All right, Nelly fans. I'm back in St. Louis for a few days. I'll technically be just outside of St. Louis for the rest of the week with my pastoral accountability group. But I'll be back in the city this weekend. I'll be preaching at Providence Reformed Presbyterian Church this Sunday if anyone cares to come and learn why I never got higher than a B+ in my homiletics (preaching) classes in seminary.
Some of you may have seen my video of the dancing frogman I spotted outside of Seattle a year-and-a-half ago. (The video is linked in my sidebar.) Well, someone else has caught him on video again! Check it out.
Me Dancing as a Frog. on
Vimeo
Robert Moses has in the past represented to me everything that is wrong with American cities and with New York in particular. He admitted to hating people and hating shared city life. He loved parks and the parkways that got you there. He worshiped the individualism of the automobile and quite literally destroyed a great many neighborhoods to make room for them. To him the city was a place to escape or drive through as quickly as possible. The effects of this urban-planning philosophy on the American landscape are so obvious and complete that they need no mention.
If Moses was Satan, then his angelic rival was Jane Jacobs who, in the publishing of her book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," launched the school that has come to be known as New Urbanism. Her aesthetic emphasizes the local street, neighborhood, shared life. Search wikipedia or something if you're not familiar with her work or the school that follows her. One of her most concrete and specific victories over Moses was to organize a successful protest of Moses' plan to slice lower Manhattan in half and destroy Soho with another highway. I'm grateful for her efforts there. NYC is still perhaps the only city in the United States where you can reasonably live without owning a car, a fact for which I am extremely thankful.
At any rate, all of this background is simply to point you to a recent New York Times article entitled "A Town Revived, a Villain Redeemed" that describes and argues in favor of the current attempt to rehabilitate the legacy of Moses. I thought the article was interesting and helpful. The author makes some good points. And while I am still against much of what Robert Moses stood for, I hereby pledge to be thankful for a few of his accomplishments and to quit calling him "the devil."
We're having our first substantial snow today here in New York City. It's amazing how quickly beauty turns to black mess.
And now it's time for some levity! This is not high-quality stuff, I assure you, but it makes me smile. Besides, I thought Redeemer New Orleans should see a bit of what they're in for with their new intern.
Ridiculous Singing Man on Vimeo
p.s. This is many hours into our cross-country road-trip to NYC last summer. Delirium had set in. Why else would Ridiculous Man allow himself to get busted singing Queen's "We are the Champions" at the top of his little lungs?!
I'm home now, but wanted to post pictures from our last two days in New Orleans. Our team split in half Thursday and Friday, one group installing insulation in a home and the other group gutting the home seen in the following pictures. This last house was by far the most foul. It belongs to a chef at the Hyatt in New Orleans who wants to rebuild his home. However, he has not set foot in his home since Katrina hit a year-and-a-half ago. If you look at the picture of the house you can see the canal rising up in the distance beyond, and the levee is about a mile away. The street on which this house resides is the lowest street in New Orleans, meaning this home was submerged deeper and longer under water than all the others in the city. Imagine all the possessions in your home swirling around under 12 feet of water for a month like clothes in a washing machine and you'll start to understand what you see in these pictures. The worst job by far was moving out the enormous refrigerator. All the food in the fridge floated in flood water for a month, then had the last 18 months to decompose and putrefy as bacteria ate on food, and bacteria ate on that bacteria, etc. It was so heavy and so nasty smelling.
The 9th ward is a really sad place. It was poverty-stricken before the hurricane, now it is a ghost town. Out of its former 5,000 residents only 75 have been able to move back in. We saw packs of now-wild dogs roaming around. This desertion also makes the 9th ward dangerous, like an old Wild West town. A couple of male electricians working nearby had a military police escort the entire time they worked--in a camouflage Hummer no less.
So pray for New Orleans. The government is doing nothing but responding to community initiative. It is almost exclusively churches and faith-based organizations spearheading the grassroots rebuilding efforts. I've been told that the city government is even sitting on billions in federal funds to fill up their coffers with the interest rather than doling it out to those in need. Pray for justice to go forth in that situation.
Thanks for your prayers!
Apart from the joy of participating in God's love for New Orleans in our work here the most enjoyable part of the trip for me has been to get to know all of my team members. Everyone is interesting! And everyone has commented on how lucky we've been to end up with such a group of wonderful people that all get along, even though none of us knew all the others before the trip. I was so fascinated by what I learned about our team that I thought that I'd share the passions and talents of a few of them with you. It's definitely worth your time, so check out these sites. There are some real hidden gems (including the artwork for a famous CD and a photograph of a notorious revolutionary-turned-Brooklyn-pastor) but I won't tell you where they are or on which site. You'll have to poke around yourself.
Laura: Artist
Jeremy: Musician
Denny: Photographer
Kelly: Musician
Dave: Artist
Enjoy!
- I'm shookfoil
- From Brooklyn, New York
- Church-planting apprentice.
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