Everybody head over to Karl Elvis's place for his birthday spankings.
(Naturally, on his birthday, Karl gets to do the spanking, so put on some nice undies.)
November 2006 Archives
I'm up in my third floor home office with the windows open. Lovely day. And I have no idea which neighbor it is, but somebody who lives in the condos next door likes to play Jah Wobble at maximum volume.
Nice.
This week we had a busload of folks from Iraq Veterans Against the War in town gutting out houses. I want to say "a busload of kids", because from my aged point of view, when I first saw them I thought they were another bunch of college kids...except they've all been to Iraq, as infantrymen, engineers, and military police. They committed to serve their country only to have that commitment used and betrayed by their government, and now they're down here serving their fellow Americans.
We did the houses of two veterans this weekend. Vietnam vet Rene Peterson, who runs the Louisiana chapter of Forgotten Warriors, escaped from the second story of his Gentilly home with his wife by swimming to the 610 overpass on the back of a floating sign. And veteran Tommy Dunne has worked with the Arabi Wrecking Krewe for a long time while his own house in New Orleans East had yet to be gutted.
During breaks we talked about the war. I talked about the flood and the barriers to returning home that most New Orleanians face. They talked about depleted uranium testing and PTSD treatment. They were outraged at what they said was the disparity between how much our government spends for engineering battalions to rebuild in Iraq, while a ragtag bunch of volunteers with a pickup truck get to rebuild an American city.
At one point, we're deep into ripping sheetrock and pulling nails when I heard...you've got to be kidding me...an ice cream truck? Out here? Then the sound of tools hittting the floor and the pitter-patter of Tyvek-clad feet running out the door.
IVAW founder Kelly Dougherty was with us both days, and she frickin' rocks. Give this group your support, they walk the walk.
Now come wreck a house.
Arabi Wrecking Krewe will be out today wrecking the house of longtime music supporter and Vietnam vet Rene Petersen, at 2122 Treasure Street in Gentilly (same neighborhood as Morwen, right off Elysian Fields and 610).
The fun starts at 10am.
Two more houses are on tap for tomorrow. Email me and I'll send you details as I get them.
I've been meaning to take my kids on a serious fishing trip for years, but being landlocked in Austin made it difficult since the ocean was four hours away. Now that we're back near the coast where normal people live, it seemed like a good time to introduce them to The Art of The Angler. With a guide, of course, because I'm inept in that department. I can cook 'em, but somebody has to help me catch 'em.
I made the reservation a month ago, when the temperature was in the 80's and the AC was running. November being "anything can happen" month, of course the first big arctic front of the season blew in two days before our fishing day, so at 7:00 AM yesterday we found ourselves out in the wetlands near Lafitte with both the temperature and the wind gusts somewhere in the 30s.
It was still great fun, and reasonably decent fishing. The minimum size limit for redfish is 16 inches, and we caught a ton of 15-and-a-half inch ones, and every time we did Cap'n' E.J. made the same joke: "Smart fish, he knows just what size to be!" and then tossed him back in.
A decent haul:
and the monster on the left (caught by Liam) will be the big dead animal in the middle of our Thanksgiving table tomorrow.
Watching Goblet of Fire.
Dad: "So every year, the whole school thinks that Harry is a cheat and a liar, and by the end of the year it always turns out that he's telling the truth and is battling Voldemort. Why don't they ever learn?"
Liam: "I don't know. J.K. Rowling can't think of anything else, I guess."
Some of you came out this fall to help gut Morwen's house in Gentilly. I contacted her last week to see about scheduling another work day and got this happy news:
We finally started the SBA stream and the place is now remediated and gutted. Also cleared the yard .The gutters took 4 days... (I know, I was there for it all.) You folks did a wonderful thing for us weeks ago. Finishing the entire task on that place would have been way too much. (Things in that house are not what they seemed... more than a few remodelings in it's past.) What you folks did was streamline the way and that Betty and I both appreciate so very much. We are moving forward now and can get the raising and the restoration going.
Thanks to everybody who came out. That's one more who is on their way to moving back home.
You might have noticed that my flickr pages lately have been overflowing with pictures of houses from Central City and the Lower Ninth Ward. The past couple of weeks I've started getting involved with Karen Gadbois' latest project, Squandered Heritage, which is a website devoted to documenting the ongoing destruction of our historic architecture here in New Orleans.
We currently have two spreadsheets containing addresses of residences that the owner has sought to demolish, either by applying to the city for a demolition permit, or by requesting that FEMA demolish their house due to storm damage. There are over 100 homes on the first list, over 500 on the FEMA list, many of which are located in National Register historic districts.
We are photographing these houses as quickly as possible and putting the photos up on the site, hoping to accomplish a number of goals:
1. Build the case for blocking the demolition of individual homes.
2. Demonstrate the scale of the problem in order to motivate the public and the city to demand enforcement of existing historic ordinances.
3. Worst case, at least document what is being lost before it disappears.
Many of the houses on the list had been decaying for years before the storm, and we feel that property owners are using Katrina as a cover for finishing off their ongoing "demolition by neglect".
It's a great project, and I'm getting to see a lot of places in the city that I didn't even know existed.
Please check it out on a daily basis.
I'm heading back to The World for the weekend, for my Class of '86 Reunion at Rice. Yeah, Houston. I know, I know. I'll be wearing full colors
so any Bushietown fuckmooks that want to give me shit, bring it, bitches. I'll show you how we play in the murder capital.
On a more positive and thoughtful and clearly better-written note, your assignment in my absence is to read and then re-read Mark's Ship of Fools entry over at Wet Bank Guide. He gets it more than anybody. Certainly more than I do.
WRNO has always been the rock of New Orleans, but where you found it on the dial has been a matter of some dispute.
For years it was 99 FM. In fact when I was a kid I heard some DJ claim that Toto's song "99" was written about them.
Somewhere around 1980 or so, some wingnut in marketing decided that if you rounded 99.5 off to a whole number, you got 100, so it became "FM100 WRNO", but it was still The Rock of New Orleans.
And during my long exile, digital tuners were invented so finally the fully-qualified 99.5 could become the official moniker.
And it's been playing the same four songs all this time. When I was in junior high, it was always Boston, Foreigner, Zeppelin, AC/DC. In high school, I discovered WTUL, where I got a big education in the Ramones, the Cramps, Echo & the Bunnymen, and Joy Division, while 'RNO was still playing Boston, Foreigner, Zeppelin, AC/DC. Interspersed with a little Zebra.
I'd come home from college during the 80's, my mind all full of Sonic Youth and Pere Ubu and Mission of Burma, and I'd tune in 'RNO and I'd be irate. "It's still goddamn Boston, Foreigner, Zeppelin, AC/DC! What the fuck is with these people?"
And as I got older, I learned to accept that some things don't change. That New Orleans is a backwater in a lot of ways, it's got a strong mullet heritage, and that every mullet town needs a mullet radio station to keep the memory alive. Teenage parties at the levee, drinking Miller ponies while the stereo in somebody's Mustang blasted Boston, Foreigner, Zeppelin, AC/DC, until the police would chase us away.
I even started to like Boston a little bit. I always loathed that band so much back then, that nowadays whenever I hear Boston, it makes me nostalgic for those happy days when I was really fucking hating Boston.
WRNO finally goes over to an all-talk format tomorrow, and 40 years of The Rock comes to an end. I was gutting houses with some Tulane students all day today, and they had RNO cranked real loud, they knew all the songs, all the words, and I thought how weird it is that I'm out here with a bunch of kids half my age, who think the music of my youth, music made before they were born, music that is as old to them as Elvis is to me, is worth listening to.
And it was all mother fucking Boston, Foreigner, Zeppelin, AC/DC.
Tonight in the car, I got a little snippet of Little Steven's Underground Garage. Not typical 'RNO, but to my ears a more fitting way to go out.
I spent half my life hating it, but I'm going to miss it.
I don't have so much to say this week. I have lots of new flickr sets though.
Liam is playing inline hockey these days. He's got this gladiator streak in him, and when he found out that every kid on the team gets to wear more gear than a baseball catcher, he fell in love with the game. When he found out that the goalie gets to wear even more gear...
A couple of weeks back, the Carries kicked those sissy bitch Rinkwraith's asses. Some guy behind me was really taken with Little Miss Ruffit. "Yo, Ruffit, kick some ass, baby". Dangerblond says to me, "Ray, do you know that guy?" and I said "No, but I imagine I'll get to know him soon"...
Liam had to pick a historic figure to do a report on at school, and since he'd heard me talking about Buddy Bolden a few weeks back when we wrecked Ms. Cora's house, he decided to do his on Bolden. So we got to go around the city taking pictures of some of the places in Bolden's life, many of which still exist and are sadly not marked with any kind of historic plaque or anything. He's buried in an unmarked grave in Holt Cemetery, which is where people who are too poor to be interred in above-ground tombs go to be buried in the ground. It's a neat place...sad in a way to see it in such disrepair, but fascinating to how people without a lot of money honor their deceased...
Pictures from Voodoo Music and Halloween when I get some time.
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