New Orleans

Nothing is ever as simple as it seems, so it has taken us more than a year for everyone to get on the same page and figure out how to make everyone happy, but the light is now beaming at the end of the tunnel and likely by Labor Day, we’ll part a 4 x 8 trailer with 800 pounds of bio-diesel gear somewhere in the 9^th Ward, I hope.

The rig can produce up to 20,000 gallons capacity a month by converting cooking grease into fuel.  If there is one place in the world that produces a huge supply of cooking grease, tell me it’s not New Orleans, so if we can put all of these pieces together, we’re going to be “cookin’ with grease!”

Of course there are a lot of slips between the cup and the lip.  The equipment needs some tune up in Cali before the pickup.  We have to work out the charitable donation papers for ACORN International to accept the contribution.  We need to get the big Suburban or something similar out to Santa Barbara to roll the operation back to New Orleans.  In the meantime we need to find a location, hopefully in our beloved 9^th Ward, where we can park this baby and locate extra storage tanks and everything else that’s needed.  We need to reach out to the hospitality world to get the grease and to our friends in high and low places to agree to use the product to make this operation sustainable as we begin the evangelical work.

Yeah, like I said, it’s a long list, so this is just the scout patrol giving out advance notice and some teasers (check out that picture!) that this is coming, and it’s going to be big!

Ps.  You want to help in New Orleans to get this going or make it happen elsewhere, give a holler to wade@chieforganizer.org.

Along with about 50 to 100 folks I slipped to the back of the sweltering art space and sweated out the presentation and question and answers.  The Lens people seemed affable and enthusiastic.  The web-paper seems to have been founded by Ariella Cohen and Karen Gadbois, whose names I did not recognize, but Ms. Cohen jumped up to answer several questions and seemed energetic.  They placed themselves along with ProPublica and other alternative sources among about 50 efforts around the country that were trying to independently gather news or offer alternatives on a regular, perhaps even weekly basis like The Lens. They were huge fans of the local Fox affiliate which was hard to follow though it seem more about the space and occasional air time than any kind of political affinity.  They spoke of partnerships with other outlets that appealed to special and historic interests in the city like the Louisiana Weekly and the local Spanish paper.  They seemed to see their mission as filling gaps that the larger outlets either were not able or uninterested in filling.   A card passed out joined them to the New Orleans rebuilding project as “media watchdogs.”  There was goodwill in the room, and best wishes for their success.

Listening the questions from the crowd was worrisome.  Too many were looking for too much, and certainly more than they could offer.  Many seemed to want a one-stop solution or competitor for the local paper, which Lens folks were sympathetic too, but correctly tried to dampen with a focus on their smaller niche.  It was troubling that many looking for more, might not find enough in the niche to develop their support, and though the Lens people were careful to deflate (“interested in who is reading, not how man y ‘clicks’”), to survive there has to be a significant base of readers and real sustainability.

Sustainability seemed the Achilles heel of this great effort.  They were excited and proud of their foundation funding, which seemed to be mostly, if not all, from larger foundations in Miami, New York, and elsewhere, but god knows foundation funding defines short term and unsustainability.   Hopefully they have a plan, since the work seems so valuable, though I wonder if this is not more of the ongoing media crises in our country.

Not long ago talking with the Patch.com folks who have been expanding rapidly around the country as a piece of AOL and have an interesting model as well, but when I talked to their top dogs, they were clearly stretched to the gills trying to push the money in the door and the product to eyeballs.

The wonder of the web is the easy and cheap access, but the bridge we all seem still searching to cross successfully is how to achieve even support and resource sustainability to match the ambition of the project to the value of the dollar.  As newspapers become more fragile and segmented, it is unclear that any of us have found the secret sauce to really serve as alternatives, much less to take steps beyond the meager efforts we are already chafing to read as the local papers downsize steadily and surely.

It was all good vibes and love in the room along with all the sweaty brows on a New Orleans night, but it was hard not to see the clouds everywhere around and wonder how long The Lens and others like it might last without finding the answers to the bottom line.

New Orleans

I loved David Simon’s The Wire, set in Baltimore.  I was never confused that it was “real” or some kind of docudrama about Baltimore.  It was good drama in an urban setting that was filled with straight talk, bent angles, and people from unions, politics, crime, and throughout the city that were multi-dimensional, complex, and felt real.  ACORN organizers and some other commentators in Baltimore felt slighted by the show because it didn’t depict the part of the world that included community organizing.  I got that, but I was a fan.

I’m having a harder time with Treme. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad the show is on the air, and I’m delighted to see it set in New Orleans.  When they film in front of my house at Fredrick Douglass High School or elsewhere in the Bywater neighborhood where I live, I’m happy to move my truck out of the way.  I’m friendly to the caterers, truck drivers, security and duty cops.   I shake hands and give the thumbs up at local bars and restaurants featured as background for the action.  On that score it’s all good and thanks, Mr. Simon.

With The Wire I knew it was all just made up stuff, but I liked the gritty slices of the Baltimore we knew being part of the action.   Simon doesn’t know New Orleans, but in Treme he tries to compensate with more “historical” and “contemporary” references to substitute for the real New Orleans, the city he seems to like, but can’t quite grip, except from a tourist perspective, which just grates on me.  Even as great as New Orleans music is and as much as I like the exposure given to some of the local players as a stalwart citizen of the hometown, I often have trouble with the one-dimensional minstrel show aspects of all of this, which sometimes are just painful to watch.

One of the things that worked in The Wire was the nuanced and complex way that Simon, a former police and beat reporter up there, handled the bad guys.  They were real people.  He drew you in.  You rooted for some of the guys and against other guys.  There is no day in the streets of any city where I wouldn’t want to make sure that Omar had my back and was a block or two behind me.

New Orleans is a violent city, even more so that Baltimore, but after a year a half it is amateurish how Treme deals with this intrinsic part of the patter n of the city.  One of the main characters is the Indian chief whose struggle and cultural rectitude is supposed to attract some of our sympathy despite the fact that he is invariably a cranky son-of-a-bitch.  In the first season we watched him lay in wait and then beat up a young fellow within an inch of his life, and possibly to his death, who had stolen his tools.  Nothing more on that…it was all just left hanging and random.  In Treme the cops are plastic, tinny, and nothing more than crooks with a badge, save for one hero, who seems largely our hero because he gets along with the sniveling, heart on her sleeve lawyer, who is so committed to the truth that she can’t tell her teenage daughter about her father’s suicide.

The violence this season was a grisly rape and general beatdown of one of the main characters, a woman bartender, as she moved to close up.  Where was Simon on this story?  None of this was real.  Watching the “tourist” Treme, we’re supposed to believe that there is a bar in the hood in our fair city that doesn’t have a shotgun or some kind of firearm behind the counter.  We’re supposed to believe that our woman bartender wasn’t packing heat, mace and more.  We’re supposed to believe that there’s a woman or man barkeep in the City of New Orleans that blithely packs the day’s money in their purse or pocket and stands in the dark to lock the door.  Maybe all of that happens in Disneyland, some college town or Toronto or perhaps even Baltimore, but that’s not New Orleans, friend!

I don’t want to seem unkind about Treme, but the tourism tinge of everything also pulls everything about race out of kilter from the real city.  In a service industry where more than 50,000 people were employed in the hospitality industry before the storm and restaurants were unable to open for years because public housing was closed and affordable housing was out of reach for the largely African-American service workers trying to return to their jobs.  Despite the fact that this is the New Orleans industry, it is a afterthought seen through a story of white woman chef whose  black sous-chef has a French accent?   I don’t even want to touch the character that is a white former DJ, trying to be a rapper in our city which is famous for our hip hop and rappers.  One of the truest notes in the show slipped out this season when he admitted he had gone to Newman, an exclusive, uptown prep school, which to hometown folks just about said everything about this dude!  It also says yet more about Treme’s losing struggle to come to grips with the reality of race in the real city which can only be ignored in the tourist’s ghetto of New Orleans, where Simon and his team seem lost.

Using Wendell Pierce, a New Orleans native from Press Park, the first African-American suburban development in the city, as perhaps the key character doesn’t give Treme the cover it needs in Treme. He’s a trombone playing, good times, skirt chasing scamp, and he plays it to the hilt, but that’s simply a caricature.  For some reason Simon chose a cartoon figure rather than a someone who felt like a real working musician from the city.  You want to be a serious musician in tourist-Treme, then you need to be based in New York, speak Dutch, play the violin, or something.  Phyllis Montana, the real daughter of a former Indian chief, is one of the few touches of reality anywhere near all of this, and her line about Pierce getting a “job job” rather than all of these gigs was a lightening shot of reality in the show.  I can still remember having organized carriage drivers in the French Quarter and their endless arguments about whether there work was a “job” or a “hustle,” and all that went with that including unionization, benefits, respect and dignity.  This is real!

Speaking of caricatures, all New Orleans politicians are corrupt and incompetent.  Yawn.  This is the rap, not the reality.  It’s the uptown club view and the outsider’s assumption.  The Simon of The Wire knew better.  It’s time for that Simon to come back to work on Treme.

The references to Katrina are too painful in a tourist-Treme. I know someone who couldn’t watch a show the first season without crying.  The show does pull some heartstrings for locals, although in my view Katrina is just a docudrama reference and little more.  The real life drama in every family of return, rebuilding, rejection, or recovery just doesn’t make it into Treme. In real life the resilience of the city and its population to come back and remake the city is one of the great and lasting dramas of heroism of low and moderate income working people of all races and backgrounds.  It hurts me and is painful for me to have to watch every show and think about how much is missed.

Working with ACORN in New Orleans, we had a front row, frontline seat in that struggle, but like everything that has to do with real people in the city, working and lower income people that have been and will be the majority of the city, those fights and victories that prevented the hijacking of New Orleans, its neighborhoods, and people will simply stay another story for the real citizens rather than tourist-Treme.

I was driving to the gym yesterday in my truck.  I still have a “Call ACORN – Hurricane Recovery” sign on the back.  I will always ride for the brand.  A car came up Rampart as I drove up the Treme neighborhood boundary line and started honking.  The passenger window was down, so that when he caught up to me, I looked over.  A guy was grinning with his thumb up, and I could see him mouthing the words, “Yeah, ACORN!” as he signaled and turned right on Esplanade.

Treme is better than nothing about New Orleans, but there’s a great show about the real city and its people that is still waiting to be made.   Sadly, Treme is not that show.  At least not yet.

March 8, 2011

They went to Rampart and I continued on course on my normal route towards the Press Street railroad tracks, the dividing line between Bywater and Marigny. A straggler group of twenty or so ended up somehow behind me so it seemed as if Cheyenne and I were acting as Spy Boy for this crew. Reaching our old shotgun double, I saw my daughter, Dine’, in the living room and called her out for a look. She hipped me to the fact that the Bones were trying to revive an old Mardi Gras tradition in the African-American community of neighborhood marchers.

The bigger news was the front page story on the thinly disguised police riot a couple of blocks from where I was standing on Sunday night around 10:30 PM that disrupted the Krewe of Eris. The Times-Picayune front page headline had been: “Police, marchers clash in Marigny: Six officers injured in melee.’ Dine’ had told me the story early Monday morning. Police had chased down marchers and bystanders and in several cases brought them to the ground and hit them with tasers. The end of her story had been that “it was one of the first times I was ashamed of New Orleans,” and that’s serious stuff in our family. The article didn’t spin the same cover-up as the headline had advertised, and quoted at length from a participant about the police’s unruly behavior. Another observer told the reporters about the police provocation with “ear splitting sirens.” Dine’ had seen a couple of marchers flick bits of their costumes at a police car, but that’s hardly damage. The police version has not come out yet, which local observers know always means that they are monitoring the story to see what they can get away with. In New Orleans only a fool would ever believe the police version of anything at this point. There is no sign despite and new mayor and a new chief that the police are anything but out of control still, despite tough talk and drum banging downtown.

At the end of her block all sides of the march converged. As Cheyenne and I tried to get by, we finally saw the Bones banner leading the way and both of us had to nod in resigned agreement as we read the white letters on the homemade black background: The Greatest Mardi Gras Illusion: The Happiness of the Poor.”

The folks uptown and in what’s left of city business will have their parties and toast each other at the balls. The hotels and restaurants are touting the late date as a boon for business.

Otherwise in the Crescent City, same ol,’ same ol.’

New Orleans

And, that was a shock.  Oliver was a friend and supporter.  Mayor Morial’s blessing and Oliver’s work on the inside when I ran the multi-union project, HOTROC, for SEIU, the AFL-CIO, HERE, and the Operating Engineers, ended up being the big success of our inside “leverage” campaign with the Piazza de’ Italia public corporation that built the Lowe’s Hotel, the only major post 9-11 property, and now the only union hotel in the city.  Earlier Oliver had been the key we needed when he cast the deciding vote preventing the privatization of the Sewerage and Water Board.  He has been one of our most vocal champions when we fought to raise the minimum wage.  Believe me, if he had been for sale, developers, hoteliers, and the privateers all would have paid way more than $20,000 chump change to take him out of those fights.  So of all the trees to be toppled and fall, the looming, large Councilman Thomas was the surprise never expected and the disappointment most deeply felt and impossible to replace.

When caught with the cookies, Oliver manned up, pled guilty, didn’t rat, and did his time.  We got some letters from him from the fed penitentiary in Atlanta that were moving and well thought out.  Big believers in redemption, when the bizarre news came out that he and his old friend, Anthony Bean, director of a community theater uptown had written a play about all of this, called “Reflections:  A Man and His Time,” I immediately went on line and bought six tickets so we would be well represented from the top (Local 100 ULU’s President Mildred Edmond) to the bottom (the rest of us organizers).

The play was sold out and my guess is that the theater should have cleared $6000 conservatively the night we attended, and that’s a very good contribution and says something about rehab right there.  What do I know about the theater?  Not much, but the play was sprightly up to the intermission.  Some of it was even funny.  The crowd got a tremendous kick out of the satire around the preachers advising and arguing with Oliver before his public announcement.  The second half focusing on his prison time was preachy and boring with one good song, which might mean it was realistic, but it didn’t offer much to most of us already off parole.

A politician slipping and falling and then doing something as public as a play to try and “explain” himself is a rare thing, so it’s hard to judge.  Having read Oliver’s prison letters, I don’t doubt his sincerity, yet watching all of this on a stage inevitably and by definition takes some of the reality out of both insight and contrition.  The sense of “I did wrong” was never diluted, but the play allowed there to be curious mitigations around the inadequate pay in politics, the puny level of the bribe, the generosity shown to needy constituents, the lack of benefit to his family, and the couple of times that problems with racetrack gambling floated out in snippets of dialogue without explanation or amplification, as if the very mention was a trial balloon for an alternate reality.

Some things can’t be explained and Oliver and Bean were sharp enough to not try to defend something that was just plain stupid.  The play also left the future cloudy and confused for our friend and now banned politician.  The very drag of the second act made it hard to believe that there as a clear path for Oliver working with young people, which was part of the hint drifting there.

New Orleans is not like other cities.  Thank goodness!  Former governor Edwin Edwards just came out of jail after a decade as the play was hitting the boards.  Here he maintains a reputation after four terms in office as delightful rouge regardless of the evidence.  In our city Oliver can still be an advocate what needs to be done.  A son of the lower 9^th ward and a long time representative of uptown housing projects and neighborhoods, Oliver can still find a voice speaking truth to power.   He did wrong, and he paid his debt to society.  Now he needs to find a new stage and talk about what he really knows and what really matters.  Maybe that will be with young people, maybe it will be a broader role in helping cement the coalition that continues to try and build real power for the majority of people in this city.

After a slip and fall, what’s most important is finding a sure path to continue on making progress as you make your way.

New Orleans

Bullock doesn’t like being played for a fool it seems.  She just solved a little problem like that in her personal life from what I’ve read.  After doing her part, hoping to help Gulf recovery, she came to understand (thanks to www.deSmogBlog.com which I’m putting on my Google Reader, thank you!) that the storm troopers were joined at the hip with America’s WETLAND Foundation, which has been a “soft core” coastal restoration outfit created (according to Bruce Alpert in the Times-Picayune) with state money and slicked down with oil company contributions (which is a little disingenuous given the huge role they have played in coastal destruction!).

Bullock wants to know the “facts” her release said about the connections.  To start with the storm troopers have been a vehicle for Anne Milling since Katrina and based on cozy, old school, uptown relationships with the Times-Picayune, Whitney Bank, oil interests, and others have been a favored darling at the fuzzy point of “elite panic” about the city and its future since the storm.  Other than fly an almost entirely lily white delegation of upper crust women to DC in a chartered plane to speak for our 2/3rds African-American and poor city, I’m not sure what they ever did at all, but they were the long toothed, debutante ball in a bad post-K season.  America’s WETLAND Foundation’s chair is her husband King Milling, a former bigwig at Whitney Bank, the old school and oil field standard in New Orleans.  Milling is Mr. Public Relations, having been quoted by me in the past for his refusal to accept pay limits as a bailed out bank and his opposition to rebuilding the 9^th ward and other black majority parts of the city.  Of course he’s there as a front for oil and finance interests.  No waves will hit them from on his shore watch.

Alpert quotes:  “A written statement Thursday from Women of the Storm said America’s WETLAND is listed as a sponsor of the Restore the Gulf effort because it agreed to help with logistics, such as presenting the signed petitions to Congress and the administration.”  Huh?  What are the storm troopers going to do then?  Or the US Mail if planes are not landing at National or Dulles airports?  DeSmogBlog says both groups are fronts for a taxpayer bailout for British Petroleum’s cleanup and a full tilt, no change charge to return to business as usual by the oil companies in the Gulf.  Neither group has gotten the memo that those days are now gone in the wake of the oil spill.

So, I’m for running Bullock for Governor.  She makes stuff happen.  She seems like she doesn’t want to shill for either the elites or the special interests.  She doesn’t hesitate to walk her own talk.  Rather than just politic about education, she rolls up her sleeves and makes change happen.  She actually seems to care about both Louisiana and New Orleans and given her deep Austin, Texas roots that must represent a life changing experience, which is also a good thing.   Given our constant war with crime as well, her experience with the FBI from “Miss Congeniality” won’t hurt.  She’s a huge football fan from what I gather from “Blind Side” and that puts her in good stead with the vast majority of Louisianans smitten with the LSU Tigers and the New Orleans Saints.  Given the amount of tax money that the State of Louisiana hands over to the film industry in tax breaks, she would at least make sure we got something on the backside because he has experience watching the books of these film folks.

I’d switch from a clown now to a star tomorrow in a flash:  Sandra Bullock for Governor of Louisiana!

New Orleans

A spokeswoman for House Appropriations Chair Congressman David Obey, a Democrat from Wisconsin, clearly knew none of this history and was simply pulling down a schoolmarm’s admonition to remind someone out there that the money was supposed to be distributed by 2007.  Honey, if you only knew!  This money would have been even better if it had been distributed in 2006 fresh after the storm, but the combination of state and federal (yes, Congressman, federal!) starts and stops on the ways and means to actually doing the distributing let to tragic delays and setbacks from which the City of New Orleans is still reeling.

This is a classic case of blaming the victim, and, even more cynically, punishing the desperate homeowners who are trying to rebuild yet another time.  In fact I’m not sure anyone can even put the real number on how many times some homeowners have been devastated at this point.  Why?  Because according to published reports, this money has been designated for families who were rebuilding but were victimized by corrupt contractors or are having to replace bad Chinese drywall, as well as finally closing on another 14000 odd families still waiting for their first dollar on the Road Home.  One potato, two potato, three potato, four!

Furthermore what kind of sick irony would rob Peter, in this case New Orleans, to pay Paul, in this case our Gulf Coast neighbors and others including many in New Orleans at the mess end of the worst environmental crises perhaps in US history?

The House of Representatives already passed this mess, but it has to go to the Senate.  I wish I could take comfort in Senator Landrieu and Vitter’s ability to carry the day here, but I really can’t.  Landrieu hardly knows how to cut a good deal, and Vitter wants to blame everyone for everything without ever carrying any real weight.

Obama promised to help New Orleans, and we’ve seen none of it in 18 months worth a spit.  Maybe the White House could buy a couple of fewer predators and finally make sure that someone does right by the city.

It’s past time for this as well.

New Orleans

There is something sweetly irrational about being a fan, even for something as meaningless in the “real” world as football.  I played football in schoolyards all my life and in high school until a clipping penalty on a block against me by an Archbishop Rummel tore out my knee, changing my life, and making me 4F in frequent draft physicals when I refused to do deep knee bends and thrust forward a dog eared letter from Ocshner Hospital saying I simply must have an operation, which I have steadfastly refused throughout all of these decades.  I’m the kind of ex-player, forced fan who has trouble living through the experience of watching the game.  With the Saints that has saved me from a lot of deadening pain over the years.  I will be as delirious as anyone if somehow the New Orleans team beats New Orleans native Peyton Manning and wins the Super Bowl.  I will also be shocked and surprised.  I have to live through a longer cultural shift.  The Saints, my Saints, are fighters, but they are not blessed by fate to be winners.  Somehow we usually find a way to lose.  This season has been the exception, but has it changed our genetic code?  Hmmm.  If the day comes when the Saints make winning routine and actually win a Super Bowl, then maybe I’ll be like my son, and be mad when they lose, rather than still surprised to see them win.

Have to keep perspective.  That’s the key.

Reading about “My Way” killings in the Philippines makes me think about all of this as well.  A great story in the Times by Norimitus Onishi talked about how dangerous it is for Sinatra’s standard to be sung in Philippine karaoke bars.  Falling out of tune can be a death warrant.

We grimace.  How could this be possible that so many would care so much about a song?

Then Onishi told the story of “a Thai man” who “killed eight of his neighbors in a rage after they sang John Denver’s ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads.’”

And, to tell the truth how many of us stopped as we read that with the sudden shock of recognition that there but by the grace of god go I.  How many times has the same thought crossed our mind?  In my case I would have to confess to a goodly number.

Who dat?

New Orleans

This is going to be a mess and the finger pointing will be hard, but probably not productive.  Ex-Governor Kathleen Blanco (D) had been doling the money out on an installment basis as various rebuilding steps were completed.  This was painfully slow and rightly occasioned huge complaints and delayed recovery because the bureaucracy, subcontracted out to private vendors, was hopeless and inefficient.  George Bush’s HUD muscled up Blanco so that finally homeowners got upfront, complete grants to rebuild.

The original homeowner signed a covenant with the state that gave them a fixed period of time to get the work done.  Some may have sold their lots, taken the money, and run.  It is unclear that the covenants are enforceable on anyone but the original owner, who is likely a long gone pecan.

Given the Great Recession and everything else that is happening there could be lots of valid reasons for a lack of progress.  Unemployment would be one, but the enduring credit crunch is likely another even in the relatively more well to do area of Lakeview because in most cases homeowners were still unlikely to have cobbled together enough to rebuild at current costs for labor and materials.

The Times-Picayune quoted the LRA director saying they were focusing on “case management,” meaning that they were trying to work with people rather than gin up the legal machinery to try and get the money back.  Despite the good service the Beacon of Hope people have done here, it seemed in the paper that they were both angling for a state contract to monitor compliance and advocating a “get tough” policy with rigid timelines.  Someone needs to be keeping up with the number without a doubt but to me this situation – and the recovery itself – needs a “get smart” policy more than a “get tough” program.

Homeowners can ask for extensions of one, two, or I suspect more years for good faith and good effort.  The state can pick out one or two scofflaws among the posh Lakeview crowd to send a signal about being serious, but it will take a calm voice and steady hand to help and maybe even more than that to bring people back to the neighborhoods and New Orleans in this economy, and that’s the best prescription for success now.