July_Aug_2015_FINAL_62215_bleedless REV

the Anniversary issue

I guess that’s how it goes when you have a near-death experience, when you close your eyes and stop breathing, when you see that bright light at the end of a long dark corridor, when you are overcome by a sense of calm, of letting go, of … And then your eyes open. And that’s when you have your choice: Get busy living or get busy dying. Back in the summer of 2005, headlines across the nation pronounced unequivocally the death of an American City. But reports of our demise were premature speculation. Or worse — misplaced wishful thinking — in some quarters. There was no death of an American City; it was the drowning of an American Dream. The loss of American Innocence. Everything changed in that moment for everyone. But letting it all go, giving up – as so many from the media and Congress suggested? That was not on the table for negotiation. You can’t beat down a people who parade in tragedy, dance at funerals and love among the ruins. Like the Mardi Gras Indian chant goes: Won’t bow down/Don’t know how. New Orleans may be the most death- obsessed city in the world, but we weren’t quite ready for our own second-line just yet. Consider the view of first-time visitors coming into town from the airport. To enter New Orleans, they must pass between

Before After 05 15

I t’s hard to imagine it’s been 10 years. Sometimes it seems like yesterday. Then again, sometimes it seems like a hundred years ago. But it never seems like it didn’t happen, right? It’s always there, somewhere. Maybe in the background, in the deep recesses of the mind. Or maybe it’s front and center on some days, still right in your face. But it’s never not there. Hurricane Katrina and the Federal Flood were events of such breadth and magnitude that they serve as the seminal, epochal date on our collective calendar. In the historical timeline of south Louisiana andMississippi, there is Before Katrina, and there is After Katrina, and no other date bears any close significance. Before and after. Those two words color everything. They put whatever is being said by Chris Rose + photos by Frank Aymami

into clear and stark perspective, lend layers of context, subtext and implication They speak to different eras, different times, different mindsets. Completely different lives. Consider this: What are you doing now? With your job, your money, your family, your leisure time, your priorities, your goals and your religion? How different would it all be if it had never happened? It’s almost laughable, isn’t it? How it changed everything? How the way we live now bears so little resemblance to the way we were, and how the two lives seem so at odds with each other on the space/time continuum? It was a shift in the cosmos. An existential pause, reset, rewind and — then hit play and see what happens.

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MY ROUSES EVERYDAY JULY | AUGUST 2015