Five Years After, Part I

After viewing Spike Lee’s two-part follow-up to his justifiably acclaimed documentary When the Levees Broke, we must conclude that Lee is a very talented filmmaker. How else to explain the fact that we were again moved, on several different levels (including, yeah, intellectually) by Lee’s handiwork, despite the cartoonish lack of subtlety in his politics –– similar to what the filmmaker would doubtless impute to Tea Partiers –– and the occasional teeth-grinding bzzzzzz of his polemics. Not that Lee makes any pretense to two-sides-to-the-story objectivity (Correction: Apparently he does!). He’s a storyteller, not a reporter. Still, the first season of David Simon’s Treme, a fictional account of post-Katrina New Orleans, demonstrated a greater journalistic scrupulousness than Lee’s non-fictional If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise, even though Simon surely shares Lee’s somewhat unfocused and widely diffused anger ––and, hey, we must be angry, all goddamn day long ––- at what happened to New Orleans.

Houston, we should note, comes off pretty good in Lee’s latest, although the segment on the city launches off in unpromising fashion with pictures of the rodeo parade and a sign for the annual big gun show at the Brown center. The music and hue of the film both darken at that point –– to suggest, we guess, that “These peckerwoods are liable to string me and any other person of color up in the middle of the night,” but we suspect, hope, that Lee, who’s got a pretty good sense of humor, offered up these rodeo week vignettes as sly juxtaposition to what follows (if not, then he’s a big dummy).* A couple of pastors –– a black preacher who relocated from New Orleans and now leads a church in South Houston, a white guy (not Ed Young) from Second Baptist –– recall those hectic post-Katrina weeks when Houston took in who-knows-how-many hurricane refugees and, in what was surely one of this nation’s recent great moments of charity and forbearance, worked like hell to get them settled. Our alcaldesa appears in an interview on the steps of City Hall, looking like a spunky cowgirl in her Go Texan Day attire (is her name, we idly wondered, hand-tooled on the back of that belt with the gigantic buckle?) and, or so it seemed to us, slightly inflating her role in the resettlement effort (she does mention that she was called into action by the then “present mayor” or “mayor at the time,” something like that, although Bill White remains anonymous and unseen throughout the short Houston segment of Lee’s film). The mayor notes that while many New Orleanians have returned home from Houston, plenty of them, who knows how many, decided to drop anchor and have blended into the city. Lee interviews three of them in what, to us, was the most arresting part of the film’s first installment, as their comments neatly illustrated the differences between the two cities, for better or worse. One of the evacuees, a Calvin Green, or Greene, formerly of Treme, tells Lee that once he landed in Houston he decided to find him a wife, the first prerequisite being that she own a house. Next to him is home-owning now-wife, a nurse he first ran into at the Reliant Center in the days after Katrina and later re-hooked-up with, somehow. Green says his second criterion for a suitable mate was that she have good feet –– “I have a foot fetish,” he helpfully explains –– and Lee obligingly gives us a brief shot of Mrs. Green’s nicely pedicured and painted toes. I’m sorry, but Houston needs more people like Calvin Green, or Greene.

Listing more toward deeply ambivalent are Colvina “Rita” McCoy and Catherine Montana Gordon, mother and sister, respectively, of Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, who was such an engaging presence in When the Levees Broke, later landed a prominent role in Simon’s Treme (nobody, not even that “Susie” character from Curb Your Enthusiasm, does cuss-fueled spousal anger like Mrs. LeBlanc,), and opens Creek Don’t Rise stridently declaiming some Bad Poetry while wearing a Saints‘ jersey. Mses. McCoy and Gordon are living in what appears to be a very nice and comfortable brick home in Humble, and Ms. Gordon goes on at length extolling the virtues of the local school district, where, apparently for the first time, her special-needs son was able to access widely available services that apparently were not provided in New Orleans. (“Life Skills,” she says, enunciating the name of the routinely available class for special-education students. “I had never heard of Life Skills!”) Still, Ms. Gordon wishes aloud that “we could take what we have here and move it all [to NOLA],” while her moms, in a moment sure to endear her to the local chamber of commerce, avows, “I hate Humble.” This sounds churlish and ungrateful, and probably is, but we forgive:** Humble isn’t New Orleans (Humble isn’t even Houston), and Houston’s not New Orleans, and what Houston obviously lacks in NOLA’s je ne sais qoui and joie de vive*** and [insert overworked French phrase of your choice here] it makes up for in an ability to put people to work and make the trains run on time, or at least in offering Life Skills classes.

*We personally don't care about how the media "portray" Houston, but we know that many locals do, so let us note the obvious: What Spike Lee says about Houston is exponentially more influential than, say, what the Greater Houston Partnership says about Houston.

**Actually, we wouldn't want to live in Humble, either, unless somebody gave us a free house there (even then ....).
***That, at least, is the outside perception, but not, as we long-timers know, the reality. We believe it was the late philosopher manque Juke Boy Bonner (Christian name: "Weldon") who proclaimed that Houston Is an Action Town ("We got womenfolk in the street flagging the menfolk down" ... and, as Mr. Bonner might have added, we got menfolk flagging menfolk down, etc.). As we've often noted in the past, recent and distant, you can find just about anything you want here, if you look hard enough.

We wrote it down so we wouldn’t forget: Past postings on Katrina.

Be TRU to Your School, Like You Would to Your Girl (If You, Like, Had a Girl)

NOTE: Despite an almost unanimous lack of public interest in his return to the “blogosphere,” if that’s what it’s still called, Sr. Slampo has reluctantly agreed to take a temporary “hiatus” from his extended hiatus to clamber up on his wheelchair-accessible soapbox and bloviate on an issue that has pitted brother against sister and is rending the very fabric of the city: the proposed purchase of Rice University’s KTRU radio (or its frequency and transmitter, whatever) by the University of Houston. In addition to his overweening need to dictate public policy to his fellow citizens, Slampo says he hopes this exercise in what he quaintly calls “typewriting” will help expunge the chorus of the Bar-Kays’ 1967 smash hit Soulfinger from his head, where it has been in more or less continuous rotation since a chance hearing on 6-23-10. He promises an imminent return to radio silence. -- Hidalgo Hidalgo, editor emeritus and under-assistant West Coast promotion man, Slampo’s Place

We see that the University of Houston’s regents, without bothering to consult us, have voted to proceed with UH’s planned purchase of Rice University’s KTRU, thus angering tens if not dozens of 30ish and 40ish Houstonians who fondly remember Marilyn Mock’s (was that her name?) “S&M Show” on the student-run station’s heyday back in the ‘80s (or whenever). We’re busy and we know you are, too, so we’ll get right to it: This ill-advised bit of empire-building and mission creep by UH is bad. It’s bad for the city, it’s bad for both schools, and, most importantly, it’s bad for us –– that is, me, myself and moi.

Oh, we’re not exactly a regular listener –– we don’t much “listen” to anything on a regular basis, ’cept for the sound of the gently falling rain –– but 91.7 is locked into rotation on our car radio’s digital scan, after KUHF (we do listen to the NPR news shows, and the classical music for its generally calming effect, but never the tiresome Car Talk or that noisome Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me [unless Paula Poundstone gonna be on!], KPFT (where we rarely stop anymore, the wall-to-wall self-righteousness usually giving us a reflexive ear-gag), KTSU ( for the music, especially Myron), and before the couple of stations our 16 year old routinely tortures us with. We couldn’t name a show or a DJ –– OK, it appears that we once immortalized The Soul and Funk Hour in this space –– but we know we can always find something reliably interesting on KTRU, even if it’s that show in the morning (do they still have it?) where somebody reads the Chronicle for the blind (or lazy). We alight on KTRU in the hope that we will hear some obscure blues, jazz or country music or even some screamin’ punk medley to get our blood pressure up in the pre-hypertension zone, and only occasionally are we disappointed. (Yes, we know this is not to everybody’s taste, but that’s because not everybody has taste, ya dig?). So, as Ken Hoffman would put it, here’s five reasons this sale is a bad idea (although we may run out of reasons well in advance of No. 5):

1. We didn’t look this up in Wikipedia, yet, but isn’t the purpose of a college radio station (like that of a college newspaper, or college mahjong club), to teach, to give youngsters hands-on training, “real-world” type experience in running the boards or punching the right buttons or whatever labor is required at a radio station these days? Yes, we believe it is. At Rice, of course, the student deejays get the added benefit of being able to show off their deep and hard-won knowledge of, say, pre-1965 Jamaican proto-ska while routinely mangling the pronunciations of various song titles and artistes (but that’s cool, ’cause, as the Rice motto holds –– or perhaps it’s that of DeVry Business School –– Vita est pro eruditio, meaning, roughly, “It’s Good to Fuck Up Now Because Not Only Is It Humbling But That’s How You Learn.”) We do not detect much of the hand of the student, the amateur, in the production of UH's KUHF.

2. We don’t see this as doing much for Rice-UH relations (the state of which we have absolutely no knowledge of).* Perhaps the mayor, a Rice alum, will be weighing in shortly (but we hope not).

3. Why in the name of Allah and/or Sweet Jesus does UH need two frickin’ radio stations? Will that somehow elevate the school to that coveted Tier 1 status? Perhaps UH’s assembling of a veritable chain of stations –– a broadcast empire! –– will do it. Does HBU have a station, and is it for sale?

4. According to the Chronicle

KUHF CEO John Proffitt said the present station, at 88.7 FM, will switch to an all-news format and the new station, to be named KUHC (91.7), will offer classical music and arts coverage. Both stations will be affiliated with National Public Radio.

Based on the dreary local “news and talk” products pushed by KUHF and sister TV outlet Channel 8, we assume this means the addition of another snooze-inducing, irrelevant outlet to today’s challenging media local landscape, and .... more Car Talk! (sheesh).

5. We’re all out of reasons, but the previous four amount to an unassailable case that should force both institutions to see the error of their way and JUST LEAVE THINGS THE HELL ALONE (which, even here in Houston, is often times the best policy).

*With apologies to Brian Wilson and whoever else of the Beach Boys is still alive.
**Although by inclination we are more of UH person, we have no horse in this race at all. In the interest of disclosure: We were once asked to leave the grounds of Rice by a campus cop or security guard while visiting there back in ’76 or ’77, which left us sore, but later we took a couple of continuing education courses there (one of which, taught by an instructor from St. Thomas, either the high school or college, was pretty good). We did teach as an adjunct prof for a couple of years in the late’90s at UH, our last semester there being highlighted by our single-handed apprehension of four –– count ’em ––plagiarists out of the 15 or so students total. The thefts were so blatant and pathetic that we almost felt like teaching the guilty a lesson in how to be a successful sneak, instead of giving them gentlemen’s ‘C’ that the ol’ boy who ran the department suggested. Whenever Rice is pitted against UH in an athletic contest, our neutral policy dictates that we cheer for whoever’s ahead.

Some Guy Called "Mahatma" Gets His Own "District," But Lightnin' Hopkins Only Rates a Historical Plaque? (Which Is Better Than Nothin')

Like all good Americans, we were pleased to learn that Sam Hopkins is finally getting some belated semi-official recognition in the form of a Texas Historical Commission plaque on a corner of Dowling Street in Third Ward, a thoroughfare named in honor of the Confederate-Irish barkeep who headed off the Yankees at the Pass in the service of the effort to keep Lightnin' Hopkins' forebears enslaved. (Pardon our "presentism," but, man, history is just so damn ironic!)

This is a good thing, of course--the plaque, not slavery--and temporary culmination of efforts that at least to our knowledge began with a long-ago suggestion by the late City Councilwoman Eleanor Tinsley (to whom it was most assuredly suggested by someone else) to rename a street or part of a street after Hopkins. Unsuccessful as it was, this always struck us as a sweet gesture, since Tinsley didn't seem like the kind of gal who'd have listed her self as a friend on Lightnin's Facebook page, if he'd lived long enough to have one. Along the way we, among others, tried to do our small part, weather and our limited attention span permitting. Just think how much hipper it'd be if you yoga ladies (and ge'men) were performing your Sun Salutations in Lightnin' Hopkins Park, rather than the faceless and flavorless Discovery Green (an excellent name for a park in Dubuque, Iowa). So congrats to Eric Davis, the local who spearheaded the effort to make the plaque a reality, or near-reality.

But the plaque is not enough. Just recently, a small swath of the home turf on and around Hillcroft Avenue was designated as the Mahatma Gandhi District, after attempts to rename a nominal stretch of Hillcroft after the most renown member of the Vaishya caste were passed over, shall we say, by property owners of other ethnic origins on the street. (This sepia-toned jester has better suggestions.) As we observed when first apprised of the Hillcroft renaming effort, Gandhi, if we remember the movie correctly, never set foot in Texas, or Houston, or on Hillcroft. (Of course, the street probably wasn't platted until after his death, but that's beside the point). Our understanding is that this designation--made visible by placement of small signs, in the shape of a Hindu temple and bearing Gandhi's likeness, atop the regular street signs--was the result of a private fund-raising effort. (If we're wrong, please correct us.) Our question is: Can anyone apply to so designate a district? And if so, where is the Lightnin' Hopkins District? A memorial sign on Dowling is good and appropriate, but it sort of ghetto-izes the man, who, as we pointed out back on Aug. 23, 2006--yes, we must stoop again to quoting our self, 'cause supper's gettin' cold--"embodied the country-come-to-town spirit" of our big hick burg better than almost anyone we can think of, except for its namesake, the illustrious Illiad-spouting farmboy and drunkard.

Sure, Gandhi made his bones with the non-violent resistance thing and was a huge influence on MLK, but let's be honest: Did he ever play and sing a song that spoke so directly to the human condition as Mini-Skirt? ("You better let your dress down a little more, baby.")

We'd envision this zone as a place where an aging flaneur such as our self could stretch out on a park bench in the sun and enjoy a strong drink (make ours coffee with lots of soy milk) and a roll or two of the dice (we'll just watch, thanks.) All the women, even the old ladies, would be required to wear mini-skirts or clingy athletic wear. There would be no bocce.

So the plaque is but a first step. Now let's get to work on the Lightnin' Hopkins District.

By that we mean: You get to work; we'll just keep scratchin' that thing.

Semi-related: Banjo Jones interviews an expert on the pitfalls of gambling on the Super Bowl.

Also: Nick Tosches smokes, FDR-style, and discusses the devil's music with the Guardian UK.

Roky Erickson: 62 Years Young and … Impervious!

Wednesday last was Roky Erickson’s birthday, and although Gov. Rick Perry once again failed to order state offices closed in observance we our own self did pause briefly during the hard turning of the day to consider the resiliency, the durability, the sheer Faulknerian indomitability of the human spirit, in particular the ragged-but-right spirit that we and a couple of hundred other Houstonians witnessed radiating outward last month at a downtown venue we will always know as the Former Site of Guy’s Newsstand.

We had stayed up way (way) past our bedtime, assisted by no stimulant other than a large iced coffee (makes Gramps “frisky”) to take in Roky’s Return to Houston—fittingly, on the night following the day when the temperature hit a brain-frying 106. According to this advance of the show by the daily newspaper’s learned rock critic, it was the first time the erstwhile Erickson had visited Houston, at least in a strumming-and-singing capacity, since 1984. (We caught that show, at the long-gone Consolidated Arts Warehouse on Montrose, and while we do not remember whether Erickson played guitar that night or not, we do clearly recall how he looked: He had shaved his muzzle but sported large, bristly muttonchops, not the height of fashion in the godforsaken ’80s, and wore a pair of madras bell bottoms, the kind of pantaloons that were fashionable for a few months in 1966 among young American males whose daddies could afford to buy them Mustangs, along with a tight-fitting pinkish or orange-ish Disco Era shirt that must have come off a Goodwill rack. He apparently did not dress “up” for the performance.)

All of the news concerning Erickson has been good for the past few years—how, with care and attentiveness and modern medication, he’s been able to return to performing, semi-regularly and triumphantly. But you never know. Roky fandom is not an entirely comfortable seat: On the one hand you dig all those churning, hard-charging goofs on horror and sci-fi movies and comics of the ’50s—centered, we presume, in that place where we go to “scare” our self, the place where Count Floyd stages his 3-D House of Schlock and E. A. Poe filches from the day’s take—and on the other you’re keenly aware of the guy’s recurrent bouts of deep mental illness. As the unflinching 2005 documentary You’re Gonna Miss Me suggests, Erickson hit the Trifecta of mental imbalance: a genetic disposition thereto, courtesy of a distant, hard-ass daddy and a hothouse-flower of a mama who appears to have been the yoga-besotted Blanche Dubois of Austin; one too many acid trips as well as go-rounds with heroin and crystal meth in the 1970s and, apparently, well into the ’80s; and, probably most devastatingly, confinement at Rusk State Hospital in the late ’60s-early ’70s after his bust by the Austin cops for one sorry matchbox of dope. (Imagine what it must have been like to be in Rusk State Hospital in 1969; hell, imagine what it was like to be in Rusk in 1969. According to a Rusk State doctor interviewed [while, for some reason, sitting at a pedal steel guitar] for the documentary, Erickson’s fellow musicians in a hospital pick-up band included notorious murderers and child killer-rapists.) So when Erickson sings about working in the Kremlin with a two-headed dog and not being shaken by Lucifer and walking with a zombie (the best part of that great Holly-inflected tune being the tacked-on time specificity of the walk: last night) a reasonable person might wonder whether these are songs of experience or imagination, and whether by whooping it up for Night of the Vampire you’re inadvertently encouraging another psychic break. If you’re, y’know, the sensitive type.

But there was no cause to fret. Erickson, backed by a youngish band whose name we missed, put on a astoundingly good show—“heroic,” in the estimation of our colleague and fellow Roky idolater Il Pinguino. The mere fact that Erickson can stand on his hind legs and bark before an audience, much less perform at such a flawlessly high level for an hour and a half or so, is indeed heroic. His voice—it’s one of the great voices in rock ’n’ roll, sounding always as if something inside him is tearing and clawing to get out and he’s exercising great concentration to keep it under control—was in fine, supple form. (Erickson has a way with a song that’s at least equal in its naturalness to Van Morrison’s, who came out of basically the same mid-’60s musical milieu, so it’s not so absurd to wonder whether, if things had gone another way for Erickson, he’d be playing Vegas, or wherever it is Van plays these days, instead of the Continental Club on a Thursday night.) He even played a crackling lead guitar on some numbers, with his back to the audience at first but turning to face it later in his set. Between numbers he looked tentative and a little lost, turning to the other band members for directions, but when the music began he was transformed, an entirely other person. He tore that place up and burned it down.

Our favorite moment of the evening came during the spoken-word interlude to Creature with the Atom Brain, when Roky reported that atomic power has not only given the undead superhuman strength but has rendered them “impervious” to bullets. There was something about the way he pronounced impervious … but guess you woulda had to have been there.

Two-Egg Man

As a non-card carrying member of the Orwell cult (a loose-knit, lower-case affiliation whose numbers include everyone from Thomas Pynchon down to, we're proud to say, our 19 year old), we were excited---interested is probably a better word---when an associate informed us last summer that the Orwell Prize Web site was to begin running entries from the great man's personal diary, each one posted online 70 years to the day after he first committed it to the long-outdated medium of paper. Since then we have peeked in occasionally at the Orwell Diaries to see what the old boy was up to back in 19-and-38, and we can report that his daily not-for-publication jottings fully reveal him to be the proto-hippie/survivalist/localist (who semi-famously despised proto-hippies) we had always pegged him for. They also confirm what is evident from even a cursory scan of The Road to Wigan Pier: that Orwell, the author who wrestled with the Big Issues of the 20th Century with greater honesty and equanimity than any of his English-speaking contemporaries, had more than a touch of the accountant in him.

At present the diaries find him in Morocco, where he went to recuperate after being shot in the throat while lighting a cigarette during the Spanish Civil War, and there he seems to be consumed with the minutiae of nature, machinery and social and agricultural custom. He records in detail, and diagrams, the local farmers' method of irrigation. He estimates the price of wheat he has purchased in "English dollars." The entry for Nov. 14, 1938 (or "14.11.38") reads, in its entirety, "Planted out nasturtiums." The previous day he reported seeing a "dead dog by the roadside. I am afraid the same one that came asking for food a few days back ... "

But what Orwell really found worthy of recording was the output of the hen, or hens, on the farm outside of Marrakesh where he was billeted. His Dec. 1 entry read:

Two eggs.

The Nov. 30 entry read:

Two eggs.

On Nov. 29:

One egg.

Nov. 28:

Two eggs.

Nov. 27:

One egg.

Nov. 25:

Two eggs.

Etc.

As you might imagine, this dedicated daily accounting of egg production (while storm clouds massed over Europe, as we think we heard on a PBS documentary) has occasioned great hilarity among online commentators, whose postings are laced with the kind of late-modern snarkiness (some are too damn funny) we'd like to think Orwell would eschew, were he alive today and forced to take his smoke breaks on the sidewalk outside an office building.

Of course, these days Orwell probably would be diagnosed as an obsessive-compulsive depressive and coaxed into a regimen of medication and daily exercise after consulting with his primary care physician. But his diary entries---while far from scintillating reading---show a man who while publicly confronting imperialism, totalitarianism and the rampant phoniness of the Modern World remained privately engaged with the everyday, the ordinary, the basic. A remarkably sane man, in other words.

"Floating in a Most Peculiar Way ... "

Just for the hell of it, the other day we imagined that because of too much of whatever we had fallen into a deep coma back in, say, 1978, and had recently awakened, not so tanned but well rested, to find that not only had the United States elected a black man---OK, a half-black man---to the presidency but that most of the once-luxuriant hair on top of our noggin had disappeared and what remained on the sides had turned a ghastly shade of brownish grey (Whoa! How'd that happen?) We figured, though, that we'd be able to incorporate these developments into our new waking reality without much trouble. We could even handle the news that the universe is actually expanding at an accelerated rate because of something called dark energy. But other developments ... well, we probably couldn't get our mind all the way around them, and we'd wind up thinking we'd really missed something:

1. The big three automakers---manufacturers of the Fords our parents drove throughout the 1950s before "moving up" to Chevrolets in the '60s and '70s and finally arriving at the Oldsmobiles of the '80s and '90s---are on the verge of collapse!

2. Al Franken, whom we last saw as a comedian on Saturday Night Live, has an outside shot of being elected to the U.S. Senate in a bitterly contested Minnesota election. Stranger yet, Austrian muscleman Arnold Schwarzeneggar is not only the governor of the nation's most populous state but is supposedly being seriously considered for a post in the half-black president's Cabinet.

3. Strangest of all, that twee song of David Bowie's from the early '70s, Space Oddity, which we always assumed was about, y'know, trippin' (in the dated sense of the term), is being used in a commercial for a Ford Motor Co. automotive product called a Lincoln MKS (as sung, apparently, by that kinda-creepy, sorta-attractive Cat Power chick).

We always figured we'd like to drop acid one more time* before we call it a day, maybe after we're firmly secured in the federally chartered Old Folks Compound in Navasota (projected grand opening: 2022), but we're thinking now that with things proceeding as they are, why bother?

*But only for medical science, of course, and under a doctor's supervision.

That Wheezing, Groaning, Sputtering Sound

Most days we take no satisfaction in the steady rat-a-tat-tat of bad news regarding daily newspapers. After all, this sorry old world would be a much poorer place without them---and a far richer place if each large- and medium-sized American city had four or five (or 10 or 12!) competing daily papers, rather than one doddering, sclerotic and (above all and for the most part) BORING monopoly product.

Then there is the every-so-often day when we believe the world will mosey along just fine without the daily newspaper, and that the daily newspaper, although falling victim to many factors far beyond its control, may be getting just what it deserves. Today was one of those days, when we pulled our local daily from its prophylactic and discovered that El Chronicle de Houston had devoted well more than HALF of its front page to the hometown-hosted Latin Garmmys* (and chronicled this momentous event, it probably goes without saying, in typical tedium-inducing fashion). If you don't believe the previous hard-to-believe sentence, get out your ruler and take measure of the travesty.

This got us to thinking: How long before America’s daily newspapers begin trying to elbow their way into the lengthening bailout queue? How long

*By the way: Apparently the Site Selection Committee for the Latin Grammys, or whoever picked Houston, was unperturbed by those giant inflatable balloon animals that had our local scenic preservationists and nothing-better-to-do City Council up in arms. In fact, we’d bet those eye-catchers were a selling point.

Gots to Get Our Rest, ’Cause Even If Monday’s Not a Mess, Tuesday is Sure to Leave Us in Deep Distress

We realized over the weekend that we are beset by Disaster Fatigue Syndrome. We don’t know whether this is a condition recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, but we’re sure that if we asked him our primary care physician would gladly authorize the dispensation of some medication that would bring at least temporary surcease to our suffering while leaving us severely constipated and diminishing what’s left of our sex drive.

First it was Gustav, which swung wide of Houston but ran right up through the Hub City, where we sat in the dark with our 81-year-old mother while winds howled (they actually did---like a goddamn dog at midnight) and we kept a weather eye on the towering, antediluvian oak in the back yard (which made it through, somehow). Gustav felicitously chose the Labor Day Weekend to come ashore, permitting us the leisure to spend 8.5 hours---we timed it---cleaning the mountains of leaves, branches and limbs it left in the yard. Afterward, we realized that we are old. There was no electricity that Monday night and we slept as soundly and for as long as we did back when we were a hirsute young man and gave nary a shit about anything. The electricity came back on early the next evening, by which time the city had cleared the surrounding streets of fallen trees and debris (they seem quicker on the uptake in the Hub City than in Houston---and this is Louisiana, my friends---but it’s probably just a matter of scale). We felt it was OK to leave our mother to her bridge and books and Turner Classic movies and beat a hasty retreat home.

Then came Ike, and we all have our Ike stories so we’ll bore you no further with ours except to report that the oak that once covered much of our front yard is gone, thanks mostly to our own spindly self and two guys named Jose who had a small tractor with a rusty claw that did not open but was useful as a battering ram. Jose No. 2, who, strangely for a Mexican, was the size of an NFL linebacker, rammed and rammed and rammed in a harrowing, hour-long round of attack and regroup … until, as promised, he and Jose No. 1 had nudged the stump, and half of our front yard, aboard a goose-neck trailer. We paid them the requested $300 in cash (most of the Americanos---white, brown and black---asked for at least three times that), shook their hands and bid them adieu, without inquiring as to their legal status.

Oh—we also must credit the contractors and subcontractors hired by the city to cart away the fallen timber. From what we’ve seen and heard in our neighborhood and other parts of town the haulers have done an expeditious and relatively thorough job (of course, the city’s under a FEMA deadline to receive federal reimbursement, but still … ). This is an example of government marshaling its resources and rising to the occasion, and for that we would like to thank whomever needs to be thanked.

But even this salutary development brings us no lasting joy, for the financial crisis that came ashore the day after Ike (as we in the locality will always remember it) still lurks overhead, casting a dark pall on what should be the cool, crisp, up-and-at-'em days of early autumn. This certainly was the most anticipated, most predicted and most written-about-in-advance “crisis” in recorded history. And the most-analyzed after the fact. In the past month we have read countless stories in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and other publications positing this or that cause for the debacle. Each seems to be describing a different part of the elephant for the blind man, and all we feel is the pressure of the beast’s massive, wrinkly leg on our chest.

Then we stumbled across this piece by one Patrick J. Deneen, who writes the second-best-named blog in the Western Hemisphere (after this one). Deneen, who appears to be a Paleo-con, a Catholic of some stripe and a neo-Kunstlerian (a designation we just made up)*, teaches political science at Georgetown. His posting sums up some of what we've been flapping our jaws about on this blog for the past few years, albeit in a more learned and eloquent manner (he, after all, is a professor, while we proudly graduated in the top 75 percent of our class at Hub City High). "Abstraction" certainly deserves wider distribution, if only for this heart-rending observation:

We inhabit a world which we have made obscure to ourselves. The height of our civilization has been to render the world unknown to us. The modern project seeking the conquest of nature has resulted in the imperative that we become ignorant. We know much, but little of substance or based in the reality of the existence we inhabit. We are distant from where, what, and who we are.

We read this, heed the resonant bell of truth, and feel our burden lifted. We believe we can make it through without the false comfort afforded by modern pharmaceuticals. At least until Wednesday.

*Say what you will about James Kunstler, and we know he’s an acquired taste, but the man has been dead-on in predicting each stage of the implosion---save for the total collapse of the stock market, and it’s still early---and he was doing it two years out.

Modern Weaponry

A casual acquaintance has brought to our attention a recent memo from the director of Communities in Schools Houston announcing that the non-profit has launched a project to reward students "who think positively, demonstrate good conduct and improve their grades." Young scholars who comport themselves thusly can get two free "smiley face pins" a week: one for conduct, a second for good grades. But the author of the memo obviously knows that when it comes to today's youth one must be prepared for all eventualities:

If students use the Smiley face as a weapon and poke other students with it the students will be banned from the Smiley face project for a designated period of time based on [the teacher's] judgment.

Banned from the Smiley face project. Next stop: the penitentiary.

Dr. Elyse to Hank Paulson: Defibrillate Us, Daddy, So We Can Feel Our Left Arm Again

The Houston Chronicle recently notified us that it would be raising its monthly subscription rate by a dollar. This news briefly led us to consider whether it was time to cancel. It wasn't the extra dollar itself---hell, the market's burned through so many of our retirement dollars* in the past two weeks that we're hardly going to miss a measly buck a month---but the principle of the thing. After all, here's a business asking for more of our money while visibly cutting back on what supposedly is its main product---news coverage**---by laying off or buying out veteran reporters. (And since much of the front page during the presidential campaign and ongoing financial crisis is being given over to dispatches from the New York Times, why not just skip the middle man and go straight to the Times while getting whatever local news we need from the electronic media or the paper's Web site? Huh, why not?)

Then we thought about what we'd be missing with our morning coffee---not just the predictable offerings of the paper's Teen Columnist and the meanderings of Rick "The Hurricane Was But a Mere Electrical Storm" Casey but the much-appreciated relationship advice of working girl "Whit" and the entire page of valuable newsprint the Chronicle devotes to TMI (a painfully tone-deaf gesture in this day and time, we'd say). Most of all, we'd miss the reportage of doughty society correspondent Shelby Hodge on the comings and goings and chowing-downs of the rich and fatuous. (Close readers with long memories will recall that the newspaper, in another strangely tone-deaf gesture, dispatched Mlle. Hodge to cover the big fund-raiser that compact socialite Rebecca Cason Thrash tossed for the Louvre in Paris some months ago. We believe this trip fell between rounds of layoffs and buyouts, so that was OK.)

If we had let our Chronicle subscription lapse we most likely would have missed out on Hodge's Tuesday column, which launched off with a chatty nod to reality

The economy might be tanking and most of us have given up on retirement,*** but some fortunate Houstonians are still eating high on the hog ...

before interrupting regular programming to deliver this important pronouncement from everybody's favorite port commissioner from the 70019 zip code:

Speaking in medical terms,Elyse Lanier offered her analogy for the current economic climate. "Our country is in ventricular fibrillation," she said Friday night at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Grand Gala Ball, which, by the way, brought in $1.3 million. "It needs a defibrillator to shock our system back into sinus rhythm."**** In layman's terms — a normal heartbeat.

If we remember correctly, Elyse's husband, the former Mayor Bob, has himself been defibrillated, perhaps on more than one occasion, and used to be in the banking and S&L rackets, so we're confident that the port commissioner knows of which she speaks.

If only our president could be so articulate.


*We know---it's only paper losses.

**Oh, we're not really that naive.

***Except for her colleagues who were forced to take the buyouts, of course.

****Would a $250 billion semi-nationalization of the banks qualify?

Wages of Assimilation

From "Neurotic Who Makes Scary World Her Banquet," a review of Patricia Pearson's A Brief History of Anxiety, the New York Times, March 19:

... the worship of reason and science, by encouraging the notion that human beings can control their environment, has created a terrible fault line in the modern psyche, although not all societies suffer equally. Mexicans have lots to worry about but don’t. The World Mental Health Survey, conducted in 2002, found that only 6.6 percent of Mexicans had ever experienced a major episode of anxiety or depression. Meanwhile, to their north, 28.8 percent of the American population has been afflicted with anxiety, the highest level in the world. Mexicans who move to the United States adapt, becoming more anxious.

The Hell You Say!

Unseen dangers lurk, especially during the holiday season, but fortunately experts are standing by with invaluable counsel. We only wish we had read the dispatch headlined “Think twice before drinking and shopping” in Friday’s Houston Chronicle before we waded out into the deranged mobs that besieged our local establishments of commerce. According to the author, John Campanelli of Newhouse News Service,

The Baylor College of Medicine even issued a public advisory about it several years ago: "Don't drink and shop during holidays." Sipping and shopping "impairs judgment and decreases inhibitions," psychiatry professor Kristin Kassaw cautioned. "You may find shopping bags full of impulse buys that you might ordinarily think twice about."

What’s worse is drinking and shopping while packing a loaded handgun, which we understand could possibly be the subject of a more recent advisory from our august local medical school.