Dirty South Bureau

Driving by work today I drove past the ruins of what was formerly the St. Bernard Housing Development. Block after block is now rubble; cranes smash what was formerly livable, if not particularly well maintained, housing. Rumor has it that the development will be replaced with a private golf course.

This is what “free-market” restructuring looks like on the ground: the wanton destruction of sound homes in the interests of lining the pockets of developers and politicians. Today, housing, tomorrow, golf courses.

Meanwhile, go under the I-10 on Claiborne, or go to the streets of any major city, and you will see what happens when we as a society don’t ensure the human right to housing.

Alphonso Jackson, George Bush, Mayor Ray Nagin, and every member of the New Orleans City Council will be remembered by future generations as criminals and the restructuring of Katrina which they oversaw as a human rights catastrophe. Already the UN Commission on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has condemned these actions.

Full report

But all of this is too late for the people living under the overpass. As for me, I’m just sick.

The most glorious image I have seen in years came across my computer screen the other day… the image of families and streams of people crossing the collapsed remains of the wall between Gaza and Egypt. Can there be any sight more affirming to the human spirit than human beings crossing the barriers that keep them from other people… and in our contemporary era, from the things that they need- such as, in this case, food, medicine and fuel?

We cheered when the Berlin Wall fell, and people all over the world should cheer now. And yet this morning, I found myself looking at another curious sight… Counterpunch publisher and Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn endorsing Ron Paul for president in the January 21 edition of The Nation (I know, I’m a week late reading this one). In Coburn’s deeply creepy column, he speaks about seeing the faces of the people with Ron Paul bumper stickers pass him on the highways of his northern California retreat and liking what he sees. I don’t know, Alex… is that because they look like you? White country folk?

I dislike even writing about Ron Paul, who to me is just another small time right-wing nut, like the pathetic two dozen white supremacists who marched in Jena on Monday (surrounded by, according to the AP, ten times their number of counter-protesters), or former presidential spoiler Ross Perot. But lately folks like Cockburn and Stan Goff have been supporting him, and so I feel like I need to come out and say it.

Now I know that the Iraq war is the most important issue in this election, and that Ron Paul has voted consistently against the war- unlike Hillary Clinton or John Edwards (Obama wasn’t in a position to, but has scary enough foreign policy statements). But there are plenty of people who oppose the war these days, and frankly that isn’t enough for me. And here’s why.

Ron Paul wants a more “secure” militarized border. Read— big wall between us and Mexico. In the twenty-first century, this is not only sick and wrong, but it is deeply backwards. Coburn mentioned that he liked Paul’s commitment to “Jeffersonian democracy”, which should tell you something- that Ron Paul is stuck in the early 19th century. Of course he opposed the Iraq war- he’s a nativist isolationist, and his ideas are worthy of the Know-Nothing Party.

True, Paul would avoid certain foreign policy decisions that increase the stimulus for immigration. But it’s too late for that. We have populations in much of Latin America who have been pushed to desperation through lopsided trade policies and other means of economic warfare, and now they are coming here.

You may be asking yourself- what does this have to do with New Orleans?

New Orleans, as a city, is proof of the power of diversity. The greatness of this city cannot even be taken away in our recent ruin, because the gifts New Orleans gave the rest of the world shaped and at times defined world culture in the twentieth century. With our Spanish and Caribbean architecture, our African-American rhythms set to European-American instruments, our African parades, Catholic-French/Latin carnivals, our African and Italian food, we remain the most culturally rich city in the nation. And we owe all of this to our mixed heritage. This was, according to geographer Richard Campanella, the most diverse city in America one hundred years ago, because of large numbers of descendants of slaves and immigrants.

Who are we to say that our ancestors, who created all of this, were the ‘worthy’ immigrants, and the new immigrants are unworthy? It is not only hypocrisy. It is self-defeating. Today Hondurenos, Mexicans and other Latino immigrants are rebuilding this city faster than it ever would be rebuilt otherwise.

To Ron Paul and all of his supporters: this is the twenty-first century, folks- not the nineteenth. Get on board. Walls didn’t work then and won’t work now. And when they fall, get ready to meet your neighbors- “over the obscene boundaries.”

So the DSB is back after a lengthy hiatus… actually in the interests of full disclosure I got a new job working for the teachers union. And let me also say that anything that I say here on this blog is my own personal opinion and should in no way be connected to the union.

And what’s new on the horizon (drumroll please…) Alphonso Jackson send us bulldozers for Christmas! And the City Council lacks the guts to do anything about it! Maybe this is because in our electoral apathy we allowed a devout gentrificationist and a woman who epitomizes hatred of poor people to be elected?

Where to start? Alphonso Jackson’s compromising relationship with Columbia Residential?

12,000 homeless people on the streets of New Orleans?

Blatantly biased reporting from that paragon of journalism that we know as our daily paper? (Love those 64-word lead sentences with no clear connection between clauses, guys.)

All I know is that I have sent my letters to Midura and Fielkow, and I am going to be at the City Council Meeting tomorrow morning, Thursday, December 20.

My letter to Shelly Midura:

Dear Councilwoman Midura,

I live in your district in the Bayou St. John neighborhood and I am asking you to vote not to allow HUD to demolish the CJ Peete, Lafitte and St. Bernard Developments.

Though I lived in District C at the time, I was glad when you defeated Jay Batt. You seemed like a person of compassion and integrity. This vote will be a test of those qualities.

We all agree that public housing in this city needs to be improved. But HUD’s plan is privatization, not improvement. It will waste hundreds of millions of dollars in senseless destruction and will not provide enough low-income housing for New Orleanians who want to come home.

There are other plans that have been approved by the city government, including your office, such as the Unified New Orleans Plan, which provide for some demolition but also renovating and improving much of the city’s public housing instead of wantonly destroying it. This plan was arrived at in a democratic and inclusive manner and is supposed to be the official plan for rebuilding the city. I implore you to follow our city’s plan instead of arbitrary and destructive measures put forth by a federal government which has repeatedly shown a lack of care for this city and our people.

There is an article in the art and design section of the New York Times which describes better than I can what a waste destroying these buildings is. Before you vote you should read it— the historical and architectural value of these projects, especially Lafitte, is immense.

But it is the people, not the buildings, who are the real issue. There is a housing crisis in this city of epic proportions, and tearing down thousands of units will make it worse. It will take at least three years to rebuild any of these developments, which will only contain a fraction of the affordable housing. Many poor people simply cannot afford to move back to this city. The failure of the federal and state government to provide for a way for these internally displaced citizens to come home is a violation of international human rights law. If you vote for demolition, you will be a party to that crime.

Please make the right choice, the humane choice, the compassionate choice. Do not allow these demolitions.

Christian Roselund

Nia Robertson was killed on Wednesday night, August 15th at a neighborhood bar in Mid-City. I had met her there maybe a week ago. She was warm, intelligent and attractive. I recall asking where she was from, and she explained that her New Orleans accent had been eroded somewhat by a few years away at college. She was 25.

People are killed every day in New Orleans. And the murders often appear senseless to many of us. But the incredible recklessness of this one stands out. A young woman in the prime of her life, her throat cut by someone she apparently didn’t know.

A number of things stand out about this murder. In the discussions of crime on the internet, in bars – anywhere where either anonymity or privacy is available, my fellow white people frequently talk about “the thugs”. It is no secret that many of those who do the killing, as well as those killed, are young black men. And whites in this city fear “the thugs” in a way that is racialized.

The Times-Picayune doesn’t print the races of those who are charged with murder – a good practice in a city where racial mob violence is a not-so-distant historical reality. However, the killer here has a Slavic last name (probably Polish or Serbian- note the cz). There are only a few Pal’s regulars who are black men, and none I’ve met are anywhere near 35.

So it appears that a white man killed a young, college-educated black woman.

Helen Hill’s death galvanized white communities in the downtown neighborhoods- the death of a promising young white woman and a mother of a young child. In a city where people die every day, the death of Helen Hill sparked outrage.

Will there be similar outrage now?

I for one want to know what could have been done to prevent this killing. There are a number of details that stand out to me. First, the killing was done quickly without any warning. This is not a murder that any number of police could have prevented unless we have police officers on every other barstool at Pal’s and every other bar. Incidentally, that would make me stop drinking. So those who suggest that an improved criminal justice system could have prevented this are either being delusional or they are thinking of a sci-fi psychic-prevention crime techniques like one in the movie Minority Report.

Second, the man claimed to be ex-military. Was this another murderer created by the US government who finally snapped? According to the Times-Picayune article the co-owner of Pal’s says that the whole process happened very rapidly. Was this a trained killer who used his abilities on an American instead of a foreigner, say an Iraqi, like he was trained to do?

This is also a man who had been fighting at work and had threatened to kill co-workers. I will note the absence of a mental health infrastructure, exacerbated by the loss of Charity Hospital, to deal with all the certifiable mentally unsound people in this city. Could this murder have been prevented by adequate mental health services in the city of New Orleans?

Finally, Nia was rushed to the hospital and died during surgery. The hospital is not mentioned in the article. Was it University? I will note the loss of the excellent level one trauma center at Charity Hospital. Incidentally, a good friend of mine who was an Emergency Room doctor at Charity just moved to Newfoundland, largely as a result of the disappearance of the hospital. Could the highly experienced ER doctors who worked at Charity have saved her life if it was open?

We will likely never know the answers to whether or not improved mental health services or an open Charity Hospital could have prevented Nia’s death. With time we may find out if this was a murderer who was created by the US Government, or if the man was idly boasting of a background that he did not possess.

Either way, a beautiful young woman is dead for no good reason.

I found myself in the Dragon’s Den the other night to catch some hip-hop. For those of you who don’t know, the Dragon’s Den is a little club in the Marigny that used to sit on top of a Thai food place (which has been replaced by Z’otz 3, which is a far cry from the elegant weirdness of the original Z’otz; duplicates and sequels are almost always inferior, but I digress). Regardless, Dragon’s Den is a strange dark space reminiscent of a broke downtown take on an opium den that has a wide assortment of music ranging from hip hop to gutter punk orchestral pieces.

I digress again… this night the music was something between hip hop and soul. Being a consummate honky, I find myself at a loss to describe it further. Music, most things in New Orleans, is subtly but definitively segregated, and I was glad to have yet another opportunity to view this other world without feeling like I was intruding. Besides, the music was good, even if I didn’t get all the musical and cultural references. I had come with my friend Miss Maybe, and we made our way back to sit on the wrought iron porch which is among Dragon’s Den’s best features. Before long we were beset by a number of lost individuals including a self-important Common Grounder. We sat and smoked an enjoyed the light rain despite these distractions.

Before long a couple sat down across from us; a black man and a pretty woman with blond curly hair. As we sat there, the delicate quiet was broken by a question:

“Are you mixed?”

The question was directed at Miss Maybe. She is someone who is fairly obviously of both African and European descent, pale coffee colored skin and facial features that suggest both. I winced- Miss Maybe is quite capable of laying down the law when confronted with someone saying something inappropriate, and questioning ethnicity is a hell of a way of saying Hi.

Miss Maybe took a moment to respond. “Yes, I am.”

The woman did not miss a beat. “Was your mother white?” she asked.

“No”, replied MM, her voice betraying a hairline crack of annoyance. “My father is white.”

“Oh.” Said the girl. There was something doe-like and innocent about her large eyes, which were focused on Miss M. “Do you identify as mixed?” asked the girl, blithely.

This was really too much. Who was this white girl to be asking M. Maybe about the details of her ethnicity? What fucking business was it of hers? Yet she approached with a naiveté that was curious and somewhat unnerving.

“I identify as black”, Miss Maybe stated. “Mixed has no political power.”

In addition to “What the Fuck?” another question was standing outside ringing the doorbell. Who isn’t mixed? I mean, I look damned “white” and despite nearly all my known ancestry arriving from Northern Europe fairly recently, I’ve got Paiute Indian blood five generations back (or so my family thinks). How many Black Americans don’t have some European ancestry after centuries of slavery and rape? How many white people whose families have lived in New Orleans for a few generations don’t have any African blood somewhere in there? How many people successfully “passe blanc”, to create this utterly false and hegemonic idea of “White”.

And if you want to go back further, how many Europeans don’t have an influx of East Asian genetics via the Mongols and the Magyar (Hungarians), or the Finno-Ugric peoples (Finns, Estonians)? Or Turkish blood from the centuries the Turks were in the Balkans? Or African blood in Italians, Spaniards and French via the Moors? Or Semitic blood? What the fuck is “White”, anyway?

My annoyance finally broke through, and I asked the girl- “Are _you_ mixed?”

“Yes”, she replied, and immediately I saw the African features in her face, and the green eyes under the blond hair. And I realized that she was asking these questions as much of herself as of Miss Maybe.

And I shut up.

By Sean Benjamin

In addition to flooding 80% of the city, Hurricane Katrina destroyed over 50,000 rental apartment units. A small portion of these have since been refurbished, but the vast majority are still unlivable and the city still faces an acute shortage of affordable housing 19 months after the storm. Rents have skyrocketed since the storm; landlords have taken the opportunity to jack up the rents on the apartments that are still livable. Apartments that used to rent for as little as $400-500 before the storm now regularly rent for between $800 and $1200. In many cases, rents have more than doubled as the pressures of a drastically-reduced housing stock and the lack of price regulation allow landlords to gouge their tenants. The folks who still haven’t returned home since the storm regularly cite a lack of affordable rental housing as one of the main reasons they are unable to come home to New Orleans.

For the first six months after the storm, I was working with a group called NOHEAT (New Orleans Emergency Housing Action Team) to fight rent increases and evictions. NOHEAT doesn’t exist any more, but high rents are still a huge problem. Since NOHEAT disbanded last year, the People’s Hurricane Relief Fund (PHRF) Tenants Rights Working Group has been doing the bulk of the organizing around issues of fighting high rents. This week they managed to get a hearing before the City Council to demand rent control and the creation of a board of New Orleans renters mandated to defend the rights of tenants and to have a voice for tenants in the rebuilding process. I haven’t been very involved in the housing struggle lately, but when the PHRF called for a large turnout of renters to this City Council meeting, I figured I’d better attend.

Malcolm Suber from the PHRF led a team of presenters to outline the urgency of the housing crisis in front of City Council. He didn’t rant about ‘ethnic cleansing’ or chew the scenery the way that some of the city’s self-proclaimed housing advocates are in the habit of doing; his approach was calm, considered, and was amply backed up with statistics and with testimony from renters and displaced New Orleans residents. He explained that affordable rents were necessary so that the low-wage workers central to the city’s economy could return, and that the lack of affordable housing was a major obstacle to the return of displaced residents and to the city’s reconstruction efforts. The PHRF proposal called for the creation of a city-wide tenants’ council to represent the interests of tenants in all decisions made regarding the reconstruction of the city. He also pointed out that it’s the City Council’s responsibility to protect its citizens by regulating exorbitant rents and demanded the enactment of an anti-price-gouging and rent control ordinance using August 2005 rents as a retroactive benchmark and allowing for modest annual increases to account for increased costs of property insurance after the storm. The PHRF delegation also submitted a 10,000-signature petition in support of these demands.

I doubt Malcolm Suber or the PHRF is under the illusion that the City Council has any real interest in counter-acting the landlords’ price gouging. He’s a solid socialist with decades of community organizing experience, and he’s well aware of the class interests of the Council and the purpose it serves within the city’s economic power structure. But publicly coming before the Council and demanding that it take a strong stand for the citizens it ostensibly serves was the right approach to take. The councillors, for their part, knew they had to appear sympathetic so that when the meeting was covered on the evening news they’d look like they have the interests of tenants at heart. The Council referred the proposal to the housing sub-committee, and most of them made appropriate noises about the urgency of the problem and the need to find ways for displaced New Orleans residents to return. Most of them, that is, except for Stacy Head.

Stacy Head made no attempt to hide her disrespect for the presentation and her disagreement with the need for protection of tenants’ rights. She spent the entire length of the PHRF presentation sighing, scowling, rolling her eyes, and whispering indignantly to James Carter and Shelly Midura, the two councillors sitting beside her. She interrupted Malcolm Suber a number of times to angrily insist that landlords faced insurmountable hardships in insurance costs and that they were the real victims needing protection. (Never mind that the PHRF proposal took into account the fact that small landlords needed to deal with increased insurance and repair costs; they recommended a combination of amortization and pressure on the state legislature to enact controls on insurance companies.)

Later, a former resident of the Lower Ninth Ward got up to testify that he’d been the owner of a small local hip-hop record label before the storm, but he couldn’t come home to contribute to the economy because of high rents and he was still stuck in Baton Rouge while commuting to the city every day. Stacy Head showed him even more contempt. She refused to believe he couldn’t find affordable housing in the city. “You’re a young man,” (I’d guess he was in his 30s) she said with that mixture of disdain and patronizing sweetness that only a yuppie can muster. “You’re probably looking for – what – a one-bedroom?” No, he said, he was actually a family man with two kids to support. “Well, there’s a website you might try looking at; it’s called Craigslist, and it’s got all sorts of listings for apartments available. I’m sure you can find something there.” This in the same cloying, falsely-helpful tones as before, as if it had never occurred to a man trying for months to get his family home and re-start his business that there might actually be apartments listed on *gasp!* the Internet! The audience murmured angrily at her patronizing suggestions, but she kept going with her lecture on Apartment-Hunting 101, completely unaware of how offensive her assumptions were.

So apparently to the Stacy Heads of the city, the housing problem is not due to high rents, lack of livable apartment units, or shuttered public housing; it’s just that these complainers just aren’t resourceful enough to find apartments for themselves. They just need to look harder. The same goes for jobs, I presume. It’s not that unemployment is a built-in side-effect of contemporary capitalism, or that New Orleans’s economy is dominated by low-wage tourism and service-industry jobs through any consequence of the way the city has been run for the last fifty years. No, it’s that people just don’t have the dedication or stick-to-it-iveness to create opportunities for themselves. It’s their own fault, really…….

Stacy Head isn’t the only opponent of affordable housing on New Orleans City Council by any means. The two Cynthias (Cynthia Hedge-Morrell and Cynthia Willard-Lewis) are also allied with developers’ interests and just as opposed to affordable housing. But they manage to talk a good talk, making populist appeals to bringing New Orleanians home while at the same time opposing the construction of affordable housing complexes in their districts. In the time-honored tradition of two-faced New Orleans politicians, they manage to fool a lot of people into thinking they represent the interests of regular folks. But Stacy Head doesn’t even try to seem sympathetic to the needs of tenants. She’s an open unabashed representative of real-estate developers, yuppie gentrifiers, and landlords. During her election campaign last year, one of her most-trumpeted qualifications for elected office was that she had bought a number of run-down rental properties, renovated them, and resold them for a tidy profit. She’s a landlord and gentrifier, plain and simple.

Stacy Head is the Jackie Clarkson for a new generation. Jackie Clarkson was also unabashedly in bed with big money real estate and developer interests, but she was also a caricature of herself: showy, flamboyant, New Orleans old money. Even if you knew she was on the opposing side in most issues, she was just too silly to take seriously. Stacy Head’s got an updated image: young, educated, professional, eloquent, with just enough of a veneer of good-government reform credentials to make her look progressive in some circles. It’s been less than a year since she was elected, and a lot of people were happy to see her defeat Renee Gill Pratt in last year’s election. Pratt was an old-style New Orleans politician of the worst kind: incompetent, openly corrupt, and solidly connected to one of the city’s most powerful political machines. She needed to go. But her replacement is one of the most dangerous politicians operating in New Orleans today.

A couple of the characters responsible for the dissolution of NOHEAT are still around, attaching themselves to the campaign to re-open New Orleans’s shuttered public housing developments. They’ve already singled out Stacy Head as an opponent of affordable housing and as a representative of landlords’ and real estate developers’ interests, and they’ve been picketing her Uptown house for the past couple of weekends. These folks are very problematic. They’re textbook examples of how not to do community organizing; they’ve got a strident, pompous, abrasive vanguardist approach which turns most people off. In any genuinely revolutionary situation, they’d probably be more likely to be strung up as ‘enemies of the people’ than be accepted in the kind of leadership role they aspire to. In fact, their outsized presence in New Orleans housing campaigns is a big reason why I’m not very involved anymore. But once in a while these guys just might have the right idea, and I’m starting to think that their targeting of Stacy Head as a major enemy in the housing struggle is a good choice.

I’ve always liked the idea of using home demos as a way to personalize a struggle and give faces and names to our opponents. Anarchists in Montreal used to organize “proletarian field trips” to the wealthy suburb of Westmount, and one of the best New Orleans demos I’ve been to took place outside a George W. Bush fundraiser at a country club amid the mansions of Old Metairie. The ruling class doesn’t like it when we come into their neighborhoods to raise a ruckus, and it’s also a good way to promote class warfare. In any case, a stepped-up campaign against Stacy Head at her home (and her law firm, for that matter) is a step forward in the fight for affordable housing.

Photos from the Council meeting: http://www.peopleshurricane.org/display/ShowGallery?moduleId=895693&galleryId=52565

Link to the text of the PHRF council presentation: http://www.peopleshurricane.org/storage/documents/council_presentation.doc

Stacy Head’s website: http://www.stacyhead.com/

A window seat at Markey’s, the one that looks through the old wooden doors onto the corner of Louisa and Royal streets. It’s as good a place as any to start an anthology of the bars of New Orleans. Markey’s is a timeless Bywater bar, one of the oldest still in existence. There’s nothing flashy about the inside and never really gets decorated. It’s all old, darkly stained wood, comfortable wooden seats, too many televisions, two video poker machines, shuffleboard, pool and darts, all in a space not much bigger than a two-bedroom apartment.

There’s a framed black and white photo of Michael Markey above the bar. Old yats like Jimmy Jones who runs a ninth ward machine shop will tell you about how the handsome Irishman used to serve blacks liquor and food through the side window. Pete Smith, the old hippie carpenter I used to work with says that both Markey’s and Parasol’s in the Irish Channel started serving women and blacks in the mid 80’s (“what would I want to go to a bar for if it didn’t have women and black people in it?” He would ask me).

These days the only thing Irish about Markey’s is the Pogues on the jukebox. Generations change but it’s still the same working-class white demographic. Today it’s a mix of young hip service industry workers from the neighborhood and carpenters in sleeveless t-shirts, their girlfriends in feathered hair and sweat pants with their brastraps showing. It’s not as flashy as Mimi’s, not as underground cool as the Saturn, not as definitively ninth ward, or as depressing, as BJ’s or Vaughns.

There’s still no black people, but El Markey’s is the first newly Hispanic bar that I have encountered in post-Katrina New Orleans. I don’t know how it happened but one day I came in and three Hispanic construction workers were sitting there drinking beer and bartenders and waiters were chatting in simple Spanish. So I go in and order an Abitita, the half-pint, and the short girl with the dark brown hair asks me if I want a little boy drink or a man-sized drink.

The jukebox is much of the reason that many of us go to Markey’s, and when it was down I never spent more than twenty minutes there. The music reflects the clientele- defiantly not as hip as Pal’s or the Saint uptown. Dylan, the Stones, David Bowie, even a Jimmy Buffet CD (incidentally, locals who work in the service industry do not play Jimmy Buffet. Not only is it shitty music, but Buffet’s French Quarter restaurant, Margaritaville, is well known. Buffet pretends to be an old, simple sailor when in fact he is a abusive, neurotic capitalist pig.) There’s Flogging Mollys in there as well, and Old 97’s, as well as some New Orleans stuff- Professor Longhair, a mix CD with some Irma Thomas. Track 47-12 is Guitar Slim doing “Things that I used to Do” which was redone in the late 90’s by G-Love, and not nearly as well. And of course Louis Prima, our homegrown Sinatra, who said in an interview about a decade ago that David Lee Roth never paid him for his remake of “Just a Gigolo”. Typical New Orleans music story.

The bartenders at Markey’s have one unifying feature- they don’t talk much. They manage a pleasantness without being obtrusive. Every bar has its particular culture of bartenders, and Markey’s is marked by both a terseness but also a longevity. Many bartenders have been there since I first started coming in 2003, which for the turnover of service industry workers in this town is remarkable.

Linnzi Zaorski is still my favorite, though she has been gone for years. Now that I know her from outside the bar, I can’t say that I like her as well. She’s beautiful, young, and ambitious, and that can ruin just about anyone. But as a bartender she was magnificent. She had this quizzical smile, this way of taking nothing and nobody seriously, this gentle contempt for the world that was strangely endearing. She always had somewhere better to be and knew it, and handled that with grace. Linnzi is on the jukebox as well, though I’ve never heard anyone play her but me and that was out of nostalgia more than anything.

Nick Moon is still around, smiling with his model good looks. My friend Leenie says that isn’t his real name, that Nick Moon is the name of a famous Baltimore bartender. He’s the quietest one of all. I knew him for about a year before I ever exchanged more than two words with him. There’s something utterly opaque about him. He wipes down the glasses, turns and smiles, a clean polished surface that leaves no room for any inquiry. He looks like a TV star, and I used to wonder what his game was. I don’t anymore. There’s a beautiful kind on interaction that you can have with someone who you don’t have to talk to, but can just be present for.

Perhaps now he is the Nick Moon, perhaps Nick Moon is the immortal bartender, the Long John Silver of the bar world.

There are others- Lisa now works at Mimi’s, but the new girl with the dark hair and sweetly sarcastic comments will be here for a while. I can just tell.

The truth is that Markey’s is a fairly dry and boring place, but so many of our adult pleasures are. Let’s face it- for flavor most of us prefer something sweeter than beer, and cigarettes don’t really taste good at all. So how did we end up here?

I can’t answer that. I’m not sure that I know. What I do know is that night after night we come here. The other day I was talking telling a friend I was headed home and I realized that what I really meant was Markey’s. It’s an anchor- I’ve had three apartments now in the neighborhood, and I can’t really imagine being able to keep one permanently. I don’t think I’m the only one these days without a sense of much permanence in living arrangements. But good, bad, indifferent, and even boring and regressive, Markey’s will still be here.

The Dirty South Bureau has been quiet a bit lately, as the heat, the humidity, and the constant complications of the first post-Katrina summer in New Orleans have impaired my abilities to do much beyond mere survival. Of course, I am far from alone in this.

Things just often don’t work in New Orleans. It’s something that outsiders, like myself, have to either get used to or leave. You may have a very clear idea in your mind of what you want to get done, and in what timeframe, and those ideas may even be realistic given your experience in other cities, but that does not matter. Things happen here on their own time, which sometimes means not at all. And the ability to handle this with grace is another invisible marking of the natives and the successfully adapted here.

Right now, the primary reason is the heat. I was having a conversation with Sean Benjamin of the Iron Rail library today, and we agreed that it is essentially foolish to try to get anything done between the hours of 11AM to 3PM. In the summer, it is wise to plan your day around the three to four hours of scorching heat alternating with thundershowers which will make up a usual New Orleans summer afternoon. So you stay inside, you sleep, you talk, you make love- whatever keeps you in the air conditioning and out of the oppressive conditions on the street.

Regardless, the rest of the world does not run on our schedule, for instance the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and occupation of Gaza. And while outsiders might think that New Orleanians are content to sit on their porches and drink either their 1. beer or 2. mint julips (depending on the socio-economic status of your ‘hood) over one hundred New Orleanians showed up at the federal building this Friday to protest the invasion and occupation. One thing that did not show up in the picture the Times-Picayune ran on the back page is that the demonstration was roughly half Arab-americans, of which the New Orleans metro area has a significant and beloved community. Of course the DSB, which is very critical of the Israeli government, was there, and I bring you an audio recording of the event, which included speakers from the Muslim American Society, local Palestinian rights activists, INCITE women of color against violence, and other groups. The first speaker is Dana Kaplan a young Jewish-American woman, whose organizational affiliation I have forgotten.

Pro-Lebanon/Palestinian rally at City Hall 1

I also interviewed Al Judah 1 2, a local Palestinian-American restaurant owner who came out for the event

Abdul 1 , a young Palestinian-American man

And Amr Achmed 1 of the Musim American Society

So, pardon the lack of communication for the last few weeks. Among other projects I’ve had to move shop. I’m still in the Bywater, but fighting the gross housing market down here right now. (see earlier post, Gentrification Gets Personal for the DSB)

The good news: the first demo of New Orleans AK (after Katrina) a weekly radio show on current events and social justice issues in the Crescent City, has come out, and was snatched up by radio station KPFT in Houston, where it will be playing tonight at 7 PM.

New Orleans AK is a collective creation of Public Digital Urban Broadcasters (P-DUB) members Krystal Muhammud, Mayaba Leibenthal, Mikkel Allen-Loper, Christian Roselund and Corlita Mahr. So far this is the first creation of P-DUB, a radical, largely african american (except yours truly) media group.

Contact me at c.roselund@gmail to com to obtain a 128 KBPS copy, or to rebroadcast on your local radio station. Enjoy.

New Orleans AK Part 1 2 3

This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

More information is available on publicdub.com

But first, the mayor’s race: Former New Orleans mayor Marc Morial called Ray Nagin’s victory “threading the needle”, and it was a remarkable political feat- Nagin, who was once the black candidate for white New Orleans, now wins with solid black support, metamorphosing from the big business candidate to the civil rights candidate. A performance, truly.

My good friend Sean Benjamin, the only founder of the Iron Rail Bookstore and Library that still is part of the collective, became obsessed with this election and has been spending his nights creating color coded maps of precinct results for all the elections in the last thirty years. Pretty weird for a guy ideologically opposed to electoral politics, but he’s had insomnia lately. Transposing the maps of the 2002 and 2006 mayoral races shows and eerie discovery- the map of precincts that had a majority of Nagin votes in 2002 are almost the exact opposite of the ones that have a Nagin majority in 2006, with the exception of parts of Gentilly and New Orleans East, which voted for Nagin both times. So essentially what this translates into is that Nagin got the white vote and the middle class black vote the first time, and this time got the majority of all the black vote and limited white support, which in this majority African-american city is what you need to win.

This is not to suggest that I supported Landrieu. Even though he might be able to get more support for New Orleans from Washington (the best reason to vote for him), his “connections” made many of us uneasy. We’ve had enough political dynasties in Louisiana, and enough insider politics.

Regardless, despite the big headlines I was paying more attention to the council races. The wicked witch of Algiers is no more- Jacquelyn Brechtel Clarkson was defeated by former New Orleans Saints manager Arnie Fielkow fifty-four to forty-six percent for the free Council-at-large seat. Since Clarkson doesn’t seem much interested in state politics and is old enough that she probably won’t run for council again in four years, we can say goodbye to Jackie. Highlights of Jackie’s last term: removing the benches from Jackson square, trying to make street performance illegal, and blocking Nagin’s list of trailer sites for evacuees in December. Bon voyage, Jackie.

But I’ve said enough bad things about Jackie Clarkson, and now that she is history, politically speaking, I feel the need to mention her good traits. No, seriously. Jackie has been a big supporter of historic preservation and also in keeping monstrously big hotels out of the French Quarter. Old timers who I’ve spoken to also mention how she stopped the expansion of the t-shirt and souvenir shops that line Bourbon and Decatur street that former District C councilmember Troy Carter (allegedly no relation to the newly elected James Carter) allowed, thus giving us the disnified version of New Orleans that we see on those streets in the quarter.

The big shocker was that Jay Batt lost to political newcomer Shelly Midura in District A. Batt, the only republican with any real position in New Orleans city government, was a big business shill who, along with Clarkson, blocked Nagin’s trailer list in December. His campaign ads suggested that Midura was going to build a housing project in Lakeview. Batt had a big lead in the primary, but apparently even Uptown, buoyed by parts of Mid-City, had enough of him.

And, lastly, defense attorney James Carter beat Jackie Clarkson’s ally Kristen Palmer in district C. So not only do we have a dark-skinned black man on the city council now, but the candidates of the I’ve-got-mine white propertied class in this city have been sent packing, both in downtown and uptown.

I can’t contain my shock or wonder at how all this happened. It appears that the old guard is finally been removed from city government, with the most regressive members of City Council gone.

Here’s the catch- we have four new city council members who we don’t know much about. In any larger race, candidates usually have articulated platforms on at least a few major issues and a voting record to support them. But city council is the amateur night of politics, and we have only a dim idea about what Fielkow, Carter, Midura, or Stacy Head (who beat Rene Gill-Pratt in district B) actually stand for.

But more importantly, things still have not fundamentally changed here. A council composed of slightly more progressive politicians does not change the fact that on the ground progressive political organizing is still in its infancy here. In a city with weak unions in a right to work state ACORN was the only such group that had any real membership before the storm. So we may have some superficial victories, but let’s not forget that this is the shell game of electoral politics and that things will not fundamentally change without the building of strong progressive organizations, a work that is much slower.

I’m not going to let that spoil my party though. The old guard is gone. Farewell, Jackie and Jay. You guys look a lot better from the rear view mirror.

It’s always amusing to me to hear the US crying foul about rigged elections in other nations (Ukraine comes to mind) when we do it so well, and these days so blatantly, right here at home. Unfortunately, this is still particularly true in the south.

The numbers for the April 22nd New Orleans municipal primary, which have been recently released, are not pretty. And from the answers that I got from the Secretary of State’s office yesterday, it seems like the runoff tomorrow will be the same. In the primary, only 31% of registered black voters actually cast a ballot, compared to 45% in the 2002 election (statistics courtesy of the LA secretary of state’s office). The joke here is that the Secretary of State seems to think there is nothing wrong with this election, though the blame must really go more on the feds.

Following is a conversation that I had with Damon Hewitt of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund yesterday about these issues for a radio show that we are about to launch locally.

Damon Hewitt 1 2

The Dirty South Bureau has been a little slow lately, having taken a well-earned break during jazz fest (well, OK, I had to get a second job to support my freelancing). But I haven’t been out of it enough to not notice Rob Couhig endorsing Ray Nagin. This goes against my theory that in a post-Katrina racial frenzy both black and white people are voting against their economic self-interest this election (see the first part of The Mayor’s ‘Race’), thanks to Rob Couhig remembering where his bottom line and the bottom line of his supporters lie. So maybe now we can get back to big-business Ray Nagin v. democratic party machine Mitch Landrieu, which is a less hysterical way to look at things than black v. white, but also boring.

Of course, the Louisiana Weekly had led the way on this one with their editorial on why black people should vote for Landrieu, which was a less courageous stand to take than, say, endorsing Tom Watson, but was a sensible argument against Nagin.

This endorsement also narrows Landrieu’s lead over Nagin, and the race heats up. And I am reminded that all the descriptive terms that we use for political campaigns can also be used for horse races, which is how I tend to see not only this race but electoral politics in general, a day at the track, only with serious but mostly pre-ordained consequences.

Personally, I am much more concerned with the City Council seats which is our opportunity to defeat the Clarkson cabal- because as much as Gisselson-Palmer tries to distance herself, she is Jacquelyn Brechtel Clarkson’s hand-picked successor. More importantly, she is supported by the same people- Algiers Point, the French Quarter, and the gentrifricationists in the Bywater and Marigny. Palmer is trying to distance herself publicly from Jackie because Jackie’s support has fallen so much, particularly in the downtown part of District C, and I fear that many who are not as aware may fall for it.

However, her opponent Carter had a wide lead in the primary- 32%. Let’s just hope that everyone who voted for former council member Mike Early doesn’t go to Palmer- which unfortunately is likely. Incidentally, it would warm my heart to see a dark-skinned black man like Carter on New Orleans City Council. Maybe then you could think that we’ve made it to the twentieth century at last.

The HMS Clarkson herself is running for Council-At-Large against Arnie Fielkow, former VP of the Saints for the council-at-large seat. Recently several candidates who didn’t make the runoff against Clarkson endorsed Fielkow, but Clarkson has good name recognition, is already on the City Council. Tight race.

For those of you not familiar with New Orleans politics, why do I hold such personal enmity for Jackie? Let’s see… removal of the benches from Jackson Square (we got them put back)? An attempt to make street performers illegal?… no those all pale in comparison to what she and Jay Batt from district A in Uptown did in December. These two humanitarians held up Nagin’s plan for ninety-some public trailer sites for eighty-one hundred trailers, thus giving FEMA the excuse that they needed to do nothing. The reason- Jackie didn’t want trailers on a sites like golf courses.

Does this qualify as pure evil?

Incidentally, when Nagin is criticized for not working with City Council, I am reminded that there are things that I like about the man, because with the current composition of the council, it can be nothing but a virtuous stand.

The permutations of race in this election remind me of those pear-shaped Russian dolls that fit one inside the other, except that in this case each layer of the doll would be a different ethnicity.

Ok, so let me see if I have this right: our light-skinned black mayor who campaigned as a businessman (business being a white power structure in New Orleans) in the last election and won via the white vote is now running against a white career politician (city government being a black power structure here) who has strong support of black voters. Layer two: This is a big deal because supposedly we haven’t had a white mayor since Mitch’s father, Moon Landrieu, but that’s counting Mayor Sidney Bartholemy who was supposed to be black but is whiter than I am.

A third layer: Ray Nagin has always sided with big business and developers against poor black people. He’s screwed over the lower 9^th ward time and time again, yet they showed up in droves to vote for him. Mitch Landrieu has more progressive politics, but just got the endorsement of Foreman, the most right-leaning of the three major candidates (also a businessman and white). So rich white people Uptown are going to vote for Landrieu even though he embodies policies they dislike to beat the man who dared to call this a chocolate city, and poor black people are going to vote for the man who is giving away their neighborhoods to developers and letting them languish without services because they know that they are being electorally disenfranchised again.

A fourth layer: Nagin’s ‘Chocolate City’ speech was made at the official city-sanctioned MLK day parade, which was in the business district, because Ray Nagin had chosen to abandon the traditional route which started in the Lower 9th ward.  How’s that for a symbolic gesture?  However, the march that was held in the lower 9th was organized by local vanguardist white activists and largely attended by out-of-town white activists (mostly brought in by the Common Ground collective), which annoyed both locals of all colors on the parade route and the few dozen outnumbered black people who attended.  Incidentally, city council member Cynthia Willard-Lewis showed up to make a speech and drive off like the amateur thespian that she is but Charmaine Marchand and Oliver Thomas actually walked the route.

And then there is the whole matter of our construction of race. This city has a long history of racial intermixing, but ever since Jim Crow all those people who look even vaguely African-american are deemed black. So we have Criminal Sheriff Marlin Gusman, who self-identifies as Creole, Cynthia Willard-Lewis, Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, Marlin Gusman, and a host of other light-skinned and mixed-blood “blacks” running city government, and I call them black in my newscast because that’s the correct usage of the word and I don’t have time to explain (which would make for a weird news story).

It would be a really radical thing if we elected a dark-skinned black, someone like Reverend Tom Watson, but he has arisen from a local black power structure, churches. And because of that he scares white liberals and some white radicals, myself included. Sorry- I know as a good radical I was supposed to support the most progressive black candidate, but religion in government scares me.

I recall an argument that I had with a gentrifier in my neighborhood in January who said she didn’t care about race, she just wanted good government. And I now find myself wishing that it was that easy, that we could put race aside and focus on policy. The problem is, we can’t, and living in New Orleans reminds me how impossibly far we are from that day.

The New Orleans primary election got much more interesting last night. Just when I thought that Nagin was dead in the water, he pulls off a nine-point lead in the primary. What happened?

Landrieu is still likely to win, but the odds are much closer now. You aren’t going to get thirty-eight percent of the vote without some white people voting for you, so my earlier hypothesis about Landrieu winning because Nagin doesn’t have enough white support to equal Landrieu’s biracial base is much shakier…

The real question now is what will happen to the 27% of voters (mostly white) who voted for Audubon Institute CEO Ron Foreman and republican businessman Rob Couhig. Conventional wisdom is that Nagin’s chocolate city comment froze him out of much of the ‘pro-business’ uptown white vote, but such voters are unlikely to find Landrieu, the candidate of the democratic dynasty, very appealing either. How many will sit out the election altogether?

Landrieu has more money, but Nagin has incumbency and a new groundswell of support among pissed off black voters who know that people tried to keep them out of this election. Too bad he hasn’t actually done anything for them in the past.

But hell, even I have to like Nagin. My argument goes like this: sure, Landrieu has a better platform (in a very safe, compromised, Democratic party kind of way), but they aren’t that much better, and he’s boring and sleazy (never trust a man with hair implants). Whereas Nagin is a son of a bitch, but he’s funny and somewhat insane, which more than makes up for the small gap in policy improvement. Even his ‘victory’ speech was in a self-depricating and charming in a style that Nagin has developed since the storm.

My housemate Aimee says that she voted for Nagin. She says that she likes to see us elect someone who known to be nuts, and that cussed out Bush during Katrina. Like a middle finger to the rest of the nation, just to prove that we’re still crazy.

If my well-educated, politically savvy housmates and I are not immune to the sort of leader-worship that comes out of disasters, even when we know we are being played, what does that say for those who don’t realize what is happening? It’s a humbling thought. Or is it that Nagin has developed real charisma?

Why am I even talking this much about the man? He tried to sell out the whole planning process to developer Joe Canizarro, and shipping mogul Boise Bollinger. How could I support him?

I don’t, really. I just don’t support Landrieu, either. A mayor’s race is not going to change what is fucked up about New Orleans. So we mine as well go with the amusing asshole to lead the city. It will make for more colorful news. Because if Landrieu gets elected, my job is going to be a lot more boring for the next few years.

Tonight the gloves came off at Loyola University, Uptown. The occasion was the third and final mayoral debate in the series, but the top seven candidates (four are included either out of charity or to keep the charade going) have been dragged around the city to various forums and bizarre speaking engagements the point that they are starting to get weary, and snappy, and have started making crude jabs at each other. Perhaps it is because the illusion of real contest is wearing off and the process of election by inheritance is starting to show even to those blinded by the spotlight.

Mitch Landrieu was going to be our next mayor before the ink dried on his signature at the secretary of state’s office. It’s clear- Forman doesn’t have the numbers to push him out of the runoff, and when it comes down to Nagin v. Landrieu, the white voters who supported Foreman will switch to the latter candidate. Nagin doesn’t have enough of the honky vote to win, especially after the “chocolate city” comment, which brought out all the not-so-buried racist apprehension in the privileged classes, who are back home Uptown and Algiers and voting.

And if, by some weird stroke of luck, Foreman can outdistance Nagin, the former will lose because the black vote will go to the white candidate for black New Orleans, Landrieu again. The only really interesting possibility is if Landrieu somehow loses his lead to both Nagin and Foreman, which would only happen in some instance out of a Edwin Edwards speech, like being caught in bed with a live boy or a dead girl, leading to Foreman and Nagin in the runoff and a direct contest along racial lines.

But Landrieu is both too smart and too boring for that, so he’ll be our next mayor.

It was, however, an amusing spectacle. The only other black candidate present, Reverend Tom Watson, tore into Nagin, accusing him of lying and “double-mindedness”. Foreman and Landrieu argued like schoolchildren (“I didn’t say that” “You did” “I didn’t”) and everyone made fun of Peggy Wilson, the republican former City Council member who keeps talking about “welfare queens”, pimps, and a tax-free city. Picking on poor Peggy was easy and cheap but still fun to watch- she makes the rest of us look so sane and progressive.

I have long ago accepted that elections are weird American rituals that have no basis in rational behavior, but why do people like Peggy Wilson run? Are their egos that grandiose? Are they that out of touch with reality to think that they have even a smattering of a chance of winning? What does she get from it? Or the other sixteen candidates who aren’t invited to the debates and won’t even get five percent? Is this Marie Galatas’ (the corrupt preacher who Pres Kabakoff bought off to support the St. Thomas redevelopment) way of denying her own mortality? Of trying to pretend that she matters?

On one hand, I’m glad- if Peggy is spending this much of her and her friend’s time and money running, that means they can’t use them for other purposes, and thus it keeps racist nut-jobs like her busy.

Soon the smoke will clear and the illusion of democracy will have been upheld for four more years, and we can all get back to full-time on our other distractions. And we’ll miss the humor in the social pageantry that is this mayoral race.

Today was a break from reporting but not a break from reality. Night before last my next-door neighbor was robbed at gunpoint, and tonight the police arrived- five cop cars flashing blue and red in the night. They had a suspect in the back of one car and I didn’t want to get close enough to find out who it was. I much prefer to remain invisible. I was hoping it wasn’t my neighbor, Clarence, who just got back from Houston. Not that I think that he robbed my neighbor- this is New Orleans and it doesn’t matter if you are innocent or not. Clarence is a young black man living in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood.

I have mixed feelings about crime here. The truth of the matter is that I am much more afraid of older gay men with small dogs than young black men. Demographics like the aforementioned older gay men are much more likely to make it so that I cannot live in whatever neighborhood I am in and thus are much more a threat to me. But I have never been mugged, so I am in no position to talk.

But this is the crux that we are in- if the neighborhood did not have crime, it would be taken over by yuppies. And the fact that the yuppies feel safe in our neighborhood is an assault on our lifestyles and identities. However insane it may be there was and is a certain attachment to the toughness and seediness that the Bywater used to have. No-one wants to get robbed or shot, but on the other hand none of us want yoga studios and dog spas either. Why is it so hard to find some middle ground?

I am reminded of what Zinn says about staying neutral on a moving train. Capitalism needs new markets, and urban renewal needs ghettoes to gentrify. And young white people like me and my friends are caught in the middle, both perpetrators and victims of gentrification.

It wasn’t Clarence- I talked to his folks. They live in a little gray shotgun across the street, one of two black families on the block. Daniel (his father) is talking about getting a big dog. He says if they try to rob him he’ll shoot the motherfuckers. Anne, his mother, sees more how much Clarence is a potential victim of the police. She says she told him to work or to move out, so that he won’t be hanging around getting into trouble. So Clarence works at Doerr furniture making fifty bucks a day cash. Some future.

Instead, the cops pulled all the young black men out of the little brick double a block down on the other side of Burgundy street. I watched them pull all of them out onto the street and felt helpless. I’m not into copwatch- for all I know they really have a reason to go in there. But I doubt it. If they’re looking for the guy who robbed my neighbor, he doesn’t live a block away, I can tell you that.

Is the Bywater coming back?

When rich people uptown say they want to keep crime down, they are saying that they don’t want poor black people to move back into town. And as much as many white radicals and liberals are in denial of it, the truth is that when the poor black people move back they bring crime with them.

This just isn’t a simple world. I can’t help it- I feel a little relieved at the mugging. Somehow the rhythm of this sort of trauma is a return to normality.

The cop cars haul off the kids. Young black men who will be traumatized in OPP and come out hard. This is what Anne wants to keep Clarence from.

America has the highest incarceration rate of any nation in the world, and Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate of any state, nearly half again the number of prisoners per capita than its nearest competitor, Texas.

I do the only thing that makes sense- I go out and drink.