New Orleans is being overrun by smart, good looking, well dressed, mostly black, people who have come from all around to celebrate the Essence Festival. It touts itself as a music festival and the artist line up is quite impressive, but it’s way more than that. It is a festival that celebrates empowerment and its aim is to arm all who come with words of wisdom, tools for living, and general self improvement techniques to…
In the be careful what you wish for category, when I finally got the house renovation behind me and could put my eye completely on the ball, I wished that I could regain the passion I once had for covering media. Lately it has been such a balls in the air type situation – the media landscape is undergoing a massive upheavel while nothing is really happening – sort of weird. Like the prognosticators are…
Check out this video on You Tube – it is infectious – and Soko’s French accent is so groovy.
There is an underlying belief that the flood we had here in New Orleans was of biblical proportions and some would go so far as to say, it came to wash us clean. Floods and fires have a way of doing that. In California, the fires rage because the underbrush has grown too bushy and the natural barriers have been destroyed to accommodate urban sprawl (oh they all drive Priuses but believe you me, they’re…
Had dinner with mom who is now trying to figure out what to do with all the time on her hands – so she paces the apartment and worries and grows increasingly more paranoid. She blamed me for her bad lab report saying that it was my words in there – “her apartment is like a pharmacy” – “she smokes incessantly” – “she had a breatholater in one hand with a lit cigarette in the…
I was interviewing someone today and the word “acceptance” came up in the natural course of our conversation. She said it’s part of acceptance of things being what they are and moving on. At the same time, I received an email from a friend who was going to adopt a child and decided at the last minute to give it some more thought. And in yet another conversation, Katrina as the force of life change…
Interesting article in the Wall Street Journal by Ted Nugent on Tuesday: The Summer of Drugs By TED NUGENT July 3, 2007; Page A17 This summer marks the 40th anniversary of the so-called Summer of Love. Honest and intelligent people will remember it for what it really was: the Summer of Drugs. Forty years ago hordes of stoned, dirty, stinky hippies converged on San Francisco to “turn on, tune in, and drop out,” which was…
We just couldn’t make it to all the parties yesterday – I did a drive by mimosa with my neighbor, then the Cotton Mill for bbq and then stopped in Del Forno and finally wound back at the bayou for a wine tasting and karaoke. I sang Sexual Healing (sorry Marvin, I butchered it). By the time my head hit the bed, I felt like there were fireworks going off in my brain.
That’s the title of a book I’m writing. Or at least that is what I told this guy I met yesterday – a friend of a friend who I ran into in the afternoon at Del Forno. We stopped in to see what was going on and as usual found a coterie of interesting Turks to engage in afternoon conversation. So Chapter One in this book is WHY I AM ATTRACTED TO ASSHOLES. But Chapter…
Ended up at a BBQ at the Cotton Mill yesterday to celebrate Independence Day – the food was abundant (pulled pork, jambalaya, beef tips, hot dogs, sausage, chili, ribs, cabagge salad, tomato salad, apple pie) and there was a daiquiri machine churning away frozen Voodoo delights! All of this was a product of two men, friends who put the whole meal on themselves. Amazing. Just like the Can, a lot of people relocated to the…