you mean creole food from new orleans, not cajun. cajuns are not african american, by and large, and mostly do not live in new orleans, but the river parishes and the western parishes. creoles are mixed ancestry, are from the city, and have different signature dishes.
as someone who thought katrina was just a joke until the last minute panicked evacuation, let me just say it is better to panic and prepare than to believe that it is just hype. it is far better to feel foolish about evacuating or boarding windows or buying water than it is to go through a disaster of any caliber unprepared.
yeah, after katrina our rents practically tripled, and still have not come down. i'm also really, really curious what would happen if a lot of housing stock is damaged in nyc, since it's such a renter heavy city. pretty much all of the relief along the gulf coast went to homeowners and bypassed renters, so i'm wondering what type of programs they would have to develop otherwise.
as a new orleanian, i will say that no, i will not rejoice in anyone's bad luck. hurricanes are the worst. evacuating is the worstest, so hopefully it won't come to that. but if it does, at least you can evac within the city- we can't do that. i sat in traffic for 17 hours during the gustav evac. stay home. buy liquor, canned goods, water, and a flashlight. on the maybe bright side, if you flood it wont take a month to pump out the water?
ha, fine. have fun pretending that having a drink at snake n jakes means you're living on the wild side. hope you feel real good about the 20 bucks you donated to the red cross after the storm. shed a tear next time we go under. i'm sure 15 years worth of mardi gras' means you reaaaally get it. i'm tired of how every time i try to talk to someone about how i feel about my city, they feel the need to pull out their "im new orleans too" balls and set them on the bar. i'm tired of generic complements instead of critical analysis.
it's just that i am exhausted by the dominant view of new orleans being this wonderful wild wonderland and how it's so different than other us cities and has such a rich distinct culture and yaddayadda. i get aggravated with the feeling that those characteristics blind people to the actual high level of dysfunction that exists here, or that somehow the dysfunction and the uniqueness feed into each other in this way that makes people believe that they are experiencing something "more real" than whatever place they are from. it's bread and circuses on this psychological level that really fucks me up. and when people who don't have to spend their daily lives grinding in this place exult it, and who have not lost friends and family to this place, i get uncomfortable. it might just be my personal bullshit at this point. and everyone's fierce ownership over this place- mine included- is also exhausting.
sorry if my overwhelming distress at high levels of fucked-up-ed-ness of the place i call home, and the overwhelming boosterism at how "different" and "magical" it is, offends you. but if you can't see what i'm saying as anything but a personal critique, you don't get what i'm saying.
i mean, i live in new orleans, i love new orleans, i have (often, very very often) gotten very drunk and yelled about how new orleans is the greatest city in the world. i liken living in new orleans to joining a cult. but. the sad fact is new orleans is not the greatest city in the world. new orleans is a violent city built on tremendous inequity, inequality, and poverty. i can get away with living here because i don't depend on public services (unless you count the streetcar, which i ride to work occasionally, and which, tuesday morning, had no power, so i sat on canal street for 30 minutes and shot the shit with the very nice driver and some very pissed off teenagers). the school system is in tatters, the health system is in tatters, the redevelopment post katrina has been a free for all for disaster capitalists. i have a very torturous relationship with this place. frankly, whenever people tell me how much they love new orleans and how it is the best city, oftentimes i think that they're just not paying that close of attention.
there is so much good in georgia! tybee beach! the guidestones! okefenokee! gladys knight's chicken and waffles restaurant! frozen o's at the varsity! boiled peanuts! BOILED PEANUTS.
i bet my home state, louisiana, will be fighting you tooth and nail for this one. luckily for both of us, mississippi exists.
you can ask that same question on behalf young black men.
it's a neat statistical trick- a lot of those jobs were poached from other states. so they were not created anew, just recreated in texas at a loss from wherever they were prior.
oh jesus. for some idiotic reason, one halloween my 4th grade class was shown "watcher in the woods". whoever approved that seriously messed up.
i can understand and sympathize, but as a new orelanian who lives without AC and who doesn't have a car and bikes everywhere, i love and relish the heat and have gotten used to it. i don't have a baby, though, so i definitely can see how awful it must be.
i've not read her work on the matter, but i'd be willing to bet that she didn't study zombies in algiers, algeria- something that you don't directly state, but it's worth nothing that across the mississippi river from the french quarter in new orleans is a neighborhood known as algiers. geographically and culturally speaking, that's probably the algiers that was the location. and since algiers is part of new orleans, it's redundant to name them both...
welcome to every summer in louisiana!
a lot of people did also die out in the east. but yes, no one from the city would ever refer to jazzland being in the ninth ward. it's most definitely referred to as the east. #Incorrect
i read that times article this morning and was deeply confused by it. why anyone looks at the poorest region in the US with the worst social indicators as an opportunity is beyond me. and the georgia budget is only going to seriously fuck all public expenditures on health and human services, transportation, and education for years to come.
a few years ago, a city contractor got caught "fixing" potholes in new orleans by filling them with garbage and then paving over it. so the streets are literally paved in trash. trash and weird rivers that mysteriously bubble out of every crack, turning intersections into mossy, stinky slicks.
i would think that the fact that he had his college girlfriend exorcised because she wanted to have sex would be a bigger reason.
