And she still works for the US Army Corps of Engineers.

Best quote in reviews I’ve read so far, from the San Antonio Current:

ACE whistleblower Maria Garzino, in particular, delivers a quietly damning testimony that calls into question not only NOLA’s levees, but our country’s safety. We can read the existential unease in her eyes, and believe me, there’s nothing funny about it.

Your song worked. I fell in love with this guy’s music long before he died today.

Playing pool near the Panhandle, in San Francisco, in fact.

I never travel far, without a little Big Star either. Assuming arguendo you still do.

Also, thanks for being awesome, mostly.

Sincerely,

Molly

Further reading:

The Box Tops

Big Star

If he was from Venus, would he feed us with a spoon?
If he was from Mars, wouldn’t that be cool?
Standing right on campus, would he stamp us in a file?
Hangin’ down in Memphis all the while.

Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton when he comes ’round
They sing “I’m in love. What’s that song?
I’m in love with that song.”

Cerebral rape and pillage in a village of his choice.
Invisible man who can sing in a visible voice.
Feeling like a hundred bucks, exchanging good lucks face to face.
Checkin’ his stash by the trash at St. Mark’s place.

I never travel far, without a little Big Star

Runnin’ ’round the house, Mickey Mouse and the Tarot cards.
Falling asleep with a flop pop video on.
If he was from Venus, would he meet us on the moon?
If he died in Memphis, then that’d be cool, babe.

A month after the storm she was on NPR’s Talk of the Nation with Lynn Neary, talking about the 9th Ward’s desire to come back home. A little later, she tried valiantly to get traction for concerns she had about soil contamination after Katrina from Industrial Canal flooding. But concerns about soil contamination were shooed away by the Lousiana Department of Environmental Quality, and the EPA data didn’t help much either. Soil contamination remained (and remains) nothing more than a metaphor for a generalized distrust in the institutions that shape peoples’ lives: I talked to so many people who stuck with a general conspiracy-theory ideeer about it. I know it’s messed up, but they’ll never do anything about it. (cf. William Jefferson: He mighta had 90 grand in his freezer, but damned if the white guys ain’t got a hundred and ninety.)

Pam stuck with her neighborhood and kept it stuck together. The 9th ward kept city planning in the public eye, too: if any of that sticks, and New Orleans itselfsticks together, it’ll be because of the hopeful acts of individuals, who made up groups, who made the difference. People like Pam Dashiell.

Open Sound New Orleans asks you – in what is a slightly evolving and definitely getting easier manner – to put a sound up from the city. Not a story; a sound. Raw and rough is how they like it.

So I added a sound. It’s one I’m looking forward to hearing in a month or so. And there will be others. Sounds, I mean. Real and mapped.

Also, po-boys.

Now I live in Los Angeles, where the city lets you recycle every darn thing under the sun. It is almost possible if you think hard about it to skip the black bin entirely. You can recycle styrofoam here.

Anyway, New Orleans is doing a survey. Except apparently it’s a guerrilla survey; nobody seems to know about it. So, you know, I thought I’d mention it where I could.

You can do it in a bunch of ways. The easiest is to call the 311 number to do the survey over the phone. Also that is the fastest. And you can print it from the city’s site.

It was in the T-P, last Sunday, page A26 too. Dig through the pile and find it in there.

In a civilized world, in a city New Orleans can be again, recycling can and should be an option.

According to a press release from Mayor C. Ray Nagin’s office, the Times-Picayune is to blame for grossly misrepresenting the mayor and the chief of police, Warren Riley.

This project was humbling, to say the least. One of my favorite authors is Julian Barnes. And in an interview with a literary website he had this to say about how he works differently in journalism and in fiction:

When I write a piece of journalism I want it to be completely understood at first reading as all journalism should be. In order to do that, you, of necessity, elucidate and simplify. And so the world appears more comprehensible. When I metaphorically move to the other part of my desk and write fiction, I am aware that my task is to represent complication and the fullness of the world. And to write the book, while certainly comprehensible and I hope enjoyable on first reading, would leave something in the reader’s mind to invite them back. I do keep this distinction firmly in mind. It’s easy, if you are doing both, for them to coalesce in some ways.

New Orleans is an impossibly knotty place. It is at once more American and less than any other city in the United States. To live there right is to love and work your way into the cracks and crevices of complication that line the human soul. So, pretty much, our project is fated to be a disaster from the start. Julian Barnes is right that journalism’s mission is to simplify and explain, and make the world comprehensible. But in many ways I find it impossible to let go of the cracks and crevices and specificity that tell me what’s true.

Now it’s up to listeners in Louisiana and Washington state (so far) (thank you Tacoma!) to tell us how we did.

Eve and I will have more thoughts to share as the show airs, but in the meantime: the reason this project exists is that we read and heard and watched reporters parachute in to Louisiana for two years, as we lived there, as we cheered like hell for Entergy turning on our neighbors’ power, as we watched – and helped – the city struggle back. As we lived there. And we wanted to tell people what it was like to do that.

I’m proud of the people we talked to, for thinking about their lives, and what they value, and why. In the real world, people don’t do that enough.

My good friend Eve Troeh had a commentary on the Katrinaversary.

You could hear the hurt in her voice. But it was nothing compared to the hurt you could hear in her voice in Courtroom A about a week ago, when she had to confront the person accused of attacking and robbing her.

The two year mark has come and gone, and life continues here. When things have been tough here, people have looked really closely at each other, and asked, “are you going to stay?” I get this a lot, because I’m a newbie, because I’m from California, because my hesitation is palpable.

I’ve read some blogs judging Eve — along the lines of, mug a liberal, find a conservative, or dismissing her as a dilettante, a flighty passer-through who never committed to living here.

That’s not fair to her, and it’s a way of understanding the city that can’t possibly nourish it. New Orleans is a port town, a place where cultures have always mixed, where new blood has melted together with old blood, where people have long come and gone. What that means is there’s more than one way to love this place. If everyone had to be a 7-generation Uptowner, it wouldn’t be the city that so many people would love.

To criticize people for leaving is as un-New Orleanian as telling other people they’re going to hell is un-Christian. It misses the purpose entirely. And New Orleans will be a step closer to healed when that stops.

It was striking to be at the Carnaval Latino a day before Barack Obama spoke at First Emmanuel Baptist Church, which I recorded for NPR. Obama mentioned that “you don’t need to ship folks in to rebuild here in New Orleans. A lot of folks need jobs right here.” After talking to regional newcomers, some immigrants, some not, who’ve come in to work demolition crews on day labor wages, who’ve subjected themselves to a culture that doesn’t welcome taco trucks or taco eaters, necessarily (“what good does the taco do our gumbo?”), who’ve been robbed because they make easy targets with cash in their pockets, it was hard to hear what very nearly sounded like race baiting.

It was also striking to read later that Obama announced a national plan at First Emmanuel. He must have released one that day, somewhere between Central City and Gentilly Woods. But his speech was aspirational, and decidedly unspecific: he wasn’t speaking solely to the First Emmanuel congregants.

No better place to notice this than how he referenced the “9th Ward.” National – or just, non-local – reporters are always coming in here and talking about the 9th ward. Like it means anything to them other than just poor Black people.

Look, I’m about to learn all this from people who live here themselves. The point of my project is, I don’t know: the people we talk to will. But from what I can tell, Hollygrove has its problems, and Riverbend, and Mid-City, and the 7th ward, and Central City. And they’re all a little different from 9th ward. Surely we’ve got more attention on a national level than that reflected in a lazy semi-political code?

Nia Robertson’s friends and family were there, peering in the mail slot of Pal’s, checking to see if there was a security camera. (There was.) Maybe 10 bouquets leaned gently against the worn out doors, which were padlocked. A sign in the window says “Pal’s is closed for a family emergency; please lend us your thoughts and prayers.”

Sonny was tan, curly hair, tattoos; a bike lock and a rope snaked up his right arm. You could tell he was trying to help. He looked each of us in the eye as he told us all about the blood. He told us she said, why me, why me, why did he do this to me, until she died. He said everyone liked her, which was true. Her friends — the ones who came up with her, who knew her since she was small — couldn’t take it, and disappeared behind a big white car, and wailed in the street. But they also thanked him with great grace, and Vera embraced one woman, two, a touch on the arm from each of us, a benediction, arms around shoulders and tears and comfort. We all told each other we were sorry for the loss, and for each of us the loss was different: a friend, a bar, a neighborhood.

It’s not a bad time to remember what Mayor Nagin said recently about crime:

Do I worry about it? Somewhat. It’s not good for us, but it also keeps the New Orleans brand out there, and it keeps people thinking about our needs and what we need to bring this community back. So it is kind of a two-edged sword. Sure it hurts, but we have to keep working everyday to make the city better.

Officer…Friendly, I don’t know who — came up to Vera and me and wanted us to go to the neighborhood meeting, at the First District police station, next Tuesday. He didn’t know me, but he looked at me, not expectantly. Hopefully. Plaintively. Please come, he seemed to say, not with words, but with his voice. And I promised I would.