KATRINA & THE LOST CITY OF NEW ORLEANS by Rod Amis New Orleans is the Lost City of America. New Orleans has disappeared as surely as the lost city of Atlantis or the lost city of Pompeii, which former mayor Marc Morial and Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA.) have compared us to in their statements. That New Orleans, the New Orleans I mean to tell you about, that will never, ever, exist again--that city of love, lust, death and sex--will never exist again. A portion of the proceeds of this book will go to the New Orleans Hospitality Workers Fund. The cooks, servers and restaurant workers of New Orleans have provided fabulous times and memories for millions. Now we must remember them in their time of need. Buy the book or get a downloadable PDF Copy now! To order on Amazon.com, go here! A small, independent and outspoken magazine like this one can't reach you every week without the support and patronage of its readership. As our way of thanking those who have committed to keep your World's Magazine here on your desktop through their generous donations, we feature their names and cities here in our Roll of Honor. SUSTAINING PATRONS RON DIENER, Wendell, NC, USA DARHL STULTZ, Largo, FL, USA TIMOTHY MEADOWS, Anaheim, CA, USA TERRY TERRIAN, Sebastopol, CA, USA CHERYL HILL NATION, West Fairlee, VT, USA DRAGAN & DRAGANA VICANOVIC, Belgrade, SERBIA LESZEK MICHAELWICZ, New Orleans, LA, USA MARIE SINSABAUGH, Granville, OH, USA BECKY ALTEMUS, Houston, TX, USA Supporting Patrons BARBARA ATWELL, Berkeley, CA, USA MATT STOWELL, New Orleans, LA, USA LARS KEFFERSTAN, New York, NY, USA MEREDITH TUPPER, Tampa, FL, USA NGOZI RAZAK-SOYEBI, Jos, NIGERIA NICK ALLEN, New Orleans, LA, USA RIC WILLIAMS, Austin, TX, USA ROBERT PURVIS, Montclair, NJ, USA IAN CRYSTAL, Ph. D, New Orleans, LA, USA STEVE VIVIAN, New York, NY, USA STUART ALTMAN, ESQ., New York, NY, USA X.N. IRAKI, Jackson, MS, USA We encourage you to add your name to this Roll of Honor. GENERATOR 21 cannot continue and thrive without your support. Thanks in advance. To support G21, please send checks or money orders to: Rod Amis Editor in Chief, G21: The World's Magazine 175-A Vernon Terrace Oakland, CA 94610 USA To donate by credit or debit card, please go to the Western Union website by following the highlighted link. Should you donate via Western Union, please notify us via e-mail. Please make all remittances payable to Rod Amis. Again, thanks. G21 at FeedBurner Rod Amis at the Huffington Post in February Rod Amis at the Huffington Post in May ENJOY WHAT ROD DOES! (From our Link Partner at Calabash Music. Merci!)

Rod Amis - Unbound

SMOKE & MIRRORS - BACK IN CALI: ROD AMIS reviews the news, talks about a new venture on journalism that excites him and sings the praise of Oakland, California, USA.

SMOKE

"Where there's smoke, there's fire ..." Popular Adage.

BEHIND THE MAGAZINE

28 June 2006: One of the goals I've set for this enterprise during the course of this summer is producing two more books under the G21 BOOKS imprint beginning in August. I've asked the writers to have initial pitches to me by 15 July. Here we go again! Both Africa Fresh! and "Katrina" continue to sell apace, with the latter selling more steadily, probably because it is more topical. (It wouldn't be the writing, trust me.)

Now, even as I settle into the transition back to California, I throw another set of daunting editorial and marketing challenges on my plate. I have to believe as we produce more titles the job will become easier for me AND some level of critical mass will begin to build for the new imprint. Wish me luck!

If you do two reads this edition, I can't recommend highly enough the latest installment of NGOZI RAZAK-SOYEBI's poignant tale, "Book Me a Seat on the Next Plane Out." This is fiction at its best.

And for provocative political commentary, with an earthy bent, you should consider JOHN R. DIENER's submission to our OpEd page.

News to Rod

ITEM ONE: My pal DC sent me the URL for this story about what's dubbed the NAFTA Superhighway. Two things got me about this story, the first of which was that I'd heard/read/seen NOTHING about this project anywhere else. The Bush Administration has done a powerful job of keeping this project a national secret. Secondly, when I contact a close friend who works fo r the Texas Department of Transportation, he told me that this was THE BIG THANG as far as his department was concerned. Oh-oh ...

ITEM TWO: Over at Counterpunch, on 5 July, 2006, I found this provocative article ("Is Cheney Betting On Economic Collapse?" by Mike Whitney. It attempts to analyze the implications of the Vice President of the United States' investment portfolio, based on information from his financial disclosures, as sourced from Kiplinger magazine.

The implication of the piece, as you'll read if you take the time, is that there may be a game afoot to profit from the suffering of the rest of us. I'm usually loath to believe that people could be that consciously sinister but ...

ITEM THREE: On 7 July, I was alerted to this rather thoughtful and instructive Blog post from Robin "roblimo" Miller that I also thought you might find enjoyable, my loves. It's a good read and takes a historical view of our circumstances.

MIRRORS

28 June 2006: It was a rough week or so after you and I last "talked," my little loves.

It seems the gods wanted to see how I could handle a little more adversity after being so HAPPY about my Liberation Check. So, that following Monday, as you first read about my joy my financial institution put a five day HOLD on the Liberation, which effectively meant I couldn't access the funds until the following Monday, 26 June. I was angry and frustrated. Especially, in this age of instant global communications, I knew I was being subjected to a shell game. But, I decided the best thing I could do was make lemonade. I shopped for Ron went on with my new job - which I can now tell you about, as it's official (see below.)

Anyway, I guess I must have passed the Universe Test for handling adversity this time. The following weekend, I received another, and larger, check than the first. When I went to credit union to deposit on Monday, 26th, it went through just fine, no hold this time, no nothing. AND THEN when I went to CheapTickets.com to book my flight, lo and behold! I could get the cheapest flight of the week one day later than I had planned to book the flight last week. I'm on the plane as I type this to you, my loves, winging my way toward Oakland, California. I'm FREE! FREE!

Hallel-fuckin'-lujah!!!

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THOUGH FLYING can get you across multiple miles incredibly quickly, it has to be among the most boring ways to spend hours of your life I can imagine. Especially nowadays, when most people sleep their way through long distance transportation ... I find it an unbearably dull way of getting from one place to the next these days, I personally prefer a train; people seem a bit more sociable on trains. There's more space. You want walk around. There's a bar car. Trains are just more civilized, I think.

When you're flying, because of the cramped quarters, because of being nearly immobile - like spending your time lounging inside a body cast - time seems to stand still. Nothing happens for hours on end. I've said that boring people are boring, in a paraphrase, let me add that processes which tend to bore people create more boring people. I'd rather have a toothache than spend twelve hours on a plane.

AND it's damned tough being a dinosaur like myself (or the late Hunter S. Thompson was before he pulled a Hemingway on himself) because you're constantly finding yourself in situations where you're asking yourself, "Self, what the Hell happened to this country? Why do the people seem so damned WIMPY?"

Case in point, I'm riding along on this plane right now and all around me are people asking if there's a vegan meal option and drinking apple juice and soda and the like.

What the Hell happened? Where are the red-meat eating, balls-to-the-wall, Hell raisers who knew that the best thing to order on a long flight (anything over three hours) is a damned cocktail? Where are the laughing their asses off, gonzo drunk travelers of yesteryear? Where are the men with hair on their barrel chests? I'd just like to know.

Maybe if Americans spent more time in gin mills and public houses and less time in Mickey D's this country wouldn't have what the Centers for Disease Control now call an obesity epidemic.

I'm sorry, but I find something just a little bit pathetic about the direction this country is going in compared to the place I grew up in thirty years ago. Thirty years ago people knew how important it is to have a good time - NOBODY would have been caught dead thirty years ago working sixty-plus hours a week AND if they did actually do so, for some God-awful reason, they certainly wouldn't admit it or brag about it the way the brain-dead do nowadays.

Five Ways to Alienate Rod

1. Treat him as though he is your servant.


2. Forget that there is a "Reader's Digest Version" of every story and decide you've got The Most Interesting Long-Winded Story Ever Told to tell in a monologue that is interminable and Rod is the perfect audience for this intended monologue.
   
   
3. Act as if Rod never has and never will have anything as important to say as what you do.


4. To put it another way, treat Rod as the scenery in your movie.


5. When Rod is doing you a favor, insist that he do it faster.

So now you know.

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ABOUT NEWSTRUST.NET: Back in December, in a conversation with one of my friends, I talked about how I could veritably smell the 'Net heating up once again. There was something in the air. Within three months I'd gone from zero to four freelancing gigs. Then I received an invitation from Rory O'Connor of Media Is a Plural to become a member of a new social network called NewsTrust.net. Its mission was to rate journalists and publications and vet what was good and bad reporting. I loved it, especially as I was then completing my "Murrow's Ghost" project at the Huffington Post Contagious Festival. Things just seemed to be falling into place, somehow.

AND THEN, NewsTrust announced it was looking for a Project Coordinator for the venture, as it moved toward going public - rather than being by-invitation-only. I had a couple of conversations with Fabrice Florin, the project's founder, and the next thing you know I was on staff. Voila! When Fabrice learned that I was moving back to northern California, things sort of fell into place; he's based in Mill Valley.

Synchronicity? Perhaps.

You can check the project here and share your thoughts with me at your leisure. Merci!

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My friends in Texas, Misty and Mikon, just put up this great documentary on New Orleans they've been working on. You can see it on YouTube here.

The Real Chocolate City

9 July 2006: I have decided to settle in Oakland, California, on the sunny side of the Bay, rather than in more trendy (and pricey) San Francisco. To give you an idea of what kind of city this is, Jerry Brown was the former mayor and the new is former-Congressman Ron Dellums. I remember that when I was young and noticed Dellums prematurely grey beard and moustache under his dark mane, I would wish that I would look like him when I got to be older. Be careful what you wish for. My moustache and beard had gone grey before I even reached forty, though my head-hair remains dark ...

Now that I'm back here, I have to get back into my daily walking regime if I mean to bring my weight back down. During those long final months of exile in the woods, I pounded beers just to hold onto some semblance of good humor. I have paid the price at my waistline. Luckily, I live on a hillside, so both my waist and legs will benefit from the climbing.

It is so wonderful to be in a city again, with its lights, its sounds and smells, the great polylingual smorgasbord of the Bay Area all around me again! The mix of ethnicities and skin tones and languages is food for my soul! That there is at least decent public transportation feeds my desire for some concession to the idea of real civilization. Oakland, as a city, has made great strides in the near-decade since I left California, the city center has a heartbeat again.

What I shall most have to re-acclimate myself toward is the climate change. I have lived in mostly hot and humid places these last few years, places so unlike this little piece of Paradise that is the San Francisco Bay Area.

No, my loves, I have not been into San Francisco yet. I needed the time to have meetings with my new boss before he is off to Romania and land my new (temporary) apartment, a sublet until September. Now that I am settled enough to have time to get to know the area and suss out a good permanent place for myself, I'll go into that city eventually.

But first, I have to land a cell phone plan. Suggestions welcomed.

Keep me in your prayers as I keep you in my own.

Thanks for coming back this week.

THINGS ROD HOPES FOR THIS WEEK

1 - Re-establishing my production routine for my many jobs.

2 - Getting to know my new neighborhood and meeting more people, particularly women.

3 - Becoming prepared for the next book projects for the G21 Books imprint.

"Work like you don't need the money,
"Love like you've never been hurt,
"Dance like no one is watching ... "

Love,
Rod

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ROD AMIS has published this magazine since 1990. It first appeared as a hardcopy 'Zine. In March, 1996, he launched it here on the Web. Rod was a Contributing Editor at Suite101.com, where he wrote the " 'Net Publishing" feature. His work has been featured in the San Francisco Bay Guardian Online, NRV8, and at the (U.S.) Public Broadcasting System (PBS's) WebLab's Reality Check site. Rod was a contributing writer on technology for Faulkner Information Services. He wrote on Web issues for MethodFive.com's Hyper newsletter.

Rod was a columnist for the Andover News Network, where he wrote over two hundred articles on web design and development issues. He was principal writer and Editor for IT Manager's Journal, where he reviewed technology issues weekly, producing 383 editorials. He became the Managing Editor for Electronic Mail/Newsletter Publications at Andover.net at the end of February, 2000, and left in September of the same year. He was a contributing writer for ACCESS Internet magazine, which appeared both on- and offline for 10 million readers in 100 newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Boston Herald, Austin American-Statesman, Denver Post and Orlando Sentinel, among others. Rod was the US reporter for Silicon.com, a division of Network Multimedia Television in London, UK, r eaching 3.5 million European readers, until May, 2001.

In 2002, he worked as Assistant to the General Manager of a Big Easy company that does restaurants and nightclubs. He did stints as the Resident Philosopher at three separate gin mills in that city in the French Quarter and the Marigny, earning his stripes during two successive Mardi Gras seasons. Oh yeah, Rod's had Day Jobs working construction. Mostly renovations of old New Orleans structures, houses and a bar. Sometimes he designs Web sites for other people so that he can get his creative juices flowing the way he can't at a staid publication like this one. And he's been the instructor in Editing for Internet Publications at the Novi Sad School of Journalism in Yugoslavia. When he's not busy here, he writes technology columns for IT Manager's Journal and NewsForge, business columns for Enterprise Leadership and Slashdot. He he also acts as a Host and Project Coordinator at NewsTrust. Rust never sleeps.

Our Resident Philosopher is taking to the road once again. Wish him luck..

In his spare time, he chases women in the manner that a fly pursues a spider.

He continues to be committed to integrity, chastity and a dose of humility.

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© 2006, GENERATOR 21.

E-mail your comments. We always like to hear from you. Send your kudos, brickbats and suggestions to rod@g21.net.