Wallis in Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Drifting in from various film festivals on smoke signals of lavish praise, the unique, fascinating and ultimately depressing film called Beasts of the Southern Wild— a low-budget independent film by Benh Zeitlin about survivors of apocalyptic Hurricane Katrina, shot in the back swamps of Terrebonne Parish, La., using local nonactors instead of Hollywood extras—is now ready to engage the movie-going public in the darkness of a dream. There is no guarantee that the movie-going public is ready. I don’t notice any critics offering to pick up its deficit tabs in case it floats away from good reviews. But get ready anyway. Brilliant, compelling and powerful, this offbeat look at a part of a world we live in but know nothing about is not going to disappear without at first making a noise.

In a desolate, burned-out butt end of nowhere (the shrimp-trawling, blackened catfish, Cajun part of Southeastern Louisiana), a little girl they call Hushpuppy is left alone for days and nights on end when her desperately ill father disappears, forcing her to invent her own survival techniques. The setting is the emotionally parched and geographically designed cartographer’s view of hell called The Bathtub—what’s left of an area of makeshift cardboard and toothpick shanties that Katrina devastated, scattering the region’s population to the wind like dandelion fuzz. It lies low between the Gulf and the Mississippi River—a man-made wall has gone up on the dry side of the levee to protect against annihilating floods. This is where nothing grows, catfish and crawdads from polluted water are the only food, and stubborn Cajuns who refused to evacuate to higher ground when Brad Pitt and Sean Penn came down to rescue them on CNN News still live in the ultimate depths of poverty and ignorance. It’s the most sobering view of the uneducated and disenfranchised outcasts the world has forgotten since Precious.

Fueled by homespun philosophy she learned in a one-room schoolhouse that has since washed away, 6-year-old Hushpuppy (played with raw, largely improvised energy by a world-weary child named Quvenzhané Wallis) provides childish narration (“The whole universe depends on everything fittin’ together just right.”) that carries the action between scenes of day-in and day-out living while Hushpuppy and her sick father do whatever they have to in order to avoid being rounded up and sent to a homeless shelter. Nothing fits in Hushpuppy’s dismal, deprived world of a jerry-built trailer safely lodged in a tree just high enough off the ground to keep the gators and cottonmouth water moccasins away. Heating up cat food for dinner, she defiantly blows up the trailer, reducing her only home life to the rear end of an old truck bed, mounted like a barge in the bayou on floating oil drums. When the levee is dynamited to drain the diseased water out, Hushpuppy and her dying father, Wink (Dwight Henry), are at last processed into a holding facility for storm refugees. Equipped with food and medicine, they have a chance for a future at last, but all Daddy can think of is breaking out and wading home through the snake-infested swamps to the condemned mud, ruins and burial grounds of dead animals—the marshy swamp they used to call home. The children end up on a barge that takes them to a floating brothel in the Gulf, their only link to civilization the occasional whir of a helicopter hovering overhead, searching for survivors who don’t want to be rescued. Gnawing on a raw crab leg for nourishment, Hushpuppy is a resourceful and imaginative child, supplementing the harsh, cruel reality around her with occasional visits from mythical carnivorous boars from the Ice Age of Hushpuppy’s nightmares called “auruchs,” who descend on the toothless outcasts of The Bathtub ready to kill them with sharp tusks and eat them alive. The auruchs are pure creations of the kind of computer-generated technology denizens of the Louisiana tide basin have never even heard of, but they add a badly needed intrusion of action in the slow, actionless story of Hushpuppy and her fear of losing her father-protector. They also stand metaphorically as a link between the endangered species of another era and the last living human remnants of today’s lost civilization of the dispossessed. One of the saddest moments in the film comes near the end, when the child’s tear-stained eyes—a mirror to the chaos and terror in the misery around her—and forlorn face, masking resignation, need and the desperation to be taken care of, come together like a grownup, as she confesses to the camera that she cannot remember ever being hugged by another living person.

This is lacerating stuff, not remotely ready to be embraced by a wide audience beyond critics and hardcore movie buffs, but it has haunted me so profoundly that I want to see it again. Filmed with blood and sweat by Benh Zeitlin, and based on a play by his co-writer Lucy Alibar, Beasts of the Southern Wild combines undeniable elements of global warming, of Robert Flaherty’s poetic documentary The Louisiana Story and grass-roots heroism, while telling a harrowing coming-of-age story set in a forgotten time and place the world knows about only from newspapers. Poetry and history come together in a unique, two-fisted kidney punch that lands with the force of a magic wand.

Don’t miss this one. A brave and inspired antidote to time-wasting mainstream movies, it is unlike anything you’ve seen before or will likely ever see again. In short, it is unforgettable.

rreed@observer.com

BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD

Running Time 91 minutes

Written by Lucy Alibar, Benh Zeitlin

Directed by Benh Zeitlin

Starring Quvenzhané Wallis, Dwight Henry and Levy Easterly

3.5/4

James Franco, Renaissance man. (HuffPost)

James Franco, the real voice of our generation, has taken time out from his busy schedule of Art and Teaching and also Learning to begin a Huffington Post diary. It's about time!

So what important issue of our times is Mr. Franco tackling? President Obama's stance on gay rights? The construction of Marina Abramovic's performance space over on the Hudson? His new album, perhaps?

Those are all great guesses, but James Franco is actually here to talk to us today about a matter close to his heart: Haunted tours in New Orleans that he took with his Nana. (Which is the name of his Japanese hairdresser, not his grandmother.)

As you would expect, Nicolas Cage is name-checked several times over the course of this hard-hitting piece of journalism :

I had great memories of living in the Quarter a decade ago, when I acted in Nicolas Cage's directorial debut, Sonny. I guess New Orleans is the place actors go to direct their first films. We were shooting Sonny when Mardi Gras came around, and Nic was crowned King of Bacchus in the Krewe of Bacchus parade. I was on a different float, but I threw plenty of beads.

I had a similar experience during the Sonny shoot, when Nic Cage and I purposely took the two haunted rooms in the Bourbon Orleans Hotel, itself a former convent. My room was said to house the spirit of a nun who had leapt from the window. After unpacking my bags, I heard the sound of rushing water and realized that the sink in the bathroom was running full blast. It hadn't been on when I entered the room, and its knob wasn't the least bit loose.

We also visited a strange mansion that at one point was owned by Nicolas Cage. It was the site of horrific medical/carnival experiments on slaves in the vein of Human Centipede. About 200 years ago, the mansion belonged to a rich socialite with red hair. A fire broke out during one of her parties, and the fireman who answered the call discovered a chamber that smelled so bad it brought them to their knees, retching. Inside were living and dead victims of a variety of mutilations: amputations, limbs exchanged between people, sexes switched (meaning dicks were sewn onto women), skin flayed in designs to turn the victims into "human caterpillars" and other grotesque monstrosities. The house is still occupied, but it has not had a single owner for more than a five-year period.

In conclusion: human centipedes, Nicolas Cage, New Orleans, ghosts. Let's just hope that this experience doesn't inspire Mr. Franco's syllabus at NYU next semester with over-eager undergrads. Or even scarier...a new book collection.

Jones and Cage.

Nicolas Cage might sleepwalk through much of his career, but if you think he can’t act, take another look at his staggering work in Leaving Las Vegas, or catch up with his cathartic, above-average performance in the new urban crime thriller Seeking Justice. It’s a welcome surprise.

Directed by New Zealand’s king of pain Roger Donaldson, it begins with an SUV pushed off the roof of a New Orleans parking garage in the middle of Mardi Gras. Nobody gets hurt except the driver, thus setting the scene for a formulaic explosion of mayhem and silliness. But brace yourself. What follows is a roller coaster ride, off the beaten track and dashed with detours, and unexpectedly plausible. Mr. Cage is Will Gerard, a hard-working, law-abiding English teacher in a ghetto high school on Rampart Street, whose wife, Laura, is a beautiful cellist in a classical orchestra, played by January Jones on a semester break from Mad Men. One night, leaving rehearsal on the way to her car, Laura is mugged, raped, brutally beaten and left for dead. At the hospital, while waiting for news of her critical condition, the distraught, shell-shocked Will is approached by a dapper but unctuously suspicious mystery man who introduces himself as simply “Simon” (Guy Pearce) and not only claims to know the assailant’s identity, but offers to kill him as a public service, reminding Will that if he pursues justice through normal channels it will take years and even if the rapist is convicted, his sentence will amount to “half the time you get for tax evasion.” The only catch is that Will might be called on at some future date for a “favor.” Despite obvious moral reservations and his resistance to breaking the law himself, Will gives in to his grief and rage, knowing the chances of ever catching his wife’s attacker and bringing him to justice in the nebulous and overburdened court system are next to impossible.

The deed is done. The culprit is eliminated in a gang-style execution and Will thinks the case is closed. Fat chance. His problems are just beginning, and six months later, when the paybacks begin, Will and Laura find themselves sinking deeper into a trap of criminal involvement that reaches nightmare proportions. The action leapfrogs across the city, propelled by secret handshakes, clandestine meetings in raunchy saloons, clues in a certain brand of chocolate bar from a candy dispenser, and cryptic spy-movie passwords like “the hungry rabbit jumps,” and culminates in a gun battle staged in the deserted section of the New Orleans Superdome that has never been restored since Hurricane Katrina. They can’t go to the cops because they’re members of the vigilante group too. The movie relies heavily on the mass panic of Americans whose civil liberties are slowly being diminished by such invasive forces as Homeland Security and the growing impotence of the criminal court system. Strangely, it only occasionally challenges credulity, and the script by Robert Tannen is so rooted in convincing realism that it really keeps you going. The film is aided immeasurably the total realism of the three central performances. Mr. Cage is an average Joe who could be your accountant or your friendly teller at Citibank. Ms. Jones still has the most beautiful hair in show business, and in her portrayal of an innocent wife plunged into a vortex of trauma, there’s not a strand out of place. Bald for no reason but affectation, the versatile and always reliable Guy Pearce is creepy and riveting as an independent hit man who circumvents the time-wasting hours of legal red tape that renders impotent the victims of hoodlums and thugs by taking the errant law into his own hands. Behind the mask of a soft-spoken solid citizen’s concern for fairness and justice, he hides a lethal promise of inescapable evil. The secret organization that recruits ordinary citizens to dispose of the scumbags responsible for the Crescent City going to hell is supported by even the most powerful city fathers until “Simon,” the leader of the gang, spirals out of control and goes viral, disposing of investigative journalists and anyone else who attempts to expose him. Hard to reconcile, I grant you, but I bought it. The acting, writing and production values are coherent and naturalistic enough to make even the most challenging plot twists seem logical.

My one caveat: Mr. Donaldson, a foreign director shooting on location in a New Orleans with which he is clearly unfamiliar, fails to take advantage of the exotic ambience of the most photogenic city in America. You get car chases on generic overpasses and homicides in seedy hotel rooms, and there is one scene in which Mr. Cage mails a letter at the Audubon Park Zoo, but for all you see of the defining atmosphere of a lush and beautiful city that can never be duplicated on a Hollywood sound stage, Seeking Justice could just as easily take place in Bakersfield, Brooklyn, or Altoona, Pa. Still, the movie satisfies, standing stand on its own even without the visual garnish. I’m usually pretty good at figuring these things out, but I didn’t have a clue what was coming next. Seeking Justice is an intense thriller so full of shocks it keeps you wired from start to finish.

rreed@observer.com

SEEKING JUSTICE

Running Time 105 minutes

Written by Todd Hickey (story) and Robert Tannen (screenplay)

Directed by Roger Donaldson

Starring Nicolas Cage, January Jones and Guy Pearce

3/4

"Mithra" (courtesy Artnet)

At 2008’s Prospect.1 biennial in New Orleans, the talk of the freshly drained town was Mark Bradford’s "Mithra,” a massive ark constructed from salvaged plywood complete with tattered bills posted to the planks. Will this year’s hit be an “environmental structure” from Joyce Scott?

The Observer has learned a few new details about second-ever Prospect biennial (financial obligations forced last year’s show to be a local placeholder, Prospect.1.5).  Through a representative for the show, The Observer learned about Ms. Scott’s work, and the work of Vietnamese photographer An My Le, who intends to document “how Vietnamese women adapt to the agricultural communities of Louisiana, and specifically the rice farms where many are employed.”

The focus on the environment, said founder Dan Cameron is largely about developing a context for art in New Orleans.

"There was little about the environment in P.1, but this year’s edition has recent works by Alexis Rockman, An-My Le, and Pawel Wojtasik that really delve into where New Orleans is located on the globe, and what that implies,” Mr. Cameron wrote in an email to The Observer. “We are less about making that initial impact – so important for the premiere edition -- than about sustaining interest in this city as a future art center.”

The complete list of participating artists via ArtInfo below:

Sophie Calle (b. France), Nick Cave (b. USA), Jonas Dahlberg (b. Sweden), Bruce Davenport Jr. (b. USA), Dawn DeDeaux (b. USA), R. Luke DuBois (b. USA), George Dunbar (b. USA), William Eggleston (b. USA), Nicole Eisenman (b. France), Karl Haendel (b. USA), Ragnar Kjartansson (b. Iceland), William Pope.L (b. USA), An-My Lê (b. Vietnam), Ivan Navarro (b. Chile), Lorraine O'Grady (b. USA), Tsuyoshi Ozawa (b. Japan), Gina Phillips (b. USA), Ashton T. Ramsey (b. USA), Alexis Rockman (b. USA), Joyce J. Scott (b. USA), Jennifer Steinkamp (b. USA), Dan Tague (b. USA), Robert Tannen (b. USA), Grazia Toderi (b. Italy), Francesco Vezzoli (b. Italy), and Pawel Wojtasik (b. Poland).

Prospect.2 runs from October 2011 to January 2012.

Five years ago this month, one of the deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history swept through Louisiana and Mississippi. An exhibition opening Aug. 28 (a day before the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina) at the New Orleans Museum of Art puts a score of photos documenting the tragedy up on the walls. They were all snapped with a digital pocket camera by noted photographer Richard Misrach in the days and weeks following the hurricane. The show, dubbed "exhibitionUNTITLED [New Orleans and the Gulf Coast 2005]," melds a focus on graffiti and street art with fine-art photography. While there are no people in the pictures, the exhibition nonetheless calls up raw emotion and human sorrow with its images of homemade magic-marker signs and spray-painted messages scrawled on dilapidated buildings, fences, cars and trucks.

These messages range from the gut wrenching-"Destroy this memory"-to the cautionary: "Don't Try-I am sleeping inside with a big dog, an ugly woman and two shotguns." The exhibition is meant to give Katrina's victims, said Mr. Misrach, "an unmediated voice, heard in a way that I haven't seen before." The American photographer is best known for producing major series, such as the vividly colored landscape suite "Desert Cantos" and a series on the Mississippi industrial area dubbed "Cancer Alley." His photos are in the collection of more than 50 U.S. museums.

"It is always important when a celebrated contemporary artist ... drops [his] work and rushes to the aid of such a calamity," said NOMA curator of photography Diego Cortez.

Far from random, the order of the exhibition is no accident-Mr. Misrach deliberately arranged the project in a narrative that follows "the profound range of emotions and responses" felt by victims, he wrote in an email exchange with The Observer. These emotions range from fear, to defiance ("Hey Katrina! That's all you got? You big sissy!!! We will be back!!!"), to anger, to mourning, to hope, to raw pleas for relief. After the three months Mr. Misrach spent in New Orleans photographing these messages, he came away with a single conclusion. "New Orleans is remarkably vital and resilient," the photographer said.

Mr. Misrach's Katrina photographs were printed in editions of five and complete sets were given to NOMA, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The Houston museum is also showing the photographs in an exhibition that runs through Oct. 31.

The exhibitions are meant to serve as a stark reminder, and a necessary one, that the aftermath of Katrina is still very much a part of everyday life in New Orleans. Mr. Misrach said he's been amazed that "the rest of the world had already forgotten."

editorial@observer.com

But five years after Katrina, and just before the debut of HBO’s upcoming Big Easy drama, Treme, a hearty posse of young Manhattan men, mostly male, white and single, have been setting up shop, once again making New Orleans an expat refuge from the high costs of New York living.   

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, New Orleans is the second-fastest-growing city in the U.S., behind New York City. Local business groups say there are more new bars and restaurants in the city than pre-Katrina, and realtors say that for every older professional who moved out of the city post-deluge, two younger professionals have moved in.

I’m one of the new expats. Last summer, I rented a 19th-century, antique-furnished carriage house for $1,100 a month. I lost eight pounds from sweating and bicycling (my only mode of transportation), and wrote a few hundred pages of a novel. Now, my wife and I are shopping for a house.

We’re hardly alone.

The Publicist: Jordan Friedman

“I was living on the Upper East Side. My business in New York City had stagnated, dating there sucked, it was crazy expensive and I knew I wasn’t getting any younger,” said Jordan Friedman.

And so, three years ago, Mr. Friedman decided to change his life and move.

Two days after the Saints won the Super Bowl, Mr. Friedman, now 36, sat in Parasol’s, a local bar and sandwich shop in the Irish Channel neighborhood, chomping on a roast beef po-boy, downing it with an Abita beer. The mood, at 11:30 a.m., was festive. A bartender was passing out Jagermeister shots to the crowded room.

Before Katrina hit, Mr. Friedman, who now co-owns a local PR firm, was a frequent visitor to the city. “What was really funny was that during the dot-com and bull market boom, I’d fly down to New Orleans for weekends because even with airfare, it was cheaper to spend time here than to stay in my own hometown. In a way, it was like coming home. People here knew I was one of them. And I am one of them. New Orleans was, to me, the closest you could come to expat living, while still being in the United States.”

He now lives in an historic apartment building, called the Orphanage, and pays $1,085 a month—“which is a little pricey by New Orleans standards”—for a 1,000-square-foot space with its own backyard.

“You’re either a New Orleans person or not. People here have a very different way of thinking than folks in other parts of the country, particularly New York,” he said.
But, he cautioned, “don’t let the simplicity of this calculus fool you. People here are not unsophisticated. In New York, I grew up among the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world. And I can tell you, without equivocation, that a large percentage of them are miserable and hate their lives.”

The Restaurateur: Sean McCusker

Sean McCusker left his Manhattan magazine job last April in an eBay-purchased Mercedes ragtop, which a friend dubbed “a 1980s coke dealer’s car.

”Mr. McCusker, 40, walked a visitor through his gutted, 3,000-square-foot restaurant space, built in 1785, 50 yards from fabled Jackson Square: prime New Orleans real estate.

“I’m hoping not to bring New York down here...by any means. We don’t want to be the hot-shit Manhattan thing coming down, because they’ll be a bit of a backlash.”
Mr. McCusker was living in New York in a $2,900-a-month brownstone in Williamsburg and working as the director of marketing for Complex, when he began to rethink his future. “I was like, I’m pushing 40, and I’m going to live in New York in a one-bedroom apartment for, hey, $800,000 or a million? It didn’t really make sense to me anymore. I miss my friends... I just don’t miss the lifestyle.”

He now pays $1,200 a month for a fully furnished, 1,200-square-foot apartment in the French Quarter, as he looks to buy a permanent home. He gets around mostly by bicycle, to and from his new bar and bistro, called Sylvain.

He considered why he chose New Orleans. “I was at Buffa’s Lounge the other day, having a po-boy, when a woman at the bar offered me a bloodied dollar if I would run across the street and check to see if the Porta-Potty was working. That’s pretty much par for the course here.”

The Entrepreneur: Nicolas Perkin

Sipping a Jack Daniel’s milk punch—while pushing his 3-month-old daughter in a stroller—Nicolas Perkin, 38, stood by a turtle-filled pond in Audubon Park, in the Uptown section of New Orleans. A flock of wild Monk parrots flew over his head. “It’s like Star Trek here, some planet no one’s ever seen before. … I spent my childhood going to Central Park to escape the insanity,” he said. “This serves the same purpose.”

He and his pals call JetBlue “the Jitney.” They can fly into Manhattan at 7 a.m., “do a meeting” and then fly home in time for a late-ish dinner the same day. “It actually takes a shorter time than going out to the Hamptons in the summer.”

Mr. Perkin, who runs “an eBay-like marketplace for selling receivables,” went to Tulane in New Orleans, and the town never got out from under of his skin.

He takes the streetcar to work instead of a subway, clanging toward downtown with the windows open. But it can be ugly in New Orleans, where crack houses and muggers still thrive. With a new child, does he worry about safety, as New Orleans nearly always tops the list of murder capitals for cities its size? “I’m a tough person,” he said. “I had a gun pointed to my head at 17, during a robbery. I saw a classmate of mine stabbed at 16. New York in the ’70s and ’80s, when I grew up, you could be mugged on your way to school in broad daylight. As a New Yorker, I just know to never go where I shouldn’t be.”

The Artist: Alex Beard

No one could say that Alex Beard was hurting when he decided to move to New Orleans this past spring. He had a namesake Soho gallery of his own and a recent, favorable write-up in Vanity Fair. His Impossible Puzzles were selling in bookstore chains. He even had a children’s book coming out.

Mr. Beard, who is 39, studied at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts, where he was a fixture in the coffee house set, sketching paintings, often dressed in a sarong (he’d traveled all over Africa and India; the look stuck), and editing an alternative culture tabloid called Tribe.

Mr. Beard, the nephew of the notorious playboy-photographer Peter Beard, moved back to New York post-Katrina, opening his gallery on Mercer Street near Prince.
A year ago, he was shopping for a new apartment, and found one he liked. But a would-be neighbor complained that the artist’s paint fumes and turpentine would poison his child, infiltrating her room. “And the guy lived outside of the Holland Tunnel,” laughed Mr. Beard, standing with a mug of Café du Monde coffee, outside his new gallery on Antiques Row, Royal Street, in the Vieux Carre. “I ran into a buzz saw with the co-op board. The guy blackballed me.”

It was then that he received a call that a space in New Orleans was coming available, an old hat shop famous in the city. “I heard about the New Orleans space on a Friday, took it on Tuesday. All of that came together in one week.”

Mr. Beard is all grown up now, with two children and a wife, whom he met in Louisiana.

“Everything is just easier here,” he continued. “It’s more conducive in New Orleans to making great art … because you’re not having to fight all the peripheral crap. You just have more time to clear your mind.”

The Movie Guy: Bill Doyle

“It’s the most un-American of American cities,” said Bill Doyle by telephone on a recent weekend.

Mr. Doyle came to New Orleans two years ago as the location manager for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a job which entailed finding sitting rooms, bars, houses and shops for the $165 million, man-child movie starring Brad Pitt, who now keeps a residence in the French Quarter.

Mr. Doyle, who is 45, had been living in Chelsea, in an apartment where “you could almost touch the walls on both sides if you spread out your arms.” For that, he paid $2,000 a month.

Now he is working on Green Lantern, the comic-book movie, starring Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, which is shooting exclusively in the parishes within New Orleans city limits. His sublet apartment in the French Quarter has a Mardi Gras–beads–encrusted, street-front balcony and a rooftop terrace, where he entertains the cast and crew.

“They’re essentially paying us to be down here,” he said with a laugh. “They” is the Louisiana government, which offers movie production companies a 30 percent tax credit, including film expenses and incidentals like renting houses and going out for meals. He estimates that it saves big-budget movie studios like Warner Bros., which is behind Green Lantern, as much as $30 million to make films there.

Even Mr. Doyle’s girlfriend is benefitting. “She’s looking for work here in films, in wardrobe, and sent out seven résumés in just the past half-hour! That’s how many movies are being made here.”

Throughout New Orleans, television shows such as HBO’s new Treme and TNT’s Delta Blues (produced by George Clooney) are currently shooting. According to the New Orleans Office of Film and Video, never before have there been so many movies and TV series being shot in the city itself.

Meanwhile, Mr. Doyle spends his early mornings cruising along the scenic old waterfront of the French Quarter, along Esplanade Wharf. He wears a U.S. Navy T-shirt to please the Harbor Police, who navigate the heavily marked, no-trespassing-signed stretch that joggers and Mr. Doyle pretend not to notice. “The celebration of food, music, living here … It’s not fake, or put on for the weekend. It’s in the people’s blood.”

The Musician: Drew Young

Drew Young watched Hurricane Katrina come ashore on television while sitting in an Irish bar in Manhattan. “It was at that moment I decided I was going to fly back the moment it was possible to go. I just felt this amazingly strong urge to be ‘home.’”

Mr. Young, 43, is a singer and recording artist in the Pete Yorn vein. As a live performer, he had come and gone from New Orleans—he once had a band there called Ruben Kinkaid, named after The Partridge Family’s manager—but had been living in Soho in a rent-stabilized apartment, and he kept finding it hard to give up. The New York native didn’t make it officially back to New Orleans until this past year, when he found a house and landed a full-time job, working for a local record company, Putumayo World Music, as its strategic marketing manager.

He recalls how when he moved into his new two-bedroom, two-story house on Uptown’s Milan Street, a doctor neighbor living across the street immediately came over and started to help him carry boxes into his new home. “I got sick in New York once, and had to go to the hospital for a few days, and when I got home, I realized I’d been living in the same apartment for years, and I didn’t know anyone in my building. As neighbors, we grunted at each other in the elevator, and stared at the ceiling when forced to interact with each other.

And what of his music career? The competition is steep, there’s no shortage of good bands,” he says, “and that can be daunting. But it just makes everyone raise the bar.”

editorial@observer.com

About halfway through Dan Baum’s brilliant but frustrating Nine Lives, a ventriloquist’s collage of New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina, Tim Bruneau, a young, strong cop hungry for some “boot-in-the-ass” policing, chases a suspect through the back streets of one of the city’s seediest projects. He turns a corner, the action freezes, and you find yourself looking through his frantic yet perceptive eyes.

“The courtyard was full of wiry young men with short dreadlocks, wearing identical white wife beaters and sagged carpenter’s pants. The fucking uniform of the day: What do they do, call each other every morning? They looked at him with no expression, a field of identical statues. But that one—his chest was heaving. When Tim made eye contact, he took off.”

Moments later the scene ends in a devastating, unforgettable instant.

Mr. Baum handles this incident—as he does so many throughout the book—with a breathtaking precision of language, imagery and pacing, as well as first-rate storytelling.

Still, even before that scene, I was exhausted—too many people, not enough plot. So I decided to try what English professors call contesting the narrative: Rather than read straight through, I went character by character. Wilbert Rawlins Jr., the high-school band director who fathers his orphaned students better than his own children; JoAnn Guidos, the proud, busty owner of Kajun’s Pub who started life as John; Billy Grace, the respected fixture of wealthy uptown society who challenges the vast economic discrepancy that is the city’s birthright; and so on. The nine tragic, resilient lives Mr. Baum painstakingly unfurls—in some cases over more than four decades—are broken into vignettes often less than a page long, alternating in no fixed pattern. The entries for all but one character are datelined. 

Because Mr. Baum’s titular metaphor is also his central conceit, a choose-your-own-adventure approach is easy to pull off, though by reading the book in a streamlined, goal-oriented fashion (that is, as a New Yorker), you may miss out on the unique and delicate atmosphere Mr. Baum is trying to re-create. The episodic structure gives Nine Lives a rhythmic, almost musical feel, reminiscent of the distinct yet intertwining melodies of New Orleans jazz. More obviously, it reflects the relaxed, non-directed nature of life in the Crescent City. As he puts it, New Orleans is a “city-sized act of civil disobedience,” its citizens “masters at the lost art of living in the moment.”

That’s half-true: New Orleanians live at least as much in their past as in their present; the future is what they have trouble imagining. This may seem charming when whiling away a steamy afternoon on the front porch with a beer, but when it results in the failure to provide Category-5 protection for the levees despite insistent and dire warnings (still the case today), it’s deadly.

MR. BAUM ARRIVED in the city immediately after the storm, as almost everyone else was leaving, or trying to. He stayed for weeks, then returned constantly over the following two years (sometimes with his wife and writing partner, Margaret Knox, who doesn’t get an author credit, but who’s described on Mr. Baum’s Web site as being responsible for “at least half” of what is released under his name), conducting hundreds of interviews as he tried to rebuild New Orleans story by story.

The first two-thirds of Nine Lives takes place between the mid-1960s and Aug. 29, 2005, and paints every corner of the city, from men repairing streetcar tracks on St. Charles Avenue to a secret transsexual mixer in a downtown hotel to the intricate, year-long process of stitching together an Indian chief’s Mardi Gras costume. The final, gut-wrenching section recounts the shattered days and weeks after Katrina, dredging up the horrific images that were projected onto every television screen in America. But here the victims have names: The woman perched on a roof, inches from the rising floodwaters, is Faye, Belinda Rawlins’ cousin; the one lying on Jackson Avenue with her head smashed in by a fallen streetlight, that was Marie. Tim Bruneau drove her around in the backseat of his cruiser, pleading with any hospital or morgue to take her in. When no one would, he was told by his superiors, “Undo what you did.”

As Mr. Baum writes in his introduction, the media in general were so fixated in those first awful weeks on the disaster itself that they missed the larger story of this “essentially weird” place, and why it’s worth saving.

Mr. Baum has performed a remarkable service in this regard, salvaging not just lives but entire communities in copious, stunningly rendered detail. The writing, always precise and nearly flawless, is a sort of flavored third person, merging the character’s thought and speech patterns with Mr. Baum’s narrative oversight. When this works well, as with Tim Bruneau’s chase scene, it works astonishingly well.

But even the best stories tend to lose their momentum as the shifting Sound and Fury narrative keeps you from settling in. Perhaps this is intentional, an attempt to instill in the reader the sense of dislocation and disorientation of catastrophe. And while it doesn’t quite work at book length, the depth and care with which Mr. Baum has drawn these nine lives demonstrates his understanding of their common dilemma, that is, “how to live in a place that by the rules of modern America has no right to exist.”

Jesse Wegman is managing editor of The Observer. He can be reached at jwegman@observer.com.

It's worth keeping that example in mind this afternoon, with Hurricane
Gustav, downgraded from a Category 3 storm (Katrina's designation) to Category 2 before it came ashore, passing west of New Orleans. It seems possible that the dire forecasts of the weekend – talk of flooding of "biblical" proportions that would wipe out whatever Katrina hadn't – will not be realized. But it's also possible that some of the levee walls in New Orleans, which have not been fully reconstitutedn since 2005, will once again give way, with horrific flooding resulting.

Obviously, everyone is hoping and praying that the former scenario plays out. But strictly from a political standpoint, John McCain's campaign has extra reason to hope so. If the storm passes and the walls hold, then McCain and the G.O.P. will probably be able to salvage two days – Wednesday and Thursday – of their convention.
(There's even a chance, depending on how the storm progresses today, that they could end up with presenting a primetime program on Tuesday night as well.)

For McCain, this would probably be the best possible scenario. In canceling the first day of the convention, he has won terrific press coverage, with television news stations playing – over and over again – clips of McCain solemnly talking about the need to be an American first and a Republican second. In so doing, he has come across as admirably nonpolitical – which is itself a brilliant political achievement.

Meanwhile, where has Barack Obama been? Since McCain announced his surprise selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate last Friday,
the Illinois senator has largely disappeared from press coverage. Plus, the cancellation of today's events gave McCain and excuse to keep George W. Bush and Dick Cheney away from St. Paul. Surely, McCain was never thrilled with the idea of two men whose combined approval rating sits at around 50 percent headlining the first night of his convention, but given their status, he could hardly snub them. Now that's not an issue. McCain can now stay clear of Bush and Cheney all the way through Election Day, if he wants.

If the storm passes without causing high casualties and heavy destruction, McCain will be able to present a truncated convention headlined only by speakers he's comfortable showcasing. If the "normal" convention is condensed to just Wednesday and Thursday, there won't be time for much more than acceptance speeches by McCain and Palin and one or two other high-profile addresses, maybe from Joe Lieberman or Rudy Giuliani. In essence, the G.O.P. will still be able to unleash harsh attacks on Obama, and McCain and Palin will still get
to deliver primetime acceptance speeches. The only difference between this and a normal convention would be that the first two days wouldn't be dominated by speeches, but rather by McCain's decision to cancel the festivities.

Also, if the storm passes without major damage, the last two days of the convention – and McCain's speech itself – would probably take on a triumphant tone. As unfair as this may seem (given the Bush White House's dreadful response to Katrina), the convention would turn into a celebration of the federal government's response, of the lives saved and the destruction diverted, and of the (supposedly) wise and heroic leadership shown by McCain in making sure his party was focused on the impending natural disaster in the Gulf Coast, and not partisan politics in St. Paul.

He released a letter earlier today essentially accusing one of the department's high-priced private consultants, Alvarez and Marsal, of professional laziness for creating a plan for city schools that looks eerily similar to the one they created for hurricane-ravaged New Orleans.

That's problematic because, as Thompson notes:

The full letter is here [pdf].

-- Azi Paybarah

John Edwards is about to announce a run for president, using hard-hit New Orleans as a backdrop.

The New York Post is skeptical.

Eliot Spitzer denied that his appointment of Nassau County Republican Michael Balboni to be his top homeland security official is part of any "ulterior scheme" to help Democrats take back the state Senate.

Democrats and Republicans on Long Island are scrambling to replace Balboni when he goes.

Some supporters of Rudy Giuliani are reaching out to the families of 9/11 victims about 2008, Maggie reports.

Sam Roberts writes that race was a key issue when Basil Paterson ran for lieutenant governor, but is largely a non-issue for David Paterson as he prepares to assume that office.

Democratic pledges to restore civility to Congress "carry risks," according to the Times.

George Pataki defended his record in an interview with the Sun, contending that it's impossible to be ideologically pure when you have a state to run.

Republican state Senator John Bonacic sent out a letter calling for his colleagues to toss Majority Leader Joe Bruno.

Peter King is opposed to a revised immigration bill that he says amounts to amnesty.

Joe Biden is going to fight any proposed buildup of troop levels in Iraq.

The mayor called the racially and ethnically diverse new class of police recruits "a gift to the city."

The city Conflicts of Interest Board released a letter scolding a Council staffer for inappropriate use of a business card.

Leaders in East Harlem and the South Bronx are angry over a City Hall deal that would allow fancy private schools in Manhattan to have "first dibs" on some of the renovated ballfields on Randalls Island.

Developer Bruce Ratner has installed surveillance cameras outside the properties he owns at the future location of the Atlantic Yards project.

The cost of doing business in New York State is high.

There will be no holiday clemencies from the departing governor.

And here's a handy guide to all the newly elected members of Congress.

-- Josh Benson