Living Culture: A Phoenix Rising from the Ashes
Editor's Column from LCV Summer 2006

If ever a city had an identity crisis, the place is New Orleans, and the time is now. To put to rest the specious arguments of architects and planners who want to privilege artistic freedom of design over structures that meet the needs and appeal to people, compare the attraction of the French Quarter or the throngs along Magazine Street as it winds through the Garden District uptown to Audubon Park to the absence of pedestrians in the Central Business District on a blazing summer day. They are like the opposite polarities of a magnet. The only signs of life on Poydras Avenue are the cars crawling along in a haze of exhaust and heat ripples radiating off the asphalt, like some mad Texas oilman's parody of Houston. Pedestrians clearly are not a priority; small wonder few actually live in this district. One could hardly imagine the old denizens of New Orleans haunting these precincts. Would Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Lafcadio Hearn, Louis Armstrong, Sherwood Anderson or Walker Percy be drawn to such spiritually-wretched a place, let alone intone its praise? It would drive Ignatius Reilly madder than already he was.

Instead of the quiet, modest streets of 18th and 19th-century arcades and balconies and live oak and magnolia-lined squares, offering shade and refuge from the tropical rain, 20th-century architecture in New Orleans has been an unmitigated disaster of dysfunction, judging from the recent designs for new construction of condos and hotels, the 21st century buildings promise if anything to be even worse, alien in form and function to the city they threaten to dominate with their visual anonymity. If only the architects of these modern monstrosities could be chained to them like Prometheus, and the ravages of sun and rain devour their livers.

Hope Amid Despair
Gnawed on by these thoughts one morning as I was about to enter Turners' Hall, home of the Louisiana Humanities Center and one of the few remaining 19th-century structures in the CBD, I was stopped by Mike Szush, one of the carpenters working to restore the building from the ravages of Katrina's flood. He wanted to tell me how much he enjoyed working on our building, especially now that we had installed a dozen major artworks of MacArthur Genius Fellowship winner John Scott to complement our new Education Center. Mike had just read Doug McCash's Times-Picayune article about John's recovery from lung-replacement surgery and waxed enthusiastically about how the beauty of his art complemented the building itself and what a great contribution they would make to the family literacy programs he had heard we planned to hold there once the Center was completed in the fall. He went on to tell me his girlfriend, who works in Plaquemines Parish, was trying to assist getting our Prime Time program mounted in the library there.

I was buoyed by his comments, because the magnificence of this art had touched him and he understood how we were endeavoring to link art and history with our public humanities program, but at the same time I thought how I didn't hear this kind of thinking often enough, certainly not from our political leadership. I walked through Turners' Hall that morning, only seeing it through Mike's eyes, hearing his words, looking as if for the first time at the graceful curves and brilliant colors of the sculptures, the layers of meaning, symbols, and icons imbedded in the paintings and prints: the resonances of the diddly-bow series, a huge woodblock print of Young Louis Armstrong gazing down on our conference room, the spirits of young girls martyred in the Birmingham church rising in spirit amidst the flames. It works, I thought, it really works.

Encore un Fois
Imagine my surprise when just two days later I got into the elevator with Dominic Imbornone, one of our tenants who runs a courier service, and he unexpectedly launched into praise for this magazine which he likened to being a kind of National Geographic, only devoted to Louisiana. He was especially moved by the richness of the photographs and art we present herein.

Between Mike and Dominic I was encouraged that all our efforts were not in vain, as it sometimes seems on too many days when we labor without praise or recognition, when the challenges of our crippled state seem like a curse, when Louisiana seems like its own worst enemy, not valuing the richness of its own culture and putting its future at risk. I know we are hovering on the edge of an unwonted opportunity, engendered by a disaster of biblical proportions, but also an opportunity to set right what we failed to appreciate in the past. This week thousands of librarians descended on New Orleans, as the American Library Association brought the first major convention to town, among them scores of librarians from around the country who are mounting our Louisiana-born Prime Time programs from New Mexico and California to Nebraska, Kentucky, and Florida, 35 other states in all, and I took solace that we who hold culture and learning dear are making a difference, sometimes in ways and among people we do not even suspect. One can only hope our future will prove as rich as our past.

—Michael Sartisky, Ph.D., Editor-In-Chief