Buried on page 3 of the Times-Pic's Metro section today are more details on the meeting I mentioned yesterday concerning the RSD's Facilities Master Plan. Glad they are slightly more prominent on nola.com's Latest Metro News page, but those headlines change over time... like, in the blink of an eye. Aren't'cha glad you've got my blog? Don't answer that...

Rejected by the Vieux Carre Commission are two public art works that hint at the sides of New Orleans life that the Commission apparently feels are best left out of the French Quarter:

DeDeaux's sculpture would be a freestanding set of three steps recalling the concrete stoops, or entrance stairs, left behind when homes in some of the city's most devastated neighborhoods were washed away by floodwaters after the levees broke. The acrylic steps, 29 inches high and 48 inches wide, would be illuminated at night.

DeDeaux said she hopes to install more than two dozen similar sets of steps at sites citywide, such as in City Park and the Lower 9th Ward, and eventually to assemble them all in one place. But she said the Jackson Square location, in front of St. Louis Cathedral and near the Chartres Street entrance to the square, would be the first and most important installation because of the site's historical importance.

She said she was seeking permission to install "Steps Home" at the site for only a few months, though she hoped the piece would be accepted well enough that people would want it to remain longer.

Campbell, who is from London, and Vis, a New Orleanian, wanted to install 10 13-inch-wide, 3/4-inch-thick metal medallions reading "You got them shoes on Bourbon Street" in the sidewalk of the heavily commercial section of Bourbon between Canal and St. Ann streets.
Besides the reference to the well-known local hustle in which panhandlers tell tourists, "I betcha I can tell you where you got them shoes," the discs would have another local resonance: They would resemble the Sewerage & Water Board water meter covers that have become popular collectibles.

You know, if the Quarter won't take 'em, I'm sure Ground Zero will. Just for kicks, perhaps this shocker of a sculpture ought to be trotted before the commission to see if they'd put it in Jackson Square. I'm such a stinker.

Leaving in eighteen months: RSD superintendent Paul Vallas, according to the board member of my son's charter school who spoke about Vallas' latest idea for the local "system of schools" at the meeting I attended last night: an International Business/International Baccalaureate high school, with the idea that it will be open next fall. Great. When I see a bunch of pecan pies in the skies, I'll let you all know then, too.

Demolished by the city...yet another home that should not have been. The Walking Id, Blakely, and all the other City Hall complacents and go-alongs-to-get-alongs need to get. The. Hell. Out of this city.

I'm already in an awful mood 'cause I'm having to type all this out at a library computer instead of in my humble fraction of a hectare.

Really, how much worse can this day get?

Ohhhhh...

...please...

...do NOT answer that.