Mmm, haven't followed stories of media misreporting on that. But I did have a friend down there throughout that period (and spoke to him on the phone two or three times), and he told me that there were indeed some gun-toting gangs around, looting and taking pot shots at the National Guard.
Where social order breaks down that far, I think you're always going to have a fair bit of crime of that nature - and particularly in a city that's got a lot of gun crime anyway. It might have been overplayed by the media, but I believe there was some substance to those reports.
Every bar is a memory.
And all the memories huddle together for company, so that in my mind it often seems as though every bar I've ever been in is on the same street, or at least in the same neighbourhood; every great drinking session I fondly recall happened on one night, or over the course of one weekend; and everyone I've ever drunk with fuses into a single person, the idealised Drinking Companion.
Sometimes it seems to me also that the melancholy that infuses so many of these memories had but a single cause, an idealised Lost Love.
Some of these memories I will now try to share with the enormous, faceless, blog-munching world at large.
These, then, are the mental voyages of the boozehound Froog; his many-year mission to seek out new drinks and new places to drink them in, to write The Meaning Of Life on a napkin.... andnotlose it on the way home.
Froog is an escaped lawyer - but there is no need for alarm; he is only a danger to himself, not to the general public. An eternal wanderer, he now lives in an exotic city somewhere in the 'Third World' *, where he is held prisoner by an unfinished novel (or, more precisely, an unstarted novel). He spends a lot of time running, writing, taking photographs, and falling in love with women who fail to appreciate him. He also spends a lot of time in bars.
[* OK, I'll come clean: I've been living in Beijing since summer '02.]
5 comments:
Is that a post-Katrina plea?
No idea where the photo comes from. Plausible. But it doesn't quite feel like N'Awlins to me.
Well New Orleans wasn't the only place affected. Just the only one where the media made up stories of rampaging mobs.
Mmm, haven't followed stories of media misreporting on that. But I did have a friend down there throughout that period (and spoke to him on the phone two or three times), and he told me that there were indeed some gun-toting gangs around, looting and taking pot shots at the National Guard.
Where social order breaks down that far, I think you're always going to have a fair bit of crime of that nature - and particularly in a city that's got a lot of gun crime anyway. It might have been overplayed by the media, but I believe there was some substance to those reports.
Not denying there were very bad spots. Bu tthe big stories about the Metrodome were patently untrue.
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