March 2006 Archives

Chin Music Press has just about run through their first print run of Do You Know What It Means, and Borders has ordered a thousand copies. And last week, we were the #6 Best Seller in the Greater New Orleans area. #7 was The Da Vinci Code. Most of the rest of the top 10 were all Katrina-related. Go figure.

I'll be in New Orleans this weekend, arriving Friday mid-day and leaving Monday afternoon, so if you want to meet up for a drink or something, shoot me an email. Between thinking hard about real estate and schools, most of my time will be spent prowling po boy joints, so if you see a guy with a Ruby's BBQ shirt on and roast beef gravy running down his arm, that'll be me.

Saturday at 1:00 some of the other DYK authors will be doing a panel at the Tennessee Williams Festival at the Cabildo. (I won't be involved but might be skulking around in the background looking for free food.) And Sunday at 2:00, several of us will be doing a reading/signing at the Barnes & Noble in Baton Rouge.

Outselling The Da Vinci Code is exciting stuff, let me tell you, but just being on the same top 10 list as Chris Rose and Tom Piazza is a bigger honor.

I haven't been posting so much about Katrina lately, since I've been reading a lot of excellent blogs that are closer to the scene of the crime (yes, crime), and I'm usually not one that likes to do a lot of "me, too" posts.

Later I'll post a summary of the New Orleans post-Katrina blogs that should be an essential part of your day, but Ashley reminds me that I haven't actually posted about the fine folks at levees.org yet.

Levees.org is a non-partisan grass roots organization which aims to hold the Federal Government and specifically the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers responsible for the New Orleans flood, and to get the Federal Government to step up and fulfill its legal responsibility to provide adequate flood protection in the region.

The site is fascinating, and gives instructions on how you can help.

Here are some basic facts to get you started:

Fact 1 Katrina missed metro New Orleans. Winds in the New Orleans area were in the Cat 1 to Cat 2 range and the tidal surges about a Cat 3. The storm surge did not overtop the Lake Pontchartrain floodwalls as predicted.

Fact 2
The flooding of metro New Orleans was an avoidable man-made disaster. The levee and canal walls failed because of human mistakes. “Experts say the New Orleans flood of 2005 should join the space shuttle explosions and the sinking of the Titanic on history's list of ill-fated disasters attributable to human mistakes.”

Fact 3
Engineering experts say the canal walls were terribly designed. Throughout the metro area, flood walls and levees catastrophically failed. Many collapsed well below design thresholds ( 17 th Street, London and Orleans). Others collapsed after a brief period of overtopping ( Industrial Canal) caused by “scouring” or erosion of the earthen levee walls – an egregious design flaw. Properly built canal walls should not collapse after brief overtopping

Fact 4
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers – a federal agency – has sole authority over the design and construction of metro New Orleans’ flood protection and water management. Congress authorized the Lake Pontchartrain Hurricane Protection Project in the Flood Control Act of 1965. The Corps was responsible for project design and construction and local interest were responsible for maintenance. See page 4 of the Government Accountability Office report to the US Senate on November 11, 2005.

Fact 5
Responsibility for the levee design failures rests squarely on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Congress. This means that the federal government is responsible for the deaths of 1103 people and the destruction of hundreds of thousands of homes and livelihoods in metro New Orleans.

An early (1987) video mashup of "Winnie the Pooh" and "Apocalypse Now".

Piglet is f-ing brilliant.

[Via BoingBoing]

BoingBoing links to a Positive Ape piece about kid heros of the 70's, including this bit about Evel Knievel:

It would be hard for someone born after 1980 to understand the hallowed place Evel held in the imagination of a kid back then. Forget fakes like Superman and Spider-Man, we had a real-life superhero to worship, a hero who dressed like a star-spangled Elvis, rode a Harley, smashed his bones like brittle Ortega taco shells, and who, in his ultimate act of insanity (and some would say of hubris) climbed into a red-white-and-blue rocket and shot himself over the gaping chasm of the Snake River Canyon. Like Icarus, he didn't complete his flight; missing the far side of the canyon, he plummeted to the canyon floor, narrowly avoiding drowning in the river below. I can still remember witnessing this event on ABC's Wide World Of Sports. just as I can instantly recall his painful slo-motion Caesar's Palace crash, the Zapruder film of my generation.

The thing is, I distinctly remember that the Snake River jump was not broadcast on TV at all, it was strictly a pay-per-view closed-circuit television thing, in the days when almost nobody had cable TV. In New Orleans, you could buy tickets to go to the Superdome to watch it on their big screen TVs. We begged and begged and begged, but the parents insisted we couldn't afford it.

So is Positive Ape just making shit up? Is this another of those "implanted memories" things, like all the people who remember being on the edge of their seat during the 1980 US hockey victory over the USSR even though the game wasn't actually broadcast on TV?

I found one article that claims that ABC was there broadcasting it live. But guess what? That article was written by ABC (and smacks of a little self-aggrandizing revisionist history, maybe?). The Wikipedia backs up my memory that it was closed-circuit only, because ABC didn't want to pay what Evel wanted to be paid for broadcast rights. These television news archives give headlines from (of all places) ABC News saying that it was going to be pay-per-view as well.

Evel's overwhelming importance to impressionable bike-riding boys in the 70's cannot be overstated, however, pay-per-view or no pay-per-view. And yeah, I had this stunt bike toy, too.

This is what it would look like if my dad ever learned to use the Internet.

[Via Suspect Device]

...but I am starting to wonder if I might have a novel rattling around in my head, or at least a very substantial short story.

I've been turning this over and around and looking at it for a few weeks now. I've been researching it. I have a pretty rich setting. I have a very involved backstory for the setting. I have a protagonist, and he has a name, and he has a personality and a backstory which provides his motivation. I even have a cool working title.

But I lack probably the most important part: a situation. What is the protagonist up against that makes shit happen? What makes the story go? Here's this interesting guy in this interesting place and he does...what?

There is more there than there was a week ago. I feel like all I need is a sudden "aha!" moment, like the moment when Stephen King first learned that the girl's bathroom in high school had a tampon dispenser, and the basic crux of Carrie just popped into his head. That "aha" moment feels really close, just out of reach, like a word on the tip of my tongue. And I don't know if the moment needs to be reeled in when it's close, or if I can just leave it alone and come back to it in a week or so. Will it get away from me if I don't pursue it right now? With the house up for sale and taxes due and all that other mundane life shit?

And if the "aha!" gets away, then what am I left with? I'm like a bunch of musicians who have instruments, and clothes, and an album cover, and an attitude. But who haven't written any songs yet. And aren't sure if they even know how.

I could barely manage to acknowledge St. Patrick's day this year.

Everything lately has been an effort. All the frantic activities of the past three months are taking their toll. I'm just fucking tired.

The family is split up. Gina is off to Santa Cruz to visit our friend Amy who is undergoing chemo for breast cancer, so I'm single-parenting until Monday night. Cassidy is being all teenagery and didn't want to leave the house. All my CDs are boxed up and in storage. No Pogues, no Chieftains, no Floggy Molly.

But still, I did my best to fake it. I pulled on my green t-shirt from Doyle's Pub in Boston. I took the boy to the Dog & Duck to hear the bagpipes. For some reason all that Guinness around me aroused the voices in my head, the voices that have been gone for over a year. I was almost thinking they'd gone away for good, but nope. They're still there. They're weak, they don't scare me, but they're still there, and I can't turn my back on them.

It was almost boring. It was almost not worth doing. Until Liam and I got us a basket of fish & chips and a Coke and sat down in the parking lot next to the music tent, and finally, finally, St. Patrick found me. Fingers all greasy, ketchup stains on my jeans, sitting on the pavement next to the trash can, in the cool cloudy March afternoon with the pipes playing and the kids running around and the happy drunk people in their green hats having their happy drunk fun, with the smell of cigarettes and spilled beer and Irish stew and fried fish. It was hard to feel it, but it was there, just barely. It felt like St. Patrick's day.

And the pipers finished piping, and we finished our chips, and we headed home to watch "March of the Penguins" until the kids fell asleep in front of the TV.

And it ain't so fucking bad, y'know?

Point...

NEW YORK - Isaac Hayes has quit “South Park,” where he voices Chef, saying he can no longer stomach its take on religion.

Counterpoint...

“South Park” co-creator Matt Stone responded sharply in an interview with The Associated Press Monday, saying, “This is 100 percent having to do with his faith of Scientology... He has no problem — and he’s cashed plenty of checks — with our show making fun of Christians.”

Much as I would love to side with the creator of Hot Buttered Soul on this one, I have to finally come down in the "Fuck Scientology" camp.

"I'm not sure what the state of the union is where the President dwells, but I can assure you that the part of the union that I live in is stupendously fucked."

This video sums up well the tangle of thoughts that swirls through the heads of New Orleans residents, evacuees, ex-pats, and residents-to-be.

It's a tearjerker. It's a must-see.

Ain't no place to pee on Mardi Gras Day
Ain't no place to pee on Mardi Gras Day
No matter what you say
No matter what you pay
Ain't no place to pee on Mardi Gras Day

Stuff about Mardi Gras this year that was as good or better than years past:

Everybody agrees that this Mardi Gras felt like the good old days, like the Carnival season as it was before the 80's when it started being overwhelmed by tourists. The family vibe up on the Avenue was tremendous. People barbecued, kids watched the parades on ladders, people shared beads and joked with total strangers. It was splendiferous. It was like a giant reunion, a huge homecoming party.

The throws were spectacular. Cassidy got two (two!) Zulu coconuts at her very first Zulu parade. Liam caught four spears. Even traditionally stingy krewes like Iris were throwing gobs of stuff. On Saturday the air was so thick with beads that nobody was bothering to pick any up off the ground. If you didn't make a fair catch, you didn't even bother to bend over because it was more lucrative to just watch for the next bundle to be thrown, and the ground was so littered with beads that it was dangerous footing if you had a kid on your shoulder.

Somebody came up with the brilliant idea of packaging beads in these non-disposable bags with zippers on them, so when the bag was empty, it became a valuable throw itself. We brought our entire haul home in these bags. How cool is that?

We didn't make it to the Quarter on Fat Tuesday, but Uptown was still thick with people masking, and most of the costumes were political humor. Granted, Katrina has made for a target-rich environment in that respect.

And racial harmony. There was a definite lack of muttered comments from the white folks about "the bruthas" or "that element" or how "dark" the Claiborne side of St. Charles is. And the mostly black crowd down around Melpomene was just as sweet as can be. It was a big frickin' love fest. It was just...different. I can't describe it. And I hope it lasts.

And if I hear another idiot say something stupid about how New Orleans is a whiter city now, or how Mardi Gras was just for the white people, I'm gonna put a boot up their white ass.

But a few thing about Mardi Gras that were different and sad:

Some parades were short. The truck parades after Rex were really short. Mid-City was only about three floats long, with no bands (this from a krewe that was once renowned for having the best marching bands).

The bands that were there fucking rocked. But a lot of them were from out of town. The legendary bands of St. Augustine, St, Mary's, and Xavier Prep combined to form a single group called the MAX band, which was clearly the biggest hit of the season. All of the schools of St. Bernard parish combined to form one small band, and they got the kind of respectful teary-eyed applause that's usually reserved for WWII vets. St. Bernard doesn't exist any more. Every damn one of those kids is homeless, and still, they represented.

Restaurants were hard to come by, or packed, or closed without warning. You couldn't just go to a place away from the parade routes, because the only parts of New Orleans with functioning restaurants are the parts of New Orleans with parades. We went by Drago's on Saturday when Endymion was rained out, and it was just closed, with no explanation, even though it reopened back in November. We ended up at Franky & Johnny's along with about a thousand other people. Monday we wandered the Quarter looking for a muffaletta, but Central Grocery was closed, Napoleon House closed at 6 (during Mardi Gras!), and we ended up at a strangely deserted Cafe Pontalba.

The saddest thing, though, was the north breeze on Saturday when the cold front came through. Every once in a while, the breeze would carry with it a hint of the smell of Lakeview, Mid-City, Broadmoor, and the other neighborhoods on the lakeward side of the Avenue. And you could still detect "that smell"...the decay, the mold, the rot...the stench of Katrina.

I hear the Mardi Gras Indians were out in force in the Lower 9. We only saw one Indian that day, running by on Melpomene, looking like he was late for the meetup. Head to toe in orange feathers. Later that night I heard a stellar live version of "Indian Red" on WWOZ, and the thought of the Indians defiantly dancing through the wreckage of the Lower 9 singing that song brought me to tears.

We won't bow down
We won't bow down
Down on the ground
Down on the ground
Oh how I love to hear him call my Indian Red

All my pictures are in a flickr set here.

Our oldest cat, Doriella du Fontaine, has gone to be with her brother Bootzilla in funky kitty heaven.

She had some sort of stroke on Friday before we left for New Orleans, but the vet reassured us that it was probably minor since her blood work was all fine. Then yesterday while driving home we got a call from the mom-in-law that we should hurry, because Doriella was sinking fast, having multiple siezures and refusing to eat. (I drove fast enough to warrant a polite conversation with one of Texas's finest, but oh well.)

Dory slipped into a kitty coma a few hours after we got home last night, and Gina had the vet put her down this morning.

Man! I pulled through,
Like all damn studs do,
But I know I'll never be the same
Cause there'll never be another Miss Doriella Du Fontaine.
That's her name,
Miss Du Fontaine.
I'll never be the same
Cause there'll never be another Miss Doriella du Fontaine