Underperforming Billboard Dreams in New Orleans - Paperback

by Chris Sullivan (Author)

All billboards in New Orleans in the fall of 2005 were underperforming; if not rendered absurd or irrelevant by catastrophe, erased by the hurricane to blither like old TV screens tuned to grey noise. Many would stay that way for months and years as advertisers had no interest targeting a much depopulated city beset and preoccupied with basic concerns. Closer to the ground, language sprouted. Ugly mass produced plastic signs advertising recovery services proliferated and many took matters into their own hands: with a can of spray paint, shard of plywood and a useful service to proclaim, a person was in business. This book promotes those efforts and imagines the billboard as a civic witness, memorial, reflection and marquee for stories from an extraordinary time.

Author Biography

CHIP SAUNDERS was the San Franciscan Who Does Not Discuss Rent a record never to be broken 1999-2004. Priori rents rose to the arena of $2 sq./ft., the arena of a bathtub. He was the Night Watchman and a lot happened on his watch, a lot of magazine reading and soda pop drinking. He established a curtain around the bathtub with private entrance. A love for the radio such he built a shelf with Ground Fault Circuit Interruption should it fall; tub sweet tub, he lined with foam, and on the shelf installed a toaster, but now needed a mini-refrigerator to keep his butters. But how, on such wages? Chip worked many the Double Shift and took holidays at time and a half so a walk-in closet could be annexed, it was a personification of the American Dream, this room he carpeted, and, owing to regulations destroyed on his behalf by a certain presidential administration, now had extra money in his pocket to cover its walls with "knotty pine" paneling that possessed nothing of the kind, just a lithograph laminated on a substrate full of formaldehyde, that was his demise.