An American Tragedy, Live & All Too Local

Nick Spitzer’s popular public radio program, American Routes, has always been heavily flavored by New Orleans, the city from whence it originates. Now the program, like everyone else in the Big Easy, is in exile, and Spitzer is using the program as an unofficial catalog of the cultural loss of one of America’s great musical centers. According to Spitzer, Katrina “[may be] America’s biggest cultural disaster – in the sense of the loss of New Orleans’s cultural stuff, the loss of the communities there that interact and the lack of will to move as quickly as if these houses being flooded were on the coast of Kennebunkport. And even for those of us who got out, there’s this grinding uncertainty of whether we’ll ever get back and ever live the same again.”