I spent four + hours to watching When The Levees Broke: A Requiem In Four Acts. It had no shortage of great stories. Those aren’t hard to find. Walk up to anybody on the streets in any town across the Gulf South and they will have hours of Katrina stories for you. It was well shot, superbly edited and overall I would recomend it. Of course I had a few problems. One of my favorite segments was the man who told Vice-President Cheney “go fuck yourself Mr. Cheney.” But he was the only person from Mississippi that was interviewed. And the time spent with him was the only footage shown from the Sip. If Spike Lee wanted to make a film just about New Orleans, that’s OK. But it seemed kind of cheap to only cover Mississippi for that one segment. That a second was spent on the issue of calling displaced peoples refugees was a second too much. That was as much of a non-issue then as it is now. A refugee is someone seeking refuge, which is what we were, and still are. And that Congress members were calling press conferences to complain about insignifigant language while people were still on rooftops and not a single citizen had been evacuated from the Superdome or Convention Center is appaling. This was the event that inspired Mayor Nagin to yell “no more god damned press conferences.” But the thing that really chapped my hide was the interviewing of Al Sharpton and Harry Belefonte. What the fuck did they have to do with anything? Neither of them has ever lived on the Gulf Coast. Why talk to these two men? There are hundreds of outstanding black activists in New Orleans.
The media is talking about New Orleans again as the anniversary approaches. This is a huge landmark, but it’s day 362 of hurricane Katrina. That storm still is destroying lives. As the 12 month mark looms, I’ve been counting down all the other little anniversaries. Every day, for the past week or so, it has dawned on me that one year ago that day was the last time I worked a normal day, the last time I performed a show, the last time I hung out at a certain bar, the last time I ate at a favorite resturant or the last time I saw a friend. There’s way too many people, places and events to remember and memorialize in a single day.
PS – TD 5 is scaring the ever living crap out of me.
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