Yeah, you got Lady Day and Ella and Sarah, the triumverate of jazz singers.  Don’t get better that.

But then there’s Anita O’Day.

She went out on her own at 14 years of age, during the Depression, was a dancer in the “endurathons” popular at the time, had a wild young life and fell into singing, ending up making her name with Gene Krupa, Roy Eldridge, the girl singer, sometimes wearing the usual evening gowns, other times an altered kind of suit that took better the knocks of the hard tours on bus or car.

She lived the jazz life.

In Can You Help? NOLA’s 9th Ward Needs Us! the excellent ikrisarus starts the big challenge:

A group of bloggers over at Docudharma have been actively writing about NOLA after Hurricane Katrina and we have decided to do a week-end marathon fund-raiser for the 9th Wards’ NENA (Neighborhood Empowerment Network Association)

The Lower Ninth Ward Neighborhood Empowerment Network Association (NENA) was established in the aftermath of Katrina to play a lead role in rebuilding New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward.

Organized and controlled by residents of the Lower Ninth Ward, NENA addresses not only the immediate recovery needs created by the storm’s destruction, but also the institutional neglect and disinvestment that plagued the neighborhood long before Katrina. NENA works with current Lower Ninth Ward residents, displaced residents living in other parts of New Orleans, and the broader diaspora who want to return to the neighborhood.

It was back in the day, early 80s, right before AIDs made it problematic to be promiscuous.

After hours club on 9th Avenue and 14th Street, dark with little tacky Christmas-tree lights and cheap drinks, a place of the imagination, one could be whomever or whatever one pleased, indulging the neverending child’s fantasy of make-believe.

My entrance was predatory, taking in the entire room as I walked to the front bar, accepting or discarding (mostly discarding) the hungry looks on the faces of all the lovely men, who outnumbered the women by a very satisfactory ratio.

Heh.

Many of us (though, sadly, not all) know by now that the damage to New Orleans was not caused by a natural disaster but by human error — the errors of the Army Corps of Engineers.

That’s why back in February of 2007, New Orleans federal court judge Stanwood Duvall ruled the ACOE couldn’t claim immunity:

The Army Corps of Engineers can’t assert immunity in a lawsuit over the catastrophic flooding following Hurricane Katrina, because of the plaintiffs’ claim that flooding stemmed from the agency’s negligence in fixing defects in the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet navigation project that it had known of for years, a New Orleans federal court judge ruled Friday.

This won’t be a long essay.

I never watch Mr. Bush, I can’t stand to hear his voice or see his face.

But I do read the transcripts of what he says.

I was wondering if he’d mention it tonight.  He certainly didn’t mention it in 2006.  And if he did mention it last year, I don’t recall.

But he did mention it this year.  How kind of you, Mr. Bush.

 

So this is Friday Night at 8.  And as our digital dictator would say “Here I Am!”

Wrote a poem and recorded it at Gabcast as well.  This one is also untitled.

Here’s the poem:

of course there’s

a big search for

a new language

for new times

maybe a kind of

esperanto of the soul

a word appears

here and there

but it is immediately

devoured  in

pacmans of

orgiastic

marketry

gibsonian wetware

epiphanies

as we merge

with our

great

machines

caravans of

digital wagons

carrying

strange new loads!

Avatars exploding

in infinite number

while wizards

laugh

over their

strange new

dominions.

And below is the gabcast thingy to click.

This is no jibe against folks who are passionately involved with the candidates of their choice in the Democratic primaries.  Frankly, I wish the present environment of our 2008 national elections were worthy of this amazing committed passion.

This isn’t even a jibe against the candidates themselves.

This is, however, a jibe at the 2008 elections.

There are folks who say it might just damned well be better if we stay home and let Republicans have their way with America.  I understand the reasoning behind it, I do .  And if our world were solely mechanical and mathematical and the heart had no place in it, I might even agree with this logic.

Trouble is, those folks calling for this strategy won’t be the ones suffering and most likely dying as a consequence.  And although it’s argued it is ultimately noble to be careless with folks’ lives that might just be blown away no matter what we do (both here and around the world), I’d just as soon avoid lending my hand to that endeavor.  If I were one of those vulnerable folks who reside at the bottom of the ladder to be considered for sacrifice, I’d be a little annoyed that my life was not even being considered in this equation.  I dunno, most folks, no matter how miserable, don’t want to die.  It seems to be something we all have in common.

So I’ll vote for the Democrat and I’ll vote in the primary.  I’m not a damned fool.  But no, for me, the heart of America is being broken by this reality, by there being virtually no opposition to these criminals who walk the halls of power in government and commerce, and it’s not even about political party at this point.  It’s just about regular Americans, not angels or devils, but flawed folks, as are we all, who are being shown nothing to aim at, feeling no genuine confidence.  Because no matter what our candidates say, our present national conversation is being held against a backdrop of criminal acts being committed the entire time, lawbreaking of such breathtaking arrogance and abuse of power that it renders all “national conversation” absurd.

reposted with permission

Dr. King went to Democratic politicians for legislative support of his call for change. One of the most insightful explanations you will find on that is the one from Bill Moyers here:

I started writing a journal when I was 13 years old.  I still have that raggedy old spiral notebook.

Here’s what I said about Viet Nam.  Please don’t hate me for my prodigy-like brilliance:

I wonder when World War III will be.  I’m almost sure there’ll be one, because of all the fighting going on in Viet Nam.  You see, it all started because we didn’t want South Viet Nam to become Communist (a form of government where the government owns and controls everything) so we fought the Communists so that Viet Nam would be a democracy (an individualistic government, where it is run by the people, for the people).

Well so far, all that has happened is a lot of killing!  Also, Presidential elections are coming up in 1968 (November).  I sure hope Johnson isn’t re-elected.  I’m rooting for Bobby Kennedy or McCarthy!  (Even though I can’t vote, I’m only 13 years old!)

I wish that wars wouldn’t “be.”  We have such a short time to live, why does it have to be spent in fighting?