Trouble The Water

Tomorrow night on NatGeo:
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/episode/trouble-the-water-4249/Videos#tab-Overview

One Block

Photographer Dave Anderson’s recently released book One Block: A New Orleans Neighborhood Rebuilds is a powerful portrait of post-Katrina New Orleans as seen through the prism of a single city block whose residents are attempting to rebuild their homes. Using portraiture and still lifes, Anderson explores the very nature of community while testing its resilience. (source)

Citizen Gulf tonight in NYC

Tonight (8/25) – in conjunction with the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina – there will be a series of CitizenGulf meet-ups across the country to fundraise and benefit fishing families affected by the oil spill. At the #citizengulf NYC meet-up, you make a step towards actionable change. Held at the Village Pourhouse in the East Village, special guest speaker is Erik Proulx, executive producer of Lemonade, the movie, will be joined by social media voices like Damien Basile, Anna Curran, Nicole D'Alonzo, Erica Grigg, Geoff Livingston, Richard Laermer, and Greg Verdino. Social Media Club is a national partner for this event. Register: http://citizengulfnyc.eventbrite.com/

Please tweet about the event:

Join @SMCNYC on 8/25 for #CitizenGulf Fundraiser RSVP http://citizengulfnyc.eventbrite.com/ pls RT

(source: smcnyc)

Katrina Ballads @ (Le) Poisson Rouge

Tonight (8/24) @ 6:30PM at (Le) Poisson Rouge:

Ted Hearne's KATRINA BALLADS featuring René Marie

KATRINA BALLADS, recipient of the 2009 Gaudeamus Prize, is a collection of songs by Ted Hearne. Featuring five singers and a band of eleven instrumentalists, it is set entirely to primary-source texts from the week following Hurricane Katrina - including everything from testimonies of survivors and relief workers to the words of Anderson Cooper, Kanye West, and George W. Bush's infamous "heckuva job." Like American music and New Orleans itself, Katrina Ballads is an omnivorous and multi-stylistic work. It is rhythmic and dramatic music, with an edgy post-minimalist drive and a deep jazz influence. With new work from renowned filmmaker Bill Morrison, Katrina Ballads calls us to reflect upon our own very recent history.

Katrina Ballads was premiered to rave reviews at the 2007 Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. It has since been seen at Chicago's Fine Arts Building, at the New York City Opera's VOX: Showcasing American Composers series and at the 2009 Gaudeamus Festival in Amsterdam. This performance commemorates the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and accompanies the release of the studio album, produced by Lawson White, on New Amsterdam/Naxos Records.

To stream audio: http://www.newamsterdamrecords.com/#Album/Katrina_Ballads

To read an interview about Katrina Ballads: http://www.indigestmag.com/hearne1.htm

(source)

SCREEN: Mine

Not to be confused with my new endeavor, also called MINE (but more on that another time) - MINE the movie is a documentary about the pets left behind by Hurricane Katrina and all the thorny issues surrounding that.

BOOK: The Year Before The Flood (tonight @ B&N)

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Musician, musicologist and longtime New York resident, Sublette revisits his Southern roots and recounts a 2004–2005 pre-Katrina research sojourn in New Orleans in this blunt, eloquently humane and musically astute memoir—a worthy companion to his acclaimed The World That Made New Orleans, a music-laden cultural history of the city to 1819. Sublette delves into some quintessential dynamics of modern American popular culture—including racism and poverty as well as restive imagination and invention—through the prism of his childhood in virulently segregated, early rock 'n' rolling Natchitoches, La., and the fraught but idiosyncratic culture he finds in pre-flood New Orleans. If discussions of Elvis, early rock 'n' roll and hip-hop millionaires straight out of New Orleans's projects inevitably rehearse familiar narratives, Sublette carefully marks them out as part of a larger personal and social landscape. Sublette's sensitivity to the precariousness of a system that collapsed completely after he returned to New York is more than mere hindsight; his worldview dovetails movingly with his turbulent and alluring subject and its dogged rebirth.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

See Sublette live tonight Wednesday September 02, 2009 7:00 PM at Barnes & Noble -

2289 Broadway (@ 82nd St), New York, NY 10024, 212-362-8835

BOOK: Zeitoun

From McSweeney's: When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the days after, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. But, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared. Eggers’s riveting nonfiction book, three years in the making, explores Zeitoun’s roots in Syria, his marriage to Kathy—an American who converted to Islam—and their children, and the surreal atmosphere (in New Orleans and the United States generally) in which what happened to Abdulrahman Zeitoun became possible. Zeitoun was written in close collaboration with its subjects and involved vast research—in this case, in the U.S., Spain, and Syria.

"Eggers honors that steady spirit of the Zeitoun family and all rebuilding New Orleanians with this heartfelt book, so fierce in its fury, so beautiful in its richly nuanced, compassionate telling of an American tragedy, and finally, so sweetly, stubbornly hopeful."
— The Times-Picayune (Read the rest of the review here.)

"Imagine Charles Dickens, his sentimentality in check but his journalistic eyes wide open, roaming New Orleans after it was buried by Hurricane Katrina... Eggers' tone is pitch-perfect-suspense blended with just enough information to stoke reader outrage and what is likely to be a typical response: How could this happen in America?... It's the stuff of great narrative nonfiction... Fifty years from now, when people want to know what happened to this once-great city during a shameful episode of our history, they will still be talking about a family named Zeitoun."
— The New York Times Book Review (Read the rest of the review here .)