Imperfectly Vertical

The Believer

2011-12-06T09:26:00.005-06:00

The issue is no longer on the newsstands and the article is not available online so I am posting "Burden of Proof," my article from the October issue of The Believer.

OWS for Radicals with Mortgages

2011-10-31T22:03:00.004-05:00

An essay I wrote on Occupy Wall Street/Occupy New Orleans in this week's Gambit:

After showing up for work at a Garden District coffee shop at 6 a.m. to work the morning shift a couple of Saturdays ago, my friend Sam shook off his midday fatigue and rode his bike to City Hall to march in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement. As the march proceded through the French Quarter, some visitors to our city were displeased with this particular attraction, yelling "Get a job," to Sam, who, among the hundreds of others in attendance, was holding a "We Deserve Better" sign and chanting "We are the 99%."

The implication of the heckling — that people only complain about the system because they are too lazy to make it work for them — has been proved false in the past two months of Occupy protests. Here in New Orleans and at "occupations" around the country, all kinds of hard-working people have shown up to air their discontent with the current state of affairs. The past few years of un-natural disasters and economic collapse have made it plain that millions of people who play by the rules, go to school, work hard, buy a home and try to grab on to their small piece of the America Dream, have lost to powers and circumstances far beyond their control despite their efforts. Go ask shrimpers and oystermen along the Gulf Coast (how their livelihoods fared) after the BP spill, anyone who bought a house in 2007 before the market crash, a recent college graduate searching for a first real job, or someone who has tried to get health insurance after surviving cancer.

http://www.bestofneworleans.com/gambit/perspective-occupy-new-orleans

The Believer

2011-10-14T08:00:00.000-05:00

An essay that I wrote about the being an adolescent boy at camp and the perils of making accusations appears in this month's Believer, along with a portrait of me by Tony Millionaire, my favorite cartoonist.

The first few paragraphs are on the Believer's website and pasted below but, consistent with the Believer's belief in print, you will have to buy the magazine to see the rest.

October 2011

Burden of Proof

A Tale of Innocence and Accusation at Summer Camp

by Billy Sothern

I decided to go to Camp Eagle Hill for one more year. I was fourteen and had been going there for five years. I had been a little boy in the lower camp and then, nearly half a life later, I was one of the older kids, hanging around the Lake Side bunk house with David and Ian before heading out to play basketball or tennis or blow off sports altogether and hit frogs with our tennis rackets against Big Red, the gymnasium where we played deck hockey and had “Sing,” the final event of Color War.

I was too old for camp, really. I had become leery of Billy Joel, thought “Sing” was corny, and was developing a strong adolescent impulse against having things required of me. But camp was still a salve, a place where nothing went wrong beyond the occasional broken bone, and where I, like it or not, belonged. The camp plaques in the dining hall proved it. There I was, Billy “The Gangster of Love” Sothern, among the campers in the “Fly Skimmers,” in Hill Top 6, summer of 1987. There again, Billy “Southern Comfort” Sothern, in Club Clueless in Hill Top 8, the following summer, and so on. People were not suspicious of me here, unlike in my new hometown, where an eighth-grade curiosity about marijuana and huffing Scotchgard had gotten me a reputation for being a “druggie.”

For this reason, when our counselor’s money went missing—a couple hundred dollars in tips from a recent parents’ weekend—no one suspected me, though we were all certain that one of the boys in the bunk had taken the money. Our counselor, Brian, devised the kind of justice that makes sense only at camp, and demanded that we all gather a hundred yards away from the cabin. He explained that he did not want to know who took the money. He only wanted it returned. He said that each of us would go back to the cabin, enter it, spend a minute inside, and return, and he asked that the person who took the money use this opportunity to return it to a drawer in his music-cassette storage box. We all agreed.

To read the rest of this piece, please purchase this issue of the Believer online or at your local bookseller.

Billy Sothern, a Louisiana death-penalty lawyer, is the author of Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City. He is working on a memoir about becoming a criminal-defense attorney after years of feeling like a criminal.

The Pale Copy

2011-10-10T08:00:00.003-05:00

In the spirit of Studs Terkel and the WPA photographers, Jack Chapman traveled the country in 2010 taking portraits of people, including me, Nikki, and Rosie, and interviewing them with the same questions about their backgrounds, lives, and hopes. The first volume is online.

9/11 Anniversary

2011-10-07T09:39:00.004-05:00

In honor of the second birthday of my daughter and the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I reworked a piece that I had posted here in September of 2009 for publication in The Lens.

A month later, here it is:

Refusing to let the 9/11 anniversary be owned solely by horror

By Billy Sothern, The Lens contributing opinion writer |

On September 10, 2009, my wife Nikki was at her midwife’s office hoping to get some indication that our baby – four days past due – would come soon, ending her mounting pain and discomfort.

It wasn’t until Nikki got back from her appointment that I saw the possibility that my daughter could be born on September 11, the eighth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Nikki told me that a woman we had met in our birthing class had been at the midwife’s office as well. And though she was a full week past due, fixing to burst and desperate to have her baby, she had postponed her induction because she didn’t want her child born on such an inauspicious date.

I had moved to New Orleans from New York City a month before the attacks; family and friends worked in the financial district, fast by the Twin Towers, and my father and step-mother were on New York bound-flights that fateful morning. And so the date – 9/11 – was likely to be forever etched in my mind as a day of horror and anxiety, made only worse by its exploitation as a pretext for war and the curtailment of civil liberties.

But my wife was in agony so I quickly reconciled to the idea of our child sharing her birthday with that mournful American anniversary. When I got home in the late afternoon, Nikki’s labor had become much more pronounced. We left for the hospital a little after midnight.

In the birthing room, I tried my best to comfort Nikki during her ordeal, playing Bach’s Cello Suites and Nikki’s favorite arias from the St. Matthew Passion on the little stereo she had bought for this purpose a couple of weeks earlier, when it all seemed so distant and theoretical. At a certain point, she began to seem really focused, in a distant place all by herself, and I started playing Philip Glass’s Solo Piano Works. She had speculated days earlier that Glass’s familiar, round, cyclical musical forms might reach her at a time like this.

When that selection ended, with Nikki clinging to my shoulders and neck from her birthing tub but still, evidently, hours away from delivering the baby, Addy, our doula, asked what we should put on. I told her that there was an opera by Philip Glass on the iPod, and that it was long enough to keep us from having to change the music again. “Satyagraha?” she asked. I hadn’t remembered the name. Without even glancing at the liner notes, I had burned it onto my computer, from the New Orleans Public Library’s music catalog a few years earlier. In the scores of hours I had spent listening to the opera, its music and Sanskrit libretto, though unintelligible, seemed truer to life and the thoughts passing through my mind than any music I had heard before. “That’s it,” I told Addy.

It begins with a low voice and a deep stringed instrument that wound around the room. Sometimes urgent, sometimes slack, at times the music almost disappeared into the rhythm of Nikki’s contractions and then her pushing. When the baby’s head finally emerged and then I held her against my fatigued but triumphant wife, the final act of Satyagraha pulsed in the background, and then stopped, unnoticed.

I sent news to our friends and loved ones by text, “Rose Mae Sothern born at 4:57. I am in awe of mother and child.” I consciously omitted the date, not wanting to associate the sad anniversary with the miraculous birth of my daughter.

But as time passed, and I was able to spend hours and then days with this new life, it became clear to me that it was seemly and even necessary, for Rose, and others, to have been born on this date, for things to occur that could create new anniversaries that might someday eclipse the tragedy. I sent out another email, this time owning the date: “Rose Mae Sothern was born at 4:57 a.m. on Friday, September 11, 2009, weighing in at 8 lbs., 10 oz., and altogether transforming the meaning of that date in our history for me.”

I got a response from Rebecca Solnit. I had met her when she visited New Orleans while researching her book, A Paradise Built in Hell, on the magnanimity of people in the face of disaster. She pointed out that September 11, 2001, had been, for the most part, “a day that people behaved beautifully under the most extreme circumstances in New York City, millions of them in contrast to the 19 who sought to destroy.” But she made another observation, which gave rise to a sense of wonder, beauty, and synchronicity that tempts me to believe the world is not simply spiraling meaninglessly but instead is ordered, even blessed. She told me that September 11, 1906, is the day that Gandhi began to harness non-violence as a tool against oppression in South Africa, a method of resistance called “satyagraha,” a Sanskrit word meaning “the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence.”

Without any of us knowing it, Nikki labored and Rose was born on the anniversary of satyagraha, to the rhythms and sounds of an opera that Philip Glass wrote in honor of Gandhi and a vision of social justice through non-violence.

As my daughter’s second birthday approaches, and with it, this terrible tenth anniversary of a date that swallowed her birthday as its name, I do my part to remind people that as much truth and love exists on that day as any other. Approach me in the park, as she romps by, and ask me, “How old is that precious little girl?”

I will tell you, stressing the date, “She was born on September 11, 2009. So she’s almost two.” My hope is that you will see in her face that satyagraha exists – as it did in 1906 and, yes, 2001 – and that its power is undiminished.

Billy Sothern is a criminal defense attorney and the author of “Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City.”

Woody Allen's The Lost Generation

2011-06-16T23:06:00.001-05:00

Nikki and I watched and enjoyed Woody Allen's new Midnight in Paris tonight, a film that plays with and examines the nostalgia that saturates so much of his work (and the imaginations of so many of his fans, myself included). The movie takes place in modern day Paris but the main character travels back to the Paris of the 1920's which he glorifies and loves from books.

The movie reminded me of a sketch from an old Woody Allen stand up record that I have, where Woody imagines himself hanging out with Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and the "Fitzgerarlds." It is very clear to me that this 30 or 40 year old stand up routine is the germ of the idea that became Midnight in Paris. And its also just really funny.

Blue Valentine

2011-06-03T20:26:00.003-05:00

Earlier this week, I watched and loved Blue Valentine, a movie whose characters you can recognize as actual human beings whose flaws, struggles, and hopes are not dissimilar from your own. I rarely see movies where the characters are drawn so true to life or where a relationship, particularly a relationship that is falling apart, is reflective of the virtues and vices of both individuals, like the relationships that actual human beings like you and me have been in, and where no one is demonized.

The realistic portrayal of the lives of the characters (and their drinking, which also seemed true to life) reminded me of a favorite writer, Raymond Carver. And then there was a scene, where in intoxication and frustration, the male character pulled his wedding ring off his finger and threw it into the grass, which I remembered from a Carver story and which I took to be a conscious reference on the part of the filmmaker.

In my recollection, the character in the Carver story, in a burst of drunken and momentary animosity and foolhardiness and in the presence of his spouse, pulled off his wedding ring in threw it off a deck out into a field. He immediately regretted it and realized that he could never find the ring, or repair the damage that he had done to his marriage.

I have looked for the story but, as near as I can tell, it does not exist, at least not as I remember it. Instead, in a wonderful story called "Chef's House," about a couple who are long separated because of drinking and strife, they come together at a summer house after the husband goes on the wagon and they remember what they loved about each other, only to see it fall away again. In that story, in his book Cathedral, Carver wrote the following paragraph, the only one in his work I can find about thrown wedding rings:

We drank coffee, pop, and all kind of fruit juice that summer. The whole summer, that's what we had to drink. I found myself wishing the summer wouldn't end. I knew better, but after a month of being with Wes at Chef's house, I put my wedding ring back on. I hadn't worn the ring in two years. Not since the night Wes was drunk and threw his ring into a peach orchard.

I guess its possible that I made up the other details, or filled them into my understanding of this moment in Carver's spare and brief narrative. Whether or not it was a conscious reference or a reference at all, I still regard the film as Carveresque, which is to say beautiful, true, and as sad as life.

PEN World Voices

2011-05-31T09:27:00.004-05:00

A few weeks ago, I was on a panel on New Orleans at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York City. We had an interesting discussion, moderated by Nathaniel Rich with a panel that also included Sarah Broom, Richard Campanella, Nicholas Lemann, and Fatima Sheik. Part of what distinguished this New Orleans conversation from many others that I have heard and been a part of was the fact that there seemed to be a consensus that New Orleans needs to, at least in some ways, shed some of its claimed exceptionalism if it is going to be able to break out of its myriad difficulties. This is something that I have been banging on about for years and which, at least in some ways, appears to be the view of other folks who care about this city.

WNYC has a recording of the panel discussion on its website and highlighted the following "bon mots" from the discussion (not all of which I agree with):

Billy Sothern, a New Orleans anti-death penalty lawyer and author of "Down in New Orleans: Reflections From a Drowned City," on understanding New Orleans: "I think there are many who view NOLA as this exceptional place and some of them are the city’s biggest fans. But I argue that instead of its exceptionalism, the rest of America needs to be concerned with New Orleans because it's highly representative of the problems of the rest of the country ... These kinds of issues are coming to a neighborhood near you — they may already have but they are going to get worse. Instead of a metaphor, I think it's important to not say we have this 'New Orleans problem' with the schools and crime. Instead, we have this 'American problem' that is tragically magnified in the city of New Orleans."

Nicholas Lemann, a New Orleans native, staff writer for The New Yorker (among other magazines), and Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, on race: "The fabled white elite that controls everything in New Orleans are probably the least powerful white elite than you'd find in any big city in the country. Not because someone took their power away, but for various cultural reasons. New Orleans has no locally controlled major economic institutions, so the infamous New Orleans white elite does not have the inclination to do what one would want done in New Orleans. And if they had the inclination, they would not be able to do them."

Sarah Broom, a New Orleans native who wrote "A Yellow House in New Orleans," on local pride: "I think this 'love of place' is really just from people who are stuck in a lots of ways. There were very few opportunities for [career] advancement. It's almost impossible for a highly-educated person to move back to New Orleans and find some sort of intellectual rigor. That is just the truth. Part of it is that Hurricane Katrina forced a lot of people from New Orleans and now they don't want to come back. This population of people who can't come back because they can't afford to are also made up of people who don't actually want to return."

Fatima Shaik, who is the author of four books of fiction set in Louisiana, on writing about New Orleans: "I think writers after Katrina were thrust into the roles of sociologists. People who are from New Orleans are likely to write about it. I think those people who are not from the city and want to write about it should focus on writing across the cultures and writing accurately. People don't have a conversation across cultures. Writers can do that."

Because PEN had proposed a New Orleans-based project, the panel drafted a statement reflecting the kind of project that we believed could be beneficial as well as some general statements that we felt should guide any effort to "help" New Orleans:

A few things we don’t want to do: we don’t want to be redundant, meaning we don’t want to start a service or project that already exists locally. Even worse, we don’t want to compete or confuse. There was a consensus in our group that education is of paramount importance and should be a component of PEN’s work in New Orleans. One way of doing this is to expand upon initiatives already in place within PEN, such as the children’s education program, prison writing and folklore projects. Where such programs exist we think there is a pressing need to implement them in New Orleans in an aggressive way. Ideally we would hope for PEN to extend these projects into New Orleans, while at the same start a new, unique project. It’s crucial that this process leads to real results.

The project should be mindful of the fact there are major human rights failings in New Orleans that have not been addressed adequately by the local and federal government and the criminal justice system.

Some ideas for projects to be implemented with PEN’s help in New Orleans:

1. Books are not allowed in New Orleans prisons. PEN should aggressively advocate to change that policy, especially given the incredibly high incarceration rate.

2. PEN should continue to support the MLK Visiting Authors program financially.

3. PEN can launch a mapping project. We would like for students to be involved with the technical and creative process of creating maps of their local neighborhoods. We could partner with the (potential) forthcoming publication, “Mapping New Orleans.”

4. Science and engineering can be a venue for storytelling. We can begin an initiative to create a workshop to bring together scientists, engineers, and writers and teach research methodology to writers—perhaps in the form of a lecture series.

5. Introduce the Prison Writing Program into New Orleans prisons.

6. We would like to launch a movie series in various parks and neighborhoods by pairing local documentaries with films that are about New Orleans in the hope of drawing a large public.

7. A regular reading series that could be held in outdoor places around the city—perhaps we can partner with local reading series, arts markets, and farmers’ markets.

8. A PEN/New Orleans literary prize should be established, for a writer, a student, or a group of students.

9. Establish a relationship with local radio stations as well as the Times Picayune, following the example of the StoryCorps project two years ago. The Times-Pic featured selected stories from that project.

10. We can try to launch a series of guest editorials in the Times Picayune by influential PEN Writers, which could be connected to another of the projects mentioned herein, where applicable.

11. Once we have identified projects on which to focus our energy and funding, have a PEN author write an editorial in a national publication to draw attention to our efforts.

12. PEN should provide a page on its web site for people who are coming to New Orleans and may be interested in doing nonprofit or volunteer work in the city, including partner organizations: a page of links to local projects.

13. Some local organizations that PEN can partner with include Tulane’s Center for Public Service, Times-Pic, MLK School, Neighborhood Story Project, Xavier, Loyola, Dillard, New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, Louisiana Endowment of the Humanities, the American Folklore Project (Maggi Michel, a representative of the American Folklore Project has expressed great interest in helping), the New Orleans Film Society, and Patois.

We would like to stress the importance of bringing into underserved schools professionals in the arts, sciences, technologies, and engineering.

All programming should be forward-looking and should not dwell excessively on Katrina.

We hope this will be the beginning of a practical discussion about what steps to take and how to implement one or several of these projects effectively. We hope such a conversation can take place within the next two months, whether at a meeting or through a web conversation. In many of the proposals given above, we have much more to add, including contacts and local organizations with whom we are in touch and who can bring about immediate results.

Sarah "Lyons" Wakeman

2011-05-30T10:41:00.008-05:00

Thinking of Sarah Rosetta Wakeman, who joined the Union army during the Civil War, fought, died, and was buried, all as a man, "Lyons." She is buried at the Union cemetery at the Chalmette Battlefield.

We brought her zinnias this Memorial Day.

Life for Pot

2011-05-09T10:20:00.002-05:00

In case you are wondering why America's prison population has exploded to become the largest in human history, the fact that a Slidell, Louisiana man received a life without the possibility of parole sentence for possession with intent to distribute marijuana might provide some answers.

From the Times Picayune:

Fourth marijuana conviction gets Slidell man life in prison
Thursday, May 05, 2011, 5:51 PM
By Ramon Antonio Vargas

Cornell Hood II got off with probation after three marijuana convictions in New Orleans.

He didn't fare too well after moving to St. Tammany Parish, however. A single such conviction on the north shore landed the 35-year-old in prison for the rest of his life.

State Judge Raymond S. Childress punished Hood under Louisiana's repeat-offender law in his courtroom in Covington on Thursday. A jury on Feb. 15 found the defendant guilty of attempting to possess and distribute marijuana at his Slidell home, court records show.

More here.

Recordio 1947

2011-03-27T20:38:00.001-05:00

I have a collection of old, home recorded records that I found at various junk and thrift stores. I found several recently, all apparently recorded by the same person, at the Latter Library book sale. My favorite of the bunch is labeled "Wayne, Jack and Brian - 3/24/47". Wayne and Jack both introduce themselves as students at the "Audubon School" and gave their last names as something that sounds to me like Laszlo.

The record is very sweet with the eldest, Wayne, reciting two nursery rhymes for his dad, then Jack, slightly less sure, and then, finally, little Brian, unable to talk above a squeak as his dad encourages him to say a few words for the record so that his grandparents can hear him.

These little boys would all now be past sixty. I would like to give them their record back. Anyone know a Laszlo family, or something like that, with three boys, Wayne, Jack, and Brian, all born in the thirties or forties and from New Orleans.

***

Here are two of the rhymes they recited for their dad:

The Secret

We have a secret, just we three,

The robin, and I, and the sweet cherry-tree;

The bird told the tree, and the tree told me,

And nobody knows it but just us three.

But of course the robin knows it best,

Because she built the--I shan't tell the rest;

And laid the four little--something in it--

I'm afraid I shall tell it every minute.

But if the tree and the robin don't peep,

I'll try my best the secret to keep;

Though I know when the little birds fly about

Then the whole secret will be out.

The Turtle

There was a little turtle

Who lived in a box.

He swam in the puddles

And climbed on the rocks.

He snapped at the mosquito,

He snapped at the flea.

He snapped at the minnow,

And he snapped at me.

He caught the mosquito,

He caught the flea.

He caught the minnow,

But he didn't catch me!

It's 10:20 a.m., do you know where your power comes from?

2011-03-16T10:21:00.005-05:00

After reading the headlines about nuclear meltdowns in Japan, I thought to myself, I wonder if I live near a nuclear power plant, here in disaster prone Southern Louisiana. A link from Greenpeace informed me about Waterford 3, a nuclear power plant about twenty miles up the Mississippi River in St. Charles Parish. Greenpeace offered the following risk assessment in the event of a serious accident:

Government data estimates that an accident at Waterford 3 would lead to 96,000 deaths and 279,000 injuries within a year, as well as 9,000 cancer deaths over the lifetime of the exposed population. The cost of such an accident was predicted to be $131 billion in 1980.

The crisis in Japan is the world's second (and far biggest) environmental disaster to strike the world, greedy for power, in the past year. When we were facing the BP spill last year here in Louisiana, I was reminded of Moby Dick, and the lengths that we have gone to historically to keep the lights on. (An op-ed in the New York Times beat me to the punch in employing the metaphor.)

The power from Waterford 3 keeps my air conditioning on all summer long in my drafty, inefficient New Orleans home. Realistically, I do not expect that my concerns about where my energy comes from, or its consequences, will change my thermostat. And if we are unwilling, I can be pretty sure that others, less concerned, will not change there behaviors. But clearly with consumption of energy growing these energy related disasters will continue until we identify energy sources that don't spoil the seas, rape the earth, and rise the tides.

I expect, or at least hope, that these past few days have tipped the scales on the cost benefit analysis that keeps us dependent on dangerous means of energy production.

Founding Fathers Too Freaked Out by Cars

2011-01-31T14:14:00.007-06:00

Seth Meyers' Saturday Night Live Weekend Update from a couple of weeks ago nails the debate, and the absurdity, of conservative legal theories (that seem to hold sway in the minds of several of the Supreme Court justices) that fetishize the beliefs of the founding fathers in addressing modern social and legal issues.

Meyers suggested that the founding fathers would be too "freaked out" by cars, planes, and the fact that all of the slaves had been freed to even engage these weighty issues in modern American life. It's too good to miss.

Character and Fitness

2011-01-18T11:33:00.002-06:00

Jason Flores-Williams is having his New Orleans book launch for his new book, Character and Fitness, on Saturday, January 22, 2011, at 8 p.m., at FAB Books, 900 Frenchmen Street, New Orleans, LA. I will opening up by reading something short, along with Jason's friend and New Orleans' writer, Raphaelle O'Neil. (http://www.myspace.com/nolabutterfly) Be forewarned, last time I did a reading with Jason, he read a piece that compared his transvestite lover favorably with a twelve year old boy. (Whereas I will likely be reading about being a twelve year old boy at sleep away camp.)

Here are the first few paragraphs of the book, posted on The Brooklyn Rail (which is serializing the book, a chapter a month):

Chapter 1

I drink my coffee and stare out the window at the cars passing by on the highway. I remember the old Kerouac line: whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny automobile? It was all open roads and possibilities for that guy. A wide-eyed, down-to-earth madness that rolled from one coast to another. Football-playing kids with books of poetry by their beds. I grew up in Kerouac's America. He was my guy. One of the first things I did when I got to New York was take the train up to Columbia so that I could walk in his footsteps. I lived for his idea of what we were supposed to be. But there are no angels anymore. No more saints. No visionary catholic supplications or prayers to make to god. No more optimism. No fantastic smiles. No great west. No more cowboys or jazzmen, unless they're in a Visa commercial. I would love to go moan for man, but the credit cards would sue me and the student loan companies would put me in default. No need to go looking for Dean Moriarty, because he works for the collections department of an insurance company in Delaware. He hates his job and would quit and hit the road, but can't afford to miss a mortgage payment. And he's not really in traveling shape anymore, but about 80 pounds overweight. Too big to fail.

I turn away from the window, go back to the Sallie Mae website and finish with the electronic forms for my second-to-last deferment. After this one, I'll be coming in here to Starbucks looking for a job. I can see myself filling out the application at the wobbly table in the corner, wallowing in the glory that really never was, then sitting there with a stupid smile on my face as the 21-year-old assistant manager holds up a mirror to more than two decades of overeducated bad decisions. The goatee with the first signs of grey, crow's feet around the eyes, and the tattoos no longer anti-establishment cool, but mile markers on the road to nowhere. I never expected or even wanted my life to be a straight line, but thought that if you put the time in and paid your dues, then you wouldn't end up back in the same place you were 20 years ago.

I put away my laptop, finish the coffee and head out the door. I walk past the California Pizza Kitchen, the Chipotle and up the sidewalk toward the Target. The way the sun glistens off the minivans is spectacular, haunting. I enter through the sliding automatic doors into the fluorescent lights and cut through rows of candles, heaters, curtains, blinds, slipcovers, mirrors, humidifiers and pet supplies. I stop to ask a salesclerk about the soy milk. The man is maybe 75, thick coke-bottle glasses, splotchy face and crooked back. He should be off somewhere playing shuffleboard and bitching about the young, not spending the last years before the grand exit struggling in the belly of a big box store. It takes him 25 seconds just to walk across the aisle. "I'm sorry to bother you, sir. But do you know where the soy milk is?"

'The milk!"

"No sir, the soy milk…."

"The milk!"

"No sir, the soy milk."

"What milk?"

I feel like the most bourgeois, pretentious yuppie that ever lived. Ohmygawd, you've never heard of soy milk? Didn't you read the article in Salon about the dairy industry? There's as much suffering in a cup of milk as a pound of beef! "Oh wait, sir, hold on…I think I see it right over there! Thank you!" I take off through maternity, outerwear, plus sizes, women's shoes, accessories, luggage, infant, toddler, patio furniture and into the refrigerated food section…Like a liberal in Texas, it's surrounded by chicken nuggets, buffalo wings, sausage patties and microwave-ready cheeseburgers. I take two half-gallons off the shelf and tell myself how wonderful I am for making the enlightened consumer choice, but really the soy milk is made by a subsidiary of a publicly-traded company that's owned by a conglomerate with its headquarters on a space station that controls the factories that make the chicken nuggets, buffalo wings, sausage patties and microwave-ready cheeseburgers. There is no escape from complicity when you're an American. All we can do is turn down the volume from 11 to 9.

Walker Evans at The Ogden

2011-01-13T11:43:00.004-06:00

Walker Evans
Greek Revival Townhouse with Men Seated in Dourway, New Orleans
March 1935
Silver gelatin print

I went to The Ogden Museum to see the Walker Evans show on its final day up, January 2, 2011. I have been a big fan of Evans' work since college, when I fell in love with Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, on which Evans collaborated with James Agee.

The exhibit comprised three rooms of architectural photographs (the one above was one of very few with any people captured). The first room was New Orleans photographs and the other two rooms were photographs of plantations in southern Louisiana. All the photographs were taken on trips to Louisiana in 1935 and 1936 and are part of the actress Jessica Lange's collection.

As described by the museum, the photographs were intended to document real life during the Great Depression:

Working in what he called the “vernacular style,” Evans forged an approach that preferred the everyday to the precious and the factual over the artful. Although he often photographed inanimate objects, with architecture and signage being among his most lasting subjects, he also captured the harsh realities of American life in the grips of the Great Depression.

But viewing the exhibit in 2011, it struck me that it was nearly impossible for a contemporary viewer to see the photographs in that spirit. It was hard not to see the photographs as historical documents or curiosities from the past. (I was, for instance, excited to see an eighty year old photograph of a house that I like a lot on Esplanade Avenue.) And I worried, as I viewed the photographs of the crumbling old Greek revival plantation houses, that viewers would see the photographs with some measure of nostalgia, something that I suspect would have troubled Evans. (Though these buildings were many decades old when he photographed them and had little bearing on the "harsh realities" of the Great Depression. So I wonder what he found in them?)

NO Comment

2011-01-13T11:40:00.003-06:00

I started a new blog tracking offensive comments on NOLA.com, the website that carries The Times Picayune's content. The website, called NO Comment, is my effort to highlight some of the terrible hate speech, slander, and general meanness of the anonymous, and sporadically moderated, comments on NOLA.com. I will also use the blog as a forum to discuss how other news organizations are dealing with these vexing issues.

Check it out.

Lancelot

2010-12-07T22:12:00.003-06:00

I just finished reading Walker Percy's Lancelot.

I received the book as a gift about eight years ago but was scared off by the description on the back cover, which struck as slightly too close to my life, inclinations, and fears of the future at the time.: "Lancelot Andrewes Lamar, a disenchanted liberal lawyer, finds himself confined in a mental asylum with memories that don’t seem worth remembering . . ."

Still not entirely disenchanted and managing to keep myself out of the asylum, I was recently inspired to revisit the book. (I lost the paperback that I had been given but had since bought an old "discard" hard copy from the New Orleans Public Library, which seems a fitting vessel for reading Walker Percy, one of the city's finest writers.)

In the book, Lancelot, the lawyer, teases through the details of his life and the world with a critical lens as he explains how he came to burn down his home, an old River Road mansion. The truths expressed by the narrator reminded me of how frequently it is the case that people with nothing left to lose, people at the very bottom of life, are most free to express truth.

Here are a few of my favorite passages:

In New Orleans I have noticed that people are happiest when they are going to funerals, making money, taking care of the dead, or putting on masks at Mardi Gras so nobody knows who they are.

***

New Orleans! Not a bad place to spend a year in prison - except in the summer. Imagine being locked up in Birmingham or Memphis. What is it I can smell, even from here, as if the city has a soul and the soul exhaled an effluvium all its own? I can't quite name it. A certain vital decay? A lively fetor? When I think of New Orleans away from New Orleans, I think of rotting fish on the sidewalk and good times inside. A Catholic city in a sense, but that's not it. Providence, Rhode Island, is a Catholic city, but my God who would want to live in Providence, Rhode Island? It's not it, your religion, that informs this city, but rather some special local accommodation to it or relaxation from it. The city's soul I think of as neither damned nor saved but eased rather, existing in a kind of comfortable Catholic limbo somewhere between the outer circle of hell, where sexual sinners don't have it all that bad, and the inner circle of purgatory, where things are even better. Add to that a flavor of Marseilles vice leavened by Southern U.S.A. good nature. Death and sex treated unseriously and money seriously. The Whitney Bank is as solemn as the cemetery is lively. Protestants started Mardi Gras, you know. Presbyterians take siestas or play gin at the Boston Club. Jews ride on carnival floats celebrating the onset of Christ's forty-day fast.

I like you banal little cathedral in the Vieux Carre. It is set down squarely in the midst of the greatest single concentration of drunks, drugheads, whores, pimps, queers, sodomists in the hemisphere. But isn't that where cathedrals are supposed to be? It, like the city, had something else even more comforting to me, a kind of triumphant mediocrity. The most important event which occurred here in all of history was the John L. Sullivan-Jim Corbett fight. Three hundred years of history and it has never produced a single significant historical event, one single genius, or even a first-class talent - except a chess player, the world's greatest. But genius makes people nervous, including the genius, so he quit playing chess and began worrying about money like everyone else. It is altogether in keeping that the famous Battle of New Orleans was fought after the war was over and was without significance.

***

Have you ever watched onlookers at the scene of violence, an accident, a killing, a dead or dying body on the street? Their eyes shift to and fro ever so slightly, scanning, trying to take it all in. There is no end to the feast.

***

I knew a married couple once who were bored with life, disliked each other, hated their own lives, and were generally miserable - except during hurricanes. Then they sat in their house at Pass Christian, put a bottle of whiskey between them, felt a surge of happiness, were able to speak frankly and cheerfully to each other, laugh and joke, even make love. But that is crazy. Why should people be miserable in good weather and happy in bad? Surely not because they are sinners in good weather and saints in bad. True, people help each other in catastrophes. But they don't feel good because they help each other. They help each other because they feel good.

In Memoriam Ms. Blettner

2010-10-31T22:30:00.008-05:00

When I was a sophomore in college, I became obsessed with the vanity of human existence. As with extremists and polemicists before me, the Bible became the sword I would wield to prove my point. I would quote the Preacher from Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanities, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?” I asked my music professor Elizabeth Blettner to advise an annual thesis paper I wanted to write on the subject. She worked with me over the course of the spring on the paper. An essay that would have otherwise taken the darkest view on the human condition and the futility of human action became, instead, under her influence, a thoughtful meditation on the balance in life. In our conversations, she was terribly enthusiastic about Ecclesiastes’ other well known maxim, “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven,” and pointed to how things in the world were seemly and related to the whole, when perceived with Wisdom, and were, for that reason, beautiful. She pointed out that Vanity in Ecclesiastes could be weighed against the value of Wisdom, “the Tree of Life,” in Proverbs. With her guidance, I wrote an essay that made clear that the Preacher was right that the risk of vanity and folly in life were overwhelming but that by turning life into a struggle to achieve Wisdom and Truth we can stay out of the “shadows of vanity” and “choose life over death.”

Ms. Blettner, with whom I had not spoken since leaving college more than a decade ago and who died earlier this year, appeared to my nineteen year old eyes to be living the proposition that she convinced me of and which concluded my paper. I got to know her – though only as a teacher – over a year of the most intense and sublime hours of my life sitting in her music tutorial, listening to Mozart, Bach, and Schubert. She was odd and old fashioned, with long elaborate dresses, thick grey hair worn in long braids under a kerchief, and frequently wearing either a nervous or troubled expression. But that look was sometimes quickly replaced by a smile that hinted at both mischief and ecstasy when things, a note of music or a comment from a student, came at the right time, showed that the stars were aligned and that the world (at least of her classroom) reflected some greater order. For my part, I was a high school dropout who had only a year or so earlier opted for drug rehab to avoid juvenile prison, whose admission to this college, the only one that would have him, shocked his parents and reflected the moral commitment of the college to accept anyone who applied and to use books and ideas to transform them into better people. Given our contrast, and the fact that she appeared to me to be some kind of mystic or angel, the attention that she gave to me, both on my paper and in class, felt more like spiritual guidance than education. We would listen to a Mozart piano sonata, two or three times, and she would point things out but would be coy about what she saw as most significant, and you would speak up, point out the repeating patterns, that it began and ended in the same place, how some small part of it related to the whole, or how it all related to some other bigger whole, and she became bright like the sun with joy because she loved so dearly small things that reflected the whole, things that begin and end in similar places. When you are a lost teenager, when the world of music, art, and beauty offer salvation, you grow towards that light, you hope it shines on you, and you bask in it when it does.

In my time with Ms. Blettner, she would say little things about her life, about studying philosophy in the mountains at Penn State, about her niece – her “namesake,” and she would be unable to repress certain views – like her shock when I was taking notes in margins of my Bible as though it were any other book. But every minute she spent with me, whether she was talking about Mozart, the Bible, or political squabbles in the music department, made me believe that maybe I was a good person, something that I seriously doubted (even more than I doubted the goodness of the bigger world), and that I could follow truth and beauty and avoid the snares of ignorance and vanity. She seemed so good, so full of truth, and she seemed invested in me and my thoughts. So I must not be all that bad, I hoped.

Though Ms. Blettner has not been in my life for a long while, her influence had deep marks on my daily life. Many of the things that I enjoy most, that cast away vice and vanity and make life worth living, are things that I learned from her. For me, works like Mozart’s Magic Flute or Bach’s St. Matthew Passion remain powerful responses to the Preacher inside me.

I have heard that the last month of Ms. Blettner’s life was filled with music and singing from her guests – former students and colleagues – who visited her at her hospice. I suspect many of the pieces that she taught us were played, as they have been in my home. In memorial, I resolved to someday teach these same pieces to my daughter, now one year old, and look forward to smiling excitedly when she finds something special or beautiful for herself in an opera or a piano sonata that I first heard with Ms. Blettner. And if she could see it, I am sure that she too would smile at how her end was a beginning for another and how all these little parts of life relate seamlessly to some glorious and beautiful whole.

Welcome Prize

2010-10-07T11:27:00.001-05:00

The day is still young but this anti-Latino David Vitter attack advertisement is the most offensive thing I have seen so far . . .

God knows that people come to this country from Latin America to be mocked and caricatured, for free hand outs, to commit crimes, and for limousine rides. Surely not to work hard, to improve the lives of their children, and to participate in civic life in a great democracy, like my grandmother's parents, who immigrated from Eastern Canada in the 1920's and who had children in Massachusetts and New York that became American citizens by virtue of the 14th Amendment, now under threat.

Vitter's implicitly attacks the family histories and American identities of anyone whose family origins began outside this country (and that's quite nearly all of us), including many of us whose families have long shed any hint of foreign origin.

But for anyone who has an aunt, or a grandma, or a great grandma who spoke English with a little accent by virtue of having been born in some other country, you should be very offended.

"We have authority by martial law to shoot looters"

2010-09-13T20:13:00.004-05:00

I wrote an op-ed for the Times Picayune about the nexus between Mayor Nagin's panicked post-Katrina declaration of martial law, the now clearly false and exaggerated claims made by Nagin and former New Orleans Police Superintendent Eddie Compass of a lawlessness among citizens that included racially tinged fantasies of armed attacks on Children's Hospital and baby raping in the Superdome, and the simultaneous attack on the citizenry by the NOPD that left eleven unarmed people shot, including five fatally, and 16 officers charged with involvement in the incidents or subsequent coverups.

It appears in tomorrow's paper:

Martial law? There's no such thing: A guest column by Billy Sothern

In the wild days after Hurricane Katrina, when a perverse game of telephone turned the actual chaos and misery occurring here into fictions of mobs invading Children's Hospital and shooting down medical helicopters, word was reportedly spread among the rank and file of the New Orleans Police Department, "We have authority by martial law to shoot looters."

It has been reported that there is now an internal NOPD investigation as to whether a "shoot looters" order was in fact given. Whether or not such an order or authority was carried out is not known at this time. What we do know is that, in the end, at least 11 unarmed people were shot by NOPD officers in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina under seriously questionable circumstances.

Of those, five died and can be rightfully added to Hurricane Katrina's 1,500-plus death toll in Louisiana. And 16 NOPD officers are now charged with federal criminal violations related to these incidents and the subsequent cover-ups.

One would think that if martial law was in fact permissible under Louisiana or U.S. law, that we would be hearing that various of these shootings were justified under that theory. In fact, martial law doesn't exist in our state and there is no authority under any law in this country that would justify shooting civilians who do not pose an immediate threat of death or serious bodily harm to officers or others.

Martial law -- literally, the law of Mars, the God of War -- is a suspension of existing civil laws and authority during a time of war or when civil authority has ceased to function, which suspends the ordinary administration of justice.

Generally, it places all legal authority in the will of the commander of an army and "is established and administered in a place or district of hostile territory held in belligerent possession, or, sometimes, in places occupied or pervaded by insurgents or mobs," in the words of Black's Law Dictionary.

Because our system of government is predicated on the rule of law, there are few historic precedents for martial law in America's history books. Tellingly, the example most often pointed to is President Lincoln's Civil War suspension of Habeas Corpus, a common law right of judicial review of a prison or death sentence, when Lincoln also established military courts in the South and West.

These measures were rejected by the United States Supreme Court, which said that even the Civil War did not justify what was essentially the imposition of martial law by Lincoln: "Civil liberty and this kind of martial law cannot endure together; the antagonism is irreconcilable; and, in the conflict, one or the other must perish."

If Abraham Lincoln, the president of a fractured country at war with itself, didn't have the constitutional authority to declare martial law, it can be safely assumed that a mayor or a police chief or captain, even in post-levee failure New Orleans, also lacked that authority.

So it's hard to know what the mayor, Ray Nagin, was saying when he told a journalist, "I've already called for martial law in New Orleans," as was recently rebroadcast in PBS's stunning "Law and Disorder" documentary on Frontline. If indeed any police officers even heard this order, they were obviously in no position to research the constitutionality of the claim at the law library of the Louisiana Supreme Court. Instead, they would have understood that the mayor was telling the world that he had lost the city to "insurgents" and "mobs" and that they needed to take it back without regard for the normal rules.

In the defining moment of crisis, when panic and passion were already so likely to overcome judgment, it appears that those in charge illegally threw out the rule of law. That they might have panicked and believed the rumors and very worst exaggerations about the citizens of our city is no excuse. The problem with the Law of Mars is that it easily confuses the blood of the guilty with the blood of innocents.

Of the many lessons learned from the chaos and confusion following Katrina, we now know that sometimes the only protection we really have is the rule of law. We abandon it at our peril.

Billy Sothern is a criminal defense attorney in New Orleans and the author of "Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City." His email address is billysothern@gmail.com.

There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better.

2010-08-30T14:53:00.004-05:00

Five years ago, I was in Oxfordtown waiting out the storm.

Sitting back in my house in New Orleans, all this time later, I still feel lucky to be here. From where I sit, I see four cypress doors with old rim locks, brown and white porcelain knobs, and transoms above, an old river clay brick fire place that used to provide heat when this room, now my office, was the back of a slave quarters, and a double hung window looking out to a Japanese magnolia, a mimosa tree, and endless cat's claw vine consuming everything in its path beneath a blue sky. It is an unexceptional New Orleans room but better than any room anywhere else.

From Bob Dylan's Chronicles, Volume 1:

I showed up in New Orleans in early spring, moved into a large rented house near Audubon Park, a comfortable place, all the rooms fair sized, furnished quite simply, wardrobe cupboards in just about every room. We couldn’t have come to a better place for me. It was really perfect. You could work slow here. They were waiting at the studio, but I didn’t feel like jumping into anything. Sooner or later I’d have to get to the point but I could try it on another day. I brought a lot of the songs with me, I was pretty sure they would hold up veil.

Right now, I strolled into the dusk. The air was murky and intoxicating. At the corner of the block, a giant, gaunt cat crouched on a concrete ledge. I got up close to it and stopped and the cat didn’t move. I wished I had a jug of milk. My eyes and ears were open, my consciousness fully alive. The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds - the cemeteries - and they're a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman, sepulchres- palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay - ghosts of women and men who have sinned and who've died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time.

The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there's a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There's something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can't see it, but you know it's here. Somebody is always sinking. Everyone seems to be from some very old Southern families. Either that or a foreigner. I like the way it is.

There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. There's a thousand different angles at any moment. At any time you could run into a ritual honoring some vaguely known queen. Bluebloods, titled persons like crazy drunks, lean weakly against the walls and drag themselves through the gutter. Even they seem to have insights you might want to listen to. No action seems inappropriate here. The city is one very long poem. Gardens full of pansies, pink petunias, opiates. Flower-bedecked shrines, white myrtles, bougainvillea and purple oleander stimulate your senses, make you feel cool and clear inside.

Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move. All that and a town square where public executions took place. In New Orleans you could almost see other dimensions. There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. After a while you start to feel like a ghost from one of the tombs, like you're in a wax museum below crimson clouds. Spirit empire. Wealthy empire. One of Napoleon's generals, Lallemaud, was said to have come here to check it out, looking for a place for his commander to seek refuge after Waterloo. He scouted around and left, said that here the devil is damned, just like everybody else, only worse. The devil comes here and sighs. New Orleans. Exquisite, old-fashioned. A great place to live vicariously. Nothing makes any difference and you never feel hurt, a great place to really hit on things. Somebody puts something in front of you here and you might as well drink it. Great place to be intimate or do nothing. A place to come and hope you'll get smart - to feed pigeons looking for handouts.

If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise

2010-08-21T22:38:00.004-05:00

An essay I wrote for Salon about Spike Lee's new documentary and New Orleans five years after Hurricane Katrina.

"If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise": Spike Lee's riveting look at New Orleans, now

The filmmaker's new documentary argues that the troubled, extraordinary city holds the key to our redemption

By Billy Sothern

A still from "If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise"

Five years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans remains one of the most troubled places in the United States. Its woes are a consequence of the civic collapse that preceded Katrina, the devastating levee failures following the storm, and most recently, the unrivaled environmental devastation from the BP oil disaster. But New Orleans also remains the heart of American culture. It's a place unrivaled in vernacular richness where people come from world around to eat, drink, listen and see — to live for a few days like many of us here live every day. Is it possible that the national seat of American tragedy can also redeem this country by refusing to give up its bon temps while fighting for its survival?

Spike Lee gives his answer in a new documentary, "If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise," a loosely structured, four-hour meditation on everything right and wrong with New Orleans five years after Katrina. It premieres Aug. 23 and 24 on HBO.

The tensions are on display from the film's opening. Its first scenes include, in sequence, an angry and defiant poem ("No more use of our Gulf Coast waters, wetlands, heritage and soil/ No more 'Up yours Louisiana,' because we all know there's blood in that BP oil/ If God is willing and the creek don't rise") read by the star of Lee's earlier New Orleans documentary, Phyllis Montana-LeBlanc (now a star of David Simon's "Treme"); images memorializing Katrina's devastation; and the joyous celebrations of the Saints' improbable 2009 Super Bowl victory. Interviewed in a throng of people following the Saints win, an unnamed woman sums it up, "Four and a half years ago we lost our home during the flood, and we are so privileged and honored to be here. Living in New Orleans is a privilege. It's not easy, but it's a privilege and a blessing."

The claim that it is "not easy" to live in New Orleans turns out to be one of the very few understatements in the documentary, which dwells at length on the many things that create this dis-ease — separate and aside from the storm that drew the country's attention and the oil spill that refocused it. The viewer is led through policy debates and critiques and personal stories highlighting the demolition of New Orleans' public housing projects and consequent housing crisis; the collapsed healthcare system (New Orleans' public hospital remains shuttered because of political wrangling about the future of healthcare); the mental health crisis that has been responsible for murders, suicides and less-than-joyous substance abuse and drinking since the storm; the incompetence of FEMA in providing post-storm assistance to the city and the agency's mismanagement of its emergency housing plan; the civil engineering missteps by the Army Corps of Engineers that made the city vulnerable to flooding and that have degraded our wetlands; the shattered education system; the out-of-control crime and violence that have plagued the city; the police corruption and history of police violence that have led to numerous federal murder and conspiracy indictments for officers involved in several, separate incidents; and deregulation that provided the opportunity for corporate greed's fouling of the Gulf.

Any New Orleanian living here during the past five years will be familiar with these issues from their daily lives and from the news on the front page of the Times Picayune. They are issues that you live when you can't find a place to rent that you can afford, when you cannot find a school where your child will receive a decent education, when you wake in the middle of the night to hear gunshots and know that someone's life may have just come to an abrupt and violent end. These are the daily challenges of living here. And it's useful to recall, in watching this documentary, that our individual efforts to overcome these obstacles are not just personal but part of a collective effort to keep this city alive.

The people telling the story in this documentary are many of the same people whose names appear in the paper. Some are policy wonks; others, activists or artists; but nearly all are fervent New Orleanians. Some of them speak in a strongly held hyperbole that hints at madness or mania, both about the good and the bad here. There are angry words, never precisely defined, about "the powers that be" and their efforts at "ethnic cleansing" on the one hand, and on the other, references to the Saints' Super Bowl win that suggest a local belief that the victory was an act of God, as if New Orleans, like the long-suffering Job, had been rewarded for its faith. This is the bipolar parlance of life here, stemming from the widely held belief that the city is vastly better than, worse than, and not really a part of the rest of the country. Most of these sentiments are presented in the documentary without any evident endorsement from Spike Lee, who seems more enamored with his subjects' intense feeling for their homes and threatened way of life than with the specifics of their claims. He is particularly interested in their suspicions about race, the government and corporations. The firmness of the beliefs held by so many people here is just as important as the accuracy of their claims.

But implicit in the framing of the documentary, and of most of the engaging books and films to come out of New Orleans since the storm, is the notion that the challenges that define life in post-Katrina New Orleans are the same vexing national crises on which the quality and success of 21st-century America will be, and should be, judged; that the same problems also exist in Lee's beloved native Brooklyn and so many other places in this country. Despite Lee's critique of the political and social realities that made the Gulf's twin disasters possible, despite the seemingly endless images of dead bodies — human and animal — that we see in this film, "If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise" shows that Lee is not without hope.

He is clearly a partisan of this city, a place where real recovery and reconciliation are the daily work of thousands of people. The efforts of the people of this city and region appear to have given him reason to believe — despite the ever-present risk of rising water — that something better may yet emerge from the tragedies along the Gulf.

death i think is no parenthesis

2010-08-03T21:16:00.004-05:00

Earlier this month we stayed in a pleasant little cottage on Peaks Island in Maine. The house had belonged to a somewhat recently deceased woman for many years and her things - her white furniture, artwork, photographs, and books - kept the place Christina's Cottage, which is what everyone called it. While the home was unmistakeably her's and left a strong impression of her as a person, we felt comfortable there and had some vague sense that we liked her from her house, her things, and the impression it left about how she lived her life.

The first night we were there, when Nikki had fallen asleep upstairs, I picked out an anthology of poems from the bookcase and went to a dogeared page. I imagined that Christina had read the poem years earlier, that it had moved her, and that she marked the page to remember it. I too was moved, thought of my wife upstairs and the woman and her children who had lived there.

I read it to Nikki in the morning. She said that it was her favorite E.E. Cummings poem, which she hadn't read in years, and that it reminded her of her sister, who passed away years earlier.

since feeling is first
E.E. Cummings

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

Treme - John Boutte

2010-06-21T13:23:00.001-05:00

I enjoyed watching the finale of Treme last night and think that the show is an important reflection of both the spirit and culture of New Orleans and the difficulties that we face as a city and a country.

But, putting all that aside, I think that there is one inarguable truth about Treme that everyone should agree on. John Boutte, who sings the opening song and who has been featured throughout the first season, deserves to be famous. He sounds like Sam Cooke (which was joked about in the finale), while still sounding distinctly John Boutte. I hope that he still plays for free at DBA on Saturdays if he gets huge but I will still count myself lucky to have seen him there so many times if he doesn't.

I frequently find myself bitching about all of New Orleans' troubles but John Boutte is way up on my New Orleans gratitude list, along with roast beef po-boys (I would say oyster po-boys but that has become complicated recently), Mardi Gras, and long pine floorboards, that make it more than worth the effort.

Shakedown Your Congressman!

2010-06-17T15:01:00.005-05:00

I lack the words to express my frustration at the continued environmental devastation caused by the oil gushing into the Gulf, destroying peoples' lives, killing animals, and devastating the already compromised wetlands that are essential New Orleans' capacity to withstand hurricanes.

So outrage is not even vaguely sufficient to articulate my response to hearing Texas Representative Barton apologize to BP CEO Hayward today during the Congressional hearing on the spill and to lambaste the Obama administration for compelling BP to create a $20B fund to compensate the people and governments impacted by the gusher:

"It is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown, in this case a $20 billion shakedown."

This has received a great deal of press today, almost exclusively critical, but it bears mentioning that this is not an isolated Republican perspective but, in fact, the Republican Study Committee, a group of over 100 Conservative Republican congressmen, issued a similar statement yesterday calling the BP fund a "Chicago Style Political Shakedown."

We are drowning in oil along the Gulf and maniac Conservatives remain so committed to their pro-corporate, liberterian ideology that they take BP's side against the people who will see some benefit, however inadequate, from this fund.

As cynical as I am, I was surprised to see Gulf Coast politicians on the list of Republican Study Committee members. Call them or email them and register your disgust:

Steve Scalise

(LA-01)

Connie Mack

(FL-14)

Jeff Miller

(FL-01)

A Digit A Day

2010-05-10T17:29:00.003-05:00

As my efforts to make Louisiana a more humane and less brutal place when it comes to the use of capital punishment have been largely unsuccessful, I am considering taking a new tack and instead proposing the use of physical, bodily mutilation as a deterrent for criminals and as a way to encourage law abiding behavior among the criminals that prey on Louisiana's defenseless citizens.
No, I have not changed my view on Bobby Jindal's proposal to mandate castration for child sex offenders and remain opposed to such a sanction on the basis that it would demean our contemporary standards of decency while being entirely ineffective in deterring sex offenders, most of whom do not expect to be caught and therefore are unafraid of an improbable punishment.
I propose that, instead, we save such punishments for the corporate executives of the companies that exploit our state's natural resources. With the largest oil spill in history gathering and expanding in the Gulf of Mexico still spewing oil, three weeks after the initial explosion at the Deep Water Horizon oil platform, I have a proposal that is penologically sound, that will encourage a quick resolution to the continuing flow of oil, and which will deter other corporate heads from allowing their companies - all rational actors, I was taught in law school - to allow similar catastrophes.
Here is what we shall do: For every day the oil continues to flow up from the sea bed - destroying the lives of tens of thousands who rely on the Gulf for their livelihood, ruining the habitats of hundreds of species of birds and animals that lives in the wetlands and barrier islands, further degrading wetlands that protects south Louisiana from hurricanes which were already undermined by oil company canals and pipelines - British Petroleum CEO Tony Hayward loses a digit. A digit a day. He can choose, start out with pinky toes if he wants, but if doesn't do something to end the flow quickly, he'll find himself with no fingers or toes left and we'll have to get creative. Either with him or maybe we'll start with the Transocean or Halliburton CEO's.
There guys are all Conservatives, I am sure, big believers in accountability who, when they achieve political office, have no regard for the "whining" of my clients on death row. They are the ones that believe that harsh punishments like mass incarceration and the death penalty are the only social programs worth keeping to solve our societal ills. And it's not like we are going to kill them. We'll just leave them fingerless, toeless lessons to corporate heads everywhere that the people who are impacted by their choices are not simply abstractions that exist in profit and loss statements. And, also unlike my clients, these guys are people who we can expect really take risks and contingencies into account before they act so our brutality will have a genuine deterrent effect. Maybe it will put a little fire under Hayward ass, get a solution to this month old problem before the elderly and children along the coast have to be moved inland to protect them from the carcinogenic benzene wafting in with the afternoon breeze. And if it doesn't, at least my anger that my city smells like a goddam gas station will be appeased, however slightly.

Is Louisiana part of our country or isn't it?

2010-05-05T12:42:00.003-05:00

Rachel Maddow's closing remarks on her May 3, 2010 show broadcast from Venice, Louisiana were a powerful expression of both what the Gulf Coast and Louisiana face from this enormous natural disaster and also what Americans face with minimally regulated capitalism. To be clear, powerful corporations are making choices everyday that put our lives at risk and they calculate our suffering into their profit and loss statements and, frequently, it's cheaper to create misery than to spend money preventing it. (Who knows what corners were cut, what "efficiencies" realized, in the construction of the "fail safe" blow out preventer that should have closed the flow of oil in this type of disaster. I wouldn't be surprised if we end up finding out that an additional $100,000 part could have prevented this multi-billion dollar disaster.) The government, with the collective interests of the people at heart, is the only way that all of us little ants can stand up and demand that these corporations consider our safety and wellness when they are digging wells, making products, and trading mortgages and securities.

The Conservative Era, from Reagan to Bush (and now, Obama), has created a landscape that would make Upton Sinclair blush. Once the oil is capped and the Gulf is cleaned (if that is even possible), something real needs to be done to clean up Washington D.C. and its stink of corporate influence, which has already managed to pollute almost everything there. Until then, I will sooner eat oil covered gulf shrimp than buy anything that comes out of those fetid waters.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

A transcript of the closing of the May 3 Rachel Maddow Show:

So, here we are again on America's Gulf Coast, the Louisiana shoreline reporting on an environmental, economic and human catastrophe. This fragile stretch of our country being ripped apart again just as the wounds of the last disaster were beginning to heal here -- that of course was hurricane Katrina, which ravaged the barrier islands off the coast here and leveled much of Venice, Louisiana, where I'm sitting tonight. That was 2005. Here we are again in 2010.

If there's a unifying truth in this state, in this region, it is that the wetlands are the only means of survival. Nobody argues this point. Republicans, Democrats, nobody argues this point.

The wetlands are to the Gulf Coast what bumpers and crumple zones are to cars. It's a buffer against the impact, an absorber of destructive energy, a giant protector against disasters. Wetlands slow and weaken hurricanes before they reach places like New Orleans. They support wildlife. They support human economy. They are incredibly, incredibly fragile, and they have to be preserved if they are going to preserve us. The marshes were built by nature over thousands of years, built by the Mississippi River's floods which left settlement in fresh water. That pushed the edge of the continent out into the Gulf of Mexico by as much as 100 miles.

But since, the 1950s, the pursuit of profit has forced 8,000 miles of marshes to yield to manmade canals -- essentially, to make oil exploration and shipping easier. It's estimated that the state of Louisiana loses 25 square miles of wetlands every year. If we were losing that much land to another country, we would be at war.

America has a choice to make about the State of Louisiana. Is Louisiana part of our country or isn't it? Because if Louisiana is part of America, then the American people and the American government have to begin to defend Louisiana against American greed, and multinational greed. Because yes, legally it's the job of BP, the oil company, to clean up this disaster that looms over this wetlands behind me right now.

But who among us believes that any company really wants to defend America, as much as we as a nation want to defend us? The gain sucked out of the sea bed here is private, it's profit, it supersedes to these pesky little regulatory bodies called countries, but the risk here, again, the risk here as always isn't private. It's public, it's national, it's American. It's borne by Louisiana again, literally borne by the land here and by the people here. The incentives all line up neatly for the companies who profit up a natural resources here to take what they can and damn the consequences.

For us as a country, if we believe in Louisiana, somebody's got to stand up against those companies on behalf of the public, the land, the people, the country.

Hubris

2010-05-04T08:55:00.003-05:00

I wrote this piece in late 2007 for an issue of Orion Magazine that collected essays from writers across the world about the impact of climate change on their immediate lives. (Orion did not end up publishing it.) The essay focuses on land use in New Orleans but the overarching theme, hubris, seems timely in light of the environmental crisis in the Gulf of Mexico. I don't think it can be repeated too many times: Katrina's impact on New Orleans (a consequence of levee failures, greedy and thoughtless modern development of flood prone areas, environmental degradation of the wetlands, etc.) and the oil geyser in the Gulf were both man made disasters, failures of engineering, imagination, and respect for the natural environment.

Pandora’s Box in New Orleans

In our creation myths, the Divine grows weary of the small, weak, and overreaching efforts of man and finds it necessary to bring about a grand, humbling event. In Greek mythology man was punished for presumptuously accepting Zeus’ stolen fire from Prometheus by being left to suffer the ills from Pandora’s box. In Genesis we see the vision of man discontent with the bounty provided him consuming the one thing denied by God and, as a result, cast out of paradise and into a world of suffering. Hubristic at our core believing in our hearts that we too are Gods, mankind is yet to be humbled.

I live in a Great American City – New Orleans – that has recently suffered an enormous catastrophe that might have highlighted our more modern brands of hubris. In the myriad causes of the disaster we see many consequences of our vast disrespect for the natural world. We walled in the reluctant Mississippi River for a thousand miles with levees and starved Louisiana’s coastal wetlands of the sediment from which they were created, thus degrading nature’s best storm buffer. At the behest of powerful development interests, we have literally stolen earth for over a century by busily draining thousands of acres of swamps with modern pumping devices to build tract houses below sea-level. We have carved up the already struggling wetlands with shipping canals that allow salt water to infect the brackish wetlands and, more to the point, allow oil interests to extract fossil fuels from below the beds of the wetlands causing the ground beneath to subside. In a world of rising seas from global warming that will only increase the risk of bigger, more powerful storms in the future, our city seems to have learned little from our suffering.

Before the twentieth century, the people who planned and built the historic sections of the city that our visitors are most familiar with were not armed with technology to drain or wall off nature so they built with nature rather than against it. Their good sense resulted in one of the most arresting images to come out of post-Katrina New Orleans, rivaling even the widely publicized photos of a dog eating a bloated human body: a diptych of maps that appeared in The Times Picayune, one showing the current city with those areas that flooded cast in blue and the other showing the pre-twentieth century city. The blue areas in the former were all just beyond the historic footprint of the city and, without exception, none of the flooded areas had been deemed habitable by the city’s fathers.

Without the tools to try to fight nature, and with a consequent respect and deference for its powers, the city's fathers had built their city on the high ground along the Mississippi created from millennia of alluvial silt deposited on the river’s banks as it crept along its crescent shaped turn. And even there, they built on piers, elevating structures several feet above the ground and likely future floods.

For want of a plan that would have prevented the foolish redevelopment of the city’s catastrophically flooded twentieth century neighborhoods, the city has allowed individuals to rebuild as they please. Now here and there among the rows of boarded up slabs homes in the miles of devastation are picture-perfect renovations with manicured gardens and owners who hope and believe that levees can be built bigger and pumps stronger to keep nature – growing ever more furious - at bay. They are encouraged by our leaders who refuse to tell people things that they don’t want to hear or tell us that we should bow our heads to anything. They are emboldened by our technologies, our supposed strengths, that in their noxious by-products, including our belief that they have allowed us to make the natural world after our image and desires, have only put us at greater risk of crumbling into the sea. Believing as we do, we won't back down from this fight and, if history is any lesson, we won't win.

Second Line

2010-04-20T00:00:00.001-05:00

The Treme premiere depicted, I thought quite convincingly, the first post-Katrina second line parade three months after the flood.

I was at the real life first second line on November 26, 2005 (at least I thought it was the first) and wrote about it for The Nation a month or two later. It was the Black Men of Labor second line, originally scheduled for September 5, 2005 but delayed - not canceled - by the storm and executed in pretty spectacular fashion less than three months later. It was pretty terrific.

Nikki took phenomenal pictures, one of which ended up in my book. Here is what I wrote at the time:

A Second-Line Revival

By Billy Sothern

January 25, 2006

"In this place, there's a custom for the funerals of jazz musicians. The funeral procession parades slowly through the streets, followed by a band playing a mournful dirge as it moves to the cemetery. Once the casket has been laid in place, the band breaks into a joyful 'second line,' symbolizing the triumph of the spirit over death. Tonight the Gulf Coast is still coming through the dirge, yet we will live to see the second line." --George W. Bush, September 15, 2005

Word spread in bars, coffee shops and by way of New Orleans' independent radio station, WWOZ, that there was going to be a second line at 10 Saturday morning starting at Sweet Loraine's on Saint Claude Avenue. The parade was with the Black Men of Labor, who second-line annually on Labor Day. There were to be two brass bands, The Hot 8 and To Be Continued, a group of teenage musicians.

By the time I arrived at the closed bar, an odd assortment of recently returned city residents were milling about on the sidewalk and the trash-strewn neutral ground. Amid duct-taped refrigerators and piles of moldy sheetrock, residents of the surrounding neighborhoods where the second-line culture has lived for generations watched with anticipation as the pre-parade drama unfolded. Gutter punks, their faces tattooed and pierced, were dressed for a postapocalyptic ball, with girls in tutus and dresses and men in top hats. Middle-aged music aficionados were also mixed into the crowd, wearing vintage "Jazzfest 88" T-shirts that testified to their authentic love of New Orleans' music. The whole scene was under the magnifying glass of 100 cameras and a dozen video cameras, recording the moment for posterity.

One documentarian, in a Yankees hat and with a large movie crew, was especially conspicuous. The storm had blown in Spike Lee, a genuine national celebrity. In a city that is just as eager to revere its own local celebrities--like Mister Quintron, an indie musician and inventor of the Drum Buddy; rock-star celebrity chef Susan Spicer; and the late Ernie K-Doe, singer of the 1960s R&B classic "Mother-in-Law" and self-proclaimed "emperor of the world"--Spike Lee attracted little more attention than the rest of the many cameramen as he worked on his new documentary, When the Levees Broke. No one had come to Sweet Loraine's to gawk at stars other than the dozen or so men in yellow shirts who were set to perform their distinctive dance up and down New Orleans' streets.

As we waited for the parade to start, an off-the-cuff press conference began, with cameras converging around the dapper men and people asking questions about the meaning of the second line after the storm. As New Orleanians are rarely at a loss for words these days in explaining their plight and the significance of their lives and culture (nothing like being left for dead by the rest of your country to make you realize that you have to speak up for yourself), Fred Johnson, one of the founders of the thirteen-year-old Second-Line Club, wearing a black fedora and dark glasses, responded at length, linking New Orleans' black cultural traditions to those of his ancestors, who were slaves in Louisiana. "Slaves created gumbo from the scraps off the table out of what no one else wanted," he said. "The big house didn't know what the little house was doin', but when they found out, it became a cuisine." He enunciated "cuisine" with slight mockery and derision but also with understanding--as, of course, who wouldn't want gumbo?

Not everyone was eager to listen to talking, though. Interrupting the monologue, a lanky middle-aged black man announced, "I came here to dance! Where's the music at?" He was soon placated by the booming moan of Bennie "Big Peter" Pete tuning his tuba. A heavy black woman with a tiny Nike backpack and big gold earrings, with a faint tattoo of an M on her hand, was ecstatic at the sound: "Bring me back home. Waah, waaah, waah, waaah. I been waiting to hear that. I been hearing it in my sleep."

As The Hot 8 tuned up, the Black Men of Labor disappeared into Sweet Loraine's, and the excitement of the promise of real New Orleans culture after months in the monoculture of Jackson, Houston and Pensacola spread among the crowd.

The Hot 8 began playing "E Flat Blues," and tears came to people's eyes as they gathered around outside, waiting for the second-liners to emerge from Sweet Loraine's. Then each player burst through the doors, one by one, like the hometown team coming onto the basketball court at the beginning of the game. Each man, dressed in the same yellow-and-black outfit, expressed an individual character coming through the darkened doors. Some sauntered, some strutted, and one particularly inspired dancer walked and danced in a squat with his butt almost on the sidewalk. Cheers for each of them were barely discernible over the loud brass.

When the last man was through, we began to walk, en masse, down Saint Claude Avenue, a street that runs through the now famously devastated Ninth Ward. The parade turned up Saint Bernard Avenue, and the brown, chest-heigh waterline became evident on the facades of people's old wood-frame shotgun houses.

As the band finished up "Paul Barbarin's Second Line," the dancers quickly headed into Mickey's Next Stop Bar, followed by about fifty paraders, all wanting a quick beer. It was unclear whether the bar just happened to be open at 11:15 on the parade route or whether these were normal hours in this near-vacant, crumbling neighborhood. But certainly, the few late-morning drinkers inside must have been surprised at all the company.

As sometimes happens here, we got sidetracked at the bar. This time the delay was justified by the fact that two critical components of the second line--beer and hot sausage po' boys, typically sold from the beds of pickup trucks following the parade--were absent.

The band got going again with a slow dirge as the parade resumed slowly up Saint Bernard into Tremé, one of the oldest black neighborhoods in America, where free people of color built homes in the mid-eighteenth century. We passed the neighborhood grocery store, the old Circle Grocery, which had become an emblem of New Orleans' post-Katrina chaos and was shown beneath deep water with nauseating frequency on CNN from the elevated interstate that runs next to it. The sad music captured the feeling so many of us had as evacuees looking at elements of our everyday lives turned upside down and projected to a national audience to tell the story of this terrible natural disaster.

The band, however, refused to dwell on this mood for long and commenced a rousing "I'll Fly Away," just as it passed under the interstate. With the sound trapped beneath the highway, the acoustics exploded. The band stopped marching and played even harder, as everyone cheered ecstatically.

When the song ended, the parade turned onto Claiborne Avenue, which runs under the highway and which served for generations as the center of commerce and social life for Tremé. It had been a wide neutral ground and once had elegant oaks under which families often picnicked. But the oaks were cut down and the neutral ground was paved for parking when the highway was built above Claiborne Avenue in the 1960s as part of a backward "urban development" plan. Recently, the oaks have reappeared as murals on the massive, concrete cylinders that support the highway, providing imagined shade to the many persistent families who still picnic there on lawn chairs, just as their great-grandparents did.

On the corner of Claiborne and Columbus, the parade made a left and lingered for a moment under the interstate again before the band and the Second Liners scurried over to Antoinette K-Doe. She was sitting on the corner in front of the Mother-in-Law Lounge, which she opened with her late husband as a venue for New Orleans music and tradition. Even before K-Doe's death, in 2001, it was a museum of artifacts from his career--it even contained a life-size K-Doe in one of his old '60s outfits. Almost all of the many images that adorned the walls featured K-Doe--with rare exceptions, including a painting of Christ. Since K-Doe's passing, Antoinette has been more open about the fact that the lounge is, and always was, a shrine to her legendary spouse.

Miss Antoinette is a revered figure in New Orleans among musicians of all stripes, from brass bands to indie rockers. In addition to her years as K-Doe's "wife, his manager, his secretary, his bartender, everything," as she described it to me recently, she is also a cousin of Lee Dorsey, the writer and singer of the New Orleans anthem and '60s R&B hit "Ya-Ya," as well as a singer and dancer in her own right.

All of the musicians and dancers stopped to check in with Miss Antoinette, offering condolences for the extensive flood damage that the lounge and K-Doe's old black limo suffered in the storm. She remained smiling, optimistic and proud in all of her exchanges as she sat against the bright-colored murals of musicians on the exterior cinderblock walls of the lounge. In sharp contrast, everyone could easily see past Miss Antoinette, through the doorway, into the gray and gutted lounge. As empress of all of this, Miss Antoinette greeted Spike Lee as she did everyone else, and posed with him for a picture taken by one of his crew, seemingly for him to hang on his office wall.

We got going again, down Columbus Street, a block that three months earlier had been an open-air drug market but that had since been abandoned to flooded cars and garbage, including a flood-darkened Ziploc bag with "pickled lips" handwritten on the white label. On the next block down, in the fenced-in schoolyard of the McDonough 35 High School, the parade approached a group of young black men in orange jumpsuits with "OPP" stenciled in black block letters on the chest. These men, prisoners of the Orleans Parish Prison, which only three months earlier had left hundreds of men to drown in their cells in the rising water, ran to the high, chain-link fence and danced to the rhythm of their home, their neighborhoods, with their fists in the air. Cute women in pigtails and handmade "Make Levees, Not War" T-shirts danced in the sunny street on the other side of the fence, framed against the burned-out shell of an old Creole cottage.

The Hot 8, no strangers to urban criminal justice, stopped and began a special performance for the men behind the fence, playing an impromptu "Let My People Go." This act of solidarity reminded me of the band's own loss when a year earlier, only about five blocks from the schoolyard, The Hot 8's trombone player, "Shotgun" Joe Williams, was killed by police. (Though the media made much of his nickname in justifying the shooting of this unarmed man, anyone familiar with local jazz could explain that "shotgun" is a colloquialism for the trombone.) While the band was scheduled to play to a mostly white, upper-middle-class crowd in the French Quarter later in the day, it is unlikely that audience received the same kind of passionate and personal performance that The Hot 8 gave for the men in the orange jumpsuits.

The parade wrapped up its tour of the Tremé in front of the Back Street Museum, a museum of New Orleans' black cultural history in the shadow of the old Saint Augustine Church, where generations of Tremé musicians were baptized. The staff had made red beans and rice, which they gave to the dancers and musicians, and then to everyone else. Some activists circulated a petition for Category Five hurricane levee protection, and others informed the crowd of a march the following week to protest the city's lack of commitment to rebuild poor neighborhoods. They passed out fliers with the South African antiapartheid anthem "Nothing Without Us Is for Us" providing the details. Everyone seemed optimistic and at home, and unlike almost any other place where New Orleanians congregate, no one talked at all about moving away.

We had, for a moment, lived up to the President's prediction and triumphed over the spirit of death with a second line through a city that had been left to die as he watched from the big house, while his wife no doubt explained to him that what we have down here is "culture."

(See photos of the second-line parade by New Orleans artist Nikki Page here.)

Treme

2010-04-18T10:12:00.002-05:00

"Treme" feels like home to me

In New Orleans, we were braced to be misunderstood again, but David Simon's drama gets our city -- and yours, too

By Billy Sothern

HBO

Steve Zahn, Kermit Ruffins and Wendell Pierce in "Treme."

I watched the first episode of "Treme" sitting on a couch that DJ Davis, the real-life version of one of the show's main characters, peed on after a hard night of drinking. Everyone in the room knew the guy "from around," so it was slightly odd to watch Steve Zahn's performance as DJ Davis. But it turned even weirder when Steve Zahn's character ran into the real-life DJ Davis, who gave a nod and a wink, in a bar where some of us had sat drinking with the real-life DJ Davis before.

I am an old fan of David Simon, the show's creator, and spent Friday nights in college obsessively watching "Homicide: Life on the Streets," the detective show based on his book. But my anticipation of "Treme" had been fraught with concern: Would "Treme" get the city right? What kind of effect would it have on the city? Could it possibly manage to capture the fact that we are so lucky to live here -- and yet that residing here comes at great risk and cost? A few weeks ago, I had a conversation about my worries out on the streets of New Orleans' Central City, a largely unflooded, historic neighborhood whose shotgun homes have recently heard as many fatal gunshots as any neighborhood in North America. It was Super Sunday, an annual Mardi Gras Indian "holiday," and men, women and children packed the streets in vividly detailed, painstakingly stitched, brightly colored full-body Indian suits. I talked with a veteran civil rights lawyer, Mary Howell, in the middle of a normally busy street. After seeking to end police abuse against Mardi Gras Indians and other New Orleanians for years, Howell was present this day as a legal observer. We talked about Toni Burnette, the character in "Treme" based on Mary and depicted by the terrific Melissa Leo, who captured her characteristic diction and gestures with great aplomb in the premiere, and how the show might impact next year's Super Sunday: Would "Treme" open the floodgates to hipsters and cultural tourists, Americans longing for a non-homogenized version of community?

Our passionate discussion of the future of the city, with a backdrop of crumbling homes, festive music, and Mardi Gras Indians, could have been a scene from the premiere. Indeed, just that day I had run into actor Clarke Peters, who plays Indian chief Albert Lambeaux, enjoying the day (in plainclothes) just before I ran into Mary. I can only guess that his real-life doppelgänger must have been there somewhere. And me, a transplanted New Yorker living in New Orleans for the past decade with the fervor of convert, could have easily been mistaken for Davis, especially after ordering a few gin and pineapples ("No tonic, sorry") out of an impromptu bar beneath the lift gate of an SUV on the parade route.

For New Orleanians, watching "Treme" can be a bit like a local version of Philip Seymour Hoffman's unrealized play in Charlie Kaufman's odd "Synecdoche: New York," in which a mad, detail-oriented genius sought to create a constant and simultaneous performance of the quotidian lives of an entire city's residents. The show is made by people who clearly adore and understand the city, and it takes great pains to get details right. I recognize myself and my neighbors in these characters, these archetypal New Orleanians, and Americans will finally see this dynamic culture that's mostly been obscured by cartoonish depictions of New Orleans in media like the short-lived show "K-Ville." But I was surprised that the show isn’t just introducing America to real life here and instead presents something that transcends the unique geography and character found within the city's borders.

That more significant reality is that New Orleans, for all its exceptionalism -- its Hubig pies and Carnival -- is the canary in the coal mine of American democracy. While its architecture, music, food and unique wonders provided a cogent argument for the country's investment in its rebuilding following the storm (well expressed in the fine "Why New Orleans Matters" by "Treme" writer Tom Piazza), the seeds of its near demise are present in every part of the country from Baltimore, Md., to Richmond, Calif. You may not be able to get a good bowl of gumbo in your town or state, but there are very few places in America where you cannot drive half an hour to the nearest neighborhood with decaying infrastructure, crime, poverty, failing schools and other plagues and find the essence of the pre-Katrina New Orleans. What happened following the storm, "a man-made catastrophe, a federal fuck-up of epic proportions, and decades in the making," according to John Goodman's character on the show (based loosely on New Orleans blogger Ashley Morris), simply exposed our pre-storm desperation. That catastrophe, not the storm, flooded tens of thousands of homes, most of which were suburban, mid-20th century ranches where regular families, like the real-life family of Wendell Pierce, who plays trombonist Antoine Batiste, lived.

So when Albert Lambeaux walked into his flooded concrete house in the premiere, a couple of inches of muck beneath his feet, his heartbreak has nothing to do with the elegant, crooked, old wood-frame homes that people visualize when they think of this city. It has nothing to do with why New Orleans, and not some other place, matters, but instead relates fundamentally to our common conception of home, and what protections we ought to expect as citizens of this terribly rich country. (I wrote about coming home to my wind-damaged, roofless, 19th-century New Orleans home in Central City, two weeks after the storm, for Salon).

Similarly, when we see Khandi Alexander's character, Ladonna Batiste-Williams, find out that her brother is lost among the inmates who were left to die in Orleans Parish Prison before they were transported willy-nilly across the state without regard to the insignificance of their purported offenses, we are hearing a true New Orleans story (which I wrote about for the Nation). But the subtext is that we are a country that relies on incarceration to lock up a greater percentage of its population than any place in human history, of which a disproportionate share are young black men. Again, New Orleans simply represents the razor's edge of a problem that is a defining issue in modern American life.

In this way, the show, like Dave Eggers' recent "Zeitoun," uses post-Katrina New Orleans to present a convergence of pressing American crises alongside some of the very things that redeem this country. In "Treme," the roar of a trombone wandering down Governor Nicholls Street sweetens the bleak realities presented by both David Simon's earlier show of urban American horrors, "The Wire," and the post-Katrina disaster that horrified Americans watching on CNN. But the joy of that music, of the celebration, does not obscure, in the show or in real life, the reality of police brutality, mothers who cannot pay for groceries, fathers who eschew their parental responsibilities, crime and staggering violence on the streets, and terrifying disinvestment in American infrastructure.

New Orleans is exceptional, and it does matter. It has Mardi Gras Indians, Sazeracs, po boys and red beans. But, in addition to those treasures, the New Orleans in "Treme" presents the post-Katrina magnification of the woes that this country faces in nearly every community. While your town is not likely to have a second-line parade any time soon, civic collapse could be coming your way. That's why New Orleans should matter to you.

Billy Sothern is a New Orleans attorney and author of "Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City." He wrote a series of articles for The Nation about life in the New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina and blogs at Imperfectly Vertical.

Published today in Salon.

Berghuis v. Smith

2010-03-30T10:56:00.005-05:00

I am pasting below Justice Thomas' concurrence in today's United States Supreme Court opinion in Berghuis v. Smith, in which the Court weighed in on a petitioner's claim that her jury pool had been selected in a manner that vastly underrepresented women.

Thomas suggests that there is no right to a fair cross section of society on criminal juries because women, minorities, and the poor were frequently excluded from service for much of our troubling history as a nation. (The full text of the concurrence is below. Read it yourself. Tell me I'm wrong.)

This is exactly the kind of absurd result that comes from the fetishism for original meanings. I, for one, am pleased to live in 2010, rather than the late eighteenth century, and hope and believe that many of the values of the Founders would be roundly rejected by most Americans today.

Cite as: 559 U. S. ____ (2010)
THOMAS, J., concurring

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
No. 08–1402
MARY BERGHUIS, WARDEN, PETITIONER v.
DIAPOLIS SMITH
ON WRIT OF CERTIORARI TO THE UNITED STATES COURT OF
APPEALS FOR THE SIXTH CIRCUIT

[March 30, 2010]

JUSTICE THOMAS, concurring. The text of the Sixth Amendment guarantees the right to a trial by “an impartial jury.” Historically, juries did not include a sampling of persons from all levels of society or even from both sexes. See, e.g., Alschuler & Deiss, A Brief History of the Criminal Jury in the United States, 61U. Chi. L. Rev. 867, 877 (1994) (In 1791, “[e]very state limited jury service to men; every state except Vermont restricted jury service to property owners or taxpayers;three states permitted only whites to serve; and one state,Maryland, disqualified atheists”); Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U. S. 522, 533, n. 13 (1975) (“In this country women weredisqualified by state law to sit as jurors until the end of the 19th century”).

The Court has nonetheless concluded that the Sixth Amendment guarantees a defendant the right to a jury that represents “a fair cross section” of the community. Ante, at 1 (citing Taylor, supra).

In my view, that conclusion rests less on the Sixth Amendment than on an “amalgamation of the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment,” Duren v. Missouri, 439 U. S. 357, 372 (1979) (Rehnquist, J., dissenting), and seems difficult to square with the Sixth Amendment’s text and history.

Accordingly, in an appropriate case I would be willing to reconsider our precedents articulating the “fair cross section” requirement. But neither party asks us to do so here, and the only question before us is whether the state court’s disposition was contrary to, or an unreasonable application of, our precedents. See ante, at 2−3, 8−10; 28 U. S. C. §2254(d). I concur in the Court’s answer to that question.

Super Sunday

2010-03-29T00:15:00.005-05:00

Today was Super Sunday, an annual Mardi Gras Indian gathering in the Central City neighborhood. Given that the new HBO show Treme is coming out in a few months, and will highlight and celebrate this culture, I wonder whether next year's Super Sunday will remain the same terrific event or whether the attention it is bound to get will somehow change it if hipsters fly in from New York and LA to see this amazing art and culture.

I wrote a little about Mardi Gras Indians a few years ago in The Nation.

St. Ailred

2010-03-23T00:09:00.006-05:00

When I am tired, so tired, of my job, of writing appeals late at night, of the fact that my writing appeals late at night is absolutely nothing compared to what my clients are facing, of my complete and total inadequacy in the face of what they face, or of the horrors of the facts of the crimes of the cases that I work on late at night, crimes which I hope stay far away from me and the people I love, I take comfort in the fact that my friend Jill wrote a poem about this very situation, the one that I find myself in, the one that I have found myself in over and over again for years. I remember the poem because I want to reach out into the night, through my computer, the very tool that I work with on these cases, and find some evidence of human decency. And I remember, I did that once and Jill wrote a poem about it so there must be some kind of decency out there.

St. Ailred by Jill McDonough

Billy writes me an email in the middle of the night, tired

and sick of it, up writing appeals for a good kid who found

a gun, decided to use it in Louisiana. Eighteen, he shot

the neighbor lady dead in a death penalty state.

Billy's eyes are tired, he's sick of this work.

There's no time for it's-not-fair, the almost-plea,

the best case scenario: an ex-good-kid in prison

the rest of his life, woman still dead, still shot to death

in her driveway, in front of her kid. Billy,

I am reading about saints and relics, reliquaries, looking for

medallions online to keep you safe. St. Ailred's the patron saint

of integrity. Who knew? He was known for his compassion,

his clear and lucid writing. He's perfect for you, Billy. He's been dead

a thousand years. Pinkerton's Lives of the Scottish Saints tells us that

at his most sacred tomb the sick were cured, the lepers cleansed,

the wicked terrified, the blind received their sight.

Health Care

2010-03-21T23:46:00.003-05:00

Pretty sure this means that my daughter is going to grow up in a world where health care, like equal rights, education, the right to vote, and free speech before it, is a universal right, however imperfectly implemented. Would have liked to have been able to cancel my Blue Cross/Blue Shield policy and enroll in the National Health Service tomorrow morning but maybe that won't be too far off.

My Valentine

2010-02-14T08:39:00.000-06:00

My wife Nikki and I have been together since we were kids and grew up together into the people we are today. I am certain that Nikki would have become the strong, inspiring person, teacher, mother, and artist that she is today in my absence. I try not to worry about what kind of cad I would have ended up being without her and instead count my blessings.

Below is an excerpt from a chapter of my forthcoming book, Put Away Childish Things.

Happy Valentines Day.

A handful of months earlier I met Nikki Page, now my wife, who is neck and neck with John for the most morally serious person that I had ever met. I met her sitting with a mutual friend in a student lounge. She was wearing a kelly-green polyester wind breaker, a white t-shirt, blue corduroy pants, and Converse All Stars. I was wearing a kelly-green polyester wind breaker, a white t-shirt, blue corduroy pants, and Converse All Stars. She was small and athletic with choppy, crazily pinned short brown hair, a wicked jaw, a button nose, light blue eyes, and an exceptionally large chip on her shoulder. “So I heard about you . . .,” she said. She had started at St. John’s a year before me and was in the midst of a year off following her freshman year. She was living in the Maine woods at her mother’s house while substitute teaching at the local public school. With a faint drop in her r’s, she explained her place of origin, “Its not the Maine where you went on vacation with your family. I hate it when I tell people I’m from Maine and they say, ‘I love it there. I go to Booth Bay every year.’ I live in the Maine where people don’t go on vacation. Ever read the book The Beans of Egypt Maine? Anyway, that’s my town. Trailers, pregnant teenagers. and pine trees. My dad was a drug dealer and his best friend down the mountain was hiding from the law for killing someone in a bank robbery and blowing up buildings. Not ‘Vacationland.’”

I had never been on vacation to Maine but was fixing to after that diatribe. I saw her again before she went home to Maine and we sat and talked for hours. I asked her why she had taken a year off of school and she told me matter-of-factly, “My sister Meg died right before I started my first year. I wanted to get the fuck out of Maine so I came anyway and thought I could handle it. But then, that year, my friend committed suicide. He walked deep into the woods in Maine and shot himself in the stomach with a shotgun, bleeding and in pain until he died. He wanted to feel something. It brought everything back about Meg’s death and I needed some time to deal.”

When she was back in Maine, we started exchanging letters and talking incessantly on the phone. I told her everything I could about myself, about how I was a drug dealer until the bust less than two years earlier, about my mean cop stepfather, my dad’s dogging around with women, my own dogging around. A few years older than me, she was also more than a couple of steps ahead of me and was deeply unimpressed – and called me out on it – when I took a bragging tone about dissolute youth or unhappy childhood. And besides, the things she told me about her own life – the things she had seen - made me feel like I had been raised in Paradise by angels. She beatings that she had witnessed her father, a drug addicted Vietnam vet, inflict on her mother. How, as a really little girl, she would try to intervene only to have the violence turn against her at the hands of both her father and the mother who she had tried to save. About how she and Meg, a couple of years apart, really only had each other and how, with Meg’s death, she had lost the only witness to the nightmare that unfolded daily in her life until her parents got clean when she was in middle school.

She wasn’t bragging that she was badass who had lived through all of this and gotten herself to college from nowhere, with no support, despite a childhood that was so ceaselessly violent. So when she said, “If I had been a boy, I would have ended up a killer,” she was just saying something that struck as her as true like if one of the other kids at our school said, “I come from a long line of attorneys.” As I got to know her better, I began to see that she wore all of this awfulness on her sleeve so no one would have any reason to be scared off down the line. She was letting me know, telling me, like she told everyone, I am not like the other kids at this college and if you cannot deal with that it’s not my problem. Like someone telling you everything that could possibly go wrong with the car he was selling so that you couldn’t come back afterwards and complain.

The more she told me about all that was wrong with her life, the more perfect I thought she was. And I could see that she wasn’t at all attracted to the eighteen year old who was impressed with himself for selling drugs in New York City, getting in trouble with the law, smoking dust in the bathrooms at clubs – which, though ambivalent, I sometimes was. She was attracted to the kid who was struggling to turn the corner, to figure out what was right with whatever little scraps were around.

I made my first trip to Maine a month or so later. For me, we were flawed, beautiful, desperate. Nikki brought urgency to my desire to my desire to be a better person. I wanted everything that had ever happened to her, every sadness that she had ever felt, every terrible thing that she wished she could forget to be vindicated by the fact that we had found each other, that we were perfect together. She wanted to take things slowly, to become friends, and for me to watch her cat, Bitch, while she taught high school students at University of Virginia to earn money before returning to college in the fall.

In the early days of sophomore year, when our romance was still very new, we trudge through the Bible in class, I averred to the truth of the preacher in Ecclesiastes – “Better is he, than both they, which hath not been, who hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun” – and listened compulsively to Bach’s depiction of Christ’s death march in the St. Matthew Passion. When Pontius Pilate offered the people a way out, after Christ’s betrayal, and allowed them to either pardon Christ or Barabas, I was horrified but unsurprised when Bach’s chorus responded Barabas in dark, discordant cries. After clarifying my views over long conversation with Nikki, I argued stridently in class that we were the rotten chorus, the thieves crucified with Christ, the Pharisees. On a trip to Washington D.C., in the Northwest mansion of a friend’s godfather, a man who walked through the National Gallery to get ideas for art that he might buy for his home, I argued these points with the powerbroker: “Life is vanity and wickedness and those things that we gather around ourselves are dust. Given the chance, we will do wrong. We even killed Christ.” He was unusually patient but countered that there were earthly goods to be done, people to feed, medicines to invent to save lives, beauty, love. I countered that there was no altruism, only selfishness, but just could not argue against beauty or love, with these so vivid in my life at St. John’s. Instead, he showed me a large Greek urn in his parlor as an example of such transcendence.

During the next three years at St. John’s, Nikki and I read the books together, trying to figure what they said about the world and how we should live our lives. Aside from negative examples, she hadn’t been given any guidance on that front and I had rejected, not bothered listening to, or was incapable of following whatever moral education I had been offered to date.

Nikki and I had to St. John’s with the same fundamental question: How could there be so much misery in a world which had either God or some other central force at its center? For both of us this question was personal. But Nikki need some cosmic order to make sense of her life. She had seen things that shook her. She had been awoken as an eighteen year old by a phone call from her father who mistook her for her sister and explained that Nikki had been in a fatal wreck, believing falsely his daughter on the phone was the daughter who had made off with Nikki’s car hours earlier without telling anyone. She had been raised in a home where, until she was twelve, her parents were so consistently drunk, high, and violent to one another and their children that she still cannot understand why no one ever put a stop to it, took them from this daily nightmare, stopped the beatings, the hunger, the terror. So when Nikki read about Job’s needless suffering in the Old Testament, puzzled through Kierkegaard’s meditation on God’s directive to Abraham to sacrifice his only son, or pondered Roskolinikov’s murder of his innocent neighbor in Dosteyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, her concerns were not merely academic but were instead primarily personal. Why do people do evil things? Why does God tolerate, indeed promote, what can only be characterized as cruelty? On the other hand, especially with Nikki, because of her approval, I felt a gathering sense of goodness inside me, a stamp of decency amidst all of my corruption. Why, otherwise, would she love me? So my questions were framed somewhat differently focusing instead on the possibility of divinity within the hearts of grievously flawed. Is there a possibility for atonement for Judas, like there was for one of the thieves crucified with Christ, like there is for all of us, all sinners? Is there any possibility that we can ever discern what is right when we are so weighed down by the flesh and sin, when we allow ourselves to be so easily fooled about what is right and wrong to satisfy our interests and passions?

While translating passages by Blaise Pascal, the gloomy French philosopher and mathematician, in a language tutorial, I wrote an analysis for class that typified the struggle that I saw everywhere:

The weight of Hell and Sin seem to weigh heavily upon the shoulders of man. Romans 3:23 offers and explanation, “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” Blaise Pascal, in his Pensees, seems to live with this. He lives with it, not as a simple thought, but as a condition. All too aware, he seems, of his sins, the sins of others, and of the vast distance between himself and his creator, God. Pascal describes man in the following manner, “Dependence, desire for independence, needs.” Pascal sees the fulfillment of independence and the negation of need and dependence as being the sole motivations for man’s actions. Unfortunately, the state of dependence and need coupled with a desire for independence will necessary lead man into folly.

Unsurprisingly, really wanting answers for these questions was not sufficient to bring one about and we were left to, and remain, struggling with the problem of evil and how to live our lives. But we made some progress and especially during Nikki’s reading of Dostoeyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, she was came up with a description of man that integrated all of our worries but expressed some of our optimism, our hope that the world had some good in it.

The Brothers Karamazov is a vast and sprawling story about Karamazov family. The eponymous brothers are Alyosha, a young, naïve man set on becoming a monk, Ivan, the middle child, a hyper-rational atheist, and Dmitri, the oldest brother, a dissolute pleasure seeker who hedonism matches that of the family patriarch, Fyodor, their father. Along the course of the book, we see Alyosha disappointed that the divine corpse of his role model monk stinks upon decomposition like everyone else’s, we hear Ivan spin a tale of Christ’s subsequent persecution at the hands of the Fifteenth Century Spanish Grand Inquisitor who felt that Christ’s actually presence was problematic for his brand of Christianity, and we see Dmitri’s trial for killing his father, the central drama of the book.

Nikki was found of characterizing the book as an existential “who-dunnit” novel. Boiling it all down, she would explain, “A murder is committed, and one person is found guilty, but that’s not the who-dunnit. The who-dunnit is all of us. We are all guilty of the crime. Why? Because we are all criminals – every single one of us. But guess what, we are also all beautiful, like Alyosha’s beloved Zosima, who is good but not perfect. We all have some stink on us.”

Trusting Nikki’s superior moral judgment, seeing the truth of her analysis, I adopted it as my own. From then on, whenever I heard about people who were “evil”, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, right wing terrorist Timothy McVeigh, or who were so very good, I’d think of Nikki’s edict and shake my head. Still, I thought of her as good, so good, and still had some clear reservations about myself. To add to the drama – and the confusion of being twenty-one years old - I persisted on thinking of us in a grandiose manner, as some combination of Bonnie and Clyde, Dante and Beatrice, Antony and Cleopatra, Christ and Mary Magdelene (with the genders reversed). We are partners in crime. We travel together on a spiritual and intellectual quest. We are doomed but strong and beautiful. And, of course, despite everything, you are perfect and I am so very deeply flawed.

America's Team

2010-02-03T15:23:00.002-06:00

Two weeks ago, the New Orleans Saints played the Minnesota Vikings for the National Football Conference Championship. My wife and I couldn’t watch the game alone – we didn’t want to bear the burden of defeat or experience the thrill of victory alone. Near kickoff, we drove the city’s streets just before the game started and they were eerily void of people just as I remembered them when I returned to the city days after Hurricane Katrina struck. We arrived at the uptown home of some friends, just blocks from quarterback Drew Brees’s home, and nervously ate the food and drink of this town. Our host had made a pot of gumbo, using a chicken he had fried and a dark roux. I separated yolks from egg whites, poured in gin, heavy cream, simple syrup, and orange flower water into my cocktail shaker and shook like crazy for a full minute to confect a round of Ramos gin fizzes, a drink invented in New Orleans more than a century ago. Despite our efforts, things looked grim in the fourth quarter. With the score tied and very little time on the clock, the Vikings had the ball, were in field goal range, and could take the game with a decent field goal kick. But we sipped our fizzes for good luck and a flag was thrown against the Vikings for something called “twelve men in a huddle,” an unlikely mishap for the polished team, driving the Vikings back beyond field goal range, which forced overtime, where the Saints won possession on the coin toss and took the game with a field goal.

We ran out onto the streets and our cries of “Who Dat!” – the cry of the Saints fan - were answered back with who dats from neighbors engaged in their own celebrations. We drove home through streets rich and poor that were now filled with revelers spilling out of bars or screaming from their front porches. We honked at cars, families, and jovial street mobs to share our joy. When we got home, the honking, yelling, and fireworks (or were they gunshots?) were audible for hours. The New Orleans Saints had defied expectations and were going to the Super Bowl for the first time ever.

The winning field goal occurred in New Orleans’s emblematic Superdome, a giant concrete spaceship that landed in New Orleans' business district a few decades ago and which had been, up until Hurricane Katrina, principally indentified as the home field of the hapless Aints, as the Saints were known during their early history of defeat and disappointment. The city of New Orleans has, as observed recently in the New York Times, been in a simultaneous struggle since the team’s inception. It lost two hundred thousand residents during the team’s first four decades, huge areas of the city were surrendered to blight and crime, the city lost almost all of its big businesses, and racial divides cleaved the city’s residents and divided the mostly black city from its mostly white suburbs. And this was all before Hurricane Katrina when the Superdome became the site of one of America’s biggest failures when desperate, mostly black citizens, abandoned in a city which had succumbed to catastrophic flooding, due more to poorly maintained and engineered levees and infrastructure than to the storm’s might, gathered for the world to see. Rumors of murders and rapes among the masses in the Superdome circulated quickly. By the time FEMA and the National Guard arrived and evacuated the entire city, the Superdome was no longer a sports field, it was a memorial to America’s persistent failure to address racial inequality, human misery and civic collapse.

I have beat this drum for almost five years since the storm, trying to tell anyone who will listen that the things that they saw after Hurricane Katrina, the things that disgusted and disappointed them, were not created by but were exposed by the storm and that similar ugliness existed not far from their homes, in forgotten cities from Richmond, California to Camden, New Jersey, and everywhere in between. And I still insist that New Orleans’ recovery is a bellwether for American Democracy and, as New Orleans goes – good or bad – so goes the country. All of this is why it is difficult for me to say that a winning field goal kick in a football game has changed things at all. But it has. The kick brought the citizens of this city and region together in a way that the common experience of displacement and loss following Hurricane Katrina had failed to do.

Whether you are listening to the black talk radio station, WBOK, where hosts are apoplectic about the possibility of the election of a white mayor, as seems likely, or WWL radio, whose white flight listeners seem to never tire of calling in to disparage the city, everyone comes together about The Saints. The Times Picayune, where the politics of the “white vote” and the “black vote” have been written about a lot recently, ran the headline, “New Orleans Saints fans build color-blind bonds in Who Dat Nation,” with the lede,

In a place where music and food can break down racial barriers but true dialogue between the groups is rare, nearly universal joy over the Saints' newfound success has created a new common language and solidified a shared identity.

The entire region coalesced this week in mass, populist, anti-corporate mania when the NFL tried to claim that “Who Dat” was the intellectual property and registered trademark of the NFL and threatened several New Orleans retailers who sold Who Dat merchandise. After receiving nothing but bad press and condemnation, summed up by a smart blogger’s exclamation, in perfect French, “Hey NFL, Bleaux Me,” the NFL backed down and local t-shirt shops sold out of anything with the word “Who Dat” on it.

Hurricane Katrina exposed our deepest divides and the “recovery,” such as it is, has in many ways only heightened the balkanization of this town and region. Things are not “better” here. The murder rate remains out of control, the city’s coffers are empty, the levees remain questionable, the wetlands that buffer the city from hurricanes are deteriorating, and the viability of many of the city’s neighborhoods is very much in doubt. But The Saints have, at least momentarily, brought us together and given people a sense of common purpose.

After the game, on Monday, or Tuesday, or Wednesday, or whenever the postgame celebration or sad hangover of loss ends, we all know that the city and region will still be laden down with problems and animosities. But on Sunday, the streets of New Orleans will empty again and people will huddle around televisions in the company of fellow Saints fans, people of all stripes including old school Who Dats and recent convert New Dats, like my wife and me. Our team, like our city and its people, are the underdogs in the game. So we will eat gumbo and hope. And if we are lucky, if we get another good coin toss after all of the bad ones for so many years, we will drive home again watching strangers hug in the streets, seeing everyone joyous and together, without regard for the usual divides, and the city can shake off some small part of what it struggles with and what has so fractured it. As with all the tragedy here, if some measure of unity and recovery can happen in New Orleans, it’s possible anywhere in this country

So forget the Cowboys, these Aints turned Saints are America’s team. Root for them and root for yourselves.

'N Things

2010-02-02T10:34:00.000-06:00

Nikki told me this morning that my old nemesis, Linen 'n Things, had gone out of business. Does this not prove, once and for all, that "'n Things" has no place in retail. ("And things" would be bad enough.) Now if we can rid Maine of stores names "Mainely . . ." (Mainely Hair, with its double play on words, being the worst offender), my work will be done.

The Agronomist

2010-01-23T11:18:00.001-06:00

Last night I watched Jonathan Demme's The Agronomist, about Jean Dominique, a Haitian human rights activist and journalist. The documentary provided historical context, largely absent from the media I have seen, necessary to understand how Haiti ended up in such a desperate place before the recent earthquake. I wish that Dominique was still here to help his beloved country and to help us better understand what must be done from here.

Media Conflict over Haiti's Impact along Class Lines

2010-01-18T22:23:00.010-06:00

Those of us who lived in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina are all too familiar with reading stories in the press, written by people unfamiliar with this town, its politics, geographies, and citizens who descended just for the big story, that misunderstood either the details of our complicated city and what it and our neighbors endured here.

As we saw in New Orleans, much of what people got wrong was driven by their preconceptions about the city, with some quickly accepting as truth false rumors of unthinkable violence by the poor people abandoned in the city and others failing to realize that the flood destroyed upper middle class white and black neighborhoods, along with middle class white and black neighborhoods, before stranding the city's poorest (flooded and unflooded) residents, who became the most visible face of a much more complicated disaster. (People from other places still sometimes express surprise about this when I explain that a rich, white neighborhood was one of the first to flood.)

So it is unsurprising to see the American media struggle to get the story straight in Haiti, a country that many of the journalists now there were likely completely unfamiliar with a week ago.

I hadn't quite grasped this reality until I saw competing headlines, one in the New York Times on Sunday and another in the Washington Post on Monday, telling stories about the impact of the storm on the rich in Port-au-Prince that seem completely at odds with one another.

The New York Times, on the cover of Sunday's paper, carried the headline, "Earthquake Ignores Class Divisions of a Poor Land." The story is summed up in the following paragraphs:

Earthquakes do not respect social customs. They do not coddle the rich. They know nothing about the invisible lines that in Haiti keep the poor masses packed together in crowded slums and the well-to-do high up in the breezy hills of places like Pétionville.

And so it was with the devastating temblor that tore through Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, last week, toppling houses large and small, and trapping and traumatizing residents no matter where they stood on Haiti’s complicated social scale.

The story in yesterday's Washington Post carried the headline, "Haiti's Elite Spared Much of the Devastation," and tells a far different story:

Although Tuesday's 7.0-magnitude earthquake destroyed many buildings in Port-au-Prince, it mostly spared homes and businesses up the mountain in the cool, green suburb of Petionville, home to former presidents and senators.

A palace built atop a mountain by the man who runs one of Haiti's biggest lottery games is still standing. New-car dealers, the big importers, the families that control the port -- they all drove through town with their drivers and security men this past weekend. Only a few homes here were destroyed.

I have never been to Haiti, no less Port-au-Prince or Petionville, but I don't see how both stories can be accurate. But, especially for those of us who have seen a complicated and nuanced place reduced to generalities by someone without sufficient grasp of the place to begin with, it should be a reminder that, from this distance and in the midst of a crisis, it is hard to get any real read of the texture a place as complex as Haiti.

I suppose it should also come as no surprise that both these stories about Petionville, and so much of the press about New Orleans, seemed especially off-base about issues of class and, in New Orleans, the intersection of class and race. While such divisions are, of course, very often visible on the surface of a city, the dynamics are always much more complicated. Take New Orleans, which commentators suggested was segregated between black areas and white areas when in fact the historic city was integrated by design and remains much more racially diverse in its neighborhoods than most American cities, a fact that does little to change the fact that it is stunningly racially polarized.

While I admire some of the reporting I have seen from Haiti and feel like I am getting a picture of what is happening there (while having to hold back tears at the horror of some of the things that I am seeing), it is worth remembering that there will be things, like the "Babies Getting Raped in the Superdome" story after Hurricane Katrina, that may not hold up under the clear light of day, which will hopefully come soon for Port-au-Prince and Haiti.

State Assisted Suicide

2010-01-08T10:03:00.005-06:00

In my view, the death penalty is indefensible without regard to whether the condemned embraces his punishment, as occurred yesterday in Louisiana with Gerald Bordelon's execution. I will concede, however, that leveling the argument against capital punishment becomes more difficult when discussing "volunteers," which is why I was pleased to read a well reasoned critique of yesterday's execution written by Bidish Sarma, a friend and colleague at the Capital Appeals Project.

It begins:

The State of Louisiana took Gerald Bordelon’s life yesterday. Mr. Bordelon volunteered for execution. After a jury convicted him of first-degree murder at the guilt phase of his capital murder trial, he asked his trial attorneys not to present any mitigating circumstances at the penalty phase – the phase where the jury had to decide whether the convicted murderer would be executed, or would serve a life-without-parole sentence. After the jury sentenced him to death by execution, Mr. Bordelon waived his right to challenge that sentence in front of the Louisiana Supreme Court. The Louisiana Supreme Court nonetheless issued an opinion in his case that ultimately dismissed the appeal. The Court indicated that it was legally obligated to decide whether Bordelon was competent to waive his appeals and also to determine if his sentence was proportionate. In October, the Court cleared the path for today’s execution, and ruled that Mr. Bordelon is competent to waive his rights to an appeal, and that the death sentence in this case is not disproportionate to the penalty imposed in similar cases, considering both the crime and the defendant.

Generally, it isn’t uncommon for death-sentenced defendants to “volunteer” for execution by waiving their appeals. According to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, roughly 12% of defendants waive appellate review. Yet, Bordelon was the first person to successfully volunteer in Louisiana since the death penalty was reinstated here in 1976. And, while every case in which someone “volunteers” presents complex legal, ethical, moral, and philosophical questions, Gerald Bordelon’s case is worth thinking about carefully.

If you are a fan of complex legal, ethical, moral and philosophical questions, you can read the rest here.

Volunteer

2010-01-07T00:00:00.003-06:00

Gerald Bordelon is schedule to be executed today and will be the first man executed in Louisiana since Leslie Martin was executed in May of 2002. Bordelon waived his appeals, making him a "volunteer" in the ghoulish parlance of the American death penalty.

In anticipatory memorial, I am posting two poems from Jill McDonough's Habeas Corpus on the lives and executions of two other volunteers.

January 17, 1977: Gary Graham
Point of the Mountain, Utah

A life of crime, of theft and drugs and jail
in Oregon and Illinois, but when
he robbed a Provo gas station, motel,
he shot and killed two clerks, both Mormon men -
Max Jensen and Ben Bushnell - with wives and sons.
There are sins that the blood of a calf, of a lamb
or doves cannot remit. They must be atoned
by the blood of man.

He asked to die like a man,
and did, chained to a regular green chair.
When asked for his last words, he said Let's do it.
Black T-shirt, white pants. They added a hood, their
target, then bang, bang, bang, three noises, quick.

A line from Gilmore's mother that I found:
They shot your brother's heart out, on the ground.

May 13, 2005: Michael Ross
Somers, Connecticut

I am one of the greatest of sinners. I have murdered
eight women in a horrible way. The papers
lined up eight photos, smiling girls with feathered
hair posing at school or parties. Wendy, April,
Dzung, Paula, Debra, Robin, Leslie, and Tammy
were dead as soon as I saw them, he confessed.

A volunteer, he wanted to spare the families.
Or die, or get attention. Or he had Death
Row Syndrome, was a malignant narcissist.
Outside the prison, supporters told reporters
What do we do with trash? We bury it.
Inside, strapped to a table, Ross gasped and shuddered
while Robin's sister watched. She said It was too
peaceful. But I'm sure I will feel some closure soon.

Helen Hill, You Are Missed

2010-01-04T00:00:00.004-06:00

Helen Hill was murder in her home, protecting her family, three years ago. Following a lackluster investigation, there are still no real leads on who killed her and shot her husband.

Helen Hill, you are missed.

I still know. And I still do not approve. And I still am not resigned.

From the New York Times:

Taken by the Tide

Michael Kupperman

By BILLY SOTHERN

Published: January 10, 2007

New Orleans

IN one 24-hour period last week in New Orleans, now a small city of 200,000, six people were murdered. Last year’s total of 161 murders probably made New Orleans the deadliest city in the United States by a significant margin. I suppose it was only a matter of time before the violence touched my life directly.

Last Thursday morning I received a call from my friend Kittee. “I have awful news,” she said, and then, very quickly: “Someone broke into Paul and Helen’s house. Helen was shot and killed. Paul was holding Baby Francis and was shot three times. He’s still alive. Francis is O.K.”

Paul Gailiunas — Dr. Paul, I call him — had been my physician for several years at the Little Doctors Clinic, a health center for poor people that he founded in Treme, one of America’s oldest black neighborhoods.

I had started to see Paul after my previous doctor mocked one of my colleagues about our work representing people on Louisiana’s death row. When I met Paul through a friend, I asked him directly, “Are you in favor of the death penalty?” He responded, with a smile, “Eh, I’m Canadian,” clearly feeling that was answer enough.

And it was, coming from the founder of our local chapter of Food Not Bombs and the front man for the Troublemakers (a band whose songs celebrate Emma Goldman and the idea of universal health care) in such a lighthearted tone that it would scarcely have alienated the most ardent conservative.

Helen Hill was Paul’s perfect match — a kind and generous woman who made award-winning animated films and taught art and filmmaking to children, adults, anyone who was interested. She’d spent much of the last year restoring reels of 16-millimeter film on which she had drawn by hand, and which had been damaged when their house took four feet of water during Hurricane Katrina.

She had a new film under way, inspired by discarded hand-sewn dresses, made by an elderly New Orleanian, which Helen had found in the trash after the woman’s death. The film interwove the story of the old woman and her dresses with Helen’s own flood-torn life, which took her, Paul and Francis to Columbia, S.C. — Helen’s hometown, where she will be buried today — for almost a year.

Helen had longed to return to New Orleans, despite Paul’s concern that crime and potential hurricanes made it too dangerous for their family. So Helen campaigned, sending Paul’s friends in New Orleans blank postcards, addressed to Paul, for us to write and mail to him. In mine, I pleaded with Paul — “We need you” — the way I do with anyone who is thinking about leaving, coming to, or even just visiting New Orleans. After what I am sure was a flood of similar cards, Paul relented.

I saw Paul and the baby a day after their return to the city, at a parade on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Francis had on a little railroad conductor’s hat, a T-shirt depicting a cartoon love affair between red beans and rice (the New Orleans Monday lunch classic), and a little sign pinned to his back, in Helen’s hand: “New Orleans Native. I Got Back Yesterday!”

The day of the anniversary was solemn but optimistic. Everyone still had a can-do attitude. Paul, for one, could help make the city’s people well and improve health care for the poor. Helen could make art depicting the city’s life. Others could rebuild schools, demand better levees, reconstruct their homes. It still felt as if our grassroots efforts, along with some real help from a government finally forced to make good on its obligations, could create a more just, fair and safe city. It might have been naïve, but it really seemed possible.

After wandering this beautiful, falling-over city the afternoon after Helen’s murder, forcing myself to remember why I love it here so much, I came back to my garden and picked flowers, those hardy few that had weathered the recent cold. I put them in a vase, wrote out the verses to Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Dirge Without Music” — “I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground / So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind” — and drove to the couple’s house, which my wife and I had recently visited for Helen’s open studio. On the steps leading up to their old shotgun house I set down the poem and the vase, just feet from where Paul had been found by the police, shot, bleeding, holding his baby.

On the way home, I stopped at my neighborhood bar to try to eat something. A picture of Paul and Helen, followed by one of the baby, appeared on the television in the corner. Oh, my God. The bartender was kind. She asked me whether I knew them, and talked to me about her fears living with her new baby in a city with no functional schools, no real plan for redevelopment, and spotty or nonexistent basic services. The TV news switched to a weather report: torrential downpours were expected to dump half a foot of rain overnight.

I drove home in the twilight and arrived uneasy and restless. Remembering the coming rain, I resolved to make myself useful to my block by digging out a sewer so backed up that the street — on high ground by New Orleans standards — floods at even the hint of rain. I had done this many times before, having realized that my innumerable calls to the city were in vain.

I pried up the 100-pound cast iron cover with a shovel and then shimmied it from side to side until I had the two-by-four sewer open. It was full to the top with debris. I shoveled out the leaves, dirt, Popeye’s cups and other garbage until the small brick rectangle was as clean as it was a century ago, when New Orleans first created this drainage system.

Then I set to work on clearing the cylindrical drain — about as wide as a hubcap, at the bottom corner of the cleaned-out basin — so that the rain could find its way into the city’s sewers, away from our houses, cars and belongings. I got down with a small shovel and burrowed through the muck until it seemed to open at the other side. Reaching in, though, I could feel that beyond the drain lay more dirt and leaves, packed hard.

Indeed, it became clear to me that the whole sewer line running beneath the street was solid with waste, impenetrable to arms and shovels — that my street would flood again that night. The problem, I realized, is bigger than me.

I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Murder City

2009-12-30T15:53:00.006-06:00

As of yesterday, the unofficial tally of 2009 murders in New Orleans stood at 171, according to the Times-Picayune. Meanwhile, New York City had 461 murders as of Monday, according to the New York Times.

It bears mentioning that New Orleans is a city of no more than 350,000 people, by even the most wildly optimistic measures, while New York City's population is 8.3 million people. So while New York City's population is almost 24 times as big as New Orleans, its total number of murders is only two and a half times greater.

To put this in per capita terms, New York City has 5.5 murders per 100,000 residents and New Orleans has 48.8 murders per 100,000 residents. So yes, fellow New Orleanians, your chances of being murdered are roughly nine times greater than your friends in the Big Apple.

Having grown up in New York in the bad old days of crime and violence, those days when the streets were so rough that only Rudy Giuliani's campaign of civil liberties violations could make the streets safe for women and children, I think it is significant to point out that, even in those awful times of low rents and vital, diverse culture, New York's per capita murder rate was still only 26 murders per 100,000 residents, based on the high point of 2245 murders in 1990.

I hope that 2010 brings better news on the crime and violence front here in New Orleans but I am not optimistic.

Rose Silhouette

2009-12-26T15:39:00.004-06:00

My wife, Nikki Page, is a multi-talented artist and photographer with whom I have collaborated on nearly everything that I have done that was worth doing.

Our most recent collaboration has been our little baby Rose and it should come as no surprise that Nikki would not have been content merely to grow, deliver, feed and raise this baby but felt the need to memorialize her infancy in her art, a pursuit that she has little time for at the moment given her other aforementioned duties.

For Christmas, Nikki made me this eighteenth century style silhouette, made contemporary with her signature cut paper technique on both the silhouette and the border that frames the silhouette. Nikki told me that I would need to give it to Rose some day. I said that I would will it to her so that she can have it when I die but that she will not lay her hands on it before then.

Three Irish Poets

2009-12-23T22:32:00.005-06:00

I am only really familiar with the work of three Irish poets, William Butler Yeats, Seamus Heaney, and . . . Shane MacGowan.

I was thinking of the last of these this eve of Christmas Eve, thinking of all the drunks, losers, and people full of regret this Christmas. Happy Christmas to them.

Fairytale Of New York
Shayne MacGowan

It was Christmas Eve babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, won't see another one
And then he sang a song
The Rare Old Mountain Dew
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you

Got on a lucky one
Came in at ten to one
I've got a feeling
This year's for me and you
So Happy Christmas
I love you baby
I can see a better time
When all our dreams come true

They've got cars big as bars
They've got rivers of gold
But the wind goes right through you
It's no place for the old
When you first took my hand
On a cold Christmas Eve
You promised me
Broadway was waiting for me

You were handsome
You were pretty
Queen of New York City
When the band finished playing
They howled out for more
Sinatra was swinging,
All the drunks they were singing
We kissed on a corner
Then danced through the night

The boys of the NYPD choir
Were singing "Galway Bay"
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas day

You're a bum
You're a punk
You're an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God it's our last

The boys of the NYPD choir
Still singing "Galway Bay"
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas day

I could have been someone
Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you
I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can't make it all alone
I've built my dreams around you

The boys of the NYPD choir
Still singing "Galway Bay"
And the bells are ringing out
For Christmas Day

Merry Christmas

2009-12-21T07:45:00.002-06:00

In the cesspool of money, bling, and consumerism that is, for the most part, the New York Times Style Section, Stephen Elliott's Christmas essay was a little diamond this past Sunday.

His sad, wonderful essay is about being a runaway, homeless kid having Christmas at his foster home and feeling a little less loved than the other kids. The essay is not just about Christmas but also memory and how our idea of ourselves shapes it, especially among those of us that chronically indulge in feeling a little less loved.

Merry Christmas Stephen Elliott, and everybody else.

No Home I’d Call My Own

By STEPHEN ELLIOTT
Published: December 18, 2009

CHRISTMAS has always been my existential holiday.

I left home when I was 13, after my mother died. I lived on the streets of Chicago for a year, sleeping on rooftops and in broom closets and breaking into boiler rooms when it became too cold.

I was 14 when I was arrested sleeping in a hallway. By then my father had moved, and I didn’t know where he lived, so the state took custody. I spent the next four years in a series of group homes and state-financed institutions.

In the group homes, holidays weren’t so bad because we teenagers were all in the same parentless boat. Depending on the home, we would be given presents and there would be a nice meal. Volunteers would take us ice skating or bowling or something like that.

It was when I became a nominal adult, a student at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, that I began to understand my predicament.

Winter break would come; the students scattered; the dorms closed. And I had to figure out where to go.

One year I hitchhiked west, hoping to make it to Los Angeles but only getting as far as Tucson before running out of time and catching a Greyhound bus back to the university.

Another year I went to Mexico, traveling by bus with a student pass, staying in boarding homes and sneaking into the fancy hotels and lying next to the pool. On the road I didn’t have to explain myself, or why I thought I didn’t have anywhere to go. It’s lonely traveling on Christmas, but nobody sees it.

There were also times when I returned to Chicago to spend Christmas with the Bell family, whom I lived with before starting college. The Bells were poor. They owned a house — a two-story frame house built in the 1930s, bought with a $5,000 inheritance used as a down payment and a G.I. loan. But that was it.

The mom, Maria, whom everybody called Ma Bell, raised three children in that house virtually by herself while working as an administrative assistant at the Catholic Charities. Her youngest son, Jason, and I were friends, and she didn’t seem to mind when, just after turning 18, I left the group home and showed up with a bag of possessions and moved into the basement. I stayed eight months, pitching in sometimes with money from a part-time job and helping a little around the house, but not much. It was a generous family, and I took more than I gave.

My first Christmas with the Bells was during my first or second year of college. I told Ma I was coming, and she said, “You’re always welcome.” That year I saw the pattern. All the children would get presents: a bakeware set for Chrissy, the oldest daughter; a drill for Benny, the oldest son; a toolbox for Jason. I would get a T-shirt or socks. It was simple commerce; my presents didn’t cost as much. The difference in price was the clearest reminder that I was an outsider who had been taken in.

Now I’m 38 and Christmas is about the babies, and I don’t notice the price tags on my presents. The Bells’ house has been sold and Ma lives in the far north suburbs, still struggling financially. I tell her that I’m writing about our old Christmases, that I have mixed feelings about them. I tell her it made me a little sad that my presents didn’t cost as much. She tells me it was complicated for her as well.

“I never knew if you were coming,” she says. “You would never commit to anything. The day before you might tell me you were coming home. But I was so happy when you were there.”

She made me a stocking, which she did for all her children, and hung it over the mantelpiece. It was there whether I arrived or not. And it was true, what she said. I had a foot out the door. I got used to running away at an early age. I don’t know how to commit.

This was my Christmas lie. I preferred to think I didn’t have a home, that I wasn’t part of a family. But it wasn’t true. At least not completely.

“Did I ever bring you presents?” I ask her.

“I don’t know,” she says. “It doesn’t matter.”

To help me remember, she brings me pictures from 18, 20 years ago. There’s Jason in long underwear, shirtless, an eagle and a skull with wings tattooed on his shoulder, holding his freshly unwrapped fishing rod. There’s Benny holding what looks like a handheld video game device. There’s Ma in her moccasin boots with all the food spread out on the table. Chrissy, the only child to have already left home, her face poking above a new purple sweater.

And there I am in the chair by the front window. Why didn’t somebody tell me to get a haircut and wear clothes that fit? There’s a picture of Jason and me leaning over the couch, Chrissy and Michelle, Benny’s girlfriend, sitting next to Benny, all of us looking at the photo album open on Benny’s lap. In the next picture I’m face down on the couch. Chrissy and I are both asleep, the cat impassively between us, the coffee table covered in candy wrappers.

There are so many pictures. Here, we’re passing a pie. There, we’re slicing a ham. Everybody seems to be smiling.

“One year we had a Goodwill Christmas,” Ma says. “Everybody’s presents were from Goodwill. There was never any money. I worked so hard and I was exhausted but I didn’t want anybody to go. I would sit on the couch and you would all tell stories, one after another. And you would all laugh and laugh, and that was my reward. I would sit on the couch and close my eyes and listen to you all laughing. It made me so happy because life was hard. Nobody helped. My first husband didn’t help. My second husband was a junkie.”

I tell her I remember. I remember the laughing. The laughs seemed endless, even though Jason and Chrissy were in recovery and Ma’s boyfriend was stuck in a series of difficult low-paying jobs. Maybe it was Benny doing voices: the Indian storeowner, the used-car salesman.

Here is a picture. Just a Christmas tree in front of the staircase, covered in tinsel, an angel on top. Beneath the tree are presents, carefully wrapped in blue, green and red. To the right, on the wall, is a picture of an Indian and a buffalo. On the floor, against the TV stand, an Elvis record. It’s almost a cliché, all the symbols meaning exactly what you think they mean.

“What was the joke?” I ask. “What were the stories we were telling?”

“I don’t know,” Ma says. “I remember the laughing, but I can’t remember what was so funny.”

Stephen Elliott is the author of “The Adderall Diaries,” a memoir.

Classic Cocktails in the White House c/o Rachel Maddow

2009-12-19T09:48:00.007-06:00

Rachel Maddow discovers what they are serving at the White House cocktail parties. Classic cocktails: the Emerson, the Stone Fence, the Robert Frost Cocktail. It looks like they have maraschino liquor and Plymouth Gin on the table in the photo that Rachel snuck. My confidence in the Union is restored by the presence of a man in the White House who drinks, drinks responsibly, and drinks tastefully. (That would likely keep me out of the White House but that is likely a good thing.)

***

Can't find a recipe for the Robert Frost Cocktail but here are the other two, as well as the ingredients Rachel listed for each:

Emerson
Ingredients:
- 2 oz Gin
- 1 oz Sweet Vermouth
- 1/2 oz Lemon Juice
- 1/2 oz Maraschino Liqueur
- Glassware: Cocktail Glass

Mix all ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Strain into a chilled martini glass.

At the White House according to Rachel:

Old tom gin

Maraschino

Lime juice

Sweet vermouth

Stone Fence
Ingredients:
- 2 ounces brandy (or applejack, or Scotch, or bourbon, or rye, or rum)
- hard cider

Pour the spirits into a pint glass; add two lumps of ice and fill with cider.

At the White House, according to Rachel:

Apple Jack
Apple cider
Fee Brothers Aromatic Bitters
Mint

Finally the Robert Frost Cocktail, developed by Derek Brown, according to Rachel:

Sherry
White Port
Bourbon
Sugar
Orange Bitters

***
Using some basic principle of drink making, I have tried to sort out the proportions of The Robert Frost Cocktail.

I am not quite sure what it is supposed to taste like and I am pretty fond of the taste of all of the ingredients so who knows if this is what Washington luminaries (and Susan Mikula) drank at the white house but it's what we are drinking at my house tonight. Suffice to say, I could drink a couple few of them quite happily.

1 1/2 oz. bourbon
3/4 oz. white port
3/4 oz. sherry
Orange bitters
Sugar cube

Muddle a sugar cube with two or three dashes of orange bitters and a little water in an old fashioned glass. (This is how my two favorite drinks, the old fashioned and the sazerac commence, so I figure it's a good way to start just about anything.) Add the other ingredients with a lot of ice and stir with a chop stick or mixing spoon. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Make pretend you are Susan Mikula, or David Axelrod, or someone else likely to attend a White House cocktail party.

Comments or real recipes for this drink (as well as an explanation of the Robert Frost connection) are welcome.

***

I finally found the real recipe for the Robert Frost on The Atlantic website.

Here it is:

The Robert Frost Cocktail

• ¾ oz. Bourbon
• ¾ oz. Amontillado Sherry (dry)
• ¾ oz. White Port
• ½ oz. Simple Syrup
• Dash of Orange Bitters

Combine ingredients and shake with ice. Strain into chilled cocktail glass and add thinly sliced orange and lemon wheels.

I wouldn't have thought equal parts. But it works.

Magnonaise

2009-12-12T12:36:00.003-06:00

Nikki and I were wondering about the origin of the word mayonnaise last week. I came up with the idea that naise must mean sauce in French. (See, i.e., bearnaisse.) So that mayonnaise was the sauce of mayon, whatever that is.

After consulting someone fluent in French last night, it turns out that aise means something like "of," not sauce, so he and I speculated that mayonnaise was simply "of mayon," maybe a town?

We consulted the The World Authority Larousse Gastronomique, the dusty old first American edition (1961) that has sat unopened on my shelf for many years.

The answer it provided was brilliant, complex, and satisfying uncertain.

From the Gastronomique:

Mayonnaise - A cold sauce of which the basic ingredients are egg yolks and oil blended into an emulsion. For recipes, see SAUCE, Cold sauces.

'Culinary purists," writes Careme in his Cuisinier parisien: Traite des entrees froides, 'are not in agreement regarding the name. Some say mayonnaise, others mahonnaise and others bayonnaise.

'I will admit that these words may be current among common cooks, but for my part, I protest that never in our great kitchens (and that is where the purists are to be found) are these three words ever pronounced. We always refer to this sauce by the name magnonaise.'

'But how is it that M. Grimod-de-la-Reyniere, a man of logic and wit, could not see at first glance that magnonaise, derived from the word manier (to stir), was the most appropriate name for this sauce, which owes its very being to the unremitting stirring which it undergoes in the course of preparation? I am more that ever convinced of this when I consider that it is only by working the liquid ingredients together (as may easily be seen from the detailed recipe for this sauce) that a very smooth, creamy sauce is finally produced; a sauce which is very appetising and unique in its kind, since it is totally unlike all other sauces, which are produced by reduction over heat.'

However logical Careme's justification for the exclusive use of the term magnonaise may seem, we are not by any means convinced that it should take the place of the usual form, mayonnaise.

Mayonnaise, in our view, is a popular corruption of moyeunaise, derived from the very old French word moyeu, which means yolk of egg. For, when all is said, this sauce is nothing but an emulsion of egg yolks and oil.

If all sauces stirred for a longer or shorter period, on or off the stove, required a name deriving from the word, manier, then a great many would come under this heading, for instance, Bearnaise and Hollandaise.

New Orleans Police Department

2009-12-10T16:34:00.004-06:00

Nikki, our friend Kristen, and I were robbed at gun point in the Marigny almost exactly a year ago. The teenage boys who robbed us made off with Nikki's cell phone and then, stupidly, used it for the next couple of days. Though reluctant to see the boys end up in our state's awful criminal justice system, I immediately brought the evidence to the police station, including the numbers called. No one was there to talk to me so I left a message with an officer at the desk. No one called me back so I called them. And I called. And I called. But no one called me back . . . until I wrote about it in the Times Picayune at which point I received tons of attention from the police, wondering why I had needed to make them look bad. "Why didn't you just contact me in the first place?"

Based on my experience, and the tons of feedback that I received from other New Orleanians who had similar bad experiences with the New Orleans Police Department, I was unsurprised to see that the police department has rock bottom approval ratings from the people they are supposed to serve. According to a recent poll by the New Orleans Crime Coalition, only 33% of city residents are satisfied with the performance of the NOPD. This is compared with an 84-percent satisfaction rating in Nashville and a 75 percent rating in St. Louis.

I am actually surprised that it's as high as it is.

I've Loved You So Long

2009-11-23T00:15:00.003-06:00

This weekend I watched I've Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t'aime), a 2008 French film in which Kristin Scott Thomas stars as a woman recently released from prison after a fifteen year sentence for murdering her six year old son.

The film presents a jarringly compassionate portrait of an infanticide, her strugglings to regain her footing in life following release, her reintegration into her family, and her inability to forgive herself for her past.

Both the relatively lenient sentence (by American standards) and the generosity with which the character is generally treated, both by the film itself and the other characters in the film, made the film seem truly foreign in sensibility.

I have posted here previously about my concerns about a general lack of forgiveness in American society for those who have strayed from the path and the remarkably different approach that seems to animate criminal justice in Europe.

A comment by one of the characters, when he found out that Kristin Scott Thomas's character had been in prison for murder, struck a chord with me, reminding me of one of my favorite lines from Capote - "It's like Perry and I grew up in the same house, and one day he went out the back door and I went out the front" - though without the solipsism.

The character, a professor who befriends the woman, tries to comfort her when others discovery her secret:

I spent ten years teaching in prison. I never mention it. I went there three times a week. And I got out three times a week. Nothing was the same after. I saw everything differently. Other people . . . The sky . . . The passing of time . . . I realized that people in prison were like me. They could have been me, or I them. It's such a fine line sometimes.

I have spent the last decade meeting with men in prisons - mostly men facing the death penalty for murder - and I have never walked through the gates without a sense of gratitude and good fortune because that fine, and often well out of our control, line between praise and blame is no where more obvious.

* Here's the trailer.

The Peacemaker

2009-11-16T23:22:00.004-06:00

Mahony's Po-Boy Shop is my favorite place to get a po-boy. While I want to prefer the old school joint in my neighborhood, Parasol's, I find myself drawn to Mahony's, a relative new comer to the city's po-boy scene, because, not withstanding my partiality to things old and slightly beat up, I like its po-boys better. I prefer its roast beef and I write this regretfully and with some sense of betrayal as I know that Parasol's roast beef po-boy is a great sandwich. Maybe the greatest if not for Mahony's.

My true feelings for Mahony's became clear to me on a recent Monday night after a long day, when all I wanted to do was po-boy the grief and stress of work away. One word rang in my ears. Peacemaker.

I longed for the peace, the serenity, of consuming another signature Mahony's po-boy, a classic, I am told, that I haven't seen anywhere else. Fried oysters, cheddar, and bacon, dressed with lettuce, tomato, and mayo, on French bread. Peacemaker. Made me peaceful.

May peace be with you.

You will know even more peace if you order it with gravy fries, Mahony's homemade fries covered with roast beef and gravy.

Stealing Fruit

2009-11-05T00:03:00.004-06:00

I got home from work on Monday after a long day of work, eager to hold Baby Rose and to forget about the day. In my driveway, I looked over at my satsuma tree, the source of so much pride and happiness this weekend, and realized that a bunch of fruit had been pulled off the tree, evinced by the white rinds beneath the tops of satsuma skins still attached to the tree.

I became really angry, imagining what I would have done if I had come across someone looting my tree and abusing the fruit.

I went inside the house and Nikki told me that she had thought she had heard someone out there.

I became even angrier.

As I laid in bed that night, my mind full of buckshot blasts, I remembered St. Augustine and his pear tree.

In his Confession, Augustine wrote:

There was a pear tree close to our own vineyard, heavily laden with fruit, which was not tempting either for its color or for its flavor. Late one night--having prolonged our games in the streets until then, as our bad habit was--a group of young scoundrels, and I among them, went to shake and rob this tree. We carried off a huge load of pears, not to eat ourselves, but to dump out to the hogs, after barely tasting some of them ourselves. Doing this pleased us all the more because it was forbidden. Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart--which thou didst pity even in that bottomless pit. Behold, now let my heart confess to thee what it was seeking there, when I was being gratuitously wanton, having no inducement to evil but the evil itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error--not that for which I erred but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security in thee to destruction in itself, seeking nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself.

Upon remembering that I, myself, am a would be stealer of pears, I felt a lot better and stopped worrying about shooting the poor thief. Let him have his vices. And my satsumas.

Bumper Crop

2009-10-31T21:52:00.012-05:00

Following some severe and prescient trimming by Nikki a year or so ago (I don't have her stomach for plant brutality except when it comes to our wisteria, which won't bloom no matter how much I abuse it), our citrus tree produced a bumper crop of fruit this year. (Last year we got about three satsumas. The year before we only got one.) The fruit set, small and green, many month ago and only recently starting turning lighter green, then orange. I was reluctant to start cutting them down because I wanted them to become as sweet as possible but they recently started dropping (with the tops of the fruit pulling right off and the fruit dropping to the ground "open") so in the past couple of days I started to harvest the fruit.I didn't quite realize how much fruit was on the tree until I started clipping them off. Over the course of a half hour or forty five minutes, I filled more than two shopping bags (taking the fruit that had either turned orange or which felt like there was some "room" between the rind and the meat) and there was still a ton of fruit still on the tree. (The above photos were taken after today's harvest.)One thing that is remarkable about the tree is how it supported the weight of so much fruit without snapping its limbs. In the above photo, I am holding two bags of fruit, each bag weighing almost twenty pounds. They were pretty heavy, even for a strapping young man like me. The tree's thin branches hold five times that and while they have bent over, some nearly touching the ground, none have broken even if the recent heavy winds. The only exception was a branch snapped by our carpenter during the recent installation of our shutters and even that branch stayed attached to the tree and produced fruit that ripened slightly sooner but were delicious none the less. (These provided some of the juice for my recent cocktail experiments.)While I take great pleasure eating food grown on my own land (a fairly grandiose way to conceive of my Irish Channel driveway), these fruit would be a delicious treat that I would enjoy even if they were shipped in from South America and I had to pay big bucks for them at Whole Foods.

The fruit is sweet and firm, with few seeds, and is so juicy that they burst when you peel them.

Apparently I am not the first New Yorker to get swept up in the excitement of Louisiana citrus. I found this 1899 article about the prospects for citrus production here ("The people of New Orleans - right here in this city - do not know wht they have, but the Eastern people are beginning to learn what this country is."):In any event, as must be clear, I am a neophyte to citrus trees and farming. I was wondering whether anyone might know with some precision what variety of citrus my tree is. I call them satsumas because they are greenish and because that seems to be the predominant local citrus. But these are much more orange than most satsumas I see. Any citrus experts out there?

Raised to believe that all men are created equal . . .

2009-10-27T15:32:00.007-05:00

Philip Spooner is a World War II veteran who served in the Battle of the Bulge. He was raised on a potato farm north of Caribou, Maine to believe that all men were created equal. He has four sons, all of whom served in the military and one of whom is gay. When asked whether he believed in equal rights for gay people recently, he thought about his experience with life, war, and its purposes, and responded, "What do you think our boys fought for at Omaha Beach?"

He's my kind of patriot.

From down here in Louisiana, it's inspiring to see progressive values close to victory on the state level on these kinds of battles, when here things appear to be moving in the opposite direction. Hard to believe its the same country.

I very much hope that my friends and family up in Maine make it out to vote against the November ballot measure repealing same sex marriage rights there. You are lucky to live in a state that reflects values of decency and tolerance. Keep it that way!

*As the husband of a expatriate Maine nationalist, I also like another Equality Maine advertisement , beginning, "Something happens when you cross the border into the state . . ." Reminds me of Nikki arguing that Maine, and maybe Vermont and New Hampshire, is all that truly remains of New England. What about Massachusetts? "Those flatlanders?" Connecticut? "Isn't that part of New York?"

*I first saw this video on Humid City, where it was posted by Loki.

UPDATE: I don't know if it appeared in today's New York Times or will appear in tomorrow's but there is an article about the ballot initiative and its national significance on nytimes.com. Sad to see that the Catholic Church is financing the initiative. You'd think that they would render this one unto Caesar so long as they can conduct marriages as they see fit in their own churches.

Baby Rose Mae

2009-10-16T11:50:00.002-05:00

I have created a baby blog for friends and family who have demanded a greater web presence for Rose Mae Sothern. At babyrosemae.blogspot.com, Nikki and I plan on posting photos and stories about Baby Rose. I may do some cross posting on Imperfectly Vertical but want to, for the most part, keep my musings about Bushwick Bill and Manson chicks separate from my little baby.

Mother to Son

2009-10-08T11:55:00.000-05:00

Since Nikki became pregnant, and even more so since Rose's birth, I have been trying to figure out what kind of father I want to be and, more to the point, what kind of father I will end up being no matter what kind of father I want to be.

I remember when my friend's mother passed away a handful of years ago, I sent him Langston Hughes' Mother to Son, which summed up something for me about the love that a parent might give to their child in letting them know the troubles of world and helping make them strong enough to bear them.

Looking at baby Rose, I am entirely committed to protecting her from everything awful and bad in the world. But I also know that the world has a way of toppling the levees we build around our precious things. In the end, I hope that I can teach her that while life isn't always a "crystal stair" that, if we keep climbing, we find landings for rest and comfort and occasionally turn corners that flights down we could never have imagined. Like the one I just turned.*

"Mother to Son"
Langston Hughes

Well, son, I'll tell you:
Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor --
Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners,
And sometimes goin' in the dark
Where there ain't been no light.
So boy, don't you turn back.
Don't you set down on the steps
'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.
Don't you fall now --
For I'se still goin', honey,
I'se still climbin',
And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.

* I am slightly worried that my broader, personal reading of this poem sets aside, a bit too much, its racial and social justice message. But my poetry consultant, certified poet Jill McDonough, assures me that "Mother to Son has plenty of room for racial equality readings and personal readings and also things-are-easier-for-the-next-generation readings; none of those interpretations cheapen it, I don't think. I think it's about the giving up, as well as the kinder hard; we all want to give up sometimes, but it's useful to realize other people went before us and didn't quit. And are still going, even." So breathe easy. And read it however you like.

Charles Baudelaire and Bushwick Bill

2009-10-07T17:55:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago I read at the ACLU's Banned Books event at the Bridge Lounge here in New Orleans.

I read from Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal, which upon publication in 1857, was seized and Baudelaire and his publisher were fined for the inclusion of six poems - Lethe, Jewels, Lesbos, Damned Women, Against Her Levity, and Metamorphoses of the Vampire. (These titles, and the poem below, are all from Richard Howard's translation.)

I read Lethe, Against Her Levity, and Metamorphoses of the Vampire, along with Baudelaire's introduction, Au Lecteur ("To the Reader"), which I have always liked because of how it confronts the reader ("Stupidity, delusion, selfishness and lust/torment our bodies and possess our minds,/and we sustain our affable remorse/the way a beggar nourishes his lice."), and his Epigraph for a Banned Book, which appeared in the 1868 edition and quite clearly told off his unappreciative readers. ("Inquiring spirit, fellow sufferer/in search, even here, of your own Paradise,/pity me . . . If not, to Hell with you!")

The idea of flowers of evil has always had great potency for Nikki and me. Whenever we like something that is tragic but beautiful or awe inspiring - a kind deed by an inmate doing life in prison, crumbling, old New Orleans houses (or pretty much anything else in this city, for that matter), courage in the face of injustice - we tell each other, in shorthand, that it was a "fleur du mal".

Before the reading, I told my friend Barry that I was going to read Against Her Levity and I told him about the crude rape fantasy that closes the poem. It reads:

You tilt your head and smile - as if
across the countryside
a breeze had rippled through the grass
out of a brilliant sky.

The sullen stranger you brush past
stops, turns and relishes
that radiant health which aureoles
your shoulders and your arms.

In all that panoply of silks
that colors you parade
awaken in our poets' minds
a giddy valse des fleurs -

garish gowns which designate
the motley of your mind:
infectious folly! all I loathe
is one with all I love!

Often, when I would drag myself
into some leafy park
and when the sun like a rebuke
would lacerate my breast,

so deeply did the Spring's new green
humiliate my heart
that I would punish in one rose
all Nature's insolence . . .

I'll come like that to you some night
when lovers ought to come,
creeping in silence till I reach
the treasures of your flesh,

to castigate your body's joy,
to bruise your envied breasts,
and in your unsuspecting side
to gash a gaping wound

where in final ecstasy
between those lovelier
new lips, my sister, I'll inject
my venom into you!

Barry told me it reminded him of a Geto Boys song that got them kicked off of their record label. That song, Mind of a Lunatic, includes an account of a brutal rape, murder, and necrophilia, just like Baudelaire's poem, rapped by Bushwick Bill, a one eyed, alcoholic, depressive dwarf who could have easily been the subject of a Baudelaire poem or, at the very least, would have been good company for Baudelaire as they consumed bottles of Bordeaux or everclear (150 proof grain alcohol), depending on whose house they ended up at. While Bushwick Bill's song is more overt, it is not quite as nasty as Baudelaire's, whose depiction of raping a woman through a knife wound he inflicted would lose him his book contract even if it was written today (and especially if he was a black rapper and people couldn't tell the difference between what he wrote and who he was).

You be the judge.

From Mind of a Lunatic (on You Tube):

Lookin through her window, now my body is warm
She's naked, and I'm a peepin tom
Her body's beautiful, so I'm thinkin rape
Shouldn't have had her curtains open, so that's her fate
Leavin out her house, grabbed the bitch by her mouth
Drug her back in, slammed her down on the couch
Whipped out my knife, said, "If
you scream, I'm cuttin"
Opened her legs and commenced the fuckin
She begged me not to kill her, I gave her a rose
Then slit her throat, and watched her
shake till her eyes closed
Had sex with the corpse before I left her
And drew my name on the wall like helter skelter
Run for shelter never crossed my mind
I had a guage, a grenade, and even a nine
Dial 911 for the bitch
But the cops ain't shit when they're fuckin with a lunatic.

Lest you think that Bill is just a nasty, heartless bastard, unworthy of comparison with one of the nineteenth century's finest poets, check out his song Ever So Clear in which he details losing his eye, while drunk of everclear and weed, to a partially self-inflicted gunshot after a suicidal scuffle with his girlfriend in which he tried to get her to shoot him dead. The song ends, "But it's fucked up I had to lose an eye to see shit clearly."

A flower of evil, don't you think?

Satsuma Cocktail

2009-10-02T12:00:00.001-05:00

Folks around the country may not be aware of the availability of terrific local citrus here in Louisiana. Though they have taken a beating in the past few years, orange groves abound in south Louisiana, especially Plaquemines Parish, which creeps south of New Orleans along the Mississippi toward the Gulf of Mexico. In addition to oranges, we have satsumas, which are like sweet, mostly seedless mandarin oranges or clementines.

At our house on Jackson Avenue, and our old place on Kerlerec Street in Treme, we have had satsuma trees. After a couple of lean years, it looks like we are going to have a bumper crop this year. The fruit is not quite ripe yet but some have fallen from the tree regardless. Lest they just rot on the ground unloved, I instead have been squeezing them (as well as some other early satsumas that I have been getting in my box at the Hollygrove Farmer's Market), adding some gin, simple syrup, and sweet vermouth, shaking vigorously with ice, and serving them up on the rocks in a high ball glass. The drink is pretty close to the Bronx cocktail, which some of you may (or may not) remember from my thirtieth birthday party a couple of years ago.

I got the idea from a recipe in New York Magazine for something they called Franny's Satsuma Cocktail, and which used Carpano Antica Formula, instead of the cheap sweet vermouth that I had on hand. My low brow variation, using Hollygrove and Irish Channel satsumas, needs a better name. Maybe Lil' Wayne's Juice and Gin (Lil' Wayne is a Hollygrove native)? Or the St. Thomas' Fallen Fruit? (My house backs up on what used to be the old St. Thomas Projects, which I wrote about for The Nation.)

Here is the recipe:

2 ounces Beefeater gin
1/2 ounce sweet vermouth
1 1/2 ounces fresh satsuma juice
1/2 ounce of simple syrup

Combine ingredients in a cocktail shaker with lots of ice. Shake until it so cold it burns your hands. Pour into a tall glass with ice. Enjoy.

Red Beans Monday

2009-09-25T19:48:00.012-05:00

During my years working in New Orleans' Central Business District, I have endeavored to observe the culinary clock of our city by consuming red beans for lunch on Monday and seafood gumbo on Friday, served at local lunch counters and po-boy shops. As every New Orleanian knows, red beans are the standard Monday lunch offering throughout the city, because, traditionally, Monday was a "wash day" and your beans could sit cooking for hours without much attention while you cleaned up. (Seafood gumbo on Friday is connected to the city's Catholic traditions, which historically forbid meat on Fridays. I am pleased to live in a city where eating a fried shrimp po-boy or a bowl of gumbo counts as religious observance.)

Sometimes on Mondays, but more often on Saturday or Sunday when I have more time on my hands, I'll make red beans for dinner. Cooking red beans requires some forethought - the beans need to be soaked over night - and is somewhat labor intensive with lots of vegetable chopping. Red beans is (are?) the only dish that gets me cooking first thing in the morning, even before breakfast, because the longer the beans simmer with the pickled pork, sausage, trinity, and seasoning, the better it tastes at dinner time.

Untethered from any real calendar aside from the one that measures the days of my baby's life during my paternity leave, I made red beans last Thursday (pictured above) and have been eating them consistently since. (Has anyone else tried eating fried eggs on red beans? It's terrific. A New Orleans version of huevos rancheros. In the New Orleans greasy spoon restaurant that I conjure in my mind when I happen upon some terrific, geographically specific dish that I have never seen in a restaurant, it would be a best seller. Along with my Leidenheimer po-boy bread pain perdu.)

I work from a recipe that I found a few years ago, from a New Orleans ex-patriate on the internet. (Chuck Taggart at Gumbo Pages.) I always use dried Camellia Beans because I love the packaging and because no other bean could possibly get so creamy. (I have never tried any other brand but became convinced on the creaminess point after reading an article by New Orleans' finest journalist, Katy Reckdahl, about New Orleanians stuck in Phoenix, Arizona after Katrina and their passion for Camellias: "Sabrina Williams cringes as she opens her cupboard and pulls out her last pack of Camellia kidney beans, the only brand that cooks down into creamy and smooth New Orleans-style red beans — impossible to find in her adopted hometown, Glendale, Arizona. But Williams' timing is good. Her parents are currently in New Orleans, mucking out their house, and they will soon return to Phoenix, suitcases heavy with Camellia beans.")

Here are the ingredients I use:

2 pounds red kidney beans, dry
2 large onions, chopped
2 green peppers, chopped
5 ribs celery, chopped
1 1/2 pounds of pickled pork, without bones, diced, for seasoning
2 pounds hot smoked sausage, sliced and halved
1 tsp. dried thyme leaves, crushed
2 bay leaves
Red pepper and black pepper to taste
Salt to taste
Fresh sausage links, one link per person

The directions from Gumbo Pages:

Soak the beans overnight, if possible. The next day, drain and put fresh water in the pot. (This helps reduce the, um, flatulence factor.) Bring the beans to a rolling boil. Make sure the beans are always covered by water, or they will discolor and get hard. Boil the beans for about 45 - 60 minutes, until the beans are tender but not falling apart. Drain.
While the beans are boiling, sauté the Trinity (onions, celery, bell pepper) until the onions turn translucent. Add the garlic and saute for 2 more minutes, stirring occasionally. [I omit garlic.] After the beans are boiled and drained, add the sautéed vegetables to the beans, then add the ham hock (or ham or pickle meat), smoked sausage, seasonings, and just enough water to cover.
Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to a low simmer. Cook for 2 hours at least, preferably 3, until the whole thing gets nice and creamy. Adjust seasonings as you go along. Stir occasionally, making sure that it doesn't burn and/or stick to the bottom of the pot. (If the beans are old -- say, older than six months to a year -- they won't get creamy. Make sure the beans are reasonably fresh. If it's still not getting creamy, take 1 or 2 cups of beans out and mash them, then return them to the pot and stir.)
If you can ... let the beans cool, stick them in the fridge, and reheat and serve for dinner the next day. They'll taste a LOT better. When you do this, you'll need to add a little water to get them to the right consistency.
Serve generous ladles-ful over hot white long-grain rice, with good French bread and good beer. I also love to serve grilled or broiled fresh Creole hot sausage or chaurice on the side. Do not serve with a canned-beet salad, like my Mom always used to do. (Sorry, Mom ... try something interesting with fresh beets and we'll talk. :^)

If you are not trying to feed an army, or don't want a week worth of left overs, you don't have to make two pounds of beans. Make a pound. Feed a smaller army.

9/11 Satyagraha

2009-09-21T15:04:00.008-05:00

On September 10, Nikki was four days past due at her midwife's office hoping to get some indication that our baby would come soon, that the pain and discomfort of ten months of pregnancy would abate.

It wasn't until Nikki got back from her appointment that I saw the possibility that my daughter could be born on September 11, 2009, the eighth anniversary of the eponymous attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Nikki told me that a woman who we had met in our birthing class had been at the midwife's office and, though she was a full week past due, fixing to burst and desperate to have her baby, she had postponed her induction scheduled for the following day because she didn't want her child born on such an inauspicious date.

Nikki's original due date, September 6, 2009, had a comforting numerical pattern, 09/06/09, eclipsed by the following Wednesday, September 9, 2009, 09/09/09, which struck me as a powerful set of numbers.* I had considered our baby's birth on either of those dates, or even on the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, August 29, 2009, but had not looked as far as Friday September 11.

Having just moved from New York City to New Orleans a month before 9/11, with family and friends working in New York's financial district, and with my father and step-mother on New York bound airplanes on the morning of the attack, 9/11 was etched into my mind as a day of horror and anxiety. The fact that the attack was exploited as a pretext for war and the curtailment of civil liberties - in ways that may never be undone - only made the day more tragic.

But my wife was in agony so I reconciled with the date, posited that another day of early labor was infinitely less desirable than having our child share her birthday with a mournful American anniversary. I soon forgot all about days and calendars, which I traded for minutes and seconds, when I got home at around three or four and Nikki's labor had become much more pronounced. I timed her contractions - forty five seconds long every seven minutes - which tightened over the course of hours to ninety seconds long every four minutes around midnight, when we left for the hospital.

At the hospital, this continued for another five hours, during which time I tried my best to provide Nikki comfort, playing Bach's Cello Suites and Nikki's favorite arias from the St. Matthew Passion on the little stereo that she had bought for this purpose a couple of weeks earlier, when it all seemed so distant and theoretical. At a certain point, Nikki began to seem really focused, distant, in a place all by herself, and I started playing Philip Glass's Solo Piano Works, thinking that the familiar, round, cyclical musical forms might reach her.

When that ended with Nikki clinging to my shoulders and neck from her birthing tub but still, evidently, hours away from delivering the baby, Addy, our doula, asked what we should put on. I told her that there was an opera by Philip Glass on the iPod, that it was long enough that we would not have to change the music again. "Satyagraha?" she asked. I hadn't remembered its name. I had burned it onto my computer, without even glancing at the liner notes, from the New Orleans Public Library's music catalog a few years earlier. In the scores of hours I had spent listening to the opera, its music and words, though unintelligible, seemed true to me and more clearly resembling life and the thoughts passing through my mind than any music I had heard before. "That's it," I told Addy.

It began with a low voice and a deep string instrument and wound around the room, sometimes urgent, sometimes slack, sometimes almost disappearing into the rhythm of Nikki's contractions and then her pushing. When the baby's head finally emerged in the water and as I held the tiny baby against my standing, fatigued but triumphant wife, the final act of Satyagraha pulsed in the background, and then eventually stopped, unnoticed.

I sent news to our friends and loved ones by text, "Rose Mae Sothern born at 4:57. I am in awe of mother and child."I consciously omitted the date, not wanting to associate the sad anniversary with the miraculous birth of my daughter.

But as time passed, hours and then days spent with this new life, it became clear to me that it was seemly, necessary, for Rose, and others, to be born on this date, for things to occur that could create new anniversaries that might someday eclipse the tragedy, as had occurred at least for our little family. I sent out an email to some friends, this time owning the date: "Rose Mae Sothern was born at 4:57 a.m. on Friday, September 11, 2009, weighing in at 8 lbs., 10 oz., and altogether transforming the meaning of that date in our history for me."

I got a response from Rebecca Solnit, who I had met when she visited New Orleans while researching her book, A Paradise Built in Hell, on magnanimity of people in the face of disasters. She pointed out that September 11, 2001 had been, for the most part, "a day that people behaved beautifully under the most extreme circumstances in New York City, millions of them in contrast to the 19 who sought to destroy." But she made another observation, which gave rise to a sense of wonder, beauty, and synchronicity that tempts me to believe that the world is not simply spiraling meaninglessly but instead is ordered, blessed. She told me that September 11, 1906 is the day that Gandhi began to harnass non-violence as a tool against oppression in South Africa, a method of resistance called "satyagraha."

Without any of us knowing it, Nikki labored and Rose was born on the anniversary of satyagraha to the rhythms and sounds of an opera that Philip Glass wrote for Gandhi and his vision of social justice. It is an opera, with a libretto of sanskrit words of the Bhagavad-Gita, in three acts, the first overseen by the Indian poet Ravindranath Tagore, the second by Leo Tolstoy, and the third, the music of Rose's birth, by Martin Luther King, Jr.

The name of the opera, of Gandhi's tool for harnessing the might of a people against their oppressors, satyagraha, is a sanskrit meaning "the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence."

On September 11, 1906, again one hundred and three years later, and innumberable times in between, people have seen it and can attest to its power.

*Apparently the date, or its inversion, 6 6 6, inspired a man to hijack a plane in Mexico so that he could bring the coming apocalypse to the attention of the Mexican president. The news originally reported that there were four hijackers but that was based on the hijacker's own representations. As far as he was concerned, he was there with three others, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Family: Rose Mae Sothern

2009-09-11T18:00:00.002-05:00

Last week, Nikki and I drove around New Orleans listening to Glen David Andrews' new album, Walking Through Heaven's Gate, trying to get Nikki some distraction from the discomfort of the ninth month of her pregnancy. The last track on the album, Family, struck both of us and gave us some sense of what was approaching for us. It's a spoken word piece with New Orleans poet, Chuck Perkins.

Perkins describes the birth of his child:

It was watching my wife
After eleven hours of labor,
Whose eyes and face
No longer possessed the words
To describe her pain,
So she pushed.
It was twenty years of anticipating
What my child would be
And who she would be
And when I saw the tip of her head,
Before the slap,
Before the cry,
Before I saw her eyes even,
It was like I was about to meet a long lost friend
Whom I had never met.

Early this morning, after an epic, unmedicated labor, Nikki gave birth to Rose Mae Sothern here in New Orleans. I am in awe of Nikki and the little baby girl that came into the world this morning. New Orleans artists have a gift for describing the indescribable, but as much as I like Perkins' description of child birth, he doesn't fully capture the feeling of seeing your wife give birth to your child. I am not sure anyone could.

Borderland in NYC

2009-09-08T13:20:00.002-05:00

Artist Maysey Craddock was gracious enough to allow me to live with her, at her creaky old house on Jena Street in New Orleans, in the summer of 1999, when I first came here. I worked a lot that summer - at an office full of renegade, British radicals trying to stamp out the American death penalty - but, at Maysey's house, drinking gin and tonic, there was an altogether different tone and feeling that could have only been in New Orleans, a city that I grew to love sweating in the summer heat on her back patio.

I lounged around the unairconditioned house in suit pants and an undershirt, having peeled off layers of my suit to get a break from the heat, which Maysey took as a good enough reason to start calling me "Boarder," in her elegant, high Memphis accent. To fulfill my role, I frequently drank in excess and put on twenty pounds of turkey necks, fried chicken, and red beans. It was as close as my life will likely come to a Tennessee Williams play.

While Maysey's work is "southern," it accomplishes this in the tradition of fellow Memphis inhabitant, William Eggleston, which is to say that it manages to be both highly vernacular and altogether universal.

Maysey has her first New York show, called, coincidentally, "Borderland," with an opening this Thursday at the Nancy Margolis Gallery. If you are in New York, you should go.

Maysey Craddock : borderland
nancy margolis gallery
september 10 - october 17 2009
opening september 10, 2009 6pm - 8pm

Handmade by Kittee

2009-09-06T14:19:00.008-05:00

Other than my girl Nikki, Kittee is pretty much the cutest girl I know. Kittee was one of the best New Orleanians until she recently moved to the greener pastures of Portland, Oregon. She is certainly the best person in Portland, a city that I have never been to and where I know no one but that I am certain could not possibly deserve her.

Aside from being outrageous cute, Kittee also happens to be one of the craftiest of all God's children (and a vegan chef of such ability that her cooking makes veganism seem to be a lifestyle choice of ridiculous indulgence rather than shirt-haired deprivation). For our little girl, whose due date is today but who has not yet arrived, Kittee made a closet full of beautiful, vegan, knitted sweaters. Each is a work of art.

I am especially fond of the baby shrug, the nicest baby shrug in existence. That shrug makes every other garment in the world wish it hadn't been born. It's why God made fiber.

Can you believe it?

Al Pacino's Doppelganger

2009-09-01T19:30:00.004-05:00

I recently rewatched the Norman Jewison, Al Pacino film, And Justice for All . . ., about a good defense attorney in a bad system.

There a few things to like about it as a movie but its a weak piece of social commentary that essentially takes aim at the adversarial process in criminal court.

The New York Times review from 1979, by Vincent Canby, sums it up as follows:

With the exception of two old men, one of whom is senile, all of the characters in " . . . and Justice for All" have such low thresholds of emotional distress that I wouldn't trust one of them to see "The Sound of Music" unless accompanied by a parent or adult guardian. They dress sloppily. They talk dirty. Yet they are of an innocence that boggles the mind and sinks the movie.

And, concerning Al Pacino's character's distaste for representing someone guilty, Canby rightly observes that the system requires just that:

If you follow what seems to be the film's feeble point to its logical end, it is that our judicial system is rotten not only because of the people who administer it, but also because it provides safeguards for the accused. The next step, one should think, is a nice, predictable law-and-order state.

(I don't often see people get that issue right, as Canby did. You have to provide a defense for everyone, whether or not they appear guilty or innocent, because there is no way to determine guilt or innocence until you provide that defense. And because the question of culpability is often a hard call, we err on the side of acquitting the guilty because we have far greater abhorrence for the possibility that the innocent might be convicted.)

The only reason why I am bothering to comment about this imperfect film is that it made me blush. You see, Al Pacino's character is a lawyer in his thirties. I am a lawyer in my thirties. Al Pacino runs around an old criminal courthouse in Baltimore. I run around an old criminal courthouse in New Orleans. Al Pacino makes pompous legal arguments to indifferent judges. I make pompous legal arguments to indifferent judges.

But here's the kicker, Al Pacino drives around town in a blue/green 1973 BMW 2002. And I drive like a maniac in a blue/green 1973 BMW 2002.

I would prefer to think of myself as Pacino's Frank Serpico, or his Michael Corleone, but instead my doppelganger is Pacino's Arthur Kirkland. I'll live.

If you are interested, Pacino's slightly famous (and ridiculous) "You're out of order" speech from And Justice for All . . . is on You Tube. It denigrates the Sixth Amendment and Blackstone's maxim that its better for ten guilty men to walk free than one innocent man to languish in prison but it's fun to watch and a classic Al Pacino-yelling scene.

***The photo of the BMW 2002 is the same year, color, and model as mine but its in far better shape (and I am sure has much less character).

Anniversary

2009-08-29T22:22:00.007-05:00

Last year, rather than participating in any of the various Katrina memorial festivities, I resolved to do something practical and, like I do most weekends, worked on my house, a vernacular structure of old pine sills and joists held together by prayers and painter's caulk that could not be anywhere but here.

Today, with Nikki teetering on the edge of labor but feeling just good enough to take a ride, we observed the day by driving over to the Louisiana Music Factory, buying the terrific new Glenn David Andrews and Alex McMurray albums, and cruising around to different flea markets and junk stores in search of a couple of pieces of furniture for our coming baby's nursery.

We drove around listening to Glen David Andrews belt out Down by the Riverside at the Zion Hill Baptist Church in Treme and Alex sing You've Got to Be Crazy to Live in this Town while Nikki urged me to avoid craters and ridges in roads that are more pothole than street because the sudden, hard bumps give her contractions. I tried my best but we hit lots of potholes.

We found a little, old wooden bookcase at a flea market in Bywater that tomorrow I will paint and then fill with the many children's books that Nikki and I began collecting well before we had the excuse of an expected child. (The many others that so many people have kindly given us - her - as gifts in recent months will also find a home there.)

And then next week, the week after, or sometime soon, we will bring a baby home to her little room, with fresh paint over mended walls that, until recently, were more cracks than plaster, in a house that doesn't pretend to be level, in a city that was just four years ago wasted by severe weather and folly.

*** The photo is Nikki's, posted on her blog for the anniversary.

Dr. Maddow's Ho-Go Cocktail

2009-08-28T12:37:00.001-05:00

In addition to my enthusiasm for compassion for convicted terrorists, depression-era photos highlighting the contradictions in American society, abstract art about the death penalty, and Manson girls, I also like cocktails.

To lighten the mood this Friday afternoon, I will share with you what I plan on drinking when I get home after work, the Last Word cocktail. Imperfectly Vertical friend and blog-hit-benefactress , Dr. Rachel Maddow, introduced me to the drink. On a cocktail napkin, she wrote:

LAST WORD

MARASCHINO
LIME
GIN
GREEN CHARTREUSE

Equal parts. Shake and strain. No garnish.

***

She also, with the use of arrows from LIME and GIN to the words LEMON and RYE, gave the recipe for a Last Word variant, the Final Ward.

On the back of the napkin she wrote "haut-gout", along with its charming phonetic pronunciation, "ho-go," describing the French term for the flavor profile of the maraschino.

So, tonight, put these ingredients in a shaker with ice and shake until the shaker is so cold that it hurts your hand. Then pour it into a chilled cocktail glass. After drinking three of them, say something smart, cutting, and unarguably true about the need for universal health care, followed by an incisive comment about infectious diseases in American prisons.

Know that you are channeling America's sharpest political commentator.

Or at least drinking and talking like her. As best as any of us can, anyway.

Cheers.

Your Desert Island Disks, Hiss Hiss Hiss

2009-08-27T14:21:00.003-05:00

The first "official poem" of Britian's new poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, appeared in June in The Guardian. An English friend sent it to me with a note: "Maybe this no longer rings true in the states where idealists can believe in politics again but this is the first poem from our new poet laurate . . ."

I suspect she was joking. It's always so hard to tell with the English.

Regardless, it's worth mentioning that while things are not quite as hopeless with Obama in office as they were during the eight years of George Bush, the political discourse in America still makes my "desert island disks" play "hiss hiss hiss". And worse, on some critical issues in this country, Obama has neither the inclination nor the authority to offer a reprieve. (We'll see if he can pull off health care reform.)

Politics by Carol Ann Duffy

How it makes of your face a stone

that aches to weep, of your heart a fist,

clenched or thumping, sweating blood, of your tongue

an iron latch with no door. How it makes of your right hand

a gauntlet, a glove-puppet of the left, of your laugh

a dry leaf blowing in the wind, of your desert island discs

hiss hiss hiss, makes of the words on your lips dice

that can throw no six. How it takes the breath

away, the piss, makes of your kiss a dropped pound coin,

makes of your promises latin, gibberish, feedback, static,

of your hair a wig, of your gait a plankwalk. How it says this –

politics – to your education education education; shouts this –

Politics! – to your health and wealth; how it roars, to your

conscience moral compass truth, POLITICS POLITICS POLITICS.

***Does this poem remind anyone of Yeats' Politics? It seems to answer that the grace and beauty that provided relief to Yeats are gone, "latin, gibberish, feedback, static . . ."

Speeding Defendants to the Executioner

2009-08-25T22:15:00.002-05:00

There are moments in the law when we need to put aside all of the theory and jargon and deal with the reality that courts exist to bring about just outcomes and not just implement indifferent procedures. An innocent man on death row would seem to be a clear case where procedures should yield and the law should bend over backwards to get the right result. Not so, says United States Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Justice Scalia's dissent in Troy Davis's case, the case of a very likely innocent person on death row, epitomizes the kind of lawyerly posture that brings mistrust and contempt to the law:

“This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent. Quite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that any claim based on alleged ‘actual innocence’ is constitutionally cognizable.”

To be clear, he is saying that it would not be unconstitutional to execute an innocent man so long as his wrongful conviction occurred at a trial conducted in accord with his narrowly defined constitutional rights. I suppose the fact that the execution of innocent people isn't explicitly barred in the constitution demands this outcome in his narrow originalist view. (Is this really what people want when they argue in favor of "strict constructionist" judges - people fetishistically devoted to a two hundred year old document written at earliest moments of a nation that only vaguely resembles the modern, multicultural state that we live in today?)

Aren't we just much better off with people who can bring some decency and common sense into the judicial role?

In another death penalty case, almost twenty years ago, Justice Thurgood Marshall was on the dissenting side where the majority had voted to uphold John Whitley's conviction and death sentence. Marshall called bullshit on the majority, as he would have, no doubt, on Scalia's dissent in Troy Davis:

"The Court's refusal to allow a federal habeas court to correct this error is yet another indication that the Court is less concerned with safeguarding constitutional rights than with speeding defendants, deserving or not, to the executioner."

I suspect that Marshall's superior wisdom had something to do with the fact that his primary engagement in the law - his real life experience - was not theoretical but instead was as an advocate for equal rights in the face of hostile and resistant judges and laws.

It will be nice to have some new judges on the bench with similar hard earned wisdom.

*** The photo is of the Thurgood Marshall monument in Annapolis, Maryland, prominently placed a few blocks from where I went to college. My friend Ian is fond of pointing out how there is a statue of Justice Roger Taney, who authored the infamous Dred Scott opinion holding that black people could not become citizens and had no protection under the Constitution, hidden on the other side of the capital building. There's the history we keep up front and the stuff we hide out back.

Stand Up for the Stupid and the Crazy

2009-08-24T10:09:00.003-05:00

At the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice Awards a number of years ago, I came upon a poem - or part of a poem - superimposed on a photograph of Bill walking down Gay Street, where he lived. The poem, part of the Preface to the 1855 edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grace, read:

This is what you shall do:
Love the earth and sun and the
animals, despise riches, give alms
to every one that asks, stand up
for the stupid and crazy, devote
your income and labor to others,
hate tyrants, argue not concerning
God, have patience and
indulgence toward the people,
take off your hat to nothing
known or unknown

As with everything else that inspired me at the time, I tacked it to my office wall where I endeavored to put it into practice.

Looking it up recently, I discovered that the Preface is actually quite long and that after "known or unknown", it continues:

. . . or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. . . .

Scottish Compassion

2009-08-21T12:49:00.005-05:00

Yesterday Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill explained his decision to release Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi and allow him to return to Libya to live out the balance of his life, expected to be brief due to terminal illness.

I know little about al-Megrahi and, beyond the fact that my uncle was supposed to be on Pan Am Flight 103 but wasn't, know little about the crime he is convicted of committing.

But I found Secretary MacAskill's speech remarkable, perhaps because I so rarely see compassion from the people with the political power to exercise it.

Given America's lust for incarceration and punishment, I cannot imagine this speech ever being made by a politician with an American accent. Sadly, compassion is not an animating feature of our criminal justice system.

I have thought a lot about why America is so different in this regard - our history of racial polarization, our frontier mentality, a belief that any American has freedom to succeed in life and the converse belief that our crimes and failures are ours alone. But none of this means that compassion is unamerican, does it?

Here is what MacAskill had to say:

Scotland will forever remember the crime that has been perpetrated against our people and those from many other lands. The pain and suffering will remain forever. Some hurt can never heal. Some scars can never fade.

Those who have been bereaved cannot be expected to forget, let alone forgive. Their pain runs deep and the wounds remain.

However, Mr. al-Megrahi now faces a sentence imposed by a higher power. It is one that no court, in any jurisdiction, in any land, could revoke or overrule. It is terminal, final and irrevocable. He is going to die.

In Scotland, we are a people who pride ourselves on our humanity.

It is viewed as a defining characteristic of Scotland and the Scottish people.

The perpetration of an atrocity and outrage cannot and should not be a basis for losing sight of who we are, the values we seek to uphold, and the faith and beliefs by which we seek to live.

Mr. Al Megrahi did not show his victims any comfort or compassion. They were not allowed to return to the bosom of their families to see out their lives, let alone their dying days. No compassion was shown by him to them.

But that alone is not a reason for us to deny compassion to him and his family in his final days.

Our justice system demands that judgment be imposed but compassion be available.

Our beliefs dictate that justice be served, but mercy be shown.

Compassion and mercy are about upholding the beliefs that we seek to live by, remaining true to our values as a people. No matter the severity of the provocation or the atrocity perpetrated.

For these reasons -- and these reasons alone -- it is my decision that Mr. Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi, convicted in 2001 for the Lockerbie bombing, now terminally ill with prostate cancer, be released on compassionate grounds and allowed to return to Libya to die.

Epigraph

2009-08-21T12:07:00.003-05:00

To Kill a Mockingbird is prefaced with a Charles Lamb quotation: "Lawyers, I suppose, were children once."

Based on my limited experience, it's true.

Lavender Disaster and the Art of the Death Penalty

2009-08-19T11:05:00.005-05:00

In early 2005, I took another trip with Nikki to get away for a few days. This time we drove west to Houston. Among the folks that I work with, Houston is a kind of Golgotha, the death penalty capital of the United States, the place from which more people have been executed than any other jurisdiction in the United States, including each of the 49 states, other than Texas.

My office mates, shell shocked by their own experiences with death sentences and executed clients from Houston, were aghast that I would want to spend my time in "that awful city" but we had heard that there were amazing, world class museums there, something that, despite its amazing culture, cannot be said of New Orleans.

We spent the bulk of our time at the Menil Collection, a stunning modern art campus including the museum, the Rothko Chapel, and the Cy Twombly Gallery.

I lost myself in the collection but was again brought back to my work and the death penalty by a large, pink silkscreen in the museum, Andy Warhol's "Lavender Disaster".
Fifteen electric chairs in rows on three in lavender.

I have no sense at all of what Warhol would have been thinking in slathering this grim device in the color of little girls, repeating it over and over, and then hanging it in a gallery, but for me it drove home the ubiquity of the death penalty in American culture.

The electric chair, despite its exclusively violent application and its hint of the previous crimes of the men and women who would sit in it, is as iconographically American as Campbell's Soup.

Whether you are in Houston, Texas or New York City, the death penalty is part of what defines us as a people. We are inheritors of a Western cultural tradition in which the executions of Socrates and Christ are two of the most culturally significant milestones.

Looking at "Lavender Disaster", I made note of all of the art and culture that I could remember that meditated on the death penalty. The art and poetry opposing the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti and the Rosenbergs. Capote's In Cold Blood. Plato's Phaedo. Camus' The Stranger. Villon's Epitaph. Dostoevsky's ruminations about condemned men in The Idiot. Miro's triptych. The list went on and on.

I resolved to put all of these things together in one place and create a cultural catalog of the death penalty that could focus and inform the discussion on the death penalty in modern America by looking at the ways in which it has been harnessed culturally over the past 30o0 years. I've been working on it, in fits and starts, since then.

*** I have a long working list that I have compiled with Jill McDonough of poetry, paintings, films, literature, and music the dwell on capital punishment, some of which I will continue to post here. I welcome any suggestions.

The Hope of the Man Condemned to Death

2009-08-16T23:22:00.012-05:00

At various points while working on death penalty cases here in Louisiana, the stress of the work and all that is at stake has weighed pretty heavily on me and required respite in various forms.

I took a brief vacation with Nikki in 2004, visiting England and Spain, both of which abolished capital punishment decades earlier, hoping to put death row and the brutality of the state out of my mind for a couple of weeks.

But in London, while staying with my friend Shauneen, I was leafing through The Guardian on the tube and came across a long article about the death penalty in America, focusing on the work of my old boss, British human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, and his representation of Linda Carty, a Briton on death row. Despite Nikki's urging to the contrary, I read every word and wouldn't stop talking about the case for a couple of hours.

And then in Barcelona, we strolled through the Fundacio Joan Miro with our audio guides taking in the lively abstractions. Nikki viewed a triptych in one of the rooms quickly and walked ahead but I was taken by it - La esperanza del condenado a muerte I, II, III - and punched it into my audio guide. I sat on the white bench before the enormous paintings of incomplete, gestural curves and blots of color and listened as the phone-like device explained to me that the paintings were meditations on the execution of an anarchist, Salvador Puig Antich. Antich was the last person executed by garrote, a device consisting of a seat with metal band fixed to the back that tightens until the condemned man suffocates. I sat there for so long that Nikki had to come back and get me. She patiently listened to my retelling of the story of the paintings and how vivid and true they seemed to me.

I brought postcards of the triptych back to New Orleans and tacked them to the wall of my office, thinking that Miro and Antic would be good reminders that other countries had struggled against, and overcome, the death penalty.

*** I found the top photo of the triptych in the gallery on Flicker .

Coiled Sexual Power of a Jungle Cat

2009-08-14T09:55:00.003-05:00

From Woody Allen's Manhattan:

Chapter one. He was as tough and romantic as the city he loved. Behind his black rimmed glasses was the coiled sexual power of a jungle cat. New York was his town and it always would be.

While driving into Manhattan over the Brooklyn Bridge, or walking into a quiet bar off the busy city streets, I felt this way about New York when I lived there.

But the soundtrack in your mind in New Orleans is different. Here, it's more like:

Chapter one. He was as broken and beautiful as the elegant, old double gallery houses that lined the streets in the city he loved. Under his blue cotton suit, dark with sweat in the summer heat, was the animal ferocity of one of the small, feral street cats that fight off the packs of pit bulls that roam his neighborhood. New Orleans was his town and, though he hears gunshots in the night, it always would be.

And in the background, instead of Rhapsody in Blue, Glen David Andrews singing Summertime.

John Waters, Leslie Van Houten, and the Possibility of Atonement

2009-08-12T12:56:00.004-05:00

Filmmaker John Waters has bravely, and perhaps inadvertently, waded into the debate over life imprisonment in America by publishing an essay on the Huffington Post about his friend, Leslie Van Houten, a former "Manson girl" serving a life sentence in California for the 1969 murder of Leno and Rosemary LaBianco. (He also discussed the essay on Fresh Air.) Waters was, admittedly, ghoulishly interested in Manson's followers when he first started corresponding with Van Houten over two decades ago. But they became friends over the years and this relationship has convinced Waters that Van Houten is a changed woman from the 19 year old who followed Manson and took part in an awful murder.

Waters asks good questions about his friend's ability to atone for what she had done:

Will there ever be a "fair" answer to how Leslie should pay for these crimes? Can you ever recover from being called "a human mutant" or a "monster" by the government, especially when you know that they were right at one time in your life? How can you feel optimistic about your own rehabilitation when you see yourself reproduced as a bald-headed dummy with an X carved in your head in Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum? How do you begin to deal with the pain of the victims' relatives when the world has turned your former image into a Halloween costume?
With patience.

And he makes clear that during her long incarceration that she has made an effort to become the best person that she can be inside prison walls by finishing her college education and getting her masters degree, teaching illiterate women to read, making a portion of an AIDS quilt and bedding for the homeless, recording books on tape for the blind, and ably working all of the jobs that have been assigned to her.

We keep people locked up for a range of reasons - to keep them from offending again, to send a message to the community about the consequence of criminal behavior, to punish because we feel like their conduct merits our reprobation, to provide an opportunity for the offender to reform themselves.

Van Houten's punishment, her forty years in prison, has abundantly accomplished each of these things.

The question that remains for us as a society is whether all this is enough, whether the fact that her continued incarceration only serves to punish her for something that cannot be undone, that happened so long ago, reflects our values. Put another way, do we believe that people who do awful things can do anything to merit our forgiveness when we know that their acts will be unable to bring back the dead, to erase their past wrongs.

Can we follow the example of the Amish, as Waters offers, and give up our right to revenge, feelings of resentment, bitterness, and hatred, and replace them with compassion?

Van Houten seems like a remarkable woman whose crimes are in her distant past and who merits such compassion but she is not unique in that, and will become less so in the coming years, given the fact that "life without the possibility of parole" has become a widespread punishment over the past thirty years. The questions posed by Van Houten's possible release will have to be answered over and over in the coming years.

Waters' essay is a powerful expression about the possibility of human atonement and forgiveness and ought to help each member of the parole board see beyond Van Houten's forty year old crime and understand that if he "knew her the way I know her, he wouldn't be afraid anymore. He might even ask her to baby-sit his kids. Her crime was a long, long time ago and she has paid her dues to society. I hope Leslie Van Houten can be given a second chance."

For all of the men who I have met who I hope will someday walk out the prison gates, get cut a little slack and a second chance at life, I hope so too.