Friday, May 05, 2006
I must be hanging out at the wrong bars...
From a cnn.com interview
A few hours after the interview was over, we got a call from The Edge's
guitar technician saying the musician was going to a few bars off the beaten
path and might be coaxed into a jam session with a local band. Would we want to
go? He asked.
We went to Bank Street Bar first. At most, there may have been 30
people inside. The Edge came in and greeted folks, then played a few songs for
what must have been one of his smallest audiences in decades.
Then we moved on to Maple Leaf, another music joint, where The Edge
hung out with a wildly talented trombone player from New Orleans named Trombone Shorty, who at 20, is already a legend.
Ezrin, the one-time Pink Floyd producer, said The Edge has enough clout
to move mountains. But the night I saw The Edge jamming, I got the impression
he's happy just doing what he can to help lift this battered city's struggling
musicians.
I must be hanging out at the wrong bars...
From a cnn.com interview
A few hours after the interview was over, we got a call from The Edge's
guitar technician saying the musician was going to a few bars off the beaten
path and might be coaxed into a jam session with a local band. Would we want to
go? He asked.
We went to Bank Street Bar first. At most, there may have been 30
people inside. The Edge came in and greeted folks, then played a few songs for
what must have been one of his smallest audiences in decades.
Then we moved on to Maple Leaf, another music joint, where The Edge
hung out with a wildly talented trombone player from New Orleans named Trombone Shorty, who at 20, is already a legend.
Ezrin, the one-time Pink Floyd producer, said The Edge has enough clout
to move mountains. But the night I saw The Edge jamming, I got the impression
he's happy just doing what he can to help lift this battered city's struggling
musicians.
Thursday, May 04, 2006
RTA defaults on bond payment
This is really too bad. It's going to make it all the more difficult for local municipal entities to secure funds in the future.
BATON ROUGE, La. -- The New Orleans Regional Transit Authority failed toFull story here
make a $6 million debt payment this week, becoming the first government
agency
default in Louisiana since Hurricane Katrina.
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
False Alarm #1
Looks like that Tropical Depression notice from the National Hurricane Center was a fake sent out by a hacker. More info here.
I'm sure they'll start coming out soon enough, it is slightly comforting to know that they're not starting months before hurricane season at least.
I'm sure they'll start coming out soon enough, it is slightly comforting to know that they're not starting months before hurricane season at least.
Brinkley on Katrina
Historian Douglas Brinkley has quite the interesting article in the T-P. It also appears that he is releasing a pretty quick history of Hurricane Katrina this week, which I might run out and buy if it didn't have 700+ pages. I don't read anything over 10 pages these days, just too challenging on my Post-K brain.
Some of Brinkley's most interesting points come from Nagin's foe in the runoff, Mitch Landrieu:
Brinkley also has this to say about our Governor:
I doubt this will have any affect on New Orleans, the biggest problem is that it is going to affect the perception outside of New Orleans, which is by far our biggest and most important challenge right now. We can't do this ourselves, it's going to take years, and we need the rest of the country to be behind us, bumbling elected officials or not.
Read the full article here
Some of Brinkley's most interesting points come from Nagin's foe in the runoff, Mitch Landrieu:
Landrieu, Nagin's opponent in the runoff, is quoted by Brinkley describing
his efforts to find Nagin the day after the storm to ask him "why school
buses and those belonging to the Regional Transit Authority hadn't been
activated to transport evacuees." Landrieu first encountered Sally Forman,
according to the article, who said she was looking for Chief Administrative
Officer Brenda Hatfield, who would know where the bus keys were.
"It would have seemed farcical if the circumstances hadn't been so
dire," Brinkley writes.
The article says Landrieu eventually found Nagin on the
27th floor of the Hyatt hotel, which had become the emergency operations
center and sleeping quarters for city administrators and where Brinkley says
-- in one of the loaded phrases that pepper the article -- Nagin was
"hunkered down" and "cloistered."
Landrieu tells Brinkley that Nagin was "sitting in a room, trying to
pick up information from the TV and radio." After Landrieu asked Nagin if he
needed anything, the article says, "Nagin stared straight ahead and answered,
'We're looking for a command-and-control structure.' "
Brinkley then summarizes: "To some observers, the naive politician was
turning into a pathetic figure, the city's skipper who didn't know what a boom
was."
Brinkley also has this to say about our Governor:
As for Blanco, Brinkley credits her with working hard and sleeping little, but
suggests she was beyond her depth. He notes that in a phone call with the
president the night of the storm, Blanco asked for "everything you've got," but
didn't specify what she needed. And he quotes Brown, who has since resigned from
FEMA, as saying Blanco "reminded me of an aunt I have whom I love to pieces. But
I would never trust this aunt to run a state or be a mayor. . . . I just see
Blanco as this really nice woman who is just way beyond her level of ability."
I doubt this will have any affect on New Orleans, the biggest problem is that it is going to affect the perception outside of New Orleans, which is by far our biggest and most important challenge right now. We can't do this ourselves, it's going to take years, and we need the rest of the country to be behind us, bumbling elected officials or not.
Read the full article here
Nice Jazzfest piece
from the NYTimes Travel pages. My favorite passage follows, as it is so illustrative of the people who come each and every year...
Lindsay Sablosky works in San Francisco's publishing industry but said she looks forward to the festival as a gathering of her "Jazzfest family." Her group of college friends and assorted hangers-on chose Jazzfest as an annual gathering spot in 1988, and have returned every year when the Fairground gates open for two weekends of music. The group rents a house in the Uptown neighborhood and spends the days between the festival soaking up New Orleans culture through its clubs and restaurants.
"The core group has about 18 to 20 people and they're from New York, North Carolina, Los Angeles, the Bay Area" said Ms. Sablosky, 42. "In an average year we have a dozen come out. It's good to see old friends, but we could rent a place in the mountains and it would be the same. We come here for the music. In 18 years, it's never disappointed."
Lindsay Sablosky works in San Francisco's publishing industry but said she looks forward to the festival as a gathering of her "Jazzfest family." Her group of college friends and assorted hangers-on chose Jazzfest as an annual gathering spot in 1988, and have returned every year when the Fairground gates open for two weekends of music. The group rents a house in the Uptown neighborhood and spends the days between the festival soaking up New Orleans culture through its clubs and restaurants.
"The core group has about 18 to 20 people and they're from New York, North Carolina, Los Angeles, the Bay Area" said Ms. Sablosky, 42. "In an average year we have a dozen come out. It's good to see old friends, but we could rent a place in the mountains and it would be the same. We come here for the music. In 18 years, it's never disappointed."
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
We need more press like this....
from sportswriter Peter King, after driving around the gulf coast recently:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/writers/peter_king/05/02/mmqbte/
I sense that we in this country have Katrina fatigue. The New York Times reported as much recently, saying that people in some of the areas that welcomed Katrina evacuees last September are sick of hearing about the hurricane, the flooding and the aftermath.
Well, my wife and I were in a car last Wednesday that toured the hardest-hit area of New Orleans, the Lower Ninth Ward. We worked a day at a nearby Habitat for Humanity site on Thursday, and we toured the Biloxi/Gulfport/Long Beach/Pass Christian gulf shore area last Friday. And let me just say this: I can absolutely guarantee you that if you'd been in the car with us, no matter how much you'd been hit over the head with the effects of this disaster, you would not have Katrina fatigue.
What I saw was a national disgrace. An inexcusable, irresponsible, borderline criminal national disgrace. I am ashamed of this country for the inaction I saw everywhere.
I mentioned my outrage to the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, on Thursday. He shook his head and said, "Tell me about it.'' Disgust dripped from his voice.
What are we doing in this country?
"It's been eight months since Katrina,'' said Jack Bowers, my New Jersey friend and Habitat for Humanity guide through the Lower Ninth Ward, as he took us through deserted streets where nothing, absolutely nothing, was being done about the wasteland that this place is.
"Eight months!" he said. "And look at it. When people talk to me about New Orleans, they say, 'Well, things are getting back to normal down there, aren't they?' I tell them things are a long, long way from normal, and it's going to be a long time before it's ever normal. And I tell them they've never seen anything like this.''
Our Mississippi guide, Josh Norman of the Biloxi Sun-Herald, put it this way: "People outside of here are tired of hearing about it. They've moved on to the next news cycle.''
How can we let an area like the Lower Ninth Ward sit there, on the eve of another hurricane season, with nothing being done to either bulldoze the place and start over, or rebuild? How can Congress sit on billions of looming aid and not release it for this area?
I can't help but think that if this were Los Angeles or New York, that 500 percent more money -- and concern -- would have flooded into this place. And I can't help but think that if the idiots who let the levees down here go to seed had simply been doing their jobs, we'd never have been in this mess in the first place -- in New Orleans, at least. Other than former FEMA director Michael Brown, are you telling me that no others are paying for this with their jobs? Whatever happened to responsibility?
Am I ticked off? Damn right I'm ticked off. If you're breathing, you should be morally outraged. Katrina fatigue? Hah! More Katrina news! Give me more! Give it to me every day on the front page! Every day until Washington realizes there's a disaster here every bit as urgent as anything happening in this world today -- fighting terrorism, combating the nuclear threat in Iran. I'm not in any way a political animal, but all you have to be is an occasionally thinking American to be sickened by the conditions I saw.
The Lower Ninth Ward is a 1.5-by-2-mile area a couple of miles from the center of New Orleans. It is a poor area. I should say it was a poor area. Before the storm, 20,000 people lived there. Fats Domino lived there. So, formerly, did Marshall Faulk. And now you drive through it and see nothing being done to fix it or tear it down, or to do anything.
In Mississippi, we drove through one formerly thriving beach town that has two structures left. We drove past concrete pads with litter and shards of wood around them. Former houses. The houses, quite literally, have been eviscerated. Hundreds of them. This is what nuclear winter must look like, I thought.
I'm a sportswriter. It's not my job to figure how to fix what ails the Gulf Coast. But the leaders of this society are responsible. And they're not doing their jobs. I could ignore everything I saw and go back to my nice New Jersey cocoon, forgetting I saw it. And I know you don't read me to hear my worldviews. But I couldn't sleep at night if I didn't say something.
On Saturday, at the Saints' headquarters for the draft, I watched the day unfold with a friend of the team, New Orleans businessman and president Michael Whelan. I told him what I'd seen, and asked him what he thought.
"We spend all this money on the war in Iraq and we can't take care of our own cities?" he said. "You get out of downtown, and it's like a war zone in a lot of neighborhoods still. The government has been a huge letdown. I've heard billions of dollars are going to be sent here. Where are they? Nothing is taking place. I certainly think that now it's back-page news; the government is sweeping it under the rug.''
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/writers/peter_king/05/02/mmqbte/
I sense that we in this country have Katrina fatigue. The New York Times reported as much recently, saying that people in some of the areas that welcomed Katrina evacuees last September are sick of hearing about the hurricane, the flooding and the aftermath.
Well, my wife and I were in a car last Wednesday that toured the hardest-hit area of New Orleans, the Lower Ninth Ward. We worked a day at a nearby Habitat for Humanity site on Thursday, and we toured the Biloxi/Gulfport/Long Beach/Pass Christian gulf shore area last Friday. And let me just say this: I can absolutely guarantee you that if you'd been in the car with us, no matter how much you'd been hit over the head with the effects of this disaster, you would not have Katrina fatigue.
What I saw was a national disgrace. An inexcusable, irresponsible, borderline criminal national disgrace. I am ashamed of this country for the inaction I saw everywhere.
I mentioned my outrage to the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, on Thursday. He shook his head and said, "Tell me about it.'' Disgust dripped from his voice.
What are we doing in this country?
"It's been eight months since Katrina,'' said Jack Bowers, my New Jersey friend and Habitat for Humanity guide through the Lower Ninth Ward, as he took us through deserted streets where nothing, absolutely nothing, was being done about the wasteland that this place is.
"Eight months!" he said. "And look at it. When people talk to me about New Orleans, they say, 'Well, things are getting back to normal down there, aren't they?' I tell them things are a long, long way from normal, and it's going to be a long time before it's ever normal. And I tell them they've never seen anything like this.''
Our Mississippi guide, Josh Norman of the Biloxi Sun-Herald, put it this way: "People outside of here are tired of hearing about it. They've moved on to the next news cycle.''
How can we let an area like the Lower Ninth Ward sit there, on the eve of another hurricane season, with nothing being done to either bulldoze the place and start over, or rebuild? How can Congress sit on billions of looming aid and not release it for this area?
I can't help but think that if this were Los Angeles or New York, that 500 percent more money -- and concern -- would have flooded into this place. And I can't help but think that if the idiots who let the levees down here go to seed had simply been doing their jobs, we'd never have been in this mess in the first place -- in New Orleans, at least. Other than former FEMA director Michael Brown, are you telling me that no others are paying for this with their jobs? Whatever happened to responsibility?
Am I ticked off? Damn right I'm ticked off. If you're breathing, you should be morally outraged. Katrina fatigue? Hah! More Katrina news! Give me more! Give it to me every day on the front page! Every day until Washington realizes there's a disaster here every bit as urgent as anything happening in this world today -- fighting terrorism, combating the nuclear threat in Iran. I'm not in any way a political animal, but all you have to be is an occasionally thinking American to be sickened by the conditions I saw.
The Lower Ninth Ward is a 1.5-by-2-mile area a couple of miles from the center of New Orleans. It is a poor area. I should say it was a poor area. Before the storm, 20,000 people lived there. Fats Domino lived there. So, formerly, did Marshall Faulk. And now you drive through it and see nothing being done to fix it or tear it down, or to do anything.
In Mississippi, we drove through one formerly thriving beach town that has two structures left. We drove past concrete pads with litter and shards of wood around them. Former houses. The houses, quite literally, have been eviscerated. Hundreds of them. This is what nuclear winter must look like, I thought.
I'm a sportswriter. It's not my job to figure how to fix what ails the Gulf Coast. But the leaders of this society are responsible. And they're not doing their jobs. I could ignore everything I saw and go back to my nice New Jersey cocoon, forgetting I saw it. And I know you don't read me to hear my worldviews. But I couldn't sleep at night if I didn't say something.
On Saturday, at the Saints' headquarters for the draft, I watched the day unfold with a friend of the team, New Orleans businessman and president Michael Whelan. I told him what I'd seen, and asked him what he thought.
"We spend all this money on the war in Iraq and we can't take care of our own cities?" he said. "You get out of downtown, and it's like a war zone in a lot of neighborhoods still. The government has been a huge letdown. I've heard billions of dollars are going to be sent here. Where are they? Nothing is taking place. I certainly think that now it's back-page news; the government is sweeping it under the rug.''
If only our governent were more like Qatar
Qatar Announces Katrina Relief Grants
''The key objective was to identify those most in need and to provide assistance as directly as possible with minimal administrative expenses,'' the embassy said through its spokesman in New York.
"Our past experience is that while you can give to any organization or to a government," he said, "you have no control over the money and then you discover the people most affected have not benefited."
''The key objective was to identify those most in need and to provide assistance as directly as possible with minimal administrative expenses,'' the embassy said through its spokesman in New York.
"Our past experience is that while you can give to any organization or to a government," he said, "you have no control over the money and then you discover the people most affected have not benefited."
Monday, May 01, 2006
All-Bruce Springsteen post
I wasn't the biggest Bruce fan before yesterday. I'd heard some of his tunes, and I have to friends that are absolute fanatics, so I've heard my share. So, I was curious to check out his set, but was also open to checking out the Meters and skipping the show entirely. I'm extremely glad that I didn't.
Bruce's set was magical. Sometimes, music transcends the reality that is around it, and provides a wonderfully uniting and uplifting experience, and that's what we got on Sunday afternoon. His set of his new tracks with Seeger covers sounded just wonderful through the mix and sound system that the fest put in place, which certainly contributed to the experience. Springsteen's comments about the songs helped to paint the picture for the fans, and his re-writes of some lyrics to reflect the situation in New Orleans was a fitting tribute. His comments about "President Bystander" and many others along those lines had the crowds cheering, and many more had the crowd moved to tears.
His set opened with O Mary Don't You Weep, which set the spiritual scene for the set. His cover of Jacob's Ladder was phenomenal, and then performed a re-worked version of How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live with New Orleans lyrics (you can hear a rehearsal recording of it here). My Oklahoma Home, originally about the dust bowl, was embraced by the crowd as a spontaneous singalong with the crowd echoing the chorus, "Blowed away, Blowed away, My Oklahoma home has Blowed Away."
By far, the most powerful and moving experience was Springsteen performing his track City of Ruins. The song was originally written for his hometown of Asbury Park, then used eloquently after 9-11. It was incredible to hear it in New Orleans, thinking of my fair city. A good friend of mine posted the lyrics to this blog sometime after the storm, and it couldn't be more appropriate. The crowd was reverent and silent as we listened to the tale about his city with boarded up windows and empty streets, and the repeating call for the city to rise up that echoes through the chorus. At the end of the song, he enters into a prayer, quoted below:
Now with these hands,With these hands,
With these hands, I pray Lord
With these hands, With these hands,
I pray for the strength, Lord
With these hands, With these hands,
I pray for the faith, Lord
We pray for your love, Lord
We pray for the lost, Lord
We pray for this world, Lord
We pray for the strength, Lord
We pray for the strength, Lord
To which the crowd all raised their hands, to sway and pray for New Orleans. I still get teary thinking about it.
He closed the show with a few more upbeat tunes, then played a final encore of When the Saints Go Marching In, which was beautifully subdued. It was much more in the vein of a hymn as it was originally written, and truthfully much more like the city of New Orleans right now. Hopeful, Prayerful, Joyous, but not really ready to celebrate as we once did just a few months ago.
Anyhow, that's my wrap-up of the show. He's all over the news today about his JazzFest performance, and his comments.
New York Times does a pretty good job of giving you a fest overview in the beginning of their article
CNN gives a similar recap, with some video thrown in there for good measure
ESPN also makes mention of it, with the Boss calling and offering to have new #1 pick Reggie Bush of the Saints to make a cameo on stage.
I also had links from Forbes, BBC, Reuters, but there was no new ground in any of those.
Bruce's set was magical. Sometimes, music transcends the reality that is around it, and provides a wonderfully uniting and uplifting experience, and that's what we got on Sunday afternoon. His set of his new tracks with Seeger covers sounded just wonderful through the mix and sound system that the fest put in place, which certainly contributed to the experience. Springsteen's comments about the songs helped to paint the picture for the fans, and his re-writes of some lyrics to reflect the situation in New Orleans was a fitting tribute. His comments about "President Bystander" and many others along those lines had the crowds cheering, and many more had the crowd moved to tears.
His set opened with O Mary Don't You Weep, which set the spiritual scene for the set. His cover of Jacob's Ladder was phenomenal, and then performed a re-worked version of How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live with New Orleans lyrics (you can hear a rehearsal recording of it here). My Oklahoma Home, originally about the dust bowl, was embraced by the crowd as a spontaneous singalong with the crowd echoing the chorus, "Blowed away, Blowed away, My Oklahoma home has Blowed Away."
By far, the most powerful and moving experience was Springsteen performing his track City of Ruins. The song was originally written for his hometown of Asbury Park, then used eloquently after 9-11. It was incredible to hear it in New Orleans, thinking of my fair city. A good friend of mine posted the lyrics to this blog sometime after the storm, and it couldn't be more appropriate. The crowd was reverent and silent as we listened to the tale about his city with boarded up windows and empty streets, and the repeating call for the city to rise up that echoes through the chorus. At the end of the song, he enters into a prayer, quoted below:
Now with these hands,With these hands,
With these hands, I pray Lord
With these hands, With these hands,
I pray for the strength, Lord
With these hands, With these hands,
I pray for the faith, Lord
We pray for your love, Lord
We pray for the lost, Lord
We pray for this world, Lord
We pray for the strength, Lord
We pray for the strength, Lord
To which the crowd all raised their hands, to sway and pray for New Orleans. I still get teary thinking about it.
He closed the show with a few more upbeat tunes, then played a final encore of When the Saints Go Marching In, which was beautifully subdued. It was much more in the vein of a hymn as it was originally written, and truthfully much more like the city of New Orleans right now. Hopeful, Prayerful, Joyous, but not really ready to celebrate as we once did just a few months ago.
Anyhow, that's my wrap-up of the show. He's all over the news today about his JazzFest performance, and his comments.
New York Times does a pretty good job of giving you a fest overview in the beginning of their article
CNN gives a similar recap, with some video thrown in there for good measure
ESPN also makes mention of it, with the Boss calling and offering to have new #1 pick Reggie Bush of the Saints to make a cameo on stage.
I also had links from Forbes, BBC, Reuters, but there was no new ground in any of those.
New Orleans Gas Prices
Interesting site where you can find a pretty detailed listing of locations and prices. I wonder how they're feeding info into the site?
http://www.neworleansgasprices.com/
http://www.neworleansgasprices.com/
We're tired of it too, Bay.
"I think Katrina has worn its welcome.- I think the American people are tired of it." --Bay Buchannan.
Watch the video here.
Watch the video here.
Shelters for evacuees re-opening?
Happy May Day everybody.
Tennessee probably will have to reopen shelters for Hurricane Katrina evacuees when a federal rental assistance program ends, emergency management officials say
Tennessee probably will have to reopen shelters for Hurricane Katrina evacuees when a federal rental assistance program ends, emergency management officials say
