The Parallel Campaign

It does exactly what it says in the URL

2009-03-12T00:12:00.002-04:00

BadPaintingsofBarackObama.com. I don't need to elaborate. Enjoy.

Russian guy gives US a year

2009-03-07T09:14:00.003-05:00

Just to temper all the boundless optimism and exuberance around these parts lately, Russian academic Igor Panarin estimates that we here in the US have less than a year before we descend into civil war, fragment into six region-states, and - lest you think there's no upside to all this - give Sarah Palin to Russia. Alaska would have to go along with her, but that's a small price to pay, isn't it? The WSJ has the story.

"There's a 55-45% chance right now that disintegration will occur," he says. "One could rejoice in that process," he adds, poker-faced. "But if we're talking reasonably, it's not the best scenario -- for Russia." Though Russia would become more powerful on the global stage, he says, its economy would suffer because it currently depends heavily on the dollar and on trade with the U.S."

Yes, yes, obviously, Professor Panarin. What we really want to know is, what kind of leader is Kris Kristofferson going to be for Heartland?

Marking one year of Ebbsfleet United - MYFC

2009-02-19T12:48:00.005-05:00

Today marks one year since the MyFootballclub.co.uk takeover of Ebbsfleet United FC.

And overall, it's been a decent year in my eyes (though my own involvement has been pretty limited at times). A trip to Wembley, a WIN at Wembley, the 3700+ attendance for the free cup match recently, holding a spot somewhere around mid-table, wholesale creation of a new culture - part local and part global, part net-based and part community-based...all seem to be very bright spots.

It hasn't all been ideal, of course, but you had to be awfully optimistic (or delusional) to think that there wouldn't be any bumps in the road. We're still lingering too close to the drop, for one. "Pick The Team" is still a dream deferred, and while that's pissed off some (hard to ascertain just how major or minor the vocal contingent on that is) it hasn't really ruffled others - including me. PTT would be fun, interesting even, and maybe will come into play if Daish totally loses the plot on us, but that isn't the case right now. There's lots I'd like to see done yet on a number of fronts. Certainly this is a work in progress.

Most importantly, with renewals sure to come in well under the original 30k mark, there's gonna be a shakeout and everyone knows it. That's gonna pose a major financial challenge, especially in the thick of the global economic shitstorm. But if there's a silver lining to be seen, it's the sense that those who remain (those who weren't so naive as to think MYFC would be buying Leeds or something) stand to have a more cohesive vision of What It's All About as we go forward.

What is it all about, then? For me, the reason why I renewed (for 30 bucks less than it cost last year - thank YOU, strengthening dollar!) is that, despite whatever squabbling goes on, despite whatever ways EUFC-MYFC falls short of being the perfect open-source club, it's still the most interesting and engaging way to support local club football on a week to week basis that I know of. Because I for one am so damn sick of creepy gazilionnaire arms dealers, oligarchs and private equity cowboys profiteering off the game at its highest level, while MLMers and soda-pushing slimeballs contrive an ersatz "soccer experience" in my own country.

My mantra on this has become - Support local clubs, though it doesn't matter so much whose "local" it is.

Better my money, attention, and affection goes to a real team and club down the ladder somewhere else. Better we try and build something different, if we can. Happy first year, MyFCers.

Look out, Gray's Papaya

2009-01-07T12:36:00.004-05:00

From Banterist.

I don't think I've ever used this phrase before, and I don't anticipate using it again any time soon, but....EPIC FAIL.

Like Lincoln once said...

2008-12-10T11:39:00.001-05:00

"You can urinate upon some of the people some of the time, but you can't urinate on all of the people all of the time."

At least I think it was something like that.

I simply must link to b online's interview with crusading Baltimore personal injury lawyer Barry Glazer, if only for this video compilation of local TV spots.

(the embedded video is working only sporadically for me here - go give b a hit and watch it over there.)

The Inauguration effect, or object lesson in supply and demand

2008-12-08T21:57:00.000-05:00

Heard about how the whole world is descending on DC for Obama's upcoming inauguration?

I've been looking at Amtrak fares for next month, because I've got to come down the Northeast Corridor, from Connecticut to Baltimore, sometime between the 18th and the 20th. If you're not familiar with Amtrak's bucket pricing system, just know that the baseline fare for this trip is about $60, and that the highest "bucket" or fare for an regular-class ticket is around $130 or $140 (I believe).

Now take a look at this series of screenshots I've made from my searches of those days.

You figure it out.

Some Baltimore links and more pretty pictures

2008-12-02T15:15:00.002-05:00

Blogrolling is what I use to serve up links to other blogs and sites. It is for the moment, anyway, but we'll see how long that lasts if they don't get themselves straightened out soon.
With them having been down for weeks now, I can't update or freshen up my blogroll. That's something I'd like to do, since I've got a bunch of new sites I'd like to add. Like these.

Since I'm living in the Baltimore area now, and I'm deeply interested in issues of urban space, culture planning, transportation, redevelopment and history, of how to adapt old cities to modern needs, how come I haven't been reading Baltimore Inner Space all along? How come you haven't been?

I've been on the lookout for some Slow Food type eateries in Baltimore, as well as some other eco-friendly services, sites and organizations around here. That's why I've started perusing the Baltimore Green Map.

Rapha cycling clothes are not only stylish in a classic continental way, less Lycra and more merino wool and tweed (I'd probably fit in a medium, if you're shopping), but the photo-essays on their site (by Ben Ingham, available also as prints) verge on the breathtaking. Maybe it's just because I'm a sucker for both the Alps and bicycles - within a year or three I'm hoping to take part in this, but I can't get enough. Say hello to my new desktop backgrounds.

Here I am! Blog you like a hurricane!

2008-11-26T21:04:00.006-05:00

Announcing the conversion of The Parallel Campaign into a full-fledged Scorpions fan site!

Ah, I'm just kidding.
But really people, if only you could see my blog stats. (You could, actually, if I wanted to you to. But I don't want you to.)
On an average day, this site gets somewhere between one handful and two handfuls of hits. Most finding their way here through the Google, naturally.
And what are these people, those web-seekers, these Googlists from Poland and Turkey and Iran and Ontario looking for?

They're drifting along on the Wind Of Change.

It all goes back to this three-year-old, throwaway, hardly-even-worth-a-twitter post.

(Speaking of which, I'm twittering a bit more these days - look right)

"Take me to the magic of the moment" is the search term that brings all the web to my yard, and it's not even close. Stuff like this makes me appreciate the total unpredictability of the internet. Of all the stupid, and slightly less stupid things I've written here over the years, this is the one thing people seem to care about. Well, this is for them. And for all of us - east and west, Teutonic-leathered and unleathered. Vacation-video MIDI-quality home karaoke at its most stirring. Blow winds, blow! Mr. Meine, sing down that wall.

Happy MLS Cup Final day

2008-11-23T10:11:00.002-05:00

Just for old times' sake, The Metrologist pops up for a moment with a word or two.

Bullock and Stilgoe

2008-11-23T02:54:00.001-05:00

BoingBoing recently sent me over to the site of LA-based photographer Dave Bullock and his stunning photos of contemporary industrial landscapes.

"I find beauty in odd places. Chemical plants, factories, railroads, bridges and various forms of industrial structures have always fascinated me." - Dave Bullock

Me too. Maybe that stems from growing up, as I did, just outside Bridgeport, CT, one of those old northeastern industrial cities with plenty of views like this, albeit on a smaller scale, especially from the ribbons of highway that cut through and across them. Which is how we see them, much of the time. How many hundreds, thousands of trips have I taken down the 25-8 connector in my lifetime, turning up on to 95 northbound, over the bridge by the ferry dock and the UI plant and the East End, towards where the city melts into Stratford, by the tank farms and those gigantic old pylons over the parallel mainline? More often, we would take the split southbound towards Fairfield or New York, over and quickly beyond a zone of crumbling old factories and warehouses and sprawling projects.

There is beauty in all this, oft neglected as quickly as we hurry through and over it.

Bullock's concrete-edifice-in-raking-sun photos jibe with my growing fascination with industrial history and industrial archaelogy, with my academic and personal interest in the built environment as palimpsest. Along those lines, they also bring to mind the work of landscape historian John Stilgoe, whose books I went hurtling through over the summer.

Outside Lies Magic is a rather poetic, sometimes precious meditation on everyday places and structures in our American lives - shopping centers, town centers, highway motels, rights-of-way for gas and powerlines, while Metropolitan Corridor is a more academic exploration of the role that railroads played in way American space was organized between the end of the 19th century and the first couple decades of the 20th.

Some of the things that Stilgoe invokes in these earlier works (the Railway Post Offices sorting mail at speed, streamlined luxury trains blazing across the Plains, the aesthetics of the metropolitan corridor) also appear in his latest, Train Time. (You can hear an interview with Stilgoe on TT, from the radio program Living On Earth, right here). This time, instead of history or reverie it's in service of a thesis - one that's thrilling, important, improbable and infuriatingly incomplete. Stilgoe's back-to-the-future notion is that we're on the cusp of a new rail age based on the contours of the old one.

It's an interesting read, full of history and detail and "hmph" moments. Yet somehow, it's just a little less than the sum of its parts. I wanted it to cohere more than it did upon first reading. (I'm working through it again, in part for a review which you may see somewhere else shortly.) Stilgoe's bases much on the "fact" that ultra-rich, ultra-smart venture-investment types have been speculatively buying up land around old rights-of-way and rail centers, seeing the future shape of the nation in the traces of the less automotive society of the past.

Yet this evidence, as far as I could tell, is itself mostly hearsay and conjecture - in essence, "I've heard through the grapevine that old timetables are being bought up and studied by speculators...not to mention some of my earlier works..." Or as Stilgoe puts it explicitly, "along (the) tracks, events are unfolding rapidly, generally unnoticed except by rail experts and a cognoscenti attuned to imminent landscape and cultural change."

"Imminent landscape and cultural change." That's increasingly the stuff of my academic and personal interests (I haven't expounded much here, but I shall). It's about what we're going to do when the price of gas doesn't come back down, when enough people figure out it makes no sense to transport freight 1500 miles over the road, or to transport people 200 miles in the air.

While Stilgoe calls it "Train Time" ultimately it's not just about trains, or any one mode - the sudden leap in popularity of woefully neglected and mismanaged Amtrak, and the competing PR pushes of CSX and Norfolk Southern (can you go 15 minutes on CNN without seeing one or the other) notwithstanding. The environmental situation demands we start doing something about our spaces and places and networks, how we get to and fro and how we live. The political shifts offer the faintest glimmers of hope that we could if we really wanted to. But the economic crisis puts it all in doubt. Or does it offer an opportunity?

Speaking as someone who'll go home - a 300+ mile trip - this holiday without getting behind a wheel, who loves his car and uses it as little as possible, I want to believe Stilgoe is right, or at least (groan) on the right track.

"Conscious strainings are letting loose subconscious allies behind the scenes"

2008-11-11T10:56:00.000-05:00

Thought for the day:

What William James wrote about religious experience might well have been written about the antecedents of acts of expression. "A man's conscious wit and will are aiming at something only dimly and inaccurately imagined. Yet all the while the forces of mere organic ripening within him are going on to their own prefigured result, and his conscious strainings are letting loose subconscious allies behind the scenes which in their way work toward rearrangement, and the rearrangement toward which all these deeper forces tend is pretty surely definite, and definitely different from what he consciously conceives and determines. It may consequently be actually interfered with (jammed as it were) by his voluntary efforts slanting toward the true direction." Hence, as he adds, "When the new center of energy has been subconsciously incubated so long as to be just ready to burst into flower, 'hands off' is the only word for us; it must burst forth unaided."

It would be difficult to find or give a better description of the nature of spontaneous expression. Pressure precedes the gushing forth of juice from the wine press. New ideas come leisurely yet promptly to consciousness only when work has previously been done in forming the right doors by which they may gain entrance. Subconscious maturation precedes creative production in every line of human endeavor. The direct effort of "wit and will" of itself never gave birth to anything that is not mechanical; their function is necessary, but it is to let loose allies that exist outside their scope. At different times we brood over different things; we entertain purposes that, as far as consciousness is concerned, are independent, being each appropriate to its own occasion; we perform different acts, each with its own particular result. Yet as they all proceed from one living creature they are somehow bound together below the level of intention. They work together, and finally something is born almost in spite of conscious personality, and certainly not because of its deliberate will. When patience has done its perfect work, the man is taken possession of by the appropriate muse and speaks and sings as some god dictates."

Joe the Theorist

2008-10-29T16:19:00.003-04:00

“I love America. I hope it remains a democracy, not a socialist society. ... If you look at spreading the wealth, that’s honestly right out of Karl Marx’s mouth,” Wurzelbacher said.

“No one can debate that. That’s not my opinion. That’s fact.”

Of course..."Joe the Plumber is named Sam, isn’t actually a plumber, doesn’t have any plan to buy any business, makes nowhere near 250k a year, and would actually get a tax cut under Obama." (Balloon Juice)

Dear God, make it stop. Make it stop. Please, make it stop.

Edit: here's another ordinary Joe. Thank God.

See more Thomas Haden Church videos at Funny or Die

Now this is reassuring

2008-10-29T14:18:00.000-04:00

Make sure your touch-screen voting machine is properly calibrated, y'all.

Oh snap!

2008-10-25T18:43:00.000-04:00

"She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone...She does not have any relationships of trust with any of us, her family or anyone else."

It's the dreaded, delightful D word! Coming out of the McCain camp!

Oh NO you di'nt!

Oh yes they did.

Tee hee.

Breaking: The Nineties are dead

2008-10-22T11:31:00.000-04:00

What will high schoolers do now?

This is right there with the extinction of the telegraph two years ago in the "WTF? I thought that died out years ago" category.

Feel like getting a headache this afternoon?

2008-10-21T14:43:00.000-04:00

I don't know if this vox pop (shriex pop?) clip from a McCain rally is more hilarious, alarming or saddening. Probably all three.

The Pain Train is comin! Wooo wooo! Wooo woo!

2008-10-19T16:27:00.000-04:00

Oh my.

Irony gives you wiiiiiiiiiiings!

2008-10-17T11:37:00.002-04:00

I've done little to hide my all-around enmity for Red Bull - the disgusting, unhealthy product meant for unhealthy living, the glib and obnoxious global branding done via the co-opting of sports and cultural enthusiasts, the shallow, nebulous "philosophy" which really isn't anything at all.

Of course, I despise what they did to my team - I think I've said that once or twice now. That may be a done issue, but I can't stop despising their creeping over the sports landscape as a whole, buying up third-rate teams in third-rate leagues, tagging them like subway cars in mid-80s Manhattan and piloting them into in a groove of mediocrity, while desperate, craven fans carry their water for them (because god knows, people on the inside probably know better than to drink that corrosive shit they purvey.)

It's brilliant! It's stomach-turning anti-culture. No doctrinaire anti-capitalist or anti-postmodernist am I, not by a long shot, but in this enterprise you have the worst extreme of postmodern capitalism, run amok; a company that makes billions by producing nothing, nothing but image. The drink is of no real consequence. They may as well be selling sand or peas or feathers in a can. The drink, you might say, doesn't even exist. (Get out of my head, Baudrillard.)

I think we can all agree that what's bad for RB is good for fans of sports worldwide. I've said it before, and I'll say it again; I'd sooner have Halliburton owning my team. Sure, they might be responsible for the deaths of thousands, but when it comes right down to it, at least they make something. The same can't be said for our Austrian overlords.

Anyway, as much as I feel a twinge of sadness for Jeff Parke and Jon Conway (assuming, as we will right now, that their actions were unintentional) the news that they've both been banned for 10 MLS games for banned PEDs infuses me with a sense of irony that truly vitalizes my body and mind.

To use the old saw, you really can't make this stuff up.

But who comes out of this sorry spectacle looking most like total idiots?

On one level - that is, on the ethical level - the answer is easy. It's MLS. Because you really can't expect us to take the league seriously, when they say that over-the-counter performance enhancers of doubtful provenance and unknown, potentially dangerous consequences are BAD things that get you SUSPENDED!

Except when over-the-counter performance enhancers of doubtful provenance and unknown, occasionally deadly consequences are GREAT things that the league wants to work with, take money from, and promote. Then it's all good. Carry on.

One feels that there is more to this episode than meets the eye, but I've yet to put my finger on what that is.

Quote for the day

2008-10-16T11:06:00.000-04:00

“People do not put mercury in your car to improve your health.”

Yes. Quite.

And Now We Wait: Will MLS Soccer Return To The NY Area In 2011?

2008-10-15T13:56:00.002-04:00

I wait, not with breathless anticipation, but mild curiosity for the clock to strike five today. That will mark the supposed deadline for the supposed application process to become Major League Soccer's supposed 17th and 18th franchises (you need to be put a "supposed" before most things MLS does. A Keatsian enterprise, their rules are writ on water, and Dubuque or Waterbury could waltz in with a billionaire next week and waltz out with a team.)

With Philly and Seattle already onboard for the next couple seasons, and up to 8 cities vying for the next two spots, expansion has become the MLS geek's white-hot topic.
More Canadian teams!
No more Canadian teams!
------ is a Soccer City, which deserves a team above all others!
Etc.

It's a bit tiresome once you've heard the arguments the first thirty times, and completely, totally ineffectual on top of that. As Bill Archer notes in the Bigsoccer blogs.

As for me, over the next couple hours I'll be waiting to see if pro club soccer - in its charmingly hinky MLS form - has a shot at returning to the NYC area after a five-year absence, likely in the form of a new club run by the NY Mets.

I would like that.

IF it's the picture of best-practices among MLS organizations; avoiding the missteps of teams past and present, taking full advantage of where it is - one of the greatest soccer areas in the world.
IF it's an organization with symbolism and integrity of its own, not just a means to cross-promote a baseball team, a foreign team, or some crappy product.
IF it aims to represent the city and the area in some meaningful, inclusive way.
And IF the soda ad in NJ hasn't already run its course by then.

I've been an MLS fan, observer and critic to varying degrees over the past 13 years, a decade of that spent supporting the late, not-so-great Metros. It was a open-top bus tour of hell in a handbasket. Yet it was great fun, shared with some great people, and I cherish a lot of memories from that time.

A few years back, I was anxious to seize some of the fame and fortune that comes with academically-inclined niche sports blogging. I was also enamored with how a team so dysfunctional, forgotten and pathetically misshapen could still be funny, galvanizing and occasionally meaningful. I started The Metrologist. Impeccable sense of timing I had there. Within months the taurine takeover had occurred. With the hijacking of the name and identity, all the shaky, make-believe pretense of it being a "club" was obliterated. And then my little baby blog became the strangest of all creatures - a fan blog whose constant underlying assertion was that my team had to lose, had to fail, had to collapse for it to be saved. That was my stance.

It still is. It just isn't very much fun to write about, not for very long, anyway.

Thus the Metrologist, sadly, has gone by the wayside. The lack of posts in a year should have told you that. I've got one more superbly self-indulgent yet useful and informative M'gist effort left in me, and I'll take care of that in the coming days.

Also diminished, my appetite for dissertating on the message boards. Having said my piece too many times, having grown enough wisdom and lost the time to skirmish around and around and around with people speaking a fundamentally different language, I stay out of the mire now. Mostly. There isn't much else for me to say now besides this; RB out, or NYC2 in. Whichever comes first. That's where you'll find me. And here, of course. Where I find it hard to keep my mouth shut.

So we wait, curious but not exactly hopeful. Because what happens next, and what happens in the years to come, is going to be mostly out of our hands. Why get agitated? Either we get a couple more months of waiting, wondering and reading the tea leaves before another deadline day, or we go back to our regularly scheduled program of not caring much what the hell happens in the world of MLS. Along with most of the area and most of the country. There isn't much in between. In the meantime we hold on to what money we're lucky to have now, spend it on teams and entities that, however imperfect, take seriously the idea that as soccer clubs they mean culture, locality, membership and tradition.

In the meantime, here's just a couple of my favorite Metrologist posts, and my post here, written shortly after MLS swapped the likes of its diehards for a joking experiment.

I did this once, too...

2008-10-13T12:46:00.000-04:00

...on Virtua Striker 2.

Via Steven Goff, here's your goal of the weekend. I get dizzy just watching it.

Sign o' the times, 10/13

2008-10-13T12:27:00.000-04:00

Desperate people are getting stupid, or stupid people are getting desperate.

Should've listened to Suze Orman before picking out that land yacht with the $800 a month payments, I guess.

10.11.2008: 140.6

2008-10-10T12:45:00.005-04:00

It's Ironman World Championships weekend in Kona, Hawaii, or "The Ironman," as a lot of people seem to think of it. That's not quite right, of course; the Hawaii race is only the last of the 20+ Ironman-branded long-distance races that go on around the world each year, the championship event, that you (mostly) don't buy, but qualify your way into. Nevertheless it is the most celebrated, the most arduous (or so I'm given to believe), and the most dramatic. It's the Super Bowl of our sport, except that anyone has a shot at getting on the field.

I've been doing triathlons for a little over two years now, beginning with sprints, moving into Olympic distance, and finishing off this summer with a 70.3 half-iron (more to come on that in the next couple days.)
In fact, I even started a blog about my endeavors way back when, but never really kept that up, so I'm rolling that effort into this one. Within a lot less than two years I've become a real bore about it, too, going on to any poor soul who'll listen about all the little ways triathlon has changed my life for the better. How it's a matter of consistency and discipline, not the test of pain tolerance and superhuman athleticism people think it is. And other such things that probably make others want to slap me silly.

I'll be checking in on the race from time to time tomorrow, via the live feed at the official website. That's your sign that I'm a full-blown geek now; I'm planning to spend some - even a little bit - of a beautiful autumn Saturday watching people swim. And bike...and bike...and bike..for 112 miles. And then run on for another 26. Unless you're a triathlete or are attached to someone who is, tri can be a pretty lackluster spectator sport. That's just my personal opinion, one that might not be shared by the private equity types that just bought Ironman's parent company. Still, it's very cool that you can tune into the race in real-time for free.

Alternatively, wait a month or so and you've got NBC's soft-focus, lachrymose, triumphant presentation that annually grabs a few Emmys. It's hard for me not to tear up while watching it. Even harder to fight the feeling that, against all reason, against even my desire (to do IM, I have none right now), I'll be pushing to get to Kona someday.

Earlier this week, the WSJ profiled A.C. Morgan a plane crash survivor who'll be competing in Kona for the first time, some years after his body was burnt and broken in a plane crash. There's a zillion stories like this every year, and they seldom fail to impress. You know what else impresses, almost as much as it disturbs me? That amateurs find ways to squeeze 20-30 hours of training in on top of a full time job (and I doubt very much that co-managing U.S. equity sales trading is a 9-5, 40 hour per week job).

Trigeeks (and I use the term affectionately) like the folks at Slowtwitch will bristle because he was handed a sponsor spot, rather than having to qualify (the primary route to Kona) or even winning a lottery spot. And I'm a little put off by the fact that a i-bank executive scored a free Trek - I don't think he would have missed the three grand, personally. Then you remember the guy survived getting mangled in a freakin' plane crash, and I suppose a free bike for Kona is fair enough.

So who to cheer for?
Just about anyone, I say. Most of these pro guys and girls seem to be remarkably cool and decent, if intense people. Unlike the real hardcore, who back an athlete based on home country or bike brand or that they know someone who knows someone who trains with him, I haven't got a favorite here.

That said, like just about any weekend warrior who caught last year's NBC show, I've got nothing but love - and a cheer - for Belgian pro Rutger Beke in tomorrow's race. Hobbled by an injury partway through the 2007 race, Beke gamely walked the marathon and finished around 900th place rather than taking the incomplete (which many a pro would have done.) The cameras caught him shuffling slowly alongside the age-groupers, and he explained that none of the people who paid their own way were thinking of giving up, that it was only in the spirit of the race that he finish.

Total class there. You go Rutger.

For my money, the mass (1800-strong) swim starts at Ironman races, just as the sun rises over the water are among the most stirring, beautiful, wild images in all of sports.

Sublime

2008-10-09T15:17:00.001-04:00

And ridiculous.
Both words fit Zlatan.

Flying cars! Robot butlers! Cubs win the World Series!

2008-10-08T12:39:00.000-04:00

Just a few of the things The Economist doesn't foresee coming during our next spin around the sun. At its new blog, The World In 2009.

Late night fun

2008-10-08T00:13:00.000-04:00

"A respectful campaign"

2008-10-07T19:30:00.001-04:00

While dinner simmers and talking heads blabber in anticipation of tonight's show, behold! How the McCain/Palin campaign has steamed headlong towards moral bankruptcy, in 4 minutes and 21 seconds. It ain't a pretty sight, but it's got a beat and you can dance to it.

Cereal makers plan to turn Lower Manhattan into wheat field

2008-10-07T11:25:00.002-04:00

I knew Wall Street was collapsing and all, but that was quick. Well, might as well do something with all that land, right?

Thought for the day

2008-10-07T10:44:00.000-04:00

"Literature has to be peace research." - Christa Wolf

I've been reading quite a bit of Christa Wolf lately.

Miami, 1988.

2008-10-06T12:34:00.000-04:00

"I want to thank you for the lovely things you wrote about me and for reminding me of what happened at Miami airport. I’m happy I could help back then, and I’m delighted to hear that your daughter is happy in Norway. Please send her my best wishes. Sincerely, Barack Obama, United States senator".

Politics of my parents

2008-10-05T22:37:00.002-04:00

I got a call this afternoon from a friendly Obama volunteer back in Ohio (I spent a couple damp, drizzly hours leafletting for Barack during the Democratic primary there.) Wanted to know if I was up for doing a little more groundwork in the upcoming weeks. And I am. I've been meaning to make that call. But then, there are a lot of things I mean to do and never get around to doing, only to kick myself over the next year. Or eight.

I'm not a terribly political person, I used to think. Not the sort to volunteer, to to put the bumper stickers and lawn signs out, to buttonhole people or lean on them to vote this way or that, to proselytize in any way. It's just not me, being my parents' kid.

My parents, after all, are pretty solid middle-of-the-road suburban folks, without too many political pretensions. No more news junkies or ideological activists than they are ignorant dupes, they follow the news a bit, and turn up at the local middle school on Nov. 5 to pull their levers, and that's about it. It's them I think of when I imagine the center in this country, not this moronic Joe Sixpack caricature.

Yet I can't tell you much about who they've voted for in my lifetime. Here and there, I've heard a little bit about those they can't or couldn't stand, for god knows what reason; like Hillary (Mom), Nixon (Dad.) For them, for my father especially, much politics seem to be about antipathy as advocacy, as much about the gut feeling you get from a candidate as what they say or do. After all, Dad is not a wonk. He is a white, northeastern Catholic centrist, of a generation that preceded the baby boom by a couple years and shares so little with it, culturally. A veteran, who served abroad in the early 60s - he'd have been among the first vaporized if the Russians shot their load and roared through the Fulda Gap - who found a good, comfortable middle-class life, along with so many others like him, in the latter half of 20th century America. Now he's a small businessman whose main concern is trying to keep things going for him and his. I can't vouch for him caring much about Bush II, but I know that Kerry, like Gore before him, turned him off.

I don't get home to see them much anymore, so we tend to make a vacation of it when I do. These trips involve driving. Driving involves talking, and this involves trouble. Because I am now a political person, and it has been a long time since we've talked politics - my father and I, especially - without it ending uneasily, or flat-out badly. So we try to avoid the subject.

We speak different languages. We see different things. In that sense we come from very different places. I know exactly when whatever latent political interest I had was activated, along with much of this generation - in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. It was incomprehensible to him that I would go protest in Manhattan. Not incomprehensible that the war might be wrong, or that we might be lied to. But that I would go. "My country, right or wrong" and all that, as a conditioned response.

I talked to my father just before Thursday evening's spectacular, and I was amazed. Amazed because he was openly, vocally repelled by the underqualified, overweening Sarah Palin. Moreover, he put that directly on John McCain and his judgment. He offered how he once liked McCain, but that's all gone now. He concurred with my feeling that Palin represents the worst mix of unlikeability, smugness and lack of fitness for the job. Of course, the folksy bullshit, the "back in Alaska"/"out there on the elite East Coast" false-dichotomizing and that grating accent cut no ice at all with either one of them. East coast elites that they are.

More to point of the issues, my mother, a human resources pro, is absolutely appalled - both personally and professionally - at the proposed McCain health care package, which she naturally understands much better than I do. A $5000 tax credit for families? she asks, as if they're really serious about that. She knows that won't cover six months worth of coverage for her and my father. And they are healthy! She imagines that those who are healthy enough to do so might just pocket the five grand, bringing on an eventual systemic collapse. It won't just not work, it'll be a raging disaster.

It's a strange time, when my parents are bending my ear about politics, and it ends with a happy, almost giddy accord between all of us. How we see only one way out of this now. It's not like their turning dark blue will make much difference - not in Connecticut. But I'd like to think, and I do think, that this conversation (and conversion) is going on throughout the country lately.

Things I probably shouldn't laugh at, but do - convulsively

2008-10-04T12:06:00.002-04:00

The sub-sub genre of sports-related Downfall parodies on Youtube. (The subtitles, if nothing else, probably aren't safe for work. And none of it's safe for your sensibilities if you can't stomach the thought of laughing at Hitler)

Brett Favre: "I feel I've been t-bagged by this son of a bitch backstabber."
Mike Ashley sells Newcastle: "But oh no, those jobless twats had to show up at St. James with the misspelled banners, didn't they?"
Celtics beat Lakers: "And to make things worse...it was Pierce."
Texas Rangers brass review their 2008 pitching staff: "He even wrote on our message boards."

Another elite academic type endorses Obama

2008-10-02T14:55:00.000-04:00

Bluegrass legend Dr. Ralph Stanley for Barack Obama. @ TPM.

Ladies?

2008-10-02T02:43:00.000-04:00

Craigslist delivers again.

Reboot

2008-10-02T01:26:00.002-04:00

I haven't forgotten about you.
Though it has been a long time.

I just hadn't really planned on having my computer stolen, my arm broken, my arm-bone bolted back together, my time as a student brought to a close, my stuff moved, my new job started, my life re-started as-it-were over the past ten months.

Or else I was really, really lazy. Embarrassingly so. What kind of slacker can't even finish a year-end top ten songs list? By the time February started, I didn't want to show myself here for that reason alone. (I've been sitting on the last song all that time. Maybe next post.)

Yet here I am again.
A year ago tomorrow (or today, by the time I post this) it was my birthday. I woke up to a flurry of facebook messages from friends around the world and felt immensely grateful for all of them. I promised myself to work harder at taking care of those connections, the wealth of my life. I also told myself I'd post here everyday. Obviously, the second thing didn't exactly work out.

I try again.

I've got enough to say, especially about things I'm not qualified to talk about. And my ego's rampant enough to make me believe that someone cares if I speak up anyway, so I've had trying again in mind for a while. Thought of starting fresh and letting this effort fade into the bone-littered miasma of abandoned blogs. I can find another arch, bookish reference to make a title out of, you know. But then I was a little amazed when I realized I've been writing in this thing for four years. A lot of it's been ordinary, and some of it just cringeworthy. On the odd day, I'm actually gladdened and moved by what I wrote. (I'll let you go back and decide what's what.) So here we go again. Here.

Expect more of the same of whatever it is I've done in the past - some music, some culture, some politics, some observation, some photos, some silliness. Expect some things leaching over from other sites I'd started with varying degrees of success, and am winding up as of now - on soccer, and on triathlon. Two of my many interests. I'm going to try them all together here. The only concept holding it all together is that I don't have a concept.

For your immediate enjoyment - environmentally-sustainable amusement, Indian-style. The human-powered Ferris wheel.

The Ten Most Songs Of The Year: IV, V, VI

2008-01-07T01:02:00.000-05:00

Despite the fact that it's already 2008, I'm still getting around to counting down ten songs that made me especially glad to have ears last year.

I've been away for the better part of a week - in transit, in flux, in deliberation, in contemplation. While I meant to have this list wrapped up well before the new year, as they say, the best laid plans...

Laziness more than anything else, I guess. As if to prove I'm not really ready to break a sweat yet, here's a trio of great 2007 songs by artists I've already written something about; I'll (mostly) let me speak for myself.

Pelle Carlberg - Clever Girls Like Clever Boys Much More Than Clever Boys Like Clever Girls. I said it before, and I'll say it again, albeit with less words than Pelle. It's an eternal truth.

The High Strung - Rimbaud/Rambo (live)
On Extrawack few months back, I testified to this being the essential High Strung song, one that gets at the very core of the band's vision...or my personal vision, which I'm keen to transfer on to unsuspecting outsiders. And here's where you notice just how much glam has seeped into the garage these geniuses must put their albums together in. Like radon. Really, really awesome radon.

The Avett Brothers - If I Get Murdered In The City
You won't find it on Emotionalism, which is probably my favorite album by probably my favorite act of 2007 (not that I go in for superlatives.) You won't find it on anything released by the Avetts, who I gushed about here and here. But this live staple is simply beautiful and will quite possibly move you to tear up. That last line.

The Ten Most Songs Of The Year: III

2007-12-28T00:37:00.000-05:00

On the way to 2008, I'm counting down ten songs that made me especially glad to have ears this past year.

Finger Eleven - Paralyzer

My second nod to the true north strong and free already, and my first (and probable only) tip of the hat to anything resembling the mainstream. What can I say? I like Canadians, at least when they're acting appropriately contrite for inflicting Nickelback upon the world.

Yeah, it's a pretty straight rip-off of Franz Ferdinand's Take Me Out groove, from the chunky, jerk-dance rhythm to the studied nonsense of the lyrics. But it was a fine groove that stood to be ganked once or twice as far as I'm concerned, so good on them for being the someone that did it. No life-changer, surely already beaten mercilessly into your brain, and not really worth me expounding upon, but for all that it's as non-suck as anything I heard on free commercial radio this year.

The Ten Most Songs Of The Year: II

2007-12-26T19:41:00.000-05:00

Over the next few days, I'm counting down ten songs that made me especially glad to have ears this year.

II: Slagsmålsklubben - His Morning Promenade

The lure of my little brother's XBox360 aside, I'm not much of a video gamer these days. But looking back, I realize just how profoundly my childhood holidays were parceled out by the sixteen-bit chunk. And that's why I'm talking about SMK here now.

Time was that every holiday meant loading into the old '77 Bonneville and driving a couple hours down to Grandma's house. It was an old farmhouse, the newer technology inside having been installed in the mid-70s. There was no cable TV there then. Hell, there's no cable TV there now. Thank God for older cousins and their toys. While elderly Lithuanian folks played pinochle and drank coffee, my brothers and I spent hours in the creaky old glassed-in porch, scuffling over who got to play this classic:

This was the best Christmas gift EVER, ca. 1984.

And while the Giants were beating the Broncos in Super Bowl XXI a few weeks after another Christmas, my Dad was figuring out how to set this up:

Looking the part of the creepiest town council imaginable, Scandinavian synth band Slagsmålsklubben makes the sort of music the 11 year old me, Super Mario, and DJ Glass Joe would have mashed together after getting high on smoked herring. It's instant, chimey and yet so deftly layered.
I love that Slagsmålsklubben apparently translates to "Fight Club" - the most inappropriate matching of an act's movie title-inspired name and sound since Three Colours Red.
And there's just something slightly, attractively deviant about the motto - "6 men with analogue synths." When you see that, you just assume something weird is up. It sure is, from the looks of the video.

The Ten Most Songs Of The Year: I

2007-12-23T23:36:00.000-05:00

It must be the night before the night before Christmas: here's the post that's leading a bunch of people to this blog lately. Got to love the keyword search meta info magic powers I have, and chuckle at the thought that more than a few people are winding up here, of all places.
The funny thing is, half are searching for "perfect christmas gift" and half are searching for "taking revenge."

And since we've reached the last week or so of the year, it must be time for everyone to toss around their 10/20/50/100 best singles/albums of the year. Here's one place to start finding a few of those.

Me, I'm not good at putting together these best-of lists. No, "not good" is a weak way to put it: I'm downright terrible at thinking about things in such ways, and so I rarely try. To begin with, I'm a bit lazy sometimes - but you knew that. What's more, I'm averse to the whole list concept, from the generally random or nonexistent criteria, to the pretense of judging Album A three slots better than Album B. Which is a shitty old music magazine cliche (I'm looking at you, Rolling Stone) that every blogger now feels compelled to mimic.

As if that weren't enough, I never feel like I've heard enough music anyway. There's just too much music out there and not enough time. When's the last time I listened to whole albums? I'm as unconcerned with "cred" as anyone who disingenuously says they're unconcerned with "cred," but if you knew how many of 2007's hyped-up acts and must-have records I haven't heard note one of, you'd shit. And then you'd ignore my "list."

Nevertheless.

Over the next few days, as 2007 shuffles off to wherever old, used-up years go, I'll count down ten songs that made me especially glad to have ears this year. I'm not saying they're the best or most significant things to be pressed to electrons this year. Nor do I see any need to order them, as if that meant a thing. Some you'll have heard of (especially since I've probably written something about them before), some you likely haven't.
Just think of them as my little, intensely subjective, year-end aural gift to you, wrapped up in a piece of me.
My, doesn't that sound gross.

Without further ado, the first of my Ten Most Songs Of 2007. With sound, when I can find it.

10. Between My Legs - Rufus Wainwright

I had been programming Going To A Town on the show for weeks before its bitterness and ornateness slapped me awake around 4 one Sunday morning while I drove to a race; that got me into Release The Stars. Rules and Regulations has similar pop quality and that hysterical campfest of a video going for it. But this is the song of the album for me, and the best song about lust and the apocalypse I've heard all year. I'm a sucker for tales of lust and the apocalypse, especially when they soar ever higher and higher like this. By the time the spoken word part ends, it's cutting through the stratosphere. And cocking a snook at the Phantom of the Opera. Terrific.

(no luck at linking from Hype Machine or Myspace, so live via Youtube will have to do.

Goodbye, my host brother

2007-11-24T02:25:00.000-05:00

Apologies to Cheever for the petty larceny of title and pathos.

In the spring of my 16th year, my high school took part in a nationwide competition put on by Daimler-Benz and the Goethe Institut. Eventually, good old THS was picked to be among the eighty-odd US and Canadian schools sending one student on a month-long, all-expenses-paid, international cultural exchange-cum-carefree summer jaunt around newly reunified Germany. Via various competitions and interviews (and there's a funny story about why I shouldn't have been allowed to participate in the first place - has the statute of limitations run out yet so I can spill it?) I was selected to be that one.

This was, for various reasons, one of the formative experiences of my young life. And so for my whole life, obviously.

That trip in the summer of '93 was not my first in Germany, or Europe. The first had come, ironically enough, just a few months before. I had already coaxed my parents into dropping a thousand bucks to go with a school group around Germany/Austria/Switzerland. So I ended up spending the better part of a month and a half of that spring/summer carousing through Germanic lands. What an indelible effect that had on me.

What effect did those few months, and especially that pretty exclusive, here's-it-all-laid-before-you second trip have on me? Thinking adult life was destined to be so jet-setting and cosmopolitan forevermore, probably; a blur of relatively innocent youth hostel parties (did anyone actually drink?), Mercedes-Benz factory tours, meeting diplomats and muckety-mucks, free flights, the Chinesisches Haus at Sans Souci. I had never been on a airplane before that April, after all. But it put me on a road.

In fact it was less catalyst than next logical step, the sprout first shooting out from the ground, from a seed planted long before by my father. The Air Force had dropped him in Germany decades earlier, stuck his enlisted, never-been-out-of-Jersey ass there right through the Cuban missile crisis. One minor detail aside - he worked in a little shack atop the command center, making him the first to be vaporized when Khrushchev gave the sign - I think it was and remains his lost paradise. Hearing his stories of working four days a week and getting four marks to the dollar while drinking away the rest, right there on the edge of oblivion, I'd feel the very same way. I'd been looking at his photos of the green banks of the Mosel and his old VW, and hearing him wax nostalgic over places like Bernkastel-Kues and people like his Deutsche mutti (his buddy's mother-in-law) since I was five. His oddly ancient-looking, black-covered German language books all ended up in my hands, though I hardly put them to any more use than he did. It was always a good place to me, and I wanted to get there; after all, my father's sentimental streak is mine too. And then I wanted to get to many places.
He has never been back there. But I have several times. And I have made, sporadically at least, something like an international life. Thanks to him, and then spurred on by that fortunate trip.

In the middle of that Daimler-Benz adventure, we all got off the coaches and went for week-long homestays.
I remember feeling absolutely, wretchedly sick, overexhausted and coked-up (there were crates of it around all the time; I drank nothing but Coke, Fanta and good coffee for a month) the night my hosts took me back to a little, neat village in the fields north of Karlsruhe. And right into the middle of their once-a-decade street fair. Got pressed into service at their club's beer stand the next day, working along my year-younger host brother to wash glasses and pour all manner of bizarre German booze concoctions (Cola-wein? Cola-bier?!) And it just went on from there.
It was terrific. I've never forgotten it. And I've always had "friends in Germany," who I returned to visit a couple times.

This morning I decided to clean up my oldest, most spammed-up hotmail account. The one I hardly ever bother with anymore. Right at the top was a message with my host brother's name, Carsten H-------, in the heading.

You know that it's never good to get an email like that.

Carsten's sister was 12 or 13 when I first arrived, and couldn't speak much English then. But then, no one in the family besides Carsten could - a fact I happily noted when the two of them came to dinner wearing their G N'R "Get In The Ring Motherfucker" tour shirts, no one any the wiser. She couldn't speak much English the following year, when I came for a second visit, when I brought both of them back with me for a week. Like I walked right into the middle of their strassenfest, they arrived right in time for my high school graduation party.

She still doesn't have English much now, she notes in the email I opened today - an email she sent only last weekend. How glad I am it wasn't sunk down among the crap I haven't looked at since July. It's a little clumsy and broken and understandably short, this note, springing "some very bad news. Carsten is dead."

And she writes that it looks like he killed himself, though she cannot believe that. I haven't asked why, how, when, and I don't particularly want to know right now. He had a wife and now three children; my mother, baby-blanket knitter extraordinaire, had cranked out one for his first son a couple years ago, but she couldn't keep up.

No, it was us that didn't keep up. I hadn't even heard about the third child. In truth we haven't talked much for years; just an occasional email and attached pics back and forth at the holidays, or a cheeky text I got after the US got bounced out of the World Cup last year. Funny, I was in Germany when that happened, but pretty far away. I never got in touch.

I don't know exactly what happened to him yet, nor what happened in his life generally. Things happen to people no matter who and where they are, which I'm having to come to grips with nowadays. Without anything else to go on, this makes it the second jarring, sickening suicide in my extended circle in so many months. Like there's any other kind.

I really can't begin to contemplate the why of it. No doubt that's lucky for me. But if despair is deep down at the heart of it, then nothing in life pushes me towards despair like the fear of making no good impact on anyone else, of not being remembered, of not being thought of.

It's a totally irrational fear, you know? Of course you mark the world. But then, doing yourself in seems about as irrational as it gets.

I'll remember that he and his folks were part of something that had a massive impact on me, and so they continue to do so. I'll forever remember bicycling to his high school and sitting in on his classes (German high school seemed a lot better, what little I saw) bicycling on hot summer afternoons through sleepy villages to the Rhine and across it via a pokey ferry (idyllic). Biking across the farm fields to the big pool at Bellheim, past the stinking brewery where they made the excellent beer.

I think I may be - I must be - the first (and only?) American to practice with his handball club in the little village sports hall, and likely the only Ami in attendance at a friendly between his beloved Kaiserslautern and FC Basel at a village nearby, unless Tom Dooley was playing. I'll also remember his catastrophic bermuda shorts (but we can blame that on 90s German fashion and not him), his somewhat annoying penchant for whistling along poorly with the music I played, and that yes, thanks to him and his folks I have actually seen Kastelruther Spatzen live. I'd really like to remember the trip we took with him and his father's musikverein - a big oom-pah/folk band - to the Mosel valley. From the highway, I saw the defunct base my dad lived on all those years ago. Traipsing with his father around Bernkastel-Kues, I chanced upon my father's veritable second home, that house of his now-deceased "Deutsche mutti". It was nice. It was more than nice. It was toll toll toll toll, as we would have said once upon a time.

Back on the blog

2007-11-11T14:34:00.000-05:00

And pledging once again to write a little more often. It's not that I haven't been spouting my ill-conceived opinions, indulgent solipsisms and windy musings all over the internet for the past few months. It's just that I've something like four too many blog projects going at once, which means none of them get the tender loving care and devotion they need. I'm thinking of bringing them together somehow, something like Voltron.

In the meantime, read my bit about the Avett Brothers - over on extrawack.

And lament the fact that I was here and you weren't.

And on a totally unrelated note; I like to think I have a somewhat developed sense of irony. I can usually pick off when the seemingly-outrageous is really just someone's idea of a dubiously tasteful joke. That said, having looked carefully over the myspace invite I got recently and the associated website, I have absolutely no idea if this is for real or not. Seriously...the hell?

The campaign hasn't even really started yet, and it's already throwing up copious amounts of netschmutz/cafepress junk which, like the black dude I saw on Halloween dressed like a Klansman, I really don't know if I'm supposed to find funny, grossly offensive, or what.

It's....

2007-06-03T20:01:00.000-04:00

Happy first tomatoes out of my container garden day!

And enjoy my review of The High Strung's Get The Guests at extrawack.

Cards on the table

2007-05-03T22:00:00.000-04:00

A so uncool-it's-cool (or vice versa) admission:

I fucking love karaoke. I really, really do.

Maybe it's the frustrated rock star in me. Maybe the attention-seeker. Maybe the easy, willing drunk.

Mentioned because I'm about ten minutes away from heading out to do some now. It's for a good cause - prevention of sexual assault or something - but make no mistake, I'd go do karaoke for illicit, illegal or plain-ass immoral causes. Almost certainly not for sexual assault, but give me a few good beers, and I'd sing for sexual harassment at the very least. Yeah, I'd rip it up for the basic human right to make "nice tits" comments in the workplace. Most definitely.

I've seen a lot of bad karaoke. Hell, I've done a lot of bad karaoke. It's a trial and error thing; for every stone-dead "Burning Down The House" or "Born to Run" I've done (word to the wise: just don't) there's been a "Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You" or "Need You Tonight" or "Uptown Girl" at just the right moment. The moment that everyone's drunk as fuck. That's really key.

It's a funny thing; the most unexpectedly good karaoke books I've seen tend to be in the most podunk places; an upcountry New Hampshire saloon; a townie bar in northern Vermont ski country with nine people in it; a a greasy country pizza pub off a racetrack my brother was working at in north-central Ohio, where the binder was so thick looked like it was meant to be on a probate lawyer's shelf.

Here in my college town things are positively average. At best. I could only dream, fantasize, that something as out there and incredible as Of Montreal's "The Party's Crashing Us" gets into the mix. I would kill for the chance to go nuts on this.

But then that's nothing. Give me the chance to do Karaoke Bowie with Of Montreal backing me, and I could get hit by a bus outside the bar five minutes later and die a fulfilled man.

In fact, I might actually run in front of the first bus I see anyway, just to go out on top, George Costanza-style. Yeah, I totally would.

And there's more.

Of Montreal Indie karaoke - Don't Stop Believing.
Need You Tonight.
Sweet Child Of Mine.

Oh God, how fun to be the one

2007-04-04T23:34:00.000-04:00

Do you read top music blog/friend of TPC extrawack on a regular basis? If not, get thyself to the blogroll down the right hand column and check it out. Trust me on this.

You could - no, you must - check out the recent post on Killer Of Sheep, which looks like an absolutely amazing film (and with a great story behind its making, as well). It's one of those things that makes me really, really wish I was anywhere close to the NYC area right now. If you are, I insist you go on my behalf. And your own, of course.

You could also go back 3 weeks or so and check out my guest blogging stint at the 'wack. If only I was smart/organized have to said something here, say, 3 weeks ago. I actually did, but it's still lying in the draft bin, along with another epic tome of a post - and may stay there forever more.

That extrawack post of mine was written in anticipation of a new release by one of my very favorite under-the-radar artists, Pelle Carlberg.

You probably haven't heard of Pelle yet, plaudits from the likes of me and fellow New England Indie Music n' Soccer Mafia member False 45th notwithstanding, but that really should change after two albums of the caliber of Everything Now!, and now, In A Nutshell, which came out last week. I've seen him pegged him as an amalgam of early Belle & Sebastian and Morrissey. That's no bad start in my book; throw in a little bit of melancholy, north-facing whimsy, plus a pinch of magic musical dust that all these great Swede acts seem to have, and you've got yourself a stew. Yes, you may marvel as he gets away with shamelessly Mozz-like prolix titles like "Crying All The Way To The Pawn Shop" and "Even a Broken Clock (Is Right Twice A Day)" and be dazzled (or appalled) by the chutzpah necessary to actually call a song "I Just Called To Say I Love You." (!)

Why not listen for yourself?

Pelle Carlberg - "In A Nutshell" - listen to the full album on live.fm.

Highlights? Well, there's the irresistibly folky, mandolin-a-janglin' "Middle Class Kid." Go here for live versions of it and "I love you, you imbecile" from Swedish TV. But everything else aside, I feel pretty close to exultant over the way "Clever Girls Like Clever Boys..." has finally turned out. I mentioned this tune a while ago here, after an early version turned up on his website. There is simply no way I could not like a song that said that and sounded like that - but, being a demo and all, it wasn't quite the finished article. It is now. A lot more layered, tighter, and with just the right sort of bounce. Man, I think it's great. I'll be listening to this album a lot this summer.

If you'd been checking out extrawack, as well as False 45th, you'd also be clued up to Brooklyn-based up-and-comers Dirty On Purpose, who rolled into town for a free show along with TPC-tested and approved Matt Pond PA, who I've seen twice and were a kick each time.

Their album Hallelujah Sirens is real good stuff, and the live show was damn good considering the surroundings. If the theater in the new student center (no alcohol: check, high school aud-type stage setup: check, cushy, bolted-down cineplex seating: check, somewhat obnoxious students that provoked a drummer from a misfiring opening act to hurl a stick at the crowd: check) is perhaps the least rockingest place to ever see a show, at least I got to hang for a few minutes after the show at the merch table with DJ and George from D.O.P., who are very nice guys indeed. Of course they are - they're New Englanders like me. In fact, I spent a few minutes chatting with DJ about the beauty of North Conway, NH, where both our families have vacation places. Now that's rawkin'.

Kudos, also, to Matt Pond himself (among the more ingratiating onstage chatterers around, for my money) for calling out the "tall blonde girl, who was doing a cabbage patch or something - we've never seen that done to THAT song ("New Hampshire") before."

Kudos and then some to said tall blonde girl, all 6 feet and 110 lbs (yeah, if that) of her, sporting the super-tight white ringer tee and skinny jeans, and making an absolute ass-shakin show of herself amidst a small crowd of arms-folded indie-kid freshmen. Yeah, she was totally being that girl, and she knew it. And holy hell, was she ever hot.

I don't know why, but there seems to be a sudden influx of devastating Amazons in these parts. "Influx" being the 3 or 4 I've seen in the last couple weeks, but you get the gist.

It's bittersweet. They all make me feel sorta like this:

Requiem for the inky handwritten bracket

2007-03-18T23:45:00.000-04:00

So I was signing in to listen to Sirius online (subject of a future post) the other day when I noticed that they've posted the NCAA brackets filled out by some of their celebrity jocks. Whether they really do some sort of awesome intra-Sirius $5 office pool pitting Barbara Walters, Handsome Dick Manitoba, Tony Hawk and Vincent Pastore against each other with 300 dollars or so at stake, or whether it's all just an easy way to promote their March Madness coverage, I don't know.

Looking them all over, the most interesting entry, by far, includes match-ups such as "Fuckeyes vs. Mormons," and pithy team abbreviations like "Chair thrower," "Twerps," "Farmers," and "Elvis." There's also the big blue ring left by a glass/bottle of something put down on the sheet. Nice. You mean people drink while participating in this? I couldn't imagine.

So you're asking; is it the work of Deepak Chopra? Jim Cramer? Baba Booey? Lynn Samuels?

Of course, you need look no further than Outlaw Country's Mojo Nixon. Duh.

It made me think. I haven't done a bracket by hand (for anything other than keeping track myself) for years now. Since I'm no longer in high school/not working in an office, I've done the million-zillion-people-in-it ESPN one for years, and got into a Facebook pool among friends this year, which I'm happy to say I'm leading (there's that jinxed.) It makes all the sense in the world, for everyone, to do these things online. It's easier to fill out; click and go. It's a million times easier for whoever's running the show to figure out who's winning the damn thing - that wait until 7th period to find out who was winning your pool really sucked.. You can even, as Dan Shanoff shows here, capitalize on the aggregated data from hundreds of thousands of entries to pick according to hive-thinking. You may not win the whole thing, but you're likely to put in a very, very strong showing. Not to give away any great secrets, but this is exactly what I did. And so far, so good.

Still, as Mojo shows us here, we'll be missing a little something special when the last xeroxed tourney sheet, like handwritten letters and cash before it, goes the way of the dodo, and you can't scratch "Fuckeyes" in for OSU anymore.

New songs that make us feel even more old

2007-03-03T22:30:00.000-05:00

My first music prediction of 2007: you may like it, you may hate it, but you are soon going to have to deal with Calvin Harris and this winning little slice of bizarro-retro-housey goodness. Ladies and gentlemen, your club anthem of the summer is here. Warm up your robots!

Calvin Harris on Myspace.

Apparently I am too old to get hugs.

Rise of the McBanks

2007-01-31T00:42:00.000-05:00

A few weeks ago, I was walking with my father near his small business in suburban southern Connecticut. I don’t get home much, so I was a little surprised to see the building next door all but emptied out. Having fortified myself to work for Dad on coffee and bagels and pizza and whatnot from these businesses throughout my formative years, it’s a little something like losing an old friend.

I can’t say how long the place has stood, but I’d wager it’s one of the longer-lived buildings on this middling-to-boho stretch of shopping road, not far from the line between one of the nations’ most affluent communities and one of its most troubled cities. And in my time (the past 15 years) there’s been practically no business turnover in this particular strip; a small farm stand (run by the landlord), a pizza joint, a newsstand, and a local donut shop (which survived rather well all along, despite the Dunkin’ Donuts sitting right beside it.)

The landlord’s death, along with the steady demand for commercial real estate here led inevitably to this liquidation. Nothing out of the ordinary thus far – the circle of life and all that - so let’s leave it aside for just a second. Turn around and look a hundred yards up from this doomed old plaza, where new business is sprouting up fast and furious. Bank business.

Passing this new Commerce Bank branch, what struck me most immediately was how un-banklike it looks – at least in traditional terms. Vast expanses of plate-glass scream not “I’m impenetrable,” but “gaze inside me, look at the customers, at the airy, attractively-lit space, at the localized-for-the-area mural inside (perhaps evoking old WPA post office murals; you can view a small gallery of Commerce Bank murals here)

The implacable arches-and-columns stolidity of the banks of yore might have been all so much pretense and “salesmanship”, as Blair Kamin put it in this illuminating 2005 article on the changing face of bank architecture. Yet as new branches roll over the land, defying the logic that brick-and-mortar banks should wither away as people move towards online banking, I think there’s something notable (if not bland and cookie-cutter, at the same time) about this new style of bank design, both inside and out.

First off, it’s interesting that Kamin writes “banks want to look like Starbucks,” because that’s the first comparison that came to mind. There’s a similar aesthetic, if not an aping of style, at play here in the use of space, light, building and decorative materials. You could envision this structure becoming a Starbucks or Gap in as much time as it took to roll coffee machines or clothesracks in, were the bank to fail – and that is increasingly intentional, as Kamin notes.

But in the here and now, is there an implicit cultural-technological-economic statement being made with a slightly diaphanous bank building like this, something like “not much actual physical money is kept here”? Perhaps that’s reading a bit much into it, even if there’s more than a grain of truth to it in an age of digitized currency.

We look in from the street; whereas old banks ostentiously displayed their outer facades, the exhibitionism of these new banks appears to involve a laying open of the inside, a show of people and “services” that go far beyond the deposit, withdrawal and storage of cash. Yet if you suspect it’s all extremely standardized, that’s because it is. The new generation of banks is heavy on customer-first concepts, concretized in a physical template; Commerce is “America’s most convenient bank,” open seven days a week. Kamin’s article mentions Washington Mutual’s Occasio concept (whose FAQ makes for some telling reading; “Combining the research with cues taken from top-notch retailers, Washington Mutual set out to design its retail banking stores accordingly.”) You could go a few towns over and see other Commerce branches which are identical but for the mural inside. Or you could just go to the Commerce Bank website itself – there it is, the model, the template bank.

The particular aesthetic/architectural analysis is only one aspect of this, of course; another is the macro trend of branch bank expansion and its economic and social effects upon towns and regions; from the financial muscle banks can (and must) muster to expand in line with their rivals, to the eventual glut of bank buildings potentially diluting the character and sales tax revenues of a retail area. What response, if any, could or should there be from other actors, private and political?

Right next door to this Commerce branch, on the site of an old KFC, another, as yet unidentified bank is under construction. This part of the world, I should mention, is not short of banks to begin with.

Still, you wonder, what’s planned for the site of that old farm stand strip just a block down the road?

Need you ask? I did. “Another bank,” my father responded, somewhat wearily.

A most inconvenient truth

2006-12-18T20:59:00.000-05:00

Smuggler's Notch, northern Vermont. I've been here for about 48 hours now, and I've got to say, real nice place. Quite obviously oriente more towards the families, at the expense of apres ski Magic-Hat-and-hot-tub-and-karaoke people like me, but it looks like it might be a fantastic place to ski. Note the wistful "might be" there. Because it's not supposed to look like this on the 18th of December.

Tulsa, for god's sake, has already gotten almost a foot of snow in one shot, while the Green Mountains are still very green indeed. Northeastern skiers, commence sighing.

A perfect Christmas gift for the woman you want to take revenge upon

2006-12-15T23:13:00.000-05:00

From the ubiquitous, tawdry card-collage inside urban phone booths, to the back pages of your local alternaweekly, to the internet, you and I have both seen a lot of seamy, seedy, sleazy, laughable and just plain gross advertisements for "escort services" (or as WFAN know-it-all Mike Francesa might put it, the sexual league where they play for pay.) This one outdoes them all.

"Potential clients are advised to screen the controversial scene from The Brown Bunny to be sure for themselves that they can fully accommodate all of me."

Just 50 grand, ladies.

In bed with the famous

2006-12-14T10:53:00.000-05:00

Via Youtube, here's my current favorite reclining gay German celebrity interviewer (yeah, the field is really wide open there, I'm sure) Torgen Schneider, aka Torgen am Morgen.

These are rather fun to watch. I love how his repertoire of questions is pretty much the same every single time, beginning with the all-too-disarming opening one-two regarding attitudes towards cryogenic preservation and sweatsuits. Of course I should also mention his pronounced tendency to interview celebs in bed - see his interviews with Chuck Palahniuk, Michael Buble, not to mention his epic six-parter with Chris Isaak - part one here:

This is the furthest thing from a grilling, yet I think you can estimate a celebrity subject's general coolness by their willingness to play along and have fun. The Rock? Awesome. Liza? A doll. Nick Lachey? Meh.

Like a dog licking its own rear end

2006-12-13T23:53:00.000-05:00

(...which is occurring a couple feet to my immediate left, as I write) I feel like doing this blogging thing once again.

So let's do it. Really, really do it. Do it better than ever, man. Starting tomorrow.

Meanwhile, you're up late with nothing better to do, so go listen to Of Montreal's upcoming (Jan 13) Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? Whence Kevin Barnes' tenacious Norweigen thang gives us "Heimdalsgate Like A Promethean Curse," the song that had me yelling "Come on chemicals!" and stuck in my head more than any song in 2007, easily.
While I thank extrawack for that tip-off, you go over there and check out Kevin Barnes's responses to the annual extrawack best-of email questionnaire - a grand holiday tradition.

That frozen moment

2006-11-14T01:09:00.000-05:00

I scored a hell of a goal last week. If I do say so myself.

I wouldn't say it was the most important goal I've ever scored - while I haven't exactly left a trail of tragically broken goalkeepers across the land, I probably have bundled, flicked, driven, side-footed, curled or tapped home a shot somewhere that meant more than the first goal in an intramural quarterfinal on a balmy Sunday night, before a crowd of...a couple girlfriends and roommates. And some crickets.

OK, maybe I haven't. Nevertheless.

To make a long story short, we were having a hard time getting going against a solid team, who kept coming close on corners without managing to put one in on us. Subs are free and unlimited in this league (a good thing; it's 7 a side) so a few minutes in I subbed in. Shortly afterwards, our left back started a counterattack up the wing and I followed, careering from deep in the midfield, drifting towards the center. The cross came bouncing in from the left, across the top of the box; our forward misjudged it, (let it go, he says later.) I let it bounce across me, then Lamparded the thing ferociously back across the goal and into the side netting from 20 yards or so.

The thing about it - the thing that probably made me look like a bit of a prick, to be honest - is that I had already turned away in celebration just an instant after I hit it. I was halfway back up the line before the ball settled in the net, but that was just instinctive and gut. Sometimes you'll see a shot taken in soccer, a three in basketball, and the shooter turns away, knowing it's in while it's still suspended in mid-air. I knew that shot was pegged as soon as it left my foot.

There's something lasting and delicious about that infinitesmal slice of time, that moment just after the perfect strike. Couple that feeling of time a-hanging with the particular kinaesthetic sense of effortlessness you get when you strike anything - a golf ball, a baseball, a New York Rangers fan - on the sweet spot. I mention it because, in this same state of suspension (only slightly more drawn out) are the comprehensive exams I just finished last week, after a month and then some of studying (did ya notice?). For those not acquainted with this pleasureable academic ritual (I had to explain the deal to my father repeatedly), comps are a quartet of four-hour written exams that represent the summation of whatever you've been doing for the past 2 years here. It's the last real step before the dissertation, which promises to be a barrel of fun of a different sort. It's an oddly stressful experience - much more so than I expected it to be.

But it was also real good. I'll write more about these things in coming days. I think - think - I struck them all sweetly enough. I don't think very many people in our program get knocked back at the comps stage, in any event (now there's a jinx waiting to happen.) But with the quarter up and so no time for the requisite oral defense, they're hanging there frozen in place for another month before I get to see them hit the back of the net (to beat the hell out of that metaphor).

The game? We won, no thanks to my half-volleytastic strike. Credit the dolt on the other team who pointlessly slapped a ball on the ground, then mouthed off to the ref until he sent him off and awarded us a forfeit. Thanks for stealing my thunder-toed glory, jerkstore.

I'm off to Texas tomorrow. Already put my Yankee passport on the nightstand so I don't forget it. Talk to y'all shortly after I've had my first bowl of vegetarian menudo or something.

Oh, and so this is why I pretty much always sneeze when I turn into the sun.

Happy Midterm Election Day

2006-11-07T11:52:00.000-05:00

So my country can be free.

Infatuated only with ourselves

2006-10-18T11:56:00.000-04:00

Youtube saves bloggers - especially the lazy ones with too much work and too much crap on their minds at the moment.

So for this late Wednesday morning, I give you videos based on two of my favorite iconic 60's movies. Enjoy.

The Pipettes - Pull Shapes

It's taken a while for the Pipettes to grow on me...but songs like this help.

Blur - To The End

There it goes....

2006-09-29T20:17:00.000-04:00

For a week or so I've been gestating my next post here; another typical epic treatment of ephemeral thoughts, striving for profundity, edging towards profanity. Taking in and swishing around Steven Johnson (who spoke here last week), his thoughts on the reluctance of people to return to the Freedom Tower, my parallel thoughts on the celebrated re-opening of the Superdome and how willing people are (against my early expectations) to return there, the workings of the mind, the way we learn and unlearn deeply ingrained habits and anxieties, the emerging possibility that we can take an active part in undoing and unlearning them somehow. Making our mind more clear of unnecessary and obsolete fears....making our minds more healthy...making our whole selves more healthy, perhaps, in the bargain.

Those thoughts will wait for another day. It's a little after 8 on a chilly, damp Friday night here; all I can really think about is that in less than two hours, Kiki's going to have her last treatment session. The last time she'll ever have to endure that poking and waiting and drugging and all the aftereffects of chemo that she so hardheadedly spares me. The one that finally sets her fully clear of leukemia forever (so hard for me to say the word sometimes; now I want to say it, take power of it, ball it up physically/mentally and throw it away, forever). But also the hardest of the sessions, so she tells me. She's done this all brilliantly; the last hurdle is a doozy, but she's gonna stretch and leap right over it. Still, it's only human to be anxious. And we both are.

I'm not there to sit there beside her tonight, and that really bothers me. If ever I should be there...it should be now.

I won't dwell. What can I do, here? I was listening to this song late (late!) last night. A song I love and that meant a lot to me, and I believe, to her, a couple years ago. For very my own little Top of the Pops....try to avoid your worst fear...the thought of me singing along with it....

Mike's Anatomy

2006-09-18T00:34:00.000-04:00

Lovely day here today; one of those clear, mid-80s, mid-September beauts that you clutch on to and revel in, knowing that it's just a few days before the air starts to crackle, and the leaves with it, and then it's really fall. What better way to take full advantage of it, AND mark a new season of Grey's Anatomy* than to spend half the afternoon down at the local hospital?

I spent the better part of the day waiting inside - in a sunny, spartan waiting room, in a little examination room in which I feared I had been misplaced - to get this new red lump, with intriguingly bite-shaped marks on my forearm checked out. Two and a half hours of waiting, to find out...not very much about the provenance of my wound. They got the slivery black legs/fangs/probiscises out of me, which was convenient; I'm handy with tweezers but my autoclave is busted. I wonder how much I'm gonna get charged for this operation, though. I ended up with some parting gifts - a script for antibiotics, and instructions to put a warm compress on it five times a day. That last part is nice, but redundant. I typically apply warm compresses to my body 12-14 times each and every day.

So, who wants to see some pictures of my apparent staph infection? I figured so much. While I'm uploading a Flickr album of it, go hunt down some episodes of Appalachian Emergency Room. You'll get the gist of my afternoon.

I'm relieved to report that no one came in with items accidentally nailed to their scrotums, a la SNL. But I'm a little sad to report that no one came in with items accidentally nailed anywhere. However, the mountain mama who asked (inasmuch as someone "asks" by boldly announcing that she's going to "put on some cartoons, since there's so many kids in here. Pokey-mon, Shokey-mon, or sumthin'") to turn off the Bengals-Browns game around the 80th minute of my stay nearly made me give up - antibiotics, or amputation, almost waited till Monday.

*I'm just about as interested in the tribulations of Meredith Grey as I am in that other media It girl of the moment, lonelysham15 - which is to say, I'm not. At all. But I guess I'm in the minorities on both of these.

Some thoughts on the day

2006-09-11T18:45:00.000-04:00

Why do we take such pains to commemorate these anniversary days - one year, five years, twenty-five years - as if they were especially different from any other day, just because they round off the units we tend to so neatly? What's the difference between five years, and four years and a bit?

It is twenty years, two hundred and fifty-nine days since the first time I went up to the top of the World Trade Center. That was the day after Christmas, 1985; it's pretty easy to remember since the trip, a gift from an aunt and uncle, was 'delivered' in the form of an inscription inside a NYC picture book.

I remember the strangeness of many first experiences that day, like taking the Long Island Rail Road in from Suffolk County. I realize now that it was my first real train trip anywhere, so it's little wonder that the stations, names and sights flashing by made some deep impression: Cold Spring Harbor (that town where I had seen actual Ferraris and Rolls Royces on the street, it fascinated me,) Syosset, Jamaica. The wind whipped down the canyons of Manhattan; though I grew up within a hundred miles of the city and saw it a hundred times from the Throg's Neck and GWB, it would be almost another ten years before I went there very much, and so for a long time after I associated the place with clear, biting cold. I remember the longest elevator ride I've ever taken (and ever will?) the floor-to-ceiling windows on the observation deck of the WTC and the vertigo they induced, my grandmother's town in New Jersey marked out on the glass (but I couldn't make that little burg out) and small planes flying over the river, below us.

It is five years and three days since I got tremendously drunk on a Saturday night at that beautiful, barely furnished apartment I shared with an old college friend on Boulevard East. Drunk on red wine along with M. and M., dear friends who are now split, dispersed and lost to me - one back to Poland, the other still in the city and enthusiastically enmeshed in some motivational cult the last I heard. Five years and two days since I woke up, hungover and not remembering what had happened to me, how I even ended up in my bed at the end of it all. Also five and two since Kiki and I had our first "fight" over the phone. Five years and one since we followed up with a desperate, drawn-out, hard evening conversation on that Monday night. I was sitting in that chair beside the window with the West Side view, trying to convince her not to give up on me, to keep her from "taking some time off" from us. What in the world possessed me - sometimes a fatalist, but never a clairvoyant - to say what I said to Kyra on the phone that night, in protest?

"None of us knows if we're going to be here tomorrow."

It is still incredibly weird to me that I said that, on that night, and I'm not certain anyone else would believe it if I told them. But it's true. September 10th.

Well over five years have now passed since I was regularly practicing with a local soccer club on the rooftop field at Pier 40, the towers lit up and beautiful just down the Hudson on those chilly spring evenings. And it is five years and a couple months since I would finish work in Newark, take the PATH into the WTC, and amble out to Battery Park City. There I would soak in the late summer, late afternoon riverside vibe; park-goers, sailboats, water-taxis plying back and forth, the haze over New Jersey. Eventually, invariably I'd fade into sleep for a while, the whir of the city all around me. A little later some fellow Metro fans would show, and we'd start a clumpy post-work game.

My father has told me about when he was working down around the city in the early 70's. The Towers weren't yet finished, but for some reason he and a colleague were inside one of the buildings, and decided to go for a little trip as far up as they could. When the elevator doors opened, they were on an unfinished floor, minus the windows and thus mighty breezy. They got out of there quick. I get dizzy just thinking about it.

Today it is five years and one day since I finally put a plan into motion - my half-baked plan to make a few bucks on the side teaching English, and in doing so, preserve my sanity. This, after all, was what I had come to NYC to do, what I did do for a little while; qualifications aside, I was always more apt in the classroom than the cubicle. With a stack of flyers fresh and hot off the printer and the idea of covering Washington Street, I went into that Hoboken evening on my mission. Now we know that this was the last night of an age. Let history note that it was oppressively hot, humid, with glowering black clouds rolling in; my flyers, my packing tape and I made it about halfway before the skies absolutely opened up.

Damning the expanse between bus stops, I sprinted to the dim end of Washington Street, and waffled on tacking one last flyer up inside the bus shelter, lest New Jersey Transit hunt me down for desecrating their property. I got home soaked to the skin, only to have that pleading, forlorn Monday night conversation, which I finally lost. And I never, ever got a call about English lessons.

It was outrageously beautiful out, five years ago this morning. I saw many glorious morning, afternoon, and night scenes, in the course of living a year and a half just a mile from the city, with that broad, all-encompassing Hudson view which I loved. But this one was remarkably so, so much that I really was dazzled by the bright, clear yellow band of sunlight on the river, despite being so late. I had woken up late and was rushing; the last regular bus to Hoboken went by at 9:15. A few minutes after nine I hurried down to the street, without breakfast, without having turned on the TV. At the bus stop a block up, a few people were pointing downtown, across the river. That's when I saw the tower smoking, and a reddish-blackish puff come out of the side.

Perhaps it's only this way in retrospect, but today, the most amazing, amusing, befuddling thing to me, is that I still tried to go to work. Of course, neither I nor anyone else there knew what the hell was going on; I thought a fire, perhaps a bomb (it is thirteen years, one hundred and ninety-seven days since I was home sick from school, and the show I was watching suddenly cut out when a bomb went off in the North Tower). It was, as everyone has said a million times, surreal. Someone at the bus stop said they had seen the plane hit. Not a little private plane, a jet. A moment later someone came along, and told us they just showed a second plane hit on television. And yet I got on the bus to Hoboken. That amazes me now.

It was a slow, increasingly anxious bus ride down to Hoboken; some kid had a radio and was relaying news: fire and smoke at the Pentagon, planes missing all over the place. When I went down into Hoboken PATH station, both towers were smoking horrendously, almost right above us. I got on a train to Newark - again, I don't know what I was doing - and sat there for a while. People who had been in the towers were getting on now: "They didn't evacuate us, so I evacuated myself." Girls who looked younger than me talked about seeing people jump. Shock.

When we came out from underground near Jersey City, there was nothing but that enormous gray cloud behind us. Someone said the towers had both collapsed. Others, including myself, refused to believe it. That was just the smoke, drifting around to obscure the view. They may be burning, but they couldn't actually go down.

In JC everything - the trains, the station - was in the process of shutting down, and so it was chaos. Thousands of people wandering the streets around Journal Square, without any idea where they were or how they would get home. Bits of dust and paper falling like snow. If I hadn't happened on a bus taking people on its way back to the depot, which lay a few towns up from mine, it would have been a much longer and more arduous day than it was.

I got home around noon, watched the news, finally got through to my family, and steadily ignored my flatmate's phone calling, knowing it had to be his family in Brazil. He worked for the stock exchange after all, splitting time between Brooklyn and Wall Street, and while I was relatively sure he was fine, I didn't want to say. His odyssey home wasn't untypical - he straggled in, having walked from the financial district to Brooklyn and back to the midtown ferries, sometime after nine that night. And he left that job, and the city, little more than a month later, even before I did.

Kiki was the first to call me that day, to make sure I was safe and sound.

And that is my 9/11 story, which I don't really think about too much anymore, outside of...yearly anniversaries like this. There's a bit more, but I've already written a ton, without saying anything terribly profound. While it's amazing to think that I was there, as I sit here in rural Ohio listening to people talk about that morning five years ago today, I find it harder and harder, more and more of a reach to put my own claim in; "I was there." I'm so far away in space and time now; in the end I was very lucky to not lose anyone directly, though a few friends of friends lost their lives in the attack. The feeling is less "witness to history" than "bystander to history." But maybe I diminish it a little. I don't know.

I left that job a couple months later, that place on New Year's Eve 2001. I've been back to the city plenty of times, but I've never been to see the hole in the ground, and I don't imagine I will before something new is in its place.

It's five years and six days since I last was in the WTC, doing the long WTC PATH-NYC subway transfer on my way from Newark to 137th Street for classes, and I remember every last bit of it.

Like Ryan Adams, I still love you, New York. But I'm hard put to say if I could ever go back there to live.

The most well informed, moderately liberal burdie around

2006-09-08T01:26:00.000-04:00

Who listens to NPR?

Only this little fella. And a consistent one he is, dropping by my window most late afternoons recently, right around the time All Things Considered is streaming. Now, he's not like the others who go right to the feeder tacked up on the glass (though he's seen there as well). Rather, he perches on the sill and stares out at...whatever little birds stare at. Good worming spots in the grass? And then he turns towards the screen and peers inside for minutes and minutes at a time. Clearly he's captivated by something. Me. MEE-chelle Norris. Something.

Kiki, I think, would have another adjective to describe him. One rhyming with "burdie."

And now a short message from our sponsors, "We're Not In High School Anymore"

2006-09-08T01:06:00.000-04:00

What is it with people I know making anonymous potshots over the blogs? And being nasty towards a person they don't even know, at that.

Please, please, for the love of God, please stop it. You're not doing anything for me, regardless of your intentions, and you're bothering someone I love. Even more so by hiding who you are. I don't particularly want to know who or why. Just, stop. Thanks.

The name of the muse

2006-09-05T20:32:00.000-04:00

Summer ends only once officially, a few weeks from now. But by my reckoning The Summer Here straggles to an end, bit by bit: the last sweltering night I spend laying in bed and hearing people monkey around in the pool of the student complex next door (I know my neighbors and their friends play a game called "chairball" during the day, but decline to speculate on the pool games they play at 3:45 in the morning, or to go find out); the sudden accretion of Cuyahoga County-plated SUVs, fresh young faces and jort-sporting parent types around town, inversely proportionate to the amount of street parking available, which signals that university move-in day has arrived; the last bedraggled and broken-down, Suncoast-smacking hurricane to wearily dump its remnants upon us, like so much surplus crops upon a Third World market (we've had only one of these, a little piece of Ernesto wandering over right in time for the football season opener Saturday night.)

Soon it will be autumn, my favorite time of the year. It already feels like it. Goodbye to those lazy, hazy, lazy, crazy, lazy, lazy days of summer. I overdo the "lazy" a little. I haven't really been a sloth, in the sense of sprawling across the futon and staring glassy-eyed at trash television, the shifts of my swollen bulk setting off little puffs of Dorito dust, crinkling burrito wrappers and tumbling fallen soldiers. No, no, happily no. As I wrote the other day, I've done a few decent things with it. But if I haven't yet stopped feeling a little under-accomplished at the end of each night, then it is no surprise that the last notes of this summer pile upon each other to sound a whole chord that is...irresolute. Dissonant.

One problem (among many) of growing up thinking that You'll Be A Writer (and this is fundamental to me, the skeleton key to understanding the strange mixed mind that results - full of bravado, unease, discriminate self-exhibition, love of humanity and the impulse to control it - but how pretentious that sounds if you aren't afflicted, or even if you are) is the mystification of that life, which must lead down a path to that nagging discontent. I used to casually imagine, assure myself of ending up in some (no doubt magical) work-place largely out of time and beyond responsibility; I mean, to live that idealized writing life of quiet regularity, no distractions (i.e. the distraction of living in society, having the concerns of social beings - this didn't really figure in those soft-focus visions), a life of waking early each day to greet the muse, whereby we would copulate vigorously (some image of the creative process!). In other words I worshipped the image of a life that few people, if any, actually live, and one that I'm probably not suited for, at least as currently constituted.

But then those have actually been my living conditions for the past two months. Nowhere to be, much less money to do anything with; I've seen the inside of a bar or two, but that's been old for a while. This summer we have seen that however industrious, I am not really regular (strike one), that I have the attention span of a toddler matched with the aspirations of Faust (fouled off), and that I've got these very, very real concerns - old work to make up, work that's coming, a "career" that's rushing up surely enough, and most of all, Kiki being happy and well. Waking before eleven was a struggle all summer, and so the days flew by (the working people of the world collectively mourn for me). This summer, I spent a lot of time (maybe too much) pacing in and around this place as if it were a boat, thinking about my thinking as it was the sea I was drifting over; I thought about those points out on my horizon, wrote, read, floated a little closer to them, but by eye alone there's no way to gauge just where I've gone, just what work of substance I've done. If any.

I figure I have, but what? That's one thing that's been bugging me, and I think of charting it...finding some bearings.

So here and there I'll try recapping some of the summer stuff I alluded to a few days ago.

June 16-17, 2006: A long 36 hour period, as any that takes you from Connecticut to Newark to Manchester to Hanover would be. Conversations with my mother on the drive down: the funny-were-they-not-so-sad dysfunctions of my extended family; my brothers' jobs and goals (I am not so in touch). Crossing the GWB within view of the NJ apartment I lived in five years ago, she offers an insight so piercing and honest and utterly right about me then (and in the year after, when I left that job, that shocked place, drifted home and more or less shut myself up in the ancestral pile); "you weren't happy then." It's one thing to know it yourself, another to realize your parents knew it too, yet another to have her finally say it so simply. With the implicit "but you are a little more, now," unspoken. And to agree. As I did.

Manchester with four hours to kill. Good taste suppresses any sentimentality over being back in England for the first time in years. Or else circadian arrhythmia does that; no wet-eyed glances at seeing the airport Boots or The Sun again, and certainly no backsliding to M. K. '98, that tortured and searching transatlantic. Once upon a time maybe, but not now; you see it is all the same place, and the pop stars have different names but do all the same things. I just want to keep moving. Momentum, and a succession of moving escalators get me across the airport.

Where I must wait. Baggage belt breakdowns produce stymied Mancunian vacationers and football fans, and that ain't my scene, baby. A proper English vegetarian breakfast; fried veggie sausages, fried little mushrooms, fried "tomatoes", all soaking in deep yellow yolk, brought by an Eastern European girl with that straw-colored hair. Watch the airplanes. I set my laptop up in the stinking smoking section, lanky young janitors puffing and speaking Polish nearby; clamber behind the fruit machines to plug in it and find out about Kiki, only to discover that wi-fi don't come for free here. Should have figured on that. The first time I contend with this pan-European menace, but not the last.

Then, Hanover on Saturday afternoon. Equally unsentimental over this, and it's been even longer since I've been in Germany, where I feel curiously at home. I stayed on a quiet street behind the central train station, in a small hotel run by an exuberantly friendly German. My own Deutsch is six or seven years out of practice at this point, but pride obliges me not just to try and bumble it, but to fake understanding whatever he tells me about the World Cup festivities downtown. I'll find them come hell or high water, later. I can barely mutter "ja" at this point for all my inflight study, but I'm so tapped out I'd be subconversational in English too.

The Bigsoccer YouTube video thread is a little 15 page (and counting) gift to anyone who loves music, especially great old rarities. My most recent contribution to it connects here; after the Ghanaians beat the Czechs I gave in to a mercy nap. Between the channel-clicking and the conking, some cosmic governor of appropriate Germanic weirdness decreed that this should be on my television.

Jet lag + nappy daze + glam roller disco + just how irresistible was Olivia Newton-John (and if you know anything about her in this movie, you'll get the extra delicious irony for me) + I haven't seen this since I was a kid + I can't believe they actually ever made stuff like this in the first place and to think I was alive then, too = truly awesome.

Gene Kelly freaks the shit out of me in that split-screen, though.

And here is where I went to watch the US shoot themselves in both feet against Italy; a patch of dirty grass transformed, Xanadu-like, into a corporatopia of uninspiring German pizza and inspired German beer, cover bands, lingering jubilant Ghanians and utterly defeated-looking Czechs, Germans masquerading as Ghanians, Germans masquerading more successfully as Italians, and the adjoining clatches of blue and red shirts. My wearing the '98 US jersey was about all the jinx we would need. Night fell fully after the match and we tried to forget that our World Cup was pretty over. The house music came on, as it always must in Germany, and there was drunken limboing. Inside I was still cursing the idiocy of Pope and Mastroeni. Everyone I met there was from Minnesota. I don't think they cursed. But they shouted, oh but they shouted, as we were shooed out of the place. I lost them all somewhere on the streets afterwards, before any sort of trouble ensued - the sort of trouble you might find these days, bellowing about the U!S!A! around the Hauptbahnhof after midnight, and I skipped half-getrunkenly the rest of the way back.

Too soon?

2006-09-04T18:20:00.000-04:00

I do admire the spirit behind the ad (kind of), but isn't it a bit strange for Johnnie Walker to be giving the symbolic warm hug/rah rah to the Lebanese people? I wonder how it would have gone over if Anheuser-Busch had superimposed two gleaming Bud tall boys on an aerial shot of lower Manhattan, and stuck that on some NYC bus stops around Columbus Day '01.

I won't even get into the fact that quite a large number of Lebanese (but by no means all) would have a slight doctrinal issue with fine Scotch whiskies and things of that sort.

What's "chutzpah" in Arabic?

Throwaway

2006-09-02T21:10:00.000-04:00

I had another meandering, inessential thousand word epic half-drafted and I'll get around to finishing it when I feel like it (maybe later, maybe not), but, all there is to say at the moment is...it's been a fucking miserable day/afternoon/evening, the pins stuck in precisely where they needed to be by the people who know where to stick them, and I'm not looking forward to the next one, or the next one, or the next one. Days or pins.

Physical pleasures, mental compulsions

2006-08-29T01:25:00.000-04:00

One of the pleasurable little things in my life; playing soccer in an absolute driving downpour on a hot summer evening. How often have I done that? Not often enough; I think back now to a week of soccer camp in the summer after eighth grade; pouring rain as we scrimmaged in the afternoon and I let a cut on my elbow bleed, no doubt in order to show how extra tough I was. Rain, grass, blood and fourteen year old bravado (wasn't there a girl there, a pretty blonde?)

It's been raining off and on for the past forty-eight hours here (and disgustingly humid all through), but the skies saved up twenty minutes of monsoon-grade stuff for us this evening. Two hours later, a few of my bones are still soaked through, my hamper-bound clothes stink of rain mixed with sweat (so I've got to get them into the washer tonight), and my boots won't be dry for a week. Apart from the thunderclaps snapping down too near - this slight, silly anxiety about lightning, not least of all when I'm running around a flat, exposed field with big metal things nearby - and the way I must ease up on the choppy ground so I don't wreck my knee again over nothing, it's a joy.

I see Kiki writes so tenderly of her own physical joys now, the joy of her son waking her up in the morning with a hug and his fingers tracing her lips, and I love to read it. Her joys become mine; her opening up allows me to open up, and it can only do us both good. We all do better when we can make sense of things. To know what she feels and thinks, how happy they are there together, though they're far from me. We'll fix that last part soon.

Some things about me, worth knowing at the moment.

The academic year is starting again in a week or so. I don't know exactly which day, which is typical of me. I'm confident I'm not supposed to be anywhere tomorrow morning, in any event.

At the moment, I'm supposed to put together an abstract for a seminar in Texas in November. Due a week from tomorrow. I've got ideas, but nothing more.

The new school year I'm starting should be my dissertation year, but in fact I'm still quite a ways from that part. Meetings, exams, proposals, etc. I resigned myself to spending another year on this a while ago, but since Kiki has dedicated herself to pushing through this round of treatment so that we can get on with our lives together both happily and healthily, it's only right (and a very good idea) that I get on the stick and wrap my stuff up on time, instead of dragging out my time here.

I am in love with an amazing woman, this Kiki of mine. Crazily enough, she is in love with me too. I could not be luckier. Her reality is her son, her sensitivity, her generosity, her spirit, her beauty; for the moment, it is also this fight against a nasty disease that she will win. My reality, for the moment, is to watch from here, support her and bug her from here, to pray from here, and be amazed by her as she makes it happen. She is one stubborn burdie, and a damn sight tougher and stronger than any AML.

All this has had its effects on me.

In the meantime, I am trying to figure out what to do with this blog, which has been a little of everything and a lot of nothing up till now.

I think the answer is "write in it." Like so. But as with all things about me, it must be a little more complicated than that.

Some write their blogs to snark, some to pontificate, some to spread the news about this that or the other, some just to write whatever comes up. That's all good, but I think if I'm going to stick with this, I want to try and do something else with it, besides all of those; to make shape of things. Things like myself.

Let's say you're a type of conscious person. You must know when and where you are impressionable, when it comes to books, art, music, and the people that bring them into being. If you are thoughtful enough, you sense who and what shaped you. You have sympathies. Not all of these are equal though; some blows are glancing and you remember only a word or sensation, others leave permanent marks. You might arrange them in a hierarchy or a pyramid. There at the top are your few models or imagined mentors, below, this massive assortment of useful others, a little niche for almost everything you've taken in. It's a jarring hodgepodge when you start young, when you hardly know what you're reading and impressing upon yourself.

The vast, ancient Yucatan crater of my inner creative sensibility, the awesome reminder of something that hit a long time ago and deeply canalized my perceiving, writing mind, this I owe to the example of Nabokov's Speak, Memory. To this, at the start of Chapter 14;

"The spiral is a spiritualized circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free. I thought this up when I was a schoolboy, and I also discovered that Hegel's triadic series (so popular in old Russia) expressed merely the essential spirituality of all things in their relation to time, Twirl follows twirl, and every synthesis is the thesis of the next series. If we consider the simplest spiral, three stages may be distinguished in it, corresponding to those of the triad: We can call "thetic" the small curve or arc that initiates the convolution centrally; "antithetic" the larger arc that faces the first in the process of continuing it; and "synthetic" the still ampler arc that continues the second while following the first along the outer side. And so on."

Never mind how superficial and ham-fisted my reading of it was when I read it years ago, when I did not read with much attention (and do I read any better now? I'm just learning....)

"A colored spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life."

I don't know whether to curse good old Vladdy or thank him for this, this...sense that there could be a conceptual pattern to one's life. Well of course he might see that; the man was a synaesthete. He fixated famously upon things like chess problems and butterflies (possessors of their own mysterious, ordered patterns) upon words, upon incidents and relics lost to time and chaos but articulated by his solicitious memory; some speculate he had Asperger's Syndrome on top of it all, but in any event, he was one of those geniuses. And you, M, are no genius. How arrogant, and quite stupid, for you to follow that approach.

It doesn't matter. It's just what I've done, or tried to do for years now. Sussing out the pattern of my life by combing over it again and again, restoring and linking the diffused bits of this memory or person to that, following a conviction that there must be some order to it all. What is the image to look for? The picture of an intrinsic, natural, deterministic order? An order created only by my willed selection? A perfect Hegelian-Nabokovian spiral, or something else? I don't know, and probably will never know; the figure may always lie just beyond the horizon, an irresolvable, tantalizing literary suggestion that goads me. Or I might crack the code. Whatever that means.

Some problem. And a continual project, here and everywhere else I write.

2006-08-28T02:21:00.000-04:00

In between the heavy thoughts, it's been too hot to think this weekend.

Me: should I change my title to "Let's Bore Each Other"?
Kiki: yes
Kiki: sounds lovely
Me: does a blog like mine really NEED that title?
Kiki: you got a point there baby

I love my Kiki so much, so much....

Summer break has broken

2006-08-25T13:35:00.000-04:00

Or, TPC Restart XIV: This time, I really, really, really mean it to stick.

I last managed to write anything here two and a half months ago, in the midst of a minor end-of the quarter whirl. That's an academic term for something normal people call "you think that's hectic?" before laughing heartily. Well, there's a reason I never seriously considered becoming an options trader or an emergency room surgeon, f'rinstance; I'd melt part way through the first 24 hour (or whatever it is) internship shift.
Also, I just can't take blood and that is an issue. My hands are kinda jittery, too.
But yeah, the point is that ninety hour weeks are no friend of mine.

Even forty hard 9-to-5 hours is pushing it. Give me the academic life, with its semester-long slow burn and irregular, knobbly, but still quite serious demands on energy and psyche instead; I'm fit for that, being pretty irregular and knobbly myself. But past a certain point in an academic term - the point where the deadlines start raining down and time really does compress - I shift into a survival mode. The solid refusal to write any more than necessary, the instinctive defense against a creeping case of cerebral overload. A willed lethargy. I don't write much in my journals, and I don't bother here at all. Unfortunately, it's not a very comfortable state to live in, especially when you see yourself as one of those people who write to think and to function. One of those people fixated upon discerning the shape and order of life by scribbling prose. When you can't or don't do so, it's like holding your breath. It's high time I broke out of that rut, started breathing normally again, and saw how long it can last.

To catch up with what's happened since, as briefly as possible.

I finished the quarter. My last round of classes ever, or so it should be, though there's still a few things to be put to bed.

I ran the Wendy's Triathlon for Team in Training. Blog here, minus the raceday recap I've been meaning to write for a while now. Whatever I put into it, I got back much, much more in terms of discipline, stamina (in more than one sense) accomplishment. Giving is good, and there's a hell of a lot that needs to be done. I hope you'll try TnT or something like it when you get the chance, too.

I spent a couple weeks in my beloved Europe: Hannover, Dresden, coastal Lithuania and Vilnius, London, Manchester. Then another couple weeks in my beloved Connecticut. August finds me back in my beloved (am I capable of saying that now?) Ohio. That is where you find me now, on the arduous to-bed-by-3, up-by-noon, read-on-the-sun-drenched-patio-all-afternoon schedule. Lord knows I'm grinding down.

Much to write about all this, and I'll get to that in coming days. For now I'll talk about my summer's books.

There's a sensible reason for this. Reading has been my primary occupation this summer. I'm not working for the first time since I came here, so I've got lots of free time, few distractions and very little cash; a better situation for reading is hard to imagine. There's a more personally ingrained reason, too. I'll lose interest and slack off here like I've slacked off before, unless I write a little more personally and deeply here; I want to correspond with the Great Collective You out there, but to do that, you've got to know me a little. I used to be one of those bookish young romantics who so dubiously believe that no one else could really know his soul without also having read all the books he's read. Did I say dubious? No, it's just ludicrous, I understand now; let's read each other's bookshelves up and down, it won't bring us all that much closer. But I still like to talk about books and talk through books and there's a chance that you do too. So here's most of my summer reading up till now:

A Fan's Notes - Frederick Exley
Flaubert's Parrot - Julian Barnes
The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder
The Fourth Dimension (interviews with Christa Wolf)
Clueless in Academe - Gerald Graff
Striving Towards Being (Letters of Czeslaw Milosz and Thomas Merton)
How To Read a Book - Mortimer Adler

The rhyme and reason to this sampling is quite obvious, isn't it?

But of course it isn't. It was dumb luck, the pursuit of fancies, and good fortune. There's a sprawling, musty secondhand shop in the basement of a building uptown full of mannequins, chintzy jewelry and scratchy old polyester things; down the far wall, there's a nice eclectic stash of cheap secondhand books that I like to plumb through from time to time (later on I'll tell you what I got there today); I picked up the Exley, Barnes and Wilder for a dollar each and toted them to Europe and back; the Graff was an excellent gift from a friend, and the Wolf had been sitting unread in a pile for months, ever since I finished a biographical piece on Max Frisch. The Adler was the product of a whim, wikipedia, and being so close to a good library; I should have read it years ago.

I've had a lucky summer; just about every book I've read has came along at the right time, or filled a need somewhere; for entertainment, enlightenment, identification, information, provocation. I'll go into detail in coming days. More to be said about this, in the next installment...

Consume this:

Happy 90th birthday, Daniel Schorr. There's no sage veteran broadcaster I'd rather hear from in these wretched times.

The great Jarvis Cocker is coming out with a new solo album after a five-year post-Pulp break. On Myspace (of course) you can hear his new, totally apropo for these times single (note; it's heavy on a certain naughty word, the one that starts with a "c", so be forewarned). Perhaps even better, click on "jarvcast" and you can listen to his reading of a wonderful Icelandic folk tale.

Pelle Carlberg: hard at work on the song of the summer

2006-06-01T12:43:00.000-04:00

A while ago I mentioned Swedish singer-songwriter Pelle Carlberg, whose "Riverbank" was one of my favorite songs of last year (and which reminds me, I've got to go back and finally order the CD)

He's posted a new song - or rather, a song in progress - on his site and I think you ought to hear it, if nothing else for the wonderful title of "Clever Girls Like Clever Boys Much More Than Clever Boys Like Clever Girls." Download it here. A pithy, all-too-true statement on the relations between the brainier elements of the sexes. A gentle, jangly buildup, the inevitable handclaps, and a breathlessly-delivered chorus with just a little too much jammed into it, but in the most charming of ways. What's not to like?
It's too long by about a minute, but then he does say it's a rough version and I've got faith that he'll end up with another gem by the end.

On the two old Austrians squaring off in my head

2006-06-01T12:18:00.000-04:00

"The limits of my language are the limits of my world." - Wittgenstein

But no no, Ludwig, there's a whole universe beyond language, after the pretty, precocious describer-words and bragger-words fall away. There is courage and beauty and so much beyond language. I've been shown this. I know this. I keep trying to touch it.

What do you say, Rainer?

"When the traveler returns from mountain-slopes into the valley, he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead some pure word, the yellow and blue gentian. Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit tree, window...Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland. Speak and bear witness."
- Rilke

So that's what my mind is rolling around just at the moment - and let's be honest, probably always will be; this tension between the sayable and unsayable. The insufficiency and wonder of words. Always find myself wishing I had more, better, shinier...but look at what you get today, instead. You get this beautiful inscrutable life, and if you're lucky enough to ignite off the right people, you get going living it as fully and interestingly and with as much love as you possibly can.

What is happening here?

2006-05-13T14:27:00.000-04:00

Something is going on
That's not quite clear

Like Mr. Richie thought, something's happening here all right. Not that you've been waiting with baited breath or anything, but I'm planning (for the umpteenth time) to devote a lot more time, love and sweet tenderness to this project I like to call The Parallel Campaign. If you're here for the first time in a while, you'll notice some surface changes (now that I've figured out how to play with templates, and discovered one I dig). More to come...very soon. Stay tuned.

The brew-thru next door is called "Elegantly Wasted"

2006-03-31T23:08:00.000-05:00

A decade and a half later, INXS is really big in Appalachia.

1995-2006

2006-03-08T12:08:00.000-05:00

An email I just finished writing to a friend overseas.

Today Modern Football killed my team.

Just a note here, on a morning when fully-corporatized, "branded" modern soccer takes another big leap forward. It's an interesting case, not at all unpredictable to those paying attention to what goes on in the game, and yet still really disturbing when it happens to you and your team.

Since the league here started in 1995, I have been supporting the New York-based (New Jersey-based, in truth) team, the Metrostars. This was supposed to be the marquee franchise, the showpiece team of the new league - but without repeating the mistakes of the Cosmos, whose unchecked spending turned soccer into a brief fad but basically bankrupted the whole NASL. The New York area is full of soccer fans of all sorts, and there were great crowds at the start (the second game I went to, on a hot July Saturday in 1996, drew 53,000+) for a mediocre product; a lot of the casual fans kept coming for a time, but a long stretch of mismanagement, comical play, and all-around buffoonery drove them off. 1999 was the nadir; the German newspaper Bild called us "the worst team in the world" when Mattheus announced he was coming to us, and they weren't far off. There are far too many stories about 1999 to go into here; it was just one of those seasons in which we would have been relegated by the halfway point - if there was relegation in the US. There isn't - instead, teams are given a chance to get better; we did, but only to the level of mediocrity. Mediocrity doesn't really cut it in the NY market, and our original owners - the giant fiber optic corporation Metromedia (hence "Metrostars") bailed. We were picked up by AEG, another giant corporation which at one point owned 5 of the 10 MLS teams; AEG is run by a reclusive, Republican-fundamentalist billionaire (with a strange belief in soccer, apparently), and its business is entertainment - cinemas and concert facilities, generally. We needed a stadium in the worst way, playing in an 80,000 seat facility that makes even 20,000 crowds look tiny; AEG wanted a foothold in the NYC concert market. Devoting scant real resources to the team, AEG tried to coax the state of NJ into funding a new stadium (one we've been hearing about since 1996), and then finally, put some money into the deal themselves, after years of hold ups. As I write, no ground has yet been broken.

Last week I was passed along some hush-hush info, that AEG was about to sell the team for $30 million+ to Red Bull; Red Bull has already bought their hometown team, SV Salzburg, and renamed them "Red Bull Salzburg", changing the colors to Red Bull colors, and erasing 70 years of history at the stroke of a pen. Tens of thousands of petitions and numerous protests meant nothing to them then. Now the same thing was about to happen here. This is real important money to the league here, to soccer in the US, but especially to AEG. The news broke a couple days ago here, and this morning, it's being made official. After 10 years, there's no more "Metrostars". It is Red Bull New York - playing in NJ of course, first and foremost a branding effort for a can of sugar and caffeine. What a few hundred diehards, and several tens of thousands of casual fans, slowly built dies without a sound.

The experience of being a "Metros" supporter, perhaps more than that of any other team in the US, has long been thankless, heartbreaking, painful; only occasionally is there some glimmer of light. Today there is a group of somewhere between 200-400 real diehards, many of whom have been around since 1995; many, many have found better things to do with their time. Some look at this as a fresh start, with a "committed owner"; others are revolted by the thought of giving up what "tradition" there was, no matter how meager; still others refuse to be made into a branding tool. It's a truly complex situation. "Metrostars", after all, was born out of the corporate world as well, however the few fans that cared were able to gradually wrest some group meaning out of the word "Metro" (the de rigeur name), and even Metromedia never forced supporters into becoming fiber optic salesmen as they cheered. They were far too neglectful and clueless to be capable of that. Red Bull is anything but neglectful of their "brand".

Well, that's that. It's done. As a few hundred supporters who will get run over by the Red Bull New York train without a moment's hesitation, we're each considering whether to walk away entirely, sign on, or take some symbolic other option. As I mentioned above, this is not at all out of line with where the sport has been going - just the next big step. Modern football.

Michael

Readin, 'Ritin, Runnin...

2006-03-05T22:53:00.000-05:00

Tonight it hit me that in the next 11 days, I have three sizable papers (15-20 pages) and a couple other assignments to finish. Plus creating a final exam, giving it, and correcting 25 undergrad term papers. So if I haven't been writing in here much lately to begin with, you'll hopefully understand why I'm scarce in the next week and a half.
That said, a few weeks ago I wrote that I was starting to train for the Wendy's International Triathlon, along with Team In Training. That's on like Donkey Kong now, and I wanted to say just a little more about it.
You can find out more, and donate (donate! donate! Every little bit is really appreciated) to my Team in Training fund over here. I'm doing a little separate blog on my training and fundraising efforts, as well.

Morbidity

2006-02-05T17:45:00.000-05:00

I don't know what's creepier - the fact that so many kids-gone-homicidally-haywire can be easily looked up on Myspace, or the fact that months after their shooting sprees have passed, their sites are still being left up. (Ok, the last one is a mirror, but the rest aren't.)

Actually, I can think of a couple things even higher up the creep scale; the downright scary number of ominous signs on "Jake Jekyll"'s space to what happened this past weekend (and I'm about as liberal and blase about teenage "self-expression" as you can get). There's also an inordinate number of "shout out to my boy, people shouldn't judge, the media has already made you into a monster" comments up there. Granted, it's a moment of mourning and confusion and difficulty for anyone who knew the kid, but between what went down and things like that photo up there...I'm having a hard time figuring out how society/The Media is the culprit here. (Not that those comments are any worse than the hundreds of "you in jail, asshole!" comments filling the other spaces.)

2006-02-04T23:24:00.000-05:00

It's 11:30 on a Saturday night. I am sitting here in a cup of lapsang souchang, savoring a warm robe. Wait, switch that, but I think you get the idea. The furnace, affectionately thought of as "Puff", is kicking on and off continually, and the wind is whistling against poorly insulated windows like a anxious speaker with bad teeth. These must be them depths of winter.

Well, they are deep somewhere, but not here, and all the wet, sloppy, completely half-hearted snow that Ohio has to throw my way, as it did today, won't make me think any differently. Meanwhile it's time, once again, for me to shuffle bleary-eyed out of hibernation and pledge more timeliness and effort in writing here. Because? Because. Various things have gotten in the way in recent months - school, reading, the increasingly rare hangover (via the increasingly rare drink), the lack of anything to say/ and/or the sense that it needed to be said here, even the obviously-troubled "anonymous" figure who drained a lot of the fun out of writing here with her stupid sniping. I thought about giving it up altogether, or starting a new one focused on some unique fixation of mine. Except I don't have few enough fixations, no ins into music or tech or stuff like that, and my nose for high concept blog ideas that'll draw nice fat book contracts is still pretty bad. I'm working on it, though.
In the meantime I'll just keep bumbling along with this one - this "loose, baggy monster", this parallel campaign to all those brighter, sharper cooler blogs. This window, perhaps pushed a little further open to keep it interesting.
For me and you.

A little further open...

What I've never said here, what I've danced around, is that my Kiki is my heroine in life. I've never let that out here before, because I've continuously struggled with what I could say about us here...and about her. Those who know our story, know. Those who don't....it is intricate, it is beautiful, it is amazing, it is surprising, it is dramatic...it is long and it is a lot to say. There's more than I could write in one post or ten year's worth of quickly-bashed blog posts...and that will have to wait for something a little more literary. But to leave her part in my life unspoken, not even hinted at, won't work - little wonder that I lose interest in keeping this up, that way. Let me just say that as she contends with, and overcomes a nasty, "ucky" disease with incredible grace and strength, day by day, she still gives more of herself - putting smiles on the faces of sweet, sick children and volunteering on community projects - than most of us will ever think of doing. Myself especially. That's just her. But she has lit a fire in me to start doing a lot more, to follow her lead.

So today I drove up to find out about, and wound up signing up for, Team in Training. That means on June 11, I'll be swimming/biking/running the Wendy's International Triathlon, raising awareness - and a lot of funds - for The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. I look forward to writing about training for it, and as soon as I have my page up and linked, I look forward to seeing the donations roll in from a few of you out there, as well.
Since I usually don't let the "urbanism student" side of me go into sleep mode, I regret not taking my digital camera along on my journey round the western edge of the truly incredible I-270 corridor. These aren't malls they put out there - they're mall cities. Not mere theme restaurants - anodyne theme monstrosities. Franklin County sprawlville, a.k.a Republicaniana; I actually saw a "Blackwell for Governor" sticker in a parking lot - so the stories are true, I guess. From where I sit down here, the thought that that man could be governor seems like a bad joke.
The meeting itself was good fun and the TnT people seem like all-around great folks. Nevertheless it was strange to be spending an early Saturday morning at a Dave and Buster's. For those unfamiliar (and before 9 a.m., I was as well), it's best characterized as a Chuck E. Cheese the size of an airport, only loaded with booze. Look at these folks, the apparent target D 'n B clientele:

Would YOU want to kick it over "brewskis" with those pantloads?

Me neither, but luckily there are options coming up. Two of my favorite bands make for what should be one of my favorite February weekends:

The High Strung
Feb 24 2006 10:00P Union Bar and Grill Athens, OH

Of Montreal
Feb 26 2006 8:00P Southgate House Newport, KY

Extrawack can (and damn well better) go and see THS (I can't pimp them any more sincerely, strongly, and tiresomely) a couple weeks later with The Datsuns at Maxwells.

Mar 13 2006 8:00P Maxwell's (with THE DATSUNS) Hoboken, NJ

In other news, I am frittering away time with Librarything. See what I mean.

I've been accepted on to a panel that's going to discuss "The World Cup and Global Popular Culture" at ICA in Dresden, Germany this coming June. So God knows if/how I'll score tickets to any games around that time, especially as long as they're all being sponged up by corporate sponsors and Jack Warner, but damned if I don't try.

Remember the days when the Super Bowl took place before the Advent of Valentine's Day began (and by the way, what is with that? Who decided we needed a month-long Valentine's shopping season?) So do I. Pittsburgh 27, Seattle 17.

For Kiki...

2006-01-07T13:50:00.000-05:00

...because the play of light is both poignant and magical.

"Let me open that bottle for you, Nick."

2005-11-30T16:53:00.000-05:00

You've got to hand it to fellow Metrosufferer b.f. over at extrawack. When he's not doing good deeds AND hanging backstage at one of the biggest shows in NYC all year, he's getting tapped on the shoulder by the cool blog kids for being the man on the spot re: the Pogues in NYC next March. For no particular reason, I've taken to scoping out such sites a little more often - the fact that I am physically and spiritually as far removed from NYC hipness as I've ever been, much less caring about most celebrity gossip, notwithstanding.

Check Gawker's exclusive of the National Enquirer's exclusive of Nick Lachey's apparent all-inclusiveness.

In particular, note the man-hands on Ms. Here-Suck-On-This-Nick-And-I'll-Reciprocate-Later.
I haven't seen a forearm like that since Lincoln Hawk went to Las Vegas in Over The Top.

I wonder if she flips her cap backwards before she....ah...better leave it at that.

Dreaming of a White Thanksgiving...

2005-11-23T14:47:00.001-05:00

So here's what it looks like, at 2:45 this afternoon.

..

2:45

Glad I didn't try to drive home today, even if it's hardly accumulating - it's just not fun to endure more weather than you must over an 11 hour trip.
It's not going to amount to much after all, but between the snow and the cold out there now, perhaps I should have made the trip out to get my tofurkey yesterday.

Legend has it, the song was originally written for The Ramonessons...

2005-11-10T21:18:00.000-05:00

What with the colossal 30th anniversary Born to Run re-issue coming out next week, and my recent tendency to crib ruthlessly off swedesplease, it seemed like high time for a Bruce and Swedish-pop related question. One that goes something like...

"Have you spent endless hours wondering what a lo-fi, Swedish-language cover of Hungry Heart might sound like?"

Well, wonder no more - Hungrigt Hjarta.

After you've done that, please, please, please go and check out Norway's tracksuit-wearing, weird-bearded, appliance-smashing, Bonnie Tyler-covering, America-conquering Hurra Torpedo - their Myspace page has the second best cover of "Total Eclipse Of The Heart" I have ever heard.*

*(Pulverized rangetops or not, no one, but no one is ever topping my karaoke rendition of Total Eclipse at Adin's House Of Kurofen earlier this year. No one.)

Here is a video (click #6) of Hurra Torpedo "playing" a "show" at a frat party in Chapel Hill.

Believe me when I say this trio is taking Kitchen Appliance Rock to places it's never dreamed of going.
Like North Carolina.

If only these guys would get together with Gil Mantera's Party Dream and tour forever - I might quit life and follow them around like they were the Grateful F'n Dead.

Links (because I'm lazy)

2005-11-07T16:08:00.000-05:00

Giggity giggity goo!

Everyone else is doing it, so why don't you frappr me?

Pelle is the new Jens

2005-11-01T01:04:00.000-05:00

Or something...

11 A.M Raid writes about one of my favorite musical finds of 2005.

But Jens is soooo February. All the hip Swedeophile kids - well, there's me, and that's stretching "hip" into serious contortions - are listening to Pelle Carlberg.
(Ha! You thought I was going to say Jose Gonzalez, didn't you?)

Go on, listen to Riverbank and just try to get that "do do, do do do do" out of your head all night. Upon multiple listens...there is something distinctly "Black Cab"ish about it...and if you're anything like me, you understand that's a compliment. Here's Oh No It's Happening Again - lush, a little Morrisseyish. And lovely.

Thanks, Swedesplease, for the The Thing That Won't Leave My iTunes Tonight. Don't know what I'd do without you.

A little behind with my sports babble

2005-10-27T21:47:00.000-04:00

So the World Series is over and done with. Congrats to the White Sox, for escaping that "lovable loser" category they got left sharing with their cross-town rivals after last October. Not that they were ever that "lovable" in the first place, but at least they've won something since the Wilson administration. Official time of series: 22 minutes, 40 seconds. And were it not for that 14 inning endurance match a couple nights back, the whole series would have clocked in at about 13 minutes flat.
At least that's what it felt like to me (admittedly, I was only keeping one eye on it ninety percent of the time). There must be something to the idea that the older you get, the faster (and less momentously) things seem to occur. It wasn't always this way. The first World Series I remember watching - Royals-Cards '85, Mets-BoSox '86 - were titanic, drawn-out, spectacular affairs (yeah, they also both went the distance, instead of petering out in sweeps like the last two). This one...pfft. Then again, I'm much, much more of a casual fan nowadays than I was when I was ten. No teams for me to love or hate here. Strange for me to think back to that '86 Game 6, I remember being teary-eyed on my aunt's den floor, actually praying for the Mets to come through somehow. And yet none of that really stuck with me afterwards, baseball fan-wise.

Which brings me, obliquely, to my insanely tendentious pet peeve of the last few days; Fox's camerawork/directing. Especially at moments of high drama (i.e innings 7-14 of Game 3).

Now, I'm just as religious as the next guy. Especially when it comes to taking up God's precious time begging him to just please oh please oh please I'll be good I'll do anything just let this guy get a hit/strike out/make this shot/throw up a brick/etc. I know well enough how that goes.

Likewise, I think Fox does a fairly decent, even sophisticated job of telling a story, visually, especially at those critical moments in the game. You know how the shot selection generally goes; close ups on pitcher, batter, pitcher, crowd, pull out to pitcher, here's the pitch....

What I'm saying is, I know that clasping your hands together is a somewhat natural and common reaction during tense, stressful moments - it doesn't necessarily mean you're taking advantage of God's Free Nights and Weekends plan to check in and ask for something. I'm not stating conclusively that Fox directors actually instruct their cameramen to seek out good, honest, reverant fanfolk in the stands.

Wait. It's Fox. Of course that's what they're doing.

Regardless, was it possible for them to fit in any more shots of anxious fans, hands clasped, steepled, or held to their lips in a gesture of supplication?

I can't be the only one to have noticed the parade of praying fans (though if anyone else out there did, they didn't vidcap it, according to Google image search), can I?

Really. Given the Kashmiri earthquake, the hurricane aftermaths, an imminent flu pandemic and the Metros needing to hold off the Revs Saturday night, Our Lord and Savior has plenty on his plate, without having to worry about preventing Phil Garner melting down, too.

Which brings us on to point two, slightly belated but still apt. 4 first round MLS playoff games, 5 total goals - 1 of them a game winner for the Metro - and Bigsoccer is in a completely predictable tizzy.
Single table! 6 teams (and a completely insane bye week - I just don't believe that's what you necessarily want when your team's doing well)! 4 teams! The Mexican League system! Put ALL 8 teams on the field at once for a Soccer Battle Royale!

Shock of shocks, a player from one of the top seeds (both of whom ended up losing, natch) agrees with the baying hordes that the current system sucks.

Conference leaders are awarded home-field advantage in the playoffs, but the Revolution were questioning that designation after a 1-0 loss to the MetroStars on the artificial turf at Giants Stadium last night.

''That is a home-field advantage, going away to play on that surface?" striker Taylor Twellman said. ''It should be one game at the home [of the team with better record].

Nothing personal, but like a lot of the folks on Bigsoccer, Taylor Twellman needs to shut up for a minute here. After all, no team has exemplified the "sneak in by a hair, and knock off the top seeds" over the past couple years quite like New England. It's also perhaps not the most prudent time for him to speak up, after a vanishing act in Game 1 that had us thinking that instead of his Revs shirt, he'd accidentally slipped on his US jersey (made of a fragile, gossamer-like material, it's only durable enough for ten minute run-outs in mop-up time, and would come apart at the seams if he ever had to celebrate a goal). But now TT, and everyone else, is up in arms? Get real.

The argument - or one of them, I suppose - is that the dearth of goals illustrates the faults of the current system. But if the home-and-home scheme isn't perfect (and it ain't), none of the other ideas look any better to me.
What it comes down to is, American Soccer Fan wants to have his cake and eat it too - to see a spectacular, devil-may-care style of play from both teams, and yet have games that are seen, felt, and experienced as "meaningful". That happens occasionally, but not very much anywhere in the world, much less in a league where everyone is around the same basic level, yet athletic and trained well enough to play tactically. Tactics and savvy are what win series, and as a supporter of a team that's won nothing in ten years, give me dumping the Revs out ugly over going down guns blazing in the first 40 minutes of game one - we've done that enough in the past. 0-0 ties aren't going to take Joe Sportsfan's mind off the NFL, any more than they'll draw Yankee Europoseur away from "supporting" Chelsea, but you know what? Winning like Brazil '70 isn't going to make that happen in a big way, either. We, as MLS fans, are still a long way from our Alan Ameche moment.

That won't stop a lot of people from wailing and moaning about what little reward teams get for being the top dog in the regular season?
To them I say, welcome to American sports.
Besides, in the end, the differences between MLS teams in this day and age are so minimal as to not matter - record be damned. The Rev team of June is not exactly the Rev team of October; with Pat Noonan and Shalrie Joseph hurt, Clint Dempsey a shadow of the player he was in the early going, and a backline I'm yet to be convinced by, is there a substantial difference in quality between the Metros (who merely suffered their own spate of injuries and bad form throughout the season) and Revolution?

Perhaps in the future things will be more like they were in seasons 1-6, when there was more separation between great, decent and bad, and some teams truly have the quality, the game-breakers, to go out and stylin' it. But right now, things look about as even as can be.

Just for fun, here's Kasey Keller, Borussia Monchengladbach and US, bodyslamming his own team's mascot, "Junter" after a win last week. And Junter's public statement, translated at the top of an entertaining BS thread. Luckily, counseling will probably aid in his recovery from the trauma. Shame 'Gladbach lost on FSC this morning - I was looking forward to big bad Juntie trying to get Kasey the Headbanger with a piledriver or chairshot in the post-game.

In happier days:

US legend or not, KK's no Serg Delgado.

Fuck you and the Hummer you rode in on.

2005-10-20T20:20:00.000-04:00

Pictures of people around the world flipping off the ultimate crass, obnoxiously unnecessary poseur driving machine: FUH2.com

BS--->NYT

2005-10-17T17:27:00.000-04:00

In cosmic correspondence with the evergreen, ever-growing "Hot Indie Rock Girls" Bigsoccer thread, the NY Times gives us a few hipper-than-thou ladies looking all dolled-up and fashionable. Well, sort of.

I just can't get into Keren Ann. I've tried. Sharin Foo? Yes, please!

What a bunch of tossers

2005-10-17T13:00:00.000-04:00

Camera toss.

A fatwa on soccer

2005-10-17T09:02:00.000-04:00

Taking a cue from those who've shown that the best way to fight something is to spotlight the stupidest iterations of it, the Saudi government takes aim at its domestic fatwa industry by publicizing some of the most frivolous, nonsensical, and outright absurd examples. Courtesy the Sunday NY Times Op-Ed page, here's one for all us heretics.

6. Do not play in two halves. Rather play in one half or three halves in order to completely differentiate yourselves from the heretics, the polytheists, the corrupted and the disobedient.

American Sucker

2005-10-05T01:34:00.000-04:00

Every now and then, I go through a curious phase. I start thinking "hey, I'm a bright kid. I understand some pretty complex things. I read the papers and a whole lot of other stuff. I'm no fool. If I just put my mind to it, I could make a little money - not a killing, but only because I'll never be that obsessed with it - playing around on the markets." Usually there's no cause to speak of behind this - just something seen or read along the way, perhaps a whim. When the mood takes hold, I start reading the financial pages more, start putting those nattering CNBC shows on in the morning and pretending I'm soaking in all sorts of useful info (I'm hard-pressed to wake up before the bell half the time), start looking at thick black books in the library about understanding the options markets....yeah, it's a fever, a dumb one at that, but one based above all on the thought that it's not merely a market, it's an intellectual challenge. Yeah, right - like Ulysses or Philip Glass.

Keynes once said that investment "is intolerably boring and over-exacting to anyone who is entirely exempt from the gambling instinct." Well, the problem is that I do have a bit of the gambling instinct. So I suppose it's a good thing that right now, I just don't have any money to dabble with, much less throw to chance. Instead I spent a few days reading David Denby's American Sucker. I thought it would be a nice bucket of cold water, and so it was.

Denby's the film critic for the New Yorker (in case you don't know); I haven't read enough of his reviews to know, but one of the Bigsoccer posters I esteem highly regards him as an insufferable pill. Perhaps he is, as a movie reviewer; if in the book's references to Veblen and Simmel and Aristotle he occasionally does topple over into the mode of whiny, neurotic New Yorker desperate to flaunt his intellectual muscles (that's what critics do anyway, right?) that's all the more appealing to a self-conscious Northeasterner with creative pretensions and intellectual biceps sore from flexing, like me. In short, it's a dramatized chronicle of Denby's life and the market during the last days of the dotcom bubble/onset of the crash, between 1999 and 2002. His marriage having just come apart, he wanted (so he rationalizes) more than anything to keep his Manhattan apartment, and so gets caught up trying to chase the boom to the tune of a million dollars. Those were good times back then; the stock market going up hundreds of points in a day, the instant financial celebrities, the whole damn thing looking like a glorious gold mine before the shafts started collapsing spectacularly. Don't believe I didn't get swept up in it too; there I was, a freshly minted graduate, cranking out ski reports on blustery January mornings outside New Haven and bouncing stock rumors off my fellow ski bums (is THAT not a sign that something was seriously off-kilter?) clicking over to my account to see that the couple hundred dollars I'd slid into a few chancers had suddenly blown up into $15,000 out of nowhere. Pumped. And. Then. Dumped. A little later I got out of all that with next to nothing - good times indeed.

Good times, New York City at the turn of the millennium, from the absolutely enervating blast of neon-lit energy that was Times Square, upon which Denby waxes poetic and through which I traversed every day to get to work in 2000 (and fucking hated after a few weeks) to 9/11, to the Subway Series. Good, distant times. As for Denby, I'm not sure just how much of a "sucker" he really could have been, compared to some others (even me, who literally lost pocket change); after all, how many regular guys had access to Henry Blodgett, Sam Waksal, the head of the SEC, and others of that ilk? (his portraits of Blodgett and Waksal make up some of the best parts of the book, by the way). Or maybe, knowing all those guys at the heart of it, these guys with power and information, and still losing the better part of a million dollars (on paper) really did make Denby the biggest sucker of them all.

Listen to Denby with Terri Gross here

A great revelation on the subject of greed? Probably not. An interesting memoir of a person and particular moment in time? Yes it is. As a creative person, as a thinking person, I take away from it the accounts of what this greed, this obsession strips from you: your physical desire, your sense of poetry, your equilibrium, your time. All that is inefficient stuff. Get rid of it to become richer. But he whose vocation (or avocation) involves imagination - be it movie criticism, a story, a song whatever - needs inefficiency sometimes. Needs to be not thinking, not even reading, certainly not cogitating or calculating or scheming or monitoring. Need to lay back and let your mind drift. But can you do that? What's it going to be - vegetation or accumulation?

Last days and nights of the Summer Palace

2005-09-28T00:26:00.000-04:00

(from late last week)

The end of September approaches, and with it (finally) a respite from hot, muggy weather that's supposed to go away with August, but stuck around the upper Ohio Valley, or Central Appalachians, or whatever you call it, a little longer than that. What was left of Hurricane Rita swept up and through last Monday, dousing us in steamy rain but little else, and then left behind the most crystal-clear, warm, blue and beautiful edge-of-autumn days you could imagine. But the nights are growing cooler, and with summer gone, summer habits go out the window too.

I have not been writing here because I have not been spending much time at the computer for the past few months. Ok, that's a lie - not as much time as I had been before. Who wants to spend summer inside? Whenever I wasn't in a dark, windowless little radio studio playing Triple A and/or NPR (which was often enough) I took off for my second residence, a place I humbly think of as my Summer Palace.

It is neither very distant nor very grand at all, this spot of mine, this...brick patio with two tables and a bunch of wrought iron chairs, about 10 yards and a wall away from where I sit typing this now. Why such a name for the place ever came to me (besides a Stewie Griffinesque-level of imagined pomposity I naturally harbor) I don't know. Maybe because in reality, I was unable to get away anywhere for very long. It's just a few steps around the corner and outside, this seating area for the deli next door, (thankfully) left vacant more often than not. A very good place to sit reading or writing, especially when evening comes in the summertime. Something slightly expansive about it, sitting clear on a rise, elevated above the identikit student apartments in the overfertilized green flat that once was a railyard; look out, over the rooftops at the sunset on a tree-lined horizon a mile or so off, the view hemmed in by the old brick factory that made God knows what once upon a time but houses a fried chicken place and a hardware store nowadays, golden-hour light streaming off it at an oblique angle.

There, this summer I read Goethe, Shelley, Csikszentmihalyi, Frisch, histories of architecture, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Buenos Aires, and the panorama painting. There I was known to cook out with others who - like negative images of winter residents of old seaside resorts, prowled the vacant town in the summer with me; also, known to don a Dad hat as protection against skull melanoma. There I contended, as best as I could from far away, with Kiki's BMT and the aftermath. She has been doing well since July, with the occasional bumps in the road. As much as she tells me, that is. She protects me. A lot.

The biggest sign of autumn to me - my birthday - is coming up in a matter of days and, just like last year, at the party on Saturday night, we'll all realize it's getting cold to be out there. The days of the Summer Palace are coming to an end. But not quite yet. Tonight I was out there as the sun went down, so big and orange, casting the apartments in blackness my eyes couldn't adjust to. Above, as they do at this time, some sort of triangle-winged flying creatures - I can never tell if they are bats or birds - wheeled and squeaked by the dozens high above me, in big, interlaced counterclockwise circles. Feeding time.

I was writing in a journal, or trying to write. Emphasis on try. I try a lot lately. For reasons I'll get into later, I wanted to set that aside, set thought aside, and just daydream a little bit, let my mind go a little. So I threw my head back, let my eyes fall into the molecular-model pattern of the little black fliers above me (how they never collide!), the unreal shades of blue and apricot sky smoldering at the horizon. A tiny contrail speeding quickly through the blue, a white pinpoint with a vanishing tail; quite unusual for this place, and that's quite unusual for me.

I've lived most of my life under transatlantic flight paths, from the Connecticut coast to a dingy, smoke-scented, cheerful basement apartment right under the Heathrow landing pattern. White streaks across the sky, cooling grass below bare feet mark my eternal summer evening. A couple days before I had to read a paper written by one of my profs; he talks about "configurated time", what Ricoeur terms an understanding created by "grasping together...significant wholes out of scattered events"....the attempt to transcend the constraints of time. It is maybe what Proust tried to do. It is what I believe Nabokov was surely trying to do in one of my very favorite books, Speak, Memory. Nabokov confessed he did not believe in time. I often don't believe in it either, as anyone who's expected punctuality out of me has found out. Like Nabokov, I spend an inordinate amount of my time gathering up reflections, images, visions...as if by obsessively gathering them, I'll never move far from the moment. Defy time. But there's more stages; now and then I'll spend hours transcribing them, then more time at work, not trying like dear old Vlad to recapture a perfect,lost past but to read in the whole river passing by some form, some essential meaning. To interpret this existence, if it can be done.

That pinpoint with the small tail was disappearing into the peach regions of the sky, but the black things flying thousands of feet below still wheeled noisily a few yards above me. And that sight rang another old chord, and not for the first time, either, of a couple nights I spent in Rabat years ago, in a hotel near the old quarter. From a top floor balcony I remember watching more flying things - dozens of flying things, filthy gray flying things, big city birds circling over the rooftops of the twilit city.
My mind blanked in dreamy reverie, the two chords rang in harmony for a moment. Happiness complete, if not meaning made.
Then one of the bastards shitted on my shoulder.

2005-06-21T09:31:00.000-04:00

Five Movies People Have Got To Stop Quoting, Now.

I concur 189%.

Muggy night blues

2005-06-06T23:46:00.000-04:00

Toyochin de spinachdip, whom I don't know except by his terminally right-on posts over at Bigsoccer and chronically interesting LES-based blog, opines that in blogging, consistency is more important that quality. Couldn't agree more, though I'm thinking that TPC is scoring pretty low on both counts lately. Rather than continue the magnum opus that took me two hours over five days last week (because I've come to the conclusion that few things are more grating than someone blogging about how their blog sucks) let me keep it short and sweet. Shorter. More frequent. Posts. Here.
Like him, I'm also betwixt and between about what this blog is supposed to be about, though I suppose I made that overwhelmingly apparent last time around and you don't need to read it again. Also, I'd love, and I mean love, to get a redesign on this thing, too. Unfortunately my web-workin' skills aren't up to it. But if anyone feels like working something up out of the good of their heart...

Three days left in the quarter; two papers, an exam and a presentation to complete. It's as good as done. End of the week sees me driving back east for the last of my best friends' weddings; and weather willing, a date with the Jersey Shore on Sunday, before I go home to tackle (literally) the new dogs. It's either that or Metro vs. DC in a bizarre 6 PM Sunday kickoff - and while I'm loathe to give up a Metro game against anyone, but especially that thuggish scum from that swamp-ridden hellhole called our nation's capital, the tug of the shore is awfully strong when you've been wedged this deep in southern Ohio this long.

But not so long that I can't appreciate that the Appalachians are a pretty damn fascinating place. Caught most of this PBS documentary yesterday afternoon; I'm a sucker for history in general, and becoming more of one the older I get. As an outsider, I really do want to know what this place is all about, and that doc was a decent, if not overly deep survey. Just about everyone I know here is from somewhere other than here, as are the majority of folks who study here, and to be honest we're all a bit too unkind about it at times. But oh look; songs:illinois put up three tracks from the documentary soundtrack. Check 'em out, buddy.

Going back to the matrimonial rite; if you're single, Kem at Critical Realism bets you'll get married before he does - and he's putting money down on it. Go get him, ladies - and gift me some easy money.

One year ago, and the meaning of titles

2005-06-01T00:09:00.000-04:00

A year ago today I was in Istanbul.
A year ago my day was spent listening to presentations on globalization and pop culture and drinking many little cups of bad Nescafe there in the basement auditorium of the Goethe Center (how the Germans and that organization of theirs crops up in my life every decade or so!), engaging in that prolonged, yet agreeable ritual known as the Academic Conference; just as agreeable were the nights spent drinking Efes in the bars along Istiklal Caddesi with old and new friends until the wee hours, absolutely delighted to be back in a city proper, to be back in Europe, to be back in a European city (I suppose you can argue that definition, but I'm not going to now), most of all one I'd never seen before.
For a few lively, fascinating days I was planted a world (literally and figuratively) away from Appalachia, consciously on the cusp of certain things (like giving my presentation, which I would do...a year ago tomorrow) and unknowingly on the cusp of others - like getting raked back into academia almost as soon as I got back, thanks largely to the trip. All of it, the trip and its aftermath, happened very quickly. It's worked out pretty well.
But that memory is a little more piquant in light of the torpor and stagnancy I'm feeling right at this moment. It's not the work - of which I have a lot - which gets to me. In fact, work right now is a saving grace. Not that I'm getting down to doing it any faster. I've got a ton of books to read and papers to write and there's little else I want to do, really, but read and do them. Wearing me down is this gnawing realization that I haven't spent a day outside this small, charming, small, lovely, small, placid, small, boozy, small town since early January. I like it here all right - but I've just about had my fill, at least without a break. Ahead is the prospect of a single weekend away for a wedding, and then back here, and then the long, somewhat rote slog of summer work right here. That work will (hopefully) earn me just enough to pay bills and rent - a vacation, even a short trip anywhere else this summer seems a pipe dream right now. The walls are not so much closing in on me, but the walls and the buildings and the streets and the people are looking all the same, all the same, all the same, everyday. Needing a change of places and faces in the worst way, if only briefly, and no such change is in the offing. I'm not going to cry grinding poverty...only drudging poverty. Drinking - the primary, if not single social activity here - has grown mind-numbingly tedious, and physically it is almost revolting now. Utterly frightening is the thought that I may not get out of this place for any meaningful amount of time between now and December.
Thanks to this I've become very very hard to deal with in the last few days.

With so few outward-leading roads open, I find myself detouring onto ones pointing towards the interior. That's led me to think about the title of this thing, which I've meant to write about since at least the second day of its existence, least of all for Zoran, who has not read Musil but whom I implore to. I think he'll appreciate Monsieur Le Vivisecteur greatly.

Why "The Parallel Campaign"? I didn't establish that at the start because I didn't have a clear idea, myself. The allusion, significant and not as obscure as it may have been even ten years ago to most (beyond German literature buffs), is to one of the most important and most thought provoking books I've ever read - Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities. I'm not going to summarize (ha! as if) or laud it any more here - read all about it somewhere else. Suffice it to say that reading this book - enormous effort that it was - was a life-changer for me, changing my idea of what writing (is Musil writing "fiction"? some think of him as a thinker using the novel as a medium, not a novelist) could be and should be and has to be (to the extent that I believe that, it may be impossible for me to ever actually write novels myself, which was once all I thought I'd ever do...though I'd like not to believe that).
It simply changed the way I go about trying to live and understand living, "essayisticly", densely and deeply.

Seems like I am not the only one among the blogerati with some such Musilian interest; taking great big wallops at philosophy where I timidly and amateurishly whiff is this Parallel Campaign, while "Robert Musil" (don't know if that's his real name) proffers political opinion at The Man Without Qualities.

If taking this title was partly spur of the moment, and partly pretentious display, then it was something else, as well. Something precisely right.
Roger Kimball describes the book's Parallel Campaign as "one of those phony endeavors whose aim is everything and nothing", and "the perfect repository for all manner of frustrated idealism, misguided beneficience, and outright charlatanry."

There should be no more question of why I picked that as the title, then. Phony endeavor, repository for idealism and charlantry...without qualities...all descriptions that spring to mind every time I start writing here. It is indeed a parallel campaign of my own, a flimsy, ersatz rival to the many, many more established, more focused, more substantial efforts out there. What the hell am I writing about, anyway?

Looking back over nearly a year of posting here, it seems I've run the gamut from extracted oddities of the web and found sound off the airwaves, through erratic political rants and literary bricolage, to the latest spate of ruminations and ill-starred personal catharsis. Everything and nothing.
Don't ask me where it's going next. I wish it were somewhere cool and hip, or groundbreaking, or influential, but who really knows?

The Blog Without Qualities would be in many ways more precise a title, but it is probably a little too late, and pointless, to change it now.

Rah Rah Rah! - It's The High Strung, live!

2005-05-27T22:44:00.000-04:00

Pictures from last night's High Strung show at the Union Bar & Grill. Criminally underappreciated everywhere, but surprisingly even in Athens, this time around; I don't think there were more than 50-60 rawk fans in the house last night.

Shame about that, but still a great show from the now three-piece group. Lots of new stuff in among the old (well, I'm assuming most of the stuff I didn't recognize was from the in-the-can Moxie Bravo LP) You know how it is when you find yourself championing an upstart little band that everyone should know about and nearly no one does - you wouldn't say they off their game, even if they were.

Let's hear it for matching star-spangled jumpsuits! And a clear inability to hold the camera still.

My kinda dame.

it's all a blur

Gotta work on keeping that camera steady

...

Today's forecast: Partly creepy

2005-05-27T22:18:00.000-04:00

Move over Al Roker. Sit down, Jim Cantore. Get your daily weather report from a name you can trust - David Lynch.

Thought for the (mid)afternoon

2005-05-17T16:52:00.000-04:00

Frisch's Sketchbook 1966-71, pg. 34

WARSAW

Little to be had, if one were to want it, yet all the same one gets the impression that they live better than the Russians. They can smile at themselves. What they display in the shop window: taste without goods, imagination, gracefulness. It looks almost like bravado.

Yes, that's it. I'll be damned if I don't live my life with taste, imagination, gracefulness...bravado.

The part where I slightly embarrass myself with my Connecticutness(Part MCXIV)

2005-05-17T00:43:00.000-04:00

Seeing that wiccachicky posted one of those ubiquitous "You know you're from -----" lists on her blog (only slightly more ubiquitous than those "Which [insert forest animal/Family Guy character/Old Testament prophet] are you?" quizzes that grow from the same sites like kudzu), I wanted to see what I should know, to know that I'm really from the Nutmeg State...

Yikes, even the first few have me going "check, check, check".

I'm taking the liberty of italicizing the ones that resonate with me somehow, and my additional comments in parentheses...not looking too far ahead, I'm betting on at least a .750 batting average.

But is that a good thing?

You Know You're From Connecticut When...

You have hiked up a big hill or small mountain at least once for a keg party. (who hasn't?)

You never went to a bar in high school.

You thought that the only highways were 91 and 84.

You thought everyone couldn't buy beer after 8 pm

You actually thought that Hartford was big (but Bridgeport was bigger)

You or someone you know has attended UCONN

You drive a JETTA

You still think that the Whalers are cool.

You have been to Misquamicut and to that little hot dog place.

There is a farm within miles of your house

You thought bars were really for people over 21

Your high school thanksgiving football game was the highlight of your school year.

You don't have an accent when you talk

You have known at least 2 preppy rich kids from Fairfield who listen to Phish.

You love Hilton Kaderli and your mom cried when he retired.

UConn basketball rules and no one can tell you different

You have deer in your backyard. (yep, most mornings)

You didn't drink or do drugs until 10th grade.

You still don't understand why people say that Connecticut is the richest state.....

Your best friend went to Central, Western, Eastern and finally Manchester Community College. (no, but close)

Your mom works at Travelers and your dad works at Pratt and Whitney.

You have been drunk at the Meadows and don't remember the concert.

You go to Riverside at least once a summer

Your parents actually care about the Governor, the Patriots coming to Hartford, the lights at Christmas in Hartford & Channel 3 news. (partial credit)

You have a UCONN flag outside of your house year round

You think New Jersey was a toxic waste dump

You hang out at Denny's

You've partied at bonfires

You have at least one friend with a pickup

You think everyone works tobacco in the summer

You think Old Lyme is a shore town

You've been to Cape Cod

You think the Connecticut River is endless

The town diner is the only place open after midnight.

You have at least 4 friends who drive Jeep Grand Cherokees

You root for all the New York sports teams

If anybody asks, you're from just outside of New York.

You've never looked at a public bus schedule

You have both girlfriends and guyfriends with the same name as you.

You go to the diner late night to post party. (well, in high school days)

You think New Haven is the worst ghetto you've ever seen (when living just north of Bridgeport? Elm City's a close second)

You can proudly tell an outsider about Nutmeg.

You weekend either on the Cape or Rhode Island at a summer home

You have said... " I'm in a good location... Between both Boston and New York."

You can carry on a conversation about Mike Liut, Torrie Robertson, and the Brass Bonanza.

You have to explain Cow Tipping to people from out of state.

When you go to a real city, you sincerely feel bad for every poor / homeless person you see.

You get pissed at anyone who doesn't know how to drive in the snow. (pissed doesn't even begin to describe it)

You can name all the members of the UCONN men's and women's basketball teams.

You still can't find your way in Hartford (except for that bar area near Union Station.)

You hold the door open for someone and they don't say "Thank You." (ALL the frickin time. I thought it was Ohio, not me.)

You own a golden or a lab (family gets me the point for this one)

You own real Oakley's

You only know Westbrook and Clinton because they have good outlets

You don't think you're a yuppie, but the rest of the country does

You only ski in Vermont or out West

Your mother is the head of the PTA

There is absolutely nothing to do in the winter

You live twenty minutes form either an Abercrombie & Fitch, J. Crew, or GAP.

You sail, or know someone who does.

You don't understand why everyone else has not been to Europe.

You can't get through the week with out a Coffee Coolata

Your family owns more cars than legal drivers (easily)

School attire is a North Face fleece jacket, a North Face Fleece or L.L. Bean back pack, a plaid shirt, khakis, and Doc Martins.

Summer footwear is either Reefs or Birks

You carry your keys on a carabineer, but you don't know how to rock climb.
(guilty in high school)
You feel for the homeless, but are not willing to give up the golf course land to develop a homeless shelter. (as if we ever acknowledged there were homeless around in the first place)

As a child you took horseback riding, golfing, tennis and swimming lessons.
(two out of four gets me the points...you guess which two)
You grew up wanting to be a lifeguard

You own every DMB CD

The state is so small you know where all the speed traps are

You can't understand why people don't understand what your talking about when you refer to a "package" store

You went to prep school even though your public schools are awesome

People actually wear sweaters around their necks

You've never taken public transportation (not in CT, I haven't)

You know of at least one person who's house was totally trashed after a huge party

Your mom drives a Volvo wagon

You have at least one friend whose house was built in the 1800's

You live in a huge colonial

You know at LEAST one person who has been pulled over and found to have weed in their car

The only overcrowding is of deer in your backyard

Your house would cost half as much in any other state

Your wardrobe contains at least three pairs of cords and five wool sweaters

Half of your friends are from another town because yours is so small

At least one of your friends has a sick house right on the water

Dewy-eyed and nostalgic now (I'm only half-joking), I go off to sleep wistful for my favorite place in this country, one of my very favorite places on the planet. Easier to love it when you're far from it.

Grad blogs > # tables certain to-remain-nameless grads have danced on

2005-05-16T01:31:00.000-04:00

I did mean to write a bit more tonight - it's been a good weekend for thinking good things. But I got caught up in my latest quixotic notebook project, which I'll say something about tomorrow, and the last couple hours have been spent reading a totally engrossing little gem of a book on Karl Popper. I'd like to finish it - or come close to it - tonight, so, give a few of my friends some love and some blog hits, and I'll make it all up to you in the morning.

Kem @ Critical Kem. Wheat-fed goodness from an Iowa boy who's hit it big.

Danielle @ National Champs Something. Loudest blog on the net.

Lisa @ pokydj. Seems to be down just now, I don't know why.

Tom @ Samurai No Kami Tommunism today, Tommunism tomorrow, Tommunism forever!

Zoran and Rinalda @ Technojunkies Balkan-Southeast Asian brain food - good for you and tasty too.

That's a nice sampler pack.

P.I.M.P.

2005-05-15T23:31:00.000-04:00

You ain't a tru playa 4 real until you've installed a shiny set of diamond spinners on your gold teef.

2005-05-13T20:30:00.000-04:00

Into temptation, over in doubt
Black night, neonlight into my house
talking talking talking about
Out of frustration, over in doubt
Hold me now, I'm hoping that you can explain
Little Arithmetics
Got me down, they're fooling me again and again
Little Arithmetics
Got me down
Sometimes I feel like going down south
Sometimes I feel like I'm over and out
Talking talking talking about
Into temptation, over in doubt
Hold me now,
I'm hoping that you can explain
Little Arithmetics
Got me down, they're fooling me again and again
Little Arithmetics
Got me down

Four days of courting a migraine with the most annoying, bullshit statistical analysis assignment....ever!..and it's a day late already...shall be days late by the time I turn it in on Monday...I don't care.

2005-05-06T16:48:00.000-04:00

...

The more splendid it gets out there, the darker I get inside.

Friday afternoon at its breezy, beautiful zenith, and I'm sitting here inside, pounding away at this computer - not because I'm getting important stuff done - I'm not - but I just can't bear to be out and about, and I'm not really keen on seeing anyone right about now. Why these moods? Why this black dog (Churchill's evocative term for depression - I don't know any better description of it)? Why now, when everything is exploding into bloom like this?

As I said in a prior post, maybe it wasn't a bright idea for me to be reading Werther last night - not if I wanted to be uplifted, anyway. (For the record, I didn't want to be.) Funny, I noticed last night how the epistolary style (plain english - the story is primarily told in a series of letters) is more than a little bloggish - being that someone has already converted Pepys' diaries into a blog, could the Livejournal of Young Werther be that far off? Maybe someone a little more industrious than me has already gotten to it. Wouldn't be surprised. (That there are people more industrious than me. And that it's already been done).

That archetypal storyline: A hypersensitive, mercurial, foppishly absurd young man (German, of course) dissatisfied with himself, those around him, and his failures in art and love drifts aimlessly, returns to the place of his upbringing only to be reminded of how his youthful hopes and dreams were so much folly, loses his daemon and his mind in the pursuit of la belle dame sans merci, and finally, in a fit of desperate, hopeless passion, blows his brains out. The parallels are a little striking.

No. Not exactly. I couldn't do that. I could never do that, and there shouldn't be one person thinking I could or would. I'm not there and never will be. Perhaps in those sturm und drang days, you could lay a duelling pistol (borrowed from your rival, and cleaned carefully by your beloved, both unaware of your plans for it) against your temple and consider it Romantic. Those were the days! But what do we have here, now? Nothing so stylish. Taking a walk in front of the West Virginia Secondary in the middle of the night, maybe. No. I could not and would never do that. I've never even been close. Certainly not now.

Still things die, and parts of you die, and they fall away. This I believe in; I am prone to forming these concepts. During the last few months of my undergrad career in England, I realized, to my horror, that I was going to have to come back to the US. There was no way around it, or I wasn't imaginative or daring enough to come up with one - I supposed I could have scrapped and starved, but that has never been me. In the last few months I envisioned myself as having almost split into two people over the course of four years; the one who had grown up in the Connecticut suburbs and returned twice a year, only to feel that strange sensation of being a fish out of water in his own home, and the pleasantly detached expatriate, belonging neither here nor there, content, if not happy, to drift.

Happiness did not enter into it.

When I did go back, it was the latter that slowly, agonizingly succumbed. That one suffocated.

I found out a few nights ago that the one I really loved, the one I really believed I was going to spend the rest of my life with, whom I stayed with through impulsive infidelity, through the birth of her child, through a life-threatening disease, the one whom I finally lost, try as hard as I might to hold on to her - that she met someone last weekend. She's well within her rights. We're over, that was her choice, what she needed to do to get better. But I am overwhelmed all the same now.

It is really really really over with us, and so is a part of me. Last night I felt my chest get tight again, that suffocating feeling. Today, too. Something inside me drying up and falling away. Sitting here in a place that suits me just fine for now and yet at the same time somehow feels like a trap, the longer I stay here without a break. I have been here in this little town since January without so much as a weekend away, and there's no chance of having one anytime soon; I'm living hand to mouth as it is. I could not be more content in the sense of being surrounded by these books, these words, these thoughts others have and I have...trying to figure out the puzzle without an image to go by, and then put it all together. I could not be less hopeful, or more dismissive, of just about any other sort of happiness here.

I walk around taking quite a few pictures now, because words largely fail me.

2005-05-06T10:22:00.000-04:00

Karaoke Star.

Feeling Werther.

2005-05-05T16:50:00.000-04:00

"If you could see me now, dear Charlotte, in the whirl of dissipation - how my mind dries up and my heart is never really full! Not one single moment of happiness: nothing! nothing touches me. I stand before a puppet show and see the little puppets move, and I ask myself whether it isn't an optical illusion. I am amused by these little puppets, or rather, I am myself one of them; I sometimes grasp my neighbor's wooden hand, and withdraw with a shudder. In the evening I resolve to enjoy the next morning's sunrise, but I remain in bed; during the day I promise myself a walk by moonlight, but I stay at home. I don't know why I get up nor why I go to sleep."

It is not a very good idea for me to be re-reading Werther these days, for reasons which I'll elaborate on later, maybe.

2005-05-01T22:38:00.000-04:00

No comment.