In July of 1968 I was in New Orleans. Hellishly hot. Midnight Cowboy, the
just out movie was playing. For the 10 o'clock movie, I stood in a long line
filled with young men, many of them in drag. I had no idea that I was about
to see one of the first (somewhat) openly gay movies in America.
At the jazz museum I met - ironically I thought - a young blond woman behind
desk who later generously took me on a ride around different parts of the
City. She said her father was an inventor for NASA and his name was left on
a plaque on the moon. For all these years I have tried to make it a fit - a
blond at work in the jazz museum who also her family name on the moon.
Metaphysical conceits notwithstanding, sometimes it's impossible to make
things fit - even when they do!
Then there was that Mark Twain steamboat tour guide booming his voice across
the waters - but that is another story.
But Codrescu, Bukowski (once) and Ann Rice in New Orleans always seemed a
good mix. Faulkner's skewed Anglo romanticism about the City - octoroons et
always seemed that, skewed. And Sherwood Anderson also seemed a little out
of place. Wasn't Richard Wright (Blackboy) in New Orleans, too?
Amazing all this stuff comes gushing up.
The last time I was in New Orleans was for an American Book Association
convention. That time I was deeply conscious of the anger of young blacks on
the streets towards whites - visiting tourists. But then we also got to
dance to the Neville Brothers. Which was great.
There is so much sadness now - I feel it coming down across so many.
Take advantage while we can before the media begins to fill us with fake
sugar and nostalgia (the 'docs' are coming.)

Stephen V



>> There was also a film from the late 1970s, Pretty Baby, with one of
>> the Carradine brothers (Keith? David?) and a kiddie-porn Brooke
>> Shields, who was all of 12 years old at the time.  Shades of Jodie
>> Foster in _Taxi Driver_.  I think Susan Sarandon was one of the whores
>> and Shields was her daughter whom Bellocq married!
> 
> I stayed a week, eons ago, as a guest in a house where part of that
> movie was filmed.  Crumbling courtyard with iron-wrought fencing and
> what a gate.  What a week.
> 
> I also lived in Houston a while, and maybe one reason N.O. thrived
> before air conditioning is that the mighty Mississippi gives it energy
> and breezes that Houston simply doesn't have.  Houston just sits there.
> New Orleans pulses--even the landscape does.
> 
> 
> Speaking of Anne Rice, someone just sent me her response to all this:
> 
> Published on Sunday, September 4, 2005 by the New York Times
> Do You Know What it Means to Lose New Orleans?
> by Anne Rice
> 
> What do people really know about New Orleans?
> 
> Do they take away with them an awareness that it has always been not
> only a great white metropolis but also a great black city, a city where
> African-Americans have come together again and again to form the
> strongest African-American culture in the land?
> 
> The first literary magazine ever published in Louisiana was the work of
> black men, French-speaking poets and writers who brought together their
> work in three issues of a little book called L'Album Littéraire. That
> was in the 1840's, and by that time the city had a prosperous class of
> free black artisans, sculptors, businessmen, property owners, skilled
> laborers in all fields. Thousands of slaves lived on their own in the
> city, too, making a living at various jobs, and sending home a few
> dollars to their owners in the country at the end of the month.
> 
> This is not to diminish the horror of the slave market in the middle of
> the famous St. Louis Hotel, or the injustice of the slave labor on
> plantations from one end of the state to the other. It is merely to say
> that it was never all "have or have not" in this strange and beautiful
> city.
> 
> Later in the 19th century, as the Irish immigrants poured in by the
> thousands, filling the holds of ships that had emptied their cargoes of
> cotton in Liverpool, and as the German and Italian immigrants soon
> followed, a vital and complex culture emerged. Huge churches went up to
> serve the great faith of the city's European-born Catholics; convents
> and schools and orphanages were built for the newly arrived and the
> struggling; the city expanded in all directions with new neighborhoods
> of large, graceful houses, or areas of more humble cottages, even the
> smallest of which, with their floor-length shutters and deep-pitched
> roofs, possessed an undeniable Caribbean charm.
> 
> Through this all, black culture never declined in Louisiana. In fact,
> New Orleans became home to blacks in a way, perhaps, that few other
> American cities have ever been. Dillard University and Xavier
> University became two of the most outstanding black colleges in
> America; and once the battles of desegregation had been won, black New
> Orleanians entered all levels of life, building a visible middle class
> that is absent in far too many Western and Northern American cities to
> this day.
> 
> The influence of blacks on the music of the city and the nation is too
> immense and too well known to be described. It was black musicians
> coming down to New Orleans for work who nicknamed the city "the Big
> Easy" because it was a place where they could always find a job. But
> it's not fair to the nature of New Orleans to think of jazz and the
> blues as the poor man's music, or the music of the oppressed.
> 
> Something else was going on in New Orleans. The living was good there.
> The clock ticked more slowly; people laughed more easily; people
> kissed; people loved; there was joy.
> 
> Which is why so many New Orleanians, black and white, never went north.
> They didn't want to leave a place where they felt at home in
> neighborhoods that dated back centuries; they didn't want to leave
> families whose rounds of weddings, births and funerals had become the
> fabric of their lives. They didn't want to leave a city where tolerance
> had always been able to outweigh prejudice, where patience had always
> been able to outweigh rage. They didn't want to leave a place that was
> theirs.
> 
> And so New Orleans prospered, slowly, unevenly, but surely - home to
> Protestants and Catholics, including the Irish parading through the old
> neighborhood on St. Patrick's Day as they hand out cabbages and
> potatoes and onions to the eager crowds; including the Italians, with
> their lavish St. Joseph's altars spread out with cakes and cookies in
> homes and restaurants and churches every March; including the uptown
> traditionalists who seek to preserve the peace and beauty of the Garden
> District; including the Germans with their clubs and traditions;
> including the black population playing an ever increasing role in the
> city's civic affairs.
> 
> Now nature has done what the Civil War couldn't do. Nature has done
> what the labor riots of the 1920's couldn't do. Nature had done what
> "modern life" with its relentless pursuit of efficiency couldn't do. It
> has done what racism couldn't do, and what segregation couldn't do
> either. Nature has laid the city waste - with a scope that brings to
> mind the end of Pompeii.
> €
> 
> I share this history for a reason - and to answer questions that have
> arisen these last few days. Almost as soon as the cameras began panning
> over the rooftops, and the helicopters began chopping free those
> trapped in their attics, a chorus of voices rose. "Why didn't they
> leave?" people asked both on and off camera. "Why did they stay there
> when they knew a storm was coming?" One reporter even asked me, "Why do
> people live in such a place?"
> 
> Then as conditions became unbearable, the looters took to the streets.
> Windows were smashed, jewelry snatched, stores broken open, water and
> food and televisions carried out by fierce and uninhibited crowds.
> 
> Now the voices grew even louder. How could these thieves loot and
> pillage in a time of such crisis? How could people shoot one another?
> Because the faces of those drowning and the faces of those looting were
> largely black faces, race came into the picture. What kind of people
> are these, the people of New Orleans, who stay in a city about to be
> flooded, and then turn on one another?
> 
> Well, here's an answer. Thousands didn't leave New Orleans because they
> couldn't leave. They didn't have the money. They didn't have the
> vehicles. They didn't have any place to go. They are the poor, black
> and white, who dwell in any city in great numbers; and they did what
> they felt they could do - they huddled together in the strongest houses
> they could find. There was no way to up and leave and check into the
> nearest Ramada Inn.
> 
> What's more, thousands more who could have left stayed behind to help
> others. They went out in the helicopters and pulled the survivors off
> rooftops; they went through the flooded streets in their boats trying
> to gather those they could find. Meanwhile, city officials tried
> desperately to alleviate the worsening conditions in the Superdome,
> while makeshift shelters and hotels and hospitals struggled.
> 
> And where was everyone else during all this? Oh, help is coming, New
> Orleans was told. We are a rich country. Congress is acting. Someone
> will come to stop the looting and care for the refugees.
> 
> And it's true: eventually, help did come. But how many times did Gov.
> Kathleen Blanco have to say that the situation was desperate? How many
> times did Mayor Ray Nagin have to call for aid? Why did America ask a
> city cherished by millions and excoriated by some, but ignored by no
> one, to fight for its own life for so long? That's my question.
> 
> I know that New Orleans will win its fight in the end. I was born in
> the city and lived there for many years. It shaped who and what I am.
> Never have I experienced a place where people knew more about love,
> about family, about loyalty and about getting along than the people of
> New Orleans. It is perhaps their very gentleness that gives them their
> endurance.
> 
> They will rebuild as they have after storms of the past; and they will
> stay in New Orleans because it is where they have always lived, where
> their mothers and their fathers lived, where their churches were built
> by their ancestors, where their family graves carry names that go back
> 200 years. They will stay in New Orleans where they can enjoy a
> sweetness of family life that other communities lost long ago.
> 
> But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us.
> You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You
> want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and
> our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny
> minority preying on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and
> turned your backs.
> 
> Well, we are a lot more than all that. And though we may seem the most
> exotic, the most atmospheric and, at times, the most downtrodden part
> of this land, we are still part of it. We are Americans. We are you.