During those few months immediately following the storm, when there was much concern about the city’s diminished population, any critical mass of people felt strangely victorious, a desperate grab at a handful of social fabric. O’Neil’s memorial was a loaded moment of many loaded moments in the new New Orleans, a place and time when everything you did carried meaning.
A story from the Fall 2019 issue
And that was the day she invented it, this particular glazed expression of hers. She had created it to please her father, but it had served her well in her life. When she wore it, most men thought she was listening to them, and most women knew that the conversation was over.
Louisiana's coastline is shrinking, rapidly. As Anne Gisleson reports, "the United States Geological Survey claims oil and gas companies are responsible for roughly a third of the state’s wetlands degradation." To try and claim reparations for this destruction, writer John Barry recently led the people of Louisiana through a lawsuit that aimed to make these companies "comply with the contracts and permits they themselves signed." This is John Barry's story—his work to save Louisiana.
All aesthetics arises from life and ends up going home to the world of art, no matter how or where it started, in the church or the counterfeit palace of pleasure known as the cathouse. What was understood by jazzmen like Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Sidney Bechet, and Louis Armstrong was of such profound importance to jazz performance that it has continued to influence every solid approach to the music, regardless of style.
What was the year? 1986? 2008? Does it matter? What was the great offense? Same as last time, more or less. Some white shit. What was the reaction? One Negro leader or another—fill in the blank—stood in front of the cameras and declared we would do such things he knew not what! This said with a walls will come tumbling down certainty, same as last time, more or less.
Today, October 25, 2012, we wait for what the cab drivers are calling a “motorcade,” their rolling protest against new regulations proposed by New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu and approved by the City Council in April.
A Southern Journey from the Summer 2017 issue.
I was feeling alright. The highway was working its gritty, illusory magic. This is all yours, I thought: freedom, control, motion. I was also feeling the salve of a change of scenery: broken-up sidewalks for marsh grass, cramped narrow shotguns for fishing camps. Tangles of electrical and phone wires for the wide-open Gulf-reaching sky. But it didn’t take long, maybe a half hour in, before I was again ambushed by G’s death.
A kind of connective tissue linked my country’s most African city with an African moment that seemed stunningly American. The pallbearers danced, the band played, the mourners walked and swayed alongside while men and women pressed yet more naira bills on the sweat of our bodies—a symbol of respect and goodwill.
We sat cross-legged on the cement floor of a warehouse in the Upper Ninth Ward, not far from the train tracks. In the center was a small wooden house with singing pipes built into its walls. This was Chateau Poulet, a musical shanty about to perform for all of us.
