The crew was stereotypically tough-looking, a mix of grizzled old-timers and muscled amateurs, except for the figure in the hub of attention, who stuck out amid the macho tableau.
Slim, with a frizzy head of nut-brown hair piled into a bun, Annie McBride is not your typical boxer. In her ring outfit, a bright yellow tank top and black trunks, she looks like she belongs in high-school gym class. Then there are her glasses. They are small, black-framed ovals that sit half way down the bridge of her nose giving her the appearance of a school teacher. Oddly enough, when not dodging punches and sticking jabs, she is one.
“People said, if you want to know how to fight, that’s the guy, ” McBride said about Joseph, who has been training fighters for more than 30 years. Joseph remembers how before he met McBride, he saw her in the background while taping another fighter and immediately felt a connection.
“I could tell she knew what was up, ” he said.
In September of 2009, McBride fought her first match and won by decision. Three consecutive victories made her a rising star and she headed into her Freret Street match with an unblemished record of 4-0. Her opponent, Jennifer Fuchs, an LSU student, also was undefeated and said she has Olympic aspirations. Women’s boxing will be featured for the first time at the London Olympics in 2012, and has recently undergone an increase in popularity in the professional ranks as well.
McBride said that while she draws inspiration from professional female fighters, including Lucia Rijker, the Dutch boxer and martial arts champion dubbed “the most dangerous woman in the world, ” she doesn’t have professional aspirations.
“I would never go pro. I would never take the headgear off. My most prized talent is my intelligence, that’s what I value the most, ” she said while getting her fists taped before heading into the gym alongside her crew.
Outside, the crowd was thick and hot, with only a pair of industrial-size floor fans to cool spectators. McBride was the second women’s fight on the card and as she limbered up, the first two women squared off.
A minute in, one landed a fierce jab and blood began to ooze from the other’s nose. When the bell rang signifying the end of the fight, her face was awash in crimson. Undaunted, she shook her hips to the blaring rap music as her gloves were removed.
One fight left to wait for Annie McBride, and she spent the fleeting moments before her match throwing series after series of lighting-fast jabs into the air and taking in Joseph’s final instructions. Then, with two trainers and fellow boxer Geni Taylor at her side, she strode to the ring.
“Ladies and gentleman, in the blue corner, Annie ‘the fighting school teacher’ McBride!” the announcer barked.
The fight began. Virginia Fuchs cracked McBride with a stiff jab and the two traded blows. Fuchs, a southpaw, was getting the best of McBride.
Leather smacked on flesh. Fists thrust like pistons. The round ended. The second began.
Annie McBride’s face was beet-red and her bun bobbed up and down at the rear of her headgear after every punch. Every time she found an opening, Fuchs closed it and found one of her own. McBride took her first loss with a stiff lip and descended the ring toward the locker room.
A week later, she was calculating the area of a parallelogram in a 10th-grade geometry class at Mount Carmel.
McBride wore her glasses, looking as bookish as ever, and bantered effortlessly with the teenage girls, guiding them through internal tangents, isosceles trapezoids and rhombuses. She created a word problem that involved calculating the distance at which a pair of teenage sweethearts sit from a French Quarter water fountain.
“Do you think math is romantic?” one student asked with a giggle.
The students know their teacher is a boxer and joke about it. “I have a geometry teacher that can kick butt, ” sophomore Malika Howard said.
They say she’s cool and relay how she broke into the dance step “the jerk” at a recent school picnic and has given herself the nickname D.J. Multiplicative.
With her first loss behind her, McBride appeared ready to get back in the gym. “I knew I had lost that match as soon as it started, ” she said, admitting nerves were a factor. “But it helped me realize that I was making mistakes. I was dropping my hands and I had never fought a southpaw before.”
The Stick and Move Gym on South Derbigny and Erato streets is where McBride trains. It’s a warehouse, half of which is full of clutter, the other half where Joseph holds court.
On a steamy Wednesday afternoon, the sun crashed through the skylights, reflecting off the exposed brick wall as a pair of fighters slugged it out on the heavy bags while two others shadow boxed in the ring. In the foreground, Annie McBride skipped nimbly over a near-invisible jump rope as it whirled around her body, stopping briefly to chat with her coach.
Joseph, who works as a security guard on the Steamboat Natchez at night, makes little money from his amateur boxing training, but said he was influenced to give back to the community by the charity work of his cousin, Eva Dykes.
Joseph oversees more than 15 fighters and runs through their backgrounds. His one female pro, Geni Taylor, has lost close to 100 pounds since she started boxing and recently won her professional debut in a 35-second TKO. There’s also a Moldavian immigrant who works as a valet, an NOPD officer and a young man whose father was shot just down the street several years ago.
Joseph, whose father taught him to fight at the age of 5, graduated from Booker T. Washington High School. “We had those big horsehair gloves then, ” he said. “Sometimes they would hurt more than getting punched.”
Joseph said he thinks McBride has the potential to make it to the Olympics, and it’s not a prediction that she completely shies away from.
“We’ll see where the amateurs take me, ” she said. “I like boxing a lot and I like my boxing family, but I feel like I’m a teacher before anything else. I truly believe that’s what I’m meant to do.”
When I woke up in a nightmarish, cold sweat at 6 a.m with the lights on and a half-finished PBR spilled across my bed, I knew something bad had happened.  Then, it came back to me—all of the horror at once—and I doubled over in pain at memories of the thing that had occurred just hours before.
The record is dead, Drew. I know it was you who set it, but I’ve been living vicariously through you for so long that it’s hard for me to believe that I wasn’t instrumental to the cause. In fact, at the San Diego game, I want you to know that I broke a record of my own in tribute.
47 high fives. All captured on camera. Here are a few of my favorite ones.
It was a tough day today, man. It was rough for me in the morning when I peeled off my Drew Brees MVP T-shirt and wobbled into the shower. I could barely brush my teeth. My energy was zapped. The Falcons. Those dirty, dirty birds.
Then I left the house and saw the front page of the paper with the headline that said Threw it Away, and I thought I was going to be sick. On the radio, the haters started to hate. Some early morning blowhard on WWL, who couldn’t hit Colston on a skinny post if his life depended on it, said that you should give back some of the $100 million. Somebody said they should have put Chase Daniel in.
On Nola.com, Jeff Duncan said it was your fault, said, “Brees wasn’t part of the reason the New Orleans Saints lost to the Falcons 23-13. He was THE reason they lost.”
There were 325 comments on that article. Here’s a particularly vituperative one.
Drew, the thing is that I’ve basically been using the lift I get from watching you slash through NFL defenses with your gilded right arm as emotional sustenance for the last five years. When some people have a bad day, they take drugs, drink or watch Lost on DVD. But, for me, whenever I have a rough moment, I look at your statistics, read your Wikipedia bio and watch YouTube highlights—sometimes even of your Purdue days.
I even watched your person-to-person segment on CBS the other morning and got a little choked up when you started crying about the veterans and talking to your grandfather on the beach of Okinawa. That was raw, man.
That’s why this morning when people were hating on you, I felt like they were hating on me, too. So much hating. Why?
Drew, I just want you to know that I’m totally not worried about the seven picks that you threw over the last two games. In fact, I’m kind of happy that it happened, even though it hurt, because I know that it’s just going to give you more of a motivation to crush it in the future.
I remember when your labrum was torn to shreds in your last game at San Diego; the thing was so busted that you couldn’t even bend your arm. It was a career-ending injury, that’s what they said. Even after you had surgery people were skeptical. The Dolphins even opted to sign Dante Culpepper instead of you. Nice one, Nick Saban.
Yet, you ended up in New Orleans, and you’ve crushed it at such a high level over the last six years that we’ve become spoiled by your excellence. Now, after a two-game funk, people are turning sour.
Not me, Drew. Not your bro, Dan. I’m a lifer—I have no other idols. I’m a believer. I know this thing will be straightened out.  I got confidence in you, man.
So, today, if you need a lift, just know that in an apartment only minutes from your Uptown estate, I’ve just purchased another dozen birthmark temporary tattoos and am still desperately trying to pull a blockbuster trade to get you on my fantasy squad.  In fact, I think I even found a solution for the sheets I soiled with spilled beer last night.
There was a Monday–I believe it was March 19–when I woke up later than I wanted, feeling depressed about something that I can no longer remember. Â I was hungry and seriously considered going to Burger King, but instead forced myself to opt for Smoothie King, assuming it to be the healthier choice.
Unsatisfied in the aftermath of my Muscle Punch, I headed right back across the street for nuggets, but when I hit the corner of Euterpe Street and St. Charles Avenue my vision was obstructed by the contents of a bright blue box, and I was enveloped with elation and shock.
Inside, rested a stack of copies of the Times-Picayune, and I could clearly see a feature article I had recently written sitting above the fold on the front page. Â The first handful of words were in a large blue font and the rest of the lead loomed equally as big in bold.
I had been wondering about the fate of this article, a profile of a grizzled, PTSD-battered Vietnam veteran that had formed such a bond with a fellow, dying Marine that he singlehandedly transported the man’s ashes to his final resting place.
I had never expected to see it running above the fold of the front page, and in lieu of ransacking the dollar menu, I emptied all the change out of my apartment and bought a half-dozen copies to savor the moment.
I grew up reading the Times-Picayune. Â Then, I drifted away from Louisiana for the better part of a decade, getting degrees in English and journalism out West and spending time walking around strange countries asking strange questions, before I finally returned, dead broke and jobless, to New Orleans.
Through pure chance, I maneuvered my way into the newsroom of the paper two years ago and was able to get a few minutes with a few editors and drop off some clips. Those clips managed to get me a story and that story managed to get me another and I’ve spent the last two years freelancing for the newspaper, a wonderfully carefree part-time gig that has allowed me to rediscover New Orleans with an intimacy that would have otherwise been impossible.
It’s within this context that I’ve watched the turmoil that has ensnared New Orleans and its hometown paper, a Pulitzer-prize winning daily that announced last month that it will end its 175-year daily publication streak by moving to only three print editions per week this fall and focusing more heavily on digital content.
Within days of Carrs’s column, a group called Save the Picayune had formed and began gathering signatures on an online petition that has now collected over 8,500 names.  On June 4, the group held a protest in the parking lot of Rock N Bowl, where a few hundred participants– many in resplendent costumes– chanted, danced, drank beer and listened to the likes of Allen Toussaint jam out on stage.
Sidenote: I know this, because I was there, unlike the Atlantic Monthly, which chose to unlawfully upload the above photo from my Twitter stream without permission and with scant attribution.
The Save the Picayune crew, spearheaded by Anne Milling, who sits on the paper’s board, simultaneously unveiled a letter of opposition to the cuts signed by a wide array of New Orleans civic and business leaders.  A week later, on June 11, the group released a second letter, this one from advertisers concerned about moving to three-day a week schedule.
“People stood in knots; women hugged themselves defensively; men threw arms over others’ shoulders. There was gallows humor – lots of it – bewilderment, more humor, more bewilderment. People emerged from meetings and drew their fingers across their throats. It was shocking: Him! Her!! What can they be thinking?â€
To add insult to injury, that same evening, while Times-Picayune reporters limped over to Wit’s Inn to drown their sorrows, Steve Newhouse, president of Advance.Net, the parent company of the paper, moved quickly to stamp out any rumor that the company might sell the paper–widely assumed to be profitable–to local interests, telling the New York Times: “We have no intention of selling no matter how much noise there is out there.â€
Public reaction to the move was  fierce.  Local businesses began circulating wanted posters of Advance Publications president Ricky Matthews–who was spearheading the change–and quickly became the only person in the city whose unpopularity eclipsed that of Roger Goodell.
Meanwhile, the press and the pundits’ reactions to the firings of their brethren were equally merciless and when Amoss went on PBS’s Newshour to defend the move, he got hammered by NYT columnist David Carr, who called the move “a pivot to weakness,†and revealed to the world that the Times-Picayune’s website, NOLA.com, is generally agreed upon as being terrible.
The next morning, readers woke up to a 1,500-word front-page essay from Editor Jim Amoss, the first attempt by the company to use its own paper to fight off the beating it had taken in the press and from the public.  Amoss’s piece, set against the backdrop of Hurricane Katrina, stressed the overwhelming need to move to a more digitally focused presence or “risk a slow, irrelevant death.†It cited 22 quarters of declining national advertising revenue and the breakneck speed of digital news as two of the primary reasons why the move was a necessity.
That Sunday, Advance President Ricky Matthews unleashed his own front page missive, beginning with his surviving the pounding waves of the Storm at his Black Bay home in Mobile and so suffused in New Orleans imagery–from Steve Gleason’s blocked punt to Matthews’s hunting and fishing in the bayous–that I fully expected to see the column end with a picture of him getting a tattoo of a fleur de lis on his bicep.
Unfortunately, it didn’t.
So that was that. Â The Times-Picayune had been eviscerated, the paper was cutting back to three days a week, a host of veteran reporters were going to be laid off and, in a best-case scenario, replaced by less experienced reporters, who would usher in the digital age by either:
(A) Creating an armada of high-quality, robust content to leverage across multiple platforms and make the Times-Picayune a journalistic leader in new media, or
(B) Transforming what was once a bedrock of the New Orleans community into a glorified blog, powered primarily by Justin Bieber’s Twitter stream.
I had thought, when I began writing this essay, that by the end I would be able to come to some sort of sensible opinion on this matter, maybe even take a side, say something poignant and righteous, like many others have, but all the obvious angles have been taken and all the contrarian ones just seem too taxing.
However, a few things are in my mind are unequivocal.
(1) Â The public relations disaster that the Advance Publications has created is of such epic proportion that an opinion survey on the matter could only be facilitated by a pollster skilled in dodging bottles.
(2)  There is a lot of merit to the idea of moving the Times-Picayune to a digital presence; there is not a lot of merit to leaving half the newsroom behind, as it is nearly impossible to imagine that the Times-Picayune can continue to achieve the same level of Pulitzer-Prize winning journalism (see last month’s series on incarceration in Louisiana as an example) after unloading so many experienced reporters.
(3) Despite the feel-good narrative of New Orleanians loving to read print newspapers ( I do enjoy it myself), newspapers, along with books, appear destined to eventually be discarded as relics of a the print age.  The world is moving fast and furiously to digital. The next generation of New Orleanians won’t drink chicory coffee and read through the newspaper.  They will drink chicory coffee and utilize digital technology of such unfathomable power and convenience that it will make today’s tablets and smartphones look like carrier pigeons.
(4)  This crisis, and the reactions that it has produced, are another example of the passion, spirit, and unrivaled weirdness of New Orleans, never mind the unrepentant rage it directs at anyone or anything interfering with its rituals. It is the energy of this city–from its charm and beauty to its eyesores and other imperfections–that has helped the Times-Picayune become such a captivating read. I am cautiously optimistic that this spirit will aid this transition and that this city will still be home to a vibrant melange of journalism, whether it exists in a print newspaper, on NOLA.com or somewhere out in the ether we haven’t even conceived of as of yet.
Things got wild in D.C. today, as journalistic heavy hitters from across the country squared off in a new media vs. old media shoot out. The session was highlighted by a saucy closing oration, during which blogging queen Arianna Huffington lambasted newspapers for engaging in the “futility of resistance”
The hearing, convened by Senator John Kerry, featured representatives from the Washington Post, the Dallas News and Google. Kerry, who has expressed solidarity with newspapers–especially the plight of the Boston Globe–led things off by welcoming attendees to “a brave new world” and quoting Joseph Pulitzer’s refrain, “Our republic and its press will rise and fall together.”
Maryland representative Ben Cardin (D) stumped for his recently proposed Newspaper Revitalization Bill, which would allow newspapers to receive 501 C-3 classification and the beefy tax breaks that accompany them(see past post on its flaws).
Former Washington Post Managing Editor Steve Coll struck a balanced tone by referring to the current state of journalism as “creative destruction.” He complimented the innovation of online enterprise, but questioned if citizen journalists and bloggers could provide the same valuable public interest reporting as newspapers.
David Simon, a former journalist and producer of The Wire, was much more blunt. He bashed blogging as “repetition, commentary and froth,” and content aggregation as leeching. He laid much of the blame at the decision of newspapers to tie in with Wall-Street and “unencumbered capitalism”
However, his heated remarks were no match for Huffington. In her thick Greek accent, the baroness of blog lacerated newspaper bosses for “putting content behind walled gardens,” “sticking their fingers in the dike” and “pretending the last 15 years didn’t happen.”
She stated her optimism that journalism would survive and flourish, but recommended that efforts be pulled away from saving newspapers and toward saving journalism. She lauded the blogosphere for its ability to follow and hammer away at a story until it “breaks through the static,” and she excoriated the mainstream media for not doing its journalistic duty in covering the lead up to the Iraq War and the financial crisis. The news industry has had “far too many autopsies and not enough biopsies,” she said.
It was a rousing performance. I didn’t agree with all it, but Huffington clearly has the spunk and tenacity necessary to transform a crisis into a period of innovation and growth. Considering the pessimistic state of journalism, I’ll take it.
Libertarian filmmaker John Ziegler, whose documentary Media Malpratice indicts the media for its partisanship during the presidential election, was arrested on Saturday while protesting at the Walter Conkrite Awards ceremony at USC. Ziegler was protesting the award being given to Katie Couric for her interview with Sarah Palin.
According to Ziegler, he was initially going to demonstrate at the event, but then decided to cover it as a journalist. USC officials had marked off a specific area behind a barricade for him to protest, and refused to let Ziegler in the event. According to USC, only press that had been approved by nominees was allowed.
In the full video, which is embedded below, Ziegler is being annoying and dramatic, but he is never confrontational with police, school officials or attendees. In fact, he makes it abundantly clear that his intention is to cover the event as a journalist and to ask critical (and annoying) questions about whether or not Couric is worthy of an award.
Ziegler points out, correctly, that there is a tremendous irony in a journalist at an award ceremony for journalistic excellence being banned from covering the event. Though USC is a private university, it has a commitment to safeguarding dissent. It’s clear from the footage that it wasn’t Ziegler’s actions, but his politics that got him removed. In a lengthy blog post, Ziegler wrote
In effect, I was being punished, repressed, and physically harmed as a form of prior restraint because they anticipated that I might do something to disrupt the proceedings based on my prior writings and commentary on the event (in which I never claimed I would do anything more than exactly what I tried to; give away copies of my film as an educational exercise).
Though he’s a bit self righteous, he’s correct, and it’s shameful that USC’s journalism school had such a primitive response to the incident. Dean Ernest Wilson claimed in his statement that the Annenberg School of Communication has a “powerful and evident commitment to protecting and promoting freedom of expression and the rights of the press,” but what was truly evident is that USC isn’t interested in tolerating journalists who are a bit kooky, very critical and a threat to their mid-afternoon toast to Katie C.
Over at the Huff-Po, brainiac John Wellington Ennis wrote a blog post entitled, “Does the First Amendment Protect Someone From Being a Dumbass” in which he assailed Zielger’s character for not showing “respect and tact,” while peppering him with childish insult after insult.
Ziegler shot right back with a Huff Post blog entry of his own, contradicting Ennis’s claims one by one(or at least the one’s that didn’t already contradict each other.)
The bottom line is John Zielger is a guy with a pretty mediocre film about something that is indisputable: The media did an abhorrent job providing coverage during the election. He’s no genius and I disregard much of what he says, but he should be able to critically question the work of Katie Couric without ending up in handcuffs. The fact that he can’t exposes the fragility of unpopular speech in one of the places it should be valued most.
I saved yesterday’s articles on the release of Bush-era harsh interrogation memos for today, because the weatherman told me that it would be gorgeously sunny in pastoral Eugene, Oregon and he was correct. So, I’ve spent the last hour or so eating an oversized chef salad at the Monroe Street pub and reading about sleep deprivation, nudity, abdominal slaps, waterboarding, walling and my personal favorite, “confinement with insects.”
I thought that the weather and the delicious meal would offset the gory details of the interrogation memos, and to some extent they did, but there is a chilling eeriness in actually reading the “dispassionate prose”–as the NYT so aptly phrased it–of the legal masterminds who set the gears of the Bush interrogation programs in motion.
Bush's Torture Dream Team
Though it was Jay S. Bybee who oversaw the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel when many of the memos authorizing brutal interrogations were approved, much of the handiwork was done by John Yoo.
Yoo–A South Korean immigrant and Yale Law graduate–set the standard for torture by defining it as action that “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.”
Using this broad definition, he was able to authorize a slew of deplorable tactics, but the most stunning revelation wasn’t the sort of brutal torture methods the U.S. was using–as this was already well known–but the calculated, rational legal minds who so cavalierly validated it.
Yoo was a dream legal counsel for a president attempting to enhance his power, as he was totally divested from the human cost of his work. During a 2005 debate, Yoo was asked by Notre Dame legal scholar Doug Cassel, “If the president deems that he’s got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person’s child, there is no law that can stop him?”
His answer: “No treaty,” and, depending on the president’s belief at the time, no law either.
For this reason, it should come as no surprise that when Yoo and his cohorts were asked to supply the legal backing to exploit detainee Abu Zubaydah’s fear of insects by telling him they were putting stinging insects in his box and actually placing harmless bugs, they were game.
The bugs were never used, but the authorization was given. It’s a strange thing to read, regardless of the sunshine. Props to Obama for releasing the memos, even though they hampered my lunch. Props to John Yoo for his hard work and creativity; too bad he used it in such a reprehensible way.
I’ve been blogging for a while now, but almost everything I’ve written previously has been too strange to permanently affix with my name. However, if you’d like to read an article about Napoleon and the Mayor of Portland’s indiscretions, you can check out some of my previous articles at politicsandfunk.com
I think this blog is intended to be some sort of coming out party for my transition from a copywriting scab to a professional journalist– that’s why I have this header in which I look respectable– but whenever I think about inhibiting my writing to tailor to a certain audience I just get bored.
I don’t think Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman ever gets bored. Actually, I’m sure she gets does get bored at some junctures of her life, but I never really get bored of watching Democracy Now. This evening they aired a documentary on Pacifica Radio and its 60th birthday.
Founded in 1949 by peace activist Lou Hill, Pacifica is the oldest independent radio network in the US. It was also the first purely listener-supported radio station in the country, a framework that kept it out of the clutches of corporate media.
It was founded in Berkley in 1949 at an anarchist meeting and its early lifeblood was the far-left San Francisco intellectual scene, but it appeared to have a commitment not to ideology but to freedom of speech and reporting the news.  According to Goodman’s column, the organization was in desperate economic straits in its infancy but consistently found support from its listeners.
It gained much of its influence while airing live broadcasts of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and was especially prominent in the coverage of the student riot following a HUAC meeting in Berkley in 1960. It hosted debates between James Baldwin and Malcolm X on non-violent protests, banter from leading intellectuals during the Cold War about the possibility of nuclear apocalypse and the poetry of Langston Hughes, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and more.
More importantly, it consistently aired journalism of criticism and dissent. People valued that, and they pulled out their pocket books and contributed regardless of the fact that no one was compelling them to do so.
That seems like pretty honest journalism. Sometimes I wonder if it’s possible that we could ever return to a model so pure.
According to Ziegler, he was initially going to demonstrate at the event, but then decided to cover it as a journalist. USC officials had marked off a specific area behind a barricade for him to protest, and refused to let Ziegler in the event. According to USC, only press that had been approved by nominees was allowed.
The bugs were never used, but the authorization was given. It’s a strange thing to read, regardless of the sunshine. Props to Obama for releasing the memos, even though they hampered my lunch. Props to John Yoo for his hard work and creativity; too bad he used it in such a reprehensible way.