Gay rodeo undermines sexual stereotypes

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters Life!) - Philadelphia’s gay community sought to dispel some sexual stereotypes when it held the city’s first gay rodeo.

About 50 contestants roped steers, cracked whips, and wrestled cattle to the ground during the weekend in an attempt to prove to themselves - and the rest of the world - that they are just as capable of tackling a traditionally macho sport as their straight counterparts…

Glad we got that, uh, straightened out.

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I wonder if there were any Indians involved in this Wild West Show, or if any a them rodeo cow-pokes was in the navy? To some people rum, sodomy and the lash probably sounds, well, electrifying. Ok, I need to stop before I get stomped on by the Politically Correct Police. I really should leave the snark to Professionals like These, especially since I can’t think of an awful pun involving motorcycles and leather.

I just hope Philadelphia survives the next hurricane season.

When I can’t find anything I’m motivated to write about in New Orleans, it occurs to me that Odd is not a local specialty dish. Just think of this as a big old Hoagie with Extra Odd, dressed or whatever it is y’all do up there. Maybe undressed. I don’t really want to know.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled life already in progress, even as you fritter it away on the intertubes.

there’s David Byrne being mounted by the loa.

Damn, I feel positively normal now. Except for that voice in my head that keeps asking: Why Be Normal?

I love this damn video in spite of its dreadful lack of close ups of Tina Weymouth.

“The Old South was simply intolerable: it required generations of neurotic artists, often alcoholic, to paste all of its myth’s together and then peer into its black heart. Its political and social realities are long gone, its eloquence and nuance vague to the point of disappearing.What remains are its literature.”
— Richard Kilbourne, “Poems Represent Bare Essentials of [Everette] Maddox’s Life, Art”

I stumbled across this particular carpetbagger while reading Umpteen Ways of Looking at a Possum Critical and Creative Responses to Everette Maddox, and was inclined to ask him:

From what ivy tower In the dour and snow white North did this particular clap trap issue from? The South’s political and social realities long gone? Just ask the chuckling seersuckers and blue blood blazers brunching in their cups at Galatoire’s some Sunday.

“How is it going? Straight down, I tell you–to the bank, that is–what with all of this nearly free real estate and oil over a hundred and billions in federal dollars floating around. We’re going to build the city the way is always was and should have remained, the Queen of the South. The new opera house will go up on the riverfront and the right sort of people will be able to walk down to it from luxurious condos with sweeping views of the Mississippi. We’ll build it with all these Mexicans, every one as hard working and subserviently afraid of the White Man’s Law as that surely busboy’s great grandfather. It might squeeze out some of the weirdos down in the Bywater but they always seem to land on their feet somewhere, and where would the show be for the tourists at Mardi Gras without them? They’ll all find a place to live in their charming artist’s squalor and not too far from a four dollar free trade cafe au lait grande, I’m sure.

“Our Blanches and Stellas are still with us, with their fine educations and they boyfriends with more tattoos then the sailors on old Decatur used to have. Of course they will have to find some new place to live, or finally figure it all out: either go back and finish that MBA or find some fellow with more head on his shoulders than hair and move back Uptown to respectability because, frankly, we’re running out of cottages to flip and the Bywater is next. Between the crack heads and Katrina there’s hardly anything left Uptown worth its weight in termites.

“Everette Maddox? Never head of him. Was he related to that cracker governor from Georgia? Poet? Well, I don’t go for that sort of thing much, but I do sit on the board at NOMA and the CAC and you have to admit that whole artist bunch are an important part of our charm, don’t you think? I love that Rodrigue fellow’s Blue Dogs, myself, much nicer than those old, dark Cajun things he used to do. My wife goes in for the literary sort of thing. She’s in a book club with her circle from Newcomb but I think they mostly read whatever Oprah tells ‘em to. I think they did Maya Angelou once. The artists and yes even our eccentrics are all part of our charm, of the brand that fills up the downtown hotels and by God we need them. Yes, we’re going to build a New South City here with all the old charm preserved, I tell you, once we get rid of all those troublemakers in the projects. We’re going to put Charleston and Savannah to shame. We haven’t lost our old ways. We’re just updating them for the 21st century.”

And I only am escaped alone to tell thee, what with all our neurotic artists having drunk themselves to death.

Ed’s Note: Forgot to tag it. Republished.

“And when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcome, but when we are silent we are still afraid. So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive.”
– Audie Lorde

Cliff of Cliff’s Crib blog asks some hard questions about crime and how people deal with it:

“Last week, when I read the story of those guys that kicked in that door on Laharpe St. and shot those three people, the first thing I thought about was “well, at least they didn’t shoot the baby. Had they shot the baby too, we would have been outraged because the baby is not part of the game. Since they let the baby live, there is part of us that considers that kind of event part of the life those folks choose to live. The question is how can that be ok when the folks in question are our family, friends, classmates, and neighbors.”

Maybe it’s not my place to jump into this discussion, since his blog post directly addresses the local African-American community and bloggers of color in particular. (Not in that quote but in the longer piece). Me, I’m as white as a truck load of of Bunny Bread. But I live here, too, and not enough people of any sort are asking the hard question: how can we just let this go one because it’s “them”, whether that’s a class them (we’re not in the ‘hood, that’s not us) or a race question (they’re black, I’m white; that’s not us).

It’s the hard question everyone in every community in this town regardless of race or section needs to be asking themselves.

I think about this every day. Earlier this year, I posted up a list of all of the people who died violently in New Orleans on this site. And not a day goes by but someone comes by searching for one of those who died. I don’t know who George Hankton was, but there seem to be a lot of people with access to the internet who cared. Someone Googling that name shows up almost every day. Still, no one who knew him leaves a comment on that page. I’ve looked out on the net myself for any more info, but there are only a couple of cryptic “my cousin died” posts on My Space pages that are marked private. The Book wrote a post about his cousin Chanell Sanchell which prompted a post of my own, but most of those who die vanish into obscurity, forgotten by all but those who knew them personally.

What happened to George Hankton (age 40, not some punk kid) and Chanell Schanell should be the concern of everyone who choses to live here, who insists on making New Orleans home. The death of every person here by violence is your concern. If you think it’s not your concern, you’re probably reading the wrong web page. This blog is primarily about New Orleans, and if you think you care about New Orleans and don’t care about the young black men (and women) dying in the streets, well, then you don’t care about New Orleans as deeply as you think you do.

The problem is none of us know what to do about it. I don’t. Cliff admits he doesn’t. Our so-called leaders sure as hell don’t have a clue. But before we get to answers, at least we ought to be able to start with some questions. We’ll take the easy ones first. How did this come about? And what can I do today that will make it stop, someday? I don’t have the answer for the 13-year olds who were just busted for sticking people up in my neighborhood. They’re the age of my own son, and may be lost already. But they probably have little brother’s and sisters going to Recovery District schools. Will they even have a chance at something better, something other than what their brothers found? Are these siblings their only role models? What about the culture these kids pick up on TV and the radio glorifying what their “big” brothers did? What about the people who profit by recording and broadcasting that?

Who are these kids’ role models? What about everyone who fled certain parts of the city but stayed “in New Orleans” (if you tell people when you’re out of town that “I’m from New Orleans, then yes that’s you regardless of where you actually live). It doesn’t matter if you fled into the suburbs and Catholic school in the early ’60s or into the East and the magnet schools in the 70s and 80s: all the people who could make a difference–white and black–seem to have turned their back on the weakest among us. This city is ringed by churches full of Good Christians who seemed to have slept through all of the homilies they ever heard.

The kids who are killing and dying, and the families they come from, were left behind like too many animals in a too small a cage with not enough to eat, and you don’t need a degree in sociology to figure out how that plays out. And now many of the best and brightest of the people who grew up in the hard neighborhoods aren’t coming back from The Evacuation. They’ve discovered a place where jobs pay decently and the schools work. They’re the next wave of the middle-class out-of-poverty story, and how many of them are staying in Atlanta or Texas or Nashville?

I think only the hand of a loving god could reach down and pluck some teenager with a pistol in his waste band off the streets and save him. I’m pretty sure I can’t, and I doubt the rest of you could either. But we have to start somewhere. The first step is to decide to give a damn. The next step is to figure out the next step. If I knew what it was I’d be charging you $1,500 for the advice and trying to sell you the companion books and tapes. I don’t have the answers, but I have an inkling of what the questions are. And thanks to Cliff (and The Book and m.d. filter) the impulse to start to ask them. That’s a beginning.

By Sunday, I was done in. The combination of days treading through treacherous, treacly mud pits and an unballasted wallet left me walking like a sailor just back from the Horn, with a Odd swinging gait and a permanent list to windward. I was burned without and within by too much sun and too much fun and could in no way contemplate another day at Jazz Fest.

Somehow I drug myself out of bed that sunny morning and managed to plow through all the necessary chores for a weekend: laundry done and my shirts ironed, something cooked easy to serve up for the week, a trip to K-Mart for some necessities, a blog post written up. After all that I was beat, but managed to find the energy to replace my back bicycle tire. I was determined that I was not going to let the last of April, first of May pass without hearing Carlos Santana. His is an almost quintessential Jazz Fest act, combining jazz, rock and latin rhythms in a way an Orleanian can digest as easily and with as much relish as a crock of creme brulee: an almost impalpable richness and sweetness touched with fire.

It is not just the sheer beauty of straight ahead guitar jazz like Europa or the cathartic drum rite of a perfect Black Magic Woman that drew me there, but something elemental like the Odd forces that hold atoms together, a species of the Strong Force. Santana is one of the generation of musical bodhisattvas: a line of musicians running back to jazz artists of the 1960s like John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, powerful jazz innovators who expressed a profound spirtuality through their music. Somewhere along the line musicians with that sort of overtly spiritual inclination seem to have vanished. Perhaps they were all sucked into one of the many marketing arms of the Cult of the Gospel Inerrant, that peculiar religio-business that has replaced Christianity in much of America, to pop up as acts like Jars of Clay or Third Day.

Santana is one of the last of a different breed. To hear him is not to experience the happy, corporate pop of what little I have heard of popular “Christian” music. The instrumental second part of Black Magic Woman is not some toe-tapping, feel-good cant. It is what was called in the decade from which Santana emerged An Experience. What comes through is not the gentle spirit of the shyly-smiling blond guy with a lamb on his lap. It is instead music that could be the song in the head of the demiurge as he raised the first roaring volcanoes out of a chaotic ocean, and then tossed the burning sun into the sky, the frenetic rites of the first peoples upon discovery of the drum and the dance.

And so while my tired wife napped in the sun with the pretense of a book in her lap I applied myself to the bicycle pump and set out to find a spot where I could at least hear Santana’s mid-afternoon performance. I pedaled up the narrow cul-de-sac streets between St. Louis No. 3 and the west side of the Fairgrounds, and found myself on the corner of a quiet residential street abutting the Fairgounds and a narrow strip of asphalt with a city street sign reading Private, right behind the port-o-lets west of the Acura stage, not fifty feet from where I’d turned the corner the day before to go buy a beer and some food over by the Jazz Tent.

Private was an apt name for the place. I had pedaled over expecting to either be disappointed that I could not find a good spot or instead that I might find one that would look like Frenchman Street on Mardi Gras night. Apparently the world is divided into people who plop down their $50 and go in the gate to Jazz Fest and people who find something else to do. Except for one fellow in sleevless black smoking Marlboro’s propped back against the fence and a handful of the people who lived back there sitting out in lawn chairs, Private was very nearly just that: my own personal place to listen.

There’s not much more I can say about Santana that I haven’t already said. I was so tired that I can no longer remember the entire play list, only highlights: an ecstatic Black Magic Woman and rocking versions of Oye Como Va and No One To Depend On, Maria Maria, a John Contrane number my tired brain can’t recall two days later. There was a long speech on politics that I silently applauded, not for its overt electioneering, or even for the long list of activists and musicians Santana cited as being in the tradition he tries to uphold (it was long and I couldn’t recreate it without notes). Instead, what wowed me was the way Santana wrapped it up with Jimi Hendrix’s famous aphorism: “We are about the power of love, not the love of power.”

Oddly enough, I had picked up a button with Jimi’s picture on it and the same saying just two days earlier when passing the Save Our Wetlands table. I visualized the button laying atop my muddy poncho on the porch back home, and immediately connected the three note base line and the simple, whammy bar guitar riff that goes with it, the one common to Hendrix’s Third Stone from the Sun and Santana’s Black Magic Woman (listen hard in your head; you know the one). “We are about the power of love.” The phrase is still ringing in my head days later even as the discrete events of Jazz Fest retreal into a blur.

That is what this last Jazz Fest was about: a healing that during the last two we were not ready to receive, an experience no Big Chief from Kansas City could possibly understand. There is enough distance now for healing, and the line up was perfect. Jimmy Buffet was my touchstone to the Gulf Coast during my cold years of exile, and the party that life here can be if you so choose. Terence Blanchard was It, The Thing, distilled into music of such emotional power that it lifted you past The Event and into the place that healing can begin. And finally Santana: the ineffable essence of beauty Keats once found on an old urn and which I found at the corner of Verna and Private; a rollicking tribal celebration with drums and fire of the Power of Love; the love of this place that brings us home, that drags us out of our tired patio chairs and back to this lonely corner of Mid-City because we need cannot get enough, the power of the love of those who have come home to stay and rebuild New Orleans.

I left before the Neville Brothers played.

First Lady Laura Bush took to the White House press podium to criticize the military junta which rules Myanmar (formerly Burma) over their failed response to a tropical cyclone believed to have killed 10,000. According to a Reuter’s report, Bush said:

Asked by a reporter whether she was accusing the junta of having “blood on their hands,” [Bush] said it was clear they are “very inept“

(emphasis mine).

You tell ‘em, Laura. Heck of a job.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Yes, Peter, I spent last Saturday at the small patch of high ground at the Jazz Fest Acura stage I took to calling Base Camp Biloxi to make sure we had a good view of Jimmy Buffet. And I did not mangle the words to “Let’s All Get Drunk And Screw”. Hell, everyone at Betz Brown’s Abbey on Decatur (not to be confused with the Abbey of subsequent owners) was required to cease all conversation and sing along when ever that came up on the juke, which occurred with alarming frequency. In spite of the fact that I was probably every bit as much afloat at that point in my life as the legendary Mr. Buffet, those words are pretty much imprinted on my consciousness forever (even if that song is in a solid tie for least-favorite Buffet song with “Great Filling Station Holdup”).

There was no way I could miss seeing Buffet, whatever my feeling about the other “big name” acts that Jazz Fest brings in. Jimmy Buffet has always had a special connection to New Orleans and the whole Gulf Coast. And for me it was another of the special moments of healing at this Jazz Fest. Belting out Jimmy Buffet songs at the top of my lungs while I shoveled a foot of snow off my corner lot’s extensive sidewalk, or listening to Biloxi sitting in the cockpit of my sailboat after a day on the water during our all-too-short northern summer were some of the ways Jimmy Buffet Saved My Life. He was, along with all of the music of New Orleans, a large part of what kept my sanity during that long decade in the cold and the dark. I’m glad he did not sing “Biloxi” or I might have wound up curled up in the mud balling, but I have to admit that I pretty much misted up for “Mother Ocean”. Buffet is one of those songwriters who become a part of your life if you’ve lived it right, a good friend you’ve never met.

Jimmy and I have have cleaned up our act a bit since the Mardi Gras day I saw him on Conti just off the corner of Royal, back in the days before the police station was on the corner of Royal, before the state building there was fenced. Back then the people who hung at that corner paid hearty tribute to the building’s name of Wildlife and Fisheries Building (and not in any way involving fish), and it was the place to hang or regroup. He borrowed a guitar from some longhairs who had stopped there to practice their rice paper origami skills and belted out a couple of songs–I only remember clearly that he closed with “Volcano”, then split before the crowd got too big.

In spite of Jimmy and the rest of us being on the High Road of Good Living (now, stop smirking; that’s not what I meant), we are all at some level still “The People Our Parents Warned Us About”.

I left New Orleans New Year’s Eve 1986, clutching the winning ticket of a good job in Washington, D.C. and leaving a hard-riding posse of personal demons and the raft of friends who had kept me afloat here behind a string of burning bridges. Still, I could never shake my connection to home. The mark New Orleans places on those who grow up here is as indelible and as defining as Original Sin. No matter where we might run to, all of our suffering and opportunities for grace arise out of that invisible fleur de lis imprinted on our hearts. We cannot escape it, are reminded of it no matter where we are as surely as a determined sinner disturbed by the bells of morning Mass on his way home from a night’s debauchery.

During my almost 20 years away from the city, WWOZ and programs like it’s Jazz Fest broadcasts were one of the links that offered me an opportunity to experience the grace of New Orleans, that redeemed what seemed at times the mortal sin of leaving. When I lived in the far north, I would spend some of the first decent days of Spring not out clearing my yard but huddled in my cool basement around my computer, the WWOZ stream struggling through the dial-up connection like a short-wave broadcast from another continent. When the entire city went dark in September ‘05, one of the first thing I found was the ‘OZ stream out of New Jersey. It was the sound track of all of my early postings to Wet Bank Guide.

WWOZ and Jazz Fest are both prominent ambassadors for New Orleans, and links that tie us all together: the people who are home, the ones still somewhere else by circumstance or choice, and the visitors lured by the glamor of the city. Without either institution the city would somehow survive, even if dearly diminished, even as we survived the steady erosion of some of our cultural landmarks over the last generation. Even with the gaping hole the absence of either would leave behind, it would still be New Orleans. Those of us here would find the music and the food and the spirit of the street parade on our own. Not so the displaced or the visitors who descend on the city every year for the Fest. Without ‘OZ streaming into the world or the Fest to draw it’s listeners here, the numbers of the foreign legion of New Orleans would be fewer and their strength diminished. We would be silently but certainly undermined in our determination to live here and remake New Orleans if either were to stop.

So what are you waiting for? Turn on. Tune In. Be Home.

N.B–Loki, here’s a “paragraph” for the ‘OZ blog on what the Fest and ‘OZ mean to me. You know I can’t just write a paragraph. Now I need to climb down from my fountain and go make some more coffee. My own Day Four at the Test has worn me out.

Today Terence Blanchard led his quintet, with faces as solemn as morticians’, in a joyful noise together with the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra: selections of his A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina). It was an Odd moment for Jazz Fest (and so perhaps our favorite here on Toulouse Street). I saw two tributes so far, one for Willie “Tee” and Earl Turbington and a show featuring young students of Alvin Batiste. Both were joyful celebrations of the musicians honored, music interspersed with stories and spoken word tributes. They were perfectly in the tradition of a city where, once we have buried the deceased, the parade begins.

Blanchard’s recital this afternoon was of another character altogether. It was more like the full funeral package, with all of the the sadness and solemnity of the service and the recession from the church and march to the cemetery. The Reverend-esque Blanchard spoke of the deceased and offered an excellent homily.There was his tale of boat rescuers, of people being taken out told to be quiet so the people left behind that trip might not hear them, told to cover their children’s eyes as they passed through an area full of dead bodies, introduced the piece “Funeral Dirge”.

His homily was on the importance of Lee’s film, When The Levees Broke. He told the tale of his mother asked by Spike Lee to let him film her first return to her ruined home, of how he warned her what having a full film crew following her might mean at such a difficult and delicate moment, of how proud he was that she insisted. People, his mother told him, need to know what happened down here. This led into the piece “Dear Mom”.

When they were not playing, Blanchard and his group were as serious as their subject, and as the music they composed. It seemed fitting for the piece of music a friend of mine told me before the show was the one he would put on when he felt compelled to escape his home on the sliver by the river to drive around Gentilly, sometimes checking on homes he had gutted to see if any have made progress. When he does this, he said, he will sometimes bawl like a baby.

At the first orchestral passage, Blanchard reached up to his face and wiped with his fingers just beneath his glasses as if to wipe away tears, a motion I last saw on a jazz stage at a Red Cross benefit in Fargo, N.D., after New Orleans trumpeter Marc Braud spoke of recovering his instrument as the rest of that band played “Do You Know What It Means”.

The audience I could see (and I was rapt and could not turn my head away from the stage) were just as transported. The WWOZ DJ who sat in front of me was not the outgoing, crowd-working celebrity I had seen in the tent and up on stage announcing the rest of the day, but sat solemn as a sphinx. The other stage announcer, a man in a red t-shirt and dreadlocks, sat at the foot of the stage looking not at the musicians but stared straight ahead into some private place. A woman came and sat beside him and put her arm around him.

As Blanchard spoke and the musicians played, the rain that had held off all day finally broke in torrents, as if the music had moved not just a few thousands in this tent on this day but had seized the hearts of the heavenly host and moved them to tears as well as they considered the Odd mix of pain and beauty that is God’s Will.

It was also, as I promised Friday, a time of joy. As the band wailed through the beautiful Ashe and the straight ahead jazz numbers that ended the concert, the LPO musicians who had sat at attention in their best, serious concert poses, began to be transported by the music as well. The first violin began to show a shy smile, and to bob her head in time as members of the audience around me did. An incredulous cello in a John Brown beard divided his attention between an incredible bass solo and watching the drummer. When Blanchard called on the audience to help him by taking of the chant “This is a tale of God’s will” from the album’s opening cut, we were all transported without moving to the Gospel Tent and the moment of redemption many of us had come for arrived at last.

As I had hoped, Blanchard’s quintet and the LPO had drowned the bitch in beauty and flooded the streets with tears of joy.

Also, don’t miss the podcast interview which Blanchard’s team (he mentioned bringing in his personal sound man and tour manager to run the boards) had put up the very same evening.

N.B. Fixed numerous typos. Must not try to post when dead tired and trying to rush out the door to the Fairgrounds. Thanks G.P.

Last update: here’s another camera video of an excerpt of Ashe’.

Not to brag but mostly to show off the cool artwork, this picture (and the priviledge to display it) are the prize in NOLA Notes and Pete’s best Jazz Fest blog contest. Its kind of them to think so where there are so many fine writers and photographers in the NOLA bloggers community. Also you should get over to NOLA Notes and Pontchartrain Pete to check out the category winners.

“I told you I would be here.
It was important that I came.
I’m leaving but I’ll be back again.
Will you be here?”
— Shelton Alexander

Terrence Blanchard. Requiem for Katrina. Tomorrow at Jazz Fest

We will drown the bitch in beauty and flood the city with tears of joy.

Will you be there?

Update: Replacing generic Terence Blanchard YouTube with a camera video shot May 2, 2008 at Jazz Fest, an excerpt from Funeral Dirge from Blanchard’s A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina), featuring Blanchard’s Quintet and the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra.

So, some Swiss guy passed on at 102, or so I just read. Apparently he did something important in the realm of chemistry. I’m not sure what the problem was he worked on, but apparently the Solution was 25. We like to keep up on such things here on Toulouse Street, especially if these have any tendency toward The Odd. In remembrance of this science dude, whoever he was, we offer the following lovely mathematical abstract representation of, uh, well, I don’t know: an Experience. Just go with the flow. You’re in the hands of experts.

I rather like the video I posted last December better, but I can never hear this song too many times. Neither can you. Surrender yourself to the Gospel of Garcia. And then there’s the fractals, such a lovely tribute to all things chemical mathematical.

If I were the last astronaut left alive on the trip to Jupiter, this would be the end of my movie.

NOLA Slate’s blog is back after a long hiatus. Read her chilling story of her adventure in the downtown ER in New Orleans one night not so long ago.

What is it about Uptown that causes some people to be so congenitally unpleasant? (I’m struggling to compose this in my head without reference to any offensive body part or function; we’ll see). You know the ones, the kids who grew up hanging out at the Valencia or by the Southern Yacht Club pool, the kids from certain high schools who ran in circles as exclusive as (and preparatory to) Rex or Comus. Yeah, them.

Perhaps it’s living in such grand houses in a city otherwise tightly squeezed onto the small slivers of high land hereabouts, the narrow streets and crowded rows of houses that confront Them when They venture out the door and off Their own block. Maybe it is the tangles of traffic in parts of town with no wide boulevards, streets crowded with people who don’t know who They are, hourlies and layabouts passing their day without the sort of important appointments They keep. Perhaps it was the pre-gentrification habit of keeping one’s servants close by in those claustrophobic little houses, and the uncomfortable situation as the master-servant relationship changed over the decades in ways visually expressed by the replacement of lawn jockeys and faux carriage posts with discrete private police patrol warning signs.

They are (at least in part) the people of Women of the Storm, our self-appointed ambassadors to the outside world–people who still know when to wear hat and gloves, people who own their own evening clothes and periodically cast them off so that slobs like us can have cheap tuxes as needed in their fine Uptown thrift shops. They travel to Washington and New York to let the Right Sort of People know that They have things down here under control, that its safe to invest in our recovery. I am glad these people do what they do whatever their motives I am not ready to condemn an honest evangelist for New Orleans until they transgress simple decency and fairness.

Then there are people like Stacey Head: evangelists only for their own advancement, for the opportunity to profit by the flood and to flush out what they might deem “undesirables” from their idealized city, who would love to carry us back to old Virginny bayou style. They aren’t terribly fond of anyone coming home who can’t afford a proper and tasteful house in spite of the tremendous escalation of prices after the storm and the collapse of the private insurance market. They are people who resent all those low-rent types and their dependents; you know, the ones who mix Their drinks, bus Their tables and make Their beds. Stacy is noted recently for blowing kisses (presumably in farewell) to the noisy public housing demonstrators, symbolically dismissing the people who make the local t-shirt-and-tits, beads-and-beer economy work. And then there was her clever remark about people so déclassé that they would rent poisonous FEMA trailers to live in because they have no other homes to come back to.

Stacey represents the Young Turk wing of the people who gave us a generation of economic stagnation and sat idly by as public education imploded after desegregation; the ones who quietly applauded as their hirelings in Washington diverted hurricane protection funds to the Inner Harbor Navigation Lock and who were convinced the MRGO would bring us a future of prosperity; they are the people who had themselves gerrymandered into suburban Congressional districts so they could at least have a Congressman they could call on when needed. They are the people who helped engineer the election and then the re-election of Clarence Ray Nagin. Heck of a job, guys, heck of a job.

They are the people who no doubt applaud the $50 Jazz Fest ticket and sorely wish they were just a bit higher, given some of the people you might encounter at the Fair Grounds. As they used to say when I lived in North Dakota, 40 Below Keeps the Riff-Raff Out: a principle someone like Stacy would no doubt admire. Too bad I can no longer bring her back a t-shirt from the Fargo International Airport like the one I saw on my first trip there. Those now retired “40 Below” shirts featured a shadow caricature of a man with an afro and a pimp hat. Very classy.

In addition to making the world safe for mohitos and driving the trailer trash into the land of Nod, Stacy has found a new job as Goodwill Ambassador for New Orleans.

This comment from Humid Haney’s Rant blog was confirmed as legitimate in an email by the woman who posted it, and her husband has in fact sent a nasty letter to the Times-Picayune. She wondered in her reply email if Ms. Head didn’t in fact have friends at the T-P who might make sure it never sees the light of day. I think there’s a good chance Ashton the Second might keep such a letter under wraps. (Ashton. Wow. Where do they get these names for their children, from lines of clothing they saw at Perlis?)

Here’s the entire post from Humid Haney’s, confirmed by the author via email.

Please let me share a story that my fiance sent to the editor of the local paper. It tells about a recent encounter we had with Stacy Head:

My family and I just returned from a wonderful visit to 2008 New Orleans and Jazz Fest. I have attended every Jazz Fest since 1983. My 11 and 9 year old daughters have attended every Jazz Fest since their respective births. My fiancé has enjoyed the region and its offerings on no less than five separate occasions since we met a year and a half ago. Despite the rainy weather we loved the first weekend, as always, and will be back for weekend 2. While we have not lived the post-Katrina challenges directly, we certainly empathize with the challenges. It has been encouraging to see the improvement during our many post-Katrina visits. We joined the Audubon Zoo last year knowing it was unlikely we would get a chance to visit regularly, but hoping the funds would be put to good use. I have lived and worked in New Orleans and in Baton Rouge for years and someday we hope to be able to return to the area to live. I guess I know enough about the area’s culture to realize that the foregoing “credentials” are helpful to what I am now going to say.

Unfortunately, our Jazz Fest experience was marred by a dispute over seating in the blues tent on Friday. I left to take my daughters to the porta-potties. My fiancé held our three seats. When we returned 15 minutes later, she was in deep discussion with several women. It turns out that they asked if our seats were available. The response, “no, but you can sit in them until the rest of the party returns”. As we returned, the women refused to get up, demanded we move down to use an open seat—not a bad idea, but we were still short a seat–etc. Our group, including young children, had to witness a less than kind interaction which included my fiancé being called a “Yankee bitch”–she from Kentucky with as strong a Southern heritage (and accent) as it comes. When the group of aggressors finally left, one of the women came behind my fiancé and proceeded to verbally dress her down at length. While perturbed by the incident, we attempted to enjoy the rest of the set. Of note, several seats opened up around us within two or three minutes (it was early in the day).

What happened next amazed us. A pleasant middle aged gentleman came up and apologized to us noting that he was embarrassed because the “leader of the pack” was Councilwoman Stacy S. Head. He indicated that he had introduced himself to her a few minutes before the altercation as she represented his district. He “couldn’t believe” how she and her group had acted. Sure enough when we checked the internet that evening it was Ms. Head who led the altercation. While her web-site boasts, stated credentials, church membership, etc. are all very interesting; I would submit that New Orleans deserves to be represented by better. As long as interactions are led with hostility and followed by put-downs such as that chosen by Ms. Head (Yankee bitch) New Orleans will not move forward. I have always been bemused by endless editorials about “outsiders who do not understand, have proper appreciation, etc.” The fact is the region has rich cultural and tourist offerings-perhaps better than any other in the nation. That said attitudes like those displayed by Ms. Head can deter all but the most committed from wanting to visit. We will be back because of our love for the area, but had Ms. Head randomly abused a first time visitor I can imagine a different result. A city that prides itself on tourism and is reliant upon tourist trade needs to rethink its approach beginning with what its elected leaders convey. Something is fundamentally wrong when people who visit have to do so “in spite of…”

Fuckmook.

N.B. Any hint of class resentment in this post is entirely intended and historically accurate. I want to take this opportunity to apologize to Thomas Agnew and his parents for the boorish behavior of all those nouveau-riches Lakefront types from C.B.S. who came to your lovely home St. Charles Avenue home for that eighth-grade party many years ago, who proceeded to get fabulously drunk on liquor looted from their parents and then introduce your delicate future debutantes to “poppin’ the gator” to The Guess Who’s “American Woman”. Not that I regret it. It was, in that Odd way we relish here on Toulouse Street, as perfect a moment of ritualized class conflict as anyone could imagine. The Agnews may take some comfort that at least one of us turned out better than might have been expected, mounting a creditable recent campaign for Congress in the near suburbs. I’m pretty sure He doesn’t want your trailer folk either, Stacey, so you can forget busing them in from the North Shore.

I don’t know how many of the happy hippy mud dancers or tourists at the Jazz and Heritage Stage at Jazz Fest Sunday understood what it meant when little Dinerral Shavers Junior took the stage holding his father’ s instrument, the snare drum, with his father’s band, the Hot 8. For a kid who didn’t look much older than seven or eight he did a creditable job. I just wish I’d gotten a decent picture. You can see a bit of a blur in one picture of one of the two young men from one of the marching clubs that joined the band on stage. Seeing those three young boys walking in their father’s steps was impressive and encouraging.

May the line of warrior drummers be unbroken in New Orleans.

Remember, you can contribute to the education of this young man who lost his father tragically and at such an early age at The Dinerral Shavers Educational Fund.

N.B. Looking at the pictures while less tired on Monday, I went back and checked then fixed the reference to Dinerral Shavers Jr.’s age to be seven or eight, per this post at NOLA.com.