Improper Ambitions at Rhino

I've been remiss in not mentioning that my friend wrote (and her husband directed) a play currently being performed every weekend at Theatre Rhinoceros in the Mission District. Oh, and I have been roped into helping backstage as what I call "tech help" but what is really more like "slide projectionist/laptop button pusher."

Christine U'Ren wrote the play, which is about real-life French painters Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun and Berthe Morisot. This is the World Premiere. The action takes place in both the 1700s and the 1800s, and some of the other characters in the play include: Marie-Antoinette, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, and Mary Cassatt, to name a few. Most of the actors play more than one role, and all of the actors are well-cast and quite brilliant. Gene Mocsy directed the play. If you live in the Bay Area, please come by. But hurry (as they say) because the run ends on October 2, 2005!

http://www.bellaunion.org/index.html

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Saxman Views Katrina Damage

My buddy Chris Saxman who is now a local politician in Virginia just went down and viewed some of the Hurricane Katrina damage in Mississippi. He emailed out this account of what he saw (this is only part of his message, but it is a good overview):

"Today I flew down to Gulfport, MS to survey the damage of Hurricane Katrina. A group of about a dozen people from the Shenandoah Valley wanted to adopt a particular area in our relief efforts. For whatever reason, we chose Long Beach, MS and we toured that town with their Mayor Skellie. While many images are being shown nightly on the television, sadly they do not come close to capturing the utter and total devastation that was inflicted by this storm. When they say a 35 foot flood wall hit the beach, one imagines a lot of water. When one sees the leveling of city block after city block, one is left with a sense of complete shock. Churches gone. Houses gone. KMarts, Taco Bells, McDonalds gone. Six story hotels gone. Entire apartment complexes gone. Condominiums gone. Not knocked over or roof damaged due to falling limbs. These things are no longer there period. Debris piled up over the roads to where the streets are really half tunnels. The military has cut off access to the residents of Long Beach south of the railroad tracks which is coincidentally where the surge stopped. Hurricane Camille stopped about 1/3 mile short of this storm."

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Pete's Photo in The New Yorker

My old BINGO (the zine) partner and fellow graduate of the CCAC undergrad photo program Peter Haakon Thompson has a photo illustration in the current issue of The New Yorker (September 12, 2005). His piece is on page 78 opposite an Ann Beattie short story entitled "Coping Stones." It looks really awesome, too. I believe the image was taken in Norway and is a self-portrait (like many of his images). Here is part of Pete's email announcing the news:

"a picture of mine is going to be published in the New Yorker as the fiction illustration for next week's issue. woah!?! I just found out yesterday when they tracked me down 20 minutes after the press deadline and told me I needed to get the print scanned and could I do it in 25 minutes. so it was pretty exciting there for a little while. most of you have probably seen the picture so I will just let you find it but it will be big so hard to miss."

*In other news, September 12 is also my birthday, and it's a big one that ends in a zero.

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Pinback

I saw a good band in downtown Oakland yesterday--Pinback. Check them out if you get a chance. How would I describe their sound?: Well, it might be easier to say that they drew the kind of crowd you might have found at a Wilco show back before their Yankee Foxtrot Hotel CD came out and attracted mainstream buzz. These were the understated but attractive, upwardly mobile, college-age stoner types with an intellectual/artistic backbone. One guy standing in front of me had a little tattered over-the-shoulder bag with a Haruki Murakami paperback tucked neatly inside it. You get the idea. Each song sounded better and better. I'm not technically a music critic, so I'm having a hard time defining their music. It reminded me slightly of The Minutemen if they had gone on to combine their punk tendencies with a melodic keyboard and vocal harmonies. Does that even seem possible? I know--it's hard to picture until you see and hear it. I will have to check out their CDs. They had the right attitude of "we're just here doing our thing." They weren't trying too hard to please, plus they had a rare originality that you have to appreciate. They didn't feel too derivative of anybody else or any other scene.

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Water Bottlers Sending Aid

I finally got a few comments on my last blog entry, and I was relatively excited until I saw that they were just some kind of weird spammers. Anyway, VA Delegate Chris Saxman (an old friend whose family owns a bottled water business in my hometown) sent out an email today about Hurricane Katrina relief that I thought I would post:

"I spoke with one friend of mine, a water bottler in Oklahoma who has been running his operation 24/7 and in fact stayed until 3 am loading trucks himself, who received a call from a local resident who blasted him for not helping out the victims!

So, these are two updates as to what is actually going on.

Here at Shenandoah Water, we have donated and shipped out a tractor trailer load of over 4,500 gallons of bottled water. We are sending it to Columbia, Mississippi after the sheriff there called our trade association looking for help. The freight is being donated by a local company, Crosby Trucking.

In speaking with a dispatcher down in Columbia, which is just north and west of New Orleans, I was struck at the level of desperation that is occurring. She said that they need baby formula, diapers, water, ice, non perishable food. They are escorting trucks in with armed security. If you see any trucks heading to that area, PLEASE give them any other (of) the above items or any other items that they are requesting."

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Word from Baton Rouge

MoveOn.org has set up this site to help people find and offer housing to victims of Katrina:
http://www.hurricanehousing.org/

My old friend John Sykes lives down in Baton Rouge, Lousiana. He works at a newspaper there (The Advocate) and gave me the following update on the hurricane and its aftermath via email recently:

Hey,

If I hadn't been so overwhelmed and busy at work, I would have sent you word sooner.   The hurricane was horrific, even the small portion we got here.  (We were on the west side of the eye.)   Much of the city remains without power, but Jeff & I never lost it.  We have extension cords running to the next door neighbor's house which is full of New Orleans refugees--who have probably lost everything they own.

The city is crowded with refugees, and every city in Louisiana has them.   Since Monday, we've been sharing our offices at the newspaper with the entire AP staff from New Orleans, and until yesterday, the Times-Picayune staff.

They arrived Tuesday afternoon in delivery trucks (no windows or vents) with the back door open----reporters, editors, staff and their families.  Most had been in the Pick's office until the water started getting high, and the publisher decided to pull them out.  They've not been able to do a newspaper since Sunday.   We're trying to figure out a way that we can print their paper, too, but I'm not sure that will be possible technologically---we use a very old newspaper system called Dewar.  Your dad probably met old Stuart Dewar, the scotch heir who developed this now-dinosaur system.

We are printing the Hammond, La. newspaper today...

I haven't heard from any New Orleans friends, but feel surely they are safe but scattered to the four winds at hotels and relatives in various states.  No cell phones from NOLA are working---it's just amazing.  Families have no clue where their relatives are, or if they are safe.

-John

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