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Wednesday, April 11, 2007
--Bloodshed greeted with outrage, apathy
In a modest Baptist church in eastern New Orleans, friends and family gave a young man in a mocha-colored casket a teary sendoff.
Though Terry Hall, 29, on April 2 became the city's 53rd homicide victim of 2007 -- one of four in a single day, the most in one day this year -- few outside his circle of friends and family marked his death. No one blamed the police or the mayor. No one marched in protest or demanded action.
Unlike some of the victims in a similar string of killings in January -- one that sparked a citywide protest and endless promises of action from police and politicians -- Hall did not go out a martyr, nor did any of the other three people killed that day, nor did the three people killed in the previous three days. (By Brendan McCarthy, NOTP)
Another Email From NOLA
marquin got shot in the hands about 2 weeks ago, got him antibiotics, he didn’t take them, hands got infected. i hauled him back to children’s hospital, and they haven’t let him out yet. shawn (don’t know if you remember him) took 13 bullets on the corner of dorgenois and st. anne last week. he’s on life support. jamal [shot in January] is out and limping around.
The New Page
In 1994 I moved to New Orleans. In 1997 I began writing emails to a few friends around the country about my life as a blue-collar working white boy in a mostly black New Orleans ghetto. The ghetto was represented by the 2600 block of Dumaine.
In 2000 one of the email recipients in New York introduced me to a brilliant webmaster who was hosting his own website and I was invited to begin posting here. The email recipient came up with the name email from NOLA. In that same year I bought a burnt out abandoned crackshack on Rocheblave, six blocks from the Dumaine house, and began a learn as you go renovation.
In 2003 I was offered a soft gig in Virginia caretaking a Shennadoah weekend property for a childhood buddy. The next three winters I found reasons to spend them mostly in New Orleans, last winter, stretching from October to June, so that I could look after my Rocheblave house and do a few necessary post-Katrina repairs.
The Dumaine house is still occupied by a friend who has remained all these years very involved as a freelance mentor and tutor to neighborhood children. She was boat-lifted from the house last September and evacuated to the west coast before returning recently in hope of receiving Road Home grant money to fill the gap left by being screwed by her insurance company.
The Dumaine neighborhood was always a little rougher than average. An average that to many of you would itself seem unacceptable. And while murderers did live and recreate on the block, the block itself was more or less murder-free for the last 13 years. So it is unusual but unfortunately true to say that in the last two months two young men have died by gunshot in the street in front of the house. And one other near the Dorgenois corner.
It is this type of drama that made up parts of the original emails from NOLA (of which only a few samples are posted here) but I don't myself have exposure to such drama now, nor do I live in New Orleans. So I've been working on a new page with a different name which you can access at--
http://www.digitalmediatree.com/mtpleasant/
Or perhaps I could offer you an actual link to get there.
RIP Eric
M, not that this would be all that unusual but I haven't heard from you since you moved back to the block, I guess you got rid of the Oregon cell phone. Hope you are all right. Sorry the craziness is starting again. It was really quiet for awhile after the flood. Drop me a line sometime if you get the chance.
Better Late Than Never
Elloie suspended by La. high court
Russia, Fresh Spinach, And The French Canadian
I don't know enough about avante garde film to make valid comparisons but after watching Dziga Vertov's Man With the Movie Camera last night I'm going out on a limb to say he rose the bar pretty high 75 years ago. If only for its documentation of 1920s Russian images it is a must see. It is a silent film and I don't know if the sound track is original to the time period (or added later) but if it is original to the film, the bar goes up a couple more notches.
I seem to have rather convenient access to a bucket load of fresh music these days and the Outkast (Idlewild) album is fresher than a bag of raw spinach (according to the FDA).
Twenty-eight years ago I was standing on the side of highway 290west, aimed towards California, but only at the time just outside Austin, TX., and this French Canadian kid with a deep south Georgia accent approached from a distant store up the hill. He had just shop-lifted some snacks and these he shared with me. We hiked all the way to Los Angeles together. After a week or so he headed north up the coast and I headed back east, to Texas. I ran into him some months later, in Austin, and he suggested a high risk caper that would finance a trip to Europe, but success was not in our cards and we got busted for some misdemeanor foolishness and spent two or three days in the Dallas jail, and after that, again went our separate ways.