Wow it has been a long time since my last post!

I've been super busy at work, which has been mostly great. Aside from administrative stuff, I've been doing some work on a new advertising campaign- they just got a grant to design and publish ads in the media and do thinks like banners and billboards. I'm hoping I'll get to help out with some grant writing as well. I actually (get ready for this) turned down a lighting design for my job. I feel like I'll get out of this work whatever I put in to it, kind of like school oddly enough. I am already learning a huge amount about fair housing law and local policy, racial and class tensions in New Orleans, and the ways in which post-K (a common term here) legislation has hurt low-income residents on a local and a national level. Crazy shit is going down here- like Jefferson Parish is trying to block the building of multi-family homes (i.e. low income housing, which tends to have a large number of African American tenants, which means that such a policy has serious racial connotations.) And the Housing Administration of New Orleans is tearing down the "big four" housing projects in the city to replace them with "mixed income neighborhoods." Read into that. What does that mean? A lot of people argue that poverty should not be so concentrated, and that neighborhoods that are more economically integrated are safer and more diverse. But you still have the problem of thousands of residents who lost everything they had (and many of whom didn't have that much in the first place) trying to move back to a city where rents have gone up almost universally. My own next door neighbor is living in a shotgun double like mine, and is being forced to leave because his landlord is raising the rent from $500 to $800.

WHERE ARE ALL THESE PEOPLE GOING TO LIVE?
Everyone needs housing. It's kind of a basic, universal need.

Speaking of housing, yesterday Phil, Joanna and I went to the New Orleans Museum of Art mostly to see an exhibit of artwork done by children at the largest FEMA trailer park in the state, called Renaissance Village outside Baton Rouge. I had read about the exhibit in the Times, and about how art therapists are working with kids there as part of a larger effort to gain support for a children's trauma center (there is a severe lack of mental health resources in the city right now.) The work was terrifying, and sad, and sometimes full of hope. In one piece a child drew a fragmented and broken home and then "fixed" it with layers of masking tape and a cut-out of his own hand.



Another kid seemed haunted by images of dead birds, so he made some dead birds out of pipe cleaners and then created a sort of memorial for them, in a special bird cage with a woven rug.



Many of the kids, when asked to draw a place of safety, drew bizarre triangular houses. Art therapists realized that for many of these children the roof, not the house, is the safe place in a post-K world.




All of the work on display is on this website: http://www.katrinaexhibit.org/

Joanna and I also saw an interesting play the other night at Southern Rep called "The Breach" which was about Katrina via three interwoven stories. There were some very moving parts, but my favorite thing about the play was what followed: a sort of panel conversation with two local grassroots organizers and a local physician. Ryan Rillette, the Artistic Director, asked them each about how rebuilding work is going in their sector, and how they thought the rest of the country perceives the recovery efforts in NOLA. They're hoping the play will make it into the regional theater circuit in time for election season. It's already going to Seattle Rep. I got really excited about the urgency of this play, and its potential political clout. And I was thrilled to go to a "talk-back" in which the IDEAS and ISSUES in the play were discussed instead of how great the acting was.

Joanna and I are going to make a ceremony. It will involve:
a. candles
b. the sound of water
c. Bulgarian chant music

This is a New Orleans sunset. It's kind of like the sky is on fire.



Our neighbor Joey who walks his dog Mambo by our house every day says the winters here are really cold, and because of the humidity, the cold sort of sticks to you. That must be an odd sensation.