Category: America

I haven’t really been able to write about New Orleans. Part of it is that I’ve been on the road. But that’s an excuse. I haven’t wanted to think about it. New Orleans, even though I only visited once, figures so deeply in my growth as a young man that I can’t bear to think of what has happened to it.

I’ve written a little about my discovery of jazz. In the year or two afterwards I started diving in deeper—broadening my listening to many of the 60s-era greats, developing an appreciation for the avant garde. But I didn’t understand the roots of the music. (And I certainly wasn’t going to learn listening to Wynton Marsalis, who, though he was pretty well grounded in the traditions, was compositionally just as avant garde as his brother, in an extremely traditionalist sort of way.) So I was completely unprepared for what I found when we rolled into New Orleans and stumbled into the back of Preservation Hall.

To set the context, this was the same trip as our nocturnal visit to William Faulkner’s house. So, by the time we rolled into New Orleans we had been on the road for four days and several thousand miles, all on a bus and a small minivan, and were looking and smelling and feeling awful. We had a gig that first night, a concert at the Church of the Most Holy Name of Jesus (aka Holy Name) at Loyola, which is a story in and of itself, and then a reception hosted by the local alumni club with liquid refreshments, followed by a mass exodus to a local student watering hole. It was there that I had my first (and last, I think) Hurricane. But I still hadn’t really seen the city.

The next morning I walked with friends to the Café du Monde, through the French Quarter, past a voudoun shop or two, into a storefront for a po’ boy, out and along a levee. I particularly remember the levee, as the heat and humidity were really getting to me, but I was still awestruck by the scale of the thing. It didn’t look like something that could be broken apart like a cracker.

But the jazz? That night I don’t remember where we ate or anything else, just lining up with Poulson Reed and John McLaughlin outside Preservation Hall, where there was a crowd—despite the lack of drinks, or anything else that might pass for conventional tourist New Orleans, inside. What there was, was the band. Percy and Willie Humphrey were still there, in their 70s or 80s but still playing. A big sign behind the band said, “Requests $2. ‘Saints’ $10,” suggesting that perhaps they had been asked to play “When The Saints Go Marching In” one too many times. The music was rough, unpolished, sloppy in some ways, but amazingly compelling. I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. This was both stranger and more wonderful than I could have expected.

The night ended some hours later in Pat O’Brien’s, but for me, it was over when we left Preservation Hall. A seed had been planted in me that led to my exploring not only older jazz but also other American musical experiences—the “old, weird America” that shared the roughness and power of the seven septuagenarians in a rundown old unpainted hall playing for a rapt audience on wooden benches.

And now, it’s gone.

Update: Greg points me to a story that suggests there is a happier ending.

Two personal thoughts this morning for residents of the Gulf Coast: one family friend who’s visiting my parents right now who has no idea what has happened to his Mississippi house and whose wife is stranded (but safe) at a hotel with no power; one for Hooblogger Todd at Frolic, who has now updated after a scary silence (turns out he was just out of the country).

For those who unlike my friends were in the city, prayers, of course, but also support. Governor Howard Dean has joined other voices in my inbox asking for donations to the Red Cross (see details for making a donation at the DNC). It’s going to take a lot of help. As Dave pointed out, the city is under sea level, so the flood waters aren’t going to go down on their own without a lot of pumping.

Half the Sins of Mankind points to the statement of copyright that Woody Guthrie wrote for his “This Land is Your Land”:

This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.

Right on, Woody.

This is going to get a little more interesting later today, I’m told. Here’s the teaser. For us code-heads, the interesting part is behind the scenes; stay tuned.

Library of Congress: The James Madison Papers. A welcome addition to the trove of primary documents from our founding fathers that are now available online. Searchable, of course, though since I can’t link directly to a search results page you’ll have to try it out for yourself. (I suggest the searching the keyphrase university of virginia.)

Also of interest: this essay on Madison’s use of code and cipher, which will resonate with readers of Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. Interestingly, some of his cryptographic correspondents included Edmund Randolph, James Monroe and Thomas Jefferson (this detail is left out of most Jefferson biographies).

Sadly, the images of the papers don’t come with transcriptions. This is a frustrating flaw in an otherwise impressive collection.

CNET News.blog: Patriot Act’s technology-related sections to be scrutinized. Declan McCullagh posts a brief summary to the three sections in question, all of which are subject to the “sunset” provisions mercifully contained in the original act. Section 209 concerns the rules for police access to voicemail stored on a provider’s system; 217 makes it easier for law enforcement to assist computer system owners in monitoring unauthorized intrusions; and 220 allows search warrants for locations anywhere in the country to be issued from the district where the crime occurs.

Declan points to a very cogent debate on 209 and 220 between Jim Dempsey and Orin Kerr, which boils down to: the need for some of the changes in these sections are clear to bring the law into the electronic world, but so is the need for extension of constitutional checks and balances on these new powers. Kerr suggests that including a suppression remedy (ensuring that improperly obtained evidence is suppressed in subsequent proceedings); extending civil action and administrative discipline guidelines to ensure that emergency exceptions are not abused; and finally some concern about how users should be notified if their electronic records are searched.

Boing Boing: TSA screener: 2-book max on flights. Ross Mayfield has an interesting conversation with a TSA screener in which the screener mentions that the number of books to be allowed in carry-on will be decreased from four to two. Is this simple confusion between matchbooks (which would make sense in the context of the rest of Ross’s conversation) and literature, or does the TSA actually think that books are possible hijacking weapons? My money is on the former, but it’s too good a story not to share.

NY Times: List of Schiavo Donors Will Be Sold by Direct-Marketing Firm. Just when I had resolved to keep my mouth shut about the Schiavo case, this comes along. I’m not sure there’s a more heinous way to repay the kindness of strangers than to sell their personal information to a direct marketing firm.

I think I agree with the angle in this article—that the parents are so focused on their daughter’s last days that they aren’t paying attention to what the people around them are asking them to agree to. But I think that anything coming from the Christian Communication Network’s Gary McCullough, who was present with the Schindlers when the deal was made, or from Phil Sheldon, who actually struck the deal, that talks about morality and values from now on is pretty suspect. Because if there’s something that’s lower than selling the names of people who are donating money to keep your daughter alive to spam merchants, it’s persuading vulnerable and grieving parents that it’s OK to do so.

Tucson Citizen: ‘Threatening’ T-shirt barred from TCC. See the University of Arizona Young Democrats page for coverage and photos of the T-shirt. Good to know that we’re still using taxpayer dollars to keep opposing viewpoints and political parties at bay. Also, good for the student in question, Steven Gerner, who comes out sounding calm and rational when others (myself, for instance) might be a little steamed:

“It’s really important that I’m an informed citizen. I can’t do that unless I open up and listen to the other position on the issue,” Gerner said. “Regardless of what side of the aisle President Bush is on, he’s still the president of the United States, and it’s an honor to be in the presence of any elected official.”

Thanks to Oliver Willis for the link.

Whiskey Bar: Scenes From the Cultural Revolution. A simple compare-and-contrast between rhetoric and incidents from the current conservative backlash on college campuses and Mao’s “Cultural Revolution.” But we don’t need to worry about the implications of the comparison, right? Because America is different…

The Left has taken over academe. We want it back.

Mike Rosen, Rocky Mountain News columnist
CU is Worth Fighting For
March 4, 2005

In this great Cultural Revolution, the phenomenon of our schools being dominated by bourgeois intellectuals must be completely changed.

Central Committee of the
Communist Party of China
Resolutions of the Eleventh Plenum
August 1966

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For those on the right, true freedom requires more diversity—which, to them, means more conservatives in faculty ranks. “If the system were fair,” says Larry Mumper, sponsor of the Ohio bill, “Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity would be tenured professors somewhere.”

Time
Fighting Words 101
March 7, 2005

“We will strike down the reactionary, bourgeois academic savants! … We will vigorously establish proletarian intellectual authorities, our own academic savants.”

Lin Piao, Deputy Chairman
Communist Party of China
Speech to Red Guards
August 18, 1966

Hat tip to Fury for the link.

…or, as the US Senate decided yesterday in its infinite wisdom, we could just keep looking for those remaining pockets of fossil fuels like a crack addict searching for that last rock that he knows he dropped somewhere.

When one of the last pristine places on earth gets covered in pipes; when the first spill happens; when the caribou go extinct; and when the price of fuel keeps going up regardless, even after we get the first oil from that formerly pristine refuge ten years from now, I want every one of those 51 senators to wake up, look in the mirror, and say, “This is personally on my head.”

Of course, the other question has to be: where was the Democratic leadership? Given the inevitability of the Bush ideology juggernaut rolling over everything, did no one at least try to attach a rider to fund development of alternative energy resources?

Ars Technica: Followup: The FEC, FUD, and the blogpocalypse, Round II. Meant to post this yesterday as a followup to my earlier comments on the FEC’s commissioner. This is the other shoe, how it looks from the perspective of a Democrat, Ellen Weintraub, on the commission:

Reports of a Federal Election Commission plot to “crack down” on blogging and e-mail are wildly exaggerated. First of all, we’re not the speech police. We don’t tell private citizens what they can or cannot say, on the Internet or anywhere else. The FEC regulates campaign finance. There’s got to be some money involved, or it’s out of our jurisdiction.

Second, let’s get the facts straight. Congress, in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, limited how one can pay for communications that are coordinated with political campaigns, including any form of “general public political advertising.” The commission issued a regulation defining those communications to exempt anything transmitted over the Internet. A judge struck down that regulation as inconsistent with the law. So now we’re under a judicial mandate to consider whether anything short of a blanket exemption that will do. For example, can paid advertisements on the Web, when coordinated with a particular campaign, be considered an in-kind contribution to that campaign? Context is important, and the context here has everything to do with paid advertising, and nothing to do with individuals blogging and sending e-mails.

Third, anyone who says they know what this proposed regulation will address must be clairvoyant, because the commissioners have yet to consider even a draft of the document that will set out the scope of any such rule…

So that’s interesting. Going after bloggers isn’t an option, but going after paid advertising is. What about going after paid bloggers?

Jeff Jarvis seems about as ambivalent about Commissioner Smith’s statement as I am, but says more strongly than I did that it smells like a stunt. MetaFilter has weighed in as well. The consensus is: either he’s pushing the commission’s rulings to their logical or illogical extremes so that the Supremes will have to smack down McCain-Feingold in toto, or he’s pushing bloggers’ buttons so they’ll work even harder to take down his political opponents as they did Dan Rather.

Both are dangerous strategies.

Why else would the White House and Justice Department step in to ask the courts to deny compensation to American POWs from the first Gulf War while saying that America ought to compensate Iraqis who were tortured by Americans in Abu Ghraib?

I’ve been pleased to see Howard Dean step up to the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee. Like him or laugh at him, he’s espoused some solid stands on things that matter, not centrist waffling, and has proven that he can energize at least some of the base. Of course, I also note that the media continues to replay the Scream clip every time they talk about this, no matter how long it’s been debunked. Oliver Willis is also keeping an ear out for bias in the way the coverage is handled, including a less-than-up-and-up blind quote question in the press conference.