A must-read, from The New Yorker (Alec Wilkinson; TNY pompously calls her a Black vernacular singer, wtf, I get it, it’s just, COME ON). Quote:

“I really don’t have a lot of talents. I can cook, and I can fuck, and I can sing. And I’m proud of all of them.”
-Bettye LaVette

Swoon.

So Harry Shearer’s ticked off at NPR’s “censorship” of coverage for his film The Big Uneasy, and NPR’s Ombudsman rejects his claims. And the whole silly flap – on the NPR site, on twitter, on blogs – misses the point. Credible claims backed by evidence have been forwarded to President Obama – claims that show New Orleans may be in danger of repeating past mistakes because its protection against hazard has been misrepresented. Engineer and whistleblower Maria Garzino deserves a real answer for the trouble she’s been through.

Like Shearer, I, too, was disappointed that NPR didn’t cover New Orleans with greater depth during this last Katrinaversary. Unlike Shearer, and unlike NPR, I spent 2 and a half years submitting nearly 50 Freedom of Information Act Requests to the Corps at various branches, to the F.B.I, to the Environmental Protection Agency. The result was an investigation that aired in four parts last year on Southern California Public Radio, where I work.

You can find it here.

The series centered on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers whistleblower, Maria Garzino. The first reporter to mention her claims at all was Cain Burdeau, in the Associated Press office in Louisiana; he reported on her initial memo expressing concern about the testing process. I followed Garzino through her escalation of her complaints and the response from her superiors, Corps command in Washington, the G.A.O., and the Office of Special Counsel. These stories also made public for the first time documents and memoranda written by other Corps officials and consultants that confirmed that the Corps knew one thing while making public a different one with regard to the pumps.

Maria Garzino reported to her superiors – and other records show – that hydraulic pumps purchased by the Corps to place at the outfall canals have never proven themselves under test conditions that mimic a Katrina-like storm. A storm that surged into the lake and raised water and pressure on canal walls. Canal walls that were not built as well as they should have been: not as deep, and not on as solid a sediment bed as they planned for. Those miscalculations cost the canals breaches, including one more than 400 feet wide in the 17th street canal that flooded Lakeview, Broadmoor, and other neighborhoods of New Orleans.

An independent engineer, finally, last year, confirmed Garzino’s engineering judgment. In a letter that landed at the Obama White House, the Office of Special’s Final Independent Engineering Expert Opinion Report found “little logical justification” for contracting for untested, unreliable pumps, and validated many of Garzino’s concerns, even saying she did not go far enough in some cases.

It is not generally speaking the custom of the station-based public radio reporter to out their inner workings with freelance pitches, particularly to NPR. I’ll make an exception to say that NPR was offered these pieces, or segments thereof, or a conversation about them. The message I received was that they had their own coverage plans, and anyway, there had been enough about Katrina around that ‘versary. (In those moments, the frustration of the local reporter knows no bounds: I lived in New Orleans after Katrina, and with Eve Troeh, now at Marketplace, I grew so restless with people coming in and telling us how it is that we decided to tell people how it was for us, for residents, not parachutists. I’ve also been on the other side of the equation, working at NPR.)

As the narrator for Pushing Daisies would say, the facts are these: Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars were spent the original contracting, not to mention millions more in add-on contracts to prop up a “temporary” system. The temporary system, supposed to be in place for 5 years, looks to be stretching out longer than the Corps originally promised, or promised in a modified way, or promises now. It’s 2010, and the temporary gates and pumps at the New Orleans outfall canals aren’t going anywhere for 3 years or more.

The Corps says everything works; the independent engineer and Maria Garzino say they don’t. The White House has been silent. Maria Garzino has risked her career and her health to seek an answer for herself and for New Orleans. I, for one, would like to see her get one, whatever it is.

A postscript: I’ll add a note to Alicia Shepard’s explanation of the Dibs List at NPR. First, I disavow any direct knowledge of how NPR operates that list now. I’ve been “out of the building” as they say for almost 4 years. But I sure dealt with the Dibs List before that, when working at Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Day to Day. Most of her explanation is dead-on, true, accurate, and valid. This caught my eye in Shepard’s blog:

When I was a producer, publicists, Harry Shearer and whoever else did in fact try to “game the system” to get on the best shows. And, yes, so did producers. But the thing is: the system IS gameable. If Tell Me More covers someone, ATC could well cover the same person, justifying it by saying that they’re taking a different tack or have an angle that the other show didn’t. Some people do appear on multiple shows; I have seen and participated in these battles first hand, and while I’d like to think our talk shows at KPCC are a little different, the fact is, the business of explaining what happens in the world is chaotic and messy. The Dibs List at NPR – as probably at any news org – tries to bring order to chaos. But a news org is an octopus on growth hormones: entropy happens, and chaos can win a day.
Just like with Frank Stoltze’s desk.

My sis Katie taught Nietzsche at Deep Springs a couple of years ago; that fact brought German philosophy back into our lives. The terrific LA blog LosAnjealous has a very good parody of the Bil Keane comic Family Circus; two of my early attempts are screen shots below. You can refresh AND make a permalink there too.

Dear Paul Westerberg:

Your song worked. I fell in love with this guy’s music long before he died today.

Playing pool near the Panhandle, in San Francisco, in fact.

I never travel far, without a little Big Star either. Assuming arguendo you still do.

Also, thanks for being awesome, mostly.

Sincerely,

Molly

Further reading:

The Box Tops

Big Star

If he was from Venus, would he feed us with a spoon?
If he was from Mars, wouldn’t that be cool?
Standing right on campus, would he stamp us in a file?
Hangin’ down in Memphis all the while.

Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton when he comes ’round
They sing “I’m in love. What’s that song?
I’m in love with that song.”

Cerebral rape and pillage in a village of his choice.
Invisible man who can sing in a visible voice.
Feeling like a hundred bucks, exchanging good lucks face to face.
Checkin’ his stash by the trash at St. Mark’s place.

I never travel far, without a little Big Star

Runnin’ ’round the house, Mickey Mouse and the Tarot cards.
Falling asleep with a flop pop video on.
If he was from Venus, would he meet us on the moon?
If he died in Memphis, then that’d be cool, babe.

It makes sense that a comedy writer would be able to navigate the difference between irony, satire, cynicism and just plain snark. From the end of Conan O’Brien’s last show:

To all the people watching, I can never thank you enough for your kindness to me and I’ll think about it for the rest of my life. All I ask of you is one thing: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism- it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere.

Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.

Reclaiming hope in comedy, in the darkest part of your career, is a foreceful, defiant act. Which is of course why I like it; which is of course why it is inspiring.

Grove Xmas from Molly Peterson on Vimeo.

They call me the groove from Molly Peterson on Vimeo.

I owe KPCC’s John Rabe a debt of thanks this week – in part for publishing this blog.

I’m reviewing the KindleDX for CyberFrequencies. Adrift in the sea of Amazon’s Kindle store, I Tweeted for help. The float John tossed me was Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine. Queena Kim (Off-Ramp and CF producer) tells me he re-reads it every year. (I approve wholeheartedly of re-reading things every year; mine is Harriet the Spy, Hamlet, The Odyssey, Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, and Gatsby. Rereading helps me mark my own changes. You should try it, too.)

Anyway, I hadn’t read Dandelion Wine in a dozen years, a dozen and a half.

I *do*remember balefully looking out my suburban window and wishing it were a cupola, once I looked that word up, and wishing the world would do what I told it to, like Douglas Spaulding. I’ve never forgotten Mr. Sanderson and the Royal Crown Cream-Sponge Para Litefoot Tennis Shoes. But it was Off-Ramp, and Rabe, who taught me to claim Ray Bradbury for Los Angeles. (I’m getting an education in the library here, like Bradbury did, though far less diligently, and probably with more late fees.) And it is in Los Angeles, this year, that I did a story about TreePeople’s demonstration cistern, and the idea that people should have rain barrels. So this passage struck a different chord this time ’round:

“Ready now, the rain barrel!”

Nothing else in the world would do but the pure waters which had been summoned from the lakes far away and the sweet fields of grassy dew on early morning, lifted to the open sky, carried in laundered clusters nine hundred miles, brushed with wind, electrified with high voltage, and condensed upon cool air. This water, falling, raining, gathered yet more of the heavens in its crystals. Taking something of the east wind and the west wind and the north wind and the south, the water made rain and the rain, within this hour of rituals, would be well on its way to wine.

Douglas ran with the dipper. He plunged it deep in the rain barrel. “Here we go!”

The water was silk in the cup; clear, faintly blue silk. It softened the lip and the throat and the heart, if drunk. This water must be carried in dipper and bucket to the cellar, there to be leavened in freshets, in mountain streams, upon the dandelion harvest.

I wondered, as I read it, what else would fall from the sky now in Los Angeles. Our rain picks up nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide before making its way into the barrels (and I’ll be visiting some barrels in Mar Vista later this month, I hope). Those nasty gases are in the atmosphere courtesy my car, and yours, and other polluters regulated by the South Coast Air Quality Management District. I’m conscious of that now in a way I wasn’t last time. Does it wreck the book? Nope. Bradbury’s vivid writing lets me imagine my way into the skies, where the east wind and the west wind and the north and south give something to the blue-silk water that will be leavened in freshets (a wonderful word, freshets). And my imagination gives life to that water; makes it true, if only for an instant, if only in my mind. But something that feels that true, that way, might become true, for more than a minute, another way. Maybe that’s why Dandelion Wine seems less sad, this time. (And dandelion wine seems more drinkable.) Maybe this is how I’m different THIS rereading.

I’ve got no cream-sponge tennis shoes. But as I thought about rain barrels, and Los Angeles, and Bradbury, my feet rocked back and forth in my sandals.

“Tom…does everyone in the world…know he’s alive?” “Sure. Heck, yes!” The leopards trotted soundlessly off through darker lands where eyeballs could not turn to follow. “I hope they do,” whispered Douglas. “Oh I sure hope they know.”

So: thanks Rabe. And, Ray B.

At all times, keep a constant check on your gear. Watch out for chafing. Chafing is generally worse in a calm than it is in a sea. Use your pump periodically whether you need to or not.

Have anchors and life preservers ready for any emergency. Nothing very serious happens to a skipper who is ready for anything.

H.A. Calahan, Yachtsman’s Omnibus

People do awful things to each other. But it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark. Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything, is light.

Tom Stoppard