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

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

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."

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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

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