Hurricane Song
By Paul Volponi
Viking 2008
ISBN 0-670-06160-0
144 pages

With Hurricane Song, author Paul Volponi has written a unique and intense novel on Hurricane Katrina for teen readers. Set almost entirely within the Superdome, this is the story of one family and how they coped with the rising tension and severe living conditions in the building both during and after the storm. All the elements many of us heard about in the dome are present here: the oppressive heat and appalling living conditions, the uneven law enforcement presence and the violent episodes from those who took advantage of the situation to harass and rob families taking refuge. The story of Miles, his musician father and uncle and the people they hunker down with is the story that we think we already know from the television and news reports, but by making it personal, by giving it names and faces and a family that has its own drama in place long before the storm, Volponi gives his book a sense of urgency that will shock readers. We think we already knew what happened in the Superdome; sit through several days with Miles, and it hits home in a way that a thirty-second news clip never could.

Hurricane Song opens on Sunday, August 28th with high school sophomore Miles wondering again if he made the right choice in coming to live with his father. His parents divorced when he was small, and he grew up mostly with his mother in Chicago and visited his father over vacations. But she has recently remarried and now has several stepchildren. Miles felt pushed out of the family and when the option to live with his jazz playing father in New Orleans was presented, he jumped at it. The two of them have struggled to connect, however, with Miles not understanding how music can be so important and his father at a loss as to the appeal of football. The two don’t know how to talk through their problems. Miles is beginning to wonder if maybe the relationship is just too strained to salvage. He is still sorting out what to do when Katrina forces him (and his father and uncle) to try and leave. Traffic and car troubles prevent them from making it all the way to Baton Rouge, and they find themselves stuck with only the Superdome. By the second chapter, they are standing in line to get in. Here is what they see:

"National Guard soldiers in camouflage fatigues stood at the door with their machine guns pointed straight up in the air. They looked us over like we’d crossed the border from another country without any papers. I locked eyes with one of them who had a thick square jaw, and his grip on the gun got tighter."

Because they came in at the last minute and had to abandon their car, the family does not have much food (it wouldn't have been an issue in Baton Rouge); as it turns out, a lot of families don’t have enough food. The whole plan behind using the Superdome as a massive shelter might have looked good on paper but the reality that Miles sees proves that the city’s disaster planners did not have a clue. People are hungry and thirsty, there is very little fresh air, and the toilets quickly rebel from overuse. The biggest issue, however, is security. There will always be people who thrive in chaos, and Miles finds himself at odds with a wandering pack of teenage thugs who shake down people for cash. The fact that he knows this group doesn’t make his interactions with them any easier; they are looking for trouble and when they can’t find it, they are happy to make some of their own.

Leaning With Intent to Fall
By Ethan Clark
Garrett County Press 2007
ISBN 1-891053-04-7
186 pages

As much as the press has tried to analyze and investigate the many different facets of New Orleans culture in the wake of Katrina and the failure of the levees, there are still aspects of the city’s culture that remained terminally overlooked. Reviewing Stories Care Forgot: An Anthology of New Orleans Zines provides readers with an introduction to the thriving zine pre-hurricane culture, but editor Ethan Clark’s new memoir provides an even more intimate look at the punks, partiers and endless array of questioning teenagers and twentysomethings who flow in and out of the city on vision quests they hardly acknowledge let alone are able to articulate. Clark ended up there after some time spent selling fireworks in Wisconsin and seeing way too much of a small segment of the interstate highway system while trying to hitchhike out of Kansas (in desperation he finally ended up on a bus). His reasons for choosing New Orleans made as much sense as the fireworks gig, but his recollections of his time spent there (and elsewhere) are a perfect window on one of those ever present but barely recorded aspects of American life. He’s very close in his new book, Leaning With Intent to Fall, to being the Sarah Vowell of low paying jobs, squats and living in your van, and readers wanting a clearer picture of New Orleans would do well to read what Clark has to say.

After chapters highlighting the disturbing antics of Midwestern fireworks buyers and the penchant for the people of Kansas to apparently drive back and forth between exits while ignoring increasingly desperate hitchhikers, Clark delves into his experiences in New Orleans. As a committed cyclist who depends on his bike to get back and forth to work (and make restaurant deliveries), the wild dog situation in his neighborhood is more than a bit disturbing, but Clark finds a way to take it in stride: “The poor bastards are just trying to get by, just like everyone else,” he writes. In a series of essays ranging from really bad roommates to really scary moments with the patrons of the local bar, Clark chips away at the working class sections of New Orleans, proving that there is still more to see about this city; still so much we do not know. (It became a ritual of sorts to climb inside a local monument of Robert E. Lee, and Clark tells us all about the weirdness, including a thankfully aborted attempt to cut their way into it one evening with a blow torch. I swear I’m not making this up.) From one ramshackle houseful of crazed roommates to another, Clark maintains his determination to find a job that doesn’t suck and some kind of direction for his future. And the reader, alternately shocked (he is nearly killed one night) and endeared (Clark doesn’t just move, he packs up “…tools and my records, my books and my zines and my nervous little dogs; I took down my increasingly ragged show flyers and band posters, and I loaded them all up into my antiquated yellow Dodge Maxi Van…”), stays along for the ride to see what Clark will do next, who he will meet and just what he is going to figure out in the end. The fact that he doesn’t know what he wants is infinitely reassuring and also very acutely what so much of young America understands all too well.

Lousiana Voyages: The Travel Writings of Catharine Cole
By Martha R. Field
Edited by Joan McLaughlin and Jack McLaughlin
University Press of Mississippi 2006
ISBN 1-57806-826-6
220 pages

In 1881 Martha Field began writing a Sunday column under the pseudonym of Catharine Cole for the Daily Picayune that ran for more than 10 years. She traveled all over Louisiana by rail, carriage and an exotic array of boats to write about the people and places in the state. She seems to have excelled at writing about the areas most often overlooked by northern journalists and truly embraced the rural way of life in a manner that is quite staggering when you consider the period in which she lived. Field accomplished a great deal with her columns, and her work serves as a time capsule for places long gone and rarely remembered. In 2006 the University Press of Mississippi handsomely collected many of her columns and presented them in The Louisiana Voyages: The Travel Writings of Catharine Cole

I was attracted to this title solely for the opportunity to peek into Louisiana’s past from a unique vantage point. Martha Field did not have any agenda in her writing and seems to be solely interested in telling an honest story about what she saw in her region as she traveled. Editors Joan and Jack McLaughlin are careful to point out as they introduce certain pieces that she was not a woman necessarily ahead of her time in all respects; Field might have been bold enough to travel as few women did but she clearly saw boundaries between the races and sexes that modern readers will not recognize. These are historical documents, however, and while I was delighted to discover Field was not a rampant racist, I was not surprised that she lacked an awareness of civil rights. The book is less about how people live together in southern society then it is about how they survive in rural areas and maintain viable standards of living which include economically successful towns. It is unfortunate that her ability to discern much about the lives of people in the timber trade in Livingston Parish is not evident in the work of so many contemporary journalists; Field was focused on the nuts and bolts of ordinary living in a manner that is often lost in the rush to find the next big thing today.

The columns are organized by location, and the editors provide a welcomed set of endnotes for each chapter explaining specifics about people and places that Field mentions with ease but will likely be unknown today. She writes about the island homes of the fishermen of Grand Isle, a place she visited before it was devastated by an 1893 hurricane, a school for young women in Natchitoches Parish (an endeavor she clearly admired) and the beautiful homes in the Bayou Lafourche. Turtle farming, for the purposes of soups for wealthy northerners, shows up in the column on Terrebonne Parish and, when writing about Morgan City, she covers a Cajun wedding on Grand Lake. Here’s a bit of what it was like to arrive at a wedding by boat:

Coming Through Slaughter
By Michael Ondaatje
Vintage 1996
(Original copyright 1976)
ISBN 0-679-76785-1
156 pages

Buddy Bolden has to be one of the most controversial and least understood characters in the history of American music. He is credited by some as the father of jazz, or at least the first to play the music, but as there is no known recording of him (there is a rumor of one being made and then lost), the only thing aficionados and music historians have to go on is the reminiscences of those who heard Bolden play. He apparently had some kind of severe psychotic episode while performing in a parade in 1907 (which was the last time he was heard publicly) and was shortly thereafter committed to the East Louisiana State Hospital, where he eventually died. Thus those who remembered Bolden and were available for interview decades later were few and far between. Jelly Roll Morton was the only one who actually heard Bolden play live and later recorded his music. “Buddy Bolden’s Blues” was based on Bolden’s song “Funky Butt.” Morton referred to him as "…the most powerful trumpet player I've ever heard, or ever was known."

With no actual recordings of Bolden’s music, there are only the many stories of wild performances where he turned his coronet to the sky and blew loud, “calling his children home,” of him possibly being a barber or just hanging out in a barber shop, of haunting Storyville and loving a prostitute and of the liquor, the gallons and gallons of liquor that fueled his manic life and likely led to his untimely death. There have been a few biographies written about Bolden, most notably In Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man Of Jazz by Donald M. Marquis. Canadian author Michael Ondaatje took a different tact when exploring Bolden’s life in fiction, however. His Coming Through Slaughter is elegant, dynamic and lyrically beautiful. It is not plot driven though, not even written from a single point of view; it wanders back and forth from historic fact at whim. It is a gorgeously written piece of work, as much about the crafts of writing and music as it is a story unto itself. Just as Ondaatje created something fresh and new with his World War II novel, The English Patient, he did something utterly unique with a part of New Orleans’ past in Slaughter. He also brought Buddy Bolden to life, in all his complicated, accomplished, successful misery. It’s a truly amazing book.

The way in which Ondaatje wrote Coming Through Slaughter is as significant as its subject. Chapters are split into paragraphs that might follow conventionally written conversations and observations at one point only to diverge into elegant stand-alone ruminations about music or marriage or photography a few pages later. There are fake interviews and real ones, mixed together and indistinguishable. Readers have to give themselves up to Ondaatje’s experiment, free themselves for the literary ride he is set to pilot. The fact that he is writing about someone who was critically involved in the formation of jazz makes this meandering literary adventure somehow appropriate though. Should a novel about Buddy Bolden make perfect sense after all, when so little about Bolden’s life does?

There is a narrative thread buried deep in Slaughter, however, and it follows both the final period of Bolden’s sane life while also recalling past events, from his fictional friendship with noted Storyville photographer EJ Bellocq and his unofficial marriage to Nora, a former prostitute with whom he had a child, to the final parade where he was present in all his musical glory until a moment when he apparently snapped and became violent. He was certainly committed to the asylum at the state hospital as the book asserts, although Ondaatje only alludes to those final moments, leaving the reader to imagine what propelled his family to make their final gut-wrenching decision. An insane asylum at that time in American history was a most unpleasant place to end one’s days, although Bolden lived there for nearly twenty-five more years, dying in 1931. He rarely ever played his coronet again, or even knew those who came to see him.

Antediluvian Tales
By Poppy Z. Brite
Subterranean Press 2007
ISBN 1-59606-116-3
116 pages

In her new book, Antediluvian Tales, New Orleans author Poppy Z. Brite has collected a group of stories written before the events of August 29, 2005. In her foreword, she explains that she did not think she could pair these “pre-K” stories with any that would be written after the flood: “…for better or worse my life, my outlook and, necessarily, my work, has changed forever.” She does include an essay, “The Last Good Day of My Life” which reflects on the two years since the failure of the levees and how that event has affected her. Her words on that score in particular are quite powerful:

“We did not stay, did not die and that haunts me as much as anything; even so the only adventures ahead of me were nightmare ones I’d never chosen.”

The stories themselves, six about the Stubbs family and two about her fictional counterpart Doc Brite, are evidence of the last good days of the author’s writing life. As such they are not only a pleasure to read but a deeply personal literary peek into one more facet of the struggles of New Orleans.

Fans of Brite’s Liquor novels and stories will already be familiar with the family of one of her main characters, G-man. In Antediluvian Tales, various members of the Stubbs clan take front and center, freeing Brite up to write a variety of stories. From a young girl struggling through a mysterious haunting in “The Devil of Delery Street” to a single mother’s decision to reach for a life of her own in “The Feast of St. Rosalie,” Brite visits the Stubbs family in all their conflicted glory, mining for great effect the rich depth of emotions and challenges faced by this thoroughly engaging family.

As I posted last week, Lisa Marie Presley has recorded a video with her father singing "In the Ghetto." This duet, only the second time she has done this, was produced for the sole purpose of raising money for construction of a Presley Place building in New Orleans.

All of this — the song, the video — is going to charity. The money from the downloads is going to help build another Presley Place in New Orleans, which is a transitional housing program that we started in Memphis. Families come in and live there, get their life skills and get it together. They get jobs ... and then about a year later, they move out when they can get back on their feet. This program has been doing incredibly well for the past few years, so I wanted to branch it out. It's something [Elvis] was very interested in, because it's kinda where he started from. And Presley Place is near where he was raised. I wanted to do this [video] and use it for something good. All fingers pointed towards New Orleans. I landed there to do the video and I looked around when I got off the plane, and it looks like Katrina happened six months ago. That's when it all fell together. And all proceeds — not a portion of — all proceeds are going towards building a transitional housing building in New Orleans.

You can read the full interview — where Lisa Marie discusses various aspects of recording one of her father's songs — at Spinner.

You can buy the video from iTunes for a couple of bucks and all of it goes to charity. I watched it last week and it's well worth your change and I'm sure some folks in NOLA would appreciate it. Behind the cut you can catch a recording from the recent Elvis anniversary concert. The visual isn't all that great, but you can hear Lisa Marie wail with her father — it's awesome. After the video plays, she talks about why she made it.

Sugarcane Academy by Michael Tisserand
Harcourt 2007
ISBN 0-15-603189-9
184 pages

There are so many stories emerging from the days and months after hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the failure of the levees that they are starting to blend together into one large collection of “disaster lit.” From experts dictating opinions from afar to those who were on the ground recounting their survival, the great purging of national shock and despair has begun in earnest. All of this is good and necessary — in fact it is likely only in these stories that the larger truths will finally emerge of just how many things went wrong in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. But in the rush of big dramatic stories, smaller ones can often get lost. Michael Tisserand’s Sugarcane Academy is one of those small stories, but his retelling of how a group of parents set out to minimize the trauma on their children and keep them going to school after they left New Orleans is both heartwarming and brilliant. When you have lost your house, it is easy to be overwhelmed and forget what matters, but Tisserand and the people he writes about did not do that — they focused on what was the most important thing for their kids, and subsequently, their families, and in doing so created a truly amazing school.

Tisserand, a writer and editor for Gambit Weekly, along with his pediatrician wife and two young children, evacuated the city to friends in New Iberia right before Katrina hit. Along with everyone else, they thought the move would be temporary and were stunned by the level of devastation they saw unfold before them on the television. Their house, one block from Lusher Elementary School, was not heavily damaged by the flood, but it still soon became apparent that they weren’t going to be returning home anytime soon. As they tried to decide what to do, what any of them could do, the children began to make noises about wanting to go to school. While many communities in Louisiana were reaching out and accepting new students, Tisserand and his friends saw a need to keep the children together if at all possible. It was when he ran into his daughter’s former teacher, Paul Reynaud, that a plan was hatched to teach the kids they found from New Orleans as a group. Reynaud was critical to the ideas’ success, as he was (and is) a unique and dedicated teacher. Interestingly enough, after college he started out working in restaurants:

“During his days and nights in the kitchens of New Orleans, Paul noticed how other workers couldn’t read. They struggled just to decipher one-syllable words and abbreviations written out on orders. He tried to help by doing things like writing H-A-M for ‘hamburger.’ Every day, Paul said, he would encounter intelligent people who could do a lot of great things, but could not read. He also met women who spent their lives assembling salads for dinners. In a way, said Paul, the city of New Orleans was built by people who did such careful work in the kitchen. But he couldn’t stop thinking about what his co-workers might have accomplished with a better education. Looking back, he thought this might have been the time when he decided to stop working in kitchens and go into teaching.”

Reynaud ended up being an inspired choice to teach the New Orleans children in New Iberia as the parents, all of whom had found each other and kept in touch over quick meals and phone calls in the new town, quickly discovered. They started out with only the children of three families, but were determined to find more. The parents also promised to pay Reynaud a salary culled from the donations they were receiving from family and friends across the nation. The school was quickly dubbed “Sugarcane Academy” in honor of the nearby sugarcane fields. Getting it going was what mattered most. As Tisserand writes:

Because really, there needs to be hardly any excuse to hear this song.

Behind the cut, John Lennon and "Imagine." Listen and then go see his piano on tour in NOLA.

Letters From New Orleans
By Rob Walker
Garrett County Press, 2006
ISBN 1-891053-01-9
226 pages

It would be deceptively easy to refer to Rob Walker’s collection of pre-Katrina essays as something like a “poetic look at a now devastated city” or a “pleasant return to the best days of the Big Easy.” It would be cheesy but effective and get the basic point across. Walker lived in New Orleans before the hurricane and levee failure, and he wrote about a lot of different things that intrigued him about his town: neighborhoods, restaurants, parties and people. That sort of description would make Letters From New Orleans sound like a pleasant collection, a nice diversion, but it would not be appropriate at all. Walker has done more than write some musings about the place he lived; he has, in spite of the storm or because of it, created a lovely time capsule for what once was the Crescent City.

His book is history now, even though he never intended it as such. And that makes reading it all the more fascinating. The reader cannot help but wonder what has happened to the people and places that Walker describes — what is left of the city he came to love. This gives the collection an aura of poignancy that it never intended to have and makes it far more relevant than its author probably ever imagined.

Walker's descriptive passages paint a memorable picture of New Orleans, like the description of the houses that “… are built high, and often there’s a big, massive, marvelous staircase of some sort leading up to a porch and a front door that might be three feet or even six feet off the ground.” Beyond these casual digressions, though, it was the essays on real people like Ernie “K-Doe” Kador that really interested me. In discussing K-Doe’s life and lounge, Walker gives readers an interesting view of the rather eccentric singer. But more than just a look at the surface, he finds what made K-Doe endearing. “If there’s any joke attached to the singular phenomenon of K-Doe,” writes Walker, “he was the only one in on it. Here’s a guy who created his own reality, simply by believing in it, or at least seeming to. And it worked.” This intimate way of seeing his subjects, of knowing them, gives Letters a feeling that is far more personal then other books of a similar nature.

Walker also visits the area under I-10 along North Claiborne Avenue, reminding readers of what that area gave up so the larger city could enjoy more direct transportation. It’s a story that has been retold relatively often in recent months, but for those new to this particular chapter in negative urban planning, it will be deeply troubling. The author gives it all a modern spin, however, commenting on the ways in which Claiborne clings to its vital nature — insists upon still being relevant even as it falls further into decay and despair. “My point here isn’t to romanticize these neighborhoods, or to condemn the decision to slash an interstate through them,” writes Walker. “I’m neither sentimental nor angry about North Claiborne. But I am somewhat awestruck.”

A little something different this Memorial Day Weekend. Take a look at how the benefit album "Sing Me Back Home" came together through the New Orleans Social Club. You have Ivan and Cyril Neville, Irma Thomas, Henry Butler and others talking about why chose the songs they did, how they feel about the city, and why making this album was so important.

A lot of benefit albums are made by people with good intentions who don't necessarily have a personal connection to the group they are supporting. But if you listen to the NPR piece on "Sing Me Back Home" (which includes three songs from The Subdudes, Willie Tee and The Sixth Ward All-Star Brass Band Revue) you will understand why these musicians - these talented, brilliant, committed musicians, all felt there was something they had to do - that it would be wrong not to do something like this.

Behind the cut, the musicians talk about "Sing Me Back Home". Watch the video then go listen to some New Orleans music and remember all over again why we can not forget.

Over at the My Space page for the New Orleans Musicians Relief Fund, you can listen to Joe Topping's sweet song, "Lord Willing". (Just take a look at the upper right, click on Joe's name and push the play button at the top to hear it.)

Last year Joe, who is British, walked 1400 miles to raise money for the Fund. Here's the scoop from his site:

From July through to October, Joe has walked from shores of Lake Michigan at Chicago to the waters of the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans via America's 'Cities of Music' - Chicago, St. Louis, Nashville, Memphis and New Orleans - in aid of New Orleans Music Relief Fund, raising awareness and money for the displaced New Orleans musicians.

He is working on a new album due out sometime this year and it will certainly include impressions made from that journey.

Rap artist Dizzy collaborated with DJ Raj Smoove to make an album that featured the sounds of many New Orleans rap singers and how they felt in the wake of Katrina. His song, "The Day After Tomorrow" shows all the anger and frustration that was felt by many in the aftermath of the levee failure. From an article last year in Fox News:

Dizzy’s video for the title track was filmed in front of his mother’s flooded house downtown. Rusted guns and piles of debris litter his hopeful lyrics.

“You could have the world in your hands and it all could be gone. You lose it all,” he raps. “Take it all as a blessing … We’re looking forward to the day after tomorrow.”

Behind the cut, Dizzy lets you know how he feels about what happened to his hometown. (Be aware, the lyrics are very intense and it might get you in trouble if you crank it at the office!)

As Congress moves to a showdown with the President on the Iraq War, it seem appropriate to remember another war and a song that serves as a reminder of just who pays the price while politicians strut and blather.

Behind the cut, Ivan Neville funkifies the Creedance Clearwater Revival classic, "Fortunate Son."

Because he is as much the heart and soul of the city as Louis Armstrong and Fats Domino. And because this song really makes me happy.

He will be at Jazz Fest on the "Acura" stage, on opening day, Friday the 27th at 3:45PM. Oh how lucky you all are who get to hear the man live!

Behind the cut, Dr. John sings a classic the way only he can............

The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish
By Elise Blackwell
Unbridled Books 2007
ISBN 1-932961-31-7
210 pages

With The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish, author Elise Blackwell has crafted a lyrical novel about life in southern Louisiana prior to the flood of 1927. By creating a fictional parish to represent those actually affected by the flood, she allows her characters to meet each other and the rising danger that is coming their way without the burden of nonfiction to weigh them down. Able to freely wander in and out of each other’s lives, Blackwell gives us one family in particular, the Probys, and all of their shifting alliances among the black and white residents of the town of Cypress. Nothing is what it seems there, just as the Mississippi River itself is hiding all manner of turbulent secrets as it closes in on the Louisiana borders. Rather than an epic narrative, though, Blackwell insists on peeking in behind all those curtains in Cypress, all the closed doors and locked hearts. She gives us life in a small town that is destroyed by a flood and fear at a time when no one thought the river was mean; when no one could imagine that men would be so greedy that they would destroy the lives of hundreds just to avoid the risk of damage to their own.

I want to say that life was simpler then, but Blackwell proves that to be a lie; she proves a lot of things in Unnatural History and will leave her readers guessing at what more she could have written.

Louis Proby is 17 years old in 1927, and it is through his eyes that the end of his world is seen. His father is the “superintendent” in Cypress, which means he is the power of the logging company that makes the town exist. He worked his way up to the position and is well respected by everyone who works for him. In his position, he interacts with both the whites who supervise and the blacks who man the crews and is known as a man to be both fair and wise. Mr. Proby wants Louis to be a doctor, and it is toward that goal that he is aimed. When Charles Segrist, the company representative in the region, hires Louis to drive his car on trips back and forth to his home in New Orleans, the Probys see it as an opportunity for Louis to gain the experience of important men. The job does send the teenager into a rarefied circle of small Southern power, as he sees backroom deals and agreements that affect the lives of thousands. It is with Segrist that Louis learns about the vulnerability New Orleans has to potential flooding and that destroying levees upriver and thus sacrificing other communities is considered a viable solution to save the city.

It is with Segrist that Louis grows up and learns what is right and wrong, and just how horribly small powerful men can be.

Grayson Capps is an Alabama native who lived and performed in New Orleans for twenty years before Katrina hit. His song "New Orleans Waltz" is about letting go of the blame and focusing on rebuilding. He sounds some parts country, some parts roots rock and all parts Americana. His sound is one of many that was nurtured by life in New Orleans and proves just how diverse the city's music can be.

Behind the cut, Grayson Capps singing for a city he loves.

Voyage of Midnight by Michele Torrey
Knopf 2006
ISBN0-375-82392-4
192 pages

The slave trade in New Orleans has been thoroughly documented by all manner of writers over the years. Author Michele Torrey offers up a very interesting young-adult story on the subject, however, with the latest entry in her series of titles set on the high seas. Voyage of Midnight starts firmly in Oliver Twist territory but quickly moves to New Orleans and an adventure into the darkest corners of the hearts of men. It’s an incredibly graphic and compelling look at the Middle Passage through the eyes of a teen who initially trusts the adults around him only to learn in the harshest way possible how very wrong they are. In the process Torrey gives her readers an intimate history lesson they aren’t likely to forget for a very long time.

Philip has one of those tragic stories that fuels 19th-century literature. As an orphan, he is destined to a childhood spent in a workhouse and barely survives the jobs he is hired out to accomplish. School is a distant dream, as is any sort of affection. Then just when he seems destined for a life of grim hard labor followed by an early death, a long lost uncle appears out of nowhere, promises to send money to keep him from having to work and agrees to return for him someday. Philip would seem to have won the orphan lottery, except by page four the uncle has come and gone and Philip is soon back at work. It’s all like a dream, and for many children that’s all it might have been. But the minute he turns 12 and is cut loose from the system, he seizes at the opportunity to travel to New Orleans and find his uncle. It is the only chance at a life that Philip can see, and he’s not the kind of boy to let that sort of chance slip by.

What follows is a truly hellish trip across the Atlantic, which will make readers wonder just how anyone managed to survive long enough to colonize the New World. Philip’s uncle is not so obviously found in New Orleans (no surprise) but some very nice people are nearby and, little by little, Philip learns to trust and carve out a life for himself. Just when he seems destined to the best sort of quiet happy life, he turns a corner and there’s the missing relative. With promises of action and adventure as a crew member of his uncle’s merchant ship, it takes only a matter of minutes for Philip to leave all his newfound safety and security behind. And then the book becomes an incredible cannot-put-down story about one boy’s discovery of the horrors of slavery. From Cuba, where Philip finds himself gifted with a slave of his own, to Bonny Town in southeast Nigeria, the teen finds himself immersed in a world he had no idea existed. He tries to be supportive of his uncle and the financial windfall that slavery will bring to him, but as he helps brand the captives and then struggles to keep them alive and provide them with medical assistance, his view of the trade and his uncle begins to change. Philip no longer sees the economics his uncle touts so often; he sees the faces chained in the dark packed hold of the ship and they will never be anything less than people to him again.

It comes as no surprise to the reader that this enlightenment doesn’t exactly make Philip popular among the crew.

Originally written in 1929 by Blues singer Memphis Minnie and performed by Minnie and her husband Kansas Joe McCoy, "When the Levee Breaks" was written for the African American workers who were not allowed to leave the levees during the 1927 Mississippi flood. (You can download their version of the song here, for free.) It's a bitter song that Led Zeppelin made their own in 1971. Rarely played live by the rock group, it has become one of their most famous songs and found new popularity in Louisiana in the days after Katrina.

Behind the cut, Led Zeppelin sings the words of Memphis Minnie to images of Katrina.

From 2-Cent, a group that was inspired by the poor television programming directed at their demographic to create their own television program, has come the amazing Rap video "Freedom Land."

After Hurricane Katrina, every artist had a song about how they were affected by the storm and their music was a release for those stressed out and frustrated. So, 2-Cent decided to get the hottest producers in the city, DJ Zella and Raj Smoove (ooh boy) to produce a track for all artists in New Orleans to say what they really feel about our city's state of emergency. K Gates, Dee-1, The Show, Young A, Mack Maine, Nutt the Kidd, and Dizzy all came together along with 2-Cent to show what can happen when black people get together to do something positive. The result was the highly anticipated "Freedom Land" project. This may be the first time in New Orleans something like this happened on the music scene and hopefully won’t be the last. Positive music can be a start for bringing this city back and this video goes to show there is strength in numbers.

Behind the cut, see the amazing work of some of NOLA's finest up-and-coming rap artists. This really blew me away, and I hope it impresses the hell out of you too.

NOLA blues legend Timothea Beckerman passed away last November after a long battle with hepatitis C. Compared to both Etta James and Tina Turner, she sings about life and love in her the wonderful "Time For a Change," Check out all of her CDs and take a few minutes to enjoy the smooth R&B of a lady that knew how to sing — and not scream — for her audience.

Behind the cut, one of the good ones gives us all a great song ...

Part of Me
By Kimberly Willis Holt
Henry Holt 2006
ISBN 0805063609
208 pages

Author Kimberly Willis Holt has written a delightful multigenerational young adult novel with Part of Me. Set primarily in the small Cajun town of Houma, Part of Me tells the stories of four different teenagers over more than 60 years of Louisiana life. Beginning with Rose in 1939, who must leave her Texas home behind after her father abandons the family, Holt writes about children who seem unremarkable, even ordinary, but engage readers from start to finish. It’s the sort of quiet little book that might be easily overlooked in the face of overwrought dramas and “problems of the week,” but it will most definitely appeal to bookish girls and boys who want to read about oysters, bookmobiles, more than one great dog and why Harry Potter rocks.

Can you imagine, a book about four different kids, over four different generations and all of them are smart and interesting and wholly original without being over-the-top clichés? Will wonders never cease!

Rose and her younger brother and sister have never been to Louisiana or even known about their Cajun grandfather before their mother is forced to take the children and go home. Everything about Houma seems exotic and strange, especially Antoine Marcel, “the oyster man” who takes them in without a word. Soon enough, scholarly Rose learns that there is not enough money for her to go to school; she has to go to work and help out. Spared from being an oyster shucker by her mother, who takes on that difficult job herself, Rose finds herself instead as the driver for the new community bookmobile. This allows her to meet people in all the surrounding small towns and begins her family’s long association with the library. It is also how Rose meets Luther Harp who eventually becomes her husband.

From Rose the narrative shifts to Merle Henry, her son, who loves trapping with his dog Blue and has a deep affection for his Aunt Pie and her wild unconventional ways. Old Yeller is the book Merle discovers one day, and the one that touches his life the most. (Don’t even get me started on the nightmare that is Old Yeller. I refuse to recommend this book to a single living soul although I will not hold it against Holt for having Merle love it. I am going to give you a big spoiler here though and tell you that Old Yeller is not duplicated in Merle’s story, and it has a happy ending for both boy and dog.)

Because it has been a long hard week here in the Pacific Northwest and this song makes me smile. I swear, I really believe that if the whole world listened to Louis Armstrong then war would be over forever.

Behind the cut, Louis Armstrong to make us happy.

The latest Shawn Mullins record, 9th Ward Pickin Parlor, was engineered by former NOLA resident Mike West (dubbed the "Allen Toussaint of the 9th Ward"). You can read all about why Mike is in Kansas now (that would be the "Katrina factor") and what he hopes to do to keep New Orleans magic alive and well in the music he produces while listening to the break through cut off of Mullins' album, "Beautiful Wreck."

Behind the cut, Shawn Mullins, a great song and wicked cool video.

New Orleans legend Irma Thomas singing the Soul classic "Long After Tonight." I'm still looking for some recent video of Irma singing — keep an eye out here for what I can find.

Behind the cut, a NOLA treasure ...

New Orleans: Playing a Jazz Chorus
By Samuel Charters
Marion Boyars 2006
ISBN 0714531316
227 pages

Music historian and author Samuel Charters has been writing and recording the blues and jazz since the 1950s. His vast knowledge of music and musicians is a big part of why his new book, New Orleans: Playing a Jazz Chorus, makes for such fascinating reading. Many other people have written (or are writing) a book about New Orleans in the wake of Katrina, but Charters brings something entirely new to the table. He lived in the city and worked with and recorded many of its musicians over 50 years ago — he remembers not a playground for the young and drunk, but a place where music truly was all that mattered. In returning after the hurricane, primarily to help his son and family who lost nearly everything in the storm, Charters is struck both by those sounds that are gone and those that persevere. His journey into the new music scene and interviews with musicians who cling to their city’s roots opens up an entirely new facet in Katrina literature. This is not about the musicians who made New Orleans great, but about the struggles of those who insist on seeing a future for the music. Louis Armstrong might be just a memory but, as Charters discovers, there are plenty of other hardworking performers who are doing all they can to keep music alive in New Orleans. It is that musical evolution that Charters most deeply explores and what makes this memoir stand out above many others I have recently read.

Charters opens with his drive south, in September 2005, to see what is left of the Gulf Coast. As he observes the devastation in Mississippi he ruminates on the potential loss of New Orleans. “What we suddenly understood, if we hadn’t known it before,” he writes, “was that some cities mean something to us. We don’t have to travel to see them, to walk along their streets, we only have to know they are there. Who would want to live in a world without Paris? Or London? Rio de Janeiro, Rome, or New York?” He knows New Orleans is certainly on this list, it has come to represent, he believes, “…the Dionysian side of our nature, the side that needs to know that there’s an easy comfort there, and a side that, just as much, needs the feeling of the exotic.” Clearly the author understands that we may not need to live there or even visit, but we need the reassurance of that place (those places) still waiting out there for us; promising they will always wait.

And now New Orleans was threatening to sink into the abyss; Charters was desperate to see what was left.

Because he is a music historian, it is that subject’s relics which draw him most deeply. Seeking out Jelly Roll Morton’s early home, on the corner of Frenchmen Street and North Robinson, he finds the house damaged but still standing, its historical plaque attached under a waving blue tarp. Morton’s house in Gulfport was in ruins but the New Orleans one was keeping his place in that city’s history alive. “…I’d always remembered this house,” writes Charters, “as a fixed point in the thoughts and dreams I had about Morton and his music.”

The Be Good Tanyas are a Canadian folk/jazz/blues trio that has been heavily influenced by New Orleans. "The Littlest Birds" is off their album Blue Horse and the video was filmed around the Ninth Ward and other Southern Louisiana spots. This song has a strong bluegrass sound to it, but gives you a good taste of the Tanyas' vocal stylings.

Their new album, Hello Love, was released last October.

Behind the cut, the sweet sounds of The Be Good Tanyas on the streets of New Orleans.

For your Friday listening pleasure, some New Orleans Brass Funk Rock courtesy of the fabulous Bonerama. Halfway through Craig sings and you get to hear some great holler back vocals with the band. It stops pretty abruptly but you get a taste of why you need to buy their CDs!

Behind the cut ... turn up the volume and dance with Bonerama!

I cannot think of a more exhuberant and joyous sound then the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. They are on the road a lot and carry their distinctive New Orleans sound with them everywhere they go. Called the first "modern" brass band, the Dirty Dozen have taken the Dixieland sound and blended it with jazz — hard to describe, easy as all get out to love.

Behind the cut, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band with "Junko Partner"

Harry Connick Jr.'s new album Oh My Nola was released on Tuesday. Here is the first single, "All These People," about what he saw and felt in the days after Katrina.

Behind the cut, Harry on the city he loves so much.

Rescued by Allen & Linda Anderson
New World Library 2006
ISBN 1-57731-544-8
346 pages

Some of the more enduring images from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina were those of the many animals left behind in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast. As volunteers from animal organizations headed south in the days after the storm, they found desperate dogs, cats, horses, birds, snakes and cows that residents thought would be fine for a day or two but of course tragically found themselves trapped and alone for weeks on end. Even worse were the images of people in New Orleans who weathered the storm to stay with their pets and then had to make bitter and brutal choices before accepting a rescue from a helicopter, boat or bus. At every turn it seemed desperate people had to make desperate choices about their lives or the animals they loved. After losing so much, it was truly horrific to then have to lose so much more. Ultimately, Katrina and the ensuing failure of the levees changed the way America looks at animals, and new legislation was passed to protect the rights of pet owners. Hopefully there will never be another animal tragedy to compound a human tragedy of this magnitude again.

But still, that is for the future, and what happened on the Gulf Coast is still very recent and very hard to bear.

Authors Allen and Linda Anderson set out to collect not only stories about how animals in Louisiana and Mississippi were affected by Katrina but also to provide a guidebook for animal lovers as to what they should do if faced by a natural disaster. Rescued: Saving Animals from Disaster succeeds very well when writing about the hurricane and levee failure — there are multiple narratives about those who stayed behind (most famously Dr. James Riopelle at Lindy Boggs Medical Center Hospital) and those who raced to the rescue. It is all rather gripping stuff, and this is the first time such comprehensive interviews and research have been collected in one volume.

It is disappointing that the authors sought out celebrity opinions on animal rescue for their book, however; there is plenty of drama here without giving us the thoughts of Linda Blair or Rue McClanahan. Celebrities don’t need to be part of the narrative when so many others were willing to risk everything to do what they believed in. Let the real stars have all the limelight — the ones who were waist deep in water and knocking down doors; those are the stories readers want to hear, and Rescued has plenty of them to impress the hell out of us.

Trumpeter Nicholas Payton is the son of musician Walter Payton and started his career at the age of eight playing for the Young Tuxedo Brass Band. Take a peek at his interview with NPR last year and then sit back and listen to him absolutely wail out the high notes in this clip from 2001.

Behind the cut, Nicholas Payton.

The video is tagged as "on tour in France" but two seconds into it you know it's New Orleans. This is a perfect example of why this city is so incredibly important to the evolving music of America.

Oh Dinerral Shavers, how you will be missed.

Behind the cut, take a look and a listen to one of the good things about NOLA - taped last fall and sounding crystal clear.

From Bruce Springsteen, who is most certainly not from New Orleans, but sings a song about his hometown that now, more than ever, applies to New Orleans as well.

Hopefully this week will mark a turning point in the history of New Orleans. Hopefully.

Behind the cut, "My City of Ruiins" with a NOLA video.

For a city that is bleeding to death where once it drowned, here are the Neville Brothers from Jazz Fest 1990, "Amazing Grace".

Inaugurating a new Voices tradition, here is the first of many Music Fridays which will provide a link to a video or song clip of a truly fabulous Louisiana artist. If you have suggestions, send them my way at colleenatchasingraydotcom and we'll see what we can do to spread the word.

Marc Broussard is one of my favorite singers and he positively wails on "Home." You will not be able to stay in your seat while you listen to this one...it's impossible.

Jack up the volume on the video, and hit the link.

In the Wake of Katrina by Larry Towell
Chris Boot 2006
ISBN 0-9546894-9-6
96 pages

In September 2005, author Ace Atkins and photographer Larry Towell drove through coastal Mississippi and New Orleans on assignment for Outside magazine. The resulting article, which ran in December, highlighted the destructive path of Hurricane Katrina from Waveland, Mississippi, to the infamous I10 overpass in New Orleans. Towell’s photos were particularly gripping — austerely black and white, they reminded readers of shots of war in their starkness and simplicity. Towell did not need to use fancy tricks of lighting to show the story of that trip; all he had to do was let the landscape reveal itself, and in the flattened empty streets of Mississippi and flooded avenues of New Orleans, the message was clear. Catastrophe had come to the American South, cities were dead, and Atkins and Towell were just two more of the many journalists who had shown up for the funeral.

In March 2006, publisher Chris Boot and the Archive of Modern Conflict released In the Wake of Katrina, the complete collection of Larry Towell’s photographs from that trip. In the words of Timothy Prus, curator of the archive, the photos are “a poignant record of what happened along the Gulf Coast, and to its people, when the hurricane hit. They highlight our individual vulnerability and social fragility in the face of such an onslaught.” To Prus and the people he works with, the photos have a value that extends far beyond a current event. “This book,” he writes, “exists because we believe such photographic records matter; it matters that photographers produce them, and that they are published. In book form, the photographs are accessible to the people who want them and need them — now, as we continue to digest the meaning and consequence of events, and in the future as part of the historical record.”

It is hard to recommend a book like In the Wake of Katrina; it is not the sort of coffee table glossy that most people will leave out to impress visitors, and it is the worst sort of late night viewing. Towell’s photographs are not graphic and disturbing in an obvious way — there are no shots of the dead or dying here. In fact, many of the pictures do not even include people. But when you see the openness of Mississippi, an openness that should be full of houses, neighborhoods, children playing street soccer and people walking dogs, you cannot deny that Pass Christian is gone, Waveland is gone, Bay Saint Louis is gone and Puckett and Biloxi and Magee and Grand Isle are just remnants of what they were. They are not the places they used to be, in most cases there is not even enough left for them to be memories. And Towell insists with his photos that we know that, and we can’t pretend to deny it anymore.

And then there are the pictures of New Orleans.

Soul Kitchen by Poppy Z. Brite
Three Rivers Press 2006
ISBN 0-307-23765-6
288 pages

D*U*C*K
Subterranean Press 2007
1-59606-076-x
132 pages

Long-time fans of Poppy Z. Brite will be well aware that she has a new entry into her Rickey and G-man series, Soul Kitchen. For those of you have yet to immerse yourself into the world of these two chefs, who lately have become owners of their own successful restaurant, it’s the perfect time to find out what you’ve been missing. While Soul can certainly be read and enjoyed on its own, the best thing to do is to buy the previous two books in the series, Prime and Liquor and also invest in some Subterranean Press editions of the companion chapbooks and delightful “backstory” to the Rickey and G-man relationship, The Value of X. (A sentimental favorite of mine as it follows the guys when they were teens and first realized their relationship was about being more than just friends.) The one thing you need to know for sure, though, is that while the books are all about good food and maintaining relationships both personal and professional (and in the latest book there’s also a disturbing mystery), more than anything they are love letters to New Orleans. Just as Travis McGee is all about Florida and Spencer lives for Boston, (and even Carrie Bradshaw saved her most intimate revelations for New York) the stories of Rickey and G-man are told around the beautiful allure of their home city. Soul Kitchen is no exception to that rule and should be a welcome addition to all connoisseurs of truly fine Southern writing.

In a change from the earlier books, Soul opens with the brutal murder five years earlier of a famous New Orleans restaurateur. The chef was convicted of that crime, but when the narrative turns to the present, and Rickey and G-man’s restaurant, Liquor, readers learn that DNA evidence has set Milford Goodman free. Unemployed and hopeless, he shows up looking for a dishwashing position. Rickey recognizes him as the great talent they had known and worked with more than a decade before and immediately gives him a job as a cook. Milford is just as good of a chef as Rickey (maybe even a bit better as he seems to have a natural gift akin to a musician’s ability with perfect pitch), which while good for the customers, begins to affect the high-strung chef and owner in small ways. It is a physical injury he suffers that really puts him in danger, though, and combined with the self-imposed pressure to stay creative and the dangling prospect/pressure of a new professional opportunity, Rickey finds himself suddenly, and hopelessly, addicted to prescription pain killers. Just like that, he needs the pills to stay in control, to get the job done, to make it through his shifts in the kitchen. And just like that, G-man suddenly finds himself faced with losing the person who means more to him than anything.

I wasn’t kidding when I said Brite’s books were about relationships.

Mozart and Leadbelly by Ernest J. Gaines
Knopf 2005
ISBN 1-4000-4472-3
159 pages

I first fell in love with Ernest Gaines through his fiction, and readers of some of his more famous books — The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and A Lesson Before Dying — will certainly agree that he has an innate ability to convey authenticity in the voices of his characters. You read his words and you believe the story is true; that it could not possibly be the work of imagination. This belief is particularly common when it comes to Jane Pittman, who certainly seems to be a grandmother or great aunt or some elderly family member that told her history to Gaines and he then transformed it for his novel. The author acknowledges this all too often misconception in the opening essay of his delightful new collection, Mozart and Leadbelly, a book that offers the sources of his inspiration and commitment to Louisiana storytelling, along with a few new short stories as well.
In “Miss Jane and I,” Gaines acknowledges that not only readers but reviewers have insisted Miss Jane is a real person — to the extent that Newsweek requested a photo to run with its review! (It does make it a lot easier to understand, though, how that whole WMD fairy tale could get past the press.) Many friends were certain that Gaines must have interviewed his grandmother and used those memories in creating Miss Jane, but she was, he writes, “absolute fiction.” To explain where such a character came from and how she developed into a voice that transcended the novel form, he shares his own memories of growing up in “Miss Jane and I,” giving readers a look into the Louisiana childhood that Gaines experienced and which has suffused nearly everything he has written since. “Who is Miss Jane Pittman?” asks Gaines. “But first, who is Ernest J. Gaines? Because to get part of the answer to the former question we must go back, back, back — not to 1968, when I started writing the novel, but to 1948, when I had to leave the South.”

Truly leaving the South behind, though, in this case for a chance at a better education, was something that Gaines found himself incapable of doing. Although he enjoyed his years in California, eventually attending college at San Francisco State and Stanford, it was still Louisiana that he longed for. As a teenager, he haunted libraries soaking up all the great literature, but none of it told him the stories he longed to read. He explains in detail what he was looking for and his frustration at not being able to find it:

“I wanted to smell Louisiana earth, feel that Louisiana sun, sit under the shade of one of those Louisiana oaks, search for pecans in that Louisiana grass in one of those Louisiana yards next to one of those Louisiana bayous, not far from a Louisiana river. I wanted to see on paper those Louisiana black children walking to school on cold days while yellow Louisiana buses passed them by. I wanted to see on paper those black parents going to work before the sun came up and coming back home to look after their children after the sun went down. I wanted to see on paper the true reason why those black fathers left home — not because they were trifling or shiftless, but because they were tired of putting up with certain conditions. I wanted to see on paper the small country churches (schools during the week), and I wanted to hear those simple religious songs, those simple prayers — that true devotion. (It was Faulkner, I think, who said that if God were to stay alive in the country, the blacks would have to keep Him so.) And I wanted to hear that Louisiana dialect — that combination of English, Creole, Cajun, black. For me there’s no more beautiful sound anywhere — unless, of course, you take exceptional pride in ‘proper’ French or ‘proper’ English. I wanted to read about the true relationship between whites and blacks — about the people that I had known.”

Unable to find those stories, Gaines began to write, as he puts it, “a simple little novel about people at home.” That first book was eventually published in 1964, almost fifteen years after he first started it, as Catherine Carmier. It changed a great deal over the years as Gaines worked on his craft, spent some time in the army and attended college. He details the way he became a better writer in those early years, while diversions from work and play constantly lured him from his stories. He remembers the lessons from his San Francisco State and later Stanford instructors: “time and work” they told him again and again, “it will take time and work.”

Come Closer by Sara Gran
Berkley 2006
ISBN 0425210316
184 pages
saragran.com

I recently read the most unusual book and I’ve been struggling to come up with an adequate way to write about it. I hate to just say “I loved this book” and leave it at that — a review needs something more concrete to convince readers that they should pick up the title and give it a shot. But Sara Gran’s Come Closer defies all the easy genre classifications; it simply will not lend itself to a canned description. So here is where I try to write about this book I read that really impressed me. It is an old story in some ways, but utterly original in the telling. And oh yeah – it’s guaranteed to scare the crap out of you — absolutely guaranteed.

Gran lives and writes in New Orleans, but Come Closer is a New York-type novel. I couldn’t help but think that things would have turned out differently for the protagonist, Amanda, if she lived in the South, however. In New Orleans her particular problem would have been more easily believed and thus easier to “cure.” I can’t imagine that it would have ever gotten as bad as it did (and then descended to ever worse levels) if she was living in the French Quarter as opposed to a Soho stand-in. Also, in New Orleans it seems that Amanda would have learned to be a bit more on the lookout for something strange that comes her way; hell, in New Orleans she might have recognized it first thing and saved herself (and a few others) a lot of pain and suffering.

But this is a New York sort of story, so you can imagine just how wrong and weird it can get for everyone involved.

In the beginning Amanda is happily married to Ed, has a comfortable conventional job as an architect and a loft in a still not discovered section of her unnamed city. Life is pretty good, although she admits there was more than one small thing or two about her husband that drives her a teensy bit crazy. “… I had become accustomed to a certain amount of irritation, as I’m sure all spouses do, and these were small arguments and disappointments that didn’t interrupt the steady flow of our marriage.” Nothing huge, just the little things, and otherwise life was grand.

Reviewed here: Stories Care Forgot: An Anthology of New Orleans Zines
Edited by Ethan Clark
Last Gasp 2006
ISBN0-86719-661-0
149 pages

The coolest thing about zines is that anyone can make and distribute one in their community. And while blogs allow millions of people to spout off to an endless Internet audience, zines are more local, more personal, and by their pen and paper nature, much more permanent. They can be political, cultural or strictly for adherents of the most arcane hobbies. Basically, you must only have something you want to share with the world and then be willing to do the work required to get your message out in a zine. I was not surprised at all to discover that there was a vibrant zine community in New Orleans prior to Hurricane Katrina; it makes perfect sense to me that the same people who would demand innovation in art and music would embrace this unique form of communication. By their very nature though, zines are not the sort of thing that a person will reach for, will try to save, when they are fleeing a hurricane. That makes the excerpts in the new collection Stories Care Forgot all that much more important. These are voices from the street telling us how it was before the storm and for most of them, sadly, this volume is the only way anyone is ever going to hear these words again.

Editor Ethan Clark was in Ashville, NC, when the storm hit, having recently moved there after five years in New Orleans. In his introduction he recounts the friends who came to him seeking refuge and the frustration he felt over watching the city collapse. "All I had was a big pile of New Orleans zines, some of the best writing to come out of the punk underground in the last decade, and that’s what I could use to try to help against not just hurricane damage, but the damage done by Bush and Michael Browne’s ‘Let them eat cake’ reaction to the storm.” As a way to most effectively help others through publication of the book, Clark also arranged for the proceeds to go to Community Labor United, a “coalition of grass-roots organizations that want to ensure New Orleans will be rebuilt for New Orleanians and not as some tourist play-land.”

What Clark created from his zine collection is difficult to qualify and even harder to describe. By their very nature, zines are independent productions, so to see the work of almost 20 different zine creators all gathered in one place is overwhelming to say the least. Should a reader begin first with the selections about bicycles and bike mechanics from issues of “Chainbreaker”? Or opt instead for stories about life in the Ninth Ward from “Factory Direct,” or “Dear ____, I Wrote This Zine For You.” There are comics, collages and notices torn off of telephone poles. Writers share their thoughts about work, home and fights in the street. And as I read this collection from cover to cover, I realized that what Ethan Clark had held onto after he moved was a slice of certain lives in a certain city around the turn of the 21st century. Where else could you read about bike messengers, strippers and being chased by wild dogs? To be perfectly honest, where else would you even know to look for those stories?

Or more importantly, even know what to look for?

Reviewed here: New Orleans Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings From the City
By Andrei Codrescu
Algonquin Books 2006
ISBN 1-56512-505-3
272 pages

One of the best ways to understand a city is to read the words of people who lose themselves within it every day. Anyone can go someplace and share their opinions on the weather and the architecture and the food, but they don’t really know the place; they don’t understand it.

They don’t love it.

New Orleans has had a lot of lovers over the years, and most of them have been more than happy to record their memories. Andrei Codrescu is a transplant who has fallen so hugely for New Orleans that he teaches at Louisiana State University, edits the literary journal Exquisite Corpse and has a weekly column in the The Gambit along with contributing to NPR on his favorite subject. Codrescu loves New Orleans and in his latest collection, New Orleans, Mon Amour, readers are finally able to read his best pieces on the city in one sitting.

A lot of the essays in Mon Amour are clearly written as brief slices of life. In “The Muse is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans,” he talks about visiting Lafayette Cemetery with friends from out of state and experiencing the unusual culture of death that pervades life in the city. “Old cities soothe and ease the pain of living,” he writes, “because wherever you are, someone else was there before, had troubles worse than yours and passed on. I don’t see how people can inhabit spanking new suburbs without succumbing to terminal anxiety. We need the dead to make us feel alive. In New Orleans they’re at it full-time.”

Reviewed here: What Would the World Be Without Women: Stories From the 9th Ward by Waukesha Jackson
Soft Skull Press 2005
ISBN1-933368-32-2
87 pages

After reading the four previous volumes in The Neighborhood Story Project, I thought I had a fairly clear understanding of what the authors were seeking to accomplish with their books. All of the teen authors did very good jobs at showing what life in their parts of the city of New Orleans was like, and their books certainly go a long way towards explaining how the city fell apart so quickly after the levees broke. But Waukesha Jackson’s book is the first one to move beyond the initial neighborhood assignment and offer insight into the more universal problems of drug addiction and poverty.

In What Would the World Be Without Women, Jackson writes about the many women living in the Ninth Ward who are the sole support of their families. She also writes about how they interact with the larger community and are significant forces of social change in the neighborhood. While it might seem that the book stems from standard feminist origins or long-known statistics about single parent minority families, Jackson is actually writing from a far more personal and powerful place. Her book is first and foremost the story of her family and, as such, it is an amazing look at the relationship between children and a drug-addicted parent.

From the very beginning, Jackson explains that in “my entire life my mom has been on and off drugs, and I have been with and without a mother.” With her two brothers, Jackson has shuttled back and forth, living part of the time with her mother and when that was impossible, with her grandmother. As she recalls her childhood, Jackson is brutally honest, writing:

There were times I was left inside alone and hungry. There were days I would wake up without my mom and nights I didn’t sleep. I had to sit there and think of places where I thought she would go and I would call and they would always say that she just left or wasn’t there when I knew that she was right there.

Reviewed here: Palmyra Street by Jana Dennis
Soft Skull Press 2005
ISBN 1-933368-30-6
87 pages

Located in the Mid-City section of New Orleans, Palmyra Street is “the street known for violence.” Author Jana Dennis hoped to broaden her block’s reputation with her book and show the tradition of support and kindness that is prevalent among her neighbors. What she ended up doing was writing a deep autobiography about life with her three siblings and mother, their church and their participation in The Golden Arrows Mardi Gras Indian Tribe. Unlike the other entries in The Neighborhood Story Project, Dennis focuses on the positive aspects of living on her street, and also provides a lot of insight into the origins of the Mardi Gras spirit among African Americans.

Dennis’ mother moved to Palmyra for the most prosaic of reasons – it was closer to work and closer to schools. In her interview with her daughter, she explained her battle to keep her oldest son out of gangs; something that became particularly hard when gang members were determined to initiate him, despite his protests.

“JD: Do you worry about violence in the neighborhood?”

"I called the police two or three times and they told me unless they can catch them in the act, there was nothing they could do. He never bothered nobody and they never thought he had back-up. I had to get on the phone and call some people. I had people from that block to that block. You hate to have to do things like that. But all those guys that were trying to initiate him in those gangs, they are either dead or incarcerated. All of them.”

Reviewed here: Before & After N. Dorgenois by Ebony Bodling
Soft Skull Press 2005
ISBN 1-933368-31-4
75 pages

One of the things that struck me while reading the Neighborhood Story Project books was how strongly the writers and their friends identified with their neighborhoods. Ebony Bolding addressed this relationship head-on with her book, Before & After N. Dorgenois. Until the age of 10, Bolding lived near the center of the Sixth Ward, but after her family moved to N. Dorgenois, she found herself near the neighborhood’s boundary. Many of the people on her block did not identify themselves at all with the Sixth Ward, something that both confused and disappointed Bolding. Her research provides a fresh perspective on the wards, however, and a look at the middle-class residents that surround John McDonogh Senior High School. One thing she learned, and very effectively conveys to readers, is that “there are all sorts of ways people look at my part of town.”

One of the unique things about N. Dorgenois is the diversity of the buildings. There were apartments, duplexes and houses for rent, and also homeowners, a church and a high school. This drew all sorts of residents, from a young doctor and his wife transplanted from the Maryland suburbs (and on their way back) to people buying homes and refurbishing them for profit. Some of them felt that the street was dangerous while others discounted rumors of violence. Bolding asked them all basically the same questions, but could not pin down a consensus as to what kind of place N. Dorgenois was. It was almost as if each person was seeing the street from their individual perspective and could not view it any other way. There was no cohesive opinion, no universal feeling about the block that the other books in the project seemed so easily to provide. In many ways, though, this makes it the street that will be most familiar to other Americans; we are largely a nation of suburbs after all, and N. Dorgenois seems more like that way of life than anything else.

For the young people on the street, though, this lack of identity grates a little hard. Bolding’s brother and several of his friends formed a club, the “Bayou Road Boys,” (not at all to be confused with an urban street gang) and spent a lot of time hanging out on nearby Bayou Road and happily calling at the girls as they walked by. The Boys suffered several run-ins with the police while standing around, something they talked to Bolding about at length during a group interview. They also talked about the difference between “bad hustles” and “good hustles” and explained how they felt wrong choices were often forced on people.

Reviewed here: Between Piety and Desire by Arlet and Sam Wylie
Soft Skull Press 2005
ISBN 1-933368-29-2
111 pages

For several weeks last September, the most well-known area in the United States was the Ninth Ward in New Orleans. We heard over and over every day that flooding was in the Ninth Ward; the situation was dire in the Lower Ninth Ward; houses were destroyed in the Upper Ninth Ward. It was our background music as we ate our evening meals even though most of us could not tell each other what a “ward” is (a neighborhood, a suburb, a city block?). The clearest thing that came out of Hurricane Katrina, though, was the destruction of the Ninth Ward and the desperation of the people who lived there. What it was like before — and who those people were — was something rarely considered, however, in all the news reports. Fortunately, sister and brother writing team Arlet and Sam Wylie wrote about the Ninth before the storm in a revealing book that pulls no punches and forces readers to consider just how truly complex the place that we call home can be.

The Wylies grew up on St. Claude Avenue, the main street of the Ninth Ward, on the second floor of a building that was owned by their father. Downstairs was a grocery store and in front of their balcony was everything bad about the neighborhood. Arlet and Sam grew up “inside,” to prevent them and their siblings from getting into trouble with drug dealers or "hustlers.” While this made sense to them when they were younger, over time they began to see the view from their balcony differently.

“I went outside to clear my head,” writes Arlet, “but as I spent more time on my balcony, I also started to get to know the guys that I had always seen growing up but never knew personally.

"As I learned more about them, I started to realize that the stereotypes were not all true. They are more complex than that. Over time, I became more curious to know what’s the word on the street. I liked to listen to their conversations. I knew if I sat outside, I was going to laugh.

"Sometimes when I’m having a really good time talking to some of the guys, it’s hard to remember that they are caught up in a lifestyle that’s dangerous. One day they could be clowning and the next day they could be killed.”

The Neighborhood Story Project is a collaborative partnership between John McDonogh Senior High, the Literacy Alliance of Greater New Orleans and the University of New Orleans. It is currently comprised of five books on various neighborhoods in the city that were originally published in June 2005. The authors were all students at John McDonogh who went though a year-long creative writing course. Professional writers, poets, playwrights, photographers and publishers were invited as guest instructors. The idea was to allow young people from the city to write about the New Orleans they knew and loved; to give a voice to their vision of home. This was a unique idea because, as project co-founder Abram Himelstein explained in an interview with the Associated Press, “John Kennedy Toole is one of my favorite writers, but he’s not someone who means a lot to the kids I teach. This is all about having other voices.”

In the aftermath of Katrina, the project’s books have taken on a much greater and deeper meaning then anyone could have imagined. After being saved from oblivion by Soft Skull Press, they serve now almost as modern time capsules, as pictures and stories about places that were washed away when the levees broke and still remain damaged and destroyed. If you want to know more about the scenes that riveted the nation in September 2005, then these are the books that will show you better than any others. The Neighborhood Story Project began as a chance to explore homes and communities, but in the wake of Katrina, it has become a witness to all our nation has lost. It is now the loudest ringing voice of truth that the largely forgotten portions of New Orleans can claim as honestly, and completely, their own.

Reviewed here: The Combination by Ashley Nelson
Soft Skull Press 2005
ISBN 1-933368-28-4
120 pages

Ashley Nelson grew up in the Sixth Ward and her book, The Combination, is about growing up there in the Lafitte Project. Initially she planned to write only about the neighborhood, but quickly discovered that she had to include her own family history in order tell an honest story. This was particularly difficult as Nelson’s mother fought a battle against drug addiction for several years and then was killed by cancer in early 2001. So, in writing about the Sixth Ward, Nelson also had to write about her mother and her own struggles growing up. None of that was easy for her, but it makes for incredibly