Oct. 27, 2006

By JOHN A. NELSON
Managing Editor
The Advocate-Messenger

Ask Nick Spitzer what New Orleans needs and he'll introduce you to a living, breathing "infrastructure."

Spitzer, folklorist and host of Public Radio International's "American Routes," says its people are what New Orleans needs as much as highways and schools and levies. "We need those things," he told the Associated Press Managing Editors conference this morning at the Astor Crowne Plaza, "but what we need more are the people back here. The people are our infrastructure."

What Spitzer calls an "intimate shared culture" is based on informal settings, he says, not something created by urban planners, "but by what people did here."

The proof is in Earl Barthé, a plasterer affectionately known as "Mr. B," and Don Vappie, a musician, who joined Spitzer on-stage at the APME opening session. Mr. B and Vappie shared their Creole stories, making Spitzer's case in word and song.

Barthé is the grandson of a Frenchman and a Haitian, a fifth generation plasterer who knows how the old buildings were built and how to fix them. He says music and plaster "go together like shoes and socks," demonstrating in pantomime and to the tune of Vappie's banjo how the music helps him work. He speaks of Carmen in the same sentence as B.B. King.

It is that mixture of opera and the blues that helps define the mixture of cultures in New Orleans, Spitzer says. "Fine art and avant garde are all of a piece here. They haven't been separated out. That mingling is the key hope of our future."

Vappie tells a story of moving from an all black school to one mostly white at a young age. Light-skinned and from a family of many shades, he says he never thought of people in that way. His life of music reflects that heritage. He started with pop, got bored with disco, and now plays jazz on the banjo, jazz with a Caribbean flavor.

It is stories like these to which Spitzer looks for an optimism that New Orleans will recover.

"Right after the catastrophe, a city that was past-focused only had the past in its memory," Spitzer said. "As New Orleans was cut off from its past it had to start thinking about its future in a way that it never had to before."

Spitzer reminds people who say the city needs infrastructure that New Orleans needed that before the hurricane. "We had terrible public schools, weak government and bad environmental policies," he said. "The things that really make the place special are the things embedded in the towns."

He points specifically to the way of the Creole. In both Spanish and Portuguese, Spitzer gives birth to the word. Its meaning? "To create and to raise up."