-> SMOKE & MIRRORS
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.
Buy the book or get a downloadable PDF Copy now!
A small, independent and outspoken magazine like this one can't reach you every week without the support and patronage of its readership. As our way of thanking those who have committed to keep your World's Magazine here on your desktop through their generous donations, we feature their names and cities here in our Roll of Honor.
SUSTAINING PATRONS
BECKY & KENT ALTEMUS,
RON DIENER,
DARHL STULTZ,
TIMOTHY MEADOWS,
MATT STOWELL,
TERRY TERRIAN,
CHERYL HILL NATION,
DRAGAN & DRAGANA VICANOVIC,
LESZEK MICHAELWICZ,
MARIE SINSABAUGH,
NGOZI RAZAK-SOYEBI,
We encourage you to add your name to this Roll of Honor. GENERATOR 21 cannot continue and thrive without your support. Thanks in advance.
To support G21, please send checks or money orders to:
Rod Amis
To donate by credit or debit card, please go to the Western Union website by following the highlighted link. Should you donate via Western Union, please notify us via e-mail.
Please make all remittances payable to Rod Amis. Again, thanks. |
SMOKE & MIRRORS - REFLECTIONS ON KINSHIP: ROD AMIS opens with an editorial on the state of the world and the denial of our common kinship, his theme this week.
SMOKE
"Where there's smoke, there's fire ..." Popular Adage.
The notion of the kinship of humanity does not seem to carry a lot of value these days, I have noticed. No, no - we are all staking out our tribal or ethnic or other ideological turf. The notion that we all share the same blood, if not the same skin shading, is not something slipping blithely off the tongues of those seeking power over our lives and our allegiance to their privileged agendas.
If the divisiveness of our own species is not bad enough, it is certainly out of the question to point out that we are only a few strands of DNA away from chimpanzees or that one of the core tenets of most religions is that we husband rather than plunder the planet Earth. Husbandry is a word that is nearly archaic to the lexicon any longer.
So what we are left with is the language of confrontation, of adversaries and of dominance. I can't remember the last time I heard a prominent person, in politics or business, use the word nurture or one of its derivatives. If, as I posited here before, we throw words out of front of us to create the future we step into, then this profile of the language we are using to shape reality paints a picture of a harsh and angry world for us.
This word-push that I see being thrown in front of us is not one that This Editorialist relishes.
Rather than having to fend off the barbarians at the gates, we have transformed ourselves into the most barbarous of people. Like Hadrian or the ancient Chinese emperors, we throw up border walls - but not walls to ward off raids but rather walls to allow us not to share the ill-gotten gains of exploitation.
Our Great Powers allow a million and half people in northern Africa to be massacred, raped and dispossessed, turning a blind eye in order to get tidbits, nuggets of information, from the genocidists about a man languishing on a kidnap dialysis machine and claim that as adequate justification for unconscionable human misery.
By our own actions, we have demonstrated to the world in this new century that, in our eyes if not those of the Most High, the life of a single American is worth more than those of a hundred Palestineans, 1000 Mexicans, 10,000 Iraqis or 100,000 Africans on the Great American Balance Sheet. It is this attitude that makes the world pray for a day of coming to account.
It is most likely, as with the Romans, that it is not the perpetrators who are made to settle accounts but their grandchildren. It is their inheritance upon which we now feast and run riot after all; those poor creatures will be left to wonder and marvel at why they have been rendered destitute and defenseless.
I am beginning to find watching, listening to or reading the news near-unbearable. Injustice and violence hurts and angers me.
Some traditions hold that the Most High has foresworn destroying the Earth with water, they believe that it shall be the fire next time. When the fire comes, it shall be more overwhelming than any deluge, I suspect, because of the great and loathsome crimes that are taking place. The weak, the poor, the sick are being sacrificed on a level that would make the Mayans blanche. And blind eyes continue to be turned, the blind eyes of those who are not personally affected by the massive suffering all around them.
As long as there is a nearby mall, Hell take the hindmost. As long as shopping is still an option, a form of recreation and establishing identity, let the rest of the world and the future be damned.
Truly, the sins of the fathers and mothers will be visited upon their children and their children's children, even unto the fifth generation.
Stood still on a highway
I saw a woman by the side of the road
With a face I knew like my own
Reflected in my window.
Well, she walked up to my quarter light
And she bent down real slow.
A fearful pressure paralyzed me in my shadow.She said, "Son, what are you doin' here?
My fear for you has turned me in my grave."
I said, "Mama, I have come to the Valley of the Rich
Myself to sell."
She said, "Son, this is the road to Hell.
On your journey 'cross the Wilderness
From the Desert to the Well,
You have strayed upon
The motorway to Hell." - Chris ReaInside the Magazine
YOU provide us with something to laugh about in our HOUSE OF CARDS feature this edition. Sorely needed, at least by me. I especially enjoyed the "Idiot Sightings" from Vermont's CHERYL NATION.
Also in this edition, I recommend the second of our two G21 FICTION pieces, JOHN KARANGA KARIUKI's biting observation on life in today's Kenya.
The irrepressible MATTIE LENNON, who has been hailed for his ability to entertainingly "talk about nothing" wonders where all the poets and lyricists happen to be hiding at moonset. It's a wonderful, whimsical piece of writing that brought a smile to the Old Man's face.
Our HOT LINKS page welcomes a new partner for those of you thinking about traveling to Germany. A wonderful resource we recommend you visit when you're not trawling around here.
About G21 Books
I haven't shared with the writers and contributors here yet my disappointment about the Original Plan for publishing two more titles this year. My best hopes were with the cinema book BRAD BALFOUR had pitched with me and, perhaps, putting out a second anthology of African writing.
The snags are that Brad suffered a personal loss this year that sidetracked his project and I got so few potential pieces for the African anthology that I was loathe to spend the time and effort.
That's certainly not all.
The fact is, as I see it now, and God Willing, I shan't be prepared to offer new titles from this imprint until next spring. I don't actually have a problem with that. I would rather publish books that I'm enthusiastic about than rush something out in order to maintain an artificial schedule. So, uncharacteristically for me, my disappointment is tempered with patience - a commodity I am known for having in short supply.
MIRRORS22 October 2006: Mayor Becky (Altemus - "Little Sister") called last night to tell me she and her husband, Kent, are driving over from Shenandoah to visit. We are going to meet the rest of the family for lunch. She is bringing over a blanket AND a comforter for me. ("Why didn't you mention that before you left?" she asked. "We can't have you down there sleepin' under a coat!") I admitted that it had slipped my mind in the excitement of trying to work at simply having a roof, of my own, over my head.
I am starting to suspect that Becky is the most sincere person I have met since my ex-wife, which is saying a lot, since my ex-wife is the most sincere human being I've ever known.
Becky calls me every week, if I don't call her. Just to "check in." I tell her she should not worry about me. "I've known you all your life," she says. "I have to worry about you." Which is true on a number of levels, as other life-long friends of me know.
I don't always have my best interests at heart and, as my good friend and editor Robin "roblimo" Miller has pointed out, "You're talented but you're a fuck-up." In other words, I have exhibited the tendency to make Rod the Person the sacrificial lamb for Rod the Writer. I'm working to overcome that tendency and establish a pact of mutual co-existence between the two of us.
One curious reader e-mailed to ask about the boxes that are my furniture. It should not come as a surprise that they are the story of my life on these Memory machines. My "desk" is the box that the eMac ("Elizabeth") arrived in. My two "chairs" are those that housed the beloved Powerbook that traveled the world with me for so many years ("Victoria") and that in which my newest companion, the iBook ("Merlin's Staff") arrived. Only my bed is near-actual. It is an air mattress that I have not named.
23 October 2006: What a difference a day makes.
Becky and Kent Altemus brought me Christmas in October, filling my life with 500% more comfort than an ascetic like me expected. Suddenly, last night, as I settled to sleep - my head falling on an actual pillow - I felt as if I were settling into a big hand, as Firesign Theatre once put it. They arrived bearing all-too-many and undeserved gifts: a blanket and brand new hand-crafted quilt, pillowcases and pillow, sheets, a new and ultra-modern air mattress ("It wouldn't fit in my boat," Kent demurred. "It's rechargeable and has a self-inflator, so I figured since I couldn't use it, maybe you could. Hey! If you want to sleep up off the floor, you can stack the two."
They gave me a chair, too, which I am sitting on now. Ohmigod! And - worst of all, horror of horrors! - they brought me a television set (fabulous color!) that has a DVD player.
I'll rot away. I'll feel too much like a regular human being.
Joking aside, I was deeply moved.
We went to a late lunch (more like dinner, as far as I was concerned) with Memaw and April. Back at Memaw's house, she and Becky called me over and said, "Rod, look at this." Up in a kitchen cabinet was a collection of expensive liquor bottles.
"Well, you know, Bill stopped drinking when April was still a baby but all his customers kept giving him bottles of this, that and the other for Christmas. He'd bring them home and put them on the shelf. I guess some of those bottles must be over twenty-years old."
"Almost thirty," April piped in.
"Do you think they're any good? If they are, you can take them," Memaw said.
I had to reach up on tiptoe. I grabbed a bottle of Smirnoff Blue and left the rest. "They'll keep," I told Memaw. "Alcohol doesn't go bad."
So I got home last night laden with that and my doggie bag from dinner. (I can never complete the portions that most people believe are a meal. Too much food. I am the king of doggie bag whenever I go out to eat.)
Becky handed me some cash, which I tried to turn back - pride! pride! - but she insisted I'd need it when rent came due. I couldn't argue with that.
The idea seems to be that I have finally come "home" to Texas. Kent and Becky have a three hour drive each way to come over here. Memaw is close, at least. I don't expect to see Ric, my putative life-long friend, I've learned, unless I'm able and willing to throw a party. Whatever. I am back in the arms of the family I joined, the one that rescued me from sleeping in the woods, after I was driven away from my biological family's house.
When Memaw and I talk, she reminds me of funny incidents from my youth, my early college years - incidents that I'd all but forgotten.
Becky seems to be reminding me that I do have a family, of sorts, and one that loves me, even if we are not related by blood.
Along the way, my loves, I'll have things to share with you about the late Aubrey R. "Bill" Williams. Pepaw. The man who took me into his family after I had lost my own. When I moved in, Pepaw was a Drill Instructor for the Marine Corps. I can't count the mornings that Ric and I, with whom I shared a room, woke up to country and western music.
Bill was from Arkansas, where he moved back after leaving the Corps, before finally settling here in Texas.
Bill never treated me any differently from how he treated Ric and Becky, once he took me in, I have to say. He chided me just as harshly, when he thought I made a dumbass move, he pushed me hard and he showed me a lot of love. Fact is, I've never felt anything but love and respect from Bill and Gloria Williams over the years; one of my biggest regrets is not having come back to Texas to see them before Pepaw passed away. I was always welcome, I knew that, but I could not come back here while I was wrestling with the angel.
Long-term Loyal Readers have been aware of how this family has been part of the subtext of my life all along. As family dynamics go, Kent and Becky have now become the "parent" figures, as it were - keeping tabs on all of us - providing a kind of relational glue.
As the "adopted child," in this scenario, for all the love, I am kind of a satellite, I feel sometimes. For the newest generation of this family, for instance, I am a suddenly embodied relic walking in from the myths and legends of when their parents and grandparents had been relevant and vital.
It is likely, I would suppose, that they would have imagined never seeing me in flesh and blood at all - a voice calling from some other part of the world, as though from the surface of the moon, or popping up in stories from some era before iPods or computers when people were really boring. April is now almost thirty; I saw her once when she was an infant. Ric's children, Ramona and Kady, are teenagers with braces, they'd never met me nor I them until weeks ago.
27 October 2006: SNIPPETS:
ONE - Little Sister's monetary largesse (See above) kept me in food, cigarettes and beer this week, allowed for me to access the Internet and submit potential story pitches and stories to my moody editor at OSTG this week.
I have a theory about my editor: He is doing an experiment to see how long a writer can survive on less than $500/month. That's been going on ever since I went to the Online Journalism Review conference in Los Angeles back in March. That's why I'm always, always looking for other sources of income. If NewsTrust and Enterprise Leadership had not come along, I suppose I would have walked in front of an on-coming truck or train by now. (Joke! To paraphrase the inimitable Rodney Dangerfield, I'm the kind of guy, if I opened a funeral home, people would stop dying.)
I feel like Job and wonder if my editor and Lucifer have a bet about me.
TWO - Visited with Tom Parish this week. He came by on Thursday and we had coffee and lunch and talked about the kind of topics only two people obsessed with the Internet, the future of communication and this (at least theoretic) rush toward "social networking" is taking the medium.
Tom's wife suddenly and sadly passed away at the beginning of the summer. The day of his visit would have been her fiftieth birthday. He seems to be handling the great loss well; he has his teenage daughter to nurture and protect, so he has to be strong. Still... I cannot but wonder that he is soldiering on so stolidly.
He is a good man and an optimist. He is in my prayers.
THREE: As my first next rent payment and first electrical bill approach, I have been frantically trawling for new jobs when not submitting story pitches to my experimenting editor. I applied for a job at a nearby Jiffy Lube with a sign up even, only to discover it was for $5.00 to hold a sign up advertising their services - standing in the median on the boulevard - on days that it was not raining. On Saturday, I shall apply for a job as cashier at the local Family Dollar store. I've also sent a resumé to a guy looking for a sports writer for a new Web portal he is starting.
I'm amazing myself with how quickly one man can go through a pound of coffee. Heck! Matt had a couple of cups (I believe) from the last bag I bought, Kent and Becky had a cup each, and I've plowed through the rest like coffee was oxygen. I gottah cut back.
I send out resumés every day and dream about the day when I can stop worrying so much about basic survival.
29 October 2006: LATE BREAKING NEWS in the Life Of Rod Universe:My putative Best Friend, Matt Stowell, telephoned at about four in the morning to inform me that he had been jacked - robbed at gunpoint - a half block away from the bar he was leaving, Cosimo's in the French Quarter, only a few blocks from his apartment - and half a block from where he'd called the New Orleans Police Department for some other guy who'd gotten jacked two or three weeks earlier.
Crime in New Orleans is NOT n ews. The nature of both crimes is, though. The bicycle guy was jacked by three white guys from Mississippi in an SUV - not the profile that everyone expects for crime in the Crescent City. My pal Matt was jacked by people with TEXAS license plates.
My comment: "Well, Matt, they didn't shoot you, at least. [ASIDE: Both Matt and I have known people who got shot for not having enough money to satisfy the thug(s) jacking them.]
"And it seems like all the criminals from nearby states know where to go for easy victims these days... America will always say it was New Orleans folks who did the crime."
Dance!
Nuthin' else for me to do but DANCE!
All these bad times I'm going through but DANCE!I don't know what to do
But then that's nuthin' new
So between Hell and high water
I need the cure to make it through: DANCE! - JamiroquiKeep me in your prayers as I keep you in my own.
Thanks for coming back this week.
ROD'S PREOCCUPATONS THIS WEEK
1 - Finding a Good Job.
2 - Keeping his apartment.
3 - Reducing the number of sleepness nights.
"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.
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 and NewsForge. Rod's more leftist writings can be found at Atlantic Free Press. (Don't tell his potential employers.) Rust never sleeps.
Our Resident Philosopher has decided to return to Austin, Texas, after over two decades away. Wish him luck..
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.
| HOME | THE THE PREVIOUS SMOKE & MIRRORS | THE NEXT SMOKE & MIRRORS | Send Page To a Friend |
CREDITS || TABLE OF CONTENTS || LINKS ||
VOX POPULI is YOUR PAGE to talk back to us. I'm glad you're not bashful. Keep those cards and e-mails comin', Kids!
RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE
Our Editor does listen!
© 2006, GENERATOR 21.
E-mail your comments. We always like to hear from you. Send your kudos, brickbats and suggestions to rod@g21.net.
