Nola Nik

Blogger No More

2010-05-06T13:44:00.002-05:00

I am no longer (as you who periodically check this blog have surely already guessed) adding to this blog. I have a new little girl and am cutting computer time out of my life to remain in the present with my family.

I will not take the blog down and you may contact me though comments if you have any questions regarding any posts.

Thank you for reading since the storm.

Nik

Black and Gold...and PINK in the Streets Sunday

2010-02-05T12:33:00.000-06:00

It seems that I am the writer of fun these days, such a nice change...

The Camel Toe Lady Steppers and The Pussyfooter swill be hitting the streets in two separate second line-type of gigs Sunday, warming up for the Super Bowl. It looks like both troupes will be adding the Black and Gold to their costumes, of course.

The Camel Toe Lady Steppers will begin their gallivanting at Louisiana and Annunciation to will finish up at Washington and Camp, from 11am-noon.

The Pussyfooters will be lining up in front of the King Pin for noon and will be, as they are annually, a part of the Lyons Club march. The band and krewe will be marching along from the King Pin to Grits via Ms. Mae's over on Napoleon, hitting a few joints along the way like the Milan Lounge.

Crash the parties!

Also look for the Pussyfooters in the SUPER BOWL PARADE!

America's Team: The New Orleans Saints

2010-02-03T16:04:00.002-06:00

by Billy Sothern, on today's Open Salon

Two weeks ago, the New Orleans Saints played the Minnesota Vikings for the National Football Conference Championship. My wife and I couldn’t watch the game alone – we didn’t want to bear the burden of defeat or experience the thrill of victory alone. Near kickoff, we drove the city’s streets just before the game started and they were eerily void of people just as I remembered them when I returned to the city days after Hurricane Katrina struck. We arrived at the uptown home of some friends, just blocks from quarterback Drew Brees’s home, and nervously ate the food and drink of this town. Our host had made a pot of gumbo, using a chicken he had fried and a dark roux. I separated yolks from egg whites, poured in gin, heavy cream, simple syrup, and orange flower water into my cocktail shaker and shook like crazy for a full minute to confect a round of Ramos gin fizzes, a drink invented in New Orleans more than a century ago. Despite our efforts, things looked grim in the fourth quarter. With the score tied and very little time on the clock, the Vikings had the ball, were in field goal range, and could take the game with a decent field goal kick. But we sipped our fizzes for good luck and a flag was thrown against the Vikings for something called “twelve men in a huddle,” an unlikely mishap for the polished team, driving the Vikings back beyond field goal range, which forced overtime, where the Saints won possession on the coin toss and took the game with a field goal.

We ran out onto the streets and our cries of “Who Dat!” – the cry of the Saints fan - were answered back with who dats from neighbors engaged in their own celebrations. We drove home through streets rich and poor that were now filled with revelers spilling out of bars or screaming from their front porches. We honked at cars, families, and jovial street mobs to share our joy. When we got home, the honking, yelling, and fireworks (or were they gunshots?) were audible for hours. The New Orleans Saints had defied expectations and were going to the Super Bowl for the first time ever.

The winning field goal occurred in New Orleans’s emblematic Superdome, a giant concrete spaceship that landed in New Orleans' business district a few decades ago and which had been, up until Hurricane Katrina, principally indentified as the home field of the hapless Aints, as the Saints were known during their early history of defeat and disappointment. The city of New Orleans has, as observed recently in the New York Times, been in a simultaneous struggle since the team’s inception. It lost two hundred thousand residents during the team’s first four decades, huge areas of the city were surrendered to blight and crime, the city lost almost all of its big businesses, and racial divides cleaved the city’s residents and divided the mostly black city from its mostly white suburbs. And this was all before Hurricane Katrina when the Superdome became the site of one of America’s biggest failures when desperate, mostly black citizens, abandoned in a city which had succumbed to catastrophic flooding, due more to poorly maintained and engineered levees and infrastructure than to the storm’s might, gathered for the world to see. Rumors of murders and rapes among the masses in the Superdome circulated quickly. By the time FEMA and the National Guard arrived and evacuated the entire city, the Superdome was no longer a sports field, it was a memorial to America’s persistent failure to address racial inequality, human misery and civic collapse.

I have beat this drum for almost five years since the storm, trying to tell anyone who will listen that the things that they saw after Hurricane Katrina, the things that disgusted and disappointed them, were not created by but were exposed by the storm and that similar ugliness existed not far from their homes, in forgotten cities from Richmond, California to Camden, New Jersey, and everywhere in between. And I still insist that New Orleans’ recovery is a bellwether for American Democracy and, as New Orleans goes – good or bad – so goes the country. All of this is why it is difficult for me to say that a winning field goal kick in a football game has changed things at all. But it has. The kick brought the citizens of this city and region together in a way that the common experience of displacement and loss following Hurricane Katrina had failed to do.

Whether you are listening to the black talk radio station, WBOK, where hosts are apoplectic about the possibility of the election of a white mayor, as seems likely, or WWL radio, whose white flight listeners seem to never tire of calling in to disparage the city, everyone comes together about The Saints. The Times Picayune, where the politics of the “white vote” and the “black vote” have been written about a lot recently, ran the headline, “New Orleans Saints fans build color-blind bonds in Who Dat Nation,” with the lede,

In a place where music and food can break down racial barriers but true dialogue between the groups is rare, nearly universal joy over the Saints' newfound success has created a new common language and solidified a shared identity.

The entire region coalesced this week in mass, populist, anti-corporate mania when the NFL tried to claim that “Who Dat” was the intellectual property and registered trademark of the NFL and threatened several New Orleans retailers who sold Who Dat merchandise. After receiving nothing but bad press and condemnation, summed up by a smart blogger’s exclamation, in perfect French, “Hey NFL, Bleaux Me,” the NFL backed down and local t-shirt shops sold out of anything with the word “Who Dat” on it.

Hurricane Katrina exposed our deepest divides and the “recovery,” such as it is, has in many ways only heightened the balkanization of this town and region. Things are not “better” here. The murder rate remains out of control, the city’s coffers are empty, the levees remain questionable, the wetlands that buffer the city from hurricanes are deteriorating, and the viability of many of the city’s neighborhoods is very much in doubt. But The Saints have, at least momentarily, brought us together and given people a sense of common purpose.

After the game, on Monday, or Tuesday, or Wednesday, or whenever the postgame celebration or sad hangover of loss ends, we all know that the city and region will still be laden down with problems and animosities. But on Sunday, the streets of New Orleans will empty again and people will huddle around televisions in the company of fellow Saints fans, people of all stripes including old school Who Dats and recent convert New Dats, like my wife and me. Our team, like our city and its people, are the underdogs in the game. So we will eat gumbo and hope. And if we are lucky, if we get another good coin toss after all of the bad ones for so many years, we will drive home again watching strangers hug in the streets, seeing everyone joyous and together, without regard for the usual divides, and the city can shake off some small part of what it struggles with and what has so fractured it. As with all the tragedy here, if some measure of unity and recovery can happen in New Orleans, it’s possible anywhere in this country

So forget the Cowboys, these Aints turned Saints are America’s team. Root for them and root for yourselves.

New Orleans Night out for Haiti: Give, Eat and Drink All in One Go!

2010-02-01T18:58:00.001-06:00

Local artist Miranda Lake and the folks from Dick and Jenny's got together to recruit restaurants to take part in a one night only benefit for Haiti. The idea is that you and yours eat out at any of the restaurants involved and that restaurant will donate a portion of your hard-earned money to an organization that will help Haiti. Each restaurant chose a different organization to give funds to, so check out the list below and find your pet org.

All you have to do is go out and get some grub or a few drinks at one of the participating restaurants tomorrow night,

TUESDAY FEBRUAURY 2, 2010

Participating bars and restaurants and targeted organizations:

Dick & Jenny's
http://dickandjennys.com/
504-894-9880
Charity of Choice: Doctors Without Borders http://doctorswithoutborders.org/

J'anita's @ The Avenue Pub
(504) 237-0335

Kyoto Japanese Restaurant & Sushi Bar
http://kyotonola.com/
504-891-3644

Theo's Neighborhood Pizza
http://www.theospizza.com/
504-894-8554
Charity of Choice: Doctors Without Borders
http://doctorswithoutborders.org/

Nonna Mia Cafe & Pizzeria
http://nonnamia.net/
504-948-1717
Charity of Choice: Doctors Without Borders
http://doctorswithoutborders.org/

The Delachaise
http://thedelachaise.com/
504-895-0858
Charity of Choice: Yéle Haiti
http://yele.org/

The Creole Creamery
http://www.creolecreamery.com/
504-894-8680

La Thai Uptown
http://lathaiuptown.com/
504-899-8886

Martinique Bistro
http://www.martiniquebistro.com/
504-892-8495

The Columns Hotel
http://www.thecolumns.com/
504-899-9308
Charity of Choice: Doctors Without Borders
http://doctorswithoutborders.org/
American Red Cross
http://www.redcross.org/

Billy's on Salon.com Today.

2010-01-19T15:56:00.001-06:00

From Salon.com, link in title below

Why can't the NYT and WP agree on Haiti?

How the media's conflicting coverage of race, class and the earthquake evokes memories of Hurricane Katrina

By Billy Sothern

This post originally appeared on Billy Sothern's Open Salon blog.

Those of us who lived in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina are all too familiar with reading stories in the press, written by people unfamiliar with this town, its politics, geographies and citizens who descended just for the big story, that misunderstood either the details of our complicated city or what it and our neighbors endured here.

As we saw in New Orleans, much of what people got wrong was driven by their preconceptions about the city, with some quickly accepting as truth false rumors of unthinkable violence by the poor people abandoned in the city and others failing to realize that the flood destroyed upper-middle-class white and black neighborhoods, along with middle-class white and black neighborhoods, before stranding the city's poorest (flooded and unflooded) residents, who became the most visible face of a much more complicated disaster. (People from other places still sometimes express surprise about this when I explain that a rich, white neighborhood was one of the first to flood.)

So it is unsurprising to see the American media struggle to get the story straight in Haiti, a city that many of the journalists now there were likely completely unfamiliar with a week ago.

I hadn't quite grasped this reality until I saw competing headlines, one in the New York Times on Sunday and another in the Washington Post on Monday, telling stories about the impact of the storm on the rich in Port-au-Prince that seem completely at odds with one another.

The New York Times, on the cover of Sunday's paper, carried the headline, "Earthquake Ignores Class Divisions of a Poor Land." The story is summed up in the following paragraphs:

Earthquakes do not respect social customs. They do not coddle the rich. They know nothing about the invisible lines that in Haiti keep the poor masses packed together in crowded slums and the well-to-do high up in the breezy hills of places like Pétionville.

And so it was with the devastating temblor that tore through Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, last week, toppling houses large and small, and trapping and traumatizing residents no matter where they stood on Haiti’s complicated social scale.

The story in yesterday's Washington Post carried the headline "Haiti's Elite Spared Much of the Devastation" and tells a far different story:

Although Tuesday's 7.0-magnitude earthquake destroyed many buildings in Port-au-Prince, it mostly spared homes and businesses up the mountain in the cool, green suburb of Petionville, home to former presidents and senators.

A palace built atop a mountain by the man who runs one of Haiti's biggest lottery games is still standing. New-car dealers, the big importers, the families that control the port -- they all drove through town with their drivers and security men this past weekend. Only a few homes here were destroyed.

I have never been to Haiti, no less Port-au-Prince or Petionville, but I don't see how both stories can be accurate. But, especially for those of us who have seen a complicated and nuanced place reduced to generalities by someone without sufficient grasp of the place to begin with, it should be a reminder that, from this distance and in the midst of a crisis, it is hard to get any real read of the texture of a place as complex as Haiti.

I suppose it should also come as no surprise that both these stories about Petionville, and so much of the press about New Orleans, seem especially off-base about issues of class and, in New Orleans, the intersection of class and race. While such divisions are, of course, very often visible on the surface of a city, the dynamics are always much more complicated. Take New Orleans, which commentators suggested was segregated between black areas and white areas when in fact the historic city was integrated by design and remains much more racially diverse in its neighborhoods than most American cities, a fact that does little to change that it is also stunningly racially polarized.

While I admire some of the reporting I have seen from Haiti and feel like I am getting a picture of what is happening there (while having to hold back tears at the horror of some of the things that I am seeing), it is worth remembering that there will be things, like the "Babies Getting Raped in the Superdome" story after Hurricane Katrina, that may not hold up under the clear light of day, which will hopefully come soon for Port-au-Prince and Haiti.

Billy Sothern is a criminal defense attorney and writer in New Orleans. He is the author of "Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City."

Ways to Give this Season and Have a Blast While Doing It! Part Two: The Camel Toe Lady Steppers Toe Down

2010-01-18T15:07:00.008-06:00

This is the second article in a series about lady groups in Nola doing good things for good people while having an excellent time doing so.

This one's about The Camel Toe Lady Steppers, better known as another fantastic group of females that marches in the Muses parade. Their major fundraiser, called the "Toe-Down" donates a percentage of the proceeds to The Roots of Music, which is an after school academic tutoring and music program founded by Rebirth's Derrick Tabb.*

Click on poster or scroll all the way down for information

I interviewed Cynthia Garza, a founder of the CTLS who was gracious enough to take the time to answer some questions during a very busy time of year for the group. There is a LOT of information in this article, including an explanation of the infamous dance-off that goes down between the CTLS and Pussyfooters and a tribute to Miss Antoinette K Doe so read on!

When and why did the CTLS form?

Back in 2003 a group of us thought it would be fun to dress up for Halloween like the majorettes who parade with the marching bands during Mardi Gras. We had big dreams of making costumes that year but ran out of time so we ordered these awful gold lamé boy shorts and crop tops off a danceteam and majorette website…a website meant for high school girls. When we tried them on…well, let's just say the snugness of the shorts inspired the group’s name.

We made huge fluffy yarn tassels for our marching boots, put on some cheap tiaras, and carried batons, which only a few of us knew how to twirl. I had the most dance experience (and I was drum major of my high school marching band way back when so I also had experience with the whistle) so I choreographed two routines for us. We recruited some friends to put together a drum line, and they followed us all night around the Marigny and the French Quarter. There were 8 of us that night. After a few hours of marching and drinking, our Camel Toe cheer was born and our group name solidified, "Hey! Ho! We got Camel Toe!” It was a crazy night. We had hundreds of folks following us up and down Frenchmen and Decatur.

Months later, Casey (our head boss lady) got a call from Muses asking how much we would charge to perform in Muses, and her response was, “Uh,sure, uh, can I get your number and call you back?” We were ecstatic.

What are your colors?

Our colors are hot pink, black and silver, although the original gold lamé was a bigger hit apparently. Our first year marching in Muses was 2004, and we wore jumpsuits in our new colors. Later, on Mardi Gras day, a group of transvestites came up to us during Saint Anne and said, “Girls, you made a big mistake with these costumes. The gold lamé was SO much better. And what were you THINKING choosing black as an accent color for a night parade?” Those bitches totally shamed us, and they were so right. So the next year, we upped the pink and got rid of the a lot of the black.

What have your themes been and what is it this year?

2010 – Urban Carnival (inspired by Ebony Bones, Lady Gaga, and a general carnivalesque aesthetic)

2009 – Camel Toe Cabaret (Bob Fosse)

2008 – Dream Toes (Dreamgirls, Motown)

2007 – Bollywood

2006 – Retro Swim (the year after Katrina – we did an out of water synchronized swim routine in hot pink Esther Williams swimsuits and flowery swim caps)

2005 – 1940s Gangster/Bonnie and Clyde

2004 – Debut year in Muses – no real theme exce

Who all is a CTLS and what are the membership requirements?

Our ages range from women in their mid-twenties to late thirties. Most of us are around 35 or 36. Occupations represented by our members are: professor, burlesque dancer, community activist, jewelry designer, hairdresser, grad student, doctor, lawyer, teacher, interior designer, aerialist, horticulturist, bartender, actor, and arts educator. A lot of us are also moms.

We live in Midcity, Broadmoor, the Bywater, St. Roch, the Marigny, the Riverbend, the 12^th Ward, the 7^th Ward, the Irish Channel, the LGD, Lakeview, and Central City.

As far as how someone can become a Toe, because we are grassroots in our approach to creating our performances (meaning that we encourage input and creativity from ALL members), we aren’t a very big group (compared to other marching groups in the city). We also look for women who are committed to the carnivalesque, to creativity, and to a certain lifestyle that prioritizes social action through performance. So our new members have integrated themselves into the group organically – mostly through friends – and not through a formal audition process or anything. We fear that if the group gets too big, it will change this dynamic. In the future, though, we would definitely like to add new members and, at that point, it will be about a person’s willingness to give her all in a performance and throughout the months of preparations. Also, we’ve had women interested in membership, and when they realize that they’d have to be at rehearsal EVERY Sunday, volunteering on one of the committees, attending sewing circles, etc., they kinda renege on their interest. It’s a lot of work.

We have five boss ladies that represent the different committees that make up our organization: choreography/dance, costumes, fundraising/PR, accounting, and general organization, and this group meets at the end of summer to start planning. Then we have a general meeting in October at Ernie K. Does’ Mother in Law Lounge to vote on a new costume and theme every year. The dance committee then choreographs two new routines for the theme and in the appropriate dance style, and we organize a workshop in that style to start to get the girls into character and moving in the right way. The costume committee organizes sewing and crafting circles to make the costumes.

In what situations did you march/dance/make appearances then and do now?

Our main event is Muses so we start preparing for that usually at the end of August. We don’t do any other performances (except for our fundraiser) during Carnival Season. Outside of that, we’ve performed for the New Orleans Bingo Show, Liquidrone, DJ Soul Sister, the Dirty Coast Fashion Show, Voodoo Fest, the New Orleans Ballet Association Ball, and the Muses fundraiser.

It appears that you have a separate, smaller group of gals who dance for events. Is this the case?

Of our 40 members who parade in Muses, we have about 15-20 who have some past performance experience. So we have a group of rotating dancers that do stage numbers outside the parade. This is also an outlet for the choreographies I have constantly running through my head. They’re a little more intricate than the parade routines, and they’re meant for the stage (as opposed to the street). Two years ago, we did a skanky goth cheerleading routine to the song “Pussy” by Miami rapper Jackie-O and made huge signs that spelled PUSSY. Last year, we performed a militant Bollywood routine to MIA’s “Boyz”. It was 1/3 Bollywood, 1/3 Public enemy, and 1/3 Afro Cuban fierceness. I know that sounds crazy. I can’t explain how I combine all these aesthetics. They just blend together in my head

This year, we have a marvelously stupid funny routine planned, but you’ll have to go to the fundraiser to see it. I’ll just say this. We think that Marie Antoinette was kinda ghetto fabulous, and if she were alive today, she might wear grills and gold chains.

What is your fundraiser like?

We used to have our fundraiser at Ernie K. Doe’s Mother-in-Law Lounge, but we outgrew it. So for the past three years, we’ve had it at One Eyed Jack’s. Every year, the proceeds are used to pay for our brass band in Muses, and the rest goes to Roots of Music.

We have a variety of acts, but we begin the night with a performance from the Roots of Music Marching Crusaders. They’re middle school aged, but they’re playing at a high school level. Derrick Tabb is doing amazing work. We were all standing in awe, some of us in tears, last year when they performed. Then we rotate acts like Fleur de Tease Burlesque (Trixie Minx, the creative director, is also a Camel Toe), an aerialist group, and a brass band and/or another type of band (this year it’s the Happy Talk Band). We also invite other groups to make an appearance. For three years, it’s been Miss Antoinette and the Baby Dolls, but since she passed away, there’ll be a memorial for her with an appearance from the Dolls.

There’s also a live auction. We have a member of CTLS whose father was an auctioneer, and she’s pretty skilled at it. Other items are raffled through pre-sold raffle tickets. There’s usually an MC. Last year it was Chris Lane, and this year it’ll be Ronnie Numbers from the Bingo Show. And then the main event is the Camel Toe stage performance.

I just joined The Pussyfooters last year and was told that there is a dance off between the CTLS and The Pussyfooters- I was scared to death at the prospect of performing in such a thing, but it never happened last year. What's up with that?

This only happened once, and I don't know the truth about where it got started. On my end, I got a call from Casey, our boss lady, saying that one of her yoga students, who is a Pussyfooter, said that they were going to challenge us to a dance-off on the neutral ground before the parade. Some girls loved the idea and started talking smack. I almost had an asthma attack. So last year, I called Amber Rosean (a Pussyfoter), and this is how the conversation went down:

Me – Hi, Amber. My name is Cynthia. I’m the choreographer of the Camel Toes. I went to the Blush Ball last week and harassed one of your dancers into give me your number.

Amber – Uh, ok.

Me – So are we doing the dance-off again this year? It’s perfectly fine with me if we don’t.

Amber – Honestly, some girls thought it was not a good idea, and we’re thinking of not doing it.

Me – How did that thing start anyway?

Amber – No idea.

And that was that. Larisa (last year's Pussyfooter dance leader) and I agreed later to call it a “dance party” and try again, and I kinda think it’s good to get our nerves out before the parade for a “safe” group. So in that sense, I wouldn’t mind doing it again. But, in the end, both groups were way too drunk to pull it together before the parade in 2009 so I think both Larisa and I conveniently forgot about it. It was hilariously funny the year we did it, though, because the drunk ass Bearded Oysters were egging both groups on. I remember after the Pussyfooters danced, and our brass band was preparing to play, the Oysters were screaming, “Are you gonna take that SHIT, Camel Toes?!” From a performative standpoint, the whole thing was like a drunken messy Big Easy version of us playing out our childhood West Side Story fantasies. Come to think of it, I might lobby to bring the “dance party” back.

Cynthia has Something to Say About Miss Antoinette

Our Camel Toe queen in 2009 and 2010 was Antoinette K Doe. She died days after parading in Muses (on Mardi Gras day) and was buried in the ball gown she wore the night of Muses. Before she dies, I had been talking to her about organizing a female marching group party. Just for fun or as a fundraiser for a chosen organization. She wanted to have it at K Doe’s, but I told her we’d need a space for hundreds. She wanted to bring together the Baby Dolls with all the new groups. I know we’re all busy, but I can’t NOT make Antoinette’s vision come to fruition. When carnival season’s over, I want to pow wow with the Pussyfooters, the Sisters of Salome, Fleur de Tease, and the Bearded Oysters.

Other Camel Toe Chants

My shorts are high and my lips are long, listen while I sing my Camel Toe Song.

Ca-mel Toe...Cam..Camel...Toe...

I got a lip to the left and a lip to the right, my Camel Toe is super tight!

*Raffle Packages this year (can be pre-bought at the door)

WE ARE FAMILY PACKAGE – 12 week session of swim lessons from Love Swimming, Kona Mountain Coffee gift basket, pet boarding and bath at Zeus' Place, gift certificate to Louisiana Pizza Kitchen, and passes for the Audubon Zoo.

LADIES WHO LUNCH PACKAGE -- gift certificate for Café Amelie, gift card from the House of Lounge, Alexa Pulitzer stationary, Rocket Science Beauty Bar gift basket, Ladie Bird hat from Jamie Gandy of Fifi Mahoney's, and a spa treatment from Lux

SPA-LICIOUS! -- 1 hour Jin Shn Jyutsu session with Adele Leas, consultation with nutritionist Danielle Paciera, an orchid from Harold's, yoga classes at Wild Lotus, gift certificate to Satsuma's Cafe, and spa treatment from Spa Isbell.

SPORTS FANATIC -- Gift certificate from Cochon Restaurant, 2 club seats to a Hornets game, a Hornets jersey, gift certificate from the Bridge Lounge, and a Dirty Coast Saints fanatic calendar

Raffle tickets are $5 for one or $20 for 5. The auction packages are even more amazing!! There’s an Art Lovers package and a “Be a Tourist in Your Own Town” Package (with a two-night stay in the Roosevelt Hotel, dinner at Mila, and ballet tickets).

REMEMBER:

Sixth Annual Camel Toe Lady Steppers Toe-Down Fundraiser
$12 advance tickets, $15 at the door

Where:
One Eyed Jacks
615 Toulouse

When:
Friday, January 22 at 9pm

Ways to Give this Season and Have a Blast While Doing It! Part One: The Pussyfooters Blush Ball

2009-12-17T14:46:00.013-06:00

This is the first in a series of posts about women's groups that march during Mardi Gras season. Many groups that march during Mardi Gras raise money during special events to help different organizations in the city of New Orleans and these events take place between now and Mardi Gras, hence the timing of the series. This first segment will be about The Pussyfooters -the history of the group and more importantly their annual fundraiser, The Blush Ball, which takes place in order to raise money to benefit The Metropolitan Center for Women and Children while throwing one hell of a party to do so!

Last year, I was invited to join a group of women who call themselves The Pussyfooters. I knew them as a fantastic group of confident dancing gals who marched in Muses but quickly learned that they are much more. The ladies (all of whom are above the age of thirty, a prerequisite for joining) dress in pink, sherbet orange and white and take to the streets to march or dance freestyle during a number of events throughout the year. There are close to eighty women in the group now, though you will see the greatest number of members march during Muses as some live in other places now or split time between different cities.

In front of the judges' booth, Muses 2009

Small groups of ladies pop up at events all over the city from August until Muses. Last year the Pussyfooters made appearances at the Midsummer Mardi Gras, The Halloween Parade, The Lazarus Halloween Ball, Prospect Everyone, The Blush Ball, and The Lyons Club just to name a few events! We do not always wear the official costume of the year, but often dress "free style" where the only dress requirement is to wear Pussyfooter colors. It is during these events where you will see individual characters shine through.

At Prospect Everyone, 2008, above and
dancing in "loose formation" at The Lyons Club March, below

THE BLUSH BALL

This year's Blush Ball will feature entertainment by DJ Soul Sister and Big Sam's Funky Nation for dancing, Pussyfooter's performing and debuting this year's official costume, Mardi Gras Indians, the 610 Stompers, raffles, edibles and a cash bar!

When:
Friday, January 15, 2010
8pm til Midnight

Where:
The Old Mardi Gras World
233 Newton Street, Algiers Point

$20.00 tickets purchased ahead, $25.00 at the door

email Nikki Page @ almanzo@gmail.com to purchase ahead

THE HISTORY & PURPOSE OF THE PUSSYFOOTERS

I interviewed one of the founding members of the group, Camille Baldassar to get some answers about how the group started and what we stand for. First and foremost, it is said that

PUSSYFOOTERS ARE ON THIS EARTH TO RAISE THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF ALL WOMEN EVERYWHERE. SISTERS FROM THE MOTHERSHIP WORK TO SUPPORT AND EMPOWER WOMEN GLOBALLY AND LOCALLY. WE HONOR OUR IMPERFECTIONS AND DANCE OUT OF LOVE AND NON-JUDGEMENT. WE ARE- EACH AND EVERYONE OF US-SHINY DIAMONDS.

Who are The Pussyfooters?

Majorettes from the Mothership sent here to help the party people get their groove on.

Can you talk about your inspiration for founding the Pussyfooters?
I was watching one of my first Mardi Gras parades and fell in love with the gals who dance in the high school troupes. I was about 37 years old and thought, "I want to do that!" I began asking around, and with the help of a few core women we called a meeting, held practices, contacted Muses, made costumes and the Pussyfooters were born.

Why the name Pussyfooters?

Someone just thought it up in the early stages of brainstorming, and as soon as we heard it we knew it was the right one. We love the double entendre twist. One of the definitions of Pussyfoot means to sneak behind the scenes-do things your own way. There's a little subversive nature to who we are as well.

How did the grow to be so large? There are close to eighty members now!

People love what we do as much as we do. We are proud to be one of the, now, many women's parade groups that fit naturally into the NOLA groove.

Note: Each woman is invited to join and is sponsored by another established Pussyfooter. Only one woman may be sponsored by a member, and membership does not expand every year.

How did the handlers come about?

The first year we knew enough to invite our male friends to march with us and help out. The first parade they just jumped in and helped with crowd control, the music system, and kept us hydrated. We couldn't do this without them.

What does the group do to help empower women?

What we see is that Pussyfooting (organizing together, costuming, and performance) creates individual and group growth, self-confidence, and self respect via performance. We are all amateur dancers, yet still get out there and strut our joy for everyone.

Since our first year we have done fundraising for Women for Women International. Additionally we have supported: Lindy's Place, The Holy Cross Neighborhood Organization and Metro Women's center.

What is the vision for the future of the group?

We hope to expand our service mission, and are in the process of applying for Non-profit status. We are working to nurture more depth in our values of Love, non-judgement, respect, and service within our own organizational culture.

The Logo

Newborn Induced Hiatus

2009-10-13T11:36:00.002-05:00

Taking a break from the blog as I adjust to the introduction of a newborn variable to my lifestyle.

I think I will be back as soon as I get five straight hours of sleep at night...

Banned Books Week 2009

2009-09-26T10:48:00.002-05:00

The ACLU/ American Civil Liberties Union has organized an event to kick off Banned Books Week 2009 to be held at The Bridge Lounge this Sunday afternoon. Stop by to see a panel of local writers read from works that have been banned.

My husband, Billy Sothern, is scheduled to read at 1:40 pm from Charles Baudelaire's previously banned works. Other writers scheduled to read include Lolis Eric Elie, Thomas Beller, Patty Friedmann, Gerod Stevens, Roberts Batson, Fred Kasten (WWNO announcer), James Gill, Louis Maistros, Tom Piazza, Poppy Z. Brite, Paula Morris, Ken Foster and Anne Gisleson

From the ACLU Louisiana website:

2009 Banned Books Week Kick-Off Event

Sunday, September 27th, 2009 from 1 PM to 4 PM

Bridge Lounge
1201 Magazine Street
New Orleans, LA

FREE and OPEN to the public :: Menu and Cash Bar will be available

What I've Been Doing These Last Ten Months

2009-09-15T11:47:00.003-05:00

I have been growing this baby!

Her name is Rose "Rosie" Mae Sothern and she smells good.

I am REALLY tired, so I will be posting Billy's blog post about her arrival. It's funny though, because though he beat me to it, I was going to write something around the very same Chuck Perkins piece...guess that's why we are married...

From Imperfectly Vertical, Billy Sothern

Family: Rose Mae Sothern

Last week, Nikki and I drove around New Orleans listening to Glen David Andrews' new album, Walking Through Heaven's Gate, trying to get Nikki some distraction from the discomfort of the ninth month of her pregnancy. The last track on the album, Family, struck both of us and gave us some sense of what was approaching for us. It's a spoken word piece with New Orleans poet, Chuck Perkins.

Perkins describes the birth of his child:

It was watching my wife
After eleven hours of labor,
Whose eyes and face
No longer possessed the words
To describe her pain,
So she pushed.
It was twenty years of anticipating
What my child would be
And who she would be
And when I saw the tip of her head,
Before the slap,
Before the cry,
Before I saw her eyes even,
It was like I was about to meet a long lost friend
Whom I had never met.

Early this morning, after an epic, unmedicated labor, Nikki gave birth to Rose Mae Sothern here in New Orleans. I am in awe of Nikki and the little baby girl that came into the world this morning. New Orleans artists have a gift for describing the indescribable, but as much as I like Perkins' description of child birth, he doesn't fully capture the feeling of seeing your wife give birth to your child. I am not sure anyone could.

Katrina Memory

2009-08-29T11:29:00.002-05:00

One Book One New Orleans Big Event!

2009-08-25T16:48:00.003-05:00

Yet another event supporting a local author:

Sara Roahen's latest book, Gumbo Tales is this years One Book One New Orleans selection and she will be at the Milton H. Latter Library signing books tomorrow, August 26. In honor of the theme of the book, there will be GUMBO TASTINGS!

From the One Book One New Orleans website:

The event will feature a free gumbo tasting tour of these fabulous New Orleans restaurants: Dooky Chase, Mr. B’s, Redfish Grill, Bourbon House, Acme Oyster House , and Felix’s, with bread from Leidenheimer, wine from [yellowtail], beer from NOLA Brewery, and a one-of-a-kind cake from Sucre!

Octavia Books will be donating restaurant and chef cookbooks to be raffled off to attendees and will have our 2009 reading selection for sale, Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table by Sara Roahen.

Sara Roahen will be there to sign Gumbo Tales, and Octavia Books will donate 20% of all sales at the event to One Book One New Orleans, so pick up your signed copy at the event!

Event: Chapter 1: Gumbo Tasting Kickoff!
Date: Wednesday, August 26th
Time: 5:30 pm to 7:30 pm
Place: Milton H. Latter Memorial Library,
5120 St. Charles Ave., New Orleans 70115

Reviews for Gumbo Tales

Ethan Brown's "Shake the Devil Off" to be released Sept 1, 2009; Author to be on Political Panel at Rising Tide Conference

2009-08-19T14:58:00.000-05:00

In his latest work, Shake the Devil Off, local author Ethan Brown investigates the circumstances behind the post-Katrina murder that shocked New Orleans.

Ethan explains his book as follows:

Shake the Devil Off chronicles the life of Zackery Bowen, an Iraq war veteran who murdered his girlfriend and then killed himself in New Orleans in 2006. (The project is) an exploration into what led a soldier to commit a horrific crime. There's an epidemic of suicides--and even homicides--in the Army now and my book is an effort to try and figure out what's driving this mental health crisis, the worst in the Army's history.

Praise:

"Heartbreaking."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Drawing the parallel between Katrina's aftermath and Bowen's unraveling psyche, Brown creates a riveting portrait of a gruesome crime while detailing the heart of a city in distress. A grim murder-suicide story delivered with skill and verve."—Kirkus

"Ethan Brown examines a notorious murder case, rescues it from the talons of tabloid journalists, and comes up with something much more than a true crime book. Shake the Devil Off is a gripping suspense story, an indictment of the military’s treatment of our soldiers in and out of war, and a celebration of the resilience and worth of a great American city."—George Pelecanos, New York Times bestselling author of The Turnaround and Hell to Pay

"Ethan Brown establishes himself as a prodigious reporter and masterful storyteller in Shake the Devil Off, a chilling portrait of a broken hero failed by the system."—Evan Wright, author of the New York Times bestseller Generation Kill

"A ‘coming home’ story that rivals any written about veterans of the war in Iraq, and a true crime account that raises the bar for the genre. Measured, thoroughly reported, and written with true empathy."—Nate Blakeslee, author of Tulia

"Looking more deeply at that from which the rest of us turned in horror, Ethan Brown has transformed an ugly and disturbing shard of the post-Katrina anguish. In this book, that which was lurid and sensational becomes, chapter by chapter, something genuinely sad and reflective, something that now has true meaning for New Orleans and for all of us."—David Simon, author of Homicide and The Corner

Author Appearances and Book Signing Events

8/22/09
Ethan Brown to participate in Political Panel at Rising Tide Conference
1-1:50 pm
Zeitgeist Mutli-Disciplinary Arts Center
1724 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd
New Orleans, LA 70113
(504) 525-2767
Author will sign a limited number of early release books available at The Octavia Books table after the panel.

9/2/09, 6pm
Octavia Books
513 Octavia St
New Orleans, LA 70115-2055
(504) 899-7323

9/12/09, 3:30pm
Maple Street Bookshop
7523 Maple St
New Orleans, LA 70118-5098
(504) 866-4916

10/17/09, 10 am
Louisiana Book Festival
Barnes & Noble Book Selling and Signing Tent
at Spanish Town Road and North 4th Street
Baton Rouge, LA

Louisiana Artist Loren Schwerd Shows at AMMO

2009-08-13T21:17:00.002-05:00

1317 Charbonnet St.
Human hair, mixed media
19" x 23" x 3.5"
2007

Loren Schwerd weaves mourning portraits out of hair. Her interpretation of the traditional craft serves well to illustrate the sense of loss left in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. A fitting tribute for the upcoming anniversary of the disaster, her work will be shown at AMMO beginning Saturday, August 15 and ending September 16.

"Mourning Portrait, is a series of memorials to the communities of New Orleans that were devastated by the flooding which followed Hurricane Katrina. These commemorative objects are made from human hair extensions of the type commonly used by African-American women that I found outside the St. Claude Beauty Supply. The portraits draw on the eighteenth and nineteenth-century tradition of hairwork, in which family members or artisans would fashion the hair of the deceased into intricate jewelry and other objects as symbols of death and rebirth. Working from my own photographs I weave the hair into portraits of the vacant houses of the Ninth Ward neighborhood. By documenting private homes, I venerate the city's losses, both individual and collective."

-Loren Schwerd

See more work from her Mourning Portrait series here.

Opening is from 6-9 pm, Saturday August 15, 2009
AMMO
938 Royal Street
New Orleans, LA 70116
(504) 301-2584

Ms. Schwerd was featured on the cover of the Nov/Dec 2008 issue of FiberARTS magazine

Just When You Think It's Just You, the Husband and The Hot Dog

2009-08-12T16:14:00.003-05:00

I was staring out of my husband's office window into our yard today and this little duo saunters across my yard from under our house...I was very surprised.

These pictures remind me that I really need to wash my windows (through one of which I took these photos), though the haze is kind of romantic.

Miranda Lake: Reclamation: 360˚

2009-07-31T10:58:00.002-05:00

New Orleans artist Miranda Lake's latest work can be viewed at the Jonathan Ferrara gallery beginning on White Linen Night, August 1, 2009.

Preview of her work for the show

Billy Sothern Has a Blog

2009-07-26T12:19:00.001-05:00

My husband, a writer and lawyer, has taken the plunge into the blogoworld. His is called Imperfectly Verticle and you should give it a gander.

Update: Dave Eggers Comes to Town

2009-07-15T10:24:00.003-05:00

I previously posted that Dave Eggers will be at The Garden District Bookshop Thursday at 6p to talk about his new book, Zeitoun. Turns out he will also be at Octavia Books that day at 2pm.

Dave will also be at Octavia Books at 2pm Thursday to talk about his book, Zeitoun.

Octavia Books
513 Octavia St
New Orleans, LA 70115-2055
(504) 899-7323

For more info about the book and author, read on.

Dave Eggers Comes to Nola to Talk About His Latest Book, Zeitoun

2009-07-13T13:44:00.008-05:00

Dave Eggers is in town and he is speaking about his new book, Zeitoun, on Thursday. You should go.

The Book.

When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the days after, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. But, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared. Dave Eggers's riveting nonfiction book, three years in the making, explores Zeitoun's roots in Syria, his marriage to Kathy − an American who converted to Islam − and their children, and the surreal atmosphere (in New Orleans and the United States generally) in which what happened to Abdulrahman Zeitoun became possible. Like What Is the What, Zeitoun was written in close collaboration with its subjects and involved vast research − in this case, in the U.S., Spain, and Syria.

- Description taken from McSweeney's

Where:
Garden District Bookshop
2727 Prytania St
New Orleans, LA 70130-5968
(504) 895-2266

When:
Thursday, July 16, 2009 6:00 PM

Check out the following description of, praise for and excerpt from the book below, taken from McSweeney's. Then check out this interview on The Rumpus.

The Author.

- - - -

Dave Eggers grew up near Chicago, attended the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, and is the author of five books. His first, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, a memoir, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It was followed by You Shall Know Our Velocity!, a novel, and by How We Are Hungry, a collection of short stories. His latest book, What Is the What, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1998, Eggers founded McSweeney's, an independent publishing house now located in San Francisco. It publishes books, a quarterly literary journal, The Believer (a monthly magazine of essays and interviews), Wholphin (a short-film DVD quarterly), and a daily humor website. In 2002, Eggers opened 826 Valencia, a writing and tutoring lab for young people in San Francisco's Mission District. There, he continues to teach writing to high-school students, and runs a summer publishing camp. 826 Valencia now has satellite chapters in Brooklyn, Ann Arbor, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, and Chicago. A staunch advocate of teachers, Eggers instituted a monthly grant for exceptional Bay Area teachers, and in 2005 he co-wrote Teachers Have It Easy: The Big Sacrifices and Small Salaries of America's Teachers. His interest in oral history led to his 2004 co-founding of Voice of Witness, a nonprofit series of books that use oral history to illuminate human-rights crises around the world. He recently co-wrote, with Spike Jonze, the film adaptation of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, and with his wife, the novelist Vendela Vida, the screenplay for the film Away We Go, which was directed by Sam Mendes. With Valentino Deng, Eggers is the co-founder of the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, which is improving educational opportunities for Sudanese children in Sudan and the United States.

- - - -

Praise.

- - - -

"This is a beautiful book. Zeitoun is a poignant, haunting, ethereal story about New Orleans in peril. Eggers has bottled up the feeling of post-Katrina despair better than anyone else. This is a simple story with a lingering radiance."
− Douglas Brinkley, author of The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast

"Zeitoun is an American epic. The post-Katrina trials of Abdulrahman Zeitoun would have baffled even Kafka's Joseph K. Though Zeitoun's story could have been a source of cynicism or despair, Dave Eggers's clear and elegant prose manages to deftly capture many of the signature shortcomings of American life while holding onto the innate optimism and endless drive to more closely match our ideals that Zeitoun and his adopted land share. Juggling these contradictions, Eggers captures the puzzle of America."
− Billy Sothern, author of Down in New Orleans

"Zeitoun is a gripping and amazing story that highlights so much about the tragedy of Katrina, post-9/11 life for Arabs and Muslims, and the beautiful nature of American multi-cultural society."
− Yousef Munayyer, policy analyst, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee

"Zeitoun is an instant American classic carved from fierce eloquence and a haunting moral sensibility. By wrestling with the demons of xenophobia and racial profiling that converged in the swirling vortex of Hurricane Katrina and post-9/11 America, Eggers lets loose the angels of wisdom and courage that hover over the lives of the beleaguered, but miraculously unbroken, Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun. This is a major work full of fire and wit by one of our most important writers."
− Michael Eric Dyson, author of Come Hell or High Water

AN EXCERPT
FROM ZEITOUN.

Zeitoun woke with the sun and crawled out of his tent. The day was bright, and as far as he could see in any direction the city was underwater. Though every resident of New Orleans imagines great floods, knows that such a thing is possible in a city surrounded by water and ill-conceived levees, the sight, in the light of day, was beyond anything he had imagined. He could only think of Judgment Day, of Noah and forty days of rain. And yet it was so quiet, so still. Nothing moved. He sat on the roof and scanned the horizon, looking for any person, any animal or machine moving. Nothing.

As he did his morning prayers, a helicopter broke the silence, shooting across the treetops and heading downtown.

Zeitoun looked down from the roof to find the water at the same level as the night before. He felt some relief in knowing that it would likely remain there, or even drop a foot once it reached an equilibrium with Lake Pontchartrain.

Zeitoun sat beside his tent, eating cereal he had salvaged from the kitchen. Even with the water no longer rising, he knew he could do nothing at home. He had saved what he could save, and there was nothing else to do here until the water receded.

When he had eaten, he felt restless, trapped. The water was too deep to wade into, its contents too suspect to swim through. But there was the canoe. He saw it, floating above the yard, tethered to the house. Amid the devastation of the city, standing on the roof of his drowned home, Zeitoun felt something like inspiration. He imagined floating, alone, through the streets of his city. In a way, this was a new world, uncharted. He could be an explorer. He could see things first.

He climbed down the side of the house and lowered himself into the canoe. He untied the rope and set out.

He paddled down Dart Street, the water flat and clear. And strangely, almost immediately, Zeitoun felt at peace. The damage to the neighborhood was extraordinary, but there was an odd calm in his heart. So much had been lost, but there was a stillness to the city that was almost hypnotic.

He coasted away from his home, passing over bicycles and cars, their antennae scraping the bottom of his canoe. Every vehicle, old and new, was gone, unsalvageable. The numbers filled his head: there were a hundred thousand cars lost in the flood. Maybe more. What would happen to them? Who would take them once the waters receded? In what hole could they all be buried?

Almost everyone he knew had left for a day or two, expecting little damage. He passed by their homes, so many of which he'd painted and even helped build, calculating how much was lost inside. It made him sick, the anguish this would cause. No one, he knew, had prepared for this, adequately or at all.

He thought of the animals. The squirrels, the mice, rats, frogs, possums, lizards. All gone. Millions of animals drowned. Only birds would survive this sort of apocalypse. Birds, some snakes, any beast that could find higher ground ahead of the rising tide. He looked for fish. If he was floating atop water shared with the lake, surely fish had been swept into the city. And, on cue, he saw a murky form darting between submerged tree branches.

He was conflicted about what he was seeing, a refracted version of his city, one where homes and trees were bisected and mirrored in this oddly calm body of water. The novelty of the new world brought forth the adventurer in him − he wanted to see it all, the whole city, what had become of it. But the builder in him thought of the damage, how long it would take to rebuild. Years, maybe a decade. He wondered if the world at large could already see what he was seeing, a disaster mythical in scale and severity.

In his neighborhood, miles from the closest levee, the water had risen slowly enough that he knew it was unlikely that anyone had died in the flood. But with a shudder he thought of those closer to the breaches. He didn't know where the levees had failed, but he knew anyone living nearby would have been quickly overwhelmed.

He turned on Vincennes Place and headed south. Someone called his name. He looked up to see a client of his, Frank Noland, a fit and robust man of about sixty, leaning out from a second-story window. Zeitoun had done work on his house a few years ago. The Zeitouns would see Frank and his wife occasionally in the neighborhood, and they always exchanged warm greetings.

Zeitoun waved and paddled over.

"You got a cigarette?" Frank asked, looking down.

Zeitoun shook his head no, and coasted closer to the window where Frank had appeared. It was a strange sensation, paddling over the man's yard; the usual barrier that would prevent one from guiding a vehicle up to the house was gone. He could glide directly from the street, diagonally across the lawn, and appear just a few feet below a second-story window. Zeitoun was just getting accustomed to the new physics of this world.

Frank was shirtless, wearing only a pair of tennis shorts. His wife was behind him, and they had a guest in the house, another woman of similar age. Both women were dressed in T-shirts and shorts, suffering in the heat. It was early in the day, but the humidity was already oppressive.

"You think you could take me to where I can buy some smokes?" Frank asked. Zeitoun told him that he didn't think any store would be open and selling cigarettes this day.

Frank sighed. "See what happened to my
motorcycle?" He pointed to the porch next door.

Zeitoun remembered Frank talking about this motorcycle − an antique bike that he had bought, restored, and lavished attention on. Now it was under six feet of water. As the water had risen the day before, Frank had moved it from the driveway up to the porch and then to his next-door neighbor's porch, which was higher. But now it was gone. They could still see the faint, blurred likeness of the machine, like a relic from a previous civilization.

He and Frank talked for a few minutes about the storm, the flood, how Frank had expected it but then hadn't expected it at all.

"Any chance you can take me to check on my truck?" Frank asked. Zeitoun agreed, but told Frank that he'd have to continue on a while longer. Zeitoun was planning to check on one of his rental properties, about two miles away.

Frank agreed to come along for the ride, and climbed down from the window and into the canoe. Zeitoun gave him the extra paddle and they were off.

"Brand new truck," Frank said. He had parked it on Fontainebleau, thinking that because the road was a foot or so higher than Vincennes, the truck would be spared. They made their way up six blocks to where Frank had parked the truck, and then Zeitoun heard Frank's quick intake of breath. The truck was under five feet of water and had migrated half a block. Like his motorcycle, it was gone, a thing of the past.

"You want to get anything out of it?" Zeitoun asked.

Frank shook his head. "I don't want to look at it. Let's go."

A few doors down, Zeitoun and Frank came upon a house with a large white cloth billowing from the second-floor window.

When they got closer, they saw a couple, a husband and wife in their seventies, leaning out of the window.

"You surrender?" Frank asked.

The man smiled.

"You want to get out?" Zeitoun asked.

"Yes, we do," the man said. They couldn't safely fit anyone else in the canoe, so Zeitoun and Frank promised to send someone back to the house as soon as they got to Claiborne. They assumed there would be activity there, that if anywhere would have a police or military presence, it would be Claiborne, the main thoroughfare nearby.

"We'll be right back," Zeitoun said.

As they were paddling away from the couple's house, they heard a faint female voice. It was a kind of moan, weak and tremulous.

"You hear that?" Zeitoun asked.

Frank nodded. "It's coming from that direction."

They paddled toward the sound and heard the voice again.

"Help."

It was coming from a one-story house on Nashville. They coasted toward the front door and heard the voice again: "Help me."

Zeitoun dropped his paddle and jumped into the water. He held his breath and swam to the porch. The steps came quicker than he thought. He jammed his knee against the masonry and let out a gasp. When he stood, the water was up to his neck.

"You okay?" Frank asked. Zeitoun nodded and made his way up the steps.

"Hello?" the voice said, now hopeful.

He tried the front door. It was stuck. Zeitoun kicked the door. It wouldn't move. He kicked again. No movement. With the water now to his chest, he ran his body against the door. He did it again. And again. Finally it gave.

Inside he found a woman hovering above him. She was in her seventies, a large woman, over two hundred pounds. Her patterned dress was spread out on the surface of the water like a great floating flower. Her legs dangled below. She was holding on to a bookshelf.

"Help me," she said.

Examples from the show

2009-06-20T21:21:00.005-05:00

A few self portraits by my students.

one of the walls of work

3rd Grade

8th Grade

3rd grade

1rst grade

2nd grade

1rst grade

kindergarten

8th grade

5th grade

4th grade

You're Invited

2009-06-18T06:55:00.004-05:00

This is what I have been up to these last few months while teaching art at Esperanza:

Bye, Mabel

2009-04-25T11:07:00.001-05:00

From Billy:

Our sweet golden dog Mabel has passed on.

From the streets of the Irish Channel, she had a wild love of people, her old boyfriend Max, her sidekick Ruth-Anne, and, most of all, her savior Nikki who cajoled me into keeping her upon returning home with a tiny puppy following a argument in which I had been in the wrong. I didn’t put up much resistance.

The night Nikki found her, she had been walking the streets with a pack of feral dogs that roamed the Irish Channel terrorizing cats and children. Nikki thought she was a Chihuahua but she was just a baby street dog. We never could sort out her breed but her odd yodels suggested some sort of African bushdog and her staggering speed, a whippet.

Anyone who has ever come to our house has been jumped on and kissed by Mabel in her effort to show a little love, and get a little back in return.

Her health failed very suddenly and out of the blue last evening when she was walking with Nikki and Ruthie through the tony, live oak and mansion lined streets of the Garden District, a handful of blocks from where Nikki had found her.

A good run for a scrappy Irish Channel kid.

We were lucky to have found her. And vice versa.

Good girl, Mabel.

Where I Have Been

2009-04-21T16:27:00.003-05:00

...Teaching at Esperanza Charter School, full time. I will be there until the end of June teaching K-8 as much art as possible until I leave. The picture above is one leftover from when the building housed Crossman Elementary, from the old Crossman website.

I eat, sleep, teach, eat, sleep, teach.

I'll be posting more regularly again when summer comes along....

Random Parade on Jackson Avenue

2009-03-08T12:51:00.005-05:00

Yay! Random Parade! We were replacing a window pane knocked out by Gustav (a little late in the game, I know) and look what passed on by! I guess it was a parade sponsored by a church down the way and was called a "March for Christ". Most of these were taken from the balcony so please excuse the wires.

And HELLO! The McDonough 35 Marching Band comes along! Note the wee child:

A wee marching child

Pussyfooting in Muses 2009

2009-03-07T20:46:00.007-06:00

The Pussyfooters march in the most popular parade every Mardi Gras, the Muses Parade. It is a krewe of women and is my personal favorite. Billy was my "Pussy Handler", making sure that the crowds were back from the route so we could dance on by, and keeping people from touching us. He also watered us as as we made our way along the very long route.

Riding my bike to the beginning of the route at Jefferson and Magazine

Nikki the Pussyfooter and Liz the Camel Toe Lady Stepper,
ignoring the super cold (so, so, cold when you are just in a corset)
night and filling the time during the very long delay of the start of
Muses due to a Chaos parade float losing an axle on the route ahead.

We had to stop at Gallier Hall in order to perform an in-
place hip-hop dance for the judges. I think they liked us....

Finally finished, at the end of the route in the warehouse district.

Some of the near 80 Pussyfooters flock for a photo

Mardi Gras 2009

2009-03-07T20:07:00.011-06:00

I finally have gotten around to posting my Mardi Gras pictures! I am pretty freaked out by clowns, so I faced the fear and made clown costumes for Billy and me. The first set of pictures are of friends, the following set is of some of my favorite St. Anne parade costumers.

A French bulldog accessory.

Luke Allen

Abram Himmelstein and his money bone suit

Kristen and Lady Fox-Head

Dave Cash and Kittee Berns in their caterpillar-
themed (with a few horses thrown in) costume

More great costumes:

My favorite: BUNNY HEAD!

Upon close inspection, it became clear that this costume was made
of her rejection letters from literary magazines and other publishers.

A LAdy and Her Chicken Man

Chicken Fight!

Mardi Gras 2009

2009-03-02T15:39:00.002-06:00

Creepy me and Kittee on Mardi Gras Day!

photo by Dave Cash

We Second Lined for Ms. Antoinette Today

2009-02-28T20:18:00.002-06:00

She was a generous and light-filled soul. She once told me when I was dressed up like a frilly cupcake that I'd make a good Baby Doll and I was deeply honored. I imagine she and Ernie are together right now in some way and that makes me smile. The thought makes today a little less sad.

I didn't take any photos today because I wanted to be fully present for the procession. I think this photo is by N. Sublette.

2009-02-25T17:54:00.004-06:00

Empress of the Universe Antoinette K-Doe called home

Posted by: Alison Fensterstock in The Gambit, In Memoriam

In the early hours of Mardi Gras Day, Antoinette K-Doe, widow of the legendary Ernie and proprietor of the Mother-in-Law Lounge, passed away. Last Mardi Gras Day, Mrs. K-Doe had entered the hospital for heart failure, but recovered and was quickly back behind the bar.

Mrs. K-Doe was a local legend and as proprietor of the Lounge and steward of K-Doe’s memory, an international icon.

EDIT: Yesterday, along with dozens of other friends of Ernie and Antoinette, I spent Mardi Gras Day helping to serve beer at the Lounge. The Northside Skull and Bones showed up early to pay tribute to Miss Antoinette. Later, her friend Guitar Lightnin’ Lee played in the garden, and the Black Eagles Mardi Gras Indians sang “Indian Red” to her memory.

Antoinette was a friend of mine and a very dear friend of my boyfriend, Lefty Parker. She considered herself his adoptive mother, and she was taking a fairly strong hand in planning our April wedding, which was to be held at the Mother-in-Law. One of the last things she ever told me was that our dog would need a special outfit for the ceremony, and that to offset the wedding’s cost, we should get sponsors. Antoinette used to baby-sit the dog when Lefty was out of town and he adored her, probably because she would feed him whole hamburgers, one after another.

Antoinette was motherly to a whole host of downtown artists and musicians, including organist and puppeteer Quintron and Panacea, who she had painted on one wall of the Lounge. She, her cousin Tee-Eva and their friend Jeannie often bartended at Q and P’s underground parties at their home, the Spellcaster Lodge. Recently, she had made them a gift of her old limousine. After the hurricane, Quintron, Lefty, MC Trachiotomy and Generic Art Solutions’ Matt Vis took time out from repairing their own flood-damaged homes to work on the Lounge, until the Hands On organization took over in November ‘06 and finished the job. Just this past weekend, the new mural on the Lounge’s outer walls was finished. Antoinette loved publicity, and I was glad she got to see the mural written up in the Times-Picayune before she passed.

After her heart attack last Mardi Gras, we visited her in the hospital a few times. It was frightening to see her looking so frail. The last time we saw her together was about two weeks ago, to discuss the wedding - she showed off her new trim figure and discussed the heart-healthy diet she’d been following. It still seems impossible that she’s gone. I can’t imagine having my wedding there without her, but I can’t imagine having it anywhere else.

Pussyfooters in 2009 Muses Video

2009-02-22T18:22:00.000-06:00

Pussyfooters March in Muses Tonight!

2009-02-19T10:04:00.003-06:00

Look for us behind float 16!

I will look like this:

Here is footage from Sunday's Lyon's Club Practice Parade. I am the one with the sliver sequin skirt behind the two cowgirls about halfway though the line. We stop "marching it out" to dance about halfway though the video...

Pussyfooters March Informally Sunday in Lyons Club Parade

2009-02-10T17:39:00.002-06:00

This means we do all our dances in free style dress, which is fun to behold.

The parade is picking us up at The King Pin at 2:30 and we are rolling here and there and everywhere to end up at Grits, at a dancerly pace.

Come join us!

And check out this video of us dancing in front of Ms. Mae's:

Violet Portrait

2009-02-10T14:34:00.002-06:00

I cannot remember if I have posted this yet. This is an ongoing portrait project. Only a wee bit more than midway though. Gouache does not photograph well so this looks moody.

Violet Ray
Gouache on linen

Au Pied de Cochon

2009-02-07T12:59:00.003-06:00

In the previous posting, I said I would elaborate on the restaurant Au Pied de Cochon, our favorite restaurant in Montreal.

First: give yourself some time to watch Anthony Bourdain in his attempt to sample the menu. Even he almost died of a heart attack:

That said, here is the menu (I will explain what we ate below it):

Avec l'apéro

Cromesquis de foie gras
Saucissettes fumées marinées
Langue dans le vinaigre
Accras de morue
Assiette de cochonnailles

Entrées

Langue de bison à l'estragon
Verdure
Tarte de tomates
Soupe à l'oignon gratinée
Mousse de foie de pintade
Salade de croustillant de PDC
Salade de Bleu, pommes, endives
Salade de betteraves et chèvre
Maquereau fumé à l'érable
Tartare de bison
Carpaccio de canard
Rôti de porcelet

Foie gras

Tarte de foie gras cru au sel
Foie gras tout nu
Poutine au foie gras
Hamburger de foie gras
Foie gras aux pommes
Terrine
Foie gras au maïs
Plogue à Champlain
Tarte de boudin et foie gras au sel
Duo de foie gras

Cochon

Boudin Maison
Tarte de boudin
Potée du PDC
Pied de cochon
Côte de cochon heureux
La Coupe PDC (0.5 kg)
PDC farci au foie gras

Volaille

Magret aux champignons
Canard en conserve
Pot au feu pour 2
Pintade pour 2

Bison & Cerf

Champvallon
Tartare
Steak & frites
Côtes levées

Agneau

Jarret d'agneau confit

Abats

Foie de cerf
Rognons de cerf
Pizza auz tripes

Poisson

Arrivage du jour de Nouvelle-écosse

Les à-côtés

Frites (au gras de canard)
Poutine
Purée de pommes de terre
Purée du PDC

3.50 $
3.50 $
4.00 $
6.00 $
6.50 $

5.50 $
6.50 $
6.50 $
6.50 $
7.00 $
8.00 $
8.50 $
9.00 $
10.00 $
10.50 $
11.00 $
12.00 $

19.00 $
21.00 $
23.00 $
23.00 $
23.00 $
24.00 $
24.00 $
25.00 $
28.00 $
35.00 $

12.50 $
15.50 $
19.00 $
20.00 $
21.00 $
33.00 $
45.00 $

24.00 $
36.00 $
75.00 $
80.00 $

22.00 $
23.00 $
23.00 $
25.00 $

26.00 $

14.00 $
15.00 $
25.00 $

p.m.

4.75 $
7.00 $
5.75 $
7.50 $

Desserts

Crème caramel
Poire pochée et glace vanille
Tarte au citron
Glace vanille
Pomme au four à l'érable
Gâteau au fromage
Crème brûlée
Pouding chômeur
Fondant au chocolat
Pot de crème au chocolat noir
tarte au sucre pour 2
Tarte aux fruits pour 2
tarte à l'érable pour 2
tarte aux pacanes pour 2
Churros à l'érable & Café Robidoux

4.75 $
5.50 $
5.75 $
6.00 $
6.00 $
6.50 $
7.00 $
7.00 $
8.00 $
8.00 $
10.00$
12.00 $
12.00 $
12.00 $
13.50 $

Boissons

Boissons gazeuses
Eau Eska plate
Eau Eska pétillante

Cafés

Espresso, espresso allonge
Espresso double
Cappuccino
Caffe latte
infusions
filtre
Cafés alcolisés
(supplément de 0,25$ décafféiné)

3.75 $
6.00 $
6.00 $

2.75 $
4.00 $
3.75 $
3.75 $
2.25 $
2.25 $
8.00 $

Bières

Pied de Cochon
Griffon Extra Blonde
Griffon Rousse
St-Ambroise blonde
St-Ambroise Stout
Cream Ale
Tuborg
Moosehead
Cidre du Minot

5
"
"
"
"
"
5.75
"
6

I had an oatmeal stout that isn't listed that was delicious and Canadian made.

We went in thinking it would be like Cochon in Nola. We enthusiastically scanned the list of nine foie gras appetizers, not knowing that each of which could easily serve as meal. We ordered foie gras tout nu and cochonnailles(an assortment of pork delicacies) to start. The foie gras came out as two 3/4 inch slabs (lightly seared) on a plate probably measuring 2.5 x 4 or 5 inches.

We could barely make it to the main course and for those of you who know us, that has never happened before.

I had the cassoulet (or about two delicious spoonfuls) and Billy had the PDC Melting Pot, a combination/sampling of several different dishes. These were beyond delicious but I was like a walking piece of foie gras at that point.

There was a couple seated next to us who obviously knew the chef. They ate appetizers like ours and then were served this large broiler pan sized heaping pile of meat -like 6 inches high. They dug in as is they hadn't eaten in days and polished it off with nothing left over. They were the tiniest little people, too. We felt pantsed by their gusto. When we engaged them in a conversation we found out that they are from Toronto and always come to Au Pied de Cochon, it also turned out that we had been bumped up to the room that they had reserved and cancelled at the hotel Gault because the group of people they were visiting with wanted to stay in the hip Plateau neighborhood rather than Old Montreal. Now that's a small world. Speaking of, did I mention that the concierge at The Hotel Gault used to be the concierge for the Ritz New Orleans before the storm?

We were very very pleased and almost comatose when we were finished with our hours long dining experience. We sat at the bar and watched the cooks which only added to our enjoyment. Ask for this seating arrangement when you make a reservation. And be ready to crawl home.

Food in Montreal

2009-02-02T14:04:00.009-06:00

There was plenty of good eating in Montreal.* We went to a bunch a places, among them:

DNA -
355 Rue Maguerite D'Youville
They make all their own meats and stress using local foods and animals (known as Terroir in french, or localvore). They also give a tour of the kitchen. We ate ciassculo (house made salami), petoncles (scallops), parpardelle with four different hand harvested mushrooms, canard (duck), I also ate pork tartare -which was fantasic. When they figured out we are foodies, they gave us free charcuterie samples and mignardises (wee little deserts).

Warning: the address is tricky because there are two streets around the same area (Old Montreal) so mapquest it and don't assume the cab knows about this. Ours did not and we missed a fireworks display we planned to watch from our table.

L'Express
3927 St-Denis
Went here for lunch and loved it. I think this was our second favorite place, but neck and neck with DNA, which I would put at third place. Very authentic French Parisian-style Cafe. Billy had three huge bones full of marrow presented beautifully. We shared a delicious duck confit salad and I had Potage Oseille (sorrel and potato soup) -also delicious.

Ferreira
1446 Rue Peel
This restaurant was recommended and was more than fine, but not a favorite. Portuguese.

Au Pied de Cochon
536 Rue Duluth
Our favorite. This place almost killed us. See the next entry for a more detailed explanation of this adventure. This was actually the cheapest dinner we had in Montreal, with far more food per plate to boot.

La Montee De Lait
1424 Bishop
This restaurant was better than Ferreira but not a favorite, though I could see how light eaters may favor it. The food was tasty and one could choose to order either "3, 4 or 7 choix" (choice)from the menu, which was small. The portions were petite, fancy style. We were not as moved as we were at our favorites, where the personalities of each chef really shone through the menu. We were not unhappy with it, but had much to compare. Here is a favorable review.

Schwartz's
3895 Saint-Laurent Boulevard
A new favorite deli, and we love delis. The Smoked Meat sandwich is a must have:

We dropped into a Chinatown noodle joint to check it out. The noodles were good (not as good as New York Noodle Town) but the atmosphere was fun. The kitchen was behind these huge windows and the cooks would perform and make faces at the children eating in the dining area. Some shots:

*we liked the blog of a Montreal couple, Endless Banquet, for food and culture tips. We used it quite a bit to get around.

Montreal

2009-02-02T13:33:00.005-06:00

We spent the time between Christmas and New Years in Montreal. We had never been before, and the weather was actually warmer than usual for that time of year so we were able to walk around a bunch without dying of frostbite. The weather was gray, however, but that added to the mood of Old Montreal, where we stayed. People were wiping out left and right on the ice, which made me grateful for having acquired ice legs growing up in Maine.
We stayed here, The Hotel Gault, the entire time. We had the incredible luck to be upgraded to what equaled a small NYC apartment on the top level. Very nice, especially at the winter rate.
The view, below, was of the St. Lawrence river (hence the big boat) and of Habitat 67 which was built for the 67 Worl'd Fair.

Another view of Habitat 67, from Wikipedia

I kind of liked the fog:

On the waterfront, above. Pretty park at dusk, below.

Some things that reminded me of New Orleans: The ships seen from the streets and the horse drawn carriages everywhere in the old section.

Pussyfooter Blush Ball

2009-02-02T13:03:00.003-06:00

I am finally putting up a few pictures of the the Pfooters dancing at the Blush Ball. We raised a bunch of money for a great cause and debuted our costumes. I think we look like candy.

I am second in line. I have to remind myself not to sing along or chant
the moves to myself as the mouth movement makes for funny pictures!

Look for us in the Muses parade! February 18th.

We have a big tail:
And Ruthie caught one of the tail feathers in her mouth.

It's Snowing Magnolias

2009-01-28T16:38:00.004-06:00

In my back yard...

A cameo Ruthie appearance

Petal strewn path

2009-01-22T18:23:00.001-06:00

These are NOT the kids who robbed me.

2009-01-20T22:27:00.002-06:00

2 suspects in Quarter murder turned in by their mothers, police look for a third
click title for story

2009-01-19T12:39:00.002-06:00

My heart goes out to the family of Wendy, the woman shot down Saturday night in the quarter.

I would like to comment about the sketches the police provided to the public. The sketches represent the hair and apparent age of the kids who robbed me, Billy and our friend. However, the two boys were about the same height- there was definitely NOT a ten inch difference between the two boys. This leads me to believe that this may not be the same duo. I distinctly remember that both of the boys were small. The kid that I dealt with directly had twists, but I did not get the sense that he was 5'10''.
A detective left me a message to contact him about a week after Billy was contacted. We called back but our call has not been returned.

Police release sketches in shooting of French Quarter bartender

by The Times-Picayune
Monday January 19, 2009, 9:13 AM

The New Orleans Police Department has released sketches of the two suspects wanted in connection to the Saturday night murder of a 39-year-old woman in the French Quarter.

More than a dozen friends and colleagues identified the victim as Wendy Burns, a bartender at French Quarter lounges Aunt Tiki's and Starlight by the Park.

• Read today's Times-Picayune story on the shooting

One suspect is 5 feet tall, police said. He has a dark complexion and has a thin build. He wore a tan hooded sweatshirt.

The other suspect is 5 feet, 10 inches tall. He has a thin build, dark complexion and short dreadlocks. He wore a lime green jacket with bright orange lining, police said.

Send To A Friend |

2009-01-19T12:03:00.002-06:00

Victims of crime feel disconnect from NOPD
Independent police monitor will take several months to establish, field complaints

by Richard A. Webster, for City Business

On Dec. 8, Billy Sothern and his wife, Nikki Page, were robbed at gunpoint by “two boys” outside a Faubourg Marigny bar. The police arrived on the scene in short time but their total lack of cooperation with the investigation left Sothern frustrated.

The morning after the robbery, Sothern discovered through his phone company that the robbers had used his cell phone to make several local calls. Believing the information could be useful in catching the suspects, Sothern called the 5th District police station and requested that a detective call back as soon as possible.

No one called back.

So Sothern went to the 5th District in person. He was told to leave a message and someone would get back to him.

No one got back to him.

In the days that followed, Sothern called several times a day leaving messages for the detective in charge of his case and the district lieutenant. But like the other messages, these too went unanswered.

Finally, after three weeks of being ignored by the police, Sothern wrote an opinion column in the Times-Picayune and released all of his frustration, calling the New Orleans Police Department to task for accusing the public of not cooperating with investigations when he couldn’t get the police to return one of his dozens of messages — even though he had evidence in hand that could lead to an arrest.

The day after Sothern’s column was published a detective called to inquire about his case and express regret that he had been ignored for so long.

Sothern, a criminal defense lawyer and published author, said he was able to shine a spotlight on his situation and hold the police up to public scrutiny through his media connections. But what about the hundreds of people with similar stories, low-income people who deal with crime and the police on a daily basis but don’t have the resources to publish their own columns?

“There’s no vessel for them to articulate their problems,” Sothern said. “I suspect there are a huge number of instances of negligence and misconduct that are totally under the radar because the people this is happening to don’t have a voice and are easily ignored by the police.”

At a time when New Orleans has been labeled both the crime and murder capital of the nation, a strong relationship between the public and police has never been more vital. But there seems to be an ever-widening chasm.

Trust runs low

From Uptown to the Lower 9th Ward trust in the NOPD is at an all-time low, said the Rev. Kevin Wildes, president of Loyola University and chairman of the New Orleans Ethics Review Board.

“The middle and upper class don’t feel they’re protected enough and the poor folk have a concern that they’ll be victimized by the police,” Wildes said. “When I grew up in New Jersey, people had great trust in the police, something that’s almost non-existent here.”

The first step toward rebuilding the public’s faith in the NOPD is creating the independent police monitor, he said. People need an agency they can trust to field complaints, investigate police conduct and enforce accountability.

But the police monitor is only in the initial planning stages and will take at least several more months before it is ready to go, said Inspector General Robert Cerasoli, who will oversee the new agency.

Even after the police monitor is operational, its impact on the NOPD may not be felt for months or even years, leaving the public searching for more immediate solutions.

On Jan. 9, the citizen watchdog group Silence is Violence held a daylong series of anti-crime events meant to highlight the public’s growing frustration with the never-ending cycle of violence. The event coincided with the two-year anniversary of the 2007 anti-crime march on City Hall.

At that time, despite the rash of high-profile murders, people were more forgiving of the police, said Ken Foster, co-founder of Silence is Violence.

The NOPD was still in recovery mode having suffered significant personnel and infrastructure losses after Katrina. But after two years and few signs of progress, the public’s patience has worn thin, and the post-storm excuses no longer cut it, Foster said. The NOPD has failed to implement long-promised reforms such as community policing that are designed to improve its relations with the public, he said.

“Community policing is supposed to mean more interaction between police officers and the community, more officers walking the beat. That would have been the easiest thing to implement but it hasn’t happened,” Foster said. “Nobody sees anybody walking the beat in any neighborhood. I feel like when the police department talks about community policing, they’re saying we need to police ourselves without their help.”

That’s the message attorney Rachel Meese got from police after her Carrollton home was recently burglarized. It took the NOPD more than four hours to respond after her elderly neighbor first called to report a robbery in progress, Meese said.

When police finally arrived, Meese said they laid the blame of the robbery at her feet, accusing her of leaving her doors unlocked.

It’s been more than three weeks since the incident and no one from the NOPD has followed-up with her.

“They didn’t seem very interested in protecting me from criminals. That didn’t seem very high on their list of priorities,” Meese said. “So we went out and got an alarm system. It makes you feel like you’re on your own, that if it happens don’t bother calling the police because they’re not going to show up. And if they do, they’re going to treat you as if you’re responsible in some way instead of treating you like what you are, a victim of a crime.”

The NOPD declined to comment for this story.

Leadership lacking

Foster said when he recently called the police to report drug dealing in progress right outside of his house, the dispatcher told him to call Crimestoppers, a citizen-run nonprofit tip line

“I hear a lot of people who say the police don’t come in a timely fashion even when they call about crimes in progress like a burglary. I think the NOPD needs new leadership, but I don’t know when or how that’s going to happen,” Foster said.

As time goes on, more and more people are pointing their finger at Superintendent Warren Riley, said Brian Denzer, founder of the Web site, Citizen Crime Watch. They don’t accuse him of being incompetent or corrupt, as many labeled former District Attorney Eddie Jordan. But they say under his watch, public safety has not improved and the relationship between the police and the community has deteriorated.

“I think most people would agree that New Orleans was a safer place after Richard Pennington was police chief,” Denzer said. “But it’s gone downhill since then and I have serious concerns. Not to disparage police officers, 99 percent are really good guys who work really hard and don’t get paid enough, who deal with a lot of crap both on street and from the police department.

“But I’m concerned there may be public integrity issues that aren’t being addressed. Either because people aren’t being rewarded for good behavior or because there is no command control.”

Problem policy

Bob Stellingworth, president of the New Orleans Police and Justice Foundation, said many of the trust issues between the police and the public stem from long-standing policies.

Historically, the NOPD has arrested an unusually high number of people for relatively minor crimes compared to other cities, and that has engendered resentment in many communities, Stellingworth said. And once arrested, people were often held in prison for up to 60 days without even being charged with a crime.

“There are a lot of reasons why the public should be dissatisfied,” Stellingworth said. “You have a high volume of arrests combined with an inefficient justice system and that feeds the feeling of discontent.”

But some improvements are being made.

The New Orleans criminal justice system is working on preventing people from sitting in jail without being charged, Stellingworth said. And last year the numbers of murders dropped to 179 from 210 in 2007.

“No doubt mistakes have been made and I think the police department has been under very close scrutiny by the media related to specific events and issues,” he said. “I think that goes with the territory. That’s something the police department has to put up with and react to. And when they make a mistake, they have to admit it, move forward and not make that mistake again.”

Absence telling

Part of the problem is that the NOPD appears to be completely tone-deaf to the public, Foster said. When Silence is Violence organized outside City Hall Jan. 9 to read off the names of the 580 people murdered in the city since the storm, District Attorney Leon Cannizaro and City Councilmen Arnie Fielkow and James Carter made appearances, but no one represented the NOPD.

“I know some people in the department who when they watched the news and saw there was no one there representing the police, they were completely shocked at how stupid that was,” Foster said. “It might have been a superficial gesture, but to not have anyone there came off as arrogant and disrespectful to the families of the victims.”•

Rachel Maddow on Bush's Latest Comments on Katrina Response

2009-01-14T16:55:00.002-06:00

She Interviews Jed Horne on the subject as well.

2009-01-06T12:06:00.001-06:00

Update

Two officers came to meet with Billy at his office. The outcome of the meeting: they'll look into it.

Not Very Cheerful

2009-01-02T12:16:00.003-06:00

I wanted to wait until I was ready to tell my family before I posted this, but Billy and I were robbed at gunpoint about a month ago. Posted below is a piece Billy wrote about it as a guest writer for the Times- Pic.

Note: we received a message from the police on New Year's Eve at approximately 2:30 pm local time -the day after the story came out.

As police dither, holdup clues grow cold

Posted by Billy Sothern, Guest Columnist, The Times-Picayune

December 29, 2008 6:32PM

I read recently that New Orleans was named America's most crime-ridden city, no shock to anyone who reads the paper or to me as a criminal defense lawyer in this town. Like many New Orleanians, I have lost friends to violence and have witnessed extraordinarily violent crimes on our city's streets. So I was not altogether surprised when, on a recent Friday night my wife and I, along with a friend, were robbed at gunpoint and, thereby, became more statistics in New Orleans' crime wave.

At about midnight that night, I walked my wife and our friend to our car just outside a bar, beneath a bright street light on a quiet Faubourg Marigny street. As they sat in the car with the passenger-side door ajar, we talked for a moment, when, as if from nowhere, two boys appeared a couple of feet from where I stood on the sidewalk. One pulled out a small, cheap looking semi-automatic gun and said, "Empty your pockets." We gave them our money, and my wife and our friend surrendered their purses. The boys turned and ran.

The police arrived quickly, and we offered our best descriptions of the boys and the crime. While we gave our report, a man rode up on his bike and said he had just been robbed in front of his house by what sounded like the same kids. I began to realize how lucky we all were to have escaped uninjured.

The next morning, as I was calling my cell phone company to have my wife's stolen phone turned off, it occurred to me to ask the customer service person whether any calls had been made since the robbery. Indeed, only a few minutes earlier, someone had called a 504 number and had a seven-minute conversation. Thinking that any phone records could help the police investigate the holdup, I decided to leave the phone on and called the 5th District Police Department.

I told them I had been robbed the night before, explained about the phone call on my wife's stolen phone and asked to be called back as soon as possible.

Hours passed without any word, so I drove downtown to the 5th District. I was barely able to hold the attention of the police officer at the desk as I explained the evidence that I had discovered and suggested that, so long as the phone was on, maybe they could even locate the user. She took a message but again, no one called me. I called again and again over the following days and left messages for the detective assigned to the case and even called the district lieutenant when those went unanswered. As of this writing, no one has called me to follow up on the calls made from the phone or, as far as I know, made any efforts to investigate the two potentially lethal armed robberies that occurred that night.

Like many people in this town, I had to overcome real reluctance to report this crime and to try to assist in the investigation. My work in the criminal justice system has turned me into a conscientious objector to its workings -- its excessive sentences and wrongful convictions -- but I put those concerns aside because I believed that the greater injustice would be to do nothing and allow the violence that we escaped to fall on others.

Anyone who reads the news in this town has no doubt read comments from our police brass shirking responsibility and blaming us citizens when asked about the high levels of crime in our city or about unsolved crimes like the murder two years ago of my friend, Helen Hill.

The police say they cannot solve cases because we fail to cooperate and speak up. My experience gives me real reason to doubt that claim and suggests that any apathy in our communities about helping the police may be motivated more by the futility of the exercise than any lack of desire to see our streets made safer.

I know that is why I have stopped calling.

. . . . . . .

Billy Sothern is a criminal defense lawyer and the author of "Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City." He can be reached at billys@thejusticecenter.org.

Black and Glitter Christmas Tree

2008-12-21T13:05:00.004-06:00

For Manna,
We went with lots of little trinkets tied with black ribbon and birdies, too.

The tree topper

A friend brought over a little box of trinkets to make
into ornaments. This little black apple is one.

Katrina's Hidden Race War

2008-12-18T11:54:00.002-06:00

"It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it." A native of Chicago, Janak also boasts of becoming a true Southerner, saying, "I am no longer a Yankee. I earned my wings." A white woman standing next to him adds, "He understands the N-word now." In this neighborhood, she continues, "we take care of our own."

Katrina's Hidden Race War

In New Orleans's Algiers Point, white vigilantes
shot African-Americans with impunity

Research support provided by the Investigative Fund of The Nation Institute.

By A.C. Thompson

Published by The Nation Institute

December 18, 2008

The way Donnell Herrington tells it, there was no warning. One second he was trudging through the heat. The next he was lying prostrate on the pavement, his life spilling out of a hole in his throat, his body racked with pain, his vision blurred and distorted.

It was September 1, 2005, some three days after Hurricane Katrina crashed into New Orleans, and somebody had just blasted Herrington, who is African-American, with a shotgun. "I just hit the ground. I didn't even know what happened," recalls Herrington, a burly 32-year-old with a soft drawl.

The sudden eruption of gunfire horrified Herrington's companions—his cousin Marcel Alexander, then 17, and friend Chris Collins, then 18, who are also black. "I looked at Donnell and he had this big old hole in his neck," Alexander recalls. "I tried to help him up, and they started shooting again." Herrington says he was staggering to his feet when a second shotgun blast struck him from behind; the spray of lead pellets also caught Collins and Alexander. The buckshot peppered Alexander's back, arm and buttocks.

Herrington shouted at the other men to run and turned to face his attackers: three armed white males. Herrington says he hadn't even seen the men or their weapons before the shooting began. As Alexander and Collins fled, Herrington ran in the opposite direction, his hand pressed to the bleeding wound on his throat. Behind him, Herrington says, the gunmen yelled, "Get him! Get that nigger!"

The attack occurred in Algiers Point. The Point, as locals call it, is a neighborhood within a neighborhood, a small cluster of ornate, immaculately maintained 150-year-old houses within the larger Algiers district. A nationally recognized historic area, Algiers Point is largely white, while the rest of Algiers is predominantly black. It's a "white enclave" whose residents have "a kind of siege mentality," says Tulane University historian Lance Hill, noting that some white New Orleanians "think of themselves as an oppressed minority."

A wide street lined with towering trees, Opelousas Avenue marks the dividing line between Algiers Point and greater Algiers, and the difference in wealth between the two areas is immediately noticeable. "On one side of Opelousas it's 'hood, on the other side it's suburbs," says one local. "The two sides are totally opposite, like muddy and clean."

Algiers Point has always been somewhat isolated: it's perched on the west bank of the Mississippi River, linked to the core of the city only by a ferry line and twin gray steel bridges. When the hurricane descended on Louisiana, Algiers Point got off relatively easy. While wide swaths of New Orleans were deluged, the levees ringing Algiers Point withstood the Mississippi's surging currents, preventing flooding; most homes and businesses in the area survived intact. As word spread that the area was dry, desperate people began heading toward the west bank, some walking over bridges, others traveling by boat. The National Guard soon designated the Algiers Point ferry landing an official evacuation site. Rescuers from the Coast Guard and other agencies brought flood victims to the ferry terminal, where soldiers loaded them onto buses headed for Texas.

In the case of one shooting victim, evidence indicates that the local police may have been complicit in his death. Eye-witnesses didn't see where the bullet came from, but when they took a bleeding Henry Glover to a police staging area hoping for medical assistance, they were met by blows instead. See A.C. Thompson's companion piece, "Body of Evidence ."

Facing an influx of refugees, the residents of Algiers Point could have pulled together food, water and medical supplies for the flood victims. Instead, a group of white residents, convinced that crime would arrive with the human exodus, sought to seal off the area, blocking the roads in and out of the neighborhood by dragging lumber and downed trees into the streets. They stockpiled handguns, assault rifles, shotguns and at least one Uzi and began patrolling the streets in pickup trucks and SUVs. The newly formed militia, a loose band of about fifteen to thirty residents, most of them men, all of them white, was looking for thieves, outlaws or, as one member put it, anyone who simply "didn't belong."

The existence of this little army isn't a secret—in 2005 a few newspaper reporters wrote up the group's activities in glowing terms in articles that showed up on an array of pro-gun blogs; one Cox News story called it "the ultimate neighborhood watch." Herrington, for his part, recounted his ordeal in Spike Lee's documentary When the Levees Broke. But until now no one has ever seriously scrutinized what happened in Algiers Point during those days, and nobody has asked the obvious questions. Were the gunmen, as they claim, just trying to fend off looters? Or does Herrington's experience point to a different, far uglier truth?

Over the course of an eighteen-month investigation, I tracked down figures on all sides of the gunfire, speaking with the shooters of Algiers Point, gunshot survivors and those who witnessed the bloodshed. I interviewed police officers, forensic pathologists, firefighters, historians, medical doctors and private citizens, and studied more than 800 autopsies and piles of state death records. What emerged was a disturbing picture of New Orleans in the days after the storm, when the city fractured along racial fault lines as its government collapsed.

Herrington and Alexander's experience fits into a broader pattern of violence in which, evidence indicates, at least eleven people were shot. In each case the targets were African-American men, while the shooters, it appears, were all white.

The new information should reframe our understanding of the catastrophe. Immediately after the storm, the media portrayed African-Americans as looters and thugs—Mayor Ray Nagin, for example, told Oprah Winfrey that "hundreds of gang members" were marauding through the Superdome. Now it's clear that some of the most serious crimes committed during that time were the work of gun-toting white males.

So far, their crimes have gone unpunished. No one was ever arrested for shooting Herrington, Alexander and Collins—in fact, there was never an investigation. I found this story repeated over and over during my days in New Orleans. As a reporter who has spent more than a decade covering crime, I was startled to meet so many people with so much detailed information about potentially serious offenses, none of whom had ever been interviewed by police detectives.

Hill, who runs Tulane's Southern Institute for Education and Research and closely follows the city's racial dynamics, isn't surprised the Algiers Point gunmen have eluded arrest. Because of the widespread notion that blacks engaged in looting and thuggery as the disaster unfolded, Hill believes, many white New Orleanians approved of the vigilante activity that occurred in places like Algiers Point. "By and large, I think the white mentality is that these people are exempt—that even if they committed these crimes, they're really exempt from any kind of legal repercussion," Hill tells me. "It's sad to say, but I think that if any of these cases went to trial, and none of them have, I can't see a white person being convicted of any kind of crime against an African-American during that period."

You can trace the origins of the Algiers Point militia to the misfortune of Vinnie Pervel. A 52-year-old building contractor and real estate entrepreneur with a graying buzz cut and mustache, Pervel says he lost his Ford van in a carjacking the day after Katrina made landfall, when an African-American man attacked him with a hammer. "The kid whacked me," recalls Pervel, who is white. "Hit me on the side of the head." Vowing to prevent further robberies, Pervel and his neighbors began amassing an arsenal. "For a day and a half we were running around getting guns," he says. "We got about forty."

Things quickly got ugly. Pervel remembers aiming a shotgun at a random African-American man walking by his home—even though he knew the man had no connection to the theft of his vehicle. "I don't want you passing by my house!" Pervel says he shouted out.

Pervel tells me he feared goons would kill his mother, who is in her 70s. "We thought we would be dead," he says. "We thought we were doomed." And so Pervel and his comrades set about fortifying the area. One resident gave me video footage of the leafy barricades the men constructed to keep away outsiders. Others told me they created a low-tech alarm system, tying aluminum cans and glass bottles together and stringing them across the roads at ankle height. The bottles and cans would rattle noisily if somebody bumped into them, alerting the militia.

Pervel and his armed neighbors point to the very real chaos that was engulfing the city and claim they had no other choice than to act as they did. They paint themselves as righteous defenders of property, a paramilitary formation protecting their neighborhood from opportunistic thieves. "I'm not a racist," Pervel insists. "I'm a classist. I want to live around people who want the same things as me."

Nathan Roper, another vigilante, says he was unhappy that outsiders were disturbing his corner of New Orleans and that he was annoyed by the National Guard's decision to use the Algiers Point ferry landing as an evacuation zone. "I'm telling you, it was forty, fifty people at a time getting off these boats," says Roper, who is in his 50s and works for ServiceMaster, a house cleaning company. The storm victims were "hoodlums from the Lower Ninth Ward and that part of the city," he says. "I'm not a prejudiced individual, but you just know the outlaws who are up to no good. You can see it in their eyes."

The militia, according to Roper, was armed with "handguns, rifles [and] shotguns"; he personally carried "a .38 in my waistband" and a "little Uzi." "There was a few people who got shot around here," Roper, a slim man with a weathered face, tells me. "I know of at least three people who got shot. I know one was dead 'cause he was on the side of the road."

During the summer of 2005 Herrington was working as an armored car driver for the Brink's company and living in a rented duplex about a mile from Algiers Point. Katrina thrashed the place, blowing out windows, pitching a hefty pine tree limb through the roof and dumping rain on Herrington's possessions. On the day of the shooting, Herrington, Alexander and Collins were all trying to escape the stricken city, and set out together on foot for the Algiers Point ferry terminal in the hopes of getting on an evacuation bus.

Those hopes were dashed by a barrage of shotgun pellets. After two shots erupted, Collins and Alexander took off running and ducked into a shed behind a house to hide from the gunmen, Alexander tells me. The armed men, he says, discovered them in the shed and jammed pistols in their faces, yelling, "We got you niggers! We got you niggers!" He continues, "They said they was gonna tie us up, put us in the back of the truck and burn us. They was gonna make us suffer.... I thought I was gonna die. I thought I was gonna leave earth."

Apparently thinking they'd caught some looters, the gunmen interrogated and verbally threatened Collins and Alexander for ten to fifteen minutes, Alexander says, before one of the armed men issued an ultimatum: if Alexander and Collins left Algiers Point and told their friends not to set foot in the area, they'd be allowed to live.

Meanwhile, Herrington was staring at death. "I was bleeding pretty bad from my neck area," he recalls. When two white men drove by in a black pickup truck, he begged them for help. "I said, Help me, help me—I'm shot," Herrington recalls. The response, he tells me, was immediate and hostile. One of the men told Herrington, "Get away from this truck, nigger. We're not gonna help you. We're liable to kill you ourselves." My God, thought Herrington, what's going on out here?

He managed to stumble back to a neighbor's house, collapsing on the front porch. The neighbors, an African-American couple, wrapped him in a sheet and sped him to the nearest hospital, the West Jefferson Medical Center, where, medical records show, he was X-rayed at 3:30 pm. According to the records, a doctor who reviewed the X-rays found "metallic buck-shot" scattered throughout his chest, arms, back and abdomen, as well as "at least seven [pellets] in the right neck." Within minutes, Herrington was wheeled into an operating room for emergency surgery.

"It was a close-range buckshot wound from a shotgun," says Charles Thomas, one of the doctors who operated on Herrington. "If he hadn't gotten to the hospital, he wouldn't have lived. He had a hole in his internal jugular vein, and we were able to find it and fix it."

After three days in the hospital, which lacked running water, air conditioning and functional toilets, Herrington was shuttled to a medical facility in Baton Rouge. When he returned to New Orleans months later, he paid a visit to the Fourth District police station, whose officers patrol the west bank, and learned there was no police report documenting the attack. Herrington, who now has a wide scar stretching the length of his neck, says the officers he spoke with failed to take a report or check out his story, a fact that still bothers him. "If the shoe was on the other foot, if a black guy was willing to go out shooting white guys, the police would be up there real quick," he says. "I feel these guys should definitely be held accountable. These guys had absolutely no right to do what they did."

Herrington, Alexander and Collins are the only victims, so far, to tell their stories. But they certainly weren't the only ones attacked in or around Algiers Point. In interviews, vigilantes and residents—citing the exact locations and types of weapons used—detail a string of violent incidents in which at least eight other people were shot, bringing the total number of shooting victims to at least eleven, some of whom may have died.

Other evidence bolsters this tally. Thomas, the surgeon who treated Herrington, staffed one of the few functioning trauma centers in the area, located just outside the New Orleans city line, not far from Algiers Point, for a full month after the hurricane hit. "We saw a bunch of gunshot wounds," he tells me. "There were a lot of gunshot wounds that went unreported during that time." Though Thomas couldn't get into the specifics of the shooting incidents because of medical privacy laws, he says, "We saw a couple of other shotgun wounds, some handgun shootings and somebody who was shot with a high-velocity missile [an assault-rifle round]." The surgeon remembers handling "five or six nonfatal gunshot wounds" as well as three lethal gunshot cases.

In addition, state death records show that at least four people died in and around Algiers Point, a suspicious number, given that most Katrina fatalities were the result of drowning, and that that community never flooded. Neighborhood residents, black and white, remember seeing corpses lying out in the open that appeared to have been shot.

While the militia patrolled the streets of Algiers Point, the New Orleans Police Department, which had done little to brace for the storm, was crippled. "There was no leadership, no equipment, no nothing," recalls one high-ranking police official. "We did no more to prepare for a hurricane than we would have for a thunderstorm." Without functioning radios or dispatch systems, officers had no way of knowing what was happening a block away, let alone on the other side of the city. NOPD higher-ups had no way to give direction to unit commanders and other subordinates. As the chain of command disintegrated, the force dissolved into a collection of isolated, quasi-autonomous bands.

Around Algiers Point people say they rarely saw cops during the week after Katrina tore through Louisiana, and in this law enforcement vacuum the militia's unique brand of justice flourished. Most disturbing, one of the vigilantes, Roper, claims on videotape recorded just weeks after the storm that the shootings took place with the knowledge and consent of the police. "The police said, If they're breaking in your property do what you gotta do and leave them [the bodies] on the side of the road," he says.

As we drive through Algiers Point in a battered white van, Roper tells me he witnessed a fatal shooting. Roper says he was talking on his cellphone to his son in Lafayette one evening when he spied an African-American man trying to get into Daigle's Grocery, a corner market on the eastern edge of the neighborhood, which was shuttered because of the hurricane. Another militia member shot the man from a few feet away, killing him. "He was done," Roper recalls.

During our conversations, Roper never acknowledges firing his weapon, but in 2005 a Danish documentary crew videotaped him talking about his activities. In this footage Roper says, when pressed, that he did indeed shoot somebody.

Fellow militia member Wayne Janak, 60, a carpenter and contractor, is more forthcoming with me. "Three people got shot in just one day!" he tells me, laughing. We're sitting in his home, a boxy beige-and-pink structure on a corner about five blocks from Daigle's Grocery. "Three of them got hit right here in this intersection with a riot gun," he says, motioning toward the streets outside his home. Janak tells me he assumed the shooting victims, who were African-American, were looters because they were carrying sneakers and baseball caps with them. He guessed that the property had been stolen from a nearby shopping mall. According to Janak, a neighbor "unloaded a riot gun"—a shotgun—"on them. We chased them down."

Janak, who was carrying a pistol, says he grabbed one of the suspected looters and considered killing him, but decided to be merciful. "I rolled him over in the grass and saw that he'd been hit in the back with the riot gun," he tells me. "I thought that was good enough. I said, 'Go back to your neighborhood so people will know Algiers Point is not a place you go for a vacation. We're not doing tours right now.'"

He's equally blunt in Welcome to New Orleans, an hourlong documentary produced by the Danish video team, who captured Janak, beer in hand, gloating about hunting humans. Surrounded by a crowd of sunburned white Algiers Point locals at a barbeque held not long after the hurricane, he smiles and tells the camera, "It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it." A native of Chicago, Janak also boasts of becoming a true Southerner, saying, "I am no longer a Yankee. I earned my wings." A white woman standing next to him adds, "He understands the N-word now." In this neighborhood, she continues, "we take care of our own."

Janak, who says he'd been armed with two .38s and a shotgun, brags about keeping the bloody shirt worn by a shooting victim as a trophy. When "looters" showed up in the neighborhood, "they left full of buckshot," he brags, adding, "You know what? Algiers Point is not a pussy community."

Within that community the gunmen enjoyed wide support. In an outtake from the documentary, a group of white Algiers Point residents gathers to celebrate the arrival of military troops sent to police the area. Addressing the crowd, one local praises the vigilantes for holding the neighborhood together until the Army Humvees trundled into town, noting that some of the militia figures are present at the party. "You all know who you are," the man says. "And I'm proud of every one of you all." Cheering and applause erupts from the assembled locals.

Some of the gunmen prowling Algiers Point were out to wage a race war, says one woman whose uncle and two cousins joined the cause. A former New Orleanian, this source spoke to me anonymously because she fears her relatives could be prosecuted for their crimes. "My uncle was very excited that it was a free-for-all—white against black—that he could participate in," says the woman. "For him, the opportunity to hunt black people was a joy."

"They didn't want any of the 'ghetto niggers' coming over" from the east side of the river, she says, adding that her relatives viewed African-Americans who wandered into Algiers Point as "fair game." One of her cousins, a young man in his 20s, sent an e-mail to her and several other family members describing his adventures with the militia. He had attached a photo in which he posed next to an African-American man who'd been fatally shot. The tone of the e-mail, she says, was "gleeful"—her cousin was happy that "they were shooting niggers."

An Algiers Point homeowner who wasn't involved in the shootings describes another attack. "All I can tell you is what I saw," says the white resident, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals. He witnessed a barrage of gunfire—from a shotgun, an AK-47 and a handgun—directed by militiamen at two African-American men standing on Pelican Street, not too far from Janak's place. The gunfire hit one of them. "I saw blood squirting out of his back," he says. "I'm an EMT. My instinct should've been to rush to him. But I didn't. And if I had, those guys"—the militia-men—"might have opened up on me, too."

The witness shows me a home video he recorded shortly after the storm. On the tape, three white Algiers Point men discuss the incident. One says it might be a bad idea to talk candidly about the crime. Another dismisses the notion, claiming, "No jury would convict."

According to Pervel, one of the shootings occurred just a few feet from his house. "Three young black men were walking down this street and they started moving the barricade," he tells me. The men, he says, wanted to continue walking along the street, but Pervel's neighbor, who was armed, commanded them to keep the barricade in place and leave. A standoff ensued until the neighbor shot one of the men, who then, according to Pervel, "ran a block and died" at the intersection of Alix and Vallette Streets.

Even Pervel is surprised the shootings have generated so little scrutiny. "Aside from you, no one's come around asking questions about this," he says. "I'm surprised. If that was my son, I'd want to know who shot him."

By Pervel's count, four people died violently in Algiers Point in the aftermath of the storm, including a bloody corpse left on Opelousas Avenue. That nameless body came up again and again in interviews, a grisly recurring motif. Who was he? How did he die? Nobody knew—or nobody would tell me.

After hearing all these gruesome stories, I wonder if any of the militia figures I've interviewed were involved in the shooting of Herrington and company. In particular, Pervel's and Janak's anecdotes intrigue me, since both men discussed shooting incidents that sounded a lot like the crime that nearly killed Herrington and wounded Alexander and Collins. Both Pervel and Janak recounted incidents in which vigilantes confronted three black men.

Hoping to solve the mystery, I show Herrington and Alexander video of Pervel, Janak and Roper, all of whom are in their 50s or 60s. No match. The shooters, Herrington and Alexander tell me, were younger men, in their 30s or 40s, sporting prominent tattoos. I have never been able to track them down.

New Orleans, of course, is awash in tales of the horrible things that transpired in the wake of the hurricane—and many of these wild stories have turned out to be fictions. In researching the Algiers Point attacks, I relied on the accounts of people who witnessed shooting incidents or were directly involved, either as gunmen or shooting victims.

Seeking to corroborate their stories, I sought out documentary evidence, including police files and autopsy reports. The NOPD, I was told, kept very few records during that period. Orleans Parish coroner Frank Minyard was a different story. The coroner, a flamboyant trumpet-playing doctor who has held the office for more than thirty years, had file cabinets bulging with the autopsies of hundreds of Katrina victims—he just wouldn't let me see them, in defiance of Louisiana public records laws.

After wrangling with the coroner for more than six months, I decided to sue—with a lawyer hired by the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute—to get access to the autopsies. (We weren't the first to take the coroner to court. CNN and the New Orleans Times-Picayune had successfully sued Minyard, seeking particular Katrina-related autopsies.) This past May, Orleans Parish district court judge Kern Reese ruled in our favor, ordering Minyard to allow me to review every autopsy done in the year after the storm. But I soon learned that reconstructing history from the coroner's mess of files was next to impossible, because the paper trail is incomplete. "We carried the records around in our cars, in the trunks of our cars, for four months and, I mean, that—that was the coroner's office," Minyard said in a sworn deposition obtained during the course of our suit. "I'm sure some of the records got lost or misplaced." Even the autopsy files we got were missing key facts, like where the bodies were found, who recovered them, when they were recovered and so forth.

Many of the manila file folders the coroner eventually turned over were empty, and Minyard said he'd simply chosen not to autopsy some twenty-five to fifty corpses. The coroner also told us he didn't know exactly how many people were shot to death in the days immediately after the storm—"I can't even tell you how many gunshot victims we had"—but figured the number would not "be more than ten."

Under oath Minyard proceeded to say something stunning. The NOPD, he testified, was only investigating three gunshot cases, all of them high-profile—the Danziger Bridge incident, in which police killed two civilians, and the shooting of Danny Brumfield, who was slain by a cop in front of the Convention Center. Minyard's statement buttressed information I'd gotten from NOPD sources who said the force has done little to prosecute people for assaults or murders committed in the wake of the storm.

I contacted the police department repeatedly over many months, providing the NOPD with specific questions about each incident discussed in this story. The department, through spokesman Robert Young, declined to comment on whether officers had investigated any of these crimes and would not discuss any other issues raised by this article.

Sifting through more than 800 autopsy reports and reams of state health department data, I quickly identified five New Orleanians who had died under suspicious circumstances: one, severely burned, was found in a charred abandoned auto (see "Body of Evidence," page 19); three were shot; and another died of "blunt force trauma to the head." However, it's impossible to tell from the shoddy records whether any of these people died in or around Algiers Point, or even if their bodies were found there.

No one has been arrested in connection with these suspicious deaths. When it comes to the lack of action on the cases, one well-placed NOPD source told me there was plenty of blame to go around. "We had a totally dysfunctional DA's office," he said. "The court system wasn't much better. Everything was in disarray. A lot of stuff didn't get prosecuted. There were a lot of things that were getting squashed. The UCR [uniform crime reports] don't show anything."

In response to detailed queries made over a period of months, New Orleans District Attorney spokesman Dalton Savwoir declined to say whether prosecutors looked into any of the attacks I uncovered. The office has been through a string of leadership changes since Katrina—Leon Cannizaro is the current DA—and is struggling to deal with crimes that happened yesterday, let alone three years ago, Savwoir told me.

James Traylor, a forensic pathologist with the Louisiana State University Health Center, worked alongside Minyard at the morgue and suspects that homicide victims fell through the cracks. "I know I did cases that were homicides," Traylor says. "They were not suicides." NOPD detectives, the doctor continues, never spoke to him about two cases he labeled homicides, leading him to believe police conducted no investigation into those deaths. "There should be a multi-agency task force—police, sheriffs, coroners—that can put their heads together and figure out what happened to people," Traylor says.

One of the suspicious cases I discovered was that of Willie Lawrence, a 47-year-old African-American male who suffered a "gunshot wound" that caused a "cranio-facial injury" and deposited two chunks of metal in his brain, according to the autopsy report. Minyard never determined whether Lawrence was murdered or committed suicide, choosing to leave the death unclassified. However, the dead man's brother, Herbert Lawrence, who lives in Compton, California, believes his sibling was murdered. Herbert tells me he got a phone call from one of Willie's neighbors shortly after he died. The caller said Willie, whose body, according to state records, was found on the east bank of the Mississippi, was killed by a civilian gunman. "The police didn't do anything," Herbert says, pointing out that NOPD officers didn't create a written report or interview any relatives.

Malik Rahim is one of a handful of African-Americans who live in Algiers Point, and as far as he's concerned, "We are tolerated. We are not accepted." In the days after the storm struck, Rahim says, the vigilantes "would pass by and call us all kind of names, say how they were gonna burn down my house." They thought "all blacks was looting."

As he walked the near-deserted streets in that period, Rahim, 61, a former Black Panther with a mane of dreadlocks, came across several dead bodies of African-American men. Inspecting the bodies, he discovered what he took to be evidence of gunfire. "One guy had about his entire head shot off," says Rahim, who was spurred by the storm to launch Common Ground Relief, a grassroots aid organization. "It's pretty hard to think a person drowned when half their head's been blown off," he says. He thinks some of the gunmen saw Katrina as a "golden opportunity to rid the community of African-Americans."

Sitting at his kitchen table, while a noisy AC unit does its best to neutralize the stifling Louisiana heat, Rahim describes the dead and lists the locations where he found the bodies. He also shows me video footage taken days after the storm. On the tape, Rahim points to the grossly distended corpse of an African-American man lying on the ground.

Rahim introduces me to his neighbor, Reggie Bell, 39, the African-American man Pervel confronted at gunpoint as he walked by Pervel's house. At the time, Bell, a cook, lived just a few blocks down the street from Pervel. In Bell's recollection, Pervel, standing with another gun-toting man, demanded to know what Bell was doing in Algiers Point. "I live here," Bell replied. "I can show you mail."

That answer didn't appease the gunmen, he says. According to Bell, Pervel told him, "Well, we don't want you around here. You loot, we shoot."

Roughly twenty-four hours later, as Bell sat on his front porch grilling food, another batch of armed white men accosted him, intending to drive him from his home at gunpoint, he says. "Whatcha still doing around here?" they asked, according to Bell. "We don't want you around here. You gotta go."

Bell tells me he was gripped by fear, panicked that he was about to experience ethnic cleansing, Louisiana-style. The armed men eventually left, but Bell remained nervous over the coming days. "I believe it was skin color," he says, that prompted the militia to try to force him out. "That was some really wrong stuff." Bell's then-girlfriend, who was present during the second incident, confirms his story. (In a later interview, Pervel admits he confronted Bell with a shotgun but portrays the incident as a minor misunderstanding, saying he's since apologized to Bell.)

On my final visit to Algiers Point, I stand on Patterson Street, my notebook out, interviewing a pair of residents in the dimming evening light. An older white man, on his way home from a bar, strides up and asks what I'm doing. I reply with a vague explanation, saying I'm working on an article about the "untold stories of Hurricane Katrina."

Without a pause, he says, "Oh. You mean the shootings. Yeah, there were a bunch of shootings."

When I share with Donnell Herrington what the militia men and Algiers Point locals have told me over the course of my investigation, he grows silent. His eyes focus on a point far away. After a moment, he says quietly, "That's pretty disturbing to hear that—I'm not going to lie to you—to hear that these guys are cocky. They feel like they got away with it."

Random Ruthie

2008-12-17T12:24:00.002-06:00

2008-12-11T20:11:00.001-06:00

Correction: it snowed Christmas the year BEFORE the storm... I switched memories.

God Lawd is that SNOW?!!!

2008-12-11T11:13:00.004-06:00

If I am not mistaken, it has not snowed here since the miracle blanketing we got as a special present for the Christmas after the storm!

Now, I work from home, and one of the drawbacks of that for me is that if it's really cold, I can't get out of bed. This might have to do with the fact that we have no heat upstairs in this giganta-house. Now I have to work late again, but that's not the worst of it...I missed the snowfall! But here are some belated snapshots:

A little car shot for Billy

No More William Jefferson, YAY!

2008-12-08T11:25:00.000-06:00

Smell you later, Dollar Bill.

Pussyfooter Ball to Benefit Women and Children at The Metropolitan Center

2008-12-03T11:43:00.002-06:00

For those who are not on my contacts list:

All are invited to The Pussyfooters Blush Ball...AT MARDI GRAS WORLD!

It would be so fun to go in a chick pack all trussed up in such a way that the mere breeze of our passing by will bedazzle all onlookers....

I'm just saying. I'm there. Anything goes. And it's for a good cause-a shelter for women and children from abused families.

Primping and juicing up at my house before the shindig, details to follow for those who wish to join in!

If you need a boy to dance with, pick one and take him too. But she-stag is fun, too!

I got tickets! Click here for them or email me. Don't click the pic - t'won't work!

Thanksgiving Dinner at the House

2008-11-28T11:19:00.004-06:00

In preparation for the big meal I made a centerpiece
from decorative kale, blue thistle and wee roses

Snacking before the meal

My mother in law, Winnie before the spread

High roast turkey, mirliton casserole, yams, mashed root vegetables, gravy, brown bread, brussel sprouts, salads AND:

Oyster stuffing: half gallon gulf oysters, 3 lbs ground pork, 2 lbs
ground round, 2 loaves Leidenheimer po' boy bread, garlic and allspice

Thanksgiving at the Race Track

2008-11-28T11:14:00.002-06:00

Some Hats

Big Oops in the Quarter

2008-11-20T09:25:00.003-06:00

Billy and I were in the French Quarter recently and while perusing through junk in a store, we suddenly heard a loud crash,crunching sound. Thinking someone had possibly hit our car, which was parked right outside, we ran out to find this:

Someone had, for no reason at all, sharply turned into a balcony support. It was quite a sight to behold. The driver was the guy in black and to the left of the car in the picture below. He seemed to accept the mishap easily, while others around gathered around and got on their horns and snapped pictures to send to friends. The shop owners said that people run into balcony supports all the time.
When we drove past to go home, we noted the piece missing from the bumper and also, not in view here, a huge, HUGE crater in the side of the car. No wonder the guy was so nonchalant.

Angel's Trumpet Obsession

2008-11-12T17:28:00.007-06:00

Our Angel's trumpet went berserk on us. It's an extraordinary effort for even this tree. After sunset, when the blossoms release an intoxicating perfume, one cannot walk outside without almost feeling assaulted by this foggy odor. The scent wafts through the house even with all windows and doors closed. Even if stifling, it is still pleasant.

Some comparison photos:

Ruthie's burden

Krewe of Boo

2008-11-11T10:30:00.004-06:00

I finally have the chance to post Halloween pics. Billy took all the shots, and next time he will be less shy and will get in front of the subject when he shoots the photos, but it was his first p*ssy handler experience so he was overwhelmed! His other very important duties included pushing the crowds back, keeping roaming hands off the ladies and alerting us to any horse droppings along the route so we don't dance through them or kick them all over each other.

The P*ssyfooters where asked to march in the first ever Mardi Gras scale Halloween parade (why we have not done this before I cannot guess), Krewe of Boo. Specifically, we were asked to wear black and dress as cats. I am not a "playboy bunny/kitty" kind of girl, I go more for the cupcake/burlesque look, so I threw together a furry costume for the event that expressed my view of kitty. I have finally gotten all the fur out of all the corners of my house from cutting faux fur to sew.

I was a bird-lovin' cat:

I had birds swarming over my head
on a pillbox hat, just over my cat mask

I made fur fingerless gloves and furry
boot covers and added a feathery tail

We were interviewed by WDSU about our thoughts on the parade. The news anchor was, er, drawn to the cat suit (Leigh sewed herself into the homemade suit right before the event. Needless to say, she didn't drink too much). For my part, I told them it was about time that we had a parade like this, considering that October is a big tourist month for New Orleans, and that we are a great Halloween town and we ought to be doing more to attract tourists in order to pump up business anyway we can. The guy seemed surprised that a cat-masked chick had a ready answer. I do not know if it aired.

Strangely haunting group photo

Random dance shots:

Really Random Ruthie

2008-11-10T18:44:00.004-06:00

It has come to my attention that Ms. Norma would like a Ruthie update. Recently, I dog sat for a dear friend from our old neighborhood (where in a strange coincidence -or the result of a small epidemic-there are at least three families with dachshunds -not including Ruth-Anne). The little long hair pictured with Ruthie and Mabel is named Sasha. She is a bit over a year and much bossier that Ruthie, who seems mellow in comparison. Ms. Norma: she reminds me of Olive at dinner time!

Taking over the bed

Sunning, yawning and stretching in the yard

Ruth-Anne has gotten loooooooooooooooong

Embracing the Obama Era, by Rebecca Solnit

2008-11-10T11:11:00.004-06:00

Supporting a friend today, Rebecca Solnit, whose article below appears in The Nation.

Citizenship is a passionate joy at times, and this is one of those times. You can feel it. Tuesday the world changed. It was a great day. Monday it rained hard for the first time this season and on election day, everything in San Francisco was washed clean. I went on a long run past several polling places up in the hills around my home and saw lines of working people waiting to vote and contented-looking citizens walking around with their "I Voted" stickers in the sun and mud.

People have again found one of their--our--most buried and powerful desires: to make a better world together. I ran across an online collection of photographs of people crying in public, so moved by what is happening in this country, and I cried a little myself last weekend and choked up again when my local paper ran a story on a woman who'd crossed the country forty years ago for Martin Luther King's funeral and left her polling place Tuesday singing hallelujah, amazed like so many older people that she'd lived to see the day.

You can argue against Barack Obama. I would myself, on the grounds that electoral politics are inherently flawed, corrosive, disempowering. My leftist friends, already cranky about him, warn me that I will be disappointed, but I'm not sure I will, because my expectations are realistic. I love his style, but he's not my messiah.

Who he is is so much better than we had any right to expect in a country left to the jackals for so long, even if he's just a pretty gifted liberal Democrat with an uncanny ability to see beyond the binaries and describe what might lie there.

What he is, in all his hyphenated hybridity, is a sign of a new world being born--not, certainly, the "another world is possible" of the anti-globalization movement, but another world of mingling and crossing borders, of making new ethnicities out of love across old divides. He is a living invitation to come in from the cold for a lot of those who have been left out for decades, for centuries.

He's my age exactly, born that summer the Berlin Wall went up, and I recognize him, a man from the in-between. And I recognize my country's ability to surprise itself and the world as well by being great, just when our monstrousness seemed utterly inescapable.

His day picks up from many that have come before. It's the first great lurch forward for racial justice since the 1960s, that era of the civil rights movement. But it pick ups as well from the 1860s, from the unfinished promise of Abraham Lincoln--the promise over which a great and bloody Civil War was, in part, fought--to undo what that great president called the "original sin" of our country that goes back three centuries and more: race-based slavery.

Obama does not cancel out or heal the legacies of racism, but in becoming the most powerful man in the world he signifies that the game has indeed changed, not just ground to a halt partway to justice and equality. The inner-city kids I see in my neighborhood and the murderous racists I've encountered recently in New Orleans are both going to think about their place in the world and their rights differently from this day forward. And that matters immensely, whatever the man being voted into power today does, or does not, achieve.

I am against heroes generally, and I grieved to see how deferentially people invested their hopes in Howard Dean nationally in 2004, and in Matt Gonzalez in my local mayor's race the year before. The movements that invoked them were, in both cases, so much better than the men. The people who made up those great populist groundswells, as far as I'm concerned, mistook those men--little more than hood ornaments--for the engines powering their movements. And the movements died out when the men went nowhere. Had each of them won, their followers would have given them their power and hoped for the best, rather than keeping it and moving past them.

I thought we were entering an era where we would do without heroes, but we have been given a hero, which is a bit like being given a chainsaw or a credit card: you have to be careful how you use it.

This moment of joy will subside, and those who expected Obama to be flawless or to keep inspiring them forever and a day may be disappointed. Still, his strength is that he speaks the language of community organizers, of "si, se puede," and that, at least for a while, he may spread rather than consolidate power.

When you come down to it though, that's our responsibility, not his. His responsibility is to preside over a nation that must shrink from empire, on economic as well as moral grounds, from the mad consumptive prosperity of the postwar era, and from the profligate environmental destruction that went with it. Perhaps he will be our Gorbachev, a man with the boldness to yield and reduce.

Four Milestones to This Moment

This is a great day that picks up from so many moments that came before. Think of Obama as a new star that lets us pick out all sorts of constellations of history.

We're just short of the ninth anniversary of the first of what now seem like five extraordinary moments in a decade that historians a century hence may consider far more turbulent and transformative than the 1960s. I was there in Seattle on November 30, 1999, when a network of grassroots activists from around the world shut down the World Trade Organization (WTO) ministerial summit and said that the future was not going to be shaped solely by corporations, capital and governments; it belonged to us. And so it did: the WTO and many of the other institutions with plans to strengthen corporate control and power have crashed and burned since then; Latin America has swung far to the left; and finally, of course, in the past few months, neoliberalism and free-market religious fervor bankrupted themselves--and nearly everyone else.

That moment in 1999 was an extraordinary one for popular power. It changed the world in ways no one expected. The year 2008 looks nothing like anything any of us imagined--for better and worse. And we got here on a sprint across three more strange milestones.

Few would normally include 9/11 among uplifting moments, but I've been writing about disasters for the past four years and part of what prompted me to do so was the extraordinary emotion of that week in 2001. We were suddenly citizens. We felt connected, urgent, purposeful, immersed in public life, eager to do something, fully alive in the face of tragedy, as we often feel in such times. Fear, blind patriotism, and malevolent anti-Arab/Islamic sentiment were subsidiary emotions in that moment, but the overriding sentiment was heroic and civic.

That was the real threat to the Bush administration, not Al Qaeda, and they did a fairly masterful job of squelching it overall, though outliers and pockets of insurrection survived. These would include Tomdispatch.com, the wonderful site I've been writing for these last five years, founded by Tom Engelhardt's outrage over the 9/11 news and the need to offer a more thoughtful version of that moment in history.

Recently, he wrote, "When historians look back, it will be far clearer that the 'commander-in-chief' of a 'wartime' country and his top officials were focused, first and foremost, not on the shifting 'central theaters' of the Global War on Terror, but on the theater that mattered most to them--the 'home front' where they spent inordinate amounts of time selling the American people a bill of goods." And smothered a moment when a better nation might have been born.

That surge of idealistic passion and solidarity mostly failed, but I saw in those days that people wanted to be something better, something more committed, something more altruistic. The avenues through which to realize such possibilities were mostly blocked then, or remained invisible to so many of us.

A third extraordinary moment came on February 15, 2003, when a worldwide passion against the invasion of Iraq, supposedly justified by 9/11, led tens of millions to march in protest on every continent. The war went forward anyway, despite the constraints an angry citizenry was able to place on it. Thanks to its marketing of 9/11, the Bush administration had carte blanche to do pretty much what it wanted, at least as far as a docile Congress and an intimidated Senate were concerned, if not an increasingly hostile world. So that third moment, staggering in itself, achieved little. And the fourth was a tragedy as well as a rallying cry.

On August 30, 2005, Hurricane Katrina broke the administration's mandate, revealing its callousness, indifference and incompetence to all those who had not yet recognized them in the conduct of an occupation that was already turning into a nightmare of murder and sectarian warfare at close quarters. But Hurricane Katrina revealed something more important. The people of New Orleans, the mostly poor, mostly dark ones left behind in a "mandatory" evacuation run in a style as laissez-faire as any neoliberalist could ever dream of, were demonized by the media and those in charge, from Mayor Ray Nagin to top Bush officials; and yet so many Americans responded not just with rage and grief, but out of a desire to be with the very people who were suffering most, to care for them, and to share with them. Within perhaps a week, 200,000 volunteers had offered beds in their homes to the displaced; in the years since, uncounted hundreds of thousands of volunteers have gone to New Orleans to lend a hand.

Outrage over the racism of that moment, as well as over the brutality of poverty and deprivation revealed then, awoke in so many a painful idealism and a yearning to be a better nation, as well as a realization of just how much remained to be done in New Orleans--and elsewhere. Some say that Obama's rise came in part from the widespread realization that the wounds of racism were still bleeding, that our country desperately needed to change more. (This was, of course, a white realization; I doubt most people of color were soothed by what progress had been made over the previous half-century.).

Katrina was terrible, but the desires it awoke were the same ones blooming today--the desire to do the truly meaningful work, the work of making a better world and better selves, as well as the desire to find common ground, to live in the open space of idealism and possibility. One of the most moving things to me this week is the realization that racism has been a grief also carried somewhere deep within by many of us who are not its victims. This is where so many of our tears came from, as we saw that that grief might be lifted for a moment, maybe even reduced in this new era.

A Brother in Hope

I began writing about hope in the grimmest days of the millennium, after the war in Iraq had been launched and most of the antiwar activists around me felt utterly defeated, not just in this one endeavor but in any sense that history, and the power that comes with it, could be ours. I began writing about hope to convince them that people have, again and again, had just that power, and have made history, and will make it again.

My hope came not only out of specific stories I had lived through, or even dug up as a historian, but out of a deeper sense of the sheer unpredictability of history, the darkness out of which hope emerges. No one foresaw that five years after George W. Bush stood, seemingly infinitely triumphant, on the deck of an aircraft carrier, he would be slinking off history's stage in ignominy and an antiwar candidate would be taking his place. Not antiwar enough, but far beyond what most hoped for a few years ago.

It's been a wild nine years.

I wrote to Barack Obama Monday night when I decided to send him a copy of Hope in the Dark, my book that came out of the invasion of Iraq and the despair around me. After all, he is my brother in hopefulness. I said to my future president (I was hopeful enough to have called the election early): "My hope resided in the countless stories I had witnessed or researched of popular power--but also resided in the unpredictable and ever-changing nature of history, politics, and popular imagination, the darkness I wanted to redeem from negativity and cast as something numinous instead. Heaven knows you are as unlikely a thing as ever happened in this country, though like any great change we will come to see it or you as inevitable and reread the muddled history of the United States as leading to this moment. But right now, it's still breathtaking."

Today, like yesterday, like tomorrow, is a great day. Remember them. And remember whatever joy, tears, or amazement they have brought you, and don't let go of them. They are the candles you get to bring with you in the darkness in which we will need to look for hope again, and to keep moving onward.

There is no stopping now. The wild mare history has us on her back.

O-BA-MA!

2008-11-03T17:34:00.003-06:00

I am so excited about my OBAMA lights!

WOO-HOO!

Prospect.Everyone Pictures

2008-11-01T14:28:00.003-05:00

Thanks to Billy, my husband for snapping photos! Unfortunately these were a little Nikki-centric rather than event focused, but here are a few shots of the scenes from Friday night on Julia street:

P-footers made individual head dresses that were inspired by art that can be seen around the city. Mine was based on the Banksy girl under the raining umbrella:

If you look closely, you will see beaded rain under the
umbrella (that do not photograph well at night....)

Fellow Pfooters

Watch out! Big Easy Roller Girls!

Everyone marched behind, in front and all around
the Panorama Jazz Band, seen here warming up.

Ernie K-Doe on his amazing throne

Brice Nice Making tunes

Baby Pool Drive-in

Shadow fun

Attention! Please Pass the word!

2008-10-26T17:06:00.003-05:00

Prospect.Everyone party this Thursday! The event list is spectacular! If you would like to print out the flyer to throw around, I reposted the picture at the end of today's post. Click it and Print away!

Among the events, is the SUMO WRESTLING RING!

That's right. You get to challenge ANYONE you wish to throw on a Sumo wresting (very err, padded) suit and throw down in the ring.

Looking for a fight? Dress up as the economy. I'm sure someone will tackle ya.

Are you and a friend up for drumming up some laughs? Dress up as Obama vs. McCain and have at it. The crowd will love you!

Meet up with your challengee and go for it!

prizes for "extra special" bouts, recipients to be determined by judge and ring master/MC Bruce France of Mondo Bizzaro

PS
Could someone please challenge Fred Radtke, AKA the Grey Ghost, or at least dress up as him so people can work out some aggression that way? That would be terrific. I'll be tied up Pussyfooting all over the event...I cannot do both. My crinoline is too big!

2008-10-24T18:42:00.003-05:00

Humid City Posts intelligent Rant Against the Grey Ghost

by NoLA Rising

Grey Ghost Allegedly Issued Summons by NOPD for Criminal Damage

I knew it would be too good to last. Just this week, the Grey Ghost began the onslaught of grey that has been further blighting our beloved city. Despite all of the rationalizing from the “art world” that even Mr. Radtke would be too sensible to paint over a Banksy (often increasing building values from $35,000 USD to $170,000 USD), it is evident he is not. Today, the Grey Ghost was seen and shot on video painting over the Banksy piece known as “No Loitering.”

We have heard tales of business owners being duped before by strong arm tactics and threats from “The Grey Ghost” that the City of New Orleans would issue citations. We don’t believe such things until we hear them first-hand and can verify stories with said business owners. One such tale comes from the Queen Food Store on N. Rampart. The Asian business owner gave permission to Banksy himself, I was told. I verified that with the owner who described Banksy as, “polite guy who asked permission.” The piece morphed from a “Buffer” piece into the piece locally known as the “Boy Flying the Refrigerator Kite”.

Not too long after returning from the Gustav evacuation, a “woman from City Hall” went to visit the Queen Food Store. Carrying no identification card from the city, nor any letter verifying a possible citation, this “woman from City Hall” told the business owner (who requested her name not be listed), that she had 30 days to remove the “graffiti” or she would face a $3,000 fine at the end of that 30 days. When asked why she would have to remove it, she was told that “neighbors had complained” because the wall art by Banksy was racist since it depicted a “black boy stealing a cooler”.

Read that last line again and feel free to scroll back up to the picture. A famous one-color silhouette style of Banksy depicting a boy flying a refrigerator kite (indicative of our massive refrigerator fiasco after Katrina) was called racist by “neighbors” that complained. Anyone with any sense could see that piece was in no way racist, and being offended by such an allegation, I went to canvas the Treme neighborhood and ask people in the neighborhood for anyone offended by such a piece of artwork.

I found no one who claimed to be offended by it, though there were some indifferent folks (one person wanted more color). Furthermore, all of the people I discussed this with in the neighborhood, a cross section of races, no one came to the conclusion that the artwork was racist. In the business as usual, don’t get me involved, NoLA, many of the neighbors refused to give me their name. However, one man was not so scared to speak up.

Charles Williams, a local and store regular, saw the mysterious “woman from City Hall” and was there the day she told the owner of the Queen Food Store that she had to paint her building or face a fine. This mysterious woman was not riding in a car identifiable as being from City Hall, but in a white cargo van, according to Mr. Williams. Ordinarily, this would evoke no further inquiry, but Mr. Williams volunteered the statement, that the “same person that wanted this off that wall (indicating the store wall), was with the same person that painted grey across the street.” WHAT? Can you please repeat that Mr. Williams.

Before I could recover from the shock that was more chagrin than anything, another man who lives almost facing the wall of the store, confirmed. “Yeh, it’s that guy that goes around painting grey all over the neighborhood.” I was obliged to take a tour of the area where this gentleman showed me grey splotch after ugly grey splotch of the style of the Grey Ghost that I am already too familiar with. Indeed, the “woman from City Hall” arrived in a white van with the man who painted grey on the building across the street. What a coincidence!

In the concluding conversation with the business owner, while on the phone with a real estate appraiser, I was able to tell her that she had increased her property value anywhere between $75,000 USD to $250,000 and then devalued it. The appraiser stated that the Banksy piece “would have been worth a fortune if it could have been removed.” If not, “still would have substantially increased her property value to make it a worthwhile sell.” A nearby piece (”Girl Under Umbrella”) that has since been covered with a protective Plexiglas has had an offer to the owner for $50,000 USD and replacement of the wall that would be taken. I’d say we have some serious art here…

Further phone calls around City Hall turned up no evidence that the address of the Queen Food Store had been reported for the “offending” artwork. No one I spoke to in the various offices of City Hall knew anything about it and had heard nothing about a “racist” piece of artwork on North Rampart. When pressed for a description by one office and being told it was a boy flying a refrigerator kite, one lady working there said, “oh, I liked that one. It’s on my way to work. Why would anyone remove that?”

The owner of the “No Loitering” piece has some serious recourse due him for this offense by The Grey Ghost. The piece is clearly politically charged and from a community standpoint, a deeply meaningful piece. Here we have depicted an elder African-American man enjoying the simple life of his rocking chair, not loitering as some may be inclined to imply. No, he is the neighborhood elder, watching over the neighborhood, guarding the neighborhood and letting the “little daddies” of the hood know that loitering is not permissible there. Why is he holding the American flag? Perhaps he is that war-era bastion of strength that kept the integrity of the neighborhood intact. Perhaps he is waving the American flag saying that he too is an American and where is his help?

Perhaps it was buffed today because it was blatantly racist as well. Or perhaps, racism on the other end is the clear answer…we will never know for sure. While we do not know the motivations behind the “Grey Ghost”, anyone reasonably acting person does not go around town with the utter impunity that this man does. What is even worse than his flagrant disregard for the way decent people live, is that the New Orleans Police Department gives him free reign. When the police are called on him, they will pull up and drive on by. However, they will pull up like gangbusters on a lanky, pimply-faced white kid when he calls them. WHY THE DISPARITY IN POLICE ACTION?

We have seen the tactics employed by the Grey Ghost and are not impressed. They are deplorable and weigh on the fears of people who don’t question the “authority” of the person “from City Hall.” This is the type of tactic I call fear-mongering. “Gangs are going to take over your store and run you out of business.” “City Hall will fine you $3,000 dollars.” What other lies have been told by this person who it is rumored believes he was sent here by God to rid New Orleans of graffiti?

On Wednesday of this week, City Business broke the news that Fred Radtke finally had police action taken against him while painting over the infamous Press Street wall, owned by Southern Waterproofing at 2930 Burgundy St. However, it wasn’t his friends at the NOPD, it was the Military Police that finally arrived to bring justice and equality to the situation. As quoted in City Business, Michelle Gallodoro stated, “It’s been going on and on like this. No matter what we say he doesn’t listen. This guy is running around throwing paint on private property, and no one is doing anything to stop him. Everyone knows that he defaces private property without permission and yet he’s never fined or jailed or anything.”

The Press Street wall is what would be considered a “legal wall” in other cities. A legal wall is a place where the business owners grant permission to local graffiti writers to do with the wall as they see fit. It is a wall where expression can flourish and Michelle Gallodoro has supported her wall being used in an artistic fashion, unassociated with gang activity as Radtke suggests. Again, she is quoted in City Business as saying; “We don’t want him here anymore. He is making everything worse.”

A more shocking twist of events occurred on Thursday, October 23^rd, when City Business had discovered the 5^th District Police told the Military Police that this was a civil and not a criminal matter and to tell Ms. Gallodoro to hire a lawyer to sue Radtke. The sad irony here is that when the artists who have been given permission to paint the Press Street wall by the owner are harassed by cops and nearly arrested, while Radtke walks the streets with utter disregard, having already been told by not to touch that particular property through letters and phone calls. Of course, in typical Radtke fashion, he was unavailable for comment. He is always unavailable for comment when it comes to the criticism he justly deserves.

In a city where our friends are murdered at an alarming rate and activists are gunned down on the street while riding bikes, it is no wonder that they let a fanatic like Radtke loose to do his own thing. They have neither the time nor the resources to deal with the “issue”. I return to the question, why then, do they jump when he calls? Because he’s duped the mayor and surrounding police chiefs with tough talk? We have a word for what the Grey Ghost does: vigilantism. Regardless of whether you think what he does is a good idea, ponder this: There are a lot of laws on the books that regular people do not get to enforce.

Operation Clean Sweep, the ego-driven project of The Grey Ghost, in coordination with area police departments, has recently offered rewards of $100 for people calling in to snitch on graffiti writers. The greatest offender (in my own humble opinion) is anti-local business vigilante Radtke and people should call and report him for violation.

Radtke can pretty himself up for the cameras and tap dance all he likes about what is or isn’t conducive to bringing new business to New Orleans, but the grey splotches aren’t any boon to our city either! He can crawl in bed with junior legislators and make laws that don’t address the origin of the issue using outdated policing theories, but the grey splotches aren’t a better approach to fighting graffiti. Capt. Ken Curlee of the State Police can stand next to Radtke on a stage and declare that graffiti on the interstate is a distraction to drivers, but does Capt. Curlee address the numerous traffic signs that Radtke has personally destroyed in the City of New Orleans?

Wouldn’t it be logical, with all of these things considered about Fred Radtke that he be charged under the new graffiti laws (House Bill 163)? The laws the Radtke supports could very well be his own downfall, as the description in the law states that graffiti is any “sign, inscription, design, drawing, diagram, etching, sketch, symbol … name or marking placed upon immovable or movable property in such a manner and in such a location as to deface the property and be visible to the general public.” I call for parity in the case of this hypocrite. Let him be fined, sentenced, forced to clean up his graffiti and given community service to do.

Now, for all intensive purposes comes the news we have all been waiting for. October 23^rd, 2008 is a historic day for Mr. Radtke because it is emblematic of the day his ten year reign of grey ends, for Fred Radtke was finally charged with criminal damage to property. What needs to happen now is for all business owners affected is to sue him in civil court and request criminal charges be filed in those events. What needs to happen now is for the cost of the permits for murals to be lowered to affordable rates; public murals and business art make this city special and the selectively enforced procedures are buried in the mire of a bizarre city code. And, what needs to happen now is that the citizens and the business owners take back the direction of their city and not let a select few determine what is and isn’t right for all of us.

It’s one small step in the right direction showing that NoLA is indeed Rising!

ReX

NoLA Rising

For related reading, check out this story from City Busines s:

See other New Orleans City Business Articles coming out today!

[Editor's Note: This story also is covered (in less depth) by the Times Picayune Newspaper as its front page lead, a story also mirrored on NOLA.com along with a great video - Loki]

Prospect.Everyone

2008-10-24T14:01:00.004-05:00

Artist Miranda Lake and photographer Zack Smith have partnered up to throw a super-bash to help kick off the Prospect.1 happenings. Come one, come all! Click on the announcement for a better view.

I'll be there as a Pussyfooter dressed in frothy pink from head to toe!

Funny Funny

2008-10-05T17:32:00.000-05:00

New Favorite News Show

2008-09-29T20:00:00.003-05:00

With all the craziness going on in our world, Billy and I have been glued to the news tube. Particularly, we love the new Rachel Maddow Show!

We are having a VP debate potluck Thursday, the theme is "Silly Alaskan".

This Cannot be True

2008-09-24T10:02:00.002-05:00

Billy sent me this message today:

"Rich Webster’s recent article in City Business reads like something from a novel, some sort of dystopian Phillip Dick tale.

It would be funny if it wasn’t horrifying. Here is the gist: 'State Rep. John LaBruzzo, R-Metairie, fears Louisiana may be headed towards an economic crisis if the percentage of people dependent on the government is not decreased. His solution: pay impoverished women $1,000 to have their tubes tied so they will stop having babies they can’t afford.'

This is an elected official, no doubt reflecting the interests of his constituents."

Yikey-Ike

2008-09-12T15:36:00.002-05:00

When I was on my honey moon, I spent a night at a nice bed and breakfast in Galveston. On the bedside table was a book called Isaac's Storm about a weather forecaster and the horrible hurricane of 1900 that wiped half the island's face off at the turn of the previous century. I read it through in one night and often thought of the story while reading Rising Tide (in which Isaac also features prominently) and then through the Katrina fiasco.

So I am thinking about Galveston and patiently replacing the plastic on the window panes every time the very blustery wind blows it in (with gusto, too).

Back Home

2008-09-10T10:39:00.003-05:00

To Family and Friends,

We have been back home since late Friday. The town looks relatively fine and we have been scrambling to clean up the yard and get the house ready to receive my little art students next week. Our house was secured thanks to the efforts of Billy's boss , Jelpi Picou, who ran over and nailed all our windows down as we had not repaired them all since we began the renovation.

Our giant Angel's trumpet looks like it was caught trying to streak from the bathroom to the bedroom, but it is still alive, even if reconfigured. And, who'd-a-thunk it but all our mint died. I didn't think you could kill that stuff.

I can't say that I can blog about the feelings conjured up by the scare, except in summary. There were tears, flashbacks, panicky-breathing attacks, wondering what the alternative life plan would be, etc. Your-run-of-the-mill-PTSD symptoms, I guess. That was not fun, but the first bruiser had to pass by sometime; it is to be expected. In the end we are very relieved and have a better grip.

Well, Nola got a much needed break from this one, but the rest of Louisiana got a thumping. A friend from Ville Platte reported that a tree fell on her folks' house, car AND boat, so put thoughts out there for them.

2008-09-02T13:22:00.001-05:00

Correction. Waiting a few days to leave in order to avoid the bottleneck. We would rather that than sit still in traffic for hours after traveling for ten.

2008-09-02T12:10:00.001-05:00

Relieved. Starting to head home.

Feeling for those who were nailed by the eye, but thankful that it wasn't as bad as it could have been.

On Gustav

2008-09-01T10:01:00.002-05:00

To Family and Friends,

Billy and I were on our yearly visit to family in Maine this month. We usually beat the heat and leave for the hottest part. Unfortunately, it usually means that we get back just after the anniversary of Katrina. We were scheduled to start the drive home Saturday, but we officially flipped our status from vacationers to "evacuaters" and stayed with friends in New Haven and with Billy's dad in NYC.

Billy's boss, who hails from Houma, was a rock and secured our houses for us before he left for Oxford, MS. Lesson learned: prepare for a hurricane in July. Seems like a duh, but we just didn't do it. We purchased a new home after Katrina, in part to underscore our loyalty to the city and in part to be able to live in a place that fit our work and living needs. The market plummeted and we decided to hold onto our first home on Carondelet in order to maintain financially. But now we are worried about two properties and have twice the work to batten down...but worrying about material objects is silly in the grand scheme of things.

I have friends who stayed behind. I think they figured if they rode out Katrina, they will be fine.

We are watching the news and I am checking emails and staring at this excellent website.

Seeing that the storm is not that strong is not that comforting to me as I will remain jumpy due to Katrina shell shock resulting from the rude awakening after the deceptive lull that came after that storm before the flooding. The reporting on the industrial canal is freaking me out.

That is where I stand now. I cannot decide if I will post describing the emotional post-traumatic responses I experienced as early as Tuesday. It wasn't pretty.

Whoopie Pies

2008-08-29T21:28:00.004-05:00

In Maine. Introduced the LA nephews to Whoopie Pies.

They Likey.

Finding ways to ignore Gustav.

Next Phase Mary Portrait

2008-06-12T21:22:00.003-05:00

Quick sketch

Doesn't look like her yet, sketched her and transferred outline of sketch to big paper (2x 3 feet).

Bulding up layer after layer of color.

Cannot wait to get those eyes darkened!

Maaary Po-trit

2008-06-02T13:28:00.004-05:00

Phase one of new project: Portrait of Mary Tuminaro. She plays accordion, sings real nice and plays drums, too. Mostly with The Bruisers. You should go see her sing every other Thursday. She might inspire you too.

Maaary

Definitely embroidering the front flowers....just trynig to decide whether to use oils or gouache with the silk thread.

Cheese Roll 2008 - Gloucester, England

2008-05-27T23:45:00.002-05:00

Crazy bastards.

The Colorized Version

2008-05-27T18:14:00.004-05:00

Paper cut-out version

Though the yellow would not be its proper self in the process of becoming digital:

Violet Has a New Brother!

2008-05-17T19:53:00.002-05:00

New Nephew Forest Christopher Greer!

My sister, Mandy and her husband Jess welcomed Forest into the fam this week! Yay!

I assume that the photo is by Manna...

Fantasy Poppy, 2008

2008-04-29T13:22:00.002-05:00

Cut paper, gouache

11x14

Finally

2008-04-03T17:11:00.002-05:00

Finished the darn thing.

Greta and a Cat

2008-03-12T07:58:00.003-05:00

A Welcome to the World to Dickie and Christine's second child, Greta!

I made her a world-warming present, this little kitty pillow out of old cashmere sweaters:

Yay!

What I've Been Up To

2008-03-08T22:04:00.004-06:00

Making an album cover for the band Gold and Glass. I just finished step three right this second. Photos are wonky because I am tired and the scanner isn't big enough for the thing. It is a silhouette cut-out and eventually will be accentuated with embroidered flowers and lines. The rule was four colors only, (black, white and two pinks) so texturize, texturize, texturize is my current mantra. The boys wanted a car parked under a Japanese Saucer Magnolia tree, with a suggestion of a person in the car.

Step One: Sketch (blown up from 1x1 inch)

Step Two: First Mock up (9.5" x 9.5") Sharpie and Chalk

Step Three: Final Draft Base (white silhouette shapes over black gouache layer)

Next step: days of embroidery. Days.

Lunar Eclipse

2008-02-22T11:52:00.005-06:00

Sat outside during the lunar eclipse drinking Prosecco with my neighbor, waiting for a break in the clouds in order to catch a glimpse of the eclipse. The clouds never parted long enough during the sliver-moon phase for good shots BUT I did get a few interesting photos around 9:45. It was a beautiful night, with the clouds rushing past with the that swiftness you see so often here in New Orleans.

Sunday Sunset on Jackson Avenue

2008-02-19T23:54:00.002-06:00

2008-02-18T12:13:00.004-06:00

Random Ruthie

2008-02-18T12:05:00.003-06:00

Ruthie's growth has plateaued and I am crazy busy so I am starting "Random Ruthie" pictures to replace Ruthie Monday. Here's the first:

Here We Are!

2008-02-11T17:16:00.000-06:00

Billy took these pictures of The 13th Ward Marching Band and the Cadiz Creepers, marching in the Krewe of Pals:

A nice, dreamy picture of Ethan, Kristen and John H (with a very pleased unkown man in red).

A friend of mine sent this to me and it's from a man named Renso's blog:

It's a very cool concept-blog where he took pictures every hour of Mardi Gras and posted them!
Cannot wait til next year!

Cadiz Creepers

2008-01-31T22:54:00.001-06:00

Gonna be a ribbon girl in the Cadiz Creepers, marching in the the Krewe of Pal's. Here are our colors:

I am super excited. I am hoping that my ribbon moves look a little like this:*

or this:

But really would love and dream to look look this:

Our poster:

Rolling at 10:30 am

Our Route (With Stops):

It will take us awhile to get to the quarter, but look for us!

*ribbon dance and color pictures come from the net. The poster and map courtesy of the Krewe of Pal's.

Ruthie-Bird-Dog

2008-01-21T15:06:00.000-06:00

Been making doll-puppet-thingies lately. Dressed Ruthie up with some materials and it's official. She hates costumes. No Barkus for her. I had to hold soprosata up in the air behind the (hence, shaky) camera to get her to stop sulking,

spoiled little thing that she is.

Believe it or not, the skeleton and doll-head-in-progress were not posed.

Too bad she looks REALLY good as a bird. with a bow. Sigh.

Change the Y to I and add ER

2008-01-20T16:42:00.000-06:00

As if I was not busy enough...

I have started teaching art again at the International School of Louisiana (aka ISL). I started out there when the 7th graders were in 1rst grade, just one year after the school was founded, in order to start up an art program. I left to go back to art school.

I called in just to see if I could pick up a few hours and suddenly I am working every morning.

As most teachers (and parents) know, when you get back into a school building, it takes approximately three days to get whatever illness is smeared all over the desks, pencils, etc. The more involved you are, the better the guarantee.

Welll. Went in on Monday to talk things over. Started teaching Tuesday. Felt the weird itchiness in the throat Wednesday. Fell prey to the nasty bugger of a flu Thursday. I have been laid out FLAT -which never, ever happens to me since Friday afternoon.

This season's flu rrrrreally hurts. I missed Krewe de Vieux AND the ball!

Oh, well. Just have to hunker down and get my Cadiz Creeper costume ready for Krewe of Pals!

But more of that later.....

Ruthie Monday

2008-01-14T14:59:00.001-06:00

Back from the Family Hollar Days.

What the "H" I been doin'

2007-12-29T18:34:00.001-06:00

Well I have not been posting as much this year. Maybe this hu-jungous house project has something to do with it. My first post-Katrina freak out purchase was a dog. That I did by myself. But together, my husband and I committed ourselves to New Orleans in the best way we knew how: to suck every ounce of equity from our starter home and take on a colossal dinosaur of a formerly glorious house in a sketchy neighborhood. We've jacked it up, stabilized it, re-plastered like we oughtta and all that good stuff -and we still have a ways to go, of course. We have recently been able to paint, and well, me being a pesky artist and all...I experiment. Here's one trial run below.

I call it "Hibiscus in the TV Room"

Did Anybody Notice?

2007-12-26T17:30:00.000-06:00

The crazy changes in the light between 4:55 and 5:05 this evening? There was an omninous yellow tint to everything. Here's what I caught after running to get my camera.

Speaking of CHILL

2007-12-26T17:19:00.001-06:00

We finally got heat for the whole downstairs under control on Christmas Eve so we could feel as cozy as our front parlor looks on Christmas morning! After all the work we've done, we can sit in it without makeshift ski masks on!

Yay!

These is the only before shot I could find (taken in July), BUT it was taken BEFORE we started grinding out the cracks in the plaster and fixing the gaping holes in the ceiling! I just finished painting before I went home this month to visit my family in Maine.

Nola Nik

Blogger No More

Black and Gold...and PINK in the Streets Sunday

America's Team: The New Orleans Saints

New Orleans Night out for Haiti: Give, Eat and Drink All in One Go!

Billy's on Salon.com Today.

Why can't the NYT and WP agree on Haiti?

Ways to Give this Season and Have a Blast While Doing It! Part Two: The Camel Toe Lady Steppers Toe Down

Ways to Give this Season and Have a Blast While Doing It! Part One: The Pussyfooters Blush Ball

Newborn Induced Hiatus

Banned Books Week 2009

What I've Been Doing These Last Ten Months

Katrina Memory

One Book One New Orleans Big Event!

Ethan Brown's "Shake the Devil Off" to be released Sept 1, 2009; Author to be on Political Panel at Rising Tide Conference

Louisiana Artist Loren Schwerd Shows at AMMO

Just When You Think It's Just You, the Husband and The Hot Dog

Miranda Lake: Reclamation: 360˚

Billy Sothern Has a Blog

Update: Dave Eggers Comes to Town

Dave Eggers Comes to Nola to Talk About His Latest Book, Zeitoun

The Book.

The Author.

Praise.

AN EXCERPTFROM ZEITOUN.

Examples from the show

You're Invited

Bye, Mabel

Where I Have Been

Random Parade on Jackson Avenue

Pussyfooting in Muses 2009

Mardi Gras 2009

Mardi Gras 2009

We Second Lined for Ms. Antoinette Today

Pussyfooters in 2009 Muses Video

Pussyfooters March in Muses Tonight!

Pussyfooters March Informally Sunday in Lyons Club Parade

Violet Portrait

Au Pied de Cochon

Avec l'apéro

Entrées

Foie gras

Cochon

Volaille

Bison & Cerf

Agneau

Abats

Poisson

Les à-côtés

Desserts

Boissons

Cafés

Bières

Food in Montreal

Montreal

Pussyfooter Blush Ball

It's Snowing Magnolias

2 suspects in Quarter murder turned in by their mothers, police look for a third

Police release sketches in shooting of French Quarter bartender

by The Times-Picayune Monday January 19, 2009, 9:13 AM

Rachel Maddow on Bush's Latest Comments on Katrina Response

Not Very Cheerful

As police dither, holdup clues grow cold

Posted by Billy Sothern, Guest Columnist, The Times-Picayune

December 29, 2008 6:32PM

Black and Glitter Christmas Tree

Katrina's Hidden Race War

Katrina's Hidden Race War

In New Orleans's Algiers Point, white vigilantesshot African-Americans with impunity

Random Ruthie

God Lawd is that SNOW?!!!

No More William Jefferson, YAY!

Pussyfooter Ball to Benefit Women and Children at The Metropolitan Center

Thanksgiving Dinner at the House

Thanksgiving at the Race Track

Big Oops in the Quarter

Angel's Trumpet Obsession

Krewe of Boo

Really Random Ruthie

Embracing the Obama Era, by Rebecca Solnit

AN EXCERPT
FROM ZEITOUN.

by The Times-Picayune
Monday January 19, 2009, 9:13 AM

In New Orleans's Algiers Point, white vigilantes
shot African-Americans with impunity