What healed you this year? Was it sudden, or a drip-by-drip evolution? How would you like to be healed in 2011? Surprise! This post will not be about Jason. This year, what healed me was New Orleans. Memorial Day weekend, I spent three days helping to rehabilitate houses. Doing good, and doing labor that required [...]
[20 Dec 2010]
Black Men of Labor Second Line 2010 by offbeatmagazine. Found on Flickr Soon, this area will be flat as a prairie. Everything that once was Lower Mid-City is being dismantled, including the streets, lampposts, curbs, electric lines, and sidewalks. On a day in early November, empty lots tramped by heavy machinery surrounded remaining homes. Although [...]
[7 Dec 2010]
Royal Street in the Faubourg Marigny, New Orleans. Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010? What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011? New Orleans. And I mean that in both physical and virtual terms. I have visited the city three times in 12 months. [...]
[7 Dec 2010]
I know not everyone feels they are better off since the storm, but I do. Now I can barely recall the restless and unfulfilled person I used to be. Five years ago I spent my time obsessing about my career and ambitions, now I spend it enjoying my family and friends via backyard BBQs, music [...]
[28 Aug 2010]
Big Freedia and Galactic at the Fillmore from Big Freedia on Vimeo. As far back as the ’40s and ’50s, it was a really popular thing. Gay performers have been celebrated forever in New Orleans black culture. Not to mention that in New Orleans there’s the tradition of masking, mummers, carnival, all the weird identity [...]
[24 Jul 2010]
If I could put my finger on it, I’d bottle it and sell it. I came down here originally in 1972 with some drunken fraternity guys and had never seen anything like it — the climate, the smells. It’s the cradle of music; it just flipped me. Someone suggested that there’s an incomplete part of [...]
[18 Jun 2010]
Photos from a Sunday, May 30th, 2010 protest at Jackson Square in New Orleans. Found on Flickr in the Humid City pool. And this isn’t from the protest, but I’m including it here because I found it amusing: Oil. Spill. Dead fish cupcakes.
[6 Jun 2010]
But recently New Orleanians have metaphorically turned the tables on this rhetorical trend. Consider, for example, the poignantly enigmatic slogan, “Be a New Orleanian Wherever You Are.” How interesting: here we are ascribing certain positive characteristics to the people and culture of this place, and advocating that they be recognized, appreciated, and adopted in other [...]
[2 Feb 2010]
There is an institutionalized racism in the way these poor black disaster victims are treated. The victims of Katrina were treated with so much presumption, as if you could assume they were going to loot, because they were black. Just like we know that the people in Haiti are bad because they’re black. And: When [...]
[22 Jan 2010]
Regarding the U. S. Marines’ presence is Haiti, holding M-16s, no less: Here is — they had no business being there. Sure, if there’s some way where you have an army of bandits, which we haven’t seen, on any mass scale going and attacking, maybe you might bring in some guys like that. But right [...]
[21 Jan 2010]