After four days in the dark, our porch light’s back on in Mid-City.
Pronounce the dot.
Author: Editor B
So remember how I said we were heading out — buggin’ — evacuating?
That didn’t happen.
We were planning to go, but the hurricane parties here were just too good to resist.
Actually the real reason is that our anticipated path was looking worse and worse for a return drive. Of course we could have gone west, or east, but straight north was where we wanted to go, and that wasn’t looking very smart. Personally I was inclined to stay here anyhow. Xy was vacillating, changing her mind every twenty minutes or so. Realizing we’d need to drive back through the storm to return home sealed the decision.
Isaac cometh. Looks like he’s headed our way for sure. Forecasters say he won’t be superstrong, “only” a Category 1 hurricane when he makes landfall…
We had a wonderful Lammas. It has emerged as probably my favorite holiday, which is kind of funny considering I never heard of it until…
For the last several months I’ve been embedded, ensnared, and otherwise entrapped in the planning process for Rising Tide 7. I haven’t actually done any…
In the recovery planning efforts that followed the flooding of New Orleans, we often heard the mantra that we need to have “the community involved…
Dear Persephone, You are four and half years old today. We have continued our tradition, now well-established, of giving away stuff for your half-birthday. This…
Why We Pulled Our Daughter Out of a Private Suburban School and Enrolled Her in Public School in New Orleans — a headline intended to provoke.…
Monday morning we got up bright and early. After breakfast I dressed my daughter in her new uniform. Then we got on the bike and…
Watching The Theologians this weekend reminded me: I finished work on another movie earlier this summer and never wrote about it. It’s a five minute…
Michael Homan has concocted another short movie of inscrutable strangeness. This one is called The Theologians. This one’s got a lot of academic in-jokes that…
Funny thing happened last night as I was finishing up my dinner. Xy was fiddling with something in the back yard, Persephone was having an…
When I got back to New Orleans, I noticed the “Save the Picayune” signs and tee-shirts around town.
With all respect to the good intentions behind this campaign, I feel it’s the wrong approach.
Let me explain why. This could take a minute.
A sick and hateful man killed six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. My heart goes out to the families of those who have been killed. A community has been wounded, and in some way we are all hurt by such violence. As Maitri notes, we are all in the gutter.
But I didn’t think I’d have anything to say about it myself, until I saw this photo.
It’s inevitable when visiting some other place to compare it to home, especially if that other place is your former home. I lived in Bloomington for thirteen years, and I’ve now lived in New Orleans for thirteen years, so I can’t resist a few elementary observations.
I was headed to Bloomington anyhow. I’d been planning an extended Indiana vacation to visit family this summer. I like having an 800-mile buffer zone, but even I have guilt feelings which must be assuaged at least once a year. Aside from family, the first person I planned to look up in Bloomington was my friend and collaborator Lee. He’d been working for years on a multi-volume DVD set of the first season of ROX. He was very close to getting this monstrous effort wrapped up, and I wanted to give him every bit of encouragement and support I could muster. And maybe, just maybe, I wanted to give him that little nudge that’s so often needed to wrap up a long-term endeavor. I know the value of deadlines. Not that Lee needs nudged.
And so then on March 8, I sent Lee an innocuous little e-mail message.
Here’s an article I wrote which was published in the July issue of The Ryder magazine. You can also see the article as it was published with photos and layout and stuff. What follows is the slightly longer text I submitted, without editorial cuts, and with a few relevant links. Consider this a rough-draft preview from a forthcoming book, still several years down the road and more of a dream than a reality.
Saturday night I found myself with a bunch of Pagans and other folks at an uptown synagogue, preparing food for the homeless. We whipped up…
Couple of weird dreams lately. Two night ago, I dreamed we got an extra-thick Times-Picayune on our front porch. It was a Sunday. We don’t…
Probably the biggest surprise for me on this vacation was just how prosperous Bloomington seemed. (More on that later.) If I had any doubts on this front, they were laid to rest by my visit to The Rail.
Contemporary craft cocktails and tapas — in Bloomington? I was impressed. And I was even more impressed when it came out that our bartender, Colin Boilini, had won a contest with Tales of the Cocktail. They’ll be bringing him down here to New Orleans next week.
Naturally we commanded Mr. Boilini to prepare for us his award-winning cocktail — which he did.