Five years ago today, a day after the western flank of Hurricane Katrina crawled over New Orleans, floodwaters continued to billow through dozens of levee breaches as they worked toward inundating four-fifths of the city. Thousands of displaced locals headed to the Superdome, joining the tens thousands who had sheltered there during the storm. In residential neighborhoods across much of the city, survivors who had defied Mayor Nagin’s order to evacuate — out of stubborn defiance or for a basic lack of the wherewithal to do so — adapted to the surreal reality that their city, an American city in the twenty-first century, had in many respects been abandoned by the powers that were.
Those who would survive would do so largely on their own.
But five years have passed, and New Orleans is rebuilding. There’s been a plethora of worthy journalism on the subject in recent days and weeks — a few examples here, here, here. We’re heading down there next week to see for ourselves and to work on a couple projects you’ll see in the coming months.
In the meantime, to tide you over, last year’s review of graphic novelist Josh Neufeld’s “A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge” (with a crucial footnote at bottom):
Graphic novels as journalism? On Josh Neufeld’s masterful “A.D.”
by Ben Fuchs
Bolstered by a glowing Sunday-edition New York Times book review, Josh Neufeld’s “A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge” plowed through a gauntlet of Batman-related titles to earn a spot on the Paper of Record’s Graphic Hardcover Bestseller List last month. However, for all the publicity Neufeld engendered through such critical acclaim and a modest book tour, the book’s tenure on the list ended after two weeks; apparently people are more interested in studying The Joker’s origin than in reliving Hurricane Katrina.
Neufeld, who built comic-geek street cred illustrating “American Splendor” for Harvey Pekar, truly began working on “A.D.” during the three weeks he spent working with the Red Cross in Katrina-ravaged Biloxi, Miss. after the 2005 storm: His blog on the experience spawned a self-published collection of choice works, which in turn drew the attention of SMITH Magazine. With the online mag as a platform, Neufeld expanded both his narrative breadth and the scope of his geographical focus (he migrated to a New Orleans angle after discarding, for logistical reasons, a considered examination of the larger Gulf Coast). Earlier this year, Smith — with Pantheon on board to bankroll — published “A.D.” in hardcover.
Neufeld’s work straddles a line between fact and fiction in a manner that might make traditional journalistic purists uneasy: “A.D.” is a novel, albeit one rooted in historically-accurate details, and Neufeld makes no claims to the contrary* (Ed: see correction below). Some of the book’s seven central characters, whose divergent narratives reflect the vastly different backgrounds of their subjects, are real people, while others are hybridized creations based on multiple real New Orleanians. Accordingly, Neufeld warns in the book’s first pages that “…some names and details have been changed for dramatic purposes….” As Neufeld told the Times in its “A.D.” review in August, “I did whatever worked to make the emotional truth of the stories much clearer. It’s what makes a certain scene emotionally satisfying in a way that makes the whole book add up to a novel.” But Neufeld’s intricate attention to detail (in addition to the obvious phone and in-person interviews he conducted, Neufeld “took tons of photos” in order to replicate precisely such minutiae as the contents of of one featured couple’s DVD collection) lends credence to Dave Eggers’ characterization of “A.D.” as “one of the best-ever examples of comics reportage.”
The human perspectives Neufeld provides certainly reflect a level of journalistic integrity rivaling or exceeding that exhibited by much of the mainstream media during and after Katrina. He wisely resisted the urge to overtly damn the federal agencies’ abominable reaction to the crisis (FEMA isn’t even a blip on the book’s radar), instead forcing readers to draw their own conclusions based on his characters’ hyper-localized trials. In doing so, we see thugs — left, along with everyone else, to their own devices by unresponsive authorities — maintaining peace at the city’s convention center, rather than raping and pillaging as had been reported at the time. (This isn’t to say that none of the atrocious rumors relayed ad nauseum by CNN and its ilk during the catastrophe played out as fact. But the erosion of these sensationalist outlets’ fact-checking standards during the meltdown was palpable, and their follow-up on such rumors during the recovery period was markedly insufficient.)
Neufeld, however, does mimic Anderson Cooper — as much a Gonzo student as a straight-edged, impeccably-coiffed WASP can be — by inserting himself into the story at book’s end. Neufeld introduces this narrative transition to bring closure to each character’s tale, portraying himself following up with the seven by phone from his Brooklyn apartment. Some of the characters initially moved away from New Orleans after the hurricane, while others stayed in the area; all have since returned to New Orleans or have plans to do so. By describing each of these stories in polychromatic form and without regard to the “official” assessment of conditions in the city during and after Katrina, Neufeld provides a raw, revelatory and intensely personal perspective on the largest domestic humanitarian failure of the 21st century.
Perhaps of equal importance in these sad, helpless days of print media consolidation and syndication, though, “A.D.” confers a considerable measure of legitimacy on a form of quasi-journalism Neufeld by no means invented (see: “Maus”): Comics and graphic novels as social conscience.
*EDITOR’S NOTE: Josh Neufeld contacted DCQ after this piece first ran to clarify a “misperception” that he says originated in the Timespiece mentioned in the first sentence. In the article, Times critic George Gene Gustines concludes that the book “is a novel, not a documentary: Mr. Neufeld edited parts of the survivors’ stories and combined some characters.” Gustines goes on to quote Neufeld as saying that he “did whatever worked to make the emotional truth of the stories much clearer. It’s what makes a certain scene emotionally satisfying in a way that makes the whole book add up to a novel.” Neufeld wrote to us to clarify that “…in truth A.D. IS journalism, and IS a documentary. I did not combine any characters when it came to the main players and their stories (I did take out a couple of people — who we never meet — from certain scenes when it became too confusing)…I felt my job as artist was to synthesize the characters’ experiences into a complete whole that FELT novelistic. I guess it sounds a bit high-falutin’; what I meant is that I did what any good journalist does when writing their story: edited it and refined it to make it a good read.”
Oggie Green on Oggie Green, from the poet’s “I Walked Away” collection (Goose River Press, 2002): “In writing these poems I was inspired by God. He gave me the knowledge through my grandparents who raised me to be the person I am today. I am the mother of four: Diana, Maxwell, Kermet and Edith. Six grand and four great grand.
My husband, Charles, is a part of my life and deserves this praise.
I was born and raised in the Bahamas. Married at the age of seventeen. Came to America in 1961. Educated my three children then went on to get my education as a pediatric nurse. BA-MSE in education. Community activist. I picked up my pen in hand and God did the rest. The poems that I am sending you are from the heart.
All this is Oggie and more.”
Select works from “I Walked Away”
“Delta ‘420’ - Confidence”
Delta is known as the best in the air
If you don’t know I’ll tell you so
I’ve been traveling with her since seventy-three
You should ask me I ought to know
I’ve been flying with her twice a year
For the past twenty-five years
The Captain, The Pilot and all the crews
They all know exactly what to do
I’ve been trusting them with my life for oh so long
I can trust them yet again
They always know just what to do
It’s a trust that will never end
Delta will always be my favorite place
I’ll tell you the reason why
They treated me as family
For God is in the air and on our side
“She Walked Away”
She walked away to find a way
There was no hope that she would stay
But then she thought what she would do
To make things right for me and you
She journeyed to another land
To find a way to do what she can
Then someone came and held her hand
And led her to a land where life was grand
She went through life her head held high
Not thinking whether she’ll live or die
But there were some things she could not forget
How she went through life with lots of regrets
Today she’s loved by all she meets
This makes her very happy
She’s doing all the things she knows are best
And left to God to do the rest
So here I am thanking God
For all he has done for me
For my family, friends and children, too
They are my life and so are you
“July in the Park”
It was July fourth in Mount Morris Park
Where people gathered from morn to dark
Old and young, great and small
They were there all having a ball
Music playing, children having fun
Playing sports with water guns
Men walking around observing things
As if they were birds with special wings
Harlem is a place you’ll like to be
Where people work in unity
Come and see how the people live
You will want to be there to live and give
Mount Morris Park is an historical place
And we should learn to keep it
Not letting outsiders think they can take it
Something that’s not theirs but ours to keep it
“The One Who is Still Our President”
Over ten thousand people welcomed him home
To a place where he belongs
There were congressmen, actresses and residents
All welcomed him in a joyful throng
There were eighteen small businesses that participated
In welcoming him home to Harlem
Harlem Office Supply, The Chamber of Commerce
They all got together, it was their choice
The cake was initiated by Pitman-Hughes
And designed by Egypt Lawson
They stuck with our President
Who came to make Harlem his residence
I’m glad this day has come as I predicted
When I saw him blowing his horn
He brought out something that was hidden in him
He was as feisty as Jungle Jim
Whatever happened to the other half
Since she became a part of New York
I wrote a poem and presented it to her
She merely said thanks and took a walk
“Bahamas the Beautiful”
I’ll tell you of the Bahamas, you should know
Are consisted of seven hundred islands
If you visit them you will see
What you have been missing by moving slow
Waters blue, sand pink
To see them you will hardly wink
Looking at them with awe surprise
At night you can hardly close your eyes
Visiting the Bahamas you will see
The sentiment of the people
They treated you as if they knew you well
You’ll feel as if you’re on a steeple listening to a bell
My visit there is on holidays
There is a reason why
The natives make you feel so good
You’ll feel as if you’re in the days of Robin Hood
A couple awaking-at-3pm thoughts on what appears to be a beauty of a wintry Sunday in New York:
1.) Kettle’s new “Fully Loaded Baked Potato” chips are a fairly large disappointment. It seems the stoners in their R&D department merely combined the seasonings of the BBQ and sour cream-and-onion lines and called it a day. Bacon isn’t even mentioned among the ingredients. Thusly, I’m saving the second half of the bag until my re-up of Bacon Salt arrives (no, really). Will report back.
2.) Ghostland Observatory + Terminal 5 = laser armageddon. Yes, Steph, this is my review.
3.) A couple of Brits are immersed in a very cool project of modest intentions (via): “To write to everyone in the world.” In April, Lenka Clayton and Michael Crowe sent a unique, handwritten letter to all 467 residents of the Irish town of Cushendall. The recipients learnt all about the origins of the horse and the artists’ outdoor exploits. Last month, Clayton and Crowe launched part two of Mysterious Letters, this time loosing their thoughts upon the 620 denizens of Polish Hill, Pennsylvania. The results include such genius dickery as this. Looks like they’re catching some press, too. Coffee table book in six months’ time.
Today’s SF Chronicle carries a front-page article on the San Francisco Panorama, the ambitious forthcoming publication from SF publishing house McSweeney’s. Blatantly self-serving motives aside (the piece offers Chron readers “the chance to preorder the one-time product” through its sfgate.com website and announces plans to run excerpts from the Panorama in the coming weeks), Julian Guthrie’s overview neatly profiles a literary endeavor that is anything but concise: The Panorama clocks in at 320 pages. The pub’s centerpiece comes in the form of a 112-page broadsheet newspaper comprising investigative and feature news writing as well as substantial arts, sports, food and comics sections. A 112-page magazine and a 96-page books section round out the epic.
As one would expect of an endeavor of such staggering length, McSweeney’s employed an army of creative types for the project — 150 of them, to be inexact. As the broadsheet’s name implies, the Panorama is heavy on the Bay Area/NorCal slant, and the contributors’ page is accordingly representative (Michael Chabon, Robert Hass, Peter Orner, Sean Wilsey and other notable locals, as well as “dozens of working and laid-off Bay Area journalists,” provided words). But the scope of Panorama’s literary and artistic haul is equally impressive from a national perspective: Stephen King, Chris Ware, Junot Díaz, George Saunders, Art Spiegelman and Matt Klam lend their names to the project. So breathtaking is the collection, in fact, that the Chronicle deems it deserving of a quote from one of its own editors, Ward Bushee, who asserts that “the Panorama may be the biggest, most creative and famously bylined edition of a newspaper ever printed.”
Justifiably gushing praise for the literary collaborgy aside, let’s get real: Dave Eggers’ latest altruistic project, slated for release on Dec. 8th, looks to be brilliant in many, many ways, but it will not save newspaper. The Panorama is a one-off several months in the making. It costs $16 (though Bay Area readers can cop it for just $5 the day it debuts). And the prospect of the publication realizing a profit appears dubious at best.
Wisely, McSweeney’s stops short of issuing any delusionally grandiose proclamations, instead implying that the Panorama is intended to display to the public and What Remains of Newspaper that there are alternatives to reining it in. Explains the publisher: “We think that the best chance for newspapers’ survival is to do what the internet can’t: namely, use and explore the large-paper format as thoroughly as possible. To that end, we opted for a huge and luxurious broadsheet — 15” x 22”. Then we unleashed artists and designers to show exactly how much the format can do.”
The newspaper section of the Panorama, then, should serve as an experimental blueprint — an idea, or rather, a collection of ideas, for purveyors and readers of newspaper to examine and consider. Many, if not most, major newspaper publishers and owners will dismiss the Panorama as a fantastic and fiscally nonviable exercise in “alternative” journalism. These are people whose ideas — or, more accurately, lack of such — haven’t served their publications particularly well in recent times.
Newspaper needs an overhaul if it is to survive in any physical form; the time for tender tweaks to the business model has passed. In an industry whose only recent innovative success is championed chiefly by a fossil intent on reeling back civil rights to 1952, the Panorama may serve as the radical catalyst newspaper needs to avoid a meek descent into utter irrelevance.
(Note: As extensive analysis shows that most readers don’t delve deeply into DCQ’s back pages, we’ve decided to occasionally tap our archives for highlights. This post originally ran on January 27, 2009.)
From time to time, among the peyote-driven snake-femme battles and botched Rolling Stone assignments, Hunter Thompson managed to Take Care of Bidniss when he decided his associates’ missteps had reached catastrophic levels. A source sends us proof positive of one such episode, in which Thompson takes the meat grinder to attorney George Tobia for apparently bungling negotiations with New York publishing house Simon & Schuster over the 1998 publication of ”The Rum Diary”:
In another declassified communique written two days earlier, the Master of the Cannonball Sendoff informed Tobia of his fate while simultaneously filling him in on leisure plans for the day and demanding an estimate of his “exact profit expectations” from the soon-to-be-released “Fear and Loathing” film adaptation. The last graph alone speaks volumes about a man who knew he had the juice to disregard formality and spent the bulk of his career doing just that:
For his part, Tobia seemingly made good with Thompson after the dustup: At present, the Boston lawyer continues to represent HST’s estate — 19 years after the two met while Tobia was handling the estate of another writer who rejected conformity in savage fashion: Jack Kerouac.
That’s what we’re doing — if we can navigate the hordes of pasties jostling for seats, that is. If not, we’ll just call up Darryl Strawberry and rail crushed Pop Rocks in Washington Square Park. He’s cousins with Doc Gooden, who’s cousins with Gary Sheffield, who played left field like Kevin Mitchell, who held his girlfriend hostage and then cut off her cat’s head. Only one of the preceding assertions is false, and it’s not the one you’d hope.
Ignoring the fact that this fragile world is just rife — rife, I say! — with such saccharine abuse and feline homicide, some parents are reportedly shitting their Flyover State dungarees over the specter of Maurice Sendak’s grinning monsters giving little Tanner nightmares. Prompted by a Newsweek reporter to address the issue for the umpteenth time since test screenings launched last summer, Sendak said he’d assuage the concerns of Mom n’ Pop by telling them “to go to hell…if (the kids) can’t handle it, go home. Or wet your pants. Do whatever you like. But it’s not a question that can be answered.”
Sendak went on to elaborate that he couldn’t accept the “concentration on kids being scared, as though we, as adults, can’t be scared. Of course we’re scared. I’m scared of watching a TV show about vampires. I can’t fall asleep. It never stops. We’re grown-ups; we know better, but we’re afraid.”
It’s no stretch, then, to conclude that Sendak sees fear as an essential part of growing up — something he says American parents are remarkably reluctant to accept, and something he made a point to highlight in Where the Wild Things Are:
“We are squeamish. We are Disneyfied. We don’t want children to suffer. But what do we do about the fact that they do? The trick is to turn that into art. Not scare children, that’s never our intention.”
On a side note, the breezy, captivating NewsweekQ&A — which brought together Sendak, adaptation director/Labcabincalifornian Spike Jonze, and screenwriter/philanthropist Dave Eggers — revealed Sendak’s inspiration for his celebrated beasts:
“The monsters were based on relatives. They came from Europe, and they came on weekends to eat, and my mom had to cook. Three aunts and three uncles who spoke no English, practically. They grabbed you and twisted your face, and they thought that was an affectionate thing to do. And I knew that my mother’s cooking was pretty terrible, and it also took forever, and there was every possibility that they would eat me, or my sister or my brother. We really had a wicked fantasy that they were capable of that. We couldn’t taste any worse than what she was preparing. So that’s who the Wild Things are. They’re foreigners, lost in America, without a language. And children who are petrified of them, and don’t understand that these gestures, these twistings of flesh, are meant to be affectionate. So there you go.”
If you’re still at your desk reading this, really, shame on you. SHAME. Take a look around. It’s Friday. It’s probably raining. The free bagels are gone. Everybody with a spare excuse or sick day is at home sleeping off last night. And nobody in the office is actuallyworking except for The Bobs, who are cashing in your 2010 raise for telling the bossman how expendable you are.
So grow some balls, fake some swine flu, smoke some dope, and drop twelve hard-earned duckets to spend the afternoon being a kid again.
Bolstered by a glowing Sunday-edition New York Times book review, Josh Neufeld’s “A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge” plowed through a gauntlet of Batman-related titles to earn a spot on the Paper of Record’s Graphic Hardcover Bestseller List last month. However, for all the publicity Neufeld engendered through such critical acclaim and a modest book tour, the book’s tenure on the list ended after two weeks; apparently people are more interested in studying The Joker’s origin than in reliving Hurricane Katrina.
Neufeld, who built comic-geek street cred illustrating “American Splendor” for Harvey Pekar, truly began working on “A.D.” during the three weeks he spent working with the Red Cross in Katrina-ravaged Biloxi, Miss. after the 2005 storm: His blog on the experience spawned a self-published collection of choice works, which in turn drew the attention of SMITH Magazine. With the online mag as a platform, Neufeld expanded both his narrative breadth and the scope of his geographical focus (he migrated to a New Orleans angle after discarding, for logistical reasons, a considered examination of the larger Gulf Coast). Earlier this year, Smith — with Pantheon on board to bankroll — published “A.D.” in hardcover.
Neufeld’s work straddles a line between fact and fiction in a manner that might make traditional journalistic purists uneasy: “A.D.” is a novel, albeit one rooted in historically-accurate details, and Neufeld makes no claims to the contrary. Some of the book’s seven central characters, whose divergent narratives reflect the vastly different backgrounds of their subjects, are real people, while others are hybridized creations based on multiple real New Orleanians. Accordingly, Neufeld warns in the book’s first pages that “…some names and details have been changed for dramatic purposes….” As Neufeld told the Times in its “A.D.” review in August, “I did whatever worked to make the emotional truth of the stories much clearer. It’s what makes a certain scene emotionally satisfying in a way that makes the whole book add up to a novel.” But Neufeld’s intricate attention to detail (in addition to the obvious phone and in-person interviews he conducted, Neufeld “took tons of photos” in order to replicate precisely such minutiae as the contents of of one featured couple’s DVD collection) lends credence to Dave Eggers’ characterization of “A.D.” as “one of the best-ever examples of comics reportage.”
The human perspectives Neufeld provides certainly reflect a level of journalistic integrity rivaling or exceeding that exhibited by much of the mainstream media during and after Katrina. He wisely resisted the urge to overtly damn the federal agencies’ abominable reaction to the crisis (FEMA isn’t even a blip on the book’s radar), instead forcing readers to draw their own conclusions based on his characters’ hyper-localized trials. In doing so, we see thugs — left, along with everyone else, to their own devices by unresponsive authorities — maintaining peace at the city’s convention center, rather than raping and pillaging as had been reported at the time. (This isn’t to say that none of the atrocious rumors relayed ad nauseum by CNN and its ilk during the catastrophe played out as fact. But the erosion of these sensationalist outlets’ fact-checking standards during the meltdown was palpable, and their follow-up on such rumors during the recovery period was markedly insufficient.)
Neufeld, however, does mimic Anderson Cooper — as much a Gonzo student as a straight-edged, impeccably-coiffed WASP can be — by inserting himself into the story at book’s end. Neufeld introduces this narrative transition to bring closure to each character’s tale, portraying himself following up with the seven by phone from his Brooklyn apartment. Some of the characters initially moved away from New Orleans after the hurricane, while others stayed in the area; all have since returned to New Orleans or have plans to do so. By describing each of these stories in polychromatic form and without regard to the “official” assessment of conditions in the city during and after Katrina, Neufeld provides a raw, revelatory and intensely personal perspective on the largest domestic humanitarian failure of the 21st century.
Perhaps of equal importance in these sad, helpless days of print media consolidation and syndication, though, “A.D.” confers a considerable measure of legitimacy on a form of quasi-journalism Neufeld by no means invented (see: “Maus”): Comics and graphic novels as social conscience.
Say what you will about his politics or his dubious interpretation of ‘objectivity’ — Rupert Murdoch got it right this time around. Back in the spring, when a very few brave souls produced a muffled murmur that resembled “Newspaper Bailout,” pundits praised Ol’ Rupe for charging readers to browse his Wall Street Journal online — a tactic eschewed by nearly every other daily in the nation.
Among the papers fearful of instigating a reader revolt, of course, was New York’s Paper of Record. The other day, we came upon this sordid scene at a craft fair in McCarren Park:
Our photo work could stand to improve — standing there, shooting away, we felt like the proverbial foot thwacking the proverbial dead horse — but the sign reads “50% Off!” The Times didn’t even bother to send out a proper sales rep — the poor sap here appears to be the laid-off mother of one of their delivery boys (they can still afford those, right?). Sad, sad days for the dead tree industry…
A few months ago, somewhere along the daily descent from online work research to tangentially work-related online reading to Youtube animal porn, Emily Gould became a known name to us me (disclaimer: much of DCQ experienced a near-total internet blackout from 2002-2005, which partially overlaps with the time period in which subject Gould rose to infamy). She’s a competent and compelling enough writer, but Jimmy Kimmel got drunk and punched his grandma and then disappeared Larry King before verbally eviscerating Gould on national TV over the dire threat her employer’s Gawker Stalker app poses to celebrities like him free societies everywhere. Other bloggers ragged on Gould’s performance, she meekly defended herself, others came to her aid, still others doubled up on the attack, and the celebrities themselves were able to leave their Cloaks of Invisibility at home that week when they picked up their frappuccinos.
Then, in February, a Cleveland startup that tracks high-end real estate deals and IDs the players involved found itself the target of some strikingly Kimmelesque criticism: Farcically malevolent legal giant Jones Day sued Blockshopper for daring to evoke the firm’s name and link to its website in articles describing condo purchases by two Jones Day attorneys. The site’s founders chose to settle with Jones Day rather than blow their wad on legal fees fighting an army of 2,000-plus smarmy Ivy League grads.
For the curious, the firm claimed the site’s usage of links constituted copyright violation. If that’s the case, Jones Day, you’ve got your work cut out for you. The real motivation for the suit was most assuredly the fact that Chesters One and Two didn’t appreciate their addresses being sprayed all over the virtual world of realty. (If you’re still struggling with good guy/bad guy, let this guide you: Jones Day is the firm that helped Chevron first defeat a lawsuit by relatives of dirt-poor Nigerians killed while protesting the company’s environmental and human rights violations, then turn around and countersue the villagers for $500K in an attempt to discourage other third-world exploitees who might sue in the future—just as the Blockshopper suit was used as a suppression tactic aimed at other would-be freeloading hippieschannelers of free traffic to the firm’s site.
From time to time, among the peyote-driven snake-femme battles and botched Rolling Stone assignments, Hunter Thompson managed to Take Care of Bidniss when he decided his associates’ missteps had reached catastrophic levels. A source sends us proof positive of one such episode, in which Thompson takes the meat grinder to attorney George Tobia for apparently bungling negotiations with New York publishing house Simon & Schuster over the 1998 publication of “The Rum Diary”:
In another declassified communique written two days earlier, the Master of the Cannonball Sendoff informed Tobia of his fate while simultaneously filling him in on leisure plans for the day and demanding an estimate of his “exact profit expectations” from the soon-to-be-released “Fear and Loathing” film adaptation. The last graph alone speaks volumes about a man who knew he had the juice to disregard formality and spent the bulk of his career doing just that:
For his part, Tobia seemingly made good with Thompson after the dustup: At present, the Boston lawyer continues to represent HST’s estate — 19 years after the two met while Tobia was handling the estate of another writer who rejected conformity in savage fashion: Jack Kerouac.
