Month: August 2006

Post-K

Tomorrow is the much-discussed anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and politicians of all stripes are spinning the recovery to suit their agendas. I just got back from five days in New Orleans, helping United Teachers of New Orleans reorganize their union after craven politicians took the opportunity to try to smash it. The city is in a truly sorry shape, with hardly any meaningful rebuilding having taken place in the last year. A tourist would get no real sense of how bad things are, so don’t trust your vacationing Limey friend’s account of how how things are getting back to normal in New Orleans. Landing at the airport in the unscathed and prosperous Jefferson Parish, one would find the airport largely empty of people, but in good shape. Driving down I-10 to the city’s central business district, one finds lots of roadwork and some year-old billboards mixed in with signs advertising […]

P.S. 504

The elites in this country used to have shame, or, at least, you could shame them when they did the wrong thing. Those days are long-gone, as evidenced by the naked power grab of the Katrina recovery in New Orleans, where, shortly after the hurricane, the state legislature took over most of the city’s schools and voided the teacher’s union contract. How utterly shameless must a politician be to view an unprecedented natural disaster as an opportunity to bust the teacher’s union? Where the union once numbered 6,000 members in 117 schools, it now has just 300 members at the four remaining public schools. The rest of the schools that survived the devastation of Katrina to reopen this week are doing so as charter schools. Many of the teachers serving in these schools are the same who taught there before the hurricane, returning to the city to help rebuild, only […]

Gender, Identity and the Grey Lady

Like a brontosaurus trudging into a tar pit, the New York Times just blundered into a debate that up to now has been best left to feminist journals and Queer discussion groups, in the Fashion & Style section, no less. With the nuance of a brickbat and the keen understanding of someone who has watched “The L Word,” writer Paul Vitello takes a look at lesbian response to transmen and finds (surprise!) some unease. Unhip and straight as I am, I still know that not every woman who identifies as a man pauses to identify as a lesbian in between and that any woman who successfully passes as a man never quite gains the male privilege that the rest of us are born into. I’ll leave further criticism of the Times for being out of its league to more qualified blargers, but did want to highlight this illuminating quote from […]

No Comment

The website is undergoing some technical problems. The server, which I like to picture as a little old computer sitting in Don Doumakes‘ closet, needs some hardware and software upgrades and will be back to its sprightly self in a few weeks. When the website is here, the Blarg has not been. Excessive comment spam (hundreds and thousands of posts about boner pills and online gambling) were overwhelming the server, resulting in error messages. Regrettably, I have had to turn comments off. If you have any knowledge and ability in Blosxom and can help me install an anti-spam plug-in to the server, please let me know.

Scoop

Like all of Woody Allen’s movies since his “early, funny ones,””Scoop” has received pretty uneven reviews. One camp considers it a loose, freewheeling trifle. The other, a plodding, boring mess. Count me in the former camp. “Scoop” is silly fun. It’s got Woody being Woody – stammering, neuroses, card tricks and Vaudeville humor – minus the distasteful groping of young ladies (a Herculean feat for any man when you are the Director and the delectable Scarlett Johansen is your star). Ms. Johansen, herself, works better here than in “Match Point.” While she’s got the figure and sultry good looks to be a femme fatale, she may take a couple of decades to grow into that role. In the meantime, she is better suited to play awkward, unsure girls who happen – purely by accident – to be sexy. Building on a few borrowed plot points from “Match Point,” that movie […]