I met Quint Davis today; he's the man behind the New Orleans Jazz Fest, and he's turned his networking prowess to bear on Baton Rouge, which will host a first-ever music festival at LSU's mammoth Tiger Stadium next Memorial Day weekend.
Read about the debut of the Bayou Country Superfest via the Baton Rouge Business Report. The biz community in bayou country sure is excited about the projected $23 million local economic impact of the superfest. Personally, I'd rather tune into rootsy alt-country a la Hank Wiliams III or Ryan Adams than the pop stars on the upcoming bill, but c'est la vie.
Sometimes journalism is a grind, sometimes it's a surprisingly rewarding pastime, and often it's both. My latest articles for the Baton Rouge Business Report run the gamut of topics from dry to personal to straight-forward information sharing.
Here's the line-up:
A barge cruises on the Mississippi River in Ascension Parish, La. Image by Geo Swan via Wikimedia Commons.
Fill 'er up gives local reaction to the FDIC's plan to replenish its shot insurance fund for lenders by charging three years' of fees up front. Don Ayres of American Gateway Bank said of the problem, caused by all those bank failures of late: "If you participated in the booming real-estate market, that’s where the majority of your loans are. I don’t care how good of a banker you are, you’re in trouble."
A river runs through it is about the two sides of Ascension Parish (county), one that benefitted from big-time growth along an interstate, and the other that lags because of old infrastructure such as above-ground phone and power lines. "If we had an interstate, it would be just the opposite," said Becky Katz, executive director of the Donaldsonville Area Chamber of Commerce. "It’s location, location, location." Guess which side she's on.
'Welcome to the boomtown' discusses the suburban sprawl to the east of Baton Rouge, where a new "subdivision carves out a swath of land along La. Highway 447 across the road from a rustic scene of corrugated-metal-roofed shacks and black-and-white cows grazing in the grass," as I wrote. "It isn’t quite smart growth, but in this economy, most planners would be happy with the growth part."
Thanks for reading, folks. See you in a couple weeks.
My slog through the depressing downward spiral of daily news reporting in California, followed by a layoff and a lengthy unemployment stint, ended last summer when I found gainful reporting work once more in Louisiana.
Things have hit a new high thanks to my first cover story for the Baton Rouge Business Report, Baton Rouge's melting pot, about the touchy topic of historic segregation and contemporary social mixing in the born-again downtown.
People here talk about an "invisible line" that divides the black-north and white-south/east areas of town, but while everyone knows about this stratification, few really talk openly about it. Perhaps the article will encourage a little conversation.
In the piece, Civil Rights icon and local businesswoman Maxine Crump, who helped break the color barrier at LSU, had this to say:
“Baton Rouge has tried to hide its history. It’s not talked about openly very often,” Crump says. “And when it is, people smile about it uncomfortably. Who has conversations about it? It shouldn’t silence a room when it’s mentioned if we’re really owning our history. And it does.”
Folks 'round here are trés polite with door-holding and "where ya from?" greetings and such. Yet as one source told me, people love to ask you to lunch, but they won't invite you to dinner. A colleague even told me that around here, "If you're gay, you keep it to yourself."
People can seem awful friendly thanks to that famous Southern hospitality, but there's a wall separating the in-crowd from the outside world that defines the region, and makes change infamously tough.
As one angry tourist insinuated while jabbing a stick into a South Carolina hornets nest, is Dixie's neighborly charm sometimes a veil masking ancient intolerance?
Speaking of outsiders, I hear a cynical local group is looking for someone to lead the charge in gathering fringe dwellers in the Capital Area, consider joining.
James Carville was a real hoot at an annual business and industry leaders lunch on Friday in Baton Rouge.
The Iberville Parish-bred campaign strategist for Bill Clinton had all of his outsize, "ragin' Cajun" personality on display for a roomful of suits and dresses at the downtown Hilton hotel by the Mississippi River.
After rambling a bit, he clicked into a story about being pulled over by the highway patrol somewhere in Virginia, supposedly going 85 in a 65 MPH zone. To paraphrase, he told the cop, come on, every redneck in the state drives a black pickup truck, you just pointed the radar gun out there and happened to pull me over.
To complicate things, Carville's wife, Mary Matalin, was mad at him at the time and wasn't in the mood to jump to his defense; instead, she told the officer, oh he worked for Clinton, they lie about everything.
When the cop then told Carville he was going to add a ticket for not wearing a seat belt, Carville complained, oh get out, I took off my seat belt to get my wallet out of my pocket after I stopped. Matalin added, oh no, he never wears a seat belt.
That was the last straw for Carver, who "snapped" and turned to Matalin, saying, "Shut up!" The officer asked her, does he always talk to you like that? And she of course replied, only when he's been drinking.
By the way, although Carville is a Democrat, Matalin is a Republican pundit; perhaps that clarifies things.
Asked during a lunch Q&A session if the couple argue over politics at home, Carville said: "I don't argue with my wife. It's not a winning proposition." Instead, he said his three secrets to a happy marriage are "retreat, capitulation and surrender."
Carville went to Louisiana State University and joked that when he served as a legislative page in the capital city, the worst part of the job was delivering an envelope with four hundred-dollar bills in it because "you never knew if the middle man took out a hundred or six hundred."
At LSU, he said he enjoyed his four years as a sophomore. He swore he eventually graduated with a 4.0 -- his blood alcohol level, that is.
He praised the sophisticated culture of New Orleans, his recently adopted home, with its alluring music, food, architecture, even its unique funerals, saying he has lived all over but was drawn back after 22 years to the people and heritage of the Gulf. Nowhere compares to the fabled jewel that is New Orleans, he said, noting by contrast, "When's the last time someone went to Ohio and listened to organ music?"
Commenting on the bitter divisiveness in right-versus-left politics today, he pointed to a truly non-partisan time in American history: 1862, at the hopeless heart of the Civil War. Since he got involved in elections in 1988, he said, every contest has been a battle for the future of civilization as we stare down the abyss -- and the next one will be even more dire. Back off all the heated rhetoric, he advised, from right-wing attacks on every decision made by Barack Obama, to left-wing promises that if the other guy wins, "I'm going to Canada."
"Well you just go on and freeze," he said.
Asked what he foresees in terms of terrorist threats to come, he speculated that "Islamic fundamentalist" attacks on America will be viewed in a few decades as an unfortunate fad given their dependence on suicide bombers and other self-dooming martyrs.
"At some point, killing yourself is not an attractive way to go through life," he said to a round of applause. "The world changes, and sometimes it changes for the better."
Besides warning that the international bond market threatens to doom the U.S. economy like nothing we've seen yet when treasuries are auctioned off in a few years and "go up a gazillion basis points," his toughest criticism was aimed at Fox News (and to a lesser extent, mirror image MSNBC News).
"I wish I had stock in it," he said of Fox. "It's not news. Opinion is cheap."
Journalism, on the other hand, is expensive, from staffing Afghan or Gulf Coast news bureaus to employing reporters to cover city council meetings across the nation. TV news is veering toward sheer commentary, he said, reinforcing what viewers already think instead of educating them on the subtle mosaic of issues.
He likened Fox News to a drunk leaning on a lamp post, noting that the network uses news "for support, not illumination."
Despite the conservative bent of the room, Carville had the audience in the palm of his hand with his witty standup act and good ol' boy charm. Yet the impolitic way he was introduced was puzzling. Both in publicity for the event and to the man's face, he was feted as someone to listen to "whether you agree with everything or disagree with some things" he says.
Surely a book deal is just the beginning of the Palin marketing machine. Go on, have a taste. It's surely full of mavericky flavor.
Talk about a back-handed welcome: Here's some liberal loon from way down South, enjoy; we couldn't get Palin.
Speaking of whom, Carville mentioned that Sarah Palin's memoir "Going Rogue" is due out soon, while Joe Biden is still working on his autobiography -- "Going Rogaine."
A challenging book I started reading 20 years ago and still haven't finished or come to terms with. A lot of its philosophic vitriol felt personal as a somewhat anti-intellectual intellectual youth. And I came to sympathize significantly wi...
So what does decoherence mean? I latched onto the term several years ago when I was reading about quantum theory and started this blog.
Decoherence is akin to entropy, where physical disturbances sort of wash out in the overall scheme of things, an averaging of unique particle interactions in an inevitably cooling universe.
Metaphorically, creating an intellectual levee to halt that trend in our culture is one way to preserve what is special and unique amid the middling herd.
A more succinct, non-technical summary of the theory that I recently came across is by this Vancouver physics prof:
"Decoherence is the process by which quantum becomes classical; the process by which the determinism of the macroscopic world arises out of the superpositions and entanglements that describe the microscopic one."
