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Money Giving Charters a Leg Up on Public Schools

New Orleans Ideologues with chips on their shoulders about the nation’s public school systems seem committed to doing everything possible to make sure there’s no level playing field to allow comparison of charter school performance as opposed to regular school district performances.

Reading the hometown paper in New Orleans, there was an item a week [...]

Waste Land

New Orleans This had to be a hot ticket!

Waste Land was an Audience Award Best Documentary (Waste Land Trailerat the prestigious 2010 Sundance Film Festival focusing on a powerful confluence of art and poverty and the lives of waste pickers in one of the world’s largest landfills, Jardim Gramacho, outside of the magical [...]

Bywater Bohemia

Bywater's McCarthy Square Arch

New Orleans        Having been on extended home-leave of almost a month before I hit the road again soon for Toronto, New York City, and DC, it’s been interesting taking the new measure of my neighborhood in New Orleans.  Bywater has morphed from what the New York Times called a “working [...]

Fifty Years Since the Freedom Rides

NewOrleans Thanks to my new library card, I stumbled onto the library’s homepage last weekend to learn how to order books on-line, and what do you know there was an announcement of a event commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Freedom Rides of 1961 complete with a traveling exhibit and speakers, so I trundled [...]

Abandoned Communities: Detroit & New Orleans

New Orleans        There is no question that Detroit has been an economically troubled city for some time now.  Apocryphal, urban legends have grown around this great city of quail and bird counts returning to some areas because they have essentially gone “back to wilderness” due to abandonment and lack of population.  Now news of [...]

Gulf Coast Hospitality Workers Need to Sit on Oil Spill Santa’s Lap Now!

New Orleans My darling and brilliant niece’s husband, an Australian bloke who we dearly love, was working this summer running a high end, specialty bar at the W Hotel on Poydras Avenue in New Orleans during the time of the terrible British Petroleum Gulf Oil Spill.  My daughter, Dine,’ now a mainstay of the [...]