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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: THE NEW LOOK/THE NEW YEAR - ROD AMIS's column, called the Father of the Blog when it was MY GLASS HOUSE turns bifurcated in this form. This week, the "Smoke" section talks about changes at your World's Magazine for year ten, the return of Thomas Hart and his take on the news. In "Mirrors" he focuses on the personal.
SMOKE
"Where there's smoke, there's fire ..." Popular Adage.
28 December, 2005: We've taken a few looks at the evolution of the media in this country over the years and, because of our passionate commitment to the growth of this medium in particular, it would be nice to believe we've had an influence on how our readers look at and understand the news. That's part of the mission of any journal of this kind, after all, to mediate between its public and the confusing panoply of other sources dedicated to interpreting reality.
We have made it a point here at your World's Magazine of wearing our biases on our sleeves. We also made the point that admitting that all media are biased is essential to your ability to suss out the best version you can of the real, the truth, of human existence in our world.
Doing anything less than making these kinds of assertions and focusing on this kind of mission, from this chair's perspective, would be dishonest.
The converse examples don't have to be listed here to drive home the point. We all know who refutes our position and why they have become jokes, notoriously ridiculed.
In this regard, I've welcome d THOMAS ("Tabloid") HART back to these pages for our tenth year here on the World Wide Web ("Web".) One thing that's been in short supply here during the last year is humor. After the experience of 2005, I suppose we all need a few laughs.
Having been here for so many years, it seems like getting back to his column was like riding a bike. In many ways, his first new column picks up exactly where he left off. Bravo!
29 December, 2005: YOU'LL ALSO NOTE that for our tenth year and the New Year, we bring you a new masthead for the magazine and a new cover design. I tested it out on a couple of people and the general response was good.I have no idea what it looks like in Internet Explorer, a browser I dumped as soon as FireFox came along. (You should dump it, too. Too many problems.) Those of you still using that will have to tell me.
Oddly, during my initial experiments, it looked close to what I envisioned when I used the Safari (Mac native) and Opera browsers than it did in FireFox. Still haven't figured out why. I still use FireFox as my default, so I'm hoping to work out the kinks by the time the new cover actually reaches you.
Please let me know what you think and feel about the changes. Thanks!
Those are all my "serious" publishing notes for this week. So let's dive right in to
NEWS TO ROD
ITEM ONE: The Pew Research Center for the People and The Press, on 27 December 2005, listed these as the top fifteen stories that Americans followed during the year:Among the things that the Center analyzed as top trends for 2005:
1. Presidential Popularity Plunge - Starting his second term with less popular support than other recent re-elected incumbents, President George W. Bush's saw his approval ratings further erode under pressure from public opposition to his foreign and domestic policies and new focus on alleged ethical lapses in his administration. In November, Bush's approval rating hit new lows, just 36% of the public thought he had lived up to his campaign pledge to restore integrity to the White House, and for the first time as many approved as disapproved of his handling of terrorism. By December, upbeat economic reports, apparently successful elections in Iraq and a series of high-profile speeches shored up the president's approval rating in some major polls although not in others. However, a Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll found that by a 47%-38% margin, the public judged that this year the president would make Santa's "naughty," rather than "nice" list, up from 40% who thought so a year ago and 31% in 2003.You can find the full text of their analysis here2. Hurricane Blowback - Most Americans gave the federal government a failing grade on its handling of Hurricane Katrina's aftermath. But the crisis revealed a sharp racial divide, with two-thirds of blacks saying the government's response would have been faster had most victims been white; only 17% of whites agreed. A month later, while a growing number saw the nation increasingly divided between "haves" and "have nots," as many Americans worried that the government would spend too much on hurricane relief as feared that it would spend too little.
3. Iraq Disillusionment - Following a small post-election bounce, public approval of the president's handling of the situation in Iraq resumed its downward drift, hitting a low of 37% in October. But opinions on Iraq remain volatile: Americans are nearly evenly divided on whether the decision to use military force was right or wrong, and more than half think it possible that the U.S. can establish a stable democracy in Iraq. In the wake of Democratic congressman's John Murtha's high-profile call for a withdrawal plan and a series of presidential speeches in rebuttal, Bush's approval rating on Iraq remained mired in the mid-thirties.
4. Pump Shock and Economy Anxiety - Even before hurricanes in the Gulf added momentum to already rising gas prices, the public remained apprehensive about the economy. In May, only 44% of Americans rated their personal financial situation good or excellent, down from 51% in January; only 35% approved of the president's handling of the economy. In Katrina's wake, fully 71% of the public (the most in two decades) reported following news about gas prices very closely. As prices receded and economic reports re-brightened in December, prices at the pump were still closely watched by 61% of the public and 40% of Americans said they were finding it hard to make ends meet.
5. Inward Turn - Isolationist sentiment was on the upswing, with more than four-in-ten among the public saying America should "mind its own business internationally"-on par with numbers expressing that view after the closing of the Vietnam War and the Cold War. Two-thirds of Americans say the country is less respected globally; most blame the Iraq war for that result.
ITEM TWO: Also on 27 December 2005, in the Los Angeles Times you might have come across this wonderful piece of commentary by esteemed MidEast reporter Robert Fiske ("Telling It Like It Isn't".) Here's a snippet to whet your appetite:
Similarly, "occupied" Palestinian land was softened in many American media reports into "disputed" Palestinian land - just after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, in 2001, instructed U.S. embassies in the Middle East to refer to the West Bank as "disputed" rather than "occupied" territory.Clearly, Orwell was prophetic, wasn't he? How can anyone rightly call him-/herself a journalist these days who actively determines to use the language of the propagandists rather than honest words?Then there is the "wall," the massive concrete obstruction whose purpose, according to the Israeli authorities, is to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from killing innocent Israelis. In this, it seems to have had some success. But it does not follow the line of Israel's 1967 border and cuts deeply into Arab land. And all too often these days, journalists call it a "fence" rather than a "wall." Or a "security barrier," which is what Israel prefers them to say. For some of its length, we are told, it is not a wall at all - so we cannot call it a "wall," even though the vast snake of concrete and steel that runs east of Jerusalem is higher than the old Berlin Wall.
The semantic effect of this journalistic obfuscation is clear. If Palestinian land is not occupied but merely part of a legal dispute that might be resolved in law courts or discussions over tea, then a Palestinian child who throws a stone at an Israeli soldier in this territory is clearly acting insanely ...
MIRRORS29 December 2005: Just about every day, when not doing research or queries from potential subjects for my column at IT Manager's Journal, I'm busily flaking my book on New Orleans or seeking people to review the G21 AFRICA anthology. I never wanted it to be this way but I suppose that's the price I have to pay for deciding to become a book and magazine publisher simultaneously.
As those of you who bothered to listen to the podcast I did last month know, I'm trying to get used to the idea that I have to be a flak. Hate it!
2 January 2006: PART OF THE WRITING, the real writing, is prowling in the night. That is the only time to hear the voices you do not hear. What the real writing is about is not creating at all, it is simply listening. It is going to a dark place you only glance at in your peripheral vision and lik e to pretend was a chimera, not there. But it is there.Our Curse is to visit it for you and bring back what we have seen, stared - gudgingly and with trepidation - in the face. What is just over the shoulder, what makes you shiver deep in the night, when you wake up but would rather be asleep, and what you shudder about in your dreams ...
It is there but not there.
I know. In dark moments, it is with me even when I am awake.
MATT STOWELL AND I talk almost every week. He is constantly hectoring my return to New Orleans. He believes that I should return to that city that is no longer a city to finish my "Mission" there: the next New Orleans book. He has not said it in so many words. It is simply a subtext of our conversations.
Matt is relentless on this one topic, New Orleans. I'm convinced that he just wants the luxury of seeing me die in that southern wasteland.
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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.New Orleans has disappeared as surely as the lost city of Atlantis or the lost city of Pompeii, which former mayor Marc Morial and Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA.) have compared us to in their statements.
That New Orleans, the New Orleans I mean to tell you about, that will never, ever, exist again--that city of love, lust, death and sex--will never exist again.
Buy the book or get a downloadable PDF Copy now!
To order on Amazon.com, go here!
But I could be wrong. It's happened many times before. Matt sent me a wonderful Christmas present: money. Yayy! It came in a very ritzy card for Maker's Mark whiskey (a brand I can't afford, of course.) But it was more that he came through when he knew I'd probably need it. I was just about out of cigarettes and prefer that I buy my own booze rather than mooch off my housemate.
Matt's boosterism of New Orleans, though, is relentless. I'm not even sure why the man is so in love with the city. His favorite musician, Tom Waits, lives in California. He doesn't seem all that taken with most of the food. He's a big fan of The New Orleans Jazz Vipers and the Hot Club of New Orleans, I know. But somehow that doesn't explain his passion for the place entirely, at least not to me.
Hmnnn ...
My new friend, Tom Parish, of Talking Portraits informs me this evening that at least of a few of you have bothered to download the podcast I did with him in December. I have to Laugh Out Loud (LOL!) wondering whether it's mostly the writers here at G21.net seeking any confirmation that I am a real person and not just a creation of the digital stream ...
TEN YEARS. I've been sitting in the Big Chair here now for as long as I was once married. I can't but think back to how many friends of mine over the years suggested that I just quit doing your World's Magazine because it took so much time and effort and it was, frankly, becoming an obsession.Becoming? Hell!
No G21, no Rod. We are synonymous. This is all I live for.
6 January, 2006 UPDATE: Yeah, I needed to come back and correct some of the typos that are an invariable part of my habit of always doing my own column last. I focus on the other writers at this site -- for better or worse.
Meanwhile, on the day we launched this edition, I received the wonderful gift of having my dear friend, LIONEL ROLFE, publish reviews of my book at one of my favorite Web sites, 3 a.m. Magazine (Shout out to Utahna Faith!) and also at a site I'd never visited before, DaBelly. Thanks, Lionel!
Thanks for coming back this week. Keep me in your prayers as I keep you in my own.
THE 2006 ROD IS
1 - Going to be less willing to show his emotions to people around him.
2 - Hopeful that the new year will be better.
3 - More likely to be childish than ever before.
"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 Gene ral 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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