theEiffel94

2008-01-05T23:38:00.000-05:00

I've moved.

I still live in Brooklyn. It's just that I've been blogging elsewhere. Same neighborhood of the internet, just over at Tumblr. See you there.

And out of what one sees and hears and out
Of what one feels, who could have thought to make
So many selves, so many sensuous worlds,
As if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming
With the metaphysical changes that occur,
Merely in living as and where we live.
Wallace Stevens, Esthetique du Mal

Rejects.

2008-01-02T12:49:00.000-05:00

Rejected Titles for what became "Curb Your Enthusiasm"

The Shame Must Go On
No Life to Live
Half Empty
Regrets Only
Best Foot Backwards
Life Be Not Proud

I think Mr. David chose well, but still, the despairing pessimism in these titles is amusing.

Albums of 2007

2007-12-30T21:29:00.001-05:00

1. Pharoahe Monch, Desire
2. UGK, UnderGround Kingz
3. Spoon, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
4. Lil' Wayne, Da Drought 3
5. Daft Punk, Alive 2007
6. J Dilla, Ruff Draft
7. Miles Davis, The Complete On the Corner Sessions
...I know I know it was recorded in '72, but its as ambitious a release as any in jazz history, truly a remarkable thing to own)
8. Bess Rogers, Decisions Based on Information
9. Feist, The Reminder
10. The Fratellis, Costello Music

Six posts this year. Four that aren't albums lists. Impressive.

iTunes uPdate.

2007-12-30T01:55:00.000-05:00

About two years ago, I posted my iTunes Library statistics. I’ve decided to update, now that I’ve acquired 650 more albums. Here are the details:

Albums: 1950 (+48%)
Songs: 22,349 (+45%)

I bought a lot of jazz albums with only a few tracks per disc (The Norman Granz Box Set is 7 discs, 11 tracks), but it seems like a lot of the Hip Hop I bought evened that out.

Top Five Songs Genres (same, though Blues at 1621)
Alternative: 5708 (+37%)
Rock/Pop: 5622 (+41%)
Hip Hop: 2157 (+46%)
Jazz: 1917 (+39%)
R&B: 1683 (+20% )

Top Five Albums Genres:
Alternative: 627
Rock/Pop: 464
Jazz: 184
Hip Hop: 180
R&B: 130

Here are some recent acquisitions:

-Queen, 19 albums
-The Police, all studio albums and 3 live shows (from 79, 80, 83)
-Miles Davis, The Complete Jack Johnson Sessions, the Complete 1964 Concert, On the Corner, Relaxin',Workin', Steamin'.
-The Big Ol’ Box of New Orleans (4 discs)
-The Complete Debussy Solo Piano (3 discs)
-Soul: Collections by Jackie Wilson, the Isley Brothers, the Meters, the Spinners, the Stylistics, the Main Ingredient
-Leadbelly, the Complete Library of Congress Recordings (4 discs)
-Sonny Boy Williamson, the Complete Recordings (5 discs)
-Bob Marley, Songs of Freedom (4 discs)
-The Story of Jamaican Music (2 discs)
-Amos Milburn, Thinking and Drinking (2 discs)
-Common, 5 albums
-Lil’ Wayne, 4 mixtapes
-Funkadelic, Motor City Madness (2 discs)
-Bud Powell’s Complete Verve Recordings (2 discs)
-John Coltrane, Deluxe A Love Supreme (2 discs) and Compete Live at the Village Vanguard (4 discs)
-Smithsonian Old Time Folk Music (whatever the hell that means, 3 discs)
-Richard Pryor, 4 albums.
-The Complete Norman Granz Sessions on 7 discs. Featuring jams with Basie, Parker, Gillespie, Oscar Peterson (who died 12/24, RIP), Hampton, Eldridge, etc
-The Louis Armstrong Box Set, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”
-The new Apes & Androids record, “Blood Moon”

Let me know if you need anything.

The Iraq ______.

2007-07-08T15:19:00.000-04:00

I suppose it goes without saying that an American life is worth a heck of a lot more than an Iraqi life, at least according to the AP, but its nice to see that one dead South Dakotan and a couple of houses outranks 220 Iraqis as the top story at Yahoo! News.

Yahoo! News: Top Stories
South Dakota fire kills 1, burns homes (AP)
Violent weekend in Iraq kills over 220 (AP)

So the question is: How can we ever pull out of this war? The casualties are little more than a statistic, and frankly, Scarlett, we don't seem to give a damn. 220 people in a fucking weekend? That's my high school graduating class. That's four full subway cars. That's exactly how many people I'm inviting to the next W & L party. 220 people dead in a weekend.

Not that I'm oblivious when the number is lower. Those "20 bodies found in Baghdad today" articles are just incredible. Here is the lead-in graph of today's AP story:

BAGHDAD - Prominent Shiite and Sunni politicians called on Iraqi civilians to take up arms to defend themselves after a weekend of violence that claimed more than 220 lives, including 60 who died Sunday in a surge of bombings and shootings around Baghdad.

If 60 bodies turned up in New York tomorrow (a city of comparable size to Baghdad) no one would leave the house. The post offices would be closed. You wouldn't be able to buy eggs. I've heard every single economic, socio-political, aesthetic, and cosmetic rationale about why we should not be in Iraq. I'm sick and fucking tired of hearing perfectly sound and well-reasoned arguments against the Iraq war.

220 people? A slow day at Auschwitz. A foggy day at the Battle of Verdun. A quarter-second at Hiroshima. I like to think that every day we distance ourselves from these atrocities. But if 1,000 people are killed in Iraq next weekend, we'll have something for the 22nd Century to reflect on in horror.

I just hope two tractors don't collide somewhere in Minnesota, because two Americans getting themselves killed will be enough to relegate 1000 dead Iraqis to the back pages.

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr: 1922-2007.

2007-04-13T01:24:00.000-04:00

As Americans, we have inherited no nobility, no centuries of conflict, no riches of a previous day. We are better minds for this lacking.

When I look back on the ways literature shaped me, I know it first got under my skin when I started chasing an ideal of American humor. A way with words in spite of ourselves, to speak eloquence to the authority that does not expect any. I've known this for a long long time now. I know the American humorists and all the pretenders. I know William Dean Howells and David Sedaris, Bret Harte and Nathaniel West, George Plimpton and Dorothy Parker. I know nearly all the names that for a time capture our imagination, who color our language with wit and charm. But I know too that there are writers who loom large in our canon. When we look to humor in literature, as a way to separate ourselves from every culture on the planet, staring plainfaced at the mess of society we've tried to construct and to say something, anything to silence the onslaught of ourselves, four voices rise above the rest. Benjamin Franklin. Washington Irving. Mark Twain. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

It is not that we lack funny men. We've had Groucho, Woody, Buster and Pryor. But our literature gives us men with peculiar senses of humor who carry us through peculiarly dark times. We are lifted toward great stories on the ease of a page read. I know that humor needs no single art form to define itself. But the writers have had the jump start, the early lead. And when I first read Mark Twain, I thought to myself, He knows that literature is the ultimate form, that his language is the centerpiece of his culture. Twain used anecdote to cultivate American humor. We didn't need to be convinced of his cultural worth. He believed it for us.

Vonnegut's first novel, a book he wrote while working in Schenectady for GE, was released in 1952. He was 30 years old. In 1928, GE began transmitting the first regularly scheduled television broadcasts from Schenectady. Vonnegut was 6 years old.

To write during the rise of television required a patience with the form that extended beyond the everyday reactions of newsmen, comics, slapstick artists, and critics. John Updike has a line, "When there are too few monks among us, something of the monk enters all of us." The American public had a writer who ignored the competition from other forms. Vonnegut told stories that could never be told on celluloid - the Tralfamador-Dresden hopping joyride of Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions Ohio to a Berlin Zoo park bench in Mother Night - that monkish delight of the strange and beautiful place one wishes to inhabit but does not long to see.

These moments do not require a great writer to tell them faithfully. These moments are invented by great writers. It is almost as if America knew, shortly after World War II, that we needed a writer to write Kurt Vonnegut novels. As if we'd convinced ourselves the last century knew Mark Twain novels weren't going to write themselves. Otherwise, we'd have a grainy picture in a box that talked a mean game but could never convey what Whitman wrote: "I was the man. I suffered. I was there."

Fortunately, for the hundred-thousand other impressionable minds I meet all too infrequently, we had Kurt Vonnegut.

Translations.

2007-01-21T12:58:00.000-05:00

So this all started when an email I received from an Argentine tour company had some Spanish I could not figure out. I cut the text and translated it at freetranslation.com. I wrote an email in response, and translated it from English to Spanish. Just to see that it made sense, I converted the Spanish translation back to English, and I found that my sentence:

"I think I will book a hostel when I arrive," translated to "I think I will reserve a youthful shelter when I arrive."

Playing on the automatic translator's colloquial malfunctions, I wrote the following paragraph:

Remember when we were just innocent rascals, running through the fields all day bright eyes and bushy tails, getting into a mess of trouble? Well those soggy days have all dried up, big spender! Now we have to take it on the chin. I can't just go slapping some chick across the face until she gets to whining. I can't keep living in this hostel, watching television with a rag on my crotch. I have to get out there and show these immigrants I mean business. As the Good Lord says, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink.

Praise the Lord, brother man, see you in hell.
Louie

This is what that paragraph looks like after I translated it from English to Spanish, back to English, back to Spanish then English again, then to French and back to English:

It recalls when we were naughty scarcely of the innocent ones, running for the eyes of fields the whole day brilliant and the dense lines, entering a disorder of the problem? Well these days are soaked that all it dried, big extravagant! Now we have to take it in the chin. I cannot go to slap scarcely some chick by the face until she came to moan herself. I cannot maintain to live in this young refuge, look at the television with a rag in my parenthesis. I have to leave over there and show these immigrants I bad deals. When the Good Mister says, you can direct a horse to water but you cannot cause that it drinks it.

The compliment Mister, the man of brother, it it sees it in the hell.
Louie

Then I took the paragraph above and translated it into German, back to English, then to Russia and back. The results are poetic, dreamy, absurd. This 15 minute exercise was a hell of a lot of fun.

It calls back when we were rough hardly innocent, what for eyes of it all the day long a brilliant of areas and dense run of lines, continuing the disorder of a problem? The goods now become it all absorbed which is dried up it, substantially extravagant! Now we should take it in a chin. I cannot go to strike hardly a chicken through the person, while it has not arrived to groan directly. I cannot keep to live in this young refuge, to consider TV with a cloth in my clip. I should leave there there and badly I should show these firms of immigrants. If the gentleman of the goods speaks, you cannot conduct, can force to irrigate a horse however you it, that it drinks it.

The gentleman of a compliment, the person sees it the brother, it it in a hell.
Луи

Albums of 2006.

2007-01-14T23:50:00.000-05:00

Haven't done this in a while... and it goes without saying that I didn't listen to a lot of white kids this year.

1. Cat Power, The Greatest.
Masterpiece?

2. The Game, Doctor's Advocate.
This record made me realize that The Documentary (2005) Is a work of art. This record is just a decent follow-up, but by decent I mean a classic in its own right.

3. Outkast, Idlewild.
A quiet little epic. Astonishing. The Train is my favorite song of the year.

4. Africando, Ketukuba.
Every other African album I listened to for the first time this year came out between 1970-2005. But definitely the 9th best Senegalese record I heard this year and probably the year's best.

5. o'death, head home.
Wow this is a good, messy, tinny, refreshingly under-produced record.

6. Beyonce, B'Day
She's the greatest female R&B singer... ever? Yeah, ever. OK Aretha Franklin. Fine.

7. Man Man, Six Demon Bag
I enjoy listening to this record, but not as much as I enjoy playing 20 or 30 seconds of it for other people. That's enough for 7 on my list.

8. Nas, Hip Hop is Dead.
I never thought that I'd say Nas would put out a better record than Jay-Z in any year, and I doubt it will happen again. Or that Nas and Jay-Z would put out records on the same label, or that Nas would feature Jay-Z on his record.

9. Boris, Pink
Just when I thought the L Train was getting too loud to comfortably listen to music (the all-new-trains and their perpetual announcements) this record swoops in at the beginning of December to be loud as hell. Bravo!

10. Clipse, Hell Hath No Fury.
Feels so old school. Just feels good.

Records I wanted to like:
-The Decembrists, The Crane Wife.
Not quite good.

-Jeremy Enigk, World Waits.
Can't listen to this without getting Coldplay songs in my head.

-Beck, The Information.
A couple standout tracks. Then its just a muddled mess of crap.

-Common, Be
This would be on my list but it came out in 2005.

-Justin Timberlake, Futuresex/Lovesounds
This is pretty lightweight stuff. Heard Sexyback and thought, "Woah." But its a lot of falsetto postmodern Andy Gibb, which is like saying its not quite pseudo BeeGees.

-James Brown Live At the Apollo
I wanted this to be on my list but it came out in 1963, 1968, 1971, 1995 and in 2001 (on CD and DVD).

-Band of Horses
Wait, I didn't want to like this. Why is this on here? This record sucks.

-The Strokes, First Impressions of Earth
If there was a number 11... This is a great album.

BONUS!!! While I'm doing this...

Songs of 2006
1. Outkast, The Train
2. Ghostface Killah, The Champ
3. Beyonce, Suga Mama
4. Nas & Kanye West, Still Dreaming
5. The Strokes, Red Light
6. Beck & Pharell, Frontin on Debra (Remix/Mash-Up)
7. Arctic Monkeys, Fake Tales of San Francisco
8. Christina Aguilera, Ain't No Other Man
9. Cat Power, The Greatest
10. Gnarls Barkley, Gone Daddy Gone

The Hell...

2006-11-28T10:02:00.000-05:00

...have I been?

This is becoming one of those "graveyard blogs." Characteristics of a graveyard blog: outdated personal reflections, months-old reactions to news nobody cares about anymore, a link that goes nowhere, a holiday greeting two holidays behind. Ever stumble across a blog like this? This one is all of the above. Listen, I've been busy, sick, and busy. So let me explain:

The paragraph project that took over this blog just didn't sustain my blogging imagination. I wanted to use it as a cheap excuse to blog more. You can lead writing to a blog, but you can't make it blogworthy. As the old saying goes...

And I started a restaurant. In my apartment. One night a week we host a dinner for friends of friends and friends of acquaintances who make reservations through our website. Since there are three of us (my roommates Danielle and Norah), everyone has a lot to do. It has been way more fun then I ever imagined. But fun takes time...

We're planning a mega-New Year's Event. I've never been involved with this kind of party before. Certainly a learning experience; details you want to overlook can't be overlooked! Aspects you thought didn't need planning actually need planning. Does everything need planning? Yes. I had to check the capacity of my coatrack this morning. It holds around 40 coats. Not enough coat space. What to do???? Why do I spend time worrying about this crap?

My body was raided with some kind of bacterial infection that I let build up to a considerable steam, and probably had since my trip to Mississippi in August. I was like, "I definitely feel sick, I should get more sleep tonight." A couple months of that and I finally said, "Ok I quit, I'm sick." I think I'm better. We'll see.

This is also my busiest time of year for work. But what blog that hasn't updated in like a year doesn't have that foreboding message implanted somewhere in... the LAST UPDATED POST... duhn duhn duhn... Fear not. This one, if it goes down, goes down in FLAMES!!!

So this is a blog entry, I guess. Lucky you!

Oh, and as if there isn't enough "not-blogging" in my universe, I've started another blog. But there's no posts yet. So you can't accuse me of not updating...

Sheets.

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

Rick tosses his hips at Simone and his weight tumbles around her; she catches him, easing down just enough so that his legs stay on the bed as she rolls underneath him. Only to rattle the picture frames and shimmy the necklace off the nightstand. Only to snap the blinds against their windows. He is these noises and a few of his own; his muscles shake the bed coils, the clunking iron frame. Headboard bucking, Simone laughing, white fistfuls of sheets, and oh how much more noise could there be, how much goddamn noise and then their eyes meet. Everything slows. He holds her with ten fingers, palms, wrists, a thigh over hers, his lower back feeding his torso to her belly, his biceps cupping her shoulders, his breath and his not blinking. A man in a stare. He is everything in the room save the bones beneath her skin.

Afterwork.

2006-09-02T12:11:00.000-04:00

Simone has returned from her day. Throws her bag on the kitchen stool, leans toward relaxing but starts talking, confident in her afterwork monologue, how it bends across the kitchen shedding intrigue. An arc, a chaos of talk, the general to the minutae blending in their echoes from the kitchen tiles to the hardwood living room floor. In the lyric play of her eyes and voice Simone is fascinating; if I close my eyes she’s unbearable. Yet once she’s exhausted her larynx, resigned to the kitchen counter to flick at some nothing with one bent knuckle, an elbow painted along the surface – when she looks at me with humanity’s efficient day laid to waste on her eyelids, is finally content and at home – she is like no woman I’ve ever known. Colors swarm her face. I lose a little of my individuality in her beauty, and even moreso when, finished with her talk, she asks me a question. Every day for a week. A new question. Today is Friday. She asks, “Are you going to ask your sister to come visit?”

Abramanos Bakery

2006-08-31T16:04:00.000-04:00

I walk out into sunshine. Russell Avenue is grocery-hauling ladies and delivery men rushing into storefronts. Parked cabs. Men in ties standing by cars. No one’s walking a dog, no one’s pushing a stroller. The walk to the bakery winds down toward the District’s north side, a pinewood/aluminum siding stretch of houses where anonymity lives. The bakery is a corner shop: a pink-lettered sign on a rusty set of hinges, repainted, clean trim, baby-blue awning. The door is open. You have to take two steps down from the street to walk in. The light inside is bad; subtleties obliterated by the fluorescent above. Four short women widened by their seats sit at one of the four front tables, somebody’s granddaughter is behind the counter, fake-tanned, hairsprayed hair bolted behind a headscarf. Five pairs of eyes start with the shoes. Someday I’ll know what this means. I ease up on my walk, let go of my feet and slow their pace across the slick tile floor, committing to some degree that I’m in need. “Do any of you know Diana?”

2006-08-29T14:49:00.000-04:00

I am working on a collection of short stories which had nothing to do with this blog until today. The revisions and rewrites demand an attention to detail. So for the time being I will post paragraphs from the collection - things I've edited every day - for you to read. No context or continuity. No titles or character introductions. Hopefully the sentences will hold their own, and the paragraphs, the stories, etc. And maybe, just maybe, the stories will benefit. I've never done this before. Wish me luck.

2006-08-04T10:48:00.000-04:00

I left the Hamptons last week after feeling a bit... spoiled, pampered? Life is very good out there and well, I could use a vacation from the lack of adversity.

So I drove to Mississippi. I'll be here for a few more days and then I'm gonna stroll up the coast. While I've been down here I've come up with a few ideas for trips I've always wanted to take. I will post them soon, and if you feel interested please let me know.

Blogging About Not Blogging?

2006-07-11T11:11:00.000-04:00

...has its merits. I'm on vacation, and will be til mid-August. I decided to take my summer vacation a little closer to home. I came back from Venezuela in January far more exhausted than when I left. It made for a tough work year. I threw a July 4th party that stressed me out to high hell. I left for the beach two days later. I am in the Hamptons for the month of July, here to be exact:

Mark, July.

Everything is great. No need to pontificate.

Which begs the question: What am I doing blogging? I'm not. I pimped out my flickr account (finally), so if you've ever been interested in a massive amount of pictures based on one or two I've posted, check there. I also wrote a photo journal for my trip to Nabesna AK, something a year's worth of blogging never accomplished. It made me miss the hell out of Alaska, and reignited the desire to go there. A bike ride to East Hampton yesterday did its best to quell that sentiment.

The Flickr Account

That is all.

Clancy Returns!

2006-06-12T22:57:00.000-04:00

Three days after I posted the collected missives of my traveler friend from Australia, hitcher/drunk extraordinaire Clancy, I got a barrage of emails from him. One was a plain old letter about being kicked out of a hostel for trying to break the "30 Bottles of Rum" record he and his friends had set the previous weekend, then being kicked out of another. But a week later I get this, the gem of the collection thus far.

In his past travails, he's tried and failed to get out of Ecuador too many times to count. Mostly this has to do with the motorcycle he bought in Quito, which has caused him nothing but trouble. The following tells of his successful passage into Peru. How he'll get out I have no idea. Enjoy.

Subject: Here we go again
Mon, 29 May 2006

Ok, here we go again, i think you´ll be entertained at my expence as usual. Not the wisest story or mature story your likely to read but you wouldn´t expect that from me!

After the hostel moves, the most travel i´d done in 3 months, i finally got out of quito. I had a few stops & minor incidents on my way to the peru border for another attempt. I decided to try the smallest one to increase my chances.

I was stamped out of ecuador, with the bike!! then stamped into peru, all good. Not so quick! Peru customs had a problem with the bike papers & wouldn´t let it into peru. Big hassles, the bike could only travel in ecuador & i could only travel in peru as i´d already had a visa extension. It was like that shit airport movie with tom hanks. I was stuck in no man´s land.

I had to make a decision. Mine was not the best idea considering the gun´s but i took off on the bike accross the border into peru. I knew they´d give chace so i had to ride flat out, it was all dirt & bends so i had an advantage there. My dissadvantage was i knew i could only make it to the nearest town & i´d have to stop for fuel as the last two places in ecuador were dry. I was stopped at a police check point, i thought i was done. I pulled up & my clutch cable snapped!! They let me go so i roll started the bike. Wasting time! I got to the gas station, it was closed of course! A sign said he was at the hotel down the road so i started walking there in a hurry. Then the customs car screechers to a halt & 3 guys jump out with gun´s & tourches running at me shouting in spanish. I said tranquillo (relax) & went into a bullshit story that i only came in for fuel as i´d told them there was none over the border. They didn´t really buy it but it worked. They followed me back to the border, gave me a lecture then escorted me over the bridge.

Back in limbo! I got on well with the ecuadorian customs guy´s & they said they´d try to help. I camped there for 3 nights. Going on the bus illegally to ecuador once for a clutch cable & a fax from the transit police, the military checked my passport but only my ID not the stamps. That was lucky!
So i´m now in PERU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! with the bike!!!!!!!!!!!!

That´s only the 1st border crossing!! Thing´s could get interesting. Anyway until next time, don´t do anything i wouldnt!!

clancy, from peru!!

2006: Birthday Weekend, 2-4 June

2006-06-05T22:36:00.000-04:00

If every weekend could be like last weekend, I'd say every weekend should be Birthday Weekend. 2007 puts my birthday on a Saturday, and I won't get birthday weekend priviledges again until 2011. Luckily, I know a set of twins who, if mine doesn't land on a weekend, theirs does. One of these years I'll have Birthday Weekend Forever tattooed on my ass. One of these years.

Let me be the first to proclaim "House Party Summer" as the official theme for the season. Kid N Play movies aside, this summer should be all about kickin' it at somebody else's apartment. That was the theme for most of the weekend. Max and I played birthday hosts on Friday to a brave lot of souls who fought uninspiring rain to swim in tequila. My apartment (which I moved into three days before throwing a party in it) is barely livable, boxes crowd the living and dining room spaces, walls are half painted. But this contributed to the anything-goes atmosphere. Wine glasses shattered. Slam poetry was read. It happens.

Then Saturday began on the rooftop party of Moynihan Station. The two twins basked in the glory of no-rain, while I spent more time looking for parking than i did eating dinner. Max and I got a vague invitation to a Tribeca loft where the guys who run this and this live. So confounded by beautiful women were we that little could be done to stop a beer chugging competition from busting out. The designated driver sees the wee hours approaching with extraordinary clarity.

On Sunday the house party moved to an apartment where Max and Morgan plan to live if their potential landlord trims the 29-page Commercial Lease into something that doesn't rape them with impunity. Still, they had the keys, and we dreamed with the Ghosts of House Party Future in this Graham Avenue storefront/mega-kingdom fitted out with bedroom heat lamps and not one but two jacuzzis. Then Birthday Weekend was over.

Although the parties were stocked with fantastic crowds, the resulting pictures focus on the same 6-8 characters; from Maxwell's flickr account, a series of photographs that beg the question: "Can posing for a camera ever be taken seriously again?"

State of the Loft Address.

2006-06-01T16:06:00.000-04:00

Currently renovating the 4-bedroom loft I moved into on Monday. Knee deep in filth and paint. Be back shortly.

Murakami v. Carver

2006-05-25T12:21:00.000-04:00

Haruki Murakami has fallen in with a category of contemporary writers I like to refer to as "The Recommended." Milan Kundera, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jonathan Franzen, David Sedaris are all writers who are consistently and overenthusiastically recommended to me. The recommendations pile up... but Murakami, most recently, has become the recommended author of choice from people who know that I read. And so not willing to dive into the 500 page Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, I decided on a short story collection, The Elephant Vanishes, that had on the cover:

"A world class writer who takes big risks .... If Murakami is the voice of a generation .... then it is the generation of Thomas Pynchon and Don Delillo." -The Washington Post Book World

This quote, edited beyond intelligibility, is profoundly the opposite of Murakami's writing. His writing would benefit from such swift editing. His verbosity is exactly what keeps him from taking "big risks," and his generation's voice is that of the man standing in the kitchen cooking spaghetti. Two stories are narrated from a man cooking spaghetti. I can feel him writing this book. It was when I got to the passage below that I decided I'd had enough. I thought, "How would Raymond Carver tell this story?" The edits I was making while I read made me laugh out loud. I was on a downtown number 3 train. The woman sitting next to me was reading a book by Haruki Murakami. She looked like she was watching the news.

I am aware of the fact that this is a work in translation, but all the quotes on the front and back covers are based on the translation, not on the original Japanese. They read the same book I did. And now you shall read a paragraph or two.

Here is a passage from "A Slow Boat To China." In boldfaced text, I tried to simulate how Raymond Carver would tell the same story. I do not believe that the bold type alone is any less a story. In fact, I think its the only readable version. But I'll let you decide.

Carver Doing Murakami

Anyway - or rather, that being the case - my memory can be impressively iffy. I get things the wrong way around, fabrications filters into fact, sometimes my own eyewitness account interchanges with somebody else's. At which point, can you even call it memory anymore? Witness the sum of what I'm capable of dredging up from primary school (those pathetic six years of sunsets in the heyday of postwar democracy). Two events: this Chinese story, for one, and for another, a baseball game one afternoon during summer vacation. In that game,I was playing center field, and I blacked out in the bottom of the third. I mean, I didn't just collapse out of nowhere. The reason I blacked out that day was that we were allowed only one small corner of the nearby high school's athletic field, and so when I was running full speed after a pop fly I smashed my head into the post of the backboard of the basketball court next to where we were playing.

When I came to, I was lying on a bench under an arbor, it was late in the day, and the first things I noticed were thewet-and-dry smell of water that had been sprinkled over the baked earth and the musk of my brand-new leather glove, which they'd put under my head for a pillow. Then there was this dull pain in my temple. I guess I must have said something. I don't really remember. Only later did a buddy of mine who'd been looking after me get around to telling. That what I apparently said was, That's okay, brush off the dirt and you can still eat it.

Now, where did that come from? To this day, I have no idea. I guess I was dreaming, probably about lunch. But two decades later the phrase is still there, kicking around in my head. That's okay, brush off the dirt and you can still eat it.

2005: Yukon Territory, July 21 and July 31

2006-05-22T23:38:00.000-04:00

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Construction projects this far north complement the landscape's magnitude. The first of several half-hour to hour-long stops was in the southern Yukon's stretch of the Alaska Highway. In a typical roadwork scenario, cars are stopped for a few minutes while paving or restoning on one side allows for one-way traffic to proceed. Up north, these one-way paving jobs placed two men with radios a full ten miles apart. Waiting for the other side to radio required that you wait for the "FOLLOW ME" vehicle to drive 10 miles, pick up a few RVs, and drive those 10 miles of blown-out dust highway at 10-15MPH. A lot of lonesome driving time was broken up with lonesome standing around time or idling in the car time.

Due to the traffic's infrequency, most of the stops I would encounter found me waiting all alone with this alien species known as: The Yukon Construction Site Radio Guy. He would stand in the cool breeze of blown dust, hundreds of miles from the nearest electric lightbulb. He and I would stand and stare by my car, smile, nod, then not talk. What does a man who has driven 14 hours in a dayhave to offer as conversation? What does the guy holding a STOP sign for 14 hours a day have to say for himself? I would stand and take pictures, looking absurd to one man who looked absurd to me. Eventually an RV would pull up and the driver would hit me up about America or gasoline or tires.

The photos below capture a taste of the sparsely-inhabited Yukon. Since the sun barely sets in this region, the time of day matters little to the photographs. What the pictures fail to capture is the sky's majestic grey swirls, moving violently, throwing sunlight and rainfall down in fits and seizures. After a picture was taken, the sky would change in an instant. This is something that can't be adequately described, but must be seen.

Also, there's a pretty hideous barbecue restaurant in the capital city, Whitehorse. Population 19,000. Two Dairy Queens.

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2005: British Columbia, July 19-20 and July 31

2006-05-20T23:04:00.000-04:00

Driving British Columbia was grueling. But I drove entirely the length across it, and I cannot say that about Alaska or the Yukon. As I took the same route from top to bottom twice (the only paved road), and drove around 100mph, I didn't get much more than a glimpse. But that glimpse, however majestic, was dwarfed by everything I saw further north.

Still, I'd like to give you a taste of the view from the Alaska Highway through British Columbia. Uploading these photos made me painfully aware of the fact that I was sitting at the helm of a PowerBook, not a rental car. I hope someday to match that sensation of driving, but I will have to search some other remote corner of the globe to do it.

Below are pictures of the highway landscape, the cautionary signage, the (massive) reason for such signage, and the absolutely beautiful Muncho Lake, which is worth a trip to itself.

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There were ten other bison just to the side of the highway. This one felt like standing on it.

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A good 25+ hour drive (at 90ish MPH) from the Washington State border, at the northern edge of BC, its probably a place I will visit only once more in my lifetime. It is certainly worth the trip, and worth staying for a while, I'm sure. This is also where I picked up Clancy the Hitchhiker (from the previous post).

Clancy's Pathological Journey to The Southern Hemisphere.

2006-05-19T22:39:00.000-04:00

Last July my Brooklyn apartment was hot as all hell. I'd had enough. Out of nothing more than the desire to go somewhere not hot I flew to Seattle, rented a car, and drove to Alaska. On my way back into British Columbia I see this guy standing by his backpack, drenched to the bone in cold-ass Canadian Rockies mist. I say to myself, "Pick him up." It's not my first hitchhiker, but I have never been so grateful for my own spontaneity. His name is Clancy (he never liked his first name and never wanted to tell it to me). He's an Aussie: has been away from Australia traveling the globe for over two years, has been from Iceland to Alaska, is headed to the southern tip of Argentina. I drive 95 mph while he's in the car, talking the whole way, and when we get the Fort St. John, BC, he says he's going east to Alberta. I drop him off at 2am along the main drag and he sets up his tent and goes to sleep. I drive off.

Since then, I've been getting periodic email updates from his starts and stops down the Western Hemisphere. Some of the following emails are mass emails, some are to me. I tried to meet up with him in January but he was in Ecuador and I was in Venezuela. The last I've heard from his was on April 25.

Here's a few excerpts as to what he's up to. Clancy is a traveler of the most incredible pedigree - a genius for misadventure and mishap. If anyone is willing and able to chase this guy around the continent come January, let me know. I'm in like Flynn.

----
from various emails

August 14, 2005

g'day all
Just cracked the 10000km(6000mi) hitchiking mark so thats been pretty eventfull. Met loads of cool people along the way. In Ontario Canada at the moment, probably fly to sth america some time in september. Heading for Niagra Falls today, thats the rough plan anyway. Well thats the basics covered, will try & get online more often to reply to people, until then, take care.
clancy

September 5, 2005

Hey mate
How's things? Went into N.Y State after the Falls but was stopped by the cops for hitching twice in 3 days so headed back up into Canada. Met some cool people on the way though. Might catch you in oz some day, cheers for the ride
clancy

September 18, 2005

G'day all
The Canadian trip has come to an end. Was an awesome trip though it wasn't all a bed of roses!!! The hitching caused a few long waits, had a couple of dangerous drivers, one guy that hated the world, will be in the news as a serial killer, no doubt. Was also in a semi when a guy dropped his cigarette, lost control of his car & ploughed into us, dickhead!! In alaska jumped in a pick up with the centre console full of bullets & the riffle on the back seat, thought that might've been the last lift!!

Got to meet the law a couple of times, twice in the states for hitching & was woken by the police once in canada for camping on a baseball outfield but he was cool.
Had a tent pole stolen which was a real bitch as that was my home!!! Met some 10am everyday drinkers, beer & whiskey they were hardcore!! Stayed with some others who turned out to be everyday crackheads!! I was attracting them all!!

Also had a barmaid in the us serve me from 7:30pm till 2:30am & charged me for 1 beer, i'm still in love!!! 3 old ladies picked me up on their way home from church & took me back for tea & blueberries, they prayed for the aussie hitcher in their mist!! I'm saved!!! Camped in peoples yards, even slept in beds!!! Was invited to dinners, bbq's & for beers!!! Sensational!!
Met loads of cool, friendly people all accross canada, thanks guys & i'd recomend the trip to everyone. I'm off to sth america now to tackle spanish & portugese, i know cerveza(beer) so i reckon i'll be fine!!!
cheers clancy

October 5, 2005

g´day mark
Sounds like you had a adventurous ride back to NY!! Have you seen any missing person pictures of your young hitcher yet!! Free alcohol´s always a bonus but there must be easier ways!!

Where in sth america do you plan to attack in those couple of months. I´m skiping Brazil due to visa issues so heading to columbia in the next week or 2 then heading down to argentina that way. No real travel plan, will just take it as it comes and get ideas off locals hopefully. Been a bit dissapointed with the girls but have been assured that will change in columbia. Trying to learn some spanish at the moment but my memories shit!!.
Anyway keep in touch, as you say i paths my cross again down here
cheers clancy

October 9, 2005

G`day all
As seems to be the case in all my trips, the turbulance continues!! I hit the brazil embassy as soon as i arrived in venezuela to be rejected of a visa due to not having a ticket leaving the country. My flight from the states wasn´t good enough. I tried to explain i´d leave when i made it down to argentina in 2- 10 weeks. Not much else i could do, i can´t stick with a 2 day plan so no chance of a long term one!! Strike brazil!!. I will now be tackling colombia a bit earlier than i would`ve liked but such is life! My spanish hasn´t really improved from cerveza (mind you that works!!). At 60c a bottle, it`s great!! Met some english speakers in the capital, "i help you my friend" yeah, help me empty my wallet in their direction!!! I´ve been in what must be called a bus rally!! It was an awesome trip, horn blowing at every corner, hands moving in unison from the left to the right on the seat in front of them, holding on for dear life. Reminicent of a bobsled team!! At the end people were doing the sign of the cross & i was hoping the blueberrie ladies haden`t forgotton me!, as it was the only way out! I`ve been in a vehicle accident on all my trips & i`m sure this ones just a matter of time! Been stranded without cash over a weekend as the atm`s are shit! That`s frustrating. I ended up in the back of a jeep with the locals & the latino music blasting, a lot of smiling & pointing. It`s been great.

Spending heaps more than in canada due to buses & sleeping in hostels. I need to become rich & famous in a hurry, not sure what for though. I can`t act, sing (nor can kylie but she`s got a better bum) or dance. I can`t even think of any wildlife that needs wrestling!! Anyway must run
clancy

November 29, 2005

G´day all
Colombia was awesome, managed to survive it with a few minor dramas. Travelled a fair bit of it with a portugese guy, an english girl & guy so that was cool. Smooth sailing while i was with them. After i left them i was given a lift home at 7am by the cops, 3 on the motorbike, me in the middle of 2 cops. The next night some clown tried to rob me with a knife, we had a bit of a fight then these guys that saw what happened took me into their club, gave me free drinks & got me a cab. Was searched about 3 times by police on the streets but never had anything so paid no bribes. Then me & another aussie guy were kicked out of the hostel for bringing to many people back for parties, such is life. The people in general were friendly as & i´ll definately come back to colombia. I also did a weeks spanish which basically taught me what i allready new, that i´m F$%"=D!!!!!.
Anyway in ecuador now about to start a new adventure, hope all´s well where ever you are
clancy

December 7, 2005

Hey mate, how´s things? I thought colombia was awesome, heard panama is pretty good aswell but was a bit disapointed with venezuela but that was probably because everything had to be done by tour. I´m in ecuador at the moment about to pick up this 250 honda i hired to ride up the volcano, should be pretty cool. The girls are easy everywhere down here aswell, which is a bonus!!! Must bail, clancy

January 11, 2006

G`day All,
I trust you all had a great xmas & NY. Mine was huge, no real suprises there!!. I can`t remember too much of xmas day but a few reliable sources have told me i enjoyed it. It definately beat last years pot noodles in the camper in England, that i do know!!

I`m still in Ecuador, not the smartest bunch but a beautiful country. I visited the womans prison on new years eve. Nearly gat raped inside the gate, was out numbered & out sized. I don`t think i`ve ever been so scared!! Was amazing. I visited a few foreigners as there is over 100 in jail in the capital. Mostely drug related. They showed me around the whole place. Anyone heading this way should do it.

I`ve also purchased a Honda XR600, i really enjoy the freedom. Having a few drama`s with it at the moment but i don`t expect anything to run smoothly on my trips. Off kayaking tommorrow for a few days then will make my way sth into Peru.

No major plans of course.

Not much else to say, drinking, laughing, spending loads too much & not remembering too much, nothing really changes.
Have an awesome 2006
clancy

February 15, 2006

G´day all,
A group email wasn´t the plan but shit happens & it´s happened! My whole trip has been full of drama, drunken broken ankle, things stolen ( 3 times), vehicle accidents (4 times) etc.

Well this is up there with the broken ankle effort. I purchased a motorbike in Quito, the mechanic said it had a really good motor, i spent more than i planned. I did a few short runs then a 6hr ride were it started making noises, i took it to a mechanic who said it was the timing chain. About $200us, not good but i could survive. We stripped the motor down, it was f*¨´%"¡. $1300us later & a month i get the bike back so i head to Peru, no go!! At the border they tell me it´s not possible for me to ride it in Peru, F¡%[¨*!!!. I have to head back to Quito, 20hrs by bus. I tried to sell it on the border were we discovered the mechanic had switched the motor casing & i now had no serial n.o, shit!! Now selling becomes a problem.

I showed a great deal of patience, not something i´m well known for but i was that calm the Ecuadorian custom guys fed me lunch then took me out for dinner & beers before i camped at customs, all for free!!!

The next morning i headed in a hurry to Quito, One of my craziest rides ever, which is saying a lot!! Dodging pigs, donkeys, cows, landslides & on coming traffic in my lane as the grass is allways greener on the other side! Well the pig was the next problem in missing one i ended up in the grass, managed to stay on but twisted my knee in the process, i thought i felt it tear but i rode on. I made it to Quito in 13hrs. Getting on & off the bike for fuel, passport checks & being stopped for overtaking on double lines (anyone who has caught a bus in sth america would know this is a laughable offence!) Tha amazing thing is they don´t speak any english until it comes to i´ll let you off, how much?

Well i´m back in Quito, violence solves nothing is the moto, though i´m not convinced, i know i´d feel shitloads better but Ecuadorian jail sounds as inviting as Peru.

On the positive side i met some great people & it´s free rum & coke tommorrow night at the hostel. I hope your all having more luck than i. Take care,
Cheers Clancy

April 25, 2006

G´day all,
Sorry for the lack of personal supplies but i hope you´ll understand, if not tough shit!!!!
Firstly the bike drama continues to haunt me. I tried bribing a lawyer but that eventually fell through. Next option was to track down the owner who had the bike before the guy i got it off. That took a while but we made an appointment at his office that he never showed for, had to keep trying.

Then we had a drunk irish men, causing heaps of shit at the hostel on rum & coke night, trying to fight most people before running off along the neighbouring roof tops until he finally fell through one into a 17 yr old girls room only to climb out & continue on his dickhead mission until he fell through another!!!! It took the police 3 hrs to catch him, warning shots where fired & the hostel invaded by the pigs. He was locked up & had to pay the people not to press charges. Our punishment for this twat was no drinking in the hostel except in our rooms for a week. Hence my room got a huge work out.

The next stage my luck started to pick up, i finally got that new bike contract, 1 step closer!! Tommorrow we would go to the judge for the 3rd time. That night we drank in my room as it was near the pool table. The next morning, i had no wallet, bankcards & licence stolen by some low life!!! No money or cards to see the judge & i´m stuck waiting for new cards. Have borrowed some money off the other regular inmates of the hostel so life goes on. So basically the clancy luck continues to shine as my new contract got a ripe in it & we´re not sure if it will still be valid!!

I hope where ever & whatever your doing your lucks a great deal better & you had a happy & safe easter. To the aussie & kiwi contingent i grant you had a smashing anzac day. Take care all & get to personal replies when i´m cashed up again,
cheers clancy

2006: Top 100 of All Time, Cedar Tavern; April 29

2006-05-16T00:35:00.000-04:00

Listmakers of the world united on April 28, as the blogosphere and non-blog-related companions journeyed into the undrenched wilds of pre-flooding Massachusetts coast to celebrate the marriage of Bryan and Jill. It was a momentous affair, far less scandalous than I had predicted; one can't muster much filth in Gloucester. Jaron tried (there was some dancing with a child, if I remember correctly). In a pathetic attempt to be the biggest badass in Eastern MA I shoplifted some corn syrup from a 24-hour convenience store. All I have as a claim to fame is that the elderly woman watching over the store didn't die before I pulled off the heist. The reception itself, at least from the auspices of table 13, was a classy affair. The ceremony was in one of New England's most picturesque churches; it was most likely built before any of our families had arrived in America. And the rocky coast of Rockport lived up to its name. I have amazing pictures of twins on the beach, though that sounds better than it looks.

Sometime during the reception, placated with every possible luxury from unlimited cake and coffee to unlimited booze and asparagus, the idea of a NEW list circulated. "The Listmaker" himself was busy freeing his new wife's hands from around the DJ's neck, so Rob, Pat and I hatched the idea of putting together the Top 100 of All Time. The criteria for nominees was quite simple. Anything goes. The list required only a night of drinking at the Cedar Tavern on 12th and University Place, a few hours after returning from the wedding.

The list honors "The Top 100 of All Time," and vaguely captures the spirit of all things magnificent. If any of you would like the complete list, just drop me a comment. Some of it is not quite publishable, for the fear of Google-able references that might scare the daylights out of those mentioned in its text. But I feel all of us can appreciate the fucking awesomeness it attempts to inspire. Here's a sampling. If you find that it ain't quite authorative enough for your tastes, come up with your own. Nominating is half the fun.

from The Top 100 of All Time

1. Horse Latitudes
2. “Room To Live”
3. The Children’s Crusade, AD 1212.
4. pro bono
5. The 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics
6. Dowling’s “Rack”
7. urinal cakes
8. Swift Boat Veterans For Truth
9. The Pelican Brief
10. training bras
13. "The “Fireman’s Carry”
18. “Baby Jessica”
19. The other Dale Harris
29. Gay Congdon
30. Third-Base Coach Dads
34. ABC TEN’s Steve Caporizzo
36. The Law of Modus Tollens
39. “eye crusty”
40. The Arch Deluxe
45. “Damn this Sideways House!!!”
54. “Escape from Sobibor”
60. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)
62. rotaries
63. a la carte
64. Alex Carte
71. Crash Man from “Mega Man 2”
76. Bob Dylan’s “Empire Burlesque”
80. 1874
82. The humongous savings store, Huck Finn’s Warehouse & More.
93. “Nobody beats Vitas Gerulaitus 17 times in a row.” – Vitas Gerulaitus.

2005: Coastal Uruguay, 2-4 Jan

2006-05-10T01:19:00.000-04:00

Before I finally wrap up my series of photographs on southern South America from January 2005, and begin posting Alaska and Panama/Venezuela pictures, I'd like to offer some pictures from a country I completely skipped over. We were advised in Buenos Aires by many other travelers not to go to Uruguay, that it was a disappointment and not worth the hassle. Despite these warnings, and the very "hassle-free" 3-hour ferry ride, our three days in Uruguay were a trip highlight. When we arrived in Montevideo, 1,000 children were dancing in the streets. No joke. The Children's Festival. And the Children's Festival went late. We arrived during the year's biggest party. The rest of our time there was paradise. I got sunburned to a near-hospitalization red.

Some random snapshots. Enjoy.

Montevideo, capital of Uruguay

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It's Fucking Over.

2006-05-08T11:36:00.000-04:00

Our lease expired April 15th. We wanted to find a new place, something bigger, closer to the train. After seeing every two-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint from March 15- May 1, my roommate and I nearly had a breakdown.

Nassau Ave and Manhattan Ave:
The first day I looked, I saw an apartment that was, unbeknown to me, swiped by another broker's client the day before. And that was the one I wanted. Tin ceilings, old fans, huge windows, beautiful living room, McCarren park across the street, bar downstairs. Danielle and I rang the other tenant, went to two bars that the landlord owned, found her, tried to persuade her to give us the apartment instead. She said, "Oh, I heard about you two. The broker said you were the sweetest two people she'd met. Oh, sorry, I rented it yesterday." Then she stared at us like a sad puppy. We were the sadder. This apartment became the yardstick to which all others were compared.

From then on, we saw some of the most uninspiring concrete bunkers, prison cells, half-finished monstrosities, and 1-bedrooms any two people can stand. Every single apartment we saw was overpriced, and usually carrying a stiff broker fee. We gave up looking for our own apartment.

The next move was based on this logic: All the good apartments in the neighborhood have been taken. Its true. My friend June will never move out of her palatial 2BR at Humboldt and Ainslie. Never. In Williamsburg and Greenpoint, these kind of apartments do not go for up for rent. They get passed on, shuffled around, but never given up. We decided to look for people who needed two roommates, who already had great apartments.

We saw four apartments where two roommates were needed. We were asked to move into every single one of them. We turned them all down. The places were far more beautiful in the minds of our prospective roommates than they were in ours. We gave up doing this too.

But then last week I found myself on craigslist once again, feeding my addiction for a better apartment. I sent out two emails. One for an apartment in Park Slope. One for a loft in Williamsburg.

The Park Slope apartment was amazing. Roof access. A floor of a building. Three bedrooms, a huge backyard, a big kitchen. Right on 7th Avenue, at the corner of 13th Street, at the apex of Park Slope's restaurant district. Two blocks from the movie theater. Two blocks from Prospect Park. With an another upstater, aged 25 years. It was perfect. David called me last night to let us know it was ours. 5 for 5. I told him, "No thanks."

We took the other place after a grueling roommates interview on Saturday. Questions like, "What's the worst thing that's happened to the both of you while traveling? Mark, if you were Danielle and you weren't in the room, how do you think she'd describe you as a roommate?" Other questions involved volume levels during intimate moments.

Enduring that, we were the perfect fit. The apartment is a four-bedroom loft on the corner of Kent and North 4th. We will be having some incredible dinner parties at this apartment. Here's my address as of June 1, 2006. It's in the link below, #109:

The new.

2005: The Beach at Miraflores, Lima, Peru; Jan 22

2006-05-08T10:17:00.000-04:00

At the bus station in downtown Lima, the world is a complicated place. All roads leading out are dirt roads. The station itself is paved but for whom? Local buses are around the corner, but I can't see them, I can only hear their engine's idle. A stretch of cabs are waiting in the dirt outside the station. The cabbies, who do not stand by their cars, are kept out of the station in full force by these menacing security guards who have the dual role of opening the gates for departing buses. Everytime a bus leaves the bus station 12 cabbies are nearly run over. They shout at Danielle and me. We stand in the parking lot, 90 degrees perfect sunshine, with a hotel reservation. No map. No chance of getting one. This is our last moment of "instinctual travel," 2 days before flying back to New York, 1 hour before we resign ourselves to restaurants and beaches. We are hungry to shower, relax, recoup, do nothing. We've been on a bus 20 hours, the single most dangerous bus ride imaginable. The only thing we have to do is go to Miraflores. In any other part of the trip we would've taken the bus. We decide to hail a cab. As travelers, this is the first time where Danielle and I get a little lazy. We make mistakes. Not even mistakes. FATAL ERRORS.

1. We hail a cabby who is not standing next to his car.
2. We walk to where his cab is parked.
3. The cab has no labels at all. It is not a cab.
4. The cab has no key. He hotwires the cab.
5. The cab has no windows.
6. I get in the back, the cab has no seats. They've been torn out.
7. There are no doorhandles on the inside. An exposed wire seems to be what opens the door.
8. His first stop after hotwiring, stalling, hotwiring again, is the gas station.

Our cab driver pulls up to the pump and looks at us, sticks out his hand.

My roommate and I answer simultaneously, in perfect Spanglish, "Are you fucking kidding me?"

He gets the equivalent of .33 cents of fuel and we're off. Of course the driver hasn't got a clue where we are staying. He starts asking the police, other cab drivers. We stop at a payphone so Danielle can call the hostel. Still no luck. So we drive around. In circles. Somehow the guy finds the place. He wants more money than the agreed fare of course. He's getting pushy. The hostel owner comes out. He's a 25-year old bodybuilder. Puts the fear of death into the guy.

We look around. There are two rooms in our hostel. The hostel is on a seaside cliff overlooking the ocean. It looks like this.

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We go to the beach. It looks like this.

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But on those giant rocks, in 90 degree sunshine with zero humidity, I get the best tan of my life. I don't even tan. I bronze.

And the big filth of Lima, the whole bubbling cauldron of 10 million, is tasted but never touched, preserved in the memory for another trip. We waste our first day on the beach; at night we ate lobster, scallops, octopus, shrimp, trout, and baby goat. The next day we went to the monastery and serious travel found us once again. But for that one day; bourgeouis pleasures, like showering. Oh how I showered.

2005: Hillside Shanties, Downtown Lima, Peru: Jan 23

2006-05-05T10:19:00.000-04:00

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2005: Monastery, Lima, Peru; Jan 23

2006-05-03T02:22:00.000-04:00

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The San Francisco Monastery in Lima, Peru has never been hailed as much of anything. Popular guide books gloss over it in a sentence. Few maps include it. And even the monastery’s own tour guides - who with professional indifference traipse through its foggy ruins of history and Catholicism - offer little more than what can be ascertained with your eyes. Through its dusty splendor and open-air decay, one thing is certain. This is one of the world’s most resilient buildings. Its calm in the face of destruction is unparalled.

Built between 1512 and 1544, the church survived its first brush with ransacking in 1586 at the hands of Sir Francis Drake. The earthquake of 1618 made rubble of much of the surrounding city. Following that was the even more devastating earthquake of 1656 (the church was repaired in 1672 in time for), a smaller earthquake in 1746, with a last one coming in 1970. Although both nature and the world’s most famous pirate had their intentions of obliterating this quiet monastery, nothing can compare to what I witnessed: the destruction caused by direct sunlight, smog, and the flashbulb of my Canon SD500 digital camera.

What traveling is supposed to do is allow us the freedom to act like ourselves until we forget who that is. Once we’re no good at routine, we’ve “gotten away.” The plan for Danielle and I, when we arrived in Lima, was to do nothing. Nothing is quite difficult; as Jerry Seinfeld once said, “Before you know it, nothing has turned into something.” But we took all the necessary precautions. We booked a private hotel on the beach in Miraflores, a neighborhood on the cliffs over the Pacific Ocean. The bus station – same logic. We solicited the first cabby we met, determined to move quickly. He hotwired his own car, jimmied the door open with a hanger, and we were on our way. A cab driver stopping six times for directions may have struck you as odd, but we knew that it could only have been our good luck. If he doesn’t know where we’re going, the odds of us doing anything more than collapsing on the beach are very slim. The odds of us learning anything… experiencing the culture? Even less so. My traveling companion and I had set out to do nothing, and Miraflores has a Starbucks. Getting away? How about a Pumpkin Spice Latte south of the Equator?

Our month in South America hadn’t started out like this. In the twenty-five days prior to our arrival in Lima, we had visited four countries, four capitals, fourteen cities, and traveled by: car, train, bus, horse, plane, bicycle, minivan, taxi, boat, and golf cart. The bus travel alone tallied 135 hours. From Rio Gallegos in Argentina’s Patagonia, to Lima, Peru, we’d traveled on a bus the equivalent of a Greyhound from New York City to Costa Rica. Lima meant a return to New York’s winter was only a day away. I had the intentions of experiencing this smoggy city of ten million inhabitants when I booked our return flight, but when I arrived all I could think was, well, nothing. After all, we’d just left Machu Picchu. This is where I learned to stop worrying and love the inner tourist.

I had been researching a trip to South America for years, but as my reading went on I began toying less and less with the idea of visiting Machu Picchu. Briefly, Machu Picchu is the name given to an abandoned Incan city near Cusco, Peru, rediscovered by a western explorer in 1911. Deserted since the 16th century, it lay mostly in quiet ruin but otherwise untouched by the invading fingers of colonizers. The reason is that it rests on the peak of a mountain in southern Peru 9,000 feet above sea level. I first learned about the ancient city from Pablo Neruda’s epic poem, “The Heights of Machu Picchu.” His writing, and the story of the city’s discovery (but mostly his writing), had created a special place for Machu Picchu in my imagination. However, it has become South America’s number one tourist attraction.

But Machu Picchu stirred in me the fascination that is peculiar only to ruins. Sure, I became a tourist for the day. It was our first guided tour of the trip (on our 23rd day), but it let me embellish the role of a tourist in an environment where such embellishments were nearly the only option. A four-day hike through the Inca Trail from Cusco is the ideal way to visit the site. But when you’re plane leaves in three days from an airport a twenty-hour drive away, you visit the site in a day and sit on a minibus crammed next to Americans because you are one.

I arrived in Lima with a mind full of ruins. The San Francisco Monastery in downtown Lima is a new kind ruin; you can feel it when your mandatory guided tour begins. Imagine for a second that you are part of a tour guide’s group at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The slim-fitted business suit with the shoulder length blonde hair approaches Jacques-Louis David’s “The Death of Socrates” in The European Wing and proclaims: “This painting is made with paint and canvas. It depicts a man named Julius Caesar who is about to be given a chalice of poisoned whisky by Sir Lee Harvey Oswald. The year is 1605.” I spend the entire tour at the San Francisco Monastery with my face pucked thuggishly, perplexed at the history I hear from my guide as it is mashed in a Magic Bullet with the grace of the hostess at a suburban cocktail party. We walk into the monastery to buy our tickets. We wait. We see guides. We read posters in Spanish about flash photography and cameras.

Our tour begins. First I’m told that we’re in a monastery built by Saint Francis of Asissi, who has left Spain with 800 followers to establish a Franciscan order of monks in Lima. My initial reaction is (and in hindsight I voiced this too rhetorically) “What the living hell was Francis of Asissi doing in Lima?” Danielle takes a more tactful route.

“Isn’t Asissi in Italy?” We’re told he’s buried here. We’ll see his grave. William Faulkner ruminated on St. Francis’ dying words, “Welcome my sister, Death.” I am in the place of famous words. I should be more respectful. Then I remember St. Francis of Asissi lived in the 13th century. My tour guide now becomes a constant target of my questions.

IMG_1958

Our first room is like the smell of a bookstore if you’ve worked in one, except every shift boiled into a breath. In the room are texted fanned out for viewing, and faded spines lining the shelves in all directions. The endless bindings lined along the receding walls look pockmarked, burled by some degenerative disease. That disease is nothing more than Lima’s perfect sunlight streaming in from the windows. Countless texts, from the 1400s and upward, sit open for your viewing. The books are testament to paper and words at their most fragile moments. These books, which we are invited by our guide to snap at with flash cameras, will be waiting for you when you visit the monastery. But the words on this page will outlive them. I give the library at the San Francisco Monastery thirty years before you can sweep it off the floor with a broom.

Our guide begins dragging us from room to room. “What is this room for?”

Tour Guide: I don’t know.
Me: Why not?
TG: The Chilean stole all the documents from the church in the war. But they did not destroy the building, we did.
Me: Why?
TG: To build the streets of Lima.
Me: How much of the monastery was destroyed?
TG: I don’t know.
Me; Do you have a percentage? 50%?
TG: 40%. Maybe 80%. No one knows that either.
Me: Can’t you look that up?
TG: No I told you. The war with Chile. They stole the documents.
Me: When was the war?
TG: Before we rebuilt the streets. In the nineties.

And of course we use this kind of language in New York to distinguish The Pixies from Pavement, Pulp Fiction from Kill Bill. I let confusion exaggerate itself on my face.

TG: The 1890s. In the next room is some painting done by the school of Peter Paul Reubens.

We enter the only room in the entire monastery that has adequate lighting. It is too much to bear; in the Met any respectable curator would dice it up into several galleries. On the wall, a conspicuous placard among tilework: “This gallery was restored with a donation from JP MORGAN CHASE.” The entire museum is crumbling around this room.
On the walls is a series by the workshop of Reubens, a famous Flemish painter. In the center is a retelling of The Last Supper. It has Christ at the center of a round table (as the most memorable meals and the best rounds of poker are displayed). Judas is at right, a devil whispering into his ear. In front of the painting, a stairwell leads to a small space under the room, with maybe five feet of headroom. A small velvet rope keeps you from tumbling blindly into the casket of Saint Francis Solanus, who ran the already completed and named monastery after leaving Spain in 1589. This information is not featured on your tour.

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There are rooms where the intricate tiles have fallen off and been replaced by other tiles from other parts of the monastery. There is a serious of oil paintings that have darkened, as they line the hallway that creates the courtyard’s perimeter. Underneath these is a fresco series that predates the arrival of Saint Francis. Our tour guide has no idea who painted them, or when (or why) someone scratched the heads off of all the fresco’s main characters.

I think we are ready to see thousands of femurs and skulls at this point, because nothing can silence the beast of unsatiated knowledge quite like death. In the basement are the catacombs. There we find troughs filled with the remains of nearly a hundred-thousand. We walk quietly passed the other tours, who have arrived here with us although we saw them nowhere previously. Each guide offers different information.

“The catacombs were used from the 1600s to the 1900s.
“Do you see the skulls in a row? The archaelogist did that. They were bored.”
“We have no poor people or Peruvians buried here. This was only for the Spanish.”

When we emerge from the catacombs the tour ends. In fact, the entire monastery closes. I had overheard a man on a tour in the catacombs make reference to a small series of caves mentioned in The Last of The Mohicans near my childhood home. He’s outside, and I ask him, “Where are you from?” I already know the answer, and it will be the first question I’ve asked in an hour that will get a clear response. I am a bit unsure if I can even ask questions anymore.

“Long Island. I live upstate now.”
“Why are you here?”
“I’m here with my wife.” He points to a small Peruvian lady, she smiles without purpose.
“You’re just visiting family?” I ask the vaguest question I can find.
“Yeah. Visiting family.”

When you meet someone who isn’t worth describing, you leave them out. Unfortunately, in the San Francisco Monastery, even the vaguest of marital relations or acquaintances are cause for embrace. First hand information does not exist, except when you are discussing the extent of the building’s decay. It is a ruin, with masterpieces of western culture that we do not attribute to ruins: oil paintings, coffins, literature, and pews. This is a very special kind of ruin, as you can see it ruining. It is not erosion, wind, or the Spanish. It is you.

Saint Francis Solanus, a Spaniard who traveled to Lima after the monastery named for a different Saint Francis had already been completed, sits in a tomb in the middle of the floor. I took two flash photographs of the coffin and the branches laid upon it, a woman from the museum sat a desk behind me, pretending not to have to see me do it.

I did not reach into the half-lit bins of skulls and spines and pluck one out for a souvenir. I did not touch the frescos or take one single tile from the hallways where missing tiles lay scattered in shards on the floor. I did not scrawl my name upon the walls of the catacombs, searching out immortality in limestone. But I did have the opportunity to act on these impulses at every single second of the tour. I could have been capable of extraordinary destruction when left to my own devices, and lucky for me the sacred is not defined by any one religion, law, culture, or history; I feel an awkward awe for all things we attempt to preserve. At a yellow monastery in Lima, where pigeons swirl in the courtyards and summer never ends, you are not a tourist. You must simultaneously preserve the place you’ve been and participate in its destruction.

The Wednesday Night Mathletic Association.

2006-04-13T12:05:00.000-04:00

I met with Nick and his sister Bee, students I've had since October of 2004, for the last time yesterday. With high school admissions out of the way, all Nick and I had to work on were the obligatory intrascholastic placement tests he'll take this week. Bee is in 6th grade, two years his junior. She's so far ahead of her math class that it borders on the absurd. We wrapped up the 7th grade math curriculum a long time ago. Nick and Bee are two exceptional students, and few Wednesday nights have passed over the last year and a half where I've been in the country and not at their palacial Park Slope brownstone, drinking green tea, discussing parabolas. Often the most intelligent conversation I will have in a week will be with a 6th grader.

(parents and Nick laughing in the other room because Nick is butchering some Hebrew he heard at a friend's Bar Mitzvah)

Mark: (laughing) You get those three around a table...
Bee: ...bizarre dinner conversations ensue.

And then later, Nick is talking about another student from his class.

Nick: Camilla spends most of math class talking to the fishes.
(all laugh)
Mark: Excellent metaphor.
Bee: No, literally. We have fish in the classroom (uses plural correctly).
Mark: OH. That's really scary.

So the kids are going to take a break from Mark's existential math review, and I will have my Wednesday nights free until someone else swoops in to take the spot. I'll leave you with some of the word problems I made up for Nick last night (he doesn't like working from textbooks, and none really challenge him anyway). First an easy one, then a more difficult one. Remember two things: 1) that he's in 8th grade, and 2) that he solved them both in less than a minute.

Enjoy.

Easy:

1. Nick goes to basketball practice at the corner of 7th Avenue and Flatbush. He stops off at home (7th Avenue and 1st St.) Then goes to get a Bubble Tea at the Tea Lounge (7th Avenue and 10th St.) He travels by bicycle at 8 MPH. If it takes 6 minutes to bike to his house and 4 minutes to bike from his house to the Tea Lounge, how far is it from Basketball Practice to the Tea Lounge?

Difficult:

2. Lets say Nick goes from Basketball Practice to Home, heading due east at 8MPH. It takes him 2.25 minutes to get home. Then he goes to get a Bubble Tea at the Tea Lounge, heading due south at 8MPH. It takes him 3 minutes. If it is possible for him to go from Basketball Practice to The Tea Lounge, finding the most direct route, yet still traveling at 8mph, how many minutes will this trip take him?

If you comment I'll tell you how he did them.

2006: DinnerParty 2, Saturday 6-11pm, 4 March.

2006-04-08T00:32:00.000-04:00

I neglected to recap the events of March 4th, possibly because it has taken this much time to get, as we say in the business world, "back on schedule."

My roommate and I hosted a sequel to the dinner party we threw in the fall. Forty-nine people had attended that one. With loftier ambitions in tow, we decided to ask a friend of ours, Erik from the neighborhood, if it might be possible to use his enormous loft for the party. Danielle and I had been at one of his party's in the winter and remarked, "We have to throw a party here." It took a few weeks of warming him to the idea. But we had an advantage; he and one of his 4 roommates had been to our first dinner party. They'd had a swell time. We held a meeting two weeks in advance at the party location. Met the other roommates. Tried to clarify the purpose of the party. There wasn't one. "Danielle and I are going to invite a bunch of people you don't know to your apartment."

The Nassau Street Location

When we arrived for our informal meeting, I was taken aback by the mess of the apartment. I remembered it as a cavernous space. My imagination had blinded me to the possibility of it being, like any apartment shared by four guys, a little on the slovenly side. The four guys who lived in there were not the cleanliest folks in the world. Even until three hours before the party, a bed was stationed in the living room. Every available walking space was covered in somebody's laundry. But there were advantages to their laid-back ways. They didn't give a damn about our micromanaging, our furniture re-arranging, our taking over their kitchen and their lives for one night. We let them invite whoever they wanted and that was that. Party approved. Which was good, because we'd already finished the invitations.

Invitations

Danielle somehow managed to scrounge up a dozen boxes of dinner party invitations from the stock room of her office. We collected mailing addresses and sent out 45 print invites. We sent them up and down the eastern seaboard, to four of the five boroughs, yet completely forgot to send an invite to the guys on Nassau Street.

The Monitor Street Location

Three days before the party we went grocery shopping. Since Danielle and I have opposite schedules, this required compiling a 4-page grocery list and dividing it between us. The master list was itemized by measurements in applicable units, with every ounce of sprouts and tablespoon of paprika accounted for in the 25 different dishes we were cooking. We recruited the crock pots of nearby friends, and on Friday morning I began prep cooking. Danielle joined me in the evening, and we chopped, peeled, seasoned, defrosted, marinated, stored, and labeled everything we possibly could. At 3am we went to sleep. At 11am on Saturday morning, we got seven crock pots going simultaneously and fired up the oven. With nothing to do between 11 and noon - too early to cook, prepping done - I made a delicious hazelnut mole sauce to sprinkle on the bacon-wrapped turkey breasts.

Arrival at Nassau Street Location, 2pm.

Hauling necessary furniture, our entire collection of pans, plasticware, cutlery, cutting boards, crock pots, and a fridge-full of food, Danielle and I began setting up. Jonny Cigar showed up to chop. Nick Bennett didn't. By 5, the place was clean, the bar was set up, the salads were underway, and the hot food was waiting patiently. At 6pm, the party began.

The Menu

Each of the dishes required some finesse. If every side dish was going to be delivered with its main courses, we had to keep on a steady pace till about 8pm, when the last of the food was to be served. We served four different salads with grilled meats on the side (sirloin, salmon, chicken), along with some ambitious empanadas, as our Summer Menu. Danielle was mostly responsible for these items, and they were gone by 7. The Winter Menu was more of my responsibility. And at the meeting two weeks prior I noticed that we'd be working with a mini-oven instead of a full-size. Nearly everything I had intended to warm in the oven was roasted on the burner instead, because I just could not get it hot enough. But the soul food, Indian, and Latin menus went out smoothly. I was pretty drunk by the time I needed to serve the finale entree: 8 cornish game hens, stuffed with mushrooms and cranberries, glazed in lime. Strawberry mashed potatoes on the side. They got sliced. They got served. Somehow. Jonny Cigar performed a show with a dead ovenbird in his hands. That's all I remember.

Dessert

Again, Danielle was head chef for this part of the operation, and it came to pass that the desserts were on the table at precisely the same time we ran out of booze. 9:30, the place was dry. The DJ's wrapped up at 10:30, the party was still well-populated at 11. I left with some friends to get a drink at Enid's around the corner, and saved the cleaning til the Oscars Sunday night.

The Wrap-Up

On Sunday, Danielle, Connor, Erik and I swept up the aftermath and tried to put together a list of attendees. 82 people were accounted for, and well over 30 bottles of wine and hard alcohol consumed. I put a recommendation for "Scotch" on the invite and 9 bottles showed up - from Johnnie Walker to an Albemarle 10-year to an 18-year Macallan. I believe the price tag perfectly matched the $500 worth of food consumed between 6 and 9:30. What remained? A half bottle of 4-year old Haitian Rum (supplied by Jaron), the fantastic Patron Espresso-flavored dessert Tequila (supplied and strategically hidden by Derrick) and the hazelnut mole sauce I never served. The party was an absolute blast. We learned invaluable information about hosting large-scale events, and some of it I share with you below. If you made it out, thanks for coming. It's gonna be hard to top, but we'll try. I'd say August, though it may be possible to put something together in June.

The Five Elements of A Great Dinner Party.

2006-04-07T23:23:00.000-04:00

The Space

Erik's floor-through loft on Nassau Street, with 20-foot ceilings, a fire escape, and a DJ booth, was the perfect atmosphere. The open kitchen featured an island counter that faced the dance floor, and the attendees could chat with us while we cooked. Since the counter space was ample, and most of it faced the party, we could work both cooking and presentation into our hosting. I recommend an open kitchen as the preferred setting for a dinner party; it makes any large room seem intimate.

The Food

People like food. As long as you stock a variety and a respectable quantity (not too much food, because an overstuffed crowd is no good on the dance floor) you'll do well.

The Bar

We decided to set up the bar as far from the kitchen as possible (to avoid the temptation to drink and hang in the kitchen) and this was an incredible advantage. Some of my favorite moments at the party derived from the two separate worlds created by the kitchen and bar on opposite sides of the space. A person I'd never met before approached me while I was in the middle of grilling shell steaks. He presented to me a bottle of wine and said, "Do you have a cork screw?" I gave him the least sympathetic look I could muster.

"The bartender has one. Over at the bar."

He replied, incredulously, "There's a bar here?"

My face cracked into a smile. "That's what they tell me."

But a bar is just a bar. We'd originally asked Nick Bennett to bartend, but it quickly became more than a one man job. Then Danielle's old roommate (and before that, Nick's old roommate) August showed up, bartending kit in hand. August and Nick took Bar/Barback positions and turned a pile of booze and soda into The 19th Hole at the country club. They mixed drinks, poured wine, ran out for ice, and kicked the party up to a classy level. Having a great bartender in the house is a must. Having two is a necessary extravagance.

Later on, around 8:30, our friend Caitlin came into the kitchen with her boyfriend John. Everyone exchanged handshakes and hugs.

Danielle: Did you guys just get here?
Caitlin: No we've been here for an hour and a half.
Danielle: Where were you?
Caitlin: We were over at the bar.

The DJs

Its nice to have music playing. Its nice to know someone who can play the music for you. Its also great to be good friends with an excellent DJ team who spins all over New York, Miami, and LA. Chris and June (DJ Baron and DJ June D, respectively, of Soulpusher) swooped in to provide us with an excellent soundtrack. From the second they broke out their needles the place came alive. They spin excellent R&B, Soul, Funk, and 60s Rock. I cannot stress enough how important it is to have the right music playing. With great looking people, great tasting food, and wonderful aromas of spices, the Soulpusher DJs treated the ears to a splendid palette of sound.

The Crowd

The night after the party I mentioned to Max the necessity of the above four elements. He added, "And the crowd." He was right. You should invite great people. Great people tend to bring great people. So its win-win.

Here are some additional elements, available in limited supply, that make a party great.

This pair of geniuses on the decks (Chris and June of Soulpusher)

This exceptional cohost (Right, with an exceptional guest)

This undercover bouncer (Center, with tie)

This professional bartender and doorman (Nick, left) and that imbiber of fine whiskeys (Pesko, right, with Macallan 18)

These two characters in the same room.

2005: Coca Matte, Cusco, Peru; Jan 20

2006-04-04T12:00:00.000-04:00

This man is a fugitive.

Whole, unprocessed coca leaves are sold legally in only three countries (Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia), and are used for a variety of purposes. Tea made from coca leaves is extremely popular in the smaller cities of Peru. Coca matte resembles a more traditional Japanese green tea (not flavored, vitamin-enhanced, etc), except that it makes your tongue completely numb. It is strong stuff, deceptively placed in a tea bag to look as harmless as Lipton.

My friend and I were hesitant to get going on the stuff, but a local guide we met recommended it highly. He told us the story of when, the year before, he'd run in the Lima Marathon and won. He said for two days he lay in bed exhausted. The only thing he ate? Raw coca leaves. Apparently they are a remedy for altitude sickness; the small amount of drug in the leaves increases your oxygen efficiency. Since Cusco sits 11,500 feet above sea level, and we were there for a paltry 3 days, the need for a quick fix from the thin air was in order. I remember going on a run my first day, Danielle opting out, and stopping at every corner to walk. I ran for twenty minutes and I will never forget the feeling; it was like I hadn't breathed at all. Every inhale was devoid of the necessary "breath stuff" I was used to. It was like jogging on the moon.

Our first morning in Cusco we ordered it with breakfast, and downed two cups floating above the street on a restaurant balcony table. Altitude no longer an issue, we hiked up to the big giant white Christ, "Cristo Blanco," another 1000 feet above town. I'll save that for another post. Later in the day we bought whole coca leaves from a woman in the park (Cusco doesn't really have a seedy side of town, so this is the best we could do). We stuffed them in our mouths like our guide had described, and washed down the metallic grass taste with some of the local brew. It was heaven.

And when it came time to smuggle something back home through US customs, Peruvian white wine and bottles of Cusqueno Dark were no match for four giant boxes of coca matte in tea bags. It is the secret weapon of 81 Monitor Street; no one here has gotten altitude sickness in sea level Brooklyn since.

2005: People, Cusco, Peru; Jan 20

2006-03-17T10:58:00.000-05:00

2005: Street Scenes, Cusco, Peru; 19-20 Jan.

2006-03-16T12:20:00.000-05:00

The Strokes, March 1, 2006: Hammerstein

2006-03-02T15:58:00.000-05:00

Setlist

You Only Live Once
Modern Age
Hawaii
Juice Box
The End Has No End
12:51
Heart In A Cage
Razorblade
Soma
I Can’t Win
Life Is A Gas
Alone Together
Last Nite
Hard To Explain
Ize Of The World
Trying Your Luck
Barely Legal
Ask Me Anything
Vision Of Division
Reptila

Encore:
NYC Cops
Someday
Take It Or Leave It

These guys are absolute pros. I got tickets off eBay for pretty cheap (cheaper than their Fri/Sat shows). Last time I saw them they weren't doing encores. I highly recommend this band's live sets. I don't really enjoy the new record but it makes a lot more sense now. They wrote songs that would be great to play live.

The Hammerstein Ballroom seems to make any good band come off as brilliant. I don't know what it is about that place...Gwyneth and Chris Martin were there, but I don't think that has anything to do with it.

2005: Machu Picchu, Peru; 17 Jan

2006-02-23T11:50:00.001-05:00

A month in South America, and only one guided tour. One "all-inclusive package," one "tourista blue-plate special." With a limited number of days remaining on our trip, my friend and I arrived in Cusco with no arrangements and no place to stay. The only thing we had was an ultimatum hanging over our schedule. "We have to go to Machu Picchu tomorrow, otherwise its not gonna work." When we arrived at the Cusco bus terminal, after a 54-hour ride from Valparaiso, Chile, the joy of being on land mixed with the exhaustion of our ride. Two women approached us and pitched their hotels. One woman gave us a phenomenal rate. The other woman said, "My twin sister runs a travel agency right out of the hotel. We have gas boilers in our hotel. This woman's hotel has electric boilers. We have more hot water." It was the strangest duel between two women I've ever seen, and it made me feel ashamed to even be in the position of choosing one fine sales pitch over another. But the idea of not having to leave my hotel to book this tour seemed golden.

If you want to go to Machu Picchu on a day trip, you are going on a tour. The only way to avoid it is to hike the last stretch of the Inca Trail, a four day hike from Cusco. I highly recommend this hike, as a day trip proved to be overwhelmingly incredible but too brief.

We get to the hotel and the twin sister of the woman we spoke to at the bus terminal says, "Yes we have a tour leaving tomorrow at 6:30am." I sigh. I haven't really slept in any of the past three days on the bus. They've been the worst rides of my life, actually. I turn to Danielle in despair. I tell her I'm not sure I want to shell out $110 to have another miserable day without sleep. She says, "We have to go tomorrow. I'm going whether you are or not." The absolute authority in her voice was all the convincing I needed. The next day we dragged ourselves out of bed and went down to the lobby. 6:30am sharp. The bus was not there. At 7:30 the bus arrived. So did the other people in the group. We were in Peru. New time zone.

But the totally unnecessary 5am wake-up was invigorating. The trip to the Incan ruins featured a ride on a coal train, a bus ride on what was formerly the world's most dangerous road (Venezuela has now earned that distinction), hikes, information, wandering, and photo-opping like nobody's business.

Though it is South America's #1 tourist destination, the January offseason and the enormity of the grounds made viewing peaceful, relaxed, and intimate. The site is similar to other ancient ruins travelers have told me about. One can, without hindrance, climb on the walls, walk along terraces, hike down any hillside, and generally play all day long. I felt as if I were among some of the holiest ruins on earth, yet simultaneous inside of a well-curated exhibition and an absurd performance art space. The way in which you can interact with the space only heightens the profundity of the trip. If this ruin was within the continental US, all of it would be roped off. Visiting hours restricted. Viewing platforms designated. Instead, the experience is not a stagnant expectation. It can be interpreted a number of ways. I highly recommend this trip, and hope to make it back someday on a more flexible itinerary.

2005: Near Aguas Calientes, Peru; 17 Jan

2006-02-22T04:01:00.001-05:00

2005: Lake Titicaca at Puno, Peru; 16 Jan

2006-02-22T04:01:00.000-05:00

The world's highest lake.

2005: Near Ollantaytambo, Peru; 17 Jan

2006-02-22T03:57:00.000-05:00

2005: Puno, Peru; 16 Jan

2006-02-17T14:54:00.000-05:00

Zora's Sonnet

2006-02-13T12:01:00.000-05:00

Zora, a 6th-grader I tutor in math, surprised me on Sunday with an assignment totally unrelated to the subject I was hired to teach her. She needed help writing a sonnet. The requirements for the sonnet were draconian, and I found it hard to believe that anyone I know could do this easily. Some of the guidelines: ABABCDCDEFEFGG rhyme pattern, in iambic pentameter, 3 quatrains and a rhyming couplet, 2 similes, 2 metaphors. I said to myself, "This is gonna take an hour."

I asked Zora what she wanted to write about. "Snow." So we wrote a sonnet about snow. I think its fairly safe to assume that the only reason I'm sharing this is because I got paid to do it. Most of the other work I did with 8th graders on Sunday (Coordinate Geometry and the Quadratic Formula) wasn't worth blogging about. Although I did lend a hand in organizing the rhymes and syllables - as best I could, but I wasn't trying to kill myself - the logic and opinions of the piece are her own. I swear. She handed it in today. Enjoy.

Sunday Snowday Hooray.

The snow is white and plentiful and deep,
The snow makes people happier inside.
Snow is very dirty on the street,
but it is very pretty in the sky.

Why do people shovel anyway?
I would rather have a snowball fight.
Snow is like ice in a weird kind of way
the X-Games are boring like old bald guys.

Snow could harden and someone could trip.
So be careful not to break your skull open.
You will get frostbite if you lie there too long.
Snow is pretty like a unicorn.

The snow wants to let out its joy and rhyme,
But that is an illusion of your mind.

The Eiffel 94 vs. Yahoo! Mail, Part 2

2006-02-09T00:10:00.000-05:00

I'm not claiming victory here. Yahoo! Mail took down all of the suggestive images on their log-in screen that I ranted about in a November post. Did Yahoo consult my site before making this decision? Almost certainly not, but they replaced the images. And the reason I am hesitant to claim victory is, well, I feel like Yahoo! has upped the ante here. This is a war, not a battle. Why? Because now I'm even more aggravated by the stupid pictures they've used as replacements. There is a lesson in here. Leave offensive enough alone. When it comes down to offensive vs. idiotic, go with offensive. Idiotic will aggravate you to no end. Offensive, when done correctly, can seem almost... charming.

Here are the stupid pictures in question:

The Book of Daniel, Part Three

2006-02-08T02:33:00.000-05:00

A twisted little snot named Daniel, aged 12 years and a student of mine, is required to do a bit of writing for me every week. Over my vacation I made him read four short pieces and write summaries of them. "We have to practice our summarizing skills, Daniel." These are the titles he was required to read:

-"Winter Dreams," by F. Scott Fitzgerald
-"Equal In Paris," by James Baldwin
-"The Man Who Was Almost A Man," by Richard Wright
-"The Laughing Man," by JD Salinger

I wanted to encourage him to use a much broader vocabulary than the one he currently employs. I wanted him to consider a variety of narrative techniques. I wanted him to identify the main points of each story and summarize them. These works I felt were both long enough to challenge his attention span and nuanced in their respective tellings. It wouldn't be easy for him. These were all stories that - and I'm not sure if I am embarassed to say this - I was assigned to read in college. The curiousity I felt, to see how these works held up in the mind of a sixth grader, was matched by Daniel's apathy toward them. Here is one of his summaries.

“The Laughing Man,” by J.D. Salinger
A Summary by Daniel F_______

There is a summer camp with only boys’ .They have a Chief who is smart, athletic, and talented and good at telling stories. Every day they ride to a field by bus and play baseball. On there way back the Chief tells them a story. The story is called the Laughing Man. The laughing man is the son of a rich couple. He then is kidnapped by Chinese bandits.The bandits torture his face and make him look incredibly ugly. So he must always wear a mask. He learns how to do crime. The laughing man turned out to be a genius in crime. The bandits got jealous of his ideas and tried to assassinate him while he is sleeping. But he was too clever for them and made them assassinate their mother. Then he ran away. He made many famous crimes such as stealing an expensive jewel which monks that trained German dogs. He lives with four pets. As the bus arrived at the field the Chief saw his old girlfriend. They had a talk and at the end of the talk the Chief is angry. The kids got on the bus. He continued his story. One day Dufarges kidnapped one of the Laughing Mans pets. They told him in order to get his pet back he must exchange his freedom with his pets. So he agrees. They chained him to a tree and let his pet go. The Dufarges’ daughter tries to kill the laughing man but he took of his mask. She dies from his ugliness. Her father shielded his eyes and shot the laughing man. But did not die because he did a trick with his muscles which protected him. The father unshielded his eyes and died. The laughing man died chained. Then the bus returns back and camp ends. You could have noticed the chief ending the story with sadness. It’s clear the author wrote this story to bore people. THE END.

2005: Pablo Neruda's Bar, Isla Negra, Chile; 13 Jan

2006-02-07T12:41:00.000-05:00

I mentioned in my last post that Valparaiso changed my opinion of Chile from ambivalence to admiration. I should amend that. Chile has 4,000 miles of coastline, stretching from Patagonia to the Atacama Desert (and coming fairly close to the Equator). The variety of natural beauty has nearly no comparison for a country its size. My ambivalence was directed toward urban Chile. That's where we spent most of our time. Chile has some great cities, but I saw only one.

Isla Negra is a small beach town near Valparaiso. We went for the afternoon to see the place where Neruda wrote some of his finest works, including "The Sea and The Bells." Both the sea and the bells were still intact, but the residence has become a hideous tourist museum. Cardboard cut-outs, shitty souvenirs, display cases, and steep fees. I pecked around for a while and found probably the best bar I never drank at: an ocean-facing lounge where Neruda could entertain. The ocean itself, the poet's backyard, is worth the trip. The inspiration he gained from it is lost to the ages, but it was wonderful to see a place that is better in my imagination (and his) than it is up close. He is a master of words this man, and he's got a hell of a flair for decorating.

2005: Valparaiso, Chile; 13 Jan

2006-01-28T22:31:00.000-05:00

This is a view of the magnificent hill city of Valparaiso, and certainly one of the greatest cities I've visited in South America. My roommate and I decided to spend one full day in Valparaiso, choosing it on a whim over the more touristy and beachy Villarica, an hour up the coast. We found one of the two Irish bars in Chile, and I bombarded the transplanted Irishmen bartender/owner about life in Valparaiso. Danielle lied to him and said, "What would you do if you had two days to spend in Valparaiso?"

His response: "Well, the first day you should cry. Then the second day you should walk around the hills above the ocean and think about staying a week." We ended up staying almost four full days, and the place made such an indellible impression on me that it: 1. rescued my opinion of Chile from ambivalence to admiration, and 2. planted a small seed in my head that this might be a great place to live.

The climate is marvelous (absolutely no rain to speak of), the population is youthful, vibrant and intelligent, the Pacific is at your feet, the streets are a maze of crumbling stairways and cobblestone spirals, and the architecture is inspiring. And then there are the murals. The City of Valparaiso invited a number of Chilean artists to paint the sides of buildings, walkways, any flat surface with broad splashes of vibrant color. Along the maze of hillside streets you will be lead past dozens of these murals, as well as some inspired and uncommisioned graffiti to complement them. Here is a very small sample of the pictures I took in Valparaiso.

Pablo Neruda's Valparaiso Residence.

2005: Rio Mapocho, Santiago, Chile; 11 Jan

2006-01-27T01:30:00.000-05:00

This is the Mapocho River, which runs through the center of Santiago, Chile. The shadows belong to me and my roommate, and the fascination with a dead river dividing a major metropolis is solely my own. I must have taken a dozen pictures of this horribly polluted river, in this culture-rich (though anti-pedestrian) city.

2005: Argentina/Chile Border near Santiago, 10 Jan

2006-01-27T01:27:00.000-05:00

This is what I will call the world's most dangerous highway. The ride from Mendoza, Argentina to Santiago, Chile appears on a map to be no more than an hour-and-a-half's drive. When the woman at the Mendoza bus station told me it would take 7-hours, I huffed and puffed and got on the bus anyway. When we reached the Chilean border, which was no lower than 16,000 feet above sea level, I knew why. Our bus spent four hours climbing and 1 descending. The descent, your first taste of Chile, takes place on a brilliant S-curving downward slope with corners so sharp you believe the bus is perpetually driving off of cliffs. The road actually disappears from your window view at every turn, only to arrive again after your bus completes its nearly 270 degree rotation. This goes on perpetually, and after a while I thought I could feel the earth rotating on its axis.

2005: The Andes, Northern Argentina: 10 Jan

2006-01-26T00:05:00.000-05:00

In the north of the country, by the Chilean border, the mountains take on this barren desert-like appearance. I remember learning in 9th grade earth science about the windward and leeward sides of mountains, and it helped to explain for me why we went from lush vegetation and vineyards to bone-dry wasteland. The Andes are a huge range of mountains, rendering all of the mountains in North America mere foothills. This leeward side is mighty dry, and littered with empty or dwindling riverbeds. I have dozens of photographs of bridges to nowhere. They are mostly railway bridges no longer in use. The immensity of the landscape makes a steel span look like an abandoned children's toy.

2005: 16th Century Juice Extractor, Mendoza; 9 Jan

2006-01-25T10:23:00.000-05:00

From the vineyard we visited in Mendoza. The early winemakers of the region juiced the harvested grapes by turning a cow inside out and filling it full of grapes. They would stand on the grapes. A small spout is visible on the bottom left.

The juice was collected in buckets also made of cow.

2005: Merlot Grapes, Mendoza, Argentina; 9 Jan

2006-01-25T10:18:00.000-05:00

2005: Rio ?, Southern Patagonia; 8 Jan

2006-01-20T10:56:00.000-05:00

Left El Calafate on the 3am bus, which took us four hours in the wrong direction (but toward southern Patagonia's only main highway) to Rio Gallegos. The town is famous for being the supposed site of a Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid bank robbery. The place has never recovered; it's bleak. But when the connecting bus pulls out, en-route to Bariloche, it is a brilliant sunny day, and we get a full 12 hour dose of beautiful scenery (we don't arrive at our destination until well into the next day). One of the highlights is this small river that the road follows. It starts as a deep blue mountain stream. There is not a person nor a residence along its entire length. I keep thinking, "Why can't we stop off and go swimming in this beautiful water?"

But the stream widens gradually, and the pace of it slows. Finally, what we're driving alongside has grown so enormous I can't fathom how it could be a river at all. Yet it just keeps going and going and going. We drove alongside it for four hours, and finally, when it looked as though we'd reached some kind of ocean, when the horizon was nearly all water, we turned a corner and never saw it again.

Whatever this body of water is called, it is absolutely majestic. I love how this last image shows water that is bluer than the sky. A perfect blue.

2005: Lake Argentina; 7 Jan

2006-01-20T01:46:00.000-05:00

A three-hour flight south of Buenos Aires. Just before landing, Lake Argentina is every direction you look. The lake is created by the melting of a number of glaciers, one of them the breathtaking Perito Moreno Glacier. The viewing platform gives you a quaint little view. But if you exit the viewing platform and hike the short hill directly in front of the glacier's face (you'll have to hop two "Do Not Enter" signs and some chains) you can walk right out to a cliff with the glacier beneath you. Even the people who paid for the tour boat ride didnt get this close. You have to see this thing, the pictures do nothing but I tried.

2005: Patagonian Skyline, Argentina; 7 Jan

2006-01-18T20:52:00.000-05:00

Patagonia has a variety of impressive landscapes, but the sky itself is an ever-changing palette of colors and textures. The weather changes drastically, and when the clouds roll in mid-afternoon you think, as it is January and it should be winter, that night is upon you. But daylight lasts so long down there that mid-afternoon clouds mark only the halfway point of the day. These clouds are astounding: forming and dispersing like old memories, humbling you every direction you look.

2005, El Ateneo, Buenos Aires; 5 Jan

2006-01-18T12:22:00.000-05:00

El Ateneo is a bookstore fashioned out of a long-dormant theatre. There is a cafe on the stage and an art museum in the top balcony. The rest of the orchestra, mezzanines, and balconies are reserved for books. Its unassuming entrance on Avenida Santa Fe promises you the pleasures of one more labyrinthian bookstore. Buenos Aires certainly has its share. Once inside, you feel as though the bookstores of the world finally have their Mecca, their one holy shrine.

2005: The Port of Montevideo, Uruguay; 2 Jan.

2006-01-17T07:59:00.000-05:00

Oftentimes my vacations begin with conflicting signs of good or bad fortune. I remember my flight to Seattle, before I drove to Alaska, featured several of these. First, the flight was delayed two hours ON THE RUNWAY because the pilot was, according to the crew, "stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway." I said to myself, things don't look good. I took out my laptop and watched the Cary Grant / Katherine Hepburn film Bringing Up Baby. It attracted the interest of the elderly woman sitting next to me. Within minutes we were sharing a set of headphones and she was laughing so hard, passengers several rows away were craning their necks back to see if we were okay. At one point she spilled a glass of water in her lap, and began drying the spill with a napkin. But her eyes never left the screen. When the movie ended, and with remarkable comic timing, she took out what she thought was the white earpiece of my headphones and set it on my tray table. As she thanked me, I stared blankly at her earring, which laid before me. I gave her the time to figure out the mistake. When she discovered it, she let out the grandest laugh of the flight. I thought to myself, "This is going to be a great trip."

When my roommate Danielle and I left Buenos Aires last year, bound for a short 4-day trip to Uruguay, contradictory predicators presented themselves. The first was the advice from travelers at our hostel. "Oh, don't go to Uruguay. It's okay, but don't waste time there. Stay in Buenos Aires." Or "It's kind of boring, you won't like it after being here." We booked an afternoon ferry (its 4 hours by boat from Argentina) and two hours before we are to depart, Danielle realizes we've left the power converter at the hostel. We hail a cab.

She jumps out, runs into the hostel. Two and a half minutes later she leaps into the cab, basically crashing into me. Her excuse: "I'm drunk!"

Between the time it took to explain to the clerk in broken Spanish that she needed the key to our room, get it, retrieve the adapter, and get back in the cab, she: ran into a group of freshly arrived Swiss hikers who were doing tequilla shots (its maybe 12:30pm), takes a shot, gets the converter, takes another shot, participates in a grand cheer (mostly in her honor), and gives the desk clerk back the room key.

We enter the port of Uruguay's capital city at dusk. A beautiful sunset over the Rio Plate spreads out before us. And our four short days in Uruguay turn out to be an early highlight to a spectacular trip.

Happy Ought Six

2006-01-15T21:20:00.000-05:00

So its 2006, and I can safely say that 2005 was a pretty spectacular affair. My travels took me from the bottom of the South American continent to the top of North America, ending the year in the middle of the two. I finally had the opportunity to embrace the Western Hemisphere, in all its spoils and superlatives.

I rung in the year at a restaurant in Buenos Aires. I was munching on venison carpaccio with raspberries; the town was absolutely shut-down by a major concert fire the night before which killed 300 people. Everyone stayed home. A city of 12 million deserted. My roommate and I ended up going back to the apartment of our waitress, who spoke no English and drunkenly commented to me on the balcony, "I am a mother." Then she pointed to her plants. I didn't know what the hell she was talking about, it was either heartbreakingly sweet or not what she was trying to say. Then we left, found a bar, ordered drinks. Left before the drinks came, walked halfway to another neighborhood, then went back to the bar for the digital camera we bought 4 days before, ordered drinks again after they brought us our camera, then left before the drinks came again. Then it was 6am. Woke up at noon and walked smack into the city morgue, a block from our hotel, where hundreds of polaroids of the body-bagged unidentified greeted our monstrous hangovers. Later broke into a city park and took pictures in fields of roses with no one to share them with. The entire city was closed for the first 3 days of 2005.

I concluded the year in a town of 200, tiny Santa Catalina, Panama, Central America's premier surfing spot. With the 7 other residents of The Cabanas Rolo - two Roman lads, two Japanese girls, a kid from Buenos Aires, Rolo and his wife, we ate cheap chicken and drank cheaper beer, then rolled to a party on the beach. A reggae band, a DJ, more $1 beers, and a town of chilled out Panamanians and a small community of international surfers, we just plain rocked out in the remote recesses of Panama's Pacific coast. The stars are better only in the middle of the ocean. I've never seen such an impressive array before.

In between these two days, 365 days apart, I:

1. spent a month crisscrossing Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, and Peru. Traveled by bus, plane, car, boat, horse, bicycle, train, subway, taxi, and golf cart.
2. took a busride from Rio Gallegos, Argentina, just north of Antartica to Lima, Peru. The 135-hour ride included many stopovers, but proved to be the most physically and mentally challenging traveling I have ever done. I have never heard of anyone who has made this kind of trek, especially in such short a time. My roommate and I traversed 40 degrees latitude in 17 days. Like boarding a bus in New York's Port Authority and riding it to Panama.
3. drove from Seattle through Washington state, British Columbia, the Yukon, and Alaska, making the drive in 3 days. Most people take five days just to do the section I did in 18 hours.
4. hiked the impressive Denail State Park and Wrangell-St Elias National Park. Not hiking I met gold prospectors, one-eyed pilots, squatters, hitchhikers, botanists, fishermen, and a slew of Midwestern retirees. Hiking I met moose, bears, wolves, and caribou, but not a single person. I spent three days above the tree line and only passed out once.
5. drove back to Vancouver and stayed for a week in a basement apartment just outside of downtown. Basically detoxing from Alaska.
6. drove to Chicago through Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska and Iowa. This brings my "Total States Visited" to 40.
7. visited the majestic Little Bighorn Battlefield, the depressing Wounded Knee, the cartoonish Mount Rushmore, the absurd Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.
8. participated in a rousing 4 car accident in Billings, Montana, which made the drive to Chicago (with no driver side window or door access) a tad miserable in the hot, thunderstormin' Great Plains.
9. chilled in Chicago for a weekend at the K-Man's house.
10. took a meager 19-hour ride back to New York on the good old Greyhound.
11. flew to Panama City, Panama and drove west to the Costa Rican border in a single evening.
12. Swam in the Atlantic and the Pacific in a single day.

Saw:
1. The world's largest glacier (Nabesna Glacier, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park)
2. 9 of North America's 15 tallest mountains in a day (also Wrangell-St. Elias National Park)
3. The Andes
4. The Canadian Rockies
5. The extraordinary Mount McKinley
6. Machu Picchu
7. The Bridge of the Americas, spanning...
8. The Panama Canal
9. The world's largest motorcycle rally (Sturgis)
10. Flamingoes, ostriches, llamas, and wild horses in Patagonia (all within 10 minutes)
11. The world's second most polluted city (Santiago, Chile)
12 Arguably the world's worst road (The McCarthy Road, Alaska)
13. Kyle Hubert
14. what might be the gravesite of Crazy Horse, though its never been proven.
15. undoubtedly the gravesite of Jorge Luis Borges and Eva Peron in Buenos Aires' Recoleta Cemetary
16. the beginning of Interstate 90, in Tacoma
17. a tennis ball strike an eyeball at 100mph
18. the new Wong Kar-Wai film, 2046
19. a group of 11-year olds (3 of them students of mine) stage Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest" in Brooklyn Heights
20. The incredible Perito Moreno Glaciar, Patagonia, Argentina.

In the next few weeks I'd like to show you some of the pictures I've taken. I'd also like to recommend some places you should go. As far as 2006 is concerned, I'd like to spend the summer in Alaska, as I made a contact with an old miner who is looking for help prospecting a gold stake left dormant since WW2. I'm sure there is time for a stopoff in Panama sometime in the spring. And if Brazil doesn't beckon me back down there, a trip to Southeast Asia in December is hard to top. Let me know if you are interested. Guatemala comes highly recommended from the backpacking community. Colombia even moreso. You wouldn't have to twist my arm.

Also there is the small matter of tending to the ten remaining states I've yet to visit: Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, North Dakota, Minnesota, Hawaii, Tennessee, Oregon, Kentucky, and Michigan. Aside from Hawaii, I'd say the others we can save for 2046.

Welcome Home, Slugger.

2006-01-15T18:19:00.000-05:00

On January 24th, 2005, I rolled back into New York from Lima, Peru. It was 90 in Lima and 27 in New York. There was 10 inches of brand new snow all over Harlem, and the wind was turning it into an unbreakable crust of concrete.

On January 14th, 2006, I rolled back into New York from Coro, Venezuela. It was 90 in Coro and 51 in New York. Within 12 hours the temperature had plummeted to 22, a fresh 2 inches of sleet covered Brooklyn, and the wind was steady at 20mph. The Weather Channel reported, "Feels like 7."

Colon, Panama "Feels like 94." I can't "Feel my face."

On Hiatus

2005-12-25T14:58:00.000-05:00

On Wednesday, December 28th, I am jumping a plane to Panama City, Panama. I will be back in the USA on the 15th of January.

Panama has always excited my curiosity. It is a former Spanish colony that was liberated into an America colony, then granted its independence. The country boasts the closest distance between the Atlantic and Pacific (50 miles), more species of birds than all of North America, two distinct climates on each coast, a currency called the balboa, which has a picture of George Washington on the $1 balboa note and looks, feels, and spends exactly like a US Dollar because it is one. Oh, and the weather is heavenly.

When I originally booked the trip I decided to recycle the concept my roommate and I used on our trip to the South American continent last January. Fly into one city and out of another. Last year we flew into Buenos Aires, Argentina and out of Lima, Peru. Part of the trip's success depended upon this planning; "We don't need to be anywhere for a month, but we have to get to Lima. That's all we have to do." I booked a flight to Panama and out of Venezuela and said to myself, "I'll take care of the little details later."

The little details have become quite enormous challenges. Apparently, Colombia and Panama are separated by a jungle so dense that no roads pass through it. The Pan-American Highway, which in theory runs from Fairbanks, Alaska, to Rio Gallegos, Argentina (I've done both ends) actually ceases in Panama's Darien Gap. From there, you put your car on a cargo vessel and start again 90 miles into Colombia. The area is so difficult to traverse that the US government and every travel guide I've read suggests, "Don't even try it." Its run by Colombian drug traffickers and rebels. This is from the Lonely Planet Guide to Panama:

"The US State Department warns travelers not to cross an invisible like that extends from Punta Carreto to Yaviza and south to Punta Pina. The area from Nazaret to Punusa is like a low intensity war zone. The paramilitaries and rebels move in big groups armed with rocket launchers, flamethrowers, and machine guns. Panamanian border police buzz the sky in helicopter gunships and tote AK-47s. Travel to the towns of Pinogasa, Yape, Boca de Cupe and Paya is foolhardy at best."

The Darien Gap is considered by some to be the rainforest least affected by human contact. The Spanish lost thousands of men trying to get through it, and it has changed very little since western explorations in the 1500s. There are still no precise satellite images of the area. What does this mean? It means I gotta get on one of these cargo vessels.

So that can be arranged in Panama City, or Colon on the northern coast. This 4-day boat ride puts me in Cartagena, Colombia, where it is very easy to catch an 8-hour bus ride to Maracaibo, Venezeula. Flying from Panama to Colombia is certainly cheap, but problems arise when you end up in Bogota, and all the available bus routes to Venezeula are a tad dangerous.

Further complicating matters is the visa required for entering Venezuela by land. If you fly into Venezuela they could give a shit how long you stay or why you came. "You came on a plane! Oh my! Please rich man, stay with your iron bird a while!" Arriving by land or sea is totally different. You need to get a visa before you leave, and you need about 6 pieces of information that prove you exist. Employment letter, bank letter, birth certificate, passport, photographs, driver's license, immunization records etc... The Venezuelan Embassy is on 51st and Madison. I think I can get a visa on Tuesday but if they give me one of these, "Oh no, this won't be ready for six weeks," I'm screwed.

Plan C is just to pay for a $400 one-way flight to Caracas from Panama City. But since I feel like I got a JFK-Panama / Caracas-JFK flight for $600, and could have gone to India for a grand, AND I'd be missing a considerably more exciting traveling itinerary, I'm hesitant to do it. Part of me just wants to show up without the visa and say, "Oops, I forgot." But I don't know how to say "Oops" or "I don't want to go to jail" in Spanish.

But... as I've done more research, I realized Venezuela is not just a place to get to but a vacation in and of itself. A 6-day hike up a table-top mountain in southwestern Venezuela (on the Guyana/Brazil border) costs $300 all inclusive. You spend two days on top of a mountain where 70% of the plant and animal life exists only on this mountain. An isolated eco-system. Venezuela has rainforests, deserts, white and pink sand beaches, archipelagos, the Andes Mountains, the continent's largest lake, and 15 cents/gallon gasoline. So a flight might be worth the extra time in Venezuela.

In any case, this trip should prove to be completely unpredictable. I won't go on and on about things I hope to do because my itinerary at this point is shaky Sanskrit scrawled on a cough. What I do know is, thanks to Long Island University Hospital, I won't be getting Yellow Fever anytime in the next ten years. Uncle Sam and I say, "Screw you mosquitos."

Enjoy your New Years festivities. If you need anything please email.

Meme of Four

2005-12-25T14:43:00.000-05:00

My brother posted this on his website and I thought, hey, pretty clever. I think I'm gonna do one myself. Anyway, a nice Christmas post.

Four jobs you've had in your life: McDonald's cashier, Drive-in movie theater snack bar attendent, clothing store manager, sole proprietor.

Four movies you could watch over and over: American Movie, Casablanca, Back To The Future, The General.

Four places you've lived: Brooklyn, NY; Montreal, Quebec: Maastricht, Netherlands: Manhattan, NY.

Four TV shows you love to watch: Wow. Umm... Curb Your Enthusiasm (on DVD) and Daily Show clips from Comedy Central's website. No TV at home.

Four places you've been on vacation: The Yukon, Patagonia, Peru, Staten Island.

Four websites you visit daily: NYTimes.com, Yahoo! Mail, Guardian UK, and who am I kidding... my own.

Four of your favorite foods: hummus, salmon, granola, Tostitos with Lime.

Four places you'd rather be: Argentina, Argentina, Argentina, and the Lower East Side.

10 NY Cafes: d.b.a.

2005-12-23T19:58:00.000-05:00

d.b.a.
1st Avenue and East 2nd Street

It is only fitting that New York's finest coffeehouse doesn't serve coffee at all. d.b.a. is a bar, and most Friday and Saturday nights a despicable one. But on weeknights, and Sundays especially, the place is like Cheers For Intellectuals. "Sometimes you wanna go, where everybody reads Montaigne..." or something like that. It is not uncommon to see two Ph.Ds havin' it out at the bar, with the Oxford Dictionary underneath a pint of hand-drawn ale, a Scrabble board between them. Aside from one night - when a drunken 25-year old ballet dancer and model berated me for reading at the bar - books, taxes, short stories, legal briefs, subpoenas, conversation, and blank pages have always been welcomed.

Recommended:
"The Juice" - Espolon Anejo, $11/glass.
Fuller's Special Bitter, $5/pint
Booker's Small-Batch Bourbon, $11/glass

10 NY Cafes, #2: The Hungarian Pastry Shop

2005-12-22T19:30:00.000-05:00

The Hungarian Pastry Shop
Amsterdam Avenue at 111th Street

Across from St. John the Divine (nation's largest cathedral, eerily beautiful and unfinished) this place has invented a new approach to cafe atmosphere that has yet to catch on anywhere else. No music. Thank the fucking Lord, there is one place in this fucking city you can go where there is no music playing. Even in the daytime its dark in here (I don't know how they do it) but the walls, tables, low-low ceilings, and obtrusive columns all make this brilliant atmosphere secondary to the main attraction: the coffee. With so many fantastic (and incredibly simple) coffee drinks, you can spend a day and a half in the place and never notice the passing time. You order at the counter and then they bring you your drinks. Table/counter service hybrid. The Russian and Viennese coffees are both highly recommended. Everyone is smarter than you, but the competition is healthy. They don't get much better than this.

10 NY Cafes, #3: The Cheyenne Diner

2005-12-22T19:14:00.000-05:00

The Cheyenne
9th Avenue and West 33rd Street

So much the dive bar of Manhattan's cafe culture that it doesn't even qualify as "cafe culture," The Cheyenne exudes a certain swagger that the rest of the list just can't hack. I like the burgers, I mean, they're okay. The counter isn't that great. The lighting leaves something to be desired, and if you could see out the windows the view would leave something to be desired too. A sad sack of a place, it is one of the few diners on the West Side that hasn't turned into a diner. Its dying to be renovated and hip. So until that happens, come here and enjoy the strange homonculi of Manhattan nightlife that happen across this murkwater oasis at the anus of the Lincoln Tunnel. And grab a booth all to yourself, because this place will not last.

Oh, and the coffee? Not that great. I mean, its watery and served in short, wide cup. But its fine. Really, I mean, who needs to be picky?

10 NY Cafes, #4: Dean & Deluca

2005-12-21T21:58:00.000-05:00

Dean & Deluca
University Place and East 10th Street

This is a grocery store chain found in posh neighborhoods. This is their coffee shop. You can get a beer or a glass of wine (which I recommend), because the coffee is no different than any other chain store. Big "American" cappuccinos (basically lattes) in enormous paper cups. No "for here" mugs. As for the ambience: Dean & Deluca ads masquerading as "art," the same music over and over and over, and the brightest lights in any establishment in New York except maybe Bellevue Hospital. But there are great pluses: a horseshoe shaped counter for getting to know people (the bright lights add to the congenial feel), enormous space between tables, great tile floors, cathedral ceilings, big windows overlooking University Place. The place is a workaholic's dream, a quintessential New York cafe: efficient, clean, scholarly, and charmingly overpriced.

10 NY Cafes, #5: Sicaffe

2005-12-21T00:03:00.000-05:00

Sicaffe
Lexington Avenue at 70th Street

In a stretch of five blocks, from 69th to 74th, Lexington Avenue has 11 places where a person can get a cappuccino. The Upper East Side is far and away the place in the city where strolling, contemplating, staring, chatting, and shopping are the main cultural contributions: a testament to the wealth and leisure of its residents. Sicaffe is the best of the neighborhood. It is a chain store of sorts, though I believe its an Italian chain with only two Manhattan locations (the other is on John Street). The place is brightly lit, white, and small. What separates this place from any other "efficiency" coffee houses in Manhattan is its absolutely incredible espresso. This is, without a doubt, the best place to get a cappuccino in New York. The difference between good espresso and bad espresso has little to do with taste. What makes a coffee here so much better than a coffee anywhere else is that when you leave this place you feel euphoric. Absolute bliss. The caffeine is some fine shit, I mean really, homegrown or hydroponic or some shit. Damn son, its good. Its also very easy to get a hell of a lot of work done, as the music is inobtrusive and the patrons keep to themselves. The sterility of the decor is offset by the comfortable chairs and tables. Highly recommended.

10 NY Cafes, #6: Payard

2005-12-20T11:33:00.000-05:00

Payard
Lexington Avenue at 74th Street

The crown jewel of posh cafe living, there are some tightly woven arrangements of tables and chairs in the center of the entryway. In the back is a restaurant that does a $50 per person all inclusive lunch. "Tea," served from 3-5, is $30 and includes some nibbles and some scones. I think its safe to say you'd never want to go anywhere but the bar. The bar has a bartender who makes cappuccinos from a machine that does everything. Its like a bionic espresso maker in the middle of a posh bistro. But put your elbows on the bar and dig in: the four dollar espresso drinks are the cheapest thing in the house, and the service is professional and brisk. The crowd can be a little geriatric at times, but the posh-ness makes you feel infinite and a hell of a lot younger than everyone else. A damned fine cup of coffee, and real lumps of brown sugar (none of that granulated bullshit). A great stop-off between museums.

10 NY Cafes, #7: Cafe Pick-Me-Up

2005-12-20T11:21:00.000-05:00

Cafe Pick-Me-Up
Avenue A and East 9th Street

What a fucking terrible name. The coffee is average, the tables are not tables at all: a strange disarray of wobbly desks and nightstands. The music is usually very good, but the service is borderline hostile. There seems to be a hell of a lot of Eastern European women chatting away. However, Pick-Me-Up has very recently exploded. I used to be able to get a table without even glancing around the room. Now you've got to stalk. I think the East Village community has finally resigned itself to the fact that it will never have a truly great cafe, so this place gets mention because it is by far the best place in the neighborhood. I wish there was more I could say about it. The backroom is like a separate cafe, completely out of view from the business at the counter. Wood interior, dull lighting, great crowd. Windows looking onto Avenue A. I love this place.

10 NY Cafes, #8: Max's Cafe

2005-12-19T01:02:00.000-05:00

Max's Cafe
122nd Street and Amsterdam Avenue

This is the only cafe on my survey that has couches. I have always despised couches in a cafe. The place becomes lounge-y, people talk louder and get a bit too comfortable. Coffee has never made me comfortable. That's why they serve those brownies, muffins, and pastries everywhere. Here's a little espresso to make you edgy, here's a little butter and sugar to calm you down. This place would be "one of those fucking places" if not for a few unique features. One: the music is always stimulating and sultry. Two: The front windows dominate the place, and what you see is Harlem. Three: The brick walls are humbling; they suck up light and make everything look, well, mysterious. Not a daytime cafe. My old roommate and I used to come here when at certain points in the late evening, everything in the world seemed amiss. Practically any existential crisis can be smoothed out at one of the rough wood tables at Max's. And the women... ah the women...

10 NY Cafes, #9: 71 Irving Place

2005-12-18T00:55:00.000-05:00

71 Irving Place
Irving Place and 17th Street

71 is a below street level, one room haunt between Union Square and Gramercy Park, a few blocks up from Irving Plaza. What makes this place a gem is its tables. They are crammed and strewn half-hazardly (a different arrangement every day) and there is a beautiful low ceiling to keep your thoughts from getting too lofty and pretentious. The house blend is probably the best in the city. Although the mugs are nice, clean, white, sitting with one of their paper cups at one of their beautiful circular tables reminds you that there is no unnecessary pomp and circumstance surrounding the New York cafe. The place is lit like a dim study, which makes up for the fact that they close shortly after dusk. Its always dusk at 71; you're always savioring a few minutes of downtime before a night on the town.

10 NY Cafes, #10: The French Roast

2005-12-17T00:25:00.000-05:00

If we had to spend a lifetime confined to one institution, I'd pick the library. If we had to spend a lifetime in a commercial establishment, I wouldn't pick the bookstore. I'd pick the cafe. Sure, I'd get scurvy (there's no Vitamin C in any respectable cafe), and progressively filthier (those bathrooms are not washrooms), but I'd be happy. In the next few posts I'll be reviewing ten great cafes.

Briefly, the necessary criteria for a great cafe.

1. Unobtrusive music.
2. Lighting, whether dim or bright, must be consistent
3. No focal point. You shouldn't have to look at anything, and the seats can't be arranged to that effect.
4. Women.

That's it. That's all you need.

The French Roast
11th Street and 6th Avenue / 85th Street and Broadway

Of the two locations I prefer the down. It's more of a restaurant til about ten, but then the eaters tend to pack up and the coffee drinkers arrive. If it wasn't open 24 hours it would be just another French cafe. But the tile work and tin ceilings are reminiscent of late 19th century Paris, where the cafe was invented and was king. It is a desperate rip-off, but the atmosphere is irrepressible. After 2am, no place in New York is this charming. Cleverly placed mirrors, a fully stocked bar, and lattes served in bowls. After your third bowl, well, it may be 3 am but you can still get a damned good omelette. The prices are relatively inexpensive for what you're getting, which is a coffee theme-park. The real EuroDisney is on 6th Ave. The cappuccinos are top notch.

Raymond Carver In Brief (exactly as he would have wanted)

2005-12-15T22:02:00.000-05:00

As of late, I have become increasingly disinterested in writers with conservative, distinguished, and long careers. Although I like the infallibility a James or a Hemingway affords you while you peruse his bookstore shelf, I've recently been drawn to writers who lack the Noble qualifications. Richard Wright, Joseph Brodsky, Theodore Dreiser, Raymond Carver, and . Carver is never consistent; even within his best collections you back yourself into a corner with him for a number of stories before you emerge in the daylight of his best prose. He has five stories that have no rival, at least in the last 40 years, and its nice to be able to say that about a writer. Although I enjoy Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, and Don Delillo, I cannot point to a stack of pages by any of them and say, "You won't find better by anyone." Carver has these five stories and for the reasons below, he's the best short story writer of the past generation.

Cathedral

This is by far the most anthologized piece of Carver's writing; so effortlessly teach-able that I hesitate to say anything about it. You have the unreliable, biased narrator; the story within a story; the effects of drugs and alcohol on perception; the realist's conventions; the believable dialogue, and the simplicity of physical presence over action. Here's something that may do nothing for you but I find it to be a unique example of a writer's confidence in his narrator's limited scope:

The camera moved to a cathedral outside Lisbon. The differences in the Portuguese cathedral compared with the French and Italian were not that great. But they were there. Mostly the interior stuff. Then something occurred to me, and I said, “Something has occurred to me..."

Where I'm Calling From

The tradition of American storytelling has always existed as an inherited tradition, and the inheritance has two lineages: the literary story and the oral story. There are convenient places in time where these two styles coexisted in straightforward examples, I'd say it was Henry James contrasted by Mark Twain, Washington Irving versus James Fenimore Cooper, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Vonnegut and Updike, the list goes on and on. Carver falls sharply in the oral tradition in this story. The first lines:

"JP and I are on the front porch at Frank Martin's drying-out facility. Like the rest of us at Frank Martin's, JP is first and foremost a drunk. But he's also a chimney sweep."

The loose, elliptical telling allows for form to be hinted at, never dominant, which is the great skill of all descendents of the oral tradition. We feel the narrator lending structure with his attachment to the story, not with his conventions. Resolution never satisfies the first person narration. We enjoy telling stories about ourselves, but Carver reminds us that our self is never resolved.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

This story has no hero. It has no characters. It has four vaguely sketched people drinking and talking in a kitchen. The silences are unbearable. This is an extraordinary story.

Careful

Careful is narrated from the last vision; a narrator so close to his own abyss, that what is offered cannot sustain any reader for any length of time. 10 pages scrapped together. A man sits on his couch in the afternoon and decides there is absolutely nothing wrong with drinking warm champagne. By the end of the story he sees nothing wrong with drinking warm champagne directly from the bottle. Along the way he is paid a visit by his wife. The details are his, not hers, so the reader understands very little about the past or the future. Between drinking from a glass and a bottle, she needs to be "careful." There is earwax plugging up one of his ears. She gets it out. That's the story. By the last page I realized, for the first time in a piece of literature, that this was the last page. Even when I finished Camus' The Stranger or Kafka's "Metamorphosis," I thought, "I'll hear this voice again. Someone will assume this voice in another piece." But the narration in Careful is fractured, unreliable, instinctively self-destructive; when it leaves the reader (ever so calmly), we feel our own loneliness and not his.

A Good, Small Thing

A tough situation for any writer to handle. A death that Carver invents and discards. He kills a kid who has never spoken in the story, does it to build emotional tension within his characters, not to get sympathy from us. Doesn't go into it (car crash), doesn't give us the sobbing and the woe-is-me's that are easier to write. The voices of the grieving parents are lifted, and we are left to listen with them as a man who knows no one involved in the story we're reading teaches people who are more experienced in life than he is precisely how to grieve. Can't say enough about it so I won't.
---

All of the above stories can be found in the collection, Where I'm Calling From; the collection Cathedral has all but one.

A Victory Over Tyranny

2005-12-06T14:04:00.000-05:00

For those of you who have often pondered the retirement activities of your former 11th grade History teachers, I have a splendid update to share with you about mine. On December 14, 2004, Jim Coccia, in the Open Forum of the Queensbury School Board Meeting, offered a suggestion, the only suggestion, on behalf of the general public. He brought up the issue that the Open Forum of the Queensbury School Board Meeting should be moved to the beginning, presumably so he could leave immediately afterwards. Well, this fall, I am pleased to report that Jim Coccia, my completely insane 11th grade History teacher, has gotten his wish. The Open Forum now comes first. Congratulations Mr. Coccia, for continuing to be a pain in the ass of an organization that was a pain in my ass for almost a decade. Keep up the good fight.

Mr. Coccia's requests and inquiries at school board meetings have only gotten more monotonous over the years. Yet they have become so persistent that the county clerk who types the meeting minutes often adds small modifiers such as, "Jim Coccia again asked..." or "...and Jim Coccia added..." He has also begun listing Coccia's name last in the section "Other Members," as a sort of big-name supporting actor of a Hollywood blockbuster: "Starring Tom Cruise, Bruce Willis, Emilio Estavez, Tom Berenger... and Jim Coccia!"

Now that he's retired, I'm proud to see the old scoundrel is changing history, rather than fabricating it.

The Book of Daniel, Part Two

2005-12-04T12:50:00.000-05:00

I meet with Daniel (an 11-year old student of mine) every Friday. In his weekly assignment, and because of the Thanksgiving holiday I got a double dose of him this week. I asked him to write a paragraph satisfying the following guidelines:

1. Write a letter about how long it takes you to accomplish simple tasks.
2. Explain my advice for correcting this flaw. Develop your own solution.
3. Address the letter to an audience of your choice.
4. Use the following words: bustle, banish, blackball, brash, brutish, bias, botch, banal.

Dear Mr. Nobody,

Mark wants to banish me for being slow. Mark's very banal mind thought of a british [sic] plan to move me faster. I feel bias against what Mark wants to do. I want to botch Mark's plan by sneaking up on him and hitting him until he gives up. I don't want to bustle through my evil plan so I'm gonna take my time.

But Mark will blackball my plan because I'm too slow. That's why Mark is so brash. Because he will lose.

Thank you Mr. Nobody,
Daniel

The Email Archive 1997-2004, Entry #6.

2005-12-03T00:01:00.000-05:00

It's been a long time since I've violated the privacy of my friends, so I decided to break out a fresh edition of The Email Archive. Why do I have emails dating back to 1997? Because of the horrible program I used to use to check my email all those years ago, my old computer stored every email I ever received. So like a beautiful nostalgia file, I can dig through the waste of correspondence for truly remarkable tidbits. So as not to offend the sender, I have blacked out the names here as best I could.

The first email is from one friend to me, after a night of heavy drinkin'. The second is another friend's response, after I forwarded the first email to him.

Enjoy!

To: malkmus@global2000.net
Date: Sun, 5 Dec 1999 00:33:14 -0500
Subject: Re: hey XXXXXX
X-Gateway: NASTA Gate 2.0 beta 3 for FirstClass(R)
X-Status: A

Lo.
Holy shoit I'm hammered.. It; smy vbietrhday.. Hehe.. Its; been a
ogddo night for me.. i got to start it out with a 4 ack of Murphy;s
Irishe Stout. .much like guiness.. Then I have been drinknign starginh
vodka and runm froth erest of then ight.. No vicodin ;left// Wish oyu
were here. I had a great birthday.. wlhtough I haven ;t
gotten anoytihing graet.. A good frien of mine Honey gave me some root
beer and ice cream for a prsent.. Unfortunately se wasn;t therewhenI
got back reom from the gym.. She rules.. alhtough I am not dating her I
found out she and her boyfriend broke up today.. I would like ot ask
her out.. but I don't want to ruin a friendship.. Im confused and
depressed aout the whole situation.. Anyway.. thanks for the e-amail
and all. acan;t wait to get home to [party withyour ass.. I'l catch ya
later.. Hope yaoi can understand this meeasege.. I know I am really
drunk.. Adios..

diggers

To: "Low"
From: XXXXXX@pobox.mcgill.ca
Subject: Re: oh man
Date: Tue, 7 Dec 1999 02:23:36 -0000
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal

fuckin hilarious..wow, i really enjoyed that. tack that one right up there
next to the erection photo and we're well on our way to an outstanding
XXXXX collage. actually the only sentence that is completely correct and
coherent is 'i know i am really drunk' . i could almost smell the booze.

Saratoga Thanksgiving.

2005-12-01T13:02:00.000-05:00

Last year I hosted Thanskgiving for the first time, in Harlem of all places. The attendees included my 50-year old Haitian doorman, a 30-year old Japanese student of mine, my 28-year old Californian boss, Floridian sisters, and a crew of family members. This year I trudged up to the Arctic brutality of Saratoga Springs, to visit old memories.

On Friday, November 25th, I visited the Starbucks on Broadway in Saratoga. It was not my first visit and, predicting the trend of future Matt Spence sightings (an old, old friend of mine), not to be my last. But the visit made me a little heavy with nostalgia for a version of me who would have thrown a brick in my face if he’d seen me in there.

I would write in my journal at age sixteen, looking out of a café window onto a casually bustling Broadway one Sunday afternoon, that Saratoga Springs was “a two café town.” For me, it was never a horse racing town (the locals hit up the Saratoga Raceway usually once a year, to show the tourists who owns the place), never the turning point of the American Revolution, and never a college town. There was Uncommon Grounds at the north end of Broadway, and Madeleine’s at the southern end.

At first, the idea of the Starbucks moving in appeared less threatening to me than it should have been. It was to occupy the corner of Broadway at Washington Street; a place where, if you were to measure out Broadway in terms of a “strip” (that section of every town that’s a little more lively and compact than the rest), Washington ended Saratoga. Washington itself starts at Broadway, veers up a hill, and merges with the quiet residential streets west of downtown. There are two abandoned churches, and a Domino’s Pizza the size of my apartment on Washington. That’s it. I thought of the Starbucks as a laughable extension of a strip gone dry. In hindsight, I realize that not only was the chain coffee shop placed directly across the street from Madeleine’s (the less fashionable side of Broadway, but still across the street), it was between the 200-odd room Adelphi Hotel, and a proposed Banana Republic that would be up in a year. By the time the green awning had been fitted with green painted spotlights (no neon allowed?), Madeleine’s had vanished into thin air. Now there are three monstrous facades on the far side of Starbucks, making Congress Park a part of “the strip,” and Starbucks just another face in the line.

Madeleines: The entryway room was fitted with wrought-iron chairs on a white-tile floor. The back room had its books shelved and its plush seating. Matt and I would go back there and drink exaggerated coffee drinks that would render us incapacitated. Whip-creamed.

Maybe I'm just inventing this, but I'm pretty sure I walked down Broadway the evening the doors were shut. There was Madeleine, all alone, still wearing that apron, her hair pulled back in a knot slightly to one side. She unplugged the display cases and stacked the dishes into boxes. I walked back to Uncommon Grounds, a little lost from the speed of the change on my favorite street. Madeleine would open a new place just around the corner, not a café, but something Saratoga probably needed a little bit more. The Natural Foods Café opened about two months later, and although it has none of the charm of Madeleine’s, it has become an essential part of downtown Saratoga. A year after Madeleine’s demise, a third coffee house returned to Saratoga, Bailey’s, replacing an ugly bar at the corner of Phila and Putnam. It is, ironically, right across the street from The Natural Foods Café. And it has, ironically, become an ugly bar.

The last time I saw Matt Spence was in March; I can’t recall what brought me back to Saratoga, but he made a concerted effort to tell me about a new coffee house just opened on Broadway. He said that it occupied the previous home of Madeleine’s. I told him we had to go. He said, “It’s called the Opera Café, they play opera. That’s their shtick.” He was right. Opera greeted us. I was looking for something to remind me of Madeleine’s; the tiled floors, the strange stairwell in the back that descended to nowhere, the wrought-iron chairs. Nothing like it. Drywall painted red. No places to sit. Opera blasting. We left without ordering a thing.

Instead of giving up on coffee houses when Madeleine’s shut down, I have done the opposite. I am the consummate café snob. There are the clean, white, efficient coffee houses with their white paper cups and generous portions, and there are the dusky, quiet places where work and conversation get done, where either way the patrons conspire accordingly. Then there are the chains. I owe my ability to walk into a café and discern either, “The people in here are brilliant/full of shit” from my time at Madeleines.

So this weekend I went back to Starbucks to watch the longest Matt Spence performance in history. For the opener, I was treated to dinner with the man himself and his girlfriend (fiancee never came from his lips but it slipped from hers) at their cozy apartment at the corner of …Washington Street and Elm. Still a couple of churches and a Dominos, it now offers a few new posh residences just out of reach of Broadway. After dinner, we strolled to the end of his street for the performance.

Saratoga still has a slew of great places, that make a trip home for leisure or obligation a rewarding experience. But if the Parting Glass, Hattie’s, Caffe Lena, The Saratoga Public Library, Congress Park, and now, Matt’s intimate peak-roofed apartment, all vanish like Madeleines did almost ten years ago, I’ll be going back to Montreal for Thanksgiving, and expecting Mom to move accordingly.

Coca Cola Worldwide!

2005-11-29T01:16:00.000-05:00

home_06-1

One of my most disturbing habits is to visit corporate websites that target small overseas markets in charmingly out-of-touch ways. One of my favorites is Coca-Cola.com, which operates a number of websites in countries where the most organized governing body is ... well, probably the Coca-Cola Bottling Co.

If you have the time, check out these marvelously absurd links to Coca-Cola in Africa.

My friend Chad loves Coke.

This country doesn't even have its own website.

Yeah, you wish you had the best Coke Website Hat and a stable goverment.

But you ain't got nothin' on this.

This is part of France, at least until Coke says so.

The site is in English, the official language, which 4% of the population speaks.

The lowest life expectancy in the world, at 33.5 years. 40% AIDS rate. Yeah, we got Coke.

The Book of Daniel

2005-11-29T00:19:00.000-05:00

I have an 11-year old student who lives in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. His name is Daniel. I try to keep at least one 6th grader in my group of students (most range from ages 15-17) because if you can entertain an 11-year old, you can teach anyone. But Daniel, for all of his math wizardry, really craps the bag when it comes to English.

I know that sounded a bit harsh, but that expression (he has most certainly never heard it) would make him laugh his ass off. Daniel makes me work for my pay like no other student I have. He stands for the entire lesson, gives me no sugar-coating ("JD Salinger writes stories because he wants to bore people" he has said), and constantly tries to bribe me into ending the lessons early (his mother gives him the cash, and he pays me).

His parents are Russian and do not speak English at home, so I am the hired hand who gives him weekly instruction in writing. His problems with grammar are no different from other English as a second language students I've worked with: can't distinguish between prepositions, can't put new vocabulary words into context, can't spell, etc. We work on extending both his knowledge of grammar and his vocabulary. Then we write. But his writing is goddamned hilarious.

Here is one of his sample essays. In this assignment, I laid out the following guidelines:

1. Write a letter about your handwriting, specifically how awful it is.
2. Argue that you should be allowed to continue holding your pen incorrectly.
3. Contrast your opinion with mine.
4. Use the following words: amiss, administer, adjoin, artificial, assert, advice.
5. Select an appropriate audience for your letter.

Dear Piece of Apple Pie,

The advice Mark told me which was changing my handwriting is amiss. Mark thinks its time I administer a new method of handwriting. I must assert loud and clearly that Mark is a disgrace to human beings and is completely a retard for thinking my handwriting sucks. I know my handwriting isn't natural but Mark thinks it is artificial.

The party that thinks my handwriting is good and the party that thinks my handwriting is bad will adjoin and discuss ways to punish Mark.

Daniel.

PS I will be looking forward to eating you.

This week I've promised to play xbox with him after our lesson. I'm a little intimidated, because he's always playing video games when I come over, and he stands THE WHOLE TIME. Plus I've never played before, and I don't think losing to him in some sci-fi fighting game will make life any easier for me.

Listmania Part Three.

2005-11-07T21:40:00.000-05:00

My friends, you see, are into making lists. I've tried to determine where all this began, but really it has no root that I can pinpoint. I remember Pat and Bryan making an epic list of "Worst Upstate New York Towns," ranking them on a series of categories such as cultural attractions, sidewalks, downtown amenities, and smell. They drove all the way to Ticonderoga, just to settle on, I believe, Hudson Falls as the worst town in Upstate New York. I could be wrong. Then I remember seeing High Fidelity and thinking, "This guy is into the most superfluous list-making. I am so much more hardcore." As if you were unaware of my list-fetishism or my ability to label degrees of "harcore-d-ness," I am up to another list. This one's in the album vein, and its due in December. I've decided to put down a blueprint for my submission to the big bad Albums List here, and I can work from this. Do you agree? Disagree? Perhaps we need more readers? Perhaps fewer list posts would be a start.

Anyway, here she be:

The Preliminary Top 50 Best Albums Ever List Subject To Change Etc Etc Etc

1. The Rolling Stones, Exile On Main Street
2. Nas, Illmatic
3. Charles Mingus, Mingus Ah Um
4. James Brown, Live at the Apollo 1960ish
5. Frank Sinatra, In the Wee Small Hours
6. Robert Johnson, King of the Delta Blues Singers
7. A Tribe Called Quest, The Low End Theory
8. Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited
9. Kanye West, Late Registration
10. Orchestra Baobab, Pirate’s Choice
11. Bjork, Homogenic
12. Wu-Tang Clan, Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
13. Miles Davis, Seven Steps To Heaven
14. Stevie Wonder, Innervisions
15. Slick Rick, The Great Adventures of Slick Rick
16. Joni Mitchell, Blue
17. The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs
18. Ornette Coleman, The Shape Of Jazz To Come
19. Jay-Z, Reasonable Doubt
20. Skip James, Blues From The Delta
21. Blind Willie McTell, Atlanta Twelve String
22. Manu Chao, Clandestino
23. Buena Vista Social Club
24. Funkadelic, Maggot Brain
25. Taj Mahal and Toumani Diabate, Kalunjun
26. Cassandra Wilson, Blue Moon Daughter
27. Buddy Guy, Stone Crazy!
28. Ray Charles, Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music
29. Bill Cosby, …Is A Very Funny Fellow, Right!
30. Dominguinhos, Brazil Classics 3
31. The Roots, Things Fall Apart
32. Mississippi Fred McDowell
33. OutKast, Stankonia
34. Chuck Berry, The Great Twenty-Eight
35. Jimmy Smith, The Sermon
36. 2Pac, Me Against The World
37. Gil-Scott Heron, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
38. Dizzie Gillespie y Machito, Afro-Cuban Jazz Moods
39. Cannonball Adderley, Somethin’ Else
40. Grant Green, Idle Moments
41. Cab Calloway, Hi De Ho Man 1930-33
42. Portishead, Dummy
43. The Geto Boys, We Can't Be Stopped
44. Lee Dorsey, The New Lee Dorsey
45. Jarabe de Palo, De Vuelta Y Vuelta
46. Julio Iglesias, Tango
47. Public Enemy, Fear Of A Black Planet
48. Dexter Gordon, Go
49. Terry Callier, Occasional Rain
50. Jimi Hendrix, Electric Ladyland

How to Throw a Dinner Party for 45 People

2005-10-29T20:25:00.000-04:00

Last weekend Danielle and I had our housewarming party, "HOUSEWARMED!" officially marking the 6th month anniversary of our cohabitation. It was the half-full/half-empty point in the lease, and if we didn't do it then we'd never get around to it. What transpired was thoroughly educational, and well, as close to perfect as any party our diminutive apartment could handle. Be advised:

1. Roommates with opposite work schedules will have difficulties planning large-scale events.

- Neither of us was around for the week's planning, so at least 7 To-Do lists were tacked to the fridge.

-We did our grocery shopping at midnight the night before, after two equally long and stressful workdays. The bottle of wine at dinner got us through a concert in the evening, but by midnight we were both on empty.

-However, it was required of us to put at least 3 good hours of prep cooking in before we could rest. What could have proven to have derailed the party actually turned out to be quite a lot of fun. I announced, grating sweet potatoes in the bathroom sink at 3am, "I'm already convinced we should do this again." Danielle, knee-deep in a pound of spinach, heartily concurred.

2. Arrange all of the evening's cooking, timing the arrival of each dish and the schedule of its baking.

-The 17 dishes served that evening were on a precise schedule. We also knew, with 25 guests scheduled to arrive (of which 20 could be safely predicted) that not everyone would be able to eat everything. We planned the entree arrivals to the minute, ensuring a swift and well-oiled operation. Only one plastic mixing bowl melted on a lit burner. Only one small grease fire.

-We made sure all of the dishes were as edible as possible without the usual "banquet style" plate stuffing. No "all at once" eating meant that people could chat up what they tried and liked. This allowed some anticipation to build between dishes. And kept people from getting a plate of food at 7:30 and not wanting anymore food for the rest of the night. We essentially starved our guests, teased them I suppose, for the entire evening, and it worked.

-We kept portion sizes small, to avoid leftovers, and planned so that our bedrooms (which acted as separate dining rooms) would each get half of the entrees. That way it did not depend on what you like and dislike but where you happened to be sitting. This worked in theory and in practice to some degree but...

-We did not predict 45 people would show up.

3. You'll be cooking all night.

-Even when the cooking finally subsided to a degree at around 9ish (a full 2 hours after we began cooking) I found it nearly impossible to acclimate myself to my own party. I went into Danielle's bedroom first just to see who was about, and discovered everyone was completely shitfaced. Somewhere a dozen bottles of wine, 3 bottles of whiskey, a 12 pack of beer, and one bottle each of rum, gin, vodka, and tequila had evaporated. I stayed for a minute and then said, "I'll come back when I'm drunk. I wonder if Danielle needs help with those stuffed peppers." It took me til about 12:30am to reach the level of drunkenness most guests reached at about 7:45. Hell, Pat was warmed up for the party by 2pm, a full 5 hours before he showed.

4. Invitations should go out early, but not too early.

-We sent out invitations on the Tuesday before, allowing just enough time to take someone's Saturday evening who had a Saturday evening to spare. We missed the people who had already made out-of-town plans, but also snagged a lot of people (THE AUTHOR OF THIS BLOG is notorious for such behavior) who get emails in advance of large events and let them get buried in Life's Inbox.

5. Get some help.

-My friend John heard me griping about the stress of preparations and offered to help. He did maybe three errands at best, but those errands saved us an hour on the day of the party that we did not have.

-Another helpful piece of advice would be to keep a strict start time to only a handful of guests. We both picked a handful of people to tell "It starts right at 6" and told the rest "7ish." This meant that we had a few minutes to enjoy ourselves before the chaos erupted. And it did, when about 20 showed up in the same 10 minute span.

6. Enlist the help of a notorious socialite.

-During the party, I advise that you find two or three individuals who can keep the atmosphere lively while you're in the kitchen. Since it is your party, people will expect you to talk about your apartment, your decorations, your rent, everything. But you will be cooking. At times, people found their way into the kitchen to make chatter, and all I remember from those conversations was that they weren't talking about the acorn squash, which had to be warmed 20 minutes prior to serving. I now know why an MC and a cook have never been confused. Except Chef Raekwon of the Wu-Tang Clan, but then I've never seen him cook anything.

7. Steak is very popular.

-It broke my heart to see the disappointed faces when, after the 2 pounds of strip steak ascended from beef purgatory to cow heaven in less time than it took to construct that metaphor, the Chilean Sea Bass hit the table. "Oh, $20-a-pound fresh Chilean Sea Bass. Fuck that." Those who got to have their fill of it had one of the best (and easiest) dishes we came up with. The sliced strip steak, dangerously tasty, inspired a bloodthirsty rampage. Next time you consider feeding that many people, keep at least thirty pound of ground chuck on hand in case of emergency.

8. Thank your guests.

-It poured like hell, there wasn't enough food, we didn't buy any mixers, the place got cramped (cozy, but cramped), and neither of us did any real "hosting," but we want to say thank you for all the amazing guests who showed. We really truly appreciate it, and had so much fun cooking for all of you that it wouldn't have mattered if five or fifty showed up.

The Upstate Chronicles, Vol. 1

2005-10-24T11:15:00.000-04:00

Rural legends abound in the quiet filth-beauty of upstate New York, a place I occasionally call home. Washington Irving, in his "The Sketch Book," gave the Catskill region more mystique than it probably deserves, but no one has yet captured the American imagination by writing about the Adirondack region a hundred miles further north. Although I have no intention of changing that, I will from time to time collect some delicious tidbits from the Great Caucasian North, and pass them on to you.

In this story below, taken from an email, an English professor colleague of my father describes a recent car accident. He does so in one continuous compound sentence, with enjambments used for effect. He signs it with style. The title of the piece, one of the many great things about it, perfectly summates the storytelling techniques of the Upstater. Here it is. Enjoy.

"Check it out...."

. . .Check it out: I'm driving on one of my favorite roads Rt 35 Rd. in Ft. Anne which is kool to navigate because it's all apogeed-perigeed-troughed-crested-helixed wickedly fun to flash-blast in my light-ended Sonoma in four-wheel drifts and I'm quite good at it--Rob can vouch for that--having had plenty of practice doing hundreds of doughnuts in late-night-closed parking lots with friends growing up in Cleveland which is one of the snowiest cities in the country and so like I said I come up on one of Rt. 35's awesome curves and from the direction I'm traveling--east--this particular section of the road is fairly well-banked with the biggest problem being that most of the curve is blind but that makes things only that much more exciting naturally--there's always the envelope you see--and right as I come around the corner to accelerate up the rise there's this gravel- and rock-strewn mars-scape appearing ex nihilo obviously part of a dump truck's load just lying there covering both lanes and I mean pea-to-baseball-sized detritus and suddenly I'm riding the wild surf
attempting to negotiate
these totally fucked-up-centrifugal-centripetal-coefficient-of-friction-second-law-of-thermodynamics vectors and like I say instead of pavement I've got a surface behaving more like ice #9 from the Bizzaro world so I try to straighten her out
as I drift when BLAM! right at my shoulder and head level I hit a steel pole inches from my head the pole bends completely to the ground from the force but
in so doing prevents
the bottom half of the truck from rotating as quickly as the top and so
having already spun around 180 degrees horizontally I'm simultaneously barrel rolling
in the air 180 degrees and down the slight embankment me sitting there
upside down like I'm in some fucking Mercury capsule unlock my seat belt upon which I land with a thud on my left shoulder and head and on all manner of broken shit mostly glass--some got stuck in my head--a samaritan motorist ducking his head in the window the rooftop now flush with the ground asking if I'm okay and after a quick inventory I decide I am and crawl out through what used to be the driver's side window and naturally an ambulance firetruck police sheriff
(did you know that that word comes from shire reeve?)
even the Post Star if you can believe it (photo and story!)
at which point there are the obligatory
"You-shore-are-lucky-s!
and I guess they're right because this morning I'm not even aching anywhere and I think I got all the glass out of my head and left hand and the truck's lights are still on but the cd player has cut out I can't remember what tune was playing all I recall is skidding spinning and looking out my window at this solid steel pole approaching at light speed which hits my driver door panel and leaves a completely crumpled nastiness on the truck and so now the police say they're going to look for who dumped the load but for some reason I don't care and I didn't get cited because I'd done nothing wrong--for a change--the action being pretty kool not depite of but because of
all the adrenaline and endorphins that flooded my system for hours
and of course a mild case of shock which is always an interesting state of reality I have it even as I write this.

Barnacle Bill, the Sailor Man

Memphis Songs.

2005-10-18T02:08:00.000-04:00

Memphis.jpg

Congratulations to Cleek, who nailed the Memphis question in high fashion, picking 3 the first time and 4 the second time, for a total of 7 songs. After all, I got Portastatic's "memphis" from you. Bryan snagged three and Jonny Cigar got 4, though he was joking and couldn't match his invented song titles with the musicians.

Here they are:

1. Marc Cohn, Walking In Memphis
2. Louis Armstrong, Memphis Blues
3. Pixies, Letter to Memphis
4. Portastatic, memphis
5. Dylan, "Stuck Inside of Mobile..." from Blonde on Blonde
6. Dylan, "Stuck Inside of Mobile..." from Hard Rain
7. Dean Martin, Night Train to Memphis
8. Colorblind James Experience, Considering a Move to Memphis
9. King Curtis, Memphis Soul Stew
10. Memphis Nomads, Memphis Nomads, Don't Pass Your Judgement
11. Rufus Thomas, The Memphis Train
12. Percy Wilson, Katy Left Memphis
13. Percy Wilson, I'm Going to Memphis
14. Beatles, Memphis Tennessee
15. Chuck Berry, Memphis
16. Neil Diamond, Memphis Streets

And if I decide to consider the Dylan song as two different recordings (which I did for the voters), we've got ourselves 16.

Still no takers on the Harlem songs? This wasn't easy...

1. Rolling Stones, Harlem Shuffle
2. The Action, Harlem Shuffle
3. Aretha Franklin, Spanish Harlem
4. Ben E. King, Spanish Harlem
5. Dylan, Spanish Harlem Incident from The Times They Are A-Changin.
6. Dylan, Spanish Harlem Incident from Live 1964
7. Cab Calloway, Tarzan of Harlem
8. Duke Ellington, Jungle Nights In Harlem
9. Duke Ellington, Harlem Twist (the 1929 remake of East St. Louis Toodle-oo)
10. Duke Ellington, Harlem Airshaft
11. Duke Ellington, Drop Me Off At Harlem
12. Randy Newman, Underneath the Harlem Moon
13. Suicide, Harlem
14. U2, Angel of Harlem
15. Alicia Keys, Harlem's Nocturne
16. Ol Dirty Bastard, Harlem World
17. Chick Webb, Harlem Congo

Thanks for playing. Boxed-sets to both Cleek and Jill (which includes Bryan anyway, despite his stupid Globetrotters joke). I promise to hold another contest by the end of 2009.

Memphis vs. Harlem

2005-10-16T23:56:00.000-04:00

I called my father and mentioned casually that after going through my music library, I was surprised to find so many (15!) songs about Memphis. This is a vague transcript of the conversation.

Mark: 15 Memphis songs, unbelievable!
Dad: Was that the most?
M: No, it was third.
D: What!!
M: Uh... yeah, third.
D: Come on! There is no other city that has as many songs named after it as Memphis!
M: That's not true at all.
D: What was second?
M: Surprisingly, and I don't think it even counts, but it was Harlem.
D: Really?
M: Yup.
D: And first?
M: Well, of course New York.
D: No way there are more New York songs than Memphis songs.
M: Well I have 18 songs that mention New York in the title.
D: Hold on, just let me get the computer going here...
M: Okay.

-unnecessarily long pause ensues-

D: I have 46 songs that mention Memphis in the title.
M: You're kidding?
D: No, I collect em. It's kind of a hobby. I have every Memphis song from the iTunes site and the Crandall Library.
M: That's incredible.
D: Do you have that version of Tiny Tim doing "Hey Jude?" That rhumba... no wait... no, that cha-cha version he does?
M: No.
D: Oh it's great. Yeah, you should look for that. I can't find it anywhere.
M: I'll see what I can do.

He proposed a competition, between Harlem songs and Memphis songs. Whoever can collect the most wins. Wins what? I haven't a clue.

But I offered up some damn fine music to those of you who could answer one of the three questions below. Jill nailed the 3rd one, and 3 contestants took a stab at the Memphis question, but no one's got that so far. I can't say whose in the lead or closest or whatever, because I'd like to leave it open for at least another day.

Wish me luck in my attempts to notify the world that Harlem is the most written-about and least habitable relic of the songwriter's imagination. Memphis is a worthy opponent on both fronts.

iNsane.

2005-10-12T13:57:00.000-04:00

Well, as I have passed the 1300 Albums mark on the iTunes Library, I figured I'd give a quick update on the current music collection's many highlights. The last time I did this I included mostly album-related stats, so for this time around I figured we'd do some songs. Here goes!

Songs: 15,363

Most Songs By Genre
1. Alternative: 4166
2. Rock: 3991
3. Hip Hop: 1479
4. R & B: 1403
5. Jazz: 1379

Most Songs By Artist
1. Beatles: 507
2. Bob Dylan: 325
3. Sinatra: 280
4. Rolling Stones: 233
5. The Who: 215 (I think I've listened to 8 of them)
6. Miles Davis: 187
7. David Bowie 166
8. Elliott Smith: 179
9. The Kinks 177
10. Pavement 176

Most Songs by "Cuss" Word
1. Fuck: 28
2. Bitch: 19
3. Ass: 12
4. Shit: 11
5. Cock: 1

Most Songs by City:

1. New York: 18
2. Harlem: 16!
3. Memphis: 14?
4. Paris: 13
5. St. Louis: 10
6. London: 9
7. Los Angeles: 8
8. Chicago: 7
9. New Orleans: 6
10. Kansas City: 5
11. Las Vegas: 4
12. Nashville: 4

13. East St. Louis: 3
-Atlanta: 3
-Reno: 3
-Brooklyn: 3
-Stockholm: 3
-Statesboro: 3
-Detroit: 3

20. San Francisco: 2
-Seattle: 2
-Box Elder: 2
-Queens: 2

24. Cleveland: 1
-Dayton, OH: 1
-Modesto: 1
-Vancouver: 1
-Miami: 1
-Atlantic City: 1
-Clarksville: 1
-Birmingham: 1
-San Diego: 1
-Hoboken: 1

-Saratoga: 1
-Montreal: 0

-Houston: 0
-Anaheim: 0
-Boston: 0

Most Songs by Color
1. Blue: 102 (excluding "Blues")
2. Red: 36
3. Green: 33
4. Orange: 18
5. Pink: 13
6. Yellow: 12
7. Grey: 9
8. Indigo: 7
9. Purple: 3
10. Violet: 2

Songs With The Words...

-Love: 508
-Blues: 428
-Money: 82

-Rock: 113
-Roll: 80
-Heart: 128
-Soul: 56
-Day: 304
-Night: 239
-Life: 94
-Death: 48
-Heaven: 46
-Hell: 24

-Hard: 60
-Soft: 6
-Mean: 24
-Nice: 18
-Dead: 38
-Alive: 11
-You: 95
-Me: 30
-Happy: 28
-Sad: 27

-Milk: 20
-Coffee: 9
-Whiskey: 7

-Man: 95
-Woman: 49
-Girl: 57
-Boy: 32

-Jesus: 18
-Dylan: 5

If you can name:

1. 8 of the 16 "Harlem" songs from my collection,
2. 5 of the 14 "Memphis" songs from my collection, or...
3. ... the song with Saratoga in the title

I will send you the complete Atlantic Rhythm and Blues Singles Collection, 1949-1974, on 8-CDs.

Answers next week! OH BOY!

Sex Sells... But Does It Need to Sell Email?

2005-10-06T12:04:00.000-04:00

I have been using Yahoo! Mail for a little while and I'm pleased with it, yes, overall I cannot complain. Hotmail, which I've been using since 1996, is a piece of shit. Especially on a Powerbook. So Yahoo has me as a customer and I don't need to go gushing like yuppies at a yacht party about it. But in the past, when you logged in, a smiling woman would greet you. I started calling her Miss Yahoo! She was generic brunette white lady to a T, but I got so used to her vacant expression that I wondered what kind of life she was leading in Los Angeles or Bulgaria or in a cramped folder of public domain images. Sadly, she has been replaced. And not by a NEW Miss Yahoo, a younger, sexier Miss Yahoo, but by a host of new and exciting images that capture what Yahoo! Mail is today!

And apparently what Yahoo! Mail is today just happens to be...well, a service that relies heavily on overtly suggestive images intended to... make me log in? I don't get it, but judge for yourself. The rotating group of photos they use when you log in to http://mail.yahoo.com favors women to men by a margin of about 4 to 1 and girls to men at a ratio of 3 to 1. Again, you can decide if I'm being a little to Pat Robertson about this, but man, I am getting pretty sick of these inane photos greeting me everytime I want to see when a Netflix film is coming.

Culled directly from the Yahoo! Mail Site. Enjoy!

EXHIBIT A: Faceless Tits.

This one goes right to the point. It seems to suggest that we prefer women with hideous paper faces and huge tits; is there any other kind, Yahoo? A little oriental theme is icing on the pervert cake.

bnr_17.jpg.

EXHIBIT B: She Loves Pigs!
Well, I guess you could argue that "overt" is an overstatement, but just look at the way she admires that piggy bank. I mean, with 'tongue-rolled-under-her-lower-lip excitement,' she looks like she's going to eat it.

bnr_26.jpg

EXHIBIT C: She Ate It!
Of course this is the exact same girl, offering us loads of tongue, and we don't even have to pay a subscription fee! Screw you AOL, and you too Lesbos.com!

bnr_24.jpg.

EXHIBIT D: She Ate It Too!
An underage girl being force-fed a slice of pizza. Is she anorexic? Submissive? You decide, I'm going to check my email.

bnr_18.jpg.

EXHIBIT E: The Trilogy Is Complete
Sometimes a snow-cone is just a snow-cone, and sometimes a 10-year old girl is just a jpeg.

bnr_23.jpg.

EXHIBIT F: Beach Fun
Cum shot?

bnr_01.jpg.

EXHIBIT G: Are You Fucking Kidding Me?
Either you've got a Georgia O'Keefe painting in your mouth, or you are really happy to see me.

bnr_05.jpg.

I mean, should I ask them to remove these? Or just wait for them to sue me for posting them here?

Thoughts on The General, Buster Keaton, 1927.

2005-10-06T01:10:00.000-04:00

keaton.jpg

Before I saw The General, I asked myself if innocence was a thing that could be displayed not simply in passivity, but by an intense struggle. Lets take for instance the comic elements of a love triangle. Shouldn’t one person be vulnerable, one be oblivious, and one be slave to unreconcilable fascinations? Hijinks galore! I knew comedy was capable of showing us that innocence is difficult to maintain, and the breakdown of it so delicious to watch. But I never thought that an exuberance for innocence (a truly American concept) would translate to film.

And then I saw Buster Keaton's film. We have Keaton the diminutively indifferent, yet irrationally excitable hero. Capable of destruction in ways each of us with a conscience can’t be. How does this violence keep our attention? He commandeers it with his overwhelmed main character. He destroys at whim. He fancies nothing more than fear. We want him to be deadly and he is not; he is a shadow of his masculinity. Yet when the ironies of his triumph become apparent –

1. he fights for the South,
2. he wins for them even though we know they will lose,
3. he represents a romantic social code that never existed,
4. he pulls us in endlessly without ever cracking a smile,

- still we must root for him. This is the true performance of innocence, no ignorance in it. Keaton’s character handles circumstances as they arise, yet prepares for nothing. It is as if preparation has become instinctive. The South must triumph over the North, the most improbable of all chores. Five feet tall, barely 120 pounds, he takes on the North and proves them wrong. Not ideologically wrong; he is never anywhere near an ideology. But because he is in a comedy, and in comedy, ideological struggles must be laid to waste like wooden bridges doused in kerosene and lit by a single match.

In this, Buster Keaton does not go about predicting the future of the comedic film, he flaunts our desire to be willingly deceived; this is the function of any artistic expression worth a damn.

The Continuing Saga of iPod: Part Four

2005-09-28T09:40:00.000-04:00

The following is not a review of the iPod nano, but more like a handjob.

Two weeks ago I found out the iPod nano had come out, and that afternoon I listed my 6GB mini for a one day auction on eBay. When I casually mentioned to my roommate that I'd sold the iPod, she acted genuinely offended. "You sold it? How much?" Seconds later, I'd worked out a way to avoid shipping entirely. Now I set about ordering the nano, which I hadn't even seen.

The nano got stuck in China's customs for 9 agonizing days. In the interim, I visited Apple Store SoHo and tried the thing out first hand. DO NOT DO THIS if you have no intention of ever owning an iPod nano. This is impossible. To make matters worse, I was suffering from the unfortunate paradox that I'd PAID FOR ONE OF THESE, why can't I have one?

It arrived on Friday, and well, its the iPod I was born to own. What a deep sense of pity one feels for all those other iPods of the world: their giant click wheels, their Commodore 64/Fredwriter/Apple 2e monotone screens, their enormity! On recent subway rides, I've gotten a few long glances; when you are carrying one in your pocket it appears you do not have an iPod, you're merely wearing the headphones. I thought that would be the case with the iPod Shuffle, but everyone seems to wear that thing around their neck like some kind of Cracker necklace.

Okay, no more blogs about iPods, I promise.

Image014.jpg

The Benefits of Hurricanes.

2005-09-26T22:00:00.000-04:00

So I'm at Lauren's house this weekend, an SAT student of mine who lives in a distant part of the Bronx (one that shares more in common with the upstate of my childhood than any other part of the city), and we stumble across "antipathy." Of course she doesn't know what it means. Her vocabulary consists only of brand-names. Now I know this sounds harsh but you'll have to realize that she has absolutely no interest in learning anything, and hates the SAT with a peculiar ferociousness. If her mother wasn't paying me so much I'd have said adios long ago. As I'm giving her the definition to antipathy I realize she is the student I have tutored the longest, on and off since April 2004. Global Studies Regents, US History Regents, SAT, SAT again. Suddenly a spark comes into her eyes when I discuss the difference between apathy and antipathy. "So like, antipathy is what I feel for the Hurricane victims in New Orleans?"

"Uh... wait. What?"

"I mean like, I don't have any sympathy for them because they practically did it to themselves, you know, like Bush gave them money for levees and the state government stole it and spent it on other things and didn't want the levees to be repaired, so yeah, its their fault. Yeah, I know what antipathy means."

The only way I could keep my composure was to make a fully-dumbfounded half-remark somewhat to the tune of, "Well, that may be completely untrue, but at least you know one of these fucking words." As much as I'd like to joke about it, this was the first time since I've begun tutoring full-time that I had to "suck it up and take it for my pay." A shitty feeling to say the least, and one we never get away from entirely.

But this past week, I contributed $150 to the Red Cross in the form of tickets to Hurricane Katrina benefit concerts. The first at BB King's on Monday, the second at Town Hall on Saturday. They were disparate (LOOK IT UP LAUREN!) in more ways than I have time to mention, but provided equally impressive moments.

Monday, September 20, BB Kings.

The Lineup: Styles P, Memphis Bleek, Talib Kweli, Q-Tip, The Executioners, Prisoners of War, Dave Chappelle, M1 of Dead Prez, David Banner, Smith and Wesson, and more.

Background: A hastily-thrown together benefit concert featuring the very best of New York's lesser-known hip hop acts. Or rather, lesser-known to white people like me.

First impressions; Q-Tip seemed to be presiding over the affair, spinning his favorite records (one was his) between sets and just being a gracious MC. But even he tired of the disorganized show, and soon it was DJ Snoop who was spinning all kinds of crazy shit. NWA/Public Enemy at the same time, a minute of the new Fugees record that sounded like he scraped it from the bottom of Wyclef's shoe.

The Format: Each artist gets about 3 songs, and I tell you, this was the best way to see all of these acts. They came out and nailed some hits, said their piece, and left. Gap between acts sometimes stretched to 40 minutes, which added to the incredibly laid back feel for the evening.

Highlights: Talib Kweli was a truly remarkable performer, one of the best I've ever seen. He performed a song from his latest album, Quality, which I've owned for months but never listened to because his first album is just too good not to put on. His single "Get By" is an instant classic, his live version was rousing, sweaty, and united the crowd and nearly all the evening's performers. An incredible shame that I heard this too late for inclusion into the QHS Song List, published yesterday.

Regrets: If Chappelle and Q-tip performed at all, it happened after 3am, because that's when I threw in the towel. Even though I admit, the place was just getting warmed up.

Saturday, September 25, Town Hall.

The Lineup: Kevin Kline Buckwheat Zydeco, Woody Allen, Willem Dafoe, Elvis Costello, David Byrne, Richard Ford, Toni Morrison, Lou Reed with Laurie Anderson, and Calvin Trillin.

Background: I found out about it, when it was organized last weekend, and said, "It's sold out." Checked anyway, found last row seats. Bought em.

The Format: No host, just effortless segues from one act to another. Everyone gets one song/jam session/reading, however they like to do it. Part of the New Yorker Festival, so a very "too smart to dance" kind of crowd.

First Impressions: I walked in about an hour late, coming from the aforementioned Lauren's house. The program is not listing acts in order, we have no idea what has gone down first and what is to come. A great feeling.

Highlights: Though Lou Reed's dark doo-wop-like version of Jesus was the musical highlight for what I thought would be the entire evening, Elvis Costello stole the show. He came out, played two minutes with an acoustic guitar, a song I've never heard of (probably written for the occasion), bowed and walked off. To allow the song to fade out, he walked out of range of the microphone and continued to sing full volume, filling the room with his unamplified voice echoing. Pretty close to a standing ovation, in the middle of the show, for one song. The guy is a genius.

Regrets: Unless Woody's still setting up, it looks like he went on first and split, because I didn't get a peak at him. The often ______ Mr. Allen ______ me again.

A. reclusive .... eludes
B. decisive .... alludes
C. perfunctory .... precipitates
D. distraught .... extols
E. verbose .... reviles

Eiffel Ninety-Four "Brisk" Fall Reading List

2005-09-08T21:13:00.000-04:00

As the autumn winds gather speed somewhere over Minnesota for their arrival later this month, I am reminded once again of those heavy leaves that tumble toward us and reveal the hidden language of the wilderness. Arc your ear toward the wood thrush's plaintive song, and the memories of boyhoods spent ambling the pine-needle pathways come rushing back. Ah, how I long to tumble into the crick, bait my rod, and sling a thin wire into the air, with every last hope in my soul hinged upon landing a glorious catch! How I yearn to sing the gospel to that plucky lass with the thick blonde locks, who lived in a small cabin up on Whistler's Notch, I think, or maybe in a Playboy magazine under my mattress. Oh Sinful Autumn, how I never shy away from you!

-From "Memories of an Upstated Boyhood," by Jeff Scarincio

Fall brings good weather to New York for the first time since late April. It's been a long time since I've had to endure a high school cross country race, but that pre-race nausea still lingers in me on brisk late afternoons during September. No matter how often I tell myself in such situations, "You don't have to run a 5k today," my subconscious retorts, "No, I think you have a dual meet against the Scotia-Glenville Tartans today." For some reason I've never understood, cool mid-autumn afternoons remind me of running in the woods against my will. I enjoy spring much more than fall (even though the weather is identical in this part of the world), but that's all over now. As Ezra Pound said to a dead Walt Whitman in 1913:

"I have detested you long enough... Let there be commerce between us."

Here are some books I'm gonna try to read. Any suggestions are welcomed.

1. The Complete Correspondences of Walter Benjamin, by Walter Benjamin
2. Selected Writings Volume 3, by Walter Benjamin
3. Sons and Lovers, by D.H. Lawrence.
4. Women in Love, by D.H. Lawrence
5. Oblivion, by David Foster Wallace
6. The Elephant Vanishes, by Haruki Murakami
7. The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow
8. Eight Men, by Richard Wright

And, as has been the case with previous attempts to make a book list, a dozen things I had no idea I would read til they were read.

75 Rejects.

2005-09-01T10:17:00.000-04:00

Some friends and I have decided to tackle the immeasurable canon of Western songcraft by putting together a list of the 50 best songs we've ever heard. Each of us is responsible for submitting 25 nominees. This limit proved to be overwhelming. I started by going through my library of 15,677 songs and nominating 75. Then I started listening, and whittled the list down to 100. I was so far into the red it was ridiculous. A new approach. I just took 40 at random and stared. Stared hard. Occasionally, I played the songs I was staring at. After ranking them best I could, I began rankling with them. Knocked off the last fifteen and listened. Done. I never want to look at those 25 songs again, because they just remind me of other songs, which remind me of other songs, and well, there's not a list to put em on.

But tonight, after compiling 2 cds to give to the voters of this little experiment, I went back and looked at what just missed the cut. These are all great songs, and especially the 25-40, which must languish in the "Shoulda-Coulda-Woulda" category for all eternity. My 25 is for later, but I'll give some hints. They include: the song one friend uses as an answering machine message, a song with no instruments, a 20-minute R&B track, a Dylan recording from the 80s, 3 songs written in the 20s, 3 songs from one collection, and even a few white people to even things out.

A list of some very, very good songs. Good, Christ... These little ditties are genius.

26. "Black Beauty" Duke Ellington, from The Okeh Ellington [CD 1]
27. "A Case of You" Joni Mitchell, from Blue
28. "Potato Head Blues" Louis Armstrong and His Hot 7, from Ken Burns Jazz (Disc 1)
29. "Jazz" A Tribe Called Quest, from The Low End Theory
30. "European Son" The Velvet Underground, from The Velvet Underground & Nico
31. "She Loves You" The Beatles
32. "Isolation" John Lennon, from Plastic Ono Band
33. "The Tears Of A Clown" Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, from Hitsville USA: The Motown Singles Collection
34. "After You've Gone (Take C)" Art Tatum, from Classic Piano Solos (1934-1937)
35. "My Lovin (You're Never Gonna Get It)'" En Vogue, from The Very Best Of En Vogue
36. "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" Bob Dylan, from Bob Dylan
37. "God Save The Queen" Sex Pistols, from Never Mind The Bollocks
38. "Done Got Old" Junior Kimbrough, from You Better Run: The Essential Junior Kimbrough
39. "Rap Game / Crack Game" Jay-Z, from In My Lifetime, Vol. 1
40. "Mrs. Robinson" Simon & Garfunkel, from Bookends
41. "Cocaine Blues" Johnny Cash from At Folsom Prison
42. "Lonely Woman" Ornette Coleman, from The Shape Of Jazz To Come
43. "My Funny Valentine" Frank Sinatra from Songs For Young Lovers
44. "Glory Box" Portishead, from Dummy
45. "Unchained Melody" The Righteous Brothers
46. "Me And The Devil Blues" Robert Johnson, from The Complete Recordings
47. "Good Morning School Girl" Sonny Boy Williamson, from The Bluebird Recordings 1937-1938
48. "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" Marvin Gaye, from Hitsville USA: The Motown Singles Collection
49. "Sing, Sing, Sing (With A Swing)" Benny Goodman, from Greatest Hits
50. "Ain't Too Proud To Beg" The Temptations, from Hitsville USA: The Motown Singles Collection
51. "What Can A Poor Fellow Do" Duke Ellington, from The Okeh Ellington [CD 1]
52. "Desaparecido" Manu Chao, from Clandestino: Esperando La Ultima Ola...
53. "Idle Moments" Grant Green, from Idle Moments
54. "Hate It Or Love It (G-Unit Remix)" 50 Cent, from The Massacre
55. "I Never Loved A Man (The Way I Love You)" Aretha Franklin, from Atlantic Rhythm And Blues 1947-1974
56. "The Best Is Yet To Come" Frank Sinatra, from The Reprise Collection
57. "One Of These Things First" Nick Drake, from Bryter Layter
58. "Basin Street Blues" Miles Davis, from Seven Steps To Heaven
59. "Roll Over Beethoven" Chuck Berry
60. "Get Off My Cloud" The Rolling Stones, from December's Children (And Everybody's)
61. "Pastime Paradise" Stevie Wonder, from Songs In The Key Of Life
62. "One Mint Julep" The Clovers, from Atlantic Rhythm And Blues 1947-1974
63. "NY State of Mind" Nas, from Illmatic
64. "Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)" The Temptations, from Hitsville USA: The Motown Singles Collection
65. "One Nation Under a Groove" Funkadelic, from One Nation Under a Groove
66. "Where Did Our Love Go" The Supremes
67. "My Philosophy" KRS-One
68. "Many Rivers To Cross" Jimmy Cliff, from Anthology (Disc 1)
69. "House of the Rising Sun" The Animals, from Greatest Hits
70. "The Unfaithful Servant" The Band, from The Band
71. "Packt Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box" Radiohead, from Amnesiac
72. "Burn Hollywood Burn"Public Enemy, from Fear Of A Black Planet
73. "Kelly Watch The Stars" Air, from Moon Safari
74. "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes" Crosby, Stills & Nash
75. "Jailhouse Rock" Elvis Presley
76. "Desolation Row" Bob Dylan, from Highway 61 Revisited
77. "Killing Me Softly With His Song" Roberta Flack, from Atlantic Rhythm And Blues 1947-1974
78. "Schizophrenia" Sonic Youth, from Sister
79. "All Right Now" Free, from American Beauty
80. "London Calling" The Clash, from London Calling
81. "Victoria" The Kinks, from Arthur
82. "Blues For Marcus" Terry Callier, from Occasional Rain
83. "Dead Flowers" The Rolling Stones, from Sticky Fingers
84. "Star Of The County Down" Van Morrison & The Chieftains, from Irish Heartbeat
85. "One Foot In The Grave" Beck, from Stereopathetic Soul Manure
86. "In The Lost And Found (Honky Bach)" Elliott Smith, from Figure 8
87. "Nothing Compares 2 U" Sinead O'Connor
88. "Washington D.C. Hospital Center Blues" Skip James, from Blues From The Delta
89. "California Girls" The Beach Boys
90. "You Never Give Me Your Money" The Beatles, from Abbey Road
91. "Poses" Rufus Wainwright, from Poses
92. "The Mess We're In" PJ Harvey, from Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea
93. "In Spite Of Me" Morphine, from Cure For Pain
94. "Rednecks" Randy Newman, from Good Old Boys
95. "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" Neutral Milk Hotel, from In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
96. "Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before" The Smiths
97. "Kiss From A Rose" Seal, from Seal
98. "Eight" Sunny Day Real Estate, from LP2
99. "You Got To Die" Blind Willie McTell, from Atlanta Twelve String
100. "Glory" Liz Phair, from Exile In Guyville

VladNews: More satire and fewer teeth than The Onion.

2005-08-30T02:10:00.000-04:00

So I came across this today in the new issue of Vladivostok News. The Vlad News (as we call it) is eastern Russia's only English-language newspaper. It comes out once a week, and features articles from a city so desolate, so poor, so absolutely miserable, that I can't believe it is a real place. Closed to westerners until 1991, Vladivostok is now trying to become a major international city. It is closer to Hong Kong than Moscow, closer to Tokyo than Kiev, but similar only to Schenectady in its appalling decrepitude. Come for the rotting submarines. Stay for the drunken 10-year old orphans. Die at the hands of a mob-boss. All in Vladivostok.

Here's an article that enforces the stereotype that Russians are drunken animals. Luckily, its the Russian's who are enforcing it.

Enjoy!

The Hall of Fame Needs More Players! Send These Guys!

2005-08-29T00:22:00.000-04:00

Well, a guy who goes by the name of Pat (and sometimes for the sake of a good practical joke, "Rob") and I decided to sit down and produce a list of 40 guys who absolutely without a doubt will be entered into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Pat's lifetime unless the last ten continue to repeat the same mediocre season they're having this year or run into Dwight Gooden's dealer in the passageways under Shea Stadium. We forced ourselves to choose forty, because some guy at Sport's Illustrated did, and our list of 48 probables took 3 full hours to reach the limit we'd set at the beginning of the evening. When the dust settled, we quickly ranked them in order of most to least likely. Then we remembered Miguel Tejada and Omar Vizquel, so we went to get some falafel sandwiches on Avenue A, and it helped us to completely forget either of those two shortstops ever existed.

So here it is: forty ACTIVE players who we believe have the best chances of being inducted. Check this blog in 40 years to see if we were right. And if you're wondering where Larry Walker is (career .312 hitter) well, Pat thought it would be funny to sneak Richard Pryor onto the list, and spell it wrong at that.

1. Clemens
2. Bonds
3. Maddux
4. Piazza
5. Johnson
6. Palmeiro
7. Sosa
8. Martinez
9. Biggio
10. Griffey
11. Jeter
12. Rodriguez, A
13. Glavine
14. Rodriguez, I
15. Thomas
16. Rivera
17. Smoltz
18. Ramirez
19. Kent
20. Ichiro
21. Sheffield
22. Bagwell
23. Pujols
24. Guerrero
25. Schilling
26. Hoffman
27. Damon
28. Jones, C
29. Helton
30. Jones, A
31. Rolen
32. Pierre
33. Hudson
34. Beltre
35. Matsui
36. Santana
37. Prior
38. Cabrera, M
39. Wright, D
40. Texeira

10 Drives: Honorable Mention

2005-08-27T20:40:00.000-04:00

...of course there were nominees. Here's a list of drives that just lost out, but were definitely in consideration. Some: suffered from a resemblance to other drives I've taken, were too long ago to recall, or didn't get a lot of words or pictures out of me. To complete the list, I have to mention a bias or two. I've always enjoyed the Blue Ridge and I-85, but I've never wholly loved the Appalachian Mountains, at least as much as others.

The nominees:
-US Highway 191 Crescent Junction to Bluff, UT (this should have been on there, now that I think of it)
-Connecticut Route 15, The Merritt Parkway, Rye, NY to Trumbull, CT
-US Route 340, Harper's Ferry to Charles Town, WV
-Vermont Route 30, Rupert to Manchester, VT
-The Nabesna Road, Slana to Nabesna, AK
-I-85, Oxford, NC to Petersburg, VA
-US Route 160, Pagosa Springs to Durango, CO
-Clendon Brook Road, Queensbury NY
-Boulevard, Hudson Falls, NY
-The Blue Ridge Parkway, Roanoake to Pennington Gap, VA
-The Jackie Robinson Parkway, Brooklyn, NY
-Pont Victoria, Montreal, QC
-Hatcher Pass, Palmer to Willow, AK

10 Drives: #1 The Alaska Highway

2005-08-25T15:42:00.000-04:00

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Provincial Route 97, “The Alaska Highway,” Fort St. John, BC to Beaver Creek, YT:

Not all of the Alaska Highway is in Alaska, and I'd say this 1100-mile stretch through the southern Yukon Territory and northern British Columbia is definitely the best of it. It would drive you insane if the road didn't attempt to throw you off it at every turn, and the landscape didn't astound at these very same turns.

But wait! As a preamble to the Alaska Highway, there is the uniquely treacherous Provincial Route 29, running from Chetwynd to Fort St. John, BC. If you’re killed on any of the drives I recommend, odds are 5 to 4 it’s on this one. The little route saves you some time off of BC Route 97 as it head due north passed Dawson Creek (the official start of the Alaska Highway and practically in Alberta). Additionally, it lets you start moving somewhat in the direction of Alaska, which if you are going from Seattle (east of Alaska) you haven’t been. Avoiding moose, caribou, and elk becomes your only concern. The road is freshly paved and I never saw another car on it heading north; the way home I saw maybe 5. BE ADVISED (not kidding here): Near Fort St. John, the road dips drastically on a sharp turn on a steep hillside, and your passenger side drops three feet while the driver side remains level. It’s a violent tilt that lasts barely a second, but I hit it going 90 and thought that I’d driven off the cliff. Also, BE ADVISED: I passed a section of the road where moose were just lined up on the side of the road, my headlights only high enough to see torsoes. And I drove by some recently killed deer.

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Joining back up with Route 97 at Fort Saint John, you pass the majestic Muncho Lake Provincial Park, where the water is crystal blue and the desire to drive into it is unheeded by guard-rails or any sort of safety precautions. A shimmeringly decadent way to be killed in an automobile. The rest of the drive winds through the thickest pine forests I’ve ever seen; animals are strangely sparse (because Route 29 and the rest of 97 south of here is like driving through a zoo). The twists and turns of the road recall car commercials that ran the tagline: “Do not attempt. Professional driver on closed road.” The lack of law enforcement and traffic make for the perfect driving experience. 95 MPH is not impossible, though its best to have your eyes fixed to the road. No blinking. Photo ops such as the ones below mostly occurred with my car parked in the middle of the highway.

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I don't mean to scare anyone attempting the drive. I read several articles claiming this stretch would take 4 days (you can do it a day and a half), and I read things about how through much of Canada the road is in poor shape. The Canadian part of the Alaska Highway is by far the easiest to drive. That doesn't mean the Alaska side is not well maintained, they just have harsher winters to contend with. Broken gravel (which tends to spin and/or flip over cars) is relatively sparse in these parts, where in Alaska its a constant hassle.

Kluane.jpg

Near the Alaskan border you get the only roadside views of the dense, enormous, mostly impenetrable, and humbling Kluane (Kloo-Ah-Nee) National Park. This is the Canadian side of Wrangell-St. Elias National Park (the nation's largest park, and something you'll hear more about from me in future posts). Together they form the first UNESCO World Heritage Site, designated in 1978. The last views of the Yukon are here, where the mountain ranges shoot up to heights not seen in the lower-48 or the rest of Canada. This is a remarkable drive that puts every road I have ever driven to shame. I'll be defending cars as a carless New Yorker for the rest of my days because of this road.

10 Drives: #2 PCH

2005-08-25T15:30:00.000-04:00

California Route 1, The Pacific Coast Highway, Santa Monica to Santa Cruz, CA

At the intersection of Wilshire and Ocean Ave in Santa Monica is the historic end of Route 66. Beginning in Chicago and winding (sometimes invisibly, consumed by larger routes) to the Pacific Coast. this is an extraordinary place to take on the Pacific Coast Highway and start up through Pacific Palisades, Malibu, Oxnard, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Big Sur, Carmel, and Monterrey onto the birthplace of American surfing, Santa Cruz. California's Route 1 does something few roads do on the Atlantic coast: it follows the water meticulously, keeping the ocean in view for more miles than any other. Passing mountains, cliffs, tropical groves, farms, and valleys, there is no single road that passes more places I'd love to live. If your car breaks down on this road, consider it a blessing. It goes all the way up the coast and into Canada - and I drove the portion that extends to Vancouver recently - but cannot say anything about it in California after Santa Cruz. Still, by motorcycle or convertible, the love affair with America's highways owes its entire reputation to this road. There won't be another one like it built in the continental US ever again.

10 Drives: #3 BIA Route 41

2005-08-24T01:43:00.000-04:00

BIA41.jpg

Bureau of Indian Affairs Route 41, Pine Ridge Reservation, SD:

Rand McNally has it listed as Route 40, and it is for a while, but then it changes to 41 when you get onto the Pine Ridge Reservation. The road to Pine Ridge is straight and lonesome (no tourists, no trucks), taking you from the lush Black Hills into the Badlands. Immediately, you are reminded that of all land that prospective farmers would turn down, this would be it. Nothing grows here. Just as you drive out of the reservations (onto my list's #4), the soil becomes fertile and the landscape plush. I mean, what could be more generous than saying, "Sorry we took your land, we saved you the Badlands. Woah, hold on there!" As an added insult to the Sioux tribes, we carved the Badlands National Park out of the Pine Ridge Reservation and claimed it back. So with this in mind, the drive becomes a three act tragedy.

Badlands.jpg

Act One: The Land. Countless scenes of barren desolation.
Act Two: The River. You pass the miserable and ironic “White River,” the only natural source of water around, which is as wide as your left arm.
Act Three: The City. Pine Ridge, site of an ignoble shootout between FBI agents and Sioux leaders in 1973. Now there's a Pizza Hut (manager's a white guy) and a gas station. That's all.

BIA41b.jpg

Route 41 takes along the butte where Crazy Horse is supposedly buried, and ends just 14 miles from the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre, as sad as any landscape on earth. The main reason why we have any roads at all in this country is because we were able to destroy one way of life to perpetuate ours. Regardless of how you feel about this, the gas station in Pine Ridge (which sells 85 Octane as regular, 87 as Plus) is one of the finest places for any citizen to pause and reflect on our "American" way of life.

10 Drives: #4 US Route 20 through Nebraska

2005-08-23T00:15:00.000-04:00

20inNE.jpg

US Route 20 Gordon to O’Neil, NE:

That’s right, Nebraska. If perchance you've wondered why a convertible is anything more than an unnecessary extravagance, please drive this road. For those of you who like your land flat: your yellow brick road. I swear at times the corn, at five feet tall, obscures the horizon. But most of the land is unfarmed and unruly, a breathe of air from the mega-farms and ranches you pass along Interstate 80 (130 miles south). This road is rarely traveled and cuts through some very small, depressing towns, running east-west from Wyoming to Iowa. I picked it up just south of South Dakota (after driving #5 and what will be #3). The scenery is lovely: lazy plains, lonesome cows, and ancient grain silos. Its like drifting through relics of a different era; some of these silos were built with materials that will stand as long as any buildings anywhere else in the country.

Silos.jpg

If you catch the sunset over the perfectly flat horizon, within half an hour you will see a sky speckled with distant stars and prominent, glowing constellations in every direction. WIth a convertible, you'd see a planetarium-like view of the heavens. I went 26 minutes without a car in either direction. But if solitude, silence, and space aren't enough, you’ll drive from Mountain to Central Time Zone at the half-way point, in the middle of the state, in the middle of nowhere, for reasons I’d like to explain but cannot.

10 Drives #5: Needles Highway

2005-08-22T01:44:00.000-04:00

Needles.jpg

Needles Highway, Custer State Park, SD:

Near Mount Rushmore, somewhere in the Black Mountain Hills of Dakota there lived a young man named Rocky Racooooonnn-ah... Though this road is only about 25-30 miles (making it the shortest road in my survey), it holds considerable sway over the imagination. The Black Hills of South Dakota aren't black, not even close, but they are densely foreboding in a way that the surrounding countryside (eastern: WY, MT, SD) just plain isn't. For some reason this part of South Dakota has a landscape of its own, and the only way to see it is to take the Needles Highway. It could prove to be an equally rewarding bike ride, though I didn't have the luxury. Plus, I’m not sure how accustomed the Dakota drivers are to seeing bikes.

When I drove Needles the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally was in full swing and the road was unpleasantly choked with traffic. The Wilderness Loop of Custer Park branches off of it, and the ride (probably closer to 45 miles with that added) is one of the best places to see towering dark rocks standing tall in the sky. Your imagination is capable of treating it as our Easter Island. What I find most remarkable about this spot of the world is that these rock formations that have gone on to inspire the faces for actual American presidents. Who knew the man we see on the $5 bill, Abraham Lincoln, was based on a carving done by glaciers or aliens during the last ice age?

10 Drives: #6 The McCarthy Road

2005-08-21T01:43:00.000-04:00

McCarthy.jpg

The McCarthy Road, Chitina to McCarthy, AK:

Who is ready for a single-lane, 60-mile crushed stone and dirt road to the middle of nowhere? What was once the CR&NW Railroad (locals referred to it as the “Can’t Run and Never Will) is now a shitty little road that no-one seems to maintain. It washboards, it goes underwater, it crosses over rickety wooden bridges and includes a few brutal turns that make it difficult to swerve around the drivers who’ve stopped to change tires. You either make it safely or blow through two spares, there’s no middle ground. The way in has a hell of an ascent, and the possibility of maintaining 30 mph (cutting the drive to 2 solid hours) is wishful thinking. Still, when you get to the end of the road and still have to walk 3/4 of a mile to town, you know you're in one hell of a remote spot on the globe. Talking about the quite rambunctious town of McCarthy (population....18?) detracts from the driving experience, so I'll save that for another time. The scenery is incredible, but the nausea one feels every time you hit a pothole (there are 3.6 million potholes on this road, I think) doesn't make it fit for the fainthearted. Worst road in Alaska? Quite possibly. The abandoned mines, glaciers, endless hiking, and wonderful weather (oh... and the bar) help to ease your mind about the much easier ride back down.

10 Drives: #7 State Route 72

2005-08-20T00:09:00.000-04:00

South Carolina Route 72, Clinton to Calhoun Falls, SC

If you were going from southeastern North Carolina to Athens, GA this appears on a "more generous than reality" road atlas to be the fastest route. It's not, but it is a splendid ride in rural South Carolina and a fun little trek through some very small towns. You'll see your little roadside shitholes, but make sure to stop and chat with the locals. I stopped for gas in Greenwood and asked the lady behind the register if the gas station was ever air conditioned. This is what I remember her telling me.

"I'm pregnant. My boyfriend pierced my bellybutton but it ain't come out right so we gonna do it again when the bruises heal. He's better at tattoos."

Since this was a few years ago, I'm fairly sure there's a little child running around with dents in its brain. The road passes through beautiful Abbeville, SC, which calls itself "The Cradle and Grave of the Confederacy," and sports a violent crimes per 1000 people rate four times that of Manhattan. The median income in most of the towns you'll pass hovers around half the national average. What really makes the drive of course are the unending miles of golden hills and sunshine. The southern pace of life isn't sold at any rest stop. All you gotta do is find a dilapidated, soot spewing pickup truck to slog behind for a few hundred miles.

10 Drives: #8 The Taconic

2005-08-20T00:05:00.000-04:00

The Taconic State Parkway, White Plains to Chatham, NY.

Maybe this one deserves mention only because it is NOT Interstate 87. The Taconic is a bad-ass two lane bobsled track relatively free of State Troopers. It begins in metropolitan White Plains, and hits some strange intersections and traffic lights before slipping into the wildernesses of Dutchess and Putnam counties. Even in traffic it’s a blast, weaving in and out through the trees, with no rest areas, fast-food, or semis in sight (trucks not allowed on parkways). Its probably what 87 was like 20 years ago. The pace is fast and the Catskill scenery blissful. Although not as speedy a commute to Albany as the interstate, I’ll take the extra 30 minutes. The Taconic proves that even when prospects are bleak, there's always another path to take.

10 Drives: #9 I-90?

2005-08-19T01:44:00.000-04:00

I-90.jpg

Interstate 90 through Northern Idaho and Northwestern Montana:

I started with I-90 on the Pacific Coast near Seattle, and could have driven it all the way to Chicago and proclaimed, "I've driven every inch of this fucking road." But I bailed on it in Billings, MT. What I didn't realize is that it's actually a wonderful road on the west coast, a sort of Poor Man’s Alaska Highway. It’s windy, mountainous, and remote (just like the real one) but it has two lanes, guardrails, and exit-ramps. And it goes through real towns. It's not dangerous, just exciting. Not an interstate, but close. One of the oddest things I’ve seen is the raging forest fires that line the road once you enter Montana. They just burn and burn, clogging the air with smoke and the night sky with sinister slashes of red going up the mountainsides. This is an easy, relaxing, and beautiful drive.