st. anne’s official scrapbook March 8, 2006
St. Anne’s 2006 photos have been posted on their website:
Plenty ‘o pics of Shannon and Katherine!
vent: we don’t need no stinkin’ clocks
Since I started law school at Loyola, the clocks in every classroom have shown a different, incorrect time. These clocks are permanently attached to the walls. About three weeks ago, someone came in and put a battery-powered clock on the wall of every classroom. These new clocks showed the correct time. The old, incorrect clocks are still there as well. This worked OK until Mardi Gras. After we all came back from the holiday, the new clocks all had the wrong time on them and they still do. I am sitting in a room with two clocks on the wall. One says 11:37. One says 11:42. The time, according to my computer, is 11:29. Since we all, including the professors, have laptops, why do we need analog clocks on the wall anyway? I feel better now. Thanks for listening.
josh’s irish parade is march 17
Downtown Irish Club Parade
Friday, March 17, 2006
6:30 p.m., Bywater/French Quarter 504-943-0785
The 30th annual downtown St. Patrick’s Day parade begins on the corner of Burgundy and Piety in the Bywater, proceeds roughly up Royal, across Esplanade to Decatur, up Bienville to Bourbon. The parade makes several “pit stops” on its way to Bourbon St.
Click to see the projected path. Josh and Kevin are in this parade. Grandma’s Drinking Club meeting place TBA.
UPDATE: Grandma’s Drinking Club is meeting at Mimi’s, Franklin and Royal, 6:30, Friday, March 17. Bring ya mama ‘nem.
video | steve’s st. anne’s video
Steve recorded this little snippet of St. Anne’s entering the French Quarter on Mardi Gras Day. It gives a little taste of what the parade feels like. I added a title card, etc., because I’m trying to learn how to use the video editing application. This one is posted on youtube.com, and they have done whatever they do that degrades the quality. It looks a little impressionistic. The original is much better. On Sunday, I’ll have more storage available on vimeo.com and I’ll post it there for better quality.
voodoo crosses and water lines
I think today was the day I finally got my head back into school. Mardi Gras was a good farewell, now it’s time to start my cycle again. Wrapping your mind around the law can be a great alternative to the flesh. It’s almost the opposite of it. I’m enjoying my classes, particularly Jurisprudence, which is about the philosphical history of the law and how it got to be the way it is. I’m also fascinated with Business Organizations because the case book has all these famous cases like the guy who bought Pepsi-Cola during the depression (why did people who didn’t have enough money to eat continue to buy Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola, anyway?). It also has Henry Ford being sued by his stockholders for engaging in social engineering at his Ford plants, and Michael Ovitz’ contract with Disney, where he worked for 14 months and made $98 million. Real life is indeed stranger than fiction.
Especially where I live. There was a traffic jam on I-10, so I took Jefferson Davis and Vendome to get Uptown. There was a 4-6 foot water line in that area. Vendome is another middle-class neighborhood that got fucked. It looks like a “Leave it to Beaver” neighborhood because it was a mid-20th century development. In New Orleans development history, Late Means LOW. All the houses are empty. One house, a two-story brick box on a slab, had sunk down on one side. It was listing to starboard, surrounded by mud. The perfectly straight water line, the bathtub ring, makes it even more obvious how crooked some of these houses are.
Broadway is still a mess. There are two large trenches cutting across the road that have been there at least since early January. There are four-way stop signs at Freret and Willow, with students walking everywhere and cars barely moving. It gave me a lot of time to look at the fraternity houses. They still have their search-and-rescue “voodoo crosses” on them. I hope those lazy frat boys never get around to painting them over. The weirdness of these X’s all over people’s houses can’t be described. My marking is still on my door “C-6 NE,” but I didn’t get an X. It’s also a discrete chalk mark, rather than a flourescent orange symbol bigger than I am, which seems to be the rule in other areas.
Driving through Hollygrove later, I saw a gigantic forklift picking up drowned cars in that horrible apartment complex on Palm. That place gets my vote for Please Tear It Down. Before the storm, it was full of poor families. I would rather live in a tent than raise my kids in one of those depressing buildings. It looks like the kind of cheesy housing that was thrown up right after WWII. The place was dilapidated before the storm. The windows and doors were always open, so I can’t believe they had working air conditioners. Now it looks like the set for a horror movie. Anything would be better for those families to live in. I can’t believe it’s worth saving. I feel like going over there tonight and tearing it down myself. Dammit, where are my safety glasses?
It seems that they are moving the flooded cars out, finally. I wonder how long it will be until we don’t see house after house with the triple water lines any more? When will I see the last car with dried sludge all over the windows, sitting in the wrong place, every day? Jim Byrne was in town on Mardi Gras and I saw him briefly. He said he was appalled. “It still looks like it happened yesterday!” I couldn’t explain in that setting that, yes, it does, in some ways, but it is much, much better in others. They have just yesterday started demolishing the houses that were swept off their foundations and into the streets. It took six months, but they were right not to rush it. It’s tough for people to lose everything they have, and I’m sure the demolition felt like they were losing it all over again. It would have been wrong to tear down their houses without letting them come back and deal with it through some process. God knows there was nothing for them to salvage.
I think Mardi Gras showed people that if they come back, New Orleans will still be New Orleans. We’ll have to adapt to some changes, though. Things will inevitably be different. We all have to be flexible and mobile. We have to get the upper hand on our “leaders” and lead ourselves. There is another hurricane season coming. But right now, it looks like spring outside. Our beaten landscape is pushing flowers out of its wounds. Every day, life returns to more houses. The water lines are gone for many blocks in some places. Instead of the ghost town neighborhoods with debris piles and voodoo crosses, we have a new normal now which looks like Ward and June Cleaver went and parked a trailer in their front yard, and so did the Cosbys, and Roger and Re-run.
Sometimes it looks like it happened yesterday, and sometimes it looks like it happened six months ago. Even if you close your eyes and don’t look, it still feels very different. I wonder how long it will take before we exhale and become ourselves again?
