I've just been writing a column about the way in which Fallujah and New Orleans are looking to be twin towns in effect. They're both been worked over by the Bush Administration.
The past in New Orleans cohabits with the present to an extent not even approximated in any other North American city.
I witnessed a surgery on a patient from New Orleans who was in a car accident. He didn't have any flow of oxygen. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't get a good flow of oxygen, so they did a surgery on him right there, and I was just holding the IV up watching.
The people who couldn't get out of New Orleans to escape the storm were predominantly Black.
In his speech President Bush said we need to rebuild Iraq, provide the people with jobs, and give them hope. If it works there maybe we'll try it in New Orleans.
The rebuilding of New Orleans is an important point in the history of the United States.
There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three-eighths of our territory must pass to market, and from its fertility it will ere long yield more than half of our whole produce and contain more than half our inhabitants.
Well, it seems that one day Dylan was drivin' up to San Francisco from New Orleans or somewhere, when our record [House of the Rising Sun] came over his radio. When it was announced he said to Joan Baez -- who was with him at the time -- 'This'll be the first time I've heard this version', although it was number one in the States. So he listened to it, stopped the car, ran round the car five times, banged his head on the bumper and began leapin' about shouting 'It's great! It's great!'
And we were Banksy on an overpass in New Orleans spray-painting porch lights on the hurricane. We were welcome mats for the un-forgiven. We never sold our windpipes to make a living. We were the letters sent to the wrong address, but opened anyway. We opened anyway.
There are things that make me excited about what I'm doing: Trouble the Water [the 2008 documentary Glover executive produced] on New Orleans, or something like Soundtrack for a Revolution, about the power of the music of the civil rights movement [which he executive produced in 2009]. Or Bamako, about the African debt crisis, a platform to discuss the experience of people who actually live it. All of these are important ways we can use film as a forum inviting people into a dialogue.
The Meters are, I think, the most influential group in our time to come out of New Orleans, to have changed and introduced us all to a way of playing, and to a groove and a level of feel in playing funk-jazz.
New Orleans is a unique environment.
You can see that the care he took defiling the beauty he had forced in them was as precise and clean as his good hands which at night had developed the negatives, floating the sheets in the correct acids and watching the faces and breasts and pubic triangles and sofas emerge. The making and destroying coming from the same source, same lust, same surgery his brain was capable of. (On New Orleans photographer E. J. Bellocq)
My dad loved black singers. So listening to New Orleans music, eventually I wanted to play an instrument.
It's a common theme around the city of New Orleans; we're resilient people because we have to be. We love this place with all of our heart and all of our soul and I just wanted to try to do something that I could to help make it better.
I like New Orleans music, I like Memphis music and I like the way that the sound like those places. I like how there are stars and there are people in those cities that are revered in the community.
Any city may have one period of magnificence, like Boston or New Orleans or San Francisco, but it takes a real one to keep renewing itself until the past is perennially forgotten.
Ozzy Osbourne and Motley Crue in New Orleans on Mardi Gras = bad idea!
There's also the tradition of voodoo, the Haitian magic arts, in New Orleans. And because New Orleans is below sea level, when they bury people in New Orleans, it's mostly above ground. So you have this idea that the spirits are more accessible and can access you more easily because they're not even buried.
Although I miss my family and friends when I'm away from Amsterdam, I've never had that feeling of missing a city like I have with New Orleans. Especially for the music.