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.

Photograph by Jonathan Bachman

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Sports and politics rarely mix on a relevant level. Fans nowadays don’t really look to athletes for political advice or opinions and there aren’t iconic stars like a Muhammed Ali or John Carlos and Tommy Smith to lead the way in terms of political activism.

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So when Will Smith appeared in the Saints locker room today wearing an Barack Obama shirt, you could say I was a little bit surprised.

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Last night was a great night for everyone except gays and Republicans. Gay Republicans, you’re particularly SOL.

Proposition 8, a constitutional amendment on the ballot in California to reverse a May ruling that had allowed same-sex marriages, passed 52-48. The stifling of civil liberties was especially ill-fitting, considering the human rights gains being shared by all Americans at the top of the ticket. No word yet on the fate of West Banker Ellen DeGeneres and the state’s other 18,000 gay married couples.

In Florida and Arizona, paranoid citizens voted to preempt the issue. And in Arkansas, a measure passed that prevented unmarried couples (no footnote necessary) from adopting. For the United States, it seems, it’s another case of so close, and yet so far away.       

I woke up this morning to this frequent-buyer coffee card stuck in my front door. Somebody must’ve been up early…

This cell-phone picture hardly does justice to the scene at Antoinette K-Doe’s Mother-in-Law Lounge at about ten p.m. last night, when CNN called it for President-Elect Barack Obama. Easily over a hundred people were jammed into the bar and spilling out into the yard, festooned with Christmas lights and red-white-and-blue balloons for the occasion. Drivers leaned on their horns and waved out car windows as they sped down North Claiborne Ave.

Note bartender Jeannie’s homemade “Barack Obama Bahama Mama Rama” T-shirt in the second photo (I don’t get it either, but it’s still cool.)

In a generation or two, kids will probably ask you where you were when America decisively elected its first African American president. So… where were you?

Hopefully no one was injured when a truck carrying a load of Taaka vodka overturned and deposited gallons of liquor on an I-10 off-ramp. Just in case, I’m heading over with plenty of ice… and olives.