Giorgio Gomelsky - Rock History

Tonight is his 75th Birthday party.

This 'n That Re New Orleans

Not only did Bobby Jindal give a dorkdong speech, notable as noted by many, for a presentation both physical and audio, remarkably like the creepy, sinister character of Kenneth the page on 30 Rock, but also very stupid --tell us again why a high speed mag lev train connecting NO and Baton Rouge is a BAD idea and boondoggle, particularly during the periods of necessary evacuation? -- and it turns out, to have a Great Big Fat Lie at the center of it. Check here on Talking Points Memo blog. Louisiana is getting mighty sick of him, the rethugz' New! Great! White! -- er- Mixed Race! Hip-Hop Off Da Hook Hope! Even the rethugz.

It's like whatever teh stupid is that Illinois politicos drink is also drunk by those of Louisiana. It's the same Big Water System ain't it. It's one giant polluted system of the stupid and the corrupt.

The World That Made New Orleans went back to press for a third HC printing. The trade edition will come out in August simultaneously with the HC The Year Before the Flood.

Yesterday we received an envelope from CRP of the latest reviews and mentions of TWTMNO. Somehow we'd missed this, but on December 31, Susan Larson, the NO Times-Picayune Books Editor, put up her ten best books of the year -- 2 fiction and 8 non-fiction. TWTMNO was one of the non-fiction titles. Among these is Bienville's Dilemma: The Historical Geography of New Orleans, the latest work of Tulane's Geography professor, the invaluable Richard Companella. We look forward to picking it up while down there in March for the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book Award event for TWTMNO.

We have jacket art for TYBTF. This one, again, has Vaquero's photographs. There's a pattern now among all three of the CRP titles in the jacket art. This one, like the cover for Cuba and Its Music, is filled with light and air; the colors are so luminous they almost feel ghostly ... but it project depth as well as a sense of joy -- ballon, as we say in ballet. It's most pleasing.

Antoinette K-Doe

Her funeral is tomorrow, Saturday, February 28, 2009. The most hurtful part is that she might well be alive if she hadn't had to endure the horrors of the levees failure, alone, at her age, with the state of her health. The stress this put on her heart is indescribable, which is equally true for so very, very many.

Visitation for Antoinette K-Doe, who died of a heart attack early Mardi
Gras morning, is Friday, Feb. 27 from 2 to 7 p.m. at the Mother-in-Law Lounge,
the nightclub at 1500 N. Claiborne Ave. that she transformed into a shrine to
her late husband, Ernie K-Doe.

Visitation continues Saturday, Feb. 28 from 9 to 11 a.m. at St. James
Methodist Church, 1925 Ursulines Ave.

Following an 11 a.m. funeral service at St. James, a procession moves
on to St. Louis Cemetery No. 2, where Ernie K-Doe is buried. A repast follows
from 2:30 to 6:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 28 at the Mid-City Lanes Rock 'n Bowl,
4133 S. Carrollton Ave.

Donations to help with funeral expenses are being accepted via the
Antoinette K-Doe Fund at Metairie Bank, or can be mailed to 2341 Metairie Road,
Metairie 70001.

Antoinette K-Doe. Yes, Still, More, Mardi Gras

Antoinette rebirthed the Mardi Gras Indians ladies auxillary of the Baby Dolls. She did this in 2004, the last year before the Katrina Failure of the Levees. If she hadn't done that, and with her sense of inclusiveness and love, that's another unique New Orleans tradition that would have been lost forever. But the Baby Dolls live. Even I could have been a Baby Doll, and probably would have been, but was still not feeling myself entitled -- because I still didn't know enough, I hadn't even experienced a Mardi Gras season, I hadn't lived the round of time that is New Orleans, when I was invited.

Antoinette was an Indian in the way that only a great Mardi Gras Indian Lady can be, one who lived her whole life in the heart and soul of the Marti Gras Indians. So many of the white women too, who are my friends in New Orleans, were Baby Dolls. Because of Antoinette. She was an encyclopedia of the Indians, and of New Orleans.She was out there, Thursday night, parading with the Krewe of Muses, I believe.

Antoinette K-Doe -- RIP

This morning, this Mardi Gras morning, Antoinette K-doe, of the Mother-in-Law Lounge, the Mother of the Baby Dolls, the heart and soul of WWOZ, died of a massive heart attack.

There is going to be a massive jazz funeral, you bet.

But I just can't believe it. And I just hate that this is true. Like so many, I loved her.

ETA:

POSTED ON FEBRUARY 16, 2009:

Rally of the Dolls

Separated by a generation — and now, by 2,000 miles — friends Antoinette K-Doe and Miriam Batiste Reed have teamed Up to bring the Baby Doll tradition back to Mardi Gras.

By Noah Bonaparte Pais

Laura Miller and Elaine Showalter Ask "Why can't a woman write the Great American Novel?"

Either Showalter's book, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, is remarkably stupid and filled with ignorance, or else Laura Miller's an idiot -- which many people for a long time have stated -- because this is the reason that Miller declares Showalter provides as why women in the United States didn't write Middlemarch:

[ "While English women novelists, even those as poor as the Brontës, had servants, American women were expected to clean, cook and sew; even in the South, white women in slaveholding families were trained in domestic arts." ]

Nevermind for the moment the very many great novels written by women in this country -- Harriet Beecher Stowe, Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Zora Neale Hurston, Harper Lee, Toni Morrison, Leslie Silko, leap to mind immediately -- and look at the astounding scope and range of each of these writers's body of work, individually and as an eclectic group! -- where the f*ck did either Showalter or Miller get the idea that Austen, the Brontes, Eliot, Gaskell didn't do domestic work, every day, and do it very well? Eliot often spoke with great pride of her domestic skills, even after she employed many servants. She insisted that only someone who knows how to do the work right herself, and has done it, could train a servant and keep a house running as it should.

Did Showalter not read a single biography of any of them? Did she not read their novels, filled with personal knowledge of all the work even middle-class women performed in the home? Not to mention nursing the sick, laying out and washing the dead? One of the lovely things about the recent BBC dramatization of Gaskell's Cranford was that it showed us, as does the text work itself, all these dirty jobs that even genteel, comfortably off women did as a matter of course, every day.

Moreover Harriet Beecher Stowe, even in the early impoverished days of her marriage in the boonies had a domestic servant. She was an ignorant, untaught backwoods young girl, who Stowe had to teach to do everything, while Stowe herself worked at domestic tasks, while pregnant, while working on her first fiction.Cather and Wharton are the writers here who did little or no domestic tasks themselves with their hands. Cather, because her family allowed her privileges that few girls her age had -- she was that exception to the average woman who proves the rule -- and Wharton because she was a member of the American aristocracy and rich.

This ignorance of the basic facts of these writers' lives is inexcusable. This is another of those feminist dilemmas in which one's supposedly feminist friends are a big part of the problem. It's also beyond infuriating.

It's Mardi Gras, Baby

I wish we were in New Orleans. It happens to be 22 degrees here, by the way.

Already have received Skull and Bones photos from this morning.