We live on Lesseps St. in the Bywater, on very high ground back by Vaughn’s and the naval base. Katrina didn’t touch us. She ripped the tar roof off of the Section-8 style mini-project across the street though, and water poured in, ruining six people’s apartments and all belongings therein. Those poor people survived the hurricane but lost all their shit anyway and had to move, to where we have no idea. Several sources have told me that HANO owns the building. If so, than we need to shut em down.

It gets more infuriating than that though. In 2007, my wife, Morgana King (who heads many big public art projects at the Arts Council of New Orleans, and also helps run The Front Gallery on St. Claude) started missing our neighbors across the street. In tribute to them, she hand-sewed a 20-foot by 4-foot pale-green and brown banner: I MISS MY NEIGHBORS (see photo). She then painted childlike cartoons of our neighbors on poster board, and stapled the painting on the wood with which HANO had covered the windows. It was supposed to look like they were still inside and happy.

While she was finishing this cute project, a HANO truck stopped by. The driver asked Morgana what she was doing. She explained, making sure to point out that her art was not painted onto the building and thus was not vandalism. HANO dude said he actually liked it. Still the next it was taken down.

Whoever took it down (we suspect HANO, obviously, though maybe it was the Grey Ghost Fred Radtke, who is a well known hater of art) they stimply untied it, dropped it limp to the second floor concrete. So we just went and tied it back up. Our remaining neighbors on Lesseps loved the project, by the way. So we know it wasn’t any of them that, on that second night, cut it down, sliced it so it would have been impossible to re-hang unless it was also re-sewn. Which we did. On the third morning it was clean gone.

Flash to five months later, and the building’s temporary wooden doors have all dried and bowed and fallen off the place, exposing the contents within. None of those people were ever given the chance to go back into their apartments and salvage any of their belongings (which, isn’t that what the city did to most its public housing residents?), so all their couches, clothes, family pictures, and everything else are still sitting in there, visibly moldy, with the roof caved in all over it. At some point they even came and put ‘no parking’ signs on the building, so no one would mess up the grass, and they left without fixing the doors. That was summer 2008.

Flash to now, we’re almost on the one-year anniversary of the protective boards falling off. Last week, three small elementary aged kids built a bicycle ramp in the precious grass out front, five feet from the dangerously open doors. Luckily the kids seem uninterested in the moldy crap inside the apartments. If they wanted to though, they could easily go in and explore, and most likely get hurt, or die when the rest of the ceiling caves in on them.

To recap: it took HANO one day to notice and rectify the cute art project Morgana did. They spent all week diligently making sure it didn’t go back up. And yet the doors on this house have been dangerously wide open for almost a year. I suppose we’ll have to fix it ourselves. Or re-hang the art project to bring the HANO workers back. Here’s a shot of the building today (notice the kids’ bike ramp):

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Hornets fans will surely rack their brains over tonight’s 91–87 loss to the Golden State Warriors. They’ll wonder how it is that the Hornets could be held to just 35.9% shooting against a 15–32 team or how is it that they could go 5-of-21 from three-point range. Skeptics will no doubt point to this loss and line it up with other Hornets’ losses to sub-.500 teams this season as a reason to say that New Orleans is not a championship-caliber team.

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The Hornets players and coaches, though, aren’t thinking about all that. Sure, no one in the Hornets locker room after the game was happy with the outcome — Byron Scott said “this leaves a bitter taste in our mouths” — but it’s not like players were on suicide watch. It was a disappointing loss, no doubt, but tomorrow’s game against division-leading San Antonio is much more important. So, did the Hornets overlook Golden State? Read the rest of this entry »

New Orleans was saddened and I would think, somewhat embarrassed, when 25-year-old Kirsten Brydum - a visitor and community activist from San Francisco who was in town for the first time - was murdered in late September. Brydum was shot in the early hours of a Saturday morning while on route by bicycle from the Howlin’ Wolf to the house where she was staying in the Ninth Ward.

Now, New Orleans cyclists (we’re not talking weekend Audubon Park exercisers here; these are the folks who, for political, aesthetic, environmental or economic reasons use two wheels as their main mode of transport) are a strong, tight-knit community. In response to the tragedy, they’ve hit upon a possible solution named in her honor: Brydum Tandem Project NOLA. The program is a community-based effort, the sort of thing Brydum herself would have supported, through which cyclists in New Orleans can request a two-person bike escort 24 hours a day, in most parts of the city, to ride home with - or even a car that can toss a bike in the trunk.

Email btpnola@gmail.com or call 985-628-1330 for more information, or join the group here on Facebook.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but not a lot of American presidents have wound up immortalized in song, and none as extensively as our latest POTUS. Just before the election, I did a by-no-means-complete roundup of musical paeans to Barack Obama. Then, today, I heard this for the first time: a remix of Jim Jones and Ron Browz #1 Billboard hip-hop and R&B hit “Pop Champagne” with the opening verse rewritten as a tribute to the new President - certainly the most-mentioned political figure in hip-hop outside of Benjamin Franklin. It’s a poppy club-rap track, with lots of AutoTune and a spare conga-esque beat that bubbles up fatly in a way that evokes the titular champagne, and the melody is so addictively singsongy that I guarantee if you listen, you will be hearing this in your head for hours, if not days:

We voted for a change and now we made it
No disrespect to McCain and Palin
We rocked the vote and now we celebratin’
President Barack and VP Biden
Oh-oh, pop champagne
Oh-on, for Barack campaign

Somebody please make it stop?

While America’s publishing industry packs up shop and says goodbye to the world, some authors are flush enough to pay postage to send you their work for free. Even when you don’t want it.

Many in New Orleans recently received in our mailboxes, a free copy (in my case two!) of the 94-page book National Sunday Law. It’s a well-printed enough little tome, almost as thick as Catcher in the Rye, with a black and white and red matte cardstock cover. Nice enough that you have to at least open it — before you see the words “Revelations,” “Jesus,” “Christianity,” or the phrase, “homosexuals and drug addicts share AIDS with the innocent,” (p.5) and immediately know whether or not you’re interested. Tossing the bigoted crap away is inevitably the right thing to do. Except then you’re to blame for 94 pages (or 188, in my case) of brand new newsprint paper plus the cover entering a landfill. This I couldn’t take.

National Sunday Law’s nutjob sentence and paragraph structure will also give you vertigo — yes, I did try to literally read the thing. But only after calling the publisher and asking, “May I speak with whoever’s in charge of distributing National Sunday Law via mail?”

“Well, the author is not here,” said a nice sounding old lady whom I nonetheless knew I would question until she hung up on me. I never stop and haggle with the cross-huggers on Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras, and I knew that all those repressed arguments would unfold now. Or maybe I was just jealous that I can’t get another book published.

“The author mails them out himself?” I asked, surprised, since the sticker said ‘to: resident.’

“Yes, and the author’s gone for a while,” she said, in a more shystee tone. “Won’t be back for a good few weeks.”

“Well then who else can I complain to, about how wasteful it is sending this book to people without asking them. If God made this planet like you think he did, then you are spitting in His face by forcing people to throw away a 90 page book!”

“No one’s forcing anyone to throw it away.”

“Well, if I am not religious –- and many people aren’t these days — what else would I do with it? Do you hand a pound of beef to a vegetarian and then blame them for throwing it away?”

“They could give it to one of their meat-eating friends.”

“Well what if they’re too smart to…I don’t have any religious friends to give this to! Giving this book to people who haven’t asked for it is simply wasteful.”

“Well, there are a lot more people wasting more than we are.”

“Are you actually telling me that it’s ok for you to waste all this paper because other people do worse?”

“You just need to look at the bigger picture.”

“I am! You aren’t! Wasting resources and creating garbage is going to bring about the end of the world way sooner than homosexuals will.”

“Well, there are things more important than the death of the environment. Once they pass this law – and they will, believe me, we have extensive documentation that proves…”

“Wait, law? What law?”

“The law that says everyone must attend church every Sunday.”

“No way.” I looked again at the book’s cover, and couldn’t help laughing: “Is that what National Sunday Law means? I didn’t read it! Is that what it’s hypothesizing, that the government will…?”

“Oh it’s not hypothesis, it’s fact! And you are really in for it if you don’t believe…”

“That the government is going to pass a law forcing us to go to church? Even though our entire country was based on freedom of religion? I…I…”

“Yes, and this is far worse than any environmental…”

“Wrong! No way. It’s even more ridiculous that y’all would waste so much paper discussing something that has even less chance of happening than The Reckoning! That would never happen in America in a million years, especially since human beings are evolving farther and farther away from religion every year!” I have no idea if that’s true. Seems true.

We volleyed for a good while more because, I could tell, she or her company had a ‘don’t hang up’ policy. Making her hang up was harder than expected. Between her finally hanging up and me finally trying to actually read the book though, I asked the lady to remove my address from any future mailing lists. If you would like to do the same (the book’s inside cover says they’ve distributed tens of millions of them! That’s an environmental disaster, one whole landfill unto itself), call:  Amazing Truth Publications, 618-627-2357