North to South visitor

Amanda came for the weekend. We stayed up till 4 a.m., til the ceiling looked weird and a tiny palette seemed comfortable. I took these the day after:

On going home

Surprise plane companions:

I was bent over my laptop, trying to connect to something or another, when I noticed Dana Rae in my periphery. Back 10 years ago, we were Internet friends, searching through these waves for other Southern lesbians. Later, we met in a real bar in Hattiesburg, Miss., all on accident. Later, we moved to the same city. This day, again by accident, we met again in the airport then flew the thousand something miles home to the South. An old lady sat on my other side and pronounced finger "fanger."

Christmasland

I spotted this headless Santa when driving from Louisiana to Texas a few months ago. I couldn't wait to go back and take some pictures, so when my dad drove me to Fort Worth while I was home, he pulled over so I could investigate. Little did I know, headless Santa was part of a family:

Year in review: Albums

1. Neko Case - Middle Cyclone
No one can write like her. No one can sing like her. Unlike her last album - Fox Confessor Brings the Flood - this album took a while to grow on me. But once it grew on me, I was hooked. Her voice is amazing, yes, but it was the lyrics that hooked me: "Your rails have always outrun mine." "And I raked the springtime across your sheets." "I love your long shadows and your gun powder eyes." "My hotel room won't remember me." They helped me write many a story this year.

See tracks: This Tornado Loves You, Vengeance is Sleeping


2. Drake - So Far Gone mixtape
I remember when Drake's Degrassi character Jimmy Brooks rapped for the first time on the show. I loved his voice then, and I loved it as soon as I heard this mixtape. I've seen a lot of people make fun of his overly earnest, overly cocky rhymes, but I love them. I usually could do without autotune, but even that doesn't bother me here. Most of the raps are slow, smooth and sexy. I never tired of listening.

See tracks: Houstatlantavegas, Lust for Life


3. Telegraph Canyon - Tide and the Current
I saw this band (my cousin's) so many times in concert this year, and every time I felt more proud than the last. Chris Johnson is a great songwriter. Each song is so complexly layered (Yep, it's an Arcade Fire-sized band). It's not folk. It's not alt-country. It's something much more lush and experimental than that. Whatever the label, I think it is a great album.

See tracks: Safe on the Outside, Into the Woods


4. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - self-titled
This album reminds me of Quentin's apartment. In the summer, we would make fancy lunches and play this record while making crafts. It's so fuzzy and so fun, and, for me, will remind me of 2009 more than any other record. Q and some other co-workers and I saw them play a free, 10 a.m. show at the end of summer, and the songs held up pretty well live. Plus, everyone in the band is drop-dead gorgeous.

See tracks: This Love is Fucking Right!, Come Saturday


5. MEN - Limited Edition Demo
MEN played, by far, my favorite live show of the year. I've loved JD Samson for years, and in the absence of any new Le Tigre, this does very nicely. It's an EP, so the chance that all songs would be good is greater, but I imagine they will do just as well with a full-length, too.

See tracks: Off Our Backs, Make it Reverse


6. Tegan and Sara - Sainthood
This album also took a while to grow on me. Every Tegan and Sara album sounds like an album -- cohesive, thematic. This one is harder, more grown up but still focused on love (both lost and looking). It's not as immediately as catchy as their previous albums, but I think that may be on purpose.

See tracks: The Ocean, The Cure

7. Andrew Bird - Noble Beast
Perfect for Portland's rainy winter. This album, like all Andrew Bird albums, is pretty, simple and lush at the same time. There are a few good standout tracks, but this works better as an album.

See tracks: Nomenclature, Tenuousness


8. The xx - self-titled
Plenty of blogs have written about this band. I like it because it's slow and sexy. The songs are all clear and catchy.

See tracks: Stars, Basic Space


9. Gossip - Music for Men
Not every song on this album is good, but the ones that are are great. It's a great dance album -- even better live.

See tracks: Heavy Cross, Men in Love

10. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavillion
I love several songs on this album, but some are too weird for my tastes.

See tracks: Summertime Clothes, My Girls

Where's the blight?

A story I had in today's paper. One thing I really want to do in journalism is find people who others might dismiss (the crazy lady who protests at every city council meeting, for instance) and humanize them, find out why they believe the way they do, how they come to be. This profile, I think, does that:

HILLSBORO -- Not too long ago, Sharon Cornish sat in the public testimony hot seat, telling the Hillsboro City Council, yet again, why she doesn't approve of its downtown urban renewal plan. As Cornish railed against the council, a group of boy scouts giggled in the back.

Cornish is Hillsboro's resident gadfly. She comes to every meeting, armed with maps and print-outs of relevant laws, to protest.

And why shouldn't people laugh? Cornish can seem a little odd. She speaks in arresting lilts and frequently accuses councilors of being socialists. She keeps her long blond hair pulled into a pony tail off the side of her head, and she punctuates her public testimonies with a creaky take-off on the old burger ads: "Where's the blight?"

But listen closely. Cornish is asking a serious question. Who decides when an area is so run-down, so in need of renewal that government has to step in and use public money to entice private development? Who decides blight?

Urban renewal districts are by nature controversial. Cities cap property taxes on an identified blighted area for, say, 20 years. Any new tax dollars above the cap during the two decades is reinvested into the district.

The result? The "blighted" areas become newer, shinier, more lucrative. But not everyone wants change.

Other people come to argue against urban renewal in Hillsboro, but they're quieter, given to softly beseeching on the rare occasions they even show up.

Then there's Cornish, always there, unapologetically angry and outspoken.

Let the boy scouts giggle. She hated urban renewal long before she knew what it was.

Read the rest on Oregonlive

Roy. (2)

For years, my grandma and mom have been describing Roy like this: "She had real short hair, a crew cut, and she wore Dickies, boots and birth control glasses. She was short and kinda chunky."

I've made my own mental pictures of what this person could look like, but when I visited Ann last week, she brought out pictures she had found for me of Roy. She was nice enough to let me take them home with me to scan. I promised to send them back through certified mail.

Roy.

Roy grew up thinking his real parents had left him in a shoebox somewhere because he was too tiny to raise. He grew up playing softball, keeping dogs and playing the guitar.

He grew up in Delhi, La., population just under a thousand, across the street from my grandma.

He was a young teenager when his parents died. When his body started to change, there was no one left to explain. Roy’s parents had a secret.

My grandma has always told me people don’t like going to their grave with secrets. Which maybe explains why, on her deathbed, Jewell Ellis, Roy’s mother, told Roy to go across the street and get my great-grandmother. The gates of Heaven looked near. But first, she had a secret to tell.

“Rita Mae,” Mrs. Ellis told my grandma. “Roy is as much a woman as you or I.”

Rita Mae Huffman kept that secret for a long time, maybe until her own deathbed, but several years ago, my own grandma told me the story. I’ve been fascinated ever since. Last week, my mom and I loaded up and drove to Delhi with a video camera to start piecing together the story.

Aaron and I are planning to go back sometime this spring to work on a documentary. This was a first step.




Before we started reporting, everyone told us we had to go meet Police Chief Rufus Carter to make sure it was okay. My mother talked to him for a long while about growing up in Delhi and how her uncle Herman had been the police chief then.





Ann M. was Roy's best friend. She calls Roy "she." Ann bought Roy her first package of Maxi Pads and taught Roy how to open a bank account. Later, when Roy was in her 70s, Ann helped Roy write letters to all the neighboring states to try to find a birth certificate. Neither Ann nor Roy knew the real story, that Roy's parents had stolen her from an abusive family and raised her as a boy to keep from being found out.



My mom and I had been trying to find Roy's old next-door neighbors, but they were out of town. We found, instead, one of the neighbors' brother, who lived next to an old lady named Mary. When she heard what we were doing, she disappeared into her house then came right out with this, lyrics to a song Roy had written.



The brother, Keith, wound up taking us to the cemetery where Roy is buried. Roy's headstone shows a date of birth that can't possibly be verified. Also, the last name shown is spelled differently than how Roy spelled it on the song lyrics.