I'd like to offer a pitch for gumbopages.com, which leads with andrei codrescu, which I happily grab here.
Looka! 09.2005 | They're trying to wash us away.: "THE ICONOGRAPHY OF HELL AND OUR GUILT
by Andrei Codrescu
Each day has its own pictures:
bumper to bumper traffic two states long
a frenzied mob in a domed prison
rising water
the hungry pushing carts out of looted stores
rooftops in a lake as vast as the eye can see
dead city silent city
the survivors the tribes stadiums filled with refugees
helicopters over a dead unlit city
a ragged parade of decadents spitting defiance
television cameras as numerous as marchers
a can of tuna and a strand of beads
take that you former shithead king
dead pets rotting away behind locked doors
the smell of putrefaction visible
muck darkness heat an eviscerated pigeon
two dogs shot by a hired executioner
a sea of horrible stories rising like swamp fever
from the foul mouths of dear ones from exile
11TH DAY OF HELL!
by Andrei Codrescu
We are all working in this pit of sorrow to unfreeze time.
I think what people in other cities find hard to understand is just how much New Orleanians love their city. I'm not saying that folks in Houston or Cleveland don't love their cities. I know it for a fact that my friend Marty loves living in Shaker Heights, which is in Cleveland. New Orleans is different, I think, if only because the locals have had a long time to elaborate a style of living and a modus vivendi that couldn't be mistaken for anything else.
Everybody in New Orleans loves the food, the music, and our sense of time (slow time) that's peculiar to us and to us only. There is a velvety sensuality here at the mouth of the Mississippi that you won.t find anywhere else. Tell me what the air feels like at 3 a.m. on a Thursday night in late August in Shaker Heights and I bet that you won.t be able to say becau"