One of the projects partially funded by a Fellowship from OSI is a little film you might have heard of: Trouble The Water. Late yesterday evening I received word that it has been shortlisted for an Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary.

Full Details are in my post for the day over there. Please stop by and shcademy are your thoughts!

-Loki, HumidCity Founder

As I understand the current Hymn being sung, Veronica White has been doing a shit job, and refused to produce documentation on hugely over budgeted contracts, so Stacey Head demanded it. Ms White stormed out of a City Council meeting, and Mayor Nagin cried racism. Which, of course, never occured, but the ‘tone’ created by asking someone to account for fucking up their job (oh, yeah, and destroying homes in the process) is racist in the Nagin Administration, if the asker is white and the accounter is black.

So now there’s a protest group calling for Ms. Head’s resignation because of her “racist” behavior. Meanwhile, rumors flourish that Nagin will be chosen as the head of HUD by President Elect Obama, for his insight into housing problems, local singer returned to town, Brian Turd, is shot dead while walking his dog at 8pm on a neighborhood street, and houses continue to be ripped down for no apparent reason. Then there’s the WWL TV report about STD trash trucks dumping toxic waste in City Park, also on Veronica White’s watch.

 Let’s just simplify, shall we? If you’re one of Nagin’s cronies, you can run a department in to the fucking ground, cheat, lie, steal and destroy parts of the city, and if anyone complains, they’re a racist. For this, Mister Nagin expects a presidential Cabinet post and you’ll get murdered walking your dog by your house, even before the kiddies go to bed.

I, for one, am so tired of this song I could spit.

Sign the petition below to recall Veronica White, and send letters to barackobama.com expressing your deep disatisfaction with C. Ray Nagin, so that armed guards appear if he ever gets near a White House appointment.

Enough of this shit already.

Lord David
Skull Club
New Orleans

One of those days when someone in an email conversation starts quoting T.S. Eliot, and you look out our your office window to make sure the person spouting Old Possum is not standing out on a ledge staring off into space. Outside it is a beautiful Fall day in New Orleans: cool, sunny, no hint of humidity, the kind of day when you wished the fireplaces worked. Somewhere out there in the apple-crisp golden afternoon they are tearing down someone’s perfectly sound house. You can almost see the dust rising in the distance without knowing which way to look, because you know with some certainly that somewhere, out there it is happening.

It would be enough to drive one to drink, living in our wildly dysfunctional city, if drinking were an exceptional occasion down here. But we drink because it’s five o’clock somewhere and who says a Sazerac wouldn’t go with an Oyster Salad at the Palace Cafe at lunch? I think it would be just fucking lovely, much preferable to standing out on a windy precipice spouting Oxonian doom. In fact it’s probably the perfect way to cap a morning spent driving around admiring the homes and community buildings that will soon be a patina of stucco dust on an empty lot. Another sazerac? Absolutely.

The kind of day when you wished the fireplaces worked–that’s what I said, wasn’t it? That is what started this slow slide from a pumpkin-perfect November afternoon that became two drinks at lunch and the next thing you know you’re standing someplace you ought not be reciting The Hollow Men to the fire department. And all because someone suggested today that it was OK that New Orleans didn’t work, that this was part of the charm.

I have lived places where things work. And I have lived in places that are charming. While I can’t say I’ve lived in any place that was both at the same time, I know such places exist. New York is not charming, exactly, but it is a place that Orleanians are drawn to, and one of the few places from which they never return. Cajun Boys, too. And in comparison to New Orleans, it works. Hell, they just decided to let their mayor run for a third term, while we would be hard pressed to give ours a five minute running start before we loosed the dogs.

San Francisco is charming  and the last time I checked it mostly worked. They weren’t randomly demolishing houses on Telegraph Hill or painting over the murals in the Castro with gray paint. The average Xcel customer pays $75 a month for electricity. Even if they have our ruinous fuel adjustment charges, that would still be a fraction of what we pay here. With the possible exception of Lombard Street the roads will not destroy a car in three years of use. Oh, and they have street cars. Not just two kinds, but three or four different models, plus cable cars.

Here the city demolishes houses in a way not quite random but almost like a puzzle in a mystery novel, a seemingly stochastic pattern like the rain of rockets on Pynchon’s London. You come away convinced their is some method to the madness, but you struggle to find one that will not drive you insane in the knowing of it.

The strange campaign to demolish wide swaths of the city is just one well-documented example of our spiraling dysfunction. Our mayor lashes out at a council member for racial slurs she never uttered, taking  the word of a fabulously incompetent department head who spends her days visiting Whitney Houston web sites looking for fashion tips when she is not presiding over both the random home demolitions and a set of garbage contracts awarded to campaign contributors that would make Dick Cheney blush. Embarrassing? I guess you could say that, but it’s more maddening.  If I start to tell you about the Sewerage & Water Board hiring a rabbit with a pocket watch to inspect the lines, stop me. It may not be true, but I would believe it in a second.

New Orleans is one of the great places in the world to live. It is also one of the most difficult, largely because of the sort of nonsense that passes for governance. When we talk about “what’s to eat” we mean which restaurant and not a strategy for survival. Then you read a story about a man three years after the Federal Flood speaking wistfully of what it would be like to have a refrigerator. And he’s not even Karen Gadbois, who has dedicated much of her life over the last three plus years to documenting and combating the slow destruction of the city not by wind or water but by a malicious incompetence.  You would start quoting Eliot too, if you had taken up the burden she has carried all this time.

My own advice to her: don’t stop. We would trade the mayor, his extended family and everyone else on his floor of city hall just to keep you at it.  The he charm of New Orleans isn’t just our food or our music or just our eccentric ways (bog bless ‘em), and it certainly is not the inmates who have taken over the asylum the way they have at City Hall.

The charm is in the neighborhoods, not in a single abandoned property that could not be saved but in the whole swath of houses around it where everyone remembers St. Timothy who taught first grade, which tree came down in Betsy and took out everyone’s lights, and what the Tuesday lunch special is up at the corner.  It’s not just about saving houses or a corner church or store. It’s about saving a way of life

And if you want despair stay away from the hyper-intellectual overkill of Eliot. Nothing better fits a distracted and melancholic have-another-drink funk than Bukowski, pure despair for the savor of it, like a cheap cigar. He came to New Orleans looking for some vague Thing, like so many vagabond artists, and found it running in the Quarter’s Ganges gutters.

I would recommend instead of despair that next time you drive the ‘hoods don’t just see the house with No Gas spray painted on it. Look at the ones all around, at the people on the stoop and the corner store that just re-opened. As crazy as it all seems at some level we’re winning because as whacked as daily life here can be we keep coming home.

Mark Folse of Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans

The release date for my New Orleans jazz novel, The Sound of Building Coffins, has been moved up to February 1^st. This is the second such move – surprising to me because I’ve always heard that your publisher moves your release date back, not up. So it’s exciting and terrifying all at once. It’s seems the publisher is excited about it, too – which is a very good thing.

Also, the book is now available for pre-order at all the major online booksellers. It’s a little cheaper if you pre-order it, and it helps to get the ball rolling, so I hope you will. (Icksnay: lowest price currently at Amazon.com)

For those of you who haven’t heard about the novel, or who would like to know more, there’s a full-blown spiel below, which includes blurbs, links to excerpts, reviews, etc.

Also, at the bottom of the “commercial,” you’ll find a little video treat to reward you for tolerating the pimpy nature of today’s post.

Thanks, y’all.

Click the book cover image below for reviews, excerpts from the novel, free mp3 downloads and more.

Now available for PRE-ORDER at:

Amazon.com

Barnes & Noble

Borders.com

Powell’s Books

Books-a-Million

(click above links to visit pre-order pages for each site)

From the publisher:
Meticulously drawn in lyrical prose, this tale of death and rebirth, devastation and redemption, will draw you into a world of beauty and pain, as alluring as it is dangerous. It is 1891 in New Orleans, and young Typhus Morningstar cycles under the light of the half-moon to fulfill his calling, rebirthing aborted fetuses in the fecund waters of the Mississippi River. He cannot know that nearby, events are unfolding that will change his life forever - events that were set in motion by a Voodoo curse gone awry 40 years before he was born. All will be irrevocably changed by a demonic struggle, and by the sound of a new musical form: jazz

Quotes:

“The Society of North American Magic Realists welcomes its newest, most dazzling member, Louis Maistros. His debut novel is a thing of wonder, unlike anything in our literature. It startles. It stuns. It stupefies. No novel since CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES has done such justice to New Orleans. If Franz Kafka had been able to write like Peter Straub, this might have been the result.”
– Donald Harington, Multiple award-winning novelist and recipient of the Oxford-American Lifetime Achievement Award.

“Set in a meticulously researched, living and breathing Storyville-era New Orleans, The Sound of Building Coffins is variously an ultraviolet comedy, a family saga, and a meditation on race, class, and how those who think they’re at the top of the heap seldom really are (more important points than ever in our post-Katrina landscape). Vividly drawn and frequently heartbreaking; a big, tremendously complex, absorbing, essential novel. Some authors live here all their lives and manage to write nothing but cliches about the city, but Louis Maistros gets it right the first time. The Sound of Building Coffins is easily one of the finest and truest pieces of New Orleans fiction I’ve ever read.”
- Poppy Z. Brite

“Magical realism meets the seedy melting pot of early 20th-century New Orleans in this richly complex novel. The story has plenty of ghosts, magic, demons and, this being New Orleans, a ‘Cajun bogeyman’ named Coco Robicheux. It depicts a world where Jesus himself, speaking to a pastor busily wrestling with demons, would say ‘Get the fuck out of this house.’ It shows a place where outsiders are conned with elaborate scams that send them packing, none the wiser but considerably poorer. Those who survive this dangerous milieu are bound together by water, and the liquid becomes one of the novel’s major leitmotifs. If all of this sounds improbable, it is. Yet this novel contains considerable wonders as well, and these wonders are more than enough to transcend the story’s complexities.”
- Publisher’s Weekly

“Deeply original and as hypnotically strange as New Orleans itself, this novel breathes to life a magical realm. Louis Maistros’ haunting characters are at once timeless and firmly tethered to their city’s dark history.”
– Elise Blackwell

“This is not just historical fiction to me, but literature that illustrates human motivation soaked in the magic of human emotion. Everyone who is curious about or already in love with New Orleans should read this book.” –
GiO, The Burlesque Queen of New Orleans

“Louis Maistros has an original and dark vision, full of power.”
- Douglas Clegg

“The nineteenth-century New Orleans that Maistros creates in The Sound of Building Coffins could not come from normal research; you can write a book like this only after spending years obsessed, trawling through old newspapers and out-of-print books and even the streets themselves for clues to evoke this vision of the city’s earlier life. That he tells a strange and intriguing story - a horror novel about the birth of jazz - almost doesn’t matter. The weird way that this commercial thriller sings its paean to that lost era reminds me of Russell Greenan’s IT HAPPENED IN BOSTON?, another classic that defies the easy caricature.”
- Peter Orr

“Maistros is an explosive new talent whose writing reverberates with color and subtle irony.”
- S.P. Somtow

“The Sound of Building Coffins is a soulful work from a writer of the weird. Maistros does more than make you feel for his characters and their twisted, damaged lives; he makes you *want* to feel.”
- Paul G. Tremblay

“The Sound of Building Coffins is a magnetic story with beautifully drawn characters that keep you turning the pages. Maistros captures the dialect, the neighborhood, the whole ambience of Old New Orleans superbly.”
- Raymond Buckland

*

Thanks for reading all that, and click here for your video treat reward.

- Louie

Via The Houston Chronicle:

McALLEN, Texas — A South Texas grand jury has indicted Vice President Dick Cheney and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on charges related to the alleged abuse of prisoners in Willacy County’s federal detention centers.

Having spent the past eight years or so feeling like Cassandra it is fantastic to feel vindicated! What I really love is the line I’ve bolded in this excerpt from The Brownsville Herald:

The indictment accuses Cheney and Gonzales of engaging in organized criminal activity. It criticizes Cheney’s investment in the Vanguard Group, which holds interests in the private prison companies running the federal detention centers. It accuses Cheney of a conflict of interest and “at least misdemeanor assaults” on detainees by working through the prison companies.

Gonzales is accused of using his position while in office to stop an investigation into abuses at the federal detention centers.

Lets shine the light on this, the most criminal and corrupt administration in the history of the US. I need to get a few crates of popcorn because I’m going to sit back and enjoy this! I tell you kids, this will be better than Iron Man!

-Loki, The Happy Founder of HumidCity

-Loki, HumidCity Founder.

At issue is not so much New Orleans Sanitation Director Veronica White’s defensive posturing at City Council but her job performance overall.

Whether we’re talking about questionable contracts with sanitation service providers or improper demolitions of the homes of our neighbors, Veronica White’s signature is all over many of the most embarrassing episodes of post-K New Orleans. And that’s really saying something.

The recent spat at City Hall only highlights what has been an ongoing problem.

The Department of Sanitation impacts all of our lives, it has become one of the most maligned agencies in municipal government. It can no longer function with such discredited leadership.

Dismiss Veronica White!

Sign the petition and tell your peoples.

Your friend,

E of We Could Be Famous

[EDITORS NOTE: This petition is not just something that E wants to share, it is endoresed by HumidCity and its Founder. Go sign it! -Loki]

http://www.prospectneworleans.org/

(If you are getting this through an RSS feed please click through to the original post to listen. Sorry for the inconvenience)

Prospect.1 New Orleans [P.1], the largest biennial of international contemporary art ever organized in the United States, opened to the public on November 1, 2008 in museums, historic buildings, and found sites throughout New Orleans.

http://www.prospectneworleans.org/

Pardon me while I self publicize… Three years in the making, my first book is now available at Blurb. You can view the commercial here.

UPDATE! It just gets better!

Just two days after releasing the lower ninth ward: K+36 on Blurb, they contacted me for their Take 5 Tuesday interview on the Blurberati Blog! I’m positively dizzy!

It’s not so much a hole-in-the-wall as it is a smoke-filled brick cave where mysterious moisture drips randomly upon the heads of patrons and brilliantly disturbing works by obscure artists stare down from mortar-crumbling walls positioned above bluntly printed placards bearing the artist’s last name in bold print and no other information whatsoever. It’s a joint where barrels stand in place of tables, where charming degenerates merrily hit on your wife right in front of you, where the men’s room features an old-fashioned urine trough that affords anyone with a penis the opportunity to mingle his piss with that of the dangling stranger beside him in real time – a weirdly intimate thing for people to be doing in the anonymity-driven electronic 21st century if you ask me. It is a rough and tumble joint, but also a haven for poets and artists; a relative rarity in this town. Musicians have havens aplenty around here, and I’m glad of that; they have their own free medical clinic, a “musician’s village,” and more city, state and corporate-sponsored charitable causes named for them than you can shake a stick at. Meanwhile, if you’re a writer or an artist you’re mostly on your own, expected to stop fucking around with your silly hobby and get a real job – or else you can get your drunk on at the Gold Mine on a random Thursday night and meet up with a tidy mob of compatriot sorry-ass artsy motherfuckers who gather with sooty smiles and know the score.

Right in the door, our friend and good neighbor GiO the Burlesque Queen of New Orleans introduces us to the proprietor, the Poet Dave Brinks. Dave’s passion is clearly to seek out and shine a light on the ever-elusive art of the every-man – I liked him right away. Regulars ranged from the shy to the surly; an interesting cross-section of two-legged animals from all walks of the city that shared exactly one thing – the desire and need to tell their stories through the art of the written word.

The evening’s theme was to pay tribute to a fellow poet who’d recently died; a man I’d never met named Paul Chasse. Today was his birthday. From what I gathered, Paul was a biker, a jailbird, a Haunted History Tour guide, a dyed-in-the-wool Quarter rat, a gleeful troublemaker, a friend, a husband, a resistor of all things mundane, a decent man with a good heart – but mostly he was a poet.

Dave started the night by reading a few of Paul’s poems aloud (all of which were brilliant), along with Paul’s wife Beth, and closed by stating the following truth, “If you didn’t know Paul, you do now.” Because the work was that good.

Paul’s poems were the carefully chosen words of a survivor. One was about his time in prison, contrasting good days from bad in the form of a laundry-list-diary-from-hell that balanced fleeting rays of heaven with heavy slabs of hell, as in; “Today this happened. Today was a good day. Today that happened. Today was fucked.” Never overstating, always just enough so that you got it, and I mean really got it. Another poem was about his experience of shooting abandoned refrigerators for sport in the aftermath of the big storm, and why that maybe wasn’t such a good idea after all. Another, called “No Pain on the Highway,” was about how he only felt free and completely without pain while riding down one. Another was an even-tempered response to the casual cult of religious bumper-sticker slogans we all love so much, and included a line I’ll never forget, that being;

“My redemption is none of your concern.”

Which, ironically, would make a hell of a great bumper sticker.

I never knew Paul Chasse, but I miss him anyway now, and I’m glad to have gotten to know him in this strange way. It’s my understanding a book of his collected works will soon be released. I’ll buy one and so should you.

Members of the audience were encouraged to come forward and take turns reading from a stack of Paul’s poems. Even the lovely Elly (my wife) took a turn, moved as she was, and read a poem called (at least I think it was called), “Farewell, Big Easy.” She finished by singing a Haitian prayer for the dead that translates loosely thus:

“The angels are here at last, and now all is well again.”

The tribute to Paul was followed by the open mike ritual, hosted by a cat named Jimmy. The readers came up one by one, some clearly nervous and some wildly confidant, while Jimmy supplied humorous or insightful commentary in-between. Surprisingly, there were few displays of raw ego along the way.

Imagine standing in an endless line at the DMV, and instead of viewing the people in front of you as a parade of nameless drones intent on sending a few hours of your life into a deep black hole called wasted time, that you could look into the soul of each and see something beautiful, meaningful and worthwhile. These are the angels of the DMV. These are not bongo-beating cool-shade-wearing hippie poseurs; these are real people with real hearts on real sleeves.

Some read for laughs, and some to air out their wounds, while others were just riffing on imagination – but all offered something needed saying, as far as they were concerned – and I tend to agree. Some wrote well but read poorly, some read well but wrote poorly. The good poems were often stunning while the bad ones were often better still; the ones that tried too hard or missed their mark or didn’t seem to have a mark in mind at all; just random attempts at cleverness lined with hints of unique and private pain; these were the ones that cut to the bone and revealed most about the writer, about the listener, about the city, about the joint, about the moment.

In the course of the night, the good and hopeful name of Barack Obama was not mentioned by any. It was almost a relief.

Too wrapped up in the moment to comfortably read my own stuff, GiO stood up and read a short chapter from my book, a page and a half about the endless circle of life and death, as it exists in New Orleans. She dedicated her reading to the memory of Paul Chasse with no complaint from me.

GiO is pure charm and grace; she introduced the piece briefly then dove right in. The crowd was restless at this point and so she had to raise her voice slightly, but 30 seconds in and there was a hush followed by complete silence. The fact that these people were listening – really listening – to these heartfelt scribbles of mine touched me greatly. And what writer can ask for a higher honor than to have his work read aloud to a roomful of unruly working class poets by the one and only Burlesque Queen of New Orleans?

Let this be today’s reason for loving and never leaving the City of New Orleans.

Apparently, this sort of thing happens every Thursday at 8PM.

705 Dauphine Street. See you there, so sez me.

- Louis Maistros

*

http://louismaistros.com

 Most of all I have seen incredibly talented people transform reality before my very eyes, until their creation is as real as the one we live in. And I have been transformed by taking that journey with them.

Do yourself a favor and get out to see some the New Orleans Fringe Festival.
Check this link to the schedule, and pick a show or three. Every performance at the Skull Club during the remaining two days is an absolute gem. I’ve seen them all, and can’t wait for more.

Join us for drinks and magic, will you?

Lord David
Pirate & Artist
Skull Club
New Orleans

As I did over there, let me preface this with a call for the immediate resignation or dismissal of New Orleans Sanitation Director Veronica White.

Mayor C. Ray Nagin sure was dealt a tough hand when Katrina came. At the point the storm came 2005, he was well into the third year of his first term. His administration had earned a reputation for adequacy. Unfortunately, Mayor Nagin had not pressed for updated hurricane evacuation plans as aggressively as he should have. A strong municipal game plan became that much more necessary when President Bush left FEMA in the stead of political hacks. We were on our own without viable hurricane preparations and were finally facing the worst-case scenario storm that we’d always been told would come. As the federal rescue failed to materialize, while Michael Brown was eating steak dinners in Baton Rouge, Mayor Nagin was left on his own. Our government failed us and our Mayor was put in an impossible situation. Certainly, he had not done enough to revamp our evacuation procedures but the newly minted Department of Homeland Security was created to help coordinate that very effort, especially at the nation’s most vulnerable locales. The DHS failed New Orleans and it failed the nation. Instead of revamping our country’s disaster response mechanisms, President Bush had merely assembled a leach-like bureaucracy from which to reward political patrons with jobs and contracts. Our country was no more prepared for a catastrophic hurricane than it was for a terrorist attack, disease outbreak or earthquake. And Ray Nagin was left holding the bag.

It wasn’t fair. It was too much for one man. For New Orleans, Mayor Nagin was the town crier, the constable, and the bucket brigade. For the President, his henchman Karl Rove, and the rest of the right-wing machine, he was the fall guy.

I will never ever forgive those people for what they did to this city. I will never forgive George Bush or Karl Rove or the conservative court jesters that left this city to drown or advocated we abandon it forever when it didn’t.

But I forgave Ray Nagin.

I forgave him because even though he didn’t do enough, he was asked to do it all. I forgave him because he yelled and cursed and cried while Bush, Brown, and Chertoff patted each other on the back. I forgave him because I thought he would never forgive them. I forgave Ray Nagin because I thought he’d never forget what they did to our city and I thought he’d keep yelling and cursing and crying until they made it up to us. I respected C. Ray Nagin enough as a man to believe that if he didn’t have the decency to do right by us as a matter of service, we’d at least benefit from the revenge campaign.

But since then…

Since then, Mayor C. Ray Nagin has worked to earn my utmost contempt. His second term in office has been a disaster of epic proportions, a criminal enterprise, a human rights violation for which Ray Nagin can never earn forgiveness. Ever. Let alone respect.

And he has crafted a city in his own image:

A city incapable of delivering basic public services to its citizens, a city unwilling to expand economic opportunity for those most routinely left behind. Mayor Nagin squandered every last ounce of international goodwill and sympathy with a recovery agenda that favors every whim of big business and every impulse of his well-heeled friends.

Instead of working toward a compromise plan to rehabilitate our public housing stock, Ray Nagin laughed his way to the wrecking ball as his city burst at the seems with the same racist rhetoric of so many public service debates of years past. Instead of embracing the permanent supportive housing initiatives that prove to be the best means of reducing homelessness in cities all across the nation, Mayor Nagin and his police chief Warren Riley used entrapment tactics and insidious loitering laws to arrest them or herd them into camp-like barracks. That episode got so bad that the Bush administration had to send down representatives to talk Ray Nagin into a more humanitarian approach.

Instead of using this cities recovery funds, Katrina reparations belonging to victims of the Federal Flood, Mayor Nagin and his incompetent planning stooge Ed Blakely hatched ridiculous development schemes that don’t come close to addressing our emergency recovery priorities. Take our community block grant development funds: What could have gone toward needed infrastructure improvements at target zone sites around O.C. Haley Boulevard or St. Claude Avenue were instead allocated in huge sums toward a river redevelopment scheme being planned for the distant future. What could have been used to reopen Charity Hospital was instead allocated in vast amounts to demolishing a recovering Mid-City neighborhood for a new LSU/VA hospital that won’t materialize for years to come. When basic municipal functions like the police, the fire department, EMS, and the DA office are struggling to find enough support to staff their temporary offices, the Mayor heralds plans for golf courses, tennis courts, and condominiums. He touts the return of the tourists as the benchmark for which we are too judge our own quality of life.

His actions as Mayor, his policies, have squandered our national goodwill. New Orleans is seen as a money pit and Mayor Nagin is viewed as a laughingstock. While the media’s treatment of certain ill-conceived remarks has not helped, those do not constitute the substance of the Nagin administration’s well-deserved reputation. Rather, it is his reactionary ideas, his lack of vision, and above all, the lack of results.

Though African Americans no longer constitute the overwhelming majority of the city’s population, it can be safely said that the African American community has been most victimized by Mayor Nagin’s wrongheaded recovery policy. This is what is so disconcerting about his most recent invocation of race in defense of his administrations incompetence, and really his repeated use of this defense mechanism throughout his term. What happened this week at City Council is clear. Our city’s sanitation department is dysfunctional on a number of counts. Sanitation Director Veronica White has locked us into some exploitative trash service contracts with the Mayor’s closest political friends and donors at a time where every saved penny is needed for other public service emergencies. Her stewardship over demolition contracts have made her an integral cog in the broken machine that is this city’s blight removal program. Instead of leaning on delinquent slumlords, the city has improperly subjected scores of salvageable homes to the wrecking ball. The city now stands to lose millions more in lawsuits from wronged property owners. But when Stacy Head has the audacity to question Veronica White about her job, all of a sudden she’s being inappropriately racial and profane.

It is like the time last year that Council called hearings into the ‘unlimited bulky waste’ provision that was retroactively stripped from the sanitation contracts. Instead of correcting the mistake and saving the city millions of dollars, Mayor Nagin encouraged his administration to defend the contractors on racial grounds. When it was discovered that the quasi-governmental nonprofit had essentially embezzled millions of dollars in CDBG money, Mayor Nagin maliciously attacked the citizens that had brought the issue to light as enemies of the recovery. He purposely lumps liberal bloggers with the unfiltered anonymous conservative and racist talk radio leftovers on Nola.com as the new Ku Klux Klan. Now he accuses Stacy Head of race-baiting because she dared to suggest that Veronica White was wasting millions more of the citizens’ dollars.

It is patterned behavior. The Mayor categorizes all of his critics, be they from the right or the left, as racially motivated. It is a mechanism he has employed time and again to avoid providing justification for his administration’s policies or avoids holding his underlings accountable for their failings. Critics are not looking for criminal activity to throw people in jail and claim victory. We just need our government to do better for us. When watchdogs discover waste, when they call attention to instances of incompetence, it is because they want you to correct them and move on. Instead, the Mayor refuses to acknowledge that problems exist, erects a smoke and mirrors campaign to obscure the information available, or accuses detractors of racism. Instead of embracing efforts to improve the function of government, the Mayor’s defensive posturing only magnifies the appearance of criminal impropriety.

In a sense, I understand where it comes from. African Americans fought too long and hard to earn their fair share of power in this historically racist city. That African Americans sometimes feel defensive about criticisms lobbed at high profile black officials is understandable given historical context and more recent efforts to use planning to eradicate communities deemed inviable and invaluable. When African American leaders use race as a political bludgeon, it effectively evokes not just the dark chapters of the past but also the sinister efforts of parts of the white establishment in the present-day.

The ‘chocolate city’ speech resounded in this city because African American communities were truly fighting to stay on the map. Now, C. Ray Nagin can no longer credibly sound that alarm because he has switched teams. Instead of fighting for the greater African American community he promised to represent, he has embraced the plan B agenda of the very same interests that originally sought to avoid rebuilding poor neighborhoods all together. We’ve become all too familiar with what that Plan B looks like. In it, Mayor Nagin clings desperately to the loyalty of political patronage while the people of this city, and African Americans disproportionately, are deprived of basic public services, intermediate opportunity, and advanced vision for this city’s ultimate revenge: A full, just, and equitable recovery.

With Respect,

Eli

Kristen Evans & Dennis Monn have brought it to New Orleans this year. Read the story about it in the special insert in this week’s Gambit, or go the website for more information, clicking VENUES, for directions and locations, or SHOWS to get listings of events and their locations.

Featured Event:

théâtre du jour at The Skull Club

Thursday, November 13 through Sunday, November 16

Performed earlier this year in Paris and Washington, DC, théâtre du jour comprises two comic shorts written and directed by Michael Merino. The first work, “Seat Yourself,” explores the frustrations of fine dining and “the euphemism.” The second work, “Pompa y Circunstancia,” concerns a bizarre commencement ceremony, where two brothers mis-communicate about what to wear, life and lunch. The cast includes Perry Leopard, Randy Maggiore and Claudia Baumgarten. The shows will be performed at The Skull Club, located at 1003 North Spain Street. Dates and times are:

• Thursday, November 13 at 8:30 p.m.
• Saturday, November 15 at 7:00 p.m.
• Sunday, November 16 at 5:30 p.m.

Tickets are $7 and can be purchased at the door or in advance through TicketWeb.com.

 Here is the Street Talk edition featuring chat with Kristen Evans, Dennis Monn & Lord David, discussing the history of Fringe Festival, the local event & venues, and the Skull Club, at wwoz.org, or listen by tuning in to Street Talk on 90.7 FM.

You can listen to Street Talk — WWOZ’s 5-minute cultural news report — Monday at 12 Noon, Tuesday at 2:00pm, Wednesday at 8:00pm, Thursday at 10:00am, Friday at 8:00am, Saturday at 8:00am, and Sunday at 10:00pm.

Get out and see some Fringe Festival Theater!

Lord David
Pirate & Artist
Skull Club
New Orleans

-adrastos

as i wander into my forty fifth year on this planet, i ache to understand where i am now. the disappointments, the failures, and setbacks have somehow lead to this year of epiphanies, connections, and opportunities.  childhood wishes and adulthood adolescence have lead me to work in the toy industry. i find it both surprising and rewarding to walk into the TOYS’R’US and see a toy in which fredtunes reside.  the disasters – personal, mental, and social- have forced paradigm shift from “demand for supply” to “ask nicely,” a philosophy that may sound naïve but has been a spiritual rainmaker. still the gadfly remains. I push and prod in hopes that the apathy around (and inside)me will either molt or melt away.

over the weekend, I was talking to a nurse friend whom i  met in 1988  when I was first diagnosed, perhaps even misdiagnosed.  we discussed my mania, my craziness, my suicidal tendencies. but she also mentioned something i did not know about-the possibility that i may have experienced neuroleptic malignant syndrome while being mismedicated. today i start to the journey to track down old state medical records and unravel this mystery. could this incident explain further health issues? could the NMS have done physical and mental damage never acknowledged?

scarred but smarter…

 thanks for your support… hope to see you all again soon…

ph “freddy” fred

phfred@notthat.com

So without further ado here’s one from the archives, HumidCity’s very own cheerleader:

-Loki, Founder HumidCity

See the very funny video here.

Louis

http://louismaistros.com

Contributed By Varg @ The Chicory dawg. www.thechicory.com, aka The Chic, also known as the bat blog, identified by some as an infernal world of lust and demonology, the ancients called it Ragnarok, later on, Golgotha!

ORLEANS PARISH SCHOOL BOARD
Special Board Meeting Notice

ORLEANS PARISH SCHOOL BOARD SPECIAL BOARD MEETING:
The Orleans Parish School Board will convene in a Special Board Meeting to act upon the School Facilities Master Plan for Orleans Parish on Thursday, November 6, 2008, at 5:00 p.m. in the Auditorium of McDonogh #35 High School, 1331 Kerlerec Street.

Second, the “responsive” press release, in its entirety for those who may not’ve gotten one:

For Immediate Release Contact: Bill Rouselle
November 3, 2008 (504) 592 -1800

THE FACILITIES MASTER PLAN FOR SCHOOLS
RESPONSIVE – ACCOUNTABLE – STUDENT FOCUSED

After more than a year of meetings with parents, teachers, students, elected officials, city, state and federal agencies and community groups; with evaluations by engineers, architects and urban planners; and with a series of Public Hearing during the two month Public Comment Period; the three school superintendents (Mr. Darryl Kilbert – Orleans Parish School Board / Mr. Paul Vallas – Recovery School District / Mr. Paul Pastorek – State Department of Education) will make the following recommendations to their respective boards in the coming weeks:

MORE SCHOOLS IN PHASE ONE – HELP FROM COMMUNITY PARTNERS

Based on strong input from passionate school communities and with the help of developers of new housing units at two sites close to schools that had been slated for Phase Two development, the Superintendents will recommend that Carter G. Woodson and Phyllis Wheatley be moved to Phase One of the Master Plan.

Moving these schools to Phase One is made possible with the help of and contingent [sic] on developers who have committed Tax Credits and additional financial resources to the development of physical aspects of Carter G. Woodson (near the C. J. Pete Development) and Phyllis Wheatley (near the Laffite Development). The schools will serve the anticipated families that will return to the City as these housing developments come on line.

Edward Livingston High School will also be moved to Phase One to complete the elimination of modular schools in every section of the City. In addition, the Superintendents will recommend the allocation of resources to stabilize Eleanor McMain School on its present site and to add a sorely needed gymnasium to the school facility offerings.

The additional schools moved into the first phase are made possible by building elementary schools to a smaller scale and by keeping “land banked” schools open over a longer period of time. The cost savings will provide enough resources to accommodate the additional schools in the first phase.

The Superintendents will also recommend that George Washington Carver be designated as the site for the school in the Ninth Ward. The Superintendents have also committed to working with the Lower Ninth Ward community to build a high school in that area as part of Phase Two work on the Master Plan.

It should also be noted that the Superintendents have met with the communities around the Morris Jeff School and have developed a plan that will adequately accommodate students in that neighborhood.

With $700 million dollars mostly in FEMA and CDBG funding committed to the Phase One rebuilding of schools and with the financial help of community partners, the Phase One building program will now include 32 schools and will make it possible for nearly 60% of public school students to be in newly built or completely renovated school buildings by 2014.

FINANCING THE ENTIRE FACILITIES PLAN

The Superintendents will recommend the appointment of a five member Blue Ribbon Committee to oversee the implementation of the Facilities Plan and to recruit national and local financial experts who will recommend bonding, cost savings and other financial strategies to be able to fully execute the Master Plan’s six phases over the next 20 years.

It should be noted that the Master Plan is the “Road Map” for school facilities redevelopment based on an objective analysis of projected demographic calculations over the next ten years. Each project will be included in the Capital Outlay Budget of the respective boards that oversee these schools and must be approved individually over the course of the Plan’s implementation.

Every two years the Facilities Plan calls for an official review of demographic projections at which time adjustments in the Plan’s implementation will be possible. As we sit today, no one can provide a total picture of what our population will be over the next five, ten or twenty years. Much of what happens to New Orleans’ population growth is contingent on the pace of housing restarts, citizens’ perception about crime and safety, the impact of future storms and hurricanes, and any number of additional unforeseen factors. The Plan must be flexible and must be developed to meet the needs of students returning and families living in a rebuilding City.

The Superintendents are fully committed to making sure the entire Plan is executed and results in 21st Century Educational Environment for all students by 2028!

ACCOUNTABILITY AND FISCAL INTEGRITY

To insure that the rebuilding program of New Orleans Public Schools is transparent, is fair and is implemented without fiscal or building standards violations, the Superintendents have begun discussions with the New Orleans City Council and Office of the Inspector General to have inspectors imbedded in the State Department of Education, the RSD and the OPSB with the specific responsibility of monitoring individual construction projects and identifying any criminal or unscrupulous activity.

The Inspectors will report on a quarterly basis to the State Superintendent and the general public about the execution of construction projects and will be in position to quickly and decisively curb any abuses uncovered. The school rebuilding program must be done in full view of the public and must be done without the hint of corruption.

In addition, the inspectors will be charged with monitoring the involvement of local and minority contractors in the rebuilding effort. It is critical that the rebuilding of our public schools be done in a manner that benefits all sectors of the local community and becomes an economic engine for the rebuilding of the entire City.

LAND BANKING – A KEY TOOL OF FLEXIBILITY

Many people have asked about what the phrase “Land Banking” schools means. The term was created to provide the School Districts with the greatest amount of flexibility in being able to satisfy the demographic growth of the City and accommodating children who return to the City.

Land Banking allows the district to keep schools open for a period of time, if the number of students in a particular district is greater than the projection provided by demographers. There are, however, some school buildings which will be demolished based on their deteriorated conditions and concerns that they not add to the blight that is too much a part of the City’s landscape.

Schools that have been demolished and are slated for demolition are:

Demolished:

Lawless
Abramson
Hardin
Abrams
Coghill
Edwards
Hughes
Hynes
Lake Area
Lockett
Landry
Lake Forest

To Be Demolished:

Derham
Kennedy
NO Center for Education of Adults
Banks
Lafon
Chester
Mondy
Phillips
Waters
Bradley
Gordon
Gregory
Shaw
Edison
Alexander
Banks
Bienville
Hughes Custodial Cottage
Osborne
Park View
Seabrook
Sherwood Forest
Little Woods
Livingston
Carver
Haley

The Superintendents plan to move forward with the demolition process on buildings that clearly have become eyesores in rebuilding neighborhoods. Many “land banked” buildings will continue to provide space for students as the construction program moves forward. Other buildings will be offered to government agencies or private developers to be refurbished and repurposed as we rebuild the City.

It is the intent of the Superintendents of Public Schools in New Orleans that the Facilities Rebuilding Program becomes a shinning star of the City’s rebirth and that we finally, as a community, put our children’s needs at the front of the line for the sake of our City’s future. The Superintendents all agree “Our Children Can’t Wait”!

G Bitch

We at least got the first thing done. I was approached by a lady at the dog park about signing a petition recalling District B Councilwoman Stacy Head for, among many other things, the fact that she “(v)oted to tear down public housing and cruelly made fun of the people who fought to defend public housing.” There were many “Recall Stacy Head” signs on the neutral grounds as well when I drove around later in the day. I wonder how many signatures were acquired…

When we brought our dog back home, the little guy saw that the girls next door were outside and he really wanted to go over to their house and play. Their daddy told us they were all heading over to vote and we’d probably see them there. Instant change in plans: “We’re going over to vote now, right, Mom?” Ooookay, kiddo.

As I turned around to lock the door after the dog, my son looked at me and said, “Mom, are you voting for Barack Obama? I like Barack Obama!”

Floored me, I tell you.

No, we haven’t been serious Obamaniks all this time. Dan and I, quite honestly, have been a bit too cynical to really believe that this man could get so, so far - up to the third presidential debate, we just didn’t allow ourselves to hope too much. Dan was having some nasty flashbacks of the 2000 elections and wasn’t putting it past the GOP to try some sort of thwarting of the democratic process. And, really, anybody going into the Oval Office come January is gonna have one very, very hard row to hoe for the next four years. Anybody who refuses to acknowledge that is truly fooling themselves.

But to turn around and find that my five-year-old son had, in some way, absorbed the importance of this day was humbling. Even if, in the same breath, he began talking about how the imaginary mice he includes in his stories were holding a presidential election of their own today. He must have absorbed that from this book…

The wait wasn’t long at our polling place, and my son and I stepped into the booth. He stood there beside me, taking in this civic action of pushing buttons on this curtained machine and having the touch of a fingertip help determine who would become our leader. This was not something to be taken lightly, this task: the man in front of me accidentally walked into a booth that hadn’t been cleared of the previous voter’s choices, and walked back out immediately with a slightly mischievous grin and a crack about that person’s vote going down the drain. Don’t revel in that, idiot, I wanted to say, but I had my son there. Not a time for name-calling, but name-choosing.

We pushed the “Cast Vote” button together, his growing finger next to my thirtysomething one, and walked out. He didn’t even mind that the girls’ school’s playground was roped off so he couldn’t play on it. He’d overheard there were possible free doughnuts for the taking, so we headed to the Krispy Kreme.

And, even though we live in a Ruby Red grapefruit juice state, I can tell my son he was still a part of history (Thanks, Mominem!):

Presidential Election Results for New Orleans

116,042; 79.32%; Democratic Party, Barack Obama, Joe Biden
989; .68%; Green Party, Cynthia McKinney, Rosa Clemente
28,041; 19.17%; Republican Party, John McCain, Sarah Palin
171; .12%; Constitution Party, Chuck Baldwin, Darrell Castle
395; .27%; Independent, Ralph Nader, Matt Gonzalez
572; .39%; Louisiana Taxpayers Party, “Ron” Paul, Barry Goldwater,Jr.
16; .01%; Prohibition, Gene Amondson, Leroy Pletten
23; .02%; Socialism and Liberation, Gloria La Riva, Eugene Puryear
38; .03%; Socialist Workers Party, James Harris, Alyson Kennedy

Liprap

x-posted at Liprap’s Lament-The Line

It has been a long journey of forty years since that night in 1968 when Kennedy told a crowd much like those we saw tonight–-young, many African-American-–that Dr. King was dead, and calmed their fear and anger with the words of Aeschylus. Neither man lived to see this day.

But I see the ghostly hands of King and Kennedy upon his shoulders as Barrack Hussein Obama leads this nation on our first step into the Promised Land

– Wet Bank Guy
Toulouse Street — Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans