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Get your vote on for Derrick Tabb, the founder of Roots of Music, for CNN's Hero of the Year. The $100,000 grant awarded to the winner of the contest will go very far in Derrick's hands...and it will contribute to the kids learning from local musicians as well as through the R of M classes. For example, when I went to see Bonerama at the Rock N' Bowl last Saturday, I saw a group of kids in the program checking out the band's performance...and then Craig Klein brought the trombone player of the group out at the beginning of the second set:

The trombone the kid in the plaid shirt is playing is Klein's instrument; he stood at the side of the stage for this number and encouraged all of the seven trombone players up there to rock it and reel it, at nearly midnight on a Saturday.

And they did.

Without Roots of Music, certainly some musical traditions will still be passed on to the next generation here in New Orleans, but the number of school bands that would be aiding the transfer is dwindling due to lingering effects of the Federal Flood four years ago and to the lack of funds coming up for any arts and music programs in the schools. Support a good program and vote early and often, 'til November 19th!

So I posted a "repulsive" image of Sarah Palin's autobiography cover Blingee'd into oblivion yesterday.

Yes, I still have the heart of a twelve-year-old.

I thought they were funny. I sent the link to an ailing friend of mine to cheer her up and she laughed, coughed, and laughed again. Palin's only real claim to fame is her tagging along with McCain for a run to the White House and, in the process, turning that campaign into a bigger joke than it already was. As far as I'm concerned, her story ought to have ended right there, but she keeps coming back like a bad penny. It's sad and awful that the media has turned into her tool to the extent that her book is already selling out online. She most certainly does not speak for me, either as a woman or as a public figure, has already proven a willingness to manipulate even her own offspring for her own ends, and, in the end, she is simply a quitter in the realm of public service.

Her brand of selfish crazy is indeed repulsive to me.

What is also repulsive, though, atop it all is how much the mainstream media takes its eye off the ball with regards to many of the real issues of the day...

....how ineffective a Democratic majority in Congress really has been...

...why we still cannot extricate ourselves from Iraq and Afghanistan...

...why not having the Olympics in Chicago is a good thing...

...and why, when all is said and done, a murder rate is much, much more than its numbers:

What concern of mine is Carmen? Why do I publish the lists of the dead, the mostly low-life victims? Why do check the blog stats page for links into those posts and the Internet searches that bring them in. I wonder why I plucked the story of another young girl named Chanel Sanchell. The local newspaper story doesn’t tell us much about Chanel either, what lead her out of her house that night with someone her family didnt’ know who came to the door looking for her. All I know is here in New Orleans there are too many golems with guns, soulless shells who will take a life without much more thought than to take out and light a cigarette, and they move through the life of the streets like sharks through schools of fish, predators and prey trapped together in the currents of only place they know to live.

I remember what I wrote about Chanel and it applies to Carmen as well. Whatever lead them out into the night with a stranger, a night that ended with a gunshot, both were once small children not much different than my own, as innocent as lambs in the lap of Sunday school Jesus. If their deaths cease to matter to you, matters no more than the condition of the bad schools your children didn’t attend or the trouble on streets you never cross; if the broken families of people who pulled two or three tours in Iraq don’t bother you then consider this:

The next time you see some kid on the corner eyeballing you at the stoplight, the one in the chee-wee haircut with the long white t-shirt, don’t avoid his gaze. Look straight back at him. If that bulge at his waist looks like it might be a gun don’t turn away or run the light. Look hard, as if into a mirror at your own cold and soulless reflection in his eyes.

That is what matters.

Okay, so I shouldn't have posted the Palin picture in a Sukkot post. My apologies there as a Yiddishe maideleh.

It's actually more appropriate for Purim...

What a way to start Sukkot

Update, 8:09 PM: Sorry, folks, I meant to post the above picture. We have someone actually cultivating etrogim in her garden, and this year, it was a bumper crop of them. Some of them are also large enough that you'll probably see 'em being thrown around on the gridiron in the game this coming Sunday. I can say that not only are they as big as my head, they smell much sweeter than I imagine the lady pictured below must smell.

Check out the original and more here.

Chag Sukkot sameach to all.

Oh, get your minds out of the gutter and respect the classics. It's Lafcadio Hearn, for goodness' sakes.

So I've been checking out what about Hearn's writings makes him worthy of having a cult founded in his name. I started off with Chita and am now in the middle of a book of his selected writings which actually begins where he ended up: in Japan, with the unusual tales he recorded in his unique prose near the turn of the twentieth century. I am now in the part of the book that presents some examples of his writing from where he began - in Cincinnati, Ohio, as a newspaperman, when being a reporter was socially only a teensy bit above being a stevedore working along the levees, the sort of fellow that Hearn wrote about quite a bit before he moved on to New Orleans, its culture and its people. For whatever reason, his reporting on a "Violent Cremation" read like a precursor to the pulps that a certain Shecky I know is so fond of: not only does Hearn report extensively on the facts of the grisly deed and on its alleged perpetrators, he starts to try to solve the murder as he goes along with the tale. The folks who came up with the particular collection I'm reading seem to dismiss the earlier writings of Hearn's when he is in America, but that is an omission of a grave order, from what I have read so far. The man seemed to write like a chameleon, taking on the most florid of styles for the papers in Cincinnati and New Orleans and the sparest and choicest words for the tales of ghosts, deities, goblins, and ancestors returned from the dead originating in China and in his adopted home of Japan - but he always had a yen for a good yarn.

Makes me wonder how he'd spin some more recent bits of straw into gold...

We are a people who are supposedly big on sensational headlines these days. Recent ones have been feeding us tales of kittens thrown to their deaths on a local highway, of Ted Williams' head being treated less than reverently in its cryogenic state, of too many Kardashians behaving like Cardassians. When it comes to what matters most, however, we can't afford to keep our eyes off the ball.

For example, the state in which I live is keeping on with its experiment in making our children suffer further effects from the urine in the education pool introduced by the idiotic loophole that is the Louisiana Science Education Act. (thanks to Madame Dangerblond)

Don’t be misled into thinking that Louisiana is a small, hopelessly backward state, and what happens there is of no importance elsewhere. That state is being used as a testing ground for a nationwide theocratic effort to literally undo the Enlightenment. If the creationists’ schemes to reverse the progress of the last ten generations are successful in Louisiana, they’ll be deployed elsewhere. So pay attention.

Another thing to pay attention to is to watch it when folks such as Diaper Dave decide to throw stones from their transparent and fragile houses. Adrastos tells it like it is over at his virtual cafe and at First Draft, where he's been burning up their XML with the 'tude we all know and love so much in these parts.

I mean, the freaking senator needs to quit with these righteous crusades, as it is waaaay too easy for others to poke him full of holes when it comes to his illegal act of having paid for sex. Just resign, man, before we actually feel sorry for your sorry ass for getting yourself on the road to being disbarred.

At least the Saints are doing well, Drew Brees' cleats will be going pink this coming Sunday for breast cancer awareness, and defensive captain Scott Fujita has expressed support of marriage equality for all, no matter what one's sexual orientation is. It's so nice to be proud of the home team, no matter what sort of punters or tossers they might actually be.

ANYway, I'll be sticking my nose back into some more of Lafcadio's words, who wasn't into the sensational titles so much as the sensational stories. Hmmm, if Hearn were a blogger...

...he'd probably never get a post out but once in a while or so. He reportedly was in constant torment concerning his endless searches for just the right words. His kids would be appalled at the way he'd moan and pace about the room shortly before he'd sit down to write.

But oh, such sweet torment...

I read through the Section 106 notices on FEMA's site for the Wheatley and Lafon schools and was struck by a number of things.

For one building, all hope is not yet lost, possibly, maybe, kinda, sorta.

For the other, I think the place is toast.

A look at Wheatley School's relation to its surrounding neighborhood shows that it only takes up an average size block in the Treme, and it has the potential not to overly clash with the nearby houses.


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Lafon Elementary, however, is in a problematic spot in terms of its preservation.


View Larger Map


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A look at the street view shows the derelict buildings of the former Magnolia-C.J. Peete low-income housing projects surrounding the Lafon building, which are now being replaced by mixed-income housing being built along the lines of the River Garden development on the former St Thomas housing projects site closer to the river. Close scrutiny of the map that shows how Lafon is situated within the former projects shows one of the main reasons why modernist buildings are so endangered today: Lafon is a block-buster.

One of the most famous examples of the "superblock" construction that was so favored by many modernist architects - and preferred and funded by their patrons - is that of Minoru Yamasaki's now-gone World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. One look at the plan of the Trade Center complex in relation to the smaller blocks around it shows how little regard there was for the oldest part of the city in the layout of the site. Surrounding streets dead-ended into the Port Authority's monument to its power. Those buildings were all.

What I have found, in the reactions for or against the demolition of Lafon in particular, however, is significant resistance to what it represents. At least one person involved in the development of what will become Harmony Oaks at the former project site has weighed in for the demolition of Lafon on the grounds that there are currently no plans for it coming from either the RSD or other sources and it will make it harder for the new homes there to thrive with such an undeveloped eyesore nearby, modernism be damned. Other objections come from the building's association with a highly corrupt and neglectful Orleans Parish School District that failed to put resources and care into what should have been its ultimate mission all these years: educating all the children of New Orleans regardless of what their race, color, creed, or class was. Concerns about the toxicity of the site on which Lafon sits have been voiced (though I'm not sure how demolition of the building will cut down on the levels of lead in the ground).

The most poignant plea, however, comes from what the superblock never managed to erase - the sad legacy of nearly two centuries of racial discrimination and prejudice in these parts:

The building should go. The question is, do we value the documented history of that school site, or do we value a building? Do we remember a man named Lafon who long ago built a school house for black children that was burned down by "an angry white mob" or do we remember an architect who in the mid 20th century along with his associates knowingly built a school on top of a black cemetery? Do we celebrate the future of a new community and let past insensitivities and paternalism go? I think we should let this building go. It represents a negative past. Imagine being a child on the day that school building opened. Would it look warm and welcoming to you? Or would it look cold and institutional and foreign? (Or today, kind of like a long truck container on stilts). Did it look like the elegant brick schools white children attended? And why did children have to go outside on a balcony to get from their classroom to a bathroom? And why was there no cross ventilation with windows? Why celebrate a building that was a vanity project for an architect and not designed for children who deserved the very best? Let it go. It's tainted. It's not the best example of its era or genre anyway. Now could be a time for healing and proper and respectful handling of any remains that may still be underground. The building should go.

Being tainted by the Bauhaus means advocating a certain amount of putting blinders on with regards to the history of a site, to the people who will be using the building...almost a willful myopia with regards to the history of architecture itself.

It is the egotism of these structures and what they represent that will spell their downfall.

In other words: homes for individuals, who can put their imprint on their surroundings quite easily, in a city for which the displaced pine, some even unto death? Yes.

Public buildings left to rot, sullied by potential unfulfilled and just plain bad planning in their situation and their sponsorship (or lack of it)? No. Always no.

NOW is the time for all good architects, preservationists and active citizens to come to the aid of the Wheatley and Lafon Schools threatened with imminent demolition by the so-called Recovery School District. Submit public comments in support of preservation here.

Deadline Wednesday 9.30.2009.

Yes, that deadline is tomorrow.

And for everyone's information, most of both Wheatley and Lafon did not suffer major damage from flooding or winds over four years ago. Wheatley in particular had most of its classrooms raised above the street level; the only building that would need any major remediation there would be a small administrative structure that was at street level and some bathrooms that were at street level just beneath the raised main structure -

The main school building, however, is intact and fully gutted, ready for renovation and reuse.


There is no real reason, in the end, for the Recovery School District to demolish this structure other than money - money they can get from FEMA to tear down this school and, most likely, to put into another school that will require families in the Treme to drive well out of their way to get their kids an elementary education.

It was nice to see Warren Easton High School featured in this week's Gambit as a school utilizing solar technology. I know one of the arguments put forth for not doing anything with Wheatley is the consideration of what sort of glass to use, as most of the outer structure of the main building is glass. "It could disturb the neighbors....or allow too much heat or cool air to escape from the building and make the classrooms uncomfortable."

If solar panels can be put atop a high school building, there is most certainly glass that can be installed at Wheatley that will not blind passersby or provide inadequate insulation for the rooms within without compromising the architectural integrity of the place. I'm sure the cost would be at a fraction of what it would take to build a new school.

What better lesson could be taught to our children than that?

________________________

In better news today, mazel tov to Humid Beings on its launch. Very nice to see all systems are go. Head on over there and get yourselves stuck to New Orleans online.

What I find velcro'd to me, however, in recent days is flattering and unsettling at the same time. Will Poll NOLA start getting some election debates and events together? Will it go beyond news/opinion aggregation and truly interact with the community in the upcoming elections? It would be nice.

Who, on this upcoming Day of Atonement, will be sealed in the Book of Life this way?

Just guess when it comes to the following personage:

"By the way, I just thought I would put this out there, and what you do with it is your own business. But, this weekend, I put out a tweet on Twitter that September 28th is the Day of Atonement for the Jewish faith, and I thought it would be a good day for all of us to fast and pray, you know. And I got this idea from Thomas Jefferson. After they put together the Continental Congress, the first thing they did was put together a day -- a national day of fast and prayer, and I thought the Day of Atonement would be a good day to do it."

Not a bad endorsement of Jewish tradition from a guy who was able to get tens of thousands of anti-government protesters to the Mall in Washington a couple weeks ago. (Besides, fasting would be a good way for the pudgy (Glenn) Beck to lose a few pounds.)

But it turns out not everyone is so happy with Beck's embrace.

"Yom Kippur is a day of atonement, prayer and fasting," said Ari Rabin-Havt of Media Matters, the liberal watchdog and fact-checker. "Glenn Beck's attempt to politicize this holiest of days with his far right agenda is not only disgusting, but shows a profound disrespect for the Jewish people." Aaron Keyak, press secretary for the National Jewish Democratic Council, weighed in at the Huffington Post with a spirited analysis titled "The Grinch Who Stole Yom Kippur."

Somebody...please...tell me this isn't happening.

Aaah, it's too late. NOLA Slate actually let me know about this link.

Already tweeted three points addressed to Mr Beck about his attempted co-opting of this holiest of days on the Jewish calendar:

1. Shut up.
2. Convert to Judaism.
3. Apologize to EVERYONE ON EARTH before you can even think about atoning for sins committed against God. Because we all have to live with you, you sorry excuse for a human being.
   

Got the idea from Thomas Jefferson, my tuchus.

You got it to somehow try to put yourself and your latest hurtful ideas about how this country should be run into a better light. Don't go choosing the chosen people that way.

There are many, many people in this town who will not like the analogy I am going to put forth on the nature of the mayor's race and on how reluctant possible candidates are to even dip their toes into the brackish waters of a possible campaign here. But hey, since I am a fan, and have been since '86, it's my blog and I'm gonna do what I want...

...even if it means putting the notion out there that this town's nonstarting mayoral race is akin to the '62 Mets 120-game losing season.

Where's Casey Stengel when you need him most?

I mean, think about this. God knows we all need some good, solid laughs, because things have been hanging lately...but we are getting short on that kind of thing. The absurdity has reached a fever pitch, to the point where any attempt at prediction and handicapping gets blown right off the shores and into the gulf.

Hell, I sincerely thought yesterday that Jim Letten was calling a press conference simply to tell New Orleanians he was not running for mayor instead of imparting the news that he was not going to investigate recent allegations of wrongdoing in the OIG. The mainstream media seems to be studiously ignoring the one candidate that would be damned good, even when a shootout happens right in front of his campaign headquarters. Makes me want to bring back Casey and have him point out the candidates for the media outlets just as he imparted some essential information to his amazing Mets at a practice once: "Them are the bases." Attention, TV news and the Times-Picayune: "Perry is a candidate."

Of course, people have floated the idea that the entire citizenry declare its candidacy for mayor, but I'm now thinking that a couple of the best candidates would actually be some people who have already passed on, with one of them leaving a mannequin of himself in his wake. Who better than the Emperor of the World and the Empress of the Universe for this here office? It'll at least bring back the VOTE K-DOE VOTE! slogan. We need some of those.

ANYway, getting back to sports, many people would say that baseball isn't even the right kind of game to liken to anything that goes on in this football town, forget conjuring up some team from up north that got its last World Series win 23 years ago with a lineup whose behavior would have shamed the depraved on Bourbon Street. Let's bring this back to the Saints! Now there's an analogy for ya!

All right. Here we go.

If we can line everybody up who's even thinking about the halls of City Hall and get them to do this:



...then I think we're gonna have one hell of a political season on our hands.

Just...Drew, man...lose that David Carradine hair.

(thanks to dat wacky Cajun Boy for the Breesus stuff)

Update, 4:35 PM: Speaking of mayors, get your best digs in at the expense of our lame duck, Hizzoner the Walking Id, in Humid City's first-ever contest. The winner will receive a free LiveNation Club Passport. Dazzle me and the HC crew with your mayoral humor.

No matter how much Advance Internet tries, they still haven't made nola.com as user-friendly, idiot-proof, and bigot-proof as it still needs to be. And it certainly won't be replacing the dead-tree edition around here anytime soon if they can't give you easy access to the day's front pages...

...like, for instance, today's gem (click on the photo to enlarge):

New Orleans' mental health is worse than it's ever been, which is saying quite a lot. But hey, we've got a rare giant squid recovered intact from the Gulf!

Hallucinatory calamari for everybody!

Update, 9-23: Cliff highlights a basic reason why anonymous commenters are an insidious lot. Comment moderation is key, folks. And I'm glad Bill Capo is out there getting these stories from the community - spotlighting organizations such as Adopt A Family can only help them meet their goals. That's something to condone, not condemn.

As my grandpa says on hearing such things:



Oy vey iz mir!

G-Bitch asks what the equivalent of a pay-as-you-go Catholic is in other religions...and I had to say...'tis not only a new year for me (5770, Erster, you treif thing, you) and a time to atone for my sins against God and to apologize to those here on Earth I've wronged, it is also the most significant holiday time of the Jewish calendar - so significant that, unfortunately, most of the secular Jewish population all over the world thinks it is the only time for them to go to the synagogue:

What I dread about Septembers is the High Holy Days. My father used to refer to them as the “running of the Jewish grunion.” The grunion get swept onto the beach, completely bewildered, but all catching the same waves; and then after a couple of days, they get swept out to sea again. And here we have the Jews getting swept into the sanctuary, also somewhat bewildered, and three days of praying later, they get swept out into the real world (some never to be seen again until the next “running”).

The difficult part for me, and what makes me dread Septembers, is trying to figure out how to meet the needs of these Jews who have made their way into our shul. I know the prayer book will completely baffle them; the choreography of the bowing, shuckling, bending, and prostrating will frustrate them; and the time will stretch into a seemingly endless highway of tedium.

The only part of the service many Jews can feel a part of is the sermon. English we all know! But what can I say to these revolving-door Jews (in on Rosh Hashanah, out on Yom Kippur) that will give a boost to their Jewish DNA? That will make them consider returning during the year?

What, indeed?

This is a serious problem within the secular Jewish community. The High Holy Days are a heavy time, full of prayer and contemplation, and - aside from the charming of the children through the blasts of a ram's horn punctuating services - imagery that includes God writing in a large Book of Life what will be in store for each of us in the coming year on Rosh Hashanah and sealing it on Yom Kippur smacks a little too much of predestination in these supposedly enlightened times.

It seems to go against any sort of individualism we might cultivate in our daily lives....and it overshadows every part of the Jewish calendar that celebrates life and the covenant we made with God atop Mount Sinai more than it emphasizes how small we are or how beholden we are to God's awesome powers of judgment.

There was a big push in our synagogue this year to emphasize social action within the surrounding community - helping out a local charter school, pitching in to build houses with the St. Bernard Project, feeding the homeless on a weekly basis, donations of all kinds to all sorts of causes - which is fantastic and is long overdue...but I think they missed some other essential stuff that makes us Jewish...

...the biggest essential chunk of information being that Jewish learning never ends.

If it were only the social action that kept Jewish people Jewish, there'd be many more of us around than there are, probably. The process in a nearly-Unitarian leaning Classical Reform movement turning back to more Hebrew in its services, more ritual observance, and more participation from members of the congregation is ongoing - and it cannot end with one's bar or bat mitzvah marking a supposed end to one's understanding of Judaism.

The doors have to remain open, no matter how much we kvetch about these people who come in and out during the Ten Days of Repentance that mark the interval between the High Holy Days.

No strings attached. No guilt in play (which I know is a difficult thing for a Jewish mother such as myself).

Forget "pay-as-you-go".

It's cheesy, but I'm starting to prefer "the more you know".:

The story has often been told of how Rosenzweig felt that if he was to be converted to Christianity he ought to do so as a Jew, moving, as he saw it at the time, from a lower to a higher form of religion.

While contemplating his conversion, he attended an Orthodox synagogue in Berlin on Yom Kippur. There he was so profoundly overcome by the devotion of the worshippers as they sought forgiveness from the God of their fathers that he realized there was no need for him to find his salvation outside his ancestral faith. As he was later to put it, the Christian claim that no man can come to the Father except through Jesus was true for all others but not for the Jew, since Jews, being already with the Father, had no need to “come” to him....

...Rosenzweig’s approach was subjective also in connection with the mitzvot, Jewish observances. He did think that he would one day become a fully observant Jew, but believed in the gradual approach in which the observances slowly made their impact by “ringing a bell” for him. Typical of this approach is Rosenzweig’s answer to someone who asked him whether he wore tefillin [phylacteries]: “Not yet,” he replied.

L'shanah tovah to all. Here's to a good, sweet new year.

Update, 9-22: One effect of the revolving door can be found here, exacerbated by the terrible decisions concerning land usage that are endemic to this town.

And my husband recently obtained a gorgeous Sephardic cookbook by a dead ringer for Jane Fonda who has quite the unfortunate name. I look forward to trying out the recipes and eventually saying the author's name with a straight face. I have a lot to atone for.

Time Machine



The Cafe Du Monde in the 40's looks so tranquil...

It was definitely another world.

Another potential school renovation site will be biting the dust:

More pictures of the moldering Hoffman site at 2622 Prieur can be seen here.

It is tragic that the RSD outright refuses to renovate this structure. The building assessment in the School Facilities Master Plan indicated that it would cost $2.2 million LESS to renovate Hoffman, but they would prefer to start over.

Key note concerning the Hoffman demolition: The rebuild costs over 20% more. It's possible that if the RSD chose renovation over rebuild for five schools, we could get a sixth school renovated for free.

Update, 3:30 PM: It's the end of a good blog. But the same ol' same ol' continues:

There are serious systemic and cultural issues that need to be addressed in order to truly reform our schools. The system is still corrupt and it is still broken, it is merely hiding behind a curtain painted with pretty pictures of reform. At least in my case, I think I can safely say that we are simply rebuilding the same old crap with a new face.