KATRINA & THE LOST CITY OF NEW ORLEANS by Rod Amis New Orleans is the Lost City of America. New Orleans has disappeared as surely as the lost city of Atlantis or the lost city of Pompeii, which former mayor Marc Morial and Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA.) have compared us to in their statements. That New Orleans, the New Orleans I mean to tell you about, that will never, ever, exist again--that city of love, lust, death and sex--will never exist again. A portion of the proceeds of this book will go to the New Orleans Hospitality Workers Fund. The cooks, servers and restaurant workers of New Orleans have provided fabulous times and memories for millions. Now we must remember them in their time of need. Buy the book or get a downloadable PDF Copy now! A small, independent and outspoken magazine like this one can't reach you every week without the support and patronage of its readership. As our way of thanking those who have committed to keep your World's Magazine here on your desktop through their generous donations, we feature their names and cities here in our Roll of Honor. SUSTAINING PATRONS RON DIENER, Wendell, NC, USA DARHL STULTZ, Largo, FL, USA MATT STOWELL, New Orleans, LA, USA TIMOTHY MEADOWS, Anaheim, CA, USA CHERYL HILL NATION, West Fairlee, VT, USA DRAGAN & DRAGANA VICANOVIC, Belgrade, SERBIA LESZEK MICHAELWICZ, New Orleans, LA, USA TERRY TERRIAN, Sebastopol, CA, USA BECKY ALTEMUS, Houston, TX, USA Supporting Patrons BARBARA ATWELL, Berkeley, CA, USA IAN CRYSTAL, Ph. D, New Orleans, LA, USA LARS KEFFERSTAN, New York, NY, USA MARIE SINSABAUGH, Granville, OH, USA MEREDITH TUPPER, Tampa, FL, USA NGOZI RAZAK-SOYEBI, Jos, NIGERIA NICK ALLEN, New Orleans, LA, USA RIC WILLIAMS, Austin, TX, USA ROBERT PURVIS, Montclair, NJ, USA STEVE VIVIAN, New York, NY, USA STUART ALTMAN, ESQ., New York, NY, USA We encourage you to add your name to this Roll of Honor. GENERATOR 21 cannot continue and thrive without your support. Thanks in advance. To support G21, please send checks or money orders to: G21: The World's Magazine Attn: Rod Amis 1116 Crestline Road Wendell, NC 27591-9245 USA To donate by credit or debit card, please go to the Western Union website by following the highlighted link. Should you donate via Western Union, please notify us via e-mail. Please make all remittances payable to Rod Amis. Again, thanks. CURRENT MOON lunar phases

Rod Amis - Unbound

Lizard Lick, NC, USA - 8 October 2005: Home.

I've probably been one writer who has said more about the concept, the ephemeral dream of finding a place that felt like home more than most. That theme has been at this core of this diaristic column, a project some now admit was the template for the Blog (web log), that theme and the theme of lost love.

I have had the audacity to call myself the Knight Errant of both subjects, as MPUTHUMI NTABENI noted in his audacious critique of what makes "My Glass House" work, "conflating [my] ego to mammoth proportions" in order to make it an umbrella under which others can be protected ... In other words, it's okay that you still feel as foreign in this world as you did as a teenager. I do, too. Every single day of my life. In other words, it's okay if you still feel you are looking for love in the most timid way possible; so am I.

And most importantly, you can NEVER, ever make as many foolish mistakes in, for, about your life as Rod. No way. I am the Crown Prince of Foolish Life Mistakes. You, my loves, get a free pass.

You, unless you are another of the denizens of that special place that was called New Orleans who are now living in exile, have not discovered the country of living with spirits and in them. You are not haunted.

You do not live every day with knowing that you must return to the lover and nemesis who hurt you most. "They always come back."

Greg and I talked three nights ago for a long while. He brought the point home.

No one else could have written the New Orleans book quite like me for this time in the life of our country and for the life of New Orleans. No one else could have held her at such a distance while still succumbing to her irresistible embrace. But I could pretend, unlike others who celebrated the city, to be the Immovable Object, the one who continued to emphasize the hate side of the love/hate equation we all knew.

The great actor John Barrymore once said that you could not succeed as an artist until you had done a love scene, a jail scene and a death scene. I played two of my three in New Orleans. Now I must go back for the love scene.

My friend Katy Reckdahl says at the end of her interview for the New Orleans book that I finally managed to write:

... any time you're walking down the street you could have somebody come up to you with a ridiculous story, or someone would just stop and say something that made you both giggle, or a band would be going by, or you'd see someone dressed really unusually. There was always something entertaining going on in New Orleans, just walking down the street.

And there was another kind of sweetness that I think people were just raised to have in New Orleans. Someone might tell you your hair looked nice today, and they wouldn't be hitting on you. Or you drop your sweater and a kid in baggie pants down around his butt would call out, "Hey, lady, you dropped your sweater" and go pick it up for you, something someone who looks like that is not supposed to do.

Just a basic sweetness. People are raised to be nice to each other in a way you don't find anyplace else.

And, of course, you've got the added benefits of a very artistic atmosphere. But it was that day-to-day stuff that made me fall in love with New Orleans.

Katy, like many of the people who have decided that, yes, against all reason, they shall return home, to New Orleans, is militantly committed to keeping the spirit(s) of the New Orleans we knew and loved/hated alive.

Not the oppression, the corruption or the prejudice but the sweetness of the Crescent City. That part was not part of the "charm" that the rest of America came to, looking for their adult theme park. We don't want "Disneyland with cocktails." We want our home back.

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Matt called today from on the freeway outside of Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He is heading back to New Orleans and could not be happier. He has chafed this week, dealing with the Jo-Effect, waiting for his chance to get back home.

When he called, he was only hours away. The excitement in his voice, and the apprehension, was palpable. But, no matter what, after spending weeks as a nomad in his own country, wandering state to state waiting to return to New Orleans, he was ready to be back, home.

I promise to telephone him, hoping that he would answer from Molly's at the Market on Decatur Street, at four New Orleans time.

ASIDE: You don't bring me anything But down - Sheryl Crowe

Get real, Rod! We all know that Jo will find some way to "decree" that Matt not make it to Molly's on his first day back -- if only because she knows that's what he most wants to do.

No, Baby, I'm going positive on this one and wanting to believe he'll make it down.

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Long time Loyal Readers, have watched this hejira of mine go on for over a decade now. The biggest joke of my life is how flummoxed I've always been when people ask me, "Where are you from?"

I used to freeze up at that question. Then, one day, after hearing my story, a woman in New Orleans told me I should respond, "Everywhere."

You know, my little loves, parts of the stories of all the cities I have lived, from Cairo, to San Francisco, New York City and Belgrade. Some are poetic, I'm told, others just damned sad.

Listen:

Standing at my window at 4:30 in the morning and listening to the blinded-canary call of the muezzin, the Call to Prayer, and watching white doves rise across the globular top of a minaret at sunrise. Allah Akbar! God is Great! I sing the Perfection of God, the Many-named, the Beneficent, the All-Seeing. The Perfection of God! And the doves, moving as a flock, a song, suddenly turn and their white wings to catch the rays of the rising sun and turn suddenly golden. It is Ramadan. The fast of renewal. I have been up all night and I am enraptured. The Perfection of God... Allah Akbar!

The essence of my life in Cairo seemed often encapsulated by Sharia Ramses (Ramses Square.) There you will find the mammoth statue dedicated to the great Pharaoh, looming above us all, monumental and impassive. History and legend melded together before the old railroad station. The place that I would take my fugitive roommate Wafah (a.k.a. Richard Damon) on his trip into the heart of Africa. The place I would come time and again to wonder about the mystery of Masra. I wrote somewhere, when I still believed I would be a novelist:

"The heat on Sharia Ramses rises in visible waves from the street and makes figures approaching or leaving the train station appear to be moving through liquid. It does the same to the garish, primary-colored film billboards that surround the square, to the dusty buses and trams weighed down to one side with people hanging from their outer shells, the donkeys pulling carts of watermelons going to the market or garbage led by the villagers who are Cairo's ubiquitous trash-pickers. Combined with the deafening noise of ten million, it is a hallucinatory vision

"A man leading a baboon by a leash across the square could have looked the same in 1954 or 1850 or 500 B.C. Only the towering and luminous statue of the dead pharaoh, Ramses, and the antiquated and equally imposing train station seem 'new' to me and a sign that Cairo can change..."

My third vision of Cairo is sailing up or down the Nile with my friend "Captain" Mohammed in the felucca with his son, Mahmet, and his daughter, Asa, smoking chi-chi (honeyed tobacco) spiked with flakes of hashish and listening to the legendary singer Oum al-Khalsoum. Mahmet would beat the drum, Mohammed and Asa would sing. The Captain had given the tiller of the small sailing vessel to me, and I had taken her into the wind...

And:

There was no time for writing while I was in Serbia (Srbija.) In Belgrade (Beograd) there were promenades to take; markets, museums, fortresses, parks and concerts to take in; and chatter, endless chatter, as Dragan, Dragana and I rushed to share as much with each other as we could before I must leave the country. There was also meeting with Rastislav Durman to check out job prospects and an afternoon with the Vicanovics young friend, Sneja, who translates contracts and other documents for the Chinese. Durman and I were supposed to get together again, so were Sneja and I -- but there was no time ...

You can find relics from the Roman era, excavated from beneath the very cobbles, there. It leads to the original Roman fortress which established the city of Belgrade. Now, beyond the park, where a French monument looms, you find the fortress of Stephan the Despot, overlooking the intersection of the Danube and Sava rivers. This was where the Turks stood against the Holy Roman Empire. In the center of the meeting of the rivers is War Island and beyond "New Belgrade" there is the border for the Austro-Hungarians.

For those who know the history of the country, there is much talk about the Turks and their long domination. Their influences are seen everywhere, even in the architecture of many of the modern "show place" homes, built by people who work abroad, in the countryside. We passed many of these going up into the mountains on our way to Romuliana.

The capstone of this hejira, of course, was this journey to Romuliana. The mountains there reminded me of Utah. And the ruins themselves were more impressive than even two years of hearing about them from Dragana had prepared me for. There are gates and towers still intac t, excavated only during the last few decades, before the money ran out ... And that is part of the tragedy of Romuliana.

An entire Roman city, built by the co-emperor Galerius -- many believe to build a personal cult -- when he shared the Roman empire with Diocletian.

You walk in Romuliana, amid the columns that supported temples with roofs of glass and breathe the same air as the Romans.

At the west gate of the city, in portals, were statues representing Jove and Alexander, from who Galerius claimed he had descended. Even in my exhausted state, I could not but marvel at what other wonders lay below the ground on which I trod. At certain points in the excavation, like the baths, you can see the actual mosaics that were those wonderful floors. In order to protect them, sand has been placed over them.

At the same time, the tragedy lies in that you can see where local farmers have blown away parts of walls and towers with dynamite, carrying away the ancient stone to use in building their own houses. It is enough to make you weep at history being lost ...

I had taken my white dove to find my dream, only to see it being despoiled. If Alexander had walked here, once, before Galerius, no one cared anymore. The protectors of Romuliana, named after Galerius's mother, lived on crumbs in order to give the place some chance to survive ...

But when Dragana asked me, "Is Romuliana also your dream now?" I answered: "No. It is your dream, but I shall help you to save it. All I dream of is finding Home..."

The great mystery of America for Dragan and Dragana, my hosts, was baseball. They had seen the American "National Pastime" on television, but had never been able to comprehend the rules or why we are so fascinated by it. (When I mentioned this to Robin Miller, on my return to the States, he joked that I should have brought George Will along.) I explained to my hosts that this was a kid's game for which adults were paid giant dollars to play. I explained that it was very simple, really, as a kid's game should be, but that the unifying principal was the notion of getting home.

I have one warning for anyone choosing to visit Serbia: Beware the Serbian brandy.

I like to think of myself as a pretty hard guy. I'm a Scotch drinker, usually. Serbian brandy knocked me on my ass.

You have been warned.

It was from Romuliana that we pushed on to Zajecar, Dragana's hometown.

Zajecar is only seven kilometers from the Bulgarian border on the river Timoc. Naturally, the men there love to fish and among the first questions Dragana's brother Mijalco (Michael) -- who we all call "Bootsa" (correctly spelled Buca) -- and her father asked me was what the fishing was like where I lived in America. I told them that in Northern California, where I had spent most of my life, salmon fishing was king. They nodded and smiled. Before I left that evening, they made me promise that I would spend more time in Zajecar the next time I visited Serbia, so that we might all spend time fishing together.

This was over the formal family luncheon (which I had been warned about by Dragan and Dragana, repeatedly, in Belgrade. "You must eat everything on your plate!")

Dragana's mother and father had been in the medical profession, working in the local hospital, before they retired, and lamented that their jewel of a country had been reduced to its present penury. Dragana's father blamed the politicians, as people do in every country I've ever visited.

Dragana didn't want to talk politics. She was the beloved aunt (Tetka) and wanted to spend time gamboling with her two nieces, Buca's lovely daughters. She had brought presents and clothes for them from Belgrade, as she and Dragan's last visit had been almost a year earlier.

It was obvious that they had missed the time together, to talk and play and enjoy the comforts of kinship.

Dragan, meanwhile, was forced to go off with Buca to work on the Citroen, almost fifteen years old, that is their car. We had driven it up to Zajecar and on the way it had started leaking oil, as an old vehicle is wont to do. Unlike other repairs on the sturdy French car, this one could not be fixed with a little glue.

Dragana and I walked through Zajecar that evening while we waited with her niece, called "Nancy," and looked in the shops, passed a wedding party and the school. Nancy reminded Dragana of the concerns of a fourth grader, while promenading in the new fashionable clothes her Tetka had brought her from Beograd.

"What will they think, Rod," Dragana teased me in her way, "when you come back alive from living among the Serbian devils and all you have to report is a lunch in a small mountain village?"

... The former Yugoslavia is now reduced to only the states of Serbia and Montenegro, of course. Montenegro is expected to pull out of what's left of Tito's stitched nation at any time now. Two years max. That will leave Serbia as the last vestige of what we once knew as Yugoslavia. And that means we must learn to understand the Serbs, I believe.

I wrote that in the late summer of 2001. I feel as if so much time has passed since then.

HOME

9 October 2005: Talked on the telephone with Matt last night after he had arrived home. He was no longer excited or sanguine. As I wrote to a former high school friend who "discovered" me again because of the Internet:

Spoke with one [friend from New Orleans} just last evening who was quite stunned by what he found. The devastation touched every house on his street in some way, from torn off roofs to scattered siding. His own fence was completely down. He lamented that the trees on Esplanade Avenue, which used to form a canopy over that major thoroughfare, were now little more than toothpicks.

Why would a man who has seen so much of the world want to settle in a hopeless city like New Orleans?

I ask myself that right now. I understand how a sane person could ask that question.

And what about the Kiplinger Fellowship and your dream of going back to school?

I've said it before, I'm a "dark horse" candidate for the Fellowship. IF I get it, I shall literally dance in the street. But I don't have my hopes up. I'm way too on the outside of the mainstream to be given serious consideration, even with the sterling Letters of Recommendation my various friends submitted.

I'm used to being passed over.

Book sales are about the only hope I have for continuing to produce this magazine and perhaps, one day, in some unforeseen and probably equally perilous future, of having some semblance of what you might call a real and independent life. I continue to depend upon the kindness of strangers. I am a "Blank," to borrow a term from the "Max Headroom" television program of old's lexicon.

Those among you Gentle Readers, who have read Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, know that prototype story of a man attempting to get Home. Every story in Western literature written about getting Home or finding it, since then, has used the Illiad and Odyssey as its template in one way or another.

This Blog template has really been no different, has it? I have taken you to cities all over the planet, called it my hejira, and shared with you the results of my own fruitless search. The Grail. (Or at least one of the two that characterized this Glass House until now.)

Until now.

In the new run, we shall talk about Rod returning home. The next chapter of the story that is the end of the hejira.

I shall wander no more forever.

At the beginning of the year I shall go home. I shall continue to attempt to see the rest of our world but my personal, spiritual wandering is at an end.

I have found Home and I shall wander no more forever.

So it's time for a change, don't you believe, my love? GLASS HOUSE NO MORE.

it is time to make an end. After this entry, we shall re-name my col umn "Smoke & Mirrors"

When I explained the new concept to my friend Matt he exclaimed, "Now that you've explained the concept, I see where you're going with this. Again ahead of the curve."

Content presented on the Web has to evolve, not just the software we use for presentation. We are hardwired for something better. Of course, when I said that six years ago, everybody thought I was nuts. I'm used to everybody thinking I don't know what I'm talking about - until they catch up.

I'm looking over the mountain now, Darling. You can't imagine what I see. It's breath-taking!

Thanks for coming back this week. Keep me in your prayers as I keep you in my own.

THINGS I PRAY FOR THIS WEEK

1 - To be understood.

2 - To go home in an honorable way.

3 - The success of the book project.

"Work like you don't need the money,
"Love like you've never been hurt,
"Dance like no one is watching ... "

Love,
Rod

ROD AMIS has published this magazine since 1990. It first appeared as a hardcopy 'Zine. In March, 1996, he launched it here on the Web. Rod was a Contributing Editor at Suite101.com, where he wrote the " 'Net Publishing" feature. His work has been featured in the San Francisco Bay Guardian Online, NRV8, and at the (U.S.) Public Broadcasting System (PBS's) WebLab's Reality Check site. Rod was a contributing writer on technology for Faulkner Information Services. He wrote on Web issues for MethodFive.com's Hyper newsletter.

Rod was a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he wrote over two hundred articles on web design and development issues. He was principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviewed technology issues weekly, producing 383 editorials. He became the Managing Editor for Electronic Mail/Newsletter Publications at Andover.net at the end of February, 2000, and left in September of the same year. He was a contributing writer for ACCESS Internet magazine, which appeared both on- and offline for 10 million readers in 100 newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Boston Herald, Austin American-Statesman, Denver Post and Orlando Sentinel, among others. Rod was the US reporter for Silicon.com, a division of Network Multimedia Television in London, UK, reaching 3.5 million European readers, until May, 2001.

In 2002, he worked as Assistant to the General Manager of a Big Easy company that does restaurants and nightclubs. He did stints as the Resident Philosopher at three separate gin mills in that city in the French Quarter and the Marigny, earning his stripes during two successive Mardi Gras seasons. Oh yeah, Rod's had Day Jobs working construction. Mostly renovations of old New Orleans structures, houses and a bar. Sometimes he designs Web sites for other people so that he can get his creative juices flowing the way he can't at a staid publication like this one. And he's been the instructor in Editing for Internet Publications at the Novi Sad School of Journalism in Yugoslavia.

Our Resident Philosopher has exchanged his legend mobility for a means of keeping your World's Magazine. Now he must become earnest about gaining a financial underpinning for this enterprise. (Read: Buy back his freedom and then go home.}.

In his spare time, he chases women in the manner that a fly pursues a spider.

He continues to be committed to integrity, chastity and a dose of humility.

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