tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-41983280519601976772024-03-14T03:55:18.645-05:00Imperfectly Vertical"Imperfectly vertical," a description offered of run down New Orleans houses in Confederacy of Dunces, attempts to keep some kind of record of the things I read, see, and hear.Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.comBlogger94125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198328051960197677.post-28889493274994478772011-12-06T09:26:00.005-06:002011-12-06T09:33:07.794-06:00The BelieverThe issue is no longer on the newsstands and the article is not available online so I am posting "Burden of Proof," my article from the October issue of The Believer.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Gs43lbOO5Pg/Tt41ZyUOAtI/AAAAAAAAAKI/6L5laoagwGc/s1600/Burden%2Bof%2BProof%2B-%2BThe%2BBeliever.final-page-001.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 309px; height: 400px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Gs43lbOO5Pg/Tt41ZyUOAtI/AAAAAAAAAKI/6L5laoagwGc/s400/Burden%2Bof%2BProof%2B-%2BThe%2BBeliever.final-page-001.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5683038496907723474" border="0" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-B87deBUHuwo/Tt41aPKwMII/AAAAAAAAAKQ/445_JbrfSRQ/s1600/Burden%2Bof%2BProof%2B-%2BThe%2BBeliever.final-page-002.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 309px; height: 400px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-B87deBUHuwo/Tt41aPKwMII/AAAAAAAAAKQ/445_JbrfSRQ/s400/Burden%2Bof%2BProof%2B-%2BThe%2BBeliever.final-page-002.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5683038504652648578" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-RDILJvfaJP4/Tt40uIg4zUI/AAAAAAAAAJg/-plFPTNkrao/s1600/Burden%2Bof%2BProof%2B-%2BThe%2BBeliever.final-page-002.jpg"></a><div class="blogger-post-footer">Originally posted at http://billysothern.blogspot.com/.</div>Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198328051960197677.post-90490592214847076512011-10-31T22:03:00.004-05:002011-10-31T22:06:25.227-05:00OWS for Radicals with MortgagesAn essay I wrote on Occupy Wall Street/Occupy New Orleans in this week's Gambit:<br /><p></p><blockquote><p>After showing up for work at a Garden District coffee shop at 6 a.m. to work the morning shift a couple of Saturdays ago, my friend Sam shook off his midday fatigue and rode his bike to City Hall to march in solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement. As the march proceded through the French Quarter, some visitors to our city were displeased with this particular attraction, yelling "Get a job," to Sam, who, among the hundreds of others in attendance, was holding a "We Deserve Better" sign and chanting "We are the 99%."</p> <p>The implication of the heckling — that people only complain about the system because they are too lazy to make it work for them — has been proved false in the past two months of Occupy protests. Here in New Orleans and at "occupations" around the country, all kinds of hard-working people have shown up to air their discontent with the current state of affairs. The past few years of un-natural disasters and economic collapse have made it plain that millions of people who play by the rules, go to school, work hard, buy a home and try to grab on to their small piece of the America Dream, have lost to powers and circumstances far beyond their control despite their efforts. Go ask shrimpers and oystermen along the Gulf Coast (how their livelihoods fared) after the BP spill, anyone who bought a house in 2007 before the market crash, a recent college graduate searching for a first real job, or someone who has tried to get health insurance after surviving cancer.</p></blockquote><p></p><p><a href="http://www.bestofneworleans.com/gambit/perspective-occupy-new-orleans/Content?oid=1902289">http://www.bestofneworleans.com/gambit/perspective-occupy-new-orleans</a><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Originally posted at http://billysothern.blogspot.com/.</div>Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198328051960197677.post-62352891277561566922011-10-14T08:00:00.000-05:002011-10-14T08:00:11.583-05:00The BelieverAn essay that I wrote about the being an adolescent boy at camp and the perils of making accusations appears in <a href="http://www.believermag.com/issues/201110/?read=article_sothern">this month's Believer</a>, along with a portrait of me by <a href="http://www.maakies.com/">Tony Millionaire</a>, my favorite cartoonist.<br /><br />The first few paragraphs are on the Believer's website and pasted below but, consistent with the Believer's belief in print, you will have to buy the magazine to see the rest.<br /><br /><div class="issuedate">October 2011</div> <h2 class="short">Burden of Proof</h2> <h3 class="short">A Tale of Innocence and Accusation at Summer Camp</h3> <h5 class="short">by Billy Sothern</h5> <div class="article"> <p>I decided to go to Camp Eagle Hill for one more year. I was fourteen and had been going there for five years. I had been a little boy in the lower camp and then, nearly half a life later, I was one of the older kids, hanging around the Lake Side bunk house with David and Ian before heading out to play basketball or tennis or blow off sports altogether and hit frogs with our tennis rackets against Big Red, the gymnasium where we played deck hockey and had “Sing,” the final event of Color War.</p> <p>I was too old for camp, really. I had become leery of Billy Joel, thought “Sing” was corny, and was developing a strong adolescent impulse against having things required of me. But camp was still a salve, a place where nothing went wrong beyond the occasional broken bone, and where I, like it or not, belonged. The camp plaques in the dining hall proved it. There I was, Billy “The Gangster of Love” Sothern, among the campers in the “Fly Skimmers,” in Hill Top 6, summer of 1987. There again, Billy “Southern Comfort” Sothern, in Club Clueless in Hill Top 8, the following summer, and so on. People were not suspicious of me here, unlike in my new hometown, where an eighth-grade curiosity about marijuana and huffing Scotchgard had gotten me a reputation for being a “druggie.”</p> <p>For this reason, when our counselor’s money went missing—a couple hundred dollars in tips from a recent parents’ weekend—no one suspected me, though we were all certain that one of the boys in the bunk had taken the money. Our counselor, Brian, devised the kind of justice that makes sense only at camp, and demanded that we all gather a hundred yards away from the cabin. He explained that he did not want to know who took the money. He only wanted it returned. He said that each of us would go back to the cabin, enter it, spend a minute inside, and return, and he asked that the person who took the money use this opportunity to return it to a drawer in his music-cassette storage box. We all agreed.</p> <div class="read-the-rest"> <p>To read the rest of this piece, please purchase this issue of the <em>Believer</em> <a href="http://store.mcsweeneys.net/index.cfm/fuseaction/catalog.detail/object_id/1c275bb2-c2c3-459a-9412-8b0dfad64019/" target="_blank">online</a> or at your local bookseller.</p> </div> </div> <div class="author-bio"> <p><a href="http://www.believermag.com/contributors/?read=sothern,+billy">Billy Sothern</a>, a Louisiana death-penalty lawyer, is the author of <em>Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City.</em> He is working on a memoir about becoming a criminal-defense attorney after years of feeling like a criminal.</p> </div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Originally posted at http://billysothern.blogspot.com/.</div>Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198328051960197677.post-18760895435751485902011-10-10T08:00:00.003-05:002011-10-11T08:47:05.213-05:00The Pale Copy<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://www.thepalecopy.com/book/img/pale_copy-33.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 394px; height: 197px;" src="http://www.thepalecopy.com/book/img/pale_copy-33.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />In the spirit of Studs Terkel and the WPA photographers, Jack Chapman traveled the country in 2010 taking portraits of people, including me, Nikki, and Rosie, and interviewing them with the same questions about their backgrounds, lives, and hopes. The first volume is <a href="http://www.thepalecopy.com/">online</a>.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Originally posted at http://billysothern.blogspot.com/.</div>Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198328051960197677.post-35079606176735936962011-10-07T09:39:00.004-05:002011-10-07T09:45:01.794-05:009/11 AnniversaryIn honor of the second birthday of my daughter and the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I reworked a piece that I had posted <a href="http://billysothern.blogspot.com/2009/09/philip-glass-satyagraha-beginning_21.html">here</a> in September of 2009 for publication in <a href="http://thelensnola.org/2011/09/09/911-gandhi-satyagraha/">The Lens</a>.<br /><br />A month later, here it is:<br /><h1 style="font-weight: bold;" class="entry-title"><span style="font-size:100%;">Refusing to let the 9/11 anniversary be owned solely by horror</span></h1><p>By Billy Sothern, The Lens contributing opinion writer |</p> <p>On September 10, 2009, my wife Nikki was at her midwife’s office hoping to get some indication that our baby – four days past due – would come soon, ending her mounting pain and discomfort.</p> <p>It wasn’t until Nikki got back from her appointment that I saw the possibility that my daughter could be born on September 11, the eighth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Nikki told me that a woman we had met in our birthing class had been at the midwife’s office as well. And though she was a full week past due, fixing to burst and desperate to have her baby, she had postponed her induction because she didn’t want her child born on such an inauspicious date.</p> <p>I had moved to New Orleans from New York City a month before the attacks; family and friends worked in the financial district, fast by the Twin Towers, and my father and step-mother were on New York bound-flights that fateful morning. And so the date – 9/11 – was likely to be forever etched in my mind as a day of horror and anxiety, made only worse by its exploitation as a pretext for war and the curtailment of civil liberties.</p> <p>But my wife was in agony so I quickly reconciled to the idea of our child sharing her birthday with that mournful American anniversary. When I got home in the late afternoon, Nikki’s labor had become much more pronounced. We left for the hospital a little after midnight.</p> <p>In the birthing room, I tried my best to comfort Nikki during her ordeal, playing Bach’s Cello Suites and Nikki’s favorite arias from the St. Matthew Passion on the little stereo she had bought for this purpose a couple of weeks earlier, when it all seemed so distant and theoretical. At a certain point, she began to seem really focused, in a distant place all by herself, and I started playing Philip Glass’s Solo Piano Works. She had speculated days earlier that Glass’s familiar, round, cyclical musical forms might reach her at a time like this.</p> <p>When that selection ended, with Nikki clinging to my shoulders and neck from her birthing tub but still, evidently, hours away from delivering the baby, Addy, our doula, asked what we should put on. I told her that there was an opera by Philip Glass on the iPod, and that it was long enough to keep us from having to change the music again. “Satyagraha?” she asked. I hadn’t remembered the name. Without even glancing at the liner notes, I had burned it onto my computer, from the New Orleans Public Library’s music catalog a few years earlier. In the scores of hours I had spent listening to the opera, its music and Sanskrit libretto, though unintelligible, seemed truer to life and the thoughts passing through my mind than any music I had heard before. “That’s it,” I told Addy.</p> <p>It begins with a low voice and a deep stringed instrument that wound around the room. Sometimes urgent, sometimes slack, at times the music almost disappeared into the rhythm of Nikki’s contractions and then her pushing. When the baby’s head finally emerged and then I held her against my fatigued but triumphant wife, the final act of Satyagraha pulsed in the background, and then stopped, unnoticed.</p> <p>I sent news to our friends and loved ones by text, “Rose Mae Sothern born at 4:57. I am in awe of mother and child.” I consciously omitted the date, not wanting to associate the sad anniversary with the miraculous birth of my daughter.</p> <p>But as time passed, and I was able to spend hours and then days with this new life, it became clear to me that it was seemly and even necessary, for Rose, and others, to have been born on this date, for things to occur that could create new anniversaries that might someday eclipse the tragedy. I sent out another email, this time owning the date: “Rose Mae Sothern was born at 4:57 a.m. on Friday, September 11, 2009, weighing in at 8 lbs., 10 oz., and altogether transforming the meaning of that date in our history for me.”</p> <p>I got a response from Rebecca Solnit. I had met her when she visited New Orleans while researching her book, <em>A Paradise Built in Hell</em>, on the magnanimity of people in the face of disaster. She pointed out that September 11, 2001, had been, for the most part, “a day that people behaved beautifully under the most extreme circumstances in New York City, millions of them in contrast to the 19 who sought to destroy.” But she made another observation, which gave rise to a sense of wonder, beauty, and synchronicity that tempts me to believe the world is not simply spiraling meaninglessly but instead is ordered, even blessed. She told me that September 11, 1906, is the day that Gandhi began to harness non-violence as a tool against oppression in South Africa, a method of resistance called “satyagraha,” a Sanskrit word meaning “the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence.”</p> <p>Without any of us knowing it, Nikki labored and Rose was born on the anniversary of satyagraha, to the rhythms and sounds of an opera that Philip Glass wrote in honor of Gandhi and a vision of social justice through non-violence.</p> <p>As my daughter’s second birthday approaches, and with it, this terrible tenth anniversary of a date that swallowed her birthday as its name, I do my part to remind people that as much truth and love exists on that day as any other. Approach me in the park, as she romps by, and ask me, “How old is that precious little girl?”</p> <p>I will tell you, stressing the date, “She was born on September 11, 2009. So she’s almost two.” My hope is that you will see in her face that satyagraha exists – as it did in 1906 and, yes, 2001 – and that its power is undiminished.</p> <p><em>Billy Sothern is a criminal defense attorney and the author of “Down </em><em>in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City.”</em></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Originally posted at http://billysothern.blogspot.com/.</div>Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198328051960197677.post-39397855671530044852011-06-16T23:06:00.001-05:002011-06-16T23:13:08.492-05:00Woody Allen's The Lost Generation<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style=" color: rgb(34, 34, 34); line-height: 18px; font-family:Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif;font-size:13px;"><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font-family: Times; font-size: medium; ">Nikki and I watched and enjoyed Woody Allen's new Midnight in Paris tonight, a film that plays with and examines the nostalgia that saturates so much of his work (and the imaginations of so many of his fans, myself included). The movie takes place in modern day Paris but the main character travels back to the Paris of the 1920's which he glorifies and loves from books.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font-family: Times; font-size: medium; "><br /></p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font-family: Times; font-size: medium; ">The movie reminded me of a sketch from an old Woody Allen stand up record that I have, where Woody imagines himself hanging out with Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and the "Fitzgerarlds." It is very clear to me that this 30 or 40 year old stand up routine is the germ of the idea that became Midnight in Paris. And its also just really funny.</p></span></div><div><br /></div><iframe width="425" height="344" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/z85zt_EUySg?fs=1" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe><div class="blogger-post-footer">Originally posted at http://billysothern.blogspot.com/.</div>Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198328051960197677.post-49332227618585641042011-06-03T20:26:00.003-05:002011-06-03T20:47:40.367-05:00Blue ValentineEarlier this week, I watched and loved <a href="http://www.bluevalentinemovie.com/">Blue Valentine</a>, a movie whose characters you can recognize as actual human beings whose flaws, struggles, and hopes are not dissimilar from your own. I rarely see movies where the characters are drawn so true to life or where a relationship, particularly a relationship that is falling apart, is reflective of the virtues and vices of both individuals, like the relationships that actual human beings like you and me have been in, and where no one is demonized.<br /><br />The realistic portrayal of the lives of the characters (and their drinking, which also seemed true to life) reminded me of a favorite writer, Raymond Carver. And then there was a scene, where in intoxication and frustration, the male character pulled his wedding ring off his finger and threw it into the grass, which I remembered from a Carver story and which I took to be a conscious reference on the part of the filmmaker.<br /><br />In my recollection, the character in the Carver story, in a burst of drunken and momentary animosity and foolhardiness and in the presence of his spouse, pulled off his wedding ring in threw it off a deck out into a field. He immediately regretted it and realized that he could never find the ring, or repair the damage that he had done to his marriage.<br /><br />I have looked for the story but, as near as I can tell, it does not exist, at least not as I remember it. Instead, in a wonderful story called "Chef's House," about a couple who are long separated because of drinking and strife, they come together at a summer house after the husband goes on the wagon and they remember what they loved about each other, only to see it fall away again. In that story, in his book <span style="font-style: italic;">Cathedral</span>, Carver wrote the following paragraph, the only one in his work I can find about thrown wedding rings:<br /><blockquote>We drank coffee, pop, and all kind of fruit juice that summer. The whole summer, that's what we had to drink. I found myself wishing the summer wouldn't end. I knew better, but after a month of being with Wes at Chef's house, I put my wedding ring back on. I hadn't worn the ring in two years. Not since the night Wes was drunk and threw his ring into a peach orchard.</blockquote>I guess its possible that I made up the other details, or filled them into my understanding of this moment in Carver's spare and brief narrative. Whether or not it was a conscious reference or a reference at all, I still regard the film as Carveresque, which is to say beautiful, true, and as sad as life.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Originally posted at http://billysothern.blogspot.com/.</div>Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198328051960197677.post-27720970322437220902011-05-31T09:27:00.004-05:002011-05-31T09:46:33.508-05:00PEN World VoicesA few weeks ago, I was on a panel on New Orleans at the PEN World Voices Festival in New York City. We had an interesting discussion, moderated by Nathaniel Rich with a panel that also included Sarah Broom, Richard Campanella, Nicholas Lemann, and Fatima Sheik. Part of what distinguished this New Orleans conversation from many others that I have heard and been a part of was the fact that there seemed to be a consensus that New Orleans needs to, at least in some ways, shed some of its claimed exceptionalism if it is going to be able to break out of its myriad difficulties. This is something that I have been banging on about for years and which, at least in some ways, appears to be the view of other folks who care about this city.<br /><br />WNYC has <a href="http://culture.wnyc.org/articles/talk-me/2011/may/11/talk-me-new-orleans-paradox/">a recording of the panel discussion</a> on its website and highlighted the following "bon mots" from the discussion (not all of which I agree with):<br /><blockquote>Billy Sothern, a New Orleans anti-death penalty lawyer and author of "Down in New Orleans: Reflections From a Drowned City," on understanding New Orleans: "I think there are many who view NOLA as this exceptional place and some of them are the city’s biggest fans. But I argue that instead of its exceptionalism, the rest of America needs to be concerned with New Orleans because it's highly representative of the problems of the rest of the country ... These kinds of issues are coming to a neighborhood near you — they may already have but they are going to get worse. Instead of a metaphor, I think it's important to not say we have this 'New Orleans problem' with the schools and crime. Instead, we have this 'American problem' that is tragically magnified in the city of New Orleans."<br /><br />Nicholas Lemann, a New Orleans native, staff writer for The New Yorker (among other magazines), and Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, on race: "The fabled white elite that controls everything in New Orleans are probably the least powerful white elite than you'd find in any big city in the country. Not because someone took their power away, but for various cultural reasons. New Orleans has no locally controlled major economic institutions, so the infamous New Orleans white elite does not have the inclination to do what one would want done in New Orleans. And if they had the inclination, they would not be able to do them."<br /><br />Sarah Broom, a New Orleans native who wrote "A Yellow House in New Orleans," on local pride: "I think this 'love of place' is really just from people who are stuck in a lots of ways. There were very few opportunities for [career] advancement. It's almost impossible for a highly-educated person to move back to New Orleans and find some sort of intellectual rigor. That is just the truth. Part of it is that Hurricane Katrina forced a lot of people from New Orleans and now they don't want to come back. This population of people who can't come back because they can't afford to are also made up of people who don't actually want to return."<br /><br />Fatima Shaik, who is the author of four books of fiction set in Louisiana, on writing about New Orleans: "I think writers after Katrina were thrust into the roles of sociologists. People who are from New Orleans are likely to write about it. I think those people who are not from the city and want to write about it should focus on writing across the cultures and writing accurately. People don't have a conversation across cultures. Writers can do that."</blockquote>Because PEN had proposed a New Orleans-based project, the panel drafted <a href="http://www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5912/prmID/2126">a statement</a> reflecting the kind of project that we believed could be beneficial as well as some general statements that we felt should guide any effort to "help" New Orleans:<br /><span style="font-size:medium;"></span><blockquote><span style="font-size:medium;">A few things</span> we don’t want to do: we don’t want to be redundant, meaning we don’t want to start a service or project that already exists locally. Even worse, we don’t want to compete or confuse. There was a consensus in our group that education is of paramount importance and should be a component of PEN’s work in New Orleans. One way of doing this is to expand upon initiatives already in place within PEN, such as the children’s education program, prison writing and folklore projects. Where such programs exist we think there is a pressing need to implement them in New Orleans in an aggressive way. Ideally we would hope for PEN to extend these projects into New Orleans, while at the same start a new, unique project. It’s crucial that this process leads to real results.<br /><br />The project should be mindful of the fact there are major human rights failings in New Orleans that have not been addressed adequately by the local and federal government and the criminal justice system.<br /><br />Some ideas for projects to be implemented with PEN’s help in New Orleans:<br /><br />1. Books are not allowed in New Orleans prisons. PEN should aggressively advocate to change that policy, especially given the incredibly high incarceration rate.<br /><br />2. PEN should continue to support the MLK Visiting Authors program financially.<br /><br />3. PEN can launch a mapping project. We would like for students to be involved with the technical and creative process of creating maps of their local neighborhoods. We could partner with the (potential) forthcoming publication, “Mapping New Orleans.”<br /><br />4. Science and engineering can be a venue for storytelling. We can begin an initiative to create a workshop to bring together scientists, engineers, and writers and teach research methodology to writers—perhaps in the form of a lecture series.<br /><br />5. Introduce the Prison Writing Program into New Orleans prisons.<br /><br />6. We would like to launch a movie series in various parks and neighborhoods by pairing local documentaries with films that are about New Orleans in the hope of drawing a large public.<br /><br />7. A regular reading series that could be held in outdoor places around the city—perhaps we can partner with local reading series, arts markets, and farmers’ markets.<br /><br />8. A PEN/New Orleans literary prize should be established, for a writer, a student, or a group of students.<br /><br />9. Establish a relationship with local radio stations as well as the <i>Times Picayune</i>, following the example of the StoryCorps project two years ago. The <i>Times-Pic</i> featured selected stories from that project.<br /><br />10. We can try to launch a series of guest editorials in the <i>Times Picayune</i> by influential PEN Writers, which could be connected to another of the projects mentioned herein, where applicable.<br /><br />11. Once we have identified projects on which to focus our energy and funding, have a PEN author write an editorial in a national publication to draw attention to our efforts.<br /><br />12. PEN should provide a page on its web site for people who are coming to New Orleans and may be interested in doing nonprofit or volunteer work in the city, including partner organizations: a page of links to local projects.<br /><br />13. Some local organizations that PEN can partner with include Tulane’s Center for Public Service, <i>Times-Pic</i>, MLK School, Neighborhood Story Project, Xavier, Loyola, Dillard, New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, Louisiana Endowment of the Humanities, the American Folklore Project (Maggi Michel, a representative of the American Folklore Project has expressed great interest in helping), the New Orleans Film Society, and Patois.<br /><br />We would like to stress the importance of bringing into underserved schools professionals in the arts, sciences, technologies, and engineering.<br /><br />All programming should be forward-looking and should not dwell excessively on Katrina.<br /><br />We hope this will be the beginning of a practical discussion about what steps to take and how to implement one or several of these projects effectively. We hope such a conversation can take place within the next two months, whether at a meeting or through a web conversation. In many of the proposals given above, we have much more to add, including contacts and local organizations with whom we are in touch and who can bring about immediate results.</blockquote><div class="blogger-post-footer">Originally posted at http://billysothern.blogspot.com/.</div>Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198328051960197677.post-32358513010795791472011-05-30T10:41:00.008-05:002011-05-30T14:23:30.961-05:00Sarah "Lyons" Wakeman<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Nq2LQNhm9hE/TePt86MKo8I/AAAAAAAAAJM/PGjkkaGsQ_Y/s1600/IMG_5062.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 240px; height: 320px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Nq2LQNhm9hE/TePt86MKo8I/AAAAAAAAAJM/PGjkkaGsQ_Y/s320/IMG_5062.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5612591191301989314" border="0" /></a><br />Thinking of <a href="http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=11079398">Sarah Rosetta Wakeman</a>, who joined the Union army during the Civil War, fought, died, and was buried, all as a man, "Lyons." She is buried at the Union cemetery at the Chalmette Battlefield.<br /><br />We brought her zinnias this Memorial Day.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Originally posted at http://billysothern.blogspot.com/.</div>Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198328051960197677.post-45634794148028448712011-05-09T10:20:00.002-05:002011-05-09T10:30:02.703-05:00Life for PotIn case you are wondering why America's prison population has exploded to become the largest in human history, the fact that a Slidell, Louisiana man received a life without the possibility of parole sentence for possession with intent to distribute marijuana might provide some answers.<br /><br />From the Times Picayune:<br /><h1 class="entry-title"></h1><a href="http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2011/05/fourth_marijuana_conviction_ge.html">Fourth marijuana conviction gets Slidell man life in prison</a> <br />Thursday, May 05, 2011, 5:51 PM <br />By Ramon Antonio Vargas<span class="author_byline"><span class="author vcard"></span></span><br /><p>Cornell Hood II got off with probation after three marijuana convictions in New Orleans.</p> <p>He didn't fare too well after moving to <a href="http://topics.nola.com/tag/st.%20tammany%20courts/index.html">St. Tammany Parish</a>, however. A single such conviction on the north shore landed the 35-year-old in prison for the rest of his life.</p> <p>State Judge Raymond S. Childress punished Hood under Louisiana's repeat-offender law in his courtroom in Covington on Thursday. A jury on Feb. 15 found the defendant guilty of attempting to possess and distribute marijuana at his Slidell home, court records show.</p><p>More <a href="http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2011/05/fourth_marijuana_conviction_ge.html">here</a>.<br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Originally posted at http://billysothern.blogspot.com/.</div>Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198328051960197677.post-32837545351057963562011-03-27T20:38:00.001-05:002011-03-28T07:40:11.279-05:00Recordio 1947<iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/dUHPq3HSehQ?fs=1" allowfullscreen="" width="480" frameborder="0" height="295"></iframe><br /><br />I have a collection of old, home recorded records that I found at various junk and thrift stores. I found several recently, all apparently recorded by the same person, at the Latter Library book sale. My favorite of the bunch is labeled "Wayne, Jack and Brian - 3/24/47". Wayne and Jack both introduce themselves as students at the "Audubon School" and gave their last names as something that sounds to me like Laszlo.<br /><br />The record is very sweet with the eldest, Wayne, reciting two nursery rhymes for his dad, then Jack, slightly less sure, and then, finally, little Brian, unable to talk above a squeak as his dad encourages him to say a few words for the record so that his grandparents can hear him.<br /><br />These little boys would all now be past sixty. I would like to give them their record back. Anyone know a Laszlo family, or something like that, with three boys, Wayne, Jack, and Brian, all born in the thirties or forties and from New Orleans.<div><br /></div><div>***</div><div><br /></div><div>Here are two of the rhymes they recited for their dad:</div><div><br /></div><div><div><a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171643">The Secret</a></div><div><br /></div><div>We have a secret, just we three,</div><div>The robin, and I, and the sweet cherry-tree;</div><div>The bird told the tree, and the tree told me,</div><div>And nobody knows it but just us three.</div><div><br /></div><div>But of course the robin knows it best,</div><div>Because she built the--I shan't tell the rest;</div><div>And laid the four little--something in it--</div><div>I'm afraid I shall tell it every minute.</div><div><br /></div><div>But if the tree and the robin don't peep,</div><div>I'll try my best the secret to keep;</div><div>Though I know when the little birds fly about</div><div>Then the whole secret will be out.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>The Turtle</div><div><br /></div><div><div>There was a little turtle</div><div>Who lived in a box.</div><div>He swam in the puddles</div><div>And climbed on the rocks.</div><div><br /></div><div>He snapped at the mosquito,</div><div>He snapped at the flea.</div><div>He snapped at the minnow,</div><div>And he snapped at me.</div><div><br /></div><div>He caught the mosquito,</div><div>He caught the flea.</div><div>He caught the minnow,</div><div>But he didn't catch me! </div></div><div><br /></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Originally posted at http://billysothern.blogspot.com/.</div>Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198328051960197677.post-86556663117835970282011-03-16T10:21:00.005-05:002011-03-16T10:40:30.610-05:00It's 10:20 a.m., do you know where your power comes from?After reading the headlines about nuclear meltdowns in Japan, I thought to myself, I wonder if I live near a nuclear power plant, here in disaster prone Southern Louisiana. <a href="http://webthing.greenpeaceusa.org/nuclear_locator/">A link from Greenpeace</a> informed me about Waterford 3, a nuclear power plant about twenty miles up the Mississippi River in St. Charles Parish. Greenpeace offered the following risk assessment in the event of a serious accident:<br /><blockquote>Government data estimates that an accident at Waterford 3 would lead to 96,000 deaths and 279,000 injuries within a year, as well as 9,000 cancer deaths over the lifetime of the exposed population. The cost of such an accident was predicted to be $131 billion in 1980. </blockquote>The crisis in Japan is the world's second (and far biggest) environmental disaster to strike the world, greedy for power, in the past year. When we were facing the BP spill last year here in Louisiana, I was reminded of Moby Dick, and the lengths that we have gone to historically to keep the lights on. (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/weekinreview/13kennedy.html">An op-ed in the New York Times</a> beat me to the punch in employing the metaphor.)<br /><br />The power from Waterford 3 keeps my air conditioning on all summer long in my drafty, inefficient New Orleans home. Realistically, I do not expect that my concerns about where my energy comes from, or its consequences, will change my thermostat. And if we are unwilling, I can be pretty sure that others, less concerned, will not change there behaviors. But clearly with consumption of energy growing these energy related disasters will continue until we identify energy sources that don't spoil the seas, rape the earth, and rise the tides.<br /><br />I expect, or at least hope, that these past few days have tipped the scales on the cost benefit analysis that keeps us dependent on dangerous means of energy production.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Originally posted at http://billysothern.blogspot.com/.</div>Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198328051960197677.post-13186577358391816762011-01-31T14:14:00.007-06:002011-01-31T14:33:35.447-06:00Founding Fathers Too Freaked Out by CarsSeth Meyers' Saturday Night Live Weekend Update from a couple of weeks ago nails the debate, and the absurdity, of conservative legal theories (<a href="http://billysothern.blogspot.com/2009/08/speeding-defendants-to-executioner_25.html">that seem to hold sway in the minds of several of the Supreme Court justices</a>) that fetishize the beliefs of the founding fathers in addressing modern social and legal issues.<br /><br />Meyers suggested that the founding fathers would be too "freaked out" by cars, planes, and the fact that all of the slaves had been freed to even engage these weighty issues in modern American life. It's too good to miss.<br /><br /><iframe title="YouTube video player" class="youtube-player" type="text/html" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/PHcvHgDxKU8" allowfullscreen="" width="320" frameborder="0" height="195"></iframe><div class="blogger-post-footer">Originally posted at http://billysothern.blogspot.com/.</div>Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198328051960197677.post-40560258830747484792011-01-18T11:33:00.002-06:002011-01-18T11:41:09.487-06:00Character and FitnessJason Flores-Williams is having his New Orleans book launch for his new book, <span style="font-style: italic;">Character and Fitness,</span> on Saturday, January 22, 2011, at 8 p.m., at <a href="http://travel.nytimes.com/travel/guides/north-america/united-states/louisiana/new-orleans/28686/fab-faubourg-marigny-art-books/shopping-detail.html">FAB Books</a>, 900 Frenchmen Street, New Orleans, LA. I will opening up by reading something short, along with Jason's friend and New Orleans' writer, Raphaelle O'Neil. (<a href="http://www.myspace.com/nolabutterfly" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"><span>http://www.myspace.com/nol</span><wbr><span class="word_break"></span>abutterfly</a>) Be forewarned, last time I did a reading with Jason, he read a piece that compared his transvestite lover favorably with a twelve year old boy. (Whereas I will likely be reading about being a twelve year old boy at sleep away camp.)<br /><br />Here are the first few paragraphs of the book, posted on <a href="http://www.brooklynrail.org/2010/12/fiction/character-and-fitness-chapter-1-and-2">The Brooklyn Rail</a> (which is serializing the book, a chapter a month):<br /><p>Chapter 1</p> I drink my coffee and stare out the window at the cars passing by on the highway. I remember the old Kerouac line: whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny automobile? It was all open roads and possibilities for that guy. A wide-eyed, down-to-earth madness that rolled from one coast to another. Football-playing kids with books of poetry by their beds. I grew up in Kerouac's America. He was my guy. One of the first things I did when I got to New York was take the train up to Columbia so that I could walk in his footsteps. I lived for his idea of what we were supposed to be. But there are no angels anymore. No more saints. No visionary catholic supplications or prayers to make to god. No more optimism. No fantastic smiles. No great west. No more cowboys or jazzmen, unless they're in a Visa commercial. I would love to go moan for man, but the credit cards would sue me and the student loan companies would put me in default. No need to go looking for Dean Moriarty, because he works for the collections department of an insurance company in Delaware. He hates his job and would quit and hit the road, but can't afford to miss a mortgage payment. And he's not really in traveling shape anymore, but about 80 pounds overweight. Too big to fail.<br /><br /> I turn away from the window, go back to the Sallie Mae website and finish with the electronic forms for my second-to-last deferment. After this one, I'll be coming in here to Starbucks looking for a job. I can see myself filling out the application at the wobbly table in the corner, wallowing in the glory that really never was, then sitting there with a stupid smile on my face as the 21-year-old assistant manager holds up a mirror to more than two decades of overeducated bad decisions. The goatee with the first signs of grey, crow's feet around the eyes, and the tattoos no longer anti-establishment cool, but mile markers on the road to nowhere. I never expected or even wanted my life to be a straight line, but thought that if you put the time in and paid your dues, then you wouldn't end up back in the same place you were 20 years ago.<br /><br /> I put away my laptop, finish the coffee and head out the door. I walk past the California Pizza Kitchen, the Chipotle and up the sidewalk toward the Target. The way the sun glistens off the minivans is spectacular, haunting. I enter through the sliding automatic doors into the fluorescent lights and cut through rows of candles, heaters, curtains, blinds, slipcovers, mirrors, humidifiers and pet supplies. I stop to ask a salesclerk about the soy milk. The man is maybe 75, thick coke-bottle glasses, splotchy face and crooked back. He should be off somewhere playing shuffleboard and bitching about the young, not spending the last years before the grand exit struggling in the belly of a big box store. It takes him 25 seconds just to walk across the aisle. "I'm sorry to bother you, sir. But do you know where the soy milk is?"<br /><br /> 'The milk!"<br /><br /> "No sir, the soy milk…."<br /><br /> "The milk!"<br /><br /> "No sir, the soy milk."<br /><br /> "What milk?"<br /><br /> I feel like the most bourgeois, pretentious yuppie that ever lived. Ohmygawd, you've never heard of soy milk? Didn't you read the article in Salon about the dairy industry? There's as much suffering in a cup of milk as a pound of beef! "Oh wait, sir, hold on…I think I see it right over there! Thank you!" I take off through maternity, outerwear, plus sizes, women's shoes, accessories, luggage, infant, toddler, patio furniture and into the refrigerated food section…Like a liberal in Texas, it's surrounded by chicken nuggets, buffalo wings, sausage patties and microwave-ready cheeseburgers. I take two half-gallons off the shelf and tell myself how wonderful I am for making the enlightened consumer choice, but really the soy milk is made by a subsidiary of a publicly-traded company that's owned by a conglomerate with its headquarters on a space station that controls the factories that make the chicken nuggets, buffalo wings, sausage patties and microwave-ready cheeseburgers. There is no escape from complicity when you're an American. All we can do is turn down the volume from 11 to 9.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Originally posted at http://billysothern.blogspot.com/.</div>Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198328051960197677.post-10882221321805576112011-01-13T11:43:00.004-06:002011-01-13T12:07:39.029-06:00Walker Evans at The Ogden<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_E_DdpBVIO8E/TKtbAjbDj6I/AAAAAAAAAjk/nmEB4iSTyjI/s1600/WALKER+EVANS+2+%282%29.JPG"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 532px; height: 423px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_E_DdpBVIO8E/TKtbAjbDj6I/AAAAAAAAAjk/nmEB4iSTyjI/s1600/WALKER+EVANS+2+%282%29.JPG" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">Walker Evans</span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">Greek Revival Townhouse with Men Seated in Dourway, New Orleans</span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">March 1935</span><br /><span style="font-size:78%;">Silver gelatin print</span><br /><br />I went to The Ogden Museum to see the Walker Evans show on its final day up, January 2, 2011. I have been a big fan of Evans' work since college, when I fell in love with <span style="font-style: italic;">Let Us Now Praise Famous Men</span>, on which Evans collaborated with James Agee.<br /><br />The exhibit comprised three rooms of architectural photographs (the one above was one of very few with any people captured). The first room was New Orleans photographs and the other two rooms were photographs of plantations in southern Louisiana. All the photographs were taken on trips to Louisiana in 1935 and 1936 and are part of the actress Jessica Lange's collection.<br /><br /><a href="http://omsablog.blogspot.com/2010/10/walker-evans-louisiana-photographs-from.html">As described by the museum</a>, the photographs were intended to document real life during the Great Depression:<br /><br /><span style="font-family:times new roman;">Working in what he called the “vernacular style,” Evans forged an approach that preferred the everyday to the precious and the factual over the artful. Although he often photographed inanimate objects, with architecture and signage being among his most lasting subjects, he also captured the harsh realities of American life in the grips of the Great Depression. </span><br /><br />But viewing the exhibit in 2011, it struck me that it was nearly impossible for a contemporary viewer to see the photographs in that spirit. It was hard not to see the photographs as historical documents or curiosities from the past. (I was, for instance, excited to see an eighty year old photograph of a house that I like a lot on Esplanade Avenue.) And I worried, as I viewed the photographs of the crumbling old Greek revival plantation houses, that viewers would see the photographs with some measure of nostalgia, something that I suspect would have troubled Evans. (Though these buildings were many decades old when he photographed them and had little bearing on the "harsh realities" of the Great Depression. So I wonder what he found in them?)<div class="blogger-post-footer">Originally posted at http://billysothern.blogspot.com/.</div>Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198328051960197677.post-22345709148674745522011-01-13T11:40:00.003-06:002011-01-13T11:43:18.065-06:00NO CommentI started a new blog tracking offensive comments on <a href="nola.com">NOLA.com</a>, the website that carries The Times Picayune's content. The website, called <a href="http://nolacommentwatch.blogspot.com/">NO Comment</a>, is my effort to highlight some of the terrible hate speech, slander, and general meanness of the anonymous, and sporadically moderated, comments on NOLA.com. I will also use the blog as a forum to discuss how other news organizations are dealing with these vexing issues.<br /><br />Check it out.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Originally posted at http://billysothern.blogspot.com/.</div>Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198328051960197677.post-65684671407979769622010-12-07T22:12:00.003-06:002010-12-07T22:48:40.458-06:00LancelotI just finished reading Walker Percy's Lancelot.<br /><br />I received the book as a gift about eight years ago but was scared off by the description on the back cover, which struck as slightly too close to my life, inclinations, and fears of the future at the time.: "Lancelot Andrewes Lamar, a disenchanted liberal lawyer, finds himself confined in a mental asylum with memories that don’t seem worth remembering . . ."<br /><br />Still not entirely disenchanted and managing to keep myself out of the asylum, I was recently inspired to revisit the book. (I lost the paperback that I had been given but had since bought an old "discard" hard copy from the New Orleans Public Library, which seems a fitting vessel for reading Walker Percy, one of the city's finest writers.)<br /><br />In the book, Lancelot, the lawyer, teases through the details of his life and the world with a critical lens as he explains how he came to burn down his home, an old River Road mansion. The truths expressed by the narrator reminded me of how frequently it is the case that people with nothing left to lose, people at the very bottom of life, are most free to express truth.<br /><br />Here are a few of my favorite passages:<br /><br />In New Orleans I have noticed that people are happiest when they are going to funerals, making money, taking care of the dead, or putting on masks at Mardi Gras so nobody knows who they are.<br /><br />***<br /><br />New Orleans! Not a bad place to spend a year in prison - except in the summer. Imagine being locked up in Birmingham or Memphis. What is it I can smell, even from here, as if the city has a soul and the soul exhaled an effluvium all its own? I can't quite name it. A certain vital decay? A lively fetor? When I think of New Orleans away from New Orleans, I think of rotting fish on the sidewalk and good times inside. A Catholic city in a sense, but that's not it. Providence, Rhode Island, is a Catholic city, but my God who would want to live in Providence, Rhode Island? It's not it, your religion, that informs this city, but rather some special local accommodation to it or relaxation from it. The city's soul I think of as neither damned nor saved but eased rather, existing in a kind of comfortable Catholic limbo somewhere between the outer circle of hell, where sexual sinners don't have it all that bad, and the inner circle of purgatory, where things are even better. Add to that a flavor of Marseilles vice leavened by Southern U.S.A. good nature. Death and sex treated unseriously and money seriously. The Whitney Bank is as solemn as the cemetery is lively. Protestants started Mardi Gras, you know. Presbyterians take siestas or play gin at the Boston Club. Jews ride on carnival floats celebrating the onset of Christ's forty-day fast.<br /><br />I like you banal little cathedral in the Vieux Carre. It is set down squarely in the midst of the greatest single concentration of drunks, drugheads, whores, pimps, queers, sodomists in the hemisphere. But isn't that where cathedrals are supposed to be? It, like the city, had something else even more comforting to me, a kind of triumphant mediocrity. The most important event which occurred here in all of history was the John L. Sullivan-Jim Corbett fight. Three hundred years of history and it has never produced a single significant historical event, one single genius, or even a first-class talent - except a chess player, the world's greatest. But genius makes people nervous, including the genius, so he quit playing chess and began worrying about money like everyone else. It is altogether in keeping that the famous Battle of New Orleans was fought after the war was over and was without significance.<br /><br />***<br /><br />Have you ever watched onlookers at the scene of violence, an accident, a killing, a dead or dying body on the street? Their eyes shift to and fro ever so slightly, scanning, trying to take it all in. There is no end to the feast.<br /><br />***<br /><br />I knew a married couple once who were bored with life, disliked each other, hated their own lives, and were generally miserable - except during hurricanes. Then they sat in their house at Pass Christian, put a bottle of whiskey between them, felt a surge of happiness, were able to speak frankly and cheerfully to each other, laugh and joke, even make love. But that is crazy. Why should people be miserable in good weather and happy in bad? Surely not because they are sinners in good weather and saints in bad. True, people help each other in catastrophes. But they don't feel good because they help each other. They help each other because they feel good.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Originally posted at http://billysothern.blogspot.com/.</div>Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198328051960197677.post-84370052624564243692010-10-31T22:30:00.008-05:002010-10-31T23:25:31.376-05:00In Memoriam Ms. Blettner<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:donotpromoteqf/> <w:lidthemeother>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:lidthemeasian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:lidthemecomplexscript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> 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<w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="19" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Subtle Emphasis"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="21" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Intense Emphasis"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="31" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Subtle Reference"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="32" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Intense Reference"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="33" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Book Title"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="37" name="Bibliography"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="39" qformat="true" name="TOC Heading"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]-->When I was a sophomore in college, I became obsessed with the vanity of human existence. As with extremists and polemicists before me, the Bible became the sword I would wield to prove my point. I would quote the Preacher from Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanities, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?” I asked my music professor Elizabeth Blettner to advise an annual thesis paper I wanted to write on the subject. She worked with me over the course of the spring on the paper. An essay that would have otherwise taken the darkest view on the human condition and the futility of human action became, instead, under her influence, a thoughtful meditation on the balance in life. In our conversations, she was terribly enthusiastic about Ecclesiastes’ other well known maxim, “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven,” and pointed to how things in the world were seemly and related to the whole, when perceived with Wisdom, and were, for that reason, beautiful. She pointed out that Vanity in Ecclesiastes could be weighed against the value of Wisdom, “the Tree of Life,” in Proverbs. With her guidance, I wrote an essay that made clear that the Preacher was right that the risk of vanity and folly in life were overwhelming but that by turning life into a struggle to achieve Wisdom and Truth we can stay out of the “shadows of vanity” and “choose life over death.”<span style=""><br /><br /></span>Ms. Blettner, with whom I had not spoken since leaving college more than a decade ago and who died earlier this year, appeared to my nineteen year old eyes to be living the proposition that she convinced me of and which concluded my paper. I got to know her – though only as a teacher – over a year of the most intense and sublime hours of my life sitting in her music tutorial, listening to Mozart, Bach, and Schubert. She was odd and old fashioned, with long elaborate dresses, thick grey hair worn in long braids under a kerchief, and frequently wearing either a nervous or troubled expression. But that look was sometimes quickly replaced by a smile that hinted at both mischief and ecstasy when things, a note of music or a comment from a student, came at the right time, showed that the stars were aligned and that the world (at least of her classroom) reflected some greater order. For my part, I was a high school dropout who had only a year or so earlier opted for drug rehab to avoid juvenile prison, whose admission to this college, the only one that would have him, shocked his parents and reflected the moral commitment of the college to accept anyone who applied and to use books and ideas to transform them into better people. Given our contrast, and the fact that she appeared to me to be some kind of mystic or angel, the attention that she gave to me, both on my paper and in class, felt more like spiritual guidance than education. We would listen to a Mozart piano sonata, two or three times, and she would point things out but would be coy about what she saw as most significant, and you would speak up, point out the repeating patterns, that it began and ended in the same place, how some small part of it related to the whole, or how it all related to some other bigger whole, and she became bright like the sun with joy because she loved so dearly small things that reflected the whole, things that begin and end in similar places. When you are a lost teenager, when the world of music, art, and beauty offer salvation, you grow towards that light, you hope it shines on you, and you bask in it when it does.<span style=""><br /><br /></span>In my time with Ms. Blettner, she would say little things about her life, about studying philosophy in the mountains at Penn State, about her niece – her “namesake,” and she would be unable to repress certain views – like her shock when I was taking notes in margins of my Bible as though it were any other book. But every minute she spent with me, whether she was talking about Mozart, the Bible, or political squabbles in the music department, made me believe that maybe I was a good person, something that I seriously doubted (even more than I doubted the goodness of the bigger world), and that I could follow truth and beauty and avoid the snares of ignorance and vanity. She seemed so good, so full of truth, and she seemed invested in me and my thoughts. So I must not be all that bad, I hoped.<span style=""><br /><br /></span>Though Ms. Blettner has not been in my life for a long while, her influence had deep marks on my daily life. Many of the things that I enjoy most, that cast away vice and vanity and make life worth living, are things that I learned from her. For me, works like Mozart’s <i style="">Magic Flute</i> or Bach’s <i style="">St. Matthew Passion</i> remain powerful responses to the Preacher inside me.<span style=""><br /><br /></span>I have heard that the last month of Ms. Blettner’s life was filled with music and singing from her guests – former students and colleagues – who visited her at her hospice. I suspect many of the pieces that she taught us were played, as they have been in my home. In memorial, I resolved to someday teach these same pieces to my daughter, now one year old, and look forward to smiling excitedly when she finds something special or beautiful for herself in an opera or a piano sonata that I first heard with Ms. Blettner. And if she could see it, I am sure that she too would smile at how her end was a beginning for another and how all these little parts of life relate seamlessly to some glorious and beautiful whole.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Originally posted at http://billysothern.blogspot.com/.</div>Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198328051960197677.post-83983898592340587432010-10-07T11:27:00.001-05:002010-10-07T11:32:13.883-05:00Welcome PrizeThe day is still young but this anti-Latino David Vitter attack advertisement is the most offensive thing I have seen so far . . .<br /><br /><object style="background-image: url(http://i2.ytimg.com/vi/9uvp0Jljh6U/hqdefault.jpg);" width="480" height="295"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/9uvp0Jljh6U?fs=1&hl=en_US"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/9uvp0Jljh6U?fs=1&hl=en_US" allowscriptaccess="never" allowfullscreen="true" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="480" height="295"></embed></object><br /><br />God knows that people come to this country from Latin America to be mocked and caricatured, for free hand outs, to commit crimes, and for limousine rides. Surely not to work hard, to improve the lives of their children, and to participate in civic life in a great democracy, like my grandmother's parents, who immigrated from Eastern Canada in the 1920's and who had children in Massachusetts and New York that became American citizens by virtue of the 14th Amendment, now under threat.<br /><br />Vitter's implicitly attacks the family histories and American identities of anyone whose family origins began outside this country (and that's quite nearly all of us), including many of us whose families have long shed any hint of foreign origin.<br /><br />But for anyone who has an aunt, or a grandma, or a great grandma who spoke English with a little accent by virtue of having been born in some other country, you should be very offended.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Originally posted at http://billysothern.blogspot.com/.</div>Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198328051960197677.post-69793213720232509822010-09-13T20:13:00.004-05:002010-09-13T20:31:07.791-05:00"We have authority by martial law to shoot looters"I wrote an op-ed for the Times Picayune about the nexus between Mayor Nagin's panicked post-Katrina declaration of martial law, the now clearly false and exaggerated claims made by Nagin and former New Orleans Police Superintendent Eddie Compass of a lawlessness among citizens that included racially tinged fantasies of armed attacks on Children's Hospital and baby raping in the Superdome, and the simultaneous attack on the citizenry by the NOPD that left eleven unarmed people shot, including five fatally, and 16 officers charged with involvement in the incidents or subsequent coverups.<br /><br />It appears in <a href="http://www.nola.com/opinions/index.ssf/2010/09/martial_law_theres_no_such_thi.html">tomorrow's paper</a>:<br /><h1><span style="font-size:100%;">Martial law? There's no such thing: A guest column by Billy Sothern</span></h1> <div class="entry_widget_large entry_widget_left"><span class="mt-enclosure mt-enclosure-photo" style="display: inline;"><span class="adv-photo-large"><img original="http://media.nola.com/hurricane_katrina/photo/4761.121705_nagin_large.jpg" src="http://media.nola.com/hurricane_katrina/photo/4761.121705_nagin_large.jpg" class="adv-photo" alt="Speaking out, cleaning up_2" /><span class="photo-data"><span class="caption"></span></span><span class="photo-bottom-left"><!-- --></span><span class="photo-bottom-right"><!-- --></span></span></span></div><p>In the wild days after Hurricane Katrina, when a perverse game of telephone turned the actual chaos and misery occurring here into fictions of mobs invading Children's Hospital and shooting down medical helicopters, word was reportedly spread among the rank and file of the New Orleans Police Department, "We have authority by martial law to shoot looters."</p><p>It has been reported that there is now an internal NOPD investigation as to whether a "shoot looters" order was in fact given. Whether or not such an order or authority was carried out is not known at this time. What we do know is that, in the end, at least 11 unarmed people were shot by NOPD officers in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina under seriously questionable circumstances.</p><p>Of those, five died and can be rightfully added to Hurricane Katrina's 1,500-plus death toll in Louisiana. And 16 NOPD officers are now charged with federal criminal violations related to these incidents and the subsequent cover-ups.</p><div class="box_gray_gray_ol clear" id="EntryStats"><div class="box_content" style=""> <div class="clear0"><!-- --></div> </div> <div class="box_bottom_left"><!-- --></div><div class="box_bottom_right"><!-- --></div> </div> <p>One would think that if martial law was in fact permissible under Louisiana or U.S. law, that we would be hearing that various of these shootings were justified under that theory. In fact, martial law doesn't exist in our state and there is no authority under any law in this country that would justify shooting civilians who do not pose an immediate threat of death or serious bodily harm to officers or others.</p> <p>Martial law -- literally, the law of Mars, the God of War -- is a suspension of existing civil laws and authority during a time of war or when civil authority has ceased to function, which suspends the ordinary administration of justice.</p> <p>Generally, it places all legal authority in the will of the commander of an army and "is established and administered in a place or district of hostile territory held in belligerent possession, or, sometimes, in places occupied or pervaded by insurgents or mobs," in the words of Black's Law Dictionary.</p> <p>Because our system of government is predicated on the rule of law, there are few historic precedents for martial law in America's history books. Tellingly, the example most often pointed to is President Lincoln's Civil War suspension of Habeas Corpus, a common law right of judicial review of a prison or death sentence, when Lincoln also established military courts in the South and West.</p> <p> These measures were rejected by the United States Supreme Court, which said that even the Civil War did not justify what was essentially the imposition of martial law by Lincoln: "Civil liberty and this kind of martial law cannot endure together; the antagonism is irreconcilable; and, in the conflict, one or the other must perish." </p> <p>If Abraham Lincoln, the president of a fractured country at war with itself, didn't have the constitutional authority to declare martial law, it can be safely assumed that a mayor or a police chief or captain, even in post-levee failure New Orleans, also lacked that authority.</p> <p>So it's hard to know what the mayor, Ray Nagin, was saying when he told a journalist, "I've already called for martial law in New Orleans," as was recently rebroadcast in PBS's stunning "Law and Disorder" documentary on Frontline. If indeed any police officers even heard this order, they were obviously in no position to research the constitutionality of the claim at the law library of the Louisiana Supreme Court. Instead, they would have understood that the mayor was telling the world that he had lost the city to "insurgents" and "mobs" and that they needed to take it back without regard for the normal rules.</p> <p>In the defining moment of crisis, when panic and passion were already so likely to overcome judgment, it appears that those in charge illegally threw out the rule of law. That they might have panicked and believed the rumors and very worst exaggerations about the citizens of our city is no excuse. The problem with the Law of Mars is that it easily confuses the blood of the guilty with the blood of innocents. </p> <p>Of the many lessons learned from the chaos and confusion following Katrina, we now know that sometimes the only protection we really have is the rule of law. We abandon it at our peril.</p> <p style="font-style: italic;">Billy Sothern is a criminal defense attorney in New Orleans and the author of "Down in New Orleans: Reflections from a Drowned City." His email address is billysothern@gmail.com.</p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Originally posted at http://billysothern.blogspot.com/.</div>Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198328051960197677.post-45718481333554543342010-08-30T14:53:00.004-05:002010-08-30T15:12:18.357-05:00There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better.Five years ago, I was in Oxfordtown waiting out the storm.<br /><br />Sitting back in my house in New Orleans, all this time later, I still feel lucky to be here. From where I sit, I see four cypress doors with old rim locks, brown and white porcelain knobs, and transoms above, an old river clay brick fire place that used to provide heat when this room, now my office, was the back of a slave quarters, and a double hung window looking out to a Japanese magnolia, a mimosa tree, and endless cat's claw vine consuming everything in its path beneath a blue sky. It is an unexceptional New Orleans room but better than any room anywhere else.<br /><br />From Bob Dylan's Chronicles, Volume 1:<br /><br />I showed up in New Orleans in early spring, moved into a large rented house near Audubon Park, a comfortable place, all the rooms fair sized, furnished quite simply, wardrobe cupboards in just about every room. We couldn’t have come to a better place for me. It was really perfect. You could work slow here. They were waiting at the studio, but I didn’t feel like jumping into anything. Sooner or later I’d have to get to the point but I could try it on another day. I brought a lot of the songs with me, I was pretty sure they would hold up veil.<br /><br />Right now, I strolled into the dusk. The air was murky and intoxicating. At the corner of the block, a giant, gaunt cat crouched on a concrete ledge. I got up close to it and stopped and the cat didn’t move. I wished I had a jug of milk. My eyes and ears were open, my consciousness fully alive. The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds - the cemeteries - and they're a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman, sepulchres- palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay - ghosts of women and men who have sinned and who've died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time.<br /><br />The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there's a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There's something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can't see it, but you know it's here. Somebody is always sinking. Everyone seems to be from some very old Southern families. Either that or a foreigner. I like the way it is.<br /><br />There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. There's a thousand different angles at any moment. At any time you could run into a ritual honoring some vaguely known queen. Bluebloods, titled persons like crazy drunks, lean weakly against the walls and drag themselves through the gutter. Even they seem to have insights you might want to listen to. No action seems inappropriate here. The city is one very long poem. Gardens full of pansies, pink petunias, opiates. Flower-bedecked shrines, white myrtles, bougainvillea and purple oleander stimulate your senses, make you feel cool and clear inside.<br /><br />Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move. All that and a town square where public executions took place. In New Orleans you could almost see other dimensions. There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. After a while you start to feel like a ghost from one of the tombs, like you're in a wax museum below crimson clouds. Spirit empire. Wealthy empire. One of Napoleon's generals, Lallemaud, was said to have come here to check it out, looking for a place for his commander to seek refuge after Waterloo. He scouted around and left, said that here the devil is damned, just like everybody else, only worse. The devil comes here and sighs. New Orleans. Exquisite, old-fashioned. A great place to live vicariously. Nothing makes any difference and you never feel hurt, a great place to really hit on things. Somebody puts something in front of you here and you might as well drink it. Great place to be intimate or do nothing. A place to come and hope you'll get smart - to feed pigeons looking for handouts.<div class="blogger-post-footer">Originally posted at http://billysothern.blogspot.com/.</div>Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198328051960197677.post-19523605131122766252010-08-21T22:38:00.004-05:002010-08-21T22:43:26.312-05:00If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise<h1> </h1> <div id="col1" class="grid_6 alpha clearfix"> <div id="pinned"> <script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.salon.com/js/continue_reading.js?20100420"></script><a href="http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/2010/08/21/spike_lee_katrina_followup/index.html">An essay I wrote</a> for Salon about Spike Lee's new documentary and New Orleans five years after Hurricane Katrina. <span class="dateline"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /></span></span><h1 class="headline">"If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise": Spike Lee's riveting look at New Orleans, now</h1> <div class="story clearfix" id="story_mps2035251"> <h3 class="deck">The filmmaker's new documentary argues that the troubled, extraordinary city holds the key to our redemption </h3> <div class="byline clearfix"> <span>By Billy Sothern</span><br /><br /></div> <div class="sbody permalink"> <div class="story_preview" id="story_preview_mps2035251"> <div class="art l"> <img class="md_horiz" id="img_mps2035251" src="http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/2010/08/21/spike_lee_katrina_followup/md_horiz.jpg" alt="" /> <div class="caption">A still from "If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise"</div> </div> <p>Five years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans remains one of the most troubled places in the United States. Its woes are a consequence of the civic collapse that preceded Katrina, the devastating levee failures following the storm, and most recently, the unrivaled environmental devastation from the BP oil disaster. But New Orleans also remains the heart of American culture. It's a place unrivaled in vernacular richness where people come from world around to eat, drink, listen and see — to live for a few days like many of us here live every day. Is it possible that the national seat of American tragedy can also redeem this country by refusing to give up its bon temps while fighting for its survival?</p> <p>Spike Lee gives his answer in a new documentary, "If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise," a loosely structured, four-hour meditation on everything right and wrong with New Orleans five years after Katrina. It premieres Aug. 23 and 24 on HBO.</p> <p>The tensions are on display from the film's opening. Its first scenes include, in sequence, an angry and defiant poem ("No more use of our Gulf Coast waters, wetlands, heritage and soil/ No more 'Up yours Louisiana,' because we all know there's blood in that BP oil/ If God is willing and the creek don't rise") read by the star of Lee's <a href="http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/feature/2006/08/20/levees/index.html">earlier New Orleans documentary,</a> Phyllis Montana-LeBlanc (now a star of <a href="http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/feature/2010/04/18/new_orleanians_on_treme">David Simon's "Treme"</a>); images memorializing Katrina's devastation; and the joyous celebrations of the Saints' improbable 2009 Super Bowl victory. Interviewed in a throng of people following the Saints win, an unnamed woman sums it up, "Four and a half years ago we lost our home during the flood, and we are so privileged and honored to be here. Living in New Orleans is a privilege. It's not easy, but it's a privilege and a blessing."</p> </div> <div style="display: none;" class="story_continue clearfix" id="story_continue_mps2035251"> <ul><li><a class="continue_reading" href="http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/2010/08/21/spike_lee_katrina_followup/index.html" onclick="return (read_story('mps2035251') && false);">Continue reading</a></li></ul> </div> <div style="display: block;" class="story_full" id="story_full_mps2035251"> <p>The claim that it is "not easy" to live in New Orleans turns out to be one of the very few understatements in the documentary, which dwells at length on the many things that create this dis-ease — separate and aside from the storm that drew the country's attention and the oil spill that refocused it. The viewer is led through policy debates and critiques and personal stories highlighting the demolition of New Orleans' public housing projects and consequent <a target="_blank" href="http://www.thenation.com/article/goodbye-st-thomas">housing crisis</a>; the collapsed healthcare system (New Orleans' public hospital remains shuttered because of political wrangling about the future of healthcare); the mental health crisis that has been responsible for murders, suicides and less-than-joyous substance abuse and drinking since the storm; the incompetence of FEMA in providing post-storm assistance to the city and the agency's mismanagement of its emergency housing plan; the civil engineering missteps by the Army Corps of Engineers that made the city vulnerable to flooding and that have degraded our wetlands; the shattered education system; the out-of-control crime and violence that have plagued the city; the police corruption and history of police violence that have led to numerous federal murder and conspiracy indictments for officers involved in several, separate incidents; and deregulation that provided the opportunity for corporate greed's fouling of the Gulf.</p> <p>Any New Orleanian living here during the past five years will be familiar with these issues from their daily lives and from the news on the front page of the Times Picayune. They are issues that you live when you can't find a place to rent that you can afford, when you cannot find a school where your child will receive a decent education, when you wake in the middle of the night to hear gunshots and know that someone's life may have just come to an abrupt and violent end. These are the daily challenges of living here. And it's useful to recall, in watching this documentary, that our individual efforts to overcome these obstacles are not just personal but part of a collective effort to keep this city alive.</p> <p>The people telling the story in this documentary are many of the same people whose names appear in the paper. Some are policy wonks; others, activists or artists; but nearly all are fervent New Orleanians. Some of them speak in a strongly held hyperbole that hints at madness or mania, both about the good and the bad here. There are angry words, never precisely defined, about "the powers that be" and their efforts at "ethnic cleansing" on the one hand, and on the other, references to the Saints' Super Bowl win that suggest a local belief that the victory was an act of God, as if New Orleans, like the long-suffering Job, had been rewarded for its faith. This is the bipolar parlance of life here, stemming from the widely held belief that the city is vastly better than, worse than, and not really a part of the rest of the country. Most of these sentiments are presented in the documentary without any evident endorsement from Spike Lee, who seems more enamored with his subjects' intense feeling for their homes and threatened way of life than with the specifics of their claims. He is particularly interested in their suspicions about race, the government and corporations. The firmness of the beliefs held by so many people here is just as important as the accuracy of their claims.</p> <p>But implicit in the framing of the documentary, and of most of the engaging books and films to come out of New Orleans since the storm, is the notion that the challenges that define life in post-Katrina New Orleans are the same vexing national crises on which the quality and success of 21st-century America will be, and should be, judged; that the same problems also exist in Lee's beloved native Brooklyn and so many other places in this country. Despite Lee's critique of the political and social realities that made the Gulf's twin disasters possible, despite the seemingly endless images of dead bodies — human and animal — that we see in this film, "If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise" shows that Lee is not without hope.</p> <p>He is clearly a partisan of this city, a place where real recovery and reconciliation are the daily work of thousands of people. The efforts of the people of this city and region appear to have given him reason to believe — despite the ever-present risk of rising water — that something better may yet emerge from the tragedies along the Gulf.</p> </div></div></div></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer">Originally posted at http://billysothern.blogspot.com/.</div>Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198328051960197677.post-85696955430540163852010-08-03T21:16:00.004-05:002010-08-03T21:47:56.446-05:00death i think is no parenthesisEarlier this month we stayed in a pleasant little cottage on Peaks Island in Maine. The house had belonged to a somewhat recently deceased woman for many years and her things - her white furniture, artwork, photographs, and books - kept the place Christina's Cottage, which is what everyone called it. While the home was unmistakeably her's and left a strong impression of her as a person, we felt comfortable there and had some vague sense that we liked her from her house, her things, and the impression it left about how she lived her life.<br /><br />The first night we were there, when Nikki had fallen asleep upstairs, I picked out an anthology of poems from the bookcase and went to a dogeared page. I imagined that Christina had read the poem years earlier, that it had moved her, and that she marked the page to remember it. I too was moved, thought of my wife upstairs and the woman and her children who had lived there.<br /><br />I read it to Nikki in the morning. She said that it was her favorite E.E. Cummings poem, which she hadn't read in years, and that it reminded her of her sister, who passed away years earlier.<span style="font-size:+1;"><br /><br />since feeling is first</span><br /><i>E.E. Cummings</i> <br /><br />since feeling is first<br />who pays any attention<br />to the syntax of things<br />will never wholly kiss you;<br />wholly to be a fool<br />while Spring is in the world<br /><br />my blood approves,<br />and kisses are a better fate<br />than wisdom<br />lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry<br />—the best gesture of my brain is less than<br />your eyelids' flutter which says<br /><br />we are for each other: then<br />laugh, leaning back in my arms<br />for life's not a paragraph<br /><br />And death i think is no parenthesis<div class="blogger-post-footer">Originally posted at http://billysothern.blogspot.com/.</div>Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198328051960197677.post-87440785979033507642010-06-21T13:23:00.001-05:002010-06-21T13:34:02.295-05:00Treme - John BoutteI enjoyed watching the finale of Treme last night and <a href="http://billysothern.blogspot.com/2010/04/treme.html">think that the show is an important reflection of both the spirit and culture of New Orleans and the difficulties that we face as a city and a country</a>.<br /><br />But, putting all that aside, I think that there is one inarguable truth about Treme that everyone should agree on. John Boutte, who sings <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1M1Iagf3GSs">the opening song</a> and who has been featured throughout the first season, deserves to be famous. He sounds like Sam Cooke (which was joked about in the finale), while still sounding distinctly John Boutte. I hope that he still plays for free at <a href="http://www.drinkgoodstuff.com/">DBA</a> on Saturdays if he gets huge but I will still count myself lucky to have seen him there so many times if he doesn't.<br /><br />I frequently find myself bitching about all of New Orleans' troubles but John Boutte is way up on my New Orleans gratitude list, along with roast beef po-boys (I would say <a href="http://billysothern.blogspot.com/2009/11/peacemaker.html">oyster po-boys</a> but that has become complicated recently), Mardi Gras, and long pine floorboards, that make it more than worth the effort.<br /><br /><object style="background-image: url(http://i3.ytimg.com/vi/FKVujOctza4/hqdefault.jpg);" width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/FKVujOctza4&hl=en_US&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/FKVujOctza4&hl=en_US&fs=1" allowscriptaccess="never" allowfullscreen="true" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><div class="blogger-post-footer">Originally posted at http://billysothern.blogspot.com/.</div>Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4198328051960197677.post-76022039867941567632010-06-17T15:01:00.005-05:002010-06-17T19:11:32.453-05:00Shakedown Your Congressman!I lack the words to express my frustration at the continued environmental devastation caused by the oil gushing into the Gulf, destroying peoples' lives, killing animals, and devastating the already compromised wetlands that are essential New Orleans' capacity to withstand hurricanes.<br /><br />So outrage is not even vaguely sufficient to articulate my response to hearing <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/38665.html">Texas Representative Barton apologize to BP CEO Hayward today during the Congressional hearing on the spill</a> and to lambaste the Obama administration for compelling BP to create a $20B fund to compensate the people and governments impacted by the gusher:<br /><br />"It is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown, in this case a $20 billion shakedown."<br /><br />This has received a great deal of press today, almost exclusively critical, but it bears mentioning that this is not an isolated Republican perspective but, in fact, the Republican Study Committee, a group of over 100 Conservative Republican congressmen, <a href="http://tpmlivewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/06/house-conservatives-call-escrow-account-chicago-style-shakedown.php">issued a similar statement yesterday</a> calling the BP fund a "<a href="http://rsc.tomprice.house.gov/news/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=191125">Chicago Style Political Shakedown</a>."<br /><br />We are drowning in oil along the Gulf and maniac Conservatives remain so committed to their pro-corporate, liberterian ideology that they take BP's side against the people who will see some benefit, however inadequate, from this fund.<br /><br />As cynical as I am, I was surprised to see Gulf Coast politicians on the list of Republican Study Committee members. Call them or email them and register your disgust:<br /><br /><table border="0" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><span id="ctl00_ctl03_ctl00_Text" class="middlecopy"></span><td><a href="http://www.scalise.house.gov/">Steve Scalise</a></td> <td>(LA-01)</td></tr></tbody></table><table border="0" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><span id="ctl00_ctl03_ctl00_Text" class="middlecopy"></span><td><a href="http://mack.house.gov/">Connie Mack</a></td> <td>(FL-14)</td></tr></tbody></table><table border="0" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr><span id="ctl00_ctl03_ctl00_Text" class="middlecopy"></span><td><a href="http://jeffmiller.house.gov/">Jeff Miller</a></td> <td>(FL-01)</td></tr></tbody></table> <table id="Table4" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tbody><tr valign="top" align="left"></tr><tr valign="top" align="left"></tr><tr valign="top" align="left"><td colspan="3" valign="top" align="left" height="20"><span class="middlecopy"><span class="middleheadline"><big><b></b></big></span> </span><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><div class="blogger-post-footer">Originally posted at http://billysothern.blogspot.com/.</div>Billy S.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09639264314799589440noreply@blogger.com2