It started raining Saturday night as soon as the festival ended. It ended raining Sunday morning just as the festival grounds were opening up to the crowds. If there's a hurricane this year down here, I'll be blaming Festival impresario Quint Davis, since he's clearly now in control of our weather.
New Orleans has always been more of a hugging town than a handshaking town. A handshake is for first meetings or for distant acquaintances. But this weekend at Jazzfest, which always has functioned, among other things, as an annual site for reunions, there was a hugfest goin on, especially among the performers and the folks working at the festival. People who would normally have seen each other every day leading up to the event were now seeing faces they hadn't seen in ten months. Whatever else this year's festival accomplishes--aside from making some people think nicer thoughts about
Shell--it will have been the occasion for a large number of relieved and happy reunions.
As well as bizarre and interesting new pairings: last night, while I was having dinner, Barry Scheck--yes, that Barry Scheck--came over to my table to tell me how great Bruce Springsteen's set was at the Fest yesterday afternoon. When I told him I wasn't a fan and had left the fairgrounds at around that time, he looked at me sternly and said, "You made a serious error."
While I've been noticing some familiar debris piles around town now, finally, removed, something else has been added to the NO equation: potholes the size of small swimming pools. You drive fast at night and don't know the terrain, and BOOM, you're halfway to China before you realize what hit you--or what you hit. The city was never that great at keeping the streets paved--that sort of thing takes organization--but the potholes springing up right now are works the Corps of Engineers would be proud of. If they can be proud of anything. Today's Times-Picayune front-pages a story about the Corps deciding not to use up-to-date elevation maps in 1985 as the construction of the current levees was about halfway completed. It was a "pragmatic" decision, says a Corps spokesman. Very pragmatic. Saved a little money then, cost a whole lot more now.
And, as many times as I've driven, and walked, through neighborhoods in the devastated zone, I wasn't prepared for this morning's experience, taking a helicopter tour of the region. You think you understand the scale of this disaster, and you keep being wrong. I may upload some photographs from the trip as an update, but some news outlet somewhere with about an hour of airtime to fill should just fly a chopper with a camera through the disaster zone, and show it, in real time, in its entirety. Not as compelling as "Parents Who Prostitute Their Children" on Jerry, but still great TV.