Home Stretch

Ladies and gents, unbelievable as it may be, time does fly and we are closing in on Rising Tide IV. If you are reading this and you are coming, then don't mind the following pleas.

What's keeping you, you late applicant, you?

Are we not chic enough? Not scruffy enough? Too far left? Too far right? We don't drink enough wine? Or beer? Or coffee? The registration now costs $25, so the boat for a registration fee minus $5 has sailed for this year. Are we too expensive? Are we selling ourselves short? Do we need to include a cage match happening alongside Harry Shearer to further illustrate how crazy things have become in this farce called "recovery"? Do we need RT throws? Do we need more national attention (oh, I shouldn't ask that - darn near everything New Orleanian has needed national attention since before four years ago)? Are you just a person who thrives on the adrenaline rush of just squeaking by a deadline? Are you in a vegetative state and need someone to hold your hand in all of this (hey, you're not alone...)? Am I asking too many questions?

Ummm, yeah, I am...or maybe I'm not. When I come up with some more....and I will, oh, yes, I will....there will be some special things in store in the coming week for those of you who guess the answers correctly. Stay tuned to this bat-channel 'til then...

I shall be putting the Greg Peters-designed orisha up every day on this blog until Saturday, and I look forward to seeing you all at the Zeitgeist, every last one of ya, no matter what you might really think about me or RT.

So, another reason why I should limit my jaunts out of the area is closely related to the health of my pets...and the one that suffered greatly during my time away was the youngest of my pets and the sweetest, my big orange cat baby. Dan reported finding blood in the cat's urine once, thought it was an anomaly, found it again, and discovered after a visit to our vet that our cat had seven bladder stones blocking his pee pathway. The surgery had to be done in Mandeville, cost nearly as much as our car repairs back in February, and now has me wondering if I should set up a PayPal donation button for the Cat Baby Fund to help cover the costs of getting our fluffy family member healthy...but there's a recession going on and we as a nation can't even deal with the health care costs incurred by the ailments of fellow human beings, forget ten-plus-year-old cats.

When the big guy came home, having been a mild-mannered patient ("the most laid-back one he'd ever seen," reportedly said by the vet who did the surgery), Dan told me the only sound emitted by the fluffy guy was a mighty hiss aimed at our dark gray tabby, who only wanted to welcome him home. Hey, he wasn't feeling well. Still isn't. We are armed with small syringes of painkiller to inject between his cheek and gums and Clavamox to ward off infection while he heals, but he certainly won't be himself for a while.

"That's not nice of him," my son stated upon hearing about this bit of rudeness. "Just like V____ (a girl in his camp and his school) was not nice to me!"

"Ummm, this is the V____ you like a lot?" I asked, then instantly wished I hadn't.

"Yeah, I like her! But she didn't want me to give her a hug. And she didn't hug me back. She treated me badly, just like the sick cat treated the tabby. The tabby doesn't deserve that, and I don't deserve V____ not being nice to me," he said with such gravitas, this six-year-old with a huge gap where his front two baby teeth used to be.

"Look, kiddo," I tried to explain, "not everybody wants to be hugged all the time. Sometimes you have to give people their space. And this works for cats, too. Our orange cat is in a lot of pain, and he didn't want to have our tabby in his face at that moment, because he doesn't feel good."

"But V____ let G____ (a camp friend for many years) kiss her! And he also kissed R____! And..."and this is when I suddenly realized I didn't want to have this conversation, at least not when my entering-first-grade child was still this young and talking as though he were in junior high and oh dear God I'm not gonna listen any more lalalalalalalaaaaaaa....

At the door to our house, Dan asked the little guy another question about V____ and got this answer from our budding Casanova:

"Oh, I know she likes me. She just doesn't think she likes me."

Yeah, that'll get him far in love.

Wish it weren't completely over. RIP John Hughes.

It takes occasional jaunts north of I-10 for me to realize how New Orleans-centric I have become in my doddering, quasi-old age. I mean, I head out on a jet plane, and this kinda insanity happens.

It's bad enough seeing TSA people doing random friskings of passengers lined up at their gate just before boarding their flight. I guess not enough people are flying Clear for the TSA's taste, or they don't trust any of us humble travelers any further than we can be thrown into the nearest 3-D X-ray machine. I hope they get a handful of diaper mess in their hands someday as a consequence of their actions.

For goodness' sakes, the last thing I need is for Krewe du Vieux to go down any sort of tubes that are not a part of its' subkrewes' themes. I'm a member of the Seeds of Decline, so I oughta know a thing or two about downfall in general, and I can tell you that the krewe members will be stooping even lower after this, and those floats will be rebuilt in the service of that, as Gawd is our witness. I foresee a number of phoenix-centric themes coming this '10 Carnival Season...

ANYway, I will still be checking up on things from time to time 'til I return. I've got four NOLA-related books I'm reading while I'm out and about, and I am still very much looking forward to Rising Tide 4, as are some others. Good to see.

Have fun, folks, and don't rearrange the furniture too much or light anything else up without me.

Roy Blount Jr. on Atlanta's Varsity Drive-In :

It may surprise you that Nancy (Gordy Simms, the Varsity's owner) has a permit from the city of Atlanta to demolish the Varsity, which she renews every six months. But that is just so the city can't register it as a historic building. So the city can't tell her how to preserve it. Good. You want your talismanic chili dog to stay fresh, not get calcified.*

It might be too late for the churches here, unless somebody can get the ear of the right people at the archdiocese and convince then otherwise... but for, say, the houses in lower Mid-City and various places people can't work on continuously but are indeed working on, could it be an option?

Just curious.


*from Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South.
Incidentally, that book has two passages I love in it, one of 'em about Garth Brooks in Central Park: Only once have I felt any sense of solidarity with old Garth - back here recently when he gave a concert in Central Park, and a quarter of a million people turned out, and a New York cop (who apparently didn't recognize anybody) was quoted as saying, "I'm sure he's very big back in his own country."

Recent Twitter exchange:

Frolic If you were Bill Jefferson and facing possibly the last weekend of freedom in your life, what would you do?

liprap @Frolic Cook everything in the freezer?

Frolic RT @liprap: @Frolic Cook everything in the freezer?<--Yes, Dollar Bill has the ingredients for a vegetarian chicken pot pit. (he meant "pie"; 'tis a typo)

Let's check and see:

Seeing all this other sort of "dough" recovered from the freezer certainly puts Dana Milbank's summation of the defense's argument into perspective. The....er....money quote:

... after all, if a member of Congress feels entitled to hide FBI cash in the freezer, who is the Justice Department to say he isn’t?

We have no choice but to wait and see if the jury will help Dollar Bill take that one to the bank...and I will hereby leave that analysis and the goofy puns to Adrastos.

The more I look at health care in our area, the more I am positively stymied by how much we must overcome. It seems that, of all the things people have lost since 8-29-05 and after, the most insidious is the erosion of our health, exacerbated by the collapse of our infrastructure.

After all this time, the results of a recent study have linked the stresses of post-federal flood life - including the scanty access to hospitals, pharmacies, and treatment by health care professionals - to a greater incidence of heart attacks in area residents:

Previous studies have focused on jumps in heart attack rates in the immediate hours or weeks after disasters like earthquakes or volcano eruptions, but Tulane’s work is among the first to look at the long-term public health impact from such major events. Irimpen says this reflects the extraordinarily broad scope and lasting difficulties caused by the disaster.

“People had to go through such a long ordeal,” he says. “Even if they were not affected directly by the hurricane, living with it all around you had a subliminal effect. They interact with people impacted, their families and their coworkers and everyone else. There is a stress level in general here that is much higher than before, and stress has a direct impact on heart attacks.”

The study was published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, and Irimpen presented its findings at that medical group’s annual meeting this spring.

“Now we have the data so we can act on it in the future. This shows how governments can use their resources for better health in the recovery. It’s not just about housing, but about healthcare, not just about getting grocery stores open but pharmacies too,” says Irimpen.

The findings are also a warning to individuals about the importance of minding their health even when a disaster upends other areas of their lives. Among the surge of heart patients fueling the post-Katrina increase, Irimpen says, many hadn’t kept up with their medications and many had begun smoking or abusing drugs. Many were also unemployed and lacked health insurance.

“People have been busy rebuilding their homes, but not their health,” he says.

The health care panel at this year's Rising Tide conference will explore this sad fact of post 8-29 living, as well as many other related subjects. Moderated by public health Ph.D. candidate and local blogger Holly Scheib, the participants will be: Cecile Tebo, crisis unit coordinator for the NOPD and one of New Orleans magazine's Top Ten Female Achievers; Dr Elmore Rigamer, medical director of Catholic Charities; and Sean Fitzmorris, local EMT and administrator of New Orleans EMTs Sound Off!

What will it take to advocate for greater access to care for our mental and physical well-being? What will it take to make that care a reality? What have the professionals seen in their experiences pre- and post-8-29 that can give us more pieces to this puzzle?

At least one thing is clear: according to the most recent New Orleans Index released by the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, we are down to twelve open hospitals in Orleans Parish from 23 open pre-8-29...

New Orleans Adolescent Hospital will probably be another statistic

...and the failure to open (or reopen) more health care facilities that can handle our current population's health is the tip of this iceberg.

If anybody wants to keep parsing race in America through the prism of the Henry Louis Gates arrest, I'm just gonna direct 'em to Adrian Piper:





Update, 7-28: Oh, hell, if you wanna cut to the chase and not get your ass kicked by the police, head to G-Bitch.

If the streets around here don't go through trials by water, they certainly go through trials by fire:

(click on the image to enlarge)

In other road-related news, I spied an Entergy worker here on my humble gray brick road with a detection box and a nifty spray paint marker denoting the location of various electricals underneath the cobblestones. I wonder how long it will take before the local road work tour comes to my 'hood....I certainly know how long it will take before any tear-ups are fully repaired.

It's the truth. My car needs at least one new tire anyhow, but I have to drive carefully, as Washington Avenue is being ripped up from Carrollton Ave to Napoleon Ave, Louisiana Ave is getting a resurfacing as well, and some streets closer to the lakefront are getting the submerged roads treatment. As far as I'm concerned, all the roads around here have desperately needed the submerged roads treatment since long before 8-29-05, but hey, there's only so much concrete and asphalt that can be slung....at least when it comes to the roads.

When it comes to other sorts of buildings, however, the concrete and asphalt can be molded into many other forms. So far, there's a lot of piles being driven into the ground, a great deal of dirt being pushed around up the street from me, and a whole lot of heraldry that has been pasted up on an abandoned building nearby:

Construction is under way on The Muses Apartments, a new complex that aims to revitalize the Central City neighborhood.

The apartments will front Felicity, Baronne and Carondelet streets between St. Charles Avenue and Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard. The Muses will be a mixed-income development on a 4.5-acre lot that has been vacant for about 10 years. Originally, an Albertsons grocery store was supposed to be built on the property, but the plans never came to fruition.

“It’s a great location,” said Kathy Laborde, president of the Gulf Coast Housing Partnership. “It has access to St. Charles, and it bridges two neighborhoods — Central City and the Garden District.”...

...Developers say attracting people off St. Charles and toward Oretha Castle Haley and creating residences for more than 200 New Orleanians will be a boon for the newly developing commercial corridor on Oretha Castle Haley, where neighborhood advocates hope to eventually attract local and national retailers.

“We’re building businesses, and they need people,” said Lynnette Colin, executive director of the Oretha Castle Haley Merchants and Business Association. “This is going to add a structure to a massive amount of land that had been vacant and blighted.”

Recent discussions with a friend of mine about most people's attitudes towards commercial development here in the city, and this editorial that speaks of how suspicious folks here tend to be of the multifamily housing unit, make me wonder how truly beneficial this latest building project will be. Living in an area that has three conglomerations of those multifamily housing units has warped my brain a tad, I admit, because all three of those buildings of which I speak are condos.

Thing is, my experiences with apartment houses in other places has taught me that sometimes one just can't help but live in a multifamily housing unit, no matter who one is, what one does, or what one's economic status is. This is one of the storied battlefields where historical preservation and economic development collide...and it is largely because of the crazy ways in which people have usually proposed revitalizing decrepit neighborhoods and/or vacant commercial properties in these parts.

"It'll mess with the atmosphere of New Orleans" is the least of it. Too many forms of proposed commercial development have revolved around bars, restaurants, and frou-frou stores, so much so that even a more useful, basic form of commercial development - the Albertson's grocery store that was supposed to be where the Muses Apartments are currently going up - had trouble getting off the ground, stalled, and collapsed. We are not a business-friendly city, and we don't like it much when we are surrounded by slumlords that can't maintain their properties...so where do we go from here?

I'll tell you what we don't go for.

Stay as far away as you can from the idiotic recession myths and platitudes. Except for the one about not switching to cheaper scotch, just drink slower. I can relate to that one.

(thanks, Lizzy)

WOW.

Big thanks to Greg Peters for our orisha.

Fair warning, all: it's coming again, and the panel discussion topics will include local politics, the state of health care in New Orleans, and New Orleans culture four years after 8-29-05.

Y'all know what I'm talking about:

Get your registration in now for the Friday night meet and greet, the Saturday all-day gathering at the Zeitgeist Center at 1618 Oretha Castle Haley Blvd, the lunch from Cafe Reconcile, the presentation of the fourth Ashley Morris Award for Excellence in Blogging.

And the icing on the cake? Our keynote speaker is none other than....

Harry Shearer!

Get registered, as soon as possible!