Looking Back On Katrina 20 Years Later
Plus, a love letter to New Orleans, the importance of inspirations and agitations, and how to get your readers sticky
The other day, I received an email from Drew Taylor, a fine journalist who had struck up a correspondence with me during my magazine years. When Drew first contacted me nearly a decade ago, he was a print jockey at the Tuscaloosa News in Alabama. But like most print jockeys these days, he did the smart thing, and got out. He’s now the digital managing editor at the CBS affiliate in Birmingham. Though he assures me they don’t put him on television. “If you see me on TV, it means something’s gone really wrong,” he says.
Drew reached out to see if I’d look back on Hurricane Katrina hitting New Orleans on the 20th anniversary (which occurred this week), since I did a lengthy New Orleans trilogy over a two-year period about the storm and its aftermath. The primary story under discussion here was my first, “Notes From Under Water,” a hairy account of what life was like on the ground in New Orleans in the days after it was nearly drowned. Which I reprinted in these pages after Hurricane Ian tore through Florida in 2022. (Skip the first 500 words or so of Florida throat-clearing, and you can get to that first New Orleans story here.) The second piece Drew will refer to below was my profile of New Orleans through the eyes of the Rebirth Brass Band, which I’ll link to downstairs when it comes up.
Drew prompted me with such good questions, and got me expanding not just on New Orleans and its music and people, but on other matters — from how to stick to your readers, to the state of the journalism industry, to whether we’ve learned anything from horror-shows like Katrina (hint: we haven’t) — that I asked him if I could simulcast it here. He was kind enough to say yes. So hide your children, pour yourself a drink (even if it’s Sunday morning, the Lord will forgive you since we’re talking about New Orleans), and sink into the dialogue. I put our names on it to get you started, but then, all the bold print is Drew, all the rest, me:
Drew Taylor: Thanks for taking a little time out of your schedule to talk with me, Matt. To start things off, how’s life after traditional media? I think a lot of people were interested to see where you’d land after The Weekly Standard folded a few years ago, but I don’t think anyone expected what became Slack Tide, your Substack on all your different thoughts, everything from a meditation on the value of Thomas Merton to a remembrance of P.J. O’Rourke. How’s this particular creative outlet been for you?
Matt Labash: Well, every day is the Fourth of July, every night, New Year’s Eve. It generally goes like this: many hours of what-the-hell-do-I-write angst, punctuated by brief moments of satisfaction/production. I came into this enterprise deeply skeptical about it actually working, as a guy who was used to hiding out on a masthead, letting others carry the load while I took my good, sweet time looking for the stories that I wanted to tell in 8,000-word shots. The name of the magazine was The Weekly Standard, but colleagues used to suggest I worked for The Quarterly Standard, because I was a little on the fussy side when looking to launch into a piece, since pieces took a lot out of me. Then you finished one, and they just expected you to write more. Almost like it was a job, or something.
So knowing I’d be pulling the trigger about ten times more often — you have to if you’re going to hang out your shingle as a solo practitioner — spooked me. In fact, one of Substack’s head honchos, the great Kiwi heartthrob, Hamish McKenzie, tried to talk me into taking the plunge in early 2019, shortly after our mag was croaked by its owner. But I didn’t come around on the idea until 2021, after I started seeing others make it work. I was kind of like the Israelites on the lip of the Red Sea, while getting chased down by Egyptian pursuers. It’s not that I thought walls of water would come crashing down on me as I crossed through on dry ground. But you know, you go on ahead and guinea-pig it first, Moses, just in case.
But watching the journalism industry collapse all around me was kind of a smelling-salts moment. At a certain point, it dawned on me: If I’m going to work for a mercurial, capricious jackass, it might as well be for myself, instead of for some billionaire nutcake owner who changes his mind as often as he does his underwear. And the risk brought some nice rewards. I love the freedom, I love the readers (or at least like them a lot, but like can grow into love), and I’ve acquired a taste for the purity of it. You eat what you kill, and it’s just you and the people who sign up to read you. No middle men mucking things up. It’s kind of liberating when you have nowhere to hide.
I’m interested in getting your perspective on Hurricane Katrina, 20 years later. Walk me through where you were when Katrina happened?
Well, when the levees broke and the floodwaters rolled in, I was in my living room in Maryland, watching New Orleans up to its gills on television. And I was completely dumbstruck and heartbroken. I couldn’t look away. I, like anyone who loves a certain kind of food and music, loved New Orleans. And as a reporter, it was always Candyland to me. Everything there, at least in my experience, is magical and mystical and weird, just as I prefer it. Everyone’s a good talker. Everyone’s a pocket historian who knows a lot about the place they inhabit. I never passed up a chance to do a story there, because something interesting always happened. You’d leave your hotel room, and your material sack would get filled in hours, if not minutes. The first New Orleans hotel room I ever stayed in as a cub reporter was a shabby hovel at the storied Monteleone on Royal Street. And I thought I’d died and gone to Heaven, walking the same halls and drinking at the Carousel bar cast into legend by everyone from Faulkner to Tennessee Williams to Truman Capote, who liked to lie and say he was born there. (His mother did live there during her pregnancy, which might explain a bit about how he turned out.)
In the piece, you talked about how Tucker Carlson, whom you had worked with at the Standard, had called you up and asked if you wanted to go with him and his MSNBC team to go down to Louisiana. Did you give any kind of thought into what you felt like you could bring to the ongoing coverage, or was it just a story too good to pass up?
Well Tucker, who was always a hard charger, suckered me into thinking his crack production team had the logistics licked. Which they didn’t. He was bluffing. But the one thing I hate thinking about is logistics, and that’s what TV people do best. So I happily joined their circus. It was kind of hard to get in and out of the city. We found ourselves driving the wrong way down a lot of one-way highways, that sort of thing. We brought self-defense hammers with us that we picked up in a Walmart outside Baton Rouge, because of all the stories of murder and mayhem on the streets. (Some of them true, many of them false.) We couldn’t get a hotel room in New Orleans, so we ended up staying at a friend of a friend’s house in Uptown, bathing in his pool, since electricity was a thing of the past. But of course, I felt like I had to go. This wonderful, old city looked like it had died right before our eyes. And it’d be a sin not to go to your grandfather’s wake. Of course, New Orleans survived. Even if Tucker and I don’t seem to have, sadly. We took different paths, as they say. A long story I don’t wish to tell. But our times in the jaws of Katrina are still some very fond memories, even if we were surrounded by horrors.
As a magazine writer, you’ve been all over the world for stories. You even went to Iraq at the height of the war, where you, Christopher Hitchens and O’Rourke toured around different places in the region. Does anything truly prepare you to cover something like Katrina?
I think all journalists are misery-barnacles, to a degree. So there was nothing particularly unique in that department. But the one thing sung home to me by Katrina was how fast civilization can fray. How a lack of resources and real help can just turn us into something else, fast, when all the conveniences and necessities disappear. I’ve been to other post-apocalyptic scenes, like Haiti after the 2010 quake, which killed a quarter-of-a-million people. And which was worse — much worse. But there’s something about seeing it here, on our soil, that was a real eye-opener for me. A reminder that oh yeah, we’re not special, even if we think we are. We’re not as buffered as we’d like to believe. Take away a person’s shelter and food and electricity. Drown his city. Erase his history. And then see what happens. I checked out a dead guy’s bullet wound under his bloody shirt. He was sprawled right out in the street in front of the convention center. Where a day or two before, I’d witnessed an abandoned police car with its sirens whirring, and three flat tires. He’d been there for a good while. And some people were walking past him as blithely as if they were walking past a pigeon in the park. While others were completely traumatized. And there were no authorities. And it felt like nobody was coming to rescue anyone. It was basically a physical manifestation of a sensation I get all the time now while witnessing our politics, almost a foreshadowing, which is: We’ve become savages. What’s wrong, here? This is AMERICA, right? Aren’t we better than this? Please God, help us be better than this.
I still remember one particular line from “Notes from Under Water” that I think truly captured a distinct scene: “Many have said there are no words to describe the smell, but I’ll give it a shot since it’s my job. If you packed a trashbag with used diapers, rotten produce, and curdled milk, stuck it in your garage in the heat of August, and waited for a thick porridge to collect at the bottom of the bag, then poured that liquid all over the floor, you’d be about halfway there.” Can you still remember that smell?
That was the smell of the convention center I just mentioned. And I remember it well. Because I was literally describing the smell of my garbage before I dispose of it, when maggot-ridden trashbags have sat too long in my garage in high-nineties-degree weather in the summer. Except I don’t live in that garbage. People in New Orleans were living in that garbage. And nobody seemed to give a toss. Or at least were in no hurry to rectify it. Which smelled much worse to me than the garbage did. The lack of care. The ho-humness of it all. Hey man, a few turns of the screw, and that could be you! Don’t ever forget it, and don’t get too comfortable, congratulating yourself that you’re above it. Because exactly nobody is.
One thing that was really compelling about “Notes from Under Water” was how you let different people you met kind of be part of the story, serving as stand-ins for what probably a lot of people were going through. “Kingfish” immediately comes to mind as such a compelling figure, someone who was trying to reclaim his life amid the wreckage, but also so angry about everything that happened. What was particularly compelling about “Kingfish” to you?
Well, Kingfish, who I’m still friends with, was a complicated fellow, as most human beings are. He initially disliked the nickname I bestowed upon him. Since unlike most political reporters who loved Huey Long for the entertainment value (Huey being the original Kingfish), Kingfish Jr. hated him, thinking him a corrupt caricature of everything that’s wrong with his state’s politics. He was a white New Orleanian from the old, privileged gentry – his was the pool we were bathing in — trying to hold off looters and rescue elderly neighbors, as all his family and most of his friends had bailed for safer climes in Florida. He was a guy trying to hold his life together, while everything around him was coming apart. And even though he loathed all the dysfunction of his city — the poverty and the filth and the crime — he was defending it like you’d defend your idiot brother, who can’t defend himself. And even as he was doing so, unsure if his business was screwed forever (it wasn’t, but he had no way of knowing it at the time), he was making us Old Fashioneds in his living room, jawboning about how The Meters played his sister’s debutante party. In other words, being a gracious host. He didn’t even know us. But that’s what he did during the most trying days of his life. Because in a way, that graciousness was part of the ethos he was fighting so hard to defend. Which is why so many outsiders like me love the place he calls home.
I can’t imagine how difficult it was to try to take in the scene while not being totally affected by the devastation. For you, what did you do to keep yourself grounded, but also present enough to capture everything as truthfully as you saw it?
Oh, I didn’t have to try to stay grounded. It wasn’t even a challenge. Or rather, I don’t want to stay too grounded. When I witness dramatic things, I want them to sweep me away. It’s not about you. But it is very much also about you. Because you’re the only instrument you have to play the music that you’re hearing. You’re the conduit to make everybody else witness what you’re seeing. And if it’s upsetting you, and you trust your own judgement, then by God, maybe it’s your duty to upset your readers, too. Name their pain. Or make them feel things they might not feel otherwise. As a music-writer buddy of mine, Eddie Dean, likes to say — music being a higher form of language, without the straitjacket of nouns and verbs — “Empathy is everything.”
As opposed to newspapers or TV, magazines give you a little more leeway to take your time, choose your words and really think about setting the scene. How long did it take you to put the piece together?
Not that long. It was a pretty quick turnaround. After I got back, probably about a week or less, start-to-finish. Much of which would’ve consisted of transcribing interview tape. There was no AI help in 2005. Which was always the most time-consuming and miserable part of my feature-writing gig. But also, a necessary, exceedingly helpful step. As you relived your fieldwork minute-by-minute, it gave you a map of your story. Sometimes, you didn’t realize what you had until you heard the instant replay, because it happens too fast while you’re living it.
Sitting down to write, what did you feel like was the most compelling way to dive into this story?
The main pull to New Orleans, for me, was always the music. That is the city’s gift to the world. It always has been, and always will be. And New Orleans has long been over-represented in my CD collection, from Professor Longhair to James Booker to the Rebirth Brass Band (who I profiled in 2007). At least when I still bought CDs. And it’s still reflected in my internet grab-bags now. So the first thing I did when I got back was put on the box set, Doctors, Professors, Kings & Queens: The Big Ol’ Box of New Orleans. And when I sat down to knock the thing out, I just put that stuff on a loop, and didn’t let it stop until I was done. I often don’t write to music, because I like it too much, and it can take over, and make you think your words sound better than they do. Writing is sound, or should be. It’s very much dependent on rhythm, if you’re doing it correctly. But sometimes I do listen to music while writing, and when I do, I drive my family crazy. Because I will play the same song 100 times in a row until a piece is finished. Groove music, I call it. So any story that gives me an excuse to play Kermit Ruffins and Sidney Bechet & His New Orleans Feet Warmers and Dr. Michael White and The Wild Magnolias and Beau Jocque & The Zydeco Hi-Rollers and Tuba Fats’ Chosen Few Brass Band…..well those guys are not just your friends, but your accomplices, helping you get over. They don’t know who I am, but from my perspective, we’re all in it together, playing for real stakes.
Similar to a lot of your writing, you tried to set the scene using different things, covering everything from The Meters to Walker Percy. For you, what’s the process of trying to find different influences as a kind of color palette for your storytelling?
Because I have to write so often now, in order to keep my site solvent, the one thing that particular discipline has taught me is to notice the bigness of small things. Stay alive to all your surroundings, and your surroundings will speak to you. And if they speak to you, they’re probably going to speak to somebody else. Specificity matters. Especially as an essayist — which is generally what I am now — I try to keep inspirations and agitations running through my filter all the time. Because you never know what is going to stick to you. And if it sticks to you, it’s easier to make it sticky for other people. Which they generally appreciate. People like getting stuck.
A few years later, you made your way back down to New Orleans for your piece “And the Band Plays On.” For you, what was important about trying to get back to the city as life was slowly trying to get back to normal?
I wanted to check up on New Orleans, a year-and-a-half after Katrina. But I’d be lying if I pretended that I didn’t mainly just want to hang out with the Rebirth Brass Band, who I loved. I wanted to tell the story of their wrecked city through their eyes. All of them are black, and many of those dudes were from the Ninth Ward, which got hit hardest. Some of them were wiped out. One of their trumpet players had to swim to safety with his horn on his back. They didn’t disappoint, even if it was genuinely hard work wrestling them to the ground. Some of them were very reluctant to talk, but when they finally talked, they spoke musically. In sentences and paragraphs I couldn’t dream up on my best day. Here’s a snippet from their leader, Tuba Phil, explaining why he keeps doing what he does, in his city that was broken:
Other shit goes on. But when you come to our show, man, you forget about your problems, the mortgage, the insurance, the housing. You come, you release. The 4R’s: Rebirth, Relax, Relate, Release. Forget about all this other stuff. The music takes you to another level. You might go home to half a house, but you sleep better that night. That’s what I hope our music does to people. That’s our obligation. The bad and the good stand side by side. I have tragedy. But I’m a stronger person. I can take it. Keep on goin’. Try to make it better. When I play in New Orleans, I play like this is the last time I’m ever going to play again. What if the city really is sunk? I play like the hell with it. I play like I might never come back to this again. I play like it’s my last year of livin’. That’s how I play.
Tuba Phil was no longer just a mere musician. He was a fearless soldier. Just typing his words out makes me emotional 18 years later. Because Tuba Phil’s is a model for living, as far as I’m concerned. During that reporting stint, there were a lot of very late nights and broken interview appointments – those guys were on musician time. And New Orleans time. So a double setback. But man, it was worth the trouble. Plus, I got to see a lot of great shows. Including the last stand I caught, at their regular home gig at The Maple Leaf. Which I turned into the culminating setpiece, when they finally played the song I’d been requesting all week, “Blackbird Special.” (Tuba Phil couldn’t play it until that moment. He calls all their songs on the spot, and explained to me, when initially and repeatedly rejecting my request, “I don’t know what I’m gonna call. I gotta feel it in here,” pounding his chest.) So when he finally called my tune, it was a personal victory. It’s a song I used to play my oldest son when he was just a toddler. He’d roll in front of the speakers with that sousaphone bassline. A thing of beauty.
“And the Band Plays On” seemed more like an opportunity for you to really stretch about all the things you love about the city, from the music to the food and people. It’s even in your collection “Fly Fishing with Darth Vader.” For you, what felt different about visiting NOLA the second time around that it felt like a different experience?
Aside from all my other reporting stints in New Orleans on other stories, “And the Band Plays On” was actually my third time around on the Katrina-specific circuit. But the thing that held the most interest to me, after the fact, is that when people live through a big catastrophe, especially one that becomes a media magnet, it’s always a bit exciting at first. Everyone cares. Everyone wants to hear what you have to say. And then, the next attention-sucker rears its greedy, heat-seeking head, and you’re instantly yesterday’s news. But what does it look like when the circus leaves town, and you have to get down to the hard business of living? Of putting your life back together. Which is usually the opposite of glamorous work. There’s often something noble and interesting about that tension. And you could feel that in the city and its people, asking themselves the collective question: Okay, now how do we go on?
For you, looking back on Katrina, in what ways did that level of devastation stay with you, both professionally and personally?
There was this moment, when we were just trying to blanket the wrecked city, that we came across a desperate mass of abandoned people under the Causeway overpass on I-10, waiting for some help – any help – to arrive. And it wasn’t coming. They’d been stranded for a long time. And I interviewed this 21-year-old dude who told me he came upon an abandoned cocker spaniel, breathing heavy, about to die. He tried to force-feed it a drink, but the water just dribbled out of its mouth. And then it threw up. And he knew it was going to die. And he didn’t want it to suffer. So he put a bag over its head, said a prayer, and smashed its head with a radio. He was utterly ashamed of doing the thing he thought he had to do. I’d just met him a few minutes ago, and he sobbed uncontrollably as he told me this. And I will never forget that moment as long as I live. This guy did not know, when he woke up that day, that he would be mercy-killing a cocker spaniel under a causeway bridge by smashing it in the head with a radio. Life takes unexpected bounces. And makes us do things we never thought we’d do.
Do you feel like the country has learned anything since then? It feels like a very different America now than in 2005.
No, I really don’t think we’ve learned a damn thing since then. In fact, I think we might be willfully dumber now than we were in 2005. We not only tolerate suffering from outside forces we have no control over, like hurricanes, but invite our own suffering, then ask for seconds and thirds. It’s hard to look at the current political climate, with all the war being waged on ourselves by ourselves, and to come to any other conclusion. The beauty of this information age is that we can know more than ever, faster. The downside is that the flood of information helps us forget faster than ever. And we don’t seem to remember any of the lessons worth remembering. We just doomscroll, moving on to the next catastrophe, so that we have something fresh to argue about.
So much of your career was about going to all these places around the country and covering interesting people and places. Does part of you miss that life?
Most definitely. There’s something wonderful about deplaning on strange terrain, and having to fully immerse yourself and make sense of it. There’s also something terrifying about it. I still have recurring low-grade nightmares where I get off a plane in a place I don’t know, and have a pressing deadline, and the story is hazy and doesn’t make sense, and I can’t make it make any sense. People speak in gibberish. No order comes into focus. And then I wake up and am relieved I don’t have to write it. That said, I do miss the swashbuckling adventure of it, the getting sources drunk on someone else’s dime to harvest the 2 am epiphany. The vagabond lifestyle.
On the other hand, I don’t think what I used to do is best suited to what’s happening now. And that’s aside from me not wishing to spend all the weeks and months and (my own) money on what that used to entail. (I do still get asked to do it by others with some frequency, on their dime, and usually turn it down in favor of servicing my own site, which requires enough attention to keep me busy.) Things happen so quickly now, that story pockets don’t stay open like they used to. The news cycle is now so fast, that these days, something that felt important on a Tuesday, seems completely obsolete by Thursday. And I used to profile lots of charming rogues. But the rogues today aren’t so charming. They’re mostly just nihilistic a-holes. And when the sideshows became the main attraction, when the inmates took over the asylum, a lot of the romance left the room. Making longform narrative treatments less interesting to me, even if it was my first love, what I was raised on, and I still consider it a high art form.
I used to spend a lot of time finding characters to either say what I wanted to say, or to push back against it. But I’m now in my fifties. And do I really need some political yutz to either exemplify my views, or to push off of in opposition? I probably don’t. If I don’t have enough knowledge or wisdom, by now, to say what I have to say directly, as well as I can, then maybe I shouldn’t be saying anything at all? But……I still feel the compulsion to say things, in (hopefully) entertaining/enlightening fashion. So the Slack Tide format is something that I’m not just settling for, but truly prefer at the moment. It allows me much-needed mobility, to cut to the quick on any given subject — sometimes, weaving several subjects together at once — and to bore deeper into them. Which used to take a lot more time and moving machinery around to do so, since I had to find a subject to fit the bill. But the older I get, the more I’m against needing to find excuses. If you have something to add, add it. If you don’t, subtract. I’m no math whiz. But arithmetic works.
Thank you for your time, sir. Anything else you’d like to add?
Besides never mix stripes with checks? Not really. I’ve admittedly already exhausted my addition capabilities (see above arithmetic answer), so will let the defense rest. Thanks for having me, Drew, and for asking thoughtful questions. Thoughtfulness, being a dying art.
Bonus Track: And here is the aforementioned song from those brass assassins on the Second Line, the Rebirth Brass Band, doing “Blackbird Special.” Which was originally a Dirty Dozen Brass Band tune. (I shot pool with the latter once before one of their shows in Virginia, not realizing it was them until they took the stage.) But my favorite version is Rebirth’s — the same version I used to play my toddler son — off their Main Event: Live at the Maple Leaf album.