Blowing in the Wind

After Katrina, New Orleanians were castigated as a bunch of slackjaws who didn't know enough to get out of the way of a hurricane coming straight at them. It was as if hurricanes are just like warm fronts and rain bands, and that once set in motion, they'll go in the predicted direction until they run out of United States and do whatever they do in the Atlantic. But hurricanes aren't that predictable, as Hurricane/Tropical Storm/Mild Breeze Ida illustrated yesterday. Despite predictions of 70 percent chance of rain all day, it barely sprinkled.

What critics also failed to account for is the cost of dealing with a storm. Hurricane Gustav was small "D" devastating to the region last year because the mass evacuation meant a whole city went on a forced vacation and people had to spend money earmarked for such frivolities as bills and groceries on evacuation. When they returned, they came back to businesses that had gone a week without cash flow and struggled to make payroll. Gustav sent a shiver through the South Louisiana economy that took a few months to work off last year, and even Ida's weak miss affected a lot of lives as many working parents suddenly had to figure out what to do with their children yesterday when many schools pre-emptively closed.

Bottom line: As always, what seems simple is rarely simple.

Faubourg Treme

Tonight at 7 CST, PBS airs Faubourg Treme: the Untold Story of Black New Orleans. Whether you're interested in New Orleans or not, the documentary by Lolis Eric Elie and Dawn Logsdon is worth watching because it fills out the outline version of the story of blacks in America - slavery, Reconstruction, Civil Rights movement. Parts of the New Orleans experience took place in many American cities, and even if it didn't, Faubourg Treme suggests that what actually happened to African Americans was more complex than such a simple narrative would suggest.

The one curious factor today is the roll of Hurricane Katrina in the documentary's narrative. Katrina frames the story of Elie moving into the Treme and "investing in his history," he says. The efforts to renovate his house are analogous to the documentary's efforts to reconstruct a meaningful history for a neighborhood that had come to be associated with drugs. Katrina literally interrupted all the processes, and some of the documentary's footage was lost in the post-flood heat and funk.

Katrina as a framing device now serves as a giant neon date stamp on Faubourg Treme. Documentaries on the city shot in 2006 all employed it to some extent, and long, lingering shots of devastation that once seemed so important now feel a part of another consciousness. The flood doesn't stop seeming incomprehensible, and dead bodies left unattended remain brutal reminders of what happened, but such shots now are reminders of the emotionally naked city we were at that time. I think my anxiety about the city being abandoned by the country is written into most of my writing from 2006, and what makes Chris Rose's One Dead in the Attic is that you can tell he's writing out of desperation and grief that he's struggling to get a grip on. Gestures that would seem artlessly big and broad under other circumstances seemed perfectly appropriate, and they were. But those gestures also pin the writing, music and filmmaking to their moment.

Now I see the flood sequences and the hurricane as frame and I don't experience Katrina Exhaustion, but a response to Katrina that wouldn't be made today. Katrina remains an event that divides all of our lives into pre- and post-, and one of the interesting facets of the post-K story is how it settles into our consciousness, and how we incorporate it into our lives. I wonder what people from outside New Orleans will see, and to what extent the pre- and post-Katrina experience is shared by the rest of the country.

What Should People Know?

It's more than three years after Katrina, and one of the underlying questions remains how we talk about the state of the city to the rest of the world. Are we half-empty or half-full? Me - I'm the half-empty type, because people can't and won't help if they think things are fine. Of course, civic leaders and tourist organizations want the world to think we're fine in most significant ways because they figure that will encourage people to come here, which has value as well. Tourist money is good for a city that has made tourism its economic engine.

When I take people to the Lower Ninth Ward these days, I point to the Upper Ninth Ward first so people can appreciate what they see when they get there. Immediately after the storm, the destruction was obvious - houses that had floated off their moorings and smashed into trees or came to rest on pickup trucks. Acres upon acres of houses contorted by the violently surging floodwaters. Now, much of it looks like a pasture because most of the irreparable houses have been demolished, leaving blocks of green space with weeds obscuring the foundations and pipes. Without a visual reference as to how dense the neighborhood once was, there's no way to gauge it anymore.

Tonight PBS' Frontline returns to the Lower Ninth Ward with 82-year-old Herbert Gettridge for a documentary on rebuilding titled The Old Man and the Storm. We didn't get a screener of it, but here are previews from Salon.com and The Times-Picayune.

... and if you see a rerun of Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, we're not all as despondent and wounded as local columnist Chris Rose, who Bourdain talks to in Domilese's po-boy shop. I'm not convinced Rose is even as damaged as he seemed, and if so, he's the one who's out of step with the city right now.