A Simple Soloution?

Posted on December 6, 2008 by Varg

Crescent City Connection audit recommends dumping toll booths for electronic tags

In the story above, remarks are made regarding the Mississippi River ferries and their cost to the Crescent City Connection. You can read the story but it says the ferries lose $21,000 a day.

Being a weekly and often daily traveller on The Algiers ferry I don’t doubt this statistic. You get pretty contemplative out there on the river and doing the simple math of counting the cars and doing the numbers shows they probably can’t break even.

But the thing is they only charge for cars. And the number of cars on the bridge are always outnumbered by pedestrians and bicyclists. So start by charging these folks a quarter. See how that works and then raise the fees over the next few years. Also, there are many people, such as myself and several of my friends who take the ferry every day. Why not offer these people, yearly or monthly passes? Or perhaps asking the port to help out in managing cost? The DOT? How about charging for traffic both ways? How about instead of easing the hours of the ferry increasing them and charging more? My number one reason for not taking the ferry is usually the wait. So if the wait were cut to 15 minutes, I would be willing to pay the dollar to take the boat. Especially if a card swipe system similar to toll tags were implemented.

1 thought on “A Simple Soloution?”

em says:

December 6, 2008 at 3:57 pm

I’d be walking on the ferry all the time if it ran 24 hours! Also, while free is great, folks pay rather more than a quarter (or even a dollar) to walk onto a ferry in places like Seattle and it’s totally worth it. Even a couple of dollars is a better deal than the $20+ cab ride to get home from the French Quarter. I’d pay it.

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Rejoice!

I say that a lot. I sign many pieces with it. I do this because I believe our lives are a true happenstance. A brilliant occurence from nothingness. We are so rare. We are so unlikely. And simply being born isn’t enough. From there we must survive, endure. So each morning, after our Sun departs and is reborn again. Please, for the sake of your ancestors and the Universe in general, hoist that cup of joe up and say, “Rejoice.”

Ours is a soulful existence. No matter how many McMansions, polyester fabrics, auto-tunes, modified foods and social networks we surround ourselves with, we are all still native, passionate beings made of ancient matter. We are organic and we have soul.

Wood also has a warm, soulful quality. Wood has a memory. It retains smells, traumas, events. It even has a calendar. This is why I have chosen it as my medium, for its old soul. I like to think the wood in my work is in its third incarnation. First a tree, then a home and now art. If you have a room that needs a little soul, get a piece. A room can never have enough soul.

My inspiration and subject matter comes from many sources, among them: Humanism, old ballads, trickster tales, flora and fauna, science, myths and folklore, stringed instruments, brass bands, amber spirits, lady vocalists, general relativity and quantum mechanics. Some of my pieces are there just to make a short, simple statement about what’s important in life. Some are more diffuse and abstract in meaning. A personal drama, an enduring line from a poem or novel, a poignant song lyric, the legacy of an important person, a fleeting thought … these are the subjects of my art.

I use hearts often because they are a very abstract way of depicting the human soul without also employing the very subjective human form. The symbolic heart is an apt representation for a person’s experience and essence. A body can immediatly conjure happiness, sorrow, youth, age, anger, bliss. These emotions can get in the way. Sometimes it’s simply about the experience.

I am the son of a sailor and a social worker, the grandson of a gypsy, a dancer and a nurse. I spent my youth moving from port city to port city, watching a lot of road go by and reading World Book Encyclopedia. After my parents settled down on the Gulf Coast, I was a miscreant youth, destroying cars and taking the wrongs things too seriously and the right things not serious enough. Eventually I began replacing my imagination with experience.

I will use any salvaged wood but prefer swamp cypress and longleaf heartwood pine.

I despise waste. Particularly the waste of organic matter. Trees are magnificent. They were here before we arrived and they’ll be around after we are gone. I’m making an effort to save as much wood as possible. Creating art is fun too. But beyond communicating with folks, but beyond making money ad providing for myself, beyond rescuing flooded parts, beyond reveling in the ethereal aroma of heartpine that hasn’t seen the light of day in 400 years, beyond all that, I am trying to make a simple comment on waste.