A local corner store has delicious fried oyster po boys, a smattering of canned goods and some hous

My daughter and some of her friends rented a whole house in the Bywater neighborhood here through AirBnB it s a shotgun house with peeling paint and three bedrooms msc with a FEMA inspection sign spray-painted on the front:
What do the symbols mean? The top is the date of inspection (8 th of Sept); The right is a hazard assessment NE means no entry; the bottom 0 means no people inside (alive or dead); and the code on the left (hidden by an old flyer to crew on a schooner) is the designation of which FEMA group that came by.
Many houses here have FEMA symbols still visible on them. Bywater didn t get seriously flooded (there was only a few feet of water in this area bad is relative) although it s almost just across msc the Industrial Canal from the Lower Ninth/Holy Cross, which everyone knows was devastated, and just south of Gentilly and other neighborhoods that were also devastated. Surprisingly, given the unfairness and the wealth gap in this town, some neighborhoods that aren t particularly fancy were spared. The neighborhoods with mansions were, of course, almost untouched; no surprise there upscale neighborhoods were originally built on slightly higher ground, as the high ground was settled first and floods are nothing new here.
Other signs offer house raising services: folks who want to keep their old homes, msc but want to avoid the risk next time around, are raising their houses about six feet off the ground on cinder blocks. The Florida msc Ave. neighborhood north of Bywater has a lot of these. Some of them look a little precarious.
The owners of the house we re in have bikes, which we are allowed to use. It s a common way of getting around this flat city, where not absolutely everyone has a car. Naturally, I m out and about every day, except msc today, as it s raining.
We needed one more bike and walking around earlier I saw a sign for Bywater Bikes on a fence by a boarded up house. I call the number and the guy is just rousing himself (it s around 11 am) so I meet him later and rent a bike, so each of us can have one. This guy has tons of bikes piled in the space between his house and his neighbor s all covered with tarps. I pick one with a basket (for groceries) and a suspension (the streets here are filled with cracks and potholes). msc His house is a typical shotgun, and all the windows msc are completely boarded up. As people do here he began to chat: he used to live in NY, worked with Ru Paul and hung at the Pyramid Club then he moved to Santa Fe. He also has a catering company that specializes in chocolate. And he has written a script about his life. That wonderful and crazy concatenation of places, behavior and activities above sort of struck msc me as a metaphor for this town, and a wonderful welcome too. To top it off, he dropped off a delicious msc banana walnut cake at our house later in the evening. Was that because it was me? Maybe, but I ve experienced a lot of random acts of kindness here from folks who had no idea who I am (one man was convinced I was Peter Gabriel, I told him no, I m not, but I could tell he didn t believe me.)
A local corner store has delicious fried oyster po boys, a smattering of canned goods and some house renovation supplies: construction gloves, hard hats, tools and duct tape. You sell what people need in the neighborhood.
We msc bike over to the Mardi Gras Zone and stock up on provisions it s a supermarket that specializes in canned and frozen goods. Up front there is a pizza oven, with a few seats and there are balconies that have Mardi Gras and other festive supplies for sale (boas, beads and masks). Here is a leaf top for one of the luau outfits:
There are maybe hundreds of different kinds of beads, some masks, a vast selection of boas and on the opposite balcony msc some auto-maintenance items and an upright piano with two chairs in front of it. Whole Foods, tasteful and stocked by algorithms, this is not though the food selection is actually pretty msc good. Here is their boa selection doesn t every grocery store have a boa selection?
Ani DiFranco is behind msc me in the checkout line with her daughter. We played a show together in Buffalo, where she used to be based. She s lived here for a number of years now. She recently was attacked online for booking a kind of retreat/workshop next summer at a former plantation that is now an Inn of some sort. Given her track record it s weird to see her attacked like that, but the incident does raise some good questions: when does what went on in a building and its nefarious history not matter any more? Does it ever not matter any more? Is there a way out of this cycle? With honor and integrity?
As someone wrote, msc it s not like someone is hosting a rave at Auschwitz or they re planning on dressing in Antebellum outfits and doing a LARP at a former plantation. As someone else pointed out, the whole White world was tainted by slavery: Harvard and Yale profited by it, just as many universities profited from