Travels with Pen Reading Sunday

This summer, a group of artists, designers and writers are heading to Detroit for the First Annual Seminole Street Artist’s Colony and Exhibition. We plan to transform an historic house, with a literary past, into a residence for artists and writers—not unlike Casa Libre. Part of our mission is to disrupt the poor image that Detroit has earned, over time, as the nation’s failure—and in this spirit, our first Tucson event this spring will be an attempt to raise awareness about the ways in which we conceptualize of our environments: “Travels with Pen: Five Minute Sketches on Place.” Please join us! If you’d like to learn more about our endeavor, scroll down! We’ll be hosting various events, and an art auction/fundraiser in the coming months.

Here are some of the bios of writers participating... stay tuned as the list will grow!

Arianne Zwartjes' first book, The Surfacing of Excess, won Eastern Washington University's 2009 Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry and a box of copies just arrived at her house. Her 2008 chapbook of prose poems (Stiched) A Surface Opens: Essays was published by Diagram/New Michigan Press, and her writing has appeared in literary magazines including The Pinch, Cue, Caketrain, Front Porch, Diagram, Blue Fifth Review, and Word for/Word. Zwartjes teaches at the Poetry Center and in the English Department at the University of Arizona; she is also an EMT and wilderness medicine instructor, and has just completed a book-length collection of lyric essays entitled (Detailing Trauma).

Simmons B. Buntin is the founding editor of Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments. His first book of poetry, Riverfall, was published in 2005 by Ireland's Salmon Poetry; his next collection, Bloom, is due from Salmon in late 2010. Recent work has appeared in Mid-American Review, Isotope, Orion, Hawk & Handsaw, and Southwestern American Literature. Look for new work in High Desert Journal, ISLE, Freshwater, Spiral Orb, Salamander, and Versal. Catch up with him at www.SimmonsBuntin.com.

Leftrick Herd had to leave Oregon one year after his birth because his parents feared he might be getting "webbed feet" from all the rain. He grew up on an 80-acre ranch in western Colorado where his main sources of transportation were horses and an old Willy's Jeep. Joining the Navy only whetted his appetite for adventure and he has been on some sort of trip ever since.

Ben Quick served as Beverly Rodgers Fellow in creative nonfiction on his way to a master of fine arts degree from the University of Arizona in 2008. He lives with his son in Tucson where he writes and teaches at the U of A. The recipient of a 2010 Pushcart Prize for Nonfiction, his work appears in Orion Magazine, Hotel Amerika, Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built and Natural Environments and other publications. He smokes. And he likes it. Especially after coffee, sex, food, exercise and any combination thereof. He doesn't like lectures. He will live to be 100.

Beth Alvarado, who has lived in Tucson since 1968, loves the desert and often writes about it. Her stories are collected in Not a Matter of Love (New Rivers Press). Newer work has been published recently in Seattle Review, Ploughshares, Cimarron Review, and Third Coast.

Timoteio Padilla is a universal artist who is not from one particular place. He is of the stars, and the red dirt, and all the elements. He is here and he is there. He was physically conceived in this plane in New Mexico, and was raised in Tucson. He is an artist who utilizes the medium of Hip-Hop, and lives what he speaks.

Lauryn Bianco would live her life to a soundtrack of music from the 70's and 90's if it were possible. This bio, in fact, should be read to the tune of Salt-n-Pepa's "Shoop" or any track recorded by TLC. Lauryn once ran a half marathon while wearing a tiara and hoop earrings. She has since completed a full marathon, and she no doubt will run her next one backwards and in heels. Lauryn is from New York, which you might not notice until she gets angry or drives. Lauryn has a BA in English from SUNY Fredonia, a master's degree in Gender and Women's studies from the U of A, and a black belt in femme fatale from an undisclosed credentialing agency.

TC Tolbert is a genderqueer, feminist poet and teacher committed to social justice. S/he earned his MFA in Poetry from UA in 2005 and currently teaches Composition at Pima Community College. TC is the Assistant Director of Casa Libre en la Solana and is a member of Movement Salon, a compositional improvisation group in Tucson. S/he is a collective member of Read Between the Bars, a books-to-prisoners program, and s/he spends his summers leading wilderness trips for Outward Bound. TC's poems can be found in Volt, The Pinch, Drunken Boat, Shampoo, A Trunk of Delirium, and jubilat.

Daisy Pitkin lives in Arizona, grew up on a farm in Ohio, and at fourteen coerced her friends to read "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "The Tempest" on a roof. Her job as a union organizer kept her moving around the world, and for ten years she rarely spent more than five days in the same place. Her most recent nonfiction manuscript contemplates themes of memory, maps and family.

Lisa O'Neill is a writer, teacher of writers, and a graduate of the University of Arizona's program in Nonfiction Creative Writing. In addition to teaching students pursuing undergraduate degrees, she co-teaches writing workshops with incarcerated writers in Pima County, Arizona through the program Inside/Out. Although she lives in Tucson, Lisa often centers her writing on the place where she grew up and the geography closest to the heart, Louisiana. She recently completed a nonfiction manuscript, Vessels, which explores the physical, cultural and historical landscapes of her home state as well as her home town, New Orleans. Lisa appreciates people who experiment and play with sound, language, color, texture and light in whatever form this play takes.

Manuel Munoz is the author of the short story collections Zigzagger and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue. He has received numerous honors, including the 2008 Whiting Writer's Award, a 2009 PEN/O. Henry Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. A graduate of Harvard University and Cornell, his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Rush Hour, Swink, Epoch, Glimmer Train and on NPR. He teaches creative writing at the University of Arizona.

Gillian Drummond is a Tucson-based freelance writer. Her articles appear every Sunday in the Arizona Daily Star and on her blog, www.homeisafourletterword.com. Gillian came to Tucson in 1998 from London, where she had spent nine years working on business and consumer magazines, and freelancing for national newspapers. Her credits include The Guardian, The Scotsman, The Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times Scotland. She is working on her first novel.

Cesar Diaz lived the fragmented life of a migrant boy: divided. conflicted. uprooted. in-between. in constant argument. unforgiving and in a bind. His work is not a figment of his imagination but a construction of the imagination of a boy (now a man) who uses language, memory, and his own words as a glue to understand the situation he was in. Cesar Diaz is a writer. A journeyman. An essayist with an urge to work with language as a method of searching. He strongly believes in the power that writing has on youth and has worked as a creative writing teacher and mentor for outreach nonprofits such as Badgerdog Literary Publishing, Breakthrough Collaborative, The Austin Academy and The GEARUP project. He is a second-year MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Arizona, and hopes that some of his journeys find their way into a literary magazine. In the meantime, he'll settle for introducing undergrads to the power and fecundity found in essays.

Ruth Hillman is a third generation Tucsonan and has been a semi-secret writer and artist since the fourth grade. She has worked to help people most at risk or living with HIV/AIDS for the last eight years and is starting a soon-t0-be famed new business, The Paper Theory.

Lucy Simpson grew up in East Yorkshire and Buckinghamshire, England. Since then she has lived in Paris, Geneva, New York City, Long Island, Dayton, Ohio, Charleston, SC and lately, Tucson, where she intends to stay awhile because moving is hard work and Tucson is nice and warm and slightly weird, which is good. Lucy has a degree in French from the College of Charleston and an MFA in Fiction from the University of Arizona. She is currently working on final revisions of her first novel, and teaching English at Pima Community College. The glamor and mystery just never stop. Lucy lives with two unruly stray children, three beautiful, inspiring, talented dogs, one cute fluffy husband and a wonderful, gruffly sexy, supportive hamster.

Remember! Casa Libre, Sunday March 28th at 4pm.

Travels with Pen: Five Minute Sketches on Place

In order to start generating awareness about The First Annual Seminole Street Artist's Colony and Exhibition, Detroit Ho! is going to host a few Tucson events this Spring.

The first will be a literary reading at Casa Libre on Sunday, March 28th at 4pm. "Travels with Pen: Five Minute Sketches on Place" will feature a collection of readings that delve into the nuances of the relationships we form with a particular environment. The goal is to spark thought on how we shape and are shaped by the places we inhabit. I'll post a list of readers soon! Stay tuned...

Re: Re: Blues People

Awhile back, my dad stumbled on what he calls, "Blues in an open field." Vacant land where folks have come together on the east side of Detroit to play and listen to the blues. "At first you wonder, Is this OK?" he said, "but then you realize that there's something sacred about this space. Nobody's going to bother you here."

He called yesterday and asked, "Have you read 'Blues People' by Ralph Ellison?" It is an essay from the collection, Shadow and Act, discussing (then named) Leroi Jones' work of the same name. This was, as my friend Radhika would say, a bit of kismet, as we just finished reading James Baldwin's "The Uses of the Blues" in my composition class a couple of weeks ago. I've since re-read some other responses to blues music, and I am going to let James Agee, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and a student from my class discuss the blues alongside the photos my father took of this summer Blues festival, to lend a bit of historical context.


In preparation for one of the most beautiful books of nonfiction ever written, (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1939) James Agee and Walker Evans went to the homes of sharecroppers in the South to see how people lived. At one point, an impromptu serenade is arranged on their behalf. They watch with discomfort as three black men in their twenties are ordered to sing. After the singers finish the first tune, Agee asks them to sing another, and writes, "I had a feeling, through their silence before entering it, that it was their favorite and their particular pride; the tenor lifted out his voice alone in a long, plorative line that hung like fire on heaven, or whistle's echo, sinking, sunken, along descents of a modality I had not heard before, and sank along the arms and breast of the bass as might a body sunken from a cross; and the baritone lifted a long black line of comment; and they ran in a long and slow motion and convolution of rolling as at the bottom of a stormy sea, voice meeting voice as ships in dream, retreated, met once more, much woven, digressions and returns of time, quite tuneless, the bass, over and over, approaching, drooping, the same declivity, the baritone taking over, a sort of metacenter, murmuring along monotones between major and minor, nor in any determinable key, the tenor winding upward like a horn, a wire, the flight of a bird, almost into full declamation, then failing it, silencing; at length enlarging, the others lifting, now, alone, lone, and largely, questioning, alone and not sustained, in the middle of space, stopped; and now resumed, sunken upon the bosom of the bass, the head declined; both muted, droned; the baritone makes his comment, unresolved, that is a question, all on one note: and they are quiet, and do not look at us, nor at anything."


In "Blues People," published in The New York Review in 1964, Ralph Ellison writes, "Bessie Smith might have been a 'blues queen' to the society at large, but within the tighter Negro community where the blues were part of a total way of life, and a major expression of an attitude toward life, she was a priestess, a celebrant who affirmed the values of the group and man's ability to deal with chaos."


In a 1964 issue of Playboy Magazine, James Baldwin wrote, "Gin House Blues is a real gin house. Backwater Flood is a real flood. When Billie says, 'My man don't love me,' she is not making a fantasy of it. This is what happened, this is where it is. This is what it is. Now, I'm trying to suggest that the triumph here-- which is a very un-American triumph-- is that the person to whom these things happened watched with eyes wide open, saw it happen. So that when Billie or Bessie or Leadbelly stood up and sang about it, they were commenting on it, a little bit outside it: they were accepting it. And there's something funny-- there's always something a little funny in all our disasters, if one can face the disaster."


After we read "The Uses of the Blues" out loud, I asked my students to find quotes from Baldwin's text and respond to them. One young man picked out this quote: "People who in some sense know who they are can't change the world always, but they can do something to make it a little more, to make life a little more human." The student responds, "I believe that if everyone does this the world can be a lot more human. But to do that you must have some sense of who you are and I don't think its just me but I sometimes feel as if I don't even know who I am so how can I do my part?"

Detroit Poet Wins an Award!

Wayne State University professor and poet M.L. Liebler has just been named the recipient of the Barnes and Noble "Writers for Writers" award. He is the author of thirteen books, including the award-winning poetry collection, Wide Awake in Someone Else's Dream, and he has done a great deal to promote a literary life in Detroit. I noticed that a photo of Junot Diaz was linked to the article and this is because Diaz and Maxine Hong Kingston, (two authors I've seen speak in the last three years who are incredibly generous with their time and energy... especially to you, Laura-- remember that?) are also recipients of this 2010 award.

According to the Detroit News, he is a busy man-- always rushing off to Russia to perform or collaborating with the likes of Bob Dylan. But it would be phenomenal to have him do a reading at our exhibition/festival this July. Congratulations!

Brainstorming Idea # 8

One thing I hope we are able to accomplish this summer is to have some kind of affiliation with "Detroit Summer." The organization is a "multi-racial, inter-generational collective in Detroit," that attempts to transform the Detroit community through "youth-led media arts projects and community-wide potlucks, speak-outs and parties."

One summer, they had a "video intensive" that resulted in a project called "Rising Up From the Ashes: Chronicles of a Dropout Hip Hop Audio Documentary." After conducting research on why students drop out, and more importantly, how they can be encouraged not to, they created a series of videos that focus on three themes: "Cooperative Economics" "Alternatives to Criminalization" and "Respect."

I am told that they also focus on urban gardening and volunteer work...

One of the major interests I've had in the last year or so is to collect all of the education-minded people I know (who are also at their wits end with regard to America's educational system) and put them to work in a dynamic environment with people who want to learn. It would be fun to conduct community and youth-focused workshops on our respective interests, such as bookmaking, printmaking, photography, journalism, bike repair/art (with The Hub of Detroit?), writing, composting, etc.

From the looks of their blog, it seems that most of the young folks affiliated with Detroit Summer probably have more to teach us than us them... but maybe we can team up and do some work together? I don't even know what's possible! But I'd like to find out.

Ice House Detroit

Lately my dad has been stalking these two dudes who are, in the name of art, freezing a Detroit house. There have been a range of uncomfortably political responses to this venture by "the public" (ie: connoisseurs of Yahoo's news feed, "Buzz"). What follows is an interview with my dad about the Ice House. Or as he calls it, the Ice Castle.

(**For more information about the house, check out their blog.)

Q: Hey Dad, so, where is this house?
A: Well, it's on the East side of Detroit, near Mack. On McClellen, about a block and a half north of Mack. On the east side of the street.

Q: What's the area like?
A: It's like many of the neighborhoods on the east side of Detroit, there are more vacant houses than occupied. I'm told by the artist that it's owned by the state, and we were talking about how it is that some houses are owned by the state and some by the city.

Q: How'd you hear about it?
A: Dell (a friend) met them at a DIA event. They sat next to each other at the event. She told me about it, then a few days ago I saw a story about them icing the house or spraying water on the house.

Q: That sort of answers my next question, which is: How, exactly, are they freezing it?
A: They apparently paid the city for a certain amount of water. I asked them how much but they didn't want to tell. They said it was pretty cheap. I said that in the summer when kids try to get a free shower by opening the hydrants, the community ends up paying for it.

Q: Do these men have accents?
A: The guy I talked to has an accent. They're New Yorkers. The guy who was the architect grew up in Detroit. He owns a house in Hamtramck. I asked "Is he Polish?" And his friend said "I don't know what he is." I don't know if he grew up in the part of Detroit where this is taking place. His grandfather is from the neighborhood where the house is, though. They are aware that a lot of foreigners are moving here. They seem to agree or make the same observation that Detroit is a place where a lot of young people can have a new start. For whatever reason they seem to be able to see down the line, where things are going to get better in the city... for those who get in early and get a place, stake their claim, maybe they can get a new start. Strangely enough some of the people investing in houses are drug dealers. Not for dealing drugs but to get their cronies in there to keep the places from being fire bombed. I'm told that this one guy owns twenty houses, and his main source of income is drugs. They'll use the houses as a source of income. Entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes. I was telling some guy about it and he said, "the Kennedy's got started the same way." Joseph Kennedy Sr., Robert, Ted and Bobby's father, was a rum runner, who brought in illegal liqueur from Canada to the US. Later on he got honest, but that's how he made his fortune. It's like the godfather. That story is not just relevant to Italians. A lot of people have done illicit things to get a foothold, and the first thing they want to do is to get legit. Get out of drugs, prostitution and get into legitimate businesses. People who have a truncated memory have a hard time comparing these guys who are dealing crack to Joseph Kennedy, but in a sense they're doing the same thing. Acquiring property in the hopes of one day going legit. And since they can get the property so cheap-- in a city where you can buy a house for a dollar-- the feds can't come by and ask how you got all that money.

Q: What kind of clothing did they wear?
A: They look like anybody else. Detroit's a blue collar town and they look like, if they weren't doing that, they might have been some guys who were laid off at the Chrysler plant or going to Wayne State. They looked to be late twentyish, early thirties. One of them had a Cannon camera. They don't seem to know a lot about the neighborhood, which this one guy seemed a bit ashamed of. I was saying with streets like Goethe, Shilling and Lessing, it must have been a German neighborhood, and this guy said he didn't know. I think he felt a little guilty about not knowing enough about the neighborhood.

Q: What are their stated/implied goals?
A: From what I can see they are going to make this ice castle, and then the photographer is going to photograph it with an 8x10 camera and make blow up prints. Clearly they don't intend to thaw it out and live in it. After they're done with it, it will become a body of work I suppose. One's an architectural photographer, the guy I talked to yesterday-- Gregory. The other is an architect, Matthew.

Q: What did they say to you when they noticed you were taking photographs?
A: He thought I was like anybody else, I wasn't using a professional camera, just a point and shoot. I guess I was elevated one step above everybody who was taking pictures with their cell phones, but when I asked him to stand so I could take a picture of him in front of the house, he was OK with that. When a guy came by with a Detroit jacket on and I ran across the street to get a picture of that, he said, "I want that picture too!"

Q: So when you were standing there, looking at their art, what revelations did you have?
A: One of the things I noticed was, on the front porch is a red door. And I was thinking: how ironic. Fire and ice. The red being fire, the ice being what it is. I could see the value in what they were doing, as making a statement. It's not the same thing as making sand castles because that requires more skill, but what's the guy who slings paint? Jackson Pollack. I can see that as requiring the same kind of... you have no idea what you're going to get. It's all serendipitous. You can't really shape the icicles. The same way Pollack might say, "I need to splash some more over here," I don't see it being any different. Not as colorful, but it's... what you accomplish by going through this process is valid because the person thought about doing it, and then they executed it, and then they're going to make it permanent by photographing it. The house is already on the junk heap so to speak, but it's sort of a clever thing to do. It's not the same thing as buying the house and refurbishing it. But because of the photographs, the house will live on beyond the wrecking ball, which is I'm sure how it's going to meet it's end.

Q: What did they say when you invited them to take part in Detroit Ho's Annual Seminole Street Artist's Colony and Exhibition/Festival?
A: I didn't mention it. I will take a spin by there tomorrow and see if they're there and uh, mention it to them. I didn't want to talk as if I was trying to take over their project or in some way try and compromise what they were doing.

Q: Did it seem, at any point, that the artists were questioning the effectiveness/methodology of their conceptual work?
A: I think, I don't think they had any doubts about what they were doing or how they were going to accomplish it. They felt that they had to justify it to people who were asking them questions. The only thing they were concerned about was doing it before the weather got warmer. They are working the same way a film company would. They got permits, that way you're not harassed by the cops, and the city is glad to see that someone is doing something positive. Now that they've got all this publicity they have to do something with it. Actually I think they're missing an opportunity. The house shouldn't be the goal, the community should be the goal. Everything that people said when they were looking, that should have been recorded. They should have filmed everybody who had come to see it. Call it the Ice House, but let the Ice House be the thing to initiate discussion about the city. You got people's attention, now do something with it. That's your project, that's your story. That would probably tell them more about human nature, art, a lot of things... it's almost as if they're frozen in time more than the house that they've created. They should record the enthusiasm that this house has generated. [The next day he spoke to the artists on this point again, and they mentioned that they were collecting email responses to the project, and working to reach out to the community]. [Click here for footage Lester took at the ice house.]

Q: Did it seem, at any point, that the neighbors of the Ice House were questioning the effectiveness/methodology of the conceptual work?
A: People were generally impressed by what they were doing, and curious about what was going on. Cars were stopping, people were taking pictures with cell phones, getting out and parking to find out what was going on. There was only one guy who was like, "What the hell? What's going on?" And I told him these two guys were making an art project out of the house, and he saw two black guys and assumed I meant them. I said, not those two, this one guy and his partner. And then he got sour. He said "Well why didn't they do it in their own home?" He seemed amused when he thought it was the black guys, and then pissed when he realized they were white. I found it strange that he got so upset about two guys spraying ice on a house when so many houses are gutted and stripped. It doesn't take anything away from the house, it makes for a colorful display for everyone in the neighborhood to share. To me he got pissed off about the wrong thing. But I think a lot of people are pissed off in general, and when they can find something specifically to get pissed off about, they embrace that. A lot of people seem to get angry that whites are moving back to the city. This one guy was complaining once, "They're just moving us out of the city," but when I asked where he lived, he lived in the suburbs, and I said, "It sounds like you left the city." It's the same thing in South Central LA, guys come back and get mad when they see all the signs are in Spanish-- but when I ask them where they live they say "Georgia."

Q: Did you tell Grandma about it? What did she say?
A: I think she saw it on the news. Since I've been here, a week today, they've been on three TV networks.

Q: How about Aunt Cora May-- what did or would she say if she saw?
A: (Laughs) What's her favorite expression? "Lord have mercy." And it's not what she says that would be so profound, but what that means. "What's wrong with these poor people? Why are they out in the cold? Don't they have something better to do?" I think she would just think they were crazy. Aunt Cora May is like every man. Every other person who comes by and says "What the hell is that about?"

Q: What would Grandpa have said?
A: (Long pause) You know, I don't know. I think my father would just laugh. I don't think it would make any sense to him whatsoever. Maybe a waste of time, or, express dismay I guess that somebody could actually get paid for doing something so crazy. Work to my father was about doing something that earned money, and there were certain legitimate jobs. When I told him I wanted to be a photographer, he said "OK OK. That I understand. But what do you want to do for a living?" I thought he was short sighted, but I remember Tom Bradley once said in earshot of anybody who happened to be listening, that photography is not really a job. And uh, it was just something that people did for a hobby. Of no value whatsoever. And I thought less of Tom Bradley, and more of my father when I heard that from him. My father said it because it wasn't something he'd experienced in his life as a means for making a living. But Tom Bradley was supposedly an educated, sophisticated man, and I thought it was interesting that he thought nothing of insulting everyone around him.

Q: Uncle Paul?
A: I would ask Uncle Paul. Uncle Paul would no doubt say something interesting or insightful. What, exactly, I don't know.

Q: Uncle Ted?
A: I think Ted'd just think they're crazy.

Q: Lisa? (my sister)
A: Lisa saw it. I did ask her opinion, she thought it was sort of interesting.

Q: Mom?
A: Ask mom. I sent her a picture and she said she'd received a picture from your cousin when these guys first showed up. I think when I go back around there I'll ask people "What do you see? What does it mean to you? What does it mean about Detroit?"

Q: Picasso?
A: Been there, done that.

Q: One person responded to this project by saying, "I will be happy to donate....as long as he promises to freeze the entire city and all the low lifes in it !! And keep it frozen !! What's the H.S. graduation rate in Detroit.....Last I heard it was around 23%. Freeze these idiots and get them out of our way so we can do something productive!!! (sic)" Another with, "shame on anyone who condones this action, shame on the bank who is allowing this to happen. You can not allow things like this to go on when this was somones HOME, it is like having a clown show up at a funeral. (sic)" Will the public's general disdain for/lack of education about Detroit, compassion and conceptual art get in the way of this project's impact?
A: Well to the person who's saying the stuff about high school graduation rates, they're using this as a springboard to talk about what you'd like to do to all these people who you consider unfit or not useful. He's not really talking about the project, he's talking about how he feels about people who drop out of school. Without understanding why this is occurring. The graduation rate in this city... if you're going to start freezing people in Detroit you'll have to start freezing people in sunny California. The institution has failed the students as much as the students have failed to navigate the institution. It's just another way of saying if you can survive, you deserve it, otherwise you're standing in the way of progress. If all these people disappeared tomorrow would things get any better? I doubt it. As for the other comment, I suppose a person could feel that way about what they're seeing. I think the artists tried to find out about who occupied the house and when and they failed. If he's saying that this person probably lost his house because it was foreclosed, that is sort of sad, but... I don't assume that the guy who made this statement made any effort to find out who lived in the house, or found out about the neighborhood and why it went down. Sure, people can show up and turn a house into an ice castle to say something about Detroit, the house is probably a symbol of the city. Whether or not that's someone laughing at Detroit, I don't think it's that. If they're laughing about Detroit then there's a whole lot of laughing to be done about the rest of the country. Maybe what the guy is really saying is "This is my f**** city." If that's the case, well say it! If you're pissed off about it, say it. Don't hide behind this suggestion that it was somebody else's home... if you feel that it's your city, it's your funeral, say you're pissed off about that.

Q: OK. Thanks Dad.
A: Can I go to bed now?

Brainstorming Idea #7: by Aisha

Ask my uncle the gourmand if he will teach me how to cook.