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mallorys_cameraObsessing about New Orleans. The Wild Tchoupitoulas stompin' some romp under fifteen feet of murky water. Coffins floating on the surface. Anne Rice vampires winking and standing each other shots of O positive in flooded jazz bars. Can you tell I've never spent serious time in New Orleans?
I watched the Weather Channel night before last with a sense of vague disappointment. The hurricane had been downgraded to Category 4. What was that about? Had the special effects budget run out? Woke up this morning to the appalling yet somehow satisfying news that most of New Orleans was now under water. All right! Now you're talkin'! Now I can spend all day crouched in front CNN and Fox TV News watching media vampires milk stunned people for their personal tragedies.
What is it that makes us all so desperate to buy into this shit? I mean this is not empathy. This is some impulse more primative than schadenfreude, something right up there with eating the still beating hearts of your enemies: if it happened to them, it can't happen to me plus GMC is still giving an employee discount on all those great cars!
I remember being similarly glued to my television set on September 11, 2001 but that was different somehow and when I think about why, it comes down to something very simple: there were no commercials that day. It's the ads that that clue you in: this isn't news, this is entertainment, programming designed to lull you into the complacent stupor that lowers your resistance to buying decisions.
Once I figure out the domestic equivalent of OXFAM, I'll donate money to relief efforts.
In other news, Max was down from Deep Springs for a whirlwind visit. Visit got off to a bumpy start – in the way of younger brothers of dazzlingly accomplished older brothers everywhere, Robin is convinced I love Max best and thus did the patented Cal Trask skulking thing for the first 24 hours or so. Tactically difficult: of course I wanted to reassure Robin but at the same time everybody's passive aggressive schtick always makes me want to scream: get over yourself! Robin is every bit as brilliant as Max; the difference is that he's never felt an internal pressure to live up to other people's expectations and so he doesn't.
We went out to breakfast at Rosine's and Robin sat at the table looking sullen and miserable. Wouldn't eat bacon. Bacon is one of his his favorite foods. I'd ordered him a special side. "I don't eat things with faces," he informed me loftily. "I don't like meat."
"Since when?" I asked. I was pissed. The side order cost five bucks.
"I've never liked meat," he said.
"You ate chili last night," I reminded him. "That has meat in it."
Otherwise silent, he kept doling out pieces of bacon to me, to Ben, but not to Max, throughout the breakfast conversation. Notice my suffering, the bacon said. Notice that I am an outsider to this family dynamic. It was hard for me to notice anything else.
But by last night, all the kinks in family togetherness had been ironed out. We had a rollicking family dinner. Max cooked – or I should say under-cooked – salmon, did an herb butter as garnish, baked his Grand Marnier cake. Maya came over. It was lovely to see her. Max entertained us with descriptions of Deep Springs variants on Capture the Flag.
"How do you choose teams?" Robin wanted to know.
"Various ways," Max said. "Sometimes it's East Coast versus West Coast. Sometimes it's circumcised versus uncircumcised. Sometimes it's rural versus urban – that's the hardest because I never know how to describe Monterey. It's a suburb, right?"
"Monterey is not a suburb!" Maya scoffed.
"Monterey is a small city," I said.
"A very small city," said Max.
"What's 'circumcised?'" Robin wanted to know.
"You know, Patrizia, I really want to see The Go-Between," said Maya hastily. "Now that I've read the book,"
And this was really sweet of her because I knew I'd put The Fear into her on one of those innumerable occasions last fall when Max had invited her over and then decamped leaving her to the mercy of his crazy mother. (Maya came over a lot last year when she was quote having problems at home – although how she could be having problems at home with her incredibly perfect family in that incredibly gorgeous Coralitos spread is still something of a mystery to me.)
I had been helping supervise her independent English studies – Maya had dropped out of school for a year and was educating herself – and had chosen books with the general theme of the Discovery of Self. The Go-Between is one of my favorite novels, containing as it does the most perfect opening lines ever written – "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." So naturally I'd assigned it. BUZZ: wrong move. Maya hated it, found nothing whatsoever to connect to in the story of an adolescent boy caught in a British class struggle disguised as a love affair.
The movie is everything a beautiful, contemporary sixteen year old girl hates. But that didn't stop me from trying to make her watch it and I can only imagine her distress – Max ditching her for some prior engagement, stuck with his insanely over-intellectual mother who wouldn't let her watch Bad Santa, who was forcing her to listen to Harold Pinter dialogue for God's sake –
It was very sweet of her to forgive me.
"If you really must see it, email me and I'll mail it to you," I said, playing smiling matriarch to the hilt. "And Robin, we'll talk about circumcision later. After we eat."
I watched the Weather Channel night before last with a sense of vague disappointment. The hurricane had been downgraded to Category 4. What was that about? Had the special effects budget run out? Woke up this morning to the appalling yet somehow satisfying news that most of New Orleans was now under water. All right! Now you're talkin'! Now I can spend all day crouched in front CNN and Fox TV News watching media vampires milk stunned people for their personal tragedies.
What is it that makes us all so desperate to buy into this shit? I mean this is not empathy. This is some impulse more primative than schadenfreude, something right up there with eating the still beating hearts of your enemies: if it happened to them, it can't happen to me plus GMC is still giving an employee discount on all those great cars!
I remember being similarly glued to my television set on September 11, 2001 but that was different somehow and when I think about why, it comes down to something very simple: there were no commercials that day. It's the ads that that clue you in: this isn't news, this is entertainment, programming designed to lull you into the complacent stupor that lowers your resistance to buying decisions.
Once I figure out the domestic equivalent of OXFAM, I'll donate money to relief efforts.
In other news, Max was down from Deep Springs for a whirlwind visit. Visit got off to a bumpy start – in the way of younger brothers of dazzlingly accomplished older brothers everywhere, Robin is convinced I love Max best and thus did the patented Cal Trask skulking thing for the first 24 hours or so. Tactically difficult: of course I wanted to reassure Robin but at the same time everybody's passive aggressive schtick always makes me want to scream: get over yourself! Robin is every bit as brilliant as Max; the difference is that he's never felt an internal pressure to live up to other people's expectations and so he doesn't.We went out to breakfast at Rosine's and Robin sat at the table looking sullen and miserable. Wouldn't eat bacon. Bacon is one of his his favorite foods. I'd ordered him a special side. "I don't eat things with faces," he informed me loftily. "I don't like meat."
"Since when?" I asked. I was pissed. The side order cost five bucks.
"I've never liked meat," he said.
"You ate chili last night," I reminded him. "That has meat in it."
Otherwise silent, he kept doling out pieces of bacon to me, to Ben, but not to Max, throughout the breakfast conversation. Notice my suffering, the bacon said. Notice that I am an outsider to this family dynamic. It was hard for me to notice anything else.
But by last night, all the kinks in family togetherness had been ironed out. We had a rollicking family dinner. Max cooked – or I should say under-cooked – salmon, did an herb butter as garnish, baked his Grand Marnier cake. Maya came over. It was lovely to see her. Max entertained us with descriptions of Deep Springs variants on Capture the Flag.
"How do you choose teams?" Robin wanted to know.
"Various ways," Max said. "Sometimes it's East Coast versus West Coast. Sometimes it's circumcised versus uncircumcised. Sometimes it's rural versus urban – that's the hardest because I never know how to describe Monterey. It's a suburb, right?"
"Monterey is not a suburb!" Maya scoffed.
"Monterey is a small city," I said.
"A very small city," said Max.
"What's 'circumcised?'" Robin wanted to know.
"You know, Patrizia, I really want to see The Go-Between," said Maya hastily. "Now that I've read the book,"
And this was really sweet of her because I knew I'd put The Fear into her on one of those innumerable occasions last fall when Max had invited her over and then decamped leaving her to the mercy of his crazy mother. (Maya came over a lot last year when she was quote having problems at home – although how she could be having problems at home with her incredibly perfect family in that incredibly gorgeous Coralitos spread is still something of a mystery to me.)
I had been helping supervise her independent English studies – Maya had dropped out of school for a year and was educating herself – and had chosen books with the general theme of the Discovery of Self. The Go-Between is one of my favorite novels, containing as it does the most perfect opening lines ever written – "The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there." So naturally I'd assigned it. BUZZ: wrong move. Maya hated it, found nothing whatsoever to connect to in the story of an adolescent boy caught in a British class struggle disguised as a love affair.
The movie is everything a beautiful, contemporary sixteen year old girl hates. But that didn't stop me from trying to make her watch it and I can only imagine her distress – Max ditching her for some prior engagement, stuck with his insanely over-intellectual mother who wouldn't let her watch Bad Santa, who was forcing her to listen to Harold Pinter dialogue for God's sake –
It was very sweet of her to forgive me.
"If you really must see it, email me and I'll mail it to you," I said, playing smiling matriarch to the hilt. "And Robin, we'll talk about circumcision later. After we eat."
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no subject
Date: 2005-09-01 12:38 pm (UTC)Ha! What a great entry
no subject
Date: 2008-10-23 11:17 pm (UTC)Unfortunately, as subsequent events (bridges collapsing in Minneapolis, levees failing in Iowa and Wisconcin) have shown, it can happen here, especially if the people in charge have zero interest in the act of governing.
Since Katrina, I've become convinced that New Orleans is the canary in the coal mine, and that if the neocons have their way, every city in America will be like my home town, only with bad food and ugly architecture.
I guess that's why I've been buggin out so much over this election, and the financial crisis. Like all New Orleanians I no longer believe in American exceptionism, this notion that we are somehow immune to the catastrophes that befall others. I know what it's like when the shit really hits the fan, and the people who supposedly have your back reveal themselves as indifferent. And it didn't take the bastards more than a few days to start blaming us, as if we somehow wore our skirts too short and asked for it.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-24 02:27 pm (UTC)Thing about infrastructure improvements... at least, this was the case when I was getting my Public Policy masters in the SF Bay area back in the Jurassic.... funds set aside for maintenance & upkeep (inadequate amounts to begin with) are looked upon as a kind of revolving petty cash fund, interest free loans that support other government spending. One of the reasons why there's often such a delay in implementing capital improvements, at least on the municipal & county levels (which are the only governments I studied in any depth.)
I'm not sure I agree that post-Katrina New Orleans is the canary in the coal mine. I think the feeling of invincibility is something that's been marketed in the television age. Certainly Pearl Harbor taught the generation before mine that we were not invincible, and the Great Depression taught the generation before that. Media's reach, however, is so pervasive that we buy into the meme of the moment in an emotional way that circumvents judgement.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-24 04:50 pm (UTC)That's a very big question.
If you stick to the areas built up before about 1920 (which did not flood) you'd never know anything happened. The French Quarter, Garden District, Uptown-Universities (on the river side of St. Charles Ave. anyway) look just fine. Also the upper 9th ward on the river side of St. Claude.
In those areas which took significant amounts of water it's a mixed bag, very dependent on whether people have significant personal resourses and how big a sackfull of bastards their insurance companies are. I have a friend who lived with a hole in his roof for 18 months because the insurance company couldn't get it together to send a claims adjuster around to look at it. If he'd tried to fix it himself they would have voided the claim, so he just stuck some plastic tarp over it and he and his family didn't use that room for a year and a half. Multiply that story several thousand times and you've got an idea.
About half of the police and fire stations in town are still uninhabitable. The cops and firemen work out of trailers (many of them still <>live in trailers). The billions the feds sent down here are still mostly tied up in red tape that W. promised to cut. For instance there's some regulation (I can't remember the name at the moment) that demands matching funds for repair of infrastructure by municipalities, and another that demands the cities pay for it themselves and be 'reimbursed.' These are cities (like New Orleans) that are, for all intents and purposes, bankrupt. I could go on and on about stuff like this, but you get the idea.
I keep a blog on New Orleans related stuff:
http://vancouverjazz.com/jdoheny/
Here's a Katrina retrospective I put up recently:
http://vancouverjazz.com/jdoheny/2008/09/dohenys-magic-8-ball.html
And of course you can always go into archives (as I did with your LJ) on both the blog and my Live Journal if you're interested in reportage of that time.