Katrina envy

Nobody could have predicted there would be Katrina envy. 

A member of the Chicago Tribune editorial board is wishing for a "Hurricane Katrina" to strike and help clean up what she sees as her own corrupt city.

Kristen McQueary, who is an actual member of the Chicago Tribune's actual editorial board, met with Mayor Mitch Landrieu and somehow came away with the notion — well, I'm not sure what's more wrongheaded, that Katrina "fixed" things in New Orleans or that a Chicagoan would want the people of Chicago to go through something similar:

Envy isn't a rational response to the upcoming 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

But with Aug. 29 fast approaching and New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu making media rounds, including at the Tribune Editorial Board, I find myself wishing for a storm in Chicago — an unpredictable, haughty, devastating swirl of fury. A dramatic levee break. Geysers bursting through manhole covers. A sleeping city, forced onto the rooftops.

So that's kind of jarring.  But is it really all that different from what we've heard from conservative pundits like Ms. McQueary right from the beginning of the post-K ordeal?  The right wing campaign to use the deaths of some 1800 people as an opportunity to "fix things" in New Orleans is not a difficult thread to trace.

For instance, here is an article by New York Times columnist David Brooks published on September 8, 2005.  Its headline is, "Katrina's Silver Lining" 

As a colleague of mine says, every crisis is an opportunity. And sure enough, Hurricane Katrina has given us an amazing chance to do something serious about urban poverty.

That's because Katrina was a natural disaster that interrupted a social disaster. It separated tens of thousands of poor people from the run-down, isolated neighborhoods in which they were trapped. It disrupted the patterns that have led one generation to follow another into poverty.

It has created as close to a blank slate as we get in human affairs, and given us a chance to rebuild a city that wasn't working. We need to be realistic about how much we can actually change human behavior, but it would be a double tragedy if we didn't take advantage of these unique circumstances to do something that could serve as a spur to antipoverty programs nationwide.

Brooks goes on to recommend that a recovering New Orleans take as a model this social engineering experiment developed in (irony) Chicago. 

The most famous example of cultural integration is the Gautreaux program, in which poor families from Chicago were given the chance to move into suburban middle-class areas. The adults in these families did only slightly better than the adults left behind, but the children in the relocated families did much better.

So mere days after the storm, while flood waters are still actually draining out of the city, Brooks tells us that Katrina is an opportunity. It has provided us a "blank slate" to do "something serious about urban poverty."  And that serious thing we should do is move poor people out to the suburbs.  Scowl if you want but this was remarkably prescient. Especially for David Brooks.

At the same time that Brooks was writing that column, advice was also pouring in from libertarian think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute where tank thinker James Glassman could barely contain his enthusiasm for building "the ultimate libertarian city" upon our blank slate.

The inevitable commission that will oversee the rebuilding must realize that the world’s best designers, developers and innovators will be drawn to the city only if they are relatively unrestricted. New Orleans could become a laboratory for ideas like tax-free commercial zones and school reform. This is the ultimate libertarian city and the last thing it needs is top-down planning. Many of the city’s great attractions–the Jazz Festival, D-Day Museum and blackened redfish, for example–are of recent vintage.

I’m optimistic. New Orleans has a unique chance to make a fresh start and, in fact, become more like cities that do work (Chicago and Phoenix come to mind) while retaining its spirit of mystery, absurdity, beauty and decadence.

Brooks and Glassman were really proud of Chicago back then.  But now McQueary wants to "blank slate" it and start all over for some reason.  What the hell happened there?

In any case, such calls of opportunity did not go unheard locally.  They began to echo among our social and political leadership almost immediately.  Here is a quote from former Bring Back New Orleans Commissioner James Reiss I first read in September of 2005.

A few blocks from Mr. O'Dwyer, in an exclusive gated community known as Audubon Place, is the home of James Reiss, descendent of an old-line Uptown family. He fled Hurricane Katrina just before the storm and returned soon afterward by private helicopter. Mr. Reiss became wealthy as a supplier of electronic systems to shipbuilders, and he serves in Mayor Nagin's administration as chairman of the city's Regional Transit Authority. When New Orleans descended into a spiral of looting and anarchy, Mr. Reiss helicoptered in an Israeli security company to guard his Audubon Place house and those of his neighbors.

He says he has been in contact with about 40 other New Orleans business leaders since the storm. Tomorrow, he says, he and some of those leaders plan to be in Dallas, meeting with Mr. Nagin to begin mapping out a future for the city.

The power elite of New Orleans -- whether they are still in the city or have moved temporarily to enclaves such as Destin, Fla., and Vail, Colo. -- insist the remade city won't simply restore the old order. New Orleans before the flood was burdened by a teeming underclass, substandard schools and a high crime rate. The city has few corporate headquarters.

The new city must be something very different, Mr. Reiss says, with better services and fewer poor people. "Those who want to see this city rebuilt want to see it done in a completely different way: demographically, geographically and politically," he says. "I'm not just speaking for myself here. The way we've been living is not going to happen again, or we're out."

If you've followed this blog over the years you'll know I've never let it drop.  There I was hundreds of miles away still wondering what in New Orleans was left for me to come back to and already I could read about plans for a "new New Orleans" and who might be welcome back there.

And this became a regular theme among the city's well placed decision makers throughout the rebuilding process. Sometimes it would merely sit in the background as every NOLA Entrepreneur Week implicitly celebrated the replacement of the black middle class with younger whiter transplants and/or "volunteer entrepreneur" grifters. Or as the Cowen Intsitute or Leslie Jacobs regularly feted the firings of 7500 public school teachers.

Often, though, it was right out in the open. Shortly after the storm, Baton Rouge based Congressman Richard Baker expressed gratitude that "God" had finally "cleaned up public housing in New Orleans."

Pres Kabacoff might prefer Baker and God send some of the credit his way. Kabacoff hasn't minced words about the favors the flood did us either. For instance, there was the time he told us that poor people were a "drag on the city's economy" who needed to be moved out of the way of an "urban renaissance" led by his development company.   Or the time Kabacoff told us we didn't really want "the kind of people who if their refrigerator stops working their life falls apart" My fridge went out on me earlier this month.  If I hadn't managed to reset the motor myself, it would have been a pretty serious hardship. Maybe Katrina should have blown me out of here too.

It's not exactly clear what Ray Nagin meant in 2008 when he told a columnists' convention, "There is big money to be made in a storm."  Nagin eventually went to jail over relatively small beans. But Nagin did also spend a lot of time encouraging people to "buy some dirt" in post-Katrina New Orleans in anticipation of "this economic pie that is getting ready to explode."

These are things you might expect any cheerleading mayor to say.  Heck, they even turned out to be correct observations and sound investment advice.  But the boosterism in the wake of the disaster did jibe well enough with David Brooks's "silver lining" narrative to make the premise seem true to a lot of people.  Owen Courreges made a similar observation this week about Mayor Landrieu's own triumphalist rhetoric which has been burning at billion watt intensity all summer long.  

In his “State of the City” address given this past May, Mayor Mitch Landrieu boasted that New Orleans is “no longer recovering, no longer rebuilding.” Citing a laundry list of improved statistics, Landrieu continued: “It didn’t happen by accident. It is all part of our larger approach to government — cut, reorganize and then invest the savings in what matters most so we can grow.”

It's worth noting again that McQueary's "Chicago needs a Katrina" column was based on impressions formed during her audience with Landrieu.

Mitch isn't the only New Orleans ambassador sending these signals out into the world, though.  Here is a criminally lengthy and pretentious ESPN Magazine feature by Wright Thompson where we find the reanimated corpse of Chris Rose brought back down from the attic to share with us the following wisdom.

Since Katrina, life on the wealthy side of that fence has improved. The New New Orleans really is a safer, wealthier place with more responsible institutions. "Almost everything's better," Chris Rose says. "You know, it's the one thing that no one can speak. Nobody dares write it ... but how many people said, 'It's the best thing that ever happened to New Orleans.' Now, here's the problem: It was rich white people who were saying that when we weren't even finished burying our dead. We still hadn't even found our dead and people were saying that. Now, you look back and you gotta think about what it was like in 2005, our crime, our corruption, our police, our education. They're all better now. Would they have improved had we not had this intense, overwhelming catastrophe, which forced us to not only rebuild and recover and repopulate but also reimagine ourselves? Would that have happened? I think it's safe to say no."

The reason the lady in Chicago thinks Katrina is the best thing that ever happened to us is because our mayor basically told her that. The reason he thinks that is because a lot of his political allies as well as some subtly smug and selfish people like Chris Rose have told him that is what they believe also.

It's fine to call out McQueary's Katrina envy column as the obviously crass, insensitive, right wing propaganda that it is.  But don't overlook the fact that local Katrina pride is very much the same thing. 

"Someone is gonna hire me. I’m Chris Rose"

In a way, what's happened to Chris Rose is overly harsh.

Rose’s collection of post-Katrina Picayune columns, 1 Dead In Attic (Simon and Schuster), became a New York Times bestseller in 2007. Since then, New Orleans’ news community has seemingly cast Rose aside. No journalism entity in town will hire him, he tells me, not even freelance. If they do answer his calls, they say he’s too much of a risk. And so for all of 2014, the 53-year-old Rose was waiting tables to pay rent and feed his three kids.

There's a litany of personal struggles there we wouldn't wish on anyone.  It's hard to see why this should become a permanent barrier to employment. "No journalism entity in town will hire him."  That sounds pretty sinister.   Your instinct is to react the way Harry Shearer does.

At Kingfish, Rose continued serving his fans—as well as his fellow New Orleans celebrities. “This waiter walks up and it took me probably way too long to realize, Oh my god, I know who you are. I was absolutely startled,” says Harry Shearer, comedic actor, voice of many Simpsons characters, and part-time New Orleanian. “To go from an essential voice to a forgotten voice in the relative blink of an eye is pretty shocking. For a city that reveres tradition and history, a city full of second chances, it seems very puritanical what seems to have happened to Chris.”

But you look again and you see the several examples of employers having been flexible and patient. FOX 8 flew him into town and put him up in a hotel several times, apparently.  And yet it keeps not working out somehow.   Except that actually it does work out. Rose is writing professionally again and "making four times the price that Gambit or Times-Picayune pays freelancers."

For some reason that isn't good enough, though.  Somehow, despite every humbling experience, Rose maintains a distinct air of "Don't you know who I am!" about him.

Clean, sober, and again a free agent, Rose this time found himself deeply unemployed. Having been praised for understanding New Orleans in a special way, he suddenly, finally, also understood its smallness. “For seven months I was getting turned down. I kept thinking, ‘Someone is gonna hire me. I’m Chris Rose.’ It took a while for me to realize, all these unreturned phone calls … I’m not gonna get a job here. And I had no other marketable skills. For 30 years there’s never been any question of what I was gonna do.”

But who is he, really? Chris Rose is a significant specimen. He was the first bona-fide Katrina entrepreneur; the first in a long line of such people to try and monetize a personal brand he built on other people's tragedy.

I say, "other people's tragedy" carefully, of course.  The time of the flood affected everyone who lived through it.  It changed everyone's lives in radical ways.  It profoundly affected our sense of community and our politics.  It made physically manifest an existential threat of impending doom we might have sensed before but never directly confronted. It made people take stock of things and decide what was important to them.  I wouldn't want to belittle anyone's experience with that.

But what I just described there was pretty much the basic package. If your life was in New Orleans before Katrina, you got one of those. That's not nothing.  But it's possible to say that, if this is all you got, then what you got was not especially tragic.

Chris Rose was living in New Orleans at the time of the flood.  Personally, he came out of it pretty well. Or, at least he should have. As you can see from the CJR story, he's been through some personal trials but it's a stretch to relate those directly to the storm.  He didn't lose his home. He didn't lose his job.   In fact, the experience was a boon to him, professionally. He made certain to take advantage of it, anyway.

It's a little strange that Rose should end up such a pariah after all this time.  He's far from the only hyper-ego to go about feeling Katrina at you for money.  He actually presaged the kind of cynical exploitation that currently comprises a large (although perhaps over-exaggerated) portion of the local economy.*

Maybe, then, we might view Rose as a bit of a cautionary tale.  Is personal branding really the best way for us to go about making a living?  There were hundreds of thousands of New Orleanians who lived through the same Katrina flood that Rose did. His supposed skill.. "understanding New Orleans in a special way," as the CJR piece puts it, is really no skill at all.  Or, at least, there's nothing "special" about it.

Of course he is an OK writer and, at times, a clever wit but really so are most people. And that's a good thing.  Obviously not everyone is exactly the same, but within a reasonable spectrum, most ordinary people are pretty smart, or funny, or have something of value to say.   None of them is particularly "special" though. Why would you want to be? That sounds pretty lonely.

But the principles of the Perpetual NOLA.com Entrepreneur Week teach us that the secret to success is to always be bootstrappin' in a competitive creative class kind of way. And so we become a whole economy full of Chris Roses forced to sell our adequate but unexceptional selves as "brands" based mostly on the power of their own bullshit self-salesmanship.  What does it mean when we find out our individual brands aren't worth very much in a market flooded with many many more similar to ours?

Pretty soon we're all just working at Rouses. Maybe that's for the best.

*Interestingly Rose says all the royalties from his book belong to the Times-Picayune thanks to the copyright provisions of his employment with them. In that case, the packaging and profiteering off of the Rose brand is partially.. or even mostly.. the company's fault.  That's probably the worst aspect of any of this. Especially since NOLA.com has become the online Church of Entrepreneurship that it has in recent years.

Unfortunate headline of the day

Chris Rose: Sexting

Yikes

Still a douchebag

I started laying off of Chris Rose because everything I started to write about him just ended up looking like the above snip from this month's Levee

I read his first Gambit column and it sort of pissed me off but in a sad way... no not in a sorrowful man of letters way... more in a bored way. When I was still bothering with it I once wrote

I still can't decide if Rose is just that creepy uncle who always wants to smoke pot with your friends or if he's more like that one frat boy who feels entitled to his smug assholery due to the fact that he may actually have read a book once.

As you can see, nothing has really changed.

The thing that always did and still does really bug me about Rose is that he's one of those people who acts as if everything that happens is only important because it's happening to him. And worse, he's not above turning the bad things that happen to him (and tangentially, in his mind, to other people) into an industry of sorts. So it's as self-absorbed as it is opportunistic as it is insensitive. But I had pretty much decided we'd covered all of that. And then Gambit had to go and give him another big platform....

Update: Also giving Rose a platform, WVUE. The point of this piece: Scott Fujita's free agency really all about Chris Rose somehow.

And Fujita delivered, big time, on and off the field. Charities and tackles; a great combination. A winning combination. And, irony or ironies, on the day he signed with Cleveland, the Times-Picayune wrote a feature about him that basically said he’s the greatest guy ever.

Well, bully for Cleveland.

Funny, speaking of the Times-Picayune: At the end of 2009, I myself became a free agent. In 25 years at the company, I never once received a merit raise. And they said I could stick around if I wanted to, but they were encouraging old and expensive goats like me to head out to pasture.

Nothing personal, they assured me. Strictly business.

Sleepy Town Daily

I'm so old I can remember when there was room at the T-P for Angus Lind and Chris Rose. You got one slice-of-life New Orleans column for (mostly boomer) natives and one in a similar vein for transplant faux-hipster douchebags. I wasn't a Rose fan but I will say the opportunity to complain about him was definitely part of what sold that paper to me. Nobody wins if he just up and goes away.

The New Orleans daily paper no longer has a Food Section, or a bona-fide "local color" column. I guess there's just nothing to do in this town anymore.

"Raycation"

Pretty funny Rose column

Weekend News Roundup

A few items from the local paper we didn't have time to comment on over a busy weekend:

• I really wanted to like Gordon Russell's front page feature on Mose Jefferson in yesterday's T-P. As it is, it's certainly a must-read for anyone who isn't already familiar with the Jefferson clan's background and their rise from small-town poverty and racism to big-time urban and national politics. One interesting fact I learned from the article was that Bill Jefferson authored a semi-fictionalized memoir called Dying is the Easy Part. I will have to locate a copy somewhere.
  
  Reading Russell's piece, I would have liked to learn more about the complicated reasons why urban political machines like the Jeffersons' in New Orleans and the Shaws' in Chicago were as successful as they were and why they seem to be fading now. It's a subject I'd like to see examined maybe from the point of view of the people who voted for the Jeffersons as much as just that of the people around them.
  
  I guess what I'd really like is a book-length treatment of this subject and I realize that a Sunday morning T-P feature probably isn't going to get all of the angles I'm looking for. But even so, the article seemed strangely unbalanced. What we read here is, Mose grows up poor - Mose moves to Chicago -Mose learns to steal -Mose turns that into a profession. It's one point of view... and not necessarily inaccurate but I found myself saying, "Yeah but we knew that already."
  
  And then there's this odd moment.

  Like Jefferson, the Shaws were Southern transplants -- they came from Hope, Ark. -- and they imparted their love for old-school politics: Shaw elections were won in the streets, with campaign workers and shoe leather, not TV ads. The brothers weren't above trickery, either: U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., a longtime foe and son of the civil rights leader, blamed the Shaws when a truck driver named Jesse L. Jackson took him on in 2002.
  
  Then there were the Shaws' ethical snafus. Bill Shaw was simultaneously an Illinois state senator -- serving alongside Barack Obama -- and mayor of the village of Dolton.

  Here's where an editor says, if the highlighted phrase is deleted, do we lose anything crucial to the story? Other than also being an Illinois state senator, what exactly does Barack Obama have to do with any of this? Is Russell throwing the President's name in there because he's afraid his readers are getting bored? Is it merely a fun fact? Should every story about Illinois politics include an Obama mention somehow? In the larger context of the right's constant attempts to imply Obama's Chicago-corruption-by-association, I question his superfluous inclusion in this story.



• In celebration of the beginning of the 2009 Hurricane Season, the Sunday paper ran a colorful insert full of standard "preparedness" type articles. Conspicuously absent from this story about the city's evacuation plan was any discussion of last year's re-entry fiasco.
  
  For those of us who have memories, the sights and sounds of Crazy Freak-Out 2008 are still fresh in our minds. After having absurdly exaggerated the size and strength of Hurricane Gustav in order to panic the populace into fleeing their homes at great personal expense, local officials arrogantly and condescendingly lied and fought to keep residents from returning to their homes well after the danger had passed. People were really upset about this and rightly so. NOLA.com's James O'Byrne wrote an op-ed titled "Next Time, We Won't Leave" which summed up everyone's feelings at that time.
  
  The fact is, the very concept of an entire city jumping up and running at the first (possibly exaggerated) sign of trouble is an untenable state of affairs to begin with. Those of us who choose to live under these circumstances do so with the (possibly misguided) faith that, in the future, we'll be better protected than we were on 8/29/2005. The treatment we received from our elected officials as we went through that exercise last year was unacceptable. It's sad that the paper chose not to address these concerns.



• Here is a re-print of a letter-to-the-editor I read Sunday.
  

  If Tulane wants in on Charity, close its hospital
  Sunday, May 31, 2009
  
  I am a Louisiana State University pulmonary/intensive care physician who has had the honor of providing medical care to the underserved for over 20 years at Charity Hospital. What made Charity Hospital world-class was not the facility itself, but the personnel who provided the absolute best care.
  
  While there is great debate about the new facility, there is one point upon which everyone agrees. In order for this facility to be economically viable and less dependent on state support, it must care for both the uninsured and the insured.
  
  Before coming to LSU, I was at the Johns Hopkins Hospital where this model worked well. LSU has publicly stated that we will admit our insured patients to the new facility. Tulane has not, and that is the critical point in this discussion. How can Tulane assume a central role in the financial operation of the new hospital when it operates a competing, for-profit facility only three blocks away?
  
  Perhaps the simple answer is for Tulane to withdraw from its competing hospital and join as a true partner with us as we build the new academic health science center that will once again identify New Orleans as the destination for state-of-the-art health care for all of our citizens.
  
  Steve Nelson, M.D.
  
  Dean
  
  LSU School of Medicine
  
  New Orleans

  
  
  Amen.
  



• Very sad to see Angus Lind go. Lind's column was a document of the home-grown eccentric New Orleans that still existed to some degree as I became a young adult. Chris Rose's column, which basically replaces it, is a document of the phony approximation of that New Orleans which continues to be sold to tourists and transplants in the post-modern era.
  



• And finally, "straight to DVD" is kind of an apt metaphor for Ray Nagin's shtick by now. The novelty is gone, the act is stale, and no one's paying any attention any more.
  

Excellence in Recovery Bookshelf

Stephanie Grace's column this morning attempts to trace what she sees as similarities between New Orleans's buffoonish Mayor and its buffoonologist outgoing Recovery Czar. There's some fun to be had there but, as I have said for some time now, the proper analog for Ray Nagin is George W Bush.

Besides, Grace's column overlooks one crucial commonality between her subjects. Each one is an aspiring author. Blakely has been talking openly about the his plans to share his part-time experiences in New Orleans with a publishing house for some time now. And similarly City Hall watchers are familiar with the repeated references to "the book" emanating from Nagin staffers.

In anticipation of these forthcoming works... and in the interest of preserving any and all "lessons learned" from our time without the cranes... I'm setting aside a special place in my home to display the Excellence in Recovery Collection. It would be a single bookshelf holding copies of Nagin's and Blakely's works along with How to Maximize FEMA Funding After a Natural Disaster by Veronica White and of course multiple copies of One Dead in the Attic (whose author, I should mention, is comparing Nagin to Paris Hilton in his most recent column; the latest effort in his quest to shoehorn our understanding of the world into the idiom of tired celebrity gossip).

I'm moving some things around so that I can raise the bookshelf above base flood elevation. Ideally I'd like to have it set atop a framed "Recovery in Progress" sign but I haven't decided which one I'd most like to steal. Also, does anyone have an extra Bernardo award or two laying around? I'm looking for an appropriately insubstantial bookend.

Somebody get that man a Bernardo

Chris Rose explains how the T-P single-handedly saved New Orleans

Jornalism!*

Chris Rose has finally lent his considerable talents to the ongoing explication of the NOAH scandal by investigating The Him Store in person.

The Him Store and its quality product lines were previously discussed here as well as here.

*Apologies to Atrios

Update: And in a tangentially related matter...

Funny

Even though it's steeped in the overblown outrages of the past week, Chris Rose's column is actually (kinda sorta) funny today.

Local Rags

Here's a little known fact about Chris Rose's column. It turns out to be incredibly absorbent. So much so that you can actually build floodwalls out of it.

4 Investigates: Floodwalls stuffed with newspaper?

We know from reading his columns that Rose takes the recovery and protection of SE Louisiana very very.. um.. personally. But who knew that his life's work would end of being literally dedicated to this purpose? Way to go, Chris.

Update: It occurs to me that this may be my fault for underestimating the litteral-mindedness of the Corps and its sub-contractors when I decide to call someone a douchebag.

Also... we may all be guilty of not taking the publishers of The New Orleans Levee literally enough.

Upperdate: I iz Contractr!

Uppestdate: Also see Celsus's post which is not as full of snark as these... or as full of old newspaper as a floodwall.

Sports Journalism!

T-P columnist and longtime friend of the Yellow Blog, Chris Rose, managed to put an important question to Hornets center Tyson Chandler during his "60 Second Interview" in Friday's edition

As you surely know, hornets live in nests, not hives. So why is the Arena called the Hive when you play there?

Chandler's answer was insufficient due to an easy dodge provided for him by Rose's earlier unseemly fawning over young cheerleaders. But this "hive" thing also troubles me and I would very much have liked to see it addressed.

Rose is also not the first local newsie-type person to raise this issue. Recently, Gambit blogger, Alejandro de los Rios, has been pushing it for at least a couple of weeks now after the following item appeared in The New Orleans Levee

“Now we’ve got the Hornets, which have nothing to do with New Orleans, and they keep welcoming us to the “Hive,” which has nothing to do with Hornets.

They are cheered on by the HoneyBees. Now, it must be said that any self-respecting hornet would sting to death any honey bee any day of the week and twice on Sundays.

The Hornets’ home colors are teal, which is wrong on multiple levels, let alone the fact that it’s not even the color hornets are.”

While this incompatibility between the terms "hive" and "hornets" is annoying, the other quibbles mentioned by the Levee are those of the incompatibility between a relocated sports franchise and its adopted "home" city.

There is nothing particularly reminiscent of New Orleans in the name "Hornets". There are multiple easy fixes for this situation. Certainly this city has a healthy catalog of insects more familiar to locals than Hornets to choose from. (May we humbly suggest "Mumkins" as one example) And ever since the Hornets arrived here, it has been suggested many times that the franchise acquire the name "Jazz" from the city's previous NBA occupant (and the most comically misnamed team in professional sports). But both teams and the NBA frown on such an arrangement. The most often cited reason for this is marketing. The league and the teams claim that changing the name and logo of a team is too risky a disruption in the product's "brand recognition" within its market even though this argument has been applied rather selectively at times. And if professional sports leagues want to argue that renaming a team after something its host city identifies with is any more confusing or off-putting than repeatedly renaming large publicly financed buildings after a team's most recent corporate sponsor then... well... good luck with that.

The unpleasant and increasingly ubiquitous teal is another product of modern sports franchise design which operates under the theory that if these franchises are all basically interchangeable anyway, they may as well all wear the same color. Since arriving in New Orleans, the Hornets have added gold to their color scheme and attempted to play the teal as a "green" to complete a Mardi Gras purple-teal-gold design. Why not just go with green? The old Jazz used to wear purple, green and gold, but they seem to have given up that look in favor of... more teal.

Even as this year's exciting and fun-to-watch from a purely basketball standpoint Hornets open the (interminable) NBA playoffs at home this week, I still struggle to understand how area sports fans can get so... um... "Fanned Up" without engaging in a significant amount of cognitive dissonance. The Hornets are only in New Orleans as the result an act of ill will from the league and the team's current owner toward the city of Charlotte. Recently, this same owner came very close to moving on to Oklahoma as New Orleans struggles to recover from the ongoing effects of the Federal Flood. Currently, this same league is engaged in an act of even more ill will toward the city of Seattle. No one in New Orleans seems to care. I find this very strange.

It's even stranger considering the same New Orleans sports fans who are willing to look the other way now, will soon be screeching indignantly as the one franchise the city truly cannot afford to lose enters into yet another round of brinksmanship against the governing authorities with substantial new leverage. Oh well. Enjoy the playoffs.


One additional note: Obviously sports isn't Rose's regular beat, otherwise he would not have gotten this bit from Sunday's column quite as wrong as he did.

I think most folks around here are divided into two camps: You're either a Mardi Gras person or a Jazzfest person but I fully believe it's possible to be both, to give everything you've got to both of the grand, defining celebrations of our city and then simply while away the rest of the year, reading blogs about one or the other and waiting, just waiting, for the Cubes to be published again the following spring.

Everyone knows that New Orleans's two "grand, defining celebrations" are Mardi Gras and football season. Jazzfest occupies it's own sort of space in the spiritual calendar.... but we've covered this in detail already.

Sigh

This morning Chris Rose submitted a column about the surprising way in which his life intersected with Ashley Morris's. Upon seeing the Yellow Blog mentioned in the first paragraph, I became momentarily concerned at 1) The embarrassment at having my name in the paper as a tangential result of a man's death, and 2) The prospect of having various enthusiasts of Rose's column inadvertently and unnecessarily pointed to this minor personal website. But upon further reflection, who gives a shit what I think?

As for the column itself, it strikes something very near the right tone... in, of course, a very Rose-centric way. And more importantly, it has been well received by those who knew and loved Ashley best. As with any Rose column, I have my quibbles but they aren't very important. What is important is that anyone reading right now can still contribute to the fund set up by Ashley's friends for the benefit of his family in their time of need. You may do so by clicking on Chris Rose's goofy little purse-lipped face below.



Besides... who's a bigger douche than Stacy Head, anyway?

Off his meds again

Chris Rose would be well served by a (gracious is a bit much to hope for at this point) retirement.

There's a lot of disturbing material in this column but allow me to call attention to two snippets:

The very first line reads,

"I should have known from past experience that the word "vagina" is more trouble than it's worth."

Which means, simply, Rose has women troubles. Doubtless, he imagines this a charming aspect of the "tortured soul" dime store soap opera star persona he believes himself to have cultivated. In fact, it's just creepy.

The meat of the column consists of Rose supposedly being a good sport by printing some (actually very poignant and amusing) criticism of his latest (in a series of about 10 billion) "Gee that Mayor Nagin sure is wacky" column.

But actually it's just a jumping off point from which Rose can launch into this impressive bout of whining:

Poke me in the eye! OK, OK . . . I surrender. From now on, I am C. Ray-friendly. I am vagina-friendly. I am "Vagina Monologues"-friendly.

The truth is, I saw "The Vagina Monologues" when it played here in 2001 and I liked it. It was truthful, funny, thought-provoking and horrific all at the same time. And anyone who has followed my moonlight career as a stand-up comedian (all six of you) knows that "The Vagina Monologues" was the influence and inspiration for a show I have been performing for several years now, a show about a different body part, to which our mayor may or may not be friendly, I don't know.

OK, I should probably shut up now. I've written way more than 826 words here. So let me close with this: I, like our mayor, am thrilled about the V-Day spectacle coming to town (the second weekend in April, at the Superdome and the New Orleans Arena; see www.vday.org for more details).

It's going to bring a load of high-profile visitors and fawning media to town. It will be yet another party with a purpose, which seems to be our city's stock in trade these days. It will make New Orleans, yet again, the Focus of All Attention, if for no other reason than Oprah will be here for it.

It will all be evidence once more that New Orleans is where it's at, ground zero, the center of the universe -- this rocking town, this interesting, exotic and sexy town; the vagina-friendliest town on earth.

First of all, the V-Monologues inspired stand-up routine Rose is obliquely referring to here is a long running production called The Asshole Monologues which is not so much an homage to Vagina Monologues as it is a vehicle through which performers of varying talents can promote themselves while lamely cribbing a meme from a well-known slice of pop-culture. In other words... it's basically Chris Rose's column brought to life.

The last two paragraphs, in which Rose appears to be sarcastically bemoaning the (apparently in Rose's view) excessive special attention continuously given to New Orleans, are particularly interesting not only because Rose has spent the better part of the last two and a half years capitalizing on this sort of thing (His book is now in its second edition) but also because it reveals Rose's inability to relate to anything (including the flooding of the city and all that that has brought with it) beyond its relationship to pop-culture trends and/or his career. It would be tasteless to speculate about the relationship between Rose's self-centered shallowness and his above-mentioned "vagina trouble" so we won't do that here.

I have a long-running prediction about the eventual departure of Chris Rose from the New Orleans media market. At first, I set D-day at one Friedman but that was like four Friedmans ago and still no dice. Still such a move could still be imminent and probably the best thing for him, for his career, for all of us.

I hate to miss the good stuff

But last week there was the Best. Blog Post. Ever. And I was too busy with Carnival or something to acknowledge it.

Frontrunner

Now I'm really not getting on this bandwagon.

Quoth Rose: "But this is a whole new ballgame -- not your father's Hornets, for lack of a better term."

That only makes sense if you are say.... under five years of age. Or if your father lives in Charlotte.

Another milestone

Today Chris Rose published his seventy kabillionth permutation of the "Gee That Ray Nagin Sure Is Wacky" column. This time, he was sure to mention Hannah Montana in order to maintain his hep quotient.... or perhaps his creepy old dude quotient. I can never decide which.

Note: I wish to make a conceptual entry in the never-ending Christmas video war. It would involve Rose singing White Christmas in front of a stack of copies of his stupid book. Actually... no... that's probably actually happened somewhere. Make it a duet with Hannah Montana and then I think you've got something.

Keeping Up

We'll be resuming our regular Yellow Blog broadcast schedule soon enough. I've been out of town for a few days... hence the slight interruption. From what I can tell, here's what's been going on while I was away:

• The T-P published the rantings of a card-carrying member of the "certifiably insane" coalition



• Unorthodox (but Greek) Goobernatorial candidate, John Georges has taken the campaign to an interesting place in its final week.



• Nagin, whose endorsements have a history of being lead balloons, laid the kiss of death on Georges as well as on Cynthia Willard-Lewis in the dismal Council-At-Large race.



• Chris Rose's new column amounts to "Oh those wacky politicians! Why are they always running for stuff?" proving once again that Rose's column possesses all of the wit of a Garfield strip. But without quite as much dark irony.



• In a somewhat related matter, I've started reading Joshua Clark's Heart Like Water which I am really really trying hard to like. But it tasks me. I'm reserving judgment for now because it at least has kept me turning pages so far.



• Time for LSU to fire Les Miles. No, I'm not kidding.

And finally, there was a professional football game Sunday night which may have attracted some local interest. I know there is a report expected here. I may have something later in the week but for now I would just like to point out one detail which may have been overlooked.


Black leotard pants = fantastic suckitude


Normal gold pants = sudden awesomeness

Just sayin'

From the department of shit that just freaking figures

Rose liked K-Ville

Update: So far, I like Schroeder's take the best.

Upperdate: And this is even better. Oyster writes the post I'm still too freaking angry to write.

And it's odd that Chris Rose is so charitable toward K-ville (a drama about troubled cops in a town saturated with wild conspiracies), but was so dismissive of Spike Lee's defense of When the Levees Broke, a four hour documentary about the Federal Flood that contained 5 minutes of interviews with troubled New Orleanians who thought the levees were purposefully blown. Last year, Rose called Spike Lee a "whack job" and a "lamentable figure" for not sufficiently ruling out the possibility that the levees were dynamited.

I have no new pretty words with which to say this so I'll just say it plainly once more. Chris Rose is a douche.

Uppestdate: This has led to a very fun and very long discussion over at YRHT where we have learned two things of import. First, I spent the first anniversary of the flood actually making a big pot of gumbo. You see, it does help you think. Second, Dambala hits something that looks like it could be true.

I think Rose liked K-Ville because he wants to get a role in the series. You forget that he also acts. I think he's bucking for slot in the series....say playing...himself.