I Thought It Warranted a Cake

What I Didn't Tell You That Night

On this day last year I returned home from trip to Thailand to discover that the hurricane we all thought hadn’t harmed New Orleans too badly had actually precipitated the biggest disaster in US history. I spent the end of 2005 in my favorite city, and wrote this in mid-January upon returning to the UK:

We'd driven down, and had dropped off the extra rental car at the Louis Armstrong airport, caught a cab, and, eyes peeled for any signs of damage, took off down the highway into the city. As we'd searched for the rental car drop-off we had seen a lot full of brand new white FEMA trailers all lined up in neat little rows, windows still wrapped in factory plastic. As we drove through the outskirts of the city we saw tattered billboards, chain hotels with broken glass in the windows, parking lots with a few dusty, seemingly abandoned cars. Nothing out of the ordinary for this place, the corrupt and dirty state where I've spent half of my life. It's part of the charm for some of us, the reason others always choose to forget us. From time to time we'd pass a suburban subdivision and catch sight of a patch of blue on a roof. But there was nothing to suggest the damage we'd seen on the news; we'd see this a couple of days later as we disaster-toured through St. Bernard and the 7th Ward, my dad snapping pix from the trunk of my parents' SUV that we'd all managed to squeeze into. It was late afternoon as we hit Treme. We had fleeting glimpses of the old housing projects, but not enough sight of them to see how these self-contained near-villages, formerly full of deep bass beats and people walking, driving, barbecuing, partying and napping on porches, had been abandoned.

We entered the Quarter on St. Ann because we were meeting our families at Place d'Armes, our 3rd or 4th and final accommodation option because our first choices in Treme and the Marigny had never re-opened or were occupied by contracters doing important rebuilding works for the city such as sorting out Saks 5th Avenue and the mall. I opened a window hoping to catch the old familiar smell. It was faint but still there. Spices, pralines, and from time to time urine and beer. Intoxicating. We did tourist-y things in the Quarter that first evening because your family had never visted the city before. Things were tame but jumping; the curfew had recently been extended. There were military vehicles along Bourbon and yankee animal rescue brigades and contracter-tourists strolling around with those ubiquitous flourescent grenade drinks that started appearing in the 1990s; the whole thing felt a bit like cinematic Casablanca, an insider place for outsiders to get away from the surrounding hell. We dropped in to a few mostly empty bars and listened to some live music. I watched the bandleader at one place sing "All of Me" ("go on take all of me, Katrina") unsmilingly, his eyes darting out to the sidewalk outside every couple of minutes to judge whether they'd get more than our table in that night. Down the street at the more populated Fritzell's, we asked the band to play "Waltzing Matilda" for you and your family. They told us later, as people would keep telling us over the coming days--sometimes accompanied by tears, sometimes by unexpected bear hugs--how happy they were that we had come back, that we were there with them, and that they themselves had gotten to come home, however many pieces there were to pick up or to try futiley to replace.

It had been four months since I had been living with the news stories, the pictures, the testaments on blogs. With the big and little daily news of Editor B, Jim Louis, The Book, Cliff, Clayton, Michael H., World Class New Orleans, Dangerblond, Poppy Z. B. and so many others, some of whom know each other in real life, some of whom met through blogging, others who maybe don't even know about each other but who are living the same thing in very different ways. I recorded--and continue to record--so much of it, sometimes with sadness, sometimes with hope, and sometimes taken beyond any disecernable feelings by the surreality of it all. Four months I'd spent compiling and mourning for something that I never had any real claim to to begin with. Moping around, obsessing about it all as if I'd been unwillingly separated from some dream boy I was teenager-y smitten with, you said, annoyedly, at one point. And then suddenly I was there in the middle of it, not quite believing it was all still standing, and yet not quite believing that it would ever be back to normal, to the way I remembered it as a little girl on fieldtrips or as an adult on--well, adult trips. Everywhere were little signs, even around the Quarter. The closed shops, the abbreviated menus, the absence of well-known characters and the lemon ice stands, the darkened aquarium, the midwestern college kids working in the tourist bars (like the Pat O'Brien's waiter who tried to fob me off--or was so green he didn't know--about Mr. Eddie, who we knew had perished in the flood). But mostly it was the people we saw everywhere who seemed to have been blown completely away and then had randomly blown back again, sometimes in pieces and sometimes not where they started from and not yet back to where they were meant to be. There was a sense of shell-shockedness about everyone we met. And yet everyone was happy to be home. As was I, in my own way.

That first night it was already getting hot; it would be one of the hottest New Year's Eves on record in a couple of days. We turned on the noisy ceilng fan to sleep in our room that smelled damp and musty from being shut off for four months; we were the first to sleep in it since late August. I went to the bathroom to get ready for bed, and then it all hit me at once. I couldn't stop crying. It all flooded out of me, all the compulsive collecting and containing and digesting I'd been doing as "research" for some film or book project was seeping out of the careful archives I'd created for it and was all around me, suffocatingly big, frustratingly at a stand-still, with no certain future and a washed-away past. And yet I was there, right in the middle of it all, and so much was still standing, and how could I be here just four months later when in September I'd thought it might have all washed away by the time I got back?

I couldn't tell you this properly that night because I was crying too hard, and you were annoyed, and maybe a little scared at this sudden outburst from me, and the way that a place and my past could haunt me so much in the present. So I came to bed and sobbed as silently as I could, thinking of all the people who will never get to come back, even to visit like we were. I thought of everything that surrounded us: the thousands of former pets who'd been left behind, driven frantic and wild by fear and hunger and who were at that moment running in packs all throughout the dark city; the tonnes and tonnes of collapsed and waterlogged wood, bricks and clay that had once stood strong and tall, and that had been built by someone's grandfather, who was proud to call the 9th Ward home at one time; the abandoned carcases of cars and boats and, we'd find out later, people; dolls, photographs, books, and the other scattered artefacts of people's lives, encased in mud in the sidewalks and front yards, waiting futilely for their owners to come back for them, or to at least give them a decent burial; the stifling darkness and quiet of the rest of the city, surrounding us on all sides.

The next morning we got up and had beignets and cafe au laits and were tourists again.

Big in China

My brother and his girlfriend are playing American author Pearl S. Buck and her brother in a film by CCTV, China’s aptly named national television company.

They just finished shooting on Mt. Lushan near Jiujang this weekend.

The Happy Headlines Just Keep Rolling In

The UK's "one year later" reporting on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast has, as expected, got me a bit down. Of course I’m glad it’s actually in the news again. It’s disturbing to me when it’s not. No news is not good news. But I can’t help but wonder whether the stories that darken the papers today and tomorrow (and then inevitably disappear till Mardi Gras) engender much sympathy among those who already think New Orleanians who’ve elected to stay or who are still trying to return home are crazy and that the whole city should be left to Ernesto or whichever hurricane finally finishes it off.

NOLA’s doing a better job than I could of compiling the anniversary coverage appearing nationally and internationally.


But if you want to get a real picture of the daily struggles and triumphs happening in New Orleans, and a sense for why it’s the greatest city in the world, despite its old and new problems, you can’t do much better than starting with this list of New Orleans bloggers.

Many of these bloggers were involved in organising the Rising Tide Conference that took place over the weekend, a conference that aimed to "dispel myths, promote facts, share personal testimonies, highlight progress and regress, discuss recovery ideas, and promote sound policies at all levels." They "aim to be a 'real life' demonstration of internet activism as the nation prepares to mark the one year anniversary of a massive natural disaster followed by governmental failures on a similar scale."

How Did You Know?

A Tekken competition
and dancing till dawn
to Public Enemy and The Fall
= my idea of perfect happiness.

Thanks for Friday night, guys!

"Presenting our case to strangers in our neighbor to the north, America ... well, that will take some doing."

Apt quote from New Orleans author and blogger Poppy Z. Brite, who is probably one of quite a few writers and other New Orleans figures being asked to give their take on the state of things in the national press as the anniversary of Katrina nears. As a regular reader of her blog (but not her novels yet), I have faith she can pull it off. And if she can't, we make like "the Muslims" and create a Hezbollah-like organisation that looks after things in the absence of any real help from elected officials given the “state within a non-state” that New Orleans is, and always has been.

I both dread and look forward to the UK coverage of the anniversary. Around this time last year I was having to explain to my bemused--bemused!--middle-England neighbour that it wasn't just "stupidity" that caused people to not evacuate. I'm not sure if he had even registered that thousands of people (and animals) were still missing, trapped or dying as we spoke. I’m not even sure if I or even the evacuees registered it at that point.

I'm getting drunk just thinking about this! Being the media-slut I am when it comes to all things New Orleans, it's going to be a hard week.

Voodoo

I've been in Edinburgh the last few days with these freaks:

Best New Orleans Recovery Plan I've Heard

"We have a silent majority here that really believes in violence and believes that America's against them. You remember the ramifications from New Orleans, that a lot of dissatisfied people here could ultimately join up with the Muslims or sympathize with them. It's a scary thing here as well as in the UK."

--Charles Payne on one of Fox "News"'s "business" programmes yesterday


Sympathy for the plight of Muslims, another opressed group of people in post 9-11 America?

An awareness of the government's apathy towards New Orleans and the popular hatred of and prejudice against its evacuees?

I'd say it's most definitely time for an organised revolution of dissatisfied residents and exiles of my favourite city, and I'll be the first to join up. I hope it leaves you quaking in your Prada boots Mr Payne.

Welcome Home to Me

I was looking for the Psychadelic Furs to get me back in the mood of being back in the UK, but I found this instead. What a wanker.

Houston, Again.

Castanets on my ipod: we could have taken any of these roads, but nobody knows about this one we chose, and who knows friend how far it goes.

I remember lying in bed in our hotel room in NYC a few months ago, feeling the immensity of the USA. Roads, waterways, tracks all snaking around our hotel and out of the city, across rivers and mountains and plains, like a living, pulsing vascular system. Lost highways through dark trees, modern ovepasses around skyscrapers and bypassing ancient downtowns below, suburban interstates strectching for miles and miles before giving way to plains, little capillaries reaching into the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic. We could have gotten into a car and taken any of these roads out of the city. We could have driven through mountains and fields and over river bridges, and we could have been in New Orleans or Little Rock the very next day, in the Texas dessert twilight or the LA airport to Oz in two. An overnight road down south leads straight to my parents, my childhood, my past. It was just one of many roads, right outside our hotel room.

It could start here, I remember thinking. We could get in a car and go down any of these roads. They're all connected. All okay. Everything pulsing like blood and in harmony. Everything connected.

Here at the airport in Houston it's raining and steam is rising off the runways in the dusk and the 100F air, and all the roads I see lead to the sky and then disappear. Even a phone call feels like a stretch like now. I can't make things fit together.

Rodeo Time

Road Kill Record

AR/LA Hwys. 82, 78, 157, 371; 21/07-03/08

Armadillos: 6
Bats: 1
Birds of Prey: 2
Bobcats: 1
Butterflies: 10+
Cats: 2
Deer: 7
Dogs: 3
Dragonflies: 20+
Fowl: 1
Frogs: 3
Migratory Birds: 1
Possums: 7
Rabbits: 4
Raccoons: 3
Snakes: 1
Squirrels: 2
Texas Grasshoppers: 1
Turtles: 1
Unidentifiable masses of fur: 10+
Waterbirds: 1

Sum Good Eats

Lethally

Flanagans knowing blue eye took in everything. She just dropped out of the race as if she startedrunning backwards. His eagerness, burning in his eyes, sent pleasant little shiversthrough her. If it washer you were for marrying youd have nothing to worry about.

Hey MLJ

Phallic Long Distance Dedication. A moi de toi, xx.

Mr Florence

I am visiting the US and have acquired a Pandora's Box of sorts. Here in the small southern town where I spent my high school years, there is an old cinema that's been around since the mid-1930s. It is called the Cameo Trio. At one time it was one of three cinemas in town, but as people here became more conservative and inward-looking along with the rest of America, the other two shut down. Today, people who want to see blockbusters usually drive to one of the huge multiplexes in one of the surrounding towns. The Cameo has never had a reputation for cleanliness nor for offering any kind of great, movie-going experience. Nonetheless, I and many others feel affectionate towards the place, in no small part due to Mr. W.P. Florence.

Mr Florence ran the Cameo from at least the late 1930s (I have in my possession documents that verify this) until just before his death a few years ago. He was a well-known "character" around town, always dressed in a scruffy gray suit and large black lather shoes, his hair greased back messily. His parents had money, he himself apparently had oil interests (as correspondence of his from senators Fulbright and McClellan suggests), and he attended the same liberal arts university that I did, before a brief stint in the military. Despite owning two residences in town, in his later years he was apparently living out of a backroom of the Cameo. My dad recalls once leaving some reading glasses behind in the cinema, and being led to this room to retrieve them; it was filled on all walls, ceiling to floor, with old newspapers, with only just enough room for a rickety old cot.

The state of this makeshift living space is indicative of the state of the cinema as a whole. It had amazing tile and mirror bathrooms, complete with a huge powder room for the ladies which connected to the "Crying Room" that was attached to the downstairs auditorium. However, everything was always a complete mess. The joke around town was that if you went to the Cameo you might just stay there, as it was impossible to pry your feet from the sticky floor. The viewing experience was less than ideal as well; movies might sometimes cut out in the middle and only if you were lucky would sound come from all speakers and be present during the whole movie.

Mr Florence was apparently well aware of the state of his theatre. My parents once observed another town "character," a strange and moneyed old lady we knew, tell him off about sticking to the floor as she tried to leave her seat. He promptly sent her a bouquet of flowers, and others concur that this was a common deed with him. He never changed the things people complained about, but he did charm everyone.

A few years ago Mr. Florence sold the Cameo to a family who own one of the large multiplexes in a neighbouring town. At the Christmas parade, they promoted the Cameo and their refurbishments on a float with a huge banner that read, "We cleaned up the Cameo!" Bizarrely, trailing behind them on foot was old Mr. Florence himself, holding up a sign that read, "And they did a good job!"

The day after I arrived here, we attended a huge "tag sale" of the estate of Mr. Florence and his late mother. Their two houses had been completely cleaned out, their contents put up for sale by an antiques auctioneer we know. She told us it took weeks to clean out the houses, and at least 5 days to clean everything up--in line with the Cameo itself, some items were so dust-covered you couldn't tell what they were, and the water they used to clean them with frequently became as dirty and thick as mud. I went along hoping to see some cinema memorabilia, and especially to see if there might even be some old film equipment going. From what I heard, there may have been, but it was thrown out due to the house clearers not knowing what it was. Two 16mm projectors were left when I got there, but someone had bought them, and I heard that a few items of what seemed to be antique cinema projectors were let go for $5 apiece before I arrived because no one knew what they were.

There were still a number of interesting items when I arrived, however. In addition to a $5 box load of correspondence with senators and now defunct film distributors such as RKO, vintage puzzles, and an antique rubber stamp set, I made a rash (given its weight and the fact that I don't live in this country) decision to buy Mr Florence's trunk pictured above. I've always wanted an old travel trunk. This was one of three at the sale, and this one cost next to nothing because, you see, it is locked, and no one seems to have the key. I'm sure it's empty, and I'm not sure I want ever to open it. I like that Mr. Florence's name is on its side, and I like owning a little piece of the ongoing death of cinema.

Chez Maison

4 Hour Layover

RIP Green Boots

There is, of course, a yet-to-be-fleshed-out reason (see the colour tinting in Blithe Spirit, the ectoplasmic logoing of Ghostbusters, photographs of the number of Green (and Gray) Lady ghosts that permeate our fair British Isles, and Michael Taussig's colour project) that I chose a GREEN representation of Mark E Smith below, but in the process of posting that image I was sadly reminded that my favourie green suede boots suddenly ripped irreparably the other week.

Wonderful and Frightening

I think few people realise that the title of this blog is inspired by The Fall, perhaps my favourite band of all time (the other half of my blog title--the title in the address--is inspired by one of my favourite texts on surrealism, by Hal Foster; I myself am neither a beauty nor compulsive). Listening to Mark E Smith ranting about computers this evening, I remembered I'd bookmarked this piece of writing that hints at the hauntological possibilities of the Fall; right up my alley, obviously. It happens to be written by one of the contributors to the recent Cultural Fictions conference I attended at Goldsmiths.

At the conference, and while I'm thinking about it (and I really should take notes when I think of these things), I especially enjoyed Mark Broughton's talk on dyschronia in relation to the excellent vintage sci-fi/ghost-fi, made-for-TV flick, The Stone Tape. However, I contend that ghosts are ALWAYS dyscrhonic, not just on the occasions when they're inaccessible through technology and "buried in time," as in The Stone Tape. It's not that technology is used to combat the mysticism surrounding ghosts; in my research on electronic voice phenomena (EVP) and the use of other digital methods of "scientific" ghost hunting, it's the technology that reinforces and redefines the uncanny nature of ghosts--and isn't dyschronia just one more example of the uncanny (being lost in, or TO, time goes beyond other forms of disorientation)? Ghosts are always dyschronic experiences, and even more so when they are stored as endlessly repetitive visual and sonic phenomena in out-of-time-and-space digital archives. Ghosts are irreversibly out of time--through technology they both symbolically and discursively keep repeating (and I don't buy exorcism film-myths and hate how Catholicism has ruined many an otherwise good horror film, but that's a topic for another post). This potential (or inevitable) link of ghosts and technology reinforces Mark B's suggestion (and my own hunch) that ghosts are the ultimate sci-fi figures; they are the ultimate uncanny, as my interminable thesis suggests.

Lost and Found Cat

Look what spent the night last night!
Our neighbours found this strange little kitty wandering around in panic mode in the middle of the street, and came to us "cat people" for advice. We took it in for the evening (well, into the hallway, along with some food and water and a litter tray and bed) and this morning located its grateful owners who gave me a bottle of wine as thanks.

His name is JJ.

It's officially tourist season in Brighton, and I can't even work out on the balcony because the square below has been taken over by European teenagers from various language schools who insist on taking pictures of me on their mobile phones. They are like a plague. The beach (above) has been overrun with the same, so I'll stay indoors and wait for everyone to leave in August.

Summer has returned, after a couple of cloudy sea-breezy days. I took my work and my bikinied self out onto the balcony this afternoon. At one point, a lovely tan women in a summery dress arrived in the square carrying a picnic blanket, some paper cups, and a tasty-looking cake on a crystal cake stand. How nice, I thought, she's setting up for a little afternoon garden party with friends. Maybe it's someone's birthday, and they'll be surprised by the cake. I watched as the woman spread out the blanket, and then herself, in the dappled shade and lush grass underneath a tree, and wondered when her friends would arrive. Then I realised what she was doing. A huge camera and little tripod had emerged from her bag. And so ensued 15 minutes of angling herself and the cake and cups around on the blanket, and lots of snapping and adjusting of lenses. And then as quick as she came she went: cake, cups, blanket and camera were briskly packed away and she strode past the usual group of drinkers, the older lady who feeds the pigeons and that guy who's always practicing juggling, back to some hot and stuffy office or maybe to her work-from-home studio and a computer full of emails from her advertising clients, one of whom is obviously a seller of cakes, or cake stands, or paper cups, or picnic blankets.

Singapore Fling

Ryan Chin (whoever you are), look what you've caused.