Allen Toussaint and the President after Toussaint received the Medal of Honor for the Arts, 2013.

It’s been a blur of a week so today’s post, forgive me, will be short and may be a little splintered.

• I spent most of last week in Washington, D.C., starting with a gargantuan conference and trade show called Greenbuild. The organization I work for —PHIUS—exhibited there, and my colleagues and I staffed the booth. My feet still hurt and my voice is recovering. But it was a good show for us, and I’m especially proud that PHIUS Executive Director Katrin Klingenberg won a Women in Sustainability Leadership award from Green Building & Design magazine. She had some pretty good company, and she belonged.
• Managed to squeeze in a visit to our friends Pick and Hank in Northern Virginia at the end of the week. Beth was supposed to join us, but the snow in Chicago grounded her flight and she didn’t make it for the night. But I still had a swell time.
• Of course, the ISIS story is ongoing and I continue, like pretty much everyone, to follow it. And to look for context and a better understanding. Found lots of good stuff, including this one in the Independent. The article isn’t exactly calming, but is informative in terms of the history of the region, and the history of the borders. Those borders were drawn not by the residents of the region, but by Western powers after World War I. Worth the time.

Finally, something that sort of got lost in the aftermath of the Paris attacks was the death of Allen Toussaint, a one-of-a-kind songwriter and musician. His catalog includes everything from Working in a Coal Mine to What do You Want the Girl (or Boy, when Bonnie Raitt sings it) to Do to Fortune Teller to Southern Nights (yeah, that pop song Glen Campbell sang). Beth and I were fortunate to see Toussaint perform a slew of his songs at the Old Town School of Folk Music a few years back—just a wonderful performance, and he told some lovely stories between numbers.

One of them was about the aforementioned Southern Nights. About why he wrote it, what it reminded him of. And then he performed it—no offense to Glen Campbell, but it’s a completely different song when Toussaint performs it.

He told that same story during an interview with Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot on their Sound Opinions radio show last year. If you want a treat, download the interview here. You’ll be forced to listen to a public radio supported by message when the program first downloads—but it’s brief. Once it ends, if you want to skip straight to the story about Southern Nights, go to the 47:30 mark and keep listening. It’s a compelling tale of how his childhood memories inspired the song. Followed by a beautiful performance.

If you can find the time, though, listen to the full interview. A whole lot of joy and beauty and essence of New Orleans float in Allen Toussaint’s voice and his music.

Having been able to see him perform live is one of the myriad wonderful things I’ll be thanking my lucky stars for this Thursday.

Have a great Thanksgiving, y’all.

That’s Ray mugging for the camera.

Realizing I wouldn’t be able to see when his schoolfriends raised their hands to ask questions, my six-year-old great nephew Ray volunteered to help me call on kids in all three of the first-grade classes we visited at his school yesterday. All of the first-graders at Westmore Elementary had read Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound before Whitney and I arrived, and that meant they had time to come up with some pretty thoughtful questions. Examples:

• What kind of dog food does your dog eat?
• How can your write a book if you can’t see?
• How do you drive when you’re blind?
• Can you get that thing on her back off of her by yourself?
• What if you’re with your dog and you bump into something?
• When your dog isn’t there with you, how can you see?
• What does the safety pin do? (This after I’d said I put a safety pin on the tag inside anything I wear that is black)
• What happens if your dog gets distracted?

Whitney was as spirited as the students we were visiting, so we answered that last question with actions rather than words. After she flipped to her back (with her harness on) to beg the kids for a belly rub, she popped up to lick a first-grader in the front row. Time for her seven-step obedience ritual:

1. “Whitney, sit!” She sat.
2. “Whitney, down!” I pointed to the ground, and even though she uttered a huge groan while she did it, she managed to lie down.
3. “Whitney, sit!” She popped back up.
4. “Whitney, heel!” I held her leash, walked four steps forward while she walked along at my side.
5. “Whitney, sit!” She sat.
6. “Whitney, rest.” I stood in front of her, put my palm up in front of her nose for a second, walked backwards away from her, and she didn’t make a move.
7. “Good girl, Whitney!” That’s what I said when I returned to her side.

When the obedience routine was over, one first-grader exclaimed, “It’s like a time out!” We had a ball at Westmore School, and as I write this post, Whitney is enjoying a real time out: she’s fast asleep under my desk.

Here’s a statement you don’t hear every day from a blind blogger: I spent a morning last week at an art museum. I wasn’t the only blind person at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art that day, either.  Sina Bahram was there, too.

I met Museum of Contemporary Art’s ‎Chief Content Officer Susan Chun in early September when she and I both spoke at “Greater Together,” Chicago’s first Cultural Accessibility Summit. The Museum of Contemporary Art had hired Sina Bahram to help them design an accessible website, she mentioned Sina’s work during her talk, and she sought me out afterwards to invite me to meet him the next time he visited Chicago.

Sina Bahram is the founder of Prime Access Consulting (PAC), a consulting firm that works with museums all over North America so that all visitors, including those with disabilities, can access the facilities and appreciate what’s inside.

Sina has had a visual impairment since he was born. When he was little, he used to get really close to his older brother’s computer screen and squint. “But that didn’t really work out so well!” Today he uses a screen reader, and he’s working on a Ph.D. in computer science in human computer interaction at North Carolina State.

The tagline for Sina’s company is “Innovation through passion, technology, and universal design,” and Sina’s own passion for the subject really comes through when you meet him.

“My company has a deep belief that making things accessible starts with universal design,” he told me, explaining that they don’t start a project thinking about how to make a building or a website accessible for people who have visual impairments or mobility impairments or another specific group. “We want to help our clients to design — and create — things that can be enjoyed by all users.”

I would have thought that designing a site for the Museum of Contemporary Art, where they especially want to show off the beauty of their artwork and exhibits, would be difficult. But Sina says that’s because of this commonly held belief that if something is accessible it can’t be pretty or creative, it has to be ugly and boring.

That is wrong, and spreading that myth can harm everybody from designers and developers to users. Sina says you can make anything simultaneously beautiful and accessible, and you can see, ahem, that for yourself now: Museum of Contemporary Art unveiled its new website a week ago using Coyote, a toolkit and project to create and publish visual descriptions of all of the images on the Museum of Contemporary Art’s site.

And that’s a lot of images!

The Coyote software was developed by Sina Bahram’s team at Prime Access Consulting, and it’s an open source tool. Staff members from all across the museum used Coyote to produce image descriptions that allow people who are blind or have visual impairments to “engage more fully with the visual arts.” Check it out.

A version of this blog post appeared Monday, November 16, 2015 on the Easter Seals national blog.

Hi Folks,

We watched the Oscars last night and were surprised and delighted when Spotlight — the only Best Picture nominated film Beth and I saw — won! It managed to be suspenseful, well-paced and gripping–all without a single explosion or any special effects. To celebrate, here’s a post from November 16 last year that  I wrote right after we saw Spotlight on November

This past weekend Beth and I took in a movie at an honest-to-goodness movie theater where we shared a bag of movie popcorn. This is something we do infrequently and with some care—that is, we have to have confidence that the film will be dialog heavy, to the point where Beth can follow on her own. I can freeze and annotate a movie aloud at home fine, but not so much at the theater.

We chose well.

The new movie Spotlight has been getting rave reviews, and I can happily say that it more than lives up to the kudos. Some of the subject matter is difficult to be sure—it involves the Boston Globe’s investigation of priests abusing children, and the Catholic Church’s systematic and diabolical cover-up. But the movie is not prurient or sensational in any way. Instead, it tells a riveting and ultimately satisfying—if somber—story of how important good journalism is, and how difficult it is.

One of the cartoons posted by Hebdo cartoonist Joann Sfar posted on his Instagram feed.

If you liked All the President’s Men, you’ll love this. If you just like good filmmaking, you’ll love it. (Writer/Director Tom McCarthy has some interesting Chicago history.) Great writing. Great acting. Two thumbs and two big toes up.

Besides reminding of the critical role the press plays in a democratic society, the movie honestly points out that, by the same token, when the Fourth Estate fails, there are consequences. In the wake of horrific events like those that played out in France, the press can get caught up in the emotions of the moment, feed nationalism and jingoistic tendencies— for example, the failed coverage of the run-up to the Iraq war.

Or it can keep its collective head and play a healthy role.

Right now, there’s a little of both out there. But it’s been gratifying to run into some thoughtful work—for instance, several writers have pointed out that terror attacks also ravaged Beirut, Kenya, Iraq—and let’s not forget that Russian Airliner.

Here are three items I found particularly helpful in trying to sort things out, and I hope you’ll give them a read and that you find them useful:

This piece by Charles Pierce in Esquire points out the elephant in the Mideast: generous funding of ISIS and other terror groups that comes from nations that are labeled as Western allies. Pearce cites documents from Wikileaks indicating that the State Department has been urging that we persuade these “allies” to clamp down on terror funding for some time. Apparently to no avail. (H/T to our friend Dean Fischer, who shared this on Facebook.)

Speaking of Wikileaks and whistle blowers, a predictable meme in the Paris aftermath has been the efforts by some to try to blame Edward Snowden and his leaks for the attacks. It’s total rot, as this piece by Glenn Greenwald makes clear. The story also raises some serious questions—at least some of the attackers were on intelligence radar, but still they prevailed.

And the most poignant, inspiring and emotionally clarifying thing I saw was an article in the British Independent. The article excerpted and translated images and comments from a Charlie Hebdo who posted on Instagram after Friday night’s awfulness. (H/T to Chuck Miller.) For one thing, the drawings and commentary signaled that the courageous and talented people at Charlie Hebdo are still at it.For another, apart from policy issues, this artwork manages to communicate some inspiration and resoluteness—and even a bit of joy. I hope you’ll give the drawings and the translated messages a look.

Here’s a taste from the cartoonist who loves his city and culture:

For centuries lovers of death have tried to make us lose life’s flavour.

They never succeed.

Those who love. Those who love life. In the end, they’re always the ones who are rewarded.

On Friday WBEZ (Chicago Public Radio) invited writer Mel Washburn and me to their studio to talk about the Sum Up Your Life in Three Songs assignment I gave to my Chicago memoir-writing classes last week. Mel is in the Monday class I lead for Lincoln Park Village. During the interview, Morning Edition host Tony Sarabia played excerpts from songs Mel had chosen and had him explain how he’d narrowed his choices down to three. If you heard us on the radio Friday — or listen to the interview online later –you might enjoy reading Mel’s entire essay about his three songs. Here it is:

Three Songs = My Life (A Memoir)

by Mel Washburn

I don’t play a musical instrument. I can’t carry a tune in a bucket. But I love to listen to music. And my tastes in music have changed from time to time, reflecting, I think, changes in the way I feel about the world around me.

During the 1960’s, my favorite song was Bob Dylan’s Masters of War, which he sang while accompanying himself on guitar and harmonica. His voice was raw, angry, and accusatory as he sang:

Come you Masters of War,
You that build all the guns,
You that build the death planes,
You that build the big bombs…
Like Judas of Old, you lie and deceive
A world war can be won, you want me to believe,
But I see through your eyes,
And I see through your brain,
Like I see through the water,
That runs through my drain.

Dylan exactly expressed my thoughts and my feelings about the powerful men who were in charge of our nation’s war economy, the men who had orchestrated the nuclear arms race and the genocidal war in Viet Nam. Like Dylan, I wanted to see them trampled and defeated.

After George McGovern lost the 1972 election in a landslide to the perfidious Richard Nixon, it seemed that the Masters had won. I was tired of feeling angry. My favorite musician became Ry Cooder. In five albums released during the seventies, he made versatile use of electric guitars, horns, strings, backup vocals, piano, etcetera to record unusual and expressive arrangements of traditional blues, calypso, gospel and country songs. One of my favorites was the 1930’s How Can You Keep On Moving? which spoke for the Okies, who were harassed by cops and vigilantes as they travelled west to escape the Dust Bowl:

How can you keep on moving unless you migrate too?
They tell you to keep on moving, but migrate you must not do.
Yet the only reason for moving and the reason why I roam,
Is to move to a new location and find myself a home.

Ry Cooder gave this song a bouncy marching rhythm, accompanied by slide guitar, drums and horns. Yet he sang it in a hopeless, mournful voice. This ironic use of traditional materials to comment on the fundamental absurdities of life, without preaching and with a sort of resignation, mirrored my thoughts about the world at the time.

In the 1980’s, I began listening to orchestral and chamber music. One of my favorite pieces is Ralph Vaughn Williams’ ethereal, hopeful violin concerto called The Lark Ascending. Though commentators routinely try to express the ideas expressed in pieces like Lark Ascending, to me their value is that they allow you to experience profound emotions without being tied to ideas.

Recently, however, I find my tastes rounding back on themselves. In the ten years since our government began its Global War on Terror, I have often returned to the ideas and feelings that long ago made Masters of War my favorite music.