The Levee Breaks

The news from New Orleans and the rest of the Gulf just keeps getting worse. Reports from the city itself tell a story of destruction on a comicbook scale, the kind of all-encompassing devastation that levels fictitious cities when writers run out of ideas. Can't figure out any new villains for Batman? Lets destroy Gotham with a cataclysmic earthquake. People are bored with Superman? Lets kill him and crush half of Metropolis for good measure. People love disasters!

First the Hurricane-force winds and driving rains, now the levee has indeed broken and Lake Pontchartrain pours into the city like an enormous, festering, overflowing bathtub. Looters have set themselves to the task of destroying as much of what's left of the city's economy before what's left of the National Guard can force them out to dry land. Power is out, food and water are scarce and lawlessness rules the land. Plagues of locusts may soon invade the city for all we know.

I can only hope that the dire predictions of the chattering classes prove false. That New Orleans will not be abandoned, that the Cresent City can be resurrected and throngs of drunken revelers will once again party long into the Bourbon Street night. We can't allow New Orleans to become the American Pompeii. The city can be rebuilt, and the surrounding marshes and coastline restored to provide better protection from future calamities. It won't be easy without super powers, and it will take more than just a few monthly installments. But it can be done, and hopefully will.

Who's famous from UNCC?

Hurricane reports have been too much. Can't really formulate any coherent thoughts on the devastation, the deaths, the intrusive news coverage of weeping victims.

Until I can get my head around Katrina, here's a little answer to the eternal question:

Forget Clay Aiken.

Here's a former 49er who allegedly murdered his girlfriend, then hid out in Atkins' Tower.

The kids at The Times must be plotzing over this one.

I scream, you scream ...

I love Ice Cream. Some scientists in Europe or some country where they study things like this determined that eating ice cream activates endorphines in your brain and sends happy waves to your pleasure center so it's practically a drug.

With that in mind, we bought an ice cream maker at the C & B a few weeks ago. Nothing brings a smile to your face like watching all that creamy bad-for-you-but-you-can't-help-yourself goodness swirling around in ever thicker gobs. Just add the mixins!

The peppermint tasted grat, but the texture was all wrong. We abandoned the healthy milk for full-on milk and cream for the next batches. What do you do when Breyers stops making your favorite flavor? You gather together some chocolate-covered almonds and coconut shavings and make it yourself, that's what.

But, the greatest of all flavors is the ice-cream version of the Jack Daniel's Chocolate Chip Pecan Pie.

Mmmmmm ... Ice Cream and Tennessee Sipping Whiskey ... a potent combination. Note: call Lynchburg.

All the News That's Fit to Print

There's a story about rampant crime and soaring drug problems in today's NYT, so of course the dateline says Baltimore. The shocking thing about this particular story is that our recently minted police commish's stepdaughter is a drug addict.

Wow.

Who needs HBO to watch The WIre?

Time used to be it was cool to see your city or state in The Times, but that was back in NC. Sure some stories were the typical northeasterners-looking-down-on-southerners stuff: "Racist does something stupid," "Rednecks are different from the rest of us," "what's up with NASCAR?" That sort of thing. But every once in a while, something positive, or at least diffferent. Like Charlotte talking about taking down the overstreet mall, or mountainbiking in Asheville. Or Gov. Easley watching King of the Hill to stay in touch with his good ol' boy roots.

Hmmm. Maybe Martin O'Malley should go up to Times Square and give them a piece of his mind. Or start his own blog like Tony Williams in DC.

Texans I don't hate

I could probably count on one hand the number of Texans I like, and James McMurtry definitely makes the cut. I first heard his roots rock on WNCW back in our Asheville days (sigh), and loved his rollicking music and intricate lyrics.

Thank god for the Web. I just learned on WNCW's online stream that he's releasing a new album, "Childish Things," on Spetember 6. It includes We Can't Make It Here, a great song available for download on his official Web site (no lawbreakers here!).

Download it only if you want to buy his album, because you won't be able to say no once you hear it!

Polish class

As some of you know, I've been taking a Polish class at the Community college in Catonsville. Finished last night. We had our final exam. It covered everything we learned from the beginning of the semester, so it was pretty tough.

A few people got hurt trying to screw in the lightbulb, but I did okay. Almost walked into the bar, then saw the door at the last minute. A close one for sure.

We also had to list 5 scams and how to avoid them, like the "Corner in the Round Room" hoax. I got a pretty high score on cleaning the house before the firemen show up, but I've always been pretty orderly. Singed my pants a little at the last minute, but you should have seen this other guy.

We had a little disturbance when the German class in the next room broke in and tried to take our desks. We managed to fight them off, but they still took the desks, and a few chairs too. We had to finish the class sitting on the floor. We could hear some grumbling from the Russian classroom, but the bell rang, so we all went home.

Magic District Rats

Everytime we escape Smaltimore for the District, we find another new reason to make the move permanent.

Better mass transit, better restaurants, more stores, more places to walk to without getting jacked .. and falafel.

So I hear Baltimore indeed has falafel; so I have heard many things about that blighted city that have proven false. Perhaps this will be different, but I doubt there is anything in Charm City that comes close to the divine inspiration of Amsterdam Falafel in Adams Morgan.

A hole in the wall falafel shop with only 3 things on the menu: Large and Small Falafel and French Fries, the perfect urban experience. This is what a city is. Walk around all day, eat great food from another country, and take the train when you're too tired to walk. Charm City's gots nothing on DC in this respect.

With an eye to the south, we wait for the housing bubble to burst.

Bubble Puppy

Stomp y'all's feet and holler, for the Southern Sampler has arrived!

Ever since Oxford American went under a few years ago, then came back, each Music Issue since constitutes a minor miracle. And I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it's available in Mary-Land, that bizzarro limbo world not quite South and not quite North.

The magazine of southern culture, skids and all, puts out a fantastic CD each summer chock-full of the most eclectic mix of southern music you'll ever hear.

This means not just blues and bluegrass, but a wide array of musical genres stretching across genres, generations and thousands of miles. Elvis and Erykah, yodelers and cowboys, even psychedelic rock.

The CD alone is worth it, but read the magazine anyway, okay? Like expanded liner notes, it covers each artist in-depth with great photos and art, plus a few extra articles on music in general.

If you buy only one southern magazine with a CD, make it this one.

Burkarama

We saw the movie Osama a few weeks ago on the recommendation of a coworker. For those of you who don't know, Osama is the story of a young girl who is forced to pose as a boy because of Taliban restrictions on women. This was the first movie made in Afganistan after the taliban were ousted in 2001-2002, and critics of all cultural and political stripes fell over themselves to praise the film.

The problem with movies created after decades of religious-fundamentalist rule is that quality tends to go downhill. Just look at what Hollywood's been churning out lately.

The story jumps from one scene to another with no sense of order or place. The acting, understandably, is god-awful. I'm sure they literally grabbed people off the street in these towns and put a camera in front of them. Even with subtitles it was hard to understand what was going on.

Even though the movie illustrated the horrible conditions that Afgans, especially women, had to endure under taliban rule, the flat and lifeless characters hardly illicited any sympathy. The girl, renamed Osama, cries through most of the film and never stands up for herself or, really, does much of anything.

I have to say that I'm impressed these folks managed to produce a movie at all under post-war conditions. Unfortunately, their good intentions have gone for naught.

A much better story about life in Afganistan is The Kite Runner, a fantastic novel by Khaled Hosseini that traces the life of a boy who grew up in relative welath before the soviet invasion, fled to the US with his father, then returns years later during the taliban years to seek atonement for a terrible sin he committed in his youth. A movie is in the works, and should be coming out next year or the year after.

City Mouse

The news is comforting. Articles appear, here and there, stating that retailers and developers are rediscovering the city as people give up their tract homes in sprawling nowhere suburbs for close-in, urban neighborhoods. Even Baltimore, still suffering from decades of neglect and abandonment, has found new life as young couples flee the suburbs that were supposed to keep them safe as children. Not enough to stem the tide of suburban sprawl, but a start.

Despite what some conservative critics may say, cities, not small towns, are the true foundation for our civilization. Centers of commerce, art, culture, philosophy, science and technology, they are the incubators of human enterprises, the engines of our economy, the cradles for our greatest artistic achieivements. I don't pretend that cities are perfect. Crime, poverty and corruption are common from New York to Asheville, but are not merely urban phenomena. Crime threatens all communities, large and small, some of the most devastating poverty can be found in mountainside trailer parks, and corruption depends on power and greed, not population density, to thrive.

Each aspect of daily life is cut off in the Sprawl. Nothing can be reached on foot; homes, offices, stores and schools are segregated from each other across miles of freeway. Each person is isolated, divorced of human connection except, sometimes, the family. This isolation destroys community and slowly kills the institutions of democracy that bind us together in common cause. It is no wonder that the progressive values of community, tolerance and cooperation are disappearing while selfish self-interest and intolerance creep into our cultural and political life.

When Americans began to abandon cities in the 60s and 70s, we were abandoning our civilization itself. As we rediscover and rebuild our cities, undoing the mistakes that made us leave in the first place, we will also rediscover and rebuild our civilization.