New Orleans News:
NOLA.com / Times-Picayune,
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| Thursday, September 29, 2005 |
Chef Austin Leslie, R.I.P. :-( Via WWL:
Austin Leslie, the New Orleans chef whose Chez Helene soul food restaurant inspired the television show "Frank's Place" in the 1980s, has died in Atlanta, where he had evacuated after being rescued from Hurricane Katrina's flood waters, a publicist said.
Until Katrina struck on Aug. 29, Leslie had been working at Pampy's Creole Kitchen, which has shut down in the flood's aftermath. Owner Stan "Pampy" Barre said Leslie died Thursday morning.
"It was an absolute shock," Barre said. "I had spoken to Austin two days ago. He called me and told me he was looking to get back to work."
The cause of death had not been determined said Vincent Sylvain, a publicist for the restaurant. Leslie's age was not immediately available.
Leslie, with his trademark white ship captain's hat, was already well known in New Orleans when producer Hugh Wilson and actor Tim Reid developed "Frank's Place." It was loosely based on Chez Helene, a hideaway that drew people from around the city to the gritty low-income neighborhood for Leslie's fried chicken, stuffed peppers, gumbo and variety of seafood dishes.
The CBS show was critically acclaimed but short-lived, with only 22 episodes made after its 1987 premier.
Leslie, meanwhile, proved to be a better chef than businessman, declaring bankruptcy in the late 1980s and eventually closing Chez Helene in 1994.
Leslie later surfaced at Jacques-Imo's, a popular restaurant in New Orleans' Carrollton neighborhood, where he spent five years.
Sylvain said Leslie and his wife had to be rescued from the roof of their home in New Orleans after Katrina inundated most of the city with flood waters. They were taken first to the Louisiana Superdome, plagued by power outages and damage from the storm, then to Atlanta. Sylvain said it was unclear whether the stress of the evacuation contributed to Leslie's death.
Although I'm glad I've had Chef Austin's cooking, I was always sorry that I never made it to the Chez.
UPDATE: More from the Times-Picayune.
The jazz funeral of Tuba Fats. I'd posted most of these photos over a year and a half ago, but now that I'm moving pictures over to Flickr I thought I'd repost the set of pictures I took on January 18, 2004 for anyone who might have missed them the first time around.
Here's my brief description from the previous post:
The jazz funeral of Anthony "Tuba Fats" Lacen, one of New Orleans' most beloved brass band and traditional jazz musicians, took place on Sunday, January 18, 2004. I was lucky enough to be back home at the time, and wouldn't have missed it for the world.
I was planning to join the second line, but wandered into Gallier Hall just as the service was starting. Even though I was quite a bit underdressed (to my chagrin), I was immediately handed a program and ushered into the service, which was just getting started. Family, friends and fans mourned together, the Tremé and Tuxedo Brass Bands played, one of Tuba's young relatives played "St. James Infirmary" on solo trumpet, Deacon John made me cry with a beautiful hymn, the preacher gave a great sermon, telling the congretation that Tuba's life is "to be continued" -- just like an episode of the old Batman and Robin TV show -- in the next life. There were tears, there was laughter, there was great music and a magnificent sendoff to a great musician.
The funeral parade and second line left Gallier Hall, went down St. Charles to Poydras, down to Carondelet, across Canal to Bourbon Street and through the French Quarter down St. Ann St. to Jackson Square, where they stopped in front of the bench were Tuba and his Chosen Few Jazzmen and Brass Bands played for free, then up St. Peter to Preservation Hall, where he was a member of numerous ensembles, then up to N. Rampart and over to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, where he was laid to rest.
(We still miss you, Tuba.)
Preservationists: "Don't tear down New Orleans." I really hope people like this can make a difference ... from today's Times-Picayune:
In the aftermath of a natural disaster, the first instinct of local and federal officials is to tear down devastated structures -- an "instinct that is almost always wrong," said the president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, who urged officials at the group's annual symposium here to lobby for the preservation of New Orleans' historic buildings.
"There are new technologies, new building practices that can be brought to bear that were not available even 15 years ago," said Richard Moe, president of the trust, which spearheads preservation efforts in all 50 states. To thunderous applause from the packed auditorium in downtown Portland, he stressed that: "No historical building" in New Orleans "should be torn down without a survey."
The trust's president is attempting to place his organization at the forefront of the debate over whether the low-lying areas of the hurricane-ravaged city should be rebuilt.
[...] According to the trust, there are 20 neighborhoods within New Orleans designated on the National Register of Historic Places, containing 37,000 historic structures.
"There's a lot of talk about mold," Moe said. "But there are measures that can be taken" to mitigate its effect and save the historic core of New Orleans from demolition.
[...] "You can't save New Orleans without rebuilding what's there," Moe said. "It has this unique character.
"No other city in the country or in the world has these layers of cultures, traditions, histories...It's the Creole home, the corner shop, the shotgun structure that makes up the vernacular architecture."
There was a terrific article in the New York Times the other day about 83-year-old New Orleans master plasterer Earl A. Barthé, from a family who for the last 150 years have provided artisanal plaster to homes and buildings, and are among the dwindling number who are part of the city's "architectural soul."
We need people like him now, more than ever. What's more, we need some home folks to come back and be his apprentices.
Corking profits. Britain's Independent writes of how their country's finest restaurants "massively overcharge for wine."
The situation isn't too different in this country. Sommeliers and restauranteurs may disagree, but I find bottle prices in most fine restaurants to be just out of control. I can rarely afford a bottle of wine in a restaurant, and usually only order by the glass. (Besides, if I'm having multiple courses, one bottle of one type of wine isn't going to necessarily go with all the dishes anyway. I also don't need to get that plastered, either.)
I don't have any problem with restauranteurs marking up a bottle of wine for resale, but c'mon ... four to six times the retail price? That's a bit much.
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| Wednesday, September 28, 2005 |
Oh frabjous day! Calooh! Callay! Tom DeLay has been indicted and will step down as House Majority Leader today.
God, it's about feckin' time. Let this be just the beginning. Frist is next.
"Brownie" warned early of shortages. The Associated Press reports that former FEMA director Michael Brown "was warned weeks before Hurricane Katrina hit that his agency's backlogged computer systems could delay supplies and put personnel at risk during an emergency, according to an audit released Wednesday."
This would seem to contradict his claims during his gorge-buoying testimony yesterday that he was taken unawares by the lack of manpower and resources in his agency. That claim is also contradicted by one of his own statements a year before, to CNN's histrionic Wolf Blitzer, on September 26, 2004:
BROWN CLAIM: FEMA Was Stretched Beyond It Capabilities.
"Mr. Chairman, this event stretched FEMA beyond its capabilities. There's no question about that. It did it in several ways. One is FEMA, over the past several years, has lost a lot of manpower. At one point during my tenure, because of assessments by the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA has lost -- at one point, we were short 500 people in an organization of about 2,500. You do the math. That's pretty significant. FEMA has suffered from the inability to grow to meet the demands."FACT: Brown Said FEMA Had All The Manpower It Needed.
BLITZER: Are you ready? Is FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, ready to deal with this new hurricane?
BROWN: We absolutely are. We have all the manpower and resources we need. President Bush has been a very great supporter of FEMA. [CNN, 9/26/04]
Some more of Brown's revisionist history:
BROWN CLAIM: "FEMA doesn't evacuate communities."
FACT: Brown Said FEMA Was Engaging In Evacuations During Katrina.
"If there is still floodwaters around there, they shouldn't be trying to evacuate those patients by themselves. The Coast Guard, FEMA, all of those continue to do those rescue missions and we continue to do those evacuations and we'll certainly continue to evacuate all of the hospitals." [CNN, 9/1/05]BROWN CLAIM: "I can't discuss with you my conversations with the president's chief of staff and the president."
FACT: Brown Spoke to New York Times About Conversations With Chief of Staff.
"Hours after Hurricane Katrina passed New Orleans on Aug. 29, as the scale of the catastrophe became clear, Michael D. Brown recalls, he placed frantic calls to his boss, Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, and to the office of the White House chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr. [...] 'I am having a horrible time,' Mr. Brown said he told Mr. Chertoff and a White House official -- either Mr. Card or his deputy, Joe Hagin -- in a status report that evening. 'I can't get a unified command established.'" [NYT, 9/15/05]
"Completely full of shit" would be, I think, an apt description of this man. He needs to go away quickly, but before he does he needs to give up his boss Chertoff, whom I believe to be nearly as incompetent.
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| Tuesday, September 27, 2005 |
Gene's from above. A few weeks ago my friend Michael, a Faubourg Marigny resident, asked me to find the neighborhood around Elysian Fields and St. Claude on the aerial photo maps from Katrina, mostly taken on August 31 - September 2. I mentioned that I was getting good at finding specific streets and houses, and some of his friends were concerned about their roofs. I found it easily enough, and as it turned out their roofs looks pretty good. I deliberately didn't look at the building on the corner, though, because ... well, maybe I just didn't want to see if Gene's had gotten trashed. That's weird, because I looked up Commander's and all kinds of other places. Now that I think about it, maybe it's because I knew that big places like Commander's will be back, and the little po-boy shops are in the greatest danger.
Robert wrote a great post on his great New Orleans food weblog Appetites that elucidated some of the very same fears some of my New Orleans friends and I have had lately:
[...] I heard a piece on NPR about a guy whose home was in the 9th Ward. He had evacuated to Memphis, I believe, and he was asked what he missed most. Fried shrimp po-boys on Fridays, and red beans on Mondays was the first thing he mentioned. He was crying, and the tears were not for the food, but for the city. He was just expressing the loss through something so familiar and something that felt like home.
I think it says something about the importance of food in New Orleans that so many people mention what they eat when they talk about what they miss from the Crescent City. I think it also says something that most of what they miss is not the high-end restaurant food but the kind of stuff you find in New Orleans on any given street corner.
Sure, the gumbo at Commander's Palace is very good, but the best gumbo you'll ever eat is at someone's Mamma's place. Everyone in New Orleans has a favorite place to get a fried shrimp, roast beef, or some other kind of po-boy, and most of those places serve fantastic food at a reasonable price. I love eating at white-tablecloth restaurants, but I'm equally in love with the native street-food of my city, even if I don't give it the attention on this website that I give to fine dining.
The soul of eating in New Orleans is not found at Galatoire's, or Antoine's, or Clancy's. It's the proclivity of really outstanding food at neighborhood joints you wouldn't look at twice if you were a tourist. More than that it's the expectations of average New Orleanians that if we stop into a hole in the wall, we'll get good food. Because it's important.
I wonder if there is any place else in this country where that is the case? I know there is great food to be found all over the US. I think that pound for pound, there are a half dozen cities that have better restaurants than New Orleans. But I wonder if I walked into some dive in any other part of the nation, whether I could get a truly good meal for $5? I doubt it.
There has been a lot written about what's wrong with New Orleans in the last few weeks, and deservedly so. I truly hope that the hurricane has given us an opportunity to do away with some of the things about my city that I don't miss. I could do without the endemic corruption, for example.
But I hope that in rebuilding the city we don't lose the folks who expect a good po-boy at the corner gas station. I hope we don't lose the people who make five pounds of red beans on Monday and invite the neighbors over for lunch. I hope we don't lose the people who really, truly understand how important it is to have good food.
It's something that worries me, because I keep reading about how many of our citizens might not come back. I'm not talking about those of our citizens who committed the kinds of crimes that will forever give my city a black eye. Fuck them. I'm talking about the working men and women of my city; those folks who probably didn't own their homes, or if they did: lost them. We need our citizens back, and we need them dearly if we are ever to have a real New Orleans again. And incidentally, I'm not talking about black folks, or white folks, or asians, or latinos. I'm talking about New Orleanians.
The potential loss of a chunk of our essential population worries us. The potential loss of places like Gene's worries us. The little poor boy shops, the mom and pop places, the holes in the wall. What will become of them?
Yesterday Michael asked in comments:
The flyover pictures can be deceiving, but the pictures I saw did not leave me very optimistic about Gene's. Definitely what looks like some fairly intense roof damage. Chuck, maybe you can clip and post a close-up?
I held my breath and did it. It kills me to say that it doesn't look good.
I'm hoping it's wreckage of the billboard, but some of it looked bizarrely pink.
Jelly Roll and New Orleans jazz. Via Tom (thanks!), here's a nice feature from the Chiago Tribune on the immortal Ferdinand Morton, subject of a forthcoming box set that I greatly covet.
Jelly Roll Morton was flat broke.
Playing piano in a dive in Washington, D.C., the first composer of jazz -- the New Orleans genius who was writing hits when Louis Armstrong still was learning how to talk -- considered it a great night when he pulled down $10.
But in that desperate year of 1938, three years before his tragic death at age 55, Morton sat at the keys in Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress and rhapsodized on the story of his life, the birth of jazz and the ways in which blacks and whites and Creoles like him lived and died in old New Orleans.
All the while, a pair of crude, battery-operated disc-recording machines captured his precious reminiscences on several dozen acetate plates, his gravelly voice singing tunes that the rest of the world had long since forgotten, his still-dexterous fingers re-creating the piano styles of earlier New Orleans pianists who had faded into oblivion.
In unsparing detail, he recounted the way the music unfolded in brothels and on street corners in Storyville, New Orleans' fabled vice district, the way it erupted in rambunctious parades that often turned into bloodbaths.
As Morton sang and talked and laughed and lamented, he not only mapped out precisely how and why a new American art form had appeared in the city of his birth, he also demonstrated his role as one of its two principal architects (the other being Armstrong). For if Armstrong, who was about 15 years younger, was the first great solo improviser in jazz, Morton was its groundbreaking composer, the first man to publish a jazz tune ("Jelly Roll Blues" in 1915), the first artist who cracked the code of putting to paper this seemingly unruly music.
Until now, the only way to hear those recordings in full was to travel to the Library of Congress in Washington, don a set of headphones and listen to nine hours of Morton's half-sung, half-spoken soliloquies. Though some of this material had been produced as a series of LPs in the late 1940s and again in the '50s, it was severely edited, omitting the often racy song lyrics that Morton recalled from his early days in New Orleans.
On Tuesday, when Rounder Records releases "Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax" (an eight-CD boxed set that lists for $127.98), an international public will begin to discover what some experts have known for years: That the composer-pianist not only penned such jazz masterpieces as "King Porter Stomp" and "Jungle Blues" but, equally important, that he built the intellectual framework for understanding jazz through his Library of Congress recordings.
Specifically, by explaining how the music emerged and detailing its central techniques and practices, Morton in these sessions effectively shaped the way listeners thereafter have perceived the art form.
The very notion, in fact, that jazz -- a music that dared to draw inspiration from both the church and the whorehouse -- could be considered an art form owed a great deal to Morton's breakthroughs as composer in the early part of the 20th Century and his explication of them several decades later, on these recordings.
[more]
I've heard excerpts from this, and I can't wait to hear the whole thing.
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| Monday, September 26, 2005 |
Rumors of N.O. deaths greatly exaggerated. I hadn't yet gotten a chance to read the Times-Picayune on the web this morning, when this article arrived from uncle Mike in Algiers. Read the entire story, not just the excerpt below.
After five days managing near-riots, medical horrors and unspeakable living conditions inside the Superdome, Louisiana National Guard Col. Thomas Beron prepared to hand over the dead to representatives of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Following days of internationally reported killings, rapes and gang violence inside the Dome, the doctor from FEMA - Beron doesn't remember his name - came prepared for a grisly scene: He brought a refrigerated 18-wheeler and three doctors to process bodies.
"I've got a report of 200 bodies in the Dome," Beron recalls the doctor saying.
The real total was six, Beron said.
Of those, four died of natural causes, one overdosed and another jumped to his death in an apparent suicide, said Beron, who personally oversaw the turning over of bodies from a Dome freezer, where they lay atop melting bags of ice. State health department officials in charge of body recovery put the official death count at the Dome at 10, but Beron said the other four bodies were found in the street near the Dome, not inside it. Both sources said no one had been killed inside.
At the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, just four bodies were recovered, despites reports of corpses piled inside the building. Only one of the dead appeared to have been slain, said health and law enforcement officials.
That the nation's front-line emergency management believed the body count would resemble that of a bloody battle in a war is but one of scores of examples of myths about the Dome and the Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the media and even some of New Orleans' top officials, including the mayor and police superintendent. As the fog of warlike conditions in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath has cleared, the vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know.
"I think 99 percent of it is bullshit," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong, bad things happened, but I didn't see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything. ... Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved."
Dr. Louis Cataldie, the state Health and Human Services Department administrator overseeing the body recovery operation, said his teams were inundated with false reports about the Dome and Convention Center.
"We swept both buildings several times, because we kept getting reports of more bodies there," Cataldie said. "But it just wasn't the case."
[...] As floodwaters forced tens of thousands of evacuees into the Dome and Convention Center, news of unspeakable acts poured out of the nation's media: evacuees firing at helicopters trying to save them; women, children and even babies raped with abandon; people killed for food and water; a 7-year-old raped and killed at the Convention Center. Police, according to their chief, Eddie Compass, found themselves in multiple shootouts inside both shelters, and were forced to race toward muzzle flashes through the dark to disarm the criminals; snipers supposedly fired at doctors and soldiers from downtown high-rises.
In interviews with Oprah Winfrey, Compass reported rapes of "babies," and Mayor Ray Nagin spoke of "hundreds of armed gang members" killing and raping people inside the Dome. Unidentified evacuees told of children stepping over so many bodies, "we couldn't count."
The picture that emerged was one of the impoverished, masses of flood victims resorting to utter depravity, randomly attacking each other, as well as the police trying to protect them and the rescue workers trying to save them. Nagin told Winfrey the crowd has descended to an "almost animalistic state."
Four weeks after the storm, few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence. The piles of bodies never materialized, and soldiers, police officers and rescue personnel on the front lines say that although anarchy reigned at times and people suffered unimaginable indignities, most of the worst crimes reported at the time never happened.
[...] Rumors of rampant violence at the Convention Center prompted Louisiana National Guard Lt. Col. Jacques Thibodeaux put together a 1,000-man force of soldiers and police in full battle gear to secure the center Sept. 2 at about noon.
It took only 20 minutes to take control, and soldiers met no resistance, Thibodeaux said. What the soldiers found - elderly people and infants near death without food, water and medicine; crowds living in filth - shocked them more than anything they'd seen in combat zones overseas. But they found no evidence, witnesses or victims of any killings, rapes or beatings, Thibodeaux said.
Another commander at the scene, Lt. Col. John Edwards of the Arkansas National Guard, said the crowd welcomed the soldiers. "It reminded me of the liberation of France in World War II. There were people cheering; one boy even saluted," he said. "We never - never once - encountered any hostility."
One widely circulated tale, told to The Times-Picayune by a slew of evacuees and two Arkansas National Guardsmen, held that "30 or 40 bodies" were stored in a Convention Center freezer. But a formal Arkansas Guard review of the matter later found that no soldier had actually seen the corpses, and that the information came from rumors in the food line for military, police and rescue workers in front of Harrah's New Orleans Casino, said Edwards, who conducted the review.
[...] As the Dome cleared out Sept. 3, Beron, the National Guard commander, fashioned a plan to deal with the dead. He knew of the six bodies in the freezer, but expected far more. He and an Ohio National Guard commander sent 450 Ohio troops to search every nook of the Dome, top to bottom. They told them to mark locations of bodies on a map of the Dome, to rope off suspected crime scenes, and leave a chemical light sticks next to each one so they could be retrieved later.
"I fully expected to find more bodies, both homicides and natural causes," he said.
They found nothing.
It's imperative that the national media repeat THIS story as well, not just the the ones that are being debunked, the ones that sell more papers.
Hackberry blues. New Orleans may have squeaked through Rita (with the crushingly sad exception of the Lower Ninth Ward), but the same can't be said for a huge swath of the land of Cajuns and Creoles in southwest Louisiana.
Cameron Parish saw destruction saw destruction almost at the level of Hurricane Audrey in 1957, although thankfully with none of the loss of life. The population of Hackberry is currently zero, where "all 750 homes were damanged, and most were destroyed." Holly Beach, the "Cajun Riviera", was levelled. "Officials who flew over in helicopters said they would have no reason to think that a town had ever been there if it hadn't been for a few telephone poles jutting out of the water."
I hope all the good people of Cameron, Calcasieu, Vermilion and all the other affected parishes can get back on their feet and rebuild their lives as well. It's going to be a long road for all of us.
Good news for the Holy Cross Tigers. My heart broke watching footage of water cascading back into the Lower Ninth Ward, and I kept thinking about my high school's 126-year-old campus, how it got 5-8 feet of water from Katrina and was about to be deluged again.
I was relieved to read this report on the school's temporary website from Charlie DiGange, our old chemistry teacher and senior class adviser, and now the Headmaster of the school:
Based on an eyewitness report, the buildings on campus did not receive additional flooding from hurricane Rita. The floodwaters did not go past Dauphine Street that was good news to hear. We will meet on campus this Wednesday with the insurance adjustor and have the recovery team begin work shortly there after. The plan is to have our main campus open by January 1, 2006, if not before.
Roll-off! (Digga-digga-dum! Digga-digga-dum! Digga-digga-digga-digga-DUM!)
Cheer, cheer for old Holy Cross,
Cheer her in victory, cheer her in loss!
Send a volley cheer on high,
Shake down the thunder from the sky!
What though the odds be great or be small,
Old Holy Cross will win over all,
While her loyal sons go marching
Onward to victory!
(That's the Fight Song, as if you couldn't tell. And yeah, I know, it's just like the Notre Dame Fight song. Sue us.)
I found a series of articles in Newsday by fellow HC alumnus Alex Martin (whom I didn't know but who I think I remember, slightly). One of them talks of a post-Katrina visit back to campus with Charlie DiGange:
Charles DiGange, who tried to teach me chemistry in the 11th grade, stared in wonder at the more than 100-year-old gazebo shaded by majestic oaks at the heart of Holy Cross School's 13-acre campus.
Dried mud crunched underfoot. A twisted piece of copper roof lay five feet away. Broken oak limbs sat atop a breezeway just behind him. Only minutes before, he had seen what 5-1/2 feet of floodwater, howling winds and stinging rain from Hurricane Katrina had done to the 110-year-old administration building to his right.
"Good God," he had said.
It wasn't pretty, but, for this moment, the school's headmaster, his pants tucked into black rubber boots and his hands covered in orange rubber gloves, chose to focus on the graceful gazebo that has been its symbol.
"Look at the gazebo, just standing there, nothing touched," Charlie said. "Isn't that something? Never moved. Not a shingle missing. Just stood there. Standing in the middle of the devastation, standing like a beacon of hope."
When I was a student there, the gazebo was in the back of campus, back by the levee (the campus is right on the Mississippi River where it joins the Industrial Canal). A while after I graduated it was moved to the center of campus, a more visible and appropriate spot, as the gazebo has indeed become the symbol of the campus and school.
I love the "tried to teach me chemistry" line, by the way. There was not much more success in trying to teach me chemistry at HC either; I recall a straight "C" average, and they were likely being generous.
Gene's. I've been uploading more stuff to my Flickr photostream as I sort them -- recent digital pics, old prints as I scan them, etc. I just wanted to share a favorite landmark with an uncertain future, a place that looked shocking pink on the outside, like a dump on the inside, and where one could get one of New Orleans' greatest gustatory experiences: the hot sausage and cheese po-boy at Gene's, on Elysian Fields at St. Claude.
I wish I had taken a better shot of the poor boy.
CONTROL Agent 86, Maxwell Smart, RIP. Comic actor Don Adams has died, at age 82.
I grew up with "Get Smart", and I loved it. I once got in trouble in kindergarten for annoying my fellow kindergarteners by talking into my shoe. (I was a very imaginitive child.)
I second Wes' suggestion, who invites us to spend a respectful moment in the Cone of Silence.
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| Saturday, September 24, 2005 |
Black sheets of rain. Whew.
So far so good. The depressing state of the Ninth Ward and St. Bernard notwithstanding, it looks like we lucked out for now. Now we've just gotta hope that the levees hold while the water in the lake is still high.
The family's all fine, but I'm worried about friends with houses in Bayou St. John and the Marigny, who think they had roof damage from katrina and never had a chance to patch it before Rita blew in. Marie said they didn't get all that much rain in New Orleans, and the wind was blowing a lot of it sideways rather than dumping it straight down, so maybe it won't be too bad.
I still haven't heard or read anything about whether or not they got more water in the East. If so, I hope it wasn't more than a couple of feet in the street, or it'll likely delay my trip back home
Hey Mother N., no more hurricanes in the Gulf this season, please? Pretty please?
Pitchas. I went ahead and bought a Flickr Pro account, primarily for its hosting and its "unlimited bandwidth", so I can post photos on here without racking up huge bandwidth charges. I had wanted to start posting photos more often, especially of food and of my collection from antediluvian New Orleans.
I'll have a new thingy in the right-hand sidebar, and you can find my photos here.
Here are a couple from my last meal at Liuzza's (which I hope won't be my last meal at Liuzza's), to go along with the photos I posted of pre-flood and post-flood Liuzza's.
(Deep-fried pickles!)
(Fried catfish filets with Oysters Rockefeller casserole)
Man, was it good.
This is going to hurt you a lot more than it's going to hurt me. This piece, by Tim Grieve from Salon's War Room, needs to be read in its entirety:
As Think Progress notes today, the $200 billion the federal government may need to pay for Hurricane Katrina could be covered entirely -- and then some -- by simply rolling back the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.
As we reported yesterday, House Republicans have another way to come up with the money: They want to carve $500 billion in spending out of the federal budget. How would they do it? Their "Operation Offset" plan is available online now and it's full of brave talk about the "tough choices" that will be required in these "tough times." We'll acknowledge that some of the choices listed therein are, in fact, pretty tough: If you don't want to roll back tax cuts for millionaires, you're going to have to tell Republican Rep. Don Young why he can't have his $200 million bridge to nowhere and America's seniors why they need to wait an additional year for help with their prescriptions.
But somehow, we get the idea that the House Republicans' plan isn't quite as painful -- for them, at least -- as they'd like to make it out to be. Like the Heritage Foundation, the House Republicans apparently see in Katrina an opportunity to advance some of their favorite policy goals and make some cuts that won't exactly bring tears to the eyes of the religious right or the corporate interests who support them. Some examples:
The Republicans would freeze funding for the Peace Corps, the Global AIDS Initiative, U.N. peacekeeping operations and a wide variety of third-world development programs; eliminate the EnergyStar program, eliminate grants to states and local communities for energy conservation, reduce federal subsidies for Amtrak, eliminate funding for new light-rail programs and cancel the president's hydrogen fuel initiative; eliminate state grants for safe and drug-free schools because "studies show that schools are among the safest places in the country and relatively drug free"; and eliminate the teen funding portion of Title X, which provides "free and reduced-price contraceptives, including the IUD, the injection drug Depo-Provera, and the morning-after pill" to poor teenagers.
Along the way, they'd find a way to punish -- or simply eliminate -- some of their enemies, real and imagined. They'd cut funding for the District of Columbia, eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, eliminate subsidized student loans for graduate students, terminate the Legal Services Corporation, eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and kill the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Of course, you can't balance the budget on the backs of PBS viewers, grad students and other outside-the-mainstream liberals alone. So the Republican plan also calls for "rational reforms to Defense and Homeland Security." Does this mean cutting weapons systems at the expense of big defense corporations? Well, no. But it does mean closing schools for the children of soldiers, cutting grants for local responders and offering National Guard members the "option" to purchase a less comprehensive healthcare plan.
We've all got to do our part. Or at least 99 percent of us do.
My feelings for the politicians of that party are nothing less than a great and terrible loathing.
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| Friday, September 23, 2005 |
The Ninth Ward is flooding again. I'd be sinking into despair at the moment, but part of me asks, how can you destroy something that's already been destroyed? One Ninth Ward resident, watching the live coverage from shelter in Lafayette, said "It's like looking at a murder. The first time is bad. After that, you numb up."
Then there's my poor old high school, which is in the Lower Ninth Ward and got 3-5 feet of water the first time around, and will probably get it again. We can only hope that the parts of the city that stayed dry last time stay dry this time too, but I've heard reports of leaks on the west side of the Industrial Canal levee. If that goes, then the lower Bywater, Marigny and the Quarter are going to get inundated.
Efuckingnough, already.
Too much loss. The sad news never stops. I read this on Poppy's journal today:
I heard yesterday that Mrs. Mary Hansen had died. Sixty-six years ago, Mrs. Mary opened Hansen's Sno-Bliz, which is featured in Liquor. She concocted the syrups daily from fresh ingredients and her husband, Mr. Ernest, invented the Sno-Bliz machine that shaved ice more finely than any other snowball machine in town. The family evacuated to Thibodeaux and I guess she just lost heart. She was in her nineties and Mr. Ernest was by her side when she died.
The above photo was sent in by Edward Newman (thanks a million), who sent along the following reminiscence:
[This is how] I like to remember Hansen's and the Hansens, taken in an unimaginably remote time, August, 2001 when life was so much simpler.
The key to success at Hansen's was to have Ernest working the ice and Mary on the syrup. Of course, in the past few years most of the work has been taken over by the apple of all of Uptown's eye, granddaughter Ashley Hansen, who has risen to the task (and who, when she heard I was moving from New Orleans this past December offered to open the shop up just for me for one last Sno-Bliz!! Now that's customer service!)
I also got a kick out of see Mary and Ernest's son and Ashley's Dad Judge Hansen working with Ashley. I remembered him as a criminal magistrate judge when I did criminal defense work, and loved seeing him on spring and summer Saturday morning's at the Magazine street greenmarket, where I'd promise him "see you later" and I always would. Mmm, half lemonade, half sno-bliz; or half cream of coffee, half cream of chocolate. Heaven on earth.
My condolences to the Hansens.
I remember the Hansens well, although it wasn't my usual sno-ball stand (other than the little ones in the neighborhood where I grew up, I usually went to Plum Street, Uptown). And of course, it was Mr. Ernest who invented the Sno-Bliz machine, which shaved ice more finely than any other ice shaving or crushing machine.
I hadn't realized this last Sunday, when I was making makeshift sno-balls. Every September Wes' church (where I go occasionally too, and where I pretty much know everyone) throws a Fall Festival, and Wes helps out with the "sno-cone" concession. Over the years I've insinuated myself into the making of the cones, doing my best to make them more like New Orleans sno-balls (although we still haven't been able to get the ice as finely shaved as it needs to be). This year I made up a batch of nectar syrup, and served the sno-cones with condensed milk on top, as they should be. (The L.A. crowd, who'd never heard of such a thing, went wild over that.) Nectar sno-balls with condensed milk is pretty much close to heaven, and was such a uniquely New Orleans experience that it made me feel much better last Sunday. It would have been far more bittersweet if I had known about Mrs. Mary.
To make a pretty decent batch of passable New Orleans nectar syrup, take one bottle of Torani vanilla syrup, one bottle of Torani almond syrup, mix them together in a large pitcher, add 2 teaspoons of red food coloring, mix and rebottle.
Although I had no pictures of my own of either Hansen's Sno-Bliz or Williams' Plum Street Sno-balls handy, I did manage to dig up a few recent sno-ball-related pictures (taken five months ago), as a tribute to Mrs. Mary:
In order, there's Tee-Eva's on Magazine Street, where you can get soul food and sno-balls; Pandora's Sno-Balls on Carrollton; Pandora's menu; Wes and me with our half-dozen Manuel's Hot Tamales and an orchid cream vanilla sno-ball, respectively; a closeup of the orchid cream vanilla sno-ball, a classic sno-ball flavor and one of those only in New Orleans things; and a picture of Nettie, me, Mary and Wes, looking a little motley and semi-threatening for some reason, in front of the barbershop next door to Pandora's.
I want a sno-ball. A proper one. Shaved as fine as real snow, with nectar and condensed milk, in a Chinese food container. Now.
Not from The Onion. In fact, from the CBS-TV affiliate in San Francisco, and with an even more jaw-dropping video. In a perfect example of why I don't watch local news (except in New Orleans, for some reason; Dennis and Angela are still classy), here's KPIX with "Interview with the Chaplain", "The Vampire Chertoff", "FEMA of the Damned", and other stories that never came out of 1239 First Street:
The presence of the supernatural and the influence of voodoo long have been synonymous with New Orleans.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, members of the U.S. military are saying that there's something spooky going on and it's not just images of death and destruction that's haunting them.
By all accounts, the Sophie B. Wright Middle School in New Orleans sits empty and evacuated except for military personnel who have taken over the campus as a staging site for missions around the battered city.
But the men in uniform have the feeling that they're not alone. It prompted a chaplain to utter this directive: "In the name of Jesus Chris, I command you Satan to leave the dark areas of this building."
Said Sgt. Robin Hairston of the California National Guard: "I was in my sleeping bag and I opened by eyes and in the doorway was a little girl," . "It wasn't my imagination."
Hairston wasn't the only one seeing things. Spc. Rosales Leanor had her own close encounter.
"I was using the restroom and I just saw a little shadow," Leanor said, "kind of looming in front of me."
Another member of the Guard unit said that she saw and heard a little girl laughing when she opened a closet that contained cleaning supplies.
At a Baton Rouge marina, boats were strewn like trash, but not a shred of paper could be found. Except for the pages of a Bible, which was found by a soldier. It was open to the Book of Revelations.
At a nearby church, nearly destroyed, another Bible was found, showing the exact same passage from Revelations.
Like the power of nature, there is a power at work in New Orleans that defies explanation.
Yeah, I'd say it's the power of a lot of freaked-out National Guards troops in the middle of America's worst natural disaster who are under a lot of stress. That, plus that fucking idiot of a chaplain. "New Orleans is also very ingrained in voodoo, cannibalism, witchcraft ... this is indeed a dark city, and we're bringing the light. You know, wherever the soldiers go, there goes the word of God."
Yeah, you know, you can't drive anywhere in the city without running into a group of those goddamned cannibals ...
If anyone from the Voodoo Shop is reading this, put a mojo on his ass, willya?
Recipe of the day: Mirliton Soup. This was in the September issue of New Orleans Magazine, which arrived a few weeks ago. I thought it might be the last one for a while, but they've got a temporary setup in Baton Rouge, and plan a special October/November issue examining the possibility of an urban renaissance in New Orleans post-Katrina.
In the meantime, I'm devouring the September issue. Food writer Dale Curry offers an appreciation of mirlitons, the mild pale green squash that's known elsewhere as "chayote" but grows like crazy all through New Orleans. Most popular is the stuffed variety, but there are mirliton casseroles (easier than doing the stuffed ones, but basically the same ingredients) and myriad other preparations; the mild flavor lends itself to almost anything.
Naturally, the lowly mirliton stands up to scrutiny on the best of restaurant tables. A mirliton-shrimp Napoleon is one of the signature dishes at Cuvée, and a shrimp-mirliton soup has been served as a special at Emeril's. Cobalt's new chef, David English, stuffs them with bacon, apple, crawfish and crab and serves them on a plate with salmon.
I've also halved, seeded and julienned raw mirlitons and mixed them into a rémoulade with shrimp, kind of a shrimp and mirliton slaw, that works really well. Then there's the magazine's recipe for this tasty-looking soup:
Mirliton Soup
Boil mirlitons in a large pot of water until tender. Cool, slice in half, discard seeds and peel off the thin, rough skin. Roughly chop the pulp and set aside.
- 4 mirlitons
- 2 tablespoons butter
- 2 tablespoons flour
- 1 onion, chopped
- 1/2 cup finely chopped andouille
- 4 cups chicken stock
- Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
- 1/2 teaspoon Creole seasoning, or to taste
- 1/2 teaspoon Tabasco
- 1 cup heavy cream
Make a light roux of butter and flour, add onion and andouille, and sauté until soft. Add chicken stock, seasonings and mirliton pulp and cook over low heat for 30 minutes. Place the mixture, 2 cups at a time, in a blender and purée. Return to pot. Add cream and heat and adjust seasonings. Remove from heat before it comes to a boil, and serve.
YIELD: 6-8 servings
Yum!
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