Slampo's Place

Bill White Juggernaut Gathers Statewide Momentum

2009-07-11T23:48:00.008-05:00

We believe we espied our first outside-the-Loop Bill White for [Office That Hasn't Been Vacated Yet and May Never Be] bumpersticker on Saturday as we were motoring up State Highway 71 near the Austin airport. The bearer of the sticker was a dark blue Scion that unfortunately made a quick juke to the right at the Lockhart exit, leaving us unable to get the license plate. We were, however, able to read the other sticker on the auto's back door: "Jesus was a liberal." Or, maybe, "Jesus is a liberal."*

*Again, we feel compelled to add that we only report the news.

Absolutely the Worst Effin' Street in the Whole Damn Town

2009-07-09T22:33:00.006-05:00

Perhaps not "absolutely." These designations, after all, are local--we're sure that every quadrant of town, perhaps every hectare of town, has its own worst street (we, for instance, don't regularly ply the byways of northeast Houston and therefore can't wield a very broad brush). This just happens to be the street we drove down about 20 minutes ago, and we're still steamin' (although normally a happy-go-lucky, live-and-let-live kind of fellow). It's South Braeswood, between Buffalo Speedway and Stella Link, and it's one f'ed-upped mess and has been for years, if not decades: seamed and rutted, potholed, bifurcated--hell, trifurcated--and it always makes us feel as if we've returned to the spine-jarring days of the Model T when we inch our way down it ('course road conditions do keep most traffic well under speed limit). It's like you're driving in Belize--rural Belize.

So the city council agrees to fund the silly-ass Houston Arts Alliance with $11 million. (We're sure this was from some dedicated fund that could only be spent on dubious " art" and the administration thereof and not road repairs, right?) We haven't been paying much attention to the mayor's race, but we know the kind of candidate who will appeal to us (and our wide, deep sphere of influence) will be one who says ixnay to the baubles and trinkets and promises a strict concentration on bread-and-butter neighborhood issues. (Yes, we know, promises are one thing ...)

The Road Does Not Go on Forever, Nor Does the Party Never End

2009-07-06T21:06:00.003-05:00

The congenial Texas singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen,* in a Q&A [not available in its entirety] in the June edition of Texas Highways,** unapologetically describing growing up in southwest Houston, back when gas was cheap and cars were big, the “domestic oil industry” was not an oxymoron and “Sharpstown” was not synonymous with graffiti, ill-maintained apartments and crappy schools*** but rather was considered a nice place to raise the kids:

We [Keen and his sister] grew up during what I call the bright, shining age of Houston, in the late ’50s and ’6os, when the space program was beginning and the oil business was rocking. Anybody who was involved in oil was just the coolest person on the block [his father was a petroleum engineer]. I remember “Go Texan Day” in Houston, which was the first day of the rodeo and the day the Salt Grass Trail Ride would end up in town. I used to keep a picture in my wallet of me when I was about threee, wearing one of those little felt cowboy hats and holding my parents’ hands as we walked down the rodeo to Go Texan Day …

*Who manages to elude critical enshrinement as a Texas legend or sumpin’ ‘cause he’s an Aggie and a nice guy and apparently has no serious substance abuse problems and has yet to be stabbed to death outside of a nightclub, although never say never ’cause there’s still time to work on the last two.

**A publication of the Texas Department of Transportation, the one whose lush color photography always makes everybody and every place in Texas look 2 to 3 times better than he/she/it does in person.

*** Sharpstown, of course, has been getting a worse-than-desaerved rap lately, especially after the killing of police officer Henry Canales, which actually happened on the far edge of Sharpstown, or where S-town bleeds into the Gulfton area, but in fact most of the single-family-home subdivisions in the area are nicely maintained and offer affordable housing for working/middle-class families who can somehow navigate the less-than-stellar public schools. We thought it interesting that Channel 11 could do this report after Canales’ murder on “the decline of Sharpstown”—a two-decade-old story that—without once employing the term “illegal immigration.” Such is the nature of coming to grips with “problems” in Houston.

"Pimp" Was Here (And the Words of the Prophets are Written ...

2009-07-02T17:34:00.004-05:00

on the bamboo at the Japanese Garden, Hermann Park, Houston, TX 77030)

Side Benefits

2009-06-29T17:18:00.011-05:00

After far too long we caught up last week with our old pal Belacqua, with whom we’ve been friends since 5th grade, or thereabouts, and who many years ago was a part-time running podnuh of ours, back when we both had hair and a reasonable amount of youthful vitality. He’s also, as you may not know, one of Our Town’s most astute commentators on culture and commerce, especially after a beer or two. As he and I and the wives gorged ourselves at that venerable Indian restaurant in Rice Village, we spoke of many things: the artistry of The Wire, the pomposity (perhaps justified) of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the late-life pleasures of puttering in our respective suburban yards (just like our dads did!) and in general of the narrowing horizon as we maneuver through middle of our sixth decade of life on earth.

Belacqua reported that the Houston-born-and-reared IT corporation for which he’s happily toiled for a decade now has more employees in India than it does here in the county seat of Harris, and that many of his remaining colleagues in the locality also hail from the Subcontinent. The outsourcing has allowed the company, which sold its headquarters and now rents back space from the new owner, to close off some of its formerly occupied cubicle space. For Belacqua, that has meant a shift to telecommuting, which most workdays spares him from making the long commute up 45 and on to the Beltway and back down again in the afternoon. A half-empty sort, Belacqua did not sound sanguine about his future prospects—perhaps explaining his professed desire to get in on the ground floor of SuperSexy Donuts®*—but his wife says he shouldn’t complain, and we agree. In his mid-50s, he’s finally achieved the real American Dream: He’s getting paid, and he doesn’t have to wear any pants to work.

*SuperSexy Donuts is a soon-to-be-registered trademark of Slampo’s Place Inc. All rights reserved.

Nostalgia Trip

2009-06-27T12:05:00.006-05:00

The Saturday editions of Houston's leading daily newspaper took a slow ride down Memory Lane (the one with all the potholes and abandoned strip centers) with a story on the city's record-setting heat wave of June 1980, which apparently was but a lil' poopy-baby scorcher compared to the one that presently brutalizes us. Accompanying the article was a file photo of a construction worker with a sledge hammer splashing his face with water at a downtown construction site. You could tell 1980 was a long, long time ago because the hardhat was
an 18-year-old white kid.

Dead Poets Discuss Michael Jackson

2009-06-26T15:38:00.015-05:00

"Michael Jackson in Disneyland
Don't have to share it with nobody else.
Lock the gates, Goofy, take my hand
And lead me through the World of Self."
-- Splendid Isolation, 1989, by Warren Zevon (1947-2003), Los Angeles, Calif.

The pure products of America
go crazy

... as if the earth under our feet were
an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September
somehow
it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car

-- "To Elsie," 1923, by William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), Rutherford, N.J.

Jay Porter Had a Plan to Stick It to the Man (Or Something Like That)

2009-06-22T16:12:00.009-05:00

Will a novel—that is, a work of fiction (which if we remember correctly means “made up”)—have any impact on the still-nascent Houston mayoral race? Probably not, but it’s nonetheless interesting, even intriguing, that Attica Locke, the daughter of mayoral candidate Gene Locke, has a new novel out that’s getting prime critical notice just as the heretofore nearly invisible mayoral campaign is becoming more visible. Even more intriguing is the plain fact that the protagonist of Attica Locke’s Houston-set book, a lawyer named Jay Porter, appears to be closely modeled on her real-life father, the mayoral candidate, right down to his “student-radical” past.

Her book, Black Water Rising, got the kind of boost that most first-time authors might consider sacrificing a limb for when it was accorded a mostly favorable review by the New York Times’ Janet Maslin at the top of the newspaper’s Monday Arts section. Maslin called the book “atmospheric [and] richly convoluted” and invoked Scott Turow, Dennis Lehane and one of America’s best working novelists, George Pelecanos, in praising facets of Locke’s plotting and characterization.

Attica Locke—she was named, Maslin reports, after the site of the 1971 New York state prison uprising—is a graduate of Hastings H.S. and Northwestern University and a disillusioned aspiring screenwriter, according to this Houston Chronicle profile from last week, wherein she emphatically disclaimed the notion that Jay Porter is her dad, or vice-versa:

“I have to be clear that Jay is not really my dad. At all,” Locke says. “Some of the circumstances of the character’s life line up with my father’s in the sense that my dad was also a political activist at the University of Houston at that time period. He did go on to become a criminal defense attorney. He was on trial, not for trying to kill somebody, but for inciting a riot.

Whatever the case, the daughter’s book can’t help but be fodder for local parlor-game amusement. It’s set in 1981—the year, coincidently, that we arrived in Houston*, along with half of the rest of North America—and the mayor is a white woman named Cynthia Maddox, an “old flame” of Jay Porter’s and onetime “outspoken member of Students for a Democratic Society, a white girl drawn to black radicals ‘as sure as if the Temptations had come to town.’ ” (Real-life reality check: Houston’s first and only female mayor, Kathy Whitmire, did not assume office until 1982, and Whitmire was no radical revolutionary, even in her youth, but rather a moderate, working-class North Houston-to-the-Heights Democrat [there used to be a whole lot more of ’em than just Gene Green]. As for the rest of it, including the Temptations part, well, we’d rather not think too much about it. ) According to Maslin, Locke also includes “arresting visual filed trips (to places like the huge country-and-western club Gilley’s … )" and other apparent deep-Houston touches.

We’ll refrain from any sweeping judgment, not having read Locke’s book, but we do detect traces of a clichéd mind at work in the plot turnings, if Maslin’s summary of the book is correct:

Where will the strike [by dockworkers at the port] lead this story? It will lead to “Chinatown”-style conspiratorial rumblings, with oil supplanting water as the natural resource worth killing for.

Forget it, Jake: It's just the Big Bad Oil Business, always messing up people’s lives and minds. (Real-life reality check: Without oil [and the Ship Channel and attendant petrochemical facilities], this place would be Shreveport [maybe], a festering, sweltering dump of no import, not a moving-and-grooving multicultural polyglot world-class metropolis, the one where insider-lawyer Jay Porter … ’scuse me, Gene Locke … has a good shot at being elected mayor.)

*At the time the local constabulary's reputation for railroading and whipping up on blacks and longhairs was so fearsome that upon arrival in our Chevy Biscayne we made a solemn vow to our self that we would do everything possible to avoid arrest and/or overly long contact with the police, a vow that, amazingly, we've been able to keep, lo these many years.

Too Damn Hot to Keep It Up

2009-06-21T13:41:00.004-05:00

We awoke Saturday morn to find that an oak around the corner from our house had apparently gotten tired of waiting for rain and had shed this dried-out branch, which blocked the street until these two dudes showed up with chain saws and rope and removed the blockage, thus allowing the crucial weekend garage-sale traffic to move freely in and out of the neighborhood.

Man, it's hot.

Two-on-One: Conceptual Art Smackdown Provides Much-Needed (Comic) Relief for Summer Doldrums

2009-06-17T21:51:00.009-05:00

Things have seemed kinda dull around here, haven’t they? We’ve got a mayor’s race under way, historic or potentially historic, with the two leading candidates of the moment being a black lawyer-insider who isn’t running as a “black candidate” and a gay female elected citywide official who isn’t running as a “gay woman candidate” (probably wouldn’t fly anyway), as well as the SWPL white-man candidate who is indeed running as the SWPL white candidate (not gonna fly at all, but we hope stays in the race all the way, if just for contrast).* But despite this interesting mix, the campaign thus far seems flat and uninspiring (which is probably how it should be, so if you’re a mayoral candidate reading this under no circumstances should you, on our account, employ any lofty Obama-toric in your next speech on TIRZs, or go out and get a DWI this weekend).

And the weather: we’re very tired of this weather (perhaps the source of our ennui). This afternoon we noticed that even the trees in our neighborhood—the water-gulping behemoths—seem bedraggled and listless, as if they were too dry and brittle to root down any further for a sip of H20 and would just as soon keel on over and end their misery.

But this, mi amigo, is H-Town, as the Chronicle’s Teen Columnist-Blogurbator so jauntily calls it (and calls it and calls it), so you and I know that some trifling entertainment tailored to capture our full, undivided attention is never too far down the massively cracked, seamed and pot-holed road. Sure enough, the road rose up to greet us today in the form of this blog posting by Chronicle art critic Douglas Britt (which came to our attention via linkage from the eagle-eyed tastemakers at blogHouston—we’re not a regular reader of the newspaper’s arts blog, although we’re open to the possibility of becoming one if days are lengthened to 26 hours.). It seems that Sr. Britt had the gall, the temerity, the sheer cast-iron cojones, to actually criticize—let’s be precise: mildly criticize—one of the scared moo-cows of the local art world, the duo selling themselves as the** Art Guys, who, thanks to corporate largesse and near-worshipful local “critics,” have gone about staging their conceptual-art works, to rarely a discouraging word, for well more than a decade.

We actually read Britt’s preview/review of the art guys’ latest “show” in last Thursday’s newspaper and found it to be a gentile, good-natured dismissal of the art guys’ “big, fat, not-so-gay wedding,” in which the two artistes, who apparently are both married heterosexuals (nothing wrong with that), were to “marry” a “live oak sapling,” as Britt described it, during an outdoor ceremony Saturday at the Museum of Fine Arts (we couldn’t make it ’cause we had to stay home and scratch our nuts). Britt believed that this performance was some statement or commentary on, or somehow hooked to, the debate over legalized gay marriage—a belief that one of the art guys both strenuously denied and seemed to kinda confirm (“piggybacking” on the issue) in the critic’s piece. If it was such a statement, it was a strange and muddled one, paralleling, as Britt noted way too far down in his review, the “slippery slope” argument of gay-marriage critics that once you allow men to marry men and women to marry women the next thing you know people will be petitioning to get hitched to dogs, cats, emus, ’74 Buick Electras, live oak saplings, etc. It even crossed our mind that if Britt were right maybe that the art guys were against gay marriage, which would indeed take some cast-iron cojones, to be so contrarian in the not-so-wide world of art. (But they ain’t—against gay marriage, that is).

After the art guys (or guy, we weren’t clear on the logistics) were conjoined to the sapling in holy matrimony, Britt followed up with a blog post affirming his initial judgment (accompanied by some sort of video we didn’t watch--scratchin’ our sack again). That posting drew an “open letter” from art guy Michael Galbraith--with footnotes, real footnotes!***--which Britt put up on his blog. Galbraith, coming on like Huey Newton in a wicker chair in 1969, opened up with a right-on-man quote from artist Bruce Nauman that included a bad word the Chronicle can’t print (it was “poo-smacker,” if we remember right), then again empahtically denied the tree-marriage ceremony had anything to do with gay marriage and drew this strange 2+2=5 analogy:

In your article you referenced an older work of ours, "Bucket Feet," in which we walked around downtown Houston with buckets of water attached to our feet. Now, what if someone believed that the action of impeding our normal capabilities of walking somehow referenced walking disabilities? I suppose they would be free to do so, but we simply walked around with buckets on our feet. And that's that.

And this:

We, The Art Guys (capital "T," by the way) do what we do regardless of what people think or how they think. And for the most part, we do it right in front of people so that they may share and experience and judge for themselves. There are other ways of working. This is what we often do.

(We’ve never judged for our particular self, because it seems we always have this itch to scratch.)

The letter went on at some length in an apparent attempt to place the art guys in some conceptual-art tradition, which we always thought was not the point, but then we’re a product of the Louisiana public school system.

We don’t know who’s right or wrong in this and really don’t care. But we do enjoy a good fight (boxing’s gotten really dull of late, with all those slew-footed Russian heavyweights). We fervently hope these exchanges blossom into a full-blown blood feud, with the art guys designing their next promotion to fully eviscerate Britt (figuratively, of course, but perhaps literally if he’ll cooperate) and Britt using his blog postings to carry out a Winchell-like vendetta against the art guys. We don’t care if they collude. That’s exactly what this town needs--a meaningless yet vitriolic public feud.

Let’s get it on!****

*By the way, we’ve opened bidding on the coveted Slampo’s Place mayoral endorsement, starting at $100. The lucky winner will get unlimited free, laudatory and unquestioning “coverage” in this blog, some of it possibly “fact-based” (some possibly not). Plus, we’ll post funny hand-drawn pictures of the other candidates. Cash only, please, and we ask that the bribe be listed on your disclosure report as a payment to “SuperSexy Donuts” for “snacks for staff.”

**That’s the, lower case.

*** Not like these.

**** -- M. Gaye, 1974

Hot Weather Reverie

2009-06-16T17:06:00.008-05:00

One of the things we've been thinking about this summer--among the many, many things we've been thinking about this summer--is opening up a down-scale pastry shop, maybe in a nearly abandoned strip center on Gessner or somewhere in that vicinity. We're thinking of calling it Sexy Donuts, or SuperSexy Donuts if that's taken.

You've probably been thinking the same thing yourself, so drop us a line at our email address (at right) and let us know how much you'd be able to contribute to this worthy commercial endeavor.

Hunger Artists Ladle Up Another Serving (Get It?) But We're Full.

2009-06-14T16:05:00.007-05:00

No sooner had we posted this prescient piece last week questioning the highly dubious proposition that “hunger” is a big problem among Houston children* than the city’s leading daily newspaper weighed in with an editorial piquantly headlined “Hard Times: Summertime’s no picnic for Houston’s hungry children” (“hunger” … “picnic” … “Summertime” … get it?). Amazingly, this blowsy space filler (“Summertime’s no picnic for editorialists”) was based on no actual facts but rather on--check it out—an opinion piece by the head of the scare organization Children at Risk that had appeared on the newspaper’s Sunday op-ed page a few days earlier. Other than repeating the assertions made by Children at Risk—given the state of the newspaper biz, wouldn’t it be better for the Chronicle if it just sold ’em an ad?—the editorial was notable in that it appeared to be encouraging more people to apply for food stamps. In Texas. Must be a sign of the times …

No need to despair, though. Almost every comment affixed to the on-line version of the editorial questioned its premise, in mostly reasonable terms. As one reader wrote: “Show us pictures of all these starving kids with their bones showing. I'll bet most of these kids below the poverty line are fat.”**

Yes, obesity, not “hunger,” is an actual real-life problem among kids from lower-income families, so perhaps the Chronicle editorialists and Children at Risk could team up to fill up some more valuable newsprint space by campaigning for a new government program to monitor and restrict the caloric intake of Our Town’s at-risk youth.

*We know that some, perhaps many, self-righteous types will arise from the congregation and declare, with a certain self-congratulatory smugness, “Well, if there’s one hungry child in Houston, that’s one hungry child too many.” To which we’d say: Yes, that’s true, so go out and find this hungry child and take him to the Jack-in-the-Box near you.

** It wasn’t too many years ago that Phil Gramm (who, we must confess, was not among our favorite politicians, although he could be engaging in person) was reviled far and near by such deep thinkers as Molly Ivins for making the observably true statement, “We’re the only country in the world whose poor people are fat,” or something like that. While he certainly might have employed a better choice of words, Gramm was on the money, as subsequent repeated studies linking obesity to poverty have shown.

Hunger Artists

2009-06-09T10:21:00.008-05:00

No matter what the calendar says, summer is here, and with it arrives a whole host of vexations—plagues of mosquitoes, ticks and fleas, brain-frying and lawn-toasting mid-afternoon heat, astronomical electric bills, the start of another hurricane season. And oh yeah: this is usually about the time we totally lose interest in the Astros, unless they put together eight or nine straight before the break. Even then, we might not pay attention again until they’re a lock for the playoffs.

Then there’s another small annoyance, one of which you may only be faintly aware but which nonetheless arrives each year roundabout this time: a news story or editorial or op-ed piece suggesting that there are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of HUNGRY CHILDREN in Houston, apparently malnourished to the brink of starvation. Summer appears to be a particularly acute time for "hunger," according to the monolithic social services-media infrastructure, because so many kids aren’t going over to their neighborhood schools to grab the two free meals the government makes available each weekday. You read it and maybe start to feel bad, then you walk or ride down almost any street in town and never see a kid who looks anywhere near emaciated; in fact, about every third kid (rough estimate) you run across looks to be ranging somewhere between grossly and morbidly obese (big, big problemo amongst your Hispanic—’scuse me, Latino—youth [check it out]). You yell at the kid to go run some laps or do some push-ups—men push-ups—but of course he can’t hear you ‘cause he’s zoned in on his MP3 player. Come to think of it, you never really hear about any actual “hungry” or “malnourished” child, with a real face and real name, unless he or she is the victim of severe parental abuse.

And you go hmm ...

Most of the media hand-wringings in Houston over the “hungry child” emanate, in some fashion, from an outfit with the ominous-sounding name Children at Risk, whose stock-in-trade appears to be ensuring that Houston is thought of—by Houstonians and outsiders alike—as a veritable hellhole for God’s innocents. Its solution to almost any “problem” it supposedly uncovers or spotlights is more, more, more expenditures of taxpayer funds. We don’t believe Children at Risk has ever cited “bad parenting” as at least an itsy-bitsy reason why some children may be “at risk” (although thousands and thousands and thousands of resilient Houston children actually survive that particular risk, daily).

Children at Risk is a non-profit think tank and advocacy group that’s been around since 1989 and has some fairly influential child health-and-welfare types on its board (its Web site also lists a couple of fairly influential media outlets as “collaborators”—check it out!). What we know about Children at Risk we’ve cobbled together from a few things we’ve heard over the years—nothing bad—and from the organization’s Web site. We don’t believe we’ve ever heard or seen any sort of an explanation in the local media of what Children at Risk is about and who funds it, beyond a description of the outfit as a “non-profit that focuses on children’s issues” or something equally as vague and meaningless. And this is the identifier that usually accompanies some extravagant claim or another that Children at Risk is making regarding the quality of the schools or all those “hungry children.” We figure the media take note of the name—Children at Risk—and automatically toss out their critical and evaluative faculties (which are not in large supply to begin with) and go with the flow. After all, how can you even question something that’s supposedly good for the children? Somebody might call you a Nazi or something, make you feel bad for being an actual journalist instead of a publicist masquerading as a journalist.

The latest eyebrow-raising epistle from Children at Risk appeared on the opinion page of Sunday’s Houston Chronicle in a somewhat disjointed piece authored by Robert Sanborn, the organization’s president and CEO, and headlined “Feed the hungry children right in our midst; Up to half of young here don’t get enough to eat.” Sanborn’s commentary does not reflect the second assertion of the headline—pretty much par for the course these days at the city’s leading daily newspaper—because nowhere in it does he actually make that statement. What he does say is this:

Contrary to popular belief and maybe a surprise to those of us wearing social blinders, poverty and hunger are far-reaching and widespread problems within the United States. This is especially true in the greater Houston area. Approximately 48 percent of Harris County children live in families with an income of $22,050 or less for a family of four. What is even more difficult to fathom is that here in Houston we are leaving dollars on the table by not fully taking advantage of federal money available to us to feed our hungry children. I, for one, want to see my tax dollars being fully utilized, especially if they were approved to help hungry children.

So it appears that Sanborn isn't connecting the dots on the imaginary grid by actually claiming that all these children in $22,050 households “don’t get enough to eat” or are “hungry.” Which is a good thing, because that would be patently, blatantly untrue (if difficult to quantify). What he is doing is unclear, except for reminding readers (and donors) that Children at Risk is on the case. Most of the rest of Sanborn’s piece is given over to recounting, in numbing detail, all the public and private resources devoted to providing free grub to Houston youngsters, except that they’re not enough and we need to get more, more, more kids to participate.

We’ll let you read the rest yourself, if you’re so inclined. In the meantime, we know you’re busy--possibly hungry for a salty snack--so we won’t draw down much more of your valuable but limited attention bandwidth. But before we go we’d like to make a couple of more points, in appropriately disjointed fashion, before somebody calls us a Nazi (but we voted for Obama, man!):

1. THERE ARE HUNGRY CHILDREN IN HOUSTON. This is a fact of which we are aware. But there aren't anywhere near the number the hunger artists would have you believe, and more often than not this is a temporary (but not good, of course) situation caused by poor parenting, or, more likely, by parental drug abuse or mental illness (the second cause growing from the first). And some parents just can’t get off their behinds or arrange to get their kids up to the school to get their free breakfasts and lunches in the summer—these meals usually provide ample daily caloric intake, although they generally are neither “tasty” nor “nutritious”—and instead turn the kids loose with giant sodas and a big bag of X-treme HOT CHIPS, the crap that just contributes to the further addling of young addled minds. (We’ll refrain from going off on the parents who drive the new Expeditions and F-250s to drop their kids off at school to procure their government-subsidized victuals—happens more than you’d think, mi amigo.) We definitely don’t believe the sins of the parents should fall on the children, especially the young ones, but we wonder what exactly Children at Risk proposes: Perhaps that each “at risk” child be assigned his or her own personal social worker to chauffeur them to and from school during the summertime so he or she can avail himself or herself of the free meals? HISD is offering the free food at 200 locations—seems like one might even be with in walking distance for most children. And lots of 'em could stand the exercise.

2. SINCE WHEN DID SOCIETY BEGIN DEFINING DOWN “HUNGER” AS “MISSING BREAKFAST”? Yes, we know, it’s best to eat a balanced breakfast, especially for young children, for all the reasons that Sanborn lists in his commentary, but does going without breakfast actually equate to “going hungry,” or, as Sanborn puts it in cutting-edge social-service jargon, “food insecurity?” Isn’t such a loose construction a real affront to people who fight against actual, documented “hunger” in Africa, Asia and parts of Latin America? Who’s to say that children who are eligible but aren’t partaking of the government-funded breakfast aren’t being fed? Maybe—and this is had to fathom, we know—their parents are feeding them (even hot chips-and-soda is something, although not as good for firing up the brain cells as the black coffee-and-a-cigarette breakfasts on which we subsisted for years). Diligent, attentive parents in a family of four making $22,050 annually can provide for their or her or his kids and do fulfill the first responsibility of parenting, which is to make sure their kids are fed and secure (and pass the TAKS!). And so:

3. HUNGER AMONG CHILDREN IS NOT “WIDESPREAD” IN HOUSTON. It’s just not, period. And when you cry wolf for so long, people tend to ignore or discount what you say and will continue to do so if you ever stumble across a real "problem."

Go ahead and call us a Nazi, if you wish, but now we must reattach our blinders and rest.

For Whom the Cock Crows (It's You, Bub)

2009-06-05T19:26:00.010-05:00

It was back in April that our civic club newsletter, ordinarily one of the biggest wastes of paper in the Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area, carried a peculiar but highly informative front-page item (the newsletter has a front and back page—dig it!) warning neighborhood dwellers THAT IT IS ILLEGAL TO KEEP A GODDMAN CHICKEN IN YOUR YARD IN THE CITY OF HOUSTON! Actually, it’s not exactly illegal, as the fine print explained: according to city ordinance so-and-so, it’s against the law to “possess or maintain” chickens, turkeys, geese, etc. in a pen or other enclosure “within 100 feet of any actual residence or habitation of human beings …” So if your domicile sits on one of those huge lots in River Oaks or Memorial it’s likely you can keep enough hens and roosters to satisfy all the egg and fried-chicken needs of a medium-sized Texas Department of Criminal Justice facility. But in our neighborhood you must live outside the law when it comes to chicken-keeping. (This strikes us as patently unfair—a for-sure “disparate impact,” if you will—and as soon as we get a minute we’re gonna email Obama and see if he can fix it. We know he'll hop right on it.)

As we suspected this notice of city law was not a random newsletter space-filler (curbside recycling is on the 28^th of this month, by the way) but was aimed at neighbors of ours who for several years brazenly keep a lil’ red rooster in their garage IN VIOLATION OF THE CITY ORDINANCE. These folks are not your average urban chicken-keepers, being neither a hard-working family from the hills outside of Zacatecas (if there are no hills outside of Zacatecas, let’s move along) nor the kind of SWPL white folks you find up in the Heights. They are indeed Anglos—no, let’s scratch that; it’s an insult, as the paterfamilias is a hard-shelled little Irishman from upstate New York who, in fact, answers to the name of “Mick”*--but like heavy-metal music and as far as we know had no previous experience in animal husbandry aside from keeping many and various cats around their place.

It seems they acquired the rooster when their son’s girlfriend--at the time he and she were students at the public high school for artsy kids--purchased a baby chick to star in some movie she was making for a visual arts class** (we believe it was a remake of the remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, with the chick playing the Brando part), and after the chick had fulfilled its cinematic duties the son and his family took a liking to it and lodged it in a roomy pen in the dark recesses of their garage (why, we don’t know). The chick grew up to be a full-bodied braying Chanticleer, and as we learned many years ago when we briefly lived way out in the sticks between Slim's Y-Ki-Ki Club and Lawtell, La. (you know it as the home of the Lawtell Playboys, of course), roosters don’t just crow at the crack of dawn but are liable to let it rip at all hours of the day. This one did raise his hue & cry just before daybreak—we’d hear it crowing, faintly, from its garage perch when we’d go out for the morning papers—but otherwise seemed to follow no natural clockwork and could be heard cutting loose at 9 a.m., 9:23 a.m., 12 p.m. (when the hand is on the prick of noon), 2:57 p.m., 3:10 p.m., 5:30 p.m., etc.--but never too loudly or after dark.

We grew accustomed to the sound, imagining that it somehow put us in touch with the ancient rhythms of a more pastoral life, perhaps like the one our grand-père Slampeaux lived in the Old Country before he hopped a boat and washed up in East Texas. But we were amazed that the rooster was allowed to do his natural thing for a couple of years, maybe longer, unmolested by the constabulary or one of the neighborhood busybodies. Someone, though, finally took offense to the rooster’s presence and instead of speaking with the owners took the weasel’s path by complaining to the ordinarily toothless civic club, which further took the weasel’s path by printing up the blind newsletter notice. Our neighbors, not wanting to upset the commonweal, hastily returned the rooster to from whence he came, the feed and seed store up on Washington Avenue, and as of this writing know not of his fate.

It’s been a couple of months since his departure, but the other day we realized how much we missed the cock’s crowing when we saw one of those trippy Ambien CR commercials on TV, the one where the bleary-eyed white woman finds herself awake at 3 a.m. with a rooster crowing at the foot of her bed but then she wrangles a script for the sleep medicine and the stalking rooster is banished, last seen wandering off at dawn down the street of some godforesaken outlying suburb (side effects now include becoming “more outgoing or aggressive”) in search of other sleep patterns to disturb.

This modern life: It ain’t no good life, but it’s the life we choose.

*We don't make up the news--we just report it.
**We don't make up the ... etc.

When the Student is Unprepared, the Teacher Appears

2009-05-17T20:47:00.008-05:00

The industrious and decidedly non-correct-thinking blogger Steve Sailer recently shone a light on his own dark night of the soul for readers:

I don't know why people speak so highly of dreams all the time: e.g., the American Dream, "I have a dream," Dreams from My Father, etc.

If my dreams are representative, then the real American Dream is that you're in the classroom for your final exam but you haven't attended a class or opened the book all semester, and for some reason you're wearing your pajamas, and you really have to go to the bathroom.

That's our dream, too, one that we still have, periodically, although it's been many years since we actually worried about taking a written exam (in our "waking" life). Judging by conversations we've had over the years with others of our rank and station, the not-ready-for-the-test dream is the great night terror that roils the collective unconscious of America's college-educated middle class. In our particular version we also are sometimes wearing pajamas or are otherwise dressed inappropriately, although the part about having to use the bathroom doesn't ring a bell. Usually the professor--and it's never a specific professor, as best we can recall--is passing out an exam or a blue book and we're suddenly overcome by panic, wondering why oh why we forgot to come to class or read the textbook and generally what the hell we're doing there. Sometimes we think we might be able negotiate, to come up with a line of plausible BS to feed the prof so that we might be excused*, but we invariably conclude that such a ploy would be hopeless and slump into despond. Once, and we remembered this one clearly, we thought we might have been drunk for the entire semester and had chosen an inopportune moment to sober up.

Needless to say, we always manage to awaken before we're forced to demonstrate how truly unprepared we are.

*During our years in the "adjunct professor" game we heard many imaginative explanations for long absences from class. These almost always were told by a female student and involved one of the following elements: 1.) a break-up with a boyfriend resulting in 2.) a change of medications that didn't work as expected or 3.) a death of a loved one resulting in 4.) a change of medications that didn't work as expected. The best one we heard was up in Aggieland, where they usually don't lie, cheat or steal, from a young lady who constructed a magnificant tale regarding the death of an uncle in the World Trade Center on 9-11 and her subsequent six weeks' disappearance from class. As much as it pained us we ended up giving her an 'A,' because she turned out to be the best student in the class.

When the Student is Ready, the Teacher Appears

2009-05-11T23:26:00.003-05:00

From "Freeing a Mentor from His Mythology," on the relationship between still-breathing Steve Earle and long-gone Townes Van Zandt, by Anthony DeCurtis, in the Sunday New York Times:

To all but a handful of his closest friends Van Zandt was a remote, elusive figure, apt to disappear and turn up with equal unpredictability. As mentor to Mr. Earle he was hardly a steady, guiding hand, and he was much too stoic to dispense sage advice about songwriting or anything else. The premise of their relationship was something like, if I didn’t think you were good enough to do it yourself, you wouldn’t be here. He did, however, recommend that Mr. Earle always put the top back on the bottle so that the alcohol wouldn’t spill when it inevitably got kicked over and, when injecting drugs, to use clean needles every time.

He also instructed Mr. Earle to read “War and Peace,” though Van Zandt had not read the book himself, as Mr. Earle discovered to his surprise when he dutifully returned with questions about it. “I just thought you should,” Van Zandt idly told him.

Put Together Like an Old Pistol

2009-05-06T12:42:00.003-05:00

Jane Ely liked to eat, drink, smoke and shoot the shit, activities that she often pursued simultaneously and with carefree determination (until it all caught up with her). She may have said a curse word or two along the way. (No one, not even the hardest core rapper, ever enunciated the word “motherfucker” quite like Ely did.) Exercise, for Ely, was bending an elbow to down an adult beverage—we don’t believe there were many she disliked—or lighting up another Camel non-filter. Late at night, in a barroom, she’d strike the match off a well-manicured thumbnail.

Ely, who died Monday of a "lung-related disease", wrote about politics and toiled in a variety of editing jobs at the now-dead newspaper out the freeway--she worked there long before it moved to the freeway--as well as the surviving paper downtown. When we went to work at the former back at the dawn of the Reagan Era, Ely schooled us, and as it stands with most of the people who have been our teachers over the years we never quite got around to fully expressing our gratitude.

Going to lunch with Ely was always a trip—a long trip. Back when she was still living large and hard, she favored ample servings of heavy foods—chicken fried steak drenched in gravy, or the deep-fried and glazed meatstuff she’d forage from the buffet line at a hideously greasy Chinese joint called Yummy Chow on Bellaire near Stella Link. She took her meals at a leisurely pace (our mode of fortification was and is to stuff everything down our gullet in 5 or 10 minutes, especially if we’re hungry, then have coffee while waiting for everyone else to catch up). About 30 or 40 minutes into it she’d put down her knife and fork and pick up her lighter and a Camel. After a couple of deep drags she might place the cigarette in an ashtray, pick up the knife and fork and slice into her slab of meat—slowly, methodically, painstakingly (Goddamn, our mind would scream, hurry up and eat so we can get back to work!) She’d take a bite or two, then return to the smoldering cigarette. This may have been at the mid-point of the meal, or only a third of the way into it. You’d arrive at the joint when it was jam-packed with the lunch hour rush, and by the time Ely had snubbed out her last Camel yours would be the only party left and the help would be hovering to clear the last table.

In the long intervals between bites Ely would regale the company with stories from her vast repertoire (she repeated some, but not many). These were usually winding narratives that never saw the light of the newspaper and often were intended to emphasize that this or that public figure was much less than he or she was cracked up to be, perhaps even a buffoon or an unreconstructed asshole. She had sound judgment and a keen eye for a person’s essential character.

Ely had her favorites, and while she seemed to prefer moderate Republican types like Tower, Hutchison and the senior Bush—a predilection we never understood—we recall her speaking fondly of such disparate Democratic types as Eleanor Tinsley, Anthony Hall and Bob Bullock, among others. These were not necessarily politicians she agreed with all the time, but people she perceived as honorable or genuine and, mostly, as gracious in private (at least to her) as others pretended to be in public. She did not seem to care for Phil Gramm or Bill Clinton, and indicated she didn’t understand the appeal of either.

Publicly and privately, Ely was scrupulous about presenting herself as objective and non-partisan, a journalist who’d give everyone a fair hearing. When we started covering politics at the now-deceased rag she suggested, among other things, that we not vote in party primaries, advice we continued to follow long after we quit covering politics. But it was clear that Ely was one of what even back then was a dying breed—a liberal Republican steeped in country-club gentility (we believe she attended Stephens College, a toity women’s institution in Missouri—a resume entry that was somewhat at odds with her raffish Front Page persona—and we’d always heard she came from an “old” and “good” Fort Worth family). Although generally intolerant of malfeasance and incompetence in government, the one issue on which we recall Ely expressing a strong opinion was abortion: She was fiercely pro-choice, and we suspect that in her later years she was not entirely comfortable at Republican gatherings. (We wonder now what she thought of Obama: We figure she saw right through him but might have been tempted to vote for him nonetheless, although she'd never say.)

As an editor Ely was sparing with compliments, but when she gave you one you knew it was real. If she thought something was lacking in your reporting or presentation, she’d come at you sideways, gently, with a drawn-out question that would usually begin “Were you able to ask …?” or “Did they say anything about …?” Out on the freeway one late Saturday night, after we had batted out a forgettable breaking story butt up against deadline, we awaited Ely’s judgment so we could be dismissed to get on with whatever frolic we had planned. Concluding her editing, she lit a Camel, blew a burst of smoke on her computer screen and without looking our way pronounced the story “put together like an old pistol.” We took it—and we hope we took it the right way—as an acknowledgment of craftsmanship. It’s a compliment we stole and have passed on to younger people over the years, but sparingly, and only when deserved.

The Skilled Foreign Worker, Houston Variety

2009-04-21T11:25:00.008-05:00

The New York Times has been running a wide-ranging series it calls “Remade in America: The Newest Immigrants and their Impact,”* and Sunday before last it examined the H1-B program, under which U.S. companies can temporarily import skilled foreigners to work, generally at what the Times calls “better paying jobs” in the high-tech industry (or, to be more accurate, at Indian outsourcing firms). The popular conception of the H1-B worker is that he or she is Indian (as is the super-genius Google worker who was the anecdotal hook for the Times piece; he had his visa but his wife doesn’t and must live in Canada while he commutes for conjugal visits from the California---that was the boo-hoo slant of the tale), or Chinese or Russian and possesses the math and science skills native Americans are too obtuse, lazy or just generally uninterested to acquire (or push their kids to acquire).** An accompanying graphic showing counties where there were large number of H1-B applications last year generally confirmed that notion: In Los Angeles, the largest corporate applicant was RJT Compuquest, in Miami-Dade it was Fortune Technologies, in Dallas it was Tech Mahnindra and in Collin County it was Infosys Technologies, headquartered in some place called Bangalore. In fact, the largest seeker of H1-B applications in every major metropolitan area listed by the Times was a high-tech company or institution, except for ...

Harris County, Texas. The largest applicant for temporary visas for skilled workers here in 2008 was … HISD, the taxpayer-supported government entity that is Houston’s largest employer. And who are these badly needed, highly skilled foreign workers? We can’t find any hard figures, but it’s safe to assume that many if not most are the “bilingual” elementary teachers that the school district has been hauling here from Mexico by the truckload, although “bilingual” is a glaring misnomer because so many of these "bilingualists" lack the English-language skills that would permit them to pass, say, a middle-school TAKS reading or writing test (we’re not exaggerating here---ask around, check it out yo’sef). They’re cannon fodder for a program that, as most any veteran and half-aware native-English-speaking educator (white, black or Hispanic) will privately tell you, is untenable to the point of absurdity, especially in a district that is now catering to growing numbers of immigrants (primarily Africans, Asians and Middle Easterners---most of them legal) who aren’t accorded the costly privilege of being taught for years in their native tongue.

As is often the case, these incidental statistical tracings give you a better picture of what Houston is really like, and what it’s becoming, than most anything you’ll read in the daily newspaper, or in a Greater Houston Partnership publication.*

*Check out last Sunday’s installment, which somewhat surprisingly for the Times offered an unflinching and relatively non-sentimental portrayal of an American-born child of Hispanic immigrants who lives in the D.C. suburbs. It’s not an, uh, elevating story. (The Times, of course, locates the problem in the supposed lack of resources devoted to tending to these kids in the suburban setting.)

**We’re guilty.

***The emerging paradigm is, of course, Mexico City, with slightly better air.

True Scourge of Western Civilization, Revealed

2009-04-16T22:30:00.011-05:00

Quite often these days, probably more than is healthy, we find our self agreeing with George Will, nodding along as he harrumphs his way through a newspaper column or his Sunday morning television turn. This, no doubt, is another manifestation of our encroaching fuddy-duddyism, as Banjo Jones, our colleague in aging, puts it. But every so often Will gives us pause to consider just how sound of mind he really is---when, to cite one notable example, he turns to the learned fiction of Michael Crichton to underpin an argument against the existence of global warming, or, as in his latest newspaper offering, he fingers the widespread wearing of blue jeans as a sign of the culture’s deepening infantilization.

With his glasses and bow ties and the camera-ready professorial air, Will has always struck us as an amusing charlatan. His tendentious columns strive for the Olympian but mostly read as if they’d been hastily slapped together with the help of a research assistant, or three. His long-running shtick---and we’d assume it’s been a fairly lucrative one---is that he is much, much smarter than you, and much too busy grappling with the serious issues to sample the grungy pleasures of our quotidian age. He fancies himself the Burke, or maybe the Chesterton, for our times, and he well may be, although this speaks more to the attenuation of the times than his particular skill set. Every time we see him on TV chatting it up about his love of baseball---it’s the thinkin’ man’s sport!---the thought invariably crosses our mind: George Will probably throws like a girl.* We know we're not alone in this thought.

Will’s screed against “denim” finds him assuming the role of le provocateur, cut-rate Tom Wolfe division, which is not a snug fit. He approvingly quotes from a recent Wall Street Journal piece by somebody named Daniel Akst decrying the the “plague of that ubiquitous fabric, which is symptomatic of deep disorders in the national psyche.”

It is, [Akst] says, a manifestation of "the modern trend toward undifferentiated dressing, in which we all strive to look equally shabby." Denim reflects "our most nostalgic and destructive agrarian longings -- the ones that prompted all those exurban McMansions now sliding off their manicured lawns and into foreclosure." Jeans come prewashed and acid-treated to make them look like what they are not -- authentic work clothes for horny-handed sons of toil and the soil. Denim on the bourgeoisie is, Akst says, the wardrobe equivalent of driving a Hummer to a Whole Foods store -- discordant.

That’s certainly the clearest explanation we’ve seen of the current economic malaise.

We found our self taking this much too personally, because we own perhaps too many pairs of jeans and wear them whenever possible, not out of some dopey nostalgie de la boue** but because they’re affordable (a pair of Wranglers can be had for less than $20 at Wal-Mart, at least the last time we looked), low-maintenance (run ‘em trough the cold-water cycle, hang 'em on the line and they’re ready to go again), durable (last for years) and---a most important consideration for us AARP members---comfortable (we really like the way our little pot belly pooches out over the waist).

Will’s column brought to mind a piece we saw last week on 60 Minutes that featured Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, who’s worked with the Defense Department to create a new prosthetic arm for wounded vets. We don’t think we’ve ever seen Kamen in anything but denim (in this video he's wearing not only a worn pair of jeans but a denim work shirt). The heart-warming 60 Minutes report portrayed Kamen as the embodiment of American generosity and ingenuity, but after hearing from George Will we realize our mistake in judgment and must conclude that Kamen is just another fraud, one of those who wears “the carefully calculated costume of people eager to communicate indifference to appearances. But the appearances that people choose to present in public are cues from which we make inferences about their maturity and respect for those to whom they are presenting themselves.”

Harrumph!

*And by this we mean no disrespect to the many girls who do not throw like girls and could most likely whip our ass, if they could catch us.

**Elvis, who in his later years favored tight jumpsuits adorned with shiny stuff, long predated George Will in disdaining the wearing of jeans, which from his perspective as a rural Southerner he associated with the attire of the "field hand." But that's OK, because Elvis was a real person.

In the Land of the Smug and Arrogant, the Liquor Company Shill in the Phony Uniform Rules

2009-04-05T14:51:00.013-05:00

The other evening (Was it Friday? Yes, it was.) we trudged home from our labors, plopped our sorry ass in to our worn but comfortable recliner and aimed our precious channel-clicking device at the TV, hoping to open some space in our mind with some nostalgia-inducing offering from Turner Classic Movies, a trifling entertainment from the long-dead black-and-white world where Americans brazenly smoked cigarettes that did not cost $8 a pack. But the cable company, which only recently raised our monthly rate by $5.13 (nice timing!) while besieging us with some of the most insidiously stupid commercials in Christendom, apparently was still unable to forward us the signal from the classic movie channel, a lack of service that has now persisted for more than a week. So we clicked down one channel to Fox News, where we beheld a show called Hannity, an entertainment that left us transfixed, unable to peel our eyes away, for far too many minutes.

The bull-necked host---apparently he has shed his lefty sidekick/punching bag, whose name escapes us at the moment---had assembled a panel of guests to discuss the great issues of the day. One was a grumpy, forlorn apparatchik from the Bush White House whose name also was not committed to our memory. The second was a chirpy young gal who once had something to do with an entity called “Rock the Vote” but now labored as a “Democratic consultant,” according to the crawler at the bottom of our screen, and was apparently on hand for some fake stab at “balance.” The third---and we shit you not, to paraphrase Jack Parr, one of the pioneers of the TV talk-show racket---was a gentleman who sported some ersatz nautical outfit (with epaulets, we believe) and was introduced as the “Glenlivet Man.” We did not catch the explanation for the Glenlivet Man’s presence; perhaps it was some jolly in-joke, but it seemed to be nothing special, just everyday business on the Hannity show. (Dave Garroway, another early talk-show pioneer, once had a garrulous chimpanzee for a co-host, and if we’re not mistaken this little man-monkey enjoyed the occasional Pall Mall or Lucky Strike, although we could be confusing him with some other cigarette-smoking chimp from the 1950s. We’re pretty sure, though, that this chimp died and went to hell many years ago, thus explaining his regrettable absence from the Hannity panel.)

But we had no time to ponder the mysteries of tobacco-inhaling chimps or why an epaulet-bedecked representative of a French-owned manufacturer of single-malt Scotch whiskey was on an alleged public-affairs show---we could only shrug when our wife walked into the room and asked, “Why does he have the Glenlivet Man on?”--- because the host was outraged---outraged, we say! What had left him in this visibly agitated state was, of course, our president, who while preening and pirouetting in France had made the wholly truthful but not exactly novel observation that America has, “at times,” been “arrogant,” not to mention “dismissive” and “derisive” toward the rest of the world. This apparently struck some deep, dissonant chord in Sr. Hannity, who did not address the rest of the sentence that Obama spoke, the "on the other hand" wherein the president chided our European cousins for their reflexive, “casual” anti-Americanism (our president now strikes us as a man who likes to turn it every which way but loose).

Perhaps listening to the entire sentence would have sorely taxed the Hannity attention span. The voluble host was so worked up---and this, we’d imagine, is indeed everyday business on Hannity, at least since Nov. 4---you would have thought that Obama had proclaimed that he, Paul, George and Ringo were more popular than Jesus. Hannity professed to not understand how our president could make such a statement, could even conceive in his wildest fantasy that America might be "arrogant," and, displaying his wide-ranging knowledge of matters historical, invoked “Hitler” and “Stalin” and somebody else as examples of the evil that our president does not recognize but which he, Sean Hannity, most assuredly does and is fully equipped, intellectually and otherwise, to deal with.

At that point we were finally roused to change the channel, thus we have no way of knowing whether one of Hannity’s guests, perhaps the dapper Glenlivet Man, piped up to argue that, yes, Americans have been arrogant and dismissive, most recently as we’ve pursued with blood and uncountable wealth “the presumptuous notion that [we] are called upon to tutor Muslims in matters related to freedom and the proper relationship between politics and religion.” That’s Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel, Vietnam veteran and Boston U history professor, in his 2008 book The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, a terse, cogent argument---although probably far too long for Sean Hannity---that for 30-plus years America has underwritten its unsustainable “empire of consumption” at home by staking an unsustainable empire abroad.

Bacevich, whose son was killed in Iraq two years ago, is a conservative, but he’s not the kind of conservative that Hannity would recognize. We await that day that we might flip on the TV and see Andrew Bacevich explaining the ramifications of American arrogance to Sean Hannity, perhaps on a evening when the Glenlivet Man is attending to other chores.

This Just In: There’s No Such Thing as a Miracle Cure. Especially for Public Education. (Especially for Public Education!)

2009-03-28T21:44:00.006-05:00

We’re not sure what the world needs at this particular point in history, but we’re almost certain what it doesn’t need is another story in the media extolling the KIPP program as the savior of public education (the examples are many so we’ll not single out any particular one). You’re probably familiar with the formula: a journalist drops in at a KIPP school (or at KIPP’s cousin in Houston, YES Prep) for a few hours, consults the voluminous clips on the Houston-born-and-raised charter schools, then knocks off a quick piece on the supposed wonders that KIPP has wrought with allegedly hard-to-educate “minority” and “inner city” students. It’s an easy space- or time-filler, and the kind of tale the media digs: a pre-scripted feel-good story with a foregone happy ending and nary a hint of ambivalence.

One journalist who’s actually probed beyond the conventional story line is Jay Mathews, the Washington Post’s respected and knowledgeable education reporter, whose stories and blog entries, at least the ones we’ve read, still come down very (very) favorably for KIPP. Mathews has new book out on KIPP, Work Hard. Be Nice. (the KIPP slogan---it beats “Down With Ossified and Dogmatic Thought,” but just barely), which this week received a thorough going-over in Slate from Sarah Mosle, who casts a hard but not wholly critical eye at both the book and KIPP itself. (Yeah, we’re approaching this subject at a second-hand remove, at least, not having read Mathews’ book, but we’re invoking Blogger’s Prerogative, whatever that is.)

One thing that’s always bugged us a little about all these KIPP success stories, whether based on statistic or anecdote, is that the media invariably fail to acknowledge the obvious built-in advantages that charters have over their non-magnet public-school counterparts. We’re talking about two things: The fact that parents who seek to place their kids in charter schools, even if admittance itself is “random,” obviously have more wherewithal (mental, for sure, if not financial and moral) than parents who are unable or can’t be bothered to try to get theirs out of low-performing neighborhood schools (the ones trying to raise their rankings from “hellish” to “nightmarish”), or aren’t aware of the alternatives (or can’t get out of bed to fill out the application). The second advantage is that the charters contractually obligate students and parents to meet standards of behavior, effort and involvement---something that public schools generally can’t do (outside of grade requirements that must be met at magnets, or most magnets). If the charter’s imposed standards of time and effort aren’t met, the kid gets a one-way ticket back to his zoned school.

The danger in all this is that it risks turning many public schools into default holding pens for the discipline problems and chronic low-performers. You can see this happening in Houston at the middle-school level, where savvy working- and lower-middle-class Hispanic parents scramble to get their kids into KIPP or YES or anywhere but their sorry, gangsta-incubating zoned schools---where, just like at home, they have to take you in.

This doesn’t mean that KIPP’s success isn’t real, but it does means that it merits at least a small asterisk, and raises questions about whether that success can translate on a wider scale. Slate’s Mosle, a former Teach for America teacher, has the goods, and we’re going to break with tradition here and quote at length from her piece, the thesis of which she states at the outset, declaring that KIPP

… is not the proven, replicable model for eliminating the achievement gap in the inner city that Mathews imagines, and this distinction is crucial. KIPP may be something more important: a unique chance to test, once and for all, the alluring but suspect notion that there actually is an educational panacea for social inequality. As of yet, the evidence for such a thing doesn't exist.

After voicing that sobering heresy, Mosle points out that

… Mathews likens KIPP to a cult "without the dues or the weird robes." But by definition, a cult is a fringe movement. To date, no one—including such mighty players as the Gates Foundation—has figured out how to take an educational cult and make it the predominant religion within any urban system.

Mathews insists that KIPP has solved this riddle. It's true that perhaps no other model program has risen so far so fast, with such consistently strong test scores. KIPP now has 66 academies in 19 states. Still, 66 academies amount to just three schools, on average, per state. Houston has far and away the highest concentration with, currently, seven middle schools, three elementary schools, and one high school. But this is in a school system with 200,000 students, nearly 80 percent of whom qualify for reduced or free lunches. At the moment, like every other model program before it, KIPP serves only a tiny fraction of disadvantaged students within any given district. And as education researcher Richard Rothstein has rightly noted, comparing students from different schools, even within the same disadvantaged neighborhoods, is very difficult to do in a rigorous, scientific way. Just because KIPP uses a lottery for admissions, for example, does not tell us anything about the self-selecting nature of the pool from which this lottery is drawn. (Rothstein's own research—here and here—has shown that KIPP students come from families that are better off, or better educated, than their regular public school or special-education counterparts.)

What is more, KIPP's approach is implicitly, but obviously, not designed to suit all students—or, for that matter, all parents or teachers. For decades, educators argued that disadvantaged children could succeed if only they received the same education as more advantaged, middle-class students. Many, if not most, of the nation's best public and private schools are decidedly progressive, with less emphasis on test scores and more on critical thinking skills, with rich arts, music, sports, and other extracurricular programs. Why shouldn't poorer children enjoy the same?

But KIPP is not the same. The program has usefully changed the debate by acknowledging the obvious: Kids who grow up poor, with no books or with functionally illiterate parents, in crime-ridden neighborhoods, with destructive peer influences and without access to basic medical care (such as glasses to help them read), need something significantly more than—and different from—kids who grow up with every economic and educational advantage on which to build. For one, the academic program at KIPP is relentless in its back-to-basics focus: a boot camp that runs nearly 10 hours a day, from 7:30 a.m.until 5 p.m., not including transportation and homework, and half a day every other Saturday.

... Parents or guardians, too, must be hardy souls at KIPP. They have to sign a contract saying they agree to KIPP's exacting schedule, which serves, intentionally or not, to eliminate kids from less involved or determined families. While KIPP does have outreach efforts to broaden its applicant pool, only the most determined parents are likely to respond to such overtures and sign KIPP's demanding contract. This dedication suggests a higher value on education within these families, and thus kids better able or willing to learn. And the weakest students, not surprisingly, get disproportionately winnowed. In KIPP's schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, the worst-performing kids have dropped out (or been expelled) in greater numbers in the higher grades; the result has been to inflate the schools' grade-to-grade improvement.

If you’re interested in this sort of thing, or just admire the stripping away of an artfully arranged veneer, you should read Mosle’s entire piece. It’s another reminder that if something’s sold as too good to be true it most certainly is, as Sir R. Allen Stanford may have remarked (in private).

Pynchon at the Ship Channel: Another Unsolved Houston Mystery

2009-03-22T15:36:00.012-05:00

Some weeks back, before we were forced to temporarily suspend blogurbatin’ here at Slampo’s Place due to a, um, conflict with the tax-collecting agency (and other crazy-making but passing vexations), we posted, in conjunction with the publication of a new biography of Donald Barthelme, a choice passage from an appreciation of Barthelme penned in the early 1990s by Sr. Thomas Pynchon. The Pynchon essay appeared as an introduction to a posthumous collection of Barthelme’s works and spoke rather poignantly, we thought, to what Pynchon described as his fellow scribbler’s long “love-hate affair” with Houston, where he was reared, grew to adulthood (a ’hood that included a stint as a critic on the long-since-expired newspaper out on the freeway, before it was out the freeway, the same publication whose other illustrious alumni include seminal local blogger Banjo Jones) and to which he returned, at least part time, before his death in 1989. We discerned a larger truth in Pynchon’s take on Barthelme’s “affair” with Houston, because we don’t know anyone with at least half a brain (arbitrary percentage) who’s lived here longer than, say, 5 years (arbitrary length of residency) who isn’t at least deeply ambivalent about the place (that is to say, has come to the realization that Houston has its charms, aside from the cheap cost of living [which, of course, stems from the town’s historical reliance on cheap labor], although these things are usually unadvertised and make themselves known over time, while also recognizing that Houston can be a colossal pain in the rear, not only on a grand damning metaphysical scale but in the mere day-to-day gettin’-along sense).

Anyhoo, it had occurred to us when we first read the Pynchon essay many years ago that Pynchon possessed more than a cursory knowledge of Houston, like he had spent some time here in the ’60s, visiting a girlfriend, perhaps, or maybe he had used Baghdad-on-the-Bayou as a port of call on his way down to Mexico, where he reportedly was known to hang. Whatever the case, his essay on Barthelme exhibited a pronounced knowingness about the town. Shortly after the above-mentioned post we received an email from our pal Il Pinguino, one of the city’s most accomplished belle letterists, mentioning that he had been told by a professor acquaintance that Pynchon had actually lived for a spell in Houston back in the ’60s. On further questioning, Il determined that the notion was set in proximate motion by Larry McMurtry and was mentioned in his recent non-fiction book, Books, a run-through of McMurtry’s days as a book dealer in Houston, the Bay Area, D.C. and now Archer City. (The prof also pointed out to Il that Buffalo Bayou is mentioned in one of the sing-alongs that punctuate Gravity’s Rainbow; this would have meant nothing to us when we read the book 35 years ago during the many slack hours in our seafaring days with Arthur Levy Boat Co. of Morgan City, La.)

We checked out Books from our fine Houston Public Library System---it is, by the way, an oddly flat and joyless tome, but perhaps only in light of our stereotyped expectations of the eccentrics who trade in the antiquarian book racket---and sure enough, the Pynchon-in-Houston tale is told therein by McMurtry, albeit in a curious, tossed-off manner. We have returned the book, not wishing to fall into arrears with another public agency, but if we remember correctly the highly inconclusive story went something like this: McMurtry writes he "may" missed his chance to meet the publicity-shy (which is a whole different thing than “reclusive,” the usual adjective applied to Pynchon) writer, who was "said" to be living "somewhere near the Ship Channel" when McMurtry was teaching at Rice in the mid-'60s (McMurtry’s Rice-area residence being the site of an infamous 1964 visit by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters as they wended their way to the New York World’s Fair on their psychedelic bus, a visit immortalized by Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, during which an acid-addled Prankster whom Wolfe called “Stark Naked” streaked nude from the bus and maternally pressed her “skinny breast” to McMurtry’s young son, future distinguished singer-songwriter James, whom Ms. Naked had mistaken for her own spawn*).

So where were we? Yeah, this story of McMurtry’s: He also relates that that Pynchon was "said" to need work and that he had sent Pynchon a "note" mentioning that he might be able to arrange something for him in the local grove of academia, but Pynchon replied with a "note" of his own declining the offer (and thank Baby Jesus for that). Why they didn’t get together for aperitifs is left unexplained, but it couldn’t have been that difficult, since the distance between West U and the Ship Channel is not that great, at least miles-wise. McMurtry apparently did not keep the note from Pynchon, the auction of which today might finance the purchase of a sizable lot of used books. Then again, McMurtry rounds out the story by saying it's possible that neither note was actually sent. Hmmm. Maybe it was all a dream, or he misremembers.

That was pretty much it---no explanation of why Pynchon might have been living by the Ship Channel, or where, or what year(s) specifically this might have been. If it was in ’64 or ’65, then Pynchon wouldn’t exactly have been a struggling unknown, as V. had been published in 1963 and won that year’s Faulkner Prize. Next up, in 1966, would be The Crying of Lot 49---is it possible that Pynchon wrote some of the small classic American treatise on paranoia while holed up in some sailor-man’s boarding house on Navigation?

We are a Pynchon fan, not a Pynchon obsessive (we plan to get around to reading the 1,000-plus-page Against the Day one day, most certainly if we find our self with a lot of time on our hands while pulling a prison stretch for tax evasion), so it’s possible that the Pynchon-in-Houston story has been well-hashed over on the Pynchon mailing list, or elsewhere that obsessives electronically gather to obsess, and we simply were unaware of it. The only other mention we can find of a Pynchon-Houston connection, and it’s a fleeting and obscure one, is in this tongue-in-cheek (we think it is, anyway) essay that appeared in Harper’s in 2001 and links Barthelme to the bizarre “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” attack on his fellow former Houstonian, Dan Rather, on a New York City street in 1986.** This mention predates the McMurtry book but appeared long after Pynchon’s essay on Barthelme, so who knows:

Donald Barthelme is one of my literary heroes. Thomas Pynchon—no stranger to Houston, I might add—described Barthelme, lovingly, as “perhaps a species of anarchist curse.”

(The author of this piece, Paul Limbert Allman, appears not to have written much else in the way of paranoiac literary/crime theory but seems to be or was a writer of books for young adults, including one whose description sounds downright Pynchonesque. Hmmm.)

Other wispy emanations suggest that Pynchon is “no stranger” to Houston: the epigraph from 1990's Vineland comes from a song by the late Houston bluesman Johnny “Clyde” Copeland (“Every dog has its day, and a good dog just might have two”) and, as the authoritative PynchonWiki puts it, the author is “known to be a fan of Roky Erickson.” Maybe Pynchon saw ’em both, back in the day. The mind reels with possibility … it do!

Our own theory is that Pynchon, a Navy veteran who has always seemed deeply knowledgeable in the ways of the water, may have hung his hat here briefly while working as a deckhand or as a crew member of some vessel, perhaps an ocean-going one or one that plied the Ship Channel (as the late Sterling Morrison*** did some 20 years later), possibly to get away from the encroaching fame his first novel was bringing, or possibly to woodshed and write (and what better place to hide away than the east side of Houston in the 1960s!). We wonder whether Pynchon, who supposedly underwent orthodontic work in the 1960s, may have visited our Uncle Ansley the dentist, who made a modest living for many years fixing the teeth of longshoremen and seafarers out of his small office on Broadway.****

True or not, the Pynchon-in-Houston mystery nicely reflects the elusive nature of both the man and his work, and if he even lived here for just one cold, lonely month, that seals the deal: This is one World Class city! (We expect the first 3-day “Pynchon Festival” to get under way at Discovery Green by 2012, at the latest. BYOB.)

*"Everything connects," or so declares this Pynchon obsessive, whom we knew slightly back in '70 or '71 before he got a high lottery number, joined the Army and was sent to Korea, where he pulled duty in a typing pool, we believe.

**Everything connects!

***Everything etc!

****Everyth ...

Modern Protest, Houston-Style

2009-02-28T19:19:00.007-06:00

So black and Hispanic leader types want their respective peoples to boycott the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo on the night that Caucasian country singer Clint Black is scheduled to perform.

That should be wildly successful, but isn't it a little like calling in sick on your day off?

But Seriously: Who's the Daddy?

2009-02-25T08:06:00.011-06:00

We noticed that our mayor gingerly sidestepped responsibility for that obviously knuckleheaded proposal to subsidize the credit-worthiness of would-be Houston homebuyers with funds originally set aside for Ike-necessitated repairs. According to Wednesday's follow-up by the Chronicle's Carolyn Feibel

While the mayor is responsible for what appears on the council's weekly agenda, White placed the genesis of the idea with the city's Department of Housing & Community Development. He said the staff member's intentions were good.

"As the mortgage markets are collapsing, banks are no longer buying mortgages, then people who can afford a house are not able to buy a house and that's what the staff was trying to address," White said.

Setting aside the question of whether this is a matter a municipal government should "address"---it's not, but let's move on---and ignoring the faulty characterization of the would-be beneficiaries of the now-junked (?) program as "people who can afford a house," we must wonder aloud why White seems to be escaping blame for this hastily aborted (?) fiasco. The Chronicle editorial page, in a recently unprecedented display of timeliness, administered a quick tsk-tsking to the "World Class Folly" but in doing so turned uncharacteristically "playful":

Maybe, it was just some smarty-pants staffer's idea of an April Fool's joke played a month early.

No, please, let's give blame where blame is due: White's the mayor, making housing in the inner-city "affordable" has been one of his high-profile initiatives, and the way we've always understood it the mayor has an agenda director whose job is to do what that title suggests (direct the council agenda). The agenda director works for the mayor. We can only assume that Councilwoman Pam Holm, in blaming the proposal's emergence on "poor leadership," was referring to the mayor, although that would be an unusually direct form of finger-pointing that would deserve the striking of a commemorative plaque. Maybe she was just talking about some anonymous, well-intentioned smarty-pants staffer.

In any case, Feibel's reporting---and by the way, these are the sort of stories you'll miss when the daily newspaper goes the way of the mastodon, miss as in "I miss my mommy" and miss as in you'll never hear about it---has turned a fertile bed for further inquiry. The reporter quotes Housing Director Richard Celli---he works for White, too, right?---saying that only one of 872 home-buying families for whom the city has provided down payments and closing costs during White's tenure has been foreclosed upon. Hmm. That seems to be an almost unbelievably salutary figure, one we assume is documented somewhere on paper. Beyond the technicality of foreclosure, though, we wonder how many of these families are actually iving in the houses they contracted to buy, and what their presence has done for the blocks where they've settled (admittedly a difficult question to qualify, but maybe it's just all good and if so props to the mayor, etc.).

Stanford! Stanford! (Rah Rah Rah)

2009-02-22T15:28:00.016-06:00

We have a confession, and we feel a little dirty making it: For the past week or so we have been in the thrall of a wickedly demonic force, a power that has rendered us all but helpless. You know what we’re talking about: that insatiable urge to learn every goddamn thing we can about Sir R. Allen Stanford and his financial legerdemain (which, according to Friday's Wall Street Journal, the Justice Department now believes was the result of a Ponzi scheme---shocking, no?)

The addiction is understandable: a “scandal” whose geographical coordinates include Mexia, Texas, Washington D.C., Galleria, Texas and the Caribbean island of Antigua and which has ensnared such diverse personages as Sir John Cornyn and Sir Johnny Damon has unmistakably high entertainment value (unless you were a, um, Stanford client) and is certainly deserving of attention. But we realized on Friday night that we might have a serious problem when we momentarily thought they were projecting Sir Al’s smiling visage on the Toyota Center’s Jumbo screen during a time out in the Rockets-Mavs game (on closer inspection it turned out to be only some contest winner or season ticket holder with a faint resemblance to the mustachioed financial genius).

We’re sure this will pass, shortly, and we can return to our normal late-night pursuits (sleeping the sleep of the just), but in the meantime we can’t get enough of that Stanford stuff, wherever it comes from and however “true” it may be. And we have many willing enablers.

The Houston Chronicle, which didn’t exactly hop right onto the story (its initial offering, buried inside the paper’s rapidly disappearing business section, was a reprint of the Feb. 13 New York Times story reporting the feds’ scrutiny of Stanford---at least they ran it on the same day), has recovered somewhat and is now assiduously squeezing every possible dollop of juice from the Stanford lemon by instituting its own Stanford Watch blog for the collection and distribution of Google-alerted news items regarding Mexia’s prodigal son. The newspaper~~, which just a couple of months ago wouldn’t spring to send a reporter to Denver for the crash of that Houston-bound Continental flight,~~ even loosened the pursestrings to dispatch a lucky scribe to Antigua on a Stanford-spelunking mission. (The local paper produced an interesting and very readable profile of Sir Smilin’ Al in its Sunday editions, a story that answered one of the crucial questions regarding Stanford: whether he affects a British accent. [Answer: Yes, apparently he does!])

But the Stanford Watch blog is not the last word on all things Stanford---that distinction belongs to TPMuckraker, which as the true cognoscenti know has been nailing developments in the Stanford saga with a pleasing frequency, including digging up those pictures of Pete Sessions with Stanford in Antigua after the Dallas congressman’s office denied that he knew Sir Al.

Yes, this is a delicious turn of events, nicely illustrating the cozy corruption not only of Washington D.C. (the Times reported on Saturday that “Texas Republicans” single-handedly killed White House-backed and Stanford-opposed legislation to force banks to crack down on money-laundering) but also of the “financial advisory” racket. It appears that the Stanford M.O. was to spread around just enough gold-plated manure---“five-star” meals, trips to the Caribbean, sponsorship of sporting events, charitable donations, etc.---to impress the too-easily impressed and have them give him things (preferential treatment, their life savings ...).