at ease

The memorial for Bill Bartman will be celebrated at 2 pm on Saturday, November 5 in the Society of Friends Meeting House. The beautiful, very simple brick 1860 building is located off the western boundary of Stuyvesant Square. See directions and map.

Everyone is welcome, and yes, there will be cookies.

NOTE: Anyone who might have one or more good photo images of Bill, and especially if they are of Bill with a group of people, is asked to call the Art Resources Transfer (A.R.T.) office at 212 564-2262. A slide show loop is being assembled by his friends.

and eventually, when interest in them flags, we can use the two big footprints for parking

So, after watching four years of people fighting over the big hole, we're now to have nothing more than some dreary architecture sheltering a theme park for the dead, a high-rise corporate office park and a Wal-Mart.

The World Trade Center is back in business.

I'd weep, if I could care any longer.

[image from thinkandask]

what do you think?

The Times-Picayune headline and story appears only after almost a full month of reports that the New Orleans victims of hurricane Katrina had acted like murderers and animals.

As the fog of warlike conditions in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath has cleared, the vast majority of reported atrocities committed by evacuees have turned out to be false, or at least unsupported by any evidence, according to key military, law enforcement, medical and civilian officials in positions to know.

"I think 99 percent of it is bulls---," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong, bad things happened, but I didn't see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything. ... Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved."

. . . .

Four weeks after the storm, few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence. The piles of bodies never materialized, and soldiers, police officers and rescue personnel on the front lines say that although anarchy reigned at times and people suffered unimaginable indignities, most of the worst crimes reported at the time never happened.

We should have known all along that racism would be a key part of the disaster response. What has surprised us most, the original reports or the news that they were spurious?

[image dated September 2, of crowd awaiting evacuation from the Superdome, by David J. Phillip from AP via Times-Picayune]

Jonathan Podwil Huey 2001 Super 8, digitally animated, continuous loop [still from projection]

Jonathan Podwil Meeting, 1983 2005 oil on linen 2 panels, each 36" x 42" [detail]

Jonathan Podwil LA Palms, Baghdad Palms 2004 oil on linen 2 panels, each 10" x 12" [detail]

Sometimes you see a single work by an artist and even if it doesn't tell you a lot about the oeuvre, it's enough to make you want to see more. When you do see more your appetite may only have begun to be wetted. If you are lucky enough you may eventually see an entire show devoted to her or his work or, even better, you may be invited into the artist's studio, where the magic starts.

I thought I knew something about the work of Jonathan Podwil after seeing it here and there across the city, or occasionally on line. I was intrigued by his paintings from the very beginning in spite of, or perhaps because of, the fact that they were representational. They weren't representional in any obviously eccentric way, but I sensed that here there was much more going on than just a surface standing in for an airplane, an automobile or a figure.

I knew that he was also known for his hand-made videos, but I had not really been able to see enough of that work to understand what it was all about, and I certainly didn't suspect that it was really closely related to the paintings.

Then we visited his studio and for the first time I saw everything come together. He does paintings and he does films, and while sometimes a particular inspiration will inhabit only one discipline, at other times what is essentially the same image is treated in both of these two related but very different mediums.

Podwil has recently begun to work with much larger canvases than he had in the past, and his strong brushwork is definitely very happy with this bolder scale and it loses none of the subtleties of the earlier work. Interestingly, I think the videos would be just as successful in larger projection as they are in the relatively miniature, exquisite scale I've seen until now.

The paintings, perhaps because they are paintings, require less information about process for an understanding of their appearance - and their success - than do the films. The oils are worked over and over before they are left to themselves. Sometimes he cannibalizes his own paintings, and this means the surface drama may have started long before the painting we're looking at was even begun.

For the moving pictures, Podwil sometimes uses found 8 mm film, sometimes images he finds on line or almost anywhere else, and sometimes footage he's filmed himself (sometimes including the use as his subjects small model planes held in his hand or suspended from above his camera). He then scans individual frames of the 8 mm or his own Super 8 film in order to create digital files. Finally he manipulates the images and assembles them into a digital video. The video artifacts are a natural product of this entire process.

I suppose many if not most people would find Podwil's choices of subject fairly idiosyncratic, yet somehow they all seem pretty natural to me. As much as I'd like to believe it's because I'm weird, I think it's because of the strength of his conception and its execution.

But for many people the appearance of this stuff may be deceptive: I was hooked early on, and my enthusiasm for these paintings, and now the films as well, has continued to grow. Some people however might still have to be encouraged to stop and smell the paint and the acetate.

I usually hate making comparisons or even suggesting similitude, but if Goya were still painting today he too would probably enjoy a visit to Podwil's studio.

Full images of the dyptichs whose details are shown above can be seen by clicking onto these thumbnails:

Podwil Meeting

Podwil Palms

For a look at a few more paintings and to see four videos, go to his website.

[images in the thumbnails from Jonathan Podwil]

Adam Cvijanovic Love Poem (10 Minutes After the End of Gravity) 2005 Flashe and house paint on Tyvek [detail of large room-size installation]

Adam Cvijanovic Love Poem (10 Minutes After the End of Gravity) 2005 Flashe and house paint on Tyvek [detail of large room-size installation]

I snapped these images on the fifteenth, so it's taken me over two weeks to get them up onto this site. I blame it on Katrina.

I love Adam Cvijanovic's latest show at Bellwether, but then I think eyes which wouldn't have yet to be born. The fact that his murals are absolutely crazy about the camera is only a wonderful bonus.

I wish I could introduce him and a patron to some deserving performance space with the bare surfaces of its foyer, hall, stair hall or ceiling dying to be brought to life. I'd buy a subscription for life. I now understand why Tiepolo was so popular with his contemporaries.

The show is titled "Love Poem (10 Minutes After the End of Gravity)" and it's up until October 15.

dangerous woman

Cindy Sheehan has been arrested for not moving from the sidewalk in front of the executive mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue. White House press secretary Scott McClellan:

"it's the right of the American people to peacefully express their views. And that's what you're seeing here in Washington, D.C."

And it's the right of a pseudo-authoritarian regime to arrest us if we try it without asking permission.

[image of Molly Riley from Reuters via Yahoo!]

An Iraqi detainee at a jail in the outskirts of Baghdad, 2004. Troops from the army's elite 82nd Airborne Division routinely beat and mistreated Iraqi prisoners at a base near Fallujah in central Iraq with the approval of their superior officers, a New York-based human rights group said [AFP caption]

"3 in 82nd Airborne Say Beating Iraqi Prisoners Was Routine"

The prodigious fool and duplicitous monster who let a very gullible nation believe Iraq was responsible for September 11, and who then told its very frightened citizens that Iraq was about to drop nuclear bombs on them, is the one who did this. Our natural proclivity for violence was the perfect instrument.

If we are citizens of a democracy*, we are all guilty, but the beatings and torture which continue today began four years ago at the very top, with the commander-in-chief himself.

*
perhaps a dubious assumption today

[image by Jewel Samad from Agence France-Presse file via Yahoo!]

Chiquita Garner, left, of New Orleans, waits with her family outside the closed Greyhound terminal in Houston on Thursday, Sept. 22, 2005. Garner and her family had been evacuated from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit and have been living in the Houston Astrodome since. They were hoping another bus would come by despite the fact that the station had closed. [caption from the Associated Press]

The store of hurricane Katrina literature is already pretty vast, but it hasn't always been very, well, literate. John Weir didn't get to Houston until some time after the disaster in New Orleans which saw thousands of people flee to Texas and into the Astrodome, but he came away with a story about . . . home.

It's no longer breaking news, and in fact evacuees in the Astrodome itself have now been [re-evacuated?] in the face of a new hurricane threat, but his is the kind of intelligent, primary-source account we will need in order to understand what went so terribly wrong in Louisiana this month.

ASTRODOME

This is how Americans lose everything: in public, within range of TV anchors taping standup segments for the nightly news. A week after 23,000 people left the New Orleans Superdome and fled to Texas, I’m in Houston’s Astrodome with a media handler and five other journalists taking notes and aiming video cameras. There are still 3,000 people sleeping on army cots across the playing field of the Astrodome – a caravan of misplaced persons moving from dome to dome across the Gulf Coast. Reporters mill around them, watchfully ignored by the arena’s inhabitants until one of them decides or is persuaded to tell her story.

Two-thirds of the people in the Superdome were women, many of them young mothers, and the Astrodome is a makeshift city of stunned moms whose little kids, playing jacks and doing cartwheels, seem unable or unwilling to relate to the disaster except as a day off from school. Beds made up with gray wool blankets are covered with boxes of Huggies, along with copies of the Bible, paperback novels by John Steinbeck, and inspirational books: Walk on Dry Land, a 12-step self-help manual that has been fortuitously named. Whenever someone is reunited with a lost family member, a cowbell clangs.

Postings on the giant message board speak of hope, and, indeed, in the past few days, there have been celebrity visitors here. Oprah came with her camera crew. George and Barbara Bush, Sr. showed up last Monday, with Bill and Hillary Clinton and Illinois Senator Barack Obama. Each of the dignitaries responded according to his or her inclination. Mrs. Bush, a booster for Texas, welcomed the new arrivals to her home state. “So many of the people in the arena, here, you know,” she told the radio audience of American Public Media’s Markeptlace, “were underprivileged anyway, so this. . . ” She paused for emphasis, laughing slightly. “This is working very well for them.”

Just whom she meant by “them” – not to mention “underprivileged” – and how much of the life and future of New Orleans has been permanently lost by their displacement, was a question that everyone was addressing directly, yet also, somehow, in code. There was the problem of what to call the arrivals in Texas, hundreds of thousands of black people who had fled New Orleans, a city whose largest Parish, Orleans, had been 66% black, and a majority of whose black citizens lived below the poverty line, many of them holding jobs that did not require marketable skills in the information economy – busboys, warehouse workers, hotel maids.

They were being called refugees. They were being called evacuees. They were being called victims and survivors. In Houston, the relief workers and city functionaries had begun calling them neighbors and guests and, finally, residents. NBC news anchor Brian Williams, talking to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, called them, defensively or apologetically, Americans, as if to distinguish them from the third world poor whose plights they suddenly if temporarily appeared to share.

They did not fit easily into the national narrative of opportunity and prosperity and the all-inclusive American melting pot. Moreover, the hurricane itself presented problems for the media and national government, restricting triumphant photo opportunities. There was the lack of a signature visual, as when the Twin Towers collapsed on 9/11. There was the lack of a unified band of Police officers and firefighters whose heroic rescue efforts could be praised and shared. Instead, the media leaked reports of members of the New Orleans Police Department abandoning the Superdome and the Convention Center, of officers looting homes and businesses, of the Police Department’s spokesperson himself committing suicide after spending a few days in the flooded city.

There was finally the complication of the people in the Superdome being, not assassinated by terrorists and mourned as American martyrs, but in fact still alive, still trapped in the ruined building days later, still needing government aid. This time the victims were twenty-three thousand working class black people, many without cars or ready cash or means of escape. They had spent their lives within drowning distance of a lake whose levees everybody seemed to know would collapse, and they were corralled into a giant sports dome while the rains came and the toilets overflowed, and media choppers flew overhead without the apparent intention of getting anybody out.

In the aftermath of this tragedy, while President Bush was keeping a rather aristocratic distance, members of America’s shadow government – celebrities, NBA jocks, movie stars – were everywhere, flying over the Superdome to assess the damage and then touching down in Mississippi and Louisiana and Texas to talk to survivors and offer leadership and support. For a period of two or three days it appeared in fact that Oprah was President. She said what many must have felt but none of the country’s national leaders had yet articulated. Visiting the Astrodome, speaking to those who had endured the ordeal at the Superdome, she said, “We owe these people an apology.”

The apology came on Thursday in the form of debit cards. The survivors of Hurricane Katrina were now being called “clients,” and they were being invited to apply for ATM cards that were issued by the Red Cross on a sliding scale depending on family size, good for anything from a few hundred dollars up to a couple thousand. Then FEMA announced it was issuing cards worth $2000 to anyone who qualified for aid.

In America, when all is lost, someone gives you paperwork, and then you stand in line. On Thursday morning in Houston, two weeks after the flood, there are two massive lines snaking around the front of the Reliant Center, the convention center facing the Astrodome. One line is for people wanting to apply for Red Cross debit cards; the other is for successful applicants, cleared for access, validated forms in hand. Twenty-five hundred people are out in the heat, some of them under umbrellas, some of them holding newspapers and cardboard boxes over their heads to shield themselves from the sun. They are wearing flipflops and sandals, shorts and t-shirts, and clutching whatever they own. People are in wheel chairs; the disabled lean on canes. One small red stand dispenses Coke.

I speak to a young woman named Trina who has fifteen dollars pinned to her shirt. She is carrying her clothes in two plastic Whole Foods bags, while her son drives his toy car across the Reliant Center windows, shouting, “Whee! Whee!” Trina was in the Superdome for four days. “The government sending all that money to Iraq,” she says, angrily. “Whatever money they give us ain’t going to replace everything we lost.”

Lainez Fisher, a beautiful sleek woman in her mid-twenties, is wearing a Marilyn Monroe knapsack on her back and a black scarf around her head. She was in the Superdome from Monday until Friday. “The military got the help, not us,” she says. “They treated us like animals.” Her sister Gretchen agrees. “No need for that,” she says. “Really no need.” Gretchen has a pit bull with eleven puppies that she shipped in a crate to Gonzales, Louisiana. Otherwise, she left New Orleans with the clothes on her back and her Betty Boop handbag. “Back in the day,” she says, “we used to run on those levees. We saw the holes. We knew they would collapse.”

I am introduced to a woman named Miss Claiborne. She spells it for me. “M-i-s-s,” she begins, then her last name. I ask her if it’s true that the Red Cross is giving out money. “They’re supposed to,” she says, loading the word “supposed” with the kind of skepticism and scorn that only certain middle-aged black women are able to achieve. She tells me, as do so many others, about living in the Superdome, about being treated like animals, fed like dogs, watching corpses rot, guarded by members of the National Guard who seemed interested only in protecting themselves. And then, thinking back before the Superdome and the flood’s damage, she remembers what else she lost. “I owned a home,” she says. “I owned a home.”

I can’t convey how slowly and proudly she says it, how hopeful and tragic it sounds, how terribly sad, the beautiful American word, “home.” Whose home? The ruined homes on the coast of Biloxi, the historical homes? The drenched housing of the New Orleans poor? The temporary shelters, the sports domes, the welcoming cities, the question, repeatedly asked, “Will you go home? Can you go home?” In Houston, a week after the hurricane, people can name what they lost, their homeland, their families, their security – “Everything,” so many tell me, “I lost everything” – but the question of exactly what it was worth, and to whom, is only beginning to be addressed.

[image of Rick Bowmer from the AP via Yahoo!]

There will be a memorial for Bill Bartman at 2 pm on Saturday, November 5, at the Society of Friends Meeting House off Stuyvesant Square, and everyone is welcome.

There will be cookies.

bedlam immediately followed the arrest of the organizer of Cindy Sheehan's appearance in Union Square [the guy in the yellow shirt is a plainclothes punk "kid" who tried to start trouble before the rally began, according to a witness, Kim Arnold, one of the principals of the site where this image was spotted, tanasimusic]

Barry has a very good take on what happened when Cindy Sheehan tried to speak in Union Square on Monday.

No innocent in the ways of our benighted republic, including its most worldly city, he suggests, "They should have added some religious content". ["worldly" is a relative thing here in America]

Incidently, the secondary headline on Sarah Ferguson's Village Voice article reads:

City’s Finest pulls move even Bush wouldn’t have tried

[image courtesy of Mike Fleming via tanasimusic]

A man in the crowd in front of Reliant Arena, lies passed out from the morning heat. He was taken away in an ambulance. Residents of the shelter were told they were being evacuated to Arkansas, due to Hurricane Rita [Times-Picayune caption dated September 21]

Anyone who has been looking at this site for the last month knows how much I've been concerned about local control of the reconstruction of lives and neighborhoods in New Orleans.

This afternoon, as Louisiana awaits the impact of another hurricane, the burden for these communities and those who would help them has become more overwhelming than ever.

I was happy to find out only a few minutes ago that Community Labor United, the people whose experience and projects seem to best describe such an initiative now have their own neat and very useful website.

[image by Eliot Kamenitz from the Times-Picayune]

bookish Bill

A full week after it was reported to the rest of the world the NYTimes finally got around to including the news of Bill Bartman's death, at the very bottom of its page of obituaries.

Many will be dismayed over what they will find there. It will be a shock to his friends, admirers and co-workers, and even to those who were often put off by his brusqueness. It will confound the thousands of people from every walk of life who have been touched by and encouraged by his love and respect for the arts, especially the visual arts, and above all the artists themselves.

This short factual account of his birth and the places of his residences, the names of the unique institutions he created and guided, the cause and location of his death and the names of family survivors will not satisfy those who survive him and continue to take joy in the art he encouraged and nurtured so selflessly.

The contracted text of the paper's obituary reads like the paid death notices typeset on the page to the right in the print edition. It would not even challenge the resources of a small-town weekly shopping rag.

The Bill Bartman left on that page today is not the irrepressible genius I was privileged to know and who persuaded me against my every inclination and better judgment to become a part of his foundation's board. I would never have said yes, or been so devoted to "William S. Bartman, 58, Art Patron", in the words of the Times headline.

Bill could be incredibly charming and absolutely impossible almost at the same moment. His many art books and his "bookstore-gallery" were totally unique. No one who happens across any of these beautiful published tributes to one or more artists, and especially to art itself, or who ever wandered into the eccentric, cookie-stocked Chelsea space he dominated will ever forget his work.

This dynamo doesn't fit into five column inches. It will take an artist and a great editor to tell his story. I'm sorry the NYTimes wasn't up to it this morning.

See the warm tributes, the giggles and the stories which have been accumulating as comments to my post of September 25.

UPDATE: There will be a memorial for Bill Bartman at 2 pm on Saturday, November 5, at the Society of Friends Meeting House off Stuyvesant Square. Everyone is welcome. There will be cookies.

[image furnished by A.R.T.]

where Dumaine crosses North Roman, central Treme after the flood, sometime late last week

The title of Jordan Flaherty's latest letter is "Shelter and Safety", but the context is racism, a racism exacerbated by the horrors of Hurricane Katrina, a racism which continues even today in "rescue" and "shelter" operations and which is built into the plans for tomorrow's New Orleans.

The sections I've excerpted below describe just a little of the desperate struggle of a poor, almost-powerless, displaced community to remain a community. [The entire text includes much more detail on the specific horrors of "Shelter and Safety" today in Louisiana, and I expect it will soon appear on leftturn].

Just north of the French Quarter . . . is the historic Treme neighborhood. Settled in the early 1800s, it’s known as the oldest free African-American community in the US. Residents fear for the post-reconstruction stability of communities like Treme. “There’s nothing some developers would like more than a ring of white neighborhoods around the French Quarter,” said one Treme resident recently. The widespread fear among organizers is that the exclusionary, “tourists only” atmosphere of the French Quarter will be multiplied and expanded across the city, and that many residents simply wont be able to return home.

. . . .

Diane "Momma D" Frenchcoat never evacuated out of her Treme home on North Dorgenois Street, and has been helping feed and support 50 families, coordinating a relief and rebuilding effort consisting of, at its peak, 30 volunteers known as the Soul Patrol.

. . . .

Asked about her plan, Momma D had these words, "Rescue. Return. Restore. Can you hear what I'm saying, baby? Listen to those words again. Rescue, return, restore. We want the young, able-bodied men who are still here to stay to help those in need. And the ones that have been evacuated, we want them to come home and help clean up and rebuild this city. How can the city demand that we evacuate our homes but then have thousands of people from across this country volunteering to do the things that we can do ourselves?"

Community organizers like Momma D in Treme and Malik Rahim, who has a similar network in the Algiers neighborhood, are the forces for relief and rebuilding that need our help. The biggest disaster was not a hurricane, but the dispersal of communities, and that's the disaster that needs to be addressed first.

Yesterday a friend told me through tears, “I just want to go back as if this never happened. I want to go back to my friends and my neighbors and my community.” Its our community that has brought us security. People I know in New Orleans don’t feel safer when they see Blackwater mercenaries on their block, but they do feel security from knowing their neighbors are watching out for them. And that's why the police and national guard and security companies on our streets haven’t brought us the security we’ve been looking for, and why discussions of razing neighborhoods makes us feel cold.

When we say we want our city back, we don’t mean the structures and the institutions, and we don’t mean “law and order,” we mean our community, the people we love. And that's the city we want to fight for.

[image by Ted Jackson from the Times Picayune]

everybody into the streets!

They could hardly have come up with a petty outrage more perfectly designed to get me going. Hummer, blocked sidewalk, trashy action movie: Could anything be more civilized in a crowded neighborhood on a warm afternoon?

At 5 o'clock today I was walking west on 23rd Street across from my home when I saw a shiny Hummer facing me, almost totally blocking the sidewalk. Crowds of pedestrians were squeezing through the bottleneck it presented. The monstrous red tank was on a carpet, surrounded by chrome stanchions draped with black velvet ropes, and there were at least two spotlight towers positioned nearby. To add insult to this injury the parking spaces along the curb for a hundred feet ahead were blocked by traffic cones, apparently in order to keep a view of the Hummer clear for cars passing in the street (the prol's bus stop served the purpose in the area immediately to the rear).

I was told by a guy with "Star Theatrical Services" spread across his tee shirt that the car was a promotion for a film festival, but I suspect it was mostly only a promotion gimmick for a silly truck whose sales are currently plummeting, even if it was tied into some rude action movie playing in the multiplex behind it. There was no advertising other than a Hummer poster slappped on the movie house wall.

The guy also said they had a permit. That may be, but how does that happen in a city already choked by millions of cars routinely playing games with people on foot whenever they step into a street? I reported the installation to 311 anyway, for "impeding pedestrian traffic on a sidewalk", which I learned is the responsibility of the Department of Sanitation. The 10th Precinct said they'd send a car by. I'm not holding my breath.

UPDATE: As I was leaving our building just before seven, someone told me that Chelsea's Hummer show had been [taken down] just ten minutes earlier. That would put it a little over an hour after I called 311. No, I don't know if there's any connection. I just hope we don't see it there tomorrow.

I was up by the Central Park reservoir (the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir) yesterday. It was one of the last days of summer and I was anxious to find some sign of color or life other than the green monotone of the brush surrounding a body of water deliberately kept pretty sterile. As I peered over the fence, hoping to spot a flower or a duck, I spotted this slightly ragged, yet still rather natty gentleman standing on the rocks below.

Incidently, a low, elegant black-painted steel and iron fence now separates the reservoir from the busy jogging path which surrounds it. I checked when I got home and was surprised to find that it's been there two years, a huge improvement over the seven-foot chain-link horror most of us always associated with this underappreciated pond.

handsome, running fence

back at Duke, Sonny Byrd, David Hankla and Hans Buder

"It made no sense whatsoever that reporters were getting in and out of New Orleans, but the National Guard couldn't remove those people from the convention center," said Mr. Hankla, 20, a sophomore. "All we knew was that we were sick of being armchair humanitarians and that we intended to help get people out."

So he and two dorm mates, Sonny Byrd and Hans Buder, set out in Mr. Byrd's Hyundai sedan for a road trip and rescue mission. [read the whole story in the NYTimes]

That's the can-do spirit which seems missing in most of the country these days. It's also the spirit (and the devices) we used in ACT UP, especially in the early 90's: Sometimes you just have to figure out how to make your own credentials if you want to help people.

Hey, these dudes weren't arrested, and they even got media coverage - key in any action!

[image by John Loomis for the Times]

Michael St. John In a daze 'cause I found god 2003 plaster, spray paint on wood, atlas, collage, pencil, paper, tape on canvas, pom poms and enamel on wood 98" x 96" [installation view with Barry]

Rachel Rampleman A Glimpse of a Thursday afternoon 2005 UltraChrome ink on canvas 30" x 64" [detail]

Champneys Taylor Still Life with Apple 2004 mini DV 1:55 minutes [still from installation]

"I'm a child of divorce, Gimme a break" is the rummy title of the current show at Cynthia Broan. The artists and the works were chosen for their affinity with the artmaking of the curator himself, Michael St. John. Not surprisingly, given its particularly ebullient character, all of them seem to be having a good time, and this writer was almost all smiles as he shared in it.

A very good, smart show, with no redundancies in spite of the risks of its conceptualization.

I was walking with Barry and some friends along 11th Avenue just above 24th Street when I spotted a birdhouse shape on the far side of a tree [by coincidence one of my most favorite trees in the entire city]. I went to investigate and discovered the entrance hole blocked by something constructed of wood and painted black. Concerned for any potential occupants, I poked the obstruction with the end of my umbrella and what looked like water flowed out of the perch/spigot below. The "water" turned out to be vodka.

I don't know this fairytale at all.

It was already early Saturday evening. We were walking down through Hudson River Park with a destination in mind, but we had started to assume that we would arrive too late to see the posthumous [performance?] of Robert Smithson's 1970 sculptural concept, "Floating Island", an homage to Manhattan and Olmsted's Central Park.

I stopped at the shore railing for a moment with my camera in order to capture a golden lining on the last clouds to witness a sun which had probably already set.

Then I caught up with Karen and Barry and we soon spotted downriver what the world had only seen as a child-like sketch until that afternoon: a little tugboat pulling a small barge along the shoreline, the barge filled with what looked like a chunk of landscape from the park itself, complete with shrubs, grass and boulders [the rocks borrowed from the park for the occasion].

The excellent skipper of the "Little Toot"-like tug had amazing control of his charges, and none of the spectators were disappointed, whether they stood on the shore or on the piers, as he passed by with his chunk of Manhattan in tow, then turned and passed again and again and again along the edges of both.

The three of us weren't even disappointed that we had forgotten about invitations to receptions which had promised food and drink. We had lingered too long among the temptations offered by Chelsea galleries that afternoon. By the time we arrived at the scene by the piers further downtown black-garbed, white-aproned caterers were emptying lots of unused bags of ice into the Hudson.

But the chase and the catch (here, the art, a delightful late-summer gift to the people of New York) was the thing, we reminded ourselves, especially if we couldn't picnic on the barge. It was now almost totally dark, so we crossed the highway and headed into the West Village to track down what turned out to be a fine dinner with excellent company.

One last thought: At what age did we first learn that most islands don't float?

NOPD officers Danny Scanlan and Juan Lopez keep a watchful eye during patrol Thursday, Sept. 8, 2005 in New Orleans. [caption of the Times Picayune]

Jordan Flaherty continues to write from Louisiana, and on Friday he argued that the most serious damage done to New Orleans was not the consequence of the hurricane or even of the floods which followed the breaks in the levees. An excerpt follows.

But the worst damage is what is being done now, this confluence of forces barraging New Orleans and its Diaspora, what some local organizers have referred to as the Disaster Industrial Complex. This is the perfect storm created by an orgy of greed and opportunism engaged in by the jackals of disaster profiteering. The list of those who are gaining from our loss is large, and it includes everyone from the heavily armed thugs of Wackenhut Security and Blackwater USA to the often well-meaning but ineffective bureaucrats of Red Cross and FEMA, to the Scientology missionaries crowding the shelters, to journalists and disaster-gazers taking up a chunk of available housing, to the major multinationals such as Halliburton, working in concert with rich elites from uptown New Orleans seeking partners with which to exploit this tragedy.

These are the institutions and individuals poised to profit from this disaster, while the people of New Orleans face nothing but further dislocation and disempowerment.

. . . .

Whether its in the shelters or in the streets of New Orleans, this may go down as the most militarized “relief” effort in history. The Chicago police are camped out on a bar on Bourbon Street. Wackenhut security convoys are riding in and out of town. Israeli security patrol Audubon Place Uptown. White vigilante gangs patrol the West Bank, with tacit permission of local authorities. National Guard and Blackwater are on patrol throughout the city, along with DEA, INS, State police, New Orleans police, NYPD, and countless other agencies.

. . . .

This militarization of New Orleans stands in stark contradiction to the people’s efforts at reconstruction. The Common Ground Collective, in the Algiers area of New Orleans, has built a community health center and food distribution network serving, according to organizer Malik Rahim’s estimate, about 16,000 people in New Orleans Parish and surrounding areas such as Plaquemines and Jefferson Parishes. “Have the police helped us?” asked one local organizer, “no, they’ve stood in our way at every turn.”

. . . .

Today I received a call from Royce Osborne, a local filmmaker who made the New Orleans classic film All On A Mardi Gras Day. Royce is also a community activist and one of the Mardi Gras Skeletons, another Black Mardi Gras tradition. Royce told me he’s aching to come back, and looking forward to Mardi Gras 2006. “If we see the Indians out on the streets in the next Mardi Gras, then I’ll know there’s hope for New Orleans,” he said.

[image by Michael Democker for the Times Picayune]

not everything's in the French Quarter

I obviously haven't seen everything being written about the reconstruction (or, gasp, "urban renewal") of New Orleans, but I know I haven't read a single word about who actually owns all those unique, traditional/vernacular style houses we've seen throughout the flooded older, poorer neighborhoods. I suspect they are mostly owner-occupied or rented from people who live in the neighborhood.

I certainly don't think Halliburton or the developers own them - yet. Why are we talking about these neighborhoods as if their ownership had evaporated, as if the governments which failed them can now decide their disposition in a vacuum?

[image of two shotgun houses from Ingolf Vogeler]

with Elizabeth Murray

Bill Bartman died this morning

An often messy, quirky, ornery bastard, but otherwise (and often at the same time) great company and a great friend with a great heart, Bill Bartman was also a selfless, totally-committed patron of the arts and an enemy of the morally and spiritually-dead who currently control the larger American public landscape and dialogue.

A dogged defender of women in the arts, an enemy of elitist institutions of any kind, but especially those which seek to prevent easy access to literature and the visual arts, Bill never lost touch with the smaller lives around him: He was unapologetic about his exuberant affection for kids and animals; I've watched him read to both.

Bill worked tirelessly to get books, especially art books, into the hands of people who did not have them, including many who would know they wanted them only once they became his beneficiaries.

His gallery space survived until the money finally ran out (including much of his own capital, and the gradual de-accessioning of his own art collection) and throughout those years Bill refused to compromise his principle that the artist was the real curator, and the artist must not have to share the receipts of any sales.

Bill Bartman died this morning after a truly heroic struggle with the multiple fiends which had been assaulting his body for years. Most of his friends have been so impressed with his awesome survival story that this latest news will be no less a shock than a report that he had been run over by a truck. He was a great soul.

Gosh, we're going to miss him.

William S. Bartman was the founder and continuing head of Art Resources Transfer, Inc., A.R.T. Press and the Distribution to Underserved Communities (DUC) Library Program

UPDATE: There will be a memorial for Bill Bartman at 2 pm on Saturday, November 5, at the Society of Friends Meeting House off Stuyvesant Square, and everyone is welcome. There will be cookies

[image by Bill Zules from A.R.T. Press]

in Afghanistan the Taliban remain an enduring threat, freedom only clings to life, especially for women, and more Americans are dying than ever before

Sixty-nine American service members have been killed in Afghanistan this year, the NYTimes reported today in an article discussing Pentagon and military officials' plans to start pulling out of the country which was the site of "Operation Enduring Freedom" in 2001.

The first paragraph of the article tells us that the contemplated reduction, as much of 20 percent of our current troop level of 20,000, would be "the largest withdrawal since the Taliban were ousted [my italics] in late 2001." Check that verb. Not untypically the paper is being a bit disingenuous, since the article continues for four long columns packed with the disconnect of these phrases I've pulled out from the text. They describe the current very real insurgency and why our allies don't want any part of a combat role:

"handle the counterinsurgency mission"
"where much of the fighting is occurring"
"the American combat operation"
"contribute troops to counterinsurgency"
"small special forces involved in combat"
"where American troops have clashed with Taliban"
"anticipated spike in insurgent attacks"
"attacks against American forces"
"stepped-up American offensives in areas sympathetic to the Taliban"
"commander of daily tactical operations in Afghanistan"
"soldiers to fight throughout the winter"
"keep the pressure on Taliban fighters"
"effort to impress villagers in the Taliban heartland"

The total count of U.S. military fatalities since the beginning of the war which "ousted the Taliban" almost four years ago is 231. According to at least one site* which breaks down the statistics by year, the numbers have been going up each year since 2001:

2001: 12
2002: 43
2003: 47
2004: 52
2005: 77

The caption for the photo above as it appears on the Times site reads:
A patrol vehicle from Company A, 508th Infantry, casts shadows in a town in Paktika Province, [southeast] Afghanistan.

*
whose statistics were compiled from Department of Defense and Central Command press releases [the discrepancy in its 2005 total and that in the Times may be due to different ways of measuring the years used in the calculations]

[image by Scott Eels for the Times]

free at last

In a post I did one week ago I included a Times Picayune photograph of the blanket-wrapped body of Alcede Jackson lying on a bench on his front porch in New Orleans, and I included some strong lines from James W. Bailey. The NYTimes now reports that on Monday, almost two weeks after he died, the body was collected.

NEW ORLEANS, Sept. 12 - They collected Alcede Jackson on Monday, relieving him at long last of a duty in death he never requested in life: to be a poor man's Pietà for his broken city.

They collected Alcede Jackson, finally.

They took nearly two weeks to do it, making their way through streets in Uptown that were never underwater, to the worn white house at 4734 Laurel St. Mr. Jackson's body had been laid out on the front-porch bench - as though for an interminable outdoor wake - waiting to be transported to some semblance of dignity.

Anyone could see his body from the street, and many did. It cried out for retrieval, lying there under a baby-blue blanket mottled with cigarette burns, a bouquet of dead flowers resting nearby, as 90-degree days came and went.

The loudest cries, though, came from the epitaph, scrawled in large letters on the kind of yellow-green cardboard that seemed to glow in the dark and taped to the house above the body's head. This was what it said:

ALCEDE JACKSON

B - D Aug. 31, 2005

Rest in Peace

In the Loving Arms of Jesus

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son (Jesus) that whosoever believeth in Him, shall not perish but have everlasting life!" - John 3:16.

For nearly two weeks, this was what it said. And not just from the porch.

Law-enforcement officials and search-and-rescue teams had regularly visited this neighborhood since the first of the month. Newspaper and magazine reporters and photographers passed by the modest house on Laurel Street every day. In fact the entire world read about this front porch and the entire world watched the body of Alcede Jackson lying there uncollected, day after day.

The entire world now wants to know how that could have happened, and it won't be satisfied with Bush's touchy, reflexive denial that there was any racial component to the government's response to this disaster.

[image by Monica Almeida for the NYTimes]

brilliant?

Maybe we've just been watching the latest sally in the radical conservatives' continuing campaign to dismantle the government. The results of a Newsweek poll released a few days ago suggest that it's working.

But Katrina’s most costly impact could be a loss of faith in government generally, and the president, in particular. A majority of Americans (57 percent) say “government’s slow response to what happened in New Orleans” has made them lose confidence in government’s ability to deal with another major natural disaster.

The only complication for the Bushies is that an even larger number of people are also convinced their own special damn fool - and his entire party - is a very big part of the problem.

Reflecting the tarnished view of the administration, only 38 percent of registered voters say they would vote for a Republican for Congress if the Congressional elections were held today, while 50 say they would vote for a Democrat.

Even showing up on a [helicopter] carrier again, as he did yesterday, won't change those numbers.

Thank goodness we can't afford still another war.

[image by Ron Edmonds from AP via Yahoo!]

Farley Post Office Building [at the top of the front steps]

BAD HABIT

Years ago they tore down the magnificent old Pennsylvania Station and replaced it with the current monstrous obscenity which became the latest incarnation of the peripatetic Madison Square Garden. The existing arena is the fourth location of what was originally the home of an earlier, somewhat less athletic freak show assembled by P.T. Barnum in 1874. The buildings in each of the previous locations have been destroyed. As the city grew, the land on which they were located was determined to be too valuable to be devoted to popular entertainment.

The word is out today that they're threatening to tear down another monumental building in order to move the Garden once again. Okay, it's only half of the building, but it's a half which would do honor to any city in the world.

When I told Barry about the story in today's NYTimes he said they're going to keep on moving until there aren't any decent buildings left in New York.

Some initial and random thoughts of my own:

Ironic?

Now can we have Penn Station back?

Nah, whadaya think this is, Germany?

What's a station?

Barnum would be proud of his heirs. Remember the sucker birth rate?

How much of a deal will they get from taxpayers this time?

Maybe they'll name it Bloomberg Garden.

The obsession with sports stadiums is gonna kill this city dead.

NIMBY.

[image from rachelleb.com]

I've uploaded two new sketches into the "Free the Art" gallery, both by W. Craghead, and they're pretty wonderful.

Carol Bove's Adventures in Poetry by W. Craghead

Jason Fox's Peaceful Warrier by W. Craghead

Once again, For anyone only joining this conversation now, this "Free the Art" project is about helping to make visible hundreds of pieces of contemporary art to which the Museum of Modern Art seems to have been doing its best to limit viewing access. The works in the current show at PS1, which is MoMA's child, are not even listed, either at the museum itself or on its website; of course that also means there are no images on line either, and visitors are forbidden to photograph anything whatsoever. Oh yes, a big museum book has been promised, but it's not here now, and it's certainly not going to be free.

Mike Paré Ditch Dance 2005 egg tempera and graphite on paper 22" x 30" [large detail]

We celebrated Super Thursday a few days ago with a relatively low-key tour of only a few of the new shows opening in Chelsea that night. Douglas Kelly had announced some fourscore gallery receptions, and even ArtCal's less democratic listings numbered a little over thirty.

Regardless of which guide was consulted, a complete tour of the openings that night, beside the point anyway, would have been impossible within the two hour window available. Huge crowds created the additional obstacle of, yes, some real lines and waits, so we distracted ourselves with the friends we ran into, but we did manage to see a few neat things.

One of our first stops was ATM, where Mike Paré has a beautiful show, "Blissed Out", with work which straddles an [almost] no man's land located between sensitive documentary photography and traditional genre painting, sometimes dressed up in black light.

Some enlightenment on the show's title, from the gallery:

Expanding beyond the communal, counter-culture themes he explored in his Black Light Folk Festival exhibition in 2003, Paré now focuses his attention on moments of individual spiritual inwardness that made up, and continue to make up, the building blocks of “the movement.”

Barry and I were a part of this afternoon's New Orleans Jazz Funeral March in Washington Square Park, where I managed to weave through an extraordinarily-diverse crowd to get a few decent images, even while encumbered by half of a sandwich board around my neck. My sign bore my simple conclusion:

NEED A REVOLUTION

The woman carrying on her shoulder a red velvet-lined case in which lay a shiny bent-up trumpet told me that some man she didn't know had handed it to her, asking if she would carry it in the procession. For me that was the defining moment of the march and protest.

When we left and headed toward the West Village we had to squeeze through the phalanx of police motor scooters which had trailed this very peaceful group around the park for an hour.

Seconds after I took a picture of this solitary flautist they swarmed into the open ground in front of him and faced the "mourners".

Then the real surprise: Barely ten feet beyond this disturbing display of obsessively-focused armed law enforcement we found ourselves parties to the familiar, repeated pitch, "smoke"? "smoke"?

Ahhh. Still maybe the people's park after all.

"Let the People Rebuild New Orleans"*

UPDATE: Community Labor United now has a website.

I've been looking at a lot of materials over for almost two weeks, and although many people have offered suggestions for directing money or other help to the people of New Orleans, I would like to suggest the importance of supporting the grassroots reconstruction of New Orleans by contributing whatever we can to:

The Peoples' Hurricane Fund organized by Community Labor United [see my post from one week ago, or this piece in The Nation for information]

For additional community resources and organizations over the long haul, see these New Orleans people:

The Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana,
The Justice Center and
Critical Resistence

*
the headline of Naomi Klein's September 8 piece in The Nation

An unidentified man sits in the flood water underneath the Interstate-10 in New Orleans, La., Monday, Sept. 5, 2005. [caption from Times Picayune]

I had forgotten to include a link to Rogers Cadenhead's blog, which had inspired it, when I set up my own post on "trying to escape while black" yesterday, so I'm using my oversight as an excuse for uploading the entire story (now also on Counterpunch) below.

Nothing you will read about the disaster in New Orleans is likely to be more useful in understanding what went on inside than this surprisingly restrained account from two visitors caught in a nightmare which really began only when the police and military showed up.

First By the Floods, Then By Martial Law

TRAPPED IN NEW ORLEANS

By Larry Bradshaw
and Lorrie Beth Slonsky

Two days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the Walgreens store at the corner of Royal and Iberville Streets in the city's historic French Quarter remained locked. The dairy display case was clearly visible through the widows. It was now 48 hours without electricity, running water, plumbing, and the milk, yogurt, and cheeses were beginning to spoil in the 90-degree heat.

The owners and managers had locked up the food, water, pampers and prescriptions, and fled the city. Outside Walgreens' windows, residents and tourists grew increasingly thirsty and hungry. The much-promised federal, state and local aid never materialized, and the windows at Walgreens gave way to the looters.

There was an alternative. The cops could have broken one small window and distributed the nuts, fruit juices and bottled water in an organized and systematic manner. But they did not. Instead, they spent hours playing cat and mouse, temporarily chasing away the looters.

We were finally airlifted out of New Orleans two days ago and arrived home on Saturday. We have yet to see any of the TV coverage or look at a newspaper. We are willing to guess that there were no video images or front-page pictures of European or affluent white tourists looting the Walgreens in the French Quarter.

We also suspect the media will have been inundated with "hero" images of the National Guard, the troops and police struggling to help the "victims" of the hurricane. What you will not see, but what we witnessed, were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans.

The maintenance workers who used a forklift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators. Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, "stealing" boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters. Mechanics who helped hotwire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the city. And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens, improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded.

Most of these workers had lost their homes and had not heard from members of their families. Yet they stayed and provided the only infrastructure for the 20 percent of New Orleans that was not under water.

On Day Two, there were approximately 500 of us left in the hotels in the French Quarter. We were a mix of foreign tourists, conference attendees like ourselves and locals who had checked into hotels for safety and shelter from Katrina.

Some of us had cell phone contact with family and friends outside of New Orleans. We were repeatedly told that all sorts of resources, including the National Guard and scores of buses, were pouring into the city. The buses and the other resources must have been invisible, because none of us had seen them.

We decided we had to save ourselves. So we pooled our money and came up with $25,000 to have ten buses come and take us out of the city. Those who didn't have the requisite $45 each were subsidized by those who did have extra money.

We waited for 48 hours for the buses, spending the last 12 hours standing outside, sharing the limited water, food and clothes we had. We created a priority boarding area for the sick, elderly and newborn babies. We waited late into the night for the "imminent" arrival of the buses. The buses never arrived. We later learned that the minute they arrived at the city limits, they were commandeered by the military.

By Day Four, our hotels had run out of fuel and water. Sanitation was dangerously bad. As the desperation and despair increased, street crime as well as water levels began to rise. The hotels turned us out and locked their doors, telling us that "officials" had told us to report to the convention center to wait for more buses. As we entered the center of the city, we finally encountered the National Guard.

The guard members told us we wouldn't be allowed into the Superdome, as the city's primary shelter had descended into a humanitarian and health hellhole. They further told us that the city's only other shelter--the convention center--was also descending into chaos and squalor, and that the police weren't allowing anyone else in.

Quite naturally, we asked, "If we can't go to the only two shelters in the city, what was our alternative?" The guards told us that this was our problem--and no, they didn't have extra water to give to us. This would be the start of our numerous encounters with callous and hostile "law enforcement."

We walked to the police command center at Harrah's on Canal Street and were told the same thing--that we were on our own, and no, they didn't have water to give us. We now numbered several hundred.

We held a mass meeting to decide a course of action. We agreed to camp outside the police command post. We would be plainly visible to the media and constitute a highly visible embarrassment to city officials. The police told us that we couldn't stay. Regardless, we began to settle in and set up camp.

In short order, the police commander came across the street to address our group. He told us he had a solution: we should walk to the Pontchartrain Expressway and cross the greater New Orleans Bridge to the south side of the Mississippi, where the police had buses lined up to take us out of the city.

The crowd cheered and began to move. We called everyone back and explained to the commander that there had been lots of misinformation, so was he sure that there were buses waiting for us. The commander turned to the crowd and stated emphatically, "I swear to you that the buses are there."

We organized ourselves, and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope. As we marched past the convention center, many locals saw our determined and optimistic group, and asked where we were headed. We told them about the great news.

Families immediately grabbed their few belongings, and quickly, our numbers doubled and then doubled again. Babies in strollers now joined us, as did people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and other people in wheelchairs. We marched the two to three miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it didn't dampen our enthusiasm.

As we approached the bridge, armed sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions.

As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and the commander's assurances. The sheriffs informed us that there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.

We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the six-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans, and there would be no Superdomes in their city. These were code words for: if you are poor and Black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River, and you are not getting out of New Orleans.

Our small group retreated back down Highway 90 to seek shelter from the rain under an overpass. We debated our options and, in the end, decided to build an encampment in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway--on the center divide, between the O'Keefe and Tchoupitoulas exits. We reasoned that we would be visible to everyone, we would have some security being on an elevated freeway, and we could wait and watch for the arrival of the yet-to-be-seen buses.

All day long, we saw other families, individuals and groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be turned away--some chased away with gunfire, others simply told no, others verbally berated and humiliated. Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the city on foot.

Meanwhile, the only two city shelters sank further into squalor and disrepair. The only way across the bridge was by vehicle. We saw workers stealing trucks, buses, moving vans, semi-trucks and any car that could be hotwired. All were packed with people trying to escape the misery that New Orleans had become.

Our little encampment began to blossom. Someone stole a water delivery truck and brought it up to us. Let's hear it for looting! A mile or so down the freeway, an Army truck lost a couple of pallets of C-rations on a tight turn. We ferried the food back to our camp in shopping carts.

Now - secure with these two necessities, food and water - cooperation, community and creativity flowered. We organized a clean-up and hung garbage bags from the rebar poles. We made beds from wood pallets and cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom, and the kids built an elaborate enclosure for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas and other scraps. We even organized a food-recycling system where individuals could swap out parts of C-rations (applesauce for babies and candies for kids!).

This was something we saw repeatedly in the aftermath of Katrina. When individuals had to fight to find food or water, it meant looking out for yourself. You had to do whatever it took to find water for your kids or food for your parents. But when these basic needs were met, people began to look out for each other, working together and constructing a community.

If the relief organizations had saturated the city with food and water in the first two or three days, the desperation, frustration and ugliness would not have set in.

Flush with the necessities, we offered food and water to passing families and individuals. Many decided to stay and join us. Our encampment grew to 80 or 90 people.

From a woman with a battery-powered radio, we learned that the media was talking about us. Up in full view on the freeway, every relief and news organizations saw us on their way into the city. Officials were being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up on the freeway. The officials responded that they were going to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. "Taking care of us" had an ominous tone to it.

Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking city) was accurate. Just as dusk set in, a sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces and screamed, "Get off the fucking freeway." A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water.

Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway. All the law enforcement agencies appeared threatened when we congregated into groups of 20 or more. In every congregation of "victims," they saw "mob" or "riot." We felt safety in numbers. Our "we must stay together" attitude was impossible because the agencies would force us into small atomized groups.

In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed, we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of eight people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding from possible criminal elements, but equally and definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.

The next day, our group of eight walked most of the day, made contact with the New Orleans Fire Department and were eventually airlifted out by an urban search-and-rescue team.

We were dropped off near the airport and managed to catch a ride with the National Guard. The two young guardsmen apologized for the limited response of the Louisiana guards. They explained that a large section of their unit was in Iraq and that meant they were shorthanded and were unable to complete all the tasks they were assigned.

We arrived at the airport on the day a massive airlift had begun. The airport had become another Superdome. We eight were caught in a press of humanity as flights were delayed for several hours while George Bush landed briefly at the airport for a photo op. After being evacuated on a Coast Guard cargo plane, we arrived in San Antonio, Texas.

There, the humiliation and dehumanization of the official relief effort continued. We were placed on buses and driven to a large field where we were forced to sit for hours and hours. Some of the buses didn't have air conditioners. In the dark, hundreds of us were forced to share two filthy overflowing porta-potties. Those who managed to make it out with any possessions (often a few belongings in tattered plastic bags) were subjected to two different dog-sniffing searches.

Most of us had not eaten all day because our C-rations had been confiscated at the airport--because the rations set off the metal detectors. Yet no food had been provided to the men, women, children, elderly and disabled, as we sat for hours waiting to be "medically screened" to make sure we weren't carrying any communicable diseases.

This official treatment was in sharp contrast to the warm, heartfelt reception given to us by ordinary Texans. We saw one airline worker give her shoes to someone who was barefoot. Strangers on the street offered us money and toiletries with words of welcome.

Throughout, the official relief effort was callous, inept and racist. There was more suffering than need be. Lives were lost that did not need to be lost.

Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky are emergency medical services (EMS) workers from San Francisco and contributors to Socialist Worker. They were attending an EMS conference in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina struck. They spent most of the next week trapped by the flooding--and the martial law cordon around the city.

[image by Eric Gay for AP from Times Picayune]

A line of women in custody line up at a makeshift jail facility at the Union Passenger Terminal in New Orleans, Friday, Sept. 9. The temporary holding facility holds those accused of a crime before they are sent to an operating jail. [Times Picayune caption dated September 10]

A line of men in custody line up after arriving from Jefferson Parish at a makeshift jail facility at the Union Passenger Terminal in New Orleans, Friday. The temporary facility holds those accused of a crime before being sent to an operating jail. [Times Picayune caption dated September 10]

A third letter from Jordan Flaherty:

Mourning For New Orleans

by Jordan Flaherty

Its been six days since I left New Orleans, and I miss
my home so much. I’m still in a daze, its hard to
hold a conversation or to think straight. People ask
if everyone I know is ok, and I don’t know what to
say. There are so many stories, so many rumors, so
many people dispersed around the US. So many of us
may never see each other again. I don’t think any of
us are ok right now.

One friend, a teacher, was searching the Astrodome
while holding up a sign, looking for his former
students. Another friend says she fears she’ll never
see New Orleans or her friends from there again.
Another friend found temporary comfort with family in
Houston and then got kicked out. A lot of friends are
working in shelters, providing assistance, medical
care, whatever they can. We are already spread across
so many states, trying to pick up the pieces of our
lives.

I can think of at least thirty people that I have no
idea where they are. In some cities it seems like
when people meet they give out their email address or
weblog or friendster or whatever. In New Orleans, a
lot of us only know each other only by first names.
There are so many people I would see at least once a
week that I don’t know how to get in touch with at
all. Even cel phones from the New Orleans area code
have been nonfunctioning for most of the last two
weeks.

New Orleans is a word of mouth town. The way you
would find out about parties, secondlines, jazz
funerals and other events is from hearing about it
from friends. I always liked that about New Orleans.
In an increasingly disconnected world, New Orleans
felt different, more real and concrete. Now that
we aren’t seeing each other regularly, our elaborate
communication network has broken down.

But when people ask I just say, yes, as far as I know
everyone is ok. I can’t really bring myself to think
about it further than that.

Those with the least to begin with are the ones we
worry about most now. Families and Friends of
Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children is a grassroots
organization with a long history of fighting for New
Orleans’ most vulnerable. Since hurricane Katrina,
they have been on the front lines of relief,
spending time in the shelters, helping advocate for
the refugees of New Orleans, and trying to find out
what happened to both adults and children who were
locked up while New Orleans flooded.

There has been a lot of media hysteria regarding those
who were locked in New Orleans’ prisons during the
hurricane, stories that make it sound like a Hollywood
action film where murderers use a disaster to escape
and wreck havoc.

This is exactly wrong. The truth is that tales from
the imprisoned population of New Orleans are among the
most heartbreaking stories of the past week.

Families are still looking for loved ones lost in the
system. According to organizers with FFLIC, of
approximately 240 kids in state custody, as of a
couple of days ago only 6 or 7 parents had been able
to track down their children.

According to statistics compiled by the Juvenile
Justice Project of Louisiana, at least 78% of New
Orleans’ incarcerated youth were locked up for
nonviolent offenses. The detention center in Jefferson
Parish reports that 96% of the youth held there in
2000 were for nonviolent offenses. At least a third
of youth in prison have been sentenced to three or
more years for nonviolent offenses. In New
Orleans, 95% of the detained youth in 1999 were
African-American. Louisiana taxpayers spend
$96,713 to incarcerate a single child, and $4,724 to
educate a child in the public schools.

According to a report by Human Rights Watch, “the
state of Louisiana has one of the highest rates in
the country of children living in poverty and children
not in school or working. Large numbers of children,
especially black children, are suspended from school
each year, sometimes for the whole year. Approximately
1,500 Louisiana children are confined in secure
correctional facilities each year...In response to the
question,"what would you most like to change here?",
virtually every child at all of the facilities
responded that they would like the guards to stop
hitting them and that they would like more food.
Children consistently told us that they were hungry.”

Some people have been hurt to hear people of New
Orleans called refugees. This hurts me too, but it
hurts me more to feel that we have been treated as
refugees. In a way, the people of New Orleans were
refugees before hurricane Katrina ever came. We were
abandoned by a country that never needed us, unless they needed a cheap vacation of strip clubs and binge drinking and
cheap live music.

One of the things I love about New Orleans is that it
always feels like another country. Now we see that in
the eyes of the federal government we truly are
residents of another country. A poor, black country.
Instead of insisting that the displaced of New Orleans
are not refugees, we should use this as an opportunity
to look at why the idea of US refugees is so
discomforting.

The transformation of the people of New Orleans into
refugees is a large part of what has captured the
imagination of people from around the world,
especially those who are refugees themselves. I’ve
received emails from Ghana and Cuba and Peru and
Lebanon and Palestine. In New York City tonight, a
group of artists, initiated by Def Poetry Jam star and
Palestinian poet Suheir Hammad, organized a benefit
called Refugees For Refugees. That title beautifully
and poignantly captures the feelings this man-made
tragedy has generated around the world.

In her most recent poem, "On Refuge and Language",
Suheir writes:

I do not wish
To place words in living mouths
Or bury the dead dishonorably

I am not deaf to cries escaping shelters
That citizens are not refugees
Refugees are not Americans

I will not use language
One way or another
To accommodate my comfort

I will not look away

All I know is this

No peoples ever choose to claim status of dispossessed
No peoples want pity above compassion
No enslaved peoples ever called themselves slaves

What do we pledge allegiance to?

A government that leaves its old
To die of thirst surrounded by water
Is a foreign government

People who are streaming
Illiterate into paperwork
Have long ago been abandoned

I think of coded language
And all that words carry on their backs

I think of how it is always the poor
Who are tagged and boxed with labels
Not of their own choosing

I think of my grandparents
And how some called them refugees
Others called them non-existent
They called themselves landless
Which means homeless

Before the hurricane
No tents were prepared for the fleeing
Because Americans do not live in tents
Tents are for Haiti for Bosnia for Rwanda

Refugees are the rest of the world

Those left to defend their human decency
Against conditions the rich keep their animals from
Those who have too many children
Those who always have open hands and empty bellies
Those whose numbers are massive
Those who seek refuge
From nature’s currents and man's resources

Those who are forgotten in the mean times

Those who remember

Ahmad from Guinea makes my falafel sandwich and says
So this is your country

Yes Amadou this my country
And these my people

Evacuated as if criminal
Rescued by neighbors
Shot by soldiers

Adamant they belong

The rest of the world can now see
What I have seen

Do not look away

The rest of the world lives here too
In America

[images by Lisa Krantz from AP via Times Picayune]

the day before

UPDATE: "Five Days with Katrina" had moved and, thanks to Silvia Morales who told me where it went, the link below now works once again

I haven't seen anything like this site before now. This album, "Five Days with Katrina," is in the form of a five-day diary posted by someone who survived the New Orleans hurricane inside the French Quarter. There are almost two hundred extraordiary images accompanied by some fascinating captions.

I haven't gone through more than a few dozen myself yet, but wanted to broadcast the site right away. I have to say that the photographs of ancient deserted streets taken just before the storm hit are incredibly beautiful.

I don't know much about this wonderful witness, but his name is Alvaro R. Morales Villa.

[thanks to Vincent Fisher for the link]

I couldn't begin to say who's the prettiest

The caption supplied with the photo reads:

Bavarian herdsmen in trad