Lower Ninth Ward Today: II

On a porch, a glass angel with see-through wings and fiber optics:





Correction: The photos shown in this series are from the area bounded by Claiborne Ave, Florida Ave, The Inner Harbor Canal and around Choctaw Street:

Map from Mapquest.com

Sorry. I forgot that I crossed Claiborne.

Lower Ninth Ward Today: I

Haven't done this yet. Here's the first:



The pictures I post are from a batch taken in the Lower Ninth Ward Saturday, April 22, 2006. All shots are from the area bordered by the canal, Claiborne Avenue, St. Claude Avenue and Lizardi Street:

Signage

St. Charles and Erato

Usually, these signs would be up for a month or so after the election. Today, I was shocked to see that they were already gone. I think that Mitch and Ray must have recycled. Good for them.

I have been pretty quiet about the elections. I am sitting here reading, watching and waiting just like everyone else. I voted for Mitch, though I really wanted to vote for Ray...I really did. More on that later, though. Festering up for a good blab during the run-off. Putting a finger on something political in New Orleans is such a crapshot. That's what it feels like right now. Hell, it always has. But this waiting thing that hangs over the city is really illuminated by the election debates. It's part of the trauma.

How can we really know what lies ahead?

Ruthie Monday II

Technically, I know, it's Tuesday but I am really busy starting up a new business right now. Sorry Ruthie Fans...
I think these are neat, even if a little blurry.

In the Narnian forest:

Shaking Hands With Ray

Ray was out today, on Martin Luther King Boulevard and Claiborne, shaking hands and talking with the public. I was in the passengers seat, but Miranda got to slap hands with him and we got this Lady-of-Guadalupe-ish flyer to boot.

Windows of NOLA III

Harmony Street between Magazine and Camp

Coliseum Theater Update

The Coliseum

Today

Neighbors pay their respects

Ruthie Monday I

By popular request, Mondays will, for the time being, be "Ruthie Mondays". Apparently there are those who want to see her development, and I can spread the puppy love.

First up: Miranda and Ruth-Anne

(dedicated to Ms. Norma)

photo by Miranda

A little lagniappe:

Good Friday

I always forget, but every Good Friday at around 10:30 in the morning, a procession walks up Erato and by my house at Carondelet. They sing songs about Jesus carrying the cross. It surprises me every year. It's a wee bit jarring in the bright sunlight...

I took these from my balcony:

The Huey P

"The Huey P" Bridge, coming down to land in Bridge City on the West Bank

Huey P had his finger in a lot of pots. Read All the King's Men if you are interested.

Driving Along River Road

Sights on the way to Bantings Nursery, out in Bridge City on the West Bank:

This photo is not a commercial.

These buildings remind me of a Charles Demuth painting.

Egypt, Charles Demuth, 1927*

*This image is from Artchive

blip

Miranda Lake's Latest: Diluvian Reign

photo from http://jonathanferraragallery.com/current.html

Miranda is having a show tonight at Jonathan Ferrara, on Carondelet. I helped her lug all the work down for it; it looks great! She works with specially developed, original photo negatives, sun-exposed photos of different subjects and surrounds them in encaustic -which is beeswax mixed with oil pigment and damar crystals. I was working with melted crayon before she showed me the technique.

Thanks Meeranda!

Review from The Times Picayune:
WAXING ELOQUENT

With her first show, Miranda Lake paints herself into the pantheon of promising N.O. artists
5/21/04

By Doug MacCash Art critic

Once in a rare while a rookie baseball player hits a home run his very first time at bat in the big leagues. Figuratively speaking, that's just what 34-year-old New Orleans artist Miranda Lake has done with "Elysian Fields," her excellent debut solo exhibition of encaustic (colored bees wax) paintings at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery.

The title refers to the idyllic ancient Greek version of heaven, with its glowing landscape and perfumed air. But Lake's vision of the Elysian Fields is much harsher and stranger, including stark black-and-white photos floating in frozen surrealistic deserts or atop cold wind-blown seas. The few trees are coated with human eyes. Raindrops seem to be falling upward. Gaps between ocean waves reveal patches of road map. Strange diagrams -- a hybrid of Egyptian hieroglyphics and chemistry-class schematics -- float across the horizon. Fish vertebrae hover in the sky. It's an odd, lonely place, made sadder and more mysterious by the puddles and droplets of translucent gray, pale blue and brown wax that coat everything like a light snowfall.

Lake's use of wax paint to depict the afterlife is no accident. As she learned studying encaustic technique at the Anderson Ranch Art Center in Colorado last year, the Egyptians used colored wax to create funeral portraits 2,500 years ago -- and many survive to this day. In a recent phone conversation she pointed out that she's begun applying that funereal-art tradition to her own family. Childhood photos of her late father and late brother appear in many of her new works.

"Primarily I'm working with family photos," she said, "so I guess the work is fairly personal, but it has universal appeal I hope. There are archetypical images of childhood and growing. I'm trying to figure out some of the choices made by people in my family. If they knew how their lives were going to turn out, how would they have lived their lives differently. I think there's a sense of fate or destiny in some of these pictures."

There certainly is a sense of destiny in the pictures. Lake, who says she's only painted seriously for one year, is destined to be among the best of the generation of young artists making the Crescent City art scene so vivid and vital.

Race and Magazine Update

The space that was formally known as the "Little Rue" is now Mojo's, another coffee shop:

Tested the stuff, it's pretty good.

Buck Owens and Hee Haw

I was watching The White Bitch (explanation A, explanation B) on Saturday night and he dedicated his show to Buck Owens.

This is The White Bitch to the left.* AKA Michael Patrick Welch





Mr. Buck was a part of my little life on the mountain in Maine as a co-host of Hee Haw -a show that I watched religiously and which made me laugh and laugh and laugh. Did anybody else watch that show? I ESPECIALLY liked the cornfield jokes. Try one.

So this is my dedication to him.
By the way, aren't these jackets great?**


*www.offbeat.com/images/staff/welch.jpg
** www.top-country-songs.com/country-music-stars.html

More Snausage Dogs

For Marco, a few Bassett mixes (These are Miranda Lake's pooches):

Mr. Whipple
Catahoola Bassett

Stretch
Bassett Sumpin' Sumpin' Mix

Meet Ruth-Anne!

There are puppies everywhere in New Orleans right now. Sit in front of the Big Rue and loads will walk by. I know my mood is much better now that I finally found my Ruth-Anne:

She is quite a comfort!

What a Mood, Laid Bare For You

You know you love a city when you are hearing love song lyrics meant to be from a man to a woman and you are thinking about your city. by city I mean people, structures, neighborhood vibes, everything.

I am going to lay myself out as perhaps too cheesy, but here you have a moment of my internal landscape and dialogue, illuminated by sound, smell, memory, sorrow and futility. If you now what I'm talking about, give me a sign.

I was on the corner of Simon Bolivar and Washington, in my car at a stop light. The windows were down and the temperature was a bit too warm with a breeze that cancelled out the edge. I smelled fried oysters and saw no place from where the smell wafted from and gave it up to the breeze.

My impulse was to take a picture, but I didn't see the frame, just signs stuck into the narrow, unmowed neutral ground. No one was around except a few teen-aged girls fake-tousling in a parking lot. But this song was playing and I was feeling overwrought for this city and nostalgic for a corner that used to teem with people out and about. Music blaring. Yelling. Baby noise. Moma noise. Hollas and holla backs.

This ever happened to you? A confluence of imagery, smells and music that create a mood beyond the actual environment. It's different from nostalgia because it talks about today and powerlessness, too. To me, and maybe this is trauma, this city is alive like a human. Maybe that's what drew me here to stay. This is not a ghost town, but it isn't a proper town right now, either. It's stagnant and it could rot or be glorious but why are we so stuck?

About That Last House

A reliable source says that beginning March 15, that house was slowly disassembled by it's owner rafter by rafter. The Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans is trying to find a way to save it before it collapses. This isn't the first time a house has been exposed to the elements for a natural, therefore legal demolition; the house mentioned below also met it's fate due to natural demolition. People cannot simply demolish historic properties, these buildings can be rehabilitated and brought back an original beauty that contributes to the architectural character of this city.

Another agency that is trying to save houses in Central City (which they are trying to rename Lower St. Charles Corridor) is Felicity Street Redevelopment Center. We bought our house from them.

Another One Lost

This house is located on Baronne street, close to Felecity street. This house didn't look like this about two weeks ago. The roof and back walls have disappeared since then. How many families could this one hold? Baronne street is two blocks from St. Charles, the main parade route for Mardi Gras and grand thoroughfare for New Orleans. It did not flood; it's in the historic footprint of the city.

Pause

Central City, MLK and Claiborne

My House is Fixed!

When we moved to New Orleans from Brooklyn, my partner and I decided that we would never leave. We were married in a beautiful Treme house garden a year later. Shortly thereafter, we began to look into buying a home. Having been obsessed with houses since I can remember (I was going to be an architect from the age of ? on and would draw up house plans in my spare time -which I still do), I fell in love with the architecture of New Orleans and would drive around every neighborhood in the city, staring at derelict homes waiting to be rescued and dreaming the potential.
My husband was hesitant, to say the least. He was looking for more of a small-job-fixer-upper. So when I came to him with this house, he was, well, not enthused:

Picture by Felicity Street Redevelopment

There was a large hole in it, there was no bottom floor (just dirt and sills), no plumbing, no electricity...on the bright side, some walls were framed up upstairs. Despite all this, I managed to convince him of my vision and we set to work on the huge project. It's amazing how many decisions have to be made, from what kind of door knobs to use to where to place every light fixture. We had to go to Baton Rouge to find doors that fit the proportions of the house, etc. The worst was when we had to move in before there was electricity and water and the dogs were constantly grayed by sheetrock dust, which was everywhere. But that time soon passed.

In the end, we had a beautiful home that matched our needs perfectly. The only way we could have ever lived in such a beautiful house was to resurrect one from the near dead:

Picture by Felicity Street Redevelopment

We are situated on the alluvial plane, as I insisted that we buy a house ten feet above sea level. Having just read Rising Tide, I wasn't feeling trust. Unfortunately, the winds ripped our roof right off and all the ceilings caved in. The entire uptown side of the house had to be gutted due to water damage. The good news is that my studio was the only room that did not cave in...all my artwork, the bass and the amp that my friend had moved into the room (out of his house in the Bywater) for protection survived untouched.

We knew early on that the roof had peeled off due to the satellite images that we could access via internet from an Oxford, MS cafe. Billy and a friend, Wallace, snuck back into the city immediately in order to secure our houses from further water damage (luckily for the city of New Orleans -not so for other states, there was a drought during many of the evacuation months, thereby saving many houses from even further water damage). He wrote a story about it for a periodical. Read it here: Carondelet Street or Bust.

Well, it has been over six months, and we finally have our house back and in full working order, so we have something to celebrate! The last hole in the ceiling was fixed last week and the last coat of paint went on Friday.

We are very lucky. Even though it was like going back to square one, renovating the house, living in it unfinished, it was nothing compared to what Slimbo and his family are going through, who received three feet of water and whose home is in the proposed green space for New Orleans. Nagin said yesterday, "rebuild at your own risk"* to those in New Orleans East and The Lower Ninth Ward. It's been half a year and we still have to sit with our hands tied while leaders running for re-election cover their bottoms. Thank you, thank you. Feeling bitter for my neighbors.

Further, and my last harp, here on the alluvial plane, there are falling down, gorgeous houses and empty lots galore. A block away, two days ago, a house just crumbled in on itself. This leads me to my new series for the week: Houses that could've been (fallen since the storm), lots that stand empty and houses that are in danger of falling any second as people are scratching their heads wondering where to put people in the "new footprint".

The first in the series:

It was a beautiful two story blue house before the storm. Could have housed at least two families.

* "But even as refused to deny any neighborhood the right to rebuild, Nagin warned residents of the Lower 9th Ward and "the lowest-lying areas of New Orleans East" that the Army Corps of Engineers has told him those areas are likely to flood once again if a Katrina-style hurricane hits New Orleans this year or in 2007." -www.nola.com

* part 2, from CNN
Earlier in the day, he told "The Times-Picayune," that he wasn't going to sugarcoat it. He warned that residents should are have no illusions. Struggling neighborhoods should not expect police patrols, functioning sewers, or even weekly garbage collection.

CNN's Susan Roesgen was there tonight. She's watching the developing story.

Susan, "The Times-Picayune" headline today was, "Rebuild but at Your Own Risk." Was that the mayor's message as well tonight?

SUSAN ROESGEN, CNN GULF COAST CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Anderson, the message still was rebuild at your own risk, but he didn't talk about some of the other things that the paper had said he was going to talk about tonight.

In fact, he presented a really rosy view of the future of the city of New Orleans -- a smarter, safer, stronger city. This new blueprint, he says, calls for residents to be able to rebuild wherever they want, but the plan comes with a warning.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

RAY NAGIN, MAYOR, NEW ORLEANS: The Army Corps of Engineers has warned me that some of our most -- our lowest-lying areas of New Orleans East and in the lower Ninth Ward, will have some flooding from levees overtopping if another hurricane travels along the same path as Katrina. Even with the restoration of higher, better fortified levees.

They Be Home in a Hour

Central City

On Sunday, the Mardi Gras Indians came out in a vigil for New Orleans, calling people back with their drums. The neighborhoods are still empty and houses are falling down left and right.

St. Patricks Day Parade 2006, New Orleans

Never really went out for the parade before. I am
still
very
tired.

No More Coliseum Theater

The Coliseum Theater, in the Lower Garden District, burned down recently.

This is the only photo I have, taken by Billy Sothern.

I guess I was hoping that they would fix it up again, as they always have -over and over again, as trucks occasionally backed into the sign or wind damaged it. The whole facade was ripped off during the storm, and they fixed it again.

But, as I was driving home down Prytania yesterday, I found this:





I don't know how, but I can still be shocked at the destruction of a building, even after being surrounded by the ravaged or destroyed architecture of the city for months and months. Even after all the trash piles, this is so depressing.