"Thank Gott He is Not Our Gubernator"

The Sun shines through my back door today. Front door, too, and all the dormers. Cool Fall fell on Big Swamp City with the clean regularity of German trains. At Squalor Heights, curtains are pulled back to allow entry to a Sun only last month barred by the flags of many lands. We hang flags for curtains. Because? Because Squalor Heights needs curtains and I love flags. Arizona's Peter-Max-like big brassy star (with yellow and red desert death rays) radiates, backlit from the dormer beside my desk.

Autumn walks find neighbors outdoors sitting with their possessions on steps, chairs, and atop old end tables that once served them well. Now these things audition for new shelter with passing strangers.

For-sale signs are taped to pasteboard boxes, and little white stickers display enticing prices. A hand-held can opener commands a higher price than expected, but an extension cord without a third plug is only one dollar.

A Royal typewriter, circa 1960, and not unlike the one on which I learned the jumbled alphabet of typewriting, sat on a stoop near Washington Square. A sign beside it read, "Make Offer". On my way back home, it sat on the curb next to a garbage can. A voice through louvered shutters said, "It's yours if you want it." I did.

"Did you know the disorder of the typewriter's keys is intentional?" the voice asked. (Faubourg Marigny is a knowledgeable place.) "Not because it fits the job more better," the voice continued, "but because supervisors, designers, ship owners, and such thought A-B-C order would be too easy for workers, and cause them to grow indolent."

R. Buckminster Fuller told us a story when we were doing time for the Illinois Board of Education about when he was a boy: "One day the teacher told us, ‘Today I am going to teach you an easier way.' " Fuller thought, "Why not teach us the easier way to begin with?" "Because it would make life too easy," L. A. Norma said, "and you would grow indolent." She opened her handbag and extracted two sweet and salty macadamia nut confections lifted from Hotel Monteleone's pastry cart. We had been upstairs at a party to meet pastry chef, Minh Duong, featured in the television series "Great Chefs of America." We drank Wild Turkey and nibbled at the view from the "Rooftop - Riverview Room," where once The World danced to the Dukes of Dixieland. Where Truman Capote claimed to have been born (his Momma stayed till time to take a cab to Touro Infirmary for the actual birth). Where Tennessee Williams and Richard Ford, to name two, set stories. Where, this day, L. A. Norma and I rode the Carousel in the lobby bar, and ate the confections she indolently took from her purse.

Robert Grasso, former head of the New York Stock Exchange resigned recently in controversy over his paycheck – it was larger than the stock exchange's income. To vote paychecks for more than your business takes in requires dazzling oversight. If your bed and breakfast "voted" to write you a yearly paycheck for more than you took in it would be fraud.

"Bill Crenshaw" (honest impresario of Torro Negro cigar bar in nearby faraway French Quarter) "looks like Robert Grasso," Norma said, one Thursday night at a Martin Wine Cellar/Torro Negro tasting party. We debated Landslide's War, with Dean Paschal and some interns from Georgia in Town for a medical convention – war opinions over French and Italian wines and goat cheese served by a French woman who had never been to Paris. It was a friendly debate in this elegant parlor with its blessed taste for writerly low lifes and soldier-of-fortune art.

Our conclusion: There is no hope for peace outside of wine and goat cheese and nights lived well in spite of darkening shadows.

"Nickel a Dance," the October treasure at Café Brazil on rue Frenchmen, kicked off with Ronnie Magri's Jazz Band. As honest critics say, WOW!!! It was a spirited dance – even a spiritual one – something like those first Congo Square Jazz Fests, or that fabled jam session in the sky. Nickel a Dance attracts old folks with umbrellas, young folks with children, music makers, and storybook fakers. In the audience, Kermit Ruffins sat at the bar wearing a black silk suit, sporting a rhinestone lapel pin. Around him whirled a galaxy of pretty young women.

On the bandstand, Magri (drums), Jesse Boyd (bass), Tom McDermott (piano), Jason Mingledorf (saxophone), Evan Christopher (clarinet), and Mark Braud (trumpet) blew the roof off. WWOZ jazz historian, Tom Morgan, leaned against a blue wall. Folks danced alone, together, sitting on bar stools, and hanging from the doorframe. Nickel a Dance happens every Sunday in October, at 4 p. m., in the last month (or two) of hurricanes – perhaps there is a connection.

*What the woman at Café Brazil was saying was that Karl Rove copied Landslide's stunt landing on the U. S. S. ABRAHAM LINCOLN from the opening of Leni Riefenstahl's film "Triumph of the Will".

One last willful note: When I was a college boy, friends met Riefenstahl scuba diving in Egypt. She was then in her seventies. When they returned to Carbondale with the story I had to have it explained who she was. Now I know. She was a pioneering German filmmaker during the time of Hitler, who was lucky to stay out of Nuremberg's post-W. W. II war-criminal trials. She claimed till her death, in Germany, at one hundred, that she had never been a Nazi. She invented many film techniques, including moving cameras and pans, but never was honored by film's homeland, California.

"Perhaps now she will be," Norma said.

One more lost German story: Dutch Fritzel, long time operator of the late-night European jam club on rue Bourbon has joined The Great Jam Session in The Sky. Good-by, "alter Freund."

To end on a lighter note, close your eyes and think of Condi Rice getting an oil tanker named after her. Now imagine her sitting beside a cigar-puffing Landslide doing Sea-wheelies in the Florida Straits. Isn't that image almost worth the three-hundred-and-sixty-five-thousand dollars a minute you are paying for it?