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At 2008’s Prospect.1 biennial in New Orleans, the talk of the freshly drained town was Mark Bradford’s "Mithra,” a massive ark constructed from salvaged plywood complete with tattered bills posted to the planks. Will this year’s hit be an “environmental structure” from Joyce Scott? The Observer has learned a few new details about second-ever Prospect Read More
LISA + DONNIE R OK. The words are both hopeful and bone-chilling. They were scrawled, in 2005, on a once-pretty white house with pale-blue shutters in New Orleans' Ninth Ward.
Five years ago this month, one of the deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history swept through Louisiana and Mississippi. An exhibition opening Aug. 28 (a day Read More
Before Hurricane Katrina trounced New Orleans in 2005, the laissez-does-it city was a place not unlike Key West, a harbor, often, for lackey expats to get drunk, live cheaply and scribble bad poetry. “New Orleans was a place to hide,” Charles Bukowski said. “I could piss away my life, unmolested.”
But five years after Katrina, and Read More
Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans By Dan Baum Spiegel & Grau, 335 pages, $26
About halfway through Dan Baum’s brilliant but frustrating Nine Lives, a ventriloquist’s collage of New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina, Tim Bruneau, a young, strong cop hungry for some “boot-in-the-ass” policing, chases a suspect through the Read More
It's worth keeping that example in mind this afternoon, with Hurricane Gustav, downgraded Read More
City Comptroller Bill Thompson isn't finished whacking the city's Department of Education. He released a letter earlier today essentially accusing one of the department's high-priced private consultants, Alvarez and Marsal, of professional laziness for creating a plan for city schools that looks eerily similar to the one they created for hurricane-ravaged New Orleans. That's Read More
Gerald Ford is dead at 93. John Edwards is about to announce a run for president, using hard-hit New Orleans as a backdrop. The New York Post is skeptical. Eliot Spitzer denied that his appointment of Nassau County Republican Michael Balboni to be his top homeland security official is part of Read More
When the dozy, dreamy singer-songwriter Cat Power walked onstage at last week’s “The Music of Bob Dylan” benefit, she was slated to sing “Moonshiner,” a desperate folksong about desperate alcoholism. But the singer (who says she was drinking a bottle of scotch a day before she dried out earlier this year) played something else instead. Read More
Look, what follows is really not appropriate. But it's hard to clear the mind and hit the Friday LIRR without finally saying something. There is one person in America telling the Tribune-owned Los Angeles Times to be more boring, and his name is Clay Risen. Mr. Risen—who penned an op-ed this week which insanely Read More
The mayor: as supple as a skyscraper
/Cheryl This New Orleans dog, abandoned by her owner even after the waters receded, was rescued by Maria, at left, when she worked at a shelter in Baton Rouge. As a doglover, I welcome her onto my blog, but chiefly to raise a fresh injustice: Maria, who dined at my house last night (my social Read More
Tonight the NBC Nightly News doggedly began its broadcast with a report from the levees of New Orleans at the onset of hurricane season rather than where CBS and ABC began: with the Haditha massacre and the European-U.S. coalition visavis Iran. By such choices, Brian Williams is hewing to the position he took at Read More
I'm just back from New Orleans, and stunned and shocked. Nothing on television or in the papers conveys the scale of Katrina, six months on. You turn onto a boulevard and suddenly there's a mountain of dead trees, gargantuan and muddy and scraped clean of branches and leaves by crews that left months ago. That's Read More
Click image to enlarge. Devoting an entire issue to real estate is a great idea for two reasons. First, New Yorkers seemingly can't get enough of the topic. Second, there's a lot of brokerages ready to spend big money on full-color ads for their luxury developments. Bulging to over 200 pages, this Read More
I should have known I wouldn't be able resist a short post on the Harlem political festivities today, first at a freezing 1199 rally, and then at the cozy Canaan Baptist Church, where Al Sharpton holds court.
Hillary, speaking at Canaan (and keeping a good distance between herself and fellow guest Harry Belafonte) Read More
