About Nigel Parry: bio | resumé/cv | contact | keep in touch  6 April 2006 - Announcements THE CHILDREN OF THE SHOEMAKER HAVE SANDALS There's an old saying, "the children of the shoemaker go barefoot", meaning that the shoemaker is so busy making shoes for other people that his kids are neglected. So it is with web design. I've been making some cool sites for people recently, see nigelparry.net for more of that, but I've been stewing in a bad place where it comes to nigelparry.com, which still sees 13,000 visitors a month. Most visitors head to the Diary, with the rest split between the archives of this front page news system, the Monkey Times blog, the After 9/11 archive, and the section with my debut album, This Side of Paradise, in it. It seems unbelievable that, from February 19th until April 1st, just under 9,000 tracks from the album have been downloaded — over 200 a day or the equivalent of 900 albums. Seeing that many visits come to such a discombobulated website whose visual look you began hating 10 minutes after it was last rush completed is just soul-destroying. After experimenting with some new looks, I realized that the reason the kids were still barefoot was precisely because I don't have enough time for this, so I grabbed the templates from nigelparry.net and switched out the header. I'll pass it off as branding if anyone asks. The new site isn't finished, but I'm past caring about things like that and there's already a ton of new content that hasn't been available on this site before, including press appearances and interviews, so here's the preview:
I was going to wait until the site was more complete for launch but a book a friend in New York gave me opened my eyes today to all the life flowing by undocumented. It was by Studs Terkel, the legendary American cultural anthropologist/documentarian who spent his life documenting the people who populate the streets of America. Terkel was on John Stewart's Daily Show last night, and the two echoes collided with the first entry I wrote in the Monkey Times blog which I was rereading while reworking the site. Towards the end of the entry, I was reminiscing about the good old days of A Personal Diary of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and how good it is to be able to look back at your life through a document like that, as well as share it on the Internet. When I did the math, over a million people had read A Personal Diary a few years ago, which helps you remember not to underestimate the Internet as a communications medium. I miss writing, and I'm in the perfect place for it. Harlem, where I live, is pretty funny, New York as a whole is a blast, so it's time to get back to that place of writing about what's around. The Monkey Times blog, in particular, is where that's going to take place. 20 March 2006 - Writing GAZA FACING HUMANITARIAN CRISIS Al-Mintar Crossing is Gaza's commercial lifeline, and the only crossing through which large-scale import of wheat and other imports and exports can take place. The crossing has been shut down for nearly 50 days-in peak harvest for Palestinian produce exported to Europe-since the beginning of the year, a total of 60% of the time according to the UN, despite Israeli promises in a US-brokered November agreement not to do so. David Shearer, head of operations at the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinians Territories (OCHA), said "The situation is extremely serious. In the next day or so all bread supplies will dry up. There is very little else around in terms of rice, which is also short in supply. Bread is the staple diet for Palestinians. It is also the food the poorest people so if that's not available people will start to go hungry." According to the World Bank's 2005 statistics, 65% of Gaza's Palestinians are living below the poverty line, surviving on under $2 a day and general poverty has reached upwards of 70% of the population. Read the report at: 20 March 2006 - Writing PHOTOSTORY: MADE IN PALESTINE EXHIBIT OPENING IN NEW YORK Made in Palestine is the first museum quality exhibition devoted to the contemporary art of Palestine to be held in the United States. It is a survey of work spanning three generations of Palestinian artists who live in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, parts of Israel, Syria, Jordan, and the United States. The exhibition was curated by James Harithas during a month long stay in the Middle East, aided in his mission by Palestinian artist Samia Halaby. Made in Palestine premiered at The Station Museum of Contemporary Art in Houston, Texas and in 2005 traveled to San Francisco, CA, and Montpelier, VT. The exhibition opened in New York on March 14th, and held its gala opening on March 16th. View the photostory at http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article4563.shtml 2 March 2006 - Recommended reading OFFICIAL US GOVERNMENT REPORT ON HURRICANE KATRINA
The website demands that anyone wishing to read the full report has to download 27 separate PDF files. Two of the links to the 27 documents were broken. No e-mail address to report the problems with the site was given, only a mailing address and phone number. For ease of public access to this report, nigelparry.com has compiled all 27 documents into a single 10MB zip file for download. Download the Katrina Report, A Failure of Initiative, here. The official website download location can be found at katrina.house.gov/full_katrina_report.htm For current archived material see nigelparry.com/archives. For archived material between October 2000 to March 2002, see the what was new page. |
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As expected, the official website hosting the recently released official US government report on its handling of Hurricane Katrina was less than satisfactory. 
