Audio from the 2009 Neighborhood Educator Fellows Event

Audrey Browder (far right) and Barbara Lacen Keller at the Le Phare event.

This past Wednesday, March 20th, NPN's Educator Fellows met for drinks at Le Phare to discuss their hopes and plans for the upcoming Capacity College. The attached audio excerpts demonstrate just a few of their ideas and plans.


Click here to check out the audio, including Trinity Christian Community's own Stanley Merriweather and the other NPN Educator Fellows!

David Simon, David Mills and Eric Overmyer talk TV writing in New Orleans

pictured: Wendell Pierce, Amy Ryan and Clarke Peters on The Wire. Pierce and Peters have signed on for the new show's pilot. Photo: HBO.com.

David Simon, David Mills and Eric Overmyer: The list reads like a televisual literary MVP line-up. Simon created The Wire, one of the most important and intelligent television shows of the past decade. Mills has written for The Wire and Simon's premiere show on HBO, The Corner. He also created Kingpin, NBC's crime drama counterpart to The Sopranos and Traffik.
Eric Overmyer has written and produced for The Wire, Law & Order and Homicide: Life on the Street.

If there's a better group of people to plot and execute a dramatic television series detailing New Orleans post-Katrina, I don't know who they are. On February 27th, after a few inquisitive e-mails, I was invited to the writer's room of this group's new project: Treme. There, we talked donuts, music and why people need to understand that this group is interested in doing more than just The Wire again.

Click here to check out the exclusive interview!

We'll have to wait until Summer to find out if the show has been picked up for a full season, but keep your fingers crossed.

Special thanks to the funny and funky David Mills, for making this interview possible. You can read his regular thoughts on music, race and life online here!

Something Different: NPN gets interviewed.

On January 22, 2009, Lala Rascic, a Bosnian artist based out of Zagreb and Amsterdam, came to New Orleans to research an "objective overview" on the city's recovery. She presented her findings to the Transmediale Festival for Art and Digital Culture in Berlin, Germany later that month. Here is that video, which features interviews shot near NPN's offices with The Trumpet's own Edward Hornick.





Click here to visit Lala's web page.

From the Archives: Our interview with Robert Cerasoli

From July of 2008: Hear the audio of Trumpet Editor Ted Hornick’s interview with Robert Cerasoli! Featuring content not in the original issue!

New Orleans’ first Inspector General, Robert Cerasoli, held the city at a distance. He maintained that it was necessary for his work that he live in what many, including the Times-Picayune in today’s cover story, called a “monk’s existence” with little more than his clothes and his air mattress. His career of investigating waste and corruption gave him a pragmatic view of New Orleans and its criminal history before he even came here, when he originated the job of I.G. almost a year and a half ago.

However, Cerasoli balanced his work with a hopeful attitude about New Orleans and the people here. He was careful not to let himself be seen as “the last failed messiah of New Orleans” and realistic about what he could do in his term. I often spoke of Cerasoli with friends outside of New Orleans as an important measure of progress here, pointing to him as a sign of post-storm recovery correcting pre-storm problems. The news of his resignation, announced just this morning, is certainly depressing, but the fact that the Louisiana Ethics Board has already found an interim successor for the man (Leonard Odom, former Assistant Inspector General for Investigations in Washington, D.C.) proves that, despite delays and a lack of response from City Hall, Inspector Cerasoli has proven the need for an independent evaluator of what does and does not work in the city.

Cerasoli often spoke of his goal of identifying the entire “entity” of the city of New Orleans. This of course overlaps with NPN’s goal of connecting the separate neighborhood groups that define that entity, but it must also remind all of us of the value for vigilance to the city’s needs. Just as Cerasoli was sure not to mythologize New Orleans when working to address its issues, we must use our actions to ensure his legacy.

-Ted Hornick, Originally posted to npnnola.com on January 30, 2009.