Drayton Blog

Continue the Adventure

2008-07-08T16:02:00.003-04:00

Well folks, it's time to move on. After three or so years of off-and-on posting, it's time to pack up and head over to a new space of the internet: draytonhiers.com, where I will continue to regale you with the odds and ends that make up my artistic career.

Such as it is.

See you there.

Traffic Jams

2008-03-04T17:07:00.001-05:00

A video explaining mysterious traffic jams. I could write a whole thing about human behavior, but I'm tired and cranky today. So enjoy:

2008-02-27T14:50:00.004-05:00

Brooke Singer posted this article by Michael Specter in the New Yorker on the Eyebeam Reblog. It's an article that I've been waiting to read for a number of years now, a look at how we can understand the carbon costs related to the production and shipment of our food.

In some ways, this issue seems obvious: eat local, avoid air shipments, and call it a day. After all, as the article points out:

"Agricultural researchers at the University of Iowa have reported that the food miles attached to items that one buys in a grocery store are twenty-seven times higher than those for goods bought from local sources. American produce travels an average of nearly fifteen hundred miles before we eat it. Roughly forty per cent of our fruit comes from overseas and, even though broccoli is a vigorous plant grown throughout the country, the broccoli we buy in a supermarket is likely to have been shipped eighteen hundred miles in a refrigerated truck. Although there are vast herds of cattle in the U.S., we import ten per cent of our red meat, often from as far away as Australia or New Zealand."

And yet, the issue, as with most things in life, is not cut and dried. Specter goes on to clarify:

"Yet the relationship between food miles and their carbon footprint is not nearly as clear as it might seem. That is often true even when the environmental impact of shipping goods by air is taken into consideration. “People should stop talking about food miles,” Adrian Williams told me. “It’s a foolish concept: provincial, damaging, and simplistic.” Williams is an agricultural researcher in the Natural Resources Department of Cranfield University, in England. He has been commissioned by the British government to analyze the relative environmental impacts of a number of foods. “The idea that a product travels a certain distance and is therefore worse than one you raised nearby—well, it’s just idiotic,” he said. “It doesn’t take into consideration the land use, the type of transportation, the weather, or even the season. Potatoes you buy in winter, of course, have a far higher environmental ticket than if you were to buy them in August.” Williams pointed out that when people talk about global warming they usually speak only about carbon dioxide. Making milk or meat contributes less CO2 to the atmosphere than building a house or making a washing machine. But the animals produce methane and nitrous oxide, and those are greenhouse gases, too. “This is not an equation like the number of calories or even the cost of a product,’’ he said. “There is no one number that works.” "

Even local may not be such a clear choice, at least in areas where "local" really boils down to "closer". New York, for example, is not in or near to a good wine growing region, so all our wines come from somewhere else. So we find ourselves in store aisles, debating the relative merits of California versus Chile versus Italy. The geography would seem to favor the West Coast over the Southern Hemisphere, but, again, the answer really isn't so clear:

"Last year, a study of the carbon cost of the global wine trade found that it is actually more “green” for New Yorkers to drink wine from Bordeaux, which is shipped by sea, than wine from California, sent by truck. That is largely because shipping wine is mostly shipping glass. The study found that “the efficiencies of shipping drive a ‘green line’ all the way to Columbus, Ohio, the point where a wine from Bordeaux and Napa has the same carbon intensity.” "

But let's call wine a luxury, and one that gets into splitting hairs - France and Sonoma are equally far away once you get past the popular "100 miles" local region. So, then, let's think about apples, something that grow in abundance in upstate New York and are easily found at any of the city's farmers markets. Surely an apple grow in the Adirondacks is a better choice than one grown in South Pacific. And yet:

"The environmental burden imposed by importing apples from New Zealand to Northern Europe or New York can be lower than if the apples were raised fifty miles away. “In New Zealand, they have more sunshine than in the U.K., which helps productivity,” Williams explained. That means the yield of New Zealand apples far exceeds the yield of those grown in northern climates, so the energy required for farmers to grow the crop is correspondingly lower. It also helps that the electricity in New Zealand is mostly generated by renewable sources, none of which emit large amounts of CO2. Researchers at Lincoln University, in Christchurch, found that lamb raised in New Zealand and shipped eleven thousand miles by boat to England produced six hundred and eighty-eight kilograms of carbon-dioxide emissions per ton, about a fourth the amount produced by British lamb. In part, that is because pastures in New Zealand need far less fertilizer than most grazing land in Britain (or in many parts of the United States). Similarly, importing beans from Uganda or Kenya—where the farms are small, tractor use is limited, and the fertilizer is almost always manure—tends to be more efficient than growing beans in Europe, with its reliance on energy-dependent irrigation systems."

Really, we're seeing this come down to larger issues of sustainability: how do we grow, what are we growing, what are the costs of the systems we've created, how far can we push things and still keep our heads above water? Specter can't really offer better answers than anyone else, but he puts together a comprehensive place from which to start a discussion.

For Those of You Who Might Have Missed This...

2008-01-20T16:41:00.000-05:00

Stephanie Rothernberg and Jeff Crouse, from over at Eyebeam are about to open the very first sweatshop in Second Life. They're selling clothes in the virtual world, and then producing them in real life. I had the chance to try out on the early prototypes. Click above to find out more.

Picture New York (in a city without pictures)

2007-08-02T12:53:00.000-04:00

By this point, you've probably heard the story. A few months back, in response to a judgement in a lawsuit that had been filed against it by the NYCLU, the Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting (MOFTB) floated out a new proposal for film and still camera permit requirements that were unfriendly to artists at best, and draconian at worst. Anybody shooting handheld on the streets of New York, working with one other person known to them, would require a permit to shoot for a half an hour or more in any one location. Add a tripod into the mix (no word about monopods), and that number drops downs to ten minutes.

So who does this affect? Well, it affects no-budget filmmakers who are working on small, mobile, limited crew pictures - the kind that don't require shutting down streets or restricting traffic flow - who would now have to apply for - and wait for - a permit. No getting inspired and going out on the weekend to shoot a music video or a comedy sketch and putting it up on YouTube the next day. Now you'll have to wait and see if the city will give you a permit - which they might not, based on their whims and perhaps the color of your skin. And this is to shoot in a public space, where you're exercising your own free expression. Funny, I thought there was already a permit for that, and it was called the First Ammendment.

But it's not only filmmakers who are affected by this. It's wedding photographers. It's families taking photographs at graduation ceremonies or at little league games. It's tourists who've come all the way from Malaysia or Argentina to film the Empire State Building at sunset, and then are told that, sorry, I don't care what your life long dream has been, you're gonna have to move along.

In a city that grew famous, that grew mythic on the power of its image in iconic photographs and inspiring films, a city that enticed so any of us to move here so we too could have a piece of that dream, these laws would rob us of the very thing that we most prize - our freedom of expression and our picture of New York.

Due to the covert nature of the MOFTB's process, these proposed regulations almost slipped through the cracks. Luckily, some local filmmakers and photographers caught wind, got wise, and started getting the word out. Picture New York, ad ad-hoc group of artists and activists (of which I'm a member), has waged an aggressive campaign to let the MOFTB know that New Yorkers won't have their city taken away from them. So far, the story has been featured in print and TV media across the country, including The New York Times, The LA Times, CBS, NBC and even Keith Olberman's show, where has had some very unkind words for Julianne Cho, the representative of the MOFTB, that I don't need to repeat.

The Mayor's Office is definitely feeling the pressure, but they haven't publicly agreed to change their proposal, so we aren't done yet. If you don't want to lose your New York, please join artists such as Patti Smith, Michael Stipe and John Cameron Mitchell in signing (y)our petition. The public comment period officially ends Friday, August 3 (that's tomorrow!), so time is of the essence.

For more about what New York means to many of us (both good and bad), check out the following video, which Not An Alternative made at last week's Free Speech Rally in Union Square:

A Parade for Bushwick*

2007-06-30T13:31:00.000-04:00

*(to be fair, I sort of missed most of the parade... camera problems)

Is there anything more Brooklyn than gypsy music? How about stilt walkers and hula hoopers, fire twirlers and virtuoso jugglers, street parades and strange costumes and worse-for-wear buildings with a mixture of longtime, ethnic residents and recently arrived, raising-the-rents artist types?

A few weeks ago, my old neighborhood of Bushwick had a weekend of open studios and art events. Some of you may recall a story I wrote a few years ago about a similar, smaller event, and how it felt to me like it was the beginning of a new chapter in the life of the area. Well, two years on and Bushwick has spread like a strangely patchy wildfire, filling up disconnected and far flung loft buildings and former factories along four or five stops of the L Train, stretching halfway to the airport and nearly to the A Train.

It's an exciting time for the area, but also a strange one - so much of the artistic life is still contained to these buildings, and while the inside of a Loft City apartment might contain a theatre space, a craft circle, a rock band or even a sex party, the exteriors are essentially empty, plain, with no clue of what's going on inside. There is no street life to the art component, only the traditional, Hispanic locals, hanging on stoops or playing in the spray of opened fire hydrants. They don't go inside, the artists don't go outside, and two worlds exist, overlayed on each other, like the theory of String that used to be so popular.

The ethics and planning and social implications of this go far beyond my tiny blog post, and are best saved for long, rambling nights of dumplings and tea in city parks, or else beer and wine in used-to-be-smokey cafes. It's a conversation with complicated questions and difficult answers, and not a small amount of community organizing.

Instead, how about a parade? How about a party in a park? How about gypsy music and stilt walkers and a sense of street life in the public space where two worlds can meet, intermingle, and perhaps become one, at least for a half a day.

To learn more, check out Bushwick Open Studios or Free BOS.

Film and Content both protected under a Creative Commons license.

“I want to tell them thanks for liberating us, but enough with the mistakes”

2007-06-05T11:27:00.000-04:00

It's now been four years since the Invasion/Liberation of Iraq, and the first wave of post-Saddam university students are about to graduate from universities across the country. Unfortunately, as Damien Cave writes in the New York Times:

"The class of 2007 came of age during a transformation that according to students has harvested tragedy from seeds of hope. They are the last remnants of a middle class that has already fled by the tens of thousands. As such they embody the country’s progression from innocence to bitter wisdom amid dashed expectations and growing animosity toward the Americans."

The article is essentially about the fact that most of the new graduates are planning to flee their country as soon as possible. One medical student compares staying in Iraq to committing suicide. The article continues:

"They said they would leave their country feeling betrayed, by the debilitating violence that has killed scores of professors and friends, by the growing influence of Islamic fundamentalism and by the Americans, who they say cracked open their country, releasing spasms of violence without protecting the moderate institutions that could have been a bulwark against extremism."

The article goes on to describe a number of instances of violence against schools, students and teachers, including a suicide bomber who killed forty people, leading to a mass grave being built at Mustansiriya University in Baghdad. You can read the rest of the article for the full story.

Turn Off Someone Else's TV

2007-06-03T16:43:00.001-04:00

Ever walked around America, and wanted to turn off all the TVs that are playing around you? Like at a restaurant, you're having a great conversation with someone, or trying to read a book (yes, some of us dorks still read), and there's a TV in the corner, blasting away. Even if it's on mute, it's still filling the air with its electrical signals and its colored lights, things that the more stimuli sensitive of us - like myself - can't really ignore, even if we want to?

Well, now there's something of a solution for that...

Get one of your own at TV-B-Gone. And if you want to find a place to start using your new philosophical weapon/toy, might I suggest your local public school classroom, where many teachers often elect (or are forced) to show our young populace corporate propaganda laced with commercials rather than actually teaching them.

We're Just Removing Mountain Tops...

2007-06-01T11:36:00.000-04:00

Ahh, the Appalachians, oldest mountain chain in the world, an incredibly biodiverse region, and birthplace of trees. Back in the days of Pangaea, when the environment as we know it was coming into existence, the spine of the continent, the mountains we would come to know as the Smokeys or the Bluegrasses, were the origin point for coniferous life. Leafy trees were born in these mountains, before the land spread apart, before seeds were carried on the wind or in the stomachs of birds, to be pooped out over new topographies, before the world was verdant and seemingly complete. To stand in the Appalachians is still to be surrounded by an air more complex and rich than any nouveau bottle of wine, than any gizmo gadget you hold in your hand and use to make phone calls or listen to music.

Unfortunately, all of that verdant diversity is inconveniently sitting on top of mountains upon mountains of the black gold that we call coal, a gold that we are more and more reliant upon as we try to power our overextended grid and move away from dirty, nasty, geopolitically unfortunate oil. It used to be that men would go underground to find the coal, but those days are over. Now we just use explosives, tear off (usually) the top of a mountain (though sometimes the whole thing), and trust in the almost mystical ability of nature to repair itself in the eons of millenia that still wait down the road, presumably for people other than us, people who haven't killed their environment in the restless zeal to have more electronic playthings (he writes, while typing on a laptop computer).

Vice TV is currently running a five part series on "Toxic West Virginia", exploring the various environmental degradations being suffered by the mountains of "The Mountain State". Part I is about coal mining; I hesistate to use the word "Enjoy".

Een Biertje at the Squat Bar

2007-05-16T20:35:00.000-04:00

A story I came across while going through my archives, thinking of something to post as "public" on Urbis. It's from my time in Amsterdam, one of a handful of one-off articletjes (that's some fancy Dunglish right there) I played around with. Amsterdam has a fairly robust squat scene, which if nothing else are fairly cheap places to grab a drink or some good food, and at the best of times are a real cultural alternative in a city that is less culturally vibrant than you would expect (that, though, is the stuff for another posting altogether). It's also a city in the midst of a real estate boom (who isn't?), which is leading to a renewed war on the squats and the squatters who inhabit them, an issue that is far too complex to go into on this humble little blog. So, then, just a story, about hanging out at one of them.

For those of you who aren't too up on Amsterdam geography, "the Pijp" is a formerly working class neighborhood turned... honestly, I still think it's fairly working class (Dutch working class), but some of the more grungy kids view it as a yuppy enclave. As is that somehow doesn't describe the whole city.

"Een Biertje at the Squat Bar"

Daniel knows this girl who works at a squat, and they’re having bar night tonight, and maybe I’d like to go along. Well, no, he doesn’t actually know her, but they have friends in common, sort of.

“She writes for this activist newspaper in Finland,” – Daniel’s accent has that husky Finnish twang, like he’s talking into the wind with a mouth full of fish – “and she’s on the Finnish IRC channel, which like everyone who’s cool in the country is on, and so when I told my friends that I was moving here, they said that I should get in touch with her, and since we both have our photos on the same website, she said to give her a call when I got into town.”

Daniel’s just arrived from Finland himself, and we’re hanging out in the Center, waiting to find out where the squat is. When we get the address – along with the warning that it’s a rather low key night – I suggest that we bike over, but Daniel doesn’t have a bike yet, and he refuses to hop on the back of mine – “no, really,” I explain, “everyone rides on the back, it’s what you have to do if you want to be Dutch” – begging off with some lame excuse about not being sure how to do it. So we walk the half hour from the Medieval district through the Golden Age into the Industrial Revolution, getting lost and praying that the rain will hold off until we make it inside. Between the two of us we don’t have a map, and even though I lived here all last winter, I can never remember the street names, so we navigate using the transit maps at the tram stops.

“Here is it,” I say, as we arrive at a boarded up and graffitied over storefront in the Old West, near the requisite Albert Heijn. I point out to Daniel the telltale signs of the squat: the little lightning logo; the yellow banner; the ubiquitous Rita fliers. “That’s about Rita Verdonk, the Immigration Minister. We don’t like her.”

“Why not?”

“Maybe because she embodies the socially regressive characteristics of an outdated colonial system. Or maybe because she’s arrogant and racist. Or maybe all three. It depends on who you ask.”

The entryway is dark and smells of urine, and a metal gate is pulled partially over the door. It’s hard to tell if anything is happening inside, but still we knock.

A Danish kid opens the door for us, with wraparound sunglasses and a lip piercing and Scandinavian punk rock blaring from behind him. He invites us inside, where three or four more people are sitting around an old bar, smoking roll ups and drinking fifty-cent beer. The lighting is dim, giving the whole room a sense of being gray and faded, as if a bunch of gutter punks had taken over a longshoremen’s watering hole. The bartender – Daniel’s Finnish connection – has a crown of tightly interwoven dreadlocks, while the other kids here are less glam rock and more thrift shop functional. The graffiti on the way to the bathroom reads “Everybody hate the Pijp.”

“Well, yeah, I can usually get to Sweden in about two days,” goes the conversation around the bar.

“Two days?! It always takes me at least three.”

“Well, you can get from here to Copenhagen in about eighteen hours, and then it’s pretty easy to get to Stockholm. I should be able to get to Copenhagen faster, but I always get stuck in Hamburg, and it’s always raining in fucking Hamburg.”

“But Hamburg’s a nice city.”

“But I’m never in the city, I’m always at a fucking gas station on the motorway, ten kilometers from the city.”

“I just think it’s impossible to get out of this city. No one will stop for you.”

“Well, where are you waiting? If you go to the official hitchhiking point and – ”

“There’s an official hitchhiking point?”

“Oh yeah, it’s at the Amstel station, there’s like a big sign with a thumb and people know to pick you up.”

The music goes through various incarnations as Daniel and I drink and chat with the other people here. This bar is emblematic of the city, young and international, a mixture of languages floating around the room, the hint of rain outside. Reggae and hip-hop and old jazz float around the smoky air, and for all of its institutional barrenness, this place actually does feel strangely cozy.

I ask the bartender, “so this place used to be a real bar?”

“Yeah, it used to be a coffeeshop. And they want to make it one again, if they can get the paperwork together. But I’m not sure if they’ll be able to – the person who wants to take it over is related to the old owner, and the Stadsdeel doesn’t like him, he was involved with all kinds of guns and violence.”

“And so what happens if this guy gets permission to make this place into a bar again?”

“Then we get kicked out. Or maybe we’ll get kicked out before, in the next eviction wave. We’re the last place like this near the Center, they want the space.”

I point to the back room, where large metal poles have been jimmied against the door, an impromptu barricade: “Is that to keep the cops out?”

“Yep. When you squat a place, you have to secure all the entrances, so that no one can break in. That’s why the windows are covered up. We used to squat this whole building, but they managed to break into the second floor.”

Such are the perils of the squatting life. Ostensibly serving a variety of social and political goods, more and more squatters are being viewed as parasites by people on both ends.

“Yeah, squatting is supposed to be about housing rights, keeping housing affordable, creating available spaces. And what a lot of people don’t realize is the work that goes into it – get your paperwork together, secure the space, go through the court process once someone decides that they want to buy the building you’re in – it isn’t just free rent. And of course it’s getting harder to find space, with everyone anti-squatting.”

I ask her if she considers the antikraaks to be the enemy, somehow, and she sort of grimaces, acknowledging the sensitive nature of the question.

“Yeah, I do. Most of the people who are doing anti-squat are students, and they do it because it’s easy, but I wish that they would squat, so that they could be making a real statement about the lack of affordable housing. And also, when you anti-squat, you don’t have any rights; at least when you squat, if you do it right, you have some protection.”

I look back at the barricades against the door and wonder just what sort of protection the squatters really have. Right now, she’s living in a building that she and her friends have essentially renovated, on their own volition, using their own funds, and now that they’ve finally finished, they’re all convinced that they’re going to get kicked out in another month or two. It’s hard to see that as being security.

Daniel, meanwhile, has hit it off with the Danish kid, who’s invited him to hop on the back of another bicycle and check out the kid’s squat, see if he wants to move in. Once again, he begs off – “No, hey man, it’s cool, that’s what everyone does here” – citing his fear of riding on the back of the bicycle.

“Well then come by tomorrow. I think you’ll like it, it’s not that far from the Center if you take the Haarlemerdijk.”
Even for squatters, proximity to the Center is important.

It’s time for me to head out, as the music changes and Daniel makes an appointment to see the Nordic squat. Something from the early Eighties fills the room, impossibly peppy and infectious for this gutter punk hangout, bouncing off the graffiti and the barricades and the angry fliers and the bottles of beer and the cups of tea and the pouches of tobacco and the languages and the laughter and the fear that everyone has of being tossed out of their homes in their tiny little holes on the fringes of society in the middle of the city. The Danish kid lets me out, locking the door behind me, and I zip up my coat, unchain my bike, and ride off in the rain.

Creative Commons, 2007, Etc. Etc.

The Hallowed Halls of Pere LaChaise

2007-05-14T11:10:00.000-04:00

A brisk January day in 2007, oddly sunny and warm for Paris at that time of year, walking along one of the fabled halls of Pere LaChaise, resting place of the famous, terminus for the wealthy, the most celebrated cemetery in all of Christendom (more or less at least).

By the way, I'm officially back in New York now, now and for the foreseeable future, so drop by sometime and say hello.

It's Like Fucking Paris Hilton (audience walk out on Mike Daisey)

2007-04-23T14:07:00.000-04:00

So I saw this story while doing my morning information ablutions (I hesitate to call them "news"). This past weekend, Mike Daisey was performing his new monologue at ART in Cambridge when a group of 80 people - about a third of the audience - abruptly walked out, with one of them pausing long enough to pour a bottle of water onto the sheets of paper that served as Daisey's rudimentary script. This apparently was Daisey's only copy of his show, handwritten notes on three pages pulled from a yellow legal pad - I'm just amazed he was able to develop an entire show on that - and it was essentially ruined afterwards.

Because his entire show only exists on three sheets of yellow - now ruined - legal pad, he also records it every night, to keep a record of what it is and how it changes night to night. So when the walk out occured, the camera was rolling, and he got it all on tape, which he then posted on his blog and on YouTube.

A few notes before you watch. I think that the bit he was doing was really quite astute, and yet at the same time, when he got to the offending segment, I couldn't help but be a litle taken aback as well. In the context of the video, his switch to talking about, well, fucking Paris Hilton (and the ways in which he really pounded on the word, like a more genial David Mamet), I felt like, "oh, so this is sort of meant to be shocking, except that it isn't really"; I just sort of saw it as blandly tasteless. Yeah, I know, I'm becoming a 28 year old prude, and one who actually uses that word myself on a regular basis, but I thought, in this context, it was a little inappropriate.

So I can understand why the audience walks out. I don't agree with the way they handled it, but I can see why they do it. What is more fascinating - and the reason I'm posting the video - is to watch how Daisey deals with it, this intrusion of a real moment on the illusion that is live theatre. The shock giving way to confusion giving way to rage giving way to reconciliation. There is real danger in this, real pain, and it leads to a moment of real connection and real discovery, a moment that we lose these days in our slick, media world with its manufactured content, and one that is over all too soon after it begins. Daisey's monologue seems quite well done, and at the same time, it has that rehearsed air of, well, a performance, and you can hear that change in his voice when he starts the monologue over again. The wall goes back up, the artifice is back in place, and the script continues.

As someone who works in artifice and performance myself, who delights in the wall because it keeps your manufactured content safe, I can't decry the situation or the phenomenon. I can simply celebrate the moments when it falls away, when we're reminded that this is all real, and that we are all living in it, and something truly fascinating - and amazing - happens.

That guy pouring water on Daisey's outline? Say what you will about his actions and motivations, but it's a dramatic moment worthy of the Pulitzer.

Mike Daisey's website can be found at mikedaisey.com

Just a couple of train hoppers

2007-04-21T04:19:00.000-04:00

Okay so this one, kiddos, this one comes to you with no introduction, no wordy build ups, no essays, no cleverness. Just watch the first episode of the series "Thumbs Up!", and then get over to VBS.TV and enjoy the fruits of the new media that awaits all of us:

Those of you not from LA, "K-Town" is of course, "Korea Town", one of the city's larger, stranger, more sprawling neighborhoods, playing host to a motley assortment of USC students, artists in 1920s Decco buildings, Latinos in single level housing, and, of course, Koreans. With Korean signage. It's hot.

For more videos, check out Vice TV (I can also recommend the series on Sudan).

The Mechanical Drone (At a Loss for Bees)

2007-04-17T15:25:00.000-04:00

Some of you may have read an article in the New York Times a few months ago, which talked about a farming crisis on the West Coast. Not the prolonged freezes in January which killed off about half of Southern California's orange and avocado crops, but a different problem altogether: disappearing bees. My friend Eli, on hearing the news, said "well, I don't like bees, so all the better." The problem, as the article pointed out, was that bees are used in commercial farming: they pollinate crops. In California, for example, hives are brought to the almond fields at the beginning of the season, and the bees are set free to go about their work on the budding almond trees (I always imagine Van Gogh's painting when I picture this scenario). Almonds are currently California's number one cash crop, and they quite simply won't grow if there aren't bees around to pollinate them.

But suddenly, the bees were disappearing. They were leaving their hives and not returning, and no one knew where they had gone. Bees are notorious for their finely turned navigation skills, as well as their ability to know the exact location of a ripe flower miles from their hive, and yet the bees weren't returning home. It was completely inexplicable, and people were terrified, because without the bees, we might not have any food (not to mention the loss of income from major domestic cash crops).

It's been a mystery for the past few months, but it seems like we might have the found answers: it's our cell phones. It's the radiation. Bad enough they're killing off our brains, now they're going for our food supply as well.

Jason (Surplus) is the one who gives me the news.

"We found out what's killing the bees", he says, and then tells me about the telephones.

"So what do we do?" I ask.

"I guess we learn to go without food."

It'd be easy for either of us to say that the more common sense answer is to go without our cell phones, but we're talking on them while we're having this conversation.

"Maybe we can build little mechanical, nano bees," I suggest, suddenly inspired. "They can do the pollinating for us. Maybe it can become our new project: as each species goes extinct due to human impact, we can make a machine animal to replace it. We can program it to have the same instincts, the same weaknesses, the same behavior, and then we can set it free in the wild, which of course by this point will be the mechanical wild, mechanical forests and reproduced tundra, entire acreages of manufactured streams and trees and mountains and wilderness."

I go on, imagining an eventuality in which we create an entire machine world, including machine people who take over when we ourselves die off.

"And then these machines will begin experimenting with organic life forms. They'll dream of beings and places that are real, that live and breath on their own, that are made up of natural elements, organic muscle and flesh and bones and oxygen and blood and sweat and sex and desire and fear and sadness and love and ecstasy and intensity and revelations and the smell of God coursing through their veins, their very existence, and the machines will want this and be obsessed with it and they'll build it and soon the real world will take over again, an entire earth bound cosmos of the natural and organic will take root and become dominant, and the machines will die out and their world will crumble and all will be real again, as if for the first time.

"At which point we'll probably start making machines again.

"Who knows, maybe it's already happened, maybe it happens over and over again, the rise and fall of man and machine, and we're just in the latest version of it, we're just in the middle of this long, ongoing, predictable saga."

"Yeah," says Jason. "Still, it's a shame about the bees."

For more about the bees/cell phone connection, check out this article in The Independent. It's British, which means it's a bit dry, but full of information.

Creative Commons, 2007, Etcetera Etcetera

Promised 40 Acres, Only Got 40 Ounces

2007-04-16T17:54:00.000-04:00

So a few weeks ago, my friend Jason sent out an e-mail asking people to help him out by being extras in a music video he was shooting. It was for a contest: make a video for a song by Sol.iLLaquists of Sound, a progressive r&b/hip-hop group, and then put it on YouTube and maybe it will be selected as the official video for the song. Jay explained that the video was going to be set at a typical college-type party, and would revolve around a game that I had never heard of, "Edward Fourtyhands" (basically, someone has two 40s taped to his hands and he can't get them taken off until he's finished both of them; this is what people who go to real colleges do at parties).

So I went out for the shoot, stood around for a few hours, drank some beer, met some people, got a free ticket to see a band play at the Viper Room the next night. All in all, not a bad way to spend a Saturday night in LA.

During the shoot, Jason told us that the video wasn't just going to be celebrating this sort of wastrel, irresponsible (though, of course, sexy) party existence, but was actually part of a larger parable. The song, he explained, was about how the Fourty (and malt liquor in general) was destroying the very community that it was being sold to, primarily poor African Americans. The song itself is quite provocative (and a little bit scattershot), and in his video, Jason finds an eloquent and stylish way of tying this all together.

If you look, really closely, you can see me in the background of a few of the shots. For the record, this was the first night that I drank an actual 40; it actually wasn't so bad.

If you enjoy the video, please take the time to go to YouTube and rate it, leave a comment, etc. The more positive reaction that Jason gets, the better the chance that this video will get picked by the band as their official selection. And the better chance that my blurry head in the background will soon be on national TV beyotch.

"This Vehicle Is Unsafe for Driving!"

2007-04-10T15:30:00.000-04:00

A dreary grey morning on the edge of Manhattan, and people are shuffling into the Jacob Javits Center to check out the chrome and steel extravaganza that is the New York Auto Show. Outside, in a boxy modernist park across the street, a not-entirely-officialy government agency is preparing for action.

They're lined up and standing at attention, ready for the commands of their drill sergeant.

"Troops! Are you prepared for your mission today?!"

"Sir, Yes Sir!"

"Troops what are we doing today?"

"Sir, Acting Out Our Presidential Mandate Sir!"

"And what was that mandate, troops?"

"To End America's Addiction On Foreign Oil, Sir!"

They break into a march, chanting as well, a snappy little ditty about global warming and concept cars, before breaking into a run. Decked out in black like a Swat Team, chests emblazoned with the letters "OEA", they are the Oil Enforcement Agency, formed by Andrew Boyd (of the Billionares for Bush) to take the President's warning about America's oil addiction seriously. They have come to the Auto Show today to impound vehicles that they deem as falling below the safety threshold for oil consumption. Cars such as the Toyota Tundra, the 14 mile-to-the-gallon gaz guzzler that effectively cancels out Toyota's commitment to its Prius and Camry hybrids. As Boyd explains it, the OEA is the government agency that should exist and doesn't.

Their drill routine finished, the members of the OEA prepare for infiltration.

"Now Troops, as some of you know, our law enforcement partners are not aware of our governmental authority, and they are not aware that we are acting in conjunction with each other. We will have to presume that they will not react to us in a friendly manner, which means that we will have to act in stealth."

He lays out a plan for the troops to enter the Javits Center under cover, dressed as regular civilians, and then reveal their OEA affiliation once they are inside the perimeter and ready to perform their auto impoundment. He notes that, as some of the members of the OEA have to be careful about their relationship to "traditional" law enforcement, not all members will be able to actually go inside the space. (A few days earlier, some of the OEA troops had staged a diversion while two of members of the mountain climbing division had scaled the rafters of the Javits Center and huing a banner displaying a Tundra driving over the earth. They had simply been kicked out, but they didn't want to press their luck.)

With those instructions, he released his troops to go about their mission.

Kelly Loundenberg and I were there as imbedded journalists with the OEA, capturing their actions on camera. After the vehicle had been succesfully - if momentarily - impounded, she edited the footage together for the following two minute spot, a mere sampling of the day's full events:

For more on the New York Auto Show, including Andrew Boyd ("Agent Chartreuse") and the hanging of the banner, check out Kelly's video on Gothamist. And learn more about the OEA at their website, http://www.oilenforcementagency.com/.

Fire Was Never So Sexy

2007-04-03T14:30:00.000-04:00

So the other day I logged onto MySpace and saw two bulletins, one marked "Fire!" and another marked "LA LA Land Is Burning Down!"

I had already noticed a strange cloud above my building which had turned the light in my room completely orange, and while it had struck me as unusual, it didn't strike me as being special - L.A. has its strange weather patterns and habits, and each day I'm being phased by them less and less.

So I opened one of the messages, from my friend Alexis, and found this:

Now. This is the point where I would normally go into a whole long speech about land maintenance and fire corridors and quote large passages from Mike Davis's Ecology of Fear for you, but I have laundry in the wash and I need to run some errands and I'm hoping to go see a bargain matinee at the Los Feliz 3, so we can save all that for later.

What I did want to mention is this article in the La Times, a surprisingly good paper with a surprisingly bad website (seriously, this is perhaps the worst web design ever). The article, in brief, looks at the Hollywood Fire (actually on the Burbank side, but who cares about such details in this town) as a user-generated media event, with photos and videos popping up on YouTube, Flickr and even the Times' own "Your Scene" section. And it isn't simply that people captured it on video, it's that they went out of their way to do it, often attempting dangerous things - like driving down the 110 while filming - in the process.

In a way, the Hollywood Fire is one of those moments when so-called "citizen journalism" goes mainstream, as anyone with a camera (which in this town is almost everyone) gets in on the action in one way or another, and people like me, out here in La La Land, can show you a little bit of what our latest environmental calamity looks like. More though, you also get to see a slice of the city itself, and the people, in their varied reactions to what is happening. It becomes a mosaic as scattered as the metroplex, and, in true Angeleno fashion, it begins with driving:

Some people, though, opted for a more raw, documentary style, B Roll footage approach. The following video really captures the intensity of the conflagration, as well as the way that the sun turned orange when viewed through the firey cloud. It's also rather long and boring, so I don't recommend catching the whole thing. For those keeping track at home, I currently live around the corner from where the first shot in this video was taken; I wonder if Electric Lotus could try and work this into an ad campaign, "our curries are hotter than a wildfire in Hollywood"?

This one is sort of an amatuer spin on the MTV aesthetic, whose main drawback is that the last three or four minutes are all darkness:

And then, this being the land of dreams, an artistic, techno rave version of the fire. Think of it as the Hollywood Conflagration Re-Mix:

And it is sort of strange, the fire being reduced to a piece of testosteroned ephemera, a collection of videos based around the theme "this could one day be important", or, more simply, "this is so fucking cool". But then I imagine that's how we've always experienced these sorts of events; one of my favorite photographs is of people on a hill overlooking the great San Francisco earthquake, dressed in Victorian finery, slightly dazed from the destruction of the city, but also smiling broadly and pointing, exultant in the majesty of the rubble and the smoke beneath them.

Which, in all honesty, is pretty fucking cool.

The Global Hometown

2007-04-01T18:25:00.000-04:00

I'm gonna try something a little new today, which is just to write an essay that's honest and disjointed and coming out of various thoughts I'm having at the moment, without too much concern for how it adds up or whether or not it even makes sense. Which I guess means that I'm going to write the way I talk, full of half finished thoughts and grasping ideas and a sort of arbitrary direction. Enjoy (and if you get tired of me, skip to the end, there's a video you'll like):

As some of you who've seen me recently already know, I've been rather cynical the last few weeks. Partially it's the move to L.A., and the adjustment to a new phase of my life - my traveling days are over, my working days are ahead of me, and even though I enjoy the path I've picked, that doesn't make it any less intimidating - and partially it's been my overwhelming sense of hopelesness. There is so much that we are facing as a world these days, so much carelesness and injustice and potential for gross, global calamity. I've thought for the past few years that educating myself would show me the path that we can take to save ourselves from our uncertain future, but instead I've essentially come to see how screwed we all probably are.

Being someone who's tended to write from a place of hope, of belief in the future and in our world, that sort of left me in a strange place, helpless, disconnected and mute. I had lost most of the force that's been driving me over the past few years, which was to grow within myself and see the world around me grow as well. I'd begun to feel that all of that growth was essentially going to be for naught, as we were moving far too fast as a world, hurtling towards the edge of a cliff, locked in our own strange version of the fabled buffalo jump, the mixture of suicide and sportsmanship that provided food to the Lakota Sioux.

There is this amazing book that I was talking about with someone at a party last night, Jared Diamond's Collapse, which is essentially a companion piece to his previous book, Guns, Germs and Steel. Where Guns was a study of how civilisations came to be, how differing environmental and geographic resources influenced the development of human culture and society, Collapse is a study of how societies fall apart, how once great empires can crumble into ruins, how people can be absorbed by neighboring culures, or else dissapear completely. Diamond is writing it partially to challenge our own society to consider our longevity, or lack thereof; as he points out, many of the societies that we look back on as "failures" actually lasted for a longer period than our current society - by which he means Western Europeans in America - has so far managed to survive. It's a sobering thought.

By Diamond's reckoning, the major factors that determine a society's failure or success are the environmental resources at its disposal, its relationship to its neighbors and, most importantly, the way that it responds to its collapse at the moment that it's happening. Cultures which survive the edge of collapse - and there have been many - are the ones that manage to utilise their resources, their power structure, their belief systems and their allies to adapt to their new economic or environmental realities, and through that find a more functional and sustainable way to live.

When I first read Collapse, nearly two years ago, it was something of an intellectual abstraction: what would happen if the world - which is now one large, interdependent society - were to fall apart. Now, after a winter that saw bizzare weather across the globe, with the newspapers full of reports on warming and the underground abuzz with concern about petroleum sources being depleted, this collapse doesn't seem so abstract after all.

It seems to be happening.

It seems easy to be cynical in the face of this, and to be angry as well. It's easy to question whether we will graciously accept a change in our lives, our comfort levels, and it's easy to consider that very comfort to be the sickness that will keep us from making the change. It's easy to speculate about famine and drought and diease, about whether or not we'll be able to take care of a global population when our growing zones change, when animal populations die off, when the rain forests of the Amazon turn into a bio-diesel fueled desert.

It also seems easy to point at scientific solutions, genetic crops that will grow in harsher conditions, desalinization plants that will turn sea water into fresh water, so that we can still take care of our gardens when our rivers dry up. It's easy to say that science will take care of us, somehow, or the market will, or some other unseen force. It's easy to question whether we deserve these things, and also to presume that we do.

And what is the answer? Well, the fact is no one knows. Maybe this is what's so incredibly depressing about it: we truly are walking into a vast unknown, and once again, our future, our very lives are in our hands, not only to do things that are going to be positive and helpful for generations to come who will have to live with the mess that humanity has created, but also to help all of the people who have to live with the mess that is right now.

What I do know, though, is that being cynical sucks. I've tried being cynical with humor, being cynical with hedonism, being cynical with passion, and being cynical while doing yoga. And at the end of the day, no matter what I try, I still wind up feeling like I'm not really feeling the way I would like, that I'm not experiencing my life in the way I wish I would. And, you know, if it is all collapsing, then all that really remains is to enjoy it. If I fail at that, then what else is there?

And it's hard, believing in that strange thing called hope, which Emily Dickinson reminded us is a thing with feathers, presumably because it flies away, but also, perhaps, because you can stuff it in your pillow to help you sleep at night or in your coat to keep you warm in the winter. Hope is one of the opiates we use to get through the day, but it is also, in some strange way, one of the steroids we can use to actually inspire action. Neither of which I would recommend as long term solutions.

What I do still believe in, maybe the only thing I still believe is, is personal growth, personal awareness, and personal change. My last boyfriend counseled me up and down that there is no such thing as the personal, and my Faerie Sister (seriously) will talk you blue in the face about how individuality and self-exploration are inherently destructive ideas. Well, you know, I'm a rebel I guess, because I still do believe in the personal journey, in the individual experience, because I believe that they are a way to reach the communal, to come together in a group and be at peace enough to engage. And I believe that community is the one thing that might save us, or at least make life bearable as we sink. I believe in the villages we abandoned long ago, even if, living in L.A., I seem as far removed from a village as humanly possible.

I woke up this with this thought today, running through my head, and it was the first positive thing I've thought - from a political standpoint - in quite a few weeks. This is from my journal this morning:

"I think that what is interesting, in talking about collapse," - yes, I actually woke up with this on my mind, this is the sort of sleep I have - "is that we live at a time of unprecedented widesoread information, widescale collective knowledge and memory, and the ability to share that with each other. We live at a time when, for those who have access to computers and the freedom and knowledge to use them, borders are breaking down and nationalistic myopia is slowly falling by the wayside. We live in an era where we can easily and critically assess information, comment upon it, and then spread it to others.

"The societies that Diamond looked at tended to be small, limited in the resources they had to respond to these problems, and limited in their power structure." - As a quick review, some of the societies that Diamond studied were small islands at the end of the Micronesian chain, which had limited populations and either a top-down hierarchy or a small scale village-style collective. They also tended to lack the appropriate resources to constitute survival on their own, hence they relied on each other to provide necessary and missing elements. So that when collapse came to one island, it came to them all, and they quite literally had no room to invent or adapt a new way of life; they were living in the only way they could.

"Without people always realizing it, we areliving in a time where we're natually shifting to more 'I' centered and 'We centered social perspective - 'We' being 'My Group'. As information moves laterally, as friendships are built through wide reaching virtual communities, as global politics become more entrenched and people become more invested in supporting or challenging that system, we're stepping into an age of new village relationships, only villages that exist outside of geographic isolation.

"If we have a chance of challenging the global decay - and realizing that we're only doing it in the short term anyway, only doing it for our quality of life, not our longevity of existence - it will come through stepping outside of the old order, and stepping into a new reality altogether."

And what I mean by that reality is that, through the internet, through social networking sites, through the exchange of photos and sounds and videos of foreign cultures, we are able, in a way never before available, to actually connect to people around the globe. There are all of these search engines and news feeds and widgets and wikkis that collect and diseminate information, and eventually the lead story of the New York Times is how, while global warming will affect all of us, it's going to fuck over Africa worst of all. This isn't per se a new story - it's Web 2.0, and it's also information overload - but it is the potential, if used well, to create new village structures, ones that span the world, ones that span a variety of social and economic backgrounds, and ones that will spread awareness like wildfire, so that we can actually do something beyond just waiting around for hope, that blasted, beautiful thing with feathers.

While looking around CouchSurfing today, I came across a series of links that eventually took me to the video below. It's from a new web series about young Iraqis in Baghdad, and attempts to show a variety of slices of life, from eating with their families to not being able to go outside because there are bullets flying through the air. At a time when the mainstream media here in America still has een hekel of showing footage of life in Baghdad, of showing what is happening over there for the real people this is an amazing series. What it shows is a mixed bag, some of it frothy, some of it harrowing, and most of it is focused on the English speaking, educated children of the Iraqi middle class. But everything it shows is a slice of some sort of reality, and the potential it creates, for dialogue and understanding and connection, is immense. It's attempting to do what I think many of us are doing in this day and age: create a new global paradigm, where rather than one city or one country being our home, it is the entire world that winds up being our village. If there is something to hope for, maybe that's it.

For more of this series, go check out Hometown Baghdad, as well as Chat the Planet. Thanks for reading, y'all.

Shedding a Tear for Virgin Wood

2007-03-30T13:00:00.000-04:00

So Kleenex has this ad campaign, where they go around with a couch and get people to tell them stories of things they're sad about, ideally crying on camera while an actor-turned-best-friend encourages them to "let it out". There's sort of a nice element to it, in a New Age, Oprahish way: anything which provides people the opportunity to feel like they're being listened to and emotionally validated is a positive thing. The only problem - aside from the general squeamishness of using people's personal stories to sell a box of tissue papers - is that one of the saddest things happening in our world today is that huge swaths of Canada's old growth, virgin Boreal Forest are being cut down to make Kleenex tissues. And even sadder, Kleenex themselves are quite proud of this; apparently the reason that the tissue feels so good when it rubs against your nose is the lush, one hundred percent ancient fiber. It really is the height of luxury.

It may feel good, but here's what a box of Kleenexes really looks like:

And remember kids, that shit ain't growing back for another couple hundred years.

So the folks over at Kleercut are taking action to fight Kleenex with, well, Kleenex. Using the momentum of Kleenex's own ad campaign against them, Kleercut is pulling some low tech ju jitsu moves on those virgin wood loving folks over at Kimberly-Clarke, taking this campaign quite literally to the streets. Enjoy the highjinks:

Now that you've seen that, head on over to Kleercut to see how you can take action against this. One way to start is by sharing this video with other friends - Kleenex is having a board meeting in a few weeks, and Kleercut wants to get the message out to everyone that we can in the meanwhile.

Film Screening at Anthology Film Archives, April 11

2007-03-13T00:22:00.000-04:00

Greetings from Los Angeles, where today was 93% carless.

This evening, I walked home through the empty streets of Los Feliz (pronounced, in the Angeleno style, Los Fee-liz), basking in the quiet and the stillness. The air was full of of honeysuckle, and the soft breeze was a welcome respite from the record breaking temperatures of our late winter heat wave. I didn't know that the air in LA could smell so fragrant, that it could hold onto the blooms, that it could drip with the smells of my own hometown, Charleston gardens in Springtime, when everything comes to life.

LA is like that, full of surprises.

Such as the first festival screening of a film that I had a hand in making. As some of you know, I co-founded a collective with Peter Kaltreider, BlindSight, a name that his wife thought up. Our very first film together was a short piece based on a character that Peter had created, The Painter of the Nothing. He was doing it as a performance piece, and decided to turn it into a proper film. I was brought on board as the director, we found a camerman on Craigslist, and then spent two days running around Brooklyn, making a movie. After which I backpacked arond Europe and Peter moved to California. Half a year later we finished it up, recording a voiceover and working with a brilliant editor to put it altogether.

I've always been proud of The Painter of the Nothing, and even a year later I still enjoy watching it - it's a piece that has held up for me long past the honeymoon period of "I made a film". And just a few weeks ago, we got the news that it has been selected to screen as part of New Filmmakers 2007 at the Anthology Film Archives in New York, on April 11. This is going to be a great night of Brooklyn and Hollywood themed movies (no, I'm not sure what they have in common either), with a bunch of shorts and features by independent, new filmmakers. Even if you've already seen The Painter of the Nothing, I hope that all of you will come out to support us and everyone else who is contributing to the cinematic life of New York City.

Full details after this preview from the film. At the time, Peter lived in the building that he's painting in front of, and I lived in the building across the street. Enjoy.

The Painter of the Nothing at NewFilmmakers
Wednesday, April 11
6:00 and on, $5
(PoN will be screening in the 7:15 - 8:15 block)

at Anthology Film Archives
32 2nd Avenue @ 2nd Street

BlindSight

NewFilmmakers

Hope to see you there!

"Save Us Pool-Aid Man!"

2007-03-01T11:47:00.000-05:00

So I was driving into Amarillo, Texas, home of the Cadillac Ranch and the Big Texan (eat a 72 ounce steak dinner in one hour - including bread, salad and potato - and it's free), blinded by the setting sun (this is the problem with driving West), when my phone rang.

It was Surplus, back in New York. Surplus rarely calls when I'm in New York, so I wasn't sure why he was calling now.

"Dude, we're at the Pool-Aid party, you're missing your big moment." I could hear the noise of people behind him, filling a bar in Brooklyn, waiting to watch the video that we had just been editing the week before, when the snow was falling in Williamsburg and the windchill got to about round zero. "I wish you were here, I'm not really sure what it's going to be like."

"Dude," I said, looking at the skyline of Amarillo passing by, "it's going to be great."

For those of you who don't know, the McCarren Park Pool, on the border of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, was a grand public works project back in the Robert Moses days. A thriving public pool for fity years, it was shut down in the 1980s when it began to become a point for violence between Italian and Spanish residents of the neighborhood. It sat dry for about twenty years, this open pool behind a hulking brick facade, looking out over a park that equally fell into disuse, until it earned the name McBarren Park.

A few years back, it began to be used for one-off events, such as dance performances in its giant empty basin. As interest in the site grew - and as the neighborhood had changed - discussions were begun about reviving the pool, either as a pool again (something the neighborhood needs), or as a site for performances - dance, music, and community events. It sounded like a great idea, but it came with this caveat: the majority of programming would be organized by ClearChannel/Live Nation, whose partnership with TicketMaster meant that tickets would often be charged up to twenty dollars beyond their face value, and whose revenues from the events would be going exclusively to ClearChannel and Live Nation.

Basically, a public park, supported by public funds, would be used to profit a private company, with little or no benefit being extended to the community at large.

To help ease the pain, last year the city sponsored some local events as well, free concerts with music by local bands (including acts meant to appeal to the non-hipster community, such as the Polish community in Greenpoint or the Latino community on the SouthSide). Also at the event, not sponsored by the city, was none other than the Pool-Aid Man ("Oh Yeah!"), there to dance, sing and tell people about the larger implications of the McCarren Park/ClearChannel deal. Local acivist and journalist Mikki Stim organized a music video to accompany Pool-Aid Man, recruiting members of Brooklyn based bands including two of the guys from Nada Surf. It was a modern version of "We Are the World", titled, appropriately enough, "We Are the Pool".

Surplus and I edited the video in early February, while the not-quite-blizzard fell around us, and it was released a few days ago, while Grayson and I ate too-big hunks of meat at the Big Texan (neither of us going for the free meal: I settled for the chicken fried chicken smothered in gravy, and couldn't eat more than half of it). Check it out below, and then go to Poolaid for more information.

Alle vogels hebben een nest gebouwd

2007-02-02T12:05:00.000-05:00

So I spent the rest of the year in Amsterdam, and the beginning of this one as well, before moving back to the States yesterday, February 1st. This is a short piece I wrote a few weeks ago. If you're interested in some further thoughts on the climate in Amsterdam, check out my video blog on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=WorldEvolove

******************

I walked around my neighborhood last night, along the kanalen, talking to the apparitional memories of semi-lost friends, soaking up my Amsterdam, the streets and canals, and still learning things about the area.

Like the block where there are words imprinted in the ground, stretching out along the sidewalks, phrases and ideas and snapshots of a moment, and even a poem, most beautiful of all, “Alle vogels hebben een nest gebouwd, behalve ik en jij waar wachten we nog op?”, which I translate, no doubt somewhat incorrectly, as:

All birds build a nest, except for you and I, what are we still waiting for?

The earliest piece of Dutch writing, somewhere in the Eleven Hundreds, a love poem.

I walked along the Schinkel – a kanaal, not a gracht, a distinction I don’t think we don’t have in English – and I felt how much I’ll miss this water, when I move to the desert, and I felt the ways in which I already take it for granted, don’t always see it, appreciate it. I appreciated it last night. Two more weeks, maybe three, and then it’s goodbye. Is this in a way what dying is like, knowing you have to say goodbye, knowing you may never return?

Approaching the middle of January, and I’m walking around without my gloves on, loosening my scarf because I’m over heating. Middle of January, and already the spring birds are arriving, summer plants are in bloom, and the hedgehogs never went into hibernation, because it simply wasn’t cold enough. Friends in Finland tell me that there’s a lack of snow, and word from New York is that you could wear a T-shirt the other day.

I expected this, but not so soon. 2020 maybe, 2030 more likely. I thought we would slowly slip into our oblivion, trace it along the calendar like marks on a wall showing how much you’ve grown while your parents weren’t looking. But 2007?

Maybe it’s an abnormal year, naturally freakishly warm. Maybe this is just an anomaly, and we should all go for a walk with loosened scarves and jettisoned gloves, because next year will be doubly cold to compensate. Weather has always done strange things, whether or not we’ve been contributing to its moodiness.

Or maybe this really is the beginning of the end, maybe we should all walk around the canals without scarves and gloves, because the canals simply won’t be around a few years from now.

One theory is that the oceans rise and flood everything out. One theory is that the North Atlantic Current shuts down and turns Europe into tundra. One theory is that mass die offs and deforestation will simply – simply – lead to a reduction in oxygen production, at which point we’ll all suffocate. Make sure to schedule that one into your Blackberry.

In a way it’s exciting: the world is changing, we get to change with it. In a time when it feels like we’ve lost adventure, true discovery, this will be a new frontier. We’ll get to ask new questions, and find the answers to them. How do we survive and adapt to a world that changes how it meets our needs? How do we build new communities and develop new philosophies? How do we cope with the flood, with the shock, with all the things we’ll miss, or wish we had, or never feel like we got enough of? How will we love, and will it be enough? In a way, we’ll return back to the living, instead of this sort of half-real dream state we’re all floating through now. It’s not a happy thought, but maybe it’s a productive one.

And so I put my hands in my pockets and continue along the canal, past a line of brick houses built a hundred years ago, built on shifting sand and sinking mud, the unstable foundation of an aspirational city, aiming for eternity. I soak up the warmth, and the light and the beauty, because I don’t know when I’ll be seeing them again.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

On the Occasion of Our 4th Anniversary

2006-04-14T19:30:00.000-04:00

I didn't realize until this morning, but last night was my Amsterdam anniversary - four years ago I first came to this city, a backpacker fresh from a month in France, walking around the canals under the full moon before Good Friday. I fell in love with this city right away, and while my impressions of this town could be written down endlessly, I've limited myself to just a few paragraphs to accompany you on this Easter weekend. Please, enjoy.

FYI: In an effort to become a little more Web 2.0, I've created a new, multi-purpose RSS feed to complement the Atom feed that Blogger provides. By clicking on the little orange icon above, you can subscribe to this blog, and it will be delivered to you in one of a variety of formats. I have no idea what any of this actually means, but it's all very high tech.

*** Of Canals and Bicycles ***

Amsterdam is a city of crooked teeth. It's the ground of course: semi-submerged mud and below sea level polder, it was never really meant to support an entire city, and no matter how many pilings you drive down, you still can't count on your house staying level. At some point, everything will sink, just a little bit. And so Amsterdam exists as a series of odd angles, buildings precipitously leaning to and fro, tipping out over sidewalks, crashing into each other, arched gables mirroring arched bridges, brick houses echoing brick streets, bicycle outnumbering automobiles, canals clogged with a mixture of house boats and paddle boats, john boats and row boats, many of them rotting from a mixture of wet weather and Dutch neglect, some of them half sunken from spending the Winter outside.

It's all perfectly charming in its own strange way. The Dutch have this word, gezellig, which is essentially a national obsession. It means cozy, and everything in The Netherlands is guaged by its gezelligness, by how cute, charming and inviting it is. But there's a catch: gezellig is social in nature, it relates to people getting together, sharing very small coffees and very small cookies in very small rooms. As I was told by some friends when I first arrived, "you can't be gezellig alone."

And that's what Amsterdam is, it's gezellig. When I first walked here, on an unseasonably warm April night, underneath a full moon, listening to the waves of the Amstel lapping against the shoreline, watching the bicyclists ride past and chatting in a mixture of languages I half recognized, it all swirled around me, like I'd walked into a movie, the movie I had been searching for that entire trip, a movie of my own. I became drunk that night, drunk on Amsterdam, in love with Amsterdam, committed to Amsterdam in ways that I couldn't even begin to understand, so that when I came back and said, "I've been to Amsterdam," no one else could possibly know what that meant.

I came back every year after that. I forsook other locations to return, to walk around, to see it at all. "Amsterdam again?" a friend would ask. And I would just smile and say, "I have to," and leave it at that. And I would come, and for a day or two I would walk around the canal belt, melting again as if for the first time.

The canal belt is the center of Amsterdam, the result of one of Europe's largest development schemes, a feat of engineering that effectively doubled the thin city in the middle of the swamp. A series of canals were dug, concentric rings forming a horshoe around the heart of the old city, the Medieval quarter that has since turned into the Red Light District, a tourist playground of prostitutes and coffee shops (a coffee shop being the Dutch term for a cafe that sells soft drugs). Like the spokes of a wheel, the streets of the city center radiate outward, crossing each canal via an improbably steep arched bridge, moving diagonally in a manner which insures that you can never get to where you're going directly, but instead are always having to double back on yourself.

When I first came here, I got hopelessly lost - everyone does. Everything looks the same. Quite literally, if you've seen one block in the canal belt, you've seen about forty of them: two rows of stove top houses facing each other across a placid canal, one lane, one way streets squeezed between the entrance steps and the parked cars, sidewalks that until recently were at grade, blocked by couches in the Summer and by garbage the rest of the time, so that you were always weaving in and out of the roadway, narrowly avoiding cars that drove too fast and bicyclists who were frustrated that you weren't paying attention to their aggressive use of the bell.

Because everything looks the same, you have very few landmarks. As a tourist, it all becomes hopelessly confusing. Street signs are small and hard to find, and once you do there's no guarantee that you'll be able to discern the difference between Elandsgracht and Elianstraat, or between Eerste Bloemenstraat and Derde Bloemenstraat. Maps become useless appendages, and besides, everything is so meticulously gridded and haphazardly slanted that it's better to just go on a mixture of gut instinct, luck and a general enjoyment of walking around in circles. After all, it's beautiful the entire way.

Walk around long enough and your mind begins to come unhinged. It's like being in a video game where they shuffle through three or four stock backgrounds: no matter how far you go you're still in the same place. Turn down a street and you think you're going right but instead you've gone left; cross an arched bridge and think you're going up but really it's down. Near becomes far, towards away, straight slanted and curved simply twists until you lose the thread completely. When you ask someone where you are, when you show them a map, where they point their finger isn't remotely close to where you thought you were, and how you get back becomes even more impenetrable. And so you just keep walking, figuring that eventually you'll wind up in the right place.

When you live here it isn't much better. You still don't really know where you are by landmarks - everything looks the same - but by place, by sequence. Three canals over and two bridges down, take a left at the narrow passageway and look out for the bicyclists, cross the cobblestone square and walk along the pedestrian lane, keep the flower market on your right until you get to the streetcar tracks, follow those for awhile and look for the overflowing bicycle rack. If it wasn't for the fact that my bike was parked on the Elansgracht I wouldn't know its name, and if you give me a street address I can't begin to tell you where it is. It took me three months to learn the difference between the Keizersgracht and the Nieuwe Keizersgracht; as any student of the language can tell you, the Dutch have never been shy about recycling words. But then the Dutch are never shy about anything.

I ask a friend from Australia what he thinks about the Dutch, and he doesn't hesitate to tell me, "I don't like them at all." Another person, an American, says to me, "the Dutch will insult you long before you insult them." Typical thoughts on the Dutch are that they're cold, they're bossy, they're frank; they don't have boundaries, they always speak their minds, they breed a level of personal independence that can border on the passive aggressive when seen in a certain light. They'll tell you themselves that they think their country is too small, too crowded, and has too many rules; The Netherlands is one large nanny state, where the idea that someone can do whatever he or she wants to as long as it doesn't cause a problem for anybody else is taken to an extreme, and ceaselessly bureaucratic, end. The Dutch themselves flee in droves for America or Southern Europe, while new immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East rush in to take their place.

And are they what everyone says they are? At times. They can be strangely formal, but they can also be friendly as well, if you give them a moment. People who are used to more Americanized climates often miss the fact that, in America, people are friendly without necessarily being sincere. We're friendly on autopilot, helpful as instinctive reaction. In Holland, there is no expectation of hospitality, not until you get to know someone, not until you've earned the right to become gezellig. But if you give it a moment, if you flash your smile, if you let someone see who you are, you'll be surprised at what they offer in return. And besides, the Dutch are nothing if not stubborn - knowing that they're considered unfriendly, many go out of their way to be overly friendly, absurdly friendly, just so that they can prove you wrong, just so that you'll have a better opinion of them. They're strangely German in that way.

And as the time passes, that way of thinking fades away. You no longer think of Dutch and Non-Dutch (although, by most accounts, they still do). You simply become a part of the city, a part of the life here. When you first arrive, people speak to you in English before you even open your mouth; it's as if something in your stance, in your presence, possibly even in your pheromones announces your foreigness, your linguistic shortcomings. And then one day that stops. People in the stores speak to you in Dutch, people that you meet ask you what part of the city you live in, tourists show you their maps and ask you how they get to the Red Light District. You begin to belong.

And every day you love it more. You see it more. Discover some new alleyway, some perfect little bridge, a darling little statue you'd previously overlooked. There are so many details hidden beneath those gables, adorning those houses: stained glass windows and art decco cornices; family crests and pastoral scenes; plaster reliefs and inlaid granite plaques; hand painted numbers over the doorway letting you know when this house was built, 1654, 1596. Some of these houses have stood for four hundred years.

This city is so old. As an American, even an American from an old city, I can't begin to understand what that means. This city was built when my hometown was still a marsh. They had dammed the Amstel, filled in the swamp, dug the canals, driven the pilings, invested in tulips, colonized the world and amassed a fortune before my town was even a settlement. You can't think of that for very long or your brain will unhinge.

And besides, that's all in the past now. The proverbial Golden Age has receded into memory, is slowly fading on the walls of the Rijksmuseum. Amsterdam today is a medium sized city, a city whose main crowds are of the tourist variety, a city that can become amazingly quiet and still when you turn off the main street, when you walk along a canal, when you pause to observe the full moon, to listen to the people around you, chatting in so many languages, going about their lives. And for a moment it all swirls around you and you fall in love all over again.

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Lily Two

2006-03-02T04:50:00.000-05:00

Sometimes when we dance in the crowd, I see Lily’s face as a child. Her face itself is painted, tonight she’s a geisha, last night she was a princess, and so I don’t know why it should be that when she puts on a mask I can see the person beneath, that her entire history spills out. In the bustling square, the music pours from the speakers and she translates the lyrics for me: “this song says jump like a rabbit”; “this song she’s so in love”; “this song is about beer.” The entire square is full of people, people dancing outside of the bars, people on temporary platforms set up to protect fountains and staircases. The town shuts down for this party, the stores board up their windows, the back alleys are awash in streamers and fanciful murals, little rivers of beer and piss run between the cobblestones. We all bump into each other, jumping up and down in the freezing night, colored wigs and painted faces not quite protecting us from the constant drizzle. It becomes a hallucination, all of these people pushed together; it becomes a blurred picture, colors streaking and bodies in motion, the sort of photo that moves when you look at it, where the elements overlay and refuse to coalesce into a whole.

And it’s amazing how small the square is. This is a medieval city, it was built to maximize density and increase flammability, it was built to confuse invaders, to squeeze them into narrow alleys, confine them in claustrophobic courtyards. It’s a labyrinth essentially, and during Carnaval the maze is full of marching bands and home made floats, puppets and cross dressers and feather boas, Belgian frites and Berlinerbolls, the uniquely European smell of fresh air mingling with cigarette smoke. It’s full of these strange songs, half Oom-Pah and half national anthem, all of them stirring and compelling and mostly concerned with the variety of food and drink options available during these three days of celebration. A sample lyric goes something like, “Frites, frites met mayonnaise!”, and the entire square screams it out in unison.

It’s completely overwhelming, people bumping into you, beer spilling onto your costume, but when we dance together we lose sight of all that. The only space we inhabit is each other, and the landscape becomes infinite. When Lily smiles her entire face lights up. Her eyes crease. A mask of white and Asian blossoms, gold rimmed around her pinned up hair, her kimono floating all around her; she becomes ageless, she becomes complete. I see my friend the adult, the one who takes care of her family and counsels us on life decisions, who looks at me with bloodshot eyes and confesses that she makes her life too complicated, that she creates drama so that she can have something to do, a situation to deal with. But I also see the child, something in how her face grows so large that you could fall into it, nestle among the covers and the cushions. A softness appears when she just lets go, and it seems to tell you that you should let go as well.

She grew up here, she’s been coming to Carnaval since she was born, nearly thirty years now of dancing in the same streets, a line of costumes stretching back through her entire life, her last relationship and the one before that, her college friends and the group they still form, her awkward stage and the embarrassing pictures that are still floating around, her high school years and her family, the parents who stayed married too long and the children who suffered for it. Her mother always made the most elaborate costumes, brought the whole neighborhood together, made it the biggest party of Carnaval. Lily still tells the stories, but her mother hasn’t been to Carnaval in years, not since her children grew up.

I hear all of this, and I almost lose myself in it. The thing about Americans is that we’re constantly in motion; like warm water over cold, we create a swift moving current, always passing through. I’ve lived in five different cities and I can’t say that I’ve put down roots in any of them, or at least not much more than is necessary to keep the top soil from drifting. Lily has spent most of her life in this town, and when we dance in the crowd she bumps into people she hasn’t seen in years, the former classmate she used to study with, the cousin of the of the boy she had her first kiss with when she was twelve. When we dance, this all flows around her like the folds of her kimono, the Gulf Stream of this medieval town.

I see it from afar, standing in the branches of a tree, sitting on a Roman Wall. I pick the vantage point with the widest perspective, the panorama, I watch the crowd and shake my maracas and sway with the music, but I also move in close, study all of the details as we dance together. You only know your friends from the moment you meet them, everything before that is a puzzle you put together, a life assembled through stories told, where the pieces never quite seem to fit. You rely on the unreliable narrator, the self-historian, you accommodate for blind spots and forgetfulness, you pick the best possible light to see them in, so you can always see them perfectly. And still, even then, everything is backstory, as if their life began in media res, because to you it did. Your relationship is the real beginning, anything before that has the substance of fairy story, gauzy and unreal.

I’ve seen the pictures, Lily at nineteen, Lily at twenty-six. When she was my age, she was nearing the end of a long-term relationship, sharing a self-renovated house with the man everyone thought she would marry. In the pictures she looks so light, so joyous. Her hair is cut in a younger style, she lacks the sophistication that she acquired after I met her. In these photos, her face is softer, cleaner, more enthusiastic, less tempered by responsibility and stress, the vagaries of her grown up life. I’d never known she was that young. When I look at the pictures, I realize that I met her at a tipping point, when she moved from one to the other, and that what I see in these pictures is a person I almost knew, the tail end of a story I only just walked in on, the strange place where ending becomes beginning.

In these pictures, she looks like Lise in The Sound of Music, “I am sixteen going on seventeen”. When we dance I see it again, her face like she’s sixteen, like she’s twenty-three, like she looked the day before I met her, the moment just before she met her husband. And he’s beside her now, dancing himself into a frenzy, and his face looks away from his youth, his only gaze is towards the future, the life he shares with her, a new beginning in a foreign country, all of the possibilities that she’s brought him, that they’ve brought each other. That’s part of the story too, that part that I was there for, the part where I came in; when we heard about Maastricht, when she told us about her family, it was just a story, it had the substance of hazy smoke lingering in the air of a Polish wine cellar, the sound of jazz winding its way around our lives.

We were pulled into her stories, we followed her, and now here we are, and there’s her brother, standing beside her, eyeing the women and buying us all too many beers. And there’s her sister, who doesn’t really like Carnaval but always comes out at least once, because you have to. And there’s the ex-boyfriend, who stayed part of the family, and there are the cousins and the cousins of cousins, the boyfriends of cousins and the cousins of boyfriends, all crowded together, all dancing in their painted faces and fabulous costumes. All of these people from all of her lives, blending together as the picture comes into focus, and we dance gaily in the rain.

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Happy Travels

2006-02-10T12:45:00.000-05:00

Greetings from the New Year and the Old World. I'm in the Netherlands now, living in a farmhouse in Halfweg, about half an hour's bus ride from Amsterdam - head over to myspace and read a little about it (because why would I ever post all of my writings in the same place?). In looking through my blog archives, I realized that there was an unfinished essay from the Presidential election of 2004 (!!) that I had never managed to finish. I read it over mostly for the nostalgia factor, and I liked a lot of what I read, so I thought I'd pass it along to all of you.

In many ways it is very much of its time, and I've chosen to honor that by not making any adjustments to the bulk of it, but I have managed to give it a proper ending as well, something which is coming much more out of my life these days, as opposed to where I was back in my G Train days. I hope you all enjoy it.

From the Archives: Happy Travels

Am I alone in missing with fondness the days when we could say President in polite conversation and punctuate the phrase with air quotes? As in: Well, the thing about our President - "President" - is that... There was something incredibly validating about George Bush being an illegitimate President, it meant that no matter what he did, you had a sort of out, which was that, really, we hadn't voted for him.

Now it seems that he actually is the President, and no one is more excited about this than he is. I picture a child in a candy store, being told that he can have anything he wants. How does this differ from his first term, you ask? Well, it turns out that, even though Bush presided over a staunchly neo-conservative administration with a slash and burn approch to any and everything in the public trust while privatizing the country and legislating enormously transparent cutbacks to the wealthy and the coporate, the man was rather insecure about his Presidency. See, he agreed with us, he didn't think that he was legitimate either. He knew as well as you and I did that he wasn't the President, and it seems to have made him cautious.

Well, not any more. Thanks to those extra three million votes, President Bush is pretty damn smug and confident about his job performance and his ability to continue doing it. And since he won with the most votes for a sitting President in, what, eighty years, he's pretty invested in this whole mandate, the people have spoken, God is on my shoulder kind of thing. Never mind that he also won by the smallest majority in the same number of years, which means that he also received more votes against him than any President in eighty years.

There's also this, and I hate to bring this up, I don't want to spoil the party, but there's also this swirling, unresolved question of election fraud. I know, I know, this is unpleasant to mention, implying as it does manipulation of the system, and I know, I know, we can't prove anything, but sometimes the lack of hard proof is emblematic of a job meticulously well done. See, if you look at the exit polls - and you can find them all on-line, just google - many of the swing states with electronic voting machines show a difference of about ten points between what people were saying as they left the polls and the actual, official results. Now, it is entirely possible that what we are looking at here is bad polling, but the discrepancy is uniform nationwide, which means that we either have a systematic failure on behalf of exit pollers, or we have a genuine shift in votes from Column A to Column B.

In any event, it doesn't really matter to the President, who is riding high on his mandate and instituting a national policy that I think can only be called "Fuck All". Any member of his previous administration who showed any signs of being unloyal is being purged as Bush et al shore up the ranks, manifest a better public face, and just generally cut off the common person from having any access from which to interact in any way with the President. It's the American Presidency as Catholic God, the one where you don't have any direct access but you're supposed to believe in his ineffability anyway. Which, no, I mean it sounds great, but let's never forget that the Catholics were the one who killed a guy for saying that the earth orbitted the sun. They pardonned him a few years ago, about the same time they apologized for the Holocaust. And the Inquisition. And the Crusades. Which is a nice gesture and all, but if you're going to be wrong about something, those are pretty big things to be wrong about.

Now, I'm a reasonable person, and I have a lot of faith in the world, and I honestly beleive that, as tragic as it may be, this Presidency could genuinly be the best thing to happen to this country. Why? Well, because it's going to be a disaster. Somewhere between the Hindengerg and driving through Dallas without the bulletproof shield, somewhere between the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and the decision made (again by the Catholic Church) to kill all the cats in Europe which subqequently lead to the Plague, this is what we're going to be finding in this country in the next few years.

See, I'm not an anarchist, but I do believe in a more transparent, open, and public form of government. I believe in people having an investment in their country, in determining its course and character, and I think that the best form of government is one which exists via an open dialogue and ongoing relationship between those who govern and those who are goverened. This is the same relationship that is involved between those who grow the food and those who eat the food, those who run the business and those who use the business, and those who make the art and those who use the art (to pick a few major examples). I think we all have a role or job that we are inherently skilled at, and the ideal society is one in which each person plays their roles to the best of their abilities, as a cooperative venture. This is neither Communism nor Capitalism nor Socialism, but it has elements of all three failed systems.

Needless to say, this is not what we're doing right now in America. Right now, America is currently engaged in its rather unfortunate Empire phase. This really isn't so surprising. Every nation goes through their Empire phase, and every nation fails; this is simply America's shot. This may not be surprising, but it is definitely disappointing; I had rather hoped that America would be smart enough to avoid this trap altogether, that we could apply our inherent American creativity and ingenuity to circumvent this entire portion of our self-growth, and instead get right to the part where we reinvent ourselves for the new modern world. I had also hoped to do this in my own life, skip all the messy parts, and on both counts it turns out I was wrong.

Will America's Empire phase be bad? Oh, God yes. We're embroiled in one war we can't win, trying to get into another. We are leeching our entire economy, and in the process destabilizing the market in the rest of the world, in a bid to simultaneously bankrupt social security and increase the poverty gap in this country; we have nearly abandoned our public institutions such as education and social services; we are increasingly turning to a polluted food supply and creating a polluted world; and, well, the list goes on. The thing is, I don't even know what we're hoping to gain from all of this. At least when Germany did their Empire phase it was clear what their goal was. I think we're just following a handful of rich, white men as they build a fortune for themselves at the expense of the rest of us.

When I go to Europe, I am constantly having to talk about America, and if I don't necessarily find myself defending it, I do find myself trying to put it in context. The question isn't "Will America's Empire phase be bad?" its "Will America's Empire phases be as bad as...". As in, will it be as bad as the Holocaust? As the Napoleonic War? As English involvement in India, or the Dutch in South Africa, or the Portugese and Spanish in South America? Will it be as bad as the Rape of Nanking, or whatever power play China has up it sleeves? These things are really about context more than anything. Context, and climate change.

That is the big question, and at the risk of being callous, the only one that truly matters. Human beings will survive bad governmental policy, we always have. Cities will survive, cultures will survive, national identities will survive. Climate change, though, climate change is pretty serious, climate change doesn't just resolve itself because you emerge from your Traumatic Years with a new perspective. The changes that we are wreaking in our environment are unquestionably serious, and potentially permanent, at least as far as our lifetimes are concerned, and is still something that we really aren't paying enough attention to.

See, our environment is an incredibly fragile thing. A lot of overdramatic environmental reactionaries, they walk around saying "Save the Earth", and the point they seem to miss is that the earth is fine. This earth has survived for over ten billions years, it has survived ice ages, meteors, and various cataclysmic events that would make each and every one of us shit ourselves. The earth is not going anywhere.

We, however, are not so inherently lucky. We are reliant upon a very fragile, tender, remarkably specific environmental equation to ensure our longevity, both as Americans and as people in general. As Americans (and Europeans as well), we are have been blessed with the most improbable and beneficial climate on the planet. America in particular has some of the world's best soil (thanks to glacial drift) as well as copius amounts of sunlight, reliable growing seasons and a stable temperature zone. Europe is entirely too far North to be as temperate as it is, and if it weren't for the miracle that is the Gulf Stream (the same Gulf Stream that scientists are concerned might be shutting down in the not so far off future), continental Europe would essentially be Canada, and Scandinavia would be pretty much frozen solid. When you start to mess with the environment, heating up the earth, melting ice caps, changing the make-up of the world's ocean, you begin to screw with the factors that create climate. This is why the buzz word these days isn't "global warming" but rather "climate change".

To put it very simply, no one knows what will happen. Current warming trends now could easily lead to severe cooling in the near future. If you saw The Day after Tomorrow, well the movie may have been absurd, but the basic scientific principles are sound, and that model, stretched over a much longer period of time, is one plausible model for climate change. Other models involve more extremes (hotter summers, colder winters, fucked up weather in between) or the rising of the climate zones, such that Canada might inherit the States' climate and we would become more akin to Mexico. There are corals dying in the oceans, algaes blooming. There are animals moving into new habitats, there are trees and plants growing in new and unforeseen places, there are entire swaths of land which become uninhabitable. In one model, all of Europe has to move to Germany because there isn't anywhere else to put them. In one model, the entire Northern Hemisphere cools down and the Brazillian rainforest can only survive South of the Amazon. In all of this there are diseases spreading, crops dying, an unparalleled loss to our food supply - if you can't count on the climate, you can't possibly know how, what and when to grow.

We are a world on the brink of the most significant change to our way of life that is imaginable. And, for the most part, we live our lives in complete denial of that reality. We tell ourselves the science is still uncertain - the science is not uncertain - we tell ourselves the evidence is spotty at best - the evidence could not be more clear - we tell ourselves that this is a future phenomenon - it is happening right now. The earth's temperature has already risen one degree Farenheit, with projections that it will rise another five (or two and a half degress Celsius) in the next one hundred years. Years are getting hotter, and January 2006 was one of the hottest winters on record in North America. Right now, at this very moment, we are contributing to monumental changes in an incredibly delicate system, and we really have no idea whatsoever what the result will be.

And in the meanwhile, still, more than a year after I first began writing this post, still America and much of Western Europe is continuing with its pro-business, pro-Capitalism, pro-Corporatocracy model. The notion that we exist as a global world is seen purely in industrial terms; we are not a global community, but a global work force, a global chain of supply and demand. The world's wealthiest nations are seeking ways to become even wealthier, the world's developing nations are building an increasingly polluted infrastructure to support that (and to get their own piece of the action), and the so-called third world is suffering for it every day, in the form of sweatshops, bad loans, underpayment for their export crops (you don't even want to hear about the less than subsistent wages paid to most coffee farmers, but probably you should hear about it anyway), and, most unfortunate of all, the particularly harsh brunt of the weather we're creating (the drought in the Amazon is now so severe that whole swaths of the river have essentially dried up). What I once though of as an American phenomenon is really a worldwide trend. We may be the Empire builder, but we're also breaking the wind for everyone who is following behind us, taking a piece of that action.

It is time to discover how we can operate, as a balanced world, with balanced economies, in a sustainable way. We strive too often for greed, for corpulence and trucculence, rather than simply focusing on what we have, what we need, and whether or not it makes us happy at the end of the day. We're not just engaged in a struggle over the political fate of the our country, or the environmental fate of our world, but the overall fate of our lives. We are creating our lives every day that we live them: the manner in which we express our fundamental beliefs, our values and our ethics is what shapes the very quality of our existence. We can live to be so much more than who we are, but it probably means living with a little bit less. It means buying less, which in turn means structuring our economy in a way that doesn't rely on unending, unsustainable growth as our primary benchmark of success. Yes, this company is growing, but what is growing into? Who or what is it becoming, and who are we becoming as a result?

These are incredibly obtuse questions, and not nearly as exciting as tearing into the presidency, complaining bitterly about the state of the world. These aren't fun, per se, because they rely upon each of us to look within, rather than without. But if we're really serious about saving the world, it's the place to start. It's the only journey we can take that will truly get us where we want to be. Even when we travel across the world, we're still traveling within ourselves. If you're up for it, happy travels. Like all adventurers, I'm sure that we'll cross paths one day, and spend an evening sharing stories.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Memories of Tokyo

2005-12-23T15:13:00.000-05:00

Walking at night...

Japan goes to bed early; by eleven the city has slowed down and by twelve is entirely still. Quiet. Peaceful in a way you would never think possible based on its daytime activity and its nightime roar. Tokyo is a city of frenzy, until it goes completely Zen. Walk around the streets alone in the dark and you see only the occasional taxi, a few stray pedestrians, nothing more.

The air in October is cool, you wear a slight pullover and feel so fresh. So invigorated. But then you always feel this way, you always feel so young when you're in Asia, you always feel new. It's why you go, to be in that place where you feel so open that you just might cry from the heartbreak of it all. That's why you hate to leave as well; you always think of flying back to America as a return to some unfortunate reality, the Lost Boys leaving Neverland. Going back to America means you have to grow up.

It's safe on the street, that's the surprising thing. Tokyo may be a remarkably expensive city (an impression that will be somewhat revised when you visit Iceland or Norway), but when you look around you can see where all the money goes: the streets are clean; the trains are timely; and even now, on your own in a strange city where the street signs aren't even in letters you recognize, even now you feel completely safe.

Stand above the black water and take it in. Tokyo is a city of rivers and canals, none of them any more prominent than the other. This isn't a city built on one epic body of water, no Chao Phraya or Vlatava, this is a city built on a flood plain, with myriad run offs and drainages. You could make an argument for the Tokyo Bay, but that's more of a backyard than anything else, a place for a shopping mall and a pleasure beach; Tokyo faces in more than it looks out. Built around a series of neighboring municipalities that somehow grew together, it geographic core is most likely the Imperial Palace and gardens, its true centers the shopping and entertainment areas for which it is justifiably famous: the neon piazza of Shibuya; Shinjuku's carnival of karaoke and pachinko, alley upon alley of drunken salary men and uniformed school girls; the expat inanity of Roppongi, where the Americans and Australians find commonality in their foreignness. Each of these is a glory unrivalled by any other in the world: compared to the Japanese pleasure arcade, New York's Times Square is a boardwalk side show, a high tech Coney Island.

But then you turn a corner, and you leave that behind. During the day, you walk a few blocks from the emerald glass siding of Shinjuku's high rise shopping mall, and you find yourself in a typical Japanese neighborhood, modest one and two story houses almost but not quite touching each other. Plain and squat in appearance, they are little Zen boxes, adorned with demure paint jobs and aged wood framing. What's most surprising is how tasteful it is, how subdued. You don't even feel like you're in a city anymore, you don't know how that would be possible.

Or walking through Jimbocho. On Saturday the booksellers open early, and you browse their musty shelves, look at old movie magazines, picture books, catalogues from museum shows, fashion shoots, a retrospective on the style of Audrey Hepburn. Walk up the hill, past signs in three languages (because the Japanese love to read French and English, even if they don't always learn what the words mean), to a long, leafy promenade. On the weekends it's a market, the old men spread out their wares on a blanket, sell off bits and pieces of the Japanese past: faded, worm eaten manga from the early 20th century, old signs from Tokyo's extensive railway system. You have to take their word when they say it's a station marker, you wouldn't know the difference.

And so why do you buy it, the railway sign you can't read, the worm eaten manga that you know is too damaged to be worth anything? Why do you spend ten days taking pictures and collecting advertisements, snatching up every little piece of the culture you can? For the same reason they look at you so intently: because you want it for your own. You'll go home in a few days, you'll mistranslate, you'll misrember, you'll think that Tokyo has eight or nine rivers when a simple look at Mapquest will remind you it really only has two. Which doesn't even matter, because you only stood on one, stood on one in the gentle breeze of a midnight month, your final few nights of your trip around the world, the feeling mixing in your breast of wonder and fear, being grateful for the experience you've had, and overwhelmed to let it go. You worry that when you return you'll forget who you were, who you've been. You worry that travel is just an illusion, that life is just an illusion, that you'll always be falling back into that hole, that awful hole you've fought so hard to escape from, the one you're afraid you'll never be able to leave. You'll always be a Lost Boy.

Walk along the canals in the drifting afternoon sun. When it came time to build the modern freeway system, Tokyo was already a crowded, dense metropolis. They looked at their map, and the only open spaces were the miniature rivers cutting through the city, connecting the various urban centers. So they decided to build above them. And why not? We think of canals as relics, toe paths to wander and reflect, little escapes from the city around us, but canals are utilitarian in function, they're built for traffic, built to keep people in contact. So why not simply extend their use? And now when you walk along the canal, you also walk underneath the freeway, which somehow isn't as awful as it sounds; we're so used to American elevated highways cutting cities in half, creating little no man's lands. In Tokyo, the freeways are just one more feature, no more or less safe than anything else, no more or less charming.

You walk forever through that city, change trains two or three times to get somewhere you can't pronounce properly, pop out of the ground to find another center, another density, another man made creation, another night street where the restaurants and shops rise six or seven stories, every floor a new adventure, every exterior wall a vinyl sign declaring all of the hidden wares inside. It looks like a comic book, or a movie, and you realize that modern Tokyo is the first city built with an eye to how it would look in the films, as a piece of manga. This city is so media saturated that it becomes a piece of media in itself. You walk along and you're both a spectator and a character, watching others, being watched yourself, until everyone is taking part in someone else's fantasy. Japan is the ultimate fetish society, every minute aspect of life blossoming into a work of art. A life of the imagination. Sometimes you look around and you're convinced that none of this is actually real.

You walk forever though that city and you only scratch the surface, walk until your feet are tired and it's three in the morning and you hop in a cab and give directions to a man who doesn't speak your language -- as long as you keep saying "Hai," keep agreeing and nodding your head, no matter what he says, as long as you keep him talking, eventually he'll say something you can make sense of, something you can use. So much of life is just keeping information flowing.

On your last day you ride a rollercoaster, a real one as opposed to simply the rhythms of travel itself. It's the grand opening of yet another combination mall and theme park, and when the pre-ride instructions are given in Japanese and English, the young women who work on the platform act out the words, simulate "scary" and "hands inside the car". You almost miss your flight because of that roller coaster, but you make it all the same, and you're so jubilantly happy that you forget to be afraid. Of the return. Or regretful.

There is one thing though, one thing you never got to do. You spend ten days in Japan and you never see Mount Fuji. It used to be people could see it from Tokyo, but a century of pollution has taken care of that. As it is, you pass by Fuji twice on the high speed shinkansen, and both times it stays hidden behind some clouds. Even with the Japanese woman helping you on the return trip from Kyoto, even then it passes by unseen. Which is totally a bummer, because going to Japan and not seeing Fuji just feels wrong, like going to New York and skipping out on the Statue of Liberty, or heading to LA and not being stuck in traffic.

Your plane takes off on Sunday at sunset, and it will land the same day at sunrise, a nice bit of modern time travel. Ten minutes out from Japan, flying over the ocean, and it's a clear afternoon. You look out the window, at the most perfect sunset, at the most perfect place, a little comic book, floating kingdom, fantasy land du jour. It's now just a black smudge, a low line on the horizon. Except. Except for right there, rising out of that smudge like a heartbeat on an EKG, proud and solitary. Mount Fuji. Waving goodbye, saying to come back.

And it's a cliche, to say that this puts a smile to your lips. And it's easy, to say that for a moment you no longer think of yourself as a Lost Boy. But it's true as well, in its own way, in the moment you're in. One trip can't change your life, but it can change who you are, and enough of that, enough work and focus and intention, and one day you do change your life, find new paths, seek new ways to be. Until you create Japan in your own country, with that railway sign on your wall, and that feeling of Asia in your heart. And when you think of Japan, it doesn't break your heart, but instead makes you feel... complete somehow. A black smudge on the horizon, with a volcano rising out of its center.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

On Bushwick 4: The Grand Finale

2005-12-05T16:25:00.000-05:00

And thus, at last, the end to our Bushwick Art Project story. For those of you who've been reading this story, thanks for your time and patience. Please let me know how you've enjoyed it.

On Bushwick IV: The Grand Finale

In the corner, a swinging quartet. Led by a slightly elfin pianoman, they tear through a set of improvisational, rock influenced jazz. Stuffed up against the condiment table and the flier board, they have almost no room to themselves, but still the guy playing the upright bass manages to make love to his instrument.

Potion is packed. Not so much carved out of a loading dock as fully installed into it, Potion, situated on the ground floor of Art Dorm South, is the pre-eminent coffee shop and lounge in this section of Loft City. Run by a multi-ethnic couple (Len’s nationalized Ukrainian, Jen’s American born East Indian), Potion opened about a year ago as little more than a concrete room with a couple of couches and a basic assortment of teas and coffees. With the arrival of organic granola and a full liquor license, the space turned into an all-purpose gathering and cultural hot spot. Len uses the brick walls to display the work of local artists, while Jen programs weekly poetry readings, political lectures and multi-disciplinary performances. Despite being located in the area’s youngest building, this is easily the most adult and sophisticated of the various hangouts in the neighborhood.

Tonight you can barely move there are so many people crowded inside; I didn’t even bother going in, I’m still out on the sidewalk talking with Russ. We’re in front of the other loading dock – like the staircases on a Georgian mansion, these things come in pairs – where a sheet has been rigged as a make shift movie screen; punk rock videos with the sound muted are the current offering. Russ watches one and tells me its by the same Norwegian band that made the “AntiAmerikansk Dans”, a hip-hop diatribe against the States and their well-documented history of human rights abuses in foreign countries. Not surprisingly, it’s banned in this country, which only makes downloading it off the internet all the more fun.

Behind the screen, a flurry of tights and powdered wigs, as characters from a pastorale of French history make themselves up as a thrift store version of the Cirque du Soleil idiom. They’re part of the night's next event, what has somewhat charmingly been called a “Burlesque”, hewing to a more European definition of the word. We would consider it a vaudeville, a cavalcade of music and dancing and circus arts to take place on the street outside Potion. The beauty of this part of Bushwick is that there’s very little traffic, and what there is we treat as foreign, outsiders momentarily granted access to our city.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Potion Café and the Bushwick Art Projects!” It’s booming voice, coming from the middle of the street, a top hatted, grey bearded smudge of man in his indeterminate middle ages, with a painted face and the unmistakable wardrobe of a gypsy. His Eastern European accent is so grotesque that it just might actually be real. “We are the Sudden Spectacle burlesque review, and we come from Baklavia”

“All hail Baklavia!”

And now there’s a band around him, a woman with feather boa and accordion, a man with electric bass and tri-cornered hat. They look like they’ve stepped out of an acid trip vision of the French Revolution, each of them a hybrid of urchin and royalty, Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI as technicolor gutter punks.

“We are going to play for you tonight some songs of revolution and freedom, which you might recognize as American folk songs. Please, don’t be surprised if when I sing I slip into an American accent – it is merely to stay in character!”

He counts them off, one, two, three, four, all in his Eastern European accent, and then switches into a Bob Dylan American scratch. They tear their way through a Jack Kerouac travelogue of Sixties era Americana, the accordion bringing in equal elements of German oom pah and French chanson, the bass keeping it all together. What emerges is a sound with no nationality nor time space, a mélange of every sound of every thought and every party and every artistic movement that ever was. It mixes myth and fantasy with real world politics and the never ending fight against corruption and bad choices. Like a dragon it grows in size, taking over the street, calling a crowd around it, and then parting the crowd, ten feet high and decked out in cowboy hats and Middle Eastern beads, two women on stilts, dancing around the band, kicking their extended legs into the ether, bouncing and spinning and turning precarious pirouettes above the bacchanal.

By now cars are slowing down to watch, passing by at a crawl, passengers’ heads pressed to windows like tourists at a drive through nature park. This kind of thing doesn’t happen all that often in this part of Bushwick, street musicians and stilt walkers and a crowd of a couple hundred people spilling off the sidewalk. The only spectacle this neighborhood usually sees is a proliferation of flags on Puerto Rican Pride day. This is an event of another stripe entirely. I turn to Russ and say the only thing I can, state the honest truth that right now everyone here, every denizen of Loft City can feel in their bones: we’ve arrived.

And, it turns out, so has the fire twirler. When I lived on the West Coast, fire was a fairly common occurrence. It isn’t a party in Portland if someone doesn’t juggle fire by the end of the evening. Roommate Gavin, who grew up in California, literally rolls his eyes at the mention of a fire performance: “I’ve seen too many people swallow fire." As it is, he skips the performance. On the East Coast, though, fire is still in its nascent phase, and aside from the girl who hulaed a flaming hoop at the First Warm Night party, fire just isn’t something that happens in Brooklyn.

Until tonight. Decked out in pink tights and wrap around sunglasses, he appears before us like the superhero he is. He doesn’t literally descend from the rooftops, but in his own foolish way he looks like he very well could have. Without a word he lays out of his props, his bottle of lighter fluid and his charred batons, everything placed meticulously.
The band continues to play behind him, the women walk on stilts. Once he’s set up, once everything is perfect, he motions to the crowd, he needs a lighter, one comes flying out, he lights a baton, we wait. He picks up his bottle of fluid, pours a stream of the clear liquid into his mouth, and puts the bottle down. We wait. He looks at us. We look at him. We’re all waiting. For something to happen.

He opens his mouth, and before you even see the giant ball of fire, you feel the heat against your skin. Most street performers do their act during the day, in public spaces, for money. They do it in front of the police, they follow certain rules, they respect concepts of safety and traffic control. But this isn’t a public space, not really, this isn’t Karl Johanns Gate in Oslo or Covent Garden in London. This is a dilapidated stretch of warehouses in Bushwick, no one cares what the fuck happens here. So where most crowds are kept a safe distance from the fire, we crowd in close. Where most audiences never really get involved in the action, in this moment we are the action. There’s a famous line in street shows, used by fire jugglers the world over. It goes something like, “now, this is not a movie. These are real batons and this is real fire and I will really be juggling them. So if it looks like the flame is coming towards you, it is. Run.” In the thickness of this crowd, you don’t even have that option.

What follows is a show to impress even the jaded. Now, I don’t claim to be a connoisseur of these things, and I’ll admit that I can be easily impressed, but the burlesque we witness, the fire dancing literally in front of our eyes, the flames pickling our skin, making us sweat, it’s unlike anything I’ve seen before. We all lean in when he swallows a flame or takes a swig of lighter fluid, and then we all press back, scream even, when he reignites. Some boys from the ghetto up the street are darting around the crowd, taunting our human flame with the careless, arrogant enthusiasm of city youth. They don’t see how they could possibly get hurt, they might not even know the fire is real.

After the swallowing and the breathing comes the twirling, two chains with a flame on each end, and the juggling, three clubs that reach up the top of the second floor before returning to his hand. We all scream and clap, our jaws dropping to the floor, the bass and the accordion keeping time with the whole thing. He drops the ground, kicks off his shoes, lights a staff on either end and then twirls that with his toes. He does the caterpillar, that old break dance move, keeping the fire lit the entire time. It is ridiculous, we are absolutely ridiculous, delirious, remarkably and insanely happy. I wish this could happen every night.

********************************************

“So what do you think, does our neighborhood stand a chance?”

I’m walking with Scott, through the intermediary silence of Loft City. After the fire twirling burlesque, the night is essentially over. There are some after parties starting soon, there’s music at the Wreck Room and a dance party over at The Factory, but for now there’s just silence, room to think. Scott and I have this conversation a lot, the forward march of gentrification, the changes happening all around us. We share a similar philosophy of sorts, a worldview where politics and social habits meet spirituality and personal choice. We’re a good match in this regard, we appreciate the ideal existence while acknowledging the tangible, physical reality.

“It certainly doesn’t look good. My friend Sarah was saying that in three years we can expect to be the next Williamsburg, with the crowds and the shops and high prices.”

When I first moved here, I liked how isolated it was, how insular. We really lived in our own world, hidden from prying eyes nearby. Where Williamsburg was fighting over chain stores and luxury condominiums, we were able to have our quiet few blocks, a little canyon of rickety warehouses, independent businesses, and the well worn illusion that nothing could change, that we didn’t have anything anyone else would want.

“I used to have this conversation with a friend of mine," I tell him. "This is only nine months ago, when I first found this area, and I said to her, we’ll be completely passed over. Whatever change happens, it will miss us. And it wasn’t that I was being naïve, I was just doing the math. I mean, look, we’re not well set up for the change, we don’t have the infrastructure. We’re just a lot of warehouses and artists.”

“That’s all Williamsburg was six years ago. And now you can’t afford to live there.”

“Yeah, but Williamsburg had a main strip, Williamsburg had store fronts. Look around you – where could you put a store? All we have are loading docks, and not very many of them. How could you possibly build a new Williamsburg here?”

But you can build anything anywhere, if you really want to, if you see the profit in it. And as I look around, I see the buildings I’ve overlooked, garages that could easily become first a boutique and then a Banana Republic, hidden away single family dwellings that could easily support more people. Seeing a city, walking down a street is always a selective experience, one shaped as much by emotion and desire as by physical reality. Any one space is generally too vast and complex to be easily understood; we all cut corners to make it our own. That’s what I’ve done with my Loft City, a dream I built from the excitement of the burgeoning Bushwick, built out of a desire to see it exist, and an ability to deny what it used to be.

Because, of course, the change has already started. We don’t say it, Scott and I, but we are that change. It’s hard to see, just yet, because technically we haven’t started displacing residents, but it’s only a matter of time. I live in an old factory, Scott lives in an old theatre, other people are in warehouses and banks and various reconverteds. These businesses would have moved on one way or the other, that much is mostly true; we can easily tell ourselves that we weren’t the ones to push them out.

This is the dark side to community activism in New York and perhaps anywhere in the modern world: we’re all fighting to stop social progression at its mid-point, we’re all fighting to keep something we made for ourselves, something we find beautiful, something we want to tend and see grow. It’s not that we want to keep our little corner of Bushwick isolated, or artificially small, it’s that we want to keep it something we recognize, something we can call our own. Surely there’s a place where we can establish our own rules, create our own protectorate; suddenly we need to designate neighborhoods and residential use in the same way we’ve set aside national parks and state forests. This is the question we all have to ask ourselves: do communities have the right to self-determination, to self-governance? Can we set our own course, or will we always be at the whims of others?

“I used to think that way you do,” Scott says to me. “But now I just think that if they want to come in, if they want to buy up the lots and turn it into the next big neighborhood, they’re going to. It’s not something we can really stop.”

We don’t know it yet, but this will be one of the last warm nights of the year. Well, not warm exactly – we’re wearing coats after all – but seasonably pleasant, the kind of night you can walk through without gloves, where you don’t yet see your breath in front of you. It’s funny how your concept of warm changes as the year goes on, how you hold on to ever decreasing glimmers of comfort, learn to appreciate whatever you can get. This party tonight, it reminds me of the last one we had, the First Warm Night party, a massive event back in May.

You should have seen it. We all met on Second Avenue and Houston in Manhattan, everyone wearing face make up and fairy wings and blowing bubbles, and then we hopped on the subway – we filled an entire train from end to end, complete with a marching band – and we rode all the way out to Red Hook in Brooklyn, another cavernous, ghostly area of abandoned docks and decommissioned longshoremen. We danced in a public park, and marched through cobblestone streets, held a rave on a dock until the cops threw us out, and then partied all night in the backyard of the area’s one performance space slash bar. There was capoeira, there were hula hoops, there were strange games and political fliers, and mostly there was joy, and people singing, and absurdity of all shape and size. My friend Elana signed people up to vote – she was the Voter Registration Fairy, with American flag wings – and I flirted with a guy who runs a program to integrate people with bipolar disorder into society and Peter showed up way at the end, after getting hopelessly lost in Red Hook, just in time for us to hang out for half an hour and then head home.

It was the happiest I had been in nearly a year, the first time since the previous Fall when my smile seemed to grow beyond myself, when the world around me truly reflected all that I believed it was possible to contain. I took Peter into the backyard, where a jazz band was playing, where activists friends were drinking and planning the revolution, where bubbles were still being blown into the night. “This,” I said to Peter, “is why I moved to Brooklyn.”

Walking with Scott half a year later, and I can still remember that night, feel the sensation, how much magic I still believed the world contained. We’re at the Antimart now, we’re browsing racks of boutique caliber political clothing, pullovers emblazoned with the words “Freedom Hater,” T-shirts that are stenciled “Hand Made.” This is the newest addition to Loft City, another store installed in a loading dock, one that isn’t even officially open yet. Half of the store is given over to a multi-media piece, music and image, ambient esoteric, and this late in the night the racks have been heavily picked over. The owners have a concept for this space, political capitalism, ethical consumerism. All of the garments are American made, sweat shop free, and some of the proceeds – once there are any – will be going to social causes. The owner wants to set up weekly gatherings, community dinners and screening of documentaries. He wants to create a place where people can mix and mingle and positively affect the world.

“I don’t know Scott. I don’t know anymore what I think. This whole night has the feeling of something beginning, of a neighborhood being born, of people coming together, starting their own methods, creating their own rules. How can we be at the beginning and the end all at the same time, how can our birth be at the same time as our death? Surely there’s something we can do, some way to keep our community alive, to let it take root before it’s torn apart.”

And he just looks at me, and doesn’t say a word.

******************************************************

And that’s it then, the end of the Art Projects. And, perhaps, the end of Bushwick as well, right at its beginning.

Well, not quite the end. There is still one more event, the piece de resistance if you will. There’s a dance party at The Factory, which is quite literally what it claims to be. On the first floor of the loft building next to the concrete refinery, there is a still functioning wood shop, complete with drill presses in the middle of the room and racks of wood along the side. Like everything else tonight, it’s been decorated just for us. Projection screens hang around the periphery, a DJ is set up at one end, everyone dances underneath blinking LCD lights.

This party, it’s the most diverse I’ve seen in our part of Brooklyn. Understand, for all of the underground people and alternative thought, our little piece of Bushwick still tends to be heavily, almost exclusively white. The diversity you see on the street is mainly the result of various worlds overlapping; we don’t hang out with the Dominicans anymore than they hang out with us, and though we share the same basic streets, we each have our own neighborhoods within them. But this party, this party is a panoply, this party is white kids and blacks kids, Asians and Hispanics, this party is everyone, dancing to their own beat, trading moves.

By now, Scott is high. We stopped off at his old apartment where a friend smoked him up. I was offered as well but declined; that isn’t my scene anymore, and I don’t know if it will be again. We solved the mystery of those oil projections by the way – it was Scott’s friend, projecting from his apartment. We should have figured it out on our own. Scott’s friend is a DJ and a Burning Man veteran, and those slowly moving oil paintings are a very Burning Man thing to do. So Scott’s off in the crowd, where he’ll be dancing until morning, literally leaving when they shut the party down around sunrise. For me, I’m about to head out. It’s a fun party, but I’m feeling slightly claustrophobic, and besides, it’s been a long day.

And so I go out into the night, alone this time, walking slowly home. Outside a vacant lot, I stop to pull down one of those red banners; it’s sitting there looking dejected, and I think it will make a nice set of curtains in my room. I feel this incredible mix of emotions, expectation and disappointment all at the same time, celebration and mourning. I don’t know what will happen to our neighborhood, nor if I’ll even be around when it happens; I’m planning to move on myself regardless, go spend a half a year in Europe and then see where the wind blows from there. But whatever happens, I believe in this neighborhood, whatever you call it, Loft City or Bushwick, East Williamsburg or the god awful MoJo. It doesn’t change who we are, it doesn’t affect what we do, and it will probably have little bearing on how long we’re here.

Maybe a community will grow from these streets, like that proverbial tree growing in Brooklyn, or maybe we’ll be swept aside, like so many other communities, tossed aside for bigger buildings and higher profits. Community, in any form, is an endangered species in this country. All I know is that we’re here now, all I know is that we’re creating our art, creating our lives, creating our own rules and philosophies, making them work. We are Bushwick, and for a night we’ve discovered what that means, just how much fun that can be. And as I walk home, as the night deepens and the air grows colder, as I can finally see my breath in front of my face, I feel a smile a smile come to my lips and I think, for tonight, that will have to be enough.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Post-Holiday Road Trip Preview

2005-11-30T16:33:00.000-05:00

Hey Everyone,

Hope you had a wonderful holiday spent with good friends and relations. I know some of you must have been waiting for that final installment of the Bushwick feature, and I had hoped to have it up for you, but many days of playing with my family (won't see them for Christmas) and my good friends Lily and Dylan prevented that. The Bushwick story will be finished soon -- expect it within a week -- and for now I'm pleased to offer you a very slight preview of a new story from my road trip back with Lil and Dyl.

Please, enjoy!

Preview: Pennsylvania Road Trip

We’re somewhere in Central PA when Lily decides she wants to see the Pennsylvania Dutch. I don’t remember how the topic came up, but one moment Lily was completely ignorant of their existence and the next they were all she wanted to see. In the backseat, reading a book on eugenics, Dylan thinks this is the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard. “I don’t know what y’all are expecting to see; they’re just people who speak a dialect of German mixed with English. You’re not going to find anybody in strange clothes driving buggies.” I wish I could correct him, but the fact is that he generally knows more about these things than I do; Dylan understands migratory trends and religious groupings, he’s able to speak of Amish Mennonites and trace their evolution from post-Puritan Germany through modern day America. He understands them as a real world, literal existence, one more piece of scholarly history, whereas for me they’re an idea, really, an American fascination. I don’t see them as a tourist attraction, or at least not entirely, but perhaps I think of them in storybook terms, as one more piece of myth in the American fabric, one more complexity we ignore when we speak of the “Real America.” I’ve just heard of the Pennsylvania Dutch, in quotation marks, I’ve just seen the commercials advertising the butter churning and the buggy rides, I’ve just read about four course meals where they’re forbidden to ask for payment and guests are told in advance by tour guides to put their money under their plates when they’re finished.

We pull off the interstate at Hershey and plunge into the seasonally barren farmland. So often we think of America in terms of suburbs and sprawl, we fly the New York to D.C. corridor and ponder Megalopolis, and we forget that America is still essentially one large vastness. Half of the country remains a frontier according to its literal, technical meaning, and for all the development and lost communities, there is an equal number of unending plains and sparsely populated countryside. We drive along rural roads for miles, rolling hills and open fields, leaf stripped trees in dense, jagged forests forming the crown of a winter backdrop. The day is drenched in mist and gray. The rain holds off, but we won’t be seeing the sun on this day, nor, it would seem, for many to come.

Bunched along the roads are houses standing two and thee stories high and sided with brownstone native rocks left behind by glaciers tens of thousands of years ago. When these fields were first tilled by modern Americans, the farmers spent most of their time digging the stones out of the soil. These houses are built for practicality: the ground floors are used as winter stables for horses and cows, their body heat used to warm the family living quarters above. The roof tops peak in bowed arches, the best for fording the snow that used to fall in such copious amounts in colder times (and as it is today, it is entirely too warm for a wet day in late November, and while none of us will say it, we’re all quite concerned). This is still a land of independent farmers, of animals husbanded in groups of fives and tens rather than hundreds and thousands. It’s doubtful that much money is raised in this manner – dairy farming is notoriously unprofitable on the micro level – but a way of life is preserved, a community continues to exist. Most of the farms have a little sign standing in their driveway announcing their participation in one brand of cheese or another, and a few are even member owners of a prominent butter corporation.

Gliding along the hills, Lily says to me, “this is just like Limburg,” which is the area of the Netherlands that she comes from. Most people think of her country as a flat, semi-submerged plain, they picture boggy polder and cloggy shoes, but Lily comes from the South, where the land slowly rises up to the German foothills which will eventually become Black Forest and Alpine Mountains. I’ve been there once, when we all traveled together last winter, and I hadn’t thought of it at the time, but I can see the resemblance. It’s so easy to get caught up in the notions of how and where Europe and America differ that we miss the similarities, and at this time of year, with spindly trees and winter light, the foothills of the Alps and the foothills of the Appalachians are essentially indistinguishable.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

On Bushwick 3: Loft City

2005-11-18T16:10:00.000-05:00

To start your weekend off, our third installment on the Bushwick Art Projects and the neighborhood it celebrates. Today we go further into the nature of our veritable loft city, and the ways in which people bring their own personal vision of residential living to a raw, urban semi-wilderness. This is a lengthy installment, so it should tide you over until the grand finale. Look for Part IV to be up sometime by the middle of next week; I'm leaving for South Carolina on Monday, so between travel and the lack of internet at my parent's house (for they are even more archaic than I), it might be Tuesday or Wednesday before our series draws to a close.

Enjoy.

Loft City

The part of Bushwick I’m in, you might think of it as Loft City. This is the inner enclave, the sanctuary, gateway to the new Bushwick but also an island unto itself. The main commercial strip – the only commercial strip – is along Bogart Street, near the alternate subway exit that is nonetheless more popular than the official one down the street. The strip, such as it is, was until recently two stores long; the Antimart, opening tonight, brings the total to three. On the corner is Brooklyn’s Natural, an independently run organic market that also serves as Loft City’s general store. This mercantile duality leads it to be one of only a few health food stores to sell cigarettes alongside soymilk. They also do a brisk trade in shaving cream and incense bundles. Next door is The Archive, a coffee shop slash video store (the iced coffee is Fair Trade, the hot coffee is not) where the walls of DVDs are meticulously sorted by genre, language and director but there is, inexplicably, no section for Orson Welles (I came in one night jonesing for The Lady from Shanghai and was sorely disappointed).

The exteriors of the conjoining stores are painted with brightly colored, fanciful murals. On the general store, a young boy scrounges around a garden, peering at anthropomorphic vegetables; an anonymous artist has added his own touch, a silver wad of snot running from the boy’s nose. On the video store, a longstanding scene of a spaceship invasion has recently been replaced with a super saturated film noir scene, a jazzy, gauzy private detective in a fedora watching a femme fatale fleeing through the brownstone streets; it looks like something from a Walter Moseley novel. This is the center of Loft City. King's County, one of the area’s two bars, lies around the corner. It hides behind a non-descript metal door like a hipster speakeasy. And if your washing machine is ever broken, it's fairly well known that you can sneak into the building and do laundry in the basement.

Tonight there is an extra flourish. The sweatshop across the street – the last true mega factory in the area – has picked up a new coat. An anonymous artist is celebrating the Bushwick Art Projects by decorating the side of the building with slowly rotating, multi-hued oil projections, shapes and shades moving their way across the broken windows and tattered bricks like a North Brooklyn Aurora Borealis.

I’m on the corner staring up at this, listening to a flutist and a freestyler spin some streetside rhymes. Red banners hang everywhere, and cardboard arrows attached to buildings and fences point the way to various events. The crowd is thin, but word on the street is that the L train has stopped running entirely, citing a mysterious “earlier incident,” and after all it’s still fairly early in the night. I run into some friends on the street and we chat for a bit, compare notes, offer thoughts on what to check out. Some more friends call and say they’re up on McKibbin, across the street from where I used to live, and I agree to head up and meet them.

McKibbin Street has two gigantic buildings facing each other, each spanning half a city block. My friend Peter once compared them to a pair of battleships in dry dock, and he wasn’t off. Long, hulking and somewhat treacherous in appearance, they are stuffed to the brims with young people; divided and subdivided beyond all meaning, there are at least a hundred units crowded into these two buildings. Populated mostly with young artists and post-college kids, and home to an array of band practices, all night parties and perpetual hallway cigarette smoke, they are colloquially known throughout Brooklyn for being what they are: The Art Dorms.

The basic layout of these buildings – of all the loft buildings in this area – is like any other apartment complex you’ve been to. This is what makes them so incongruous; while the individual apartments are unconventional spaces carved out of factories and offered as blank slates for the artistically inclined and the constructionally proficient, the larger complex is shockingly conventional, with your usual array of hallways, mailboxes and laundry rooms. The stairways are generally poured concrete and exposed brick walls, which adds to the institutionalized feel, and in the younger buildings there is usually a Sunday morning trail of beer bottles and still wet vomit.

The hallways tend to have an Alice in Wonderland feel to them, partially a result of being so tall and long, and partially due to their institutionalized barrenness. While the apartments are all studies in personal taste and approaches to life, the common spaces are blank, stark walls and unending floors. Some hallways are brightly lit, some are “ambient”, which is a nice way of referring to an effort to cut costs. Some are full of trash, some are kept absurdly clean, but they’re all soulless in the same way. Little if any of the character inside manages to sneak out, unless it’s a party night, and then it all spills indiscriminately throughout the building.

The apartments themselves vary a great deal. These buildings have gone through so many different phases of development that nothing is standardized. The building owners began by converting a few units into residences back when most of the space was still given over to factories. Those early units may have been as much as a quarter or even a full half of a floor, but this is all hearsay, so it’s hard to get exact numbers. With each successive wave of conversion the apartments have grown smaller: new units are allotted less space than their predecessors, and existing units are divided and subdivided further once the original lease holder moves out or, just as common, is kicked out so that their space can be “renovated” and re-rented for more money. Word on the street is that an entire floor of 265 McKibbin was recently kicked out so that the landlords could jack up the price and attract the Bedford Avenue crowd.

For the most part, the units are somewhere between fifteen hundred and two thousand square feet, give or take (and the newest units take a lot – recent entries onto the market have measured about eight hundred fifty square feet, and at a few hundred dollars more than spaces twice that size rented for three years ago), and with ceilings running somewhere between ten and sixteen feet high. You can’t really build two complete floors in these units, but you can easily build one and a half, leading to myriad rooms of Japanese proportions, with lots of kneeling and furniture kept low to the ground.

And then there are the windows. The crowning jewel of these spaces, perhaps the main reason many of us want to live in them, is that they literally have walls of windows. Often stretching half the height of the walls themselves, the windows can be as much as eight feet high and aligned in nearly continuous rows along one side of the apartment, offering phenomenal views, amazing amounts of light and – some of you can see this coming – mind bending amounts of heat when the sun is out. These are, after all, enormous factories; designed with an eye towards fiscal efficiency rather than personal comfort.

In many ways they’re terribly inconvenient places to live. In the winter the units can be quite warm if you’re facing the sunrise, but they cool down quickly, and if you’re on the sunset side they essentially never warm up to begin with. In The Art Dorms at least, the kids who are too poor to afford heat (or who prefer to smoke and drink their money away) spend the day shuttling from apartment to apartment, chasing the sun. In the summer, with the walls of windows and tin ceilings, the entire building becomes an oven. The stairwells positively bake and each successive floor feels warmer and warmer; by the top you feel as if you’re in the high desert, only when night comes there’s no relief. In the summer, the top floor in Loft City is a miserable place to be.

*******************************************************

Okay, this building is the more grown up of the Art Dorms, the one that Peter – who not coincidentally lived here – said was sailing off into the future, while the other was somehow stuck on the shore. It does have a quieter feel to it, less graffiti in the hallways, less noise bleeding into the outside world. All of these buildings are little worlds unto themselves, they all have their own character; they attract different sorts of people. Where Art Dorm South is a social scene and an incubator (this is the space of the Moha Lounge, the liveliest monthly happening in the area), Art Dorm North seems to attract early career artists, people on their way to a prestigious graduate school or some sort of gallery representation. People here probably aren’t making any money off of their art, or at least not very much. They can’t afford to live in some of the more upscale buildings down the street, they’re still living with plywood walls and too many roommates.

I find my friends in the hallway, talking with a young artist. A friend of Peter’s, I’ve previously only known him as “that drunk guy,” so it’s nice to discover another side of his personality. His canvasses are too large to properly show in his apartment, so he has brought them out into the hall. My roommate Cat, an art student herself, is peppering him with questions about his work and process as an artist. I think it's a bit intense, but Vernando, he’s the kind of guy who takes everything in perfect stride. With a massive smile, smooth ebony skin and the classiest dreadlocks you’ve ever seen, he’s one part erudite and one part trickster, Coyote in a smoking jacket and high tops. Meeting him in his element, I’m able to appreciate what Peter sees in him.

Like many artists, he’s a little bewildered by the things that other people see in his work. “This one girl, she looked at this painting,” he says, pointing to a canvas that I’m too polite to mention looks like the poster art from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, “and she was seeing all these things. Like, she was saying to me, ‘oh, you got his chakras, and his spiritual side, but also you capture his struggle in society,’ and I’m just like ‘whoah!’, ‘cause I just paint, you know? It just comes out and then I see what’s there.”

He has the two canvasses in the hallway and then a handful more inside, along the walls of the TV room, a freestanding box within the larger box of the loft; the walls stop a good six feet below the ceiling. His paintings – and I mean, I don’t want to read too much into them – but they seem to capture people, often young women, in a state of reaching or yearning. A few of them are adorned with a pulpy, whispy paper, and it appears – “a lot of people say it looks like she’s actually breaking through the painting, like coming out of the canvas” – that she’s emerging somehow, coming into herself.

Upstairs, on the second floor, an open loft offers “Wine, Art and Free Hot Dog,” and, indeed, the apartment smells of boiling not-quite-meat. The mood here is subdued, the place elegant in its sparseness. In this it resembles the art on the wall, a series that a few months ago was hanging in the café/lounge across the street. The work is three dimensional and structural, presented in the size and scope of traditional canvasses, but with metal as the medium, studs and rods forming shapes like guitars and spines, sinewy curves and alluring shapes. It’s all very evocative and distancing, hot and cold, off putting and entrancing at the same time. I could stay and look at it for hours, but the smell of hot dog is getting to me, and my friends, less impressed, want to push on.

From here on out we walk the same roads in varying combinations, McKibbin and Siegel, Bogart and Thames, and no matter how we go, we always cross through the Bogart Strip, Loft City’s only important junction. We run into friends and friends of friends, people we’ve met at our own parties but still only vaguely recognize. Somewhere on these streets a guerrilla dance troupe is winding their way towards us, but we haven’t seen them yet, and the way we’re going, it’s doubtful that we ever will.

Tucked away in its own little corner on Thames Street (which, yes, we pronounce phonetically), OfficeOps is in many ways the unofficial boundary of Lofty City’s town center. Launched in 2000 as the particularly bizarre brainchild between a Hassidic developer and a group of DIY dumpster divers, OfficeOps is an all in one arts resource space, a four story converted factory offering studio space for both residential and non-profit professional use, dormitory style subsidized housing for itinerant arts groups, a screening room, a dark room, a radio station, a post office and a giant concert hall that is also used for monthly roller rink parties. That’s right, hundreds of hipsters skating around a rock band while wearing four wheeled boots; it’s the nearest that you’ll ever see New York get to a Zoo Bomb.

OfficeOps is also meticulously clean. That’s the first thought I have upon entering the building. I had heard about this – a friend of a friend lives here and he had warned me about the sanitary factor – but it’s still surprising. I have seen million dollar buildings that weren’t as well kempt as this run down former factory in the middle of Bushwick. It also turns out that this is really all that we’ll be seeing of OfficeOps; the screening room is open and we’ll stop there on the way out, but the art showing isn’t actually taking place in anyone’s studio, but rather throughout the hallway on the third floor.

Oh, bummer.

The first installation is across from the laundry and snack room. This should give you an idea of just how professional OfficeOps is, each floor has its own laundry and snack room (I can’t begin to tell you how weird that is in this area). In their own darkened nook, a pair of artists oversee an electronic, ethereal installation. In the corner, a black and white picture of a young girl walking through a field is projected onto the pages of a book. A fan blows the pages in one direction, and then the weight of the binding pushes back, so the image surface is always being broken up; one moment it is perfectly clear, and then it is lost again. The image becomes ephemeral, and at so many moments it ceases to exist.

Next to that, a large screen with scrolling text, homilies and haikus. A woman in a cocktail dress hands me the controller to a video game console; “here,” she says, “try it out.” It’s an interactive piece, hit the buttons to change the text, increase or decrease its size, scroll across the screen, make it bounce or change its words. As people take the controls, you see their personalities emerge; one person is slow and methodical, savoring the impact of each minute maneuver, every little change, while another grabs the controls and tries everything at once, and the words fly across the screen, the image flows and mutates and turn hyperkinetic.

Along the hallway, pictures of an old polyester couple. The woman has orange beehive Jersey hair, the man wears plaid slacks and penny loafers. They’re in a typically dreary living room, brown carpeting and walls, appliances purchased in the Fifties, the world’s first stationary exercise bicycle. These are actually the photographer’s parents.

Around the corner, a talking box, a radio evangelist doing faith healings and life interventions. The odd thing about those people is that I’m always put off by their accents and their intensity, but if you actually listen to what they’re saying, it isn’t anything that you wouldn’t hear from your therapist or self-help guru. Filter out all the references to their personal interpretation of God and you’re left with simply “get your life together, make good choices, become a stronger and more aware human being.” Next to this – and these don’t seem to be related, so you have to wonder what each artist thought of the other – but next to this is a hallway full of plastic sculptures, melted to resemble dried and stretched bubble gum, dangling from the ceiling. It’s an entire corridor of misshapen pink and purple, while the squawk box on the wall tries to save our souls.

The second floor of OfficeOps is something else altogether. Decorated with rows and rows of salvaged red lockers, it feels like a television set, a Saved by the Bell vision of a high school rec room. Vintage pinball machines line one wall, while a collection of decommissioned cigarette machines vend healthy snacks. Down the corridor is a screening room with cinema style seating; able to fit forty people, it feels like a miniature version of the real thing. When we walk in, they’re showing a series of films made by an Israeli couple with the help of their children, the youngest of whom seems to be no more than five or six. It's nice, at least in theory, a family making movies together. In one story, a rather protracted fable about a young ostrich lost in the wilderness, all four members play themselves as the ostrich family. In another film, father and daughter act out Melville’s Moby Dick in a seven minute abridged version set entirely in their kitchen. They play all of the parts and construct the ship by placing a mast in their sink and using the refrigerator as the crew’s cabin. It’s actually quite ingenious.

Back at the Bogart Junction, we raid the health food store for a quick snack. Emblematic of this area, there is a long line to check out; even though this will be one of the busiest nights of the year, Brooklyn’s Natural saw no need to bring in extra staff. With iced green tea and raw food energy bars in hand, we pop in next door, where The Archive has been taken over for a Jack and the Beanstalk puppet show. It’s a cool idea, a Betty Boop-esque fantasia in which Jack and his family are a Hollywood cartoon version of American Indians, and the giants are cardboard skyscrapers intent on developing the nascent region of Bushburg by constructing apartment complexes alongside virgin streams. There are shadow puppets and skeleton head bras, jangling beads and beatbox accompaniment, culminating in a three minute dance number to C+C Music Factory’s “Everybody Dance Now”. It is almost as cool as it sounds, but it’s also kind of dull – their eyes were a bit bigger than their mouths – and afterwards Roommate Gavin talks to the director and comes back to report.

“She said it was an excerpt from an hour long work,” – now Gavin is rather famous for his deadpan delivery and brilliant timing – “though I can’t imagine how anyone could sit though anymore of that.”

“I don’t know, I thought it was kind of fun.”

“You also came in halfway through.”

We flee the crowd – “I didn’t know you could fit that many people into The Archive” – first popping into the bar around the corner and then heading across the street, to the building above the subway station. I am in love with this building. Mind you I’ve never been inside, but I’ve wanted to live in this building ever since I moved to Loft City. It’s next to the city park, which means that many of the units look out onto actual trees, a rarity in this neighborhood, and it also just has a nice vibe. When I say that, I speak to an intangible feeling, how I always find a little more space and personal peace for the thirty second of my day that I spend walking past it.

We ran into one of our old roommates outside King’s County, and he said that we had to check out the Living Bird; “it’s completely amazing”. I’m not entirely convinced that he wasn’t on drugs when he told us this: looking at the bird myself, I’m a little underwhelmed. We’re in the third floor landing of the stairwell, a particularly cavernous affair, and we’re crowding around a young women in a cardboard box meant to resemble something at a carnival, all glitter and sweeping lettering. She is in some sort of felt animal costume, rather generic and nondescript, with a little beak and feathers in her hair.

“Hear the Living Bird,” the sign says. “Listen to Her Song Then Learn Her Secret!”

People write some words onto a piece of paper, stick it through a slot in her box, and then she sings an improvised poem in a strangled, eerie voice. Somehow I was expecting something a little more Broadway. A calliope provides the background accompaniment. At the end, she profers a little card and tells the person in front of her: “Take it”. It’s an advertisement, “Fortunes Read, Chakras Cleansed”. That’s the secret of the Living Bird, she's self-promoting.

I drift away, eager to explore this building, to find out just what lies inside. Ostensibly I’m still on the Art Walk, but really I’m just an explorer. I move around a lot in life, and one of the things that I like about looking at apartments and hunting for roommates is that you’re able to see all of the different ways in which people live, all of the realities which lie behind the facades. In this building, for example, the usual hallway wooden floors have been replaced with marble. The walls are still crappy, the lighting still institutional fluorescent, but the flooring is all white marble tile. A sign in the hallway instructs people that “Doggy Poop on the Roof Is Not Cool!” and warns the tenants that they might lose their roof access due to a few irresponsible pet owners. Dog shit on the roof is actually a big problem in this area. Too many residents can't be bothered to take their animals to the street level, and instead take a lackadaisically Dutch attitude to pet maintenance; we should really put up signs everywhere reading “Hond in de Straat!” (because apparently making it all the way to the curb is too much to ask for).

An open door and I go inside. This loft is a rich sherbert green, with a couch at the end and a cat in the corner. A TV set floats ten feet above the room, nestled into an alcove on the verdant wall. The design aesthetic is New Wave chic; this apartment wouldn’t be out of place on the homo home makeover show. As I said, each building in Loft City has its own character, its own collection of residents; this is the Design Building, no wayward plywood or misshapen foam core here. The Art Dorms are famous for walls pitched at precarious angles, for entire lofts that look like something out of a fourth grade science fair project, all of those misshapen paper maché volcanoes. The apartments in the Design Building – in all the buildings along Bogart – are tightly conceived and professionally assembled. They are show pieces as much as they are playrooms.

Like this loft. This one isn’t even on the art walk, we just walked inside because the door was open. There’s a party going on inside, and the moment I see it I fall in love.

“This was in The Voice last year. I swear I saw this in the Shelter section and ever since I've wondered where it was.”

It’s like something out of a Sixties’ science fiction film crossed with a Seventies disco: the entire space is a series of rolling hills, swooping curves and refracted light. Rather than hard walls, the space is delineated by opaque, undulating fiberglass, the sort of siding you see on gardener’s greenhouses, and as for the beds themselves, rather than being in proper bedrooms, they are nestled into self-contained pods suspended from the ceiling and floating above the room; little doors open onto the outside world. Along the windows, a giant curving stage has been built, four feet high and easily fifteen feet deep at its greatest point. Ambient music plays, everything is backlit in greens and blues, and even though there is no art on the walls, and even though we don’t know anybody here, we just sit for a while, and soak it in.

This is what I love about Loft City: people find their own way to live, their own personal aesthetic, their own understanding of the world, of the process of life, of their existence. They find their home, they build it for themselves, create a community, and every so often, if you’re lucky to be around, you get invited in, you spend an hour, you experience a moment beyond yourself. And Loft City goes on, while we sit and dream.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

For People Who Ask

2005-11-17T00:40:00.000-05:00

At the Media Center slash vaguely Asian shopping mall, just after the art decco snow flake light show (which I watch and think "this is what is killing Western Civilization" while taking a picture with my cell phone), and going down the escalator to the health food supermarket with the high prices and the questionable labor practices, I hear behind me:

"You know, James is coming into town -"

"Oh, I haven't seen him in ages - I didn't know he was coming, he didn't e-mail me -"

Two friends, talking over each other, like the patter in the old Thin Man films, only with the youthful inflection and slack vowels peculiar to the Under Thirties. They're bubbly and excited in the way that people get in New York during the holiday season, which now officially begins somewhere around mid-November.

"No, he didn't send an e-mail, he put up a posting on Friendster -"

"Oh, I haven't been on Friendster in a month -"

And I'm just as bubbly myself, and excited, energized from a session of Alexander technique and already emotionally heightened because of the full moon - I feel freshly scrubbed. I also have that strange power which comes from living in a city you ultimately feel incredibly neutral about - it's a very odd thing to live in New York and have no opinion on it, but that's where I find myself these days.

And she continues, the one with the piquant voice, slides into

"And I love this haircut on you"

And I'm not even aware it's happening, but already my head is turning, has turned, because somehow in the span of half an escalator ride I've become invested, I want to know how this ends, I want to see the haircut for myself. I try and fob it off as I'm just looking at the lucite stars, but I don't even convince myself.

And it is nice. Though short. One of those haircuts that is really too short to properly be called a haircut, and maybe that's why I get caught, because I pause for a moment, to take it in. I'd make a horrible spy, I think too much.

And she asks me, "it's nice, isn't it?"

And he askes me, "do you think it is?"

And I say, "yeah, it's great."

When I turn back around, they continue to talk about me. She says:

"He looks like Chris Lubick"

"He does look like Chris Lubick"

"He could be Chris Lubick"

"I wonder if he knows Chris Lubick"

"Excuse me, do you know Chris Lubick?"

"No, I don't know -"

"Because you look like -"

"Are you as nice as Chris Lubick?"

"Am I as -"

"If you're even half as nice as he is, you'd be very nice -"

"Chris Lubick is very nice"

"He is very nice"

"I'm sure at best I'm only half as nice"

"That would still be very nice"

"That would be awfully nice"

And we part ways at the bottom of the escalator, but of course we meet up again at the hot food bar, because this is a crowded supermarket, and because we remind each other of people we know, and because it just seems right. To talk. To sit together and have dinner. And it's not like I'm given a choice; one of them (the guy of course) simply declares that I will eat with them - "no one should eat alone, even though I often do" - and then it's decided.

Sitting along the everchaning color wall of the subterranean eatery at the organic market, the conversation which follows is far too delirious to recount. I'm their guest, but I'm also their audience. Friends from college (and of course it turns out we all have the same useless degree in theatre directing), they're one of those perfectly matched pair who are essentially a walking vaudeville act. I'm here simply to watch, because they can't watch themselves, and occassionally to throw out topics which they can then riff on. I'm the erudite, but then I always am. In my own comedy days, I always played the straight man, because I wasn't very good at hitting the punch lines.

Sitting along the now red, now green color wall, we're surrounded by a mob of people, absolute chaos, every chair taken, and at quite a few of them, little Harry Potters, men and women in black wigs, striped scarves and round glasses; it's like being in a living Where's Waldo painting. Apparently there's a private screening upstairs; somehow my dynamic duo has tickets, and the level of excitement passing between them would be enough to power most third world villages for a winter or two.

And so we exchange topics, we go round robin - the inherently disappointing nature of a directing degree, the Middle East in American movies, how every culture throughout time has told their own version of the Cinderella story - they hit punchlines and spin stories and regale me with their own version of "Upstairs/Downstairs" (he travels first class to Buenos Aires because he knows the right people, she scrounges for cab fare to Astoria because it's raining), and when they get up to leave I say, "Oh, here, let me give you the address to my blog."

I say this to everyone these days, because right now the blog is the nearest thing I have to discernible artistic output, and because it comes the closest to explaining what I mean when I say "I write," and then offer the vague and lame follow up of "plays, essays, stories, that kind of thing." Really, I might as well say "words" for as helpful as I am. But then, that's the point of the blog isn't it, to simply offer the writing, rather than my attempt to explain the writing. People who know me, they understand that when I say I have a blog, I don't really mean that I have a blog, it's just that it's the nearest word that we can all agree on.

These kids, however, having known me for only twenty minutes, are armed with no such knowledge. They don't know that I'm really inviting them to read my essays, they think I'm inviting them to something much more, well, topical. So when I say, "here, check out my blog," the answer I get is

"Will we be in it?"

I'm not sure if taken aback is the right phrase.

"Oh, I'm sorry but -"

"Can we be?"

"Oh, it's not that kind of -"

"Then I don't think I'll read it."

I'm absolutely speechless at this point. Proper etiquette would at least have called for him to take the address and then toss it away once he was out of my sight. We've had dinner together, the least he can do is take part in the charade.

"You'll have to excuse him, he's -"

"Don't get me wrong -"

"No it's nice, you've properly integrated, you're a real New Yorker now -"

"He's a little self-obsessed -"

"It runs in the city -"

"Of course give us the address, of course we'll read the blog."

And I write it out.

And I give it to them.

And I make no promises.

They walk off, they see their movie, I stay behind, I do my Dutch homework, I go to the concert with the Russian pianist, I walk home through the rain.

And I hadn't planned to do this, because I didn't really see the story in it, because I'm already in the middle of other stories, because there's a structure and a form to this thing, there's an ongoing series and a devoted following and all sorts of things to keep in mind, but at the same time, what the hell, why not write about them, why not put them on the blog?

And so this is for the Vaudeville Duo. Because they asked.

On Bushwick 2: A New Sort of Art Walk

2005-11-15T17:35:00.000-05:00

Today, the second of a series. Scroll down to read Part I if you haven't already. Part III should be up by Thursday or Friday, and hopefully we'll be able to finish the set by the end of the weekend.

Please feel free to leave comments once you're done reading, either privately or here on the blog. I'm trying out a variety of new things in this writing, and I'm interested in finding out how they work. Any feedback would be very appreciated, whether you like it or whether you don't.

Happy reading.

A New Sort of Art Walk

By the time I get to the Paper Woman, I’m beginning to think that my initial excitement was misplaced. I had envisioned some phenomenal experience, dashing from art studio to art studio, an array of ambient sounds and projected images, a wash of color and people and free food and heady conversation and live music percussing the entire way. I had pictured Iceland Airwaves or Roskilde, multiple venue rock concerts, and instead what we have is more of a multi-disciplinary art walk. The trouble with being a writer is that you’re always making things out to be better than they are: reality has a hard time keeping up.

This may be just an art walk, but it isn’t a terribly well compacted one. It’s an art walk with very long blocks, an art walk where even the venues in the centralized core are generally five minutes walk from each other. Further out, across Flushing Avenue and along the J train, the handful of open studios are essentially satellites. Events here started a few hours before the rest, and they’ll end their night well before the others have hit their stride. This year at least, the venues south of Flushing are really the opening act, a warm up for the night to come.

I don’t know this as I’m walking up Bushwick Avenue, one of our main strips, a corridor of public housing, Robert Moses’ vertical ghettos giving way to modern, semi-utopian developments, block long buildings masquerading as row houses in soothing natural materials of cream and beige. Across the street are mom and pop auto garages and chain link fence; three roads converge up ahead, and the triangle of land squeezed between them becomes increasingly useless as it narrows. Behind this, visible in the streetlights, are the buildings I’ve come to see, four and five story brick behemoths, out of scale in almost any environment, able to fit in here because this is a neighborhood which is entirely lacking in any sort of homogenized planning. A red banner hangs down the side of the building, three stories tall at least, announcing the building as an open loft. These banners are all over Bushwick tonight, running along fences and hanging from buildings. Some are just plain red, others have white circles stenciled on them, or the initials BAP.

The entrance itself is on a side street, one of those quiet blocks which always sends you into debate over whether it’s quaint or dangerous. A paper sign is taped onto a metal door that hangs slightly ajar. The entrance. The stairwell is dark, dusty and narrow. Buildings like this aren’t divided and sub-divided like the ones across Flushing; this building hasn’t been developed to attract the Manhattan kids, there’s no graffiti on the walls because there aren’t enough people. Buildings like this, you rent an entire floor and then you’re left alone, free to do whatever you want, however you want, separated from the modern amenities and services most city dwellers take for granted. The true pioneers, these are the spaces that they moved into, back when everything was like this.

I leave the stairwell lighting behind somewhere on the third floor, and by the time I get to the fourth, I’m fairly convinced that I’ve done something wrong. This is the floor marked on the brochure, but there is no noise coming from the other side of the door, no sign to say that I’m in the right place, no indication whatsoever that I’m supposed to walk through and be part of some major event. What can I do, I open the door. Inside is simply an enormous apartment, fairly empty of people but decked out in all sorts of art. I was promised, by the program, “Industrial-Organic Hybrid Landscapes,” and you can imagine what I did with that in my head. I’m not even sure that I knew what to expect, but it definitely wasn’t this. The milieu I’m greeted with isn’t so much “experimental art project” as “some guy lives here.”

A cat darts across the room. I take a few steps inside. Talk radio plays in the background and the air smells faintly of stale smoke. I see a guy in his mid-thirties, dreadlocked and wearing a Communist party pullover.

“Am I in the right place? I’m here for,” and I fumble to pull out the brochure I’ve stuffed in my back pocket.

“Yeah man, come on in, take a look around.”

The art is arranged on tables and along the walls, much of it stuffed into the corners or hanging in front of sheets. The usual apartment furniture and accoutrements have been pulled over to one side of the room and hidden by drapery. So much of the art is process based and refuse based that it’s hard to tell whether I’m looking at a pile of junk or a pile of art. So much of the art is of the tchotke variety, little books and place settings; the space feels like a cross between a garage and an antique store.

In the corner, there is an assortment of sculptures made out of soda cans, detergent boxes and other forms of consumer waste. Aluminum is twisted and cut, cardboard waxed and shellacked, and, this being commercial packaging, the colors are almost painfully cheerful. I don’t really see discernible shapes or structures so much as collage, and I drift off into a reverie about an old friend of mine who did used to make masks like this, with spangles and moving parts; we used them in a play we did once, but we couldn’t take them on tour because –

“That’s all made with re-used materials. He really believes in recycling everything he can.”

It’s CPPR again, come to act as my personal tour guide. He holds a coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and oddly enough the tune that comes to my mind when I look at him is the theme song from Mr. Roger’s. He has a relaxed air, the ambassador showing off his loft, and I can tell I’ve missed the bulk of the party because he’s already changed into his house slippers.

He shows me another corner, large canvasses with pencil markings and what appear to be splotches of wax. The figures on the canvasses are all hands and arms, reaching limbs, knotted and gnarled. These same figures stand before the paintings as well, large form three dimensional sculptures, hanging from the ceiling. It’s impressive in its scale, if not necessarily in its actuality. This is the kind of art I look at and I want to like, and I try to like, and I generally walk away from feeling fairly unimpressed. This is the kind of art I will always think better of after the fact, remembering the smell in the loft and the layer of dust on the floor, and how nice it was to have a tour guide, and how, really, once I saw the rest of the art that night, this was one of the highlights. At the time, of course, all I can think is, “oh look, it’s giant hands.”

In the adjoining room, a large projection screen is set up, with an array of pillows on a banque along the floor, gold and orange and sumptuous earth tones. Eastern music is in the air, the slow meanderings of the sitar, and a variety of shapes and colors flow across the screen, like a sophisticated version of the visualizer on your computer’s music player. The room has a nice vibe, but it too is empty, and I can tell I would have been treated to a great event if I had simply been on time.

The next venue is more of the same. Two blocks away and on another quiet if vaguely threatening street, the building itself is an impressive affair, all molding and extended corners, like an old bank building, a meeting hall or a theatre. Which it very well might have been – in this neighborhood, everything has been converted into something else. It’s also, for all purposes, functionally dead, inert. I ring the buzzer three or four times to no answer, and I’m about to leave when someone comes to let me in. This space is designated a performance venue, but there is no performance going on, just some people hanging around and chatting. As I walk around, a guy talking on his phone tells an absentee friend, “oh yeah, we started at four thirty and did like three or four performances!” I duck in and duck out and head back along Bushwick.

So at this point I’m two for two, and it’s possible that this is entirely my fault. We had a late start today, cleaned up our loft and grabbed brunch over at Life Café, so it’s not a mystery as to why I’ve missed all of these performances. But then, that’s always the question with these events: how much do you trust the program, how much faith do you have that things will truly begin on time. In Portland, anything listed as four o’clock won’t begin until six, and half the time they don’t even bother to put the time on the program. We’ve always had the luxury of drifting through these events, on our own time scale, in our own little bubbles.

Cross Flushing and back into the Warehouse Ghetto, past the Chinese factories and onto Moore Street. I’m thinking that now I’ll hit the crowds, but it’s just as spare as before, and equally low key. The courtyard at 260 is hosting chain link furniture, rather clever sculptures of a chair, a bench and a four poster bed – with curtains – all made out of fencing material. Upstairs is the hallway of trash bag snakes and the Paper Woman. Across the hall, a series of pictures, symmetrical and photoshopped, created by an artist who doesn’t even live in the loft.

“We were just asked to host some art, and we agreed,” says one of the young women sitting on the couch, reigning over a coffee table of pretzels, cookies and cheesy puffed snacks. “The bad part is they didn’t even send us a relief worker, so we can’t go and see anything. We have to stay and guard the art.”

“Our roommate is coming home soon,” interjects the other spiky haired docent, in tweed and fleece. “When she gets here, we’re putting her in charge and we’re gonna split.”

Their loft is set up for three people. The front room is the kitchen and dining area; a sign above the sink implores people to wash their dishes and put away their food (“we have fruit flies” it says, next to a picture of a frowning face), and a pile of fliers on the kitchen table sit untouched beneath a collage made by one of the residents. The rear room, the majority of the apartment, is set up around an entertainment area, a coffee table and a small TV, two couches sitting low to the floor, a line of CDs stretching along the wall. Nothing here was bought at IKEA. Three lofted bedrooms form an L shape around the room, tuck themselves away behind walls painted in bold, primary colors. Like South East Asian tree houses, the rooms sit on stilts four feet high, each served by a wooden staircase covered in shoes, a waterfall decoration both aesthetically pleasing and imminently functional. The ambience here is Emo Zen. I’m sure if I asked it would turn out that the cookies are vegan.

I leave imminently more intrigued by the loft than by anything on the walls, and this will eventually become a trend; at some point the art walk shifts into a house walk, like the sort they have in my hometown of Charleston, except that instead of looking at well appointed gardens and colonial era mansions, we’re looking at people’s alternative spaces and the strange, clever things they can do with them. I had expected a night of creativity, and in fact I won’t be disappointed, I’ll just be surprised by how it appears. It’s not going to be on the walls or in the program, it’s not going to be part of the officially sanctioned event, but rather it will come from all of the lives that surround the event, all of the moments and experiences we’ve brought with us to Bushwick, all of the tactile realities that make up our diaspora. It’s a Bushwick walk then, and so much the better.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

On Bushwick 1: Birth of a Neighborhood

2005-11-13T18:45:00.000-05:00

Last night was the Bushwick Art Projects, an all night affair of art on the walls and art in the streets, of performances in coffee shops and the grand opening of a new political-ethical clothing store. This morning, I'm posting the first of a series, a multi-part essay on the event, the neighborhood, and the larger implications in terms of the city. Today, a little history of the area, and a description of just what this crazy place is like.

Please, enjoy!

Birth of a Neighborhood

I haven’t seen this before. A friend of mine used to live in this building, up on the fourth floor, so I’ve been here. And I looked at an apartment once on the ground floor, so I know what the units look like bare; I’ve measured them out, I have a sense of what could be done with them. But this is the second floor, which I haven’t been to, and even if I had, it’s never looked like this, a long hallway decorated with what appear to be slowly undulating snakes or giant feather boas made out of plastic bags, hanging from the ceiling, writhing along the floor. Some strange ambient music drifts into the hallway from an open door, an eerie Icelandic tenor half singing, half whispering, beckoning us inside. It’s an open loft and at the end, seen through the glass panels of her own little jewel box, a young woman wearing a simple ballgown, moving slowly through a room of thatchwork dress maker’s dummies, a history of women’s fashion hanging from the rafters above, all of it, everything, made out of paper. She collects thinnest tissue, large sheets of it, and she cuts, little A frame dresses without the women to wear them, she folds the paper and she cuts deliberately and then pulls apart a daisy chain, pulls apart a daisy chain and then tosses them in the air while Sigur Ros purrs and we all hang suspended in her moment, in time and in breath, in this strange place where we all exist, a cocoon of sorts, a world about to be born, a neighborhood on the verge, an entire new community, in this strange little world, in a loft in Bushwick, one block from the cool alterna-video store and two blocks from where that girl was raped last week.

No, this I have not seen before.

This is my fourth stop of the night, and in all honesty, this is the first place I’ve been where the art was as compelling as the space it’s in. It’s a seasonably cool night in Brooklyn, a clear and crisp November evening with enough stars in the sky to actually form constellations, and all over the newly reclaimed Bushwick (well, Inner Bushwick) a massive art event is taking place. Packs of artists and hipsters walk around, programs in hand, popping into open studios and stopping at loading docks, checking out live bands and freaky puppet shows. It’s all part of the Bushwick Art Projects, an evening of more than a hundred artists showing work in twenty venues over the course of sixteen hours, culminating in an all night dance party in a basement woodshop. Like Bushwick itself, this is an event in which the finished product still shows its process origins, in which the finished and unfinished intermingle. Many of us live in spaces with active woodshops, why not have a dance party in one as well?

This is a celebration, and as the night wears on and people come together, you can feel it in the air, and while the intent of the organizers is most likely to display art, what really emerges is a vision of the neighborhood. Still a young area, we’ve been in our gestation period, and tonight we have our debut, our coming out, the newly reclaimed neighborhood, a space that has formed, like most entities, with an organic lack of awareness, and is only now, perhaps, looking around and appreciating what has emerged.

I say reclaimed because, just until a few days ago, this section of town used to be Williamsburg. Well, East Williamsburg. And then briefly, and still no doubt on realtors’ listings, MoJo, a neat little piece of synergy meant to create the manufactured notion of a self-sustaining hipster enclave. Before that this was called Bushwick, which is how the Old Timers still think of it, but you have to go back long before any of us moved here to actually find a time when it was called that. It was actually a parlor game for awhile, what will we call ourselves, with the majority of options being awkward and rather lame combination of the old and the new, like Bushburg or Williamswick. I wanted to call us Area Near the Concrete Refinery, but that was shot down.

The fact is that this neighborhood is a bit of an anomaly. Really, this is no neighborhood at all, and as we endlessly discuss whether or not we’ll become “The Next Williamsburg,” that’s a point which can’t be forgotten. For the most part, this neighborhood is former warehouses and factory buildings, or current warehouses and factory buildings, and the few exceptions are on the outskirts. This was never a residential part of town, at least not until the artists and young people began moving in as the factories moved out. And now that it is a residential neighborhood, it’s one of a different stripe; there are only two coffeeshops, but they outnumber the bodegas; the only video store is an independent local business (and is also one of the coffeeshops); the only grocery store is a semi-organic market; until the Antimart appeared there wasn’t a retail outlet for material goods until you crossed Bushwick Avenue and entered the terrain of East Williamsburg proper. There are very few places where one could put a storefront, and most of those are carved out of something else, like a laundry room or a loading dock. There is only one place to get brunch, there are only two bars, and most of the nightlife here is booze and drugs in someone’s loft, or maybe a game of Scrabble down at the Archive. We also have a fire station, which is rare in these parts of Brooklyn. I’m still not sure how we lucked out on that one.

What we have are blocks and blocks of big box buildings, the original big box buildings, stuffed to the brims with artists and progressives and people who are living some sort of personal, alternative lifestyle, as well as your general retinue of hipsters in hoods and drug addled post-college kids. We have Office Ops, the original art complex, a mixture of low rent office space, reasonably priced studio/living space, and performance venues on the second floor, complete with a movie theatre, vintage pinball games and old time snack machines serving up to date snacks. We have movies shown on roofs, we have artists selling their clothes on the streets, we have a rather ingenious campaign to get Morgan Avenue, one of the most barren, concretized stretches of North Brooklyn declared a “Greenest Street in New York” (the city will give you free trees if you enter the competition), and we have sweatshops. Still active sweatshops, which we regard from the sidewalk while drinking coffee and ponder the injustice of the world, and then hop on the subway and go get some food.

We have large buildings with large windows, the panes broken, or frosted over, or replaced with blue and brown plastic, or some just boarded up entirely. We have vacant lots a mixture of concrete and weeds, we have local graffiti artists tagging every surface in sight, we have a still active concrete refinery across the street from one of New York’s preeminent playground (this must have been a mistake, I think, giving such a nice playground to such a poor and underpopulated community; most of the children here are living with their immigrant parents in vinyl sided, fully attached row housing along McKibbin Street, or in what appear to be single family units in buildings only marginally above tenement level), and we have some of the worst streets in the city to park on if you want to keep your windows intact. We have nighttime parking regulations, we have cargo trucks navigating too narrow streets, and we have Boar’s Head meat, proudly declaring a hundred years of excellence. We have women being raped, with a new flier going up every few weeks to announce another incident, another corner to watch out for.

We have Hassids selling real estate, and I always look at the kindly, matronly women and try to see if I can find the wig line. I love their patent leather shoes, and the old style elegance that comes from being stuck in the Nineteenth Century. They’ve become the surprising innovators of the area, outdoing each other to trick out their buildings with newer and better features. The connoisseur can find something to suit any taste, from the trash filled, graffitied hallways of the infamous Art Dorms to the marbled tiles and clean views of Bogart and Siegel Streets.

Getting away from the L, you can live in reconverted opera house which is being turned into an all inclusive lifestyle complex, a gated compound offering bike storage, basement gym, and large common area with plasma TV and recording studio. One of the hottest properties in the area, and set to open up a stretch of blocks along the heretofore impenetrable J train, the Opera House Lofts are the brainchild of the mastermind behind the Real Form Girdle Company building. More commonly and rather mistakenly referred to as the Mini Mini Mall, Real Form is an all-in-one retail and living space on Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg’s main strip, offering coffee shop, book store, internet access and yoga studio, with residential lofts above.

In truth, there are two separate areas of Inner Bushwick, which until recently were quite distinct but are now growing towards each other, stitched together by the uneven pavement of Flushing Avenue. There is little, if anything, to join these sections of Brooklyn, aside from the fact that they’re neighbors and they share transportation. I live in this second portion of Bushwick, and here the equation reverses; where they have a majority of factories interspersed with a handful of residences, we are a proper residential neighborhood, mostly Dominican and Ecuadorean, rows and rows of three and four story apartment buildings interspersed with the occasional factory or warehouse, the majority of these much simpler affairs than the big boxes found across Flushing. Where people moving into that area were filling a vacancy left by the shift in industry due to the global economy and so-called free trade zones, people who are moving into this area are increasingly facing the prospect of driving out families who have lived here for many years, who have created entire communities in this section of Brooklyn. Walk on this side of Flushing, and you realize, if you’re white, that you have suddenly become the minority, and that even your native tongue is foreign in these parts. When the Williamsburg Wave comes to wash us all away, this is the area which will be most affected, rather than the warehouses and factories along Bogart and Siegel Streets.

No one really knows when the Settlement first began, but reasonable estimates put it around the turn of the current century, with the first batch of restless Manhattan and Brooklynites looking for more space and cheaper rents. Back then, this place genuinely was a wasteland, a handful of streets hemmed in by the projects and the factories, the handful of new residents taking up entire floors which have since been subdivided and subdivided again, as units grow smaller and prices go up. Recollections of those days are few and far between, but stories do drift in, the time that the guy who ran that coffee shop let his dogs shit in the corner, the time that store front window was broken. The explosion of the area seems to have been the past year, and there doesn’t really seem to be one single tipping point so much as people just found their way in larger and larger numbers, were slowly funneled in to an area they had previously been ignorant of. That is part of the charm of the area: it’s easy to overlook. Two years ago I lived about ten blocks away, on the other side of Bushwick Avenue, and I had no idea any of this was here. Even when I looked at it, I just saw the tell tale signs of industry; this neighborhood hides in plain sight, uses its very character to remain invisible.

Even now the neighborhood feels strangely unknown. Sure, maybe you hear about it a little more often, generally in reference to some party they’ve been to, but the real estate papers still talk about Bed-Stuy before they talk about us, and our parties generally have little of the cachet or notoriety that surround such truly out of the way hot spots as Rubulad. I’d had the sense, as of late, that we were building momentum somehow, that we were emerging into a new presence, but there was little evidence of that on the ground, save for an increasing amount of “for rent” fliers on the board at The Archive, the vague sensation of longer lines at Brooklyn’s Natural.

It wasn’t until the posters went up for the Art Projects that I had a real recognition of something actually happening, of that “ah-ha” moment. It wasn’t simply the reality of a large group of artists doing a show, although the numbers of course speak for themselves. Really, it was the level of organization, that there were people in our area who could take the idea of open lofts and extend it from a self run affair limited to one or two buildings and turn it into a community run affair that covered an entire neighborhood, that connected the entire populace, that crossed disciplines so that it equally celebrated visual art and performance art, multi-media work and film projection, rock bands and hip hop acts, fire twirlers and marching bands, puppeteers and guerilla dance troupes. The online catalogue was fourteen pages long and almost impossible to read, the Google map so covered in arrow points (as well as the requisite wrong locations – Google and Mapquest both have a hard time with accuracy in the jumble of streets around here) that it required a separate key just to make sense of it.

For better or worse, the neighborhood had arrived, and any doubt about which neighborhood it was had been cleared up. It was there for all to see, our official new name, our official decision about who we were and who we wanted to be, our self-designate identity: Bushwick. The Bushwick Art Projects (opposed to the real one across the street) had arrived, and it only remained to find out how many people actually showed up, and just how Goddamned big the party was going to be.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

On Portland

2005-11-11T00:15:00.000-05:00

I'm back on this blog because James yelled at me. I was in Portland, trying my best to stay warm and dry, and at some point James said to me, "I wish you still wrote in your blog," and I said, "you know, the blog ran its course," and James said, "but I told some friends to check it out, and then you stopped posting, and they got mad at me." And he looked so hurt.

So, this is for James.

Portland in Fall feels like a mountain town, at least on the West side of the river, at least in the hills. The mist hangs low and the air is cool, not so much the air of rain as the air of breath, being in a cold room and seeing your words crystalize before you, hovering and then disappearing. This is when it's not raining, this is when everything is still. I stand, on my first morning, on the walkway of the Steel Bridge and I watch the MAX go past, and I look at the city, and the river, and the trees rising behind the high buildings, and I feel like crying, or almost crying. The same way that I almost cried in the Geiranger Fjord in Norway, the same way I almost cried when I left Amsterdam for the last time, the same way I almost cry so many times when I write, that feeling of being in touch with something so much larger and truer than myself. It's the expectation of tears, and how almost crying feels the same as almost sneezing, and how to look at the grey sky and the soaring span of the Marquam Bridge, and the green truss of the Hawthorne Bridge, is to feel that sensation of flight, and dizzyness, and loss and gain.

Portland is a bridge town. There are eight bridges within the two or three mile length of Portland proper, and a few more bridges before and after, all crossing a river that in many ways isn't worth the trouble. The Hudson is large, the Seine majestic, the Vlatva accented by the spires of Prague, the various waterways of Tokyo reflecting so much neon and magnificence. There is none of that in Portland. The Willamette is a simple river, proper and sturdy and meditative but not much of a waterway at the end of the day. Of medium width and average current (at least now that its flow is regulated by a complex of dams throughout its valleys and tributaries), it is prominent only for the fact that it is America's longest North flowing river. The agriculture in this area is sufficient without being awe inspiring, the wines produced in its valleys rather unremarkable. The Willamette empties into the Columbia at the state line, not ten miles away from the town center, and then it fades into obscurity. It never even makes it to the ocean.

The Columbia trumps its tributary in every way imaginable. It is the famous one, the epic one, scene of Lewis and Clark's white water canoe adventures, the fabled highway that brought notions of Jeffersonian democracy to a land of virgin forests and endless rain. The Columbia begins at an ice pack in Canada and crosses two provinces, two states and two countries on its path to the Pacific. Compared to this, the Willamette is little more than a stream, a country road that has been paved and lined but is still lacking in proper signage. When the first Euro-American explorers sailed the Columbia, they twice missed finding the mouth of the Willamette, even when, looking at the mountain line, they knew it was there. They knew exactly what they were looking for and exactly where to find it, but it still eluded them. Turns out that an island got in the way, or maybe some fog.

But then Portland is used to being overlooked, has reconciled itself to being obscure and unknown. Nestled in the shadow of such Western cities as Seattle and San Francisco, Portland keeps a low profile. It shares its name with an equally unknown East Coast city, it has only one professional sports team (and once you're there, that seems like one too many), and so far the most prominent local celebrity is the white trash figure skating ice princess who hired some menacing goons to harass the competition. Portland is not a town that thinks of itself in worldly terms, or wonders how it is seen by the rest of the country, or worries about its image. Portland is simply a town that is content to sit on the river, watching the current flow Northward, and contemplate the subtler points of existence. Portland is a "there is no reality" town.

The bridges along the Willamette are your first clue to the nature of Portland. The older bridges walk that line somewhere between quaint and industrial; where New England has covered bridges, Portland has early Twentieth Century lift bridges, low lying series of undulating metallic humpbacks suddenly blossoming into twin peaks of cross braced steel, like a child's drawing of a mountain split apart, or, fitting for a literary city, a pair of bookends. An elevated roadway hangs between the two, and when nautical traffic comes -- which is rare these days -- massive counterweights are lowered while the roadways rises. There are two of these bridges, one at either side of the main downtown strip, anchors to the Portland Bus Mall, bookends to the city itself. They are the image of Portland, the Hawthorne Bridge seen from the East bank as the gateway to Downtown, the Steel Bridge in the Spring, floating above the cherry blossoms of the Japanese memorial. They are regal and outdated simultaneously, too narrow and too heavy, yet tricked out with the best in modern conveniences, wide bike paths and semi-dedicated transit lanes.

The other six are more common: freeway overpasses, double-deckered concrete spans, a magnificent arch structure and your garden variety cantilevered drawbridges. You've seen their type in every other city you've been to, but never in this ubiquity. There is a major bridge in Portland less than every half mile, which I think must be a record. Perhaps Paris would be the nearest model, and even Paris' crossings thin out once you get past Ile de la Cite. But then this is the secret to Portland; it is entirely too busy, accomplished, and bustling for a city of its size. Sometimes it feels like a small town, sometimes it feels like a miniature metropolis, and the reality lies somewhere in the middle.

Part of this is by design: Portland has notoriously short blocks. A heavily, often obsessively gridded city, it was thought by the original planners that corner lots would be more valuable than mid-block, and so they built small blocks in order to increase corner real estate. An average Portland block is half the size of its typical counterpart, and aside from making the whole place feel strangely Dutch (you know, a big city struck small, a dollhouse town), they also tend to blur concepts of distance. On the East side, 41st Street is only ten minutes from downtown, while in another city you'd still be in the mid-twenties, or even teens. You begin to think of the larger urban area in hops and skips rather than slogs.

And part of this feeling is through use: Portlanders are Americans of the old cloth, people who want to get out, be out, inhabit their town. Portland has the nightlife of a city twice its size, and an assortment of neighborhood shopping districts, complete with coffee shops, book stores, boutiques and public spaces, which rival Los Angeles in their distinctiveness and inviting nature. In many ways Portland and LA are two different version of the same idea, and I like to say that they have essentially the same mass transit system, which would be great if LA weren't something like twenty times the size of the City of Roses.

What Portland really has is space, to live and breathe and think, and it has the advantage that the people who are there want that. It also has certain institutionalized disadvantages: the ubiquitous bridges are all too small to handle modern traffic in any real quantity (as are the approaches from the city center); the rigid grid of the residential part of town, heavy with East-West streets, allows for very little North-South travel; the weather is difficult at best; and, of course, the economy is crap.

Well, arguably crap. If your goal in life is to get rich, or accumulate sizable wealth, then Portland would be a disaster for you. As we all like to say, "there's no money here". And for an American city, it's true. Portland has enough wealth to support coffee shops and shopping districts and an extensive light rail system. It has the money to support culture and attract artists. It has the money to build new residential lofts and nice houses in the West hills. It has the money (and the weather) to keep the world's largest bookstore in business (no, seriously, it's one block and four floors and they have to give you a map when you walk in so that you don't get lost). It just doesn't have any industry.

As a former resource based state (read hunting, fishing, cutting down trees), most of Oregon's ways of making money are anathema to most of its urban population. Seattle has Boeing and Microsoft, Portland has some home grown organic food companies and a big blinking sign along the waterfront announcing "Made in Oregon". Austin has Whole Foods, Portland has a patchwork of co-ops and a weekend market under the Burnside Bridge. Portland used to have marauding pirates who would highjack boats and shanghai sailors, and now it just has pirate bands (like, musical bands) who charge five bucks at the door and take a cut of the bar receipts.

Portland is the only city I've been to in the Western world where intelligent, educated, young men and women (white young men and women) will gladly drive a cab (in hoodie and cut off gloves) or work in a gas station selling you a Snickers bar. It's a town where people spend four or five months looking for a very basic job with a very basic salary, and then are happy to get what they can, because they really aren't interested in doing it any other way. They have no desire to get caught up in some institutionalized system where they work a job for forty years and never experience their own lives. Really, Portland isn't a poor city economically, it's a poor city philosophically, not so much as a decision but as an outcome.

And it's a city that is perfectly content to live by the result of its philosophy, because that's the whole point of life to begin with. It's respectably Bohemian, which means that people still pay their rent, but it's absurdly cheap rent. I can't tell a New Yorker what I paid to live in a house in Portland, a house with a living room and a dining room and a roof and a backyard and a view of the city from my window. I can't tell them because they just look at me, astonished, unable to move while they do the math.

This is what keeps Portland small, this is what keeps it a strange mixture of quiet and noisy, sleepy town and bustling metropolis. Standing on the Steel Bridge on a grey Fall day, looking at evergreens along the hills and orange leaves along the waterfront, looking at a dense concentration of tall buildings in a miniature downtown, looking at the clouds in the sky, layers of grey and light shining through, the ambience of sun and warmth without necessarily the sensation, seagulls in the sky and taste of fresh on the wind and little not quite tears in my eyes: I feel all of this and I am simply, humbly grateful to be back, to have found my way.

I have four cities in this world, four communities that, improbably enough, have become or have been or will be my homes, my bases, the places I return to again and again because no matter how I try, or where else I go, or what traveling I do, I simply can't deny them, I simply feel alive when I'm there, at peace, complete. They all have their advantages and disadvantages, they all have various reasons for being compelling, and sometimes they're actually contradictory ones (I love Portland because it's such a compact, sustainable city, but then I love being in LA because it's so artistic and improbable), and I'm at a place in my life where that seems to be okay, where it makes sense, where everything comes together at odd angles and says "here I am".

And standing on the deck of the lift bridge, I look out at my mountain town, my city not a city, my home not a home, and I feel my soul lift up, and my life take flight.

And then I walk back down the bridge, back into town, taking in the skyline, taking in the hills, while Aaron calls, to say he found a job, and we agree to meet at Pioneer Square and go thrift shopping. I will do entirely too much shopping while I am here, a result of the intersection of good clothes, cheap prices and no sales tax. And I walk through Old Town, looking for the MAX, boarding at one of the stops where you can ride for free, and blinking my eyes at how beautiful and sad all of this is. Portland always gets me melancholy, which might be another insitutionalized disadvantage. But it's one that I can live with, and eagerly.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

We Who Are About to Lose Our Homes Beseech You

2005-04-20T23:26:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, I suddenly discovered that my neighborhood was in danger of being destroyed. I had had no idea. I was going through my life, completely oblivious, and then there it was, clear as day. I moved into the Williamsburg area a few months ago, and had just begun to settle into my new home. For the first time in many years of moving around the country, I felt at peace in my surroundings, in a neighborhood that was eager to have me. I thought that I had found a place of my own, I thought that I was part of a community, until I discovered that my community was about to be torn apart.

Under a zoning plan currently awaiting a vote in the City Council, the entire waterfront of Williamsburg and Greenpoint will be rezoned to allow for the construction of more than twenty high rise, luxury towers. Both Williamsburg and Greenpoint are working class, family oriented, lower to middle income neighborhoods with an appealing and old fashioned low rise skyline. Towering at upwards of four hundred feet, these new buildings would be up to eight times as tall as the current residential buildings of our neighborhood. With the construction of these luxury dwellings, property values would skyrocket across the neighborhood; local businesses are already being pushed out in expectation of the rezoning, and area residents face the constant fear that their buildings will be sold and demolished.

I cannot tell you how frustrating these past few weeks have been, as I have begun to understand the full implication of the danger that Williamsburg is facing. This neighborhood, from the East River to the Canal, from the Northern Waterfront to the J Train, is something very special and very beautiful, that rare model of a viable, functional neighborhood. Urban developers and city leaders talk about creating integrated communities, yet when they are confronted with a thriving success such as Williamsburg, their only responses is to plot its destruction. Once this neighborhood is gone, we won't see the likes of it again. The Original Penn Station, the Los Angeles Streetcar System, Gene Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, and a Little Town in the Big City that once was Williamsburg, a fully actualized, cooperative community. We are that Shining City on a Hill, or at least we were, for a moment, and while I refuse to believe that it's too late, if this re-zoning isn't significantly curbed, our neighborhood will simply disappear.

I’m part of a neighborhood organization that is fighting to save our community. We meet once a week and we plan events to raise awareness of the dangers we are facing and the validity of what we are working to save. Our meetings are creative and productive, but they tend to ignore the basic issue: the City doesn’t want what we’re selling. There's a white elephant in the room at every meeting, and it's that City Hall has a plan for our neighborhood -- or at least its real estate -- and it doesn't include the current residents. No matter how strenuously we appeal to their sense of humanity, no matter how forcefully we appeal to their appreciation of community, no matter how eloquently we express the poetry of our self-built (something), our words fall on deaf ears: their only poetry is the urban ziggurat, eighty stories of steel, glass and flying transverses. They have dreams of Hong Kong and Shanghai, and we're selling them on a model of sustainability and person to person connectedness. They have no sense of community, of gardens and sunlight, of something you can feel in your soul as being beautiful and true. If it were enough to show them the value of our community, we would have already won.

The problem is that Mayor Bloomberg, City Council Speaker Gifford Miller, Dianne Reyna, Amanda Burden et al have a vision for our area; you can see it in the re-zoning, you can see in the conversion of the L to an automated line, you can see it in the stonewalling that we've been given and the removal of Anthony Avella from the zoning board. Every moment that the community makes a clear, concise presentation of our needs, every moment that we efficiently and eloquently defend our Community Plan, they simply close another door, they simply discount us, not simply as citizens of the City, but as human beings.

They have a dream of a new Garden of Babylon sprouting up on New York's Eastern Shore, of a city that straddles two rivers, a nouveau riche utopia of eighty story high rise residences and marble food courts, all being served by an robot train and a free water taxi. As someone who once had the same dream (call it the myth of an American Tokyo), I can tell you that they have no capacity to see the genius of an area that is ramshackled and tarnished, that has been built by a divergent community and crafted into something that is not only functional but inspiring. We are an affront to the Megalopolis that is across the river, and The City is seeking to revoke the basic tennent that all residents of the Outer Buroughs have heretofore been able to claim, that we can love the city without having to live in it, that we can benefit from Manhattan without adopting its peculiar brand of isolation and alienation.

We're fighting for our homes here, in a city that has shown without fail that it will bulldoze whatever it wants in order to build a better highway or a bigger building. With very few exceptions -- and the modern day existence of Greenwhich Village is the most inspiring -- this city has been shaped and reshaped by a handful of powerful men who took it upon themselves to mold New York to their own fanciful and often misguided dreams. Too often we fail to realize the power of what we have until it is lost. Imagine Manhattan without Greenwhich Village or Little Italy; imagine America without its Heartland and amber waves of grain.

I am calling upon the residents of New York, of all of the Buroughs that make up our beautiful patchwork city, to stand up and come forward and implore City Hall and the City Council to respect the integrity of Williamsburg. What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, but what is happening in Williamsburg will soon spread to the rest of New York. We are all fighting for our neighborhood identities and personal communities, we are all fighting for the right that is owed to all New Yorkers, the right to move into your ideal neighborhood and say at last, “I will never move again”.

To find out more:
www.communityplan.org
www.williamsburgwarriors.com
www.northbrooklynalliance.com

I Look Around the Room, Looking for Myself

2005-01-18T16:18:00.000-05:00

I have this group of friends that I obsess over. I’m not even sure that “friends” is the right word; we knew each other in college, we’re bound by familiarity and fondness more than an actual connection. The rare occasions that we do see each en masse are usually dedicated to getting ridiculously drunk and pretending that things aren’t quite as awkward as we all know they are. We only see each other a few times a year, at this party or that function, and so far I’ve managed to miss most of them by being out of town. I imagine that this only adds to my mystique while obscuring the inherent let down of my actual presence. It is certainly more fun for me to be in Amsterdam imagining what I’m missing than to be at one of these parties wondering why I’m living here rather than Amsterdam. These really aren’t my scene, these group parties; I’m much more suited for the lecture hall than the crowded bar.

And yet I go, I always do. Hell, you couldn’t stop me, and I get the sense that it’s the same for everyone else. Migrating whales, salmon swimming upstream, birds flying North in the spring, we’re all just responding to some internal, involuntary homing mechanism, we’re all compelled to return to where we’re from. The strange thing is that, in spite of it all, I actually look forward to these parties, I think about them all week, I practice things to say, rehearse conversations, choose my talking points. It’s a disease really. And then the night comes, and once again my illusion crashes down around me; I’ve forgotten how crowded it gets, and how noisy, how quickly conversation falters, how some people don’t even bother, just shake your hand and then duck outside, find the comfort of someone else. I occasionally wonder if it’s just me, but as I stand against the wall and watch the room, it’s happening everywhere I look, this little drama repeating itself endlessly in various combinations.

Mostly we just stay in our small groups, the ones we had in college or new alliances that have been built since then; mostly we treat it the same way that we did as undergraduates, we ignore it, smile through it, get intoxicated as quickly as we can to perhaps reduce the awkwardness. There are worse things you can do. I look around the room and very little has changed, the groupers group and the floaters float and the only difference is that some people have less hair or better fashion sense. Some people look remarkably different, others look exactly the same, and it’s hard to tell which is more compelling.

When I first started going to these things, within the first year of graduation, I invariably nearly passed out every time. All those people, it was a roomful of ghosts, my entire life flashed before my eyes and I suddenly couldn’t breathe. I’m not sure why I didn’t simply stop going; perhaps I’m a masochist, but more likely I just didn’t want to give up. I’d always been someone who disappeared, who slunk into the shadows of the past, and I was tired of that. Even if every new party was an excruciating experience, I was going to go Goddamnit, and the more that I went, the less terrible each one was. Now I just go and have fun; it seems so quaint to me now, so distant. These people, I look around the room, and it’s as if I knew them in a different life, I’m no longer that person, and they probably aren’t either. I find this exciting, and comforting somehow, but I never get the sense that it’s a two way street. Most of these people, they look as nervous and awkward as they did four years ago, and as desperate as well. Whatever wounds are here, time hasn’t healed them; whatever we’ve learned about being adults and living life, it hasn’t changed our embarrassment over the things we did, or how we acted, or how weird all of this is.

Every time I go to one of these parties, I expect it to be different, I expect us all to have grown, to have learned something, and to share it with each other. I realize how absurd this may sound, but in the circles I travel these days it isn’t such a farfetched idea. More than anything, that’s what I feel, how far I’ve gone since then , how removed I am from these people, how my life has gone somewhere entirely surprising, and new, and wholly separate from all of this. When I go to these parties, it’s time travel, and exploration, a chance to see who else is on this path; there’s always someone who engages me, someone I might have overlooked four years ago with whom I suddenly feel a connection. There’s always a reason to go, despite my petty desire to be liked, to be absolved of my own embarrassment, my own silly actions. There’s always someone with whom I talk, and learn, and have a good time.

Usually there’s a few of them, popping up every so often, like waves hitting the shore. In the times between, I simply watch the room, watch the faces. I love these people, in spite of everything, or perhaps because of it. These people are my memories, they’re my family in some strange ways, markers of a time I will never quite forget, nor remember correctly. I look around the room, and I’m glad that I’m here, and I’m glad that I’m not. There’s always a part of me that I check at the door, a personal reality that I surrender for awhile, so that I can join everyone else’s. It’s fun to have that, but fun to reclaim it as well, to fall into the street at the end of the night, maybe walking with a friend, comparing notes on how strange it was, slowly regaining ourselves, as we are now, away from what we were, away from how we’re seen, away from what everyone thinks we are and will never actually know.

Our footsteps echo on the streets, our voices bounce of buildings, echoing unimportant thoughts, our hand stuffed in gloves in jackets, avoiding the cold. Eventually we just walk in silence, strangely content, all the people we have seen, all the people we have liked, all the people we won’t see again for months, or years, or ever.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Final Night Surprise

2004-12-20T04:27:00.000-05:00

It's midnight in New York. This morning I drove my car upstate, to my friend's house in the Catskills; I leave it there when I go out of town so I don't have to burden my roommate with alternate side parking maneuvers. The road entered a fog at the top of a mountain, really a cloud, and emerged on the other side in something of a winter wonderland, perfect white snow falling gingerly along the trees.

My friend lives across from the ideal vacant field -- I camped out there for a night back in September, snuggled my one man tent in between the cotton bearing reeds and wild grasses -- and after I parked my car up there I just stood for awhile, watching the snow fall on the field. Everything was so quiet, so still. Nothing moved.

My friend was up there, and he gave me a ride back to the city, which spared me the bus fare to get the Short Line. We left in the snow, but it quickly turned to rain, my friend and I in the front seat, a new friend of his, a very cute new friend of his, in the backseat, quietly reading to himself. When we got back into the city we all had martinis, and I was given a tutorial in deciphering professional weather maps; I soaked most of it up, but really I just wanted my friend to go into the back room so that I could make a move on the cute guy.

Which didn't happen.

Instead I was very ceremoniously asked to leave, ostensibly so that my friend could rest, but I'm not entirely certain it wasn't so he could make the move himself. My friend is infinitely better at these things than I am, and this wouldn't be the first time that he's outmaneuvered me.

I sauntered home, mushing through the rain soaked streets, still buzzed from the gin, a buzz which only seemed to grow over the hours rather than dissipate. I rode it out for the rest of the evening, watching German films and calling people on the phone, soaking up my final night in New York for this year. This year has been one of the more relentlessly challenging of my life (which is not the same as difficult), with a diabolically perfect mixture of disappointment and wish fulfillment, often in the same moment. While this was a year that will always hold many beautiful moments for me, it isn't one that I'm entirely sorry to see go. I'm not rushing through these last few weeks, but I'm not holding onto them either. I'm really looking forward to the new year, I'm really looking forward to something of a fresh start.

According to those weather maps, it's supposed to storm across America in the next two weeks, it's supposed to be wet and cold on Christmas day along the Eastern Seaboard. A chance to blow away all of the old energy, I think to myself.

As I sit watching the movie, I can hear the wind outside, not only whistling but intermittently shaking my window. It's already started, wiping away the past, making everything fresh. Round about midnight I head out for some air, and when I open the door to the street I nearly pass out.

Snow.

The street is half covered in a granulated white mist, our stoop is a wedding cake, untouched ledges of perfect powder, the sidewalk, the cars, all of it slowly turning into something peaceful and still, shining under the streetlights.

I run out into the road. No cars have come this way yet, no one has walked over this blanket, it is still pure, pristine, waiting for me. I run through the street, laughing as I turn around and see my footprints behind me. The wind picks up snow from the ground, loose, like glass, like glitter and sugar, and blows it around, into my face, my hands, covering my coat. I run to the end of the block, cross the street, and stand there. Just stand there.

Everything is so still, so quiet. Even my breath is softened, in awe of the scene before me.

I run back to my apartment, pass a girl in a parka, exhaling smoke on her stoop, and stop in front of my building, taking one last moment to soak it all in. My last night in New York. The end of the year.

I want to linger, but the wind picks up, and I know it's time to head back inside. The most important thing in life, knowing when to end a moment, when to turn your back on the beauty the world provides, and see about creating some of your own.

Happy Holidays everyone. If you're heading home for the week, have a safe trip, be well, and enjoy your family.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Bumming Around the 101

2004-12-15T16:43:00.000-05:00

No long story, no digressions into Icelandic languistic or cultural attributes, just one last round of photographs and a sparse thought or two.

I had two final days in Reykjavik after Airwaves essentially finished. Technically Sunday was part of the festival, but it was so low key -- for Reykjavik -- that it really felt like the night after. Which simply means that everyone got moderately drunk and stayed out until two in the morning rather than roaringly drunk at six the morning. And there was no one vomitting on the street or getting into a fight or tossing their empty beer bottles into the road.

That night, Sunday, I slipped out of our room at about two or two thirty, and went wandering through the streets, hunting for the Northern Lights. I managed to find them in someone's back yard; I stood next to one of those spinning clothes lines and gazed at this strange cloud of ink like light creep its way across the sky. The Northern Lights, at least when viewed from the city, resemble a bottle of sediment heavy liquid as seen through a flashlight. Strange densities appear and then recede, the volume has shape and mass. Stare at it long enough, and it even seems to have intention, as the light darts and slides, undulates through the sky. It looks like a snake, slowly going back to its burrough.

As always, these photogrpahs are protected under a Creative Commons license. My only request is that you not use the final photograph in the series for any reason. You are welcome to save a copy for yourself, but this is the only shot that I am making public which I feel selfish about, and wish to reserve solely for my own work. I appreciate your respect in this matter.

Please enjoy.

Did It Ever Strike You...

2004-12-15T14:03:00.000-05:00

That the Bush administration are just like the Keystone Kops, only a Keystone Kops that invades foreign countries?

For the latest in their misadventures of hubris and an appalling lack of common sense, check out this article on the Bernard Kerick debacle, and then remind yourself that no matter how often we laugh at them or how much trouble they get into, nothing seems to stick to them.

My favorite part is when Bush's intended nominee for Attorney General couldn't get Kerick to tell him about his nanny problems. This is the guy who will be the lawyer for the nation and, by consequence, the world, and after three hours of heavy interrogation he can't expose basic accounting fraud? Not to mention mob connections and (my new personal favorite) gross misuse of the public trust. After all, it's not that he was sleeping with his editor, it's that he was doing it in an apartment building that was reserved for police officers working down at Ground Zero...

The Plight of Clinton Hill

2004-12-13T23:22:00.000-05:00

I was walking around my neighborhood today (as a part of my Artist's Way work), and literally every street that I walked down showed signs of construction. New buildings being put up, old buildings being renovated, up one street and down another people were out working in groups of twos and threes, very low key, very localized, very community oriented. On my way back, I passed a giant old building, newly renovated, offering two bedroom apartmens for fifteen hundred a month as part of a community revitalization program.

My neighborhood is cleaning itself up, is preparing itself for a new flock of residents.

Remember when I wrote in "Lament of the G" that I couldn't think of a reason why anyone would be opposed to the revitalization of this area? Well, I thought of one today. Clinton Hill, which primarily exists between Lafayette to the North and Fulton to the South, is only twenty walking minutes from downtown Brooklyn, and less by bus or train (unless the G is acting up). Clinton Hill actually slides out of Fort Greene, right about the point that you leave the self-declared "Safety Zone" and the brownstones begin to be a little more spaced out and a little less well kept.

Clinton Hill is a folksy neighborhood, a human neighborhood, and for a variety of reasons it is appealing to New York City residents, perhaps most of all because it isn't a high rise area, a modern area, a corporate area. Thankfully, most of Brooklyn is like this, elegant and low key, which is why I enjoy being here. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that Brooklyn is going to stay this way. Right now, the city is trying to push through a plan to create a downtown Brooklyn that is essentially a new Manhattan; they want to build a series of mixed use high rise office/living space with a new sports arena, new performance space, new modern architecture; a whole new city in the middle of our antiquated burrough.

Now, logic will tell you that there is an equilibrium in development. If there are only, for example, five thousand people that want to move to Brooklyn, you can't build ten thousand units. If there is one neighborhood that is on the cusp of being developed solely through renovation, then it makes no sense to go in and build an entirely new area essentially from scratch. It's just not a good business model. One of these neighborhoods will have to go.

For reasons that have nothing to do with the desires of New York's citizens, the city planners dream of a high rise Brooklyn, a modern Brooklyn, a glass and steel Brooklyn, a dream that is entirely disconnected from any reality. It isn't that it wouldn't be nice to have a new, modern Brooklyn, it's that there really isn't any need for it. This dream is purely one for the ego, purely one for the dazzlement of the eye.

When I was younger, I really wanted a train set. Just because I thought they looked cool. When I finally got one, I played with it for a few weeks and then quickly grew bored. Have you ever had a train set? There really is nothing to do. Unless you have the time and resources to build a track that stretches through your entire house, there is nothing in a train set to occupy your interests. It's just a little train going around a little track, past the station house and through the tunnel. It's an inherently empty past time, and once I realized that I just stopped playing with it.

A new downtown Brooklyn is the same thing. It's a fun idea primarily along the lines of having something cool that everyone else has, rather than having something cool that is genuine, organic, and your own. Brooklyn as it is now may be shabby, but it isn't shoddy, it isn't nasty, there's nothing wrong or broken with it. It's a very cute, very charming, very natural place. It exists with its own character and its own being, and any attempt to change that is a great mistake. Once we lose Brooklyn, it will be one more thing that we can't get back. At a time when all new American cities are essentially the same place, it's a shame to lose the few that are unique, that are themselves.

But still a new downtown Brooklyn must be had, and it wouldn't surprise me if in twenty or thirty years we find out that the city and the MTA were systematically doing their part to cut off the development of Clinton Hill and other "new" neighborhoods in order to better serve their own interests. This exact thing happens all the time in one form or another; just read Cadillac Desert and the chapter on the L.A. water scandal to get but one example (which also happens to be my favorite). I'm not going to stand here and accuse anyone of anything, I don't have the facts, I haven't seen the documents, I don't know what's going on. But I do know that something is definitely wrong here, something doesn't add up, and once we know what it was that was off, it could very well be too late.

I walk through my neighborhood, and it's as run down as it is beautiful, as dirty as it is sparkling. I don't mean to oversell these handful of blocks, this isn't yet the new perfection, Paris in the Twenties or Berkely in the Sixties, but it is a very nice place to be, and genuine, one in which people take some pride in their homes. This is a neighborhood where people smile as you walk past them, take a moment to say hello, even slap your hand as you walk by listening to your iPod (I am not making that up, it actually happened). We spend so much time in this day and age mourning the loss of our traditional values, but we don't take the opportunity to actually ask ourselves what that means. Values aren't about abortion or gay marriage, not really, values are about taking the moment to look at your fellow man, and recognize who he is. Values are about grabbing a moment of life and savoring it for its existence, not for its commodity. Values are about looking at a neighborhood of hard working, well meaning people, and saying "I think this is worth saving", rather than looking at a prospectus of more steel buildings and saying "what we really need here is another shopping mall or giant hotel."

I would just hate to come back here in twenty years, and find that we lost something we never really knew we had.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Did You Ever Wonder?

2004-12-13T21:45:00.000-05:00

Maybe the reason we can't seem to catch Osama bin Laden is that we don't really want to? The minute he's caught, the War on Terror is essentially over, which aside from having been a rather lucrative endeavor for a great number of people, is also a remarkably effective tool for instittuting federal rule and manufacturing hysteria among the common people.

It seems to me that if Bush didn't produce Osama in time for the election (guess Karl Rove figured they didn't need the boost), then he isn't ever going to. Osama is of far too much value broadcasting his obscure videos from random caves to actually be brought to justice. That would ruin the whole game.

But maybe it's just me...

Looking Out My Window

2004-12-13T19:45:00.000-05:00

Sunset in Brooklyn
Originally uploaded by Drayton Hiers

Sunset in Brooklyn
Originally uploaded by Drayton Hiers

I was sitting at my little Portland desk today, working on my photographs and test driving a double mix CD that I'm making for a friend of mine (file under "The Saddest Music in the World", only without the legless beer baron), when I looked up and saw this.

See, my little Portland desk (so named because I bought it in Portland, and because it isn't a desk so much as a piece of modern design that I almost entirely obscure with my little laptop), is directly against one of my two beautiful windows (with, of course, the red curtains hanging on curtain rods... these are the first curtain rods I have ever had, and I'm still adjusting to the intrinsic adult feeling that comes along with them), and so my view is of our backyard (which we can't use), the community garden next door (which we don't have a key for), the abandoned wharehouse next door (which actually is not so abandoned, as some photos to come will show). All of this land, and none of it is open to me. That's fine, though, I can still hang halfway out my window and capture the light as it does remarkable things to the buildings across the way. Please enjoy.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Portland Story 1: Three Thousand Miles from Home

2004-12-13T00:32:00.000-05:00

Well, after a prolific week, things are slowing down a bit here at draytonblog as we take the opportunity to get some things sorted out and create new space internally and externally (which is a very philsophical way of saying that draytonblog has started doing The Artist's Way and is otherwise engaged with writing down his list of artistic champions and monsters). I thought I would help to fill the void by posting an old Portland story, written over the summer. This was one of the first things that I wrote there, and was submitted to Willamette Week, one of the two local alt-papers. (And by the way, it's wil-AM-ut, not wil-uh-met.) I had originally planned to send them one story a week until they were forced to run something, but my subsequent bike accident (see Drayton fly over the car) put a scuttle on my Portland adventuring for awhile.

This was also going to be part of my Portland zine, "The Kids Call It Stumptown", along with stories about Zoo Bomb and the Multnomah County Bike Fair, but that, alas, never got off the ground. So, then, you are the first to have a chance to read the following story, which in all honesty is the least "Portland" of anything I wrote while I was there, in that, really, this could have happened anywhere.

Enjoy:

On Monday I see the Italian film where the father accidentally shoots his son (not to be confused with the Russian film where the son accidentally kills his dad), and afterward I hop on my Schwinn and head across town to catch a rock show. I arrive at the venue and just walk inside; there’s no bouncer at the door asking for ID, but then there’s also really no one in the bar. I pop my head into the performance room, a cavernous space with a spinning disco ball; it's very quiet and mellow, which is a kind way of saying empty.

There are maybe ten people here, most of them seated at a large table stranded in the middle of the room; people could stand five deep around them and still not touch the nearest chair. I suspect that most of them are friends of the various bands, but what I won’t appreciate until the end of the evening is that most of them are the bands, hanging together to create a critical mass. There’s a nice solidarity to it, and it blurs the fact that, including myself, there are maybe five people here who have actually paid.

Skateboard videos play on the wall, a stage of pristine instruments stares at us, and occasionally one young kid or another will casually hop up on stage and methodically plug in a cable or strum a guitar. It’s difficult to take it as a formal sound check, but that seems to be what it is. There’s no real urgency to start the show, and even when the club lights go out nothing really happens. We wait a few minutes, while behind me the club’s booker offers to fetch water for the first band while imploring them to start. By now the stage lights are up, the soundtrack is off, and still no one is on stage, still we’re waiting, still the band, this very young band, they’re not ready, and it turns out someone is missing; “check outside, I think he’s around the corner.”

Finally, they take the stage, to silence. With no introduction, they just begin to play. It’s loud, but loud with a hint of music, and these kids, these kids may not even be old enough to make the evening’s age limit, but if they are they’re just barely, and no matter their age, they’re still very new at this, very green, hiding behind guitar riffs and shaggy bangs. They’re passionate though, at least at first, jumping up and down, falling over themselves, over the stage; whatever else, they’re connected to what they’re doing. Though that could just be nerves.

When they finish the first song, they don’t attempt to fill the space, they don’t say anything or engage us in any way. The silence is as shattering as the music, and as pure. I hear a buzzing that could actually be crickets or just my eardrums equalizing. I always mean to bring earplugs for these concerts, and I always forget.

After a few songs, each one a little less impassioned than the one before, a guitar string breaks, prompting a five minute break in which the pianist makes his best attempt at talking to the audience. “Hi, we’re” and he mentions the band’s name ”from Sarasota, Florida”, and if you listen just so, you may hear a quiver when he says this; they’ve been on tour now for a few months, most likely their first, and they’re nearing the end of their endurance. He attempts to tell a story, which is a painful process for him; he has no flow, no point, no intent to actually communicate anything, and I think that he’s completely stoned, though I am told later that these guys don’t even really drink.

“The other night we were in Los Angeles and we were hanging out at this party… David Carradine was there, and if you don’t know who that is… he’s... Bill in Kill Bill… and he was in Kung Fu… and the lead from Airplane was there… the guy with the arrow through his head… so we’re gonna play two more songs for you… we also have some stuff for sale…… we’re two thousand miles from home” – and now the crack in his voice is unmistakable, the absolute certainty of being lost – “so buy some stuff so we can go home.”

And then more silence, tinkering with instruments, the booker behind me yelling “kill the dead air!”, and, really, it seems that they are just trying to hide, that they are just killing time in order to get off stage sooner, that really they just hate being here.

“All right, since that took the time of a song, we have one more song, two more minutes, buy some stuff, y’all stick around.” And then they play, oblivious to the fact that we aren’t hearing any vocals, and when they finish they just want to get off.

The room though, the room yells at them for another song, the booker wants another song, the sound woman says they can play another song, the other bands scream out for one as well; it’s an encore call and the kids on stage, lonely from Sarasota, they ignore it completely, just pack away their instruments. The feeling in the air, unmistakable, is defeat and self-loathing. This was not a good night and they’re so far from home, it’s the end of the tour and they’re just trying to make it through.

I head outside to check on my bike, I buy a drink, I come back in and I’m astonished to see that they’re still on stage, they are indeed going to play another song, with the same lack of fanfare they’ve displayed all night. They look out at us, intimidation written across their faces, and I think this will be just another place for them to hide, to keep themselves isolated and safe. But then they begin to play, and something comes over them, they rock, truly letting go, flying across the stage, feeling their music, feeling themselves, as everything else fades away. The crowd and the night and the city they’re in, these just melt, they disappear. For a moment their very being changes, bends and adjusts, and while they may just be a group of young kids, while they may be horribly out of their element, stranded in Portland like that table in the middle of the room, when they play they find themselves, when they play they’re home.

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Lament of the G

2004-12-08T19:58:00.000-05:00

Mark my words, the minute you take the G train for granted is the minute it screws you over. You really can't even regard it as a betrayal; it's just the G's nature, and you should have known better.

For those of you who don't know (including all of you in New York who are just ignorant of its existence), the G is the Brooklyn-Queens subway, the only mass transit rail in the world that doesn't go through the metropolitan center of the city it serves. The G train, you see, never graces Manhattan, a fact that the MTA uses to justify their tendency to underrun it. See, this is the plight of the G: it is brilliant in design, the lovely little green line that not only connect Queens to Brooklyn, but connects Brooklyn to Brooklyn (otherwise, how will all the hipsters in Williamsburg make it to BAM?). It also serves a variety of thriving neighborhoods (well, perhaps "vibrant" is a better word) that would not exist were it not for the subway that runs underneath them. Still, in a city that regards its burroughs more as suburbs than as equal members of the city proper (it's that damn East River, it ruins everyone's sense of perspective), it is easy to shortchange the G, and shortchanged it is.

To put it simply, the G never comes. Back when I actually lived in Williamsburg (and had to get to BAM), I used the G primarily as a hobby; I regarded it as my own personal cute way to get around Brooklyn (see Drayton ride the G to Park Slope, see Drayton ride the G to Gowanus), as something with the fantasy coated veneer of a Jonathan Lethem novel. So I never noticed the G's poor scheduling, or when I did I simply laughed it off; after all, I didn't actually need to get anywhere, I was just traveling through my burrough. I heard rumors that the G was called "The Skel Train" (as in Skeleton) due to its bare bones, ghostly demeanor, but I never gave it much attention.

Now that I live on the G, the result of a decidely mixed experiment in being a "true" bohemian (as opposed to the roundly dismissed "poseurs" in Williamsburg, the faux bohemian hipsters that I now sorely miss), I have discovered the sad fact of the G, which is that those Skel Train rumors were true.

You wait on the platform, your breath fogging in front of your face, two or three other people on the platform. You don't really know what time it is, time loses all meaning once you hit the lower platform, it just seems to stand still. Standing on the platform, it could be 1957, it could 2048, it could be nuclear holocaust on the streets above and you would have no idea. You're not sure how long you've been here; every so often you check your phone for the time, but as quickly as you register the signifigance of the numbers, you just as quickly forget their reference. It may be 1:38 now, but you don't know what it was then, the magical time when last you checked.

You feel a rustle first. You don't actually hear anything, you never hear anything, you just feel a rustle, a stirring against your skin, as perhaps some goospimples break out and trash on the rails swirls up around you. You lean over the edge, the precipitous drop off to the rusty tracks below, you peer into the darkness, perhaps you see it growing lighter, ever so slightly, perhaps you sense more than anything else that the G is near.

And then, just like that, it appears, from around the bend or within the black hole, you'll never really know, just one moment there it is, unleashing a wailing sound as it screeches on the brakes, pulls to a stop in front of you, a train that is only five cars long, a train that is barren inside, a train that is nothing so much as a skeleton, taking you to the underworld, the River Styx and Hoyt-Schermerhorn.

Or, to get a little more modern in my reference (people tell me the Kids aren't so up on their Greek mythology these days), I often sit, waiting for the G, looking at the station and the tracks and the switching lights and the lack of a train, and I think to myself, 'it doesn't exist, it's one big prank, there is no train and we're all being punk'd.'

There are other times, of course, when the G is right there, when you step down to the platform and it's just arriving, you hop on and get to Hoyt just as the A pulls in, you hop on and make it to Times Square or Penn Station in a little over half an hour. Come to expect that, though, come to count on the G arriving within five minutes, and that's the day that you'll wait ten, or even fifteen, that's the day it will never come, and you'll remember again why you've learned not to trust it, never to trust it, despite its innocent face, despite its eagerness to please.

The G is that relationship we've all been in, the one person to whom we should never say "yes" but can't quite say "no". I'm trying to talk with the G now, to give it the "It's not you, it's me" speech, but really it is the G, the G's a problem, and by all accounts it's only going to get worse. The MTA, fresh off the heels of their eight million dollar surplus of a couple years ago, is now looking at a record "budget shortfall", which any way you cut it amounts to massive consumer fraud and abuse of the public trust. Their solution to this is to "reduce service", which doesn't mean closing all of the completely useless stations (any stop on 28th Street in Manhattan, any stop on 18th Street in Manhattan, any stop that is less than six blocks from the next one), but rather to reduce service on the G in an as of yet unspecified way. I guess that no one has told them if they run the G any less they won't be running it at all.

It's a very strange thing, to be living in a fairly central section of Brooklyn and have people treating me as if I'm in the Rockaways. I'm meeting my friend Tom in a few hours, in Manhattan, because when I gave him the travel directions he pretty much freaked out and said there was no way he could come out on a week night and maybe we could reschedule for a weekend during the day, as if going to Clinton Hill can only be regarded as a day trip, like going antiqueing in Rhinebeck or taking a hike along the Appalachian Trail.

It's a shame, really. My neighborhood is very cute, one of those up and coming areas that is still ethnically and socio-economically diverse, one of those neighborhoods that is really working hard to integrate itself into a new community. The longtime residents are open to the interlopers, the early warning of the mass caucasian migration to follow, and those of us who are relatively new (and often young) are trying to learn from Gentrifying Past and reduce if not outright avoid the White Wave.

Of course, the best way to avoid the White Wave, from an Insitutional point of view, is to stop the migration before it starts. The best way to avoid the White Wave in Clinton Hill is to make it undesirable location logistically, to make it inconvenient and difficult to commute to and from. The best way to minimize the White Wave is to run the trains less, and less, and less, until you don't run them at all.

Now, in all honesty, I have no idea why it would be in anyone's best interest to minimize the vitalizing of any part of New York, particularly one that is still underdeveloped in terms of housing and commercial opportunities. And I'm not even sure if this is genuinely what's happening, if there is truly a conscious decision on behalf of the municipality to keep this area down. But, frankly, if there's anything we've learned from the course of urban history, it's that cities are far better at sabotaging neighborhoods by neglect and carelesness than they are by an actual focused campaign. So while it may be that no one is trying to discourage the socio-economic integration of Clinton Hill, it's hard to deny the basic trend against it.

I had this joke when I first moved out here, which I thought was ironic and snarky, but more and more I begin to see as being prescient, or at least accurate. I used to joke that they would run the G train more if white people lived on it. Now I'm beginning to wonder if that isn't the point.

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"Getur Þu Sagt Mer Hvard Domkirkja Er?"

2004-12-08T05:14:00.000-05:00

Remember when I said that I knew four phrases in Icelandic, one of them being how to find the Domed Church? Well, that's it right there. I never actually wanted to find the Domed Church, but it was nice to know that if I needed to, I knew how to ask it.

Of course, I could have just as easily said the English version: Can you tell me where the Domed Church is? (This actually translates literally; one of the nicer features of Icelandic is that it has a similar syntax to American.)

A few notes on Icelandic:

1) It has no independent direct article, no "a" or "the"; instead, the direct article is folded into the word, and words change their endings almost at will to indicate, potentially, "a" or "the". I say "potentially" because, for example, the word "daggin" means "a day" (dag = day; in= ending which specifies a), but it also means just "day". So there are up to four or five ways to say the word "day", all of which mean, simultaneously, "day" and "a day", which makes Icelandic not only needlessly difficult, but roughly the linguistic equivalent of quantum theory. They introduce this a few weeks into the lesson, and that's generally when most people give up.

2) It is essentially old Norse, or Norwegian circa the Fourteenth Century. Icelandic actually hasn't changed at all in the past 700 years, which is phenomenal, and a testament to the general isolation of Iceland. For a comparison, understand that Icelandic looks nothing like modern Norwegian, not just in words but even in letters. For example, Norway has that O with the line running through it, which also appears in Danish, but which is completely absent in Icelandic. As the other Scandinavian languages have grown together, Icelandic has just stayed the same; imagine if we still went around saying "thee" and "o'er" and sounding like something out of Beowulf, and you might have a sense of what Icelandic must be to a Norwegian or a Dane.

3) While Iceland has a series of accented vowels and a dipthong that is used by joining and a and e like so -- æ -- the only two consonsants that they use that are not in English are þ and ð. Interestingly enough, they are both pronounced as "Th". Þ (thor) is pronounced as the "th" in "thought", while ð (eth, or crossed d) is pronounced as the "th" in "weather".

4) In pronouncing Icelandic, the stress is placed on the first syllable, rather than the second as is common in English.

The really interesting thing about Icelandic is that the accent sounds vaguely Scottish; really, it's Celtic Norse, which is fitting as the original settlers were a mixture of the two. The language is also spoken with a very heavy tongue and what sounds to the untrained ear like something of a lisp; it always struck me as the language of people who are in the cold, talking with a numb mouth.

Will this help you when you go to Iceland? Well, it could. But in order to even bother to learn Icelandic, you must have a strong sense of the absurd; Icelandic is only spoken by the roughly three hundred thousand people who live in Iceland, almost all of whom speak better English then your average native speaker. It is about as useful a language as Ancient Greek, only without the scholarly cachet.

For more on the Icelandic language, you should pick up Daisy L Neijman's Colloquial Icelandic. For pictures, you need only go to my other website. Twenty-three new pictures are posted, fom the final day and a half of Airwaves, and featuring shots of: Siggi Armann with member of Sigur Ros; Indigo; Eg; Lights on the Highway; The Honeymoon; The Leaves; Keane (sigh...): The Bravery; Trabant; Gus Gus; and also the Blue Lagoon. There will be one more photo update from this trip, probably over the weekend, which will all be more pictures of Reykjavik itself.

Please enjoy, and remember that the photographs, like everything else these days, is protected under a Creative Commons License.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

The Geijin Flying Over Megalopolis

2004-12-07T20:57:00.000-05:00

I'm on the plane to D.C., flying over Megalopolis, sipping Budweiser and talking about Japan. You'll have to excuse the blatant product placement, it's so rare that I drink cheap American beer, it deserves to be commemorated.

See, it all begins with a broken plane. I'm in line at Kennedy, strangely enough the only line under the glass canopy at twelve in the afternoon, half listening to some music and eavesdropping on the conversation behind me. This guy in a suit is talking on his cellphone, which is always more interesting to listen to, because you get to make part of it up. He's here on business, a one day turnaround, and he's trying to shuffle which flight he's taking out of here.

"Yeah, I was supposed to go out on an earlier flight, but apparently they had a problem with the wheel."

Silence. I imagine a middle aged white guy who has the office next to his. I imagine some jokes about golf.

"There was a flat tire and the spare was in Washington, so they had to fly it in."

Wait, seriously? I have to stop myself from turning around and asking him if this is true; I don't want to reveal that I'm listening in. How do they not have a spare tire at Kennedy? It's a very large airport and a very small tire, surely there's a storage locker or something on the grounds where they could put an extra tire or two.

I get my ticket, pass through the first security, where they swab your bag and size you up, and then find myself in the dual purpose departure lounge/arrival's hall. One thing that I enjoy about Kennedy Airport is that you can pass through the duty free shops both going and coming. Unfortunately, the smoothie shop isn't open yet. Which is strange; it's two days until Thanksgiving and the entire terminal is surprisingly casual.

I kind of didn't get that much to eat this morning. I kind of need some food.

I pass through second security, where I try to good naturedly glare at them while asking "do I need to take off my shoes?" in a way that is meant to convey my sense of how absurd this all is. Not to belittle America's hysteria over terrorism, but perhaps we're taking this whole thing a little too far. The last time I flew to New York, I was practically molested by a rather salacious TSA official after I pulled the magical security code ticket. I'm not sure what he thought I was hiding in my crotch, but he was really determined to find it.

I grab a bagel and a bottle of water from the airport equivalent of a bodega, at a price roughly commensurate with those in Iceland (read: very expensive), and then head to my gate, which is host to a crowd only slightly less voluminous than the ones that are picketing the Ukrainian parliament for a new election. These are people who were on the plane with the flat tire. These are people who apparently are going to be stranded at the airport. These are people who are way too calm for the stupidity of the situation; if it was me, I think I would lead the people in a revolt, maybe set fire to one of the trash receptacles (because, of course, you're still allowed to bring open flames onto a plane, as if that's not dangerous).

I look out the window onto the tarmac. The broken plane is sitting down there, dejected and forlorn, clearly frustrated at having failed everyone on such an important day. Of course, that could just be inferiority; we're flying on those miniature jet planes, what used to be called "commuters", and it may just feel unworthy compared to all the Boeings and DC 47s. I look back at the crowd -- "Ladies and Gentlemen, we are giving priority to those people who were flying to Pennsylvania, but we will get everyone onto a plane today" -- and think to myself, 'Christ this is gonna be a full flight.'

And it is. Our plane, arriving from Boston, is already late due to traffic slowdowns all along the Northeast Corridor. We're ten minutes behind before we get the chance to stow our carry on bags, and even after we've all fastened our seat belts there seems to be no rush to close the cabin doors.

Time passes.

We sit there.

The steward (there's only one on these small flights) walks up and down the aisle, getting more harried on each pass, talking on the phone at the front of the plane, sticking his head out the cabin door, conferring with someone, slowly spiraling into his own form of pre-Thanksgiving madness.

Finally, he comes on the intercom:

"Ladies and Gentlemen" -- his accent is native Hispanic of some sort, Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic, possibly the Northern reaches of South America -- "I apologize for the wait. This flight is very full and we're having a problem with our weight distribution, with how heavy the underside of the plane is compared to the cabin. We're going to try and move some of your plane-side checked baggage" -- this is one of those flights where you can leave your larger carry-on bags with a respresentative on the tarmac and they put it under the plane for the flight but pull it back out immediately upon landing, a sort of compromise between checking it and having it with you on the plane -- "out of the underside of the plane and into the cabin, and see if that can solve the problem."

Thus begins a river of luggage flowing back into the plane. Understand, at no point are they actually weighing the plane. As far as I know, this is all algorithms and guidelines in some book somewhere. I inherit my laptop computer, which I absolutely cannot fit under my seat, while the people behind me pick up not one but two bags, which means that they have nowhere to put their legs but over each other and in the aisle. It's kind of like the subway at rush hour in here now, and as absurd as all of this is, it isn't actually helpful.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, I am sorry to inform you that we are still currently overweight and we will be unable to take off under our present conditions."

Here's the deal: every seat is full; everyone who is on here met the baggage weight and size requirement; the plane was not oversold. What's happening is that the plane apparently isn't rated to fly at its own capacity. I don't know how these things happen, but they do.

"We're going to have to ask for three volunteers to give up their seat on the plane, so that everyone else may be able to get to their destination today."

Maybe you missed it, but that time reference was crucial. In that last sentence, today was the operative word.

"If you give up your seat, we'll give you a voucher for one hundred dollars" -- which is, on average, about half of the cost of a one way ticket -- "and get you on the next flight to Washington D.C. If for some reason we can't get you out today" -- there it is again -- "we'll pay for your hotel room here at the airport so that you don't have to stay overnight in the terminal, and then get you out first thing in the morning."

There are worse ideas than taking that deal, but not many. I'm guessing that it's geared to people who not only are in no rush to get home and spend time with their family, but would actually like to delay it as long as they can.

Amazingly, three people actually do give up their seats. As they walk down the aisle, the rest of the plane self-servingly applauds them, as if the volunteers are doing it out of kindness for the rest of us, as if we really appreciate it.

By now we're forty minutes late; I've already called my own family to tell them that I might not be making my connecting flight and that I might be in D.C. well past nightfall. I look around the plane, and other people are doing the same thing; we're all a little antsy about getting to where we're going. This isn't helped by the announcement, delivered while we are at last in line to take off.

"Ladieds and Gentlemen, due to traffic conditions at Baltimore/Washington, Dulles Airport has instituted" -- and I forget which word he used but basically it's lockout -- "which means that for the time being no planes are cleared to land until some planes that are already on the ground are able to take off."

So, actually, I might not make it out of New York before nightfall. None of us might. I can feel around me the whole plane turning hostile.

"However, I have some good news, which is that I am making a decision of my own, and I am going to give you all free drinks once we are in the air. We have a modest selection of alcohol, so please just take whatever is available and don't be picky."

This time, I think the applause is genuine, I think we really mean it.

Now, we're sitting in the back of the plane, so once he makes it back to us, he's out of liquor and is down to just beer. Which is Bud or Bud Light. Not even PBR, which would at least be nouveau classy. Whatever, a Bud's fine. At this altitude and with almost no food all day, I probably don't need a real beer anyway.

By now I'm talking to my seatmate, whose name I haven't actually managed to get yet, but who's heading down to D.C., where he grew up, in order to hang out with his family for the holiday. He's in New York working in the music industry, doing something with publishing.

"I make sure that people get the right royalties. So if someone in Kentucky writes a song called 'Stairway to Heaven', I make sure that he doesn't get Led Zeppelin's money."

"Does that happen a lot?"

"That situation? Sometimes."

" 'Cause it sounds like the perfect scam, just go and write some random song, name it 'Hey Jude' or 'Good Vibrations', sit back and wait for the money to roll in."

"Well, it isn't quite like that. I mean, mostly it's just making sure that all the paperwork goes through and the all the money goes out. It's weird, I'm either dealing with these major record labels that are demanding their million dollars, or some struggling songwriter who needs to expedite payment of his two thousand bucks so that he can pay his medical bills."

"Yeah, it's a weird business, entertainment. I work mostly in theatre, and over there you either make nothing or you make a million dollars, and there's literally no in between. There's no earning a decent living writing for the theatre, but there is buying your second house in upsate New York. It's very strange."

By now we're comfortably relaxed, drinking beer at thirty thousand feet, flying above the clouds that hide from the view the suburban sprawl of Megalopolis below us. It's actually gotten quite pleasant on the plane now; the flight is smooth, everyone getting a little buzzed, and we're all enjoying the first sunlight that we've seen in nearly three days. Our conversation meanders through a couple of different topics, before coming to rest, somewhat inexplicably, on the Japanse mafia.

"I heard this story once, someone I knew" -- actually my tattoo artist out in Portland -- "knew an America who used to own a business in Japan. This guy ran a shop, and like everyone else he would get shaken down by the yakuza. Well, everyone just paid them, it was the smart thing to do, and there was never any trouble. Except that there was this one lady who decided she'd had enough, just refused to pay and that was it.

"So, one day this American is out in a public square, having tea at an an outdoor cafe. And he's surrounded by at least a hundred Japanese people who are doing the same thing, just enjoying the day, very peaceful and calm, the way that Japan is. And suddenly they hear this gutwrenching scream, and this woman, the one who wouldn't pay, she comes running into the square, screaming her head off, being chased by these two giant men.

"Now, the square abuts a public road, and this woman is running towards it. As she reaches it, this van pulls up and stops right in front of her. The door opens, this guys gets out. He has this hook like tool in his hand. The woman, when she sees him she just stops. He takes his hook, sticks it in her eye, pulls it out, grabs the woman's left hand, puts her eye in her hand, grabs a roll of tape, tapes her hand shut with her eye still inside of it. Then he and the two other men get in the van and pull away.

"The woman just stands there, with her eye in her hand, completely shocked. She's there for maybe twenty or thirty seconds when an ambulance pulls up. These EMTs get out, put her in the back, and then drive away, taking her to the hospital. And the whole time, the entire square is watching, and no one does a thing."

"Wow."

"Seriously."

It turns out that I have another yakuza story as well, from my travels through Japan.

"This one is a little more pleasant. I was in Osaka last year, staying in a capsule hotel -- do you know what those are?"

"Like for the Salarymen, tiny little rooms."

"Not even rooms, more like little cubby holes that people sleep in, these spaces four by four by maybe seven. If you're Japanese sized, it's actually a pretty good deal; it's really just like a fully enclosed bunk bed with your own TV. The crazy thing is that it has that Japanese contradiction of size: the sleeping spaces are small, but the building is huge, just massive, which means that every floor looks like a wharehouse of sleeping people, just rows and rows of double decker white pods with little screens that pull down for privacy. It's like something out of Space Odyssey.

"Anyway, the basement of the hotel is this giant bathing area, a sort of modern take on the traditional public bath."

For those who don't know, the Japanese taking bathing very seriously. This is partially because in Japan everything has a ritual component to it, and partially derives from a practical aspect of traditional Japanese life: until very recently, the Japanese lived mostly on the floor. Tatami mats were laid down over wood planks or, commonly, dirt floors, and people would sit on these, eat on these, even sleep on these, and so of course good hygeine became crucial as a way to stave off basic contaminants and disease.

The bathing etiquette is the same in Japan whether you're at a public bath or in your home; you first must clean your body thoroughly and completely before stepping into the pools. At the bath in Osaka, washing happened at one end of the room; I sat on a small plastic stool, grabbed some soap and a washcloth, lathered myself up, scrubbed hard, and then washed myself off with a hose. This may sound a little primitive, but you have to understand, two weeks prior I was using squat toilets on a remote South Thailand island, I no longer had any capacity to judge these things.

After the washing, you're free to soak yourself in the pools. In Osaka, the bathing area had four baths of different temperatures. I chose the large pool in the middle, and lowered myself into the hot waters.

"So I'm soaking in the tubs and I'm looking around, and I see these large, beefy men, which in and of itself is a rarity in Japan. On top of that, they all have these amazing tatoos, filling their entire backs, extending down their arms and legs, these beautiful, lyrical drawings of goldfish and samurai, all in the traditional Japanese style. I mean, they really are impressive, and it's the first time I've seen anything like them.

"So anyway, I'm sitting there and trying not to stare, partially because I'm still a little uncomfortable with being the only Westerner in here, and partially because there's something about these guys that is a little unsettling. I think it's the tattoos, how ostentatious they are, how flashy and arrogant; in a culture where anyone over thirty is still trying very hard to blend in, you begin to be a little suspicious about the people who aren't.

"So, I stay in the pools for awhile, trying out different temperatures, and then I head into the steam room, and all of those guys, they're inside now, just chilling out -- did I mention that we're all naked? We are, there's no towels or anything -- most of them watching a ballgame on one of the TVs. One of the TVs, because not only do the Japanse have a TV in the sauna, they have many, all tuned to different channels. And one of these programs, it's these two Japanese kids who are maybe our age, doing an old Vaudeville routine. It's in Japanese of course, so I can't really understand what they're saying, but the basic concept is easy to follow, and all of the jokes and rhythms are pretty much standard American vaudeville. It's well done too, so it's actually quite funny, and I'm laughing, I'm genuinely amused.

"Well, I look up, and I see one of the guys pointing at me and laughing. It's not malcious, in fact it's totally goodnatured, just he's amused by the skinny American geijin laughing at the Japanese TV show. And I kind of smile and laugh back. I think that we're all united, for a moment, by our own uniqueness. Not only am I this Western kid, but I'm doing something quite bold for the culture, which is that I'm laughing around strangers, and meanwhile here they are, covered in these tattoos, and while they are clearly a unit amongts themselves, you get the sense that they're porbably outsiders relative to the rest of Japan. It's almost sweet, this connection we have for a moment. I think one of them even spoke to me, and I just kind of made the international face for 'I don't know what you're saying', and we all laughed some more and they all thought I was kind of cool.

"It wasn't until a couple of months later that I read somewhere what those tattoos meant and I realized I'd been hanging out with the Japanese mafia."

It turns out that I'm telling him all of these things about the Japanese culture, but really he already knows. Not only has he been to Japan, but he's ethnically part Japanese. Like everyone else, he's fascinated by Japan, and by its inherent complexities.

"I mean it's an interesting culture, there's this incredible naivete to it."

"Although you see that all over Southeast Asia."

"Well, yeah, but it's more in Japan -- everything is more in Japan. They have all of those 60s style variety shows, and they have the vaudeville, they have the music, the J-Pop... there's just this very childlike character to it."

"An innocence."

"Right."

"Which is surprising because they aren't lacking for sophistication."

"No, they're very sophisticated, very cultured, but at the same time very sheltered."

"I was really surprised when I was there how much it genuinely felt like an island. Japan is part of the Western world, but at the same time it's insulated from it. It seems that Japan is really good at absording these external cultural influences without losing their inherent sense of themselves. So whereas most of the world has America's version of Western culture, Japan has Japan's version of Western culture, which I think is a lot more fun."

"They're managed to keep themselves from getting cynical, or ironic -- they've kept all of that at bay."

"Whereas we revel in our irony, we use it as a way to survive our culture."

"I just hope that they can hold onto that, keep themselves pure."

"I think they will, though. I think that their culture is inherently geared to that, because their culture is essentially made up."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, my first few days in Japan, I really couldn't make sense of any of it. I mean, I recognized everything, I'd seen it in their movies, but I couldn't figure out what it meant, or how to put it together. I have that when I travel, I have to figure the place out, make sense of it, before I have any context from which to enjoy it.

"So it's my third day there, and I'm in standing in this temple graveyard, up on a hill, and looking out over the cityscape, looking at the skyline. And I see, and this is so weird, but I see this building that I know is in Copenhagen. And the one in Copenhagen's not even a new building, it's an old building, a building that was built at some point in the 1800s if not earlier. I'm looking at a copy of a building in Europe, and there's a roller coaster running through it. I actually had to close my eyes and open them again to see if I was crazy.

"Nope, still a building from Copenhagen, still a rollercoaster runing through it. So of course I have to go check it out.

"I leave the temple and make my way down the hill, walking past expressways and neon lit radio towers, walking under powerlines along a pachinko strewn pedestrian street, tinkly music and clattering balls, and I wind up at this shopping mall slash theme park, with a roller coaster, and this mildly famous Danish tower in the middle of it. I can't begin to explain how weird this already is, but it only gets more weird: after I ride the roller coaster, I wind up in an arcade, which is like a super arcade. Americans, we don't know what an arcade is. There are easily a hundred machines here, including one game called 'Photo Battle', where you literally take pictures of things on the screen, and then some game involving a giant tribal drum. I head to the bathroom, sort of marvelously bewildered by all of this, and I see a guy in a foam and felt samurai costume, brushing his teeth at the sink. And like that, in a flash it hits me:

"None of this is real, it's all made up.

"And after that I had a great trip."

With that our plane lands (it's only a 37 minute flight), and as I get up to leave he hands me a CD -- it turns out he's in a band, and I'm sort of surprised that he hadn't bothered to mention that a while ago. If I was in a band, I would say to everyone, when they asked me what I do, "I'm a rock star". Even if it was blatantly untrue. I grab the CD, which will turn out to be really good, and stuff it into my bag.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, excuse me, but is there a Passenger Drayton Hiers on this flight?"

Oh, hey, that's me.

They want me to hurry off the plane and be escorted to my connecting flight, but since I'm at the back of the plane, that isn't going to happen. The aisle is completely blocked, and as no one on this plane felt that their personal happiness was worth less than that of the rest of the passengers', no one here is going to sit down and let me pass. Someone nearby says, "I'm sure they'll hold the flight for another minute" and then proceeds to make sure that all of his seatmates get off the plane before I do.

It's no matter; I say goodbye to my seatmate -- Chris is his name, it says so in his CD -- and then step off the plane and into the arms of a waiting airline employee, who runs me through Baltimore/Washington airport, making sure that I don't get lost going from Gate 1 to (literally) Gate 2. My head is still somewhere in the clouds, thinking about my trip to Japan last year, and meanwhile my body is hurtling through space, propelled to a new destination, a new place to go, a new flight to make. I just let it all pass in a blur, pull out my ticket, get it stamped, and walk down the concourse to get on my plane.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

String Theory, One More Year and It Can Drink.

2004-12-07T17:39:00.000-05:00

Yes, Kiddos, string theory has turned twenty. String is the proverbial "Theory of Everything", and if you're just now hearing about it, well, you're only about a month behind me.

For the past couple of years, I've walk around with this Copenhagen inspired vision of the atom and quantom mechanics, this very eloquent, very poetic, very beautiful and very outdated view of the world around me. That whole idea of the nucleus is a ball of mass and the electrons orbit it like planets? Nope, not how it works. Apparently, the electrons are more of a giant dust cloud, or as Bill Bryson puts it in A Short History of Nearly Everything, like the blades of a spinning fan, everywhere all at once. So when I tumbled around New York in a haze of poetry and pot smoke, thinking that I had unlocked the philosophical dimensions and implications of the world, I was really just working off of bad information.

See, I had presumed what most people presume, which is that the rules of the physical world are consistent. The brilliance of quantum mechanics, as popularly understood, was that everything worked the same way, from the smallet atom to the largest solar system and beyond, everything had an order and was united. Quantum mechanics created a singularity. Unfortunately, it seems that we potentially live in a world with duality, and that in fact the way that things work on a subatomic scale is markedly different from how they work on an postatomic scale.

To put it simply, this doesn't make sense. Not only is it counterintuitive, but it is counterintuitive in a completely opposite way than General Relativity is counterintuitive. Einstein spent the latter portion of his career living in New Jersey and unsuccesfully trying to reconcile these theories, and it is debatable which of those was the worse idea.

Twenty years ago, however, string theory emerged as a completely untestable, unknowable, all encompassing idea which perfectly exists at that point in which physics is the same philosophy and literature, at that point in which some unseen force crafts the nature of the physical world as nothing so much as a dream state in which we all transpire. It's strange, we live in a time where you can mathematically prove the very things that poets, artists and spiritualists have been saying for eons. The true power of string, or whatever may eventually overtake it as the One Theory, is that it provides a path to unity again, in which the intellectuals, thinkers and dreamers of the two divergent paths -- broadly seen as the emotional and the factual, but more specifically the intuitive and the logical -- find themselves meeting once again, having a picnic and comparing notes, maybe getting a little too drunk under the full moon and basking in the glory of simultaneously celebrating their ability to completely know the world and the fact that the world is completely unknowable.

Anyway, you can read a slightly more scientific recap of String Theory's birthday over the at the New York Times here. And if you want to learn more about the basic context of modern physical thought, you should check out A Short History of Nearly Everything. Click on the link to go to Book Sense, which will help you to locate your friendly neighborhood independent bookseller.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

The Two Faces of China

2004-12-06T14:08:00.000-05:00

From this morning's New York Times, The Two Faces of China, an article with an audio slide show concerning China's still booming economy, which is already the world's largest consumer of steel and concrete, and will soon surpass the United States in such products as copper and soybeans. Meanwhile, China's bank assets are expected to surpass the American economy's by 2034, and eventually surpass America's overall economic output by 2047. These numbers do, of course, presume a great many factors, not the least of which is a steadily growing economy that does not suffer a bust (a rarety in post-war East Asia), and a continuation of the "stable" political environment in China for the past quarter century (I guess Tiananmen Square was a rave or something).

It's an interesting article, one of many that are beginning to come out on the role of China in the modern world (recently the London Guardian did a week long series on daily life in China, which you can find at their website); it's probably not correct to say that China is still under the radar, but it is fair to say that we are going to see the country, for better or worse, claiming a new place on the public stage during the next year and the time leading up to the 2008 Olympics.

All of this raises an intersting question that isn't covered by the article, which is what will happen when China and Japan are both major economic powers. Aside from the fact that they generally hate each other, there has never been a time in Asian history (as far as I know), where both countries were strong at the same time. Expect fireworks of some sort.

And You're Telling Me This Because...? (New Ways to Market Products)

2004-12-05T21:25:00.000-05:00

I just wanted to take a moment to inform you all about the New York Times' Magazine's article on "The Hidden Persuaders", concerning a new tactic in advertising that involves employing people (most commonly "BzzAgents"), almost always unpaid, to spread word of mouth by manufacturing conversations on new products. (Click on the link now if you wish to read it without any influence on my behalf; the rest of this post is purely my own opinion and attempt to convince you of my point.)

It works like this: someone reads a book on the subway so you can see the cover, and then finds a way to talk to you about it, genuinely, without revealing that they are employed to push the book onto you. If you've seen The Corporation, this is similar to a form of marketing that is examined in that film, except that here people are actually talking to their targets one on one, rather than just walking around talking loudly among themselves about a new product.

The article raises some very interesting points, both to the general sincerity of most of these BzzAgents (who only plug a product they like and seem to be doing it for the self esteem that comes from having an opinion, having people listen to that opinion, and then having people respond to that opinion by buying the product for themselves) and the inherent lie in their presentation, which is that whether or not these people sincerely like the product, they are talking to you with a very clear agenda, which is to get you to buy the product. Many of these agents seem to see what they are doing as altruism, an entirely self serving viewpoint which ignores the basic fact that while they may generally believe in the value of the product, they are still trying to manipulate people.

Of course, the catch here is this: people try to manipualte each other every day. When we recommend a book to someone, we almost always have an agenda, which is to get you to read the book because for some reason we think that it is important, or that you will be a better person for reading it, or because we want the book to sell; these are only a few of many possibilities. Even now, I am foisting upon you information about this article, not only asking you to read it, but asking you to read it with my personal bias and viewpoint.

This of course is the real question: if people are going to share information with each other anyway, if people are always trying to get each other to do something , then what is the boundary that separates the genuine from the manufactured? What we are talking about here is harnessing natural human behavior in such a way as to achive a desired end, in this case a choice to buy a product. It is the mechanizing of human life to serve a machinery of capital creation, which is something most people have agreed to in their working life, but have yet to agree to consciously in their free time. The lie here, of course, is that most people are already a part of that machine full time, it is just that even if they are not aware of this (as in if they don't regard watching commercial television as playing a part in capital creation), they can at least differentiate the process. You know when you are being sold something, because it is labelled as such.

What we are seeing here is a campaign of subterfuge, of ulterior motives, of a violation of the inherent social agreement that we will operate under a model of full disclosure. Of course, even this is an illusion: we almost always hide things from each other, we almost always disguise our true feelings.

Meanwhile, the Western and Western-influenced society is already so predicated upon consumerism and product identification (i.e. I feel special when I have my iPod on the train because everyone else does, and I feel like I am part of a group*) that it becomes a logical, natural step to then make our very own interactions with each other into a product in and of itself -- in this case, BzzAgents are turning their time into a commodity, and are doing it with no second thought as to the part that they are playing, mainly because they like the part they are playing. They are also doing it with no guilt, or even the conception of potential guilt, that they are abusing the trust of others, because they don't see it as being in any way an abuse. Or, at the least, if they do see it as an abuse, they prize their own self gratification above the feeling of the person who is being misled and manipulated. Essentially, we are looking at a breakdown in a social contract that has always been tenuous to begin with.

I think this is one of these things that you either view as inherently wrong, or simply have no qualms about whatsoever and can't fathom why anyone else would.

If you are not already registered with the New York Times, you will need to do so. If you do not wish to register, please e-mail me and I can send you a copy via e-mail; I promise to send it from my personal account rather than the New York Times' website, as that should, in theory, give them no trail to trace you down.

You can find the article here.

Please let me know your thoughts, particularly if you take a differing opinion from my own.

*There is also another side to this, which is that I like my iPod not just for the solidarity, but because it is a genuinely beautiful human creation. Not only is it a machine that I have wanted for at least the past six years -- something that would provide me with my entire music collection at any time -- but it is a machine that has been designed to be simultaneously beautiful and functional, which renders it, in my mind, a work of art. This is the tension in our identification with products, which is that often they are human designed to be human used, and as such are as important to us as tools (how many museums show awls and hoes from two thousand years ago as special relics) and as cultural markers that serve as works of art (how many museums show not only art, but specifically narrow windows of art that are used to mark an entire era or school of human behavior and thought). Rather than creating an ambivalence, this can often create a heightened awareness of the product and of our lives in relation to it; what does someone living in a village in Chad, for example, have any use for in an iPod?

One of my fascinations with Japan lies in their consumer culture; when I was there, I picked up every flyer I could find, ostensibly because it showed "Japanese graphic design", but also because on some level I was fetishizing the Japanese culture (which is already highly fetishized by the Japanese), and the material goods that they sell. When I need a pick me up, I will often go to one of the Japanese toy stores in New York, and just gaze for awhile at these beautifully crafted and entirely useless hunks of metal, simultaneously to me a symbol of how quirky and wonderful our cultures can be, and also how completely disposable and disconnected from a higher ideal.

These are essentially irreconcilable concepts, which may ultimately be unimportant. It may simply be that the tension provided by the two is what is necessary, the awareness of the pleasure both of the immediate and the worldly.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

"Er þetta ekki Reykjavik?"

2004-12-04T17:20:00.000-05:00

"Nei, flugstoðin er i Keflavik..."

Thus go two of the perhaps six lines of Icelandic that I have committed to memory. (This conversations regards the whereabouts of the airport; I can also ask where the Domed Church is and say that I am from Canada; the former I never needed to use, and the latter is blatantly untrue.) These all come from Daisy L. Neijman's Colloquial Icelandic, which is simultaneously the best Icelandic do it yourself course available and the only Icelandic do it yourself course available. It would not be entirely correct to say that we spent our days walking around Reykjavik quoting these lines at random, but it wouldn't be too far off the mark either.

I was in Reykjavik back in October for a week; I went for Icelandic Airwaves, a three day music festival spread over five nights, drawing on some of the best bands in Iceland and the world beyond. My personal highlights included Keane (sigh, keane...), Tenderfoot, Indigo and Sahara Hotnights, but these were only a handful of the more than 25 acts that I saw perform. Alas, I missed The Shins, but since I saw them in Portland over the summer, I was only mildly dissapointed.

I am slowly putting up photographs from the trip on my .mac homepage Things I Always Wish I'd Done. So far there are forty five photographs from the first two days posted, with perhaps sixty more to come, based on my storage abilities. Please feel free to mosy on over there and look at the very funky, very strange, very cool city that is Reykjavik.

Two notes:

The .mac setup is rather crummy when it comes to writing text, so all of the captions are necessarily truncated from what would no doubt be a novel sized explanation of each image.

As with my written text, all images on the site are protected under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. I'll spare you the graphic for once. Basically, this means that you are welcome to save a copy of the photograph for yourself, and even to use it for your own artwork, as long as it used for a non-commercial purpose and proper credit is given for the original source material.

Please enjoy.

On the Joys of Zen Palate

2004-12-04T16:03:00.000-05:00

I'm at Zen Palate. I love Zen Palate. I love Zen Palate with a passion that I can't fully express in words, except to say that I've been known to plan entire days around the geographic realities of Zen Palate restaurants. Trendy new vegetarian restaurants have come and gone, but for me, Zen Palate always remains.

Zen Palate, for those of you who don't know, is a small chain of restaurants in Manhattan. It's unmistakably Asian influenced in its decore, with an international menu of meat-free dishes, such as Sweet and Sour Sensation or Sheperd's Pie Croquettes, a small sampling of incredible and ostensibly dairy free deserts, and these unapologetically overpriced yet still quite wonderful tea/juice infusions. I say ostensibly because it's fairly well known within the vegetarian community that Zen Palate is not quite as animal free as they claim to be, or as a feisty vegan friend of mine once yelled into my face, "They lie! Zen Palate lies! They use honey!" There are also reports of milk protein (gasp!) sneaking into dishes, or even just wholesale use of eggs and cheese in general.

It's probably a little sad to admit that I wasn't overly concerned by this when I was a vegan, and now that I'm not even really a strict vegetarian any more (which is to say that I go about three weeks off, one week on when it comes to eating meat), it doesn't really matter at all to me. I just know that it's delicious, and as long as I can still get a few dishes with minimal to no soy, I'm happy.

I became addicted to Zen Palate a few years ago when I returned from my first trip around the country. A friend of mine (I probably shouldn't use his name) had been spending a few nights a week at my apartment watering my plant, getting high and ordering Zen Palate. Like everyone else in New York, they deliver. For months afterward -- actually until I moved out -- whenever I called to place my own order, they thought I was him.

When I got back from my trip, he would still come over and we would get Zen Palate together. I was passionately conflicted about living in New York at the time, and just probably afraid of life in general, and so Zen Palate became one of the three or four things that really kept me in a good place. (The others were a coffee shop near Union Square that has since closed, my ever changing array of wall hangings, and the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet.) I used to just go and get take away dumplings and spring rolls, eat them at home while I watched some Animee that I had Tivoed the night before. Let's be honest, this was all creation of an imaginary and perfect world, but then isn't most of life?

When I was living in Charleston, I missed Zen Palate desperately, more, honestly enough, than most of my friends, if only because Zen Palate is always there, while my friends are often busy and bad about returning phone calls. The first time I came back to New York, for a weeklong visit, I literally ate at Zen Palate four times, dividing myself equally between the restaurant and the cafe. (Zen Palate has this interesting feature where they have a front room which is an eat in or take away cafe, and then a back room which is a full dining area with nice plates and specialty dishes. The cafe has that great crowded atmosphere which is reminiscent of most non-Western eateries in Asia.)

Now, usually I'll be found either at the Zen Palate (or ZP, as I affectionately call it) overlooking Union Square, sitting in the front, looking out the windows, slowly savoring my mid-afternoon snack of brown rice, vegetable dumplings and taro spring rolls, or at the one in Hell's Kitchen, near my old apartment, saddled up to the bar and noshing on a more respectable pre-theatre dinner. That's where I am now, looking up at the sign reading "if animals could talk, we'd all be vegetarians". (I'm not even sure this is true; I think if animals could talk we'd probably just yank out their tongues. And then eat them.) The countertop of the bar, it's an unmistakable black and white pattern which never fails to surprise me when I come here.

I turn to the guy next to me, a decent if quiet paraprofessional munching on some vegan scallion pancakes (I resist the urge to ask him "are you sure those are vegan?"), and say:

"Does it ever surprise you that the countertop is a cow pattern?"

Now, he doesn't actually look up from his plate, but he does engage in the conversation.

"Huh...I never thought of that... maybe the owner is a Holstein fan."

"It just seems kind of strange, all this meat free food and the main focal point is the animal we're not eating."

"Well, maybe he's making a point."

"Cow solidarity?"

And here he actually laughs a little bit.

"Yeah."

And then goes back to eating.

Another night, just before the election, the restaurant is more crowded, and I'm further down the bar. Tonight I'm here because I'm about to go see another friend of mine in a show over on 42nd street, a political vaudeville that I fully expect to be terrible. I'm sitting next to this guy who's eating soy over broccoli and reading a computer print out of a poem. I turn to him and ask, "Is that yours?", and the look of confusion on his face, it's genuinely unique and priceless.

"Yes, I -- Oh, you mean the... I thought you meant the food."

"No, I figured the food was yours."

"Yes, the poem is mine."

"Is that what you do, you write poems? Or is it more of a hobby... I mean, hobby is the wrong word, I mean..."

You ever get halfway through a sentence and realize that the idea you have in your head and the actual words that you are using don't match up, and that really you should have stopped talking a while ago? Yeah, that's where I am right now. What I mean to say is, "do you self-identify as a poet, or is poetry something that you do purely as a personal release with no intention of sharing it with others?" Unfortunately, I am rarely this eloquent in day to day conversation.

"Well, I don't get paid for it."

"Well, who does, right?"

"Actually, though, I'm performing this piece."

"You do spoken word?"

"Yeah."

"So when are you reading?"

"In December." December is easily five weeks away. He's getting a really early start.

"Oh, where at?"

And he mentions a comedy club down in the Village.

"And they do poetry?"

"Well, no, they -- we're sort of -- "

"You're taking it over."

"Taking it over, yeah."

"Do the comics know?"

"Well --"

"Or are you just going to break in, institute lock down and begin reading your poems?"

"Well, we're renting the space for the night. We're doing this whole evening of spoken word and performance art, and we wanted a nice venue."

"So why a comedy club over a theatre?"

"Basically, we wanted a place where people could drink."

Well, that'll do it.

We continue talking for awhile, exchanging tips on travel writing and vegetarian restaurants. It turns out that we're from the same state, just opposite corners, and that we even have a mutual acquaintance in common, also from our state (it's a small state).

"Oh yeah, he lived in the dorm my first year of college. We actually, one night we pulled this prank where we literally covered his bed a foot deep in these giant balls of crumpled newspaper. And then he came in and said 'I'm allergic to newsprint, I'll have to wash the sheets.' We felt kind of bad."

It also turns out that The Poet is still registered to vote in our home state (I had just hastily switched mine to New York; my vote was going to be relatively ineffective in either state, so I wanted to at least be ineffective in a blue state), and had just cast his absentee ballot for the Liberal-for-the-South Democratic candidate for the Senate, who of course lost. (Liberal for the South generally means that you don't actively hate gay people or feel that women who get abortions should be shot at.)

With curtain time approaching -- he was going to see some friend in some play that he expected to be equally dreadful -- we hastily finished our meals and grabbed our checks. On the way out we exchanged e-mails, and of course I haven't heard from him since. That's the thing about this city, people aren't looking to make friends, they're fine for a twenty minute conversation but that's the extent of the interraction. I'm still so spoiled from traveling -- meet someone at hostel breakfast and spend the rest of the day walking around some city together, for no other reason than that it's better than spending the day on your own -- that I still expect it to work the same way here. Or anywhere. But non-travelers, at least in America, are notoriously bad about this.

Not that it really matters. I walked down the street and saw my friend's show, which actually turned out to be quite enjoyable, and then we went out and had a few drinks (I was having one of my non-drinky nights, so I stuck with water) and broke New York's cabaret laws by treating the back of this very straight laced Guy Bar (this is that category that falls somewhere between Irish and Sport's) as our own personal dance floor. It was a sort of blurry fun.

That's New York, everything transient, this air of impermanence, we're all just floating through space. You sort of develolp a tactic to deal with that, you create your anchors to hold you to something, to fill the dead time, when things stop and you have a moment to choose your own course. For whatever reason, and there are delicious many, one of my anchors seems to be Zen Palate, if only because after spending a year and a half living in other states and countries, I can really appreciate how difficult it is to find vegetarian dumplings outside of New York.

Well, that and because I always leave happy, and how many things in this life can you say that about?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Hey Kids, Torture Is Fun

2004-12-04T13:00:00.000-05:00

So I'm sitting in that plaza catty-corner to where the World Trade Center used to be, bundled up against the cold, eating a falafel and watching this nice old lady getting tortured. Well, OK, not really. Really it's this cute little Chinese woman with makeup on her face, sitting in a folding chair and pretending to be tortured. You have to suspend your disbelief.

Now, when I got back from Portland, this was a new one to me, but by now it's a pretty commonplace affair. For at least the past six months, New Yorkers have borne witness to fairly regular re-enactments of state torture. SoHo on Saturday, people with shopping bags, hipsters in ugly clothes that are passing for stylish these days and across the streets there's an agent of the Chinese government administering electroshock. Times Square, theatre crowd, old women from New Jersey catching a matinee, the militant wing of the Nation of Island decrying the presence of the white man and then, hey, look over there, someone bloody, beaten, and sitting in a cage. Bryant Park, Union Square, Madison Square Garden; water drip, sensory deprivation, open-face wounds. I mean, New York has always been a brutal city, but perhaps it's getting a little out of hand.

So what's this all about? Well, take a pamphlet, ignoring the fact that the very attractive brunette on the cover is a dead ringer for my friend Carissa (who now works for the Secret Service in Washington D.C.; whenever I call her I presume her phones are wire tapped), and you find out that they're trying to bring attention to the persecution by the Chinese government of practitioners of Falun Dafa. Which I've never heard. And probably neither have you. Falun Dafa, as near as I can tell, is a cross between yogic meditation and tai chi, and part of the fun of these demonstrations is that alongside the torture victims are usually four or five elderly Chinese people actually practicing Falun Dafa, slowly moving through this flowing series of poses. (It is also referred to as Falun Gong, and is in some way an offshoot of qigong, which is getting rather popular on the West Coast)

Now, to you and me, this whole Falun Dafa thing seems fairly innocuous; they aren't really doing anything that we can't do at my gym. To the Chinese government, though, this Falun Dafa (or Falun Gong) is some serious business. The practice began in China relatively recently, within the past fifteen years, as a way to seek truthfulness, compassion and tolerance (you can already see why it might be a little anathema to the Chinese Communist Party*), and has now spread to over fifty countries. You can read about it here and here.

In a nutshell, Falun Dafa is a practice that has roots in ancient Chinese traditions, and is currently being practiced by as many as 100 million people in China. Initially, it seems that the practice and its accumulating popularity was accepted within the Party, but then President Jiang Zemin grew worried with the size of the movement, apparently concerned with its threat to his own power. In 1999, Zemin declared the practice illegal, and then began a rather nasty propaganda campaign against Falun Dafa, both in China and abroad. He also, and this is the sticky part, "imprison(ed), tortur(ed), and even murder(ed)" some of its practitioners. Not cool. The death toll from 1999 to the present is estimated to be somewhere between 300 and 2,500, based on whose figures you are using. The fact that the low figures come directly from the government of China are an indication that it's operating with a fairly clean conscience. You can read all about this here.

The thing is this: while the acts of the Chinese government against their own people are obnoxious, so are these demonstrations. I mean, they're everywhere, and they show no signs of stopping. Apparently, between our vigilance on the America Waging the Perpetual War thing and the Genocide in Darfur thing, people just aren't on top of the whole petitioning China to stop its human rights abuses against practitioners of a spiritually tinged exercise regiment thing, and so basically nothing is happening on that front. Which means that I'm still running into torture victims, still being handled pamphlets, still seeing Chinese women who are easily in their sixties lugging around large plastic bags filled with fake blood and newspapers from prime traffic site to prime traffic site in the hopes of capturing people's attention.

The thing is, this Falun Dafa is a non-aggressive, peaceful, patient practice, which means that we could be looking at torture demonstrations for years. They're gonna be out there until either the torture stops or we tell them we aren't going to do anything about it, so I really think we should all, as New Yorkers, take a quick huddle and draw up a plan of action. I say we either petition the Chinese governement, or we kindly ask the Falun Dafas to go do their stretching and face painting in another city, like Philadelphia or Washington, somewhere they can get to on the Chinatown bus for less than ten dollars.

Personally, I'm leaning towards the former, because China is doing a lot of bad shit to their people, and we're already passively supporting it simply by buying t-shirts and toaster ovens that come from their factories (which in many cases are German factories that were literally dismantled piece by piece and re-built almost halfway around the world), so it would seem that if the Chinese government has the power to persecute some really nice old people who just want to achieve inner peace, it's kinda sorta partially our fault. It also would just be the right thing to do, a concept that I hope hasn't lost its credence now that American foreign policy is generally based on the notion of focusing on the wrong thing to do, and then doing it.

But if we are going to opt for indifference, let's at least be proactive about it and actually make it a mutual declaration. Let's make it a decision, a cause, to mobilize and be heard and, in some small way, take back our streets. Because, really, I just want to eat my falafel in peace.

*As an aside, I just wanted to toss out two things. One, in the words of Clue: The Movie, Communism was always a red herring. Two, we live in a world in which there are people who genuinely believe (I am not making this up) that we are in Iraq fighting the spread of Communism (yes...), who at the same time are buying, I'm sure, countless knick knacks and appliances that are of course made in China. Now, I've never been one to seek consistency from either American foreign policy or the basic belief systems of your average human being, but it seems that if the goal of our new empire phase, I mean nation building project, is to bring Freedom to the world (which, I think Freedom has also been a red herring, at least for as long as you or I could remember), then one place to start would be China, where despite a mild lenciency in the major cities of Hong Kong and Shanghai, the government is still regularly commiting acts of aggression against its people, limiting access to information, and barring public discussion on matters of faith.

At what point did the international community give China a pass on its human rights abuses simply because they could mass produce mercantile goods at a better rate than anyone else? At what point did we decide that our ability to buy really nice shirts from H&M at twenty Euro a pop was reason enough to pretend that because China was all for the capitalist system (equally corrupt as Communism but at least more transparent and less efficient) on their own terms it was going to solve all of those pesky totalitarian regime issues?

And, I mean, I include myself in this question. Those shirts from H&M? I bought them in Denmark, I wear them all the time, and I love them. I don't really like to think about the implications of my fashion choices, but all the same I can't excuse myself from being a part of a system that I don't entirely support.

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Welcome to Blog

2004-12-04T12:56:00.000-05:00

OK, yes, that one is of course stolen from laurabush.info, the pre-eminent blog about all things (or, well, many things) Portland. Let me just take a moment to mention how much I love Portland, Oregon, and miss it, although I must say that the generally sunny weather we´re having right now here in New York isn't causing me to miss it that much.

Perhaps I simply miss my box of books that are still back there.

Or perhaps I have a passing nostalgia because the whole idea of writing a blog first surfaced out in the crazy DIY world of Portland (home of the Independent Media Resource Center, where the kids makes their own zines), and by all rights I should really be blogging Portland, writing about my little room looking out onto downtown and the hills beyond, the perfect sunsets that I would see as I wrote little whisps of thoughts into my plays and e-mails.

But this isn't a Portland blog, ostensibly because they already have the blogs covered, but really because, let's face it, I was just too lazy to get my act together. So instead, this seems to be a, God forbid, New York blog, sort of like "The Colossus of New York" without quite so much lyrical poetry or lofty ambitions.

Beyond that, I don't really know what to expect; we'll sort of feel this whole thing out as we go along. Just as a friendly reminder, everything on this site is protected under a Creative Commons license.

Please: browse, read, have fun. It's a sunny morning in New York, and this time of year you don't know how many more we will have.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.