New Orleans, the Mississippi River and lots and lots of water.

Photo credit.

By the way, it's raining again.

Hell Is High Water: When will the Mississippi River come for New Orleans? by Henry Grabar (Slate)

ARABI, Louisiana—The water is breaking gently around the hull of the crew boat Miss Emerson, as if she were puttering across a muddy lake. Instead she is tied at the dock of Port Ship Service, straining at her bowline as a supercharged Mississippi River rushes beneath. On the bank of a levee just over the parish line from New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, Capt. Charles Crawford is preparing to take control of the Valle Azzurra, a big ship coming down the river in a hurry. The Miss Emerson is a transport boat. She will pull alongside the Malta-flagged tanker, and Crawford will board the larger vessel as the ships run momentarily together. He will climb a ladder that hangs over the ship’s port side, whose paint is scraped from a recent trip through the Panama Canal. His assignment: steer the Valle Azzurra safely to Pilottown, where the river meets the sea.

“Where’s mine?” Crawford asks Timmy Lopez, the drawling, tattooed dispatcher, his eyes as blue as the river is brown.

“Coming up on Perry Street,” responds Lopez with a glance at a monitor, as if we were waiting for an Uber instead of a 200-foot ship carrying 10,000 gallons of God knows what around the bend at Algiers Point.

Crawford is a member of the Crescent River Port Pilots Association, a group of elite mariners who steer tankers, freighters, and cruise ships down the 106 treacherous miles between New Orleans and the Bird’s Foot, the Mississippi River’s branching delta. It is specialized terrain, the pilots say, and even an experienced captain would struggle with its eccentricities. Crawford has the demeanor of a Hollywood airplane pilot—tanned, pleasantly lined face, a full head of gray hair. He has been doing this job for 40 years, and this one will be his last. “I always said, ‘I think I’ve got another high river season,’ but this year I said, ‘No, no more,’ ” he says, passing me the association calendar, which he helps photograph and design. “I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve seen a lot of high rivers, but I’ve never seen a river this high, this long.”

No one has. The Friday that Crawford sat waiting to board the Valle Azzurra was Day 225 of high water in New Orleans, tying the longest stretch in recorded history, set in 1973. The next day—Saturday, June 8—the record broke, and there is no end in sight ...

I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say ...

Tipping it off, did you know there is a New Orleans Jazz National Historical Park in New Orleans?

Experience Jazz Music Where it all Began

Only in New Orleans could there be a National Park for jazz! Drop by our visitor center at 916 North Peters St. to inquire about musical events around town. In the mood for a world class musical experience? Attend a jazz concert or ranger performance at the new state of the art performance venue on the 3rd floor of the New Orleans Jazz Museum.

Buddy Bolden (1877-1931) may or may not have been the first jazz musician. The cornetist made no recordings, and all we have for evidence are the recollections of certain of Bolden's contemporaries, all of whom are long dead. A likelier explanation for the advent of jazz is that numerous musical strands came together during the early years of the 20th century and combusted. 

(I dislike biopics, but for those so inclined a long-awaited film about Bolden has been released: Bolden, by Keith Uhlich.)

Bolden's name was mentioned whenever jazz lovers talked about the oldest times, but he didn't even get a proper headstone until 1996. Here's a good overview of Bolden's story by Gayle Worl in the Washington Post.

"King Bolden had everybody in the city of New Orleans real crazy and standing on their heads," Willie "Bunk" Johnson, a trumpeter and Bolden contemporary, recalled in an interview with the late jazz historian Bill Russell. Louis Armstrong, 23 years Bolden's junior, didn't give his predecessor as much credit. "Buddy Bolden had the biggest reputation, but he just played loud," Armstrong said. "I don't think he really knew how to blow his horn right."

PJ Morton, the keyboardist for the band Maroon 5, is a New Orleans native. He's spearheading an effort to restore Bolden's residence.

PJ Morton's party was a kickoff celebration for the Buddy's House Foundation, his recently announced plan to renovate Bolden's house, in consultation with the Preservation Resource Center (PRC) of New Orleans, an organization which advocates for the city's historic architecture. According to Morton, the house will become a community center, museum and recording studio, offering music-business education for young performers and celebrating the jazz originator's legacy.

To close, a recollection by a jazz writer, broadcaster and archivist. Jelly Roll Morton's version of "Buddy Bolden's Blues" is embedded above.

“I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say....” by W. Royal Stokes

I am occasionally asked why my professional card, letterhead, website, and blog are headed by the phrase “I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say. . . .” Sometimes, a person will inquire, “Who is Buddy Bolden?” Well, the phrase comes from, “Buddy Bolden’s Blues,” which was originally titled "Funky Butt" when it was a song in the repertoire of New Orleans cornetist and bandleader Charles “Buddy” Bolden (1877-1931), the legendary father of jazz. You can read about Buddy here. For further reading, I recommend Donald Marquis’s In Search Of Buddy Bolden: First Man Of Jazz and Danny Barker’s Buddy Bolden and the Last Days of Storyville.

Some consider "Funky Butt” the oldest known jazz tune. It was Jelly Roll Morton (1885-1941) who bestowed the title “Buddy Bolden’s Blues” upon it and fashioned his own lyrics ...

From Berlin to Budapest to New Orleans: "Historically, Confederate symbols have appeared at times of racial discord."

A concise, yet comprehensive essay about symbolism.

‘They were not patriots’: New Orleans removes monument to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, by Janell Ross (Washington Post)

NEW ORLEANS — They are all gone now. On Friday, the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee became the last of New Orleans’s four contested monuments to go, an end to more than 130 years of publicly honoring a man who embodied Southern pride and racial oppression.

Getting down to the heart of the matter:

Carol Anderson, a historian and professor of African American studies at Emory University, says that the various reasons given for defending Confederate monuments and symbols share a common underlying expectation — that even in an increasingly diverse democracy, power and influence should remain unchanged.

Speaking personally, my feeling for the "heritage" argument runs to a temperature far less than zero.

However, I'll concede to a shade of appreciation for the "landscape-defining art" defense, because while in East Berlin in 1989, I was intimately acquainted with an example of it.*

Lenin was removed shortly after German unification, and this is how it looked in 2014.

At the time, the multi-story apartment building would have been among the sleekest and most modern in East Berlin. The statue was placed to be framed by this structure, with the greenery of the adjacent public park softening the harshness of the concrete. The plaza and postwar Communist buildings facing Lenin's statue were all of a piece, flowing outward from the statue.

It may have been totalitarian, but there was a unity of purpose in design. When Lenin was toppled, there remained a pedestal with nothing, like a missing limb. You wouldn't need to know a statue stood in this spot without feeling something is missing.

Is there symbolism in omission?

A fair number of neighborhood activists opposed the statue's removal on precisely these grounds of landscape-defining art. They also made an argument worthy of reasoned consideration: we can't scrub the past entirely clean, and shouldn't try. Reminders of bad times are needed, so as to avoid their repetition.

Had the Lenin statue remained in place, would it have served as a shrine for remaining Communists? Perhaps, though it might also have been deployed in the manner chosen by the Hungarians. In 2002 while in Budapest, my tour group visited Statue Park (now apparently rebranded as Memento Park).

Memento Park in Budapest

Displayed in the Park are 42 pieces of art from the Communist era between 1945 and 1989, including allegorical monuments of “Hungarian-Soviet Friendship” and “Liberation”, as well as statues of famous personalities from the labour movement, soldiers of the Red Army and other gigantic pieces: Lenin, Marx, Engels, Dimitrov, Captain Ostapenko, Béla Kun and other “heroes” of the communist world. A favourite with visitors is the Liberation Army Soldier. A hammer-and-sickle flag in its hand and a cartridge-disc machine pistol hanging in its neck make the statue complete. This 6-meter tall statue of the evil-eyed Soviet soldier once stood on the top of Gellért Hill in central Budapest, well-seen from every direction.

When facing it, the main entrance bears the image of a monumental classicist building. Looking behind it, though, it resembles a 12-meter high, under-propped communistic scenery ? a perfect introduction into the nature of dictatorship.

The words of architect Ákos Eleőd, the conceptual designer of Memento Park serve as its motto: “This Park is about dictatorship. And at the same time, because it can be talked about, described and built up, this Park is about democracy. After all, only democracy can provide an opportunity to think freely about dictatorship. Or about democracy, come to that! Or about anything!”

Here are two photos from our visit, taken from the Tom Henderson Collection.

Ironically, the late Jim Scott (second from the right) lived in New Orleans.

For now, New Orleans will store the four Confederate monuments in an undisclosed location, due to threats made against city officials, activists, contractors and work crews involved in taking them down. City officials announced late Thursday that an unspecified water feature will replace the Lee statue, and an American flag will fly where the Davis fixture once stood. Nonprofits and government agencies will eventually be allowed to submit plans that would put the statues on private property. City Park officials will decide what will replace the Beauregard statue.

Symbolism matters, but at the same time, if we're determined not to learn lessons from 152 years ago, symbolism just might be the least of our concerns.

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* The oft-told story of how I came to be in East Germany in 1989 can be found at these links.

Pilsners with Putin: 1989 Revisited (Part One).

Pilsners with Putin: 1989 Revisited (Part Two).

Pilsners with Putin: 1989 Revisited (Part Three).

Pilsners with Putin: 1989 Revisited (Part Four).

Design as protest: “What does disaster capitalism look like on black women’s bodies?”

If, by chance, I'm not elected mayor, it's becoming increasingly clear to me which direction I'll be traveling in future endeavors.

A Radical Design Movement Is Growing in New Orleans, by Nina Feldman (Next City)

City zoning that supports fair housing is boring. Very few people want to jump into a casual conversation about the best way to manage blight or reduce verbal street harassment. Unless you’re with friends, it’s next to impossible for a discussion about Confederate monuments or race and policing to become anything but inflammatory. (If you need evidence of that, refer to the comments section below any online article attempting to deal with those topics.) Yet these issues of urban justice can’t be left to trolls, or even politicians, to hash out — not if we want to see progress in our cities. Change will only come as a result of public awareness, dialogue and, ultimately, political pressure.

So, the question becomes a simple one: How do we get people to pay attention?

Over the past several years, activists in cities from Cairo to Oakland to Rio de Janeiro have increasingly found answers in the built environment and the field of design. They have protested inadequate infrastructure by building their own, deployed street art as political missive and reappropriated abandoned homes. All of this can be described as design as protest.

In a sense, design as protest is a matter of branding. It is a means of broadcasting a message and drawing people in.