Who appoint-a da chief?

On Friday, Mayor Cantrell (apparently back from France) swore in the person she expects to become the next  "permanent" (at least until the next mayor takes over, anyway) Police Chief. It's Anne Kirkpatrick. As the only of the three finalists who wasn't either a guy who killed a man on a party bus or a politically un-viable interim appointee, she's the perfect fit.

If confirmed by a council majority, Kirkpatrick will make history in other ways. She would become the first female to become NOPD superintendent, coming after Woodfork opened the door as the first female interim chief.

Woodfork, who was one of the three finalists for the job along with Kirkpatrick and Thedrick Andres Sr., was appointed in December to succeed ex-chief Shaun Ferguson when he abruptly retired.

Kirkpatrick, a 35-year police veteran with 20 years in leadership position, last served as police chief in Oakland, Calif. Like Oakland, the NOPD has been laboring under a sweeping federal consent decree to foster Constitutional policing and usher in sound training and leadership.

A few notes here regarding Kirkpatrick's prior experience. There are issues one would hope City Council will address during the confirmation hearings. But the tendency with professional job-hoppers is they are granted a clean slate in each successive city they skip away to. There's always another sucker somewhere. Our city appears ready and willing to become the next.

Anyway, a NOLA.com article raised a bit of this a few weeks ago. One incident highlighted there was Kirkpatrick's role in covering for the cops who rolled a whole SWAT unit up on a homeless man named Joshua Pawlik. They found him sleeping in a park and murdered him.

Kirkpatrick endured intense criticism over her handling of discipline after five officers were involved in the 2018 shooting of a homeless man they’d awoken. The federal monitor over Oakland police wanted much heavier discipline than Kirkpatrick was willing to impose, calling her analysis “disappointing and myopic,” according to reporting by the East Bay Times.

Ali Winston, a journalist who co-authored a recent book on the Riders scandal and policing in Oakland, said Kirkpatrick was brought in to help “break up a frathouse atmosphere” but caved to the rank-and-file.

“She claimed to reverse culture in the department but basically rolled back serious discipline on a number of officers and didn’t follow through with a mandate to ensure consistency of discipline, that all cases are investigated thoroughly,” Winston said.

John Burris, a civil rights attorney involved in the Oakland police reform case, agreed that Kirkpatrick went light on the officers in the case.

“She really made an effort to cover it up,” he said. “She went out of her way to shade things and interpret them in a way that was designed to protect the officers.”

I decided to check out Ali Winston and Darwin Bondgraham's book this article mentions.  In addition to her mishandling of the Pawlik investigation, it finds several other points of criticism to consider. Here is a quick summary. 

1) At the beginning of the Trump Administration, Kirkpatrick violated the city of Oakland's promise to protect immigrants and instead cooperated with ICE to conduct deportation raids. 

In 2017 Kirkpatrick put her foot on this third rail by ordering several officers to close off a West Oakland street to help ICE agents raid a family's home and arrest two men. The OPD issued a statement afterward claiming ICE was pursuing suspects who were "sex trafficking juveniles." Kirkpatrick said later that her department hadn't violated Oakland's sanctuary policies because the officers were assisting in a criminal "human trafficking" case, and she claimed one person had been charged with a "crime."

In truth, the case had nothing to do with underage sex trafficking, and no one had been charged with a crime. Instead, one of the detained men was charged with a civil violation for being unlawfully present in the United States. He was sent before an immigration judge for possible deportation.

2) The Oakland Black Officers Association alleged that Kirkpatrick discriminated against Black officers and recruits in various ways saying her conduct "hurts our members and the public at large"

3) Under Kirkpatrick, the Oakland Police showed signs of backsliding out of compliance with the dictates of its federal consent decree. Most critically there were problems with use of force violations as well as failures to complete investigations within an appropriate time frame. 

Thus far, the press in New Orleans has shaded Kirkpatrick's "experience" working under a consent decree as a positive. The conventional line seems to be, she is well placed to finally complete the task of getting NOPD into full compliance. But that isn't what her record actually tells us. Rather than work to comply with the consent decree in Oakland, Kirkpatrick worked with outside consultants and PR pros to launch political attacks against the court appointed monitor and call the whole process into question. 

(Judge William) Orrick knew that behind the scenes, Kirkpatrick and other city officials, not just within the police department, were already criticizing (the federal monitor Robert) Warshaw, laying the narrative that it was the monitor's subjective judgments that were the cause of the recent problems, not the OPD's actual misdeeds. More pointedly, current and former officers were lining up to criticize Warshaw, claiming that his views on the OPD's backsliding were influenced by the hefty paychecks he collected from the city. Clashes with city officials and Department of Justice attorneys in Detroit, where Warshaw also served as court monitor over that city's police reforms, were cited as supporting evidence, and even and ex-NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton took shots via Twitter at Judge Orrick and Warshaw over the latter's alleged profiteering. 

Orrick made it clear he would have none of this in his courtoom: across sixteen years, the monitoring team exposed egregious scandals and reined in the OPD at crucial junctures, and it was trying to do this again. "I have complete faith in them and their ability, and they are the eyes and the ears of the court," he said of Warshaw's team.

Kirkpatrick's arguments before the judge in these hearings, though delivered with plenty of "we are doing progressive reforms here" type language, were little more than arrogant cynicism concerned primarily with political "narrative."  This, in Winston and Bondgraham's telling, is the moment where her insincerity became most clear. 

"So, your honor, the OPD is on the move," she said. "We are progressive. We are not regressive."

It was a presentation Orrick could appreciate, balancing the clear and obvious failures during the chief's twenty months on the job with some good work. But Orrick wanted a little more soul-searching from the police commander. "Before you go, Chief, what do you think is your biggest challenge?" he asked.

Kirkpatrick thought about it for a moment and answered: "the narrative."

An astonished look came over the judge's face for a split second before Orrick frowned and asked her if she meant to say communication. 

"No sir. The narrative that we are not moving forward," explained Kirkpatrick. 

"That's what you think your biggest challenge is?"

"I think that's a challenge," the chief replied. "I think there are other -- I think that's the challenge. I think that we do indeed have culture shift. I think that we have failed in explaining the proofs."

It was for these reasons that a citizen-led police oversight commission (no we don't have one of those in New Orleans) decided to fire Kirkpatrick.  Afterward, she remained defiant. Kirkpatrick held a political rally with the police union and their political allies denouncing the consent decree. She also filed a lawsuit against the monitor.  

While that T-P article cited above does acknowledge Kirkpatrick's politically framed attacks on federal police monitoring seem to be on the same wavelength as Cantrell's bucking of the NOPD consent decree, it also shrugs the notion off.  One would hope that City Council, proud as they are of flexing their muscles over appointment powers lately, might take a more critical view.  But something tells me they won't. We'll find out next week.

In the meantime, how about a movie?  That's right, Catch Basin Cinema is back. And in honor of the resolution of the city's police chief search, we watched a movie about another infamous episode in NOPD Chiefing history. It's 1999's VENDETTA, and it's a TV movie about the 1891 lynching of Italian Americans in New Orleans following the murder of Police Chief David Hennessy. The movie stars Christopher Walken as sort of the Michael Hecht of his day, leading a Gilded Age NOLA Coalition to control the police department and keep working class communities in line for the benefit of business elites. Intrigue and mayhem ensue.  But what else is new around here, right?

There will be blog

Yeah yeah yeah, here comes the occasional bit about how I've been tweeting too much and blogging too little and all memory is being lost in the sands of windswept digital chaos and I need to do more deliberate writing for archival purposes, etc. etc.  But, seriously, I'm getting back to posting here soon.  Really.

Meanwhile, the Hunkerdowncast has its first official spin-off piece of media, so there's that. Basically we're gonna watch some New Orleans themed/shot/set movies and talk about them.  Here's the first one. 

 

Update: 

Oh speaking of blogging again, I did write this bit for the above mentioned show. Might as well just post it.

 Last month the mayor of New Orleans and several city councilmembers decided we are all ready for our close-ups and voted to rescind a very recently passed ban on use of certain surveillance technologies such as facial recognition software by the New Orleans police department.

There is no evidence that these tools do anything to reduce violent crime. They have been shown, however, to reinforce the existing biases of the criminal punishment system against poor and marginalized people, and to cast a wide dragnet over a city where everyone is effectively treated as a suspect.  Of particular concern was the potential for police to violate the privacy of consenting sexual partners and to use it to enforce a newly activated state prohibition against abortion.  

City Council had already passed a resolution explicitly instructing city law enforcement not to enforce the so-called state “trigger laws” that went into effect when the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned the constitutional right to abortion established by Roe vs Wade. The resolution calls for no city funds to be used to catalog or report abortion cases.  

However, when the new surveillance ordinance failed to include language prohibiting NOPD from using surveillance tools against abortion seekers or against consenting sexual partners, council had to scramble to amend the law again a week later.

Meanwhile Mayor Cantrell embarked on a public campaign against the NOPD federal consent decree monitoring program put in place in 2013 after a Department of Justice report found that NOPD officers routinely engaged in “patterns of misconduct that violate the Constitution and federal law.”  One prominent case at the time being the 5 NOPD officers charged with murdering and burning the body of Henry Glover in the days following Hurricane Katrina (put a pin in that one).

At a press conference, Cantrell asserted that the consent decree had put officers “in handcuffs” and that she was "concerned about our officers' ability to protect themselves”  However, in interviews, many NOPD officers who exited the force report that they have not been driven away by mandates for unbiased constitutional police practices but rather by an capricious, political and punitive NOPD management style responsible for flagging morale. Federal Judge Susie Morgan, the person responsible for administering the decree, slapped back at Cantrell during a subsequent hearing saying that comments by the mayor, “Suggesting that officers want the consent decree to end so they can return to policing the way they did before 2013 is wrong, and dangerous.”

Called back before the City Council to address this and other matters, Police Chief Shaun Ferguson then let slip that  NOPD policy does in fact recomend collecting information on abortion seekers after all.  It was at this same hearing that District C councilmember  Freddie King asked the chief if there was something he could get the police to do about homeless people sleeping on the sidewalk  because it makes "everyone's quality of life a little undesirable." This coming on the heels of CM Oliver Thomas having run a pair of panhandlers off of Crowder Boulevard to the thrill of his Instagram followers.

All of this is to say that  the mayor of New Orleans (who was in DC this week continuing to lobby against the consent decree) along with a faction of the City Council now appear more determined than ever to turn their cameras and other instruments of state surveillance against the city’s most vulnerable populations for the benefit of the rich and powerful.

But what if I told you that there was another way for the rich and powerful to clean up the streets of our unhappy little corner of the planet while also boosting the city’s high dollar tourist trade at the same time?  Therein lies the premise of this week’s film.
 

The "end of history" never ended

You may not think you want to read a medium-length essay about the 1998 Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan vehicle "You've Got Mail" but you really ought to. The cultural zeitgeist of the 90s was all about sublimating anxiety about the total victory of capitalism over everything.

For a comparatively complacent political period in the United States, the ’90s boast a surprisingly large number of mainstream romantic comedies about fighting the Man or resisting the pressure to sell out. There’s no coincidence here. It was as if the culture was grappling with the implications of having abandoned even the pretense of crusading reformism, to say nothing of socialism, in favor of an unapologetic celebration of corporate values and business culture.

The lesson: It sucks. But what can you do? Maybe there are little opportunities to make a kind of personal peace with your conscience.  But nothing that rises above the petty or symbolic. In any case, it's best just to look inward, give up, hide if you can. 

Still, defiance of one kind or another was the norm in this genre until, as far as I can tell, You’ve Got Mail hit theaters. That was the genius of the film’s appeal: it was not only a clever and captivating love story, but also a fantasy that spoke to the neoliberal subject’s thorough exhaustion with politics and yearning for acquiescence without punishment. To the extent that it was even happening, resistance didn’t seem to be working. What if you didn’t have to resist anymore, and nothing was lost? What if “the Man” turned out to be Mr Right?

Meagan Day wrote this article after watching "You've Got Mail" and talking about it on the Michael and Us podcast which has been one of my favs for a while. One unstated thesis in the show is that all this late 90s "End of History" stuff is embedded in popular culture. I think a lot about what that's going to mean during the Biden years. How are we going to dissociate and pretend all is well even as the world is visibly burning? Don't be surprised if we find it easier than you may think.

The price of an uptick

Warren Riley is still smarting over missing out on an opportunity to lead the city's public safety operations pull down another six figure salary plus benefits.

Former New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Warren Riley filed a federal lawsuit Friday that accuses Mayor LaToya Cantrell and the city of breach of contract for reneging on an agreement to hire him as public safety czar.

In the lawsuit, Riley claims more than $700,000 in damages as a result of quitting a lucrative job in the federal government and preparing to move from Georgia to work for the city where he served a tumultuous four years as police chief beginning a month after Hurricane Katrina.

The suit names Cantrell both individually and as mayor, claiming Riley has been unable to find a job with the same salary and benefits as the $170,000-per-year post he left at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. In that job, Riley helped coordinate federal disaster response and recovery efforts.

Go ahead and read the rest of that article for the full re-cap. But the short version is, LaToya was all set to announce Riley's hiring until a last minute "uptick in the community" in her words, persuaded her to back out.  The community was particularly upticked that the new mayor wanted to hire the man who ignored/covered up the Danziger bridge murders buy New Orleans Police officers under his charge in the days after Katrina.  The shooters themselves have eluded justice due to an already bizarre set of circumstances. That their boss would be rewarded now in this fashion only further highlighted the glaring lack of accountability for that crime.  Of course, in LaToya's estimation, the real problem here was the upticked community was still too caught up in their feelings to move forward, or something.

Well now it looks like it's Riley who's having trouble getting over it.  Would it help if we sent him a Christmas card?  Maybe a councilmember can make him a video. 

New Orleans may be one of the few towns in America that keeps a piano in the City Council chamber — in this most musical of the nation’s towns, that’s how often City Council members invite performances during meetings.

But during the Thursday (Dec. 20) meeting, council members were treated to a whole new genre of music: The Constituent Christmas Carol, created singlehandedly by District E resident Frank Richard with his “District E 12 Days of Christmas.” The song counts down the accomplishments District E Councilwoman Cyndi Nguyen has achieved since taking office in May.

Congratulations to Cyndi Nguyen on winning this year's #Hostilidays.  This one is a real banger. 



Well, okay.. it's still better than another Benny Grunch re-run. Nguyen's explanation for it is especially gratifying. 

Nguyen has worked for the past seven months to raise the district’s profile, which includes New Orleans East and the Lower Ninth Ward — two areas where residents often feel like they get the least attention. So Nguyen wanted to continue that work when she came up with the idea for the video after Thanksgiving because it was too expensive to mail Christmas cards to everyone in her district.

What is meant by "worked to raise the district's profile," by the way, is  Cyndi explored the idea of re-branding it "The E" along with "The L9" for the lower ninth ward just to give you a sense of the high-wattage we're dealing with in the Nguyen creative department.  As for the Christmas cards being too expensive, I'm a little surprised she didn't ask Entergy to sponsor them.  I'd hate to think we aren't exploring every option to make things right with Riley.

OMG this is best Star Wars trailer yet

Merry Christmas

Movie time!

Now it can be told

A few weeks ago, this Bobby Jindal fact had some people scratching their heads. 

Politicians mulling presidential candidacies have made dieting something of a signal that they’re serious about running, but not all potential candidates are struggling to shed weight. According to a source close to Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal, the governor has gained 13 pounds over the past few months. At 5′10″, Jindal has always looked slight; this is the first indication that, with the 2016 election on the horizon, he is looking to beef up.  

Even people who already understood how weird Jindal is thought this was kind of strange.  But this was because we thought he was serious about wanting to be President in 2016 and.. I mean.. come on.

But it turns out, Jindal's actually been preparing for a different role.

Gov. Bobby Jindal will be in at least one scene of a movie about human trafficking starring Kevin Sorbo, an actor best know for playing Hercules in the television show of the same name, according to the governor's office.

In addition to acting, Sorbo is an outspoken Christian and conservative who frequently criticizes President Barack Obama. His anti-human trafficking movie, called "Caged", is currently being filmed in Baton Rouge. The governor's staff said they couldn't disclose much about Jindal's cameo on screen because of a confidentiality agreement.

The confidential plot is probably Bobby Jindal and Hercules go blasting into Grand Isle to free some Filipino laborers. I mean, sure, I'd watch that. But only if Bobby bulks up a little first.

Lawyers gonna lawyer

The most important thing I took away from  Gasland 2 which aired on HBO Monday night is we're not only on the way to becoming a third world democracy-in-name-only, we pretty much have been that for some time.

Industry does what it wants to do. People try to take them to court or lobby their representatives and get treated as "insurgents" literally.

Recordings of a gas industry conference at which public relations managers are told to study the Army’s counterinsurgency manual — because “we are dealing with an insurgency” when it comes to protesters and angry homeowners — are both hilarious and horrifying. Mr. Fox’s account of the Pennsylvania government’s hiring of a private company to monitor fracking protesters, an episode not widely covered outside the state, is particularly valuable.

And, in the end, whatever progress the "insurgents" think they might have made is eventually just vetoed by the puppet government anyway. (Seriously, this is exactly what happened.)

I think it's been a while since most of us mattered much at all as citizens.  We're getting less and less important as labor.  And we're getting to a place where we aren't even very important as consumers anymore either.  So the America we're moving toward is one where very large portions of the population are idle and poor and without prospect for much of anything except frightening elites.  But that's okay. They've got ways to deal with that.   

In a series of 2007 interviews explaining his motivation for launching Bulletproof Securities out of his existing real estate business, owner Tom Perrella (who we profile here) pointed to the example of 9/11. “We see things changing and the threats coming here. And it’s something that is going to be more frequent in the future … There’s no way our government can secure and protect with the situation we’re in. We’re trying to bridge the gaps between private security contractors and local government and law enforcement.”

Private security services are nothing new. But the trend to more paramilitary types of protection in an era of demonstrably diminished risk is something new. In addition, as our society becomes economically stratified, with a tiny segment living in a wildly different world than everyone else, you have some rational need for security but also the desire for security chic as another accoutrement of wealth or conspicuous consumption.

But  before we get too sidetracked, the point of all this is  I don't have much hope that the legal process will ever coerce BP to pay what is necessary to fix the dying Louisiana coast.  And given everything I just described above, I think I'm pretty justified there. I know the ongoing litigation is everyone's One Cause For Hope in this regard.  But all that we know about politics and precedent suggests that ultimately BP will be OK and we won't.

In the meantime, though, there's plenty of money to skim out of the process.  Yesterday Dambala published another post about suspicions that insider attorneys have been manipulating the claims process in a way that may ultimately squeeze out far too many legitimate claimants. I can't speak to that directly until I understand more about who precisely benefited from the supposed queue jumping. For instance, this commenter suggests that we look at the specific circumstances of the clients for clues as to why their claims were resolved when they were. 

But it is worth noting that Damabala's post was in response to a New York Times article where we find major media already siding with a multi-national oil company against the people of Louisiana. Dambala concludes,

Well, this poor, little company that is being taken advantage of has decimated the economy, ecology and culture of this state....and the damage continues to this day, with no end in sight.  If Mr. Nocera wants to fly down here and take a tour of the Louisiana coast, I'd be happy to show him the damage that has been done and what continues to unfold.  I can pull up over 100 blog posts on this blog, and others, that document it...much of it on video.  More importantly, I can drive him to the people that are suffering and show him the irreparable damage that's been done to our environment.

A distinction needs to be drawn between the lawyers/judge(s)/politician(s), that comprise the PSC/DHECC vis-a-vis the hard working people of the Gulf Coast, Louisiana folk, in specific.  These two classes of people mix like oil and water (forgive me).

What we have in this article, is a monkey howling in a tree, throwing turds at one pack of hyenas in defense of another pack.  Never mind the slaughter that's taking place underneath.

 The slaughter underneath, that's us. Get used to it.

Movie Time

Changing the Channel: The Renovation Question (1977) A film by Louis Alvarez and Andrew Kolker

Alvarez and Kolker were part of the filmmaking team who put together Getting Back To Abnormal which I saw at Film-O-Rama last weekend. More on that later but, for now, enjoy.
Changing the Channel: The Renovation Question [1977] from CNAM on Vimeo.

Happenings

Mark Laflaur's new novel, Elysian Fields is out this week. There is a launch party Friday night at Mimi's and a reading scheduled at Garden District Bookshop this Sunday afternoon.

Something called "FilmOrama" is this weekend. Apparently this is different from the same organization's more familiar New Orleans Film Festival which happens in the fall.  Anyway, this documentary about the 2010 District B City Council race looks interesting. 

Update: Uptown Messenger's Robert Morris reviews the film here. 

Arachnoquake for real

Local fans of stupid schlock will recall that the phonetically spelled SyFy network recently aired a made-for-TV horror film about  a plague of giant killer spiders unleashed upon New Orleans from the bowels of the Louisiana swamp by a natural gas drilling operation.

It was called Arachnoquake and it was kind of a big deal for a second. And then it wasn't. Here's the trailer in case you've forgotten.



You pretty much get the idea from that.  And ordinarily, after seeing this trailer, you could fill in the rest of the blanks in the plot and wouldn't have to actually watch the movie.

Except in this case, we may end up having to live it.

Authorities are trying to find out what lurks below Bayou Corne. First, people in Assumption Parish felt tremors. Then, there were bubbles. By Last Thursday, a massive sinkhole appeared, pulling cypress trees and plant life in the area under. All that's left in the area near Bayou Corne and Grand Bayou is a "slurry mixture of muddy water and soil" that's 380 ft. wide, according to the state. Now, with a salt dome owned by Texas Brine, LLC, is being investigatied as the cause.

Uh oh.  Call Scott Angelle. He'll know what to do.

So we saw Batman last night

Summary: A masked terrorist, I think it was Jonathan Vilma, leads the cast of Swamp People out of the Gotham City sewer in order to #Occupy Wall Street for a little while before also trying to nuke it. But only after waiting long enough so that a movie can happen during the interim.  Maybe that was a bad decision on their part.

There's been some controversy in the news related to the politics of this film thanks to the actions of some idiots followed by those of even bigger idiots. And I suppose if one squints really hard one can cherry pick little nuggets of social commentary from amidst the numerous explosions and unusual costumes and such.. although I would advise you to steer clear of such nonsense.

For example yes, of course the part about a massive heist in broad daylight at the stock exchange followed by a day when nobody questions the validity of the transactions there seems pretty much in step with what goes on in real life so there's that.  Later, a paraplegic man is dropped to the bottom of a well where a "doctor" hangs him from a rope and punches him in the back. This is a rather dark vision of Obamcare, all told, yet a difficult one to argue with. 

But why bother worrying about any of this when you've already suspended enough disbelief to put up with hooded billionaire vigilantes, experimental aircraft and assault motorcycles that are apparently as user friendly as iPhones to the characters operating them for first time in their lives, and a thermonuclear explosion that is TOTALLY OKAY as long as it happens... you know like 10 or 15 miles over there or whatever.

Alright well, that last one is pretty much the same thing the Japanese government was telling people after the Fukushima meltdown, but the point is it's a goddamned Batman movie! Just be happy that some small portions of it make sense.  The parts you can make out over the sound of the background music and all of the many many things exploding, I mean, since that part of the soundtrack is turned way way waay the hell up in relation to the dialogue. Maybe this is deliberate. If I ever find out what was being said I can determine whether or not it was a good idea.

Anyway, despite the fact that this movie is in your face just about everywhere you happen to put your face right now, this doesn't mean you actually have to go and see it.  But if you do go, just know that it is still very very unlikely that anyone will shoot you while you are there.  Although I can't guarantee you won't want them to.

Late Night Movietime

Please enjoy.

"What degenerate produced this abortion?"

Believe it or not I can actually see Zach Galifianikas as Ignatius Reilly not so much because of the obvious typecasting but because of what NOLADef's Shay Sokol hints at in this paragraph.

Ignatius J. Reilly once mused, “Apparently I lack some particular perversion which today’s employer is seeking.” Zach Galifianakis – the comedian who smoked a joint on television – might be uttering those lines to himself this week

Sokol is actually trying to make a slightly different point with that quote but it hits very near to the heart of Confederacy which I've always thought of as a subversive book.  Or at least, I think it succeeds because it captures that essentially subversive something about New Orleanians that makes so many of us incompatible with "the particular perversions" of  regimented employment in Ignatius' or any other day.  If you've seen Galifianakis' standup act, you get the impression that he's just smart enough to strike the right tone.

On the whole, though, I still don't expect Hollywood to get this right no matter who they put in the cast. It will be too tempting and too easy to turn Confederacy into a gross-out slapstick like the American Pie franchise rather than stay true to the Simpsonsesque satire it really is. Anyway, as we all know by now, the odds are against the movie ever getting made which is just fine with me.

Monday

So a guy came in here this morning and requested the movie "Eagle Eye" staring Shia Leboeuf. But he didn't phrase his request in the form of a question. Rather he just blurted, "Eagle Eye" at me. Which was weird because the dude was wearing an eye patch. I thought for a second he was telling me his nickname.

Also kickass Testaverde set at One Eyed Jack's on Friday. It was good to see Tim stop by. Unfortunately Droid video at a rock show doesn't produce the greatest quality sound. Here's the best one I could get.



Oh also, go Pack!

Monkey's brains, though popular in Cantonese cuisine, are not often to be found in Washington D.C.

If you need the reference, which I doubt, scroll to about 1:30 or so into this. If you're wondering why, it's because it's no longer possible to leave comments at YRHT.

Cake Wars

As with all great crises, this one is being hashed out through the universal language of expressive cake baking. Just this morning we learned that the Alaska office of the Minerals Management Service (the federal agency charged with safeguarding you against mishaps like the great Macando oil gusher) recently staged an office celebration with a "Drill Baby Drill" cake.

Now maybe that's a little shocking but since we've already learned that BP is currently ordering the US Coast Guard around, we aren't quite as surprised as we used to be. Here is a must-read NYT article about the entrenched conflicts of interest generated by leaving BP in charge of clean-up operations. The feds want BP to pay for everything, so BP gets to call all of the shots, and since they're paying they make they're decisions based at least in part on finding the best way to save themselves money.

Here is a video of "Plack-mines" Parish President Billy Nungesser complaining that the feds won't approve state plans to dredge sand for emergency oil barriers. Likely because BP doesn't want to have to pay for it.



Meanwhile, as we all know by now, the good people at Breaux Mart have hit back with a cake of their own. We showed it to you earlier this week but here is it again in case you missed it.



And here it is on a blog called Cakewrecks. And here it is on eater.com, Salon.com, DailyKos, the LA Times, God knows where else it's gone now. Oh it also made HumidCity which I think is pretty sweet.

I'm a little sad that this random picture I took in the grocery with my cell phone currently has 68,221 views while Michael Homan's brilliant short film Geauxjira has pulled in a respectable but paltry by comparison 1147. The good news is that all of this sets up the sequel Geauxjira vs Cake which we hope goes into production any day now.

Meanwhile, as your Friday Cat Blogging treat, please enjoy. Biscuit Watches Geauxjira.



Expect this one to make the cover Time Magazine sometime next month.

Quote of the Day

Billy Nungesser:

"Everything that that blanket of oil is covering today will die," he said. "All of the bugs that the fish come in to eat, all of the critters in the marsh will die. And that marsh will die. There's no way to clean it up."

I know. That's harsh. I hate it too.

Hey, I know let's watch a movie! What do you want to see?

Spillcam is pretty popular today

But so is Geauxjira and it's got a happier ending.



Update: Alright, which one of you killed Spillcam?

On Wednesday, Representative Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts wrote a letter to Lamar McKay, chief executive of BP America, asking the company to make its real-time camera feed of the gulf oil spill publicly available.

BP has complied, and the feed is up at the Web site of the Energy and Commerce Committee, of which the Democratic lawmaker is chairman.

Now, the only problem is that the site’s servers are unable to handle the traffic. As of early this afternoon, the video was not viewable.

“We’re working around the clock as we speak to fix this,” said Eben Burnham-Snyder, a spokesman for Mr. Markey. “The enormous demand for this video means that it’s now taxing the servers.”

Well I, for one, am glad to see that they're "working around the clock" to clean up this unprecedented overloading of their website that nobody could have predicted. It will probably take a few months to get the relief server installed so we're open to any quick fix "Apollo 13" style remedies you can think of. I've tried lowering a large dome down over my monitor a few times to no avail. Next I may start throwing old tires at it.

Follow-up

Spike Lee is working on a sequel to 2006's When the Levees Broke

Lee has said for years that he intended to follow-up on the original by perhaps expanding its scope to Katrina’s impact on the entire Gulf Coast.

"Returning to New Orleans five years after Hurricane Katrina, the new film will revisit some of the people who appeared in 'When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts' to find out what has happened to their lives since then," says a news release on HBO's press website. "The documentary will look at the progress and failures in education, housing and population relocation, and spotlight New Orleans's indomitable spirit. Going beyond the boundaries of the city, the film will also visit the devastated Gulf Coast area."

I remember watching Lee's original film on the first anniversary of the Federal Flood. Viewing the film, I thought, was a factually and emotionally pitch-perfect way to meditate on the day's significance. Here's what I wrote about it at the time. I am very much looking forward to seeing the follow-up.

You don't piss on hospitality!

We saw a New Orleans Film Festival screening of this at the Prytania last night.



Very funny stuff.