Friday, November 04, 2005
Despite losing it all, Pete Fountain plans to continue playing, marching
Associated Press
Pete Fountain's home in nearby Bay St. Louis, Miss., told his life story --
gold albums, pictures posing with four presidents, thank-you notes from Frank
Sinatra, and beloved clarinets and other vintage instruments.
But Hurricane Katrina wiped virtually all the treasures away, destroying his
plantation-style home and about 10 instruments -- even a grand piano. Fountain
and wife Beverly survived after multiple evacuations that took them from Cajun
Country to Cotton Country when Katrina and Hurricane Rita struck.
Still, at 75, Fountain's intent on performing again.
"Those two ladies, especially Katrina, really got me," Fountain said recently
in his newly rented home in Hammond, about 50 miles northwest of New Orleans.
"But I have two of my best clarinets so I'm OK. I can still toot."
The hurricanes took a heavy toll on the many legendary musicians of New
Orleans. Fats Domino, who was rescued from rising floodwaters in a boat, found
his piano overturned among mud and debris and his house in ruins. Aaron Neville
lost four Grammys when his home was flooded.
Despite the losses, the musicians who brought fame to New Orleans are not
giving up on the city where jazz was born.
"I'm not running from New Orleans," said Lucien Barbarin, who plays trombone
with Harry Connick Jr. and suffered severe damage to his home. "I'm going to
stay because I was born and raised there and I'm going to pass away there. We
name drinks after hurricanes. We should be used to this."
Fountain, renowned for leading his Half-Fast Walking Club on Fat Tuesday down
St. Charles Avenue to the French Quarter, said that tradition will continue. A
prominent member in recent years has been actor John Goodman.
"We might walk in our drawers, but we're going to walk," Fountain said.
Among Fountain's losses were photos of Louis Armstrong, with whom he performed,
his collection of vintage guns, a Porsche and his part-time gig at Casino Magic
in Bay St. Louis because of severe hurricane damage.
He found one of his gold records, covered with mud, and one of the two
clarinets was recovered by a neighbor a few blocks from his house.
But Fountain, who planned to give his memorabilia to his grandchildren, said he
and his wife consider themselves fortunate to have survived. They still have a
home in New Orleans and recently celebrated their 54th wedding anniversary.
"My world was going one way, now it's going the other," he said. "I just hope
we can come back. I know the French Quarter is going to make it. Besides the
Quarter, everybody has got to get it together and get it going."
(Copyright 2005 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
New Orleans' troubled renaissance
By Kris Axtman | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
HOUSTON - Darrin Butler exhibited at an art show in his hometown of New Orleans two days before hurricane Katrina hit and was "too lazy" to unpack his car before evacuating. Inside was all his artwork and two pairs of pants.
Since that time, Mr. Butler has been showing that art at festivals across the country.
"If they do decide to rebuild [New Orleans], we will probably have a better, cleaner, safer place to live," he says from his booth at the Bayou City Art Festival in downtown Houston. Butler plans to return as soon as the city is livable, but he says he knows many artists who won't.
Displaced musicians, cooks, street performers, painters, and costume designers are closely watching New Orleans' slow revival. The city has always been a rare mix of peoples and cultures, a breeding ground for creativity set apart from the strict Christianity of much of the rest of the South. But many of these artists can't mount a successful encore there unless the Big Easy recaptures their audiences - and its own spirit.
That may not be easy, cultural experts say.
"In New Orleans, some of what creates the city's mystique and culture is its depth. When you strip away the top tier of excellence, there is another layer of excellence, and another, and another," says Ari Kelman, a history professor at the University of California at Davis and author of "A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans." Any city in the United States that has the money and the desire can erect magnificent architecture, put on a great series of jazz concerts, and employ celebrity chefs at its finest restaurants, he adds. "What makes New Orleans different is the vernacular, the everyday. The fact that you can go into just about any diner in the city and have a meal that's better than some of the best food in the country. I'm not talking about an $80 dinner. I'm talking about an $8 lunch of shrimp étouffée or a crawfish po' boy. That's different."
The potential loss of everyday culture worries Mark Samuels, owner of Basin Street Records, an independent New Orleans label.
"Where I think the culture has the possibility of changing the most is the brass bands and second-line parades that are grounded in some of the poorer areas - those that have been the most heavily flooded," he says. "Depending on how things are redeveloped, there may or may not be affordable housing for them to return to."
Urban planners have started descending on New Orleans in the wake of hurricane Katrina with the best intentions: figuring out how to better integrate the social classes.
"But a lot of New Orleans' culture was built around poverty: the Mardi Gras Indians, the neighborhood restaurants selling po' boys, the kids playing jazz on the sidewalks," says Ferrel Guillory, a native Louisianian and director of the program on Southern politics, media, and public life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "So the challenge is to preserve what's worth preserving - the jazz, the food, the art - but to do it in a way that mitigates or ameliorates the class divide."
If urban planners re-create New Orleans as a smaller, more compact city without the Lower Ninth Ward or Treme, for instance, they will be creating "a kind of Disneyland, a gentrified historical-preservation mall with the French Quarter serving as its anchor store," says Professor Kelman.
Richard Russell is one artist who has already decided he's not returning. He managed to save his art, but lost his home in the flooding.
"I have 99 percent assurance that New Orleans will be back stronger and better than before," he says. "The big question is, 'When will the tourists feel comfortable coming back in?' Business in the French Quarter depends on foot traffic." His art gallery there cost him $10,000 a month. "So you are really under pressure to make a lot of money just to pay your rent. And that isn't going to happen for a long time."
"I love New Orleans," adds Mr. Russell, now permanently settled with his family in Cullman, Ala. "But I'm ready for the country life."
Other cities can also expect displaced New Orleans artists to stay on.
Take Kermit Ruffins. A well-known New Orleans trumpeter on the Basin Street Records label, he has been doing nightly gigs in Houston since he arrived after the storm. While he's sure New Orleans will "swing again," he says the response here "has been real pleasant and so lovable. It makes me feel good."
So good, he says, he is planning to keep his apartment here and travel between Houston and New Orleans as much as possible. "I will be swinging in both cities, to the best of my ability."
New Orleans still retains advantages for artists.
"The atmosphere encourages them," says Sharon McBroom, visual-artist manager for the Bayou City Art Festival. "It has its own culture that is separate from the rest of the United States. Yes, business goes on, but New Orleanians are always in pursuit of pleasure. Food, drink, dancing, enjoying art, it's the driving force."
And because the medium home price is $85,000, it's a city where artists can live relatively economically.
"It's cheap, which is important for artists," says Ms. McBroom. "Other cities appreciate the bohemian, but you can't rent an apartment for $425 [a month] in San Francisco, Santa Fe, or New York."
It's far from clear what the new New Orleans will be like. But Mr. Samuels, who has relocated his family to Austin, Texas, feels a responsibility to be one of the first to return.
So does Tory McPhail, executive chef at the famous Commander's Palace in New Orleans. He has been working with a handful of his sous-chefs and cooks at Brennan's of Houston temporarily, but says his restaurant will reopen as soon as potable water is restored.
"The New Orleans cooking community is tighter than ever," he says. "And when we return, I think the creative push will be stronger than ever."
Thursday, November 03, 2005
FEMA Official Says Boss Ignored Warnings
In the midst of the chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina, a Federal Emergency Management Agency official in New Orleans sent a dire e-mail to Director Michael Brown saying victims had no food and were dying. No response came from Brown.
Instead, less than three hours later, an aide to Brown sent an e-mail saying her boss wanted to go on a television program that night — after needing at least an hour to eat dinner at a Baton Rouge, La., restaurant.
The e-mails were made public Thursday at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing featuring Marty Bahamonde, the first agency official to arrive in New Orleans in advance of the Aug. 29 storm. The hurricane killed more than 1,200 people and forced hundreds of thousands to evacuate.
Bahamonde, who sent the e-mail to Brown two days after the storm struck, said the correspondence illustrates the government's failure to grasp what was happening.
"There was a systematic failure at all levels of government to understand the magnitude of the situation," Bahamonde testified. "The leadership from top down in our agency is unprepared and out of touch."
The 19 pages of internal FEMA e-mails show Bahamonde gave regular updates to people in contact with Brown as early as Aug. 28, the day before Katrina made landfall. They appear to contradict Brown, who has said he was not fully aware of the conditions until days after the storm hit. Brown quit after being recalled from New Orleans amid criticism of his work.
Brown had sent Bahamonde, FEMA's regional director in New England, to New Orleans to help coordinate the agency's response. Bahamonde arrived on Aug. 27 and was the only FEMA official at the scene until FEMA disaster teams arrived on Aug. 30.
As Katrina's outer bands began drenching the city Aug. 28, Bahamonde sent an e-mail to Deborah Wing, a FEMA response specialist. He wrote: "Everyone is soaked. This is going to get ugly real fast."
Subsequent e-mails told of an increasingly desperate situation at the New Orleans Superdome, where tens of thousands of evacuees were staying. Bahamonde spent two nights there with the evacuees.
On Aug. 31, Bahamonde e-mailed Brown to tell him that thousands of evacuees were gathering in the streets with no food or water and that "estimates are many will die within hours."
"Sir, I know that you know the situation is past critical," Bahamonde wrote. "The sooner we can get the medical patients out, the sooner we can get them out."
A short time later, Brown's press secretary, Sharon Worthy, wrote colleagues to complain that the FEMA director needed more time to eat dinner at a Baton Rouge restaurant that evening. "He needs much more that (sic) 20 or 30 minutes," Worthy wrote.
"Restaurants are getting busy," she said. "We now have traffic to encounter to go to and from a location of his choise (sic), followed by wait service from the restaurant staff, eating, etc. Thank you."
In an Aug. 29 phone call to Brown informing him that the first levee had failed, Bahamonde said he asked for guidance but did not get a response.
"He just said, 'Thank you,' and that he was going to call the White House," Bahamonde said.
Senators on the committee were dismayed.
"We will examine further why critical information provided by Mr. Bahamonde was either discounted, misunderstood, or simply not acted upon," said GOP Sen. Susan Collins (news, bio, voting record) of Maine, who heads the committee. She decried the "complete disconnect between senior officials and the reality of the situation."
Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman (news, bio, voting record), committee's top Democrat, said Bahamonde's story is "ultimately infuriating and raises serious questions which our committee's investigation must answer."
In e-mails, Bahamonde described to his bosses a chaotic situation at the Superdome. Bahamonde noted also that local officials were asking for toilet paper, a sign that supplies were lacking at the shelter.
"Issues developing at the Superdome. The medical staff at the dome says they will run out of oxygen in about two hours and are looking for alternative oxygen," Bahamonde wrote regional director David Passey on Aug. 28.
Bahamonde said he was stunned that FEMA officials responded by continuing to send truckloads of evacuees to the Superdome for two more days even though they knew supplies were in short supply.
"I thought it amazing," he said. "I believed at the time and still do today, that I was confirming the worst-case scenario that everyone had always talked about regarding New Orleans."
