Liprap's Lament - The Line

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Yep, only in New Orleans...well, with Pamplona as inspiration...and nobody here died from being gored by a bull...at least no one I know of.

The Running of the Bulls in New Orleans

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

STUCK...big time...

I married someone who is, geographically speaking, a great deal like me.

We are both from places, but not of them.

How best to explain this?

Though I was born in Tennessee and grew up in Texas, I have no strong attachments to either place anymore and can't even navigate my cities of birth and of childhood well without a map. There are only two places in which I have truly felt at home - New Orleans and New York City. NYC is more the domain of my paternal grandparents, but it is also the first place where I truly felt as though I were charting my own course apart from my family.

Dan, though born and raised in California, tends to feel closer to the midwest, specifically Chicago, as well as New Orleans. Both are places he landed in post-college. Chicago was also where there were strong ties to a set of his grandparents.

Geography is much larger than just where you are this second. It is a good part of how you identify yourself...but it helps to be realistic about this.

For instance: I am fond of kidding my in-laws in No-Cal about the San Andreas being all their fault, since they live quite close to it...

...but they don't deserve to be in a state that is now so financially strapped it can't even conduct Michael Jackson's funeral without asking for help to pay for security. Where one charter school in particular is successful enough to have a new building, but has to go begging for the necessary stuff to put inside its walls.

"Hey, for once, your state is making ours look less bad," Dan said to his mom with slight glee when she bemoaned her state's financial crisis.

At the same time, however, when an exhibit at the Queens Museum of Art superimposes the locations of foreclosures atop its semi-historic Panorama of the City of New York...

Each plastic triangle represents a block where there have been three or more home foreclosures. Visitors on the balcony walkway that surrounds the Panorama, at the Queens Museum of Art in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, can see in a single glance precisely where subprime lenders wreaked the most havoc.
Hundreds of these pink stigmata cover Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, East New York and Canarsie in Brooklyn like an invading army. In Queens most markers are camped out in Ozone Park and Cambria Heights, as well as in parts of Jamaica and Corona. As for Manhattan, there are precisely two.
This mapping of the 45-year-old Panorama is part of a larger exhibition about housing, in which politics intersects with art.
“I hope that my work operates on a principle of opening up a set of issues for exploration,” Mr. Rich said.
Titled “Red Lines Crisis Housing Learning Center,” the show includes photographs, models, drawings and sculptural installations — like a large, three-dimensional wooden graph of interest rates over the past 70 years — that offer an explanation of how the private housing market works, beginning with the federal government’s involvement during the Depression.

...it seems that neither end of the country is faring too well these days.

If it isn't the loss of our homes or our money that will hurt us, it will most decidedly be our health that does us in. Thank goodness we've still got that. As my grandpa says, if you don't have your health, then what have you...

...Oh. Right.

Time to give Mary Landrieu another call, y'all. And don't mind any rude staffers you might come across.

Dear God, we are so stuck.

Monday, July 06, 2009

by Greg Peters

Click on the pic above to read the whole thing.

Sunday, July 05, 2009

The other day, I suddenly thought of one of the many stories that used to be on the national TV news.

It wasn't one of the momentous, earth-shattering ones that seems to be the lifeblood of all news stories today, the ones that have numbed us all to the point where the same earth barely whimpers when a news anchor shouts. It was about a man who lived near a major crossroads, where many had gotten lost and he was the only one around to give the lost a clue as to where they were and in what direction they should be heading. Sick of this position he found himself in, the man began making his own road signs, directing everybody to all the places they'd asked him about, adding new destinations on the signs based on the wayward travelers' queries that still came his way, despite the signs he'd made.

The story had appeared on a segment of the CBS News that was called On The Road. The man who brought us the story: Charles Kuralt.

I remembered the gandy dancers, the man who decided to build his own highway across a midwestern state, the small town cafe where all the coffee cups were emblazoned with a regular's name after said regular had drunk five gallons of coffee...all due to Charles Kuralt.

I began to read his book America at a moment in my grandparents' house when I was cutting the boredom with a knife, and was charmed at the tale he told of a house for sale that had once belonged to an upper crust member of Charleston society, who was appalled when a potential buyer had ventured into a part of the house in which the soon-to-be former owner would never have gone: "You went into the kitchen?"

After checking out some books of his from the library recently, I found that a great secret of his that he'd kept all the years he'd been traveling the country and wrangling several different types of RVs in his quest for the gems hidden in the everyday, the next-door, and the so-called run-of-the-mill had come to light. He was an adulterer all those years, a fact that seems to have tainted his legacy for all time for some:

Reactions to Kuralt's marital infidelity ranged from censure to sympathy. Faced with two disparate images of Kuralt - one whose friends characterized him as a national hero; the other of a man who cheated on his wife for nearly three decades - I found it difficult to reconcile how I should remember him. His moral frailty contrasted sharply with the seemingly strong convictions of the television personality who espoused goodness and character and virtue.
The apparent contradiction muddled Kuralt's image not only in my mind but also in others. Following my January 1999 cover story on Kuralt for North Carolina's Our State magazine, one reader angrily fired back that he was deeply disappointed that we would pay tribute to Kuralt: "Is it not now widely regarded that Mr. Kuralt led an adulterous, scandalous personal life that must surely have brought great shame to his wife and family? In no way do I view Mr. Kuralt in the high esteem as I did before these revelations."

Each must reconcile a person's gifts to this world with the fact that we are all flawed human beings who mostly want nothing more than to transcend our humble origins - even Kuralt with his legacy. He was not a perfect individual - but even his wife forgave him his longtime frailties. In many ways, the strongly adverse reactions to these revelations in light of the stellar career and personality he built over decades says a lot more about how successful he was at his job than about how good or bad he actually was as a person.

Death seemed to have canonized this man before these revelations, especially when Kuralt passed away on a date as momentous as the Fourth of July:

Watch CBS Videos Online

I for one am grateful that he passed through our lives in his way, showing us all how extraordinary the simple and the mundane could be in this world that seems to increasingly encourage us to leave all of that in the past. Kuralt even convinced Walter Cronkite, a scion of network news, of the wisdom and value in his reporting of subject matter that was not so worldly as to be almost otherworldly.

Without this man, these stories would not be with us today.

Without this man, I probably wouldn't be writing this blog.

Happy belated Fourth to Mr Kuralt, of blessed memory.

Saturday, July 04, 2009

My grandmother always loved Ray Charles.

GM, this is for you.

Happy 4th, all.

Thursday, July 02, 2009

A little something was passed along through the bloggers' listserv by Matt McBride: the link to this interview that was done with Hizzoner the Walking Id after he was cleared to leave Shanghai and continue on to impart some supposed bits of disaster wisdom to folks in Australia. I am not in the mood to watch it at the moment (as far as I'm concerned, if the identity of the "tech-savvy person" in charge of doing virtual surgery on the mayor's emails has not been revealed in the interview, it's not worth much) so feel free to DIY and leave your impressions in the comments here.

(*Head to Da Zombie for more info on "the professional" and on other recent revelations about misbehavior meant to discredit the Inspector General stemming from Nagin supporters)

I may tackle watching it later on, but I am instead unraveling my feelings of disgust over Barack Obama's plan to dazzle Louisiana people and pols with his rationality concerning the public option in health care: All I can do is make rational arguments and hope they catch; it's a great experiment.

A great experiment.

Barry, man, listen to me, please: this state's health care does not run on anything near the scientific method. We are not one giant laboratory in which we will all submit to being pickled by chronic illnesses for the sake of your rationality - which is suspect anyhow. Presenting rational arguments for a public option and likening their acceptance to throwing them against a wall and seeing what sticks is highly irrational.

According to our governor, who has cut funding to a much-needed mental hospital here in New Orleans, this state is running in the red, a situation in which thrift trumps sanity. According to our Democratic "good" senator Landrieu, it runs on good old-fashioned level-playing-field competition fostered by private insurers, a large number of whom have given her money to ensure that their positions in that level field will be greater than that of the public option. According to those same insurance companies, their rules can be bent and twisted into a Mobius strip of excuses as to why the claims one files for compensation for medical procedures are of no concern of the insurers - pardon us, O claimant, while we take your money and run. Don't get sick, now, stay healthy!

The only rationality that speaks to all of the abovementioned entities in this game of providing affordable health care to all is that of the color green.

Speak rationally, Mr President, but please, carry a big solid gold stick that you have no hesitation about using. Money will keep talking long after your voice has been silenced.

Wednesday, July 01, 2009

...and if Mary Landrieu's lack of support for the public health option doesn't drive you a little crazy, Bobby Jindal's veto of funding for the New Orleans Adolescent Hospital might well ensure we all go off the deep end here for lack of facilities devoted to the treatment of mental health.

Seems fitting that the forum for advocates of an override of Jindal's veto will be held on Bastille Day.

The folks in Baton Rouge are lucky nobody from here is bringing their protests there....not yet, anyway.

Sunday, June 28, 2009

On the one hand, when the charter schools are good, they're good...especially when a school system has been down for so long, damn near anything looks like a light at the end of a long tunnel:

On average, Louisiana's charter schools outperform traditional schools in both reading and math, according to one of the most comprehensive studies of charter school performance nationally...

...Raymond added that the results vary considerably among states, with Louisiana's charter schools posting one of the stronger performances. In Louisiana, the report looked at the math and reading results of 34,479 charter school students from 52 charter schools between the years of 2001 and 2008.
The researchers matched charter students to noncharter students based on such factors as family income, starting test scores, and special education status, creating what they called "virtual twins." Using student-level data, they then tracked the test score growth of charter school students compared with their "twin" -- really the aggregate of all comparable students -- in the traditional schools...
...The study also noted that charters tended to outperform traditional schools in states where overall student performance remains low, such as Louisiana.

In states where school quality lags generally, there's "a pattern that you are going to have a more vibrant charter school sector, " Raymond said.

She added that in New Orleans, specifically, charter leaders had an advantage in that after Katrina there was such a strong national outreach to bring successful charter school models and support structures to the city.

"I wouldn't call it an aberration so much as a strong point of evidence on what's possible, " she said.

What happens, though, when the light at the end of the tunnel is more like an oncoming train? Let's see what's possible then:

In creating Schwarz Alternative School, the Recovery School District faced one of the toughest jobs in American schooling: to teach and minister to the neediest students in one of the nation's poorest and most violent cities. Many arrived with criminal histories. Nearly all had been expelled from other schools.

To this task, district leaders assigned a cast of rookie teachers and a company with revolving local leadership. The system housed the faculty and students in a crumbling, termite-infested building with spotty air conditioning, few supplies and a single full-time social worker for at times more than 300 students, four Schwarz teachers said.

To maintain control, the private management company, Camelot Schools, fielded its own security force. They were typically large men -- some of whom regularly slammed students into floors and walls for defiant behavior, according to accounts from six students, a youth advocate who regularly visited the school, a former Camelot staffer and two Orleans Parish Juvenile Court judges...
..."In neglecting Schwarz, I feel that the powers-that-be were essentially saying to the kids: 'You had your chance and you blew it,'" said Mitra Jalali, a Teach For America instructor who taught at Schwarz last year. "In a merit-based system, maybe our kids aren't the most deserving. But in a needs-based system, they deserve the most."

Charter schools are not the absolute answer to everybody's education problems. The Stanford study found that nationwide, the charters actually perform slightly worse than the traditional schools. This calls for more than a generalized, namby-pamby urging for greater "quality control" for the charters. It calls for far more than Paul Vallas backing up what has happened at Schwarz as being "a pretty good job, all things considered". It calls for more than bringing in teachers with very little experience and throwing them into a situation where they are doomed to fail.

It calls for seeing kids and teachers as more than cogs in some giant for-profit, for-statistics machines.

Teaching is a profession.

How we treat our children is how we treat our future.

It's not looking too good.

Friday, June 26, 2009

I really didn't need this poll to tell me what I already know. Hebrew Nationals are absolutely superior hot dogs to any other brands on the planet...

...with the only exception being the ones I had from this place in Chicago once.

The only thing I don't understand is that the sidebar Quick Poll asking what one's fave regional frank is has "Louisiana Style" as one of its choices. What the hell is a Louisiana style frank? Are they talking about Lucky Dogs? Boudin? Getting a dressed dog? Throwing hot sauce on it?

Somebody please enlighten me, if you would.

Update, 3:33 PM: Seems the definition of a "Louisiana Style" dog is defined largely by those who are outside of Louisiana. For instance:

Seattle: chorizo and capicola with mozzarella, cream cheese, jalapenos, and onions
Chicago: BBQ sauce, grilled onions and tomato
Portland: the “Fire in the Hole” – a Louisiana Red-Hot
This menu from a place in San Jose serves a hot link that is "100% beef, Louisiana Style"

I mean, we aren't even in the top ten in hot dog consumption here in New Orleans.

To add a footnote to the Reza Aslan-Jon Stewart talk da Zombie has posted, I give you a little something concerning the position of the Supreme Leader, aka, the current Ayatollah, Khamenei, from Hooman Majd's The Ayatollah Begs To Differ. Boldface emphasis is mine:

Khomeini, as father of the revolution and someone who was elevated (some argue inappropriately) to Imam, an honorific that has seldom been applied to any Grand Ayatollah, as it implies sainthood of the sort that is the basis of Shia Islam with its twelve Imams, didn't need to worry about his authority and popular support while he was alive, but he was careful to ensure that his successors, who could not be guaranteed to enjoy the same privileges, would have an absolute authority that would entrench the Islamic Republic for generations to come. Today, the valih-eh-faqih, "Supreme Leader," is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the similarity of his name to his predecessor's entirely coincidental but guaranteed, as it has over the years, to confuse Westerners. He has, in the years since Khomeini's death elevated him to the post, carefully balanced his use of what is arguably unlimited power with the cultivation of a public perception that the elected presidents of the republic are responsible for the ordinary welfare and woes of the people, and their general dissatisfaction, if they have any, with their government. It's a difficult balancing act, one that he plays with enormous skill, for when the people are too happy, as they perhaps were in the wake of the initially extremely popular election of President Mohammad Khatami, he has to ensure that the credit for that happiness doesn't rest entirely with the elected officials; otherwise his very role might come into question. Similarly, a certain amount of dissatisfaction, whether from the left or the right, bodes well for his authority as Iran's "Guide," someone who can lead the nation through turbulent times. It speaks volumes about both Iranians' penchant for dislike of the leaders they elect and the Supreme Leader's deft manipulation of the political system that Iranians' disapproval of Khatami's inability to deliver on his promise of reform was blamed not on Khamenei directly, although Khatami and his allies implied as much at every opportunity and most Iranians understood the limits of the president's power, but on Khatami's unwillingness to stand up to conservatives and Khamenei, who by the very nature of his job supported the conservative agenda as often as, if not more often than, the president's. Blaming the weakness of their president rather than the strength of the Supreme Leader, then, stands in contrast to Khatami's successor's term, when those Iranians who quickly became unhappy with the state of affairs under President Ahmedinejad blamed him for incompetence and pigheadedness rather than Khamenei for his apparent inability or unmillingness to completely rein him in. The Supreme Leader, it seems, can never lose.

Khamenei's name has been cropping up more lately as he shows his hand in what started out as a dispute over a crooked election and has indeed turned into a bloody battle over the future of Iran's Islamic Republic. Let's hope something can be worked out between the people of Iran and the man behind their green curtain.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

All right, fine. Ten years in New Orleans, with a four-year hiatus in NYC, and it took driving a visiting group of Reform Jewish women around to finally get me into Hansen's Sno-Bliz.

I had a Chocolate Mint one. In an spiffy 70th Anniversary cup.

The women I brought there raved about the ones they got as we watched the rain coming down under the awning of McKeown's Books across the street and reveled in our moment of cool in this disgusting heat.

Wonder how much the world's largest Sno-Bliz would be now?

I think the next time, the Reform Jewish women AND men who come to town ought to dig in to one of those. The surrounding neighborhood could join in. A Sno-Bliz block party.

Hell, I ought not to let fourteen years go by again without having another frozen treat from there. There may be no shortcuts to quality, but I'll be damned if I refrain from taking any to Hansen's.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

[Smalls has lost a baseball signed by Babe Ruth]
- I take it back. You're not in trouble, you're dead where you stand. *

Once upon a time, I was such a baseball nut.

These days, the closest I get to baseball is the Mets t-shirt I occasionally wear, one Zephyrs doubleheader I only got to see the first game of this season (they were playing the Albuquerque Isotopes, who were named for a certain fictional Springfieldianite ball team), and the many baseball books I still have. I couldn't even converse with someone I knew recently about the latest Mets-Yankees games, where, it seemed, once again the Mets had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. (Come on, fellas, Joe Torre ain't there no more. You coulda pulled it out. Beltran only got on the DL just recently...)

How could I forget my son's ball games in that list?

Well, for one thing, it certainly ain't the majors. Before you get all het up about that assessment, let me explain. I know baseball played by 6-year-olds can't be expected to be like watching grown men slug an airborne shot into the hot corner where the third baseman is just waiting to pluck it from the air, get the guy running from second, then throw a fast one over to the waiting second baseman's glove a split second before the runner from first touches the bag. The kids are barely able to wrap their heads around the basics of catching a ball, then throwing it to make plays like that, and I don't even want to talk about the hitting. At least the games are arranged so that the kids are only playing two full innings in which all of the players get to bat and all of them play in the field. I don't think most of the parents could take something going on for that long, forget the kids. And I certainly know that my son's coach, as patient as he is most of the time, can only take the human equivalent of herding cats so much.

So, it's a struggle...for me, anyway...because, it seems that for every kid on my son's team who is unable to keep the ball from dribbling past his outstretched glove, or has to have the tee brought out after three attempted pitches have sailed by his swinging bat, or who gets out after he spends a little too much time following the ball he just hit with his wondering eyes rather than running for first base as fast as he can, there is a kid who swings for the fences like Barry Bonds and gets the ball there. There are kids who are throwing the ball straight, true, and fast to first once the ball leaves the hitter's bat, and on one occasion, the ball made it into the first baseman's glove with that satisfying thwack in the pocket just before the hitter got to the bag, eliciting an ooooh from the watching parents who were not expecting it.

- Man, you think too much! I bet you get straight A's and shit!
- No, I got a B once. Well, actually it was an A minus but it should have been a B.
- Man, this is baseball, you gotta stop thinking! Just have fun. If you were having fun, you would have caught that ball! *

After being away from baseball for one summer, my son decided to come back to it this summer, and his lack of aptitude for the game kinda shows. He's more interested in getting the snacks from the concession stand, especially, after the games, one of those giant Pixy Stix that looks for all the world like the company decided to add steroids to a humble puff of flavored sugar and the straw in which it is packaged. He goofs off when he's playing defense out in the field, and, after loosening his very loose tooth right out of his mouth during a game, walked all the way through the infield, past the coach from the opposite team pitching to a hitter from his team, to where I was sitting in the bleachers to tell me he'd lost it and he couldn't find it (it's still in left field someplace). He's made contact with a pitched ball on occasion, but there is still a big reliance on his using the tee.

Yeah, so...he's six.

"I didn't start playing Little League until I was in third grade," Dan tells me.

The parents sitting by me are an encouraging bunch. Nobody is insanely raging for their son to become the next Derek Jeter, Manny Ramirez, or David Wright. "They're just trying as hard as they can, considering it all. It's amazing they even stay out there in this heat and do as well as they do," one mother says to me as she watches her child run for a ball that danced past him and is fast on its way to the fence, guaranteeing the batter a double by the 6-year-olds baseball rules. The games here are, by and large, entertainment, not life and death. I'm very grateful for that.

But there's still something nagging at me, a feeling that my son is a square peg in a round hole. He has admitted to me that he likes soccer better, but, overall, he's having fun with baseball, even taking a few practice swings in the teensy batting area behind home plate before he steps up to take some pitches. I get concerned about what he might be learning out there, if anything. Worried that he still feels pressure despite the looseness of the structure at the games. A tad exasperated that we put money into what has become a public goof-off with food for him...which is the point at which I want to kick myself. Hard.

Because all of the nagging I feel is probably just me, reeling from experiencing what happens when my son meets the world and worrying a bit too much about the impression he leaves. That sensation of having been hit by a pitch - or, even worse, having been hit on the elbow by a player picking up and swinging a bat right by you, which is what happened to a mom who volunteered to help herd the players along through their batting order while in the dugout - is that of having turned into my own mother.

Let me tell you something kid; Everybody gets one chance to do something great. Most people never take the chance, either because they're too scared, or they don't recognize it when it spits on their shoes. *

Baseball and any related practices and pickup games are all about preparing for moments, for eventualities, for whatever can come your way. Catch the ball as it caroms off the wall and use velocity and direction to launch it from your hand to the second baseman to hold the leadoff batter at first. Keep your knees loose and your glove down to capture that ball dribbling between second and third and, barring nailing the batter at first, keep a single from turning into a double. If you're batting, train yourself to swing at the right moment, to look for what might be coming from the mound even before the pitcher knows it.

I love my son fiercely, as my mom loves me and my brother, and I fear that he won't show how great he is on the inside, that he won't be ready to give his best, to put his heart into it when the opportunity comes. The moment will pass him by, and there he'll be.

But there he is, out there on that field.

I have to be a good parent and let him go.

_________________

*The Sandlot