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08/29/11
Well at least this time it was from the outside looking in. Watching the coverage of Hurricane Irene last week I was struck by this piece of advice issued to our east coast brethren as it appeared on The New York Times website: "Residents riding out the storm should not tape windows; it does more harm than good, federal officials say." What! For all the past hurricanes down here taping windows was one of the first things we were supposed to do. Now feds are saying we shouldn't. Why? What's changed? That question was also raised by many who replied to the website. A similar article in USA Today said that taped windows would not stop a projectile, perhaps a neighbor's garbage can, from crashing through a window, but we knew that. The...
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08/22/11
If someone had asked me in recent times about the long-term survivability of Le Petit Théâtre I might have said it is year-to-year at best, possibly month-to-month, if not even more tenuous. After the events of last week I can say that Le Petit just may be around forever. Members of the theater did the right thing when they, in effect, approved a charter change that will allow the board to sell 60 percent of the building to the Dickie Brennan’s Restaurant Group to be used as a restaurant. Most of that part of the building was added onto Le Petit in 1963 and was not part of the more historic original 1922 structure. In return Le Petit gets $3 million which will allow its board to pay off longstanding debts, provide operating money and give the theater its...
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08/15/11
President Barack Obama and I have something in common, other than that we are both southpaws. Two summers ago we both threw the first pitch at professional baseball games. Obama’s toss came at the Major League All-Star game. Mine (the anniversary of which was last week) was at a much more meaningful event as the hometown Zephyrs tried to avoid falling deeper into last place by taking on the Iowa Cubs. This game, which was also designated as New Orleans Magazine Night, had a true sense of purpose. There is no grander male physical gesture than grasping an object and throwing it. The feeling is certainly linked to the first Neanderthal man who hurled a stone at a saber-toothed tiger, or at another Neanderthal. Earlier that day I rekindled that feeling as I stood in the...
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08/08/11
Someone asked me what I thought about the verdicts in the Danziger Bridge case. The first word that came to mind was “tragic.” Tragic for the convicted and their families; deadly tragic for the victims and their families. If there was any light at all it was that the justice system worked. The jury got it right. Clearly there was a cover-up; clearly the “civil rights” of the victims were violated. But the jury also ruled that the convicted did not intend to create murder. The jury was right about that too. Danziger was about a whole chain of circumstances gone amuck. Prisons around the world are filled with people who faced bad circumstances and did the wrong thing. Crimes must be punished, but what nags at me is a variation of what...
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08/01/11
Louis Armstrong’s birthday is this week, Thursday, Aug. 4. But were it not for the late Tad Jones, jazz history would be off by 13 months. Jones was the local jazz researcher who made the discovery that Louis Armstrong was wrong about the date he gave for his birth. Armstrong had claimed he was born on July 4, 1900 - certainly a festive date with a nice round number. Jones, however, located Armstrong's baptismal records at Sacred Heart church on Canal Street and discovered that the infant Satchmo actually made his debut on August 4, 1901. Having a true birth date for Jazz’s greatest figure is significant, because so much else about the music’s history is uncertain. Both the city and the music would profit if an exact place and time where jazz was born...
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Errol Laborde holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of New Orleans and is the editor in chief of Renaissance Publishing. In that capacity he serves as editor/associate publisher of New Orleans Magazine and editor/publisher of Louisiana Life magazine.
