Source: Next American City

A look at the Prospect. 1 New Orleans biennial which brought 81 artists from around the globe to create works in random and not-so-random sites scattered around the city:

P1 opened Halloween weekend. [Organizer Dan]vCameron estimates that more than 3,500 people flew in that opening Friday, a number I can partially vouch for given the three New Yorkers who camped out in my apartment and seemed to be getting a lot of phone calls from other New Yorkers who were in town. In subsequent weeks, the influx of art-bound tourists has waned. Local museums hosting exhibitions reported attendance numbers for Nov. 5-9 ranging from 747 at the Prospect One show at the Old U.S. Mint to 1,910 at the New Orleans Museum. The numbers indicate that initial hopes of bringing 100,000 visitors to the city may prove too ambitious. But more important than the number of booked hotel rooms or crowded sofas is the impact the show could have on our understanding of this city’s resilience. At a critical point in the city’s lagging recovery the dreamers came together and won. The idea worked.

[Post pic of Peter Nadin’s “The First Mark”.]

Source: Press Street

The Drawathon, organized by Press Street, has almost become its own bookmaking/zine/illustrating festival. Check out the lineup of activities planned for this third annual event. It starts at 6:30 am this Saturday and goes until dawn the next day. Very cool.

Source: Oxford American

In the magazine's Katrina anniversary issue (which is fabulous and you should get a copy of it) Jesmyn Ward has an essay about surviving the storm in De Lisle, Mississippi that is beyond upsetting. Here is a bit after they had to flee their house due to rising water:

The water flowed in channels from the forest to the street to the ditches and created rapids, which blocked us from heading to the west to the interstate, or to the east to the local Catholic church, which my grandmother insisted would be a safe place. The small hill we were on belonged to some white neighbors. The neighbors emerged from the house to check out their pickup trucks and cars and an old Mardi Gras float in the field. We shouted at them over the wind.

Over and over again, as I huddled with my freezing sister in the swaying truck, I thought, They didn't even have any room for us to stand.

The OA site includes a Q&A with Ward which covers what she loves about the region and what she thinks we've learned from Katrina (and Rita):

“I think that we definitely need to be aware of where we live, of how we live, and if our way of life is sustainable. We need to be more attuned to and accountable to the natural environment, and I think that before these storms, we had gotten lazy about that. I also think that these hurricanes, especially Katrina, taught us that the old spectres of race and of government corruption and inadequacy are still here. They have long plagued the South. They hover over us still.”

Ward has a new book out, Where the Line Bleeds, and Booklist includes a "Story Behind the Story" interview. Here's a bit:

Booklist was curious about how she, as a first novelist, faced filling up screen after screen with words, words, and more words. Was it a daunting proposition? Ward responded that after college, she went to New York City to seek employment and secured a position at Random House publishers. But she knew she wanted to be a writer. Then when her brother died, she realized the time had come to get down on paper the novel she’d had in mind. When she enrolled in the MFA program at the University of Michigan, she found the time and impetus to complete it. She knew that her close relationship with brother and the close-knit community she grew up in provided her with her major theme—making your own way in the world.

The book is available now.

Source: Examiner

Phil Jackson, perhaps the most overrated basketball coach to ever grace the court, needs to shut up. He is showing that he is less the Zenlike master some people thought he was during the Chicago Bulls run, and more just a blowhard corporate suit with the empathy of a Fox New analyst. If you don't believe me, just read what he's saying about New Orleans. It's not horrible, it's just callous and shallow and very much the kind of thing someone who does no internal thinking and has no grasp of what people are going through would say.

So Phil, you won with Jordan and Pippen. You won with Shaq and Kobe. What do you bring to it all? Just some mildly distasteful comments about a city that has suffered immensely and a dull-witted, tin-eared arrogance that befits a man who has received so many accolades for so little achievement. Phil, you deserve Oklahoma City.

Source: All About Jazz

Here's a thorough wrapup of the 10th annual Voodoo Experience, held about three weeks ago.

(I)t was the less heralded acts that made this year's Voodoo especially memorable. Away from the big stages in City Park, off to the sides of the festival area and located on the WWOZ/SoCo Stage and in the Preservation Hall Tent, less visible acts such as former Cowboy Mouth guitarist Paul Sanchez with his Rolling Road Show Band, The Iguanas, Ivan Neville's Dumpstafunk, The Old 97s, Bonerama, The Leo Trio featuring Leo Nocentelli, John Boutte, The Dirty Dozen Brass Band and Irma Thomas plied their trade to dancing, screaming, smiling and enthusiastic fans.

Source: BBC

Paul Stewart and his wife, Melody, moved into their trailer four months after Hurricane Katrina and were among the first to discover what might be causing the problems.

"It was so disheartening because Fema kept saying 'just open your windows and everything will be fine', so they continued to deny there was any problem," she added.

If there is justice - any sort of justice - in the world then there will be charges brought against those inside and out of FEMA who allowed those trailers to be purchased and dispatched and used for so very long. This is a story that I hope does not go away until the final, and most significant, chapter is written.

Source: Associated Press

Prospect.1 New Orleans curator Dan Cameron is bullish about the effects of the recently launched biennial:

“These shows are very successful, sometimes incredibly successful,” said Dan Cameron, the founder and curator of Prospect.1. “We think we’ll have about 100,000 people visit the show in the three months it’s here.”

Sounds like a very interesting show. Anybody been out to see the exhibits?

Source: National Public Radio

Did anyone see this comparison coming?

In Iraq, improved security is slowly restoring life to the sprawling southern river port of Basra. Backed by American air power, Iraqi government forces regained control of the city last March, breaking the grip of Islamist gangs that had dominated Basra for years.

Iraq's biggest southern city shares some of the attributes of New Orleans. Like the Big Easy, Basra is a river city, located at the point where Iraq's two great rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, converge and become the Shatt-al-Arab, the waterway that flows into the Persian Gulf. Like New Orleans, Basra is a commercial center, noted for its good food, its music and its easygoing approach to life.

Source: Times-Picayune

In the first full measure of its performance since the 2005 flood, New Orleans public schools showed improved academics, with a handful of open-admission charter and state-run schools posting fairly strong gains over the previous year, according to results released Friday.

But schools operated by the state system continue to remain in crisis, as all but two of the 17 district-run schools that opened in the chaotic 2006-07 academic year received scores below the state minimum of 60, giving them an academically unacceptable label.

Wow. The teachers of New Orleans obviously are doing good things against very tough odds. That's what I take away from this article.

Source: Slate

This is a round-up of a ton of different thoughts on the election but a third down you have this from a commenter to Slate's discussion:

Obama's road to the White House began in New Orleans. I have always lined up with the Libertarian Party on most issues. I am pro choice and anti gun control. I don't like the idea of a huge federal bureaucracy that sucks money out of my pockets as fast as I can earn them. I have voted for politicians from both parties who seemed to line up with my beliefs.

If Bush had only called his vacation short on say, Monday. He could have sat in the Oval Office and shuffled papers, and his supporters could have defended him. If he had actually gone to New Orleans instead of flying over it, they could have supported him. Instead, he didn't see fit to end his vacation until Thursday. He presided over one of the greatest natural disasters in American history, and he couldn't have done worse if he had started fiddling or said "Let the people of New Orleans eat cake."

We all dodge "jump the shark" moments in our lives; more and more Katrina seems to have been George W. Bush's.

Source: Times-Picayune

It's a question on a lot of minds lately and there is a lot to think about:

Under an executive order signed by Bush, the Office of Gulf Coast Rebuilding, based in the Department of Homeland Security, will cease to exist Feb. 28, a little more than a month after Obama takes the oath of office. The political appointees in the office, including O'Dell, are expected to depart when the Bush administration ends Jan. 20, leaving the agency with a skeleton crew of civil service employees.

"The most important thing, whether you keep the office going or appoint a coordinator, is to have the president let it be known that the person is speaking for him and has the authority to get things done," said one of the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Source: Times-Picayune

It's telling that Louisiana was out of step with the national zeitgeist on Election Day for the first time since it went for former Alabama Gov. George Wallace back in 1968. For four decades, Louisiana went to the next president of the United States. But not this year. Obama did well in the New South, however, and my wish, -- based on no facts whatsoever, mind you -- is that the New Orleans diaspora helped turn communities across the South a little bluer.

Louisiana was one of five Southern states to support Republican Barry Goldwater in the landslide for President Johnson in 1964, and to line up with Alabama Gov. George Wallace's third-party presidential bid in 1968. But since then, in nine successive elections, Louisiana along with Arkansas and Tennessee, have voted with the winner every time.

Not since John Kennedy's victory in 1960 has a Democrat been elected president who was not a Southerner.

Source: Christian Science Monitor

The ongoing stories about the rebuild fascinate me - we just don't have something like this (in terms of real time records) for any other modern city.

Of the Lower Ninth Ward's 14,000 residents who lived north of St. Claude Avenue, about 1,000 have returned, she estimates. Make It Right, a nonprofit community development corporation Mr. Pitt established in 2007, handed Ms. Guy the keys to her new home last month and is nearing completion on five other of the 150 homes it plans to build here. Other disaster-relief groups and churches have helped others rebuild. A local school is back in session – all due to a decentralized, bottom-up effort of volunteers from across the US and residents who became activists in rebuilding their neighborhood.

Along with the charter school and the US Defense Department's $200 million redevelopment of nearby Jackson Barracks, a National Guard base, the Make It Right houses are serving as catalysts for rebuilding the Lower Ninth, where, despite much progress, whole city blocks remain empty fields.

Step by step, brick by brick, this is how a country is made. (Or in this case, remade.)

Source: Chronicle of Higher Education

Should FEMA help Southern University of New Orleans relocate? The university is operating in a low-lying part of the city right now, and because of the fear of further flooding, it is not occupying the lower floors of many of its buildings. FEMA has so far said no to the relocation request, using this rationale:

“The fact that they’ve been able to make repairs and occupy those upper floors indicates that the viability of those buildings is still there,” Jim Stark, FEMA’s assistant administrator for Gulf Coast Recovery, told the newspaper.

So should FEMA pay to relocate SUNO?

Source: United Press International

Cameras, trumpets, clarinets, saxophones and $30,000 in cash have been raised for the program by the musicians' advocacy group Sweet Home.

The program's first day Saturday brought in a dozen guns and attracted 50 people, including 20 children, who were told to "blow a horn till your jaw hurts" rather than resort to violence to blow off steam, said Diana Meyers, program coordinator.

Source: Univ of NOLA Press

Here's a short recent interview with Algerian author Nabile Farès, whose works have recently been published by the University of New Orleans Press:

UNOP: You could be described as a political writer-certainly as an "engaged"one; current politics don't leave you depressed?

NF: Success in the political arts requires transcending the conflicts and heritages that have weighed us down, both in civil wars and in international onesŠ Taking charge of the future of a people, of a nation, is also a kind of
relieving, a "going beyond," the sufferings, tortures, injustices of the past-even if this past is still close to us.

UNOP: Since your next publication (Hearing Your Story) is also the first English translation of your work, perhaps you could say something about the American presidential election?

NF: Today, the United States-and how I love in these United States the open possibility of a presidential election that could transform the racist mentalities that have caused, still cause and will cause again so much harm to
humanity-enters onto a new path toward the future, characterized by a going-beyond the differences, segregations, apartheids, violences, ignorances and vengeances of history.

UNOP: You've been watching closely.

NF: If you followed the evolving Democratic Convention in the US you saw the enthusiasm, the credibility, the weight, the un-feigned joy that surrounded the nomination of Barak Obama for the future presidency. And, without being a US citizen, for the first time I accepted and understood the slogan "I Love The USA," not for her pretensions to leadership which often turn out catastrophic, but for this present moment which puts into play a new history for the US: a "future history" let us hope different from the pangs of anguish, the sequelae, of the past.

(translated from French by Peter Thompson)

Nabile Farès is an Algerian novelist , poet, and psychoanalyst, living in Paris. Born in 1940, he participated in the Algerian War of Independence. Novels include Yahia, Pas-de-chance (1970), and poetry includes Escuchando tu historia (Hearing Your Story), 1979.