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KATRINA & THE LOST CITY OF NEW ORLEANS by Rod Amis
New Orleans is the Lost City of America.A portion of the proceeds of this book will go to the New Orleans Hospitality Workers Fund. The cooks, servers and restaurant workers of New Orleans have provided fabulous times and memories for millions. Now we must remember them in their time of need.
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SMOKE & MIRRORS -Young & Fresh: Rod Amis, our Publisher, continues his stretch of the Blog paradigm
SMOKE
"Where there's smoke, there's fire ..." Popular Adage.
16 February 2006: What's the fastest way to recognize the calcification, the loss of dynamism, in any movement? Picture the Brezhnev era Politburo in the old Soviet parades; think about the warhorses of the former civil rights movement or the raging fogeyism of the once glorious feminist movement and you'll have an idea of what I have in mind.
Any group where leadership is dominated by the geriatric has lost its leadership because it has no view of the future. It has no visible stake in taking a dynamic path. This is the true dilemma of the American Left.
Without the taste of being indestructible that only comes from youth - another form of intoxication, this one provided by hormones - a movement lacks the fire to face the challenges of change.
The mature and elderly, challenged by health problems, family responsibilities and career obligations, are poor fodder for the meat-grinder of social change.
The biggest problem of leadership challenging the Left in the United States is that it long ago abandoned its young. This lack of concern for the future, this repudiation of whose world it is today, was especially egregious within the Black community.
The stances of too many Black preachers and, most eminently in recent years, Bi ll Cosby, have been anti-youth.
It is as if those fogies are insulted by the fact that their glory days have passed. This is, in this editorialist's view, anathema to truly visionary leadership.
Consider the current People of Influence in the Republican Party ruling class of the United States of our era: most of them were influential among the College Republicans of a decade and a half ago. The Democratic Party in the United States, and Leftists in general, has no analog.
What I am describing is the story of a political Lost Opportunity. The self-congratulatory and self-absorbed Left of a generation ago saw the Hip-Hop phenomenon - then highly political and a reflection of real conditions that stood behind the American Dream neurosis - as the facade it was. Rather than the dominant paradigm for a new global idiom, Leftists failed to see it as any more than a fad. In so doing, the doyens of Political Correctness and Limousine Liberalism abandoned the Hip-Hop Generation to the blandishments of corporatist consumer culture.
More of us should be admitting that mistake and writing about it more forcefully. That mistake was the blind spot of the American Left.
ABOUT US
The majority of the writers at G21.net are thirty years of age or younger. This is by design, not accident.
While seasoned voices are instructive, they are also too concerned with looking to the past instead of either celebrating the life of now or envisioning the kind of future world where they will be in charge. (Some people claim that the Editor and Publisher is so immature that the can't help but always look over the next mountain top.)
Mortality stalks and, in this view, intimidates the old too much. Between the issues of their legacies and their maintenance during their dotage, the old are too much preoccupied with security and too little tantalized by adventure.
Along these lines, we're particularly proud of two features offered this week. The first is NATASHA TYNES comprehensive report on the growth of Blogging as a form of self-expression, and often political speech, among young Arabs. It's well worth the price of your ticket.
The second is the second installment of STEVE OGAH's extended and personal piece about the temptations, challenges and insights of young Nigerian youth and the day-to-day life he observes while visiting the neighboring Benin Republic. If you missed the first installment, it wouldn't go back and have a read.
As far as I'm concerned, if we have any prospect of world peace and justice in our futures, articles like these help us to better understand and relate to the people from whom those older of us are merely borrowing this world.
19 February 2006: Various of my friends have been insisting that I start driving an automobile again. Meanwhile, accoring to a report on CBS's "60 Minutes" tonight, if ALL OF YOU stopped driving today, the ice melting in Greenland as I type this would continue to do so. In fact, the equivalent of all the ice in the Alps would melt away in the Arctic. Storms like Katrina would be considered mild over the next fifty years.Yeah, Lemmings, keep on driving your cars. You're killing us all. You're killing us all.
MIRRORS16 February 2006: After spending a couple of hours sipping brewskis and absorbing the atmosphere at Two T's, Raleigh, I'm going to visit my housemate, Ron at Duke General Hospital. His hip replacement operation took place two days ago.
From what I hear, from his phone calls, he's doing well. I'm taking him stuff to read.
It now turns out that he must go to a physical therapy place this weekend. The worst is over, though, whether he believes it or not.
19 February 2006: I have to give a special shout-out to all those of you who have taken the time to visit my special project at the Huffington Post Contagious Festival, It's Only Smoke. It's a work of love and I appreciate your supporting The Old Magician, Do tell, a friend; it helps.Who knows? Maybe one day the prophet will recognized in his own country.
Longtime Loyal Readers know that I repudiated being a fiction writer long ago. But, as Hemingway said, "It's tough to be hard-bitten at night." So some nights, when my legendary restlessness attacks me, some things just spill out. Here's an example:
"Honey, I don't know why all those women raved about him"He's not that great. He's thick. But he's no longer than you," she said.
She said this because she had always hated Jack. She had especially always hated that Jack and her husband were so tight.
"And after he did me, he just went into his bedroom and passed out."
What she said had the needed and desired effect. She had told her husband, two years after their marriage, at which Jack had been the best man, that Jack had screwed her, while he, her husband was passed out on Jack's living room couch. Jack, that cad, that bounder, that scoundrel, Jack.
Her husband threw up all over Jack, the best man's , bathroom.
After he threw up, pushed all that food out of his innards, he slapped his wife and they left Jack's condo.
Jack himself, the bounder, slept through all of this drama. He was too drunk to have heard what was going on only a couple doors away.
When Jack awakened the next morning - It was Sunday, wasn't it? - Jack stumbled into his bathroom and found it a vomitorium. He wondered about that. There were panty hose covered in vomit on his bathroom floor. Shite, who do those belong to?
He bled the lizard, still wondering about this horror scene. Who was she? Did I hurl?
He lit a cigarette. Ahh ...
Didn't somebody come over last night while I was writing?
Then he remembered.
Oh shit!
He tried to recall if he'd actually fucked her. Maybe he had. No way of telling. He had thought about it after she plopped her fine ass on his lap while they were sucking down his cocktails. Had he really fucked her? Was that his vomit? or what?
I'm glad I stuck to journalism.
I'm becoming an evangelist for Skype. I talked to my sister-in-law, the lovely Martha Rudell Amis, my sister Dragana in Serbia, and my friend Logan Bentley Lessona in Rome this weekend for mere pennies, using my SkypeOut account. I can call Skype members here in the USA for FREE. (Man, I love that word free!) If you don't have it, get it NOW! You're welcome.
The next time I talk to you, I shall have returned from visiting Cali. The hejira continues, Luvs. I'll be at the Online Journalism Review conference for indy publishers like Yours Unruly, in Los Angeles, and then I'll catch a plane to Oakland, California, and BART to Berzerkley to visit old friends I haven't seen in about ten years. People and cats will once again have to deal with my presence.
I'll even go back up to the Wine Country of Sonoma County to see my nemesis, Van Helsing, and his grandchildren. (I know he's afraid to break out his chessboard now that Von Braunschweiger will return.)
"Be a man, Van Helsing, face your inevitable evisceration!"
Thanks for coming back this week. The Old Magician appreciates your patronage.
THINGS ROD BELIEVES THIS WEEK
1 - It's a good year. I'm getting on a plane.
2 - I NEED more book sales.
3 - I CRAVE a decent shot at a Huffington Post Contagious Festival Prize. You can help!
" Work like you don't need the money,
"Love like you've never been hurt,
"Dance like no one is watching ... "
Love,
Rod
ROD AMIS has published this magazine since 1990. It first appeared as a hardcopy 'Zine. In March, 1996, he launched it here on the Web. Rod was a Contributing Editor at Suite101.com, where he wrote the " 'Net Publishing" feature. His work has been featured in the San Francisco Bay Guardian Online, NRV8, and at the (U.S.) Public Broadcasting System (PBS's) WebLab's Reality Check site. Rod was a contributing writer on technology for Faulkner Information Services. He wrote on Web issues for MethodFive.com's Hyper newsletter.Rod was a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he wrote over two hundred articles on web design and development issues. He was principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviewed technology issues weekly, producing 383 editorials. He became the Managing Editor for Electronic Mail/Newsletter Publications at Andover.net at the end of February, 2000, and left in September of the same year. He was a contributing writer for ACCESS Internet magazine, which appeared both on- and offline for 10 million readers in 100 newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Boston Herald, Austin American-Statesman, Denver Post and Orlando Sentinel, among others. Rod was the US reporter for Silicon.com, a division of Network Multimedia Television in London, UK, r eaching 3.5 million European readers, until May, 2001.
In 2002, he worked as Assistant to the General Manager of a Big Easy company that does restaurants and nightclubs. He did stints as the Resident Philosopher at three separate gin mills in that city in the French Quarter and the Marigny, earning his stripes during two successive Mardi Gras seasons. Oh yeah, Rod's had Day Jobs working construction. Mostly renovations of old New Orleans structures, houses and a bar. Sometimes he designs Web sites for other people so that he can get his creative juices flowing the way he can't at a staid publication like this one. And he's been the instructor in Editing for Internet Publications at the Novi Sad School of Journalism in Yugoslavia. When he's not busy here, he writes technology columns for IT Manager's Journal. Rust never sleeps.
Our Resident Philosopher has exchanged his legend mobility for a means of keeping your World's Magazine. Now he must become earnest about gaining a financial underpinning for this enterprise. (Read: Buy back his freedom and then go home.}.
In his spare time, he chases women in the manner that a fly pursues a spider.
He continues to be committed to integrity,
chastityand a dose of humility.
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