(8/24 by Scott and Borgman)

Start things off with a pseudo-haiku

The weather has stayed the same but the change is still in the air. I realized that seasons had shifted last week when I drove down City Park Ave., a street that's been quiet all summer, and ran right into clogged street full of cars and people milling about on the sidewalk, spilling out of nearby Delgado Community College.

Whoa. People have to go back to school. Its not something that's going to change my schedule but it definitely impacts me. In the city of NO there are a number of institutions that make us a solid college town. Uptown there is Tulane University and Loyola right next door (both of these sprawl up and down St. Charles and allthe way to S. Claiborne). Then down Carrollton by the 17th street canal is historically black Xavier. Then deeper into Midcity is Delgado and Universtiy of New Orleans by the lake. That's not including all the Tulane & LSU med schools and other graduate stuff uptown and downtown. That's a lot of people coming back to the city at the end of August.

Some people have even been asking me "Does it feel strange for you to not be going back to school?" Now I understand the innocence in this question; for 17 of my 22 years on this world I have spent every August preparing myself to be reinstitutionalized like thousands of others. But that is an old habit that did not die hard. The answer of course is NO, it feels great not to have to go back to school. I've waited my whole life for this week in August. Of course I have new responsibilities but I look forward to dealing with them in September on my own terms.

Did I mention the trash???

once you start looking its just so hard to stop. NYC is a rich place, so of course the garbage up there is on another tier. Here are two pictures of stuff I would've gladly scooped up and hauled back to my apartment in Midcity if I could've. Not pictured are the four boxes of free books put out on a saturday afternoon along a sidewalk in Park Slope, BK. I selected a French-English dictionary and a book about urban legends. I regret not taking the complete collection of scary stories to tell in the dark by Alvin Schwartz, but it was heavy.
Phil says: What's the big deal? Its just a legless table thrown out on the curb, let's go!

The Farmer

Check out more

Treasures of the Deep

I love the Tulane library. Not only do they have these nice scanners to use but the place is also full of antique books like these buried among the racks of endless knowledge. I didn't check this one out today (instead I'm leaving with two books for source material on alligators and mermaids and a third book, a novel titled Mermaids on the Moon) but I thought the antique style on Glaucus was worth sharing. How do they print these kind of things?

Inside:

READ MORE ZINES!

Fred Argoff's awesome aforementioned book about Brooklyn purchased impetuously at the Iron Rail info shop.


More on Conejos and Coney Island to come...

Text and Fluorescents

This was interesting to me to see on W.23rd St in New York City because when I first arrived to New Orleans these were plastered all over downtown in and around Canal St and Decatur. They were greyghosted-over over there and half torn down like they were in NY which makes me appreciate them even more. Illegal maniacal rantings on the street, despised by most everyone has my vote.

They're reminiscent of the guy who pasted up all the fetal skulls and anti-abortion slander about liberals around Music Row back in my hometown when I was in high school. More on those if I can find the peelings I preserved. Those were a big influence back in the day, walking back and forth to school and passing them everyday. I got a lightbulb like: Oh? You can just put up any kind of crazy shit on the sidewalks can't you?