Photo by Jonathan Bachman

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“We got our butts kicked,” Coach Byron Scott said. “We didn’t come ready to play.”

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And, with that, goes the perfect season (ha!). Sometimes it takes losses like last night’s to put things into perspective. It was just the fourth game in the season, but Atlanta, in Scott’s words, “played with more energy, they were more physical than us” and “they were just manhandleing us.”

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The irrepressible Hank Staples, proprietor of the Maple Leaf Bar - 8316 Oak Street in the heart of Carrollton (called the Montparnasse of New Orleans by Everette Maddox, but that is another story) - called to let me know that they are doing a tribute to James Booker this Saturday in honor of the 25 anniversary of his passing. Yes, November 8 1983 Booker got dropped off at Charity Hospital in New Orleans where he was put in a wheel chair and in line to see the stomach doctor. He passed out and some orderly whose name is lost to the ravages of time saw his eye patch and moved him from the line to see the stomach doctor to the line to see the eye doctor. There he died from stomach complications and kidney failure. He was 43 years old.

There are other sources to find out the Booker story, but I will tell you that he is the second best pianist in the history of the instrument. (Nobody touches Art Tatum). His story is one that sums up much of what we love and hate about New Orleans. Imagine that Mozart grew up here and was too good and crazy to make any kind of commercial success, but still played like all of the great art that human beings have conceived. That was James Booker. I can almost guarantee that tales of his genius and illness will be spun at the Maple Leaf, a place that can own his ghost more than anywhere else.

Hank tells me that the band will include a Weber, a Hall, and a couple Nevilles. He wasn’t sure about pianists, but there are so many great pianists in this town touched by Booker that it should rival WWOZ Piano Night for the best night of radiating the 88s anywhere on the planet. I’ll place money that there will be a Cleary, a Paxton, a McDermott, a Worrell, and who knows whom else.

Should be a special evening. see you on the back patio.

Aside from the obvious historical significance, one of the most exciting aspects of a potential Obama presidency was always the question of who would populate his Cabinet.

With that possibility now reality, and on the heels of assembling the most effective political campaign anyone’s ever seen, the Obama appointment hot stove has fired up in earnest. Politico.com reports a number of juicy details about early considerations that should have Beltway junkies salivating: Robert Kennedy Jr. for EPA? Colin Powell for Defense? Fellow Illinois congressman Rahm Emanuel is in as White House chief of staff. But will the famously principled President-elect pull any fast ones in his inner circle? Could Warren Buffett head up the Treasury? Is John Edwards still fit to be Attorney General? It’s doubtful they’d accept, but how about Chuck Hagel for Homeland Security or Hillary Clinton for Health? 

The idea of a bipartisan all-star team advising an intellectually curious commander in chief is a refreshing change of pace in D.C., to put it mildly. And it’s light years better than thinking about a potential Cabinet under John McCain, whose selections of Sarah the Biblethumper as V.P. and Joe the Plumber as veritable campaign director portended secretaries Bob the Builder (Interior?) and Dora the Explorer (State, natch). 

Do you ever get the feeling the folks on Wall Street are kind of like this guy? Just a little manic, greedy and unstable?

From the BBC:  ”The United States has seen the biggest transformation in its standing in the world since the election of John Fitzgerald Kennedy in November 1960.” Read the rest here.