Liprap's Lament - The Line

2012-01-28T08:06:00.001-06:00

From Twitter the other day:

Me: "Can we opt the kid outta the iLEAP?" Dan: "Don't think so. Property values in #nola depend on how well he does." Me: 8-P

It's not that I don't think the little guy will do well. On a personal level, I am annoyed at the miscommunication over what page he's supposed to be doing in the iLEAP workbooks and when it's due, sure. I just wish it weren't taking away the good time he spends really learning and getting enthusiastic about it - even the teacher commented on how much he enjoyed a recent lesson on volcanoes, something he'd been jazzed about when I picked him up from school one afternoon.

A recent carpool incident:
"Mom, I've got some baaaad news."
"Oh, well, what's the bad news? (aka, what iLEAP homework sin did you commit today?)"
"Well, they're having another fundraiser...next week...at the skating rink."
My 92% healed ankle throbs a little more than the dull rug-burn-under-the-skin feeling I have these days.
"Oh...uh...huh. When is it?"
"Next Thursday night."
Whew, choir practice night!
"Oh, I don't think we can go anyway, honey."

He then proceeded to read me the skating rink's liability policy, which was just what I thought - go into a crowd of people wearing your own personal set of eight wheels and break your bones at your own risk, with a "tough toenails" for emphasis somewhere in the fine print. Hey, the kid only stumbled over a couple of words. Not bad for a third grader.

One other thing I really appreciate when driving to the new location of the school? The nice man on Paris Avenue near Vista Park who waves enthusiastically at every car while walking his dog in the mornings. "Who are you waving to, Mom?" "Just wave, okay???" Thanks for the welcome, sir, whoever you are.

2012-01-17T19:23:00.000-06:00

Fight the Bath Salts and the Suriname Toads...

...that is, SOPA and PIPA.

I'm doing this tomorrow in the hopes that the government won't be doing it to all of us permanently. Don't be surprised if you can't get to any content here. Instead, let your government representatives know what a bad idea regulating the internet to their extreme is.

2012-01-16T09:54:00.002-06:00

New Orleans Slate tells us a story about a man in need:

Kweku Nyaawie grew up in Central Texas based mostly out of Austin. A carpenter and cabinet maker, he came to New Orleans with his brother to help out with reconstruction of homes damaged by the Federal Flood in late 2005. He saw the destruction first hand and continued to work and save his money. At some point he decided to stay. He wanted to contribute to the community, buy a house, make it a home not a speculation project and found the shotgun at 616 Port Street. It needed work, but he knew he was the guy who could do it. He looked for period architectural pieces, was painstaking in his research, checked the history of the house, delighted in knowing that he'd be the one to restore this little bit of New Orleans history with the added bonus of living in it.

He got involved with the Community Garden Project in Treme and put his money and time into fixing the house. Long after the Poor Clares, the house had been purchased by a Mr. Frisbe, who lived there with his partner from 1977 until he passed away. His partner continued to live there until the storm. Kweku, or Ku as we all call him, bought it already needing repair in 2008. He loved working on the house and loved that it was exactly 100 years older than he was. When we moved here we knew him to say hello but never saw him because he was always at the Garden or working on that house.

Then came the summer of 2010. As Ku was riding his bicycle on Dumaine Street in the Sixth Ward, a black sedan hit him. Hard. Knocked completely off the bike, he watched as the car sped away without even checking to see if Ku was alright. He headed to his girlfriend's house battered, bruised and scratched badly. He didn't go to the ER as he thought he was just healing from some bad road rash and deep bruises. Knowing him now, my guess is that he also figured he'd just tough it out and he'd be fine. Weeks went by. His back still hurt. Months went by. His back still hurt. Then in December 2010 he realized that his legs wouldn't quite support his 6'3” frame. He headed off to the doctor but realized that he couldn't get the help he'd need here in New Orleans, he couldn't work so money was also an issue (given that the bastard who hit him took off, there was no insurance money coming in to help with medical bills), so he made the decision to move back to Austin and his family. Those of us who knew him were worried as we didn't hear from him.

He was busy. He spent nearly 14 months in therapy and is still on crutches with his legs still unable to support him. Although he's the most positive attitude guy in the world, he's also a proud man and a man who loves his house. He is unfortunately learning the lesson many of us learned after the storm: sometimes you gotta ask for help.

A few weeks ago he got a letter from the City. A hearing. Blight. Neighbors complaining. (We're neighbors, we couldn't figure out who would complain knowing how hard he'd worked and knowing what had happened to him.) At the hearing it was discovered that one complaint had come from a doctor (a DOCTOR? Wouldn't he know how devastatingly long spinal cord injuries can take to heal?) because some vines had overgrown the fence and were interfering with his backyard garden. (This doctor is also the owner of a lot of property on our block.) Evidently Ku's next door neighbor, an absentee homeowner and an attorney who lives in the house intermittently, wanted Ku's house demolished. Ku was given a list of things that had to be fixed or a $500 a day fine would be levied.(Although he wouldn't probably bring it up, he's one of only 2 black property owners on the four sides of this block, and some of us, though not Ku, can't help but wonder if that's a part of these complaints.)

Ku sat in an office chair for a week sanding the front of the house in order to get it ready for painting. Stand across from it and you can see how far the outer limit of his reach is, which frankly from a desk chair is impressive. Today he's working on the bricks that front the house from the sidewalk to the base of the house. Siding needs to be replaced for sure. His brother had been able to help for a while, but we heard he recently got a job so he's on his own for the moment and his next hearing is a week from today.

I am asking anyone out there who can help, who can climb a ladder, sand, paint, write a letter, anything that can toss a road block into the $500 buck a day fine that he can't afford, to get in touch.

Read more here. The go-to email for NOLA Slate is river.dharma@gmail.com.

Humid City Supplemental

2012-01-13T09:53:00.001-06:00

I just realized I left an unqualified declaration in my latest post over at Humid City...that of being "fairly fortunate" thus far in navigating the current "system of schools" obstacle course that is public education in New Orleans.

To be sure, I've been called a hypocrite for my stance on charterization. My son is attending classes at a charter school. We are fortunate in that we got him into the school and, more importantly, that it is doing right by him socially and educationally. We were also benefactors of damned good timing - we managed to shoe-horn him into his current school back in the spring of 2006, when, even then, the most a parent could do was to fill out the requisite forms, attend the required classroom tour and parent meetings, "and then you pray," one mother responded when a teacher asked about the no-guarantees admissions process. It was probably the last time any parent had to deal with a waitlist for the school due to the city's population still reeling from the effects of 8/29/2005. At that time, we also benefited from the little guy's pre-K3 tuition being paid for by the state, which is no longer happening for parents with 3-year-olds in New Orleans public schools.

But our fortunate position is subject to change. Our financial status could fall away, the next teacher might be unable or unwilling to reach our son or work with us to help him realize his potential, and we might not be able to put the time and effort into all the forms, all the school visits, and all the research it would take to get our son elsewhere without further jeopardizing an already sketchy economic state. Where would we go then? What could be done for him?

This is what I fear the most every day. And unfortunately, my fear is a reality for far too many. It's a reality of fewer jobs out there that will pull you out of economic dire straits and give you at least a prayer of raising a family right. It's a reality that can turn families onto or away from each other and explode in violence or pass away in a whimper of abandonment. And then the rug gets pulled out by the realities of what is ironically called "school choice." It is only choice when you can devote large chunks of your time to making sure said choice does not turn sour - placing your child in a school that isn't even working for the children who are there, forget the ones that are coming in, is one big way all of this goes wrong. Another is when your child's special education needs get shoved aside because the school's performance numbers don't need the stress of accommodating a child that needs that extra attention. Trying to call out the state on what is required in its own laws isn't just a full-time job, it can be an exhausting obsession.

How much time do you have to devote to all of this and still raise a family again?

My family is fortunate yet I am uncomfortable in it. If the only comfort I can give a struggling parent who has been waitlisted for charters all over the place is "wait and see and keep trying," that's extremely cold. The state, with its recent election of a man younger than I to its highest education position (I told my grandmother, a veteran of teaching in Long Island, NY schools about John White's RSD appointment and she was appalled. "He's much too young and inexperienced," she said. ) is going to give too many parents positions on similar waitlists all over Louisiana, all in the name of covering its own ass when things go wrong or a charter doesn't meet expectations. The doors on fair and nearly free-with-your-taxpaying public education will be closing even faster than they already have been.

And this ranting is only from my vantage point as a lowly, imperfect parent. To get some clarification on some much greater implications of Louisiana's move towards charterization, head to G-Bitch.

2012-01-09T13:42:00.000-06:00

Parenting Purgatories

If there's anything this past weekend has taught me, it's this...

Nothing has driven me to drink like parenthood has. NOTHING, I tell you.

It's not like one can choose the sex of their baby (not yet), but when I first found out I was going to have one, I initially thought it might be a girl. At 20 weeks gestation, I found out it was otherwise (hey, 50/50 chance). At the time, hormones amplified some of my more histrionic fixations and pronouncements, and, on observing how eager children's clothiers were to have 14-month-olds dress like J-Lo and Britney (aka, twentysomething skankdom), I was relieved that a boy was coming our way in another 20 weeks or so. "Look at this!" I'd holler, yanking my friends into the Children's Place just to show them the macrame halter tops for toddlers and shout a little more. "We used to have to scour thrift stores in our teenage years to dress like this, and now it's mainstream!!! And it's all PINK! What the hell????"

This past Saturday, I found a major downside to boys is dealing with the effects of team sports when they are no longer just a fun game. Granted, my son is most likely not going to be the next David Wright, but he likes baseball - or at least the idea of it he loves that is presented in The Sandlot. You know, the camaraderie among teammates that can possibly lead to some life lessons and lifelong friendships.

Problem is, he said something that alienated him from his teammates, caused the coach not to trust him, and I was the one chewed out for it.

I was in shock - suddenly I was a bad parent because my son said one (admittedly) dumb, selfish thing. I was made to feel smaller than small by a guy who was supposed to be a role model for 9-10-year-olds. I was induced to worry that, because of one mistaken thing said by my just-turned-9-year-old, the kid would possibly never again have a future with his peers because he messed with team camaraderie. It still hits me even now, the dressing down I got from someone who only cared about winning (in what was supposed to be a noncompetitive off-season set of games) and not about the reasons why a kid might say such a thing. Title IX may have ensured that coaches like this appear in girls' sports as well, but there seems to be a much longer tradition of them trying to teach boys that winning isn't everything, it's the only thing, and with way less panache than Vince Lombardi. Verbally whaling on a nine-year-old for such a transgression is pretty damned bad, but going after me? Yeah, that really works...Thank God I have a levelheaded spouse who put it into better perspective for me and the little guy, but being on the other end of such wrath isn't easy no matter what age you are.

And, speaking of wrath...hell hath no fury like a community deciding to go completely bonkers over school renovations. As though a lawsuit against the city over the possible traffic much-needed construction work on a neighborhood school building will bring to the streets isn't bad enough, the school's parent listserv is going up in flames over the temporary school site. As far as the temporary site goes, I was pleasantly surprised at how nice it was, but then I saw it when it still looked like this:

Driving out to the new campus was also mostly traffic-free despite its Gentilly location being pretty far out from where we live on the gray brick road (although I'm told that will change once UNO is back in session). It was also still a sobering drive, as the site is surrounded by mostly empty lots, some too-new homes, some still-vacant gutted houses, a small shopping center struggling to get new tenants in, and a spanking new Holy Cross school campus relocated from its flooded-out former location in the Ninth Ward and built on the grounds of the now-demolished St Francis Cabrini church. So many ghosts of recent making are still being exorcised out there. I hope the kids' presence will help it all.

I also hope that the battles over this one school renovation being chronicled so well by a hyperlocal are not going to set a nasty precedent...but it's amazing what kinds of things can be seemingly justified by that phrase "For the children..." Trying to undo decades of damage done through neglect and outright theft from those same children should not be this fraught with insanity.

2012-01-06T10:44:00.000-06:00

A Reassess

I sit here at my blog most times these days at something of a loss for some long-form wordiness - aka, a substantial post.

It's been like this for a while, and it'd certainly be convenient to blame the diversion of those energies to my more frequent usage of Twitter and Facebook - but then I wouldn't be on those if they didn't help serve some sort of substantial need - or, most likely, serve an addiction to feedback. What I've found through recent huge amounts of time spent on those two platforms is that human-like virtual interactions gradually grew to be something I craved through the conduit that this blog initially was. It took me about a year to get to it, but once I did, it was one hell of an interactive community that peaked at about 2008 - which was, coincidentally, when most of the New Orleans blogpocheh I'd become acquainted with on- and offline got Twitter accounts and Facebook started its many annoying revampings that only seemed to draw more people to open accounts on it. Even now, while writing this, I have windows open on my desktop to Twitter and Facebook, where I check them periodically and respond to new tweets that come up and new posts on the Facebook news feed.

The key word in that last sentence is "respond."

Most of what bloggers tend to do is respond on a much larger scale than 140 characters (Twitter) or however many characters Facebook feed posts limit account holders to. As long as our freedom to do so - in the form of free server space someplace - is still there and we've got the urge to (mostly) rant, we'll be a-posting. As this particular space comes close to it's sixth blogiversary (January 16th!), though, I wonder at the many things that can turn even the most devoted bloggers away from frequent postings...

1) Stuff happens. Paying jobs and caring for one's family take precedence of parking one's butt in front of a computer to kvetch about the news of the day. Health problems appear - never has my grandpa's adage of "If you don't have your health, what have you got?" resonated with me more personally than it has in the past year. Just leaving the house for a diversion, a respite from a need for others to communicate with us almost virtually violently at times, is more of a thing in these tough days than dwelling too hard on too many troubles that may be beyond one's control.

2) Feed readers. I don't know how many of you have put the stuff your read online regularly into feed readers, but it does render many blog stats kinda useless. As it is, I'm paying much less attention to what Sitemeter's telling me anyhow. I've never been much interested in how I can sell this corner of the interwebs, the ads in the sidebar here being more of a concession to my husband's idea that all this time I spend at the keyboard be measured in some sort of monetary way. In the four years since I threw the code into my sidebar, I think it's garnered fractions of cents. All mah internetz are not fillin mah bank account.

3) User-friendliness in commenting suffers in the face of Twitter and Facebook. I have comment monitoring up for a reason: I'm not interested in spammers. Signing in with an account to comment and typing in random characters to post said comment and prove you are not a bot and have genuine interest in a discussion of what I say pales in comparison to the immediacy of Twitter, I'll admit. Which gets me to my reassessment of this particular weblog...

I don't know what the future's gonna bring for this space. I don't know what the future's going to bring for blogging in general. It still serves a need to go long-form, but in my particular case, it feels like I've gone back to the days when this was a diary that happened to be online and happened to have a comment section for some strange reason...except now more people who are not heavily online savvy can use the internet to do a simple search and use that information for their own ends, be it in attempting to judge prospective hires or in otherwise using that stuff learned about you against you. The controversies over SOPA legislation are also hinting that future attempts to regulate and sanitize the internet for Homeland Security's pleasure are not going to abate anytime soon. A door on virtual freedoms may be closing, and who knows if, where, or when a window will open?

Then again, perhaps my pessimism is being colored by my having to currently be in the strange, sad business of pain management for my only 80% healed ankle, the insanity surrounding the renovations to my son's school, and some other strange changes in my personal life.

When all is said and done, change is the only true constant.

_______________________________________________

So we're officially in another Carnival season in these parts...which means it's okay to have your king cake and eat it too - not to mention washing it down with some king cake vodka just to make things super-sweet.

Thanks, DJ Soul Sister.

2011-12-31T16:33:00.000-06:00

...The radical freedom my daughter embraced created a form of imprisonment for me. Even though Marissa assured me I had nothing to do with her choice, for that year and a half she was away, I was locked in the feeling that I had failed her. The sense of safety I had provided at home clearly hadn’t been enough.

Or maybe my vision of her future was what she ran from. I had said, stay in school, get a job, buy a house, and you’ll retire securely, even though that hadn’t worked out for me. When she said she wanted to break free, at first I gripped tight, imposed new rules and higher expectations. I insisted that she turn away from wildness, even in this wild time. Eventually... I loosened the reins and trusted to fate. Neither approach brought her back. Marissa said she was going toward something I wouldn’t, couldn’t, understand. After a year of trying, I see that she is right. This life she and her friends led was not worse than I imagined, but it was more dangerous than I had wanted to believe. I can describe it, but understanding still eludes me.

I read Danelle Morton's article on the eight killed in the December 28, 2010 warehouse fire and am still struggling with my reactions and the responses of others to the sympathy she exhibits for the dead and her attempts to understand why they made the choices that lead to their deaths in a fiery inferno that likely resulted from their attempts to keep warm on an icy cold night. The knee-jerk impulse for us all - myself included - is to roundly condemn these kids for being there in the first place. Raised in good homes by the families' accounts (though there may be some things they aren't sharing), who in their right minds would think that family conflicts during the teenage years could get so bad that hopping trains and engaging in Darwinian-like struggles for day-to-day survival could be a viable option?

It rid the world of some extra weight. What would kids like that ever contribute to society anyhow? Cruel, yet comforting (on some level) thoughts, designed to insulate oneself from the idea that it could ever happen to one's family. The scarier thing to contemplate, after all, is that it could and does happen indiscriminately. You could still do everything you're supposed to do as a family in rearing your kids and they could still choose that kind of life...and, short of having them committed to some sort of institution against their will, you'd be stuck in the same kind of limbo Morton describes, forced to trust fate will somehow keep smiling upon your kids as they embrace body and soul this idea of freedom that is so far outside what most of us think of when we contemplate the same thing - familiar, but far out.

I guess there are times when I could've gone the same way myself, most notably when I ran right out of grade school around 4th or 5th grade in frustration with the near-constant bullying I got from my peers and got as far as the railroad tracks down the block before realizing I'd make a terrible runaway. Any frustrations I had with my family as a teenager - and believe me, there were many - were mostly neutralized by a strong sense I had of simply tolerating it all because I'd be out of the house before I knew it. It was, in the end, the values I had and a sense of guilt over hurting my parents' feelings too much that held me out of the life of a traveler. I didn't want to do anything drastic that would kill my family emotionally. Not until I was out of their house, anyway.

I look at my son who is now halfway to eighteen and I wonder about the choices he will make, and the kind of world we currently have a hand in creating that might give him the impression that being a traveler is a good idea. Would it be in rebellion at how much we are spending our lives plugged into technology? In recoil at how much we pay and pay and pay in health care, education, and overall homage to consumerism? Or would it be as simple as we'd be cramping his style and, in the face of a serious lack of coming-of-age rituals and/or starter employment for young adults, he'd rather hop a train and squat in an abandoned home? Yes, my fears are colored by this past year's events worldwide, which constantly drive home that this world needs a lot of work. But is the best way to help it all along found in completely dropping out of it all in this way? I don't know, I can't bring myself to willingly find out, and I don't know what I'd do if my not-so-little guy decided to take that path. What I do know is that if things don't change in another nine years priority-wise for our entire country, more of our kids will head down that no-holds-barred road with only our love - if these kids even have it (horrible to contemplate, but some households are like that) - to prepare them for any uncertainties.

No one is completely blameless in any of the business that led to eight people dying in an abandoned warehouse over a year ago. At those tragic times, it is simply driven home how little control we have over the decisions of others, no matter how much we care for the decision-makers themselves. We can only lay some foundations, set some good examples, and stay alert for the possibility that these wild souls will return in one way or another - and, if they do, our doors and hearts will be open to what they bring.

X-posted at Humid City

2011-12-21T11:07:00.000-06:00

Indulge me, please. I gotta post this about Bushwick's own House of Soul, which has now hung around for ten years. Gotta love where the Amy Winehouse Back To Black platinum record is in the house, too:

What can I say? I still wanna be Sharon Jones when I grow up.

2011-12-16T17:14:00.001-06:00

My brain is full these days, and I kinda need a bit of a dumping thing to happen, so here goes:

It's simply too, too easy for me to be on Twitter. I have a serious habit that is enabled by my trusty Droid, and I have to face up to being able to "stop anytime I want" as being the ultimate in personal delusions. I think I recently pledged to form a Carnival subkrewe through it, for crying out loud - in light of Will Ferrell being named as this year's Bacchus, a few of us speculated as to why Christopher Walken was never tapped for that bastion of celebrity Carnival royalty. He would be the most badass Bacchus ever...but he deserves his own twisted legions. Think of the debut of the Walken Krewe: a bunch of stylishly dressed marchers with these sorts of moves. Throwing cowbells of their own. Perhaps a watch or two. Or just engaging in some subtly and not-so subtly dirty old man antics. Perhaps all the Walkens can do the suave Bond villain thing, psychotically destroying carnival even as they participate in it. The possibilities are nearly endless at this point...

I look for distractions - the more powerful, the better - to mainly take my mind off the pains of my ankle getting used to the lace-up brace I'm supposed to be wearing (and I do wear it, for the most part, if I'm going to be walking around. The physical therapists I've had couldn't believe I hadn't tried some walking without Das Boot before the brace, but I want it so that I don't want to deal with this ever again if I can help it.) I've fallen into listening to lots of music again, with the help of many music streaming sites and apps - it's been like discovering college radio plus some of the best indie record stores all over again. It's mind-blowing, the amount of music that is currently readily available at your fingertips if you are web-savvy and have little fear of exploring what these sources have to offer. It's a world that places even greater emphasis on a plethora of individual opinions over the tastemaking of a select few, which consequently contributes to the number of ways certain institutions like the Grammy awards and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee choices can be bashed, not to mention which top music lists may matter more than others. Some things never really change.

What I wish would change for the better would be how we consider education. Yeah, yeah, same ol' same ol' from me...I should just give up any feelings of concern over schools destined to fail, schools in the process of having staff jump ship in anticipation of their closure, and the pratfalls of semi-autonomy and just let it go because current proponents of community involvement in and local leadership of the schools have already had their chance. When even some of my own basic assumptions about education and the supposed importance of the socializing elements of it are called into question, however, I wonder. Maybe we should do away with teachers if they don't value creativity. Maybe parents should avoid the very institution that is the public or private school if continued bullying cannot even be countered by those meant to guide the children in that environment (I know if my own parents had thought similarly about my grade school experience, seven years of my life might have gone very differently.). And let's all turn back time and forget about birthing any more babies while we're at it.

All of this makes my head spin almost as much as this holiday "wreath" I saw at a too-spiffy-looking new bagel place in town:

Good bagels. Questionable decor.

Pardon me while I go see a brass band making a horse buck it like a...well, a horse, of course.

2011-12-12T20:54:00.002-06:00

This year, I had one of these on my cake.

It would've been nice if we'd been told about that wire to cut off the bazillions of times the thing was playing "Happy Birthday." The following ensued instead.

This doesn't happen every time we go to our pal Edie's house to watch the Saints games, but it was fun. And now we know what to do when we can't shut "Happy Birthday" off.

And Das Boot is finally off my ankle. But this lace-up ankle brace I have on now is giving me strong deja-vu. Like getting used to Das Bootie. Urrrrrgh.

2011-12-07T09:31:00.001-06:00

Well, hello, mangling of any and all rock n' roll genres in the name of a Jewish holiday! How are you this morning? You're moving like Jagger? Really?

I don't wanna say what you sound like.

2011-12-06T11:09:00.001-06:00

Childish Things

When you spend a good chunk of your morning on Twitter debating the validity of a few choice phrases with Nicholas Payton and some of our Twitter followers, things are gonna go, well, downhill. Specifically, all the way back to my college days when we art students took out our frustrations in the all-day foundation studios at the ice rink tormenting anyone from the opposite team who happened to find himself in the penalty box, cheering on the Zamboni man, and shooting off the occasional bottle rocket while the college's president happened to be in attendance (oops).

What's especially funny is that a version of these t-shirts used to be hard to come by, and now they're sold in the college store, along with those of the basketball team that was formed after I graduated.

These days, I'm definitely feeling my past. Part of it is certainly my son turning nine today - another part of it is seeing how much I get het up over things I swore I'd never go nuts over if/when I had a kid. It all paints my husband as the optimist and me as the pessimist - hey, at least I married well in that regard.

"He can't seem to really focus," I said to Dan on hearing one of the little guy's inner-yet-spoken-aloud monologues in progress instead of the subdued sound of pencil against paper completing his homework.

"Oh, he can sure focus on books he likes and LEGOs he wants to build," Dan replied. "It's all about what he wants to focus on. He's perfectly capable," he said with a smile.

"And you really want to have more kids?"

"We've already made all the mistakes we're going to make, right?"

"But with another, we'd probably be making different mistakes," I said grumpily.

"Fail, then fail again differently, huh?" Dan shook his head.

Okay, so my reproductive system isn't exactly screaming for one last chance - and if it is, I can't hear it over my constant mantra of "Kids are a crapshoot." For every person who walks up to me and asks if I'm going to have another as though I've found the Angelic Child Formula with the little guy (it's so easy to fool people when you resemble Macaulay Culkin in "Home Alone" and you have a sense of humor to match), I have to restrain myself a little more from detailing how much I dread a developmental phase in his and my roads that will suddenly make me and Dan "the enemy" somehow. Until that day, though....

I don't brag about this kiddo of mine too much because 1) I'm biased and 2) I tend to roll my eyes some when others do it concerning their kids (I've been working on 2). Like you wouldn't believe.). However, he's a bright little character who once asked a friend if her stuffed panda was snake intolerant.

Although he has problems picking up after himself and seems to have inherited my husband's inability to really look for things he needs to find (I think it's a Y-chromosome thing, anyhow. Try looking under things, guys.), there's a good heart in there that is curious about the way the world works - it's a curiosity that I wish I could explore more with him, but things in our house already resemble one giant science experiment...perhaps we can get going on that crystal-growing kit soon. What the hell, another addition to the mess.

He loves baseball, and I wish I could get the damned Das Boot off my ankle so that I could drive him to one of his fall ball practices or games just to see him getting into it. He loves to dance - in fact, this past Halloween, he danced so much to the live band at the neighborhood party he neglected the candy part of the night, much to Dan's yen-for-chocolate chagrin. He also gets very conscious of rules for certain things, and about abiding by those rules: "We can't use the internet on this homework, Mom!" he admonishes me when it comes to another of his research projects (we probably deserve some of that considering how we showed our displeasure with one of his assigned subjects). "That's my character," I say.

But wow, the general intolerance for bright guys like him is increasing out there in the big ol' world. The pressures to conform may not be as great in some ways and in some places - and we're already on the wrong side of a lot of it anyhow due to our Judaism - but I worry for the kiddo as he gets older and the schooling situations change, which they will. At the same time, I know these are battles that he has to largely muddle through himself, as we all had to in our childhoods, but I don't want to be completely indifferent. The impulse to throw up my hands and unleash a string of curses over it all is nearly overpowering - but I largely leave the cursing in front of the little guy to Dan.

We're not totally ready to put away childish things in our house, at any rate. It's still worth it to giggle with the kid over the Katrina refrigerator-esque scene in The Muppets where the Swedish Chef simply takes a torch to the moldy Muppet things inside. If that's some kind of liberal/lefty bias, well, fine. I personally find it more childish not to have a sense of humor.

Happy 9th birthday, little man.

2011-11-30T18:10:00.001-06:00

Being Critical

I've been contemplating my most recent writing foray lately and have wondered how I get myself into these things...

Cameron Crowe's tepid facsimile of Lester Bangs (which Philip Seymour Hoffman vailantly tries to breathe life into) talks about the only real perk rock journalists get, which is free albums, and that's very much where I'm at, I'll admit it. What I find intriguing is that technology has turned that desire for possessing grand, thematic, long-form statements from artists into something declasse, unless you are making the effort to be consciously retroactively hip and going into collecting vinyl. It's amazing that CD players still exist, actually.

It's amazing that albums still exist, when you think about how easily mp3s are gobbled up like so much appetizers these days, everyone thinking their favorite song is worth shelling out a few cents to download it onto their preferred digital storage device - until the listener starts thinking hey, if this song is good, what else is out there by these guys/gals?, which is when the few cents-per-download add up fast. "Just go ahead and get the whole album, dammit," is what I say, and I have downloaded a few directly to my Droid - but then I miss the crucial thing that dates my sensibilities, which is the album art and the liner notes. If you don't think that's still important, check out how cool the Black Keys' Brothers album packaging is. It's been a part of the whole experience of owning an album since at least the late '50's. Hearing about how jazzed the too-soon-gone Coco Robicheaux was about his latest album's packaging says that the musicians still consider it, too. All of this is why I find the whole thing about free music by way of the internet so intriguing.

Major label record companies have never embraced anything that looks as though it's going to cut into their profits, but truth of the matter is, many of their usual m.o.s have imploded in the face of artists being able to put themselves right out there on the internet and manipulate their own image, sounds, and marketing in any way they so desire - if they choose to do so. We live in a world where it is easier than ever for an artist to still stick it to the Man some kinda way, even if it ultimately won't benefit the artist. The only recourse any of these labels have is to give music lovers limited-time releases they can listen to before they deign to buy, because the consumer demands it. Or to hype an artist so, so much that people will feel they have no choice but to buy to get a listen - and even though that's working less and less on savvier listeners, you can still fool the younger people a lot of the time by waving Katy Perry in front of them on Sesame Street. The kids will find a way to hack that planet to their liking, though, and the major players will be left scratching their heads. Again. And chasing the trends through numbers obtained through Soundcloud or Spotify, numbers that will make their heads spin because now more than ever, the types of music people are able to access are so incredibly diverse. This doesn't even bring YouTube or Vimeo into the equation.

Pardon me while I move on to the opinions. There are so many of those. I started following a bunch of the music news sites via Twitter and began to think about how much my opinion really matters...especially when I dwell on how many women are in the music criticism realm. New Orleans is lucky to have Alison Fensterstock in there, as well as ANTIGRAVITY's own Erin Hall, and one look at DJ Soul Sister's tweets and her sense of soul and funk's places in popular music history comes right through
- all of which can seem like an embarrassment of riches in this area compared to how many female opinions of today's music are out there: more than ever before, but still not a lot. I took a look at Rachael Maddux's review of two female rock critics' writings in the most recent Oxford American issue and am still contemplating what it means to be a woman telling everyone how good or bad an album is, or if it even matters. I'm inclined to say it really doesn't matter anymore, but boy, some people will still make an issue of it. It's more of a choice these days rather than a requirement, though. I think.

Anyway, I'm learning and absorbing as I'm listening.

But I will always prefer to have that CD in my hands over the contents of it in a digital player.

UPDATE, TOO LATE: Dammit, I shoulda included Red Cotton in all of this. The only woman to really chronicle the second lines in this town in recent years, she is not one to be ignored. I mean it.

2011-11-28T09:57:00.001-06:00

Week 6 - I Think

Seriously? I can only take one kvetch post from myself per week, and I barely wanna burden all of you still reading with ankle and elbow complaints. Here's to say that yes, Das Boot is still on my right foot, but if all is going well, it is slated to be replaced by a lace-up ankle brace next week, and the day that that happens, I may take Das Boot into my backyard with a load of lighter fluid and some matches and burn the damned thing into submission. I'm convinced that most of my current ankle achiness results from its rubbing against the side of Das Boot, making simple things like browsing through the new Marshall's by my mom's house the day before Black Friday into events akin to a high-altitude stroll through Bhutan. My first full physical therapy session is today, and, judging from the experiences of a friend of mine who spiral-fractured his leg a few years back, I might wanna torch that facility after my own experiences getting flexibility back into my injured limbs. Yes, fire is a big theme here. I am born under a fire sign after all and have some pyro tendencies - plus, if you haven't noticed, it's gotten cold out.

All of this convalescing has had me thinking a great deal about some stuff that concerns those who can't heal or who take a longer time to do so. Our healing powers are all different, more than each of us will probably ever understand. This world ain't too kind to those of us who have chronic problems, though, and we do have a tendency to hold up those who behave like they have all their limbs and perfect health as being heroically normative - so let's check out the perspective from the other side for a change.

When a cripple climbs a mountain or runs in a marathon it isn’t a victimless crime. It makes life harder for the rest of us cripples. Because when they go around being so brazenly indomitable, everybody expects the rest of us cripples to be indomitable too. And that’s fucking exhausting. If you think being indomitable all day is so easy, you try it. You’ll be worn out by noon. These racing/climbing cripples are a threat to my precious, inalienable right to be domitable. There’s nothing I enjoy more than kicking back with a six pack and being domitable.

And these indomitable cripples also threaten my right to be a fuck up. They go out there and bust their asses training because they think they have to prove their excellence because if they don’t excel beyond excelling they’ll ruin it for the rest of the cripples. But they’d serve us better in the long run if they fucked up and did it with pride. It’s just like Jackie Robinson. There was no way he could fuck up playing baseball because if he did there was no way anybody who wasn’t white would be allowed to play major league baseball ever again. But if they banned white people from playing just because the first one to come along wasn’t a superstar, there would never have been any major league baseball in the first place. White ballplayers are allowed to fuck up all the time. Just watch the Cubs and you’ll see. Had Jackie fucked up, history may well have eventually regarded him as even more of a pioneer, a proud symbol of the right of all people of all races and creeds to attempt to do something they might fuck up. Now that’s equal rights.

John Hockenberry has written many times about the inaccessibility of the New York City subways, including one particular time that resonated with me as a new mother trying to make my own way through the stations with an infant and all his paraphernalia - he looked around at a subway stop once and found that it wasn't just his wheelchair-bound self that was having trouble, it was mothers and nannies whose charges were more mobile in strollers except when it came to access to trains. If the stroller-pushing masses who rely on public transportation in this town ever unite with the handicapped, watch out, RTA...but then New Orleans hasn't had much in the way of a major transit system in decades. It also doesn't have much in the way of smooth sidewalks and roads, which can be tough to navigate for even the healthy. For someone encumbered by a certain apparatus on her foot, it can be downright infuriating to try to traverse someone's unwieldy brick walk made into a petrified earthen wave by New Orleans' pudding-like ground and whatever trees' roots may be pushing the bricks around. Much as I love this town, I probably would think twice about staying if I had a serious physical problem and couldn't get around too easily. It would take a lot of help to keep me going, at any rate.

I won't lie - thinking about all of this, being forced to confront it, is a scary business. Having to deal with this thing on my foot for so long - I've almost forgotten what it's like to be able to not even think about walking. This is a certain kind of failure that cannot be denied. My body gave up the ghost in two places that have turned out to be pretty vital to my movement. And I know now that even though the doc will give me an all-clear on the bones eventually, it will take more time for me to get out of my current mindset. In my worst moments, I feel like a useless appendage to the human race. Thank goodness for loving family and friends. Their contributions at this crazy time cannot be underestimated.

So I will pick myself up as best I can and maneuver my way through my encumbered physicality as best I can. Yeah, my brain hurts a little, too. More Aleve. More good humor atop it. More struggle. Shit ultimately happens. Life goes on with or without me. Guess the only thing really propping me up is that I don't want it to get too far without me hanging on to it.

2011-11-20T07:45:00.001-06:00

I mean, REALLY???!??

Oh, yes. Pizza is still not a vegetable. Kermit says so.

2011-11-18T12:47:00.001-06:00

No, I don't work in an office with a bunch of people...but if I did, I would have them all do this one day:

Of course I'm absolutely certain I need to get out more, anyhow.

2011-11-16T08:32:00.001-06:00

The events at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan yesterday, and the subsequent court injunction tussles regarding tents in the park and other assorted issues related to the use of privately owned public spaces, took on different dimensions for me when it was revealed that not only was the People's Library at the park treated as though it meant nothing*, there was the possibility that a Torah may have been subjected to the same treatment - and there were definitely some Tanakhs that were trashed.

Tanakhs - aka, the entire Jewish Bible - are bad enough. If a Tanakh, usually in book form, is ruined in some way, it doesn't just go into the nearest garbage can, because it contains the name of God in it. It must go into a special depository for ruined documents of its kind known as a genizah. The most famous genizah is that of Cairo, in which not just pieces of parchment were discovered, but also pieces of wood with God's name on them, illuminated manuscripts, art, and other fragments of all kinds in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic. When I attended classes at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, there were clearly labeled receptacles in the library copy rooms that told us where to deposit any copies of sacred documents mentioning God that we weren't going to use, which certainly forced me to reconsider the power of words and how disposable they have become in society today. To have the NY Sanitation Department roll Tanakhs into dumpsters, when considering the genizah, adds extra insult to the injury of a donated library headed for a landfill.

The even greater problem, however, comes from the alleged disposal of a Torah scroll, which is a HUGE no-no in Judaism, one that crosses denominations. I was told as a kid by my father that if one merely drops a Torah scroll, everyone present at that unfortunate event must fast for three days. In some circles, penance for dropping it can last even longer than that. Torah scrolls are heavy - it's like holding a small child - and it isn't unusual for some wobbling to occur as its spindles are lifted, but everyone must take great care with them.

If - IF - a Torah was treated badly by those clearing Zuccotti...the first thing that comes to my mind is a scroll in my grandparents' synagogue on Long Island enclosed in a glass case for all to see as a memorial to the six million Jews who perished in the Shoah in Europe. This memorial is especially heartbreaking because the scroll has been opened enough to show the boot marks on it from Nazis who thought they could somehow stamp out Judaism by stomping on its most sacred document. The Torah cannot be used in services because of that desecration, but if it were even more badly damaged than that - as, say, the Torahs from the flooded Beth Israel Synagogue in Lakeview were - it would be given a burial with proper funeral rites. To not do such a thing would be tantamount to a grievous crime.

Hearing about these terrible events puts the denial of press coverage by those clearing the park into a more sinister light for me. Whether or not people can be allowed to settle nights at Zuccotti pales in comparison to the suppression of mere words and ideas concerning why protesters were there in the first place. If those booted out of the park can take that and run with it, Bloomberg will have ultimately failed and we will all be the better for it.

And, if - IF - a desecrated Torah scroll is indeed lost in this mess, as a Jew, Bloomberg should have known better.
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*Edited & updated at 10:32 PM. Some books have been recovered, but their condition is terrible.

2011-11-15T10:53:00.001-06:00

Crutchin'

I have to give huge thanks to Clay for the following picture. I, too, wanna see this as an animated gif - and, once I do, I'd like to (virtually) bronze it and entitle it "Win One For The Gimper."

I got the feeling, from the gesturing with the crutches, that Sean Payton may well keep them after he's healed up. Nothing like waving a stick for emphasis on the sidelines.

It was through those crutches, actually, that we found out my orthopedist doesn't watch much football, attributing it to "an ADD when it comes to watching games." I don't know if that equates to a dislike of football necessarily, but I'm glad we gave the doc a heads-up with regards to what might be the latest local trend in orthopedic aids. Heck, I'd go back to the Touro ER and demand a pair of Mobilegs...except that I have, at long last, been okayed to move free of my stylin' walker due to the appearance of new bone mass in my ankle. Don't get me wrong - Das Boot is still ensuring I walk like Quasimodo, but I can get around a tad more now.

In the long run, it also means I can shed more of my housebound addictions I've required in recent days, like the analysis of movies with Kurt Russell in them. Not to mention watching a bunch of said movies. Save. Me.

Update, 6:02 PM: Via The Gambit comes this gem:

Daaaamn right.

2011-11-09T19:40:00.000-06:00

Fourth Week Musings

Thanks to a borrowed heating pad and the fact that I tend to sleep with my right arm curling over my head anyhow, my elbow is fast on the way to allowing me to straighten it out without pain. For some reason, I keep thinking of pitcher Bob Gibson whenever I think of trying to straighten my arm out: one tale of his going to a tailor to have a suit altered comes to mind. When he was asked to straighten out his pitching arm to help the alterations, he was convinced that he had straightened it out. Seasons of stellar pitching hasn't gotten my elbow in this current situation, though, so I'll have to keep working on it.

Twitter has been a helluva online place despite my starting to get off the second floor a bit more than I have been. Disputes over the sexual abuse of boys and the sexual harassment of women will always get people talking, and the terrible news related to recent revelations over Jerry Sandusky's sexual misconduct while at Penn State (and the institution's attempts to keep it under wraps and in-house) as well as the women who are speaking up in seeming droves over presidential hopeful Herman Cain's sexually suggestive behavior have had virtual forums all abuzz for the past few days. The most memorable Twitter stream in probably all of the site's history then came courtesy of Queen of Spain, who posted a pointed question out of frustration and was so overwhelmed with followers' replies that her retweets of them had her in Twitter jail for a time (scroll down on both of those last two links to see them all). Answers ranged from simple "nos" to some descriptions of the offensive behavior complete with the further harassment victims found themselves subject to when they did report it. Just because we women are outside of the home in greater numbers doesn't mean we deserve this garbage from men in general. Putting us back in the home won't change things, either. Nor will dressing less provocatively, or speaking out less, or wearing more damned pink, or any of the other asinine ideas floated to women about how we can keep these guys off our backs. Simultaneously, though, women are expected to go through life being stoic about it all, which is still useful some of the time, but it all requires ordinary women to operate as superhumans. Perhaps it's been my physical state contributing to my current thoughts on this subject, but I have been thinking about this stuff a lot lately as I look at my mess of a house and simultaneously want to do something about it myself while wishing I could whip my husband and son into working on it. Women still have an uphill battle in life. Only thing different is the incline.

This past Monday counts as the third time in a few days my parents have been shaken by earthquakes in their current home in Oklahoma City. The second time it happened, it freaked my mother out quite a bit. Nowadays, though, I think she's graduated from being freaked out to simply being pissed off. Even her initial idea that her childhood home in east Tennessee might be free of the shakes has been abandoned. Just when Mom and Dad thought all they'd have to deal with out there were tornadoes...

Off to warm my arm. Hopefully, my physical therapy concerning it and my bum ankle will be beginning this week. 'Til then, I must limp off, though I was able to gingerly shuffle step in Das Boot yesterday to this:

Maybe I'll kick back with one of these concoctions while I take this album in. Who knows?

Update, 8:19 PM: Oh, and speaking of all the harassment talk, here's another way to look at the Penn State scandal: what if the victims were female? After you read, you might wanna do this. Dammit.

2011-11-05T14:47:00.002-05:00

Schlep To Moses Meeting

In the course of my long periods of time spent at home lately, I've been introduced to a Facebook game known as Journey of Moses that has helped me pass some bursts of hours (when I haven't been trying to figure out what I make of this, that is). I've been digging up energy, whacking scorpions, spiders, and snakes in Egypt and, currently, the east African wilderness (hey, I just killed an overseer, which makes me persona non grata in Pharaoh's kingdom), and slowly making a camp a self-sufficient enterprise, complete with a well, fig-bearing trees, an energy-giving camel (don't ask) and a cave bearing gems. It's kinda fun figuring out what furniture, flowers, and shrubs you can use to make your personal oasis a nice, friendly spot to which you can retreat when tussling with traders in the desert or digging for mysterious clues gets to be too much (or you run out of energy, whichever comes first). I came across something in the relics up for purchase that was kinda disturbing and just erroneous, historically speaking.

"D'you know they're offering crosses you can put in your campsite in this game?" I said to Dan about my recent game obsession. "They're supposed to produce gems for use in the game. But that's just wrong, anyhow. Um, it's MOSES, here, not Jesus."

Dan said the game sounded stupid anyway, but said it could be just a piece of equipment, like something to hang a tunic on or something. "If it is intended as a cross cross, I can just see a campsite covered with the things," he said with a mischievous smile.

Uh-oh, I thought. Last thing I want is for a fantasy space of mine to resemble Baton Rouge.

2011-11-04T13:00:00.003-05:00

RSD Holding Forth

Thanks to the Gambit's newest reporter Charles Maldonado, I was able to check out from home the Recovery School District's presentation to the city council on its efforts to get more community involvement and input into the workings of its schools.

If anything was to be learned from this bit of political theater, it was at least two things:

Nothing in recent memory illustrated how detached the workings of the city's schools have become from the day-to-day of city council business, from the cluelessness of Stacy Head on where early childhood education funding (specifically for pre-K3-and-4 programs) has gone (down the toilet) to the queries of councilman Jon Johnson demanding RSD superintendent John White give him clues as to what is happening with specific school sites in the Lower Ninth Ward - queries that couldn't possibly have been addressed that morning. White repeatedly directed councilmembers and public commenters to the many public meetings that were forthcoming to have their concerns addressed in more detail. Giving everybody only a minute to speak will do that.
Then again, it wasn't like only having a minute to speak discouraged those who wanted to be heard (for the determined, it never really does). Recurrent themes in the comment period were all from African-Americans wondering how much more the destruction of their heritage in relation to local education could take. People at the podium raised issues from the possible renaming of L.B. Landry High on the west bank ("What did we do to deserve this?") to the contentiousness of school admissions to the mass firing of a mostly black public school teaching pool shortly after 8/29/2005 vs. the current predominantly white makeup of the RSD's current teaching pool to a plea for control of the public schools to return to the city. Judging from the few comments that were heard, community involvement still has a ways to go.

The only public meeting I currently see listed on the RSD website is the one on November 29 White referred to a few times yesterday. There are supposed to be more meetings, as well as some parent centers to help facilitate greater community involvement, supposedly. Can't find them on the RSD site yet, but at least White mentioned those locations yesterday. Kristen Gisleson-Palmer lauded White on his work with two of the high schools in her district, which was the only reference to this measure that was apparently sprung on the teachers of those schools without much warning. Of course the RSD's defense will be that everyone should have gotten a clue from Johnny White's 100-day plan. When you're in the thick of actually doing your job, however, who has the time to see what may be coming down the pike?

One unfortunate sidebar to yesterday's events was BESE District 2 board member Louella Givens' appearance at the presentation. It was noted that, though Jackie Clarkson couldn't be in attendance for the RSD presentation, councilmember Cynthia Hedge-Morrell - who kept the presentation and the comment period moving along in Clarkson's stead - had invited Givens to be present. That fact alone, along with some asides from Givens during the presentation, made Givens look more like a stepchild of local public education rather than a leader. Though I admire her being the only one on the state board to speak out against blanket charterization, her appearance in council chambers and her press conference later on in the day didn't exactly cement a higher position for her in the upcoming BESE District 2 runoff elections.

2011-10-31T13:19:00.001-05:00

Convalescence Dispatch

A big howdy from the second floor.

Twitter communications have still been emitting from my portable tech device, though I wouldn't describe it as wrestling manatees by any stretch of the imagination. I have mostly gotten over the feeling that something with a screen and a keyboard will explode if I touch it.

I still can't extend my arm all the way out, though I haven't worn a sling since the first week of my injury, but, after the news in the second week that the cracked ankle bone wasn't healing in a perfectly aligned manner - a millimeter off, the doc said - I did get better news on the ankle today. No more shifting of dem pesky bones. Gonna peel open a Halloween Fun-Size peppermint patty sometime today in celebration - perhaps when I sit out on my porch later tonight and give candy to the spooky things that pass by. Apparently, every NOPD district station will be giving away candy as well...just a couple of days after they had a prescription toss-out event. Check your treats, kids.

It's amazing how insane staying mostly indoors in one place can make a person. Having to stay off this ankle for these past few weeks, nervous at even the slightest bit of weight put on it for fear of a further separation of the cracked bones, necessitating a cast and/or surgery, wishing that, perhaps, one of these could migrate from the New Museum to my house so I wouldn't have to deal with my stairs - it all reached a fever pitch this past Saturday when it seemed like the walls were closing in and I was a useless lump reduced to reading and cross-stitching to pass the time. Dan took pity on me and got me out and about that night, and then I went to check out the latest Saints game at Edie's the next day. Ah, the freedom. Even if it was only a few hours' worth.

One thing I am also free of is the Vicodin - no that it did much for me anyway. I appear to be in that subset of the human race that does not get loopy on the stuff. Both my parents cautioned me strongly against getting hooked on it, and hey, my dad should definitely know, but it didn't even get its hooks in me to begin with. Only real painkiller for me was rest and less stress, I guess. No, I will not be passing out those little blue pills along with our Almond Joys.

There'll be more later on some of my other musings in past days, most notably this, probably over on Humid City. This was just to let you know what's doing.

Dan saw loads of Christmasy stuff following close on the heels of the Halloween stuff that began appearing in the stores around late August (it seems) and asked if the Nola blogger Hostilidays You-Tube Wars would be beginning after tonight. Guess the only answer I'd have to that right now would be this. In other words, it could get hairy.

2011-10-28T13:57:00.001-05:00

2011-10-24T15:38:00.001-05:00

Both Sides Now?

Perhaps it's just me, but the tone of this trailer for Learning Matters upcoming documentary on New Orleans public schools seems a tad too hopeful, and a bit dismissive of the activists and parents who have experienced serious flaws in the current "system of schools" here.

I do have more to say on the BESE board elections, but I have to resign myself to one more week of making sure my cracked ankle bone doesn't realign itself while it heals. What I will direct you to is why the sleeper campaigns that flew under the radar in the middle of this past Saturday's elections were much more important than you would think.

"BESE races are where it's at," said Timmy Teepell, the governor's campaign manager, but also the prime mover behind the GOP Victory Fund, which is spending heavily in BESE campaigns. The Republicans are joined by a deep-pocketed coalition of business groups that are active for the first time in education elections.

They are opposed by the Coalition for Public Education, comprised of the statewide organizations for teachers, superintendents and school boards, which are using their extensive grass-roots networks to counter the financial advantage of the conservative coalition.

As one consultant put it, the Republicans and business PACs, with all their money, can only marginally improve the conservative majority in the Legislature, but they can have a profound effect on BESE by turning just a couple of seats while defending the ones held by their allies.
Why that now matters so much to business leaders is their commonly held view that the greatest barrier to economic development in Louisiana is not the tax structure, government regulation or the legal system but the shortage of skilled workers to fill available jobs and the more that could be created. The fastest way to change that is through better public schools, whether their kids attend them or not.

The business coalition is targeting two districts for turnover: in northeast Louisiana, where incumbent Keith Guice, a Monroe Democrat and former superintendent, is being challenged by Republican businessman Jay Guillot of Ruston; and in the southwest, where incumbent Dale Bayard of Lake Charles, who recently switched to Republican, faces GOP newcomer Holly Boffy, the 2010 state teacher of the year, from Lafayette Parish.

Those groups also are supporting Teach for America leader Kira Orange-Jones in an uphill race in the New Orleans-based district against incumbent Louella Givens, who, despite a $1.3 million IRS lien on her business and a DWI arrest this year, is backed by some local officials and the Louisiana Association of Educators and will be hard to beat.

The ultimate goal of the business coalition is to give Gov. Bobby Jindal a clear board majority that will enable him to hire the superintendent he wants and to press his agenda for charter schools and performance-based teacher evaluations. Changes in K-12 education figure to be the centerpiece of his legislative agenda in 2012, leading to a showdown with teacher unions and school boards over modifying tenure.

Why K-12 education matters so much to Jindal, for his future, is that, by the end of his second term, he hardly will be able to claim to be an effective governor if public education still drags in the rear of national rankings.

Add in NYC mayor (and head of NYC's public schools) Michael Bloomberg's nifty financial contribution to an anti-teachers' union PAC just a few days before this past Saturday's elections and anyone paying attention to what's going on with public education these days gets the idea that something's up. Since the abandonment of this state by viable Democratic party candidates, though, the best the state can muster is Runoff City in the BESE elections to let Jindal & Co. know we won't be taking his special interests lying down. If you are in one of those runoff districts, don't miss your chance to have your voice heard. Go vote.

Update, 10-25: The Daily Kingfish has more.

So, major financiers from elsewhere (all rabid pro-charter donors) are boosting a Louisiana BESE candidate. So what? For once, I guess we have to agree; this is way the game of politics is played. But at some point, doesn't it become hard for us in-state to stomach the fact that our education system's future is compeltely in the hands of a bunch of trust-funders and corporate fat cats? Buying our elections must be rather cheap for these 1%'ers.

2011-10-21T18:00:00.001-05:00

While housebound...

I've been discovering what a great bunch of friends we have to have been assisting me all this time. They've spoiled me with granitas from my favorite coffee place, they've baked me cookies and made me gumbo, and they've even helped me down and up my stairs for a lovely evening outing. I am a lucky, lucky person and a grateful one.

I've also been doing a lot of Twitter scanning, reading, and cross-stitching to pass the time up on my second floor. What follows is a small sampling of stuff that has occurred to me while my bones have been healing (I hope - I'll know for sure come the orthopedist's appointment Monday).

My dad called me last week from Oklahoma City's brand new Whole Foods Market to see how I was doing. I asked him how he liked it and he said it reminded him of the Wegman's store he and my mom used to frequent when they lived in central Pennsylvania. What he didn't like was that the pizza my mom ordered from the Whole Foods' pizza bakery hadn't even gotten started when he came around to pick it up. I heard a "You suck" from my dad to said pizza bakers. "It's not good pizza anyhow, Dad," I told him. Not a good way to get started in OKC, Whole Foods.
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I was told once by my aunt's ex-husband that, as a kid, I tossed a frisbee on a Fire Island beach and, when it got out of control, a nice man picked it up and tossed it back to me, a man my ex-uncle swears up and down was E.B. White. I am currently in the middle of Michael Sims' account of how Charlotte's Web came to be and don't want the book to end. It is written so lovingly and carefully about White's inner life that I find myself wanting to curl up with it, take it slowly, then hunt down most of White's writings and look them over again with new eyes and new knowledge. The best nonfiction should have this effect.
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My thoughts on Sean Payton's injury, through the prism of my own injuries, are up at Humid City. I am also jazzed to learn that HC blogmaestro Loki will be moving back down here later on this year. Sit down and get crunk - that's how I'm rolling right now.
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It's nice to have reminders of how great this city is, especially when it takes Los Angeles to task. It's also nice to have reminders of why being the first generation under the 24/7/365 media microscope is a burden we're frankly tired of. What we still have on a local level, however, are reminders of our failures in the realm of public safety that go beyond the pain of storm-and-levee breach recovery. Paul Gailiunas' brief return to New Orleans for the premiere of his and his late spouse Helen Hill's film The Florestine Collection was one such reminder. I had similar feelings as Kelly had when I read the front page account of Gailiunas' return in the daily paper, along with some real anger at how little things have changed. It is irreparably damaging, the crime that we have here, and are we really any closer to addressing the causes of it? I don't know that we are. I don't know that the same police force that accused Gailiunas of being a suspect in his wife's murder isn't still at work in key positions on the force now, which means Helen Hill's murderer has even less a chance of being found beyond the ordinary passage of time making the case ever colder with each passing year. There is a lot that makes New Orleans great, but we are still a damaged community. Some damages have cut deeper than others and are still hurting us. Are we really easing this pain, or performing a rushed triage, thinking we can get to some things later? We are long past the band-aids.
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Tomorrow's a voting day. My husband asked me about the state school board representative elections, and I personally feel I have to go with the one person who has been speaking out against the rush to charterization, despite her other failings. G-Bitch has more on this, but also emphasizes the need for informed voting. Don't go to the polls and leave your brains at home.
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That's all I got for now, folks. See you all on the Tweeter Tube, as it's easier for me to tote the trusty Droid around while using my stylin' walker to schlep to the terlet. yes, I wash my hands, even though the broken elbow makes that kinda tough. Don't fall on your roller skates, kids.

2011-10-12T21:43:00.000-05:00

Arrrgh, I have the perfect picture of the current torture device I must wear 'round my ankle right now, but I cannot upload it from my otherwise trusty Droid. Suffice it to say it has unceremoniously been dubbed Das Boot because, honestly, it isn't really helping me out pain-wise right now. What I CAN say is that I am 38 years young and I have possibly learned some lessons.

1. Even though my brain pretty much thinks I'm 25, or 21 on my best days, it reverted back to my preteen self the second I walked into the skating rink with my son for his school's skate party last night. I was never a roller queen as a kid, but I did enjoy it. I strapped those rental skates on with some relish, helped the little guy get his on, and we gamely stumbled into the carpeted area surrounding the huge, flat oval. He headed for the kiddie rink while I took a few turns around the big one, turns that weren't half bad considering I hadn't been near a rink in a couple of decades. The trouble began when I got back on that loud carpet to get the kiddo.

2. My powers of denial are something to behold. Truly. Put mine up against any current GOP presidential wannabes and I'd leave 'em all in the dust. Ankles already weakened from some trips 'round the concrete floor, plus even greater crowds of stumbling kids to avoid, plus having to make sure a stumbling little guy was staying intact led to my falling on my butt and trying to cushion the fall with my right elbow. My right foot was also not feeling so good. I carefully removed my skates right there, made it to the picnic table where I'd stashed our shoes, struck up a conversation with the parents of a new kid in my son's class, and asked them if they could get me some ice for my ankle. The elbow wasn't doing as bad at the time, but boy did that change. Dan was at a band practice near the lakefront, so it was just me and the little guy in Metairie. Don't even ask how I made it to Touro's ER. I'd probably have admitted even then, with the pain finally getting to me, that sheer denial that the swollen ankle could be more than a sprain, but hey, let's get it checked out for kicks was stronger than anything else getting me to a doctor last night.

3. ERs ain't nothing but elaborate reassurance machines, a reality I've only really had to face in relation to the little guy's care up to this point. The most the X-rays got me were crutches, Das Boot, and a Vicodin prescription Dan didn't think he could refill unless I was at our local pharmacy in person doing it, so I haven't had much more than a couple of ineffective Percocets until this afternoon. Putting me on crutches with this bum elbow is kinda ridiculous right now, but ERs are not known for expert interpretations of X-rays. Plus, I live on the second floor of a grand ol' New Orleans home with high ceilings, a house that is already four feet off the ground to begin with. Don't ask me how I got up 24 steps with a broken bone in my ankle and possibly a broken one in my elbow. "Possibly?" you're asking. I couldn't get in to see the orthopedist referred to me until tomorrow. Until then, I've gotta struggle. A good first step on the road to using my left hand more is, apparently, using chopsticks. Thanks for these lessons, Touro ER.

Ultimate moral? If you're old and decide to roller skate, wear pads. I talked about my dreams and fears about becoming a Big Easy Rollergirl to Dan in the ER waiting room, among them that I'd become injured and it'd throw the household out of whack because my primary responsibility is the care of the little guy, and he said, "Well, here's your biggest fear realized. Is it really so bad? Besides, roller derby's great exercise. You should go for it." He was dead serious. No idea if he'd fallen on his head on the way to helping me into the ER.

Then again...they say a broken bone becomes stronger after it's healed...and I wasn't wearing pads...oh, somebody stop me before I try out for the BERG!

2011-10-07T18:52:00.000-05:00

Humid City Supplemental

I attended the Occupy New Orleans march yesterday and had all this to say about it. I also have the pictures to show for it.

One of the things I've been thinking about this whole time, though, is Gary Shteyngart's reaction to the prescience of his most recent novel, Super Sad True Love Story, in which people are judged by their credit ratings, the United States is in many wars over oil - the latest being with Venezuela - and the financial state of the country is beholden to China. One particular series of scenes revolves around people who have camped out in Central Park and Tompkins Square Park in Manhattan, in part out of protest at being made homeless by the government, and, ultimately, because the majority of the campers are "Low Net Worth" and have no other place to go. Sounds a tad familiar...

...his prophetic tendencies started to crop up as early as 2006. "When I started writing 'Super Sad,' the research took me to the idea that the real estate market, because of all the sub-prime mortgages, was going to burst, and that it would take along with it all the hedge funds and investment banks, provoking an economic meltdown," he said. "Well that happened in 2008."

He was forced to make his satire more and more extreme. He shifted focus from the real estate bubble to China.

"Flying from the stunningly modern Beijing airport to the Newark airport now is like flying from Paris to Burkina Faso," he said. "There's a different spirit in China. They have a market of a billion people who are so extraordinarily energized, in the way we haven't been since the fifties."

The currency of choice in "Super Sad" is the yuan-pegged dollar, and luxury Manhattan apartments are priced in yuan and "Northern Euros." China's rise culminates in a Washington summit between the ruling "bipartisan party" and a group of Chinese dignitaries, which leads to the announcement of the U.S. default. It's a chain of events specific to the satiric world of the novel -- which Shteyngart noted makes the current standstill in Washington seem even more absurd. We don't yet have other central banks breathing down our necks. So why trigger such a potentially catastrophic event?

"The debt talk is just complete nonsense," he said. "It's all calculated to appeal narrowly to a political base. No one really thinks that it'll help anyone if our debt rating gets downgraded."

Shteyngart said that he's depressed by how many of the parodic, extreme predictions he's made have come true. So with his next book, which he's in the midst of writing, he's getting out of the futurist game. Instead, he's looking back, in a memoir, to his experience growing up in the Soviet Union.

"I'm going to write about my childhood," he said. "It's about time."

2011-10-03T21:06:00.000-05:00

I can't even bring myself to type it. It'll always be the Louisiana Superdome. There ought to be a rule about stadium sponsorship: If the owner(s) can't get a stadium sponsor's product to every fan, then sponsorship is out. Alas, none of us will be getting a luxury car anytime soon. It's totally fair that Alabama gets a factory from the Superdome sponsor that creates jobs, while one man gets loads of dough from that same sponsor. Oh, yeah.

Perhaps, on Dome Renaming Day, we can reenact this famous scene with a bright red vehicle straight from Benson Motors:

One of the first "Killer Bee" movies to come out in the late 1970's "The Savage Bees" starts out with this Brazilian banana boat, the Cornila Rios, limping into New Orleans Harbor with everyone on deck being either missing or dead.

later in the movie a local Sheriff Donald McKew, Ben Johnson,finds his dog Zeth dead and despite it being Fat Tuesday and the Mardi Gras parade he takes Zeth's body to the City Coroner's Office to find out what killed him. Assistant Coroner Dr. Jeff DuRand, Michael Parks, sees something in Seth's stomach that truly disturbs him and calls his girlfriend and entomologist Jenny Devereaut, Gretchen Corbett, to check it out. It turns out that his as well as the city of New Orleans, worst fears are borne out. Zeth was killed by a swarm of deadly killer African Bees.With a number the crew of the Corlina Rios bodies recovered from New Orleans Harbor it becomes more and more evident that the banana boat has a colony of African Bees hidden in it's hull....

Jenny ends up being stuck in her red Volkswagon,the color red attracts the killer bees. Jeff in a last act of desperation has her drive the car with him in a police car pushing her Volkswagon, the last mile, through the now empty streets of New Orleans into the Superdome.

The temperature inside the enclosed sport facility is lowered to 45 degrees immobilizing the killer bees and having them collected and brought into the custody of Dr. Rufus Carter's lab for further study.

Crank up the meat-locker temperatures, Saints fans. It may be the only way to immobilize Tom Benson.

2011-10-03T14:14:00.002-05:00

Suspicion

This might just be me on a lack of sleep, but we are a country full of suspicious minds lately. This goes beyond my son wanting to be an amateur sleuth, when he's not telling me how he'll kit-bash HO-scale model trains.

I returned from an out-of-town jaunt this past weekend to read this about the Wall Street arrests I'd heard about:

The fact is that while at one time in our nation's history individualism was seen as a serious threat to the status quo, now not only is it not dangerous, it's an almost comical anachronism. There is no individualism these days. Nothing truly audacious can stand in our culture, not when our culture has become so monstrously adept at assimilating all forms of rebellion until they become completely meaningless and utterly impotent. Prepackaged, homogenized non-conformity is as close as your local Hot Topic. Agitation is fashion. Defiance is a slogan. Insurrection is product placement. The revolution is not only televised, it can be DVRed and enjoyed at your convenience.

So, no, hundreds of people wearing different colorful outfits, each carrying a sign emblazoned with his or her personal agenda not only constitutes an ineffective mess, it provides endless fodder for the idiots at Fox News, who get to smirk patronizingly and present it as good news from the front, as Matt Taibbi once called it, for their audience of bitter old people.

The protest itself was important -- too important to be incompetently executed to the point that it could be easily dismissed by the masses.

But admittedly, something has happened over the past week or so: A single, fundamental message of Occupy Wall Street has begun to coalesce, and a series of disorganized grievances has slowly started to dovetail into one, coherent movement. What's more, the outrage voiced by a few has lit a match to the anger felt by millions -- and the resulting fire is now spreading rapidly, with similar protests flaring up across the country. Occupy Wall Street may have started as a muddled gathering of occasionally conflicting ideas, but it was the spark that was needed to potentially create a conflagration. And it's damn well about time.

I've always believed that in order for a protest of this kind to be effective, it would have to draw the support of -- and present as a public face -- more than simply the youth, since young people can always be shrugged off as misguided or simply in need of a job to better occupy their time (the latter criticism being wonderfully ironic given the very reason for the protest in the first place)....

...It's more than just a bunch of "deluded kids" now. It's the impossible-to-deny men and women who've found themselves crushed under the heel of an unaccountable and out-of-control corporate culture -- of those consistently on the winning end of the rigged, zero-sum game that success in America has gruesomely morphed into at the beginning of the 21st century. They're part of the vanishing middle-class -- and they're fucking sick of it. We're fucking sick of it.

I'm not a fan of the Rage Against the Machine brand of social upheaval, which is the reason I was wary about Occupy Wall Street at the beginning. But the band was right about one thing, and it may provide the perfect summary of what's erupted on the streets of New York City: It has to start somewhere. It has to start sometime. What better place than here? What better time than now?

...and then I took a look at Jennifer Williams' interview with Julie Lause, principal of the newly reorganized Harriet Tubman Charter School on the west bank and found that I was still pretty suspicious of the people who do want to do better by the kids here but who still must straddle the standards set by the feds and the state. I do wish Lause well in this:

We really believe that if the teacher teaches well all year, we shouldn’t have to do “test prep” to prepare them for the LEAP and iLEAP. All year, teachers are teaching to the standards and these interims are a way for teachers to do course corrections and make sure all the students really are mastering the material.

This is a great thing to aspire to. I hope it holds up when parents begin panicking about Tubman's school rankings, as they will. Unfortunately, the life of the school depends a tad too much on it, which is what's partly responsible for the revocation of the Algiers Charter School Association's Tubman charter in the first place. And, apparently, the former Tubman teachers who decided to stay with the ACSA...

(according to Lause:

LAUSE: All of our teachers are new to this building.

LENS: Was that a strategic decision on your part or was the old faculty reluctant to get involved with the turnaround?

LAUSE: The former ACSA teachers chose to stay with ACSA, I believe.)

.... seem to be getting screwed for their loyalty. If anyone can corroborate the following, please let me know:

@bcreative10 ACSA#rsdcharter annouced to teachers that they will no longer have a retirement plan!

As for somewhat happier, less suspicious news, I started my weekend with bad chicken-treatment information only to spend a good part of my time in Buckhead with my aunt's gorgeous free-range chickens. None of these babies will be swinging 'round anyone's head anytime soon.

Update, 7:27 PM: I am still suspicious of Occupy Wall Street and its satellite movements, largely because they are more re-actions rather than actions. There is definitely something - a whole lot of somethings - wrong, and more concrete goals are needed, because, like it or not, we are a goal-oriented society. Look at the commonalities in all your stories. Please. Then start from there.

2011-09-30T07:30:00.001-05:00

I missed tossing my sins into the Mississippi this year (why symbolically toss your sins into a moving body of water? Fish don't blink.). I've never done this*, and I had no clue that there was a large amount of protest surrounding it. I should've figured. This is pretty cruel:

To get their message of peace for poultry out, The Alliance To End Chickens as Kaporos is going to host not one, not two, but THREE two-hour protest/demonstrations in Brooklyn this year. The group argues their side like this:

The use of chickens in Kaporos rituals is cruel and contrary to Jewish teachings. It is not a mitzvah but a custom that originated in the middle ages. Most observers give money to charity which they express symbolically by swinging coins while reciting prayers for mercy and peace. Swinging and slaughtering chickens as Kaporos violates tsa’ar ba’alei chaim, the Jewish mandate not only to avoid needlessly hurting animals, but to show them compassion.

There are indeed other ways to show that you've repented. At this point, the chickens ought to go on strike...

Here's to a good, sweet new year. Leave the chickens alone.

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*The Gothamist article makes a cheeky reference to the Occupy Wall Street protests in the article to boot. Perhaps some swinging of money about the heads of some investment firms' CEOs might get a little repentance going there. Who knows?

2011-09-27T12:40:00.002-05:00

I still cannot resist bookstores to save my life, and I really should, but I took a look in a local one today to get a surprise tome for the little guy (okay, and a little something for myself). I found myself browsing through this one:

Wow.

My little guy is going on nine and is already engaged in reading and talking (or should I say lecturing?) about environmental issues such as recycling, the oil spill, and alternative energy: if he could stand up in front of a group of people and give the impassioned speech he gave on the above-mentioned subjects to his carpool mate in the backseat on the way to school this morning, he could well get more people to start hounding Congress and private research entities for affordable clean alternatives. Yet I hesitated to get this book because of its frightening implications...

A few things instantly came to my protective mama brain:

An interview in comic form Art Spiegelman conducted with Maurice Sendak around the time Sendak came out with a children's book about the homeless. I could only find it in Spanish through the interwebs, but I recall the discussion between Sendak and Spiegelman presenting a justification for a graduate school instructor I had to deny her young daughter the opportunity to read Spiegelman's comic opus Maus until she was older because of its frank discussions and depictions of the Shoah. There's something to be said for age-appropriate introduction of thorny subjects - but then there's the point where you have to ask yourself, as a parent, when the protective nature of your child-rearing becomes overprotective.
There are differences between reading about this stuff and seeing it. Big mistake on our part: taking the kiddo to see WALL-E. We'd been warned about the entire first half of the flick being kind of scary for young kids - a dusty, abandoned planet with a lone robot charged with compacting mounds of garbage, his only friend being a small cockroach he nearly squashes - and he didn't calm down until the lone robot hitched a ride to the humans' ship with his robot love EVE. It's pretty much why we rarely watch the news or take in documentaries like Gasland or anything about the Macondo blowout with the little guy at this age. Does he really need the weight of possible futures on his shoulders at this stage of the game?
That said, we've all got to struggle with the fact that our time on this planet is finite, as are our resources, yet here we are doing the things that will supposedly ensure that we'll stick around for generations to come: having children, raising them to carry on as we have done. We must also struggle with the fact that some things have gone awry in this assumption of "progress" and take solid steps to alter our paths, because no amount of sheltering our kids is going to keep them from seeing that this world is, in fact, not perfect and we could be doing a hell of a lot better. Any possible models we may have presented them with for living may well be turned inside-out and stood on their heads despite our best efforts. Ultimately, willful ignorance on our part - and on our son's - could be our undoing. But - once again - can an eight-year-old really handle this?

I flipped through World Without Fish quickly and liked a few things in it towards its end. There are actual suggestions of what individuals can do to stop the demise of the fish populations around the world and guidelines for local activism that include having a sense of humor. Not bad, really.

But...not until he gets a little older.

I'm sure he will then be ready for the following:

Heart-breaking pictures of seabirds covered in black crude oil, arresting as they are, can miss the hidden story of an oil spill's impact on wildlife.

Exposure to even tiny concentrations of the chemicals present in oil can also cause harmful biological effects that usually go unnoticed, according to a study published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"It's striking that even though the analytical chemistry doesn't indicate exposure, the biology does," says Andrew Whitehead, a biologist at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, who led the study. "We can measure all the chemistry we want in the environment, but if want to know whether organisms have been exposed, we have to ask them."

The researchers studied the impact of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill on Gulf killifish (Fundulus grandis) living in the Gulf of Mexico. They collected water and tissue samples three times from marshes where the killifish lived: once in early May, before oil from the blown well had arrived; once in late June, when oil had reached the marshes; and again in late August, after oil was no longer visible. They collected samples from six sites, but only one -- in Barataria Bay, Louisiana -- was heavily oiled following the spill...

...Whitehead has previously shown that exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) can cause harmful gene expression changes in killifish, which are an important food source for many species, including economically important ones such as red snapper. Because PCBs and the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) found in crude oil have similar biological effects, the researchers looked at their impact on the same set of genes.

They found analogous changes in gene expression in killifish from the marshes, and in killifish embryos exposed to contaminated water samples in the lab. These changes have previously been shown to cause developmental abnormalities, decreased embryo survival and lower reproductive success. "It doesn't take much PAH to mess with development," Whitehead says.

"The ability of fish larvae to survive has a huge effect on the population down the road," says biologist Lee Fuiman, director of the University of Texas Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas, who was not involved with the study. "A small change in the percent survival equals a large change in the adult population."

If he decides to write about it for school, here's hoping it won't be suppressed.

2011-09-23T13:59:00.001-05:00

Sorry, folks, can't resist this:

:

Geaux, Saints.

9/24/2011: Oh, and, my gut reaction on hearing about this was...well, it kinda started to turn my gut inside-out. I agree with Ian that it is indeed probably the worst trend in sports, this insane, seedy business of selling a stadium's naming rights, but the upside is that it spawned a heck of a Twitter hashtag harnessing the best of this town's sense of humor. Go add to it if you've got anything. It's better than antacids.

And, if Benson & Co. were really serious about trying to attract sponsors, they shoulda taken a cue from the New Orleans Levee's second issue ever and put a giant "You Can't Beat Wagner's Meat" bumper sticker atop the Dome's roof.

2011-09-21T13:25:00.000-05:00

Halcyon Daze

It's never something known fully at the time - when you're busy living your life, the possibility of stopping to look around is mostly not an option - but there are times that shape and scar your mental landscape so vividly that their impact isn't fully realized until years later.

See, I embarked on something kinda new for me a few months ago (check the, um, reviews in the back of the pdf for my by-line on a few). It's been a challenge, but a good one, although nearly every time I rack my brains trying to come up with ways of describing what I hear (and wonder why I jumped at doing album reviews in the first place in the low points of the process), I discover more and more about the prism through which I see today's music.

1989: My family moves me from sprawling metropolitan Houston to small town Pennsylvania at what I felt was the worst possible time. Sixteen, missing my friends with every fiber of my being, I find some solace in watching MTV on cable - something I never had access to unless I went to friend's houses back in Houston - getting a subscription to Rolling Stone, and getting to know my dad's record collection better than he did. My parents, one New Year's Eve, watching The Last Waltz, were racking their brains trying to figure out which band was the main attraction. "Who are these guys?"

"Dad, you have their albums. It's The Band."

"What, who?"

"They're right here, Dad," I say with teenage exasperation, yanking out the Brown Album and Stage Fright.

I go through the rest of my high school years convinced that, by and large, popular music is kind of a wasteland except for R.E.M., most early-'80's era music coming out of Athens, Georgia, Neneh Cherry, Talking Heads, They Might Be Giants, and early Violent Femmes. My suspicions are confirmed when I go to my first concert, a double-bill of Squeeze and Katrina & The Waves, after a friend urges me to go see a band that's still playing music, not one that's alive only on records, tapes, and posters like the Beatles or the Who. I admit that it was good to dance to but it didn't really speak to me any more than that. It's okay to dance, don't get me wrong, but man, did I want more.

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This past Saturday, I turned on NPR and heard snippets of this interview. Later on, that same day, I saw this post, and could not believe how freaking old I felt. 1991? It's been that long ago? Don't tell me that. '91 was the beginning of the process of my busting out of the small town I'd been held in for two years, the home of those who expressed surprise that I'd actually made plans to go to a college outside of Pennsylvania. Yes, the world was bigger than the Keystone State, and it was certainly much larger than my parents' house. Location, location, location...

And if what I'm going to say next sounds like a cliche, well, it happens to be one that has truth behind it. Not much gets the kids into music more than location, and that goes doubly so for kids attending art schools. All-day studios three times a week, homework designed to make you nearly lose your head (you don't want to know about how horrible designer's gouache is), and terrible cafeteria food combined to make the freshman dorms a holding tank for all sorts of crazy doings at all hours. When clandestine underage drinking wasn't going on (all you had to do was look in the recycling bins in the trash rooms to see that it was, in fact, happening), all sorts of furtive sex, some drug use (and hey, wasn't it great that Spray-Fix, a relatively cheap high, was pretty much required in freshman foundation?), or random acts of public art and public annoyance (woke up to two of those: both the upper and lower quad covered with masking tape outlines of people, animals, and bikes one morning, and then sixty people drumming in the lower quad at 3 AM), the next best release was music.

If you could afford going to shows after blowing loads of money on art supplies for your courses, you went. If you couldn't, you got hold of albums wherever you could - if you hadn't already brought a ton of them with you - and you blasted them as you worked in the super-messy dorm studio spaces. The Doors would beat against Blues Traveler shouting down Bob Marley, melding into that Julee Cruise/Angelo Badalamenti Twin Peaks music my roommate would play ad nauseum when she wasn't watching my copy of When Harry Met Sally... on our VCR practically every time I walked into our room (I still can't watch that movie all the way through), folding into De La Soul, Public Enemy, the latest U2, and some Metallica screaming down another hall where, when two guys discovered they were in the room a rock star briefly stayed in during his time at the school, they somehow determined which side of the room his bed had been on and positioned their beds against that same wall to "pick up his vibes." Jane's Addiction vied for attention with Black Flag, Sonic Youth, the Grateful Dead, Neil Young, the latest R.E.M., the Flaming Lips, and Helmet. The effect of walking through the halls was sometimes schizophrenia-inducing; I wasn't entirely sure which music was out to get me more, or which I wanted to carry me off, for that matter.

Once I got hooked on glassworking, I didn't have much of a choice. If you had a blow slot for three hours, one of the best ways to cut the roar of the furnaces was to blast the hot shop stereo. Second or third year glass students would usually monopolize it - one trio would constantly get the Allman Brothers or the Pixies on; I liked the latter better than the former - but the default was always the local indie station, where so many more sounds were piped directly into our brains as we kept hot glass from falling off stainless steel blowpipes and got better at shaping it into vessels and other art works. It thus seemed much more than serendipitous when some of those sounds were coming out of one of the great studio glass Meccas of the 20th century. Seattle was it in no small part because one man with an eyepatch decided to establish a couple of Glass Wonderlands, one of 'em by Puget Sound, another 50 miles north of Seattle proper, where the first students legendarily braved the rain and the damp, raced banana slugs in what little spare time they had, and slowly, steadily built a school for generations of other glass artists.

I finally got to the Mecca to do mostly what I'd been doing up to that summer: work away with my favorite medium. The Pilchuck campus was beautifully isolated and very dry that summer, the only trip into Seattle was to see Chihuly's Boathouse studio, and the only music I remember hearing in the hot shop was Professor Longhair, Morphine, the Iguanas, and Ween. The imagined Pacific Northwest shone so much more brightly back at my art school on the East Coast - the reality was a gas station barista getting pissed off at me because I didn't order a cappuccino the way she thought I should. No wonder Kurt Cobain wrote the kinds of songs he did.

Life went on after that, as did the music. I found I liked Pearl Jam's second album much better than their first, that Nirvana's Unplugged was better than their regular albums in some ways because of their versions of great tracks by the Vaselines, the Meat Puppets, and Bowie, and that I really preferred Hole to Bikini Kill. My time with glassworking flamed out, but my love for music never did.

So, hey, bear with me as I try to decide whether to be shocked or pleased that some of these guys and gals are still making music - or not, as the case may be - and I find some new stuff that may or may not be to my liking. This is supposed to be fun, I'll tell myself as I rack my brains once again over how to put music into words. Fun - or obsession?

I'll get back to you on that...

2011-09-19T09:52:00.001-05:00

The combination of massive dispersant use, fewer obviously dead birds and animals, the capping of the well, and the government's apparent eagerness to help BP tell the story in the past tense, dovetailed nicely with our own short attention spans and eagerness for novelty. When anyone dared bring up the fact that there were still troubles in the Gulf you could almost see the country cringe. Please, we said, Haven't we covered that already?

Despite this, in late October of 2010 I returned to the Gulf to see things for myself. During the summer I had gotten to know Ryan Lambert, a Cajun fishing and hunting guide in the town of Buras, about an hour and a half south of New Orleans. In July Ryan took me out in his boat to show me the necrotic fringe of oil along the wetlands, and that fall I wanted to visit him, and his landscape, again.

After we shook hands in his lodge, Ryan told me he wanted to show me something. We walked out behind his house to massive fish scaling tables where two hundred pounds of shrimp was piled. The shrimping season had finally opened, despite the objections of many shrimpers themselves and the reports of tarballs coming up in the nets. A cry of "Ollie, Ollie, in-come-free" had gone up. Everyone back in the water. Now, while I watched, Ryan started flicking through them until he got to one that he held under my eyes. He pointed to the black gills.

"Something is wrong down here," he said. "Very wrong. Look at this shrimp...I don't know what that black is but it's not right. Yesterday we had 500 pounds of shrimp and I looked at the gills and I could see black inside every one of them. I called the authorities and they said, 'Well, yeah, that's black gill disease. It's a bacteria.' So okay, I'll buy that, a bacteria. So then I got a question for you. Why haven't I ever seen it before in thirty years of hunting and fishing here? I try to be open-minded about all this to make sure that I don't overstep. But things are not right. I know when things are right because I been here so long and I live outside. In all my time here I've seen only one fish kill. But since the spill I've seen nine with my own eyes. Nine massive fish kills. Fish suddenly thrown up dead on shore or floating on the water. Why? For thirty years it didn't happen, so why'd it happen this year? And the fish too. Usually in October, when the trout come in, you have ten to twelve boats out fishing which means you're catching a thousand fish a day. But that's not what we're seeing. I've seen only seven boats limit-out since July. Seven boats! Unheard of. Ought to be seven a day. I can understand why we don't have business because of the perception of the oil. But not to have fish."

When the media did occasionally check in with the Gulf story, they liked to ask the question "Where has all the oil gone?" It turned out that Ryan Lambert had an answer to that question too. In the two weeks before my visit they had picked up 36,000 gallons of oil just in Bay Jimmy, Ryan's prime fishing grounds, and 10,000 bags of tar balls.Ryan's was a different sort of news than that I had been hearing on the national broadcasts. As the year stretched on, and the spill receded into the past, it became not just a minority voice but a practically unheard one. You had the sense that people in the media, as the foreman in the bar in Mobile suggested, were a little embarrassed by how they had overreacted at first and so now compensated by swinging the other way.

Read more here.

Further info on David Gessner's The Tarball Chronicles can be found here. It's a helluva read.

2011-09-17T09:55:00.000-05:00

It is a fateful time of year for the latest of the local summits on crime to be happening. Deeper thoughts on the effects of crime locally can be found from Cliff:

In general I support the summit. My only concern is that the message there makes it to the kids that actually seem to be in danger. The people who show up to crime summits are usually not the ones that are going to do any crime in the first place. Maybe with the mayor involved the conversation will lead to a plan that will get the message into the closed in subculture of our city that probably has no idea there’s a crime summit going on because they are too busy focused on doing their own crimes. Those are the kids we have to get into some programs even if we have to force them into them.

...and the G-Bitch Spot's Save Our Sons? Save Our Daughters, Too:

And then maybe we can look at the girls, our daughters. Every year I have taught in NOLA, I have had too many young women not done with high school or starting college with 1-2 children. I know I see the most determined and supported ones, and that for each there are a dozen others I don’t see in a college classroom. I seethem pushing their babies down the street in strollers or holding them by the hand [the other hand usually holding a cell phone], or balancing one on a hip to cross the street. So what about them? Can we actually have a summit on that, on the too many girls with babies? Or is that much harder? When you talk about babies, you must talk about sex and talk about sex gets very politicized and filtered through one religion or several and information gets distorted or left out or falsely discredited. The Girl’s health textbook takes the hard sell scare-’em line to promote abstinence as the only sensible option. Textbook publishers aren’t going to print texts school systems won’t buy; I understand that. So we critiqued the text with her, a conversation she started, and I gave her the link to scarleteen, which covers everything, respectfully. Everything. Really. From squirting to masturbation to vulvas and anal sexand bisexuality to penises and “A Basic Kinktionary.” But she’s my daughter and I can do that. Someone else’s daughter? If she asks me, if she is a student of mine, yes, I will give her honest, appropriate answers. I have to. She needs to know. You can’t make wise choices if you don’t have good information.

Information, though, is not enough. Like one meeting is not enough. The hardest thing to do is have a group conversation, and we’ve failed before. But one of the few things we can all agree on, across all lines and barriers, is that too many young black men are involved in murders. I hope that common ground makes the difference this time.

I struggle with this prayer below, and I know I'm not the only one:

On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword, who by beast, who by famine, who by thirst, who by storm, who by plague, who by strangulation, and who by stoning. Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquillity and who will suffer, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted.

What the prayer is talking about is the relationship between people and God. What many people miss about the point of the Jewish high holidays is that the forgiveness of the past year's transgressions only applies to matters between people and God - when it comes to matters between ourselves, we are on our own, and it is up to each of us individually to right the wrongs against our neighbors, and it is up to our neighbors to accept our efforts. "Would that repentance, prayer, and charity towards our fellow human beings be the order of the day" is the message the high holidays are supposed to urge the Jewish people to carry into daily life.

It's a message that is still sorely needed in New Orleans in 2011. I, too, hope that not just the "right" people get it, but that all of us continue to get it and act upon it.

2011-09-16T10:22:00.003-05:00

Here's something from Dr. Daniella Cook on New Orleans and education reform:

Kinda tough to hear. Best to turn it up.

It is also worth it to give Dr. Cook's Voices Crying Out From The Wilderness: The Stories Of Black Educators On School Reform In Post Katrina New Orleans a perusal. Once Cook explains her methodology for a few chapters, the history of the New Orleans schools and the current "system of schools," combined with the stories of individual New Orleans teachers, makes for intriguing reading.

______________________________________

Something a little less serious, you say?

It's been twenty years since Ren and Stimpy warped our airwaves. I can't think of much better commemoration-wise than to check on what creator John Kricfalusi's been up to these days, kick back with something better than bad, and, to get a certain Yaksmen song out of your head, get a crowd at the nearest bar to join together in singing this nifty song about a whale:

2011-09-15T12:02:00.001-05:00

Reasons To Kvetch

Not that it takes much these days...

I wasn't aware of this latest bit of crap from our latest Phyllis Schlafly-esque female presidential candidate until I saw Ayelet Waldman going off on how little morality had to do with HPV and its treatment. Frequent check-ins on Twitter yesterday saw Erin, aka, Queen of Spain, agonizing over what she eventually spoke of so beautifully in Embarrassed By That Mom On Stage. It takes my recent complaint about being unable to cheer for current high-profile female presidential candidates to another level: that of how concepts of motherhood are used and abused by moms like Bachmann and Palin to get them ahead. Check Athenae for more spot-on analysis of what Erin says...and please remember this:

So keep in mind as you see female after female take to the cable news shows calling themselves feminist pundits and politicians that these women do not speak for me. They do not speak for the women I know who call themselves feminists, truly fighting each day against the patriarchy (not submitting to it) and working hard for equality. An equality that includes more than one path for women and girls who wish to be anything they want to be, under terms they, themselves, set.

Because despite all the rhetoric you hear from these women on stage and tv claiming to be champions of all females, the absolute only thing we have in common is the name ‘Mom.’

This wasn't the only thing that got my ire up yesterday, amazingly enough. My Queens synagogue listserv is currently abuzz with back-and-forth tussling over GOP (and Tea Party-leaning) candidate Bob Turner winning former representative Anthony Weiner's congressional seat. This got me angry at three different things right off: former rep. Weiner, then the orthodox and ultra-orthodox Jewish constituents of the district who happily got used by the NY Republicans to supposedly send a message to Obama that he isn't taking Israel seriously enough, nor is he taking enough of a stand against same-sex marriage (which only further proves that getting out the vote is very important to ensure that you are, indeed, spoken for by you), topped by the milquetoast Democratic Party for being such wusses in this whole thing. Obama not being supportive enough of Israel? Spare me. Not enough support from the POTUS against same-sex marriage? Clear case of fear being greater than good sense. Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch. Moan, moan, moan.

At least The Lens' charter school reporting corps website is up and at 'em...although it will probably present even more opportunities for kvetching...but they will be informed opportunities.

2011-09-13T07:48:00.002-05:00

Here's a deeper look via School Finance 101 at one of the tenets of the Kristen Buras article for your morning:

Map 1. Year 2000 distribution of traditional public and charter schools in New Orleans
In the first figure, there are a significant number of decent size schools in the deeper red (higher % black) areas of the city. Citywide, there are a handful of charters scattered around.

Now, here’s the distribution of charters and traditional public schools in 2010. Yes, the city as a whole lost a lot of population (but did rebound somewhat between 2006 and 2010, hence the interest in 2010). Quite strikingly, there are simply very few schools of any size now available in those deep red zones (shading still based on pre-Katrina population). And while there are charters scatted throughout the city, even the highest concentration of those schools is in areas with marginally lower pre-Katrina black populations. There are generally more schools and more larger schools in those neighborhoods.

Again, circle size indicates enrollment size, and if the circle has a yellow triangle over it, the school is a charter school. Further, I’ve kept the size scaling of circles on the same scale in this map as in the previous one. So, if a circle is smaller, it’s enrollment is smaller.
Map 2. Year 2010 distribution of traditional public and charter schools in New OrleansNow, it is indeed hard to untangle supply from demand here. One can make the argument that the population didn’t return, therefore there is no demand for schools in those areas previously inhabited by the city’s lowest income black populations. Alternatively, one can as reasonably (and more so after reading Buras) argue that the dearth of available public services may provide some explanation for why families have not returned, or have not been able to return.

One might argue that because there exist so many “schools of choice” throughout the city, that geographic location doesn’t really matter. Ya’ just got to travel a bit. Sign up for one of those great schools over there! But research has consistently shown that even in “choice’ models geographic location/proximity is central to enrollment decisions. Location matters. And having quality options nearby is important. In fact, parents will often favor location over publicly available “quality” measures, continuing enrollment in schools identified as persistently failing if/when other options are simply not geographically accessible. Then again, those “quality” measures aren’t always particularly meaningful.

This population density map for individuals 18 and under suggests comparable population densities in those areas where school density (especially charter school density) has remained much lower: http://www.gnocdc.org/LossOfChildrenInNewOrleansNeighborhoods/Map3.html

Authors such as Henry Levin have explained on numerous occasions that for a choice model to yield equitable distribution of opportunity, consumers must have equitable access to information on schools and equitable mobility among options. Clearly, equitable geographic access is out the window in Post-Katrina New Orleans. Yeah, I think we already knew this from various media reports. But sometimes I have to play with the data and map them myself for it to really sink in. Whether driven by geographic assignment or by choice enrollment, the distribution of educational opportunities in Map 2 above is troublesome.

Far more troublesome is that so many have publicly pitched this New Orleans mixed delivery model as the key to the future of urban education.

Bold red italics are mine, by the way.

To further emphasize how the less-than-equitable geographic access has been working here, I direct you to exhibits A through E from back in 2008, especially D and E. There's also the go charter and save your school building sword of Damocles that has been held above greater New Orleans communities for far too long.

And with all of this, I find myself suffering from some terrible deja-vu.

2011-09-12T09:07:00.000-05:00

Remembering 9/11/2001 has been kinda like being asked - or having it demanded of me - to remember the Shoah, only this time the entire country was involved in the remembrance, not just my own people. It makes a difference...I'll get to that...

It's been written about many times on this blog. I've been reading about it quite a bit in the past couple of weeks, too:

Tom Junod's The Falling Man and its follow-up, Surviving The Fall.
The scars Logan Airport workers still bear from that day.
It's incredible what lingers physically from the towers' collapse.
What most people don't realize is that, after the towers took a few hundred firefighters and police with them, a month later a plane crashed into Belle Harbor outside of JFK Airport, heaping further tragedy on a town that had already sacrificed a lot to the events of 9/11. I found this to be especially poignant.

What made me decide to leave all social media alone yesterday, however, was this:

How could I honor the loss of 2751 lives in one day of social media silence?

Getting out my calculator, I learned the grim statistic that 2751 over 24 hours amounted to just under 2 people per minute. By defining a “moment” as 30 seconds, it would take 22.9 hours to observe a moment of silence for each individual killed that day. The last hour honors those that survived, yet suffered loss or trauma, and are forever haunted by the events of that day.

2751 Moments of Silence.

Because social media like Twitter and Facebook have given me the luxury of meeting and befriending so many new, interesting individuals, while giving me a chance to develop personally, creatively and professionally, I want those 2751 individuals to have it for a day.

2751 individuals never had the chance to tweet, post a Facebook status update, record a Seesmic, write their blog or to decide it was all stupid and a complete waste of time.

It was a pretty good illustration of the virtual version of this.

That was mostly my day yesterday, though I was a tad stymied when I came into the religious school teachers' meeting yesterday morning and was confronted by a fear that our children - many of whom had not even been alive when the planes crashed into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and a meadow outside Shanksville, PA - would somehow stay ignorant of these events. It was as though none of us had remembered how we were taught about the Shoah. Many of the kids are too young to be taught the worst details of the Nazis' reign of terror, anyhow, or of the people trapped in the towers who decided to jump...which brings me to why the nationwide insistence on 9/11 remembrance is different from just one much smaller group of people insisting on remembering something like the Shoah.

"Never forget" has been neatly appropriated from Holocaust remembrances and used to try to keep a nation in a war that many of the people caught up in it don't even understand why we're fighting. It is being used to justify why we need to keep on the path we've been on for ten years that doesn't look like it's ending anytime soon. What lessons have we truly learned from 9/11's version of "never forget?" Is it to be kinder people, to be less enabling of the urge to go to war, to be more conscious of the hurts we still continue to put on those in our midst who don't necessarily think in the ways of those who turned those planes into missiles? I don't see much of that, unfortunately. I wish I did.

I don't fear our children having no clue of what happened on that fateful day. I fear that they won't learn that we as Americans are more, much more, than this tragedy. The best lessons of the Shoah emphasized that we as Jews are not defined by the Zyklon-B filled chambers that sent many lives that could have been into nothingness. Would that we as a nation were not defined by those planes wrested from their pilots' control ten years ago...

2011-09-08T14:13:00.001-05:00

There are moments in time when you realize you've been living in what has become messy, uncomfortable history, whether it has affected you to your soul or not.

I had one of those on reading Kristen Buras' "Race, Charter Schools, and Conscious Capitalism" article from the most recent issue of the Harvard Educational Review. Subtitled "On The Spatial Politics Of Whiteness As Property (And The Unconscionable Assault On Black New Orleans)," I found it to be a useful account of the advent of charter schools in New Orleans, dating from the mid-1990's, when Cecil Picard got SB 1305 passed allowing charter schools to operate on a trial basis in some Louisiana school districts, up to the present day's near-charterization of the New Orleans public schools. Amid all the analysis of perception vs. reality in how school "choice" has been faring down here (including a scathing portrait of the Cowen Institute), Buras throws in this bit of tit-for-tat that goes on whenever today's education reformers want their critics to put up or shut up:

Notably, while charter school advocates frequently refer to fraud that predated current reforms, there is much less talk about the fraudulent manner in which the schools were taken over or the ways in which their charterization enables the channeling of public monies into private hands through "legal" means.

Can't think of a better way to describe what one goes through as a critic of the current operations of the "system of schools." The in-your-face paralysis that comes upon me when someone, in a move to shut me down, asks me if I simply want things to go back to the bad old days of OPSB corruption and mismanagement when all I want is some consideration of what still isn't being done with regard to making our schools better is hurtful. Perhaps it's a reaction that comes as part and parcel of being in a city full of people looking for agency. I look at the policy ecology diagram of the New Orleans public schools embedded in Buras' article, however, and it's amazing how many cooks are jostling for position in the local public education kitchen. That's a hell of a lot of agency that could use some organization, a kitchen nightmare in major need of some Gordon Ramsay-type help. The fact that a large number of those cooks have an "oft-repeated exultation" (Buras' term) trumpeting their lack of experience in education is worrisome. The fact that critics can be dismissed as pressing agendas of their own is too cruel.

To be sure, no one's an angel here. On seeing The Lens' latest project monitoring charter schools through their boards' monthly meetings, which are subject to the state's open meetings laws, charter critic Dr. Lance Hill took aim at The Lens' news editor Jed Horne for some work he did for the Cowen Institute. What The Lens is trying to do is long overdue, and the decisions made concerning the coverage of the charter boards' meetings are being made independently of what Horne thinks (he was in attendance at the unveiling of the site devoted to the charters). But hey, it's good to know in case he decides to become another Walter Isaacson. The least we can all do is support The Lens' efforts in this area, because we can only benefit from knowing what goes on, despite the assurance that community participation is greater than ever because of the large numbers of charter school boards in operation (forget that the boards were not elected by the communities they serve).

What I do know is that these wrongs continue to be inflicted on veteran teachers, new-to-the-maligned-profession teachers, parents, and the children in the public schools here. School choice, in practice, is a sick joke designed to drive families either out of their minds, into bankruptcy to pay for quality elementary and secondary education, or out of the system of schools - and possibly out of New Orleans - entirely, and it comes down the hardest on the lower, poorer classes. This hurts all of us dearly in the long run, and yet, to paraphrase Abraham Joshua Heschel, all it takes for us to ignore possible miracles and good works is for us to put our hands in front of our eyes and see nothing. I'm damned tired of being hemmed in by the blindness of those who profess to be in charge.

2011-09-06T13:35:00.001-05:00

@cyganka: explaining #TSLee to a friend up north: "he's an abusive husband, basically.sunny in between intermittent beatings."

Welcome to our past weekend here in New Orleans. Can't think of anything more appropriate than the tweet above as a description for what the weather was like. More than anything else, the uncertainty of what would happen in the city itself was what had us in a bizarre limbo. Flooding further south of the city and the breach of an "interim levee" at the edge of the Harvey Canal on the west bank of the river were unfortunate events further complicated by how the damages caused will be handled by insurance companies and the Army Corps of Engineers alike. It makes what I'm going to post about pithy and trifling in comparison, but fact of the matter is, a slow-moving system like the one we just had passing close by proved to us, more than anything else, that one of the greater things to fear from these storms could well be our extremely bored selves.

I own a Truisms t-shirt by the conceptual artist Jenny Holzer on which a bunch of seemingly contradictory phrases are silkscreened (I used to get into an argument over one of them with a good friend of mine every time I wore the shirt...but that's a whole 'nother story). Among the phrases is BOREDOM MAKES YOU DO CRAZY THINGS.

After one has taken in all the occasional squalls, cleared the storm drains between them, made sure the water levels didn't seep into the floor of one's car, taken the pets out despite their unwillingness to put one dainty paw on a wet sidewalk in order to relieve themselves, and marveled at the fact that the power is still on, what is there left to do but hunker down and stave off ennui as best one can? So, we cleaned house. We played computer games and board games and card games. We got more than our fill of crap teevee-watching in (and I of my own guilty pleasure through reruns online) between monitoring the meteorologist freak-outs on the local news. We cooked and baked. We read and napped. We had to make it a point to leave the house at least once a day, which usually turned out to be at breakfast. I've never seen local breakfast places so devoid of 20-30 minute waits on weekend mornings as I have this past weekend. People got shocked over the past few days, and local businesses suffered, resorting to some desperation on their part to keep customers coming. Not that I blame them. This time of year isn't normally a bad time for retail, but Lee messed with everyone's best-laid plans, including ours to venture out to the beach. Closest we got to that was the aquarium and the Algiers ferry.

Being held hostage by what the wind and the rains could do drove us more than a little nuts. Only so many goods can be baked, so many games played, so much shut-eye acquired. I know my grandparents were probably more than a little disappointed to find that this storm didn't require us to evacuate - if Lee had become a full-fledged hurricane, we'd have headed up to my parents' in Oklahoma City where, coincidentally, my grandparents happened to be visiting this past weekend. After having checked the Gulf Coast surf reports early Monday morning in a last-ditch gesture of eternal hope that was dashed on discovering the possible wave heights, I found myself wishing we'd piled into the car and gone anyhow, even if the closest body of water we'd be near would be the artificial Lake Hefner. Maybe if I were experiencing all of this by myself, things would've been different, but the cabin fever my husband was suffering was highly contagious.

My personal favorite post-storm move, though, can be seen below:

That riot of broken bamboo stalks actually came from the house that can be seen just past the palm tree, but was dragged across the street by members of that household in part as a service to people driving down the gray brick road or walking down its sidewalk. Sure, that pile is too big to be on the narrow sidewalk in front of that house - but I saw it and wondered:

Did the people living in the house right next to the pile give their permission for it to migrate across the street?
Close examination of the nicely-cut ends of the bamboo in the pile, as well as close examinations of other, much smaller debris piles in the neighborhood, red-flag this stack as a suspiciously opportunistic bit of yard work more than a casualty of storm winds. Why pay for debris-hauling when you can take advantage of a storm situation to pick it all up for you?

No, I'm not gonna whistle-blow the hell out of this one. I just could not believe the depths to which my bored mind would go to create a busybody mountain out of a pile of bamboo. I'd much rather have been schlepping up to the Catskills to assist with all their mess rather than creating messes of my own. I'd also have liked it if the weather had gone further west in order to put this out. Sure, Texas has Rick Perry, but it doesn't deserve to go up in flames.

Anyway, boredom makes you do crazy things in large part because of the partly forced idleness that is exhilarating at first, then grips your soul with an emptiness that no amount of contemplation of Elise's behavior on Hell's Kitchen or of the godawful college football uniforms teams across the nation seem to be sporting in a horrific epidemic of fashion-gone-wrong* can fully disperse. At least the aftermath of city-abuser Lee has given us a beautiful day. Enjoy it while it lasts, 'cause we aren't out of the hot-weather woods yet.

Update, 2:44 PM: To do more than just look at the pic I linked to of the wildfires affecting central Texas, head here and send help to the folks mentioned at Virgotex's link.

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*Okay, so it may be yet another sign of the apocalypse, but face it, the business of sports uniforms is a fairly serious one, even if it does involve putting the state flag all about a player's head and shoulders...and it's an excuse for me to link to this.

2011-09-01T13:12:00.000-05:00

It's been a definite "Who by fire and who by water" situation these past few weeks.

I've had to call family and friends to ask about how they braved earthquakes and storm surges - people who live in places I'd never have thought would be experiencing such tsuris. Follow this to learn what the mainstream media seems to be pushing aside with regards to the effects of the remains of Hurricane Irene in the northeast. Upstate New York and Vermont have been hit by heavy rains and are still in need of help.

And then there's this:

Yep, that's the Crescent City Connection, barely there on this past Tuesday morning.

A good friend of mine moved here in part to escape the fumes of the wildfires that occasionally roll into greater Los Angeles and give her daughter's asthma a workout, and now here she is having to supply her little girl with the asthma medications she hasn't had to use until this week. Judging by the lines of parents outside the little guy's school nurse's office clutching inhalers for their children, my friend is not the only one in that situation, either. Thank goodness for the rain outside my window right now, even if it may screw up my husband's plans for us to head to the beach on Labor Day if it continues.

The ongoing one, though, is the fact that in these tough times, people are still going hungry. There was a food drive at Rising Tide VI this year, as there was last year, in large part because the need is still very much there. hence the addition of the Power To Fight Hunger widget to the sidebar on this blog. It leads to the site of Second Harvest Food Bank of Greater New Orleans and Acadiana, and this is their Hunger Action Month - although every month, really, ought to be Hunger Action Month. Check all the links at the site, donate some funds, canned goods, or even your time to helping feed the hungry. It isn't good for the possible future of Louisiana to be starving like this:

“One in five children in south Louisiana is food insecure and the number is growing,” said Natalie Jayroe, President and CEO of Second Harvest food Bank of Greater New Orleans. “Good nutrition is absolutely critical for children to learn and succeed in school and in life. Far too many children in Louisiana are going to bed hungry each night.”

“Map the Meal Gap: Child Food Insecurity” provides the following data for south Louisiana, by Parish, in an interactive map format:

o The percentage of the population who is food insecure.
o The percentage of children that is eligible for assistance from federal nutrition programs like Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), free or reduced-price school meals, and others.
o The percentage of children that is not eligible for assistance from federal nutrition programs like Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), free or reduced-price school meals, and others.

An executive summary of the report can be found at: www.feedingamerica.org . The study is an important tool because it provides critical information for developing strategies to alleviate child hunger.

Any assistance is of great help. Thanks in advance.

2011-08-30T15:00:00.000-05:00

It's happened...we've made it to Year Six after the events of 8/29/2005 in the greater New Orleans area, and boy, are we tired. Honestly, I spent a good chunk of yesterday catching up on sleep when I wasn't checking Twitter obsessively, because my weekend was chock full of activity. Between the Rising Tide conference, my first day back teaching religious school in a long while, and taking the little guy and one of his friends out for a swim afterwards - not to mention our current troubles with a whole lot of smoke inundating the area - I had to sneak in some shut-eye sometime.

Not surprisingly, there are still a lot of problems here.

Lack of health care facilities in the city is a big one.

Yeah, our levees still aren't so hot...but hey, things on the face of it do look physically better in many parts of the city, and for folks like Athenae to see the changes and remark upon them does help us feel that perhaps we really aren't sitting still even though it may feel like it at times...perhaps the changes we are trying to push uphill in the manner of a latter-day Sisyphus won't roll back down on us and crush us, exposing our vulnerabilities for all to see.

What comes to mind most of all this anniversary time around for me, though, is more than just who can speak for us. I think so many of us have learned by now that if we don't raise our voices, at least make an effort to educate others on what and where the needs are, even raise our own hands to help as much as possible, then nothing will get done. If none of us stand for this city, it will fall. What I get concerned about still is a sense of scale that we must still constantly convey.

How best to illustrate this?

I don't have cable or satellite TV in my own home, but the place where I've been working out pretty regularly has it so that people aren't bored out of their gourds on the ellipticals, the stationary bikes, and the treadmills (I found an elliptical machine one morning that everyone was avoiding because its TV was out of order even though the machine itself was fine. Says a lot about how we regard the repetitive motions we do to keep ourselves in shape these days...). I caught an encore episode of No Reservations in Liberia while channel flipping and kept it there while I exercised. Coming attractions of Anthony Bourdain's show cropped up in the commercial break, and I found myself shocked into near-stillness when I saw where he was headed next. It took one quick clip to bring Chernobyl into a certain relief I'd never even considered before - or perhaps I'd refused to consider it. Photographs by folks such as Robert Polidori have a certain eerieness, to be sure: there's still something sad about such abandonment, but it somehow fails to sear the heart like suddenly seeing people right next to the source of such horror and pain - both of which are, in fact, ongoing. It's that feeling that brings a tragedy made distant by Time magazine and the passing of time itself right into your lap, the it could happen here that demands you look at it right now, see it for what it really is.

The levee breaches happened here. They really did. Those moments of scale won't ever leave us. The trick now is to live with those shocks and keep striving as we have all these years without beating ourselves and others over the head with the enormity of the tragedy that befell the Gulf Coast over half a decade ago, because we all have some living to do. That does not mean forgetting - it means continuing to rise above, turning the tragedies into lessons learned and making that work for us all.

Long way to go, indeed. But we are still here. And it's amazing how much of a difference that makes.

In this sixth year, the strength to stay is what must constantly be mustered. I for one look forward to helping keep that alive.

2011-08-29T00:01:00.000-05:00

Our Day of Remembrance

2011-08-26T12:10:00.000-05:00

Schlock and Awe

I got asked through an email not too long ago if anything was seriously wrong, as I hadn't posted anything here since June 30th. To answer that question: aside from a low-speed wreck I got into that rearranged the passenger side of my old car and had me running to a Palestinian-run car repair place to get the car door temporarily closed while I solicited a bunch of estimates from auto body shops about town, I am fine.

I was simply out of town for a while on a family vacation to points west....one of those points being what is possibly the Cheap-Ass Kitsch Capital of the World in the midst of what is possibly the Spam Capital of the U.S. - Waikiki in Honolulu. Once the playground of Hawaiian royalty, Waikiki is now home to some of the highest of the high-rise hotels and condos in any idyllic location anywhere on the planet, and when its malls aren't catering to the moneyed tourists who are ready to drop loads of dough on Prada accessories, Hermes scarves, or - my personal favorite - overpriced Ferrari-emblemed strollers and apparel, they are full of shops designed to sell you any amount of aloha shirts, cheap sarongs, Elvis-in-Hawaii-ana, kukui nut necklaces, ukuleles (both the higher-end, lovingly crafted instruments and the plastic kind of questionable quality), fake-flower and liquor leis, anything in pidgin, rubber slippers galore, coconut-shell brassieres with accompanying grass skirts, muumuus for any and all sizes of wahines, various snacks, and hula dolls of the islands' current favorite kama'aina, Barack Obama. It all makes French Quarter t-shirt shops look like kiddie lemonade stands making feeble stabs at the sales of such offerings - but then again, Hawaii's been participating in the tourist attraction game for much, much longer than New Orleans has, at least since the early part of the 20th century.

The marketing of the island culture there has achieved its zenith, and there is no greater indication of that than the all-inclusive resort hotels such as the Hilton Hawaiian Village that are little more than cruise ships on land: one could conceivably come to Waikiki and never leave the beachfront confines of such a place what with all their hula and surfing instruction and lei-making classes, as well as their own set of higher-end kitsch shops. I'm not going to say we didn't take advantage of any of that (the swimming pools at some of these hotels have to be experienced to be believed), but we did make more of an effort to get out of the hotels, with the assistance of Dan's Hawaiian-transplant cousins. Even if we didn't have that, I'm sure we would've still taken Oahu's TheBus system everywhere anyhow.

What I didn't expect to get a kick out of, though, was getting to meet Dan's cousin at one point at a site made famous by that bastion of 1980's TV, Magnum, P.I. - the fictional King Kamehameha Club. My son couldn't understand my glee as I grinned through dinner and couldn't wait to tell my dad, a huge fan of that TV series, where we'd just been that night. So here is my final query for you, dear reader, to get $5 off your Rising Tide VI registration.

Remember the rules, now, and pick up some of the Rising Tide schlock while you're dropping some funds for the conference. It's been beautifully designed by Greg Peters - no plastic coconuts or Spam there.

What is the actual site used for the King Kamehameha Club scenes in Magnum, P.I.'s first season?

Get me your answer before 8 AM tomorrow. See you at Tracey's tonight, or at the conference.

2011-08-25T11:04:00.000-05:00

We have a winner from yesterday! Ms. Nola-Bolt got the correct answer and will receive $5 off her Rising Tide VI registration fee, straight from my hand to hers. Well done.

I've had glassworking on the brain lately, especially the story at the tail end of this post. I can say that there ain't much sadder than someone who still has her hot glass tools and pipes, even though the last time she got near a bench to do any glassblowing was February 14, 2004. In my sicker moments, I long for a mean trick like that exploding Price Rupert drop in Maya Lin's unsuspecting hand. Glass had a hold on me for a number of years, and it hasn't quite let me go. I found myself reminiscing about the things I'd seen to my husband's naturalized-Hawaiian cousin recently when I was on Oahu, but I think about getting back into it, and it's hard. My duties are different now, my body is unused to the extra heat from furnaces and glory holes, my hands are no longer calloused from turning turning turning steel pipes, and my arms are not tenderized by burns from hot waxed jack blades gained from looking at a vessel on the end of a punty rod and forgetting the tools that were just in contact with molten glass were still in my hand. The dough it takes just to build the equipment and keep the air-gas mixes and the molten glass flowing, not to mention the electricity, is enough to make me think very, very seriously about a new beginning, and about the ups and downs of operating my own business. The fact that I keep thinking about it is a torment in itself. One of these days, a reckoning is in the cards for me, I know. Until then, I will see news items such as the following and struggle a little with this internal crap each time:

...Jeremy Piven will follow the imminent end of HBO’s Entourage by producing a new reality show on the art of glass blowing, practically daring someone to make a “from sucking to blowing” joke, so there it is. Indeed the whole story reads like an open provocation, what with the series’ title, Blow, evoking a certain drug that Piven is often scurrilously rumored to be fond of, and the name of Piven’s production company, Luscious Mayhem, being the sort of phrase that triggers involuntary violent responses and/or nausea and blackouts.

Anyway, for what it’s worth, Piven’s involvement is entirely behind the scenes, as Blow is really just your standard American Chopper/Cake Boss-style reality show about New Orleans glassblower Josh Cohen and his “band of misfits” squabbling as they attempt to please their “demanding clientele,” all of whom demand that their glass be blown in a very exacting way indeed.

It's making lemonade out of lemons time....Get ready for your next $5 off your Rising Tide registration question. Check the rules again. Get your registration/donation in. Here goes:

What else is the central subject of Piven's new show known for?

Leave your answer in the comments.

2011-08-24T12:11:00.000-05:00

My Oxford American subscription dates from their first ever Southern music issue in 1997. Yeah, the CD that came with it was scratched all to hell, leaving me with small skipping snippets of Lucinda Williams' "Pineola" and Kate Campbell's "When Panthers Roamed In Arkansas" to listen to, but the writing on that music was pretty damned good. Our horrible thieving movers stole that and the OA CDs I'd accumulated up to 2001 when we went up to NYC for a bit, but the magazines made it. They still come out with some good stuff after all this time, and their Education Issue is something to read, savor, and contemplate. Where I began to take issue with the latest issue, though, was with Anne Gisleson's "The Lottery," in which she describes what New Orleans public school reform looks like from the standpoint of a parent (Gisleson) tired of paying private school tuition...who considers there to be only three "choices" for educating your child:

1) Enroll your children in a segregated public school*
2) Pay for them to attend a slightly less segregated private school.
3) Compete with thousands of other families in a lottery for limited spots in racially and socioeconomically integrated charters.

*Gisleson's note: Ninety percent of New Orleans public-school students are black; nearly a quarter of the public schools are a hundred percent black.

On my posting said choices by way of Twitter, someone informed me of the fourth choice Gisleson forgot to mention: get the hell out of the system entirely and homeschool. Which is true. But what I had a bone to pick with was #3: this assumption that the charters are racially and socioeconomically integrated.

Gisleson jumps through the hoops for her kids and ends up on seven waitlists. The schools she mentions by name: Lusher, Hynes, Audubon Charter, the International School - three out of those four are schools that, pre-8/29/2005, were the better performing ones in the corrupt and largely failing OPSD - and they are still there mostly because of their current selective admissions policies. She nails the cruelty of the Publisher's Clearing House-like ordeal of navigating these lotteries and then relying, in the end, on sheer luck to hopefully sweep her kids into the schools applied for, but presenting the 70-plus percent of charter schools that now make up the former Orleans Parish public school system as being integrated is misleading. If they truly were, she would probably be applying to many more of the charters here and actually getting into them, but we're not there yet. Lord knows, I wish we were, because even if all the schools here had reached that Racially And Socioeconomically Integrated Promised Land, we still wouldn't have enough room for all the kids that are of elementary and secondary school ages - nor would the state have the money.

It all gets in the way of having the exceptions become the rules. And it's pretty damned sad.

But enough of this kinda talk for now. I have my first Rising Tide trivia question to ask! Check the rules, folks, get your registration/donation in to Rising Tide, and get your best guesses ready:

The Oxford American has been through a lot in its history. An employee embezzled substantial amounts of its funds. It had to move from Oxford, MS, all the way to Arkansas not too far from the Toad Suck Bridge (once the passage for the Toad Suck Ferry). Things were hand-to-mouth for the OA for a time when it had to search for another publisher after this one decided not to fund the magazine anymore.

Who was that publisher?

$5.00 off Rising Tide admission to the first correct answer.

2011-08-23T12:15:00.000-05:00

Technical Difficulties

Everyone can now rejoice, as, despite the need to run a line across the melting floor of our newly resurfaced balcony (a need which had the Cox installers walking across it with plastic grocery bags over their shoes), I now have internet access back in my house. What do I spend my time doing on my trusty laptop once I get that access? Oh, you know, the important stuff: checking the email, goofing off on Twitter, and, of course, playing lots of Zuma Blitz on Facebook, not to mention watching some Hulu shows. Blog? What blog?? Don't tell me I don't know what to do on the internets...well, some of you will tell me anyway. I can hear it now - hello? Internet porn??? Yes, it's out there. No, I don't look at any of it.

ANYway, having had no in-house internet access for over a month was akin to my first week without access to a glass studio after I took a six-week course in hot glassworking. The withdrawal symptoms were not good, and I was forced to haunt the local library or nurse a single caffeinated drink for hours at a time in coffee shops in which the wifi access was not guaranteed (What I would have given to toss a chair through a window without suffering consequences every time I got a "Connected - Local Access Only" message - a message that says you are on the net, you just can't do anything. I'd have gotten better connectivity with a tinfoil hat on the laptop.). Because I married a man who is intent on squeezing blood from pennies, it took a while for us to thoroughly research our options and conclude that Cox internet was the way for us to go. My mother-in-law shook her head when I told her about my travels with my laptop, and we discussed how much internet access is taken for granted by our spouses, not to mention ourselves.

The digital divide is quite real. An hour a day on a library computer, some texting on a cellular phone that is free with your wireless plan, perhaps some work-only emails - that's about the most interaction the general public has with the series of tubes pulsing with information each day. It suffices for most people. For those trying to get a job in these tough times, however, access to the internet can be the thing that gives one an edge when every little thing helps. Sure, there are times when vacations from being digital are sorely needed, but we no longer live in a world where we can completely ignore it all.

When my eight-year-old little guy is having to sign netiquette forms issued by his school (and he hasn't even learned cursive yet, nor does he have his own email account), the net cannot be completely discounted. I wonder a great deal about these families that jump through the hoops and get their children into the good schools only to find that well-meaning measures that are meant to reduce the usage of paper for notes home from school and reduce the sheer volume of homework kids have to lug home in backpacks and book bags cannot be easily accessed at home. Possible results? Parents end up being out of certain loops due to lack of access to school listservs and general school emails, and opportunities for the kids to develop good study habits can go straight to hell. Yeah, I may be overstating all this as an admitted internet addict, but it's something I contemplate more as a result of my time spent bumming wifi.

And hey, speaking of internet addiction, this year's Rising Tide trivia contest is a truncated one due to my recent internet access odyssey. So it isn't a full week of queries. You'll just have to deal:

Here's a heads-up on my third annual Rising Tide contest, in which, on the three days before the conference (that's August 24th through August 26th this year), I ask a different trivia question, the answer of which could get you $5 off your conference fee from li'l ol' me.

First off, the money for this is coming from me and only from me. Do not ask the Rising Tide website, blog, Facebook, or Twitter accounts for sympathy if you have any beef with this little exercise - just bring it on over to me.

The rules:

Ineligible participants are: the RT organizers, volunteers, panelists, and speakers. Sorry, folks, c'est la contest.

Register for and/or donate $10 or more to Rising Tide VI.
Check back on my blog each day during August 24-26.
There will be a new question each day for you all to answer. Leave your answer in the comments.
First correct answer to the question each day gets a five-note from li'l ol' me. If there's more than one correct answer each day, the first one in the chronology of comments left on this blog gets the five bucks. There can only be one winner each day.
If you have not registered or donated, there will be no dough for you, no matter how right the answer is.

So there you have it. Register now.

2011-08-14T10:34:00.000-05:00

Have women always been likened to cats on a tear or is it just me? The movie version of Kathryn Stockett’s The Help seems to take the serious issues of inequality among the races and put them into the context of a cat fight – or at least some seem to think so. Having read the book, I find that I don’t particularly want to see the movie. Fact is, there are varying degrees of selfishness within us all that can contribute to our being kind or our being mean – and although barriers to true civil rights have largely been lawfully put down, the meanness is in the loopholes. Times are more selfish now than they ever have been, as the loopholes threaten to overcome the laws. Wait, I said threaten? I think they’ve already been overcome. I also think this wasn’t what the civil rights workers had in mind when they were singing that song.

Back to women – I’m not sure if another tale of Caribou Barbie was supposed to be in the making when a journalist asked me for permission to use this picture I took when I passed through Wasilla last summer:

…but if a Wasillan-on-the-street piece on the all-too-present Sarah Palin was supposed to be in the making, well, I responded too late for the picture to be used, and I found I was kind of glad about it. And I’m not glad because I am suddenly going all-in for hunting from helicopters and making speeches only Dadaist bebop jazz poets could snap their fingers in appreciation for, but because I am tired of women in power and/or grasping at power being so stupid that I cannot support them. I had a friend in college who once expressed a need for there to be an old-girl network in the art world, which is still a pretty damned sexist arena, in order to help us all break some glass ceilings. Well, the art world is very much the entire world, and I am still torn between the ever-present need for that old-girl network and the need to shake these idiotic women silly and try to impart to them how much they will be on the wrong side of history if this keeps up…but hey, we’re living in times where nobody thinks that far ahead. We don’t even think that far behind.

Which brings me to a fairly womanly thing that I never ever thought I’d feel – the longing to have my son back on a day-to-day basis again. This is the first time he’s been away from us longer than ten days, and it’ll be good to have him back from his Grand Grandparent Tour of 2011. Tomorrow he returns, and until he does something like spill the first glass of milk he pours – oh, hell, even then, I’ll be happy to have him back. Part of my recent crazy times have simply been born of this feeling of someone missing, of a vital role having been snatched away for a time, and it’s something I thought would never happen to me. Perhaps it’s a form of parental Stockholm syndrome, I tend to think in my darker moments, but then explain to me why a nice young man sidled up to me at a bar recently and, when he asked me what I do, I answered that I raise my son? I am a mom. It’s true what the ubiquitous “they” say: once a mom, always a mom. A new school year is ahead, and I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that the little guy is nearing his ninth year on the planet. Can’t believe we all got this far without more than a hairline fracture, a sliced-open cranium, an ADHD diagnosis, and my particular neuroses. I still find it amazing that any human beings grow to adulthood.

I am also finding that there are no loopholes to true parenting – because if I knew what true parenting was, I’d box it up and sell it for beaucoup bucks. Sure, some things can be gleaned from books and from the experiences of others, but the practices are all one’s own. Practice well, everybody.

2011-08-11T15:45:00.002-05:00

Med Check, Addiction Check

It's official, dammit. After months of being so ticked off at AT&T we couldn't see straight, figuring we could manage just fine with Verizon cell phones as our home numbers and the free wifi we were getting in our house anyhow, and then coming home from a two-week vacation in mid-July to discover that the wifi was no more, I'm here to say that my name is Leigh and I am highly dependent on the internet.

Oh, I have been denying this fact for some time now, but I had to face how truly upset I was when I had an antidepressant check today and turned into a blubbering mess. It's compounded by having to face another year in which I anticipate tussles over the little guy's consumption of medication to keep his ADHD in check, but it also cannot be denied that the internet has also become an essential tool in his schooling. My husband seems to be content to bum the wifi from coffee shops when he isn't working in the office, but I'm finding I cannot do that. It's everything I can do to write this post at the library, even...hence the strange paradox that's consuming me: I know, deep down, that once one is on the internet, the computer being used is not a form of one-way glass, but I don't feel comfortable using it for long periods of time anyplace but my own house.

It's a weird feeling that I'm hoping will be remedied by our finally biting the bullet and getting the services of Cox Communications, but my spouse wants to see how much blood he can squeeze out of the pounds of monetary flesh we will have to give them before we get started with them. Anybody got a line on cheap cable modems?

ANYway, this is to say that I did have a marvelous vacation despite my current distress...and I am, once again, assisting in the planning for this year's Rising Tide Conference, which promises to be a good one. Give the graphic below a click to check what we've got going this year for programming:

If you're too lazy to click on it, then perhaps telling you that David Simon, creator of Homicide: Life On The Streets, The Wire, and Treme will be there, as will Tulane professor and local geographer extraordinaire Richard Campanella, might get you to do something. The food panel this year promises to be a doozy...in fact, I'm finding that I don't want to miss a thing this year. You know you want to check it out. You know you do. And don't gimme that line that this is only a bloggers thing, because it isn't. I would LOVE to see you all there.

Seriously, until I can satisfy my internet jones, getting more people registered will have to suffice. Make this crazy Jewish mother happy and go for it.

2011-08-01T16:55:00.003-05:00

This one's been in my head a lot lately:

Getting back to blogging soon. Promise.

2011-07-27T14:39:00.000-05:00

Soul That Snapped Her Control

I had made up my mind. Anybody who could steal a band out from under one of my favorite soul singers, make an album with that band that sold millions of copies, and walk away with an armful of Grammys was someone to be detested. She didn't deserve to have farted on the couch next to the ratty-looking orange chair Sharon Jones had sat in as a queen sits on her throne on the cover of Naturally, her second album with the Dap-Kings. This jazz impostor's song about avoiding getting off drugs and alcohol was everywhere to boot, compounding things by being just a little too catchy.

So, that was that. I couldn't stand Amy Winehouse and I would never never buy one of her albums.

Well, I keep learning to never say never. A reissue of Winehouse's first album, Frank, was out, and I was curious, especially when I learned that a version of "Moody's Mood For Love" was on there. Made famous by King Pleasure, it's a mid-fifties quasi-scat masterpiece that is a challenge for any singer, and, aside from the idiotic arrangement she had to sing over, I had to admit that her vocal treatment of it was pretty damned good, even if Winehouse was a skinny-yet-curvy Jewish broad whose hair was bigger than she was. I also had to admit that her style and her attitude were hooking me...especially that partly scornful/partly celebratory shout-out to all the Victoria Beckham-wannabes and north London bar-hopping tarts, "F___ Me Pumps." The trouble with Frank wasn't the woman's voice, though - it was trying to back it up. Her style and quality was at times much older than she was, and the instrumentals didn't always complement her.

Maybe it was the assistance of a different producer and co-songwriter. Maybe it was the backing band that had the chops to not only complement that voice, but boost its vulnerability into the stratosphere. Maybe it was one too many nights boozing, fighting with boyfriends (especially that one who became her husband for a time), and listening to the Shangri-Las. Whatever it was, it became Back To Black, a whirlwind of Ronnie Spector plus Anita O'Day, with a chaser of Janis Joplin for good measure, and Winehouse was no longer just some Brit jazz singer, but a tattooed, beehived international star. She was also drinking quite heavily and greedily from the cup of life, inhabiting the bad girl persona with every inch of her increasingly rail-thin self. In this day and age of any and all news traveling instantly through the internet, everyone who cared to follow, and even those who didn't, could vicariously ooh and aah over her "authenticity" while tsk-ing over the excess of it, and with that, some sort of sick die was cast that I, for one, hoped the stronger side of her would be able to bust wide open. Having never been an addict, myself, I failed to get that she needed much, much more than inner strength to get through her troubles, especially because the eyes of the public seemed trained on her every move. These past few years or so, it seemed she was taking the time to get it together, and then she had a disastrous appearance in Belgrade, followed some time later by being found dead in her flat.

Just because you can see something coming like this for someone like Amy doesn't make it any less sad. What makes it infuriating, however, is when you see her death reported by a blogger concerned with Jewish issues and the comments include attacks on the life she led (which, well, everybody had done many times over already) and saying that, because of all her tattoos, she couldn't have a Jewish burial anyhow. She sported a "Daddy's Girl" on her left arm that kinda stereotypically screamed "Jewish princess," so I think a Jewish burial could've come about on the basis of that alone, but I bristled at the automatic condemnation on the basis of what was on her outside. Amy Winehouse had a supportive family, friends, and great talent, chose a terrible path, and seemed to be working her way out of it when she passed away, but the commenter forgot that even in the Tanakh, there are bad girls who aren't all bad. He also forgot that the ceremonies surrounding the burial for the dead are just as much for the living. It heartened me to learn that even though she was cremated, there was a Jewish service for her. It wasn't all about glorification of this flawed human being, it was an acknowledgment of her humanity: that she was beloved to some despite the choices she'd made.

At any rate, I look at her performances and wish she hadn't joined any damned club of the young, famous dead. I wish the peace for her had been longer-lasting, that she could have survived whatever losing game she put herself through. But that's past and gone, fading away, leaving nothing but her voice and the impression that a little girl got very, very lost.

2011-06-30T12:44:00.000-05:00

A traveling frame of mind has overtaken me, as it tends to do this time of year. Hey, between our extended families living in faraway places and Dan's need to stay in all 50 states at some point in his lifetime, we travel. And though in coming weeks, we will be headed to points west, I'm tickled by the news that a bunch of diamondback terrapins tied up JFK airport runway traffic. Although I woulda loved to have heard what the pilot had to say to his passengers on the American flight that got stuck for a bit while turtles in heat were herded off the tarmac, the closest we have to that is a listen at what air traffic controllers there had to deal with:

If those terrapins are headed for Brooklyn, I hope they avoid the heavily polluted Gowanus Canal.

Of course, Dan comes back from his latest trip to NYC with some stuff from one of his favorite bargain stores, and, for the first time, I took a good look at the shopping bag and wondered...how long has Century 21 had that slogan?

See, thing is, their flagship store in lower Manhattan is right around the corner from the site of the world's most infamous terrorist attack. Are we really in Afghanistan to fight for those bargains? According to Century 21 department stores, we are.

And finally, though I will be out and about for a while, I will have something to look forward to once I return - a certain conference that's being held on August 27th at Xavier University this year. The registration fee will be increasing to $30 tomorrow from $25, though, so it'd be best to sign up for it today, while you're reading this. Head here to sign up for Rising Tide VI at the reduced rate. I would love to see you there.

2011-06-21T11:05:00.001-05:00

"What are you doing about it?" Dad asked when I told him about the recent Louisiana Science Education Act repeal attempts rearing up only to get smacked down. "So you think this is awful and stupid, which it is. So what are you doing about it?"

Well, yeah, I wrote about it. But I knew he wanted to know how much further it could be taken. And gosh, I would love to see it here. Get the ears and the funds of a few like-minded, moneyed influence brokers and beat the Benjamins about the heads and shoulders of those affiliated with the Louisiana Family Forum until they voted these "alternative" teachings down - a neat, short-term political gaming solution to this problem that will most likely resurface in this state because it's easier to legislate this stuff into existence than it is to, say, work on a real plan for curing what ails this state economically. Heaven forbid there should be lasting, earthly, rational change coming from the Louisiana lege that actually serves the constituents.

Recent reading has me wondering if this is in no small part dictated by a viewpoint that still endures in one form or another from down the centuries - a viewpoint that we still can't fully shake.

It was a credulous age (the early nineteenth century). One reason people were so quick to believe in the Murrell excitement was that they were eager to believe in anything, no matter how strange, as long as it was bad news. They were particularly fascinated by occult portents of doom. Everybody knew that owls and whip-poor-wills were evil omens, that a dog howling in the night meant somebody was about to die, that prudent people had to carry a tuft of wool tied with thread at all times to prevent being ridden by witches. It was a time of seances and mirror divination and spirit rapping - an era when, as Melville observed in Moby-Dick, "the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city."

Having also just studied a parasha of the Torah this past weekend that once again presents the mixed multitude that came out of Egypt as being a whiny bunch ready to believe the worst, I have to contend with this aspect of human nature that also tends to nip our better inclinations in the bud. Or, if there are indeed better inclinations, they are fairly misinformed, misdirected, and downright patronizing ones meant to impose one's will on another rather than actually seeing to what is needed.

It's kind of what burns me up about HB580, which is up for vote in the state Senate today, having already been approved by the state House. Introduced by the same legislator who was also responsible for the Louisiana Science Education Act, HB580 enables local school boards to buy textbooks not approved by the state - a bill that, if approved, can make it easier for individual parishes to introduce the "supplemental materials" in biology classes that the LSEA allows. So hey, state-sanctioned pseudo-science could have money spent on it, but the funds for, say, remediating a temporary school site while the school building itself is being worked on are supposedly not there. I foresee that, for Louisiana public education's next trick, they will solve the problem of badly needed school facilities and renovations by telling the kids to pray for them.

For now, we do have the recourse of telling the state senators not to vote for HB580. Email links and further contact info can be found here. But after that...

...where do we go from here?

2011-06-16T14:48:00.000-05:00

Well, the parents of my son's school have kind of gotten what they wanted. Emphasize "kind of":

After failed attempts to arrive at an acceptable mitigation plan with the LA Department of Environmental Quality (LDEQ), the Orleans Parish School Board announced today that it will postpone its Audubon Charter renovation project until further notice.

Audubon Charter was scheduled for a two-year comprehensive renovation at its Broadway school in accordance with the School Facilities Master Plan. In order to accommodate the school, the School Board had arranged for a replacement site, known as a swing site, in the Lower Garden District on the block bounded by Richard, Constance, Orange and Annunciation Streets.

The Annunciation site was selected after an exhaustive search for space in the Uptown area. Because of soil contamination that was previously mitigated at nearby Annunciation playground, the School Board ordered soil samples as part of its due diligence. When that study indicated significant levels of lead in the soil, the Board took steps to outline a mitigation plan, developed by noted scientist, Dr. C. Paul Lo, who has experience in the area. Following a meeting of Audubon parents on May 25, concerned parents contacted LDEQ, which in turn called for meetings and communication that resulted in suspension of the project.

School Board President Lourdes Moran said student safety is her highest priority. “Unfortunately, LDEQ’s recommendation would not allow the charter operator to meet its projected August opening. Therefore, it made the project impossible to begin at this time. The School Board will review its process for all projects scheduled for Orleans Parish. We will continue to identify a suitable location that is safe for our school children.”

More info can be found here. The fur - and the lead - was flying over this back in late May. It was of course going to come to this, but bathrooms and facilities still in dire need of work are preferable to lead.

What I am now wondering is when nearby districts will start doing this:

From the Washington Independent:
A school board in Virginia has voted unanimously to leave No Child Left Behind, which would mean joining a bevy of other boards across the country in sending a resolution to Sec. of Education Arne Duncan asking for the request.

The petition is a joint effort by The American Association of School Administrators and the National School Boards Association to “urge—absent Congressional reauthorization—immediate regulatory relief for the 2011-12 school year, and any efforts to rescind or modify current regulations and alleviate undue pressure on the nation’s schools.”

The letter continues:

We urge the Department of Education to exercise their regulatory authority to relieve school districts from the constraints of current statutes, keeping schools from being held hostage while Congress moves forward with complete reauthorization. We request that this relief be straight regulatory relief, not waivers. Schools deserve straight regulatory relief, and not the additional requirements or conditions that often come with waivers. We specifically support suspension of additional sanctions under current AYP requirements, effective for the 2011-12 school year. (Schools currently facing sanctions would remain frozen; no new schools would be labeled as ‘In Need of Improvement’ or subject to new or additional sanctions.)
Over 900 school districts have signed onto the proposal
900 is a lot.

The joint effort by associations which represent school boards and school administrators is not insignificant. The massive number of school districts which have opted out of No Child Left Behind dwarfs the eight state level education heads whom want the strict guidelines maintained to support their own reform efforts.

It's too late for this for the New Orleans schools, I fear. We're too frazzled from trying to maintain what we already have. It's unfortunately up to all of these other drops in the bucket of NCLB mutiny to fill the bucket and douse the standardized testing that has run amuck in public education. Best we can do as parents is keep fighting it and not to let it overwhelm us and our children.

2011-06-15T13:10:00.000-05:00

Time flies when family is concerned. It seems to do so more now than when I was a kid in my parents' house yearning to be free of the obligatory visits, the cards, the gifts, the constant remembrances that hold families together in these times when - more often than not - extended members live farther away from each other like never before.

I deeply, almost desperately wanted a sibling when I was younger, in part because most of the other kids I knew in school had one. I somehow felt I would be less alone if I had a brother, but, when telling people my mom was going to have a brother didn't seem to hurry it along, I managed to let go of the idea until I was fourteen and Mom said, "Guess what?"

My teenaged mind then rolled its eyes and thought, "Great timing."

I felt by then that I had to hold back on voicing a lot of smartassed thoughts, as my strategy until I was out of my parents' house was to keep my head down and my nose clean and then my chances of getting what I wanted would be greater. I did make it clear, however, that I wasn't going to be the default babysitter for my brother. It's a decision my parents mostly complied with, and one that I now regret that they did to a certain extent. Then again, dealing with a formerly colicky infant who was then in the midst of being potty-trained while I was looking at colleges wasn't on my list of things I thought I should be handling.

It became even clearer as the years passed that my parents were raising another only child. It wasn't just the age difference that made this so - I'd grown up in a Texas metropolis, and my brother came of age in small-town Pennsylvania due to my dad's job-related moves. I didn't really play catch with my brother until he was near the end of his high-school days. Friends of his jeered at him for telling the truth about his big sister. "Oh, yeah? A sister?? Where IS she, then?" The most I could do at this distance was chat with him occasionally across the phone lines, see him occasionally at family gatherings, listen sympathetically to Mom when she told me about one or another of his escapades, not all of them benign.

But when it came to my brother's college graduation, I knew I was going to be there, even if it involved piling into a rented Suburban with most of my extended family and heading to upstate New York to sort out hotel rooms for ten-plus. It threatened to rain the day of the ceremony, but it managed to hold off until after all the graduates had walked through the central memorial on campus, as per commencement tradition, and had their names called to accept their degrees. Journalist/anchor Judy Woodruff gave the address, correctly stating that graduates probably won't remember her or recall much of what she said - hell, my family remembers much more than I do about my college graduation (it kinda helped that this guy gave our student address).

Perhaps it was her particular perspective on my brother's generation and its challenges. Or the injections of reality into her address that told the class of 2011 they would likely fail at some points in their lives, and, in considering the current economy and job market, the class members would probably have to move back home for a while. Or it was my brother asking me about a potential job in Metairie, then dismissing it when I told him biking to work in the Causeway-Veterans Blvd. area could be a dicey proposition. Maybe it was my enjoying a beer at a bar with him for the first time...but I started to worry some about the future for my brother. I still worry about it, to a certain extent.

Having my head in the interwebs, my kid in school, and my self in a city struggling to keep its dirty existence alive and well has probably sensitized me more to the fact that, more even than demonstrable ability and undeniable skills, a certain selfish cunning, desperation, and dumb luck is needed to get by in the world today - and I don't know how well we're training these future generations in those realities. The best any of us can really hope for is that, when that learning comes, it won't crush our kids too badly. Ideals like my brother wanting to bike to work may fall, and there will be compromise. It may even eat away at many, many souls...but that is life in all its insane glory.

How well equipped are any of us for all of this, when all is said and done? We won't know until those bridges will have to be crossed somehow. What I wish for my brother is that he do all of it with style and grace and with not a little of the chutzpah in his genes. Goodness knows there's a great deal of it: I learned a few things about my dad this past weekend that make me wonder even more how he could've survived his wild days. The door's always open to him down here, no matter what he decides to do.

This little brother of mine's come a ways in his twenty-three years. Here's to the beginning of his long adult road.

2011-06-04T10:59:00.000-05:00

I'm a tired broad who has fallen full-on into the Twittersphere since the past couple of early-week posts here. It's too easy now that I have a smartphone. Throw in the mad dash to clean the house before the in-laws arrived atop the work being done on our house at the same time and I've got lots of things rolling 'round my head that I sorta threw about in Twitter shorthand.

I missed it this week, but I've been taking pictures of the Natchez pier Mississippi River gauge at the edge of the Quarter and posting them on Twitter as "This week's edition of The River Is Too Damn High" in partial homage to this movement and also because the river IS too damn high. My father-in-law understands the phenomenon of drought while a river rises from his visits as a kid to summertime Hannibal, Missouri, further upriver, but it really is something to experience. My Twitter pal and local blogger E.J. has taken the RITDH theme and run with it as a campaign manager for my run for the governor's office. There will be levees around every house, a Flood Deduct Box to steal...er, centralize contributions to the effort, "priority boarding for campaign contributors on all future rooftop helicopter rescues," (credit E.J. with that one) and we will get together to tell the higher ground all the way up in Yankee Minnesota where it can shove all this extra water in an action I call the Billion Gallon March. We are currently amending the platform to address the heat by proposing a temperate dome over Louisiana, which is a pretty insular state to begin with, so why not make it a physical reality? Wow, what else is Too Damn High? Let me know, citizens.

As a consequence of the heat and the stupidity, too many children are dying in locked cars in this heat. One is certainly too many, but that number is actually rising. I was afraid to even let the little guy in the car for a few seconds while I went to return the shopping cart to the bin in the grocery store parking lot. Take your kids inside with you when you gotta go places with them in this heat, or make arrangements for them to be indoors with a responsible sitter if you can't take 'em with you someplace. This goes for pets, too. In all seriousness, it's dangerously hot.

And finally, Karran Harper-Royal has been tweeting from the Orleans Parish School Board teacher firings trial in civil district court for the past few weeks and is wondering why in hell the mainstream media is not covering this. Don't start with the possible reasons, just check her Twitter stream and go look at the website for the trial for further updates. Why is this trial important?:

After Hurricane Katrina, the Defendants (local and state education officials) took arbitrary, capricious and unreasonable actions in the aftermath of a national disaster to enact legislation that abrogated the plaintiffs’ employment rights and “property rights.” Political newcomers to the OPSB used Hurricane Katrina as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to carry out an old political agenda to abolish the New Orleans Public School System as it existed before Hurricane Katrina, and replace it with quasi-private, Charter Schools, using public funds.

Effective November 30, 2005, the Louisiana Legislature passed a law known as “Act 35” which resulted in the State takeover of 107 public schools in New Orleans---with the publicly stated intent to authorize national Charter School operators to take over these schools. Of the 50 State-controlled public schools which reopened nearly a year after Hurricane Katrina, 31 became Charter Schools and 18 were operated by a new State-controlled agency called the “Recovery School District.” It was no surprise that State education officials also refused to allow even tenured pre-Katrina NOPS employees to transfer to the 18 state-run public schools. They seized an inopportune time…a tragedy…to advance their political agendas.

The combined actions of the local and state education boards threatened the economic and personal survival of 7,500 public school employees and their families. The establishment of 31 quasi-private, publicly funded Charter Schools threatened the future of a public education system in New Orleans. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, these employees enjoyed a property right in their employment guaranteed to them under Louisiana’s Constitution and several State statutes. The storm took their homes but local and state education officials took their jobs.

...Court documents and testimony show that 88 of the 120 NOPS schools met or exceeded their state-required School Performance Score (SPS) for the 2004-05 School Year (just prior to Hurricane Katrina) but this fact has not been reported in the media. Nor has it been reported that immediately after the storm, Louisiana State Department of Education officials changed the definition of an acceptable School Performance Score from “60” to “88” which allowed the takeover of 107 NOPS schools---- leaving the local school board with only five (5) schools post-Katrina.

Keep checking it out and spread the word. This trial is simply another way in which state and local governments seem to want our tax dollars to be spent. I don't know about you, but I don't want my money to be going towards endless idiotic fights in court over these asinine decisions that hurt too many people. Do we really elect our legislators on this basis? If so, stop the world, I wanna get off...or maybe I'll amend the gubernatorial platform to include a Trial Costs Are Too Damn High tenet.

2011-05-31T09:58:00.001-05:00

So, lately The Gambit's Twitter account hasn't exactly been the bearer of good news...among its latest tidbits of legislators behaving badly came this one from last week:

BREAKING: @RepealtheLSEA fails by 1-5 vote of state education committee. Sole vote to repeal: Yvonne Dorsey, D-Baton Rouge.

...followed by this insult to that injury:

LSEA: "All of you have been able to get out of high school despite this 'terrible' law." - Rep. Julie Quinn, R-Metairie, voting no on repeal

Well, at least we know who doesn't believe the children are our future.

The Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA), for those not in the know, can be found here. It is an intriguing and craftily creative exercise in how to allow creationism to be taught alongside the theory of evolution in public elementary and secondary schools in Louisiana without explicitly mentioning the word "creationism". If there is anything in this act that could possibly work in the favor of keeping the supplemental teachings of the C-word out of the science classes, it is this self-referential Section D caveat within:

This Section shall not be construed to promote any religious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs, or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion.

...but saying that only that section is not promoting any religion or any discriminatory practice gets us into the realm of "It depends on what your definition of 'is' is."

This piece of garbage was signed into law by our governor nearly three years ago. One of the immediate reactions to Bobby Jindal's signature on it was for organizations such as the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology to take their conventions elsewhere, kicking New Orleans' recovery in the teeth in the process. And now it seems the only thing that will peel this complete nonsense back will be many, many expensive days in court that we as a state cannot afford, all because the Louisiana Family Forum, in concert with the Discovery Institute, has successfully imposed its values on the rest of us poor schmos.

What is the Louisiana Family Forum, and how were things allowed to get this far? Well, let's let Lamar tell you. They showed the lege the money through exploiting some non-profit organizational loopholes themselves, and now we have the LSEA. It'd be a perverse thing of beauty if it weren't wielded in the service of such stunning ignorance. It is in an atmosphere such as this when sometimes, a child shall and must lead.

Enter Zack Kopplin and his campaign to repeal the LSEA. It begins with the following:

While the misnamed and misguided Louisiana Science Education Act claims to promote critical thinking in schools, it is really stealth legislation worded in a way that attempts to dodge the Supreme Court rulings against teaching creationism (and its offshoot intelligent design) in the public school science class. Louisiana’s kids deserve the best education possible, and should be taught proper and truthful science rather than religion in their science classes. We need to be taught real science in order be successful in today’s global economy.

If that weren't enough for most people -and it apparently isn't - the reasons why such an act is wrong are in this post, and it snowballs from there, to the point where Kopplin is ready to up the ante despite being "stunned at the way (Rep. Julie Quinn) attacked the other kids (at the State Education Committee Hearing). We had about 30 kids, and she went after them."

To borrow a few pages from the Christian bible the LFF, Livingston Parish, and Louisiana legislators like Quinn seem to revere so, too many hearts have been hardened like Pharaoh's in the course of this mess. What plagues will be brought upon us as a result? Am I the only one who thinks the continued ignorance of the average Louisiana public school student is a pretty damned big one that isn't worth all of this grief? Not to mention all the money that will be poured down the drain should the defense of this act ever enter the courts...

Louisiana legislators: let our children go.

Cross-posted at Humid City

2011-05-31T07:16:00.000-05:00

Even though I own a copy of it, I've been reluctant to watch Who Does She Think She Is? in large part because I've lived large portions of what the artists in the documentary have gone through. I still see myself and my ongoing struggles in any book or essay, any film, any set of statistics documenting how damned difficult it still is in this country - indeed, in this world - to be a mother and to be an artist of any kind. I don't care who you are: if you are a mother, you still have to choose. Societal pressures dictate this. If you are not a slave on a pedestal in your own home as a mother, then you are a selfish bitch unworthy of your family. Okay, the extremes might not be there on a relationship-by-relationship basis, but the overall tendencies are there.

I have known this deep, deep down...but I don't think my husband really got it until the documentary cropped up on PBS Sunday night when we were channel-surfing and it was really the only thing on. His knee-jerk reaction when he sees my face light up at the mere mention of artists who are women, God love him, is "You should go back to your glassworking," which is what he said when we discovered Who Does She Think She Is? was on. We watched it after Dan put the little guy to bed, however, and both of us grew quiet, me because I was struggling with my feelings over what I knew was going to be said...but all Dan said, at long last once it was over, was that he was headed to bed.

I'm finding myself afraid to ask him what he really thought about it all.

Most of the women in the documentary ended up divorced, with one of them, artist Maye Torres, recounting her struggles over custody of her children once her presumed life partner decided he didn't want to be with her anymore. Her response, after discovering that no one in town would really help her with her custody battles, was to do her damnedest to become such a good artist that there would be no question in people's minds that that was what she was meant to do, therefore putting obstacles in her way as a mother could be seen in a different light. Artist Janis Wunderlich, one of the ones in the documentary who is still married, has to shoe-horn making her art in-between shuttling her five kids around and doing cooking and cleaning, and then she doesn't even get a chance to really take in the clay work she does once it's finished for fear of one of her children breaking it. Can you say recipe for exhaustion?

These are the "options" laid bare, my biggest fears about marriage and parenting screaming out of the TV, and the truth is, I don't have faith in Dan that he could weather any of the turmoil that would be guaranteed to come this way were I to take up glassworking again today. I've sacrificed too much, and he hasn't sacrificed much at all. I'm all too conscious of how much money would be spent and of how time would be changed around were I to try to construct a small furnace in our backyard or set up a table torch for flameworking. I'm too aware of the house and the cars not being in my name, too mindful of the ways in which school hours and 9-to-5 work hours don't meet up for me to trust him with things as basic as dropping off the little guy and picking him up from school, too afraid that his lip service to my return to glassworking will cause harsh, hurtful things to come out of his mouth when faced with the realities of going back to it again and managing a household with a kid. I guess one could argue that I am not blameless in this, and I'm not - I've enabled him to think it'll be sooo easy for me to just pick up where I left off when I found out I was pregnant, because he's still doing the things he did before we were married. He's still going to all of his band practices after work, still going to Torah study and services on Saturdays, leaving me home with my son, and when there's a night I want to do something and he's already got something planned, there are cringe-worthy gripes about how much a sitter costs when I can't get another mother-friend to look after the little guy. I'm not supposed to be a needy person and ask him to give all that up, am I?

I hate feeling this way, that asking the man I love to overcome a few millenia of patriarchy and face the realities of juggling the undervalued and overlooked roles of parenting and housework will blow up in my face and implode our family, but it's there. I'll have to ask him about it one of these days, I'm sure, and the answers will probably reinforce the reasons why I'm still on antidepressant medication and why I'm still a big chicken about setting up some kind of studio in my back shed.

Sometimes, no matter how good documentaries are, they still suck.

2011-05-24T11:28:00.000-05:00

It's a crazy dilemma, to be sure.

Yes, my son's school building is in dire need of the renovations that are planned to be going on for the next couple of years. Yes, the kids can't be attending school in that same building with all that work going on. Yes, I'm kinda happy that the proposed temporary site is much, much closer to where I live.

BUT...

...when lead levels in the ground of the temporary school site are found to be much, much higher than normal, what will the school district be doing about it?:

The school board plans to remediate the future playground area, but didn't test a much larger area where modular classrooms and the cafeteria will be located. There is no word yet on whether that area will be remediated, even though it wasn't tested.

"I feel very strongly that the school needs to step up and protect our children and do it transparently," said (Audubon student parent Melissa) Piñera.

But Lourdes Moran, the school board president whose grandchild attends Audubon Charter School, said parents shouldn't be concerned.

"I would not jeapardize (sic) my child, my grandchild, or anyone's child," said Moran. "It's just not within my personality to expose any child to a perilous situation. It's unfortunate that some parents might disagree."

Moran went on to say that the site, which is owned by the Orleans Parish School Board, was chosen because school officials were unable to find another location large enough for the classroom modulars needed to accommodate hundreds of children who attend Audubon Charter School.

"It is not our intent to make [parents] feel uncomfortable, but unfortunately we really have no options," said Moran. "We've gone so far as to discuss with the Recovery School District to give back a building that they're not using so we could use that as "swing space" and not have to spend this much capital in temporary modulars, but unfortunately they could not acommodate(sic) us. This is the only solution we had at hand."

Concerned parents started an online petition Monday asking that the entire area be remediated with new soil and concrete.

"We're just trying to urge them to really look at the site, face the facts about the lead levels there, and really, remediate the entire place," said Piñera.

Parents also say they've never been formally notified the school is relocating for the next two years.

There were no links to the petition to the OPSD in WWL's report, which can be found at this link. Lead is in most places in the ground in this town, to be sure, but the city is taking steps to remediate public playgrounds. For the OPSD to keep the school at this site, however, they need to start the mitigation process now, for the entire site.

Over 900 more signatures are needed. Give it a read, at least.

2011-05-20T07:58:00.000-05:00

I've been out of the posting loop this week, as I'm still coming down from the successful launch of Endeavour I got to see from 3 miles away.

Tell the truth, it feels kind of like this:

Yep, that's ET-122 falling back to Earth. Mesmerizing, isn't it?

Yeah....

*blink*

Back to life on this planet soon, I promise. Tide yourselves over with my Flickr pictures 'til then.

2011-05-16T05:37:00.002-05:00

Here we go again, this time in the early morning.

Yep, I'm there. Again. Just give the #NASATweetup hashtag a follow.

2011-05-14T06:18:00.001-05:00

We here are happy to be back after Blogger's nervous breakdown. Hey, I'd be needing a vacation, too, if I had to keep track of all these posts all by my lonesome. There may still be some hiccuping here and there with the system, but unlike so many I know, Blogger has been good up 'til now to this blogger.

BUT, as soon as it comes back, of course I gotta head back east to NASA Tweetup Number Two, where attempts to blog will be well nigh impossible for me....and where we will be, once again, cheering on these guys:

While I am headed for the spacey Space Coast, go read some stuff and see some movies. I'll give you some suggestions:

Drake Toulouse on the intersections between the Mississippi River spillways opening and the ways in which the oyster farmers will be screwed.

I told you to go see some flick.

Cliff worries that the Mark St. Pierre trial is being inundated by all the flooding river hysteria. I most definitely see his point. In that spirit, inundate your brains with Dambala's accounts of the trial. You're not supposed to be looking at that big, bad river, anyhow...although, funny thing, my son's Little League organization is having an opening day second line at the Fly this morning, so I'll be hearing from my husband about the river today despite the city's admonitions to stay off the levees. I wonder how many calls there'll be to the city about today's "suspicious activity".

NOLA Slate goes toe to toe, but not drink to drink, with Davis Rogan. Go get his Once and Future DJ album, lady, if you can find it. Fun fact: first time I got really drunk as a skunk in New Orleans was at an All That show. Yes, that was me bouncing on that easy chair in the club to the music 'til someone had to get me to stop. Hiiiii, 1996!

And finally, the rapture cannot start without getting in your car, driving real far, driving all night 'til you see a light.

Don't strain your brain. Be back soon.

2011-05-11T11:49:00.000-05:00

My flood photos from the past few days.

The Mississippi River is a-rising, and it hasn't even crested here yet.

More on all this from me at Humid City.

2011-05-09T13:06:00.000-05:00

It's hard to write about the NASA Tweetup I attended nearly two weeks ago. Somewhat surprisingly so.

"I've decided: you should stay," my husband said over the phone as I was waiting for the motorcade of the president of the United States to pass us by. The arguments spilled out of the phone, despite the fact that I'd made the decision to come back home and not play the NASA waiting game. They'd first told us it would be a 48-hour wait for a launch attempt after that worst right turn of the astronaut van, then it became 72 hours to the next attempt, and by then I could see the writing on the orbiter...although it didn't come until after I seriously risked my relationship with my employer by trying to change out a workday I'd already committed myself to a few weeks before.

I stood firm, though I knew that Dan still had in his head the idea I'd had to let go of in a hurry: that this was now a very rare event I would possibly be missing. "Look," I explained. "I've met a lot of great people here. I've had a great time despite this. It's okay." I was about 60% convinced at that point that I'd made the right call. I wavered a tad when the fellow next to me overheard my end of the conversation and gave me a killer stare through his aviator sunglasses. "You have got to be kidding me," he said. I then looked at his credentials on the lanyard 'round his neck and realized: Oh, dear, I'd wandered among those for whom viewing the launch was work, not play - it was a disgruntled journalist I was standing next to at that moment. The scrubbed launch had made his job difficult, but he was missing the story that had been in his midst for the past day or so.

It's not easy for 150 people to drop everything and head to Florida for a few days, which is an amazing thing in itself - but when you throw in a couple of celebrity attendees, a few foreign nationals, a bunch of great speakers that included spacesuit developers, NASA's chief science officer, the flow director for Endeavour's last flight, an astronaut or two or three, a LEGO designer (there's a good reason why: check this post at Spuds In Space for more) and people enthusiastic about space travel and research from all over the country, you get a whole lot of fun. You get the people like Barbara Nixon, who hails from Florida and had the car with the Swiss Army trunk that was ready for any emergency except, of course, for fixing what ailed Endeavour on launch day - one look at her license plate told me what she was at NASA for. Or Karen Lopez, aka, @datachick, who brought along a bunch of Barbies that even Seth Green was interested in. Or Dr Lucy Rogers, who came up with the best response for why she, a Brit, wasn't at the royal wedding: "I got a better invite." Or fantastically generous and humble Rachel Maddow Show producer Tricia McKinney, who lent me the use of her iPhone when my Droid's battery died. Or horrifically jet-lagged Sydneyite Tim Bennett, who lent me the use of a USB cord. Or Lisa Bain, who's gonna do her best to schlep all the way back from Idaho to watch the launch, if she can...

...which brings me to the reasons why this post is so tough to write. I caught launch fever and it brought out the worst in me when I tried to remain in Florida a couple more days in order to stay on NASA String-Along Time (aka, NSAT), and I regret that. At the same time, I kinda agree with fellow tweetup New Orleanian-in-attendance Chris Smith - the experience feels unfinished, somehow, without seeing a launch, although the last thing anybody wants to see is a repeat of Challenger.

The official launch date for STS-134 is to be announced today at 2 PM CST. At least one mission astronaut says that NSAT will correspond. We'll see.

2011-05-04T23:09:00.000-05:00

From a message to parents of my son's school concerning a fundraiser:

...donations support critical operating needs, including salaries for additional teachers and teaching assistants and teacher professional development.... It is important that (said school) have high family participation because foundations often want to know if we have the support of our own families before they will give money to the school. (boldface mine)

Oh, the horror. The continued obstacle course that must be run or else our children's education will suffer even more than it already has. Our state is cutting funding for schools so violently and deeply that if you don't show us the money, neither will these foundations we have to beg from.

Shouldn't educators and their administrations be doing something like, I don't know, actually teaching the kids? I'm sure having to scrounge around for funding isn't sitting well with them, either. I almost expect there to be bouncer/enforcers walking around at school fundraising opportunities next.

Make no mistake: I personally don't mind contributing some money to the kitty, but I think of the parents who just can't and I wonder how well this argument is going over with them.

2011-05-02T22:38:00.002-05:00

Despite my previous post, there will be some NASA Tweetup posts coming. Didn't think I was gonna let it all slip by, did you?

'Til then, here's something to contemplate: I didn't notice this sign outside the diner I ate in on the first day of the tweetup until I overheard an entering patron tell a waitress: "That is some sign you got out there."

Obama's being blamed for a lot of things he didn't start - and for a lot of things that are, sadly and not-so-sadly, ending under his watch - and hey, anybody following the train wreck that was Dubya's two terms was going to have a hard row to hoe. The shuttle program was already being phased out around the time of Obama's election, but the anger at its end is clearly being directed at him.

Truth of the matter is, we in the U.S. no longer have the funding, or the political imperative that used to be goading us from the former Soviet Union, to continue space exploration all on our own...and if the continued trend towards cutting education and/or passing the management off of it to private enterprises keeps on, we will likely have a corresponding diminished role in the global scientific community currently launching people to the International Space Station, but planning for greater, farther destinations such as Mars.

I was also saddened to see Fox News on in the NASA employee cafeteria near the media site, too. The misinformation it passes on is spreading like wildfire and contributing to the general stupidity - hence the signage I saw on State Road 3 just south of Kennedy Space Center. Not that other 24/7 news outlets are much better...a truly critical eye on the media's reportage is an asset that must be developed now more than ever before.

How can we better educate folks in this current day and age about these issues? Will Obama actually grow a pair and start to take a stronger stand on the things that matter like the sciences, and, more importantly, will a majority of Congressional members follow his lead? I am, currently, at a loss concerning these questions...but I know there were 149 incredible, enthusiastic people chosen to be in that tent for two days learning about exploration beyond the Earth's gravity.

I even admonished one who said, "Oh, I'm just nobody."

No, you are somebody. All of us are.

So what do we do about it?

2011-05-02T12:56:00.003-05:00

A vacation from this past week's vacation is sorely needed, almost no question. Not that I didn't enjoy myself, but the highs and lows in such a short period of time have been short-circuitous to my brain and psyche. I should have taken a huge hint from the universe when I set out on my long drive to Kennedy Space Center after having dropped my big orange cat baby off at his regular vet - after he'd already spent a night at the emergency vet's under observation and testing and seemed to be improving.

So he hasn't always been the healthiest of cats. In his younger days, he had some major skin irritation that flared up at the back of his neck and occasioned his first emergency vet visit many years ago and a surgery that proved to be inconclusive as to what the source of the irritation was. It left my cat with his first scar, an irregular bald patch between his shoulder blades that would still get mildly irritated, but not like that one scary night I found him meowing from pain with a huge open sore there. Things didn't get scary again until two years ago, when my husband had to take him in for surgery again, for removal of bladder stones, and I came home from my in-laws' to this sight:

It was still hurricane season. I called his collar the cat cone of uncertainty.

My husband wasn't always fond of the cat, and that feeling was mutual in the beginning when, in our first apartment together as a newly married couple, the cat crawled out on one of the rafters in the loft in the middle of the night and started hysterically yowling in panic at his predicament. I awoke an hour or two after midnight to my husband laughing in a manner that was almost as hysterical as the yowling because the cat wouldn't come to him. All it took to beckon my orange baby off the skinny board he was precariously perched on was my hand reaching over the upstairs banister and a few clicks of my tongue.

Eventually the cat warmed to Dan, too, but when Dan took him in for the surgery, he didn't need to ask me to know if he should do so or not. Despite my husband's cat allergies, he knew how important the cat was to all of us, especially me. I'd had him from when he was two months old and my ex-boss rescued him from a neighborhood crack house where - she learned later - if the litter of the cat's brothers and sisters that was still there weren't placed in other homes, they would've been put into a trash bag and hauled out to the curb for the sanitation crews to take them away. I didn't intend to keep him, but he was mine from the second he climbed on my bed, found my hip, and took a long snooze on it.

But last Tuesday, when I came home, I could tell my cat wasn't feeling well at all. I'd never seen him looking that bad. He wasn't breathing well, and his ears felt cold. He hadn't moved from his spot on the floor by his water dish since that morning. It looked bleak, and I started to mentally prepare myself to let him go. He'd had a good 12 years or so on this earth, this big cat baby. If the tests showed he was in decline, then it was best for him to go to his rest...

...but he rallied the next morning. His blood work was good. There was color coming back to his paws and his gums. He even tried to groom himself, they said. I dropped him off to his regular vet with hope in my heart and turned my car towards the east coast to the hotel I'd be staying in for three nights while I visited NASA.

After my trip down there, I am now firmly convinced of one thing: any navigation skills I might have once possessed before I married Dan are now nearly lost. My husband called me while I was still on the road and asked where I was. "You're where?" he asked incredulously.

Hey, it could happen to you, too, if you mixed up I-95 with I-75:

I am amazed I found Florida. Honestly.

The other reason for the phone call, aside from chiding me for going all the way to Tampa, was that my cat had taken a turn for the worse. Dan was in Mandeville with the vet who had done the bladder stone surgery. My big fluffy orange guy had already stopped breathing once and was on life support. It was a respiratory illness he'd contracted, and even though his blood work was still good, it was highly likely he'd be brain-damaged after having suffered one cardiac arrest. I had to make the decision - on the road, while I was trying to extricate myself from my bad navigation decisions - to keep him alive or let him go.

I got to my hotel late at night with a heavy heart. I couldn't let him suffer any longer.

My vet was upset. My in-laws sent me condolences. And I came home after my trip to a cat-less house. I miss my fluffy baby.

Rest in peace, my Leo.

2011-04-29T05:00:00.010-05:00

Follow all of us tweeting from the STS 134 tweetup here. It's Endeavour's final trip into space, and tweeting's the only thing I can do right now.

2011-04-27T01:40:00.000-05:00

Just for the hell of it, I signed up through NASA's website and thought there was no way in hell I'd get picked to see one of the last two shuttle launches - and, even if I did get picked, one of them was scheduled for Passover. There was definitely no way in hell I'd pass over visiting my grandparents, who I only see once a year now, for the shuttle. What were the chances? Pretty piddly, I thought.

I checked my email the morning after the sign-up deadline to find that I was one of 150 chosen - out of over 4,000 signees - to view Endeavour's explosive escape from the earth's gravity to orbit around the planet. Surprise! If I'd have known how lucky I'd be, I'd have bought a Powerball ticket, too.

At the time I found out, there was one hitch: Endeavour's original launch date, the night of April 19th.

My husband looked over my shoulder at the confirmation and exclaimed "That's great! You can't go!"

We laughed together. The Passover seders and the time with extended family absolutely won out...but Dan said, "You know, they change the dates of the launches all the time. Go ahead and register. See what happens."

Fair enough but for another problem - the impulse I had to scream this news from the virtual rooftops of Twitter and of the blog I maintain and those to which I contribute had to be held in check. I didn't want to start blabbing to brand new Twitter followers headed to Kennedy Space Center that hey, I was going to go to the launch if it was moved - I felt like my place would be instantly revoked if any NASA folks saw that tweet in the stream. Bitter herbs and matzah over the orbiter built to replace Challenger going up and coming back for the last time? What kinda space enthusiast are you anyway??? Buh-bye, special pass to the press area.

But it's a fair question. I grew up in Houston. I barely remember all of us in school being herded outside to see Columbia sitting on the back of the 747 taking it to Florida - the plane did a nice circle around the city in tribute to the home of Mission Control and the training ground for the astronauts. We took occasional school trips to Johnson Space Center and I unfortunately remember them as being kind of boring, initially: NASA didn't have a flair for making things look pretty or exciting for the tourists. The small museum on the JSC campus had a lunar lander and a display I nicknamed Space Suits Through The Ages. It wasn't until I won the city science fair's Earth sciences division with a project about crystals and crystal growth that I got a real taste of what lay beyond that first impression. I also received an award from NASA that had me meeting an astronaut (Pierre Thuot, who served on Endeavour's first flight), seeing the swimming pool in which the astronauts train in full space suits, and peering into Mission Control. I'd gone beyond that hall of space suits, and it was pretty damned cool. It wasn't long after that that those areas I was only allowed to view for winning a science award were opened to the public. The nation's space agency had finally figured it out.

So how did I get from gnawing on my fingernails and worrying about my scheduling conflict being exposed to the world to running off to see this spectacle after all? I have the Russian Space Agency to thank for that. The Soyuz launch earlier this month took precedence over Endeavour's, and instead of having an orbiter that couldn't dock at the International Space Station because a Soyuz capsule was already there (nyaah nyaah), the STS-134 launch date was pushed to April 29th.

Yes, fine, all you locals know that's the first weekend of JazzFest. No, I can't create a Space Travel JazzFest at KSC - they don't allow folding chairs or alcoholic beverages, or even bands, in the press area. But I have to go all the same.

I ask only one thing of all of you...recite the Shepard's prayer on my behalf as I embark on this long car journey all by my lonesome to Cape Kennedy today...that's Alan Shepard's prayer:

Dear Lord, please don't let me fuck up.

cross-posted at Humid City

2011-04-26T07:45:00.000-05:00

Even though I was never much good at math, the first thing to pop into my head when I contemplated it was an equation:

(X + car) NY traffic = Z
X = family member
Z = the driving experience (which, depending on the variable X, can indeed vary widely)

I guess, as a late-bloomer in the driver's license sweepstakes and an even later first-time car owner, I don't see the act of driving in the same way the rest of my family does. Being in the car with my mom, my dad, and my brother this time around was an experience, for certain. It only happened a couple of times, the most memorable being when they were headed back to the airport on that artery from hell known as the Van Wyck Expressway, and I was a helpless passenger and captive audience for their road show. Traffic was at a fever pitch, a couple of drivers decided to follow the ambulances passing us by on the shoulder - "That's ILLEGAL," someone in the car nearly shouted at the ambulance chasers, I can't remember who - and then, further up the road, someone in the left lane decided to change lanes regardless of whether or not there was a car there, and the car that was forced into the shoulder to avoid a wreck was ours. The scream that came from my mother was enough to give me a heart attack, and I first thought she was suffering from one, but once I got over the initial shock, it was simply a lot of blood-vessel-busting anger at the lane-changing offender. As she directed multiple birds at the guy who nearly held my family back from their Delta flight home and shouted a bunch of curses through the closed windows while I tried to calm her down, Dad moved the car back onto the Van Wyck and we continued making our way slowly up the road.

Much as I love my family, getting behind the wheel once we got to the terminal was a relief. I made my way back to my grandparents' house going through neighborhoods we'd haunted some when Dan and I had lived in Queens: Corona, Elmhurst, Middle Village, and on to Woodhaven Boulevard and (relatively) cheaper gas to fill up the car before heading to the Belt Parkway and Grandma's. My grandmother got behind the wheel to take us to a South Shore playground, where the little guy frolicked on monkey bars and swings while we suffered the high winds in the sunniest spots we could find. An hour of that was more than enough. The drive back featured a few of my grandma's less-than-5 MPH turns from one street to another, and when some impatient jerk decided honking his horn wasn't enough and passed her too fast going into her subdivision, the curses came flying again, only from a different source. I just had to shake my head.

Later that same night, more lone driving nirvana, this time in the Nissan my grandpa drives, which has a keyless ignition that scares my grandma so, she made my grandpa take it to pick up my parents and brother from the airport despite my dad's protestations at the smallness of the car and its trunk space. I took the Cross Island to the Grand Central Parkway to visit a friend in Astoria I haven't seen in ages. After we caught up in all too brief a time, I got back on the Grand Central and chanced the Van Wyck, which was moving well at 11 at night, but not well enough for the driver of a sporty black Mercedes ahead of me who tried to weave through traffic and ended up impatiently weaving on a much smaller scale in the left lane before finding an opening to the right in which he could shoot in and let the horsepower fly. I mentally will people like that to keep calm, and I'd like to think it worked, but it was like watching ADD on wheels. But that's driving in New York, and it's better to accept it and move away from it rather than try to direct it from your car.

The seasoned pro, however, is my grandpa, who turns ninety next year and was driving for two years before he got his license (which he got after he first flunked the driver's test because of all the bad habits he'd learned in those pre-license years). The man is having trouble seeing as well as he used to at night, true, and having my parents and brother in the car with him on a rainy, dark night, yelling at him to get off the lines in the road would be difficult for anybody to endure (okay, so, he probably turned down his hearing aids when they got in the car), but he reportedly drove my aunt back into Manhattan just fine after the first seder night, and he did all right taking us to the Transit Museum in downtown Brooklyn despite my less-than-exact recall of where to exit the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

One particular wrong turn of his was reminiscent of his being behind the wheel when I was a kid: he missed the median in the Houston suburbs and ended up turning into oncoming traffic, and he did the same in downtown Brooklyn, where there was fortunately no traffic coming at us when he turned. My impulse to yell as I did when I was a kid (Grandpaaa, you're going the wrong waaaay!!!) was tamped down by the need to not scare the heck out of my son in the back of the car. We negotiated around the median, weaved through some pedestrians and got on the right side of the road. He told my grandma the next day what happened and she gave him a good scolding about how oblivious he could be...but don't we all have some of that going on? Constant vigilance is always the key with good driving, but sometimes, one just can't help one's natural tendencies. My grandpa sees a median sometimes at one edge of a road with many lanes, and it doesn't register as an indication of a divider to him - especially if he doesn't know the way too well. Is it time for him to hang up his license? Is it time for my grandma to take a cold, hard look at her less-than-5 MPH turns and hang it up as well? Do I really want to confront them with their mortality like that yet, when they already have many reminders of it coming at them every day?

What I do know is that Grandpa, having never even heard of the Transit Museum before I directed him there, likes it a lot and wants to return, but he won't be taking the Long Island Rail Road, the buses, or the subways to get there. Old habits die hard...and he will remember that wrong turn. It won't happen again. And on a future visit, I will be there with him when he turns to me and says, "I got it that time!" When he doesn't get it is when I'll really worry.

2011-04-19T16:44:00.000-05:00

Ah, Passover...

...that time of year when that burning question is on the mind of every Gentile leader throughout the world...

Yeah, it's tasteless, and so are some of the attempts to make, say, kosher for Passover beer.

Chag sameach, everybody.

2011-04-18T14:57:00.002-05:00

A Happy Passover to everybody.

2011-04-14T14:36:00.001-05:00

Video via Dambala's "More Cries For Help":

Louis was one of over 40 fisherman I spoke with on Saturday who is gravely ill. All of these fisherman confirmed to me that the Gulf is still full of oil and dispersant is continually being deployed....including areas which have been deemed safe for seafood harvesting.
There are more testimonials coming....please help spread this message...please help spread the truth. The nightmare BP left us with is not over, in fact it may just be starting. The MSM is not going to report what's happening, but I implore you to dig deeper and don't trust what you are being spoon-fed.

Dambala includes a link to the Louisiana Environmental Action Network, which is keeping up with these developments. Keep a close eye on it and spread the word.

Many prominent fisherfolk are joining in on the fight, too, in other ways. Well worth your time to watch the Kindra Arnesen and Ryan Lambert links on the clips in there.

Kindra Arnesen and Ryan Lambert live only a few miles from each other deep in the bayou of Plaquemines Parish, LA. They share the same love of the marsh, the sea and the coastal wilderness that make this area an irreplaceable treasure of the south.

But this week they are now both in Washington talking to members of Congress about the need for comprehensive legislation to protect against future disasters and make sure money is provided to restore the damaged Gulf coast.

Kindra and Ryan are neighbors but live worlds apart. Kindra and her husband are commercial fishermen, who shrimp and fish all year long to sell their catches to the market, providing some of the finest seafood on the market. Ryan is a fishing and hunting guide, one of the Louisiana's most successful. Together they share a love for the bayou they fear has been irreparably damaged by the oily assault, a land that is rapidly washing away due to human intrusion...

...Ryan and Kindra are among many Gulf residents who feel the country has no clue about what’s really going on along the coast. They face tens of millions of dollars worth of ad campaigns funded by BP and local governments putting a pretty face on the oil disaster. But they say they have no choice but to fight for their land and their future.

Update, 3:56 PM: More from WhoDat35 - Dr. Riki Ott on what is going on in the Gulf:

2011-04-14T13:21:00.001-05:00

This mother is tired - and not just physically, although that is a good part of it right now. You'd be zonked, too, if you walked with your child's class twenty-plus blocks from his school to a local library lugging a book sack the whole way...but I'll get back to that in a bit.

Saw this Twitter hashtag the other day, commented on its creation and how dissatisfied more parents seem to be with the whole process and hype of charter schools, and got a response from another Tweeter Tuber saying that most New Orleans parents seem to be giving the most kudos to the charters here. My answer to that: depends on which parents you talk to and what their experiences are. It'll be intriguing to see what happens with my son's school in the next few years in this regard, as I'm no stranger to gripes about administrative actions large and small - or teacher actions - but now that we're set to have the school building worked on for the first time in ages, there's already serious questioning of the site where the kids will be for the next couple of years. I personally like where it is, as now the place will be within walking distance of where we live...but hey, parents, news flash: lead is everywhere and so is crime. The International School is right by there and I don't see people yanking their kids out of there every time something happens in the neighborhood. But the bigger concern for some parents is how much the school has fallen in the state rankings, which are based solely on the results of the LEAP tests. I am mightily dreading next year's emphasis on the LEAP in the little guy's third grade year. I heard tell of the late arrival of LEAP study materials this year, and then the supplemental instruction parents had to do on Louisiana history, because the school doesn't obsessively teach to the test in every way. Has anybody outright boycotted the test in Louisiana? If so, lemme know.

And then, amid the front page reports of wild chickens roaming our city streets (they'll form Mardi Gras chicken tribes next, recording chants such as "Meet De Chickens On Da Battlefront", "Pluck My Peace Pipe", and "I looove to hear him caaall Rhode Island Reeeeeeeed..."), there's now the added stress of dear God, parenting is making me fat.

There was a time when we parents were entitled to our zaftig states, but now it seems we aren't running after our kids enough to make it worthwhile for the childless in our society to retain their stick-figure physiques. Case in point was yesterday's LEAP week field trip the little guy's class took to a local library branch. The emails were sent out previously to let everyone know a brisk march was going to be the mode of transportation, but boy, did the kids' energy test the parent chaperones in attendance. I'm glad I began working out in early December, myself, even though I'm not svelte by any stretch of the imagination - it helped endurance-wise. The double-time walk back was what did most of the parents in, especially since some of them were toting back loads of books the kids got at the library's Wednesday book sale (including a few hardcover dictionaries, as the kids have gone mad for definitions). We were all simultaneously envious and slightly scornful of the cute, skinny, marathon-runner teaching assistant who ran, without breaking into any visible sweat, ahead of the kids to direct traffic at each intersection so that our group could keep marching safely. I certainly needed a drink after all that, and I was quite ready to buy my fellow parents a few rounds of their alcoholic beverages of choice, because, by God, we deserved it after all that kid-wrangling and speed-walking.

Another news flash, to first the women: you will gain weight in your pregnancies. If you didn't gain a fraction of an ounce after having four kids, you are an anomaly and I hate your genes for setting some impossible standard. Most mothers out there are working too damned hard to worry about extra pounds, so if you're all up in our business about our weight, then get some better working conditions going for all parents, better food prices, better schools that don't cost an arm and a leg in time put into getting the kids in or in tuition payments - hell, better lifestyles regardless of race, class, or economic status. Don't keep it so that having anything to do with the birthing and raising of children makes us non-people.

Pardon me while I kick back responsibly with food and drink I like because I earned it, despite constant admonishments that I'm just a lowly part-timer in the working-for-bucks world. If I were getting paid for all this worry and all the explanations of why Big Freedia is a she, I'd be doing quite well, thanks.

cross-posted at Humid City

2011-04-10T07:21:00.000-05:00

One mom said, in the refill line for the water spraying toys, she was glad she didn't have to go to Blue Bayou as much now.

One can only agree after having seen the gator deluge a bunch of times:

Take it from me: it is darned near impossible to go to the Cool Zoo water park and not get wet. And it's about time for this town, too. Now if we could just get some splash parks adjacent to all the spiffy, newly-equipped playgrounds cropping up all over New Orleans...

Yeah, I know the big obstacle to that is the Sewerage & Water Board. Stop laughing.

2011-04-09T09:44:00.000-05:00

Over at the New Orleans Metblog, Rayna Nielsen has begun to blog about her experiences starting her child in a local charter school and has already run into a financial fact of life that didn't exist when my son was starting:

Since the school lost federal funding for it’s Pre-K program last year they were forced to cut the K-3 grade all together and charge tuition for K-4. We will be heading into K-4 next school year so we will be paying tuition. The up side to this over private schools in which we would also be paying tuition this year is that every year after next is free. That makes paying $4,570 by July 15th much more appealing if not actually easier.>

The long and the short of last night’s meeting was we all have to go to an independent website (sss.nais.org) type in our financial information and that will tell us if we are eligible for reduced tuition. I am pretty sure we are not eligible though I will be plugging our numbers into that little website just to be 100%. They also mentioned a loan that is available but of course couldn’t really answer any questions on that since it is “official bank stuff”. The whole shebang lasted half an hour and I didn’t learn a single thing I couldn’t have learned easier from an e-mail.

May she and all other parents negotiating the current system of schools landscape here only go from strength to strength...which will be sorely needed in negotiating any bureaucratic speedbumps along the public education way.

Speaking of those speedbumps: Read through this New York Times article on Middle School 223's triumphs, travails, and daily battles in the Bronx. Yes, it's long, but it's good.:

In certain respects, 223 is a monument to (former NYC schools chancellor Joel) Klein’s success: empower the right principals to run their own schools and watch them bloom. Thanks to Klein, (MS 223 principal Ramon) González has been able to avoid having teachers foisted on him on the basis of seniority. He has been able to create his own curriculums, micromanage his students’ days (within the narrow confines of the teachers’ union contract, anyway) and spend his annual budget of $4 million on the personnel, programs and materials he deems most likely to help his kids.

And yet even as school reform made it possible for González to succeed, as the movement rolls inexorably forward, it also seems in many ways set up to make him fail. The grading system imposed by Klein that has bestowed three consecutive A’s on González also disqualifies him from additional state resources earmarked for failing schools. The ever-growing number of charter schools, often privately subsidized and rarely bound by union rules, that Klein unleashed on the city skims off the neighborhood’s more ambitious, motivated families. And every year, as failing schools are shut down around González, a steady stream of children with poor intellectual habits and little family support continues to arrive at 223. González wouldn’t want it any other way — he takes pride in his school’s duty to educate all comers — but the endless flow of underperforming students drags down test scores, demoralizes teachers and makes the already daunting challenge of transforming 223 into a successful school, not just a relatively successful one, that much more difficult....

...González prefers to think of himself as a community activist. His vision for 223 is in some respects anachronistic in the era of school reform. Klein’s animating belief, and surely what he will best be remembered for, is the notion that while low-income families may not be able to choose what neighborhood they live in, they should nonetheless be able to choose what school their children attend. It was toward that end that he brought more than 100 charter schools to New York — with at least 100 more still on the way — deliberately concentrating them in high-poverty areas like Harlem and the South Bronx to create competition for existing public schools. Without ever quite saying so, Klein was agitating against the very idea of the neighborhood school with deep roots in a community, which is precisely what González is now trying to revive and reinvent.

Broadly speaking, the modus operandi of most charter schools, or at least those in impoverished neighborhoods, is to separate children from their presumably malignant environments. González objects to this in principle. “I don’t want to be part of the history of taking talented kids out of the neighborhoods and telling them to move on,” he says. More practically, he doesn’t think it’s a realistic objective, considering 223’s population. “Most of our kids are never going to leave this area just for financial reasons; they can’t afford to live anywhere else, they don’t have the guidance, whatever. So how do we make those places better so that their kids aren’t going through the same cycle?"

Given his and Klein’s conflicting agendas, it’s no surprise that González is critical of many of the policies of education reform. He has no problem with schools being held accountable for their performance, but he worries that the reform movement’s infatuation with competition will undermine the broader goal of improving public education — that by grading schools against their peers you are encouraging them to hoard their successful innovations rather than to share them. He is concerned as well about the fact that the new principals being sent, disproportionately, into disadvantaged neighborhoods have little experience with or connection to the communities they’re supposed to serve. And he is made uncomfortable by all of the educational experimentation, the endless stream of pilot programs, being implemented in neighborhoods like his. “I’m just afraid that our kids are being sacrificed while everyone is learning on the job,” he says. “This is not some sort of urban experiment. These are kids’ lives we're talking about.”

Think John White would bring that sort of thinking with him to the RSD? That'll be about as likely as White hanging at his namesake bar in the Quarter on a regular basis.

Yeah, all right, all serious links make this blogger a dull broad...so let's cut this stuff with a YouTube, shall we?

2011-04-07T12:10:00.002-05:00

The best link-o-rama thus far concerning John White's appointment as replacement RSD head can be found at NOLA Defender. When one of the links cited there begins with "my condolences to New Orleans", well, it makes me wonder...

In the views of many public school parents, he has consistently ignored our concerns about overcrowding and inequitable distribution of resources and space. See this account, for example, of the proposal to place the Hebrew Language Academy charter school within Marine Park middle school; here are also videos of the highly contentious hearings.

During the proceedings, he called the 150 children who would attend the Hebrew charter school the “jewels” of the DOE, which hugely offended the parents of the 1100 children currently attending Marine Park MS, as well as the community’s elected officials, including Rep. Anthony Weiner.

White also supported the creation of a middle school called “Quest to Learn” based on video games, despite the opposition of District 2 parents and the Community Education Council. He promised it would not go into an existing school building but that it would find its own building. That never happened, of course. Instead it was inserted into the Bayard Rustin building, eliminating precious gym space for students at the schools already housed in the building. His refusal to consult with parents and the CEC led to a lawsuit.

More recently, White has been pushing the rapid and costly expansion of the Izone, or online learning, to 400 schools, despite the fact that it has little or no research to back it up, as today’s NY Times points out. Yet he wants to spend $500 million on technology next year to make this possible. As quoted in this recent report on the Izone, White said, “We are trying to make achievement the constant and adults the variable.”

It is no wonder that White would want to leave NYC, considering the negative feelings he has aroused; and the fact that approval ratings for Bloomberg’s handling of education is at an all-time low of 28%. Despite all the money spent and often wasted, achievement has lagged, especially among black and Hispanic students.

John White also led the campaign to close schools. Below are videos of public hearings at which he presided concerning the closing of Jamaica HS in Queens and Metropolitan Corporate Academy in Brooklyn.

Jamaica HS Closing Hearing: James Eterno Presents the Real Data from Grassroots Education Movement on Vimeo.

Hey, just so we know what we're getting into... Lovely to know that, if I were the parent of an RSD child, White would see me - and RSD teachers - as a "variable".

So today, as part of the Education Writers Association seminar here, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who infamously said "The best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina," will be addressing seminar attendees today. If any of you are going, can you ask Duncan why his policies deviate so much from what the president feels about education?

In a town hall meeting hosted by Univision, President Obama was asked by a student named Luis Zelaya if there could be a way to reduce the number of tests that students must take.

His answer was superficially reassuring, but underneath, rather alarming.

He replied:

"... we have piled on a lot of standardized tests on our kids. Now, there's nothing wrong with a standardized test being given occasionally just to give a baseline of where kids are at.

"Malia and Sasha, my two daughters, they just recently took a standardized test. But it wasn't a high-stakes test. It wasn't a test where they had to panic. I mean, they didn't even really know that they were going to take it ahead of time. They didn't study for it, they just went ahead and took it. And it was a tool to diagnose where they were strong, where they were weak, and what the teachers needed to emphasize.

"Too often what we've been doing is using these tests to punish students or to, in some cases, punish schools. And so what we've said is let's find a test that everybody agrees makes sense; let's apply it in a less pressured-packed atmosphere; let's figure out whether we have to do it every year or whether we can do it maybe every several years; and let's make sure that that's not the only way we're judging whether a school is doing well.

"Because there are other criteria: What's the attendance rate? How are young people performing in terms of basic competency on projects? There are other ways of us measuring whether students are doing well or not."

Then he said something really radical.

"So what I want to do is—one thing I never want to see happen is schools that are just teaching to the test. Because then you're not learning about the world; you're not learning about different cultures, you're not learning about science, you're not learning about math. All you're learning about is how to fill out a little bubble on an exam and the little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test. And that's not going to make education interesting to you. And young people do well in stuff that they're interested in. They're not going to do as well if it's boring."

Barack...Barry...Dude...after you've met with Boehner about keeping the government working, get with your education guy and figure out where you guys' signals have crossed, because this country desperately needs your kind of thinking. Yesterday and today.

The Department of Ed's responses to Anthony Cody's questions on Obama's thinking versus policy are here.

Further extrapolation in a two-part "Obama Knows Best" series is here and here.

And finally:

Let me explain why I think this is resonating so much.

The Obama campaign relied on the energy of millions of us, activated by a call to our hopes and dreams. We were exhausted by eight years of Bush, seven years of No Child Left Behind, and Obama promised a fresh start. We have not seen that fresh start in education. Instead we are seeing a deep entrenchment on the part of the Department of Education, finding ever more creative ways to pretend that making the tests more frequent will somehow make them benign. Those of us who are experiencing the effects of these policies are not deceived. We see how they are destroying schools, and stealing opportunities from children.

Three years ago, in 2008, I actively campaigned for Barack Obama during the primary. I knocked on doors in my neighborhood, and brought together more than a hundred educators to raise thousands of dollars for his campaign. About 18 months ago, deeply disappointed by the way that President Obama was continuing the test-aholic traditions of NCLB, I wrote him an open letter. I posted it here on my blog, and launched a Facebook group called Teachers' Letters to Obama in order to gather more letters, and create a forum for educators to gather and discuss how we might reshape the education debate. We gathered 107 letters, which were sent to both President Obama and Secretary Duncan. We eventually had a brief conversation with Secretary Duncan, but otherwise, our concerns have been ignored.

Last week, President Obama reminded us all why his election gave many of us so much hope. In 338 words he spoke of how he wanted his daughters, Sasha and Malia, to have their learning tested. He described a low-stakes, low pressure environment, with the results used not to punish them, their teachers or their school, but simply to find out what their strengths are, and where they might need extra support. He spoke of the need to avoid teaching to the test, and the value of engaging projects that would make students excited about learning. President Obama has made sure his daughters can learn this way. If only Department of Education policies would allow students in our public schools this same privilege!

President Obama needs to understand. Those of us who care deeply about our children and public schools cannot support his candidacy if he does not fix his education policies so they align with what he said on March 28th.

We have created a petition asking President Obama to support the Guiding Principles of the Save Our School March and National Call to Action, which are aligned with his. Please sign it here.

2011-04-05T12:39:00.000-05:00

Reposting the following via Dambala and Varg at The Chicory:

Clayton Matherne from Blackbird Media on Vimeo.

Please get the message out....nothing has been "made right". We're being lied to...but that shouldn't come as a surprise to the people of the Gulf Coast, now should it?

2011-04-05T11:57:00.002-05:00

The groove hit us almost before the band did. It rolled off their rendition of “Didn’t He Ramble” and rocked the crowd as the players came to a stop by us in the dark, hampered by the non-motion of the parade before them. A few fellas from the ‘hood were nearby, soaking it up and giving it back with every dance step. They paid the players one of the ultimate compliments at that moment: they made a request. “ ’Casanova’! ” they cried. “Can y’all play ‘Casanova’? “

The band heard the request and shook their heads. The classic ‘80’s soul tune, a part of the repertoire of more than a few black brass bands, thanks to Rebirth's rendition, wasn’t this white band’s cup of tea. The moment had passed, leaving me empty and bothered inside. Granted, the band was probably tired after having walked half the parade route; plus, I’m sure, they already had their set list down to the point where the leader could shout out a number and off they’d go…but I felt like it was, somehow, an opportunity missed.

When the tagline for The Whole Gritty City, a documentary slated for release in 2012, presents the local high school marching bands as being “the front lines in a battle for survival”, that’s a lot to put on the power of music. It was something I never seriously thought about until that moment along the parade route. Jordan Flaherty has said in his book Floodlines that the presence of a brass band can help create an alternate space, “a lawless but communal utopia” that can draw anyone and everyone on the street into its possibilities. I considered that, and then it hit me.

Amid the stops and starts of a trio of Mardi Gras parades, that utopia had, unexpectedly, sneaked up on us all for a brief moment between floats. Sure, these days, the whiter bands stick closer to the traditional jazz and the brass bands like to rock out more, taking on some Marvin Gaye and even Lady Gaga, but the band that night slammed us right between the eyes with a simultaneous trip backwards and forwards in time, showing us why jazz was and is le jazz hot. Didn’t he raaamble…rumbled up from the street with a small growl…he raaAAMbled! That he did, and it made you want to shout…Rambled ‘til the butcher cut him down. Oh, but it made you feel good, even so.

But then the instruments left the players’ lips. There wasn’t going to be “Casanova”, nor any other tune coming from the band for a while when the parade royalty far ahead was being toasted at Gallier Hall. The disappointed fellas wandered off, and so did I, failing to find any utopias in the bits and pieces of parade refuse strewn about. We’d heard the call of truly moving music and had wanted more, but we had to settle for that cherished feeling of having had the ideal in our ears for an all-too-brief time. May we never become too closed, too jaded, to hear that ideal again.

cross-posted at Humid City

2011-04-03T18:13:00.001-05:00

Get your tickets for this one before they sell out:

A concerned mother turned filmmaker aims her camera at the high-stakes, high-pressure culture that has invaded our schools and our children's lives.

Race to Nowhere points to the silent epidemic in our schools: cheating has become commonplace; students are disengaged; stress-related illness and depression are rampant; and many young people arrive at college and the workplace unprepared and uninspired.

Race to Nowhere is a call to action for families, educators, and policy makers to challenge current assumptions on how to best prepare the youth of America to become healthy, bright, contributing and leading citizens.

Tuesday, April 12, from 6 PM to 8 PM at

United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO) Headquarters Oak Park Shopping Center

4718 Paris Ave (corner of Mirabeau) New Orleans LA

Tickets available here.

2011-04-02T12:38:00.001-05:00

Knowing a good friend who was a friend of the late Jim Dugan is to know how terrible the whole situation has been for friends and family involved. The fact that a senseless accident was exacerbated by a witness' lateness in coming forward and by the non-action of the 5th District has made things harder to bear. May his memory forever be for a blessing.

The one who has been keeping up with the developments and posting them is Champ Superstar - check them out here, here, here, and here.

A major account by Eve Kidd Crawford of the bumbling of the local police in this matter is here. Some excerpts:

On Saturday, Jim’s friend Abby Van Deerlin, a lawyer, and Sarah and I, two journalists, went to the Bywater police station with printouts from the Facebook group in which Kelly had stated, again, that she could not be sure he made it out of the water. We just wanted the police to know that there was a very high probability that he did not make it out of the water and that they should be focusing their efforts there.

At that point, the woman behind the desk said that NOPD didn’t handle anything in the water. She told us that she couldn’t even swim and that it was far too dangerous for NOPD to do water searches. She said Coast Guard would help recover a body when it surfaced. She said Harbor Police could possibly help search for a body. She said we could call the coroner. She did not seem to sense our urgency.

We asked when we could expect anyone to look at our printouts, and she said nothing could happen until the only copy machine in the office was fixed because she’d need to make copies for every person involved in the case. When will it be fixed? we asked. She didn’t know exactly but assured us that it wouldn’t stay broken for days.

Feeling defeated, we left. Abby made the copies herself and delivered them back to the police station. No one has contacted any of us about them...

...A volunteer dive team from Texas, EquuSearch, was finally called in by the police yesterday (March 27th). They have known since Wednesday that he had fallen into the river and not been seen since.

Another friend, Molly, called both NOPD and Harbor Police and had this to say on the Facebook group: “I called NOPD just to ask why Harbor Police or Coast Guard haven't resumed a boat search to supplement the dive team search, and mostly just to let them know that the public cares about this. So I was surprised when neither the NOPD public information officer nor the Harbor Police shift lieutenant could give me accurate information about the search. NOPD sent me to Harbor Police, saying they would be the ones to decide to resume a boat search. But when I called Harbor Police, they said NOPD's the lead and they're waiting on instructions from them. So I called NOPD back, got in touch with Officer Williams, the public information officer on duty at the dive search site. She repeated what the other PIO had said, that Harbor Police is responsible for deciding whether to resume a search. I told her what HP had told me, that NOPD is the lead, and that it looks pretty bad that neither of them knows what the other is doing or supposed to be doing. So all I said was, if NOPD has not yet coordinated a resumed downriver search with Harbor Police, Coast Guard and downriver parish emergency operations, then that should be done, because obviously you can't rely on this dive team searching one spot on the river. She said she would look into it.”

Molly later reported back that the Coast Guard wasn’t involved because they only look for living people and the detective and the Coast Guard had determined that it was impossible for him to have survived in the river. We all knew that. We weren’t living in a fantasy world where he’d be found alive in the river clinging to a piece of driftwood. But we were never told – by anyone – why dive teams weren’t called in sooner, and it’s been nothing but a jurisdictional nightmare since this all began. I know resources are scarce everywhere, but, you know, they found Douglas Schantz. They found Brian Reed. Jim wasn’t a big shot, and his brother doesn’t play pro-football. But Jim was still better-connected in terms of friends and resources than many other people, and we all should be worth looking for. As Jim's friend Margaret Davidson said on the Facebook group: “What about people who fall into the water who don't have 1,600 friends with computers and connections? This whole thing is heartbreaking, and the idea of the countless others that it's happened to without so much as a whisper just makes it that much more despicable.”

Sarah and I went today to search surveillance footage from Turn Services, a private business located near where Jim went into the river. We found nothing, but it was good to be able to cross that off the list. “Have the police contacted you?” Sarah asked. They said no, no one from the police had been in touch.

Ummm, why did they call in EquuSearch when there is already a dive and rescue group operating locally? What exactly is the NOPD's procedure for finding people who may have taken a tumble into the Mississippi? Wait until they float up in their jurisdiction? Pass the buck to the Harbor Police who will pass it right back to them? And, of course, this has to involve the worst of the police districts in the city. Don't die suspiciously in the 5th, New Orleans residents.

A Fundrazr account has been set up for the recovery of Dugan's body and for his seven-year-old daughter. But we must still, by all means, keep demanding the answers to these questions and the changes that will ensure this doesn't happen to another family.

2011-03-31T15:22:00.000-05:00

Due to the kiddo's Bloom County readings, I've had to specifically address some of the things that were happening when I was coming of age in the 1980's. There's nothing like having to explain Communism to an eight-year-old (especially after his having read, "Stop yelling 'Ronald McDonald is a capitalist stooge!' out the window!" in a comic), but there's also nothing like having to refresh your own memory about what was going on then.

With this link, consider yourself refreshed on what else happened in the Reagan years. It is instructive to remember that not everybody was in a "morning in America" coma at that time. I especially keep a lot of this stuff in mind when I read about the current assaults on who controls women's right to choose and about how much women are losing these battles.

If women in Great Britain could get together and protest nuclear proliferation for nearly 20 years, we can certainly make our voices heard before this sick generation of right-wing politicians and their equally sick constituents pass these laws literally over our dead bodies.

Part 2 is here.

2011-03-29T06:51:00.000-05:00

Recent Little Guy Reading Choices:

When the kid isn't engrossed in science tomes, Geronimo Stilton, or books about some of his favorite cartoons, he unwinds with this stuff he's found around our house:

circa 1975

Not before my time but not of my time, either. Enough universal humor in it to keep the kiddo interested, especially the antics of Zonker Harris. Explanations have had to be proffered for the Vietnam War, Nixon and Watergate, and what mortar shells are. The kid especially gets a kick out of the friendship between all-American hero B.D. and the Vietcong terrorist Phred.

circa 1987

There's already some favorite strips that the kid keeps reading aloud again and again, and each time, his readings make me giggle, especially the one where Deathtongue starts rehearsing and Bill blows up because his tongue was plugged into the amp. I've had to explain the subliminal message freakouts over the Judas Priest albums, Sean Penn and photographers, and the tail-end of the Cold War and the arms race (think Rosebud the basselope). I'm starting to think a pattern is emerging...

circa 1996

Only thing that is more universal than Calvin and Hobbes is Peanuts. The kid goes back to this one again and again for the fun of it, exclaiming over what a bad boy Calvin can be, yet still delighting in it.

Of course, he's had me rediscovering all of this stuff all over again. Boomers Bloopers Blessers Bosoms!

2011-03-24T19:04:00.000-05:00

This seems to be departed Jewish goddesses week...

Scholarly studies concerning Judaism and the Tanakh, or the Jewish Bible, crop up a lot, and since the late '70's-early '80's, there have been eyebrows raised when evidence of actual female deities mixed up in Judaism's origins crops up. This latest concerning Asherah is no exception. A lively discussion on my Queens synagogue listserve has put forth that Asherah is still there, she's simply been sublimated into the role of Shekhinah, God's feminine presence.At any rate, it's not likely that a largely patriarchal religion is going to be welcoming the goddess into its practices.

Sadly, when I first heard about screen goddess Elizabeth Taylor's death yesterday, I could only see her as the butt of too many jokes, the Lindsay Lohan of her day. I've never seen one of her movies all the way through, and I had no idea she was a Jew by choice. I'm starting to enjoy the phrase "Jewish audacity", however. When all is said and done, Elisheba was quite a broad.

Tomorrow, however, is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which killed many Italian and Jewish immigrant women, kicking off lobbying for safer working conditions and stronger workers' unions to get worker safety done right. At a time in our history when unions are under siege, it cannot go without saying that without the power to bargain collectively, it could indeed be a worker's very life at stake.