held a promotion last September at Harrah's Casino in New Orleans, featuring cookware created by Todd English, the chef behind Riche, a restaurant at Harrah's Hotel. "They donated 5 percent of the sales of the cookware on those two days," Stilp said. Ultimately, Habitat received a $72,000 check.
A nationwide audience also whipped out their wallets for The Concert for New Orleans held Sept. 20, 2005, at New York's Madison Square Garden. Concert sales and proceeds from a DVD of the event, "From the Big Apple to the Big Easy," generated a combined $1.49 million for Habitat's house-building efforts here.
But Stilp also acknowledges the importance of smaller contributions raised through the sale of items made by individuals, schools or churches.
She points to $1,500 raised by the local Hard Rock Cafe. "Their store manager has been great at doing benefits, and they're in the process of designing a pin that will have a purple Habitat house on it.
"And a high school in the Chicago area has a goal of producing 2,000 CDs and selling them, and they also are anticipating sending some students to be volunteers," she said.
If so, they'll number among the hundreds of volunteers who, over the past months, have descended on Alvar and North Roman streets to wield hammers in the Musicians' Village.
Such volunteer labor, combined with money from donations, gets the Habitat houses built. Habitat then sells them to qualified families through a zero-interest mortgage. In lieu of a down payment, the home buyer must put in 350 hours of "sweat equity," joining in the construction of the house.
"It's truly overwhelming, the lessons this teaches on so many levels," said new home owner Harris, a musician who plays with Sunpie Barnes and sings in the Shades of Praise gospel choir. Prior to moving into his Musicians' Village cottage, he and his son lived for almost two years in a one-room apartment in the Lower Garden District after Katrina washed away his Lower 9th Ward house.
"I'm just truly humbled by the entire experience," he said, adding that he proudly wears his Save NOLA T-shirt. "I just keep thinking, I'm home, I'm home, I'm home."
. . . . . . .
Susan Langenhennig can be reached at slangenhennig@timespicayune.com or at (504) 826-3379.
Good intentions have been paying off in a big way, as the millions of dollars raised by sales of Katrina-related merchandise are building houses, buying instruments for musicians and helping City Park meet expenses
Sunday, September 30, 2007
By Susan Langenhennig
Michael Harris lives in a house built by T-shirts.
The singer/bassist and his 17-year-old son, Michael Jr., moved into their new gray and white cottage on Aug. 21, two of the newest residents of the Musicians' Village in the Upper 9th Ward.
It cost the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity $75,000 to build Harris' 1,100-square-foot, three-bedroom home.
The money didn't come from some big corporate donation. It was raised, at $20 a pop, through the sale of Save NOLA T-shirts.
"We started out by putting up a table on Magazine Street, and we thought we'd make a thousand dollars," said Clare Durrett, one of the volunteers behind the fleur-de-lis-emblazoned cotton tops. "We sold out in two hours, 200 T-shirts and caps. And we thought, well, we might be on to something here."
All told, the Save NOLA folks -- a loose volunteer group ranging from eight to 12 people, many of whom lost their own homes to Katrina -- have raised a bit more than the $75,000 needed for Harris' house.
"It's phenomenal, really," Durrett said, still shocked by the receipts rung up in less than 24 months on the group's Web site, www.savenolanow.com, and in local boutiques. Purchases have been sent to Argentina, Canada and Germany.
The group gives all net proceeds from its products -- shirts to hats to coffee mugs -- to local charities linked to home-building.
The Save NOLA shirts are just one of dozens -- maybe hundreds -- of products that bobbed up in the storm's wake to raise money for hurricane relief and rebuilding.
First came the lemonade stand-style sales on street corners of hometown-proud caps and car magnets.
Then came products targeted to more sophisticated shoppers -- $75 silver fleur-de-lis pendants to benefit a foundation helping artists; $500 George Rodrigue Blue Dog posters to help the New Orleans Museum of Art; and dozens of $20 music compilations, whose riffs and refrains generated dollars for local musicians' aid agencies.
Even Style.com, the online fashion bible of Vogue and W magazines, touted $320 Hermès silk scarves benefiting New Orleans City Park. A Google search at the time found everything from plastic arm bands to Christmas ornaments to six packs of Abita Brewing Co.'s Restoration Ale with Katrina donation tie-ins.
Taking stock some two years later, a skeptic may wonder where all the money went.
While there's no data tracking total dollars generated through such independent charitable merchandise sales, a quick survey of nine of the more high-profile pieces showed an impressive sum. Sales of products ranging from T-shirts to bottles of beer to DVDs raised more than $3 million combined for local nonprofits.
The yearning to shop for items linked to hurricane relief efforts was as intense as the desire to produce the merchandise.
"I gave my nieces and nephews all New Orleans T-shirts for the Christmas after the storm to not only support some of the local charities, but to instill pride in New Orleans," said Mary Beth Romig, director of communications for the New Orleans Metropolitan Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Romig, whose Lakeview home was swallowed by the flood, also scooped up fleur-de-lis jewelry to replace lost pieces and bought her daughter a necklace with a music note pendant because "it fit her passion and it was also for a good cause (raising money to help struggling musicians). I saw it and bought it immediately."
Indulging in such charitable retail therapy proved a panacea for many residents mired in a painfully slow rebuilding process. It also had the side effect of shoring up local cultural institutions and companies drowning in Katrina's economic backwash.
Such was the case for jewelry designer Mignon Faget, whose company has donated $155,000 to the Louisiana Cultural Economy Foundation. The money primarily has come through the sale of her fleur-de-lis pendants, necklaces and earrings.
Those proceeds have turned into grants to replace lost paints and brushes, horns and drums for local artists and musicians, said Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu, who set up the foundation to "get money directly into the hands of artists who needed it after Katrina and Rita."
"To think we've raised that much money when we thought we might go bankrupt ourselves back in September 2005," said Virginia Saussy, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Mignon Faget.
"When the storm hit, we had just purchased all of the metals for holiday '05. We came back and opened the doors on Magazine Street to an empty city. We didn't know if we were going to make it. Mignon says the fleur-de-lis saved our business."
The historic French symbol, reinterpreted by many local designers, quickly became New Orleans' unofficial badge of courage. Anything adorned with the image flew off store shelves.
Even while Faget's staff was still scattered around the country, her company's Web site was logging orders from customers.
"We had a woman e-mail us with about a thousand-dollar Web order," Saussy said. "She said, 'I'm trying to find a way to help the city, and if I can keep you all in business, maybe that will help.' "
From Sept. 1, 2005, through the end of that year, Faget dedicated 10 percent of all fleur-de-lis sales to the Louisiana Cultural Economy Foundation. Then in 2006, she gave 5 percent of sales of specific Katrina-related pieces, including a Rebirth Ribbon and an Anniversary Amulet, to the foundation. Faget, whose company now has 100 employees, up from 80 before the hurricane, picked the foundation because she recognized the economic and cultural importance of the arts to the city, Saussy said. "Mignon is an artist who employs artisans," Saussy said, so "she was very interested in helping to bring back artists to the city."
Across Lake Pontchartrain, just two months after the storm, Abita Brewing Co. was mixing up a batch of malted barley into a new recipe: Fleur-de-lis Restoration Ale.
Since it launched the brew in October 2005, the company has donated $1 from the sale of every six pack of the ale to the Louisiana Disaster Recovery Foundation, generating $400,000 so far for the nonprofit fund set up after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita by Gov. Kathleen Blanco. The company anticipates it will raise an additional $100,000 before the donation ends at the end of this month.
"We felt like we had to do something to help out, and when we thought about it, we thought the thing we do best is make beer," said David Blossman, president of the company.
"Normally a launch of a new product is about an eight- or nine-month process, but with the help of our artists, suppliers and the federal government -- which pushed through our label approval -- we got it done much quicker."
Abita also printed up T-shirts, caps and lapel pins with the Restoration Ale logo, and all net proceeds from that merchandise also went to the foundation, Blossman said.
When Pat Baldwin read in the newspaper that French fashion house Hermès had reissued its New Orleans-themed scarf, she had to have one. "I sent an e-mail to the Hermès store in Paris, and they referred me to the Hermès store on Park Avenue in New York, and I got the black one," she said. The colorful, jazz-themed square of silk replaced one of three cherished Hermès scarves Baldwin had owned before the storm. "They all drowned in the flood . . . I live in Eden Isles, and our house had six feet of water," she said.
It was easy for Baldwin to rationalize the purchase: Hermès contributed 10 percent from the scarf sales to New Orleans City Park. "If I'm going to buy it anyway, then I might buy something that helps," she said. "I thought it was for a good cause. I believe in supporting the city, and I want to see the city come back."
Apparently she isn't alone. Those Hermès scarves raised $27,000 for City Park, said John Hopper, the park's director of development.
"It's real money, and it helps," he said.
But it wasn't only replacements of cherished possessions that many residents were seeking in their post-storm shopping.
There were a lot of businesses who saw an unexpected climb in (sales of) luxury items after the storm," said Janet Speyrer, professor of economics and associate dean for research at the University of New Orleans College of Business.
"To an economist, at first it just didn't make sense that jewelers would be having such a big year when there was so much of our lives destroyed," Speyrer said. "But people were buying things to make themselves feel better, luxury cars, jewelry, expensive things. Spouses felt so bad for their wife or husband, they went out and bought them something special."
Such purchases sent local sales tax collections soaring. For the first six months of 2006, Jefferson Parish sales tax revenues went up 41 percent and St. Tammany recorded a 48.6 percent jump as compared with the same period a year prior.
Products with tie-ins to Katrina relief only made purchases that much easier.
"People who lived through this were looking to buy and wear something that said 'I'm here, I'm supporting the effort, I survived the storm,' " Speyrer said.
Then there were the out-of-town buyers, those who fell in love with New Orleans' cobblestone streets and jazz-filled haunts long before Katrina and were broken-hearted about what happened. Other purchases were taken home by the many caring volunteers who came here to help the recovery effort by gutting flooded houses.
"I gave out some (New Orleans music) CDs that benefited Katrina victims at a conference after the storm, and people just hugged them," Speyrer said. "It was as if I gave away so much more than music. If you were a visitor and could buy something like that, it simply made you feel good."
Among organizations on the receiving end of Katrina-related product sales is the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity.
To make sure its name is not used in vain, the nonprofit group has anyone who wants to fundraise on its behalf sign a contract, said Gina Stilp, the local Habitat affiliate's development coordinator.
"We have every company or individual sign a letter of intent with the terms of the fundraiser, how long they'll run the benefit," Stilp said. "That ensures it's a legitimate fundraiser not only to Habitat, but also to the customer.
"We are protective of the Habitat name, that it's being used with good motive and for a good product," she added.
To date, Stilp said, she hasn't heard of any cases in which a product used the Habitat fundraising hook without actually anteing up the money generated.
"We have had very positive experience thus far," she said. "Occasionally we will have people send out press releases without talking to us first, but I've never had an instance where we couldn't reach them and say, 'OK, let's back up a step and get that letter of intent."
Stilp points to Save NOLA as one of its "standouts." Habitat worked with the group's volunteers, tracked their fund-raising progress, and when they'd reached $75,000 "we assigned a (building) lot and a partner family."
Another high-dollar contributor was the Home Shopping Network. It held a promotion last September at Harrah's Casino in New Orleans, featuring cookware created by Todd English, the chef behind Riche, a restaurant at Harrah's Hotel. "They donated 5 percent of the sales of the cookware on those two days," Stilp said. Ultimately, Habitat received a $72,000 check.
A nationwide audience also whipped out their wallets for The Concert for New Orleans held Sept. 20, 2005, at New York's Madison Square Garden. Concert sales and proceeds from a DVD of the event, "From the Big Apple to the Big Easy," generated a combined $1.49 million for Habitat's house-building efforts here.
But Stilp also acknowledges the importance of smaller contributions raised through the sale of items made by individuals, schools or churches.
She points to $1,500 raised by the local Hard Rock Cafe. "Their store manager has been great at doing benefits, and they're in the process of designing a pin that will have a purple Habitat house on it.
"And a high school in the Chicago area has a goal of producing 2,000 CDs and selling them, and they also are anticipating sending some students to be volunteers," she said.
If so, they'll number among the hundreds of volunteers who, over the past months, have descended on Alvar and North Roman streets to wield hammers in the Musicians' Village.
Such volunteer labor, combined with money from donations, gets the Habitat houses built. Habitat then sells them to qualified families through a zero-interest mortgage. In lieu of a down payment, the home buyer must put in 350 hours of "sweat equity," joining in the construction of the house.
"It's truly overwhelming, the lessons this teaches on so many levels," said new home owner Harris, a musician who plays with Sunpie Barnes and sings in the Shades of Praise gospel choir. Prior to moving into his Musicians' Village cottage, he and his son lived for almost two years in a one-room apartment in the Lower Garden District after Katrina washed away his Lower 9th Ward house.
"I'm just truly humbled by the entire experience," he said, adding that he proudly wears his Save NOLA T-shirt. "I just keep thinking, I'm home, I'm home, I'm home."
. . . . . . .
Susan Langenhennig can be reached at slangenhennig@timespicayune.com or at (504) 826-3379.
Monday, September 24, 2007
About Our Levees
The levees that we trusted, broke.
No resident here ever dreamt that they would break; we innocently thought that the Army Corps of Engineers had done their job adequately. The 17th St. canal levee had just been replaced @ 10 years ago. Katrina came ashore near the small town of Pass Christian, MS, pretty much wiping it off the map. We experienced Category 3 winds and Category 5 storm surge, but not a direct hit. The levees protecting much of the city were never over-topped. They didn't get a chance to hold the amount of water they were designed to accommodate; the levees failed from the bottom.
The levee protecting the lower Ninth ward at the Industrial Canal was slammed by a barge which contributed to the levee failure there and subsquent drowning of an entire New Orleans neighborhood.
Several weeks prior to the storm, a homeowner, whose land abutted the 17th St. canal in the Lakeview area, called the Sewage and Water Board because they noticed that water was seeping into their yard from the levee. They thought it might be a broken pipe. The Sewage and Water Board filed the complaint away; the Levee Board was never notified. The Sewage and Water Board had also dredged that side of the 17th St. canal, which separates the city of New Orleans from the suburbia known as Metairie, 2 years before the storm. They dredged to deepen the canal, so that it would accomodate more rainwater runoff during severe rainfalls. Unfortunately, the dredging may have also weakened the levee wall, which only failed on the Orleans parish side, not into Metairie.
As hearings were held post-Katrina, it was revealed that neither the Levee Board nor the Army Corps ever inspected the levees; they relied on the untrained guys who mowed the grass to let them know if anything seemed amiss. The Corps and Levee Board met once a year, ostensibly to take care of business, but they revealed under oath that their meetings basically were about lunch at a nice restaurant.
Incredibly, the levees which were funded in the 1960's, were still unfinished. During Congressional hearings, both Democratic and Republican senators grilled Carl Strock, then Corps leader, about why the levees were never completed. He replied that the system never had enough money; yet he couldn't come up with a good reason why the Army Corps had never asked for the money to finish.
Every year, pre Katrina, President Bush cut our funding for flood protection, as if it was just more pork barrel.
It was always front page news here and I always noticed. It always turned my stomach.
Every summer, on the front page of The Times-Picayune, there was a diagram of how deep the flood water would be if a hurricane hit New Orleans in the worst possible scenario- coming up the Mississippi River, pushing the Gulf into the city. Every summer, for at least the past 10 years the diagram was the same; every structure in the city, high ground included, would be covered by upwards of 20 ft. of water.
After the storm, I actually heard public officials say that they had no idea that this would happen. A mock drill called Hurricane Pam had been staged 2 months earlier, correctly predicting EVERYTHING that was to unfold during Katrina.
Ironically, we have an OEM office, a bureaucratic part of our government called the Office of Emergency Preparedness.
What, exactly, do they do?
No resident here ever dreamt that they would break; we innocently thought that the Army Corps of Engineers had done their job adequately. The 17th St. canal levee had just been replaced @ 10 years ago. Katrina came ashore near the small town of Pass Christian, MS, pretty much wiping it off the map. We experienced Category 3 winds and Category 5 storm surge, but not a direct hit. The levees protecting much of the city were never over-topped. They didn't get a chance to hold the amount of water they were designed to accommodate; the levees failed from the bottom.
The levee protecting the lower Ninth ward at the Industrial Canal was slammed by a barge which contributed to the levee failure there and subsquent drowning of an entire New Orleans neighborhood.
Several weeks prior to the storm, a homeowner, whose land abutted the 17th St. canal in the Lakeview area, called the Sewage and Water Board because they noticed that water was seeping into their yard from the levee. They thought it might be a broken pipe. The Sewage and Water Board filed the complaint away; the Levee Board was never notified. The Sewage and Water Board had also dredged that side of the 17th St. canal, which separates the city of New Orleans from the suburbia known as Metairie, 2 years before the storm. They dredged to deepen the canal, so that it would accomodate more rainwater runoff during severe rainfalls. Unfortunately, the dredging may have also weakened the levee wall, which only failed on the Orleans parish side, not into Metairie.
As hearings were held post-Katrina, it was revealed that neither the Levee Board nor the Army Corps ever inspected the levees; they relied on the untrained guys who mowed the grass to let them know if anything seemed amiss. The Corps and Levee Board met once a year, ostensibly to take care of business, but they revealed under oath that their meetings basically were about lunch at a nice restaurant.
Incredibly, the levees which were funded in the 1960's, were still unfinished. During Congressional hearings, both Democratic and Republican senators grilled Carl Strock, then Corps leader, about why the levees were never completed. He replied that the system never had enough money; yet he couldn't come up with a good reason why the Army Corps had never asked for the money to finish.
Every year, pre Katrina, President Bush cut our funding for flood protection, as if it was just more pork barrel.
It was always front page news here and I always noticed. It always turned my stomach.
Every summer, on the front page of The Times-Picayune, there was a diagram of how deep the flood water would be if a hurricane hit New Orleans in the worst possible scenario- coming up the Mississippi River, pushing the Gulf into the city. Every summer, for at least the past 10 years the diagram was the same; every structure in the city, high ground included, would be covered by upwards of 20 ft. of water.
After the storm, I actually heard public officials say that they had no idea that this would happen. A mock drill called Hurricane Pam had been staged 2 months earlier, correctly predicting EVERYTHING that was to unfold during Katrina.
Ironically, we have an OEM office, a bureaucratic part of our government called the Office of Emergency Preparedness.
What, exactly, do they do?
"Why New Orleans Needs Saving" by Newt Gingrich for Time Magazine, March 2006
Why New Orleans Needs Saving;
the City's Natural Vulnerability Is Also Its Greatest Strength
Time Magazine March 6 2006
Newt Gingrich John Barry
Shortly after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert wondered aloud whether the Federal Government should help rebuild a city much of which lies below sea level. The most tough-minded answer to that question demonstrates that rebuilding and protecting New Orleans is in the national interest. Reason: The very same geological forces that created that port are what make it vulnerable to Category 5 hurricanes and also what make it indispensable.
One such force is the Mississippi River. Once, the Gulf of Mexico extended north to Cape Girardeau, Mo., but the river gradually deposited enough sediment into a receding sea to create tens of thousands of square miles of land stretching south to the present mouth of the river. Long after New Orleans was first settled, the entire region remained above sea level and safe from hurricanes. Engineers prevented river floods by building levees and kept shipping channels open by constructing jetties two miles out into the ocean so that the river dropped its sediment into deep water. Before the jetties were built, 100 ships at a time often waited days for deep enough water to pass over sandbars blocking the Mississippi's mouth. The levees and jetties stopped sediment from feeding the deltas; the land sank, and coastal Louisiana shrank. Similarly, other great ports on deltaic rivers, like Rotterdam, are also below sea level; the airport serving Amsterdam is 20 ft. below sea level, lower than any part of New Orleans.
If engineering the Mississippi made New Orleans vulnerable, it also created enormous value. New Orleans is the busiest port in the U.S.; 20% of all U.S. exports, and 60% of our grain exports, pass through it. Offshore Louisiana oil and gas wells supply 20% of domestic oil production. But to service that industry, canals and pipelines were dug through the land, greatly accelerating the washing away of coastal Louisiana. The state's land loss now totals 1,900 sq. mi. That land once protected the entire region from hurricanes by acting as a sponge to soak up storm surges. If nothing is done, in the foreseeable future an additional 700 sq. mi. will disappear, putting at risk port facilities and all the energy-producing infrastructure in the Gulf.
There is no debate about the reality of that land loss and its impact. On that the energy industry and environmentalists agree. There is also no doubt about the solution. Chip Groat, a former director of the U.S. Geological Survey, says, "This land loss can be managed, and New Orleans can be protected, even with projected sea-level rise." Category 5 hurricane protection for the region, including coastal restoration, storm-surge barriers and improved levees, would cost about $40 billion--over 30 years. Compare that with the cost to the economy of less international competitiveness (the result of increased freight charges stemming from loss of the efficiencies of the port of New Orleans), higher energy prices and more vulnerable energy supplies. Compare that with the cost of rebuilding the energy and port infrastructure elsewhere. Compare that with the fact that in the past two years, we have spent more to rebuild Iraq's wetlands than Louisiana's. National interest requires this restoration. Our energy needs alone require it. Yet the White House proposes spending only $100 million for coastal restoration.
Washington also has a moral burden. It was the Federal Government's responsibility to build levees that worked, and its failure to do so ultimately led to New Orleans' being flooded. The White House recognized that responsibility when it proposed an additional $4.2 billion for housing in New Orleans, but the first priority remains flood control. Without it, individuals will hesitate to rebuild, and lenders will decline to invest.
How should flood control be paid for? States get 50% of the tax revenues paid to the Federal Government from oil and gas produced on federally owned land. States justify that by arguing that the energy production puts strains on their infrastructure and environment. Louisiana gets no share of the tax revenue from the oil and gas production on the outer continental shelf. Yet that production puts an infinitely greater burden on it than energy production from other federal territory puts on any other state. If we treat Louisiana the same as other states and give it the same share of tax revenue that other states receive, it will need no other help from the government to protect itself. Every day's delay makes it harder to rebuild the city. It is time to act. It is well past time.
the City's Natural Vulnerability Is Also Its Greatest Strength
Time Magazine March 6 2006
Newt Gingrich John Barry
Shortly after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert wondered aloud whether the Federal Government should help rebuild a city much of which lies below sea level. The most tough-minded answer to that question demonstrates that rebuilding and protecting New Orleans is in the national interest. Reason: The very same geological forces that created that port are what make it vulnerable to Category 5 hurricanes and also what make it indispensable.
One such force is the Mississippi River. Once, the Gulf of Mexico extended north to Cape Girardeau, Mo., but the river gradually deposited enough sediment into a receding sea to create tens of thousands of square miles of land stretching south to the present mouth of the river. Long after New Orleans was first settled, the entire region remained above sea level and safe from hurricanes. Engineers prevented river floods by building levees and kept shipping channels open by constructing jetties two miles out into the ocean so that the river dropped its sediment into deep water. Before the jetties were built, 100 ships at a time often waited days for deep enough water to pass over sandbars blocking the Mississippi's mouth. The levees and jetties stopped sediment from feeding the deltas; the land sank, and coastal Louisiana shrank. Similarly, other great ports on deltaic rivers, like Rotterdam, are also below sea level; the airport serving Amsterdam is 20 ft. below sea level, lower than any part of New Orleans.
If engineering the Mississippi made New Orleans vulnerable, it also created enormous value. New Orleans is the busiest port in the U.S.; 20% of all U.S. exports, and 60% of our grain exports, pass through it. Offshore Louisiana oil and gas wells supply 20% of domestic oil production. But to service that industry, canals and pipelines were dug through the land, greatly accelerating the washing away of coastal Louisiana. The state's land loss now totals 1,900 sq. mi. That land once protected the entire region from hurricanes by acting as a sponge to soak up storm surges. If nothing is done, in the foreseeable future an additional 700 sq. mi. will disappear, putting at risk port facilities and all the energy-producing infrastructure in the Gulf.
There is no debate about the reality of that land loss and its impact. On that the energy industry and environmentalists agree. There is also no doubt about the solution. Chip Groat, a former director of the U.S. Geological Survey, says, "This land loss can be managed, and New Orleans can be protected, even with projected sea-level rise." Category 5 hurricane protection for the region, including coastal restoration, storm-surge barriers and improved levees, would cost about $40 billion--over 30 years. Compare that with the cost to the economy of less international competitiveness (the result of increased freight charges stemming from loss of the efficiencies of the port of New Orleans), higher energy prices and more vulnerable energy supplies. Compare that with the cost of rebuilding the energy and port infrastructure elsewhere. Compare that with the fact that in the past two years, we have spent more to rebuild Iraq's wetlands than Louisiana's. National interest requires this restoration. Our energy needs alone require it. Yet the White House proposes spending only $100 million for coastal restoration.
Washington also has a moral burden. It was the Federal Government's responsibility to build levees that worked, and its failure to do so ultimately led to New Orleans' being flooded. The White House recognized that responsibility when it proposed an additional $4.2 billion for housing in New Orleans, but the first priority remains flood control. Without it, individuals will hesitate to rebuild, and lenders will decline to invest.
How should flood control be paid for? States get 50% of the tax revenues paid to the Federal Government from oil and gas produced on federally owned land. States justify that by arguing that the energy production puts strains on their infrastructure and environment. Louisiana gets no share of the tax revenue from the oil and gas production on the outer continental shelf. Yet that production puts an infinitely greater burden on it than energy production from other federal territory puts on any other state. If we treat Louisiana the same as other states and give it the same share of tax revenue that other states receive, it will need no other help from the government to protect itself. Every day's delay makes it harder to rebuild the city. It is time to act. It is well past time.
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Chris Rose, columnist for the Times Picayune 9/23/07
An Open Letter to the Producers of 'K-Ville'
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Chris Rose
Dear "K-Ville" Guys,
Allow me to introduce myself. I'm a big fan of your work. Really. That said, we gotta talk.
Let's cut right to the chase -- and not a car chase, please.
We liked your noble attempt at a post-Katrina New Orleans cop show. I say "we" because I wrote a story about it on Tuesday, the day after your prime-time premiere on Fox, and the responses I got from scores of readers ran about 9-to-1 in support of the actors, their characters and the down-but-not-out message you presented.
It was the formulaic plot that left the senses unfulfilled. And we like our senses filled around here.
You've got a helluva lot of money wrapped up in this show and we've invested a lot of blood into this living-in-New Orleans thing, so it's in our mutual best interest for "K-Ville" to succeed.
I don't know a thing about ratings, but when it comes to searing human drama about the life-and-death struggles of a group of people driven to preserve their hometown no matter how profound the collateral damage to their personal and professional lives, then trust me on this one:
I'm your guy.
And as my colleague Dave Walker expertly articulated last week, what you've got here are two different TV shows. And one of them really sucks.
I'm referring to the cop drama. Car chases and Uzi-toting mercenaries are so, well . . . so '80s.
Two years after The Thing, this town is many things. "Retro" is not one of them.
There aren't many ways for new shows to distinguish themselves from the cacophony of prime-time crime dramas that litter the airwaves. But you have a very real chance here.
So, please, dig deeper. If you must give us violence -- and we realize you must -- then give us the real thing, the real story, the real streets, not this watered-down James Bond bunk.
Ditch the wild-scheme plotlines. Don't be afraid to delve into the discomfiting reality that is life in the off-camera "K-Ville." Do race. Do politics. Press buttons. Pose difficult questions that provoke even more difficult answers.
Make us uncomfortable. Make America uncomfortable. Make us think.
Katrina is not just a local issue, as much as many folks around the country would prefer it to be. It's an upheaval of massive national implications, up there with the Depression, the Dust Bowl and the diaspora that followed the Civil War.
In short, it's American history. And you guys have gotten a hold of this long before the History Channel, so take the opportunity to make it shine.
You can make a network prime-time TV series that is groundbreaking, entertaining and meaningful. You can be the next "M*A*S*H." But only if you stop trying to be the next "Miami Vice."
Push buttons. We can take it. The nightmares of race and politics are not exclusive to New Orleans; we're just more transparent about it. We're the fishbowl. So go ahead. Make an example of us as the aggregate sum of all of America's social ills. Everyone else is.
And a little more humor wouldn't hurt. Tragedy fuels comedy -- it's always been that way -- and our darkness can be full of absurd laughter. Some days, it's the only thing that keeps us going. (Maybe you can get Bill O'Reilly to write some jokes; he's the funniest guy on the Fox payroll.)
Then again, what you should probably do is hire some of my readers to co-write the series with you. You want Reality TV? We've got plenty of reality to go around in this town.
Too much, in fact. But we can save some of it for the inevitable series spin-off. And you can name that anything you want, as long as it's not "Gone With the Wind." Or the water.
. . . . . . .
Columnist Chris Rose can be reached at chris.rose@timespicayune.com; or at (504) 352-2535 or (504) 826-3309.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Saying Goodbye To Willie Tee
Many of his friends, neighbors, music lovers and music moguls in New Orleans gathered this morning to pay their last respects to one hell of a great musician and sweet soul, Wilson "Willie Tee" Turbinton. We had last seen Willie Tee one month before, at the church for his brother Earl's funeral. Earl was an extraordinary alto and soprano saxaphonist, who had played with Nat Adderley, Joe Zawinul, and many others, but had never achieved the wide recognition he deserved. Willie Tee had cared for and taken care of his brother Earl for a long time.
At Earl's funeral, Willie looked great and seemed in good spirits, despite the obvious hard toll of the preceding 2 years. A month later, we celebrated Willie Tee's life at the same church.
Although Willie Tee is remembered for his contributions to the Mardi Gras music tradition and for authoring "New Suit" a standard, he was also a phenomenal jazz player, comfortable and conversant in all idioms. He had played with Nat and Cannonball Adderley, Joe Zawinul, taught at Princeton, and invented the Wild Magnolia sound, later developed by the Neville Brothers.
Following is the article about Willie Tee from our local newspaper, The Times Picayune. What they don't mention is how much Willie Tee loved his wife and family. Married for over 40 years, everyone who knew Willie Tee well, spoke at the funeral and mentioned that before music, Willie Tee loved and cared for his family and God first.
Having lived a good life and having been a roll model for others, we will have a hard time saying goodbye. You will be well missed.
Way to go, Willie Tee...
Funeral Today for Musician Who Helped Introduce Mardi Gras Indian Funk to the World
by Keith Spera, Music writer
Saturday September 22, 2007, 9:10 AM
Before Aaron Neville hit the road to promote "Tell It Like It Is" in 1966, he stopped at a club called Gloria's Living Room and sang soul standards with Wilson "Willie Tee" Turbinton's band. Neville and Turbinton had first met as boys in the Calliope housing development, where Turbinton's cousins lived a few doors from the Neville family.
"He had a great voice, was a great musician," Neville said. "He was a wizard on the keyboard. He could play anything. He created his own thing, his own style. He didn't copy anybody. It was him."Over the next 40 years, Neville and his brothers went on to worldwide fame while Turbinton toiled as the quintessential New Orleans music jack-of-all-trades, blurring the lines between funk, soul and jazz.
Touring Europe with the Neville Brothers, Aaron occasionally encountered Willie Tee fans. But mostly, "like a lot of New Orleans guys, he was under the radar," Neville said. "He didn't get his due."
Turbinton died Sept. 11 of colon cancer; he was 63. His funeral Mass is today at 11 a.m. at Our Lady Star of the Sea Catholic Church, 1835 St. Roch Ave. Visitation will begin at 9 a.m. Burial follows in St. Louis Cemetery No. 3.
Turbinton is perhaps best known for arranging, co-writing and leading the band on the Wild Magnolias' self-titled 1974 debut. That landmark recording -- and the subsequent "They Call Us Wild" -- introduced Mardi Gras Indian funk to the world.
Philippe Rault is officially credited as the album's producer, but by all accounts Turbinton was the driving creative force.
"Willie always told me that, in his heart of hearts, he produced the two Magnolias records," longtime friend Leo Sacks said.
Sacks, a noted producer of reissues from Earth, Wind & Fire, the Isley Brothers, and Teena Marie, is an ardent Turbinton admirer. He wrote the liner notes to a CD reissue of "The Wild Magnolias."
The original "Wild Magnolias" album dropped two years before the future Neville Brothers collaborated with their uncle, Big Chief George "Jolly" Landry, on the Wild Tchoupitoulas project. The Wild Magnolias had supplied a blueprint for grafting traditional Mardi Gras Indian street beats and chants to an electric funk band.
"It was fantastic stuff," Aaron Neville said. "When it came out, it was like, 'Oh, yeah, this is some funk.' We'd play it on gigs. Cyril still does 'New Suit.' "
Turbinton first launched his career as a teenager via the local AFO Records. In 1965, he scored a national hit for Atlantic Records with the soulful "Teasin' You." In the late '60s, Willie Tee & the Souls toured from the Apollo Theater in Harlem to the Ivanhoe on Bourbon Street. In the early 1970s, he fronted the Gaturs on a string of locally popular funk-soul singles.
Rappers later would raid the Turbinton catalog. Houston's Geto Boys sampled "Smoke My Peace Pipe," which Turbinton wrote for the Wild Magnolias. Sean "Diddy" Combs nicked the Gaturs' "Concentrate" for his 1997 album "No Way Out."
More recently, New Orleans rapper Lil' Wayne sampled "Moment of Truth," from Turbinton's 1976 album "Anticipation," for "Tha Mobb," the opening track on Wayne's multimillion-selling "Tha Carter II."
Turbinton reaped a financial windfall from rap royalties, but his fortunes took a turn for the worse when the breached levees of Hurricane Katrina flooded his Lakeview home.
Weeks after the storm, he joined the New Orleans Social Club, an all-star ensemble of displaced musicians assembled by Sacks in Austin, Texas. He and the Social Club recorded the Gaturs' "First Taste of Hurt" with new lyrics.
In late 2005, Turbinton was thrilled to accept a four-month appointment as a visiting lecturer in the music department at Princeton University in New Jersey. In January 2006, he returned to Louisiana and settled into post-Katrina exile in Baton Rouge.
On May 3, he headlined a free Lafayette Square concert sponsored by the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and Foundation. Backed by nouveau funk band Galactic -- a stylistic descendant of the Gaturs -- he performed to an estimated crowd of 4,000.
"He's known to those in the know, but too many people are unaware of his contributions," said the foundation's Scott Aiges. "That show was an opportunity to raise his profile. I didn't realize it would be one of his last performances."
Willie Tee's death was the second suffered by the Turbinton family in as many months. On Aug. 3, his older brother Earl, a modern jazz saxophonist, died after a long illness.
At Earl Turbinton's funeral on Aug. 11, Willie Turbinton appeared to be in good health. A few days later, a nagging lower back pain compelled him to see a doctor.
"He thought maybe he had an infection and needed antibiotics," his daughter, Racquel Turbinton, said.
The terrible diagnosis came as a shock: advanced colon cancer. Barely four weeks later, Turbinton died at Touro Infirmary, in the same hour as his friend, jazz keyboardist Joe Zawinul.
Days earlier, Neville called Turbinton at the hospital.
"I told him I loved him," Neville recalled. "He said, 'Man, I never thought I'd be in this predicament.' It happened so fast, you know? It was a sad thing."
Sacks considers Turbinton a victim of Katrina.
"What happened to the city broke his heart," Sacks said. "I'm no doctor, but I'm sure you can make a case for the physiological toll that it took."
Friday, September 21, 2007
Near Miss
A tropical depression formed quickly today off the west coast of Florida. A severe weather warning was issued for our area. Many of the proposed storm tracks had the storm coming straight toward us. There was talk of evacuating low lying populated areas, to the south and southeast of us.
The Army Corps of Engineers was quick to install a make-shift gate along an unstable canal on New Orleans westbank, to avoid flooding from rising storm surge.
Katrina came along a similar path.
Many people have been biting their nails, not to mention wondering if their FEMA trailers can withstand anything beyond 35 mph winds. Affordable housing continues to delay the full recovery of the city.
At 6 PM, the groceries stores were packed.
Prior to Katrina, there were 3 supermarkets in my neighborhood. Two years later, not one has reopened.
At 7 PM, the storm went ashore in MS, without having the opportunity to strengthen.
For a truly wonderful view of life in New Orleans, visit timsnamelessblog.blogspot.com. He has one of the best, most well written exposes of life in New Orleans today.
The Army Corps of Engineers was quick to install a make-shift gate along an unstable canal on New Orleans westbank, to avoid flooding from rising storm surge.
Katrina came along a similar path.
Many people have been biting their nails, not to mention wondering if their FEMA trailers can withstand anything beyond 35 mph winds. Affordable housing continues to delay the full recovery of the city.
At 6 PM, the groceries stores were packed.
Prior to Katrina, there were 3 supermarkets in my neighborhood. Two years later, not one has reopened.
At 7 PM, the storm went ashore in MS, without having the opportunity to strengthen.
For a truly wonderful view of life in New Orleans, visit timsnamelessblog.blogspot.com. He has one of the best, most well written exposes of life in New Orleans today.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Katrinka
So many stories....
Our friend Greg lived with his family in the Lakeview neighborhood, a few blocks from the 17th St. levee failure.
He, his wife and 2 youngest children prepared to evacuate the day before the storm. Their 21 year old son refused to leave.
Greg's wife insisted on leaving a hatchet in the attic for their son, who was adamant about staying.
He was sleeping when the levee broke.
The flood water rose from floor to ceiling in 10 minutes.
Luckily, he awoke to the sound of rushing water and was able to get into the attic and hack his way out through the roof.
Once out, a neighbor picked him up off the roof in a small boat.
He spent the rest of the day helping to pull bodies out of the water....
There were many local heroes who took care of others, at peril to their own health, after the storm.
All the doctors, nurses, police, firefighters and coast guard that stayed were heroes, as well as many other creative souls who came up with ways to move downed trees to unblock streets, deliver water and carry out innumerable necessary acts for the greater benefit.
There were also some people who stayed, burned and looted people's private property and tried to hinder rescue operations.
Our local paper, The Times-Picayune, kept publishing, despite all the difficulties.
Their web address is http://www.nola.com.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
New Orleans: After the Storm
I'd like to move on...to completely forget Katrina ever happened. Now that we've "celebrated" the second anniversary of Katrina, I feel compelled to write about what life was like immediately after Katrina and some of what is going on today.
In this blog, I'll be posting as often as I can. Thinking about what happened continues to puzzle and amaze me. But dwelling on it too much becomes unbearable. I paint every day; without painting, I would not be able to stay here. So to continue to write about Katrina and it's aftermath, I'll post paintings on my blog at joandagradi.blogspot.com and post here as I can without becoming too bummed.
After writing 2 entries on my painting blog about Katrina, it became evident that another outlet was needed. I don't plan on giving up painting; I have a lot to write about. The following was my first entry.
"I wish that by writing, I could help every other place to avoid a disaster.
It's quite unnerving to see Anderson Cooper on CNN, in your neighborhood night after night, while you're hundreds of miles away, unable to return home. We evacuated, just like we do for every hurricane. This was probably the 6th or 7th evacuation in the past 15 years. I was in Baltimore, caring for my dad, when it became apparent on the Friday before that the storm was headed our way. "Just grab the small box of important papers near the door, turn off the gas, bring the cats and meet me in Memphis", I pleaded with my husband, who had just returned home after playing at a Jazz Fest in Arkansas the night before. "Too far", he said. We met in Jackson, MS on Saturday, spent the night at what seemed like the last available room in town and drove on the next morning to a small town outside of Shreveport, 6 hours north, to wait out the storm. At the Motel 6, my husband had made reservations for 5 nights. People were lined up when we got there, looking for a room. The hotel was sold out. Two cars, two cats, we eventually drove to CT to stay with family, feeling like refugees from a bad movie. No clothes, no cash, thank God for a laptop, a cell phone, and family. No way to go back home, no idea if your house is under water or has been looted. No idea where your friends and neighbors are or if they stayed. My city and neighborhood were in 'lock down"; no one was allowed in or out without a sheriff's pass. No electricity, no neighbors, no food stores or gas stations, just water, or a thick gray, stinking muck everywhere, once the water had drained. Days later, I watched live coverage as our head of Homeland Security, Michael Chertoff denied that there were any people stranded at the Convention Center, while CNN reporters were showing simultaneous live footage of people starving and baking in the 90 degree heat.
Truly surreal......"
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