Saturday, December 31, 2005
happy new year! --ab3 Sunday, December 25, 2005
merry christmas! happy hanukkah! i'm up finishing wrapping presents and putting the final touches on my white chocolate-cranberry bread pudding for the family get together. ugh. it's 3am and i've still got a long way to go. but nobody leaves ME milk and cookies. much love to you all, hope you have a wonderful holiday. Wednesday, December 21, 2005
merry christmas! standard intelligence prevails over intelligent design. yay! the judge in the dover, pennsylvania case lays the smackdown on the extra-crunchy christians!(if you want to read the decision - it's suitably harsh - here's the PDF.)
I love that for no good reason, coltrane's version of "my favorite things" gets so much airplay around the holidays. Sunday, December 18, 2005
blah, blah, blah. i don't want to sound like a knee-jerk liberal, because, really, i'm not. not even close. i am, however, something of a civil libertarian, and it just kills me to see our rights being hacked away at in broad, sweeping strokes. that being said: george bush authorized NSA spying on american citizens, in the US. and he's got the hubris to defend it. pleasantly, this admission cost him the renewal of the patriot act. for now. not like he wasn't acting outside of its bounds anyway. i'm sorry, i know we all signed that social contract, where we agreed to sacrifice some of our liberties to the government in return for a little security and protection - but this is getting out of hand. the ends no longer seem to justify the means here. why are we giving up all our liberties to a government that can't abide by it's own laws, makes a habit of lying to the people who put it in office, and can't even protect the people of new orleans from a storm they knew was coming for days, much less take care of them afterward? Monday, December 12, 2005
 i've got a couple of new galleries up - the first, as promised, mostly of places you might know or have asked to see (not complete, but i'll be adding more as i take them.) Because they're not always very visible in the photos, i've marked the highest waterline with a red arrow. The second set are photos of a curious phenomemenon that occurred during katrina - houses burned *to the ground*. or to the water, as it were - with no (or limited) firefighting happening during the flood, homes just burned completely to nothing, which is something you don't see very often these days. there are blocks of these former homes all over the city; for those who know the city, the two featured here are on napoleon (behind the park on the downtown side, between freret and st. charles) and on carrollton, across from the seminary. Saturday, December 10, 2005
I want to be somewhere warm. with hot cocoa and nice, cinnamonny cookies. (not that it's very cold here. but still.) --ab3 Friday, December 09, 2005
a bit melancholy today, though not it a 'feeling-sorry-for-myself' blues kind of way. much more general and catholic than that. current woes: • the sheer enormity of the world • life's vagaries • a seemingly endless catalog of my own personal shortcomings (that's all you get, fill in the blank with those you know!) • the dull throbbing hopelessness that radiates from that great swath of dark and rotted land that surrounds the tiny sliver of new orleans of which my life now consists • the inexplicable disappearance of nearly half a year's time • the contagion and inevitable rise to power of hubris and stupidity • being 30. • the stupid cold sore i've been enduring for most of this week. • and not least the endless torture of static shocks i get every. god. damned. time. i get out of my new car in this cold weather. thank god for small gifts, like listening to Sufjan Steven's Illinoise (which i currently am), and the diet doctor pepper i just found that i had forgotten i left on the front seat of my car this morning. :)
even among the living, the changes are vast and terrible. word on the street (and in offbeat magazine) is that the virgin megastore at jax brewery is unlikely to reopen. I know it seems petty and materialistic, but to me, and other music fans here, there was a great quality of life element associated with having that store in town. anyway... that's another check in the "cons" column. at least there's still tower records. Monday, December 05, 2005
the war in iraq has finally hit too close to home for me. on december 1st, 10 marines were killed and 11 were injured in Fallujah. my good friend, Marine Captain George D. Hasseltine - Donnie - was the company commander of the unit that was hit. fortunately, he was one of the 11 injured, with shrapnel in one arm and eardrum damage - apparently his digital camera took most of the hit for him. from what i've heard he's back on duty now, but i'm sure that's no consolation to him and those were all his boys and i can't imagine the anguish of that loss. in high school Marine Corps JROTC, Donnie and I were staff officers together - our senior year I was a Cadet Captain, he was a Cadet Major, and together we were in charge of public relations for our school Battalion. he's always been a great guy in general - pretty intense at times - but it was obvious even then that Donnie was going to make a damn fine Marine. and from what i've seen and heard, he has. I usually get to see Donnie and my other friends in the Marine Corps at Christmas - our group of high school friends meets at midnight mass at Jesuit and then adjourns to drinks at Snake n' Jakes. not looking like that will be happening this year, with Donnie in iraq and Jesuit flooded by Katrina... but then, this is new orleans, nothing will ever be the same again. Please keep Donnie and the rest of his unit (Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Regiment, 1st Marine Division, I Marine Expeditionary Force) in your thoughts and prayers, along with everybody else over there, and pray they come home safe. Saturday, December 03, 2005
so I'm spending my saturday night alone, thinking, drinking coffee and reading a book of poetry at the rue de la course on magazine street - what I'dve called "rue major" before but there's no minor now. party people pass by my windowseat, trekking, traversing the block, drinks in hands, grinning between the balcony bar and the rendevouz - this may be the post-apocalypse but it's still new orleans - looking for a better scene, a better flavor, to savor a better beer. or looking or friends. and they pass me here, reading and happy tonight, tonight I'm drinking and driving but not driven or drunk to socialize, I am pleasant and solitary for now, savoring the here, and how i can enjoy iced coffee and aloneness with my thoughts; I know there will be a time, times when I won't be alone on a saturday night, on saturday nights, slung with scenes and spinning with drinks and tight with society, when I'll wish I were thinking, drinking coffee and reading a book of poetry alone at the rue de la course on magazine street- what I'dve called "rue major" before but there's no minor now - and I'm thankful to be spending my saturday night here. then again, the coffeeshop's closing up, the curfew's closing in, maybe i'll stop for a drink somewhere before i call the purple dark sky by name and go home. poems be damned, these thoughts of mine want volume, reverberation and timpanums off which to bounce - and it would be good to talk to someone i know. Friday, December 02, 2005
 after work, i came home and did some flood photo restoration work - did i mention i've been doing that? hmmm. no, i guess i didn't. well, i am. anyway, several hours of trying to restore other people's family photo albums takes a rather unexpected emotional toll on you, so around 11 i decided i was at that critical juncture where i either needed a drink and preferably some music or to just collapse in bed of pure depression. i headed to the circle bar - which i suppose is my default these days - and caught most of a set by a band called "the melts" from the northshore, good gravelly roots-rock kind of thing. had a couple of high lives, and a couple of PBRs and even(tually) overcame my standard social idiocy and actually talked to a couple of girls. really pretty, really intelligent girls, my age. the kind i wouldn't have expected myself to be talking to... anyway, whatever. had a pleasant and quite long conversation about the flood (as if people talk about anything else), finished my PBR, exchanged vague promises to see each other around, and headed home. did i mention they were really pretty? *sigh* not to whine, but i could really use a girlfriend at this particular point in my life. so much going on, so many thoughts and adventures, so many possibilities - and nobody to even talk to, much less share this whole strange experience with. gah. what's wrong with me again, exactly?
unapologetic is by no means an MP3 blog, though as i'm sure most of you know, i do have a pretty serious music along those lines, thought i'd share a few things with you that've been on heavy rotation with me lately: first, for the holidays - it's all over the music blogs: Sufjan Steven's "Hark! Songs for Xmas" EPs - which you can download for free over at irresponsible journalism. the whole thing is awesome, and minus the irony you often find on indie rock xmas cds (arcade fire, anyone?). My new favorite Christmas song EVAR is Come on! Let's Boogie to the Elf Dance!.mp3 three months later, katrina is still here and life is weirder than ever. it's kind of fitting that last night i drove home through a still dark city, listening to The Legendary KO's Katrina remix of kanye west's ubiquitous "gold digger". the new lyrics are maybe the most important hip-hop about new orleans since mc thick's marrerro. check it out. George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People.mp3 oh, and i'm not going to post it here, but you can download all three songs performed by Jarvis Cocker (of Pulp fame) in the latest Harry Potter movie, over at anablog. haven't seen the movie yet, but my favorite is "do the hippogriff!" anyway. enjoy! Thursday, December 01, 2005
yesterday was my dad's birthday. i took him to Clancy's, where he had never been, which i found hard to believe. it was excellent. my mom got one of the best crabcakes i've ever tasted - which is saying a lot. and Clancy's is just such a classic uptown place, it was really nice to be able to take them there.
last weekend, jen came in with her friend timur. i gave them the disaster tour, and since timur had never been here before we also did the non-disaster tour: bourbon street, the quarter, the river, etc. we ate at dick and jenny's, which continues to be my underdog favorite "white tablecloth" restaurant in this city, to the exclusion of all the more famous places... i got scallops for both appetizer and entree, and it was -awesome- as usual. i'm glad places like those still exist. |