October 2007 Archives

Having had the honor to witness the Great Migration up close and personal this summer in the Masai Mara, I found this bit on MSNBC rather sad:

Wildebeests' migration in danger

This reminds me, though, that I never finished posting my travelogue so I will try to find the time to do that in the next week or so. I mean, no trip to Africa is complete without haggling with vendors over souvenir prices, so I'll see if I can scrawl out an anecdote or two.

Yeah, you know that dude is going to be totally stalking the rolling rally today, whispering crazy talk out loud about how "They have the Precious but the Precious is Mines. Yankees betrays us. Wicked, tricksey, false. Where is it? Where is it? They stole it from us. My Precious."

Don't ever let your team win the World Series. The wanting it is way better than the having it. Last night was little more than an exciting baseball game. We cheered, we shrugged, we went to bed. 2004 will never happen again unless we hit another 86-year dry spell.

I want to be a Cubs fan now.

And go Saints, almost all the way again this year!

Elevating this from the comments. I completely agree with this statement from Percy Marchand and will support Una Anderson in the run-off:

After meeting several times for numerous hours with both remaining candidates in the District 95 race, I have chosen to give our full endorsement to UNA ANDERSON.

Although I have not always been on the same side with Ms. Anderson, she shows a genuine interest in coalition building in order to find the best solutions.

Ms. Anderson has committed to addressing many of the issues our campaign raised including, bringing a high school to the area and re-opening neighborhood schools, parks, and playgrounds.

She has also committed to addressing the needs of the entire district and being accessible and responsive to all constituents.

In addition to not being satisfied with Mr. Hines' responses to our questions and concerns (ie: no real education plan other than getting rid of the school board and allowing the governor or mayor to appoint all the members), we want to make a personal statement to Mr. Hines. Money does not entitle any individual to any more rights, privileges, votes, or endorsements when it comes to public service.

There is no question that Mr. Hines wants this position and has and will continue to work hard to attain it. The question is why he wants it and what he will do if he gets it.

I was also disappointed with Mr. Hines absurd accusation that the only reason I am endorsing Ms. Anderson is because "she promised her seat on the school board" to me. As I am sure you all are aware, Ms. Anderson does not decide who takes her place on the school board.

The fact is that I am more comfortable with Ms. Anderson. There are no party affiliation concerns, she has a comprehensive platform, and she has developed long-standing relationships across the district. I can not say the same for her opponent.

I ask that everyone who supported me strongly consider Ms. Anderson - the clear choice for State Rep. - District 95.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THE ABOVE REPRESENTS MY INDIVIDUAL OPINION.

Thanks for all the support you all have shown me.

This just tickled my tailbone funnybone (courtesy of Karl):

So no sooner do I mention that I once deleted some things from my archives because they hurt the feelings of a loved one, then some fucktard from San Francisco at 209.237.238.# (Alexa Internet) using Mac OS X starts digging through my archives looking for dirt using the Internet Wayback Machine.

It's not there, man. And if it was, you wouldn't even recognize it for what it was, because it doesn't concern you or anyone you know. It's not like my wife made me take down the gay porn I made with Ashley.

Now please fuck off.

The other day I had myself a doofy little accident that involved me basically falling on my ass for no good reason at all being attacked by ninjas and thrown to the ground. X-rays indicate no fracture, just a bone bruise, so today I took the day off work since my pain meds are incompatible with debugging Java.

While I was snoozing, the wife leaves a message on the machine: "How's your bum'n'nem?"

Ha ha. It is to laugh.

[For my readers from America and other foreign lands, "mama'n'em" is local vernacular for "your immediate family", as in "how's your mama'n'em?" or "how much water they get by your mama'n'em's in the storm?"]

[Minor spoilers ahead for people who don't know anything at all about Joy Division.]

The other night I got to see Control, the new biopic about Joy Division vocalist Ian Curtis, who took his own life in 1980 at the age of 23, thus sealing his status as an eternal rock legend.

I first learned about Joy Division from reading about his death in Creem Magazine, the summer after my 16th birthday. In fact, most of the cool music I first learned about was music that I only read about and never heard. I knew gobs about obscure bands like Joy Division and Panther Burns and Siouxsie and the Banshees and Gang of Four and the Alley Cats just because I'd read about them, because Robert Christgau had an opinion about them, and I rarely heard them because it was stuff that it was hard to hear at the time even on WTUL, and I didn't have much of a budget for buying music, especially expensive imports. But the short Creem blurb about Joy Division, their music, and Ian's death, accompanied by this haunting photo, really stuck with me. It felt like the Quadrophenia thing I talked about the other day, but taken to a much darker place, a place I hadn't been to yet but could see from here.

In college, I became one of those kids who lived in the Joy Division world a little too deeply. When I was 19 I used to say, in all seriousness, that I hoped I didn't live to see 30 and that I would make sure I didn't. I was moody, I was depressed. (And chicks dug it, at least a few of them, which was an added bonus. Mysterious moody bad boy. Until they would get sick of my morose shit and dump me, which then further fed the beast.)

Seeing Control was a big deal for me. And on the heels of last week's Quadrophenia epiphany, on the eve of my teetering sobriety anniversary, it affected me deeply.

From a pure film critic point of view, you could probably pick it apart for a lackluster ending, for the lack of depth of character of the other band members.

None of that matters to me. Greg Peters has called this, with a hint of derision, "The Passion of the Christ", but for me, in trying to newly process my memories of my life as a 19-year-old vaguely suicidal alcoholic, it really was exactly that. I needed to see inside Ian's head. I needed to understand. I needed to know why.

And why, as it turns out, was a simple garden variety love triangle. Ian got married too young, before his art and his importance had flourished, and he fell out of love with the mother of his child and in love with somebody who would have been his soulmate if only he had waited a few more years to meet her. And his epilepsy and other health problems prevented him from dealing emotionally with the complications of living in the fucked up situation he had place himself in. And one night, in a moment of great pain and pressure and confusion and weakness, he hung himself.

So when you see the movie and re-listen to the music in the context of what was going on in his life, you realize that what he did was pour his feelings and his doubts and his regrets into his songs. Literally. Literally in the extreme. When he writes in "Love Will Tear Us Apart":

When routine bites hard,
And ambitions are low,
And resentment rides high
But emotions won't grow,
And we're changing our ways,
Taking different roads,
Then love, love will tear us apart again

Why is the bedroom so cold?
Turned away on your side.
Is my timing that flawed,
Our respect run so dry?
Yet there's still this appeal
That we've kept through our lives
And love, love will tear us apart again

he is writing about his wife, and he knows his wife knows he is writing about her, and she knows that the whole world knows that he is writing about her. But he wrote and recorded it anyway.

As art, it is a profound piece of work.

As a way to treat a person you love...it seems morally questionable. Is inflicting pain like this somehow justified if great music or literature or art is the result?

Yet, if you strip out all the interpersonal relationship complications and all the regret and pain from Ian's lyrics, you're not left with fucking much else besides "dance dance dance dance dance to the radio". If all that emotional raw material was not available to him as a lyricist, then likely nobody would have ever heard of Joy Division, nobody would have ever made a movie about them, and I wouldn't be writing a blog post trying to explain why this is all so personally important.

So what the fuck does all this have to do with me?

Because I've been wrestling with these very issues for a long time. Some of you may remember that I did a big purge of some archives of my blog a year or so ago because I wrote some things there that hurt some people that I love very much, not expecting that they would ever read them. And so certain topics and certain people are no longer discussed here, because the risk is too great.

I have coworkers who have found my blog. My wife's coworkers and derby friends read it. My parents and possibly my brothers and for all I know my kids friends from school read this stuff. So my blog slowly constricts down to that which is safe, which is inoffensive, non-worrisome, and family-hour friendly. Circe said to me a few years ago, "your blog is just brochure-ware now...you post about bands you like and movies you saw and you link to funny pictures you found on the internet, but you don't actually say anything any more. Your blog is just a brochure of Ray". As if I were a hotel chain now, and this is just an inoffensive and inviting protrayal about what a fun and interesting guy Ray is. Hotel Ray is kid-friendly, serves crawfish ettoufee in the main restaurant, has Mission of Burma karaoke every Tuesday, and shows all the Red Sox games in the Sporty Sport bar on the mezzanine.

But it's just a blog, right? I mean, who cares? But the same conflict holds true for any kind of writing, and that is where I am really struggling. I want to be a writer. Published and all. I have one published work under my belt, a humorous little memoir about working as a float grunt during Mardi Gras in the 70's, which was published right after the storm by Chin Music Press. That story worked because I am pretty good at telling true stories in a funny and entertaining and only slightly embellished way. I want to write more; I've got a short story in progress, and a short speculative fiction novel taking shape in my head. But I write best when I write what I know, when I base my writing, at least loosely, on things that have actually happened to me or to people I know.

But other than a handful of humorous anecdotes, the really important, real literature-worthy things that I've experienced, are things that must remain private.

I can't do what Augusten Burroughs did in Running With Scissors or Dry. I can't just let fly on everybody I know, burn every bridge, and let the chips fall where they may. There are people involved, people I love, people I don't want to hurt. I want to write painful stories, but those stories are painful for other people too, not just me.

So I don't write anything interesting. I'm crap for making stuff up completely out of whole cloth. I can't do pure fiction the way somebody like Stephen King or William Gibson can. There has to be some of me in there or the words just don't come.

I don't know the way out of this conunudrum. I wrestle with emotional issues as significant as Ian Curtis...different ones, to be sure, but just as significant...but I am bound by duty to family and friends, and by rules of social and workplace decorum not to write about them.

I think I'll figure it out. Maybe I'll find my fiction voice one of these days. But right now it's fucking hard.

In the meantime, I am going to try, try really hard, to not let this blog be brochureware all the damn time.

[P.S. I feel I must add that if you read the above and try to infer anything about my marriage or my relationship with any of my family members or friends or any of my past relationships...if you think you know what specific people or events or experiences I am referring to...you're wrong. You just read my blog. None of you really know me. Not all of me.]

I happened to be riding my bike around Hollygrove checking out the progress in the neighborhood (a few blocks are back, but most of it is deserted), and I swung by Mrs. Cora Foster's house on Monticello just to see what things looked like.

I'm still so sad and so angry.

We partially gutted this house and salvaged a lot of personal belongings out of it on the first anniversary of the storm, along with some Rising Tide volunteers and the Arabi Wrecking Krewe, and a few weeks later some volunteer rollergirls organized by Brian Denzer cleared the lot of weeds and overgrowth. There's a blog entry about it here, and Scout from First Draft put together a great video of it here:

Back then we were so full of energy and optimism. Volunteers filled the city, the Road Home program was just getting rolling, and we knew it would just be a matter of time before we would be getting people back into their houses.

Fourteen months later, for this part of Hollygrove, I have nothing but despair.

Two lots have been cleared around the Foster house. Most of the rest are gutted houses, untouched by rebuilders. Within a two block radius of her house, you can see one house occupied, and one gutted with an occupied FEMA trailer in the yard. The rest of the neighborhood, at least up at the top end by Monticello, is just gutted and abandoned.

If you look inside, it looks pretty much how we left it on that day in 2006. You can see the hole in the living room floor where we almost dropped the fridge, and the hole in the hallway where Oyster fell through (both events captured in Scout's video).:

I talked to Sheik from the AWK last spring, and he was discouraged. Said of the almost 100 houses he had done, only one person had moved back in, and a few of the houses had been demolished (against owner's wishes), including Al "Carnival Time" Johnson's house.

I wonder how Mrs. Cora is doing, up in Detroit. It saddens me to think that she may never see New Orleans again, and if she does, it won't ever look like home.

All of my recent pictures of Mrs. Cora's house, taken last month, are in a flickr set here.

I've been taking a library of recent photos of all of the houses I've gutted in the past fourteen months, and I'll post a summary later in the week.

"You're barmy, that's what. Staying out all hours. Gettin' up to God knows what. Dressing like a bloody freak. Stand still when I'm talking to you! I wouldn't be at all surprised if you're on drugs."

"I'll tell you. It's somebody, like you, who doesn't know where his mind is. Bloody split personality. Half your mother's family were the same. That's where you get it. Your Uncle Sid was always trying to kill himself. And when he did it was a bloody accident. He never knew what he was doing."

1979 was the year that Quadrophenia was released, when I was 15. I idolized this film. For obvious reasons...the music, the fashion, the rebellion. And for reasons that I didn't think anybody else really understood like I did. Split personality. One minute fun, the next moody, and the moodiness would drive friends or girlfriends away, which would make me clingy, making them run further away, making me moodier and angrier and more and more lonely. Even when I had a girlfriend, I felt isolated, like it wasn't real, like I didn't really deserve this. And if they dumped me, I would obsess over them for years. More often, I would dump them first, reject them before they could reject me. It's a useful defense mechanism. Attack before you can be attacked. Ask the Germans. 1940. A banner year.

1979, coincidentally, was also the year I started drinking. Heavily, from the very first night. I did not "experiment" with alcohol and drugs, I said "gimme!" And if you believe what some people tell you, the year an alcoholic starts drinking is the year that he stops developing emotionally.

Last week I watched Quadrophenia with my daughter, thinking I was just passing on one more bit of musical history for her so that she can be the hippest musical kid in school (it's working, so far). But as I watched, I realized I was not watching an image of my teen angst years. I was watching my current grown self on the screen, being amped up one minute and depressed the next, taking anger out at rejections, real or imagined, wanting to be part of something larger than myself and finding myself isolated at every turn, angry and confused and not knowing how to figure anything out.

Two weeks ago I almost relapsed. Not even because I wanted to get drunk, really. I was angry about something. Something stupid and petty, I don't even remember what it was. But there was a half-empty bottle of wine on the counter and I picked it up, took the cork out, and smelled it. And then I put it to my lips. Thinking, "this'll show 'em." Like I could prove a point that way. I could show "them" (whoever "they" were) that I'm serious, about whatever the fuck it is I'm supposed to be "serious" about. I used to do that in my drinking days. Drink "at" people. Drink to show 'em. And I was daring myself to do it, curious to see if it was as dangerous as it's made out to be, curious in the way I was curious about letting go of the handlebars on my motorcycle last year.

I tipped the bottle back, and the wine hit my lips...but I didn't open them. And I pulled the bottle back down, and wiped my mouth. Put the cork back in the bottle, and put the bottle in the pantry out of sight. Then I called somebody, 'cause that's what you do in AA. You call somebody. I called a person who was once a temporary sponsee of mine who is currently stronger and wiser than I have been in months. The student has become the master.

And I'm hauling my ass back into meetings for real now. I have friends in the program now, friends who I know from outside activities, so it's easier to stay connected. It's kind of ironic; I get called "rescue hero" by a couple of people I've helped in the past year, I get called "fireman" by somebody who knows about my secret dream of wanting to be a volunteer fireman. And the other day in a meeting, a chick there who I didn't even know said she thought I looked like the sponsor type, like the kind of guy people must ask to sponsor them all the time. When inside I still feel like a messed-up kid half the time.

Four years ago today, in the wee hours of the morning, I drank the last drink of my life (a pint of pink lemonade and vodka that was about 2/3 vodka) and cried my eyes out to my wife about things in my past I'd never told her about, at least not in detail. That really was my last drink. I've never relapsed, and I don't plan on doing it any time soon. And today I will get a new little AA chip (why don't they call them doubloons here?) with a big Roman numeral "IV" on it.

If it's true that your emotional development freezes when you start drinking, and starts growing again when you get sober, then today I turned 19. I feel 19. I feel like a confused teenager on the verge of young adulthood who is only just now starting to figure out what is important and what is just distraction. What parts of my past are worth hanging on to and what parts should be traded in for something else. And it's high time for me to drive the Vespa GS off the cliff and walk away from all that mods and rockers nonsense, and grow the fuck up.

I'm Ray, and I'm still a motherfucking alcoholic.

High as a kite on a windless night....

Here's what I'm gonna do when I do it:

Governor: My choice in the "Anybody But Jindal" field is Foster Campbell, who despite all his faults at least doesn't consider his Democratic party affiliation to be just a temporary tactical move which shifts with the winds.

Lt. Governor: Mitch Landrieu. No question. I'm a big fan, I just wish he'd give me a goddamn yard sign already.

Secretary of State: I think I'll just skip this one.

Commissioner of Agriculture and Forestry: Bob Odom. He may be a crook, but he's our crook, and ain't nothing like the status quo when all your alternatives are Republicans.

State Senator, 6th District: Monica Monica. I just have this vague hope that she won't be voting 100% with the American Family Association the way the wife-swapping incumbent does. This is a big deal, since this is the first time in my life that I've ever voted for a Republican for any office. But there aren't any Democrats, so what're you gonna do?

State Representative, 95th Representative District: Percy Marchand. I've chatted with him quite a bit, I think his heart is in the right place. He's thoughtful and accessible. I wouldn't be sad about a John T. Parker win either, and honestly I don't think Una Anderson would be a total disaster. I think Walker Hines and Evan Wolf would be total disasters.

Judge, Criminal District Court, Section A: Laurie White. Just because my friends told me to.

BESE, District 2: No clue. Quick, somebody give me a crash-course in this race. I don't know anything about either candidate, Givens or Marcelle.

Councilmember at Large: Virginia Boulet. I do think she's competent and her heart is in the right place; I think she got played by forces more powerful than her in the mayoral election, and I think she's smarter now and ready to do battle with the mayor this time around, which is what we need. Plus her brother on the NOPD is doing a fine job and makes a good shrimp poor boy. I could also accept a Vassel win here. Everybody else, including Quentin Brown, just depresses the fuck out of me.

Judge, Municipal Court: Charbonnet? Davillier? Roby? Beuller? Help a brother out here, I'm clueless.

I suppose if Americans got to pick, they'd just pick New Orleans and solve two problems at once, but realistically, somebody else will get to pick.

From American Zombie.

There was a rally last week to protest the lack of progress in rebuilding SUNO, the historically-black university which was hard hit by the storm. Dillard is back, Xavier is back. SUNO looks, as the cliche goes, "like the storm was yesterday".

I missed the rally, but I took some pictures later that afternoon, and I have nothing but questions and outrage.

Who is in charge of the rebuilding? Where is the money coming from? How much has been spent, and on what? What is the plan?

From what I know about rebuilding, step one is clearing the moldy flooded contents from the building. Before you can muck it out, before you can remove moldy sheetrock and ceiling tiles and ruined fixtures, you have to haul out the furniture, the carpeting, the books, all the stuff that sat in the flood for so many weeks. That's step one.

From what I can tell, at SUNO, they have not done step one yet. Faculty offices:

and libraries:

and classrooms:

look like they have never even been entered. They look no better than the elementary schools in the Lower Ninth Ward, but this is a university.

The only work that seems to have been done is that these giant things that look like ventilation units surround all of the buildings:

They're new, they have stickers indicating installation in May of 2007:

But what purpose do they serve? What good do they do for a building still shoulder-deep in moldy books and furniture? Did rebuilding money go to a big fat contract for somebody to staple expensive ductwork to the outside of ruined buildings?

There is a rat here. I can feel it. There is a reason SUNO students are going to class in trailers, while money goes somewhere else and time ticks away.

An army of volunteers, from ACORN and Common Ground and SUNO students, could at least clear the muck out of these buildings, but even that seems beyond reach, when there is no leadership.

[More pictures in a flickr set here.]

From the AP via Nola-Dishu:

NEW YORK -- David Simon has made the streets of Baltimore famous with gritty television dramas such as "The Wire," "Homicide: Life on the Street," and "The Corner." Now he wants to take on the Big Easy.

The next series he hopes to produce for HBO is about musicians reconstituting their lives in New Orleans, he told The New Yorker for its issue hitting newsstands Monday.

Filming on The Wire wrapped up last month with the final season airing starting in January.

And Wire star and Ben Franklin alum Wendell Pierce will take part in a presentation of "Waiting for Godot" in November, in the Lower 9th Ward and Gentilly.

I don't know why it's taken me this long to notice, but this practically leapt out at me last night from some campaign workers t-shirt:

"Vote 69 Virginia Boulet"

I swear, you boys, it's true.

Finally, somebody who can get on top of the issues and face them head on.

I am fully behind her.

Other than the film festival and the ALCS series vying for your time tomorrow, there are two very worthy and badass events taking place that should keep your feetses and your belly happy all day and all night.

Tomorrow from 3pm til, at Vaughn's in the Bywater, a benefit for the Jena 6 featuring Kermit Ruffins, Treme Brass Band, John Boutte, Craig Klein, Bob French, and a whole bunch of others. $20 for a truly great cause. See Maitri for all the details.

Later in the evening, the Ashe Cultural Arts Center hosts a Special Building Benefit Concert, with music by Rebirth Brass Band, the Mardi Gras Indian Collective, Rev. Lois DeJean and the Johnson Extension, Jo Cool Davis, Mother Tongue, Ashé Drum Circle, and the New Orleans Renaissance Society. $25 donation gets you all that and dinner.

Enjoy. And enjoy the fun stuff on my blog while you can, 'cause I'm loading up my Flickr with some anger and misery and expect some pretty depressing posts once the weekend is over.

I made my daily phone call to Guy's Po Boys this morning, and for the first time in months, somebody actually answered.

They're re-opening Monday. It's gonna be a gravy-soaked lovefest, and call your order in ahead of time, 'cause it's gonna be packed.

Ashley and I were talking on the phone about the SR 95 race this morning; we were laughing about Wolf and Hines, he was offering me his highly negative take on Una Anderson, and we both were impressed that Percy Marchand seems to be reaching out in the blogosphere.

A couple of questions I had about Percy were whether he was related to Charmaine Marchand, whose signs I had seen along St. Claude this weekend while doing some gutting work with ACORN. Political dynasties are neither good nor bad in and of themselves (Landrieus, Kennedys good; Morials, Bushes bad), I was just wondering. And I was also curious whether Percy was associated with any of the sometimes controversial Democratic organizations such as BOLD, SOUL, etc.

Quite by accident I ran across this post by Percy on the nola.com forums which answers both questions (in the context of discussing housing projects and affordable housing):

I wish this discussion would have occurred before judgment was cast. Moving forward:First - The major issue here is access to affordable housing. Like you, residents of the projects (citizens of New Orleans) have every right to return (keep reading). Do you remember the uproar people had about the limited access to their property (land, buildings and personal)? These residents were locked out and basically left with few options. Do agree that this is not fair - absolutely.

Second: My Stance on affordable housing and home ownership (as posted on my website's issues page):• Increase affordable housing and home ownership to instill pride and strengthen the family unit

I don't believe in any system that does not promote and demand forward progress. POVERTY AND HOMELESSNESS IN NEW ORLEANS IS REAL. What do you propose to do...have these residents sleeping in your alley or in front of the store at which you shop?

I think that housing projects as they existed in New Orleans need to be greatly modified...used as places to help people as they better their lives and gain the resources to move out. Projects should not be long-term housing units.

What we need to do is revitalize the numerous blighted, abandoned, and unsecured properties and get residents into those units.

We say it starts at home; lets get them into homes - homes they own - and see the differences.

Again, I request that you read my platform and get the facts on where I stand on issues and who I represent.

I DO NOT belong to any political organization. As I stated in my previous post, I am primarily funding my campaign (it helps that I own and operate a printing company). While I have received some contributions from family members (less than $5,000 - and I don't see a problem with family contributing, much better than these large companies who expect contracts in return), I have not received any funding from Charmaine or her immediate family (and if they do contribute I will accept).

This whole family issue should not even be a basis for discussion. If you owned a company and there were two related candidates for employment - would you automatically rule hiring both of them out just because they are related? If you would, I think you would be over a failing company. You would look at each one's records and abilities and make a decision based on that.

Don't be a part of "any change" "reform" movements. They encourage irresponsible leadership selection and the results are evident today.

Platforms, Ability, Records, Qualifications, Accountability, in my opinion, these are the qualifiers for selecting our leadership.

My last name should not be the basis for support or opposition.

I note again that you are still basing my candidacy on my cousin and what she stands for as opposed to me and what agenda I am pushing.

I have been endorsed by the AFL-CIO, Orleans Parish Democratic Executive Committee, LELA, IDEA, and YAPA. Each active candidate in this race has sought and/or received endorsements. I'm assuming you were hoping I was with BOLD (many of its members including OT are/were backing Ms. Anderson), SOUL, LIFE, Progressive Dems., etc. I have not even met with any of those organizations - nothing against them, but I made the personal decision to run a clean, independent campaign.

Thanks for your time.

I admire a guy who will take the time to wade into hostile forums like that to engage on the issues. Whereas Ashley will relate to you how he could never get the time of day out of Una when she was on the school board.

State Rep 95 candidates:

Walker Hines. 23 years old, has lived almost none of his adult life in New Orleans, he's already a lobbyist, and he has a rich lawyer daddy. Y'know, if you want your dad to buy you something shiny, why not start with a nice new Lexus and work your way up to a seat in the House? No fair skipping ahead in line like that.

Evan Wolf. I was already disliking this guy because of his snarky tone in defending himself on Ashley's blog a few weeks back. Sarcasm and condescension aren't attributes I look for when choosing somebody to represent my interests in Baton Rouge. You're going to have to work with people when you get there, dig?

Well, now, looka here in this morning's T-P:

Evan Wolf, a Democrat from the Carrollton area, encouraged a friend to enter the race as a Republican to siphon votes from [Una] Anderson and Hines, both centrist, business-friendly Democrats who might appeal to conservative and independent voters.

That candidate, a Tulane medical student named Erin Anderson, happens to share a last name with Una Anderson and will appear ahead of her on the ballot. Wolf said his friend is not actively campaigning, and she did not respond to several efforts by the newspaper to contact her by phone and e-mail.

What's more, Karen Gadbois recently asked him whether he had anything to do with the Erin campaign and he allegedly denied it. Then this morning he confesses it in the local daily.

I don't know what's worse, lying about it, or doing it and then being stupid enough to admitting to it. With Evan Wolf, it's the best of both worlds. He's a liar and he's stupid. With this much attitude and dishonesty going into the race, imagine what kind of shit he'll get up to once in office.

Bottom line: Don't vote for Walker Hines, he hasn't earned it yet. And don't vote for Evan Wolf, 'cause he's kind of a dick.

P.S. And obviously, don't vote for ERIN Anderson because she's not actually running for office. She's studying for her Gross Anatomy mid-terms, no doubt.

K-Ville. The gumbo party. Everybody thinks "how stupid! Those writers ain't from here. We don't have gumbo parties. We have parties, we have parties where there is gumbo, we have crawfish boils, we have all kinds of celebrations, but who ever heard of a gumbo party?" Hell, Loki and I keep threatening to have a maque choux cookoff party, but that's different.

Myself, I think, "why the fuck didn't I think of that?" What a great idea. Gumbo party.

It helps you think.

We got two frozen ones from Langenstein's tonight, one seafood and one chicken and andouille. Was aight. We hope to make this a more elaborate tradition in the future. I'll have to cook it on Sunday because Monday is just not a day designed for gumbo. Not unless you already got stock in the freezer.

Whether I watch K-Ville though depends on what happens in the next 10 minutes of the Indians/Yankees game.

Overheard near the foot of Poydras Street, mid-September, 2005:

"Man, then why you here? Huh? Why you down here in the bottom of the United States of America livin in a city thas surrounded by water? And specially why you here now that you ain even sposed to be here now? Now that water's left your city in all these mean ashes you talking bout?"

"Cause I ain lovin any other place."

"You lovin it? Oh you loving all this? Whas there to love bout all this, man? You lovin this because of what?

"You cain be loving somethin because -- cause a this and cause a that. Thas nice, but that ain love. You love despite. When you love it despite the way it is, thas when you know you loving somethin."

From the extraordinary Heart Like Water, by Joshua Clark.

For State Senator district 6, I'm guessing I'll go with Monica Monica, since she at least makes noises about Charity other than "close it and tell the poor to stop getting sick all the time". If I didn't know better I'd think she was a stealth Democrat, judging from her web site, although nobody has actually outright asked her about internment camps for homosexuals.

Plus Julie Quinn used to be on MTV and I've always hated her for that. I was more of a Kennedy man myself.

State Rep district 95...OK, I'm new here, I have no idea who all these people are. I look at the League of Women Voters guide and right off the bat I can disqualify Erin Anderson and Marc Napoleon for not even showing up, and John T. Parker for his atrocious spelling. [Update: John T. "My friends call me Jack" Parker provides some humorous commentary on his spelling in the comments, and requests a link to his campaign site. Consider it done.]

So, the real and semi-real candidates:

Percy Marchand, who seems to have a passion for the problems faced by poor and working folks.

Walker Hines, who looks and talks like a Republican, and went to (ick) Country Day. Plus he probably gets carded when he tries to buy beer, and he puts signs in yards of people who don't want them, which is a typical Grinchy trick.

Evan Wolf, who like many adjunct professors manages to take a long time to say very little.

Una Anderson, who has an impressive and detailed take on a wide variety of issues, but whose husband wears the blue oxford and khakis uniform, and we all know what that means.

Desiree Cook-Calvin, who must be smart because she went to Franklin, and must be a lot of fun because her campaign includes a birthday bash, but I'm a little concerned that her platform is a little thin.

I'm leaning Una, but I don't have a yard sign yet so there's still time to convince me otherwise. Somebody tell me something I don't know.