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X marks the spot

December 15, 2008 By Meera 1 Comment

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Click on image for slide show.

There was a great egret, three feet tall if it was an inch, standing in the middle of Flood Street. Before Hurricane Katrina surged the city, there were once rows of houses instead of the weedy wild fields that now fill the expanses between the asphalt. The tall bird stood, considering, and flocks of starlings chattered in their watery language from the branches of the thick oaks that remained standing, battered but alive, nearby. I was in the Lower Ninth Ward, seeing, finally, what had happened to the city of New Orleans.

I lived there in the Big Easy once, when I was an eighteen-year-old kid trying out architecture school before leaving the school and the place in search of something and somewhere else. Then, as now, it struck me as a city from some other time, some other country. Certainly not America. The architecture, intricate and rotting; the food, heavy and complex, distending the belly; the air, wet and erotic; the divide between tourists and those who lived there — the number a fraction of what it once was — a chasm that had grown in some ways and shrunk in others. Everyone we met was kind, generous, some fierce pride about survival uniting them in defeat and resilience both.

The Prospect.1 New Orleans (P.1), apparently the largest biennial of contemporary art ever organized in the country, was taking place throughout the city, at established art museums as well as warehouses that had been transformed into museums, rough with plywood floors and alive with music and sound. There was art at the city parks and universities and Ideal Auto Repair. Outdoor installations included the frame of a woman’s house who had enough money to rebuild, until the contractor ran off with her money, leaving her nothing. Shuttle buses took us out, farther and farther from the screaming sameness of Bourbon Street – to St. Claude and then the Lower Ninth Ward, a place that no one had heard of before August 29, 2005. Rain fell from a slate sky as we passed houses still boarded up and silent. Half of the houses I saw  were still marked with the large X — spray-painted signs that rescue and recovery teams who inspected houses, one by one but much too late, left to mark their passage. A date, the agency acronym,  a marking of what they found – the number of dead.

Other houses were freshly painted. Life resumed.

It was the second thing I learned about New Orleans before I went there for school, (the first was that there were as many bars as churches, and a lot of both). But the second thing I learned was that parts of the Crescent City lie as much as 18 feet below sea level. It’s an impossible city. They rebuild, slowly, but the levees are still weak and more storms likely. I was reminded of my visit to a relief camp set up on the shores of south India after the tsunami. Another storm will come, someday, but, really, where else are the fisherman and their families who live in these seaside villages to go? In New Orleans, most of the people don’t live off the sea, but they do live below it. I looked at the length of the levee where a rogue barge struck during Katrina, causing or accelerating the breach that resulted in the worst of the damage. The rebuilt wall looks like an eight-foot concrete barrier. It looks insignificant. Unsubstantial. It is not angled, to help lean its slight frame against the wall of water that lies beyond.

More art stood there among the waist-high grass, an extension ladder stretching up to a suspended window frame thirty feet above, defying gravity; metal letters as tall as large child, spelled out in a circle, “HAPPILY EVER AFTER.” Mostly it was wide open space, a place for the birds that have wings to lift them out if needed, along with a few structures, widely spaces. Two trailers parked next to a double grave. The house of Common Ground Relief. A half dozen Make It Right eco-houses like splashes of child’s paint.

But much of the city is as I remembered it from twenty years ago. The stuffed artichoke from Frankie and Johnny’s. The swill at Cooter Brown’s. The smell of iron from the brakes of the St. Charles streetcar, acrid on the tongue. The rain that falls, heavy, lingering in the grand oaks whose branches reach back to the ground, as though they, too, are lazy from the heat.

Go. Remember this place that shouldn’t be there, but is. I recommend the Avenue Garden Hotel, a cozy place right on St. Charles, that is struggling to keep it together as the economy hits the city like yet another storm. Go and listen to the music, transcendent in the night.

See more photos on Flickr

Jazz at the Spotted Cat
Jazz at the Spotted Cat

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Art, New Orleans

giving thanks in St. Bernard

December 1, 2008 By Meera Leave a Comment

Wes the Violet Cowboy

Wes the Violet Cowboy

Wes the Violet Cowboy is emblazoned in block letters with a Sharpie marker across the back of Wes Kramer’s yellow shirt. He’s standing outside the back door of the Frederick J. Sigur Civic Center in Arabi, just outside of New Orleans proper, where dinner is being served as rain clouds move in. The front of the building is still battened up with sheets of plywood, and only about half of the businesses along Judge Perez Drive look like they’re still in business, but here  the kitchen is running and the great room is filling up with people. There are more volunteers with their white t-shirts than those seeking meals, and most eyes fall on Wes as he walks into the room that echoes with the sound of voices. He props up his guitar against a chair while he goes to get a plate of turkey and fixings. The guitar was given to him by his Aunt Sue more than forty years ago, and it is bordered with Mardi Gras doubloons nailed into the wood and identical to the ones woven into his belt. He sits down to eat, his daughter across the table from him, and her son next to her. The boy has his earphones in, but he watches every move his grandfather makes, and smiles each time his grandfather makes someone else smile, which is often.

Wes has never left his home in Violet in St. Bernard Parish but for two years in the Army, when he was stationed at Fort Dix in New Jersey in 1961-2. He is happy that he was too late for Korea and too early for Vietnam. He was content to ride out his service in the North and return home to a house that made it through all the storms before Katrina.

“All the hurricanes that passed could not take the tin off that house,” he says, olive eyes set in a weathered face. He has a toothless grin that comes easily and only once disappears, as he tells me about his house filling with water – he holds his hand up to chest level – and that he wanted to get to the nursing home where his mom was, but he just couldn’t, he just….

He thanks God for his daughter, who has taken him in. He thanks God for giving him the ability to write songs that make people laugh. At sixteen, he picked up the guitar. At 46, the parish voted in his song, “Hearts of St. Bernard” as the official parish song. At 71, today, he steps up to the mic and plays the song to the several hundred people who are eating their Thanksgiving meal. The room fills with applause when he finishes the song. And then he plays another that he sings when blessing the shrimp boats. His grandson, earphones still plugged into his ears, sings along, mouthing each and every word.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

map making in new orleans

November 27, 2008 By Meera Leave a Comment

Brodsky & Utkin

Brodsky & Utkin

For my first assignment in my first (and last) year of architecture school, we were given black, white, and grey sheets of construction paper, some glue and a pair of scissors. I was almost surprised they didn’t tell us not to run with sharp objects in our hands, and to pass them, if we’d please, handle-first to our neighbors when sharing. But the assignment was this: make three maps of your home (meaning the place where we’d grown up and just left, heading to these hinterlands of higher education), graphically using just the three tones. The first map was your block, the second your town, the third the greater area of your county or township.

Each one, I found, was progressively harder. The further I radiated out from my house, the harder it was to remember what went where, especially using the unambiguous line of cut construction paper and not a more forgiving medium such as pencil, which can be fudged and smudged. This was long before Google Earth, but cut by cut I formed the shape of the place that had shaped me. The pond where I fished for sunnies with my brother. The woods (long gone now) that I cut through on my way to grade school. The two rivers that bordered the small town. The ocean they drained into. We rarely look at maps of the places we grow up in, and I imagine the information that guides us through these local landscapes without thought are lodged in some deep recess of the brain. The knowing below knowledge. We learned, through that assignment, in that magnificent stone building, how to make our own maps of the worlds we inhabited. How to define space. I quit architecture, but some lessons remain.

I’m back in New Orleans, the home of that freshman year of my life. It’s been a dozen years since I was last here, long before Katrina came, conquered and left. I hope to walk by that building where I spent many an all-nighter, to cross St. Charles and see if the grand old tree I remember from 20 years ago is still there, it’s tremendous branches still sweeping the ground. Tomorrow we’ll help serve a thanksgiving dinner at the Civic Center, but there’s also a long list of restaurants to hunt down in the pursuit of fried artichokes and crawfish and beignets and booze. Hopefully I’ll check out the Prospect.1 Biennial with art installations all over the city, including the recovering Ninth Ward.

But I leave you with an assignment. Draw a map of your place, however you want to define that. If your supply of construction paper and glue is low, then paper and pen, not pencil, will do. No research. No internet. Just you and the recesses of your mind. Let me know what you come up with. Governor Palin gets her own special assignment — to draw a map of Africa.

And happy thanksgiving.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: New Orleans

Fatso perestupidjerk

November 8, 2008 By Meera Leave a Comment

falcon

photo of Cornell Medical Center falcon, the cocky bastard, by Tom Templeton

The satirical newspaper, The Onion, does it again.

Peregrine Falcon Acting Pretty Cocky Since Being Taken Off Endangered Species List

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: peregrine falcon

an international election

November 6, 2008 By Meera Leave a Comment

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There will not likely be a revolution. But a shift did happen on Tuesday night. I join the world, less those who despite all evidence to the contrary believe things were going swimmingly, in a collective sigh of relief. And revel in the miraculous ability to still be moved by the power of words spoken by a – gasp! – politician.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Vote. Here. Now.

November 4, 2008 By Meera Leave a Comment

Down Parkside, Bedford, and Winthrop, the line does wind.

Down Parkside, Bedford, and Winthrop, the line does wind.

Jess & I fixed some tea and headed to the polls right at 6 am, when they opened here in New York. While it seems that everyone I know in other parts of the country already voted long ago — early voting, mail-in ballots — it’s today or nothing here. People were streaming in from all directions to join the quickly growing line that went around the corner, and around the corner again. An hour and a half later, I was in the solid metal booth, strangely reassured by the old-school machine being used in the 63rd precinct. And not reassured that the other booth for the same district was already out-of-service. I stepped in. I cranked the red lever to the right. I voted. I pulled the crank back to the left, and with a resounding THUNK, my vote was cast. I believe. I do believe. If one doesn’t believe, then there is nowhere to go from here. I fear my cynicism runs deep, yet still I hope we are on the brink of some paradigm shift we are long overdue to make. Age of Aquarius anyone?

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Slumdog Millionaire and chicken nugget barnyard

October 28, 2008 By Meera Leave a Comment

OK, I know I said I was only going to do this blog thing while I was on the road, but… I got to go to a pre-release screening last night of Slumdog Millionaire, the new film by English director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting). It takes place in teeming Mumbai, following Jamal from his boyhood in the slums to his fidgeting moment on national television when he lands on the game show, “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” — and answers the questions correctly, one by one. The story unfolds in aching beauty and agony. Keep your eyes out for this in 2009 when it is released.

Afterwards, I went to see the latest by Banksy, who I only knew as a graffiti artist, famed for his politically charged images and his eternal inability to be identified, well, maybe. Bansky’s West Village Pet Store, on Seventh Avenue, is set up in a small shop space and filled with displays of animitronic animals and procesed food products that you can see here and here.

Having recently written a piece about a falcon cam for The New York Times, I stood soaking up the uncomfortable irony of the scene behind the storefront window — two baby surveillance cameras, sitting in their nest, eagerly reaching up to their surveillance camera mama, all moving in a decidedly birdlike manner. Further down the window, chicken nuggets bobbed into a plastic container of sauce.

“I wanted to make art that questioned our relationship with animals and the ethics and sustainability of factory farming,” Banksy explained in an official press release. “But it ended up as chicken nuggets singing.”

Inside, an eerily lifelike chimp sat in his cage, headphones on, transfixed by the television set showing Discovery channel images of chimps mating, face-to-face. His face moved in subtle response, his belly rose and fell with breath, and one hand held a remote while the other rested easily on his groin.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Banksy, Slumdog Millionaire

the things i have collected

October 23, 2008 By Meera Leave a Comment

The odometer read 10,859.1 miles when I turned onto the cobblestones that mark the beginning of my street in Brooklyn. If I ignore the pile of reporter’s notebooks, the infinite hours of audio recordings that need to be transcribed, and the stack of books I’ve amassed in this two-month trip, the things that I’ve collected could fit in my hand. They rode with me in the little carpeted nook next to the gear shift. I started with a soapstone carving of Ganesh, a token of the gods I have carried with me for longer than I can remember. He’s led me along the ribbons of highway in safety; maybe it was his presence that kept me from sideswiping that guy in my blind spot in California, and being sideswiped by the lady whose blind spot I was in in Montana. The elephant god who, along with audio books, Radio Lab, This American Life and gallons of caffeinated beverages, kept me alert and mostly at the speed limit.

There is an acorn, small and dry enough that it rattles when you shake it, that Jim Weaver stopped his truck and got out to pluck from the dwarf desert oak plant. He waded through the waist-high grass to get it, handing it to me as he told me of the Indians that once roamed this New Mexico plateau, when a bumper crop of the acorns would “beat the hide off your shins,” the plants were so thick with them. “They say,” he told me looking across the endless stretch of flat land over the steering wheel of his truck, “that Bonnie and Clyde hid out here.” Burrowing owls stood like sentries among the sand sage as we bumped along in the ruts past them.

There is a shiny copper bullet that has been shot through ballistics gel, causing its tip to flare into an O’Keeffe-like flower, four-petaled and deeply grooved. Peter Jenny of the Peregrine Fund handed it to me as I sat with him and Tom Cade at the Fund’s World Center of Birds of Prey in Boise. It’s weight is solid and in it lies the hope that condors can fly free again in the places where men now hunt with lead ammunition, mushy and toxic and most unflower-like in its firing.

More copper. A penny, year 2005, found face up on the threshold of a Super 8 motel in Salt Lake City like some lucky charm telling me all was right with the world despite word of an economic collapse in some far-off place with tall buildings. In two months, I only needed or wanted to stay in a hotel less than seven days. I camped when I could, in my brother’s backyard, in the shadow of Mt. Shasta, overlooking the canyon of the Colorado River. To everyone who put a pillow under my head, fed me and let me use their washing machines and bathtubs, I thank you. The people who had to smell me after I visited you thank you also. The generosity was as boundless and welcome as the western skies I traveled under.

I took a bit of the earth with me. A rock from a dried up tributary that I ventured into with a friend as we climbed down to the edge of the Colorado River, wide and determined as it headed toward the Grand Canyon. I hold the image in my mind of our two shadows contoured to the red desert rock, two forms instead of one. We passed a couple returning, leaning heavily on their walking sticks as the shadows grew longer, who warned us that it was tough going ahead. We scrambled onward into the fading light, confirming our mutual belief that the idea of waiting until you retire, until age has leached the motion from your limbs, to see all the magnificent, magical and nearly inaccessible places in this world is a waste indeed. Every person I have interviewed, every friend I have visited with on this trip, seemed to me to hold this belief like some core guiding light.

Add a small bough of cedar to the dashboard.

Add a sprig of sage, pungent and hopeful.

Then there is the invisible, collected along the journey as well, the reason for the road, the stories of the people I had planned for months to see, and those who were an unexpected surprise. Their words filled in the blanks in my mind, their faces took shape in my memory, the way they held themselves, their reserve or openness when faced with my notebook and recorder and onslaught of questions. We talked of subspecies variation within Falco peregrinus, about migration and movement and breeding and believing, but we also talked about the books they read as boys that led them to go out and trap their first red-tailed hawk. The impact of a Disney movie or a National Geographic article. Scientists,  biologists, zoologists, geneticists, toxicologists, falconers, all people with questions that drive them forward in inquisition. They seek answers, but I think that more than that, they seek the next question. They make statements knowing they can shift. That it’s all a work-in-progress.

And intertwined in the travels were friends and family, precious and scattered across the continent, and the joy and despair in learning about the latest chapters in their lives. Of lives that are just beginning and others that are reaching their end.

I am now the keeper of these tales, and all I can do is try to pass them along, to share them with those who care to listen. In the stories we remain. In the stories life persists.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

SEJ Conference 2008

October 21, 2008 By Meera Leave a Comment

The Society of Environmental Journalists met in Roanoke for their 18th annual conference. This was my third time attending and the gathering of 800+ journalists from around the country (and globe) is always overwhelming in its content (which can make one walk quite sure that we are, indeed, toast), inspiring in its breadth (making you once again rise to face a new day), and a good reminder that I am part of wide community of people who are telling the important stories that link humans to the physical and fragile world we inhabit. Some highlights:

I already wrote about concerns about lead poisoning from ammunition, but Marc Edwards from Virginia Tech has been studying lead in drinking water at public schools. While the EPA has set 10 ppm (parts per million) as the acceptable level (and there was discussion of this too being much too high to mitigate low-level poisoning), Edwards has found levels in the hundreds and even as high as 5,000 ppm. This is a hazardous waste level. His research found that 30% of the schools tested had elevated levels beyond EPA standards, yet there is no requirement for testing because the public water source has been deemed acceptable. “You’d have to eat six Thomas-the-Trains to get the same level as what we saw in some of these schools,” he said.

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, gave a keynote luncheon talk about climate change.  Someone, Dr. Pachauri said, once asked Gandhi if he wanted to see India reach the level of prosperity that Britain had. It is a question that echoes in different forms today more than ever, usually in the context of the West having no right to now tell those in the East that they have to hinder in their development. Gandhi’s response? It took Britain using resources from half the world to reach their level of prosperity. How many planets would India require?

The last day of the conference was a blessing, tearing at the thin fabric of my skin after these two months on the road, on thinking about place and the creatures that fly above and what we’ve done – are doing – to the land below our feet. The conference crowds had thinned and a cold front had dusted the sidewalks with frost when we gathered around our coffee cups in the small intimate room to hear Wendell Berry – Kentucky farmer, activist, and writer – read and talk with fellow Southern authors Ann Pancake and Denise Giardina. They spoke of the greatest environmental disaster in their region, and quite arguably the country: mountaintop coal mining. While I once spent a good part of my time fighting to keep large trees standing upright upon the land, this is a battle for the mountains themselves. See images here to grasp the extent of this devastation. John Prine’s song, Paradise, came filtering into my mind.

And just in case you haven’t heard of Wendell Berry, here’s one of his classic poems, Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front. Read this and then read more.

Here’s a video of him giving the same speech he read to us – “a speech against the state government,” he said in his introduction.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgfMu2NxtZI]

It was a room full of journalists and they asked the unanswerable question of how to get this information out so people will care, so that it will effect them. Write the stories, said Wendell, that you are authorized to tell. And find the one way to tell it. He quoted this, but I don’t know if they are his words or someone else’s. Either way, they bear repeating:

A thousand deaths, a thousand sufferings, makes a plateau. It is a bed of nails you can lie upon. But one death, one moment of suffering, one Lear, one Hamlet, is the point of sorrow.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Society of Environmental Journalists

into the fall

October 21, 2008 By Meera Leave a Comment

summer falls

summer falls

I drove into autumn, leaving the warmth of Texas behind, seeing Arkansas for the first time, traversing the breadth of Tennessee and arriving in Roanoke, Virginia with the trees ablaze.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

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