Footballs.

Turquoise and yellow footballs.

click on the picture to enlarge

Women of the Storm members dropped off about 200 turquoise-and-yellow footballs, tangible reminders that Louisiana is losing a football field of its coastline every 50 minutes, and they promise more today so that each of the 736 students (of MLK Charter School) will have one.

Somebody needs to give the president a tour of the wetlands, pronto.

Much as I think the footballs are a cute idea, nothing beats having the spectacle of entire communities abandoned to the sea being burned into your brain.

Adrastos on how universal the ridicule of Obama's being awarded the Nobel is:

I've found it a bit disturbing that some on the Left seem to be ridiculing Obama's peace prize in a way that *almost* echoes the Right Wing noise machine. Remember, nobody campaigns for a Nobel Prize, they sometimes emerge out of nowhere and are often awarded to *encourage* good works in the future as well as to reward past performance.

Having said that, here's your reading assignment and, yeah, I'm bit late: I was at a meeting of the procrastinators club and our starting time kept getting put back. Now where was I? There are two fine pieces at Salon by Juan Cole and Joan Walsh that place the whole thing in historical context. Imagine that....

...Obama is not perfect and has moved more slowly on some things than I would have liked BUT he's trying to do the right thing, which is something that should be encouraged. The Bushies left an unholy mess on so many fronts that it is IMPOSSIBLE for all those wrongs to be righted in a mere 9 months. I don't need to go into chapter and verse on the many problems inherited by Obama that predate the last 8 years. Remember: don't ask, don't tell was the end result of Bill Clinton's ill fated attempt to end the ban on gays in the military. Holy backfire, Batman.

We all knew that anyone who ended up in the White House after the Dubya years was going to have a very hard row to hoe. In some ways, Obama's receiving this award makes it even harder on him...but if it does get him considering what he's doing and why a great deal more, then the Nobel committee will have helped do us all a great service.

Go read the Salon articles A references for more.

And applications for Obama town hall tix end today at 10 AM CST.

YES, VIRGINIA, THERE WILL BE A TOWN HALL...

...when Barack goes marching in to New Orleans.

Only catch is this:

Due to limited space at the event, we will only be able to fulfill a limited number of requests for tickets. Please note that filling out this form DOES NOT guarantee a ticket to this event.

Filling out this form qualifies you to be selected for a ticket.

Doors for the event will open at 11:00 am. The event location and further details will be given to those individuals who are selected to pick-up tickets.

After 11:00 am on Tuesday, October 13th when the online sign-up has expired, a limited number of individuals will be selected and contacted by email called in regarding ticket pick-up information. Each individual selected will have the opportunity to pick up a maximum of TWO tickets.

Please note that the White House will not be able to respond to all requests for tickets. You will only receive an email if you are selected to pick up a ticket.

This form will be available until 11:00 am on Tuesday, October 13th.

Form's not up yet. Won't be up until 10 AM central - aka, our - time.

Synchronize your watches, folks, get ready for the virtual starter's gun tomorrow morning, and brace yourselves for Wonka Golden Ticket-like hysteria.

Thanks, shercole!

Update, 10-12: Thanks again to shercole, we have a number you can call if you cannot get online to apply: 504-280-7060.

Anudder update, 10-12, 11:36 AM: Just filled out the application four times and got nothing more than the same page minus the blank form and plus this message: "The White House will not be able to respond to all requests for tickets. You will only receive an email if you are selected..."

Well, wham, bam, no thank you, ma'am, to the White House, too. Loving the "don't email us, we'll email you" response. I mean, I know my chances of getting a ticket are about 1 in 400, 000 or so, but hey, at least give me a "we received your application, thank you!" to acknowledge my interest or something. Courtesy, y'all, always courtesy.

One mo' time, 10-12, 12:40 PM: On finding the voice mail for the phone number full, I thought of all the ways attendees could be randomly chosen, began with throwing all the applications down the longest flight of White House stairs and whichever ones reached the bottom were headed to UNO... and then I got carried away on Twitter.:

Other methods for choosing Obama town hall attendees: eeny meeny miney mo, darts, pulling out of a hat or bingo # cage...playing "Deal or No Deal" (any excuse to involve hot babes), sending it to the Nobel committee to pick...having a massive "cook-off", dance-off, talent show, or inane essay-writing contest...beauty contest, wet t-shirt contest, karaoke, trivia, video poker, the slots at Harrah's, whoever can swim from the Quarter to Algiers...rock, paper, scissors, shoot, ultimate frisbee, whoever makes it out of a Saints football game with no broken limbs...soon, WWOZ is going to offer town hall tix when you purchase a Brass Pass to JazzFest to boost their fundraising this week.

Feel free to add some of your own versions of how the town hall selection process will go.

Adonai our God saw fit to blow down the roof of our sukkah in the downpour last night, which was the crowning glory to a Sukkot holiday in which we barely got to enjoy our outdoor representation of what our wandering ancestors lived in when they were stuck in the Sinai desert for forty years. Just too hot or too wet out this year to be in there - even our sukkah party guests couldn't stand to be out there for long.

I mean, I know we are supposed to start praying for rain in Israel to help ensure a good harvest of crops in the coming year, but this is ridiculous.

So fine, the sukkah is down already. Hope the Almighty is a happy camper.

What made me a happier camper after such a rough week was the celebration last night of the most recent holiday in this Jewish calendar-induced marathon: that of Simchat Torah. The name of the holiday is, literally, "happy Torah", signifying how happy we are to have finished reading the entire five books of Moses and how happy we are to start it all over again. I got a dance in with a Torah scroll (and I held on to it quite well, as there are some consequences if the scroll is dropped, even by accident), got to hold the edges of the parchment as the entire scroll was unrolled, some recently bar/bat mitzvahed members of the synagogue read their Torah portions as we all carefully held this massive document, and then we sang some more and ate some afterwards.

What popped into my head when I got home from the synagogue, though, was not only the afterglow of the celebration. It was some remnant of memory from my deep, dark past as a Jewish day school student in deepest, darkest Texas.

Half a world away in the early '80's, there was still a Soviet Union. There were still a lot of Jewish people there, even though they weren't allowed to practice their religion, read any books about it, learn any Hebrew, or even walk into a synagogue, if any still existed there. At the same time, they were still marked on identification papers as Jewish, which made it difficult for them to get ahead in that world where, even though it was supposed to work by Communist tenets that made everything equal no matter what one did, there were still some comrades that were more equal than others. These Soviet Jews, kept in ignorance of their religion and unable to criticize the Soviet leadership for it without suffering repercussions that could be as harsh as imprisonment and death sentences, were very much the lesser equals.

And if they decided they wanted to leave, they were labeled as the worst of all. No visa would ever be granted to them, and no quarter would be given to these refuseniks.

The Refuseniks (from left to right) back: Vitaly Rubin, Vladimir Slepak, Lev Ovsisscher, Alexander Druk, Yossi Beilin, Dina Beilin front: Natan Sharansky, Ida Nudel, Alexander Lerner

The ones pictured above were some of the most famous of the Soviet Jews who applied for visas to immigrate to Israel and were refused them by the government. That refusal became the least of these refuseniks' problems, as they found themselves under surveillance by the KGB at all times, found it more difficult to get proper housing and promotions at work - and an extremely unlucky few, among them Sharansky, suffered imprisonment and trumped-up charges of treason that were punishable by death. We're not talking about just an isolated group of nine here - those nine were representative of a million or more people who were trying to leave.

The 1970's and 1980's was the period when American and Israeli Jewry got involved. It was a huge cause that united all denominations of Jews all over the world. If kids like me weren't writing letters to refusenik adults and children that we hoped wouldn't get confiscated from people visiting them to let them know the world was not completely ignoring their plight, we were trying to contribute to funds for the purchase of Hebrew texts, prayerbooks, and ritual objects that, if they weren't confiscated, either, would be smuggled into the country and then passed around to other refuseniks as discreetly as possible in an act of rebellion against the country that would keep them ignorant of their heritage if it could. If we really hit the jackpot, we could possibly buy some lucky few people out of the Soviet Union and get them out from under such repressive measures taken against them, but that was a pipe dream in the early '80's. The U.S.S.R. was clearly not going to let these people it was persecuting go.

What it did do on a once-a-year basis, however, was allow them one celebration.

It is no secret that the former Soviet Union was an inhospitable place for anything Jewish; one's Jewish identity was a liability, not an asset. But during the 1960s, because Israel was showing its might through its many wars, the Jews of Russia began to feel emboldened, if only slightly. Simultaneously, the American Jewish community began paying attention to the plight of Russian Jewry and initiated great lobbying efforts to pressure the Soviet government to allow Jewish immigration. With both forces converging, Soviet Jews for the first time began considering the previously impossible thought of leaving the Soviet Union for a better life elsewhere.

Equally astounding, beginning in the late 1960s, the Jews of the large cities of the Soviet Union began to congregate periodically in large demonstration-like groups around the state-sanctioned though locked synagogues. The day of these spontaneous gatherings of thousands of Jews in cities across the Soviet Union: Simchat Torah.

"Why Simchat Torah," I asked my mother. "Why not Rosh Hashana, Passover, Yom Kippur? Who knew the date? How did people find out about it? Who started the practice? Why did you go? What did you do?"

My mom thought these were silly questions. "We did it because all the young Jews in the city were going and we found out about it from our friends, and they from their friends. We went, we sang, we danced, we met people we hadn't seen for a while, we laughed, we read letters from Israel, we exchanged information about immigration and life abroad. It was simply one time a year when we could be unafraid and happy to be Jews, even with the KGB shills in the crowd. The feeling there was profound. We felt our strength. We saw our numbers. We realized who we were and we were proud."

For the Jews of Soviet Russia, Simchat Torah was the one opportunity to celebrate who they were. They had no other holidays to experience the various aspects of their Jewishness or their connection to each other or to the Eternal. Simchat Torah was it. More specifically, Simchat Torah was a celebration of who they were apart from being Russians, of their separate values, their separate ways, their separate status, and the separate criteria by which they were judged. On all other days, this separateness engendered hostility from their neighbors; on Simchat Torah the separateness was turned on its head and celebrated.

Many Soviet Jews participating in these rallies had never seen the Torah in whose name they celebrated. Yet, by their descriptions of the events, the Torah was never far away. Evgeni Valevich, a Russian Jewish musician, wrote a popular song to reflect the mood at those Simchat Torah celebrations. "As the old cantor sang," the song goes, "our small nation seems so great." Amazingly, this pride and sense of nationhood was such a new and unique feeling for so many Jews, it compelled them to transform their lives completely and emigrate.

Quite simply, the key to "why Simchat Torah?" is in a prayer saying of the Torah that "it is a tree of life to them that hold fast to it and all of its supporters are happy". The Torah is the blueprint for the way Jewish people live, for why we are who we are. Even the mere thought of that powerful document helped sustain a persecuted group of Jews in their enforced exile (even for nearly a lifetime) and got the rest of world Jewry united in a way we haven't seen the likes of since the Berlin Wall came falling down.

Here's hoping it will take more than the repression of millions to unite us all once again.

This was more of a wake-up call than the alarm on my cell phone this morning, I'll tell you that.

OSLO – President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples," the Norwegian Nobel Committee said, citing his outreach to the Muslim world and attempts to curb nuclear proliferation.

The stunning choice made Obama the third sitting U.S. president to win the Nobel Peace Prize and shocked Nobel observers because Obama took office less than two weeks before the Feb. 1 nomination deadline. Obama's name had been mentioned in speculation before the award but many Nobel watchers believed it was too early to award the president....

The Nobel committee praised Obama's creation of "a new climate in international politics" and said he had returned multilateral diplomacy and institutions like the U.N. to the center of the world stage. The plaudit appeared to be a slap at President George W. Bush from a committee that harshly criticized Obama's predecessor for resorting to largely unilateral military action in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Rather than recognizing concrete achievement, the 2009 prize appeared intended to support initiatives that have yet to bear fruit: reducing the world stock of nuclear arms, easing American conflicts with Muslim nations and strengthening the U.S. role in combating climate change.

"Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world's attention and given its people hope for a better future," Thorbjoern Jagland, chairman of the Nobel Committee said. "In the past year Obama has been a key person for important initiatives in the U.N. for nuclear disarmament and to set a completely new agenda for the Muslim world and East-West relations."

He added that the committee endorsed "Obama's appeal that 'Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.'"

Mazel tov to him.

I wish I could rejoice in this more. I just wish more people in our own country felt this way. It simply seems that the people who would have us go trotting back to some idealized Middle Age in which everyone is a heterosexual Republican have been yelling pretty loudly as of late and the media has been letting them do it without much digging into how wrong they are factually and how backward they are socially (bless Saints defensive cap'n Fujita for having the cojones to call these "heterophobes" out and to really think of the kids in the process. Makes me even prouder to be a Saints fan.)

As it is, next week the president is visiting New Orleans for the first time since his campaign ...and he still needs to give us something more than the audacity of hope in this forgotten corner of Louisiana that overwhelmingly elected him to office. Just because we are located in a red state doesn't mean we have to go to the same hell our state legislators seem to want to drag us to.

I've had a few reasons thrown out to me concerning why it's taken nearly a year after the election for Obama to come here, among them the embarrassment that is Hizzoner the Walking Id and the many federal investigations into local government corruption that are going on. I mean, who wants to be associating themselves with that and giving legitimacy to incompetents?

Granted, I think a national recession and health care reform have been taking up the lion's share of Obama's time these days...but if those reasons I've cited above have been a major consideration in the timing of this visit, then all I can say is: if the president can be so courageous abroad and be recognized for it without being associated completely with the people he is trying to reach out to, he can certainly do the same thing here in New Orleans.

Go read Cliff for more. I hope the folks in charge of the president's itinerary while he's here take Cliff's suggestions to heart.

Update, 8:36 AM: Yeah, I could see this Twitter trending topic a mile away. Will have to tell Daniel Z. about it.

Anudder update, 10:28 AM: Coozan Pat on the prematurity of Obama's Nobel.

Full Office of the Inspector General's report on the city's budget process is here. Thanks, Kevin!

Pardon me while I peruse the whole thing. You can, too.

If you need a break, just think about how oblivious Greg Meffert is to the obvious: he is in some deep doo-doo.

I'm now thinking we need Bobby Hebert in that courtroom to tell the clueless, swaggering former CTO what's really up.

Mixed Bag

Apparently, according to this survey, we rank 45th out of the 55 smartest American cities. Who'd we beat out? Houston by a nose, Orlando, Dallas-Fort Worth, Phoenix, Harrisburg, PA, Memphis, Louisville, San Antonio, Las Vegas, and the dumbest of the smart: Fresno, CA. Austin and Portland, OR are apparently smarter than we are...and the smartest of all is Raleigh-Durham. What kind of world are we living in, I ask you????

Well, we are living in a city with a less than transparent budget process, which was finally confirmed today by the OIG's office.

The report also looks at budgeting for city services and determines where New Orleans stacks up to similar-sized cities.

Comparatively, the report indicated that New Orleans budgets more per person on its police services, more per person on executive and legislative functions and far more on sanitation services. It said that the city budgets less when it comes to parks and recreation.

The findings come as the mayor's budget for 2010 is expected in the next couple of weeks.

"It sounds like this is a systemic problem that has probably developed over many years and is not going to be easy to correct," Kane said.

WDSU asked a city spokesperson about the findings and was told, "The budget was adopted and passed, which means it was acceptable to the City Council, Clerk of Council, City Attorney's Office and CAO's Office."

It goes on to say that the city's capital plan and budget have been key to the city's improved credit rating after Hurricane Katrina.

And all this after the city council members voted themselves a needed pay raise. Those folks are going to have a hard time collecting that pay if we start going the way of California and its near "financial armageddon". Then again, this could be the perfect way to increase our "smart city" IQ if we get this thing solved.

What I have concluded will solve absolutely nothing, in the meantime, is checking out Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's roots and calling him out as a hypocrite.

So the man's family converted to Islam and changed their name; he wasn't raised Jewish to begin with. Big whoop. I have no desire to claim this man as one of the Jewish people, believe me.

What is disturbing to me is that an Iranian blogger and other Iranians were the first to jump up and down about this and the Telegraph picked it up and ran with it. Being Jewish in Iran is not considered to be as bad as being a Baha'i, but it's still pretty bad. That this was one of very few ways Iranians felt they could discredit Ahmadinejad says volumes about what is permissible speech and what is forbidden speech in the Islamic Republic these days. Rather than addressing the very real problems they have with a "really really bad" democratic process, an economic system that is falling apart, a brain drain of educated Iranians that are choosing to live anywhere but Iran, and many other troubles that are contributing to the corruption of such a place, it is easier to attempt to bring down a leader there through religious prejudice.

To continue with the other disturbing part of this is the Telegraph taking it further...and by doing so, it unintentionally reinforces a tenet of the Nazi insanity Ahmadinejad persists in legitimizing through his continued denials of the Shoah: that no matter what you believe now, or what you practice as a religion, you are Jewish if your recent ancestry was Jewish. It doesn't help matters much when even Telegraph blog posts about this are titled thus: "Let's See How Iran's President Likes Being Called 'The Jew Ahmadinejad' " Well, of course he's not going to like it. What the hell do you all expect? Thanks a bundle.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in a position of power, and such criticism will only fuel the further repression of reformers in Iran, help ramp up the anti-Zionism of the country's leader, and it will hamper any further attempts by a Western country to try to form any kind of relationship with a regime that is clearly not going away that easily. Violations of human rights are so not conducive to good diplomacy....but all that the president of Iran's family tree is giving anyone at this point is something to hold up in the man's face and say nyaah nyaah you're a self-hating Jew, which is an idiotic thing to even consider in this supposedly more enlightened time in human history.

It doesn't help Iranians confront their very real problems.

And it doesn't help us look at why being Jewish is evidently still a racial slur even in Western countries.

Sad. All of it is sad.

Update, 7:27 PM: Hah! It's a fake story anyhow. So there. Nyaah Nyaah. Thanks, Cajun Boy! (check the vid of Bobby Hebert going berserk at Sunday's Saints-Jets game while you're visiting that Looziana man in NYC's blog)

Anudder update: 10-6: Alejandro de los Rios on Hebert's press box etiquette.

Sooo, what follows is a widget and a message:



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.


View Larger Map

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


View Larger Map


View Larger Map

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.