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Brookings Findings
Days Since Katrina Made Landfall: 156
Now over five months since Katrina made landfall, New Orleans is home to over 130,000 people, including a much larger than expected population of college students. But, the city lacks enough essential services to support all of these returning residents, and the area continues to hemorrhage workers. What key trends were available this month for the states suggest little progress in both Louisiana and Mississippi.
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The slow pace of recovery on fundamentals strongly suggests that the city and state will be unable to restore essential services on their own, and require direct federal assistance to do so. Meanwhile, the well being of the nearly 750,000 households that remain displaced by Katrina is essentially not known. With New Orleans, Louisiana, and Mississippi still facing massive economic and infrastructural challenges, it is likely that many of these households will need federal assistance for many months to come.
Why wireless Internet in Louisiana and New Orleans? Why is it so important for the citizens around the state?
Bayoubuzz asked the Chief Technology Officer, Greg Meffert to explain the needs of New Orleans and why it is so important to the State of Louisiana. Currently, the City of New Orleans is backing legislation that is on the Governor’s call to allow cities build or deploy wireless Internet systems for its citizens.
As we discovered during the very last hurricane season, there was a complete and total communications breakdown in areas throughout Louisiana. Each parish would be allowed to opt-in as to whether it wants to make wireless Internet available to its citizens.
sunny david aka roy hall
In the summer of 1954 Elvis Presley came to Roy Hall's club looking for work. Roy recalled; "I fired him after just that one night. He weren't no damn good." Towards the end of that same year another young man came to the club looking for work. He was Jerry Lee Lewis, and Roy kept him on for a few weeks. Roy hired Jerry for $15 a night. They did a lot of duets together. It was also in 1954 that Roy Hall and a black musician named Dave Williams took a trip to the Everglades that resulted in one of the classic rock 'n' roll songs;
Twenty-one drums and an ol' bass horn
Somebody beatin' on a ding-dong
Come on over baby, whole lotta shakin'goin' on
Come on over baby, baby, you can't go wrong
There ain't no fakin', whole lotta shakin'goin' on
Well I said shake baby shake
I said shake baby shake
I said shake it baby shake it
I said shake baby shake
Come on over Whole lot of shakin goin' on
Ahhhhh Lets Go !!!
Piano Solo Guitar Solo
Verse
Weary old faiths make art while hot young sects make only trouble. Insincerity, or at least familiarity, seems to be a precondition of great religious art—the wheezing and worldly Renaissance Papacy produced the Sistine ceiling, while the young Apostolic Church left only a few scratched graffiti in the catacombs In America, certainly, very little art has attached itself directly to our own dazzling variety of sects and cults, perhaps because true belief is too busy with eternity to worry about the décor. The great exception is the Shakers who managed, throughout the hundred or so years of their flourishing, to make objects as magically austere that they continue to astonish our eyes and our sense of form long after the last Shakers stopped shaking. Everything that they touched is breathtaking in its beauty and simplicity. It is not a negative simplicity, either a simplicity of gewgaws eliminated and ornament excised, which, like that of distressed object found in a barn, appeals by accident to modern eyes trained already in the joys of minimalism. No, their objects show knowing, creative, shaping simplicity, and to look at a single Shaker box is to see as attenuated asymmetry, a slender, bendin eccentricity, which truly anticipates and rivals the bending organic sleekness of Brancusi’s “Bird in Flight” or the algorithmic logic of Bauhaus spoons and forks. Shaker objects don’t look simple; they look specifically Shaker.
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It is here, ironically, in the need to make things to sell to other people, that the first stirrings of a distinct style begin. This is not to say that the objects were made insincerely, or that Shakerism in design was a scam. The built-in cupboards and chairs and ladders constructed only for other Shakers, in Shaker communities, are made in the same spirit as the things for sale. The point is that no line was drawn the other way around, either: what was made for sale looked like what was made for sacred. The urge to make consumer goods is, after all, one of the keenest spiritual disciplines that an ascetic can face: it forces spirit to take form. An ascetic drinking tea from a cup decides not to care what kind of cup he’s drinking from; an ascetic forced to make a cup has to ask what kind of cup he ought to drink from. By the mid-nineteenth century, “Shaker” had become a brand name.
The checks Bultman writes are allocated only to those who work, which these days in New Orleans can mean performing at a club in front of a handful of Federal Emergency Management Agency workers.
On many nights, money from the door is minimal or nonexistent. Bultman hopes her $100 subsidy is enough to dissuade someone from taking a gig in another city. If instruments and artifacts from the city's musical heritage were washed away, then New Orleans' soul -- the musicians who define it -- must stay.
"As the time wore on," Bultman says, "more and more musicians who were dumped all over the country wanted to come back. We soon realized that this is really about giving people instruments and giving people hope, and that's when we started paying the gig fees."
Two months ago, Bultman, a writer/historian and the co-founder of the New Orleans Musicians' Clinic, was urging displaced musicians to return to the city. She started the clinic with her husband in 1998 with the assistance of Dr. Jack B. McConnell, the developer of Tylenol tablets whose son, Page, played keyboards for the band Phish. With a mix of pride and a dedication to preserving a music culture that she says "percolates out of the ground," Bultman hoped all New Orleans' evacuees would soon be returning.
'NEW ORLEANS IS NOT A HEALTHY PLACE'
Reality, however, soon sunk in, and now she is not so sure. "The goal was to get everyone we could get back to New Orleans," she says. "Now that we're back, we've moved away from that. We've moved away from the fantasy that everything would go back to the way it was. New Orleans is just not a healthy place for everyone to come to."
After four years of public debates, political infighting, posturing and stalled momentum in the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan, the next five weeks promise to be among the most critical since the towers fell.
Gov. George E. Pataki set the stage for a March 14 showdown at ground zero shortly before Christmas when he gave the developer Larry A. Silverstein 90 days to work out his longstanding differences with the Port Authority over the rebuilding process.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg upped the ante recently in language certain to incite the developer, when he called on him to set aside his financial interests and "do the right thing": cede two proposed buildings and a major portion of the site to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey so that rebuilding can go more quickly.
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"It's long overdue, but very welcome," Mr. Yaro said. "Ending up with a see-through Freedom Tower and the rest of the site vacant, while the developer gets a half billion in his pocket and the public is stuck with billions in obligations, doesn't sound like a particularly attractive outcome."