You can’t blow away New Orleans

Katrina Memorial by the Convention Center: the stone says: Honoring the people and remembering the events that occurred August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina

The first time I went to New Orleans it was part of a road trip I took with my college friends. We piled in a car and drove to New Orleans from Dallas. This is pretty much a rite of passage for Dallas kids and as these things go ours was a pretty tame affair. We were college girls from a small Catholic school where my uncle was the Dean of something. The driver on this wild weekend trip, Mary Jo, had been my friend since high school and her father once dated my mother — an apparently happy, if brief, relationship because neither party shows any inclination of shutting up about it. All in all, our idea of a wild New Orleans weekend involved a beer or two and a chance to stare self consciously at boys.

We were driving up to see my roommate Sara Anne.

The drive was magnificent and mysterious to us Dallas girls. After our own bleak plains we were amazed to find ourselves in endless woods punctuated by tiny tree shaded towns that sometimes seemed to consist of nothing more than a few roadside buildings including a bar, a grocery store, and a couple of old fashioned gas pumps.

Once we got to New Orleans we stayed with Sara Anne in Metarie and she obligingly took us into the Quarter for lunch and a little shopping. This wasn’t even close to the wild weekend we’d planned with trepidation but Sara Anne also took us to Lake Ponchatraine for soft shelled crabs (What a revelation! They didn’t have a lot of soft shelled crabs in Dallas in those days), Canal Street for Oysters, on the street car to see the great houses in the Garden District, and I do believe we managed to get to Tipitina’s for some fabulous music and great food — but that may be my imagination. I do know that we had a few beers and stared self-consciously at boys — quite a bit as a matter of fact. We drove all over the area and all over New Orleans and everywhere there was something wonderful to see and something even better to eat. I can’t say that I really came to understand New Orleans on that trip — I am a slow learner.

I got the opportunity to start figuring it out anew when a bunch of friends saddled up for a another road trip to the New Orleans Jazz Fest. This time I surely did get it. We beat our feet in the Mississippi mud. We ate crawfish morning noon and night — most memorably in the dark at the side of the Natchez river boat listening to Pharoah Sanders wail away on the boat. We watched the barges on the river as the music floated by on one of those impossibly beautiful moonlit nights you get in the south and we dream about out here in the west.

Since then we made the pilgrimage to Jazz Fest and New Orleans repeatedly and one night was preserved for Dooky Chase’s restaurant, another for Tipitina’s and the Maple Leaf. New Orleans was becoming “my” town.

Once I moved to California, I didn’t get to New Orleans nearly as often as I liked. Before Hurricane Katrina though, New Orleans was a major stop on the high tech conference circuit so I usually got a trip every now and again. Then, of course, came Katrina, really another 9/11 for the U.S. This time the attack came from nature and in the aftermath of that disaster, many Americans were left feeling disappointed in themselves, ourselves — we weren’t able to come together and help each other as we always believed we would. Instead, everything came apart inexorably on the television.

I went to New Orleans this year in connection with one of my favorite conferences, Siggraph (short for special interest group, graphics). It’s a gathering for people who work in the fields affected by computer graphics including glamorous fields like movie making and game development, but also the sciences where computer graphics are used to visualize oil fields beneath the sea and scientists put together new molecules as if they’re snapping together Tinker Toys. As you might imagine, there’s a lot of work going on all around the Gulf Coast to find oil and get a better handle on weather patterns. In fact, in spite of all the emphasis on games and movie special effects, much of the real ground breaking work in graphics happens on the scientific side and the entertainment industry puts new breakthroughs to work where we all can see it. And, it is at Siggraph where everyone in the field of computer graphics hunkers down and shows each other what they’ve been working on all year. It’s where graduate students make a name for themselves with a new breakthroughs for creating computer graphics and the big media companies give back by presenting their discoveries and tircks of the trade to eager students.

Siggraph has been held in New Orleans twice before, both times before the storm, and both times the conferences were like no other trade show on earth. We partied through the night and we trudged through astounding heat in the morning and all the bright colors and fanciful architecture of New Orleans made moving from the real world into the imagined world a smooth transition.

In that sense, this year wasn’t all that different. There were fewer sponsored parties and less people showed up. There’s not enough money to go around right now. But, anyone who can’t find a good time or run smack dab into magic in New Orleans probably shouldn’t have gone there in the first place. And, if you, like most tourists, just hung around the French Quarter and the Garden District, New Orleans seems to be just about the same, but it’s not the same. Whole neighborhoods are now fields of weeds with the occasional re-built house looking lonely and forlorn. The neighborhoods we’d passed through on those rides with Sara Anne and all those other road trips from Texas are just not there. It’s a supremely disorienting experience.

Some neighborhoods have come back stronger than ever — as evident on this map: the blue areas are 80-100% rebuilt, but the yellow and green areas need more work. Source:
http://www.gnocdc.org/RecoveryByNeighborhood/Figure1.html

All of which finally brings me to the point of all this nostalgic rambling. This year Siggraph was different in another significant way. This year people came to an annual trade show with a determination to bring something back to a city that showed them such a good time in the past. Spontaneous projects bubbled up. Turbosquid, a company that sells 3D models to content creators in the game industry and for movies and television sponsored a house for habitat for humanity. Their team built a house in the 9th Ward.

Walt Disney Animation Studios, Nvidia, and Autodesk helped make over the computer room of the Algiers Technical Academy with new computers, software. Volunteers came and painted, cleaned, and set up hardware and software. Nvidia sponsored a pub crawl through the French Quarter. Proceeds and matching funds went to the Algiers Technical Academy.

ACM Siggraph also supported the Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong Summer Jazz Camp which offers classes in the music business and music making. An album of New Orleans Music is available here $9.99 and proceeds go to the camp. http://www.siggraph.org/s2009/community/outreach/index.php#louis.

The New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts (NOCCA) offers arts training to New Orleans school kids with classes in culinary arts, dance, media arts, music, theater arts, visual arts, and creative writing. Siggraph invited 50 students from the school to meet professionals in the Siggraph community for one on one mentoring.

Siggraph also supported the Tipitina’s Foundation’s Instruments a Comin’ project to provide new musical instruments to New Orleans schools.

Finally, a project close to my heart is the Make It Right House sponsored by the ACM Siggraph Graphics Pioneers — a group of people who have been active in computer graphics development for more than 20 years. This group has been formed out of a desire to give back and they offer scholarships and mentoring programs. The Make It Right Group http://www.makeitrightnola.org/index.php?isDirect2=true was founded by Brad Pitt, William McDonough + Partners, Cherokee Gives Back FoundationGraft, and works with neighborhood groups to help rebuild the 9th Ward where the destruction was the worst and the rebuilding is taking the longest. The emphasis is on building sustainable houses that are practical for the Louisiana ecosystem. They’re economical to build and to cool, they’re on stilts, they use solar energy, and they’re attractive. To donate to the Siggraph Pioneers’ Make It Right house go to: http://tiny.cc/GraphicsHouse. You can show support and monitor the progress of the house at the Facebook group for the Pioneers MIR house.

This last visit to New Orleans made me realize that we’re really not as helpless as the television makes us feel. Just because there was nothing we could do to stop the storm or help people immediately, there’s nothing stopping us from doing more now and to keep doing more. People in New Orleans said over and over again, thanks for coming, we know you haven’t forgotten. I was proud when a waiter at Emeril’s told me the people of Texas have been wonderful and he put his hand down on the table and just started listing what groups in Houston and Austin were doing for the town and especially for the musicians of New Orleans. I realized that Americans still really do come together and help people. You just can’t believe everything you see on the television.

And, so hey, by the way, we ought to have another of these little talks about Galveston, Texas.