A Frolic of My Own

Jazz, Books, Food, and the Writing Life

Blogging from New Orleans, La

18 May 2010

Other people’s prose:

“New Orleans” is the Big Easy that the tourists go to so they can drink themselves into a stupor on Bourbon Street and connect themselves to a prefab sense of the city’s character, which is built on a series of stereotypes — most of which are self-perpetuated.

At the same time, the real New Orleans and Katrina belong on that blog “Stuff White People Like” because both continually attract a kind of seeker, from Brad Pitt’s green rebuilding effort to writer Dave Eggers’s “Zeitoun,” and on down — well-meaning people who want to bring their special understanding for the city’s tastes, sounds and people.

It’s fascinating to watch “Treme” skirt both the drunk’s indifference and the intellectual’s arrogance. What results in the first three episodes is a much fuller celebration of place and soul; everything you’re initially going to remember about the series is the music, but do stick around for the stories. I say all this as someone who lived in New Orleans for four years, in college, and came away with only an infinitesimal (and youthful) understanding of its complexities. Like most visitors, I let the bon temps rouler right off into meaninglessness. All I ever knew for sure about New Orleans was that it was doomed.

Among the endless words I read on Treme, Hank Stuever’s comments in the Washington Post make the most sense.

Posted by Todd at 10:06 am | No Comments

4 May 2010

Slate asks, “Why is Miller Lite’s ad campaign more about the container than the beer?”

Because the beer tastes like shit. Next question.

Posted by Todd at 1:23 pm | No Comments

1 May 2010

Sloppy thinking can matter more than months of good reporting. In New Orleans, we learned that after Katrina. No amount of solid journalism from the Times-Picayune, NPR, or the New York Times could overcome the perception that a hurricane, and not a massive engineering failure, caused the flooding in New Orleans. It was, people continue to say even today, a “natural disaster.”

Since oil started pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, the New York times has covered the crisis better than any other national outlet. Today, though, the paper added its voice to the growing murmur of spin that casts what happened on that BP platform as a “natural disaster.” In a story on the political implications of President Obama’s handling of the crisis, Helene Cooper writes:

Natural disasters provide great opportunities, or great peril, for presidents. President Bush’s slow response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, magnified by his now-infamous “You’re doing a heck of a job, Brownie” praise of his FEMA director, Michael Brown, cemented an impression that his administration failed to act with enough urgency to address the suffering of tens of thousands of people.

This morning I wrote an email to the NYT:

Dear Editors,

An article today by Helene Cooper states that both the BP oil spill and Katrina were “natural disasters.” That is false.

The spill and the damage from Katrina, at least in New Orleans, were both caused by human error and engineering failures.

Sincerely,
Todd Price

This is the paper’s reply:

Dear Mr. Price:

We are aware that many people want us to make the distinction between Katrina and the flooding.

But Ms. Cooper did not call the flooding in New Orleans a natural disaster. She called the hurricane Katrina a natural disaster. And that is correct: a hurricane is a natural disaster.

I think all the families who were displaced and who lost loved ones would agree that a hurricane did exist.

Best regards,

Greg Brock
Senior Editor/Standarde

I considered many responses. In one of the politer versions, I wondered if Mr. Brock’s failure to address Ms. Cooper’s characterization of the oil spill as a “natural disaster” means that the New York Times stands by that description?

I also wanted to point out to Mr. Brock that a hurricane is actually a storm and not a natural disaster. Hurricanes often make landfall without causing damage that anyone would call disastrous. In fact, if our levees had worked as designed, that’s exactly what would have happened in New Orleans.

In the end, what’s the point of a response? I don’t have the impression Mr. Brock is looking for a conversation.

Posted by Todd at 1:34 pm | Comments (20)