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We watched Lilja 4-ever last night and despite the grim reality it presented what made it watchable is the character of Lilja who despite all odds against her radiated hope.

Hope dies last – a Russian proverb.

And it was then that this unapologetic movie took us to the end of hope.

For those of you who cannot watch crimes against women – don’t watch this – but if you do and if you can imagine that this is the cost of inhumanity then perhaps when the next Change.org email petition comes to your inbox asking you to petition against human trafficking you might sign it because the faceless now has a name – 16 year old Lilja.

I wrote earlier about the horror of the fake brass bands, but it’s not as if I don’t understand why people come to New Orleans craving an authentic experience. Take this email that my neighbor sent yesterday:

Tom is sitting on his balcony playing Honky Tonk Blues with a fellow musician. Tom is playing harmonica and the other is playing guitar. This is truly heaven.

The Tom she speaks of is our very own Tom Marron, a local musician by night and a carpenter by day. This is an authentic experience living in a neighborhood where most people know each other, a lot are musicians, and we have a temperate climate that makes sitting outside, picking on a guitar, with a friend the norm.

When people come to visit me, they get a first hand look at what it is like to live in paradise, on our terms, of course, they don’t as often get a look at Dumaine Street between Broad and Claiborne, they don’t read the headlines which vie for Saints or Murder coverage, and they certainly don’t understand what it is like trying to make a living in a city that care forgot.

But I am ambassador for this city, and now that I’m renting out my own house, even more so. I want visitors to see New Orleans in its grandeur, and I try to keep the ugliness at bay because as my neighbor is want to say, “God don’t like ugly.”

Which brings me back to the fake brass bands and why anyone sees the need to create an experience that is inauthentic. At once you have police and residents coming down on pop up brass bands on Frenchman and at the same time, you have a city condoning bogus parades. Something has to give.

If we want to continue to live in paradise two things seem clear – fostering a climate that allows for the free expression of music and the arts in our streets, in our homes, anywhere – along with a police and justice department that keeps all of us safe so our headlines can focus on the Saints. AND we need to have a culture that is not so dependent on the tourist economy that our musicians must sell their souls to march in the streets for tourists like trained monkeys.

We, they, are greater than that.

I must admit to ignorance when Tin joined the Waldorf School here in New Orleans. I had heard of Waldorf but other than heard the name, I knew little about the school’s philosophy or that of Rudolf Steiner, who I hadn’t heard of at all. It’s possibly a grave oversight that not many people have heard of Steiner as he was one of the giants in philosophy and his work prescient enough that reading his writings now makes it hard to believe he is not of our time.

I took home a great article about Steiner that I found online as well. This provides a cogent overview of the man and yokes together his wide reaching tendrils into so many facets of our world that Waldorf is just given a mention near the end of the article.

But it is worth a read especially for those of us who are navigating a world that has worked hard to sever our physical self from our spiritual self from our conscious self. We are becoming is what Steiner wrote about back when WWI was thought of as the war to end all wars.

Most of us live in New Orleans because the lines between the waking and dreaming world are blurred by the fact that a continuous looping soundtrack is being played in the background of our life. We take this as normal here. And maybe too normal, so that we forget how special it is. Read Evan Christopher’s rants about the state of musicians (and music) in New Orleans today. Some of it ain’t pretty, let me just say.

So last night, Tatjana and I went out to hear some live music prompted by a cursory read of an article that OffBeat had written about Hurray for Riff Raff. The article said they did a fab cover of My Sweet Lord by George Harrison, and when I went to go listen to it on YouTube, I ended up posting here. It is a great cover. And when I went to go buy it on iTunes, it was instead offered for free. (Evan would blanch at the thought, and I even thought, why free? I am willing to pay?)

Then I noticed that Hurray for Riff Raff was playing this Thursday night (last night) at One Eyed Jacks with another band that I had only faintly heard of, Alabama Shakes. So last night, we got a babysitter and went to hear some live music. We arrived to hear Tumbleweeds get down with some boy picking and grinning beats that segued into Hurray for Riff Raff. Lo and behold, they hail from New Orleans, yet another progeny of the vast musical riches of this city.

The place was packed with a cornucopia of ages and walks of life, who had mostly come to see the headlining band, Alabama Shakes. This morning I went again to iTunes to buy their hit HOLD ON, because it resonates with a lot I have been living through, and I found the song for free, yes for free on iTunes. Again, why free?

While this is mildly disturbing to me, a patron of music, what happened last night has nothing to do with Tumbleweeds, Hurray for Riff Raff or Alabama Shakes but what happened in between.

Right before the first act came on, as we were walking from our parked car to One Eyed, we heard a marching band (read: not unusual in this city) and then we saw them, majorettes and high school marching band marching through the Quarter tailed by a block and a half long group of business men marching and staring at us on the sidewalk.

We stood there as these tourists eyed us suspiciously. Wait, I’m not a tourist, I thought to myself and instead of eyeing them back suspiciously I smiled and continued on my way to One Eyed.

Horrors.

I realized we had been witnessing a fake parade. The latest in the Cultural Extraction of a real New Orleans spontaneous event scripted, packaged and delivered to the mighty tourists of New Orleans and misnamed authentic.

Of all the things that were so great about last night, I woke haunted and unable to shake the vision of the fake parade.

I went to get my hair done today at Jupiter where even to this day I continue to call Scott, David, in my mind. It’s because in San Francisco David was my hairdresser for 12 years, and when I moved back to New Orleans, the idea of not having David a phone call away was like telling me there was no bathroom for 800 miles. Panic.

So when I met Scott, I knew he was my new David, and I couldn’t get this comparison out of my mind. And I couldn’t help but trust that Scott and I were just starting a long relationship. To say that he has been able to handle every change I’ve asked for in the few years I’ve known him is to misunderstand just how many times I have changed my hair since 2007.

So how do you thank someone who has taken you from short to long, from light to dark and back again? It isn’t easy, but I’ll try – there were many more small changes but these were the obvious ones and they are in chronological order (frightening):

I took a walk with a friend this morning as I was walking the dogs and was downloading the state of the union around here, around the LaLa, and around work. I’ve been blessed to start my business and have a client even before I had a logo. And just yesterday spoke to a prospective client in an industry that I have been wanting to enter from this new vantage point. So count your blessings, Rachel.

Yesterday, I took a bike ride to Tin’s school to pick him up as I can’t seem to get to the gym on time and the weather here is so outstanding. I sat there with another parent watching the children playing – the shoving, pushing, crying, tattle telling, and then outbursts of joy – he turned to me and said, “They have issues,” and I said, “Indeed.”

It seems we spend a lifetime working out our issues and some of us get passed them, and some of those issues linger like a bad dream.

My friend on the bayou said, “You guys are so creative and free spirited” and I said, well, necessity is the mother of invention. So yesterday, when I got home and we were about to eat our late European style lunch, and it was a little too cool on the screen porch, we gathered up our plates and went out into the sunshine in the backyard. And Tin came bounding out of his room saying, “Eat in the Garden!” delighted to be on this adventure with us that is unscripted and mostly filled with wonderful days (even when they don’t seem like it at the time).

No posts until it is removed from Congress. First time my blog has gone dark since 2004.

http://sopaboycott.com/

http://sopastrike.com/strike

The better part of 2012, I have spent reading lists and at the end of the day, they have done nothing if not make me more dissatisfied with the status quo. What I have read that has inspired me have been an array of unlists: a friend’s food blog, a new podcast from Bill Moyers, a blog I stumbled upon, and one I sought out, as well as re-reading the Tao te Ching.

And so here is my Re-list for 2012:

1. The lists I have read in the past 15 days have inspired me to quit reading lists. Everything you need to know about life is contained within the Tao – I’ve read nothing that has inspired me as much as rereading this passage.

TtC #9:

Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people’s approval
and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.

2. Connectivity – this is something I have read about in every list because I study media, but no one has gotten it right so far. I adopted a child in 2009 and he is growing fast. I force myself to be connected with him because at my age I know that work fills all available space. An ex colleague of mine took two weeks off for maternity leave over a decade ago. Another leaves in the morning and returns at night to her kids. I want to be present. The reason I had more time to read lists this year is I accompanied a friend to the midwest where she, in her 40s, adopted a newborn baby. That experience was simply put, incredible. It made me realize how fast my own son is growing up and so I drove 90 miles an hour after being away for a week to be present in his life. And how this relates to media? – I purchased a bottle of Perrier Pink Grapefruit (it’s the same sparkly water with a dash of pink grapefruit juice) on the way to a dinner party and loved it. I went back to get more and the small grocer was out so I did a shout out to my larger grocer – Rouses – on Facebook and as Rouses has done in the past, they responded immediately, with all of the information I needed to be satisfied and get more. Here is one local grocer who gets social media, who gets connectivity. Makes me proud.

3. In the blog I stumbled upon, one post described Woody Alan’s work habits (working five hours a day) and what we can learn. Right now America is anti-Europe, calling on the European schedule – time off and 35-hour work week – as the antithesis of what we need to be doing. I disagree. A woman in Croatia said her grandfather told her all you need in life are two chairs – one to sit on, and one to put your feet on. I began this year again as an entrepreneur. I aspire to help companies tell their stories, launch products, and green-light their strategies. It’s a simple plan. My friends tell me I’ll be working harder than ever with my own business. But I disagree. Read #1 and #2 – aspiring to be rich is not an option, but neither is failure.

4. Give, but also receive. I started working on a community project back in 2011 that took up a lot of my time. Too much of my time. I then proceeded to pick up two other community endeavors – working more closely with my son’s school and a broader conservation project. I was soon overwhelmed. My new company’s DNA has social and philanthropy in its blueprint, but that doesn’t mean at the expense of living. This year, give a little, take a little. Time is a valuable resource.

The monarchs are dying around my neighborhood – I keep trying not to step on them. It seems butterfly season has lasted longer than usual given the continued high temps in New Orleans. I read somewhere that if there was no change, there would be no butterflies. We know only too well here that change allows other things room to become, even while we mourn what we lost.

I was trying to explain spirituality to someone who is a self professed atheist. This person didn’t like Martin Luther King’s speech because it had too many religious references. My response is that we – mere mortals – are stuck in the metaphor. The one that was handed down to us so people say words and phrases like God will provide, or Jesus loves me, but when an individual sits down and contemplates his or her place in the universe it is really not through the lens of religion – that is what most people use to communicate with others, but the silent conversation we have with the universe is a different one – one where we are trying to get out of the ego, trying to let go of one track thinking, trying to sprout wings while trying to root down into the essence of who we are.

How do you explain that to a friend? You don’t. You use language that others understand – words like God, words like prayer, words like blessing, words like heaven and earth. You use words because you don’t have other words that explain things that are larger than yourself, that are mysterious and wonderful.

God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It’s as simple as that.
Joseph Campbell