New Orleans

It's just so fucking awful. There's not really anything to say.

Give to the relief efforts, if you can.

I'm going to drink a large glass of whiskey tonight, listen to When the Levee Breaks very loud, and drink to the waters receding. The Zeppelin version of the song, not the John Campbell version, though that one's good too.

Star-Crossed Times For the Crescent City

By Ken Ringle
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, August 31, 2005; Page C01

And yet, inseparable though they may be, New Orleans has always been more about the dance than about the death. Somewhere in the shade of its majestic live oaks and the shadows of its lacework balconies, among the saxophone riffs in its echoing alleys and the soft magenta glow of its crape myrtles at twilight, the flickering ghosts that haunt New Orleans whisper huskily of sweaty, sensual love and the promise of enduring memory. Even the street names whisper promises: Desire, Amour, Abundance; Pleasure, Treasure and Joy.

It is not comforting to realize that, in the wake of Katrina, bloated bodies are floating on those streets today. But to speak of New Orleans's resilience is simply to cite its history -- a demographic and cultural melting pot of German industry and French and Spanish elitism, of Irish gregariousness and Sicilian emotionalism, of African exuberance and American frontier cussedness that embraces death, too, as a part of life.

Lives, levees and live oaks are merely temporary in any case. Katrina's catastrophes will no more define New Orleans than the Nazi occupation defined Paris, though they may last almost as long.