It’s been seventy-something days since Gustav and I’ve been looking for the right time and place to pick up the A&W thread. Right now I’m sitting on the back deck in front of the fireplace finishing off the last of the handle of Makers Mark I bought in the days before the storm and am burning, for the first time, wood cut from the tree that landed in the front yard during the storm. So the circle is complete. So mote it be. (more…)
There’s been a lot of waiting and watching on Gustav up to this point. I had told myself I’d know to switch gears to full on ‘hurricane survival mode’ when I started hearing the helicopters coming in. Choppers overhead in Baton Rouge are my enduring memory of Hurricane Katrina. On the Friday before the storm hit I was at Independence Park up on Lobdell which is right next to the State Emergency Response Headquarters, hitting baseballs on one of the fields when the helicopters started coming in, landing a few hundred yards away to shuttle officials into disaster planning meetings. It drove home the fact pretty quickly that something big was going down even though we still didn’t have a clue as to how big that something was going to be. After the storm they were the constant reminder of how bad things were down in New Orleans: for a number of days the only way into and out of the city was by helicopter, all of which were using Baton Rouge as home base. For at least 6 weeks after the storm the sound of rotors cutting the air was a constant companion to life post-Katrina.
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James Joyce fans unite, for Bloomsday is upon us. I couldn’t find any direct flights to Dublin from BTR, so I’m going to celebrate Leopold Bloom’s perambulations for the first time here in Baton Rouge. The Baton Rouge Gallery at City Park is hosting a celebration (.doc file) featuring LSU’s Joyce scholar starting at 6:30 pm (free admission) and then Culture Candy takes it late night with a fund-raiser at Red Star downtown, which kicks off at somewhere between 9:00 and 9:30. (more…)
I’ve followed horse racing since doing some work for a breeding consultant when I lived in New Mexico and have always wanted to be able to say that I saw a horse win the Triple Crown. Every year since then I’ve watched the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont and seen a number of horses come close to horse racings banner achievement. While I was alive the last time a horse won the Triple Crown, I was only two years old, so today’s opportunity to watch Big Brown, the most dominating thoroughbred race horse I’ve ever seen run, take his shot is an exciting one. I’m even missing the first few innings of LSU’s super regional game against UC-Irvine to see if Big Brown can repeat horse racing history. (more…)
Only a few days after the publication of the article that I linked to in my last post and Baton Rouge is facing a pretty big community art crisis. It’s a rather lengthy play-by-play, so I’ll just link to The Advocate’s article on the matter. Wgo had told me about the school board meeting and I had planned to attend but just ended up watching the meeting on public access. I turned off the proceedings before the vote on the matter, thinking that there was no way that anyone could argue with the substitute motion that was filed. Alas, it only garnered a 5-5 vote, and so the Baton Rouge school board has cleared the way for the demolition for a student-built sculpture that is listed on the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s inventory of American sculptures. Culture Candy sent out a call to action, where Wgo summarized the issue as such:
Culture emerges from community; and the various artworks and attitudes that comprise culture sustain and inform the very context in which they arise. Authentic art arises from authentic community, and this art in turn models authenticity to the community. Education is one of the more conspicuous of the means by which culture is communicated and sustained; it is certainly the most conspicuous guardian of a community’s intellectual health, and in a healthy community, this intellectual well-being includes the arts and humanities.
And this is why citizens who recognize the central role of culture in a healthy community must take notice when its school board votes to destroy a public sculpture on the Smithsonian list of monuments, a sculpture built by its young people through the process of education, an artwork that has authentically arisen in the community through the very process of acculturate that community. This is more than deeply troubling. The system by which the Baton Rouge community is educated has chosen to authorize the destruction of one of the few public displays of arts in education in this town. This is pathological; this is an animal eating its own heart in an attempt at sustenance.
I’m not sure what can be done or who is going to do it, but take a look at the full Culture Candy email for their immediate suggestions (I’ve reposted it here it because their site is down right now). If education, art and community are something you value in Baton Rouge, be on the lookout for ways to help out with this. I’ll post more as I know it.
Many congratulations to BobbyP and MsXTC on the arrival of their first born! Joseph Walker (who at only 4 hours old has no online pseudo-name yet) arrived at 12:17 pm at 7lbs 3oz and 21 inches long at Women’s Hospital here in Baton Rouge. BobbyP reports that both mother and child are doing well and JW (I’m pretty sure I’m allowed to call him this until he’s old enough to tell me to stop) arrived with 10 fingers, 10 toes, and all other requisite male-oriented appendages.
Free time for A&W posting has been hard to come by recently, with a lot of time devoted to the doing of things and not enough time for reflecting upon them or even really catching my breath between them. In the last few weeks there have been trips to NO for both Wilco and St. Patrick’s Day, each excellent adventures, plus the first meeting of the Historically Curious Flavors & Pastimes Investigatory Committee (more on this to come as a regular A&W feature). Just this last weekend Maddie Potter and I had BobbyP, MsXTC, Wrestlerette and Wgo over for the first cookout since time changed. Over vegetable kabobs, hot sausage po-boys, galvanized buckets of ice cold beer and a fire on the deck we celebrated BobbyP’s birthday, he and MsXTC’s last weekend of living child-free and the arrival of the Vernal Equinox and Easter, all rolled into one. Through all that I’ve somehow knocked out over 20 hours of overtime (any web application in developers in the Red Stick area looking for work?). So yeah, things are jumping.
