Distressed Homeless & Fat Squirrels

Walking along the usual route to the local supermarket, between the Manhattan Island New Amsterdam era botanical museum and the Community Garden, was a homeless man lying in the middel of the walkway between these tree and flower filled spaces on one side, NYU faculty housing and the Morton Williams supermarket on the other. No baggage, no blanket, no cardboard, no plastic. I couldn't tell if he was breathing or not. People are walking around him. Others are feeding the very fat squirrels. Nobody even seems to notice him, much less cares.


I called our local EMS-911 number. While I was waiting for them to arrive, two college guys walking their dogs started to encourage their dogs to pee on the man. I stopped them. They told me to get a sense of humor, frigid bitch.

Then, coming home after he was roused by the EMS people and ran away from them, though he couldn't walk, much less run, in anything resembling a straight line, a very young woman pushing a baby carriage with two small children begged me for money to take the PATH train to her mother's because she just had no money. This is the second time this exact conformation and request has been made to me in two days. Nevertheless I gave her 5 dollars of what I've got to live on this week, unless a check comes it (which is supposed to, but so often doesn't). How can you tell, things are so bad for so many.

Of course for those for whom it isn't bad at all, they have more money than ever. You see it all around us here.

The Prehistory of New Orleans: Treasures from the Hogan

On AfroPop tonight, at least on the radio station here.  Vaquero made the program this week.

It can be streamed here on the AfroPop Worldwide site.

Post Mamboist New Orleans

Tuesday night he's playing a concert at a restaurant-bar that does a lot of bands, readings and so on, called the Evangeline Café.  It's a New Orleans restaurant in Austin.

But this thing the poster is for, is Monday, at UT.

Library Books

Why have I never read Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989) by David Hackett Fischer?

Because it weighs a ton. Thus it isn't a traveling book. And because the American folkways I've been most deeply interested in for decades -- because they affect my life -- are African in heritage.

I have the 2009 Jack Reacher novel, Gone Tomorrow, which since it's large print isn't an hc either, thus not heavy, thus a travel book.

And what looks like a Spanish knock-off of Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Dr. Wao, by Javier Cabo, titled -- ka-ching! -- Wonderful World (2007), published in Spain by Mondadori and here by HarperCollins (2009). Cabo lives in Brooklyn when he's not living in Barcelona. So it's very likely the two, Cabo and Díaz, know each other. Paging through Cabo's my eyes light immedately upon a passage in which the narrator reads an X-Man comic. And like that, on all the pages. No footnotes though. And much longer than Díaz's. Also Cabo's guiding light is Stephen King, whereas Díaz's is The Lord of the Rings. LOTR is beyond love in the pantheon of books I hold dear. Stephen King? My dear, I don't give a damn.

Mardi Gras's Comin', Baby!

It's on my birthday this year.

And guess what? There's an invite from Tulane which includes putting us up for 3 days for a Cuban Music thang -- keynote -- on the 19th. Is this cool or what?

Part of something to do with US Department of Education.
Mardi Gras and Cuba in the same span of days!

This is really exciting.

Election Day

It's a most gorgeous day here. I remember election day here in 2001 though. It too was gorgeous, as was the primary day which happened to be 9/11 in 2001.


Vaquero voted very early this AM before heading out to a studio in Brooklyn. When I got there -- there was a line! Now this is a very low turn-out election across the state, and here in the City. Particularly here in the City since Bloomberg and the city council highjacked the two -- yes TWO! -- voter referendums that refused to accept no term limits for mayoral terms. So he's been pouring about a million a day into getting himself a 3rd term as mayor since about January this year.

Evidently the hatred my district shares with me for Bloomberg is the platform for the number of voters turning out today here. The other districts of my polling place didn't have anybody voting.

Also, this was an election in which I could vote the straight Working Families party and still vote for all the candidates of my choice. One way of giving the ball-less dems a message. As far as it goes. But the Working Families party is getting on more ballots every election ....

Needless to say I voted no on both propositions: one to allow construction in public lands to create a for-profit -- what? electrical plant? not sure, as there's been so little discussion about it anywhere, and no against using prison labor in non-profit businesses. Already Haliburton seems to think we believe they aren't for profit. The basic economic problem we are all facing is a lack of paying jobs. Encouraging prison labor is like encouraging slave labor and illegal immigrant labor -- it takes more and more jobs away from us -- and in this case also encourages the FOR PROFIT PRISON SYSTEM to keep lobbying with all their $$$$$$$$$ -- which so often happen to be tax payer dollars -- to expand the prison population LIKE IT ALEADY DOES. And who is going to prison illegally? Primarily kids and African Americans.

La Luna

Last night, walking along the colonial era botanical 'museum,' I was moonbushed.

Just a woman, minding her own business, I come to the wide staircase of an open area among the tall cubes that are NYU, and -- BLAM! Right Between the Eyes! -- I get hit by this enormous, perfectly round white moon, struck immobile for several minutes.

She will do that to you.