"The forecast could change in the coming days"

Weather people. What do they even know?

Carnival season kicks into high gear this weekend, with more than two dozen parades set to roll in the New Orleans area. So the big question is: will the weather cooperate?

According to the National Weather Service, the first half of the week should stay dry in New Orleans, but a cold front moving into the area on Thursday could bring rain back into the forecast for the weekend. On Friday, showers are more likely early in the day, with a break in rain chances possible late Friday and Saturday, the National Weather Service said. However, moisture is expected to return again on Saturday night into Sunday. On Monday morning, the Weather Service said that Sunday will bring the biggest chance of rain, with showers likely during the day.

Highs on each day will range in the upper 50s to low 60s, the Weather Service said.

The forecast could change in the coming days.

The forecast can certainly change.  We learned this Saturday night when, through what we can only assume was spiritual intervention, a day of thunderstorms and "flash flood warnings" gave way to balmy temperatures and a light fog.  Suddenly, improbably, there it was; the ideal atmosphere for a parade in the Quarter.



We should have known it would happen this way.  There's no way the same universe that allowed Stefon Diggs to take a playoff win away from the Saints was also going to rain out Krewe Du Vieux during the Tricentennial Mardi Gras. This is merely an absurd existence we are living through, not a deliberately cruel one. It's important to remember that.



To help celebrate the city's 300th, KDV enlisted geographer, New Orleans know-it-all dude (and one time Rising Tide keynote speaker) Richard Campanella as its King.  Here he is trying to throw to the balconies.



For his latest NOLA.com column, Campanella published a "virtual tour" of the parade route. If you're reading this right now, you probably know KDV pretty well. But, for the sake of covering all of our bases, here is Campanella's introductory description from that article.

Krewe du Vieux, which rolls Saturday, Jan. 27, at 6:30 p.m., is best known for its ribald satire of public figures and current events. But in its structural form and route geography (small mule-drawn floats on old, narrow streets packed with revelers), the parade is something of a throwback to 19th-century Carnival.

The KDV format and ethos is among the purest exemplars of the creative disorder and subversion of social and political norms that is central to the spirit of Carnival. Predictably, this spirit is always in tension with the established social and political hierarchy which seeks to assert itself in various ways during the season as well.  Sometimes this tension contributes to the pageant. For example, this is the time when local blue bloods present their debutantes to society. To do this, they style themselves as royalty presiding over elaborate balls where the city's elite are expected to literally line up and bow to them to the undying amusement of everyone.

There are also ways in which the exertion of elite privilege detracts from the celebration.  Think about the discrepancy in parade fees charged to neighborhood level parading groups vs. what the larger, wealthier krewes are expected to pay. Or the present effort to limit the number of individual bands and marching groups who appear in parades. Here, by the way, is a photo of the balcony Campanella was throwing to in the previous one.  It's a little blurry but the sign says, "Marching Clubs Matter."



And these are only a few of the  thousand ways the more organic aspects of Carnival tend to be repressed by the city's bias toward the tourism industry and the security state.

For Carnival season, city cameras are also being installed along the Uptown, Mid-City and West Bank parade routes, Miller said. Those cameras may be moved later to other locations, he said.

In total, there will be about 70 cameras watching the 8th District, which includes the French Quarter and Central Business District, and about a dozen locations with cameras along the parade routes, Miller said.

The flashing lights on the new cameras are intended to make sure the devices are visible to residents who have requested cameras in their neighborhoods and also to discourage crime in those areas, Miller said.

The lights haven’t gone smoothly at all locations.

I think the lights are actually flashing, "Be safe," in Morse code. But I will have to remember to check that later. In the meantime, someone needs to help me FOIA the tapes so we can finally make that #KreweOfChad nature documentary.  Mayor-Elect Cantrell says the cameras are, "better than I ever imagined" so I assume the picture quality is very good.

Speaking of LaToya, here's another terrific case of elite pressure working against the subversive Carnival instinct. It looks like incoming mayor's relationship with the business class folks who run the Krewe of Muses is crimping that parade's traditional aspiration toward satire.

The all-female Krewe of Muses is one of the Carnival organizations that use their parades to satirize and poke fun at politicians and other celebrities.

It appears, however, that the city's first woman mayor is getting a pass this year.

The group announced Friday that Mayor-elect LaToya Cantrell will in fact be the krewe's Honorary Muse for the 2018 parade. She will lead the procession on Feb. 8, riding in the "shoe float," a 17-foot-tall, fiber-optic-encrusted red pump.

This is dereliction of duty. At least come up with a way to make it fun for people. I mean, don't get me wrong, I am definitely now on a quest to catch a shoe from LaToya this year. But what if they came up with a way to make it more interesting.

For example, check out this float the St. Tammany Sheriff's Office rolled in the Krewe of Poseidon over the weekend. It is designed to collect beads from the crowd for the purpose of turning them over to a local charity for recycling.  You can "donate" your beads to the cause by throwing them at targets on the side of the truck. But, as an extra incentive for the crowd, a gigantic likeness of Sheriff Randy Smith is riding on the front of the float for people to throw at as well much the way attendees at Bacchus enjoy throwing back at King Kong. (By the way, Bacchus is upping their ape game this year, it seems.)

But since the Muses have an actual live LaToya Cantrell available, it seems like they've missed an opportunity to do some fundraising themselves.  How much trouble would it have been to put LaToya on the Bathing Muses float rigged up as a dunking booth?  Not a single strand of beads would have found its way into a storm drain that night.  Oh well. Nothing is guaranteed to go perfectly. Not even the weather. 

Buy some (cool) dirt

Ray Nagin 2006:

He said that billions of dollars will be invested into the rebuilding effort and urged the audience to "buy some dirt in New Orleans."

"New Orleans is getting ready to be the biggest job site in the world," he said.

While touting the positives of the city, Nagin also said the wait continues for delivery of money the government has approved for homeowners. He acknowledged the biggest issue still facing the city is inadequate housing.

It's worth remembering that even at a point less than one year after the flood even Ray Nagin understood that the federal recovery investment in New Orleans was going to set off a boom.  (Something like a boom, anyway.) [Update 3/14: This was the part of the post where I had intended to make an "Exlpoding Pie" reference but forgot to put the link in.  Sorry.  Happy Pi Day]

We spend a lot of time and ink and virtual ink praising the Hollywood buzz and tourism driven real estate bubble we're experiencing and calling that "recovery."  But that's all just booster babble obscuring the federal investment that has been the real driver here.

Every major project in town you see hailed as a "sign of recovery" whether it's the Mid-City hospital complex, the Loyola Streetcar, the "five new libraries" (actually five old libraries rebuilt but whatever),  the "revitalized" Main Streets, the Circle Food Store, or even the new Whole Foods on Broad,  all of that stuff is happening thanks to federal grant funds mostly tied directly to disaster recovery.

It might be advantageous to some to go around proclaiming this is all the work of "entrepreneurs" and movie magicians, but really those are just stories about the yuppies who have followed the money here.  And in the process, these folks have done some funny things to the housing market.

Richard Campanella says, in so many words here, that recently arrived trendies have bid up the cost of living according to a "coolness map."  Well.. maybe. The further Campanella ventures out into the world of punditry he gets himself into more and more trouble giving some pet concepts and lazy generalizations the imprimatur of academic legitimacy.

For example, this recent article on Bourbon Street (a preview of his new book) makes a number of simplistic assumptions about who is or is not an "authenticity seeker."

Not everyone plays the authenticity game. Many working-class natives of metro New Orleans, particularly African Americans, have all the authenticity they need, and tend to view Bourbon Street as harmless, naughty fun. Middle-class folks throughout the region enjoy it for what it is and shrug off its faults. It’s the cultural elite and their aspirants who obsess about authenticity, going so far as to segregate nearly all aspects of city life into an authentic/inauthentic dualism. They would universally agree, for example, that the Seventh Ward, St. Claude Avenue, the bounce scene, second-line parades, Mardi Gras Indians, and anything to do with Creoles all sparkle with realness. And with equal unanimity they renounce the upper Quarter, the French Market, Indian-owned T-shirt shops, and anything related to Bourbon Street. To be sure, most are willing to concede a few spots of Good Bourbon amid ten blocks of Bad Bourbon. Even the most rabid haters revere Galatoire’s, say nice things about Irvin Mayfield’s Jazz Playhouse, maintain a polite neutrality regarding the St. Ann queer space, and enjoy Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, whose candlelit interior wins over just about everyone. But these exceptions only prove the rule — and progressives rule that Bourbon Street is phony, period.

I want to agree with this paragraph. It mostly rings true.  But it is also too neat. Worse, it appears to assume that only the "cultural elite" are capable of introspection.. however navel-gazey it may be in this case.  I know Campanella probably does not mean to imply this but one reads this article and finds the need to say that aversion to phoniness is neither an upper class privilege nor any sort of character flaw.  Pretentiousness, on the other hand, is.  Campanella seems to conflate these.  

I don't want to get bogged down in this Bourbon Street stuff.  I agree with Campanella's aim to defend it as an "unpretentious" place. But it's possible to be both annoyed by and fascinated with a thing at the same time. As someone who has spent far more time on Bourbon Street than on its truly more pretentious alternatives (Frenchmen, St. Claude) I can both say that Bourbon Street is awful and that I'd rather go there than most places.

It's a shame Campanella has this tendency to make his valuable work so difficult to trust at times.  When he's good, he's very very good.  This paragraph, for instance, is very very true.. but ends up making me cringe despite myself.

Contrast this with the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, the annual springtime fete that attracts hundreds of thousands of people to the Fairgrounds in Gentilly. Jazz Fest takes great pride in its musical acts and regional foods, arts and exhibits; cultural cognoscenti love it devoutly, and criticize it only when it fails to live up to its own authenticity-reverent ideals. Among the unwritten rules of self-respecting festgoers are no beads, no Bourbon T-shirts and no Bourbon antics; Jazz Fest sees itself as a cultural refuge from all that phoniness. Yet Jazz Fest was invented by a man from Massachusetts as part of a worldwide megafestival circuit — essentially a local franchise of a global chain. Meticulously choreographed and carefully policed, it is managed out of New York, coordinated by crack professionals, “presented by Shell” (a phrase now officially appended to the event’s name), increasingly dependent on global superstar acts, subsidized by an on-site Acura showroom, and funded by Big Oil — not to mention an entrance fee that has risen 400 percent in 10 years, to 50 dollars per person, more than the median daily take-home pay in New Orleans. Trained staffers screen the acts, taste-test the foods of every concessionaire, and inspect the merchandise of all vendors before passing authentic/inauthentic judgment. The motifs of the event are all professionally designed to affect a funky juke-joint atmosphere — bottle caps nailed to rough-hewn clapboards, folk-style naïve art, helter-skelter multicolored lettering, that sort of thing. Jazz Fest is the epitome of invented, planned, centralized cultural control that leaves nothing to chance and covers its tracks with the trappings and aesthetics of authenticity. An existential philosopher would have to be particularly generous to describe Jazz Fest as authentic, and equally parsimonious to dismiss Bourbon Street as phony. Yet that is precisely what most Bourbon-hating culture lovers do.

It's that "most Bourbon-hating culture lovers" assumption that brings the cringe back. Those terms are too loose and poorly defined. We kinda get what he's talking about. And it's fine for some rube like me to say stuff like that on my dumb personal blog.  But when you write that in a pseudo-academic setting like the magazine this article appears in, you're giving some stereotypes too much weight.

The same is true of Campanella's  "Coolness Map." There's a lot about it that rings true.  But he runs into trouble, as anyone might, not only trying to define "cool" (My God he even relies on fucking Malcolm Gladwell to do this) but also attempting to quantify and spacially represent what can only be considered highly subjective sorta-data.

Coolness constantly needs to be ahead of the mainstream, and if the mainstream catches up, coolness goes elsewhere. "The act of discovering what's cool," observed Malcolm Gladwell in an influential 1997 article entitled "The Coolhunt," "is what causes cool to move on." As it does, coolness often produces new cultural innovations and explores increasingly edgy terrain. Coolness thus becomes geographical: it occupies certain spaces, disdains others, and seeks new ones when uncoolness approaches.

It's difficult to overstate how terrible this is. It is the exact equivalent of crediting the FEMA stimulated recovery of New Orleans to American Horror Story and the guys who made that pee pee finder phone app.  It's not "coolness" that drives a neighborhood's value.  It's these more tangible factors which Campanella himself names.

True, these neighborhoods boast other advantages. They have history, architecture, walkability, high topographic elevation and favorable flood zones, not to mention proximity to resources and employment. But they had these advantages years ago, yet few came a-bidding.

Except the people did come a-bidding.   It's just that you only notice the a-bidding heating up when there's a lot of money a-floating around town.  This happens in starts and stops. Here is GNOCDC's description of gentrification in the Irish Channel during the late 1990s.

In 1990, 1 in 4 Irish Channel houses was vacant. By the late 1990s, things were turning around in the neighborhood. Ms. Husing points out that change has been happening with incredible speed. “The houses that weren’t torn down are being purchased and renovated. And the people who own section 8 rentals are doing renovations for higher-paying tenants. My neighbors, little old Black ladies, are saying ‘Used to be I couldn’t give my house away. I can’t believe how much it’s worth now!’”

And that was during a marginal period of relative non-decline for New Orleans. Right now, again, thanks to the massive federal investment in rebuilding,  the market is more superheated than we've gotten used to than at any time since the oil bust of the early 80s. Take a look at this 1977 documentary by Louis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker about the rush to renovate and flip Irish Channel properties.  Pretty familiar stuff, right?

Of course Campanella knows all of this.  He's made a career studying and writing about the cultural geography of these neighborhoods. Where he goes wrong is his assertion that these cycles of revitalization and decline follow upon notions of perceived  "coolness" rather than the other way around.  "Coolness" is a marketing gimmick imposed after the fact by planning consultants and the real estate sales interests they typically work for. Campanella more or less describes this but it isn't clear that he grasps the point.

Jefferson Parish authorities hired a consultant from Manhattan to advise them on how to revive the district. His advice: "create a 'cluster of cool'" in the heart of Fat City, "where you can really make it look and feel different."

Managers are trying a similar strategy for the cool-challenged French Market. They've been running "Hip Scene, Historic Setting" ads in cool magazines like Offbeat, recruiting earthy craft vendors to counter the beads-and-T-shirts stigma, and piping in the very cool sounds of WWOZ into the flea market like intravenous nourishment for the ailing.

Here and elsewhere, coolness has become an urban planning strategy, and planners today wield its trappings the way their predecessors once plied golf courses and gated subdivisions. "Real" cool, meanwhile, has a mind of its own.

These slogans are not what is transforming hitherto affordable urban neighborhoods into the exclusive yuppie enclaves they're becoming.  These are just the shallow rationalizations presented in order to congratulate the yuppies for buying in.  After all, once you've sliced your building into 210 square foot "micro-mini-studios" you're not gonna get anyone to pay $600 a month for one without some flattery.

For $600 per month (utilities are included), renters get 210-square-feet of space, the luxury of a private bathroom, a kitchenette, a "private bar," which we're pretty sure is micro-dwelling code for "counter," plus internet and cable access. The ceilings are 12-feet, and good thing since it's a loft bed set-up. There are several mentions of these "quirky and luxurious, private and cooperative" rentals being "green-oriented," so take that for what it's worth.

Sure, tell them they're being "green-oriented" or something.  That sounds like it's got some coolness involved.

Meanwhile, though, look at all the free land they can't give away!

State Rep. Wesley Bishop, D-New Orleans, has an idea for speeding up the pace of recovery in the Lower 9th Ward: sell off some of the hundreds of government-owned properties in the sparsely populated neighborhood for $100 a pop.

He is planning to propose two bills to that effect during this year’s legislative session, one of which would tweak the Louisiana constitution in order to allow this to happen. Under existing state law, the city cannot simply give property away to individuals for less than fair market value. Bishop’s changes would allow New Orleans to donate the properties for a nominal fee.

Folks are paying three dollars per square foot to rent little boxes over in Mid City.  Maybe if someone could get some more affordable areas "back into commerce" we'd have an easier time of it, right? 

In a memorable exchange last year with James Gray, who represents the neighborhood on the City Council, Hebert warned that unloading properties all at once and below market value might destabilize the broader housing market. Since the redevelopment authority will go ahead with an auction only when there is enough interest from potential buyers, most of its lots in the hardest-hit section of the 9th Ward remain dormant.

Oh well, OK, then. Can't go around destabilizing the insane bubble we've got going, I guess.

The only thing left to do is see about generating some interest from potential buyers.  According to Campanella's thesis, all we'd have to do is "create a 'cluster of cool'" over in the Ninth Ward.  If he's right about this, I'm guessing a couple food truck rallies and an art market should do the trick. 

Wonked to death

Thomas Frank:

Actually, let me offer a correction to Obama’s formula. What really defines our time is the simultaneous soaring of inequality and the maddening inability of most progressives (there are exceptions, of course) to talk about it in a way that might actually inspire anyone to get off their ass. Start with the word itself: Like “neoliberalism,” another favorite lefty term for many of these same developments, “inequality” is confusing. It is euphemistic and aloof. It gets easily muddled with other, similar-sounding issues like marriage equality, gender equality and equal housing opportunity. Its tone is also needlessly clinical, giving the whole debate a technical and bloodless air.

Still, to read around on the subject is to get the feeling that certain liberals like it that way. “Needlessly clinical” is exactly their style. The subject, for them, must be positively cloaked in wonkery. They don’t talk much about “class,” like some troublemaker from the ’30s; they talk about “inequality,” which is a delicate and intricate signifier. Oh, it is extremely complex. It requires so many charts.

There are several factors that contribute to this phenomenon.  Sure, some of our so-called liberal politicians and pundits are just kind of spineless.  But still more of them really do just identify too closely with the people who created the problem in the first place to challenge them directly.

One often wonders whose side Mary Landrieu is even on, for example.

“I’m a die-hard Republican, but I love Mary Landrieu,” said Lafayette resident Mark Miller, who owns and runs multiple Louisiana-based companies that drill and offer support services to other energy firms. “You can’t overstate what it means for this state to have her experience and influence, especially with the energy chairmanship.”

Among other things, Miller cites Landrieu’s support for the Keystone Pipeline extension, her opposition to cap-and-trade legislation, her defense of offshore drilling after the Gulf oil spill and her support for the industry’s tax advantages. Landrieu has also garnered support from shipbuilding magnate Donald “Boysie” Bollinger, noteworthy because Bollinger helped bankroll the GOP’s takeover of the Louisiana Legislature.

But, more to Frank's point, too often arguments over substantial crises involving real life villains are sanitized as the passive consequence of circumstance rather than the deliberate product of policy choices.

The rich got so goddamn rich, in other words, because the signature policies of the Great Right Turn were designed to make them rich. And, as the world knows, these policies weren’t limited to Republicans; Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama—plus, of course, their resident economists and cabinet members—all more or less endorsed the basic tenets of the free-market faith. They are all implicated.

So inequality, now that we’re having a “conversation” about it, must of course turn out to be massively complicated, something no one could possibly have seen coming — sort of like the 2008 financial crisis, come to think of it. Furthermore, it must be seen as another technical problem, a matter for the experts to solve, like the budget deficit or entitlement spending.

Which brings me back to Tulane academic and Preservation In Print contributor Richard Campanella's carefully chosen words describing the "green dot" plan in this NYT piece.

Decision makers may see a disaster as “an opportunity to finally get things right,” said Richard Campanella, a geographer at Tulane University, but during those times, “everyone else craves normalcy.”

Of course it isn't Campanella's job to say "Decision makers Plutocrats may see a disaster as an opportunity to finally get things right take advantage of tragedy in order to improve their position, but during those times, everyone else craves normalcy victims may push back." But his phrasing does paint the parties more likely to help him get his work published in a forgiving light.  And keeping those types happy actually is a big part of his job. 

Not that academia is all about flattery to power.  It has other uses. But those who would seek to represent  us on the short end of the inequality debate aren't doing us any favors by adopting its often hedged and passive rhetoric.