Katrina Fatigue

Today's NY Times film section does a story on New Orleans documentaries about the post Katrina devastations and catastrophes.

Here's a problem we've got to face too. Within about 16 months publishers saw any project that concerned "New Orleans" as a "Katrina book," and, "Katrina books don't sell." They call it "Katrina fatigue." (That was because, as any fool could have told them was GOING TO HAPPEN, they rushed a passel of badly writte and repetitious books about Katrina into print and yeah, they didn't sell.) So foreign publishers don't want our New Orleans books, though they aren't about Katrina at all. Yet, foreign readers who get hold of them, devour them and praise them, citing them just the way USian readers do, for giving them history within a cultural and political matrix that they can understand, and which they've never known before, because no one else has ever pulled all these strands together, and connected all these dots. (Just for starters, unlike Vaquero, most music writers aren't musicians and don't have his vast range knowledge of musics, which he's internalized so deeply that knowledge is there to draw on, effortlessly.)

[ If most Katrina films have had a hard time getting beyond the festival circuit and into theaters, it probably stems from an industry belief that these projects are uncommercial. While trying to raise financing for “Trouble the Water,” Mr. Deal said, “we heard the word ‘fatigue’ a lot.”

This perception may stem from the sense that Katrina reached media saturation point almost immediately. Or it may reflect more pernicious biases: Mr. Deal said one executive asked “if we could find some white characters.” The tagline for “Trouble the Water” — “It’s not about a hurricane. It’s about America” — speaks to the film’s deft handling of race and class but also reflects a reasonable defensiveness. ]

[ Implicit in claims of Katrina fatigue is the assumption that there is only one story to tell. In reality there are almost as many approaches as there are films.

Cauleen Smith’s “Fullness of Time,” a commissioned companion piece to last year’s outdoor production of “Waiting for Godot” by the artist Paul Chan and the Classical Theater of Harlem, experiments with science fiction, an apt corollary for the alienness of the wrecked landscape. Phoebe Tooke’s short documentary “Circles of Confusion” contemplates the suicide of Stevenson Palfi, a New Orleans filmmaker. One of the most accomplished Katrina films, “The Second Line,” a 20-minute drama directed by John Magary and shown at Sundance, is a simmering moral tale about a young man driven to extremes after his FEMA trailer is burgled. { Fox here: Several of our friends had this terrible experience, including a doctoral student at Tulane, a brilliant young Jamaican, who lost all four of his computers, with his four different books-in-progress and all his research to his neighbors looting his house. FYI, his neighbors were not people of color. }

Standing apart from the other Katrina movies, Benh Zeitlin’s “Glory at Sea,” a 25-minute film that screened at South by Southwest, displaces the tragedy to the realm of myth even as it evokes the celebratory rituals of New Orleans as it used to be. In this exuberant fantasy, a ragtag band of storm survivors build a boat from materials found on the streets — car parts, a bed, a bathtub — and set sail in the hopes of reuniting with their loved ones at the bottom of the ocean. ]

Vaquero's going to be on radio and television in the next couple of weeks, re the disaster of the levees' failures. He may have been the first on a national broadcast to call for the impeachment of the puppet currently holding the Oval Office, which he did on Labor Day, 2005, Al Franken's show on Air America. Like the rest of the 'important people" in this nation, he went on vacation. He went on vacation even though Air America as a progressive talk radio network had just gotten started. You cannot establish presence while not being present. Another really stupid move, broadcasting frivolity, not seriousness of purpose, the same as just about every other damned institution and organization in this nation since the days of Reagan. Laura Flanders was filling in for Franken and she called Vaquero.

We're even more angry now than we were then. The puppet is still. They have not been incarcerated, but instead are still rampaging and pillaging the nation. Their actions continue to destroy the Constitution and Iraq and Iraqi people. Who would have thought that to be possible? Ah, we're suffering Katrina fatigue, so how can you expect poor us to do anything about them or anything else?