Coast activists take demands to D.C. Sun Herald Washington Bureau June 1, 2009 WASHINGTON — With a FEMA trailer strategically parked across the street, a coalition of Gulf Coast activists stood outside FEMA headquarters at the start of hurricane season Monday to demand Hurricane Katrina rebuilding and to protest the latest deadline for eviction of about 5,000 [...]

In March I learned that the W. K. Kellogg Foundation will be making a grant to support “Turkey Creek” and the launch of The Bridge Project. I’ll be posting something soon about what this will mean, but for now I’m running off to Louisiana to participate in a meeting of the Gulf Coast Sustainable Communities [...]

National treasure Howard “Louie Bluie” Armstrong would have turned 100 on March 4, 2009. The Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville and other venues around the country will celebrate his centennial with screenings of my documentary SWEET OLD SONG and the “P.O.V.” series will stream the film on it’s Web site from March 2, [...]

Bill Claiborne, of the Louie Bluie Music and Arts Festival in Tennessee, emailed photos of the birthday celebration for Howard that took place in his hometown of LaFollette on March 6. He and the other locals there phoned Barbara Ward Armstrong and sang “Happy Birthday.”

I learned yesterday that Piedmont blues guitarist John Cephas died on March 4 at the age of 78. He and his musical partner Phil Wiggins spent time with Howard Armstrong at the Centrum Country Blues Festival in Port Townsend, Washington, when I was making “Sweet Old Song.” In the film they play “Louie Bluie Blues” [...]

When Howard’s parents named him William Howard Taft Armstrong on March 4, 1909, they named their son after the U.S. President inaugurated that same day. I heard from Bill Claiborne (of the Louie Bluie Arts and Music Festival) a couple days ago that on this coming Wednesday, March 4, 2009, a flag will be raised [...]

I received this letter from a network of groups organizing a campaign around the Oscar nomination for the incredible documentary “Trouble the Water.”   Please go to: www.troublethewaterfilm.com/congress and ask Congress to introduce a bill to help people struggling on the Gulf Coast.   Dear friends of the Gulf Coast:   More than three years ago, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast and [...]

Today a San Francisco TV show called “View from the Bay” featured a clip from SWEET OLD SONG and invited me to speak along with Nader Shabahangi on a segment called “Five Elements of Healthy Aging.” We were promoting the International Film Festival on Aging, which kicks off Friday with a screening of the film.

More than a decade after HOLDING GROUND was on public TV I ran into Jason Webb at a meeting in New Orleans. Jason was a young teenager when we filmed him declaring that he’d dedicated half his life to Boston’s Dudley Street community. Now he’s in his 30s and he’s the director of the neighborhood [...]

I’ve interviewed two of Gulfport’s mayors while making TURKEY CREEK. In 2003 Mayor Ken Combs sat down with me to explain why he’d called the opponents to a development on 1,300 acres of land in the Turkey Creek watershed “a bunch of dumb bastards” (!). Combs was replaced just a few months before Katrina by [...]