New Orleans Ain't No City, It's a Scar

"I was playin' every Sunday on Burgundy
in some shitty little bar...
I was working on a novel called "New Orleans
Ain't No City, It's a Scar..."

-Old 97's

Prescient words from Mr. Rhett Miller, once again.

Matt and I drifted down to New Orleans, where we happened to be unemployed, but interested in seeing what's going on after Katrina, and to spend some money in a city that seems like it needs it. We stayed in the French Quarter, the famous, relatively untouched by hurricane district where the riche white French built everything a few feet above sea level, those clever dogs. Here's the Hotel St. Pierre, our digs...



a yellow French Quarter house...



some pretty blue shutters... the French Quarter is the closest to a tidy European town you're gonna get in America. Everything is very historical, there's lovely gaslight at night, and people really put a lot of care into the upkeep of their houses...



Here's where the King (no, not that king, silly!) of Creole lived...



We actually did stay on Burgundy, just like the song... (pronounced bur-GUN-dee)



stucco...



as the frogs say, Francais Quartier...



french and creole language bookstore....



The Arcadie...



And earlier, when nwe were in Mississippi, I mentioned Muddy Waters, the guy who's got his mojo workin'. Ever wonder what that means? We did, so we looked it up. A lot of the old blues guys would go down the river to New Orleans to the voodoo priestesses and buy a "mojo hand" or a "mojo bag," a little sack of herbs that's supposed to make your wished come true. Wishes, as far as bluesmen are concerned, usually meant, "I wish I weren't impotent," or "I wish she would come back to me because I'm no longer impotent, since sniffing my mojo hand," etc.

There you are. That's what Muddy's talking about. Matt and I were hoping for some Mojo, so we went to Rita's, the realest-looking voodoo store in the Quarter, and took some contraband pictures (note: none of this voodoo shit pictured here works anymore... we destroyed its soul by photographing it...).







We thought this might be flood damage, but it wasn't...



Jackson Square, home to America's oldest but somehow least tasteful Catholic cathedral...



The main drag... Decatur Street? Don't remember.



But oh my god, the food.... That I remember. Here's a catfish po'boy...



cup o' gumbo from the corner store...



Blissful, incredibly delicious gumbo from the Gumbo Shop restaurant...



After Matt and I lived in luxury for one morning, we took a driving tour of the neighborhoods north of the Quarter, close to Lake Pontchartrain, to check out what Katrina actual did. The place was like a ghost town. Basically every house, for hundreds and hundreds of blocks, miles of city, was abandoned and wrecked, boarded up and spraypainted with the FEMA "x" for "searched".


(except the above)




"where is fema? fema don't want us home"




"1 orange cat under house"

We heard that Ray Nagee is sending in bulldozers to raze this whole area if the houses are not reclaimed by their owners by October 25th. It's nuts because massive parts of the city are condemned, so they're gonna knocked down and redeveloped. Not only will the city physically change, but the make-up of basically every neighborhood will too. The poor black families that didn't have insurance or who rented their homes will not be a part of the New Orleans. Very strange to imagine.

more mess...


very "everything is illuminated"...


and finally, the weirdest and most alarming thing... this is one of TWO work crews we saw in total while we were driving around the whole afternoon. And these guys are basically just throwing stuff out...