FoodMusicJustice.com

Left to right: Bo Dollis, Big Chief of the Wild Magnolias (lead singer of what may be the funkiest funk band of all time); rhythm and blues artist Al “Carnival Time” Johnson; singer Michelle Davis; poet Chuck Perkins; composer and arranger Wardell Quezergue (seated); Ken McCarthy

Last month, I was at the 80th birthday party for Wardell Quezergue “the Creole Beethoven,” a musical genius who applied his gifts behind-the-scenes to countless hits over the last fifty plus years.

Some of Quezergue’s music with cuts from the Wild Magnolias and Al “Carnival Time” Johnson.

Yes, I know. It’s sacrilege.

But the Question of the Age - for New Orleans at least - is this:

Is the perpetuation of the inept and corrupt criminal enterprise known as the US Army Corps of Engineers more important than the physical survival of New Orleans?

The issue really is that stark.

I’ve never been prouder to stand by someone: Dr. Ivor Van Heerden.

Van Heerden continues, at great personal expense, to insist that the Corps (and their enablers at LSU) tell the truth about why New Orleans flooded in 2005.

For the full story: Ivor Van Heerden, the Corps, and LSU

Note: If you question my categorization of the Corps as a criminal enterprise, they crossed that line when they applied pressure on LSU to censor and ultimately fire Professor Van Heerden for telling the scientific and engineering truth about the New Orleans levee failures.

From the book “24 Hour Party People” pgs 205-206 by Tony Wilson

A half-hour profile - sorry - small, cheap documentary, of the textile billionaire David Alliance, big boss of Coates Viyella, answered the question, ‘why Manchester?’ once and for all. Alliance was answering the question from Wilson the interviewer: ‘Why do you, one of Britain’s richest industrialists, keep your head office in Manchester and continue to live in Manchester?

‘I’ll tell you why.’

Forty years in England had only mellowed the delightful Middle-Eastern lilt of his speech. Alliance was a handsome, charismatic man in his mid-fifties who once tried to warn his friend the Shah of Iran, ‘You’re feeding their bellies, you’ve got to start feeding their minds.’

‘I’ll tell you why. When I had been in this country from my home in Persia no more than ten days, I was looking for my uncle’s house in Clyde Road in West Didsbury. I was sheltering from the rain under the awnings of the old Rediffusion cinema in East Didsbury. I spoke maybe ten words of English. I had the address on a piece of paper. I saw a woman pushing a pram, I showed her the address and she indicated I should follow her. We walked, perhaps a mile and a half, through the rain, and finally got to Clyde Road and got to my uncle’s house. I knocked. He opened the door and flung his arms round me, shouting, “Davoud, Davoud.” And I looked back and the woman waved and walked back the way we had come, pushing the pram.

‘I turned to my uncle and said, “She wasn’t coming this way, why did she come all this way if she wasn’t coming this way?”

“Davoud, because this is Manchester.”‘

It is this city’s hospitality to the outside that gives rise to the great truism of Manchester music: Manchester kids have the best record collections. That’s not a Wilson line, though he wishes it was. He’d been given this gem by A&R hero Dave Ambrose. Right on, Dave. They do. They have the best record collections. Open to outside influences.

Why do you think Jon Dasilve, Graeme Park and the Pick were playing house music on a Friday night? Why were the Mondays listening to it every fucking night? It was bloody foreign, wasn’t it? It was and this is the city of the foreigner, with its open arms. And hands held out, palm up.

And maybe that’s why so many of the people in this book are mysteriously devoted to the town. Its open arms inspired a return. Even down to putting everything you’ve earned and everything you’re going to earn into a designer dance hall that was now slowly approaching break-even thanks to student (urgh) night and Stella a quid a pint.

And you never give up. That was the lesson of Wilson’s next small, cheap documentary. The story of the Manchester Ship Canal.

King Cotton made us first city of the empire. Foundation stone of the Industrial Revolution. Bit like Peter Saville being responsible for Designer Britain. Good thing or bad? Maybe like Chou En-Lai said when asked the same question about the French Revolution: it’s too soon to tell.

Anyway, come the American Civil War and all this cotton stuff comes to a halt. Famously, the textile workers of England’s North-West sided with the black (Liverpool-imported, if you don’t mind) slaves and Lincoln’s Republican army, although this was precisely against their own interests, holding down jobs that relied on the plantation owners of the South. They rightly identified the African slave labour as remarkably similar to their own alienated labour.

A little bit Bradley Hardacre and a little bit Andy Warhol.

New Orleans and Manchester have a history together that goes way back - but everyone forgets because no one on the US side of the ocean asks the question:

“Where did the cotton from New Orleans go?”

To Manchester, where textile mill workers - including children as young as five - faced conditions every bit as brutal as Delta slavery.

In spite of their own situation, Manchester workers stood in solidarity with enslaved Africans in America and called for Abolition.

Today, victimized by government corruption, incompetence and neglect on an epic scale, the people of New Orleans have been beaten, but are not bowed.

If ever there were a time for Mancunians who love the beat to turn their eyes back to New Orleans, now’s the time.

Every beat in popular music - jazz, R & B, rock and roll, funk - originated on a drum kit in New Orleans.

Chicago and Detroit? Musical nephews of the Big Uncle Big Easy. Look it up…and share the video.

Manchester loves New Orleans

Thanks to videographers Hubie Vigreaux, Ken McCarthy, and YouTubers. Edit by Matthew Lipscomb and Ken McCarthy.

Special thanks to A Guy Called Gerald.

Info about the upcoming Food Music Justice program in Manchester, UK is here:

http://www.ChuckPerkinsVoices.com

Thanks for all the support our video “The Katrina Myth.”

At the moment, we’re a hair away from having had over 60,000 viewers in just 10 days.

I hope you’ll continue to spread the word about this video. It’s the only “quick read,” comprehensive source of info on levees, levee failures, and the reality of New Orleans geography.

A lot of long time residents wrote us saying they were grateful for the video because even they’d been bamboozled by the propaganda about New Orleans “doomed geography.”

New Orleans is doomed ONLY if the Army Corps of Engineers is not brought to task, reformed, and put on the job of designing and building a levee system that works.

Speaking of the Corps, finally after how many years, informed commentary about the Corps investigation of itself (sic) is appearing. Much of it confirms what levees.org has been saying since the beginning…and more critiques from more sources are in the pipeline.

It would have been great if the Corps management had copped to their errors three years ago and focused on correcting them instead of running an expensive, full-court publicity blitz obscuring the facts in an attempt to “defend” themselves.

Watch for things to heat up on this issue in the weeks and months to come. It’s not over yet.

Click here for “Corps Self-Critique Criticized”

The “Katrina Myth” has been the #4 top rated video in the “News and Politics” category on YouTube for the last 12 hours.

That means the levee issue is right up there on the top line with stories about the Democratic convention and McCain’s choice of Governor Palin as his running mate.

It’s also the #10 top favorite video, and the #14 top rated video in ALL categories.

YouTube’s counter, which is notoriously slow, shows 23,146 views in the last 24 hours.

Thanks to everyone who helped in this effort.

If you haven’t had a chance to support the video yet, there is still time.

The goal here is to keep the levee issue on the top of YouTube’s consciousness at least so that it might be picked up by a major news service.

That way instead of hearing how corrupt New Orleans people are, or how doomed the city is, people might learn that if the FEDERAL levees were simply built the way we all already PAID with our tax dollars for them to be built, New Orleans would be facing a hard time, but
not a second inundation by flood waters.

We’re getting a lot of international interest in the video and the comments from international viewers are all the same:

“How is it possible that the US treats its citizens this way?” They are genuinely baffled.

Anyway, if you’re in a position to (i.e. not packing up your belongings and heading out of town), keep pushing it.

Bizarrely (to me at least), this video seems to be the only source of publicly available information that lays out the levee situation in a clear, concise and comprehensive manner.

Here it is. Please let people know about it…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wln_iq5bc8k

We’re already getting a some major press for “The Katrina Myth.”

This came as the result of the sneak preview at the Rising Tide blogging conference last weekend.

Click here for the review from the Guardian (UK):

The Guardian reviews “The Katrina Myth”

In the meantime, my heart goes out to all New Orleanians who are currently being terrorized by the weather news and the realization that the levee problems have nowhere near been corrected.

If you can make it to the premiere tonight, great. If not, I certainly understand.

Three cheers for Sandy Rosenthal of levees.org for keeping up the fight.

We didn’t have the runtime in the video to make a dedication, but if we had, we would have dedicated “The Katrina Myth” to her. No one has done more to fight against the Katrina myth and for the future of New Orleans than her.

Info on the premiere of “The Katrina Myth”

Hi y’all,

I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been busy.

One of the things I was up to was putting the finishing touches on the production and promotion of a film I wrote and produced called “The Katrina Myth: The Truth about a Thoroughly Unnatural Disaster.”

In an ideal world, this film would have been out sometime in early September - of 2005 - but as Mark Twain said: “A lie can get half way around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”

I’m pretty sure that even before the levees came crashing down, Karl Rove was filling up his friends at Fox News with bullshit in order to cover up the fundamental inconvenient truth about “Katrina”:

‘Tweren’t no natural disaster. It was an engineering one. And the engineers responsible were the US Army Corps of Engineers. A FEDERAL failing and a federal responsibility.

As for the people “stuck” inside the city, they were held in the city at gunpoint by representatives of the Bad Old South who drew guns and fired warning shots (sometimes into the backs) of people who tried to walk out of the city to food, water, and safety.

Instead of the truth, we heard about looters, snipers, cities built below sea level and all other manner of assorted distractions, some manufactured - and nothing about the epic heroism and kindness of tens of thousands of New Orleanians in the face of inhuman pressure.

Anyway, the future of New Orleans depends on three things and they all begin with the letter “L.”

Love, luck and levees.

The love is there. No problem.

Luck? Personally I don’t like to count on luck. Waaaaaay too fickle.

So that leaves us with levees.

Good levees, New Orleans survives. Bad levees, New Orleans drowns again.

Sorry to be so ugly about it, but there it is.

As far as I’ve been able to tell, there is only one group in the known universe that is focused on the levee issue and needless to say it is not a governmental group or even a traditional NGO (the new Orwellian-speak for a non-profit.)

Right now, the only thing standing in the way between New Orleans and future disaster is a kitchen-table-based enterprise called levees.org

If you’re not a member, please correct that right away.

And make sure you tell everyone you know who cares about the city that Step One in rebuilding the city is to swell the ranks of levees.org until it reaches a size that is capable of making noise and creating an agitation that can’t be ignored.

To help this along, I made a simple 10 minute film that addresses and demolishes the five key Katrina Myths that enable the government crooks in Washington DC, Baton Rouge and indeed New Orleans itself to “make believe” that everything is OK and they don’t need to do anything about the levees.

I don’t mind telling you I busted a gut writing this thing and getting it ready to go in time for the Big Three.

(Huge thanks to Goodman Green who provided rapid-fire video magic I’d be hard pressed to find anywhere on earth, New Orleans or elsewhere.)

There will be a sneak preview tomorrow at the annual Rising Tide conference for New Orleans bloggers.

Then on Thursday, August 28th, there will be a public premiere.

Be there. Bring friends. Tell friends in New Orleans and elsewhere.

In a week, we’ll be launching a YouTube campaign and we’re shooting for 100,000 views in seven days or less. Watch for the announcement.

Real levee repair and building cannot go forward until the bullshit about New Orleans laid down by Karl Rove, Fox News and the rest of the media ratpack back in ‘05 is thoroughly cleaned out of people’s heads and replaced with the TRUTH.

I’ve done all I can do. Now it’s up to you.

Please make sure that everyone you know, inside New Orleans and out, sees this film and are enrolled to make sure their friends and colleagues see it too - and join levees.org.

It’s three years out. It’s do or die time. Fresh momentum or the mortuary.

I think New Orleans is worth saving.

How about you?

Click here for info about the August 28th premiere:

http://www.levees.org/blog/sandy

Ken McCarthy
FoodMusicJustice.com

I admit it.

I’m hiding out in the cool weather of the Catskills.

But if I were in New Orleans, I’d made sure I was at this event. It looks like it will be absolutely beautiful.

Click here and be inspired: http://www.weshallnotbemoved.org/

“We have built a series of structures and walked away from them historically,” said Leonard Shabman, a water resources expert with the think tank Resources for the Future. “If you’ve got potholes in the road, people go out and fix them; that’s not the case with levees.”

Yeah, that’s right. Slowly, but surely the rest of the country is getting a clue.

New Orleans was first and not the last. It all started 40 years ago when the country decided we could afford massive military adventures overseas.

It’s a national problem, not a New Orleans failing.

More: Gaps in Aging Levees Leave Washington DC landmarks exposed